Gentle Murderer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Read Free Book Online

stuff?”
    “Not as special as some she’s got in the closet, but the boys’ll bring out anything on it.”
    Holden lit a cigarette and went to the window. Looking down, he saw the crowd milling about, stretching, straining, striking up a camaraderie they never found except in disaster. He closed his eyes and thought about Dolly Gebhardt. The medical examiner placed her death between eight o’clock and ten “Saturday night. She was wearing evening clothes. She probably had not eaten dinner. The autopsy now in progress would determine that, also the probable weapon with which she had been murdered.
    Holden dragged deeply on his cigarette. There was always a lag at this stage of investigation that put him on edge. Laboratory reports incomplete, witnesses not immediate … all the important routine work to be done and yet the pressure for haste upon him … the possibility that a murderer was throwing up his camouflage, burning bridges, making time.
    He turned from the window as Goldsmith came back from the bedroom. He watched him move about the room, studying the pictures on the walls, the books, magazines. The sergeant might be there on a visit by the looks of him—a young doctor, a teacher maybe. Probably a teacher: patient, inquisitive, but rather off-hand about it. A small man nobody would take for a detective, there was a warmth in him that had not yet burned out in the coldblooded business of criminal investigation. That was his great value: his human understanding. It brought him to the most unlikely criminal. No fingerprints and weapons man, he always started by studying the victim. The apparent leisure with which he could approach it grated on Holden at moments like these, however.
    “You’ve had the afternoon in the boudoir and lounge, Goldie. Just who was Dolly Gebhardt?”
    Goldsmith was accustomed to his superior’s sarcasm at this junction. “She was born Doris Arleen Gebhardt in 1910 at Spring Falls, Minnesota. She was in the chorus line a good many years ago, but I’d say she fell by the wayside early.”
    “Don’t be so damned poetic. Give me the facts.”
    “She was a call girl, a high-class prostitute.”

9
    T HE EARLY EDITION OF the tabloids carried the story … not much story but plenty of bold print. They described Dolly Gebhardt as an attractive redhead and former show girl, they called the murder brutal, and they mentioned Mrs. Flaherty. Father Duffy read the piece through, his heart pounding. For the load he had borne by knowing that murder had been committed, he now picked up one twice its weight. The penitent had not gone to the police, and with each hour that he remained unapprehended, the weight would be that much more unbearable.
    He laid the paper away and put on his coat. Downstairs he looked up the Flaherty address in the parish record. He walked the distance briskly, not knowing what he might say or ask. There was something vaguely comforting in the fact that out of all the people in New York who might have discovered the crime, one of his parishioners had … comforting and frightening. The largest city in the world was very small to a man in flight. It was large only to his pursuers.
    He nodded absently to those who greeted him. Half the neighborhood seemed to have gathered on the steps of the tenement building where the Flahertys lived. Word of his coming flew up the stairs ahead of him, and Flaherty came down with his lunch box as the priest rounded the second floor railing. “Hello, Billy.”
    “Good evening, Father. Are you here about the murder?”
    “I thought there might be something I could do.”
    “There is something, Father. You can talk sense into Norah’s head. She’s past listening to me for many a year. I’m all the time telling her if I don’t bring home enough we can go without. Not to be hiring herself out, and the kids running round like wild geese. Now look what she’s brought us. What do the likes of us want meddling in a murder?”
    Or the likes