Death in The Life (17 page)

“Just what you’d say to anybody who left a message for you to call them. Who are you? What do you want? But keep her talking.”

“Okay.”

Russo got the line he wanted and dialed. He handed the phone to Julie before the first ring. She assumed the recording device was operating.

The third ring brought an answer. “’Lo?” Sweet and low.

“This is Julie Hayes. I have a message to call this number.”

“Friend Julie?”

Julie and Russo exchanged glances. “That’s me.”

“I was hoping you could help me get in touch with my friend Rita,” the woman said, clearing her throat and then speaking with a certain hesitation that might be natural to her or might indicate that there was someone with her.

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Julie said.

Russo made a sign to go easy.

The woman gave a surprised “Huh?” Then: “Don’t you know where she is? She said like you’d sent her to this place. And I was thinking, why couldn’t I go there too.”

“Sorry, I can’t help you,” Julie said.

Russo made a winding sign: keep talking.

“Rita didn’t mention having a friend,” she tried.

“We was real close, Rita and me.”

“How close? I mean were you in-laws or something?”

“Wife-in-laws. Know what that means?”

“Sure.”

“Only now I want to split too, divorce like.”

“Can’t help you,” Julie said.

Russo shook his head. This was not the way he wanted it played. Julie had the feeling that May might just know more than she did herself. If she did, Julie wanted to find out, but not on police tape, in case it involved Doctor Callahan.

“All I want is the name of the halfway house,” May said before Julie could head her off.

“I don’t have any such,” Julie said and hung up the phone. A halfway house: that had to be Doctor Callahan’s idea, and if there was a particular one, that too was Doctor’s recommendation. She faced a detective who was both surprised and angry. “I’m sorry, Detective Russo, but I don’t like to be used by anybody, including the police.”

“What did she say? It’s on the tape if you don’t want to tell me.”

“Nothing, really. I advised Rita when she came to see me,” Julie lied, “to find herself a place to stop off part-way home, some place where she could get used to the idea that she wasn’t a prostitute anymore. She must have told this May person. May wanted to know where it was.” Much too much explaining.

“And is there a place?”

“It was only a figure of speech,” Julie said, and realizing that he would listen to the exact words anyway, she repeated them, hoping thereby to make them seem less specific, “a halfway house. That’s what they call drug rehabilitation centers, isn’t it?”

“Is it? Julie, it was you gave me the number of Miss Weems, if you don’t want to play square with the police, don’t volunteer to play at all. Now I’ve got work to do. Thanks for coming in.”

“Don’t mention it.” There was no use trying to fix things. Unless she was prepared to mention Doctor Callahan. She wasn’t.

He walked her down the stairs in silence. Then, as she was leaving: “You’d better count on it: Miss Weems is fronting for Mack. He’s the one who’s looking for the halfway house with Rita in it. It may turn out he wants Rita worse than we do.”

“T
HANKS FOR COMING IN,
” Julie thought, pounding her heels on the sidewalk of Ninth Avenue. Belatedly, she was furious with Russo. Thanks for coming in. She had brought him a direct link among Romano, Pete, and Mack, something it might have taken him a week to turn up without her help. She wasn’t even sure he was glad to have the information. Maybe he didn’t want the Romano connection: big in real estate. Rita was more his speed. Julie was swinging in all directions and it did not take her long to realize that Russo was not the actual object of her anger: she was. She had herself to blame now if Doctor became involved, playing police lady, first assistant to a detective third grade. Whoops. Another twist to the umbilical of truth: with his “psycho” crack, Detective Russo had alienated Friend Julie.

She had to turn back to look for Haven House. Rita’s fantasy of being married to a third-world diplomat was wild; her notion of the third world could not be much deeper than Julie’s own and the first thing that came to mind with the phrase was the prevalence of black people. Which, on the surface, made it hard to reconcile the fantasy marriage with Rita’s remark—concerning Goldie—that she didn’t think she could fall in love with a black man. Julie wondered if, asking questions in the thrift shop, she should try to pass as a police investigator. She was about to go public for the first time.

The woman in charge of the shop—run for the benefit of a school for the severely retarded—looked as though she were an alumna of Miss Page’s School. “Can I help you, dear?”

All right.

“Well, yes,” Julie said, and tuned her own accent to the prevailing key. “Detective Russo said you might be kind enough to repeat for me the story Rita Morgan told you. He wants my psychological evaluation of it.”

“Rita Morgan. Ah, yes. The unfortunate.” Undoubtedly a Miss Page graduate. With a straight “A” in Compassion.

The one customer in the shop, a teen-aged girl, slipped out the door with a surreptitious glance over her shoulder, “What did she steal?” Julie said.

“I’m afraid you’re right. Probably a bit of costume jewelry. I follow them sometimes and ask them to pay a token price—I’ll ask for anywhere between a nickel and a quarter.”

“Killjoy.”

“You
are
joking?”

“You bet… Try to remember from the first time Rita Morgan came in the store.”

“She only came once.”

“But she tried first to sell you certain items of apparel?”

“Yes… some exquisite lingerie which had never been worn. She said she was going to be married and it was part of her trousseau, but her husband-to-be wouldn’t understand such finery. He was a third-world diplomat, she said. But it was rather curious, Miss… Mrs. I don’t even know your name.”

“Mrs. Julie Hayes. Please don’t stop about Rita. It was curious, you say.”

“Curious… yes. When I asked if he was with the U.N. she didn’t seem to understand. I know now of course that it was a complete fabrication.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Julie said. “It’s the fabrication that interests me. I think we reveal more of ourselves in the lies we tell than we do when we try to tell the truth.”

“For me it’s quite the opposite. I don’t find it all that difficult to tell the truth, and I can’t lie worth a darn.”

Julie smiled and prompted gently, “A third-world diplomat.”

“She said that in his country only women of the street wore fancy underclothes and she wanted to do everything proper when he took her home. I explained that we have no purchasing budget, and when I think now of what she said, well… she said, ‘I don’t mind donating—if they’re going to bring a good price to somebody.’ I said I’d save them for the summer auction and that seemed to please her. And, of course, I offered to send her the usual tax-deductible receipt. You can imagine how foolish I felt telling that to Detective Russo when I found out what her real occupation was.”

“What did she say?”

“That please, I wasn’t to send any receipt. She didn’t want to have to explain it to her fiancé. She also left a box which included two lame dresses, a gold one and a silver. She was gone by the time I got around to opening the box. I did wonder, such a child for clothes like that.”

Julie nodded. “Any more conversation?”

“She wanted to know what severely retarded meant as against just plain retarded, and I explained it meant people for whom there was no hope that they would ever be able to help themselves. ‘But they don’t know there isn’t any hope, do they?’ she said. And I told her what I believe is so: If they knew, they wouldn’t be severely retarded and there’d be hope. It sounds like semantics, and maybe it is, but to me it’s worth saying because it sounds cheerful. She smiled when I said that, I do believe gratefully. She said, ‘My brother is retarded.’”

Julie held back any show of surprise.

“And that too,” the woman added, “could be something she made up.”

“It could, couldn’t it?”

Julie went along to Forty-fourth Street and wrote down Rita’s account of herself as given to the thrift shop woman. Why that story? Why any story? And the retarded brother for whom she bought a teddy bear the next day, and then got as far at least as the Port Authority Building… a couple of hours before Pete Mallory was murdered in her apartment. She wanted to do everything proper when the third-world diplomat took her home. Psychological evaluation. Yeah.

The morning papers carried Sergeant Greenberg’s sketch of Rita. That was going to be a great help when it came to doing everything proper. The third world. Suppose Rita meant The Life as one world, the straight world as number two, and a kind of limbo as number three, a halfway house… Hey! Then who was the diplomat? Pete?

Julie locked the shop door so that she would not be disturbed and phoned the Illinois area code for Libertytown Information. She got the number of Helen Mallory and dialed it before she could change her mind. Waiting, listening to the bleeps and buzzings in the few seconds before the connection was completed, she thought of Russo’s picture: the lone woman groping her way through the house to answer the phone in the middle of the night. Did she look like Pete? Younger? Older? The phone was ringing. The voice that answered was strong and resonant. Somehow Julie had expected a mouse.

“Miss Mallory?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Julie Hayes and I’m calling from New York. I’m a friend of your brother’s and I’ve been wanting to call you and offer my condolences.”

“I don’t remember Peter’s mentioning you, but I do thank you.”

Strong and resonant, but a groaner. Julie wanted to say, He didn’t mention you much either, but she said, “I was supposed to meet him the night he was found.”

“Oh, you’re the one. I should offer you condolences then too.”

“Thank you,” Julie said. “Are you going to come to New York?”

“I don’t expect to now. Pete kept trying to get me to visit him. It would be awful for me with him not there anymore.”

“If you want me to help you with Pete’s things, packing them and sending them on, I will.”

“That’s real kind of you, but Father Doyle is going to take care of that for me. Were you and Pete engaged?”

“Engaged?” Julie repeated, wanting to be sure, and wanting a second or two to weigh the idea and where it came from.

“Engaged to be married.”

“No. We were only friends. I’m already married. I don’t think Pete was actually engaged to anyone, Miss Mallory.” She could think of no other way to play for more information.

“I’m glad to hear that. I wouldn’t want to think there was someone who didn’t get in touch with me.”

“Pete was probably teasing you,” Julie said. Her palms were wet with the tension of trying to coax information without asking directly. Why not ask directly? Something told her not to. The subject might close forever.

“Well, it did sound a little like that, like he wanted to see what my reaction would be. We were terribly close, you know, for brother and sister.”

“I understood that,” Julie said.

“What did he tell you about me?” the sister asked.

To lie or not to lie? With the truth according to Mr. Bourke, she decided. “Only that you were close—after your parents’ death—and your injuries.”

“Did he tell you I’m lame?”

“No.”

“He used to carry me down the stairs every morning and up the stairs every night. He cooked and washed for me. Completely devoted.”

Oh, boy.

“And then he went away so that I’d learn to be self-reliant. And I did. Oh, yes, I learned. I was going to come to New York to see those Irish plays. Our mother was Irish. A saintly woman, by the values Pete and I were brought up to respect. Well, I shouldn’t run up your phone bill, Mrs. Hayes…”

“Do. I can afford it really. If it’s important and sometimes it is, just to talk. Please call me Julie.”

“If you call me Helen.”

“I will. Helen, what did Pete say about being engaged?”

“He didn’t say that. He said something like, ‘What if I was to come home—what if I
were
to come home with a brand-new wife?’”

Julie waited. So did Helen Mallory. Finally Julie said, “I didn’t know Pete had been married ever.”

“Well, I think it was only a manner of speaking.”

“Yes, I see. Of course.”

“Julie, do you know the woman where the police found his body?”

“She’s a young girl. I met her a couple of times. She’s disappeared now. I don’t have anything to go on, but I keep wondering if she doesn’t come from Libertytown.”

“I never heard of her. The police asked me on the phone, and Sheriff Anderson out here. Rita Morgan.”

“That might be her stage name,” Julie said, forgive me actor of the world. “The sheriff will probably bring you a picture soon. It looks a lot like her.”

“Is she a fallen woman?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Julie said. Helen sounded biblical.

“I work in the office of our local paper, the
Weekly Chronicle,”
Helen said, “and that’s what my boss said it sounds like.”

“Maybe,” Julie conceded and changed the subject. Rita was not going home anywhere now without the stigma. “If you want to call me for anything, Helen, please do. Let me give you my number here at the shop and at home.”

Miss Mallory repeated the numbers. “What kind of work do you do, Julie?”

“I’m a private investigator. Or I will be as soon as I get my license.”

T
HE CRACK IN DOCTOR’S CEILING
was definitely getting bigger. Julie wondered if any of her patients ever thought of hiding things in it.

“When I was a kid I used to hide things in the sofa, peanut shells, paper clips, vitamin pills that tasted awful, The Pill… I’m only kidding about The Pill. I’ll have to start taking it again if I go to Paris. Isn’t it funny, I just said it when I was thinking of hiding things?… Maybe I won’t take it and take my chances on getting pregnant. Except if I had a child, I’d want to want it really. I mean, I’d want it to know it was wanted. I’ll say that for my mother, she made me know she’d wanted me. Even if my father didn’t. Mrs. Ryan was funny about Irish women always making excuses for the men. I wonder why Mother told me. I mean she could just as easily have said he died, you know. I think if it’d been me, I’d have got an urn of some sort and put it on the piano or the mantel or someplace and said, That’s your father, Julie. Pay respect. Except him being a Catholic, cremation would be out. But I wouldn’t even have had to know he was a Catholic. Hey, maybe down deep she hoped I’d go looking for him someday. I’d find him and I’d say, Well now, Mr. Hayes, let me introduce myself. Look me over and tell me, do you still want out? Why did she tell me, doctor?”