Gentle Murderer Read Free

of the hall. In his shirtsleeves, he turned on the radio—music … hill-billy, jive and “music to read by.” Music to sweat by, he thought, plucking the shirt from where it clung to his back. He rubbed the aching muscles.
    The minute-hand on his alarm clock lumbered toward eleven. It reached it simultaneously with the time signal on the radio. The newscaster began as he did every other night of the year. He numbered the global tragedies, fears and fiascoes, and finished off his reports with the metropolitan roundup—robbery and rescue, pathos and nonsense. Murder in New York was not among them. Nor was the word mentioned in the news summary at midnight.
    As he turned off the radio he remembered the man’s last words: “No peace on earth, especially for men of good will.”

3
    T HERE WAS A PARTY going on that night when Tim Brandon returned to the boarding house on Twelfth Street. There was generally a party on Saturday night. He could hear it half a block away. But then there were parties in most of the houses in the block, and with the windows open, the songs of one reached out to join the laughter of another. But Tim recognized Mrs. Galli’s voice. The laughter rolled up in her, shaking one layer in her buxom figure after another, and then exploded into the faces of those around her. They invariably rocked with it as though the whole room were shaking, even if they didn’t know what she was laughing at. Whatever Mrs. Galli did, the world did with her.
    She had been calling up the stairs to him all night, Tim thought. The more wine she had, the more people she thought of to call into the party, and she would want him, especially him.
    Her son’s concertina started as Tim went up the outside steps. He paused a moment and looked in through the limp curtains. “When I was a fisherman there by the shore …” Johnny Galli sang. He was a baker and the son of a baker, and if ever he had caught a fish he had trapped it in his mother’s goldfish bowl, Tim thought. He thought about goldfish and bowls for a moment, and how much like them people were, except that most of them didn’t know they were in the bowl. He knew it. It was why he liked the darkness and preferred to see a party from where he watched now. The chorus of Johnny’s song was picked up in Italian. The singers swayed with the music and closed their eyes, remembering the shore they sang about, the long white beach and the blue Mediterranean and the great gulls flying …
    Tim was more weary than he could remember ever having been before. He entered the house and went upstairs unnoticed. In five minutes he was sprawled on his bed, clothes and shoes still on, and asleep.
    He awoke suddenly to the sound of his name. He looked about the dark room frantically, trying to get his bearings, for he had been torn out of a wild and terrible dream.
    “Tim, Tim, are you in there?”
    He heard music now behind the voice and the knocking, and fumbled his hands over the bed. The tufted quilt was familiar. He turned his head and felt the coolness where the air sluiced his wet neck and forehead. He moistened his lips and breathed deeply. The knocking persisted.
    “What is it?” he called out.
    “It’s me, Katie, Tim. Mama thought you’d be sorry if you didn’t come down.”
    “Just a minute, Katie.”
    He groped for the light cord above his head and pulled it. Sitting up, he shook off sleep and the dream. “Come in if you want to.”
    A slim, dark girl opened the door a few inches at a time.
    “I didn’t want to bother you, Tim. But you know how mama is when there’s a party.”
    “It’s all right, Katie. I’m just groggy with sleep. The light hurts my eyes.” He swung his feet to the floor.
    She moved a pile of books from the one rocker in the room and sat on the edge of it tentatively.
    “How do you feel, Tim?”
    “How do I feel?”
    “You had a headache this afternoon.”
    “Oh. It’s all gone. I needed sleep. That’s all.”
    “Wasn’t it