The Good Friday Murder Read Online Free PDF

not in the bathroom. There was blood in the bathroom, in the sink and on the tile floor and on the towels. More frightened than ever, Magda ran to Mrs. Talley’s bedroom. It was neat, the bed made as it always was—“She was such a clean person,” Magda told the police—but Mrs. Talley was not there. She ran into the boys’ room, which was in disarray, the beds not made, blood on the sheets. But no Mrs. Talley.
    Magda then ran through the living room into the kitchen and stopped herself at the door. There it was. “It” was the ravaged body of Alberta Talley, lying on the kitchen floor, covered with blood, blood congealed on the floor about it, blood on the cabinets, blood splashed on the window and the pretty white curtains.
    “I crossed myself,” Magda said.
    It must have been horrible. Reading the accounts, I wondered that so young a girl had comported herself so bravely. First she took Robert by the arm and walked him to Mrs. Talley’s bedroom. She told him to stay there and closed the door. (She explained that Mrs. Talley sometimes locked one of the twins in her bedroom when she was too busy to look after both of them. Magda didn’t have the key to the bedroom, but, she said, she thought Robert would believe he was locked in and would stay there. He did.)
    She then called the police. They came very quickly, she said, and they were very kind.
    I put all this into my chronology and then looked further for reports of the autopsy and the questioning of possible suspects. The autopsy reports were in the Wednesday papers, having been made public on Tuesday. Mrs. Talley had died of multiple stab wounds covering almost all her body. Some of them were fairly superficial—as if the killer didn’t mean it, one newspaper said—but the slash across the throat was probably the mortal blow.
    Fingerprints from James and Robert Talley were found everywhere—on the bread knife that had killed their mother, in the blood that had congealed on and around her body, and throughout the apartment. Both twins had handled the knife; in fact, they had held the blade as well, leaving me to believe that they had picked it up out of curiosity or horror but not as a weapon. The police removed the twins from the apartment in handcuffs. There were photos of them being led away. I could not tell one from the other in the pictures, but I could see the resemblance between the twenty-nine-year-old twins and the old man at Greenwillow.
    I suppose the police questioned them for hours, perhapsovernight. The year 1950 was long before the famous Miranda case and the subsequent Miranda warnings that everyone nowadays takes for granted. Heaven only knows how they abused those two poor young men, but apparently to no avail. Neither twin admitted anything. In fact, they were quite silent, asking frequently for “Mama” and for each other.
    The tabloids kept the story alive in that grotesque manner that is not common nowadays, I KNEW THEY WERE KILLERS , one headline screamed on Wednesday, quoting a neighbor who lived in another building on Ocean Avenue and who sometimes saw the twins walking with Mrs. Talley or Magda. There was little behind the headline, and I felt disgusted both by the sentiment and by its publication. I am not always a lover of the good old days.
    Separate from my chronology, I made a list of all the people mentioned whom I thought it would be useful to interview. There was Magda, of course, if I could find her. There was Sergeant Kevin O’Connor, who had told one newspaper that only a madman could have done such a killing. I hoped he had been young in 1950 so that he might still be on the force or perhaps retired somewhere in the area. There were people living in nearby apartments who were mentioned by name. I knew that New York’s rent-control laws made it disadvantageous to move, and I thought there might just be a slim chance that someone who remembered that Easter Sunday might still live in the same building. And I wondered