Death in The Life (14 page)

“We can stop there. I want you here Wednesday as usual.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be here.”

“Don’t worry? Is that what you mean, don’t worry?”

“I guess I mean
do
worry.”

“Why do you always guess?” Doctor let her chair up with a jolt. It was obviously a question for which she did not expect an answer at the moment.

Julie was halfway to the door when she remembered what had pressed most on her mind, coming in that day. “Doctor, did Rita tell you the same things she said to me?”

Doctor Callahan looked as though she was not going to answer at all. Then she said, “She talked about herself. Wednesday at two.”

Julie dared to persist. “Did you believe her?”

“It’s never a matter of belief here. Patients often lie for a variety of reasons. Many times they don’t even know they’re lying. We can take that up sometime.”

“What about Jeff? Am I to go to Paris?”

“Are you?” Doctor Callahan got to her feet and changed the paper towel on the pillow: a fresh towel for every patient.

“But what am I going to write to him?”

“You might send him the clippings from today’s paper before his friends do.”

“H
AVE A GOOD DAY,” THE
doorman said as Julie left Dr. Callahan’s building. Like old times. Not quite. She’d never got Mother out in the open before. If she
was
out in the open. She kept disappearing. And why did she feel so angry? Doctor hadn’t commented. Why are you angry? Because that’s what I am, a Victorian spinster… That sure as hell wasn’t Mother—that was Julie Hayes—“Dearest Jeff, a funny thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I left Dr. Callahan’s office…” There was no point now in telling him of the interruption in therapy, unless his accountant called it to his attention, paying Doctor’s bill. But where to begin? “In my last letter, I told you I was reading about Zoroaster…” Or: “Do you remember the revival of
Streetcar
we saw last year? The designer…” It seemed like a crazy patchwork of coincidences, and maybe it was in the beginning. The Tarot would say no, no accidents. If the Tarot had anything to do with it. She half-believed it did. Magdalene’s daughter: that’s where it began in earnest, when she wrote those words. Daddy, you bastard… Mother, you whore. It came up from the bowels of the couch like hidden treasure she had finally dug out. But that was not for Jeff, nor of Jeff. Or was it? “Dearest Jeff. I remember the talk you gave when I graduated and you got your honorary degree. You said, ‘Get the facts, all the facts, and write them down before you start the story. Because if you don’t, you’ll find yourself making up facts as you need them. Your copy may be richer, but your reader will be ill informed, and you will have begun the corruption of history.’ Aren’t you impressed that I can recite that whole speech? I thought it was the most important speech I ever heard or read. I was in love!”
What?
Oh, boy. Watch it, Julie… “The reason I mention it now, I want to give you the facts about the story in this morning’s paper. I also know things which may not be facts, only feelings. I’d appreciate it if you would challenge me where you think I’m making up…” Hey? I mean it.
I do mean it.
Mrs. Julie Hayes of West Forty-fourth Street had identified the victim, according to the morning
Times.
No connection with Mrs. Geoffrey Hayes of West Seventeenth Street. But there is a connection. Make it or break it, Julie. Paris or bust.

A fine rain was falling. The park was a yellow mist, forsythia and pollution.

She took a bus, fetching a token out of her raincoat pocket. She kept a handful of tokens and loose change ready for transport, musical beggars, and Orange Julius, a beverage on which she often breakfasted at a stand on Fiftieth Street and Broadway.

On Forty-fourth Street she met Fritzie at one end of his leash with Juanita at the other, neither one of them doing what the other wanted. Outside the shop, Mrs. Ryan was standing under an umbrella, talking with the man from the telephone company, Mrs. Rodriguez counseling from her window.

“I said I’d be here by eleven-thirty,” Julie said to the phone man. “Hi, Mrs. Ryan. Mrs. Rodriguez.”

“Detective Russo told me ten sharp. You should get together. What kind of a telephone do you want?”

“The cheapest.”

“Not if the city is paying for it, Julie,” Mrs. Ryan advised.

“That’ll be the day,” Julie said and unlocked the door. She had to put her shoulder to it, stuck as it was, presumably with the dampness.

Mrs. Ryan gave a little cry. “Don’t! Maybe there’s a bomb.”

“Come off it,” Julie turned and used her backside and her heel. She supposed Mrs. Ryan and Mrs. Rodriguez had had quite a talk.

The door yielded and revealed a scattering of messages on the floor beneath the mail slot. She gathered them and took them to the card table in the back room. She told the phone installer that it would be all right to put the instrument where the last customer’s phone had been connected.

“How long will it take?” Mrs. Ryan wanted to know.

“Ten, twenty minutes unless the rats have chewed up the wires.”

“I’ll come back,” she said to Julie. “I waited till after twelve o’clock at McGowan’s on Saturday night.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m not reprimanding you, only saying I felt terrible because I didn’t stay with you. Mrs. Russo says you’ve been a great help to the police.”

Julie made a noise of agreement and looked at the messages. One was from Amy Ross, saying to call her at the Forum. A note on
Daily News
stationery was from a columnist, wanting an interview before two
P.M.
There were several throwaways. Another note, this one in a plain envelope addressed to “Friend Julie” and on stationery from which the letterhead had been torn away, read, “Please call me about Rita. 321-9270.”

Mrs. Ryan was watching her from the inside doorway, hoping to be confided in. Julie put the messages beneath the crystal ball. Mrs. Ryan sniffed in disappointment and then made the best of the situation. “I’ll bring us a little lunch… unless you want me to stay.”

“That would be just fine—the lunch, thank you.”

When Mrs. Ryan was gone, Julie read the note again, a heavy, childish hand which had taken great care. Somebody who did not want to go to the police? Mack?

She told the phone man she would be back in ten minutes and went out to ask Mrs. Rodriguez if she could come up and talk with her. Juanita was trying to tie a string around the neck of one of her dolls. She held it up to Julie for help. “Good dog.” Julie couldn’t remember her having put two words together before.

The
Daily News
was open on the table alongside the Rodriguez family photograph. Julie hadn’t seen the morning edition. It carried a picture of Pete. He’d been wearing his hair longer when it was posed and his features were more delicate. You’d look twice to decide, male or female. Beautiful, but she didn’t like it. To have got it into print so soon, the reporter probably dug it out of the paper’s own morgue. There would have been a story with it when it first appeared.

“Your boy friend,” Mrs. Rodriguez said and patted Julie’s hand.

Julie let it stand that way. The more sympathy, the more information.

“The lady with the dog told me. He put up your curtains like a decorator. He don’t look like that picture now.”

He sure as hell didn’t, but Julie knew what she meant. “Could I have the paper when you’re through with it, Mrs. Rodriguez?”

“Here.” She tore out the page and gave it to Julie. “The rest I keep. I don’t read so quick in English.”

Julie folded the paper and put it in her raincoat pocket. “Do you remember the young girl who came to see me last week? You said she was on the street. She didn’t look it to me. How could you tell?”

“I could tell!” She was exasperated at being asked to explain something she couldn’t explain. She gave a great wiggle to her ample body. “Something.”

“Yeah. I thought maybe she’d been around before. Or since. Have you seen her again?”

“I don’t see her, but I don’t always look.”

Not always. Just often.

“Was there anyone at all looking for me over the weekend?”

“Every once in a while somebody stops and looks in the window. I don’t say anything. Yesterday I took Juanita on a ride on the ferry boat with her father.”

“Nice. How about Mack?”

“Mack?” She made it sound like “Mock” and a total stranger.

“The guy with red hair, a dude, a pimp. You called him a gangster.”

“I remember.”

“Is he a gangster?”

“I don’t know. He looks like a gangster, like she is a whore.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Julie said, and then chanced to catch the faintest look of satisfaction in Mrs. Rodriguez’s eye. Satisfaction or relief? She stemmed her own impatience. It would get her nowhere. “Please, neighbor, my friend is dead. You don’t like this Mack character any better than I do. Tell me what you can about him. I need to know.”

Mrs. Rodriguez made a sour face. “It don’t concern you.”

“Please. I just want to know what he’s like.”

“No good. All right! I pay him money.”

In her mind’s eye Julie saw the child offering to give Mack back the coins he had thrown to her. But the mother? Then she caught on. “Blackmail?”

“Si. He finds out about me and Señora. He’s trying to steal girls from Goldie, and so by accident he finds out.” She rubbed her fingers against her thumb, the traditional sign of the payoff. “He comes for his percentage every week. So he don’t tell Goldie.”

“Oh, boy. Talk about a petty crook.”

When Julie got downstairs again Juanita was whacking the make-believe dog on the sidewalk. Bad dog.

She watched the repairman dial and then hang up. The phone bell went off like a burglar alarm.

“It works,” he said as though he had wrought a miracle.

Julie’s first call was to Detective Russo, to tell him the phone had been installed. It was the pretext under which she could then ask him if anything new had developed.

“We’re putting out an ‘all points’ on her and Mack. No sign of him in his usual haunts, and he has to be one of the last people in that apartment of hers. The one clean set of fingerprints in the place. That gal’d make somebody a good housekeeper.”

Julie decided she’d better tell him about the note.

“Let me have it,” Russo said. “I’ll send somebody around to pick it up.”

“Shall I try the number and see what happens?”

“Not till I say so.”

Julie set up the typewriter, an old Underwood portable of Jeff’s that had finished the major work of its lifetime before she had reached puberty. She sat a moment, her fingers on the keys, and in her fashion, vaguely Yoga, prayed that the energy Jeff transmitted through them would pass into her. A beginning, a middle, and an end, connecting all the way.

“Dearest Jeff, I am making a carbon copy of this letter because I need to write it for myself as well as you…”

She had almost finished a double-spaced page that got her no further than her meeting Mrs. Ryan outside Kanakas’s Eighth Avenue shop when the woman walked in with the promised lunch in a paper bag.

“I left Fritzie home. I should never have let that child take him for a walk. He’s all skittish and off his food.”

Julie pushed the typewriter aside, turning it so the letter was facing the wall. “She’s a spooky little kid. What do you make of the mother, Mrs. Ryan?”

“Well, now, Julie. I was going to ask you the same thing. I used to see her in church with her husband, a dapper little man she could carry under her arm. They say opposites attract…”

“At St. Malachy’s?”

“No. There’s a church on Forty-second Street I like to go to now and then. They say the Mass in Spanish and it sounds like Latin. I do miss the Latin Mass. I made egg salad sandwiches. I wasn’t sure if you eat meat, so many young people don’t nowadays.”

“Egg salad’s one of my favorites. Do you ever notice street characters, Mrs. Ryan? Hustlers and so forth?”

“I try not to, but yes, of course I do. I’m only human.”

“Ever see a big white fellow with red hair, a flashy dresser? He crawls around in a red sports car that matches his hair.”

“I have seen him, yes.”

“Lately? Like over the weekend? Since Thursday, say.”

“No, no. I couldn’t say when, but I do know that when I did see him, I had the feeling I’d seen him before. Somewhere entirely different.”

“You mean not on the street?”

Mrs. Ryan thought about it. “I can’t really say. It’s like something you almost have and then it goes up in smoke.”

Julie was tempted to back off the question that came to her mind, but she asked it: “Would you have seen him anywhere with Pete?”

Mrs. Ryan’s eyebrows went up and she pursed her lips. Julie would have given a lot to have been able to track that stream of associations.

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“Meaning you don’t want to think so.”

“Well, I suppose that’s so, and when you first asked, I said to myself,
Was
it? Something… Oh dear, I’m not much help, am I? When Laura Gibson was alive I was much more alert. She was such a vital body, even toward the end of her life, quick witted. She made a person think.”

It was interesting that Laura Gibson had been cued in then. Julie took a bite of her sandwich and let Mrs. Ryan muddle through her memories. Her faded blue eyes were on the crystal ball, not that she was seeing it: it was simply in her line of vision. “Now isn’t it strange, I’ve made a peculiar connection. When Laura finally had to go to the hospital, it was to St. Jude’s and I do believe that’s where I saw this Mack person.”

Julie held her tongue. And her breath.

“He was ordering someone around,” Mrs. Ryan went on tentatively. “Laura was having a spasm. I suppose he said, Get the doctor, or something like it. I was just coming in the door so I didn’t see much of it. I only guessed what was happening. Or maybe Peter told me.”

“Was he there?”

“He was always there. Laura died holding onto his hand.”

The question was, What was Mack doing there? Julie asked something she afterwards wished she hadn’t: “Could Mack have been visiting one of the other patients?”