Death in The Life (18 page)

“Why do you think?”

“To make herself look better to me, raising me without him? Wouldn’t it be crazy if she made the whole thing up? If there wasn’t ever an Irish diplomat named Thomas Francis Mooney? God! What a joke…”

“You just said,
Mr. Hayes,
let me introduce myself.”

“Mr. Hayes… Did I say that? Jeff is almost old enough… Oh, Doctor, a million things exploding—thoughts. I can’t hang onto them…”

“Take your time and tell them as they come.”

“The church and Pete and me being jealous, the whore of Babylon, I always liked that—the Roman Catholic Church—the whore of Babylon—Mother, Jeff… my saying she was a whore. Sure there were men but that doesn’t mean she was, there weren’t that many, I was exaggerating… I was jealous of her, that’s what it was all about… I wanted Jeff for myself and it was like she wanted him too. And then I did get him mixed up with my father. Does that make sense?”

“If it makes sense to you.”

“It’s like he’s always somewhere else where he doesn’t want me and then when he does, I don’t want him. I don’t know. It’s all mixed up.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“It’s like I want it that way, like I’d have to do something if it wasn’t…”

“Such as?”

“Grow up, stop blaming everybody else, stop pretending to be a little girl, an angry kid… I keep saying I’m not a little girl, but when Pete said I’d be one at seventy-five it was like he knew me better than I did… I wonder if he knew Rita, really knew her. I don’t know why I keep thinking he was so wise, maybe I think all men are, the very idea of diplomat, of newspaper correspondent…”

“Why do you think your mother told you about this Thomas Francis Mooney?”

“She couldn’t have made that name up, could she?”

“Why not?”

“I mean it’s corny Irish. And boy, can they be corny. No, his name is on the records, my birth certificate, et cetera, and I do feel at home with the Irish, Doctor. I do.”

“And you don’t in your own home?”

“I don’t feel like it’s mine. That picture of Jeff in the living room…”

“Painted by his first wife?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you ask him to remove it?”

“I’d have to admit I was jealous or something.”

“Is that so terrible?”

“But I’m nobody and she’s a painter. I don’t have the right…”

“You’re Julie Hayes, the present Mrs. Geoffrey Hayes.”

“The former… who? Hey, I’ll bet Jeff could find out about my father.”

“Can’t you find out, if you do want to know? Aren’t you playing the great detective these days?”

“Am I? You could say that. Absolutely. I told Pete’s sister on the phone that I was a private investigator. Ha! I also told someone I was making a psychological evaluation of Rita’s behavior for Detective Russo.” She looked round at the doctor.

“That was brave of you,” Doctor said dryly, and with a flip of her hand directed the patient’s head forward.

“Now how about this? Talk about diplomats. Rita made up this story to tell the woman in the thrift shop where she tried to sell all her fancy clothes.”

“A third-world diplomat,” Doctor said after Julie repeated the woman’s story. “What an interesting fantasy.”

“I have a theory about where it came from.”

“Had you told her about yourself, your natural father?”

“No. It’s spooky though, her latching onto an imaginary diplomat.”

“What does the word
diplomat
suggest to you?”

“Someone who makes peace, who negotiates. Somebody patient, polished, polite… I don’t think my mother made him up.”

Doctor said, “But Rita did make up her fiancé and chose a diplomat, someone who makes peace, who negotiates—that’s a fairly general concept.”

“I think she was talking about Pete underneath. It’s just even possible that Pete was going to marry her.” Julie turned her head quickly and surprised the look of incredulity on Doctor Callahan’s face. “All right, Doctor it’s not all that far out. I talked to Pete’s sister on the phone yesterday. She’s kind of weird too. Who isn’t? I mean I was lying in bed last night thinking about that conversation and what I’d heard about them from Mr. Bourke, but what came up, you know, was how the people in Libertytown would feel about Helen. And about Pete, and I’ll bet those good straight Americans would say, Didn’t the Mallory children turn out fine when you consider how they lost their parents when they were only teen-agers? You and I see the quirky insides of people, Doctor. But there’s Helen Mallory going to work every day at a weekly newspaper and talking to everybody about how devoted her brother is.”

“And the brother?” Doctor said.

“What?”

“The brother in the New York City morgue, dead of multiple knife wounds he received in a prostitute’s bedroom: is that what you consider turning out fine?”

“If it turns out the way I think it may, that he tangled with Mack that night, and maybe just had to fight him off Rita, I’ll bet they give him a hero’s funeral in Libertytown. Doctor, would you have recommended that she go someplace, like a rehabilitation center, you know, a halfway house, before trying to go all the way home? You don’t have to tell me, but it sounds like you.”

“I did.”

“That’s what I figured. Well, the police are going to find her if there’s some particular place you recommended.”

“Good.”

“I don’t think it’s good at all. I’d like to be able… I mean, I’d like to see… All right, I’ll say it the way I started: I’d like to be able to solve what happened to Pete before she surfaces. Maybe that way she’d still have a chance to get out of The Life at least.”

“She ought to return to New York of her own accord.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know what happened. How about that, Doctor? After all, Pete wasn’t exactly an international figure, and if she’s in some kind of nunnery…”

“You would like to be able to solve the crime before she surfaces,” Doctor said. “Shall we go into that?”

“Okay. It sounds arrogant, but…”

Doctor Callahan interrupted, “Isn’t the word
surface
often used in a political context these days for someone who has been underground?”

“Yes, but I didn’t mean it that way. I use words that exaggerate my meaning.”

“Why?”

“To get more attention.”

“So there was no political connotation when you used the word
surface?”

“Well, Doctor, if sex is politics…”

“Sex is not politics. Sex is sex, although undoubtedly it is used as a means to political as well as any number of other ends.”

“Okay, but politics wasn’t what I had in mind. I mean she’s bright enough, but she isn’t old enough…”

“Where did the third-world diplomat business come from?”

“That was fantasy. She made it up.”

“Fantasy proceeds from awareness.”

“I was just thinking, sixteen’s how old I was when I went on that peace march I’m always talking about.”

“She told you she was sixteen?”

“Going on seventeen, she said.”

“And you believed her, of course.”

“Actually, I thought she was even younger.”

“Which pleased her even more.”

“I guess it did. She said she’d been away from home for over a year which I figured was supposed to make me think she’d had a lot of life experience.”

“Or to shock you with the extent of her life experience—for one so young?”

“Could be,” Julie said.

“Why would she want to make that particular impression on you?”

“I don’t know. It would turn most people off.”

“That’s right,” the doctor said.

“And I don’t think she could read me all that well. It even turned me off a little when you come right down to it. Which would not have been what she wanted at all. Would it be some kind of masochism, some kind of self-punishment?”

“Couldn’t it be simpler than that? What was your main, overall impression of her?”

“I’ve got to say it again, how young she was.”

“Yes?”

“Hey, maybe she isn’t that young at all, is that what you mean? Maybe she’s some kind of Peter Pan who isn’t ever going to grow up. Doctor?”

“I think there is a distinct possibility that she is rather older than she wanted us to believe.”

“Oh, boy… That throws the merry-go-round into reverse.”

“It is only conjecture on my part,” Doctor said.

“I wonder how old that little brother is she bought the teddy bear for. She did buy a teddy bear on Thursday, and she did go to the bus station about five o’clock. Nobody knows if she took a bus.”

“Did she purchase a ticket?”

“I don’t think the police know that either. Did she tell you about the brother?”

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you he was retarded?”

Doctor was slow to answer. “No.”

“I think she made that up too—at the thrift shop. It’s run for the benefit of severely retarded children. What a put-on Rita, I mean.”

“I’ve been put on many times,” Doctor said. She changed position and the chair creaked. “Have you written to your husband?”

“Twelve pages, single spaced. From the day I moved into Forty-fourth Street. He already knows about my interest in the Tarot. I didn’t tell him you’d fired me. That’s about the only thing I didn’t tell him.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think you made a mistake, and I don’t see why he has to know it.”

Doctor laughed aloud, one of her rare comments. She brought her chair upright. “All right. Friday as usual.”

“There’s a lot I’ve found out about Pete that I didn’t get to tell you.”

“I’m not sure it belongs here,” Doctor said.

“But it does, if I do.”

“Then we’ll go into it next time, and into why you think it does belong here. What about Paris?”

“If this adds up the way I think, Paris could be awfully important to me. Have you noticed, Doctor? I’m not just drifting.”

“I have noticed.”

“In fact I’m working very hard.”

“Good,” Doctor said, without even a touch of skepticism in her voice.

Julie said, “I make a copy for myself of everything I write to Jeff. It’s a kind of log. Would you like it if I made you a copy?”

“Perhaps you had better, since you’re determined to involve me.” Doctor sounded fairly cheerful about it. At the very least, reconciled.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if we turned out to be a kind of female Holmes and Watson?” Julie said.

“Hilarious,” Doctor said without a smile. “Wouldn’t Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin be better models?”

“I don’t think I know them,” Julie said.

“That is the most depressing thing I’ve heard today.”

T
HE ONE THING JULIE
was determined not to do was to take off in all directions at once. She now carried a pocket notebook, and on the bus downtown after her session she added to the things she had already set down to be explored. She decided then to ensure order by numbering them in what she saw as their degree of urgency. She left the bus at Fiftieth Street and while drinking an Orange Julius realized that she was close to St Malachy’s where, she presumed, the Father Doyle Helen Mallory had mentioned was on the staff. She tackled number seven on her list first and composed a hidden logic to the procedure. Seven was the numeral she considered most important to her personally, and it had to mean something that without her having even thought of it at the time, she had assigned the number seven to Father Doyle.

Father Doyle was a round-faced, high-complexioned man who would have looked like a cherub when he was an altar boy. Now he was forty or so, a little seedy-looking and missing a back tooth. The vacancy showed when he smiled. Which had to be often, Julie figured, since she was so much aware of the missing tooth. He was not the authority figure she had expected. Nevertheless, she remained on guard from the moment the priest joined her in the tiny square parlor furnished with chairs about as comfortable as Early Inquisition.

“It’s a great mistake,” the priest was saying, “to think the church belongs only to the craw-thumpers, as my mother used to call them.” He gave himself a couple of pats on the chest by way of illustration. “And my own experience suggests that the louder the thump, the more hollow the heart. Mind now, I’m not gossiping. You asked if Miss Mallory was a terribly religious person, and I would say she likes to think herself such, a little of the Christian martyr. To be sure, I’ve had but the two telephone conversations with the woman, that and bits and pieces her brother dropped along the way.”

“Being lame and all,” Julie said, “maybe religion’s all she’s got.”

The priest smiled. “It’s no small thing to have. If I’m not mistaken, you’d agree to that, Mrs. Hayes?”

How in hell had she left herself open to that? “It’s not my thing, but sure, I do think religion’s great for people who go along with it.”

This time the priest laughed aloud.

“What?” Julie said.

“I wasn’t trying to make you commit yourself.”

“Is Helen younger or older than Pete?”

“Two years his senior.”

“Father Doyle, would it be very expensive to arrange a memorial Mass for Pete?”

“It doesn’t have to cost a cent when you put it that way. I’ll arrange it and you can give what you like. I think it’s a fine idea. I’ve been remembering him in my own Mass.”

“Twenty dollars maybe?”

“C.O.D.,” the priest said with gentle mockery.

“I didn’t mean to be insulting. I know it’s customary to give something.”

“If you can afford the twenty that will be fine. I’ll go and get the book now. Is there any weekday you would like especially?”

“Just so there’s time to put a notice in the papers and on the bulletin board at the Actors Forum.”

“And there’ll be an announcement from the altar on the previous Sunday.”

While he was gone from the Room Julie took a good look at Pope Paul. You couldn’t exactly call him jolly. On the opposite wall was the jolly one, John the Twenty-third who every Catholic she had ever known considered their kind of pope. 1958-1963. It would have been his predecessor who was on the throne when she lost a father. You couldn’t lose a father. He’d lost a daughter.

Father Doyle returned. “How about Thursday, the twenty-fourth.”

“That’s fine,” Julie said.