Death in The Life (15 page)

“It was a private room.”

“Yeah,” Julie said, feeling she had interrupted Mrs. Ryan’s associations. Whatever Mack was doing in the hospital on that occasion, Pete would have known him from there, seeing him afterwards. They would almost certainly have had to meet on the street, in the vicinity, say, of Mr. Bourke’s or even in the building where both Pete and Rita lived.

Mrs. Ryan was off on a reverie of her own. “We had such grand times in the Willoughby before that, Julie. Peter had a lovely voice, especially singing Irish songs or reciting poetry. My own father was an Irish rebel and the light of his life was Maude Gonne, a beautiful wild patriot for all that she was an aristocrat. She was the one Yeats wrote the play for that we seen the other night…” Speaking of the Irish, Mrs. Ryan became more Irish. “Sometimes the two of them would pretend at being Yeats and Maude Gonne,” she went on, “him pouring out his heart in poetry and swearing he’d marry no woman if she wouldn’t have him, and her saying she’d have no man until Ireland was free. It was a queer sort of make-believe between them, her and Peter. She never married, you know, but when she was younger, her affairs were legion. And Peter… We talked about that before, didn’t we? Are you a Catholic, Julie?”

The question surprised her. Like a random shot and yet somehow it was relevant. “Can you be part Catholic, Mrs. Ryan?”

“No, dear. If you’re part, you’re all.”

Julie shook her head. “My father was Irish and Catholic.”

“Hayes,” Mrs. Ryan said.

“That’s my married name. I grew up with my mother’s maiden name.”

“Oh, dear. He was one of those, was he?”

“There were circumstances,” Julie said.

“Don’t be so sure. There is nothing annoys me more than the excuses women make for the weakness of Irish men. Have a part of my sandwich. You’re skin and bones.”

“No more, thank you. You eat it. It’s very good.”

“I’m not that fond of my own cooking. If you want more information about those days in the hospital, Julie, I know how we can get it. Sheila Brennan is an R.N. and lives at the Willoughby. It was her got Laura into St. Jude’s in the first place. I’ll find out when she’s off duty and bring her around, shall I?”

“Do, and afterwards I’ll buy us all a beer at McGowan’s.”

I
T WAS ALMOST FOUR
in the afternoon before Julie finished her letter to Jeff. She had been tempted several times to rewrite, having proposed at the outset that it be an orderly chronicle of the events, but the events evaded order. Or her mind did. Questions kept coming up which seemed as important as the incidents that prompted them. In the end, she decided that it was better to get everything on paper than to define “facts” arbitrarily without their qualifying circumstances. The decision might be a cop-out, but the ten-page letter gave her a veritable catalog of issues without answers. What it would give Jeff was something else.

What became apparent along the way was her own need to know. Her need. Absolutely. If she was going to understand Julie Hayes, understanding Pete Mallory was a part of it.

The letter had not been without interruptions. A female legman (legwoman?) for the columnist with the two
P.M.
deadline came by. Her boss had a great idea: Julie the occultist’s premonition of the murder. No way. Several kids from the Forum stopped. She promised to join them later there and sent word with them to Amy Ross. She persuaded a customer that the next day would be more propitious for an inquiry of the cards.

Adding a postscript to the letter to say that she and Doctor Callahan had postponed the Paris decision for a session or two, she sealed the envelope, locked up shop, and walked to Thirty-fourth Street to mail it at the main post office.

Then she went to see Mr. Bourke. She remarked, going through the shop, that she had never seen a customer on the premises. He was tagging a group of lamps set apart, she guessed, for rental.

“Well, Julie. I didn’t expect to see you.”

“I don’t know why not.”

“The police and all. I figured they’d advise you to keep away.”

“From what?”

Mr. Bourke sighed heavily. “Contamination. And they’d be right. I must’ve said it to you before: it’s not a place for the likes of you. It wasn’t a place for the likes of Pete either. I’ll miss that boy in a way nobody’s going to understand.”

“I can try.”

“Maybe you,” Bourke said. A sad little droop of a smile.

“Have the police been here?”

“Time and again. What could I tell them that they don’t already know? Not much they’d want to hear. I missed Pete at St. Malachy’s yesterday. He was the lay reader. Do you know what that means?”

“I know. I’d heard him myself.”

“Did you?” Bourke took off his glasses and polished them. “I’ve been going to that church for forty years. Every Sunday morning my mother and I used to sneak out of the house, leaving the old man to sleep it off, and go to Mass there. To this day, when I leave a church and dip my fingers in the holy water, I can see her reach out her hand and take a drop from mine.” He crossed himself, telling it. “Afterwards, we used to go to the Mayflower Shop and have doughnuts and coffee. Pete and I often did the same thing. A half-hour. We never said much. It was… kind of a rest. For me anyway. There was something—I don’t even know if it had to do with God. Peace, that’s what it was about. If I could tell you, I would. You know what it was like? Forgiveness. Two people knowing and forgiving and yet never having to say a word about what.”

What
did
you know? Julie wanted to ask. Forgive what? But she said, “Yeah.”

“Well, God knows what happens now. At the moment, I don’t care.” He put his glasses on again, letting them slide down his nose almost at once.

“Did Pete really study to be a priest?”

“Not for long. His people were killed in a car accident and his sister was laid up from it for a long time. He took care of her and went to school part time, art school in Chicago. Then he blew the whole thing and ran away. Too much. Instead of getting better, she got more dependent on him. Like a marriage. He got to hate her and everybody else in the town where they kept saying he was such a good boy.”

“Libertytown,” Julie said.

“That’s the place.”

“Do you know Detective Russo?”

“Since he was that high.” Bourke held his hand waist level.

“He talked to Pete’s sister on the phone Saturday night. She was planning to come out to see the Irish Theatre Production.”

“Did she tell the police that?”

Julie nodded.

“Even after she knew he was dead, she told it?”

“I think so.”

Bourke shook his head. “She wouldn’t have come. It was a game they played. Every few months Pete would say, ‘I’m going to invite my sister out,’ or ‘I invited my sister to come and visit me. Where do you think I ought to take her, Philip, besides theater if I can find a play that won’t shock her?’ They talked about it on the telephone, him and his sister, how she was coming on such and such a date, but she never did come to see him.”

“That’s wild.”

“I suppose it is, but I can understand it. They were probably closer that way than living together.”

Oh, boy. Paris or bust.

“When did you first get to know him, Mr. Bourke?”

“I’ve been trying to think. I must have met him two or three years ago at the Willoughby. There’d be a party at Miss Gibson’s—or Mrs. Ryan’s. When they’d get feeling good, they’d invite anybody who came along. Like myself. She was a very gracious lady, Miss Gibson. Then after she died, I got to know him better. While she was sick, he’d come in sometimes and talk. And after she died, he’d just come in.”

“How was he able to pay her hospital bills?”

“I don’t know that.”

A cutoff, Julie thought. Too quick. She should not have asked so directly. “But he did, you know.”

“I’m not surprised. Now I’ve got to get these lights together, Julie. They’ll be picking them up in an hour or so.”

An hour or so was going to be six o’clock. The moonlighters: without whom, as he had told her himself, he could not stay in business.

“About Rita, Mr. Bourke. Did you know she lived in the same building as Pete?”

“Not till I read it in the paper.”

“Did you ever see them together?”

“I think I may have introduced them, Julie. A couple of months ago. The vice boys came out full force that night and Rita ducked in here. Pete was here and she asked him if he would do her a favor. She changed clothes in the can in back and he walked out with her. She had one of those knitting bags and he even carried it for her. Half the gals on the street were busted that night. Not her.”

“Was she ever busted?”

“Not that I know of. She hadn’t been around long then, but she was a pro.”

“I was just thinking, she knew how to take care of herself in an emergency, didn’t she?”

“You’re damn right. I resented what she done that night, picking Pete up like that.”

“Did you like her? Feel sorry for her? What?”

“Nothing like that.” He thought about it for a minute. “What you’re asking me, Julie, is why I let her come in here in the first place.”

“All right.”

“Because I was afraid of Mack and he was the one decided I was going to be her shelter.”

“I get it,” Julie said, but she didn’t, not all of it. “What could he do to you?”

“I don’t want to find out.”

“Has he got other rackets besides prostitution?”

“I have no idea. Why don’t you leave police work to the police?”

“You’re right,” Julie said. She was only making him more uptight.

To appease her or something like that he said, “How… about that book you were going to lend me?”

“I’ll try and remember next time around.” She didn’t think she was ever going to loan Mr. Bourke that or any book. That notion had come out of another era when she thought everybody was as innocent as she had thought Rita.

By the time Julie got to the Forum Amy had gone, but she had left a note on the message board: “The Master says no memorial here. So that’s that.” The Master was the director of the Forum. “I left out some scrapbooks for you in the library you might like to look at. If you want to call me at home tonight, here’s my number.”

The stories Amy had marked concerned theater productions in which Pete had been involved. In all the clippings the names of members of Actors Forum had been underlined, the reason for the scrapbooks in the first place. A review of the Street Theater Festival carried the picture of Pete that had appeared in that morning’s
Daily News.
“The New York Street Theater troupe took their caravan last night to a vacant lot on Houston Street, the gateway to Little Italy. They set theater back four hundred years. Is that bad? Not as seen by this reviewer. I should think they modeled their wildly improvisational happening on the classic
Commedia dell’Arte
with something for everybody in the family. Pratfalls, mime, political satire all combined to make an hour’s hilarious entertainment. Take the balcony scene from
Romeo and Juliet:
‘O, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse they name… what do you mean, deny my father, refuse my name? I am proud to be an Italian!’

“The genius of this troupe seems to be Peter Mallory who mounted the production and acts as stage-manager-narrator…”

Julie wrote down the names of the Forum members in the cast. One of them, Rudy Farber, had done Julie’s audition scene with her which had won her membership in the Forum. She hadn’t seen him since, but she had meant to. He had caught on as a nightclub comic and she was pretty sure he was still playing at The Guardian Angel in the Village.

“B
ABY, WE WERE AS
rotten as a couple of two-month eggs,” Rudy said of the audition scene.

“Then how come I got into the Forum?”

“Charm… and a successful marriage.” The comic smiled puckishly.

“You mean I got in because I was married to Geoffrey Hayes?”

“It didn’t harm.”

“But it’s not supposed to be that way.”

Rudy mocked her, a musical flourish, “Da-dah.”

“Jeff couldn’t care less.”

“Still married to him?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t give me of course. There ain’t no such condition. If you want to tell me about yourself, that’s okay, but don’t make it sound like I’m undermining the holy institution of matrimony.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I didn’t come to talk about me.”

“About me?” He said it jokingly. “Look at the company I’m keeping these days. Look!” He flung out his hands to call attention to the walls of his dressing room. They were crowded with the photographs of nightclub entertainers. Generations of them. Julie sat on the foot locker he had turned on its end for her alongside his dressing table and looked from face to face as he called their names like an honor roll. Not many of them meant much to Julie. “They all got their start at The Guardian Angel. I sure as hell wasn’t going to make it in theater, so I got myself a uniform”—he nodded at the costume hanging behind the door, overalls, a blue denim shirt, and a straw hat—“and a partner. He’s the brains of the act, the brains, the soul. It’s like this: He’s the persona, I’m the personality.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll introduce you.” He reached across the cluttered table and touched her hand. “Pete Mallory: you want to talk about him?”

She nodded.

Rudy looked like a “Rudy,” a round, mischievous face with a large, mobile mouth and restless eyes that came back unexpectedly and took hold of yours, then wandered off again. “How did he get tied up with a hooker, will you tell me that?”

Tied up. “What do you mean, tied up?”

“Tied up,” he repeated and shrugged.

“Hookers are pretty casual acquaintances, right?”

“You got a point. What did I mean? Pete was one of those semper fidelis guys. Semper fidelis—that’s Marine Corps for Be Prepared. No, seriously, he either got involved or he didn’t. He had a reputation for running out on people, but the fact is, he never ran out on anybody he was committed to. He’d cut out before, not after. So I guess I meant just what I said, tied up.