Gentle Murderer Read Free Page B

that thy whole body go into hell.’ What is hell like, Katie? What is it like when cutting off our hand is nothing compared to it?”
    She was startled by his appearance when she turned to look at him. There were great hollows under his eyes and his whole face looked gray, almost green, slimy, swimming as it was in sweat.
    “You better go to bed, Tim. I’ll tell mama. It’s after midnight, anyway.”
    “No,” he said harshly. “I’ve got to have some music. I’ve got to sing. When I can’t work I’ve got to sing.”
    He pushed the rocker out of his way and got a towel from where it hung at the side of his dresser. He looked at himself in the mirror and brushed the sweat away with the back of his hand. He caught her reflection in the glass.
    “I frightened you, Katie. I frightened the little bird.”
    “I’m not a little bird.”
    “Oh? Have you grown into an eagle all of a sudden?” He smiled at her and picked up his toothbrush and soap.
    The whole room changed when he smiled. “I’m a skylark,” she said, lifting her chin.
    “Ah, that’s it. A little pilgrim of the sky.” He went to the door. “Don’t fly away until I come back. I can’t fly alone, you know.”
    “Katerina!” The rich full voice of her mother boomed up the stairs.
    Tim went to the head of them. “She’s talked me into coming down, Mrs. Galli. As soon as I wash my face.”
    “Before you come down it will be already time to go up. The wine will be gone.”
    “Then save a song for me.”
    “Send her down, Tim. Maybe if she runs down to Krepic’s before he closes …”
    “Not alone!” Tim shouted.
    “Then I’ll go out myself,” she said petulantly, her chubby, jeweled hand not moving from the railing.
    Tim could feel a knot of revulsion rising in him. He shook his head and shivered. Easy, easy, he told himself. This always passes.
    “Don’t you care whether I go or not?”
    Go to hell and good riddance, swiller of wine and men, he thought. He choked out the words: “Send Johnny.”
    “You’ll hurry before he comes back?” Her hand slid down the railing with a slow sensuousness.
    He plunged toward the bathroom without answering.
    In his room, the door open, Katie pulled his tool kit from beneath the bed and laid the hammer away in it, refastening the strap around the canvas. She took a shirt from the hanger on the pole that was stretched between the walls in the corner of the room. The other of the two shirts she had ironed for him that day was hanging there, as was his other pair of army suntans—his complete wardrobe. It was then that she wondered what he had done with his third shirt, the clean one that he had put on that afternoon. He was wearing a tee shirt now, and that so soaked with sweat it might have been wrung out in the sink and put back on without looking any different. Her thoughts drifted from it to the shirt she now laid out on the bed for him. She unbuttoned it and smoothed it out, feeling of the kind cleanliness of it, and relishing it as she so relished the same virtue in Tim. He was the one clean thing, she thought, in a world very much in need of scrubbing.
    She went to the mirror and pushed up the waves in her black hair. She touched her lipstick on her lips with her little finger, spreading it where a little had congealed in the corner of her mouth. There was a faint scent to her hand, the same as she had noticed on Tim’s hand … Putty, she thought, or some such pungent stuff as would cling to the hammer from his work. She lifted her hand again and smelled it, and then put it from her, lest straining for the association she lose it altogether. Humming “When I Was a Fisherman,” she left the room and went downstairs.

4
    F ATHER DUFFY HAD THE six o’clock Mass that Sunday. He had no more than fallen into a sodden sleep when the alarm clock wakened him. He was conscious several seconds before he could identify the sound. Whatever his dream, his first waking thought was that he was lying on