Death in The Life (11 page)

S
HE AWOKE STRUGGLING OUT
of a horrible, disgusting dream. In it she was about to have her picture taken, hundreds of people around, and she had turned for a quick look into a mirror. But it was not her face that she saw, it was the oval of her backside as though she were bent over, and in its center was a glowering, rheumy eye.

The phone rang. What had awakened her was the clicking sound that sometimes preceded the ring. Just as she picked up the receiver she remembered what had happened the night before.

“Julie, it’s Amy Ross. Did I waken you?”

“What time is it?”

“It’s eleven. Something terrible happened to Pete Mallory. He’s dead.”

“I know.”

“I just heard it on the radio. Everybody was looking for him Friday and he must’ve been dead then.”

“Yeah.”

“When did you find out?”

“I identified his body at the morgue last night.” Pete’s mouth had looked like an eye.

“My God… Julie, are you alone? I live on Tenth Street Shall I come over?”

“Thanks.”

She put the receiver back on the hook and pushed the phone farther away from her, to the very edge of the bedside table. Her clothes were strewn where she had dropped them on Jeff’s bed. For hours she had lain, going over and over Detective Russo’s interrogation and her answers. And the smell of the morgue had persisted. Then finally sleep and dreams of which she could only remember the anxiety. She drew her arm back under the covers and pulled her knees up into the fetal position. When she had seen her mother dead, she had felt she was looking at a stranger. She hadn’t wanted to touch her as she had Pete. Jeff had kept trying to console her when she didn’t feel the need to be consoled at all. Then, because she was ashamed, she had pretended. Like sex when she didn’t want it. Thinking now of the putrid, all-pervasive smell of which Pete was part, and the impulse to touch, to save, to understand, to what?—thinking of it now, she was filled with sexual urgency.

Amy Ross brought bagels and cream cheese. And she brought something of the outdoors into a house that had felt sealed up. She wasn’t even a friend, but she became one on the spot, giving orders, taking over.

“You look like hell. Why don’t you take a shower? I’ll find the coffee and fix breakfast.”

Amy had picked up the Sunday
Times
marked “Hayes” in the vestibule. Sunday: at St. Malachy’s they’d have to send in the understudy. Julie felt a little more like herself. The bath helped even more. But not once, even while brushing her hair, did she glance in the mirror.

The table was set, a split bagel in the toaster, the coffee ready. Amy came from the parlor where she had been exploring. “This apartment’s something. I don’t know what I expected.”

“After Julie’s Place?” Julie’s Place: it did exist. She reached for the coffee.

“You’re married to Geoffrey Hayes, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

“My father’s always quoting him.”

“That’s about right,” Julie said.

“You’ll feel better when you have something to eat.” Amy pushed down the spring in the toaster. When the bagel popped up, she spread a half with cream cheese for Julie.

Julie ate without tasting, numb and silent. Amy ate a bite or two of the other half, pushed it away, and then picked it up and finished it. Then she ate a tiny bite of cream cheese from the knife. She was fighting weight, getting a little plump in the waist. Julie began to think about her. She had seen her in the production of
Streetcar,
in which Laura Gibson had starred.

“I saw you play Stella,” she said. “You were good.” Was she? It had to be said anyway.

“Thank you. Pete designed that production, you know.”

“I’d forgotten.”

“You shouldn’t. That was the best part. He used film as counterpoint. Remember? I wanted terribly to do Blanche DuBois. I don’t mean Laura Gibson wasn’t good. Well, she wasn’t, but that wasn’t her fault. People said she was too old for the part, but it wasn’t that; she was already ill.”

“What about her and Pete? Was there something?”

“Oh, yes, there was something.”

“Was he in love with her?”

Amy shrugged. “I don’t know about Pete. Were you in love with him?”

“On my way to it maybe. I don’t know. It’s all mixed up now.”

“There was something tremendous between him and Laura. Personally, I don’t think it was bed. But she wasn’t the mother type either.”

“Was Pete homosexual?”

“The gay boys adore him.”

“So?”

“So I don’t know. I’m just saying.”

“What did they say on the radio,” Julie asked, “about what happened last night?”

“A member of the Actors Forum—they had to get that in naturally—found slain in another apartment of the building where he lived. The police are searching for the apartment’s occupant. I forget her name, I’d never heard it before.”

“Rita Morgan.”

“An older woman, I’ll bet anything,” Amy said.

“Sixteen. A prostitute.”

“What?” Amy made a face of disbelief.

“Screwy, isn’t it?”

Amy said, “I mean if Pete wanted sex, I know a dozen kids…”

“Yeah.”

“Including me, if you want to know the truth. I kind of like the borderline kooks. But like I told you at the Forum that night, Kiss-and-Run Pete. Julie, a prostitute in this day and age? It doesn’t make sense.”

“There’s a lot of them on the street.”

“But they’re out for a different breed of cat. I don’t even think Pete could afford the going rate.”

“The coming rate,” Julie said in that reflexive pattern. But it put her in mind of a play Pete had made on the same word, “Nobody comes natural anymore.”

“Amy?”

“Yes?”

“They found his body in her apartment, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he’d been to bed with her. The police don’t know that. He could have known her like I did—somebody she could tell her troubles to.” She told Amy of Rita’s coming into the shop.

“That sounds more like it,” Amy said of Pete’s relationship with the girl.

“What’s Pete’s background, do you know?”

“Midwest, a town outside Chicago. I think he has a sister living out there. I know he went to Yale on some kind of fellowship. He was a protégé of Ira Windsor…”

“The designer,” Julie said.

“Now that relationship… everybody took for granted, you know? Windsor’s the queen of queens. It’s too bad Laura Gibson isn’t alive. She knew Pete like nobody else did.”

“It’s too bad Pete isn’t alive,” Julie said and poured herself another cup of coffee.

“You should have seen her when they were doing street theater.
Cathleen ni Houlihan.
I mean the play is nothing today, but she was… a presence. Something went wrong for her to have missed being a star. She drank a lot. Maybe it was that. But my God, think of the drunks who made it.”

“I saw
Cathleen ni Houlihan
last night. Just last night. It seems like years. I was supposed to meet Pete there. Afterwards a friend and I walked down Ninth Avenue. There was a crowd and the police and I wanted to know. Boy, did I find out.”

“Pete wasn’t ever going to make it big either,” Amy said, following her own train of thought. “It has to do with being at the right place at the right time.”

“Pete avoided the right places.”

“You can’t go back to doing small parts after you’ve played leads—unless at some place like the Forum. Even there.” Amy had lapsed entirely into thoughts of herself and her own career. That was the thing about actors. Every time you told them about somebody else, they told you about themselves.

“I wonder what happens next,” Julie said. She thought of Mrs. Ryan. How long had she waited at McGowan’s Tavern? Wherever she was right now, she’d certainly be talking about Pete Mallory.
Peter
Mallory. And her friend Laura Gibson. “What’s the latest disaster at the Willoughby?” Mr. Bourke… who was somehow the link among them all… Could Rita have gone home to
Pete’s
home town? She’d refused to tell Julie where home was. Why? What difference could she have thought it would make to Julie? Could it mean that Rita knew she and Pete were friends?

“Amy, how old was Pete?”

“Thirty-one or two.”

“Did he go home summers… or on vacation?”

“You mean to Illinois? I don’t think so. I don’t really know. I’m not even sure about the sister now. It was something at the back of my mind.”

“Did you know he’d studied for the priesthood?”

“I knew he was a Catholic. I mean a real one, practicing. So was Laura Gibson.”

The name kept coming up. “Why do you keep mentioning her, Amy? I don’t mean you shouldn’t. I’m just asking—do you think of her automatically every time you think of Pete?”

“No… Well, it’s funny. I almost do. You see Pete was a strange cat. Every time you’d think you were getting to know him, that he liked you, that you were getting underneath that offhand way of his, he’d walk away. It was like a comedy routine, something in an old-time movie where the hero goes into the burning building, rescues the girl, and carries her out in his arms, then drops her on the sidewalk and walks away. But he wasn’t like that with Laura. He’d be waiting for her after theater, he even helped her take off her makeup. It was—oh, hell, it was touching, and I know that when she was dying and didn’t have any money, Pete paid her bills.”

“Where’d he get the money?”

Amy shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“When did he come to New York, how long ago?”

Amy thought about it. “I still have the
Streetcar
program, and I think his bio gives the date he was at Yale. I’ll call you when I get home.”

Without thinking of what she was doing, Julie got up and cleared the dishes.

“I’ll go,” Amy said. “I can take a hint.”

“I’m sorry. I was thinking. I am grateful to you, Amy. I needed help this morning and you were it.” She thought of Doctor, who had at no time been very far out of mind, only too distressing a presence to be allowed all the way in.

“What would you say to my organizing a memorial for Pete at the Forum?”

“Great.” Julie could think of nothing that seemed less relevant just then. Except that any number of people might have things to say about Pete that she would have no other way of finding out.

“I’ll think about it. Not everyone was as fond of Pete as you and I.”

“Let’s make it an open invitation anyway,” Julie said, and then, catching a little gleam of resentment in Amys eye, “I’ll help out in any way I can, but you’re the preacher.”

At the door, Amy said, “I hope you don’t mind my saying this, I just realized what Pete saw in you. You’ve got an unusual way of saying things, way out, and yet they’re right. Pete was like that. He did things that worked by contrast, not just illustration.” Then, thinking over what she had said, she added, “I must remember that for the memorial.”

“Write it down,” Julie said.

She was bolting the door after Amy’s departure when the phone rang. A midtown precinct officer identified himself. Detective Russo would be grateful if she would accompany him to Broome Street and assist the police artist who was preparing a sketch of the missing witness, Rita Morgan. Julie agreed to be ready at two-thirty.

Amy called within the hour and read her Pete’s biography from the program of
A Streetcar Named Desire:

“‘Peter Mallory (designer) met Laura Gibson while he was studying at The Yale Drama School on the Ira Windsor Fellowship in 1967. He has worked with her in every play in which she has appeared since, including the off-Broadway revivals of
Juno and the Paycock, Red Roses for Me, Medea,
and
The Chalk Garden.
He designed, mounted, and stage managed last year’s highly successful New York Street Festival Theater. A native of Libertytown, Illinois, Mr. Mallory studied drawing at the Chicago Art Institute and design at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. He is considered one of the most promising young innovators in multimedia design.’”

“That’s it,” Amy said. “We opened January 17 and closed in April. Laura Gibson died last fall.”

“Thanks,” Julie said. “You’re great.”

Julie could not figure out why the production had made so little impression on her, or more to the point, such a bad one apparently that she had not thought of Pete these past couple of weeks in connection with it. Then she had it: Jeff had despised it. It represented everything wrong with American theater, an assault upon the senses, a psychedelic trip, self-indulgent, a travesty on artistic discipline, et cetera, et cetera. A snow job. After which she had looked for a new hiding place herself, taking courses toward becoming a psychiatric social worker. It turned out that Jeff had even stronger opinions in that area. And when she again crawled out from under the snow, Jeff had suggested Doctor Callahan. For Julie.

D
ETECTIVE RUSSO’S SOULFUL EYES
were puffy and bloodshot, but he grinned at Julie, leaned across the seat, and opened the door for her. “It’s me,” he said. “I’m still on the job.”

“Great,” Julie said. The car reeked of shaving lotion.

“My wife sends her regards.”

“Thanks.”

His eyes rested on her a moment as he looked around before pulling out ahead of the oncoming cars. The motor sputtered and then decided to keep going. “It’s my own car,” he said. “I don’t drive it much.”

A poor thing, but his own. “It’s stiff,” Julie said.

“I should have asked you last night if you needed a sleeping pill,” Russo said, apparently measuring her sleep by the length of her sentences. “Do you live alone?”

“Most of the time. My husband’s a newspaperman.”

“No kidding.”

“I’d as soon keep his name out of this, however.”

“I understand. It’s nobody’s business, including mine. But I knew you weren’t just anybody.”

“But I am,” Julie said. “It’s Jeff who’s special.”

“That’s who’s special in our house too, me. You know, my wife owned a beauty shop when I married her. She gave it up when I got made a detective because she thought it might hurt my image.”

Or hers as a detective’s wife, Julie wondered. “She’s very ambitious for you.”

“Yeah. Maybe if we had kids…”