Lullaby of Murder (15 page)

“She did,” Julie said. “Except when you won’t let her.”

“When I won’t let her,” Fran said. “I suppose we’re both right about it. And both wrong.”

BACK IN THE APARTMENT
they managed small talk about Greenwich Village while Julie served the thick, sweet coffee. Then Fran remarked, “Tony used to say it was the last playground of a man’s youth.”

Eleanor exploded. “How can you remember something like that now? I don’t understand you, mother.”

“Nor I you,” Fran said.

“Mother, Tony’s new girlfriend isn’t any older than me, and that’s disgusting.”

“He was infatuated, that’s all.”

“He wanted a divorce,” the girl shouted.

“He only thought he wanted one. He was at an age when it was important to him that women found him attractive.”

“Stop defending him!”

“Until I die.”

“When will you go back to school, Eleanor?” Julie asked clumsily.

“As soon as the police say I can.” She took hold of her mother’s wrist. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve been hiding for years, trying to forget…”

Fran groaned.

“If you listen to me, mother, maybe you’ll understand if Julie does.”

Imperfect logic, and yet…

Fran bowed her head and settled her eyes on the strong hand wrapped around her wrist. The girl’s knuckles had gone white.

“When I was eleven years old and came here on a visit, Tony promised me a great treat one day when you were at the shop. He took me downtown to meet someone he said was important in the theater, and I remember him combing my hair for me and pinching my cheeks to bring more color into them. We were backstage in an empty theater, then waiting in a dressing room and I was looking at myself in the mirror. I pretended it was my dressing room. I was pretty. It’s true. I’ve turned into a pony or something with a long face, but I
was
pretty and foolish. I won’t say I was innocent. I can’t remember ever being innocent…”

Fran closed her eyes. Julie was stiff with a sudden tension.

“Then this man came and asked me if I wanted to be an actress when I grew up and of course I said I did. Tony went out and left us…I didn’t know where he went, but I wasn’t scared at first. The man seemed very nice…” She paused and swallowed a mouthful of saliva.

“You don’t need to go on,” Fran said.

“I do need to because I want Julie to tell me if she thinks I could make up a story like this.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “He said I was a little Joan of Arc. He was so gentle. Even now I remember the way he put his hands on my shoulders and had me kneel down in front of him. At first I thought he was praying, then he lifted my face and there were tears running down his…and then, and then when he was trying to get me to do what he wanted, Tony crashed open the door. He’d been waiting outside all the time, knowing what was going to happen.”

Fran shook her head.

“Yes, mother, yes!”

“How in the name of God could he have known?”

“But he did. The man said so to him. And to this day, do you know what I remember most, what’s burned into my mind? Shame. As though it had all been my fault, and what I’ll remember until I die is the smug, superior look on Tony when he came in the room and hit the man in the face and then in the stomach and then in the groin, and the man just stood there and took it, his arms hanging down straight. ‘I know, I know,’ he kept saying. And do you know what Tony said afterwards to me when we were out on the street? He said, ‘If you don’t tell your mother, I won’t.’” At last Eleanor fell silent.

Fran lifted her head. “But he did tell me. He was beside himself that he’d left you alone with such a person, and it was sheer accident that he’d gone back. He was supposed to be interviewing someone in the theater lounge where the cameras had been set up. We talked about it all night—whether we shouldn’t both talk to you. But Tony had given the man a beating in front of you and we decided that further discussion would only prolong the trauma. You’d heard and seen enough to know that it was wicked, and if anything like it ever happened again you would know to run, to scream.”

“I have been running,” Eleanor said. “Oh, yes. I have been running.” She spoke directly to Julie: “I know it isn’t so, but I’ve always thought that in spite of everything, she needed me.”

Julie prayed, almost aloud: Fran, say she’s right.

But Fran was silent. She rubbed her wrist where Eleanor had finally let go of it.

Eleanor said, “Damn you, mother. Damn you, damn you, damn you!”

T
HE FIRST THING JULIE
did Monday morning was recheck the date of
Autumn Tears.
It jibed with Eleanor’s story, so that almost certainly Tony had taken her to the Irving Theater where
Tears
was playing, Patti Royce the star, Jay Phillips the press representative. But no names were spoken last night by either Fran or Eleanor.

On the phone Julie managed to clear up one thing: Jay Phillips had
not
been working on publicity for the soon-to-be-released Patti Royce picture,
Celebration.
His office had never heard of it. One tiny knot untied.

She locked up the shop and walked a few blocks north to precinct headquarters where she got to see Detective Russo, an acquaintance who was the warmer toward her because his wife and Mrs. Ryan were chums. Russo, second generation Italian-American, had grown up in the neighborhood. His parents still ran a fruit shop at Ninth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street. He took her upstairs to the interrogation room where they shared the long table with a couple of offenders and the officers who had brought them in.

“The hospitality of the house,” Russo said. “We’re redecorating the living room. What can I do for you?”

“Information about child molestation,” Julie said. “It is a criminal act, isn’t it?”

“The first offense is a misdemeanor in New York State. I think I have this right. After that it’s a felony. But it’s sticky business. It’s like rape used to be—still is in some cases—it’s easy to throw doubt on the victim. The question of seduction is bound to come up, especially if the victim has reached puberty.”

“And feels guilty about it herself,” Julie said. “I’m speaking of girls.”

“I figured. And then kids don’t tell. And mothers of kids who do are often afraid that the fathers will find out and land in jail for trying to kill the perpetrator. That’s how it plays in this part of town.” Russo went on to cite several cases he knew about. “When you do collar a molester, nine times out of ten he gets off on the promise of psychiatric help. I don’t know what else I can tell you, Julie.”

“You’ve been very helpful.”

“I’ll get you a number at the desk. The best thing to do is take it up with the child abuse people. They got the savvy and these days they’ve got the clout.”

“Thank you,” Julie said. She wanted now to talk to Doctor Callahan, but it would have been less than gracious not to take the number he proposed to get for her.

As they were leaving the room, one of the prisoners called out to her, “Hey, lady. You a lawyer?”

“Sorry,” Julie said.

“Man, you don’t know what sorry is.”

JULIE STOPPED
at the Actors Forum, hoping to run into Madge Higgens who had played Patti’s mother in
Autumn Tears.
The only person on hand was Reggie Bauer who spent most of his waking hours there. He might once have been the child actor he claimed, but Julie doubted he had done a day’s work since his voice changed. She had heard he lived on his wit and his winnings at bridge. He greeted her with congratulations on that morning’s by-line.

“Thanks.”

“It’s an ill wind, as my sainted grandmother used to say. You don’t need a side-kick, do you, someone with a strong inclination to evil?”

“As your sainted grandmother used to say?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I used to sneak a midnight read of the Baltimore Catechism at her house. I thought it was pornography.”

Julie thought about Reggie and Tim: they were very much alike. “Do you know anybody in the cast of
Little Dorrit
?”

“I
can
know someone. Give me twenty-four hours and tell me what you want to find out about whom. You may count on discretion and confidentiality. Pay is optional. Take a chance on me, huh?”

“All right. Abby Hill went out of the show with appendicitis last week. I’d like to know when the attack came on and where she’s hospitalized, if she still is.”

“She’s English,” Reggie said. “Probably went home to have the operation on the health plan. Hound dog Bauer is on the scent. I’m kidding about her going home.”

“You may be right.”

Reggie grinned. “What you really want to know is whether the affliction from which she suffered was actually appendicitis. Right?”

“You said it, I didn’t,” Julie said blandly.

SHE STOPPED AT THE SHOP
long enough to phone her former therapist between patients. She asked for a one-shot although she didn’t put it that way.

“Is it a crisis?” Doctor Callahan wanted to know.

“No. It’s just that I need more insight than I have.”

“Who doesn’t?” the doctor said and gave her an afternoon cancellation.

A
LICE ARTHUR AND A
man from the custodial department were rearranging the office when Julie arrived. The big room smelled of fresh paint. A transparent tarpaulin covered the card files with a sign that read,
Do not open by order of the police.
The couch had been released. Tony’s desk was gone, Julie’s and Tim’s partners’ desk was moved to where it had stood. She studied it for a moment and then said, “Let’s turn it half way around.” She didn’t want to sit where Tony had, and she didn’t think Tim would want to either.

The man from custodial called downstairs for help, rejecting the women’s offer to move it with him. Gallantry, or union regulations? He identified himself on the phone as Jasper.

Alice remarked that it was a lot of work for just two more weeks of occupancy. Julie tried to picture Alice working out of the shop on Forty-fourth Street where she was thinking of taking up her own headquarters. Most of the
Daily
columnists worked away from the newspaper’s offices. What came through about Alice was that Julie didn’t know her very well. Tim she knew better, knowing how and what he wrote. He had a natural talent for purveying gossip. It was compounded of such ingredients as bitchiness, drollery—and a little droolery, to coin a word: you had to treat the stars with reverence if not respect; you had to have an instinct for who was on the way up and who down, for whether cats were in, or dogs, or marmosets; and the sense to know that diamonds were not a girl’s best friend when the bottom had just fallen out of the diamond market. Tim had already come and gone. He’d left a dozen items for Alice to type and hand over to Julie.

“Mr. Jasper?” Julie said when he hung up the phone on Alice’s desk.

“Johnny Jasper, ma’am.” He was fifty or so, an intelligent looking man. In a different uniform he’d have looked like a major at least.

“How would you go about getting into the building after hours without Security knowing?”

“Well, we’ve been working that over with the police since Friday night, and you’d be surprised.”

Julie invited him to sit down opposite her at the conference table.

“Take for example the cleanup crew: they come to the north door at nine and ring the bell. Somebody from custodial goes up and lets them in. They punch a time-clock, work nine to five, a crew of twenty up to thirty. Most of them are women, mostly black or Hispanic. They’re a younger lot than in my early days around here, and there’s a big turnover. Some of them know one another from outside work, but I think a stranger who knew the ropes could come in with them and then disappear without being missed. The police are working on something like that now, the boss was saying.

“And then you got the plant downstairs, remember. All that equipment takes servicing, and the trucks load up with the early editions and roll out all night and early morning. I seen your eyebrows go up at me calling down for help. Now if you want a real tough bunch of union men, you take the teamsters running the newspaper trucks. We call them ‘the horses’ because they run to win. Many a loader’s been caught on the wrong side of the tailgate and found himself in another borough before they put him down.”

“No kidding,” Julie said.

“I’m exaggerating a little, but there’s a lot of ways to travel all through this building if you know them. Take the elevator system, especially on the plant levels. If I was to tell you where the key was to the freight elevator, you could take it to the fourth floor and switch over to the public elevators there without seeing a soul at most hours of the day or night.”

“You’d think I’d know the building myself after a year, wouldn’t you?” Julie said.

“Either that or you’d know who to partner up with—if you had murder in mind.”

“If I had murder in mind, I don’t think I’d partner up with anybody.”

“It’s done all the time,” Jasper said, “like it was a business deal. I tell you everything’s a deal nowadays. Everybody’s on the take, and they don’t see anything wrong with it. You show me a man who admits he’s a crook and I’ll show you an honest man.”

NOT ONE MAN
, but three arrived from custodial. The desk was turned and nobody got a hernia.

When they had gone Alice said, “I took down what he was saying. I take down everything these days. Would you like me to type it up for you?”

“Thanks,” Julie said. “You never know.”

She read Tim’s copy as Alice rolled it out of the typewriter: Alice was being very helpful. All of Tim’s items were usable as written, none of them memorable or libelous, bits of fluff, an occasional barb. She thought of Eleanor’s censorious question on the importance of interviews and previews. “Alice, have you ever met Eleanor, Tony’s stepdaughter?”

“Never.”

“Or heard Tony talk about her?”

“No. He used to send her a check every month until her mother took it over. Substantial too, for a school girl.”

“I don’t suppose she ever sent them back?”