Death in The Life (24 page)

She was unable to reach Detective Russo at headquarters, but when she gave her name and the matter on which she had called, the Mallory murder, she was asked to hold on.

A moment later: “Lieutenant Donleavy of Homicide speaking, Mrs. Hayes. What can I do for you?”

Julie got no further than telling him where she had been that morning.

“Why don’t you come in and talk to me about it? I’ll be here for a while. Detective Russo is on his way to Philadelphia to pick up the Morgan girl. She’s waived extradition.”

“S
OME GOOD DETECTIVE WORK
on Russo’s part,” Donleavy said, sitting across from Julie at the table in the small airless room with the recording equipment. “A street informant told him that she was headed for a halfway house. He canvassed three or four of them in the East and turned up one in Philadelphia run by the Sisters of Charity. A New York doctor had called them last week to make inquiries on behalf of a girl who’d come to her. The girl never arrived at the hostel, but Russo alerted the Philly vice squad. They picked her up this morning, working her trade.”

Working her trade. Boston, New York, Philadelphia. Run it through in reverse and what came before Boston?

“Now tell me about Romano and how you got to him. You haven’t been carrying on your own investigation by any chance?”

“In a way I have, but I couldn’t help it. I kept finding out things about Pete, psychological things, and I kept wanting to know more.”

“So you parted company with Detective Russo,” Donleavy said shrewdly.

“I turned off, but it wasn’t his fault.”

The lieutenant smiled and said, almost with a lilt in his voice, “Let me see if I can turn you on again.”

Julie had the distinct feeling that she had not helped toward Detective Russo’s promotion. “Where to start,” she murmured.

Donleavy shook out a cigarette, lit it, and left the package on the table between them. “I was talking with Father Doyle, by the way, and your name came up. Isn’t he a grand fellow?”

Julie nodded.

“Now there’s a man who won’t get a promotion till the Last Judgment.” She’d been right about Russo’s chances, Julie thought, tracking Donleavy’s association. “And if he got one, he wouldn’t be nearly as effective as he is now. Well, shall we try to get on with Romano? It will bring us around to Mack the pimp, right?”

“Mack used to be his bodyguard,” Julie said. “You’ll have to let me tell it my own way.”

“I wouldn’t have it otherwise. Shall we put it on tape while we’re at it?”

“All right—if I could have three copies of the transcription.”

“A deal.”

Julie covered her eyes with her hands to help her concentration while he turned on the machine. She plunged in at the hospital scene, going from that back to the street theater and forward to Romano’s own account of his vicarious pursuit of Laura Gibson and his prognosis of how and why Pete died.

Donleavy turned off the recorder when she finished. “A voyeur and an exhibitionist. He gave you quite a performance, didn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you that Mack is dead. That’s the word on the street this morning, rumor, that’s all. But there’s nothing in what he said to you to implicate Romano legally.”

“I guess not,” Julie said.

“Nothing that would stand up even before a magistrate. I wonder if we really have it.” He lit a fresh cigarette and watched the smoke for a moment. “Suppose Mack is not dead: Romano certainly laid out the way the investigation ought to go. What did he say? ‘The police have not been to see me.’ The arrogant bastard. But he’s right. We ought to have got to him before now. It’s interesting that when the Philadelphia boys picked up little Miss Morgan this morning, she claimed not to know how or when she got there. The last thing she remembered in New York was telling her pimp that she was going and giving him back the key to the apartment. Somebody gave her a beating, that’s certain.”

“What about Pete’s key?”

“Still don’t know. He might have dropped it in the fray. If there was one. The two locks are similar: there could have been confusion about the keys. The time comes out well enough. She was seen at the bus terminal at five. We now have a witness who’s pretty sure he saw Mack going into the building on Ninth Avenue before seven o’clock. She could have been back there by then. Mallory left the Irish Theatre at six-thirty, had a bite to eat, and called his sister at seven forty. Then what happened?” Donleavy shook his head. “It doesn’t seem possible in a building that size that there weren’t any other witnesses. Scared. It’s a bad scene.”

“Who did finally call the police?”

“My guess is Mack—with raw nerves by that time.”

“I do think Mack is dead,” Julie said, “and I’m not ever going to forget that man Romano’s eyes, but it does seem incredible.”

“Not really. I can’t think of a more worthless member of society than Mack, and Romano does consider himself a benefactor. Maybe he thinks he’s saving the taxpayers’ money.”

“Do you really believe that, Lieutenant?”

“No, I don’t, and the more I think about it now, I’m not at all sure I agree that Mack is dead. The street rumors: it could all be a scenario. Mack could be hiding out—possibly from Romano—waiting for the police to catch up.”

“What happens to Rita now?”

“Bellevue… for psychiatric observation. That’s her immediate address.”

“Could I see her, Lieutenant?”

“Check with me in a day or so. We’ll see what the medics have to say.”

After she left Donleavy, she went to her shop for the volume of Yeats and then walked over to St. Malachy’s. Father Doyle was out on a sick call. Julie told the housekeeper she would wait for him in the actors’ chapel.

It was a low-ceilinged room with a few pale saints in their shrines illumined by the flickering candles. She had used to, with the sudden fervors of adolescence, swallow chunks of Catholicism, only to violently disgorge them afterwards. Longing and revolt. It had a lot to do with that mythical father whose name was real enough on her birth and baptismal certificates; the myth came afterwards. Someday she might pursue him when the need seemed fierce again. And it would happen, but she didn’t think she’d ever find him. Or God. Whom she didn’t know any better than she did her father. Sometimes she pretended. She tried. And then in anger cursed Him. Which was pretty hard: goddamn God. What had she said to Rita? Something outrageous… Sometimes I think of God as one big penis. You wouldn’t say that to me if I wasn’t a whore… Why had Pete kept those photographs? Were they stills from the porn film? My God, that day in Sergeant Greenberg’s studio they had been looking at Pete! The male tower. Babel. She slipped from the bench to the kneeler and tried to pray. But it didn’t work. Only a little when she prayed for understanding. Her only peace was understanding… For peace comes dropping slow. Was that Yeats again? It was.

Father Doyle had not come, so she left the chapel quickly. She would not have had much to say to him that day anyway. But as a kind of punctuation—a half-way pause—leaving, she dipped her fingers into the holy water font and made the sign of the cross. It was something she had often practiced. She left the book with the housekeeper.

A letter came from Jeff that night by way of diplomatic pouch. Very dramatic. He had written it the night before with her last letter in front of him. He started out saying, “I had no idea you had made such progress with Dr. Callahan.” An irony of course. He went on to praise her logic and her ability at organizing her material… as though it hadn’t organized itself. The odd thing was that if he found anything remarkable in her participation in such a scene, he did not mention it, except insofar as it was contained cryptogrammically in “progress with Dr. Callahan.” “My dear little puzzle is going to solve herself.” All right. Skipping through the letter, she read the last sentence: “I am reserving a bedroom-sitting room in an old hotel on the Left Bank to which I have always been partial. It may not have the charm for you of Forty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, but you will recognize certain human universals.”

Well, Jeff. Then she went back to read a middle paragraph more carefully.

“I want to comment on that production of
Streetcar
to which I seem to have reacted so violently. I am quite willing to concede Williams to be one of the great modern playwrights, but for my part, I find the virgin who tries to cure herself of the affliction by turning whore an unpleasant phenomenon. Why not enter a convent, make love to God, and get drunk on sacramental wine? I understand whores and I understand nuns, but it’s these nunning whores and whoring nuns which confuse me. That way lies madness. Which, I should suppose, was what Williams had in mind. I did not believe Laura Gibson in the role for a minute, and that psychedelic production was designed to cover her ineptness. One man’s opinion. But when I was a young blade cadging theater handouts for somebody else’s column, I had the opportunity to observe Miss Gibson. She made good copy, talking extravagantly of her lovers, their prowess, and their appetites. She was a bawd and proud of it, but I have come to believe that most bawds are likely to be sexually frustrated, their bawdiness a rich cloak under which they are making anything but love. My guess is that Miss Gibson and the much younger Mallory played lovers for an audience who wanted lovers and then played tiddledywinks in “bed.”

Julie felt profoundly that he was right.

Oh, Jeff, I hardly knew you. Or you me. That was for sure.

W
HEN JULIE LEARNED THAT
she could see Rita Morgan at three on Sunday afternoon, she weighed calling Doctor Callahan. Doctor had seen Rita as her present observers had not, but there was bound to be protocol, and she knew in her heart Doctor wasn’t going to volunteer. The best way to get her in was to persuade Rita herself to ask to see her. Nor did Julie want to run the risk of jeopardizing her own visit. She had not seen Russo or Donleavy again, and the newspaper coverage told her nothing she did not already know.

She waited in one of those small consultation rooms which itself suggested madness. One barred window looked out on the tubes and funnels connected to the heating and ventilation of a vast institution. In the room was an empty desk and three chairs. The door had a small window which Julie would have had to stand on tiptoe to look through. The attendant who brought Rita was as body-beautiful as Mack, but he was there for his brawn, not his beauty. He said he would be right outside the door. Julie understood the minute she saw his charge. Rita came in carrying the teddy bear.

It was the size of a year-old child. She set it down in one of the chairs, and drawing the other chair close, sat down beside it and folded her hands in her lap. She was clean, she wore a sweater and slacks, but the gloss was gone from her hair and her eyes seemed almost as empty as the bear’s. There were greenish bruise smudges beneath them. She still looked like a child, but an abused one. The teddy bear looked the worse for a week’s wear, as though he’d been wept over or left out in the rain.

Julie chose to sit on the desk and dangle her legs down the side. “Remember me, Friend Julie?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I tried to help you. I thought you were going to make it. What went wrong?”

Rita gave a great sigh, a little shrug at the end of it.

“It’s funny, both of us knowing Pete Mallory, and not knowing the other knew him. Or maybe you knew. I didn’t. I’ve been trying to figure out if it was Pete who sent you to me.”

“No.”

“Did you love him, Rita? I did.”

Something stirred in the girl’s eyes, but she would not look at Julie. She reached out and put a finger to the toy bear’s leg. But no answer.

“I’ve been talking to his sister on the telephone. Helen. She seems to think Pete and you were going to be married. And you know, Rita, it might have been all right. Pete was a kind of third-world diplomat… I figured out that you were talking about him when you made up that story for the thrift shop woman. She said you were very happy.”

“Stupid bitch.”

So. Something. Something new.

“You or her, Rita?”

Silence, but a little clutch at the bear’s foot. Security blanket.

“Or me?”

“Not you, ma’am. You’re okay.”

“Thank you. I wish there were something I could do to help you.”

“I’ll be all right.”

Julie was avoiding mention of Mack. The police would have gone over that part of her story again and again. She did not want to associate herself with them if she could help it. “Would you like Doctor Callahan to come and see you?”

“No.”

“She’d be on your side.”

“They all say that. Nobody’s on my side, except…” She gave the bear a tug upsetting him and then set him upright in the chair again. He did look odd. Or else it was the eeriness of the whole scene.

“I am too,” Julie said.

“You wouldn’t be.”

“If what?”

“If you knew all about me.”

At least she was talking a little. “I think I do,” Julie said. “I think you’ve been trying to go home for years and years and telling yourself that as long as you could stay sixteen you could make it. From city to city—where did it start? Chicago? San Francisco? And then you met Pete in Boston last fall, of all the people from home you wouldn’t have wanted to meet…”

“I could have killed myself. I should have.”

“But you didn’t, and Pete gave you hope again. Right?”

No answer.

“What will you do when all this is over?”

“All what?”

“When the police let you go,” Julie said carefully. For the first time, Rita’s eyes met hers. Briefly, a fleeting hope. “They won’t ever let me go until I tell them what happened and I can’t.”

“You mean what happened to Pete?”

Silence again.

Julie chanced the name. “When they find Mack, maybe they’ll know.”

Nothing.

“I do wish there were some way I could help you. Why
did
you come to me… when there was Pete?”

“Because I don’t trust any man alive.”

Only dead men? Odd… “Rita, did you know that your father died a couple of years ago?”