Death in The Life (12 page)

The cure-all, kids. “They grow up,” Julie said.

“Oh, man. We got a sergeant in the department. He’s got five kids, from junior high up. Two of them already busted for drugs. ‘Those beautiful babies,’ he keeps saying. ‘What happened to them?’”

Julie thought of Rita. “What will you do with the picture if it turns out to look like Rita?”

“Don’t worry, it’ll turn out like her. This guy’s a whiz, but we won’t use it till you say okay. You and the cowboy, Matt Arlen. We’ll get back to him with it before he takes off for Wyoming. We’ll sweep the neighborhood with it, give it to the newspapers, and then see what happens. You never saw a street as clean as Eighth Avenue this morning. There isn’t a hustler in sight. That’s how it’ll be for a couple of days. Then one by one, they’ll crawl out of their holes.”

“Except Rita.”

“That depends. She could still be here—at some other address. If it turns out she’s clean, she’ll come out as soon as she knows we’re looking for her. The cowboy saw her Wednesday night so we know she was here then. He’d signed her up for every night in the week through Saturday, and the poor dumb bastard gave her a hundred dollars in advance. She said she wanted to buy a present for her kid brother’s birthday.”

“F.A.O. Schwarz,” Julie said.

“What?”

“She used to go there and look at the toys when she got homesick.”

“No kidding.” Russo pulled to the side of the street and wrote himself a note. “That wasn’t in your statement, was it?”

“I guess not.”

“You can never tell,” Russo said. “Maybe she really did want to buy a present for her brother.”

“I’d have believed her.”

“Most prostitutes are pretty convincing liars, Julie. Okay to call you Julie?”

“Everybody does.”

“I’m Dom as in Dominic. I’m playing with the idea that once she got the hundred bucks extra in hand, she cleared out on the cowboy. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, three nights at twenty-five bucks a trick, she was still twenty-five ahead and without having to come across.”

Women’s lib, Julie screamed silently.

“Tricks on tricks,” Russo said, pleased with himself. “This is only one cop’s theory, of course. It may not hold up.”

“If it does hold up, it means somebody else killed Pete.”

“That’s the way I was going. Women don’t generally use knives, except in a family situation.”

“Did I say in my statement she told me she had a knife? God, I’m so foggy.”

“You did say it. It would have been some oversight if you forgot that.”

“But I didn’t really believe she had a knife.”

“You said that too, and for the time being, I go along with it. Me, alone. Donleavy says, get her, grill her. That’s your job. He likes to keep the heavy stuff for himself. Which is okay by me.”

“What you said about family—I’ve been trying to figure out if she and Pete could have come from the same place in Illinois. There has to be some connection.”

“Not if her name is Rita Morgan, which it probably isn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, now…” He broke into his own train of thought to ask: “Did you know Mallory had a sister?”

“I found it out this morning. He came from a town called Libertytown, Illinois.”

“That’s the place. Donleavy decided last night that since I was such a good neighbor type, I ought to be the one to call her. We’d got an order and entered Mallory’s apartment by then. We found out he called his sister at seven-forty Thursday night. That was his last known contact. He was supposed to get back to the Irish Theatre for a dress rehearsal by eight o’clock, but they went on without him. Nobody from there tried to get in touch with him till the next day. So sometime between seven-forty and midnight—probably between then and eight o’clock—he went down one flight of stairs to the apartment right under his, and that was it. Want to hear the details?”

“You bet.” Julie clinched her teeth.

“He was lying face down on the bed, a wound in the chest and two more in the back. It was one of the back wounds that was fatal. The weapon was a knife with a narrow, six-inch blade, a wide hilt. There was a lot of blood.” He glanced at Julie. “Are you all right?”

“Keep going.”

“He was wearing slacks and a tee shirt, no underwear. There was no linen on the bed, just a blanket, pad, and spread, so if they had sex, it probably wasn’t premeditated. The pathology report isn’t in yet.” He paused.

“I get it,” Julie said.

“He didn’t have a key on him. In fact, the only thing in his pocket was a stub of a pencil. We figured at first he’d been rolled—no wallet on him. We found that upstairs afterwards, but still no key, and he had locked his door before going down. Somebody must’ve taken the key with them. There’s no sign of them having gone near his place, but we can’t say that for sure.”

“What about shoes?”

“Smart girl. One on, one off. It came off with the lace still tied.”

“So he probably didn’t take it off himself.”

“Right.” Russo drew the car up to the curb alongside a fire hydrant and cut the motor. “Let’s just sit for a minute, and you tell me how it looks to you.”

“It doesn’t look like Rita. I’ll tell you that. Her place wasn’t locked, right?”

Russo nodded.

“When she was all set to split, could she have given the key to Pete, maybe to give to somebody? Maybe she was going to sublet. How about that? He went down to show the apartment for her…”

Russo was shaking his head. “Her pimp paid the rent, Julie. He put her in there and paid the bills.”

“All right. Let’s say Pete and Rita were friends, just friends. Let’s say she told him the same things she told me about wanting to go home, et cetera…” Julie paused. “I’ve just remembered: I told Pete on the phone about her coming to see me, and he never let on that he knew her.”

“It’s not exactly the kind of friendship a man boasts about to a respectable young lady,” Russo suggested.

“I guess,” Julie said, but she was pretty sure that whatever had kept Pete from mentioning it had nothing to do with her respectability. “He did ask me if she’d told me where home was…”

“I’m going to make a note of that,” the detective said, and did.

“Then he kidded me about not being able to give her the fare home, something like that. One thing I feel sure about, Pete would have encouraged her.” Even as she said it, Julie wasn’t all that sure. She had done a lot of fantasizing about Pete that had more to do with herself than with him. He was a pretty cynical guy.

Russo said, “Who’d have wanted to stop her?”

“Mack, of course. A rough character.”

“And a petty operator,” Russo added.

“Hey, if he’d been knocking her around, Pete wouldn’t have just stood by. I am sure of that.”

“The gallant type?”

“All right,” Julie said defensively.

“Could be that,” Russo said. “And while they skirmished she took off. In which case, let me ask you this: Do you think she’ll come back and give testimony against the pimp?”

“She’d almost have to, wouldn’t she?”

“Voluntarily or otherwise, yes.”

“Then she isn’t ever going to get home. Unless she’s already there.”

“It’ll be a short visit.”

He put the car into motion again. Presently he said, “His sister was coming out here next week to see this play he was working on. It was rotten, having to tell her what happened to him. On the phone yet. Seems like we could’ve waited and had the local cops break it to her. But, Donleavy’s the boss… and of course we wouldn’t ’ve known about the phone call till later. I did ask her if she knew anybody by the name of Rita Morgan. I also checked the phone company for the name Morgan in Libertytown and environs. Seems like a common name, but not out there apparently.”

“What’s the sister like? Could you tell?”

“I couldn’t tell. It was after midnight. I’d woken her up. I did most of the talking. I asked her if there was anyone else in the house or a neighbor she could call to be with her. Name is Helen Mallory so she isn’t married. I got the idea she was a schoolteacher or librarian, you know.”

“I know.”

“It gave me a funny feeling, thinking how she’d be finding her way to the phone through one of these small-town houses you see in the movies, turning on lights as she went along. And there I was on the other end of the phone, sitting at her brother’s desk with a swarm of technicians around me, cracking jokes, doing their job like it was all in a night’s work. Which it is.”

“I wish I could see Pete’s apartment,” Julie said.

“Ask his sister. We got it sealed up for now, but she’s the one who’s got the say about what to do with her brother’s effects. Do you know anybody by the name of Laura?”

“Laura Gibson, an actress.”

“I figured that. Her picture’s on his desk.”

“She’s dead too.”

Russo nodded and swore softly at someone who cut in ahead of him. “He’s got an interesting photograph collection. Know anything about that?”

“Stage design?”

“Not exactly.” He looked at her and then back to the street. “Stills from a porn movie.”

“My God,” Julie said, and then, almost to herself, “I didn’t really know Pete at all.” She sighed deeply, needing the breath, and wondered whether she was more surprised at Pete or at herself for being all that surprised. “Hey, I wonder if there’d be a picture of Rita.”

“I was wondering that too.”

“So? Where are they?”

Russo took one hand from the wheel and rubbed the back of his neck. “He wasn’t exactly interested in physiognomies.”

Julie’s impulse to laugh was cut short. Suddenly she remembered her dream. Physiognomies.

Russo said: “I’ve got a few of them in an envelope back there.” He indicated the back seat.

“Shall I look at them now?”

“They’ll have a magnifying glass at the studio.”

Julie was quite willing to wait. She thought about Pete’s sister to whom the pictures, whatever their content, whatever they told her about Pete, would now belong. Did she, like Pete, go to church every Sunday, and did she sometimes pray, like Mrs. Rodriguez, to the open heart of Jesus? Russo was probably a Catholic too. For somebody who wanted no part of the scene, she’d sure as hell plunked herself down center stage.

In the dingy loft studio, Detective Russo introduced her to Sergeant Greenberg who, pleasant enough to Julie, took out his complaint on Russo of having to come in on Sunday and instead of getting time and a half was going to have to take a day off mid-week.

“You’re going to love your work today,” Russo said, opening his briefcase. “Dirty pictures. These are the ones with faces. Set ’em up so Mrs. Hayes can look at them.”

“You mean mask them?” Greenberg said with a half-snicker as he turned the eight-by-ten prints around and around to satisfy his own curiosity, viewing them from all angles.

“You know what we want,” Russo said tersely. His face had taken on a ruddy glow.

Julie, to clear the air, picked up a photograph, chosen at random, and looked at it. It shocked hell out of her: half a man’s torso, the enormous penis erect, with two nude women, one on either side, facing the camera, lying on their bellies and both about to touch the center piece. The photo had been shot at a slight angle. “The leaning tower of Pisa,” she said. It broke the cops up. “Neither of the girls is Rita Morgan.”

They were able to proceed with something approaching laboratory conditions. Greenberg provided a magnifying glass and turned on more light. Rita was not in the collection.

Greenberg brought out an album of pictures of women, some photos, some clipped from magazines. Julie studied them under his direction, looking for eyes, expression, hairline, any individual feature that looked at all like the missing girl.

Russo had two other descriptions of Rita besides Julie’s, the building superintendent’s at 741 and the cowboy’s. The latter tallied with Julie’s very closely, even to the “kind of innocent smile.”

“Give me a couple of hours,” Greenberg said. “Go see a porn movie.”

Funny.

Outdoors, Russo proposed to Julie that they go over to Chinatown and have something to eat. She did not expect to have much appetite, but it was something to do. “Are you on the case permanently now?”

“Nobody’s on any case permanently, not nowadays. But I’ve been temporarily detached to work with Homicide.”

Temporarily detached. Julie hoped that her present feeling of detachment was temporary. She had only just begun to feel involved with her life when this had happened. Nothing that was coming out about Pete related to the guy she thought she knew. “Who knows anybody?” she said aloud.

“I see what you mean. There’s times I don’t even know myself. No kidding, sometimes at night, or mornings, when I get home and take off my thirty-eight”—he patted the gun holstered under his arm—“and lock it away the bureau drawer, I’ll look at myself in the mirror and say, Now, who are you, Russo?”

“There ought to be a pretty good answer to that.”

“Thank you.”

“Well?”

He smiled and cocked his head thoughtfully, the ignition key in his hand where it rested on the steering wheel. “Dominic Russo, second-generation American whose grandfather peddled fish from the back of a Ford truck and put his four sons into the wholesale fish business and local politics. I could have gone in a lot of directions. A lot of what they say is crap, but I do have a godfather.”

“Godfather with a capital
G?”

“He thinks it’s pretty capital, and it probably is. Yeah.” He was about to turn the key in the ignition. “You know, we could walk from here.”

“Then let’s. I’d rather walk any day. I’ll bet I’ve walked every foot of Manhattan. I ought to be a cop.”

“They don’t walk much, especially the lady cops. It’s too dangerous.”

“They ought to dress like me,” Julie said. “I really go around in plain clothes.”

“You’re a kook,” Russo said, grinning.

Sergeant Greenberg came up with a good likeness of Rita except for one thing: “She’s not that old,” Julie said.

“Maybe she will be by the time Russo finds her,” he said grumpily. Then: “Let’s clean it up a little and see what happens.”

It was remarkable to see the change he wrought with a few erasure rubs.