The Good Friday Murder (9 page)

Driving to Valley Stream, I reflected on my behavior, on the phone and off, with Jack Brooks. I sounded like two different people. On the phone I was confident as we were distant; in person I turned into a ridiculous mouse. Even at the prospect of seeing him “socially,” I heard myself change on the phone. He heard it, too.

I wanted to see him. I found him attractive. He hadn't flinched when he found out I was an educated woman. He seemed kind and considerate.
I really found him attractive.
And that was the problem. Two problems, in fact. I wanted to be out of the convent and on my own a decent length of time—months—before I began dating men. I wanted a clear separation between leaving the convent and living as an ordinary American woman. And secondly, at thirty, I was as inexperienced as a young girl. He would not expect that. It would make things difficult.

The O'Connors' house was a short drive from the exit on the Southern State Parkway. It was small and boxy, with the lush green lawn and garden that are so common on Long Island. I pulled into their driveway, stopped in front of a one-car garage, and walked to the front door.

It was opened almost immediately.

“Hi,” a casually dressed woman with short gray hair said with a smile. “Christine Bennett?”

“That's me.” I offered my hand.

“Delores O'Connor. Call me Del.”

We shook hands. “I'm Chris.”

“Kev's in the living room.”

Former detective Kevin O'Connor sat in a reclining chair from which he extricated himself as I approached. We shook hands, made pleasantries, and he asked his wife for a couple of beers. I declined the offer. He got back in his chair, worked the mechanism, and got into position. His wife turned off the TV as she left the room.

“This guy Jack Brooks who called yesterday, he said you were interested in the Talley murder. So how come?”

“I'm doing some research on old murders,” I said, having decided this was the best approach. “This one is fascinating because of the twins.”

“So where does Brooks fit in?”

“He got the file and found you.”

“Uh-huh.”

He still had the bright blue eyes, but his body had gone to fat, in spite of his morning golfing. He had a classic beer belly over which was pulled a green golfing shirt that coordinated with his pants. His hair was gray and thinning. Somewhere in the face was the handsome one that Magda had admired forty years ago, but I had to struggle to find it.

“Can I ask you some questions?” I asked.

“Shoot.”

“Did the twins ever say anything to you to indicate they were guilty?”

O'Connor's face screwed into a pained expression. “The twins never said nothin'.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Didn't gimme the time o' day.”

“So you arrested them on the basis of evidence you found in the apartment.”

“Yeah. When did that happen again?”

“Nineteen fifty.”

“Nineteen fifty, nineteen fifty,” he murmured. “Hey, Del?” he called. “When did Mike and me start to be partners?”

“After Carol was born,” his wife's voice called from the
kitchen. She appeared in the living room with a can of beer and a glass of iced tea.

“Was that that Easter one?” he asked me.

“The body was discovered on Easter Sunday. The file says the murder probably happened on Good Friday.”

“Yeah, right. There was a girl there, like a baby-sitter.”

“Magda.”

“Yeah, some Polack name. Kinda cute.”

“Do you remember what it was that convinced you the twins did it?”

He moved one shoulder in a shrug. “They'd been at 'er. You could see it. There was blood all over. It was a knifing, right?”

“Yes.”

“Hell, everything said it was them. They were retards, they got their fingerprints over everything, they were alone with her.” His voice ended slightly up, as though there were many other indications of the twins' guilt that he was just too exhausted to enumerate.

“But you were sure they were the ones.”

He looked at me quizzically. “You think they weren't?”

“I don't know. I'm just looking into it.”

“Oh, hell, sure they did it.” He paused to drink some beer and I sipped the iced tea, which was quite tasty. “I had another one, maybe ten years after that, a guy got cut up by a neighbor after a fight over garbage. The neighbor turned out—”

“Kev,” his wife interrupted, “I don't think the lady's interested in the other case.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He started to say something further, but checked himself.

“Did anybody check for blood that wasn't Mrs. Talley's type?”

“I s'pose. That's forensics. The lab guys. Not my job.”

“Was there anyone else's blood found there?”

He smiled. “That's a long time ago. Look in the file.”

I had, and there hadn't been any other blood at the scene.

“If there wasn't any other blood except the victim's, couldn't
that mean that someone else did it and cleaned up after himself? That's something the twins wouldn't have done.”

“Christ, I don't know what they found there. The guys did it, that's all. Del, you got another beer?”

“Later, Kev.”

“Del.”

Del got up and left the living room.

“Who was your partner that day, Mr. O'Connor?”

“Call me Kev. You know, I'm tryin' to remember. Geez, that was a long time ago.”

I had asked just to test his memory. Magda had recalled every detail of that day; Kevin O'Connor seemed to be coasting on broad recollections. Del returned with a can of beer.

“Was that the Easter I missed dinner at your folks' and your father was so pissed?”

Del grinned. “That was it, hon.”

“Geez, he was sore—1950, huh?”

“Did you question the twins yourself?” I asked.

“Sure. It was my case.”

“Did you know when you were questioning them that they had very special gifts of memory?”

He looked dazed, as if I'd asked him to solve some difficult mathematical problem. “The girl told me somethin',” he said finally. “I got nothin' outa them. Ab-so-lutely nothin'.”

“Did you interview the father?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He didn't sound very sure.

“He lived in New Jersey,” I prompted.

“Yeah, right.”

“Did it occur to you the father might have had a good motive to kill his wife?”

O'Connor looked puzzled again.

“The family cost him money,” I said simply.

“Look, honey,” O'Connor said, “those twins did it. That's all. A judge said so. The evidence said so. There's no story here.”

“Did a psychiatrist ever examine the twins?” I asked.

“We had a guy come over from Kings County. They wouldn't talk.”

“Not even to a psychiatrist,” I said, more to myself than to him. “Did anyone call in the psychiatrist who had been studying them?”

O'Connor shrugged. “We're in Brooklyn. We'd call Kings County when we needed a shrink.”

My iced tea was nearly gone and I was developing a distinct dislike for Kevin O'Connor. I had expected interest and a memory for details. Instead I had encountered a nearly blank wall.

“A man's coat was missing from the coat closet,” I said. “What did you think when you were told that?”

“What do ya mean?” Something seemed to change in him—or maybe it was just my hopeful imagination.

“When you heard that an overcoat was missing, did you look for it? Did you think that maybe someone had put it on to cover up a bloody shirt and walked out with it?”

“Hey, wait a minute.” Something in his face became alert. “There something in the file on this coat?”

It was a question I couldn't answer, because I hadn't read every document in the file, but the fact that he asked the question made me feel he knew the answer.

“No,” I told him. “Magda told me about it.”

“The little Polack? C'mon.” He smiled in what he must have thought was a winning way.

“She says she told you.”

“Hey, I'm a cop, not a nursemaid. A retard goes out and loses his coat, it's not my business. I'm lookin' into a homicide, Chris. Your name Chris?”

I nodded.

“I'm lookin' into a homicide, not a missing coat.”

“Magda says she called the station a day or two after Easter Sunday to remind you about it.”

“I didn't get no call.” He drained his can.

“She says she left a message for you.” I was tempted to say,
with a man named Applebaum,
but I couldn't bring myself to.

“She's dreaming.” He leaned over toward Del, handing her the empty can. Del took it but didn't move. “I hope
you're not suggesting anything, Chris. I was an honest cop, right, Del? I did my job. I put in my time. Sure, I took a cup o' coffee here, a Danish there. But I always had a buck in my hand. They
wanted
me to have it. I never had a complaint made about me. I knew them and they knew me. They were glad when I stopped around to say hello.”

“Kev,” Del said, “no one's accusing you.”

“No, I want her to know. I want her to know the truth. There wasn't any fuckin' missing coat. That's it. That's the truth. Coupla retards kill their mom, I'm not gonna worry about no fuckin' coat.”

I stood and picked up my bag from the floor. “Thank you,” I said. “You've been very helpful.”

“Sure.” O'Connor was in a snit.

I walked to the door with Del.

“If Kevin says he never heard about a missing coat, he never heard. He's an honest man and he was a good cop,” she said.

“Thank you. It was very nice of you to have me over.”

I drove into the center of Valley Stream and found a pay phone.

I don't own a credit card. Maybe next year, when I've got a brief history of working for a lay institution, I'll apply for one. But in the meantime, I pay for my purchases in cash and I pay for my calls with coins.

I gathered together everything in my change purse and called Jack Brooks. When he got on the phone, I gave him
the number I was calling from so he could call me back if I ran out of time.

“Hang up. I'll call you now,” he said.

A few seconds later the phone rang.

“I've seen him,” I said.

“O'Connor?”

“Yes. I can't say I liked him. He didn't remember half of what Magda remembered. And I think he lied.”

“About what?”

“About the missing coat. He changed when I asked about it. He was so convinced the twins were guilty, I don't think he wanted to hear anything that might point in another direction.”

“Cops are human,” he said. “He wanted to close the case.”

“Have you found Applebaum?”

“Not yet.”

“When Magda called about the coat, who was she likely to have talked to? Someone at a nearby desk?”

“The call could have been forwarded to the Brooklyn Communications Bureau, the precinct squad, or the borough office.”

“I see.” I shuddered at the complexity, the number of people involved, the impossibility of finding them at this late date. “Do you know who O'Connor's partner was? He said he couldn't remember.”

“It's in the file. I saw the name somewhere. What happens is, the partners take turns. One time O'Connor's catching the cases, the next time his partner catches. Some teams split the tour four hours of catching apiece. It was just chance that O'Connor got it that day.”

“Maybe we can find the partner,” I said. “Since it wasn't his case, maybe he'd be more open.”

“Possibly, but remember, this is a big fraternity. The brothers protect each other.”

“Somewhere there's got to be a crack, and I've got to put a wedge in it. Someone took a coat out of that closet and walked out with it.”

“Let me see if I can find O'Connor's partner. What are you planning to do next?”

“I want to find out all I can about Patrick Talley. It's too late today, but first thing tomorrow I'm going to New Jersey and walk into churches. I'll bet he got married as soon as his wife died.”

“Good luck. Talk to you tomorrow.”

The phone rang after I'd finished dinner.

“Hello, Miss Bennett. This is Edwin Hazlett.”

The way he said it, I had the feeling I was supposed to recognize his name. “I'm sorry,” I said, “do I know you?”

He laughed. “I'm the mayor of Oakwood. I guess I'm not the household word I thought I was.”

“Mr. Mayor. Forgive me, it just didn't ring a bell.”

“How're you doing on your project?”

“I'm making progress. I'm afraid I can't say much more, but I'm encouraged and I'm continuing.”

“Well, that's good news. You will keep me posted, won't you?”

“Of course. You'll be the first to know if I learn anything concrete.”

On Wednesday I drove to the George Washington Bridge—it's free leaving New York, but they clip you three dollars coming back—and crossed to New Jersey. Patrick Talley had lived in a town called Leonia, not far from the Jersey side of the bridge. I used a map to find the street, and then I drove down it slowly until I found the house. It was an old brick house with a small second story, two dormer windows above and on either side of the front door. I thought the house was rather pretty. It stood between two other brick houses, both different, both about the same size. In front of the Talley house a brightly colored plastic riding toy stood on the lawn, which was neither as lush nor as well cared for as the O'Connors'.

I made a U-turn and drove back to the corner I had come from. Leonia is a small town directly west of the bridge, past
the town of Fort Lee. It's surrounded by a slew of towns: Fort Lee, Englewood, Teaneck, Bogota, Ridgefield Park, and Palisades Park. I had the feeling that people like Patrick Talley and the woman he lived with would want to marry—had probably planned to marry—as soon as they were legally able. I also felt that they wouldn't do it in the church closest to home, because there would be a certain embarrassment attached to their relationship if it became known they had lived together for years without benefit of matrimony.

On the map, Englewood and Teaneck both looked like larger towns than Leonia, but because I was pointed toward Teaneck, I drove in that direction. It proved fortuitous.

The yellow pages gave me the names and addresses of the Roman Catholic churches in the area. The first one couldn't find any record of the Talleys' marriage, searching from Spring 1950 on, so I went to the next one on my list. It was a big old church with a convent on the grounds, and I found myself wondering about the nuns who lived there. After I lit my three candles, I found Father Romero, a smiling, bearded priest who was happy to look into old records—“It gives me a sense of history”—and he quickly found the Talleys' marriage. They had tied the knot in May of 1950, confirming my suspicion that they had married at the first opportunity after the first Mrs. Talley's untimely death.

There was no record of the Talleys as members of any church organizations, which didn't surprise me since they lived in another parish. I thanked the good father and made a contribution to the church building fund, which pleased him.

Then I returned to Leonia. I felt sure that when the Talley children had been born, the parents would have wanted to baptize them, as any parents would. This they could have done in their parish church simply by concealing the fact that they were not married. Then, when they were able to marry, they slipped away to another parish to avoid embarrassment.

There was no record of Patrick Talley Jr. being baptized in the local church, but the daughter, Kathleen, had been, in 1939.

A picture of the Talleys started to emerge. Patrick and Anne had begun living together sometime in the 1930s, perhaps in an apartment. (I would probably never know where, but it didn't matter.) After the birth of their son, they had bought the house in Leonia and become members of the local parish. There was little likelihood that anyone would ask them point-blank if they were married. There are few occasions in life when you're called upon to produce a marriage license. If the Talleys traveled abroad and needed passports, they could probably lie to the feds as well, or tell the truth and use their legal names. It would make little difference. But people didn't travel much during the war, and probably not very much in the years immediately after.

I asked Father McDonald, the priest at the local church, to look further in his records for first communions, organization memberships, and so on. They were all there, until the summer of 1951, little more than a year after the murder, when the Talleys moved to another New Jersey town farther from the bridge and probably, I thought, more fashionable and more expensive.

I was right.

I found the town on the map and drove north along roads with county numbers through a succession of towns, past a reservoir, into communities where the size of the lots was increasingly larger. Suddenly, at a bend in the road, I saw the church ahead of me. It was a frame building one story high with a large parking lot behind it. Inside, I found it divided roughly in half, the church on one side, and a few meeting or classrooms on the other. In one of these rooms a small group of women sat around a table.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I'm looking for the pastor.”

They looked at each other. “You can probably find him in the rectory,” one said.

They directed me and I took off. The rectory was a house on a residential street about a quarter of a mile from the church. The door was opened by a young woman in street clothes who turned out to be Sister Diane. Part of her job
was assisting in the parish, and she was more than happy to be helpful.

As it turned out, the Talleys had lived in this small town until Patrick died in 1965. His widow then left for an apartment in White Plains, New York. That piece of information gave me a shiver. Oakwood isn't far from White Plains, and there was a chance Anne Talley might still be alive. She was born in 1907, which would make her about eighty-three. It also made me think that one or both of her children might be living in that area. After all, where do you go when your husband dies? To be near the children.

Sister Diane checked the marriages starting with 1955, when Kathleen Talley would have been seventeen. It was such a small town (“We're over four thousand now,” Sister Diane said) that looking at a year's marriage records took less than a minute. And suddenly there it was, Kathleen Talley and Gordon Mackey, June 1958, when the bride was twenty.

“Any forwarding reference?” I asked, so excited I could scarcely contain myself.

“An address in White Plains. Looks like an apartment number. And a letter was sent to the church, introducing them.”

“Wonderful.” I wrote it all down. “Would you mind looking to see if the son married here? If he married a local girl, it's always possible.”

“I don't mind at all. It's kind of fun to see the old names. It's surprising how many are still here after so many years. It's a town people get attached to.”

“It's very pretty.”

She went right through to the present, but Patrick Jr. hadn't married in town, and there didn't seem to be any reference to him anywhere. But at least I had something to go on.

Before leaving the town, I drove to the Talleys' address to see the house they had lived in. It took my breath away. The contrast between the little brick house with its tiny front lawn and this old colonial set way back from the road, a circular
drive in front and stately old trees everywhere, was dramatic. On a lark, I turned in to the drive, parked the car, and went to the front door.

It was opened by a well-dressed woman in her fifties. I introduced myself and told her I was looking for Mrs. Talley, who had lived here in the sixties.

“We bought the house from her,” the woman said. “Her husband had died and she was all alone.”

“I don't suppose you kept in touch with her.”

“We never saw her. I think she left when she put the house up for sale. She wasn't even there at the closing. Her lawyer came. I think it was too painful for her, you know, selling the house she'd raised her children in. We just dealt through the realtors.”

“Was the house in good condition when you bought it?”

“Oh yes. No house is perfect, you know, but they'd kept it up. And it was furnished beautifully. It was our first house and it was really a reach for us. We kept her decorations for years, until we could afford to do our own thing.”

“Well, thank you. It's really a beautiful house.”

“If she's still alive and you find her, tell her we've been good to the house. I think she'd like to hear that.”

“I will. Thanks for your help.”

I drove around the rest of the half circle of drive, lingered a minute at the tree-shaded road, and went on my way.

Sister Diane had told me how to get to the Tappan Zee Bridge, which crosses the Hudson River farther north than the George Washington. There the toll is only $2.50, so I saved fifty cents on the day. Hah!

The church in White Plains found a record of a baptism for Kathleen and Gordon Mackey's first child, a daughter, Lisa, born in 1961. The family moved after that to an address in North Tarrytown, which was close to the Tappan Zee Bridge, from which I had just come. It was already three o'clock and I had visited more towns in New Jersey than I ever knew existed, not to mention half the Catholic churches on the east coast. When you get up at five, you tend to tire
early, and I could feel fatigue gnawing at me. I had done a good day's work and it was time to go home.

I called Information that evening and asked for Gordon Mackey at the address the church in White Plains had given me. He wasn't at that address, but the operator volunteered that someone with that name lived at a different address in the same town. I wrote down the number, hung up, and rallied my courage. I didn't like the idea of calling a stranger—possibly a wrong number, at that—but either I did it, or it didn't get done. I killed a little time by calling Information again and asking for Mrs. Anne Talley or Mrs. Patrick Talley. There was no listing for either name in White Plains.

That left me with a phone number for Gordon Mackey and no excuse not to call. I dialed the number.

A man answered, and I asked for Kathleen Mackey. He asked for my name and I gave it. He said, “Just a minute,” and left the phone. I heard his voice at a distance say, “Some gal named Bennett,” and then the phone was picked up.

“Hello?”

“Is this Kathleen Mackey?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Mrs. Mackey, my name is Christine Bennett and I'm researching some events that happened in 1950.”

“What events?” she asked quickly.

“The death of Alberta Talley.”

There was a moment of silence. Then, “Who are you? What do you want?”

“I'd just like to get together with you, Mrs. Mackey. I'd like to ask—”

But she cut me off. “Exactly what kind of ‘research' are you doing?”

“I'll be glad to tell you about it when I see you. It has to do with the twins.” I thought that if I dropped something about the twins, she would know that I was aware of all the family relationships.

“How did you find me?” she blurted.

“In the phone book, actually,” I said.

“I have to talk to my brother. Give me your name again.”

I did.

“And your phone number.”

When she had it, she said she would call me back, and she hung up rather abruptly. I knew I had stirred something up, but I had no idea what. I felt fairly confident that Kathleen Mackey would return my call. She was listed and I could find her. I might not want to impose myself that way, but she didn't know that.