Scarlet Night (5 page)

“I’m not moving out yet. Just closing the shop to the public.”

“Your friends will like it that you’re staying. Mrs. Ryan missed you something terrible.” He mimicked the Irish voice. “And Fritzie, it seems, won’t eat.”

“It’s worms,” Julie said. Fritzie was Mrs. Ryan’s long, low dog which wasn’t entirely dachshund. “Fritzie loves Fritzie, and pro tem, whoever takes him for a walk.”

Mr. Bourke laughed. Then: “It will be a sad day for her when he goes.”

Their eyes met. He had spoken of the dog but both of them thought of Pete Mallory. Mr. Bourke had been very fond of him. “Look, I’ll bring the lamps back and then we can decide what I owe you.”

“Take your time.” Mr. Bourke retreated behind the counter.

Julie started out, not wanting to see the tears she was pretty sure were in his eyes.

He called after her, “There’s a Mass for Peter at St. Malachy’s at five on Thursday.”

“I’ll try to make it.” She was sure she wouldn’t.

She bought some eyelets and picture wire before returning to the shop. The first thing she did when she returned to Forty-fourth Street was gather the junk mail. In among it was a folded piece of lined paper on which was written in a foreign but childlike hand:

Dear Julie

Anyone looks for me I am back July 7. We go to Puerto Rico. Please.

Rose Rodriguez

Julie crumpled the paper and put it into the plastic garbage bag. “Anyone” meant a trick, a John: Mrs. Rodriguez, her upstairs neighbor, presumably had a private practice which she conducted while her husband was at work. To date, happily, Julie had not encountered any of her customers. Today was July 7. Her final addition to the Glad trash bag was the window sign,
Friend Julie.
She braced the door open to let air in. Maybe the mold would crawl out under its own power. She took
Scarlet Night
into the back room.

Suddenly, through the doorway came Mrs. Ryan and Fritzie. Mrs. Ryan gave a great high croon of pleasure that sent Fritzie into paroxysms of excitement. He yapped and leaped and unintentionally peed on the floor. In the hug between the two women, Mrs. Ryan’s straw hat got knocked askew with hairpins flying in all directions and the gray hair tumbling.

“Everybody in the neighborhood’s been asking after you, people you wouldn’t believe knew you were here. Oh, dear. Look what Fritzie has done. His kidneys aren’t what they used to be. Poor boy, I know you didn’t mean it.”

Julie got a paper towel. The unrepentant animal lathered her face with smelly kisses when she got down to his level.

“See? Even Fritzie missed you. You were in Europe. Did you by any chance get to Ireland?”

“Only Paris,” Julie said.

“For all this time? Oh, I dare say there’s enough to see. There was a play about Paris once in a theater where I was usher. I saw it night after night, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. And it was about prostitutes. You wouldn’t think that would be so complicated, now would you?”

Julie made a noise of agreement, stuffed the towel into the trash bag, and went to the bathroom at the back of the shop to wash her hands. She tried to open the small window there, but it was stuck tight.

Mrs. Ryan followed her through the curtained partition into the back room. “You’ll need to air this place out. I could loan you a fan. When old Mrs. Driscoll, down the hall at the Willoughby, died, her son gave me her air conditioner. It’s saved my life.”

“I’ll have to do something to get some air back here,” Julie said.

“Will you be living here, dear?” Mrs. Ryan said hopefully.

“No. My husband came back with me. He’ll be home for a while now.”

“I was going to ask about him,” Mrs. Ryan said with ill-concealed regret. “He works at home, does he?”

“Sometimes.”

“Julie, are you married to the fellow who writes in the
New York Times?”

“Uh-huh.” She had not advertised Jeff among her West Side friends. She looked around in time to catch that puckered shape Mrs. Ryan made of her mouth at something she did not altogether approve.

“I knew a lovely man once who wrote a column for the
Daily News,
an Irish name. I was hoping it might be him.”

Julie said, “Jeff used to be a legman for Tony Alexander.” It was a name well known to readers of the
News.

“Did he?” Grudging admiration. “There’s always something in that column worth reading.” Making her tour of the room to see what if anything was new among Julie’s possessions, Mrs. Ryan discovered the painting. Another of her high, crooning “ohs.” Somehow, Julie thought, Mrs. Ryan had become more Irish in the past month. “Isn’t that beautiful, whatever it is? They always tell you to make of it what you want. Did you bring it from Paris? It looks very Frenchie.”

“It is,” Julie said.

“Where are you going to hang it?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“It’d be very attractive on the wall in front with one of the spotlights perking it up.”

“Yeah.” Just what it needed, perking up.

Mrs. Ryan was looking at her carefully, making some calculation, Julie knew. “I suppose you have to go home and fix dinner for himself. Or do you have a cook?”

Julie laughed. It had not taken Mary Ryan long to fantasize the life of someone married to a
New York Times
columnist. “I don’t have a cook, Mrs. Ryan, and as a matter of fact, Jeff’s in Washington today.”

“So you can have a bite with Sheila Brennan and me. We’re going over to the Actors Forum afterwards. They’re doing a play now with the public invited. I’m sure you could get in without a reservation.”

There was no reason not to, really, and she did like to drop by the Forum now and then where she was still a member.

At dinner the conversation of the three women dealt largely with the unfortunate event that had brought them together, or at least had brought together Julie and the nurse, Sheila Brennan. But you couldn’t talk long of Pete Mallory without mention of the New Irish Theatre where he had been working at the time of his death.

“There’s another young man I’d love you to meet, Julie,” Mrs. Ryan said. “He reads beautifully…Wouldn’t she take to him, Sheila? The voice of a poet and the heart of a patriot.”

Oh, boy.

Miss Brennan wiped away a small white mustache of beer foam. “I don’t like his eyes,” she said.

Mrs. Ryan gave her shoulders a shuffle. “You said that before. There’s some people can’t look at a person. He looks you straight in the eye.”

“Oh, doesn’t he? He nails you to where he’s looking at you. I knew a priest like that once. He’d have you confessing sins you never committed just to get away from him.”

Julie laughed.

“It wasn’t a bit funny, let me tell you. I was a young girl then.” Miss Brennan’s pale blue eyes narrowed at the recollection. Her freckles had gone from red to brown with the summer sun. “And mind, it was through a screen where he shouldn’t have been looking at you at all. The way he’d say, ‘Ye-e-s?’ you’d start making up things for fear there were some you’d forgotten and you taking up his valuable time.”

“What are you talking about?” Mrs. Ryan said.

Julie understood perfectly what Miss Brennan was talking about. “He should have been a psychiatrist.”

“Right on!” the nurse said, proud of herself for using a new phrase in her vocabulary that had gone out of Julie’s before she left college.

“Isn’t it nice,” Mrs. Ryan said stiffly, “the two of you speak the same language.”

To mollify her, Julie asked, “What’s the poet-patriot’s name, Mrs. Ryan?”

“Sean O’Grady. It has a wonderful sound in Gaelic. Do you remember it in Gaelic, Sheila?” Julie knew now where Mrs. Ryan had freshened her Irish.

“I wouldn’t remember it in English if it wasn’t for you. I’m not so taken with these I.R.A. people, Mary. If you worked in a hospital it’d chill your bones to see them come in as I have, even in this country, after a blast of some sort, with their eyes hanging out of the sockets, or their jaws blown off. There was a man walked into Emergency once and gave me his hand. He literally gave me his hand and then fell in a dead faint at my feet…”

“Hush’t before you spoil our appetites,” Mrs. Ryan said.

The play was terrible. It went off in all directions and never came back. Julie stuck it out to the end. Never, never would Mary Ryan walk out on a play. As she said, it would be like leaving the Mass before the consecration. The only thing that cheered Julie was that it had been produced at all. Even if the playwright hadn’t been able to pull it together, he’d laid it out. Right now she’d settle for that herself. You couldn’t get
there
without a
here
to go from.

The next day Julie tried to get started on the story of Pete Mallory’s murder. Most of the characters were going to work out all right: Peter Mallory, scenic designer for the Actors Forum and the New Irish Theatre; Rita Morgan, who had come to Friend Julie for advice on how to get out of The Life, soul-poisoned Rita, who took Pete’s offer to marry her and take her home as the ultimate insult; Mack, Rita’s pimp, whose disappearance after Pete’s death was taken by Julie and the police to be the doing of Sweets Romano; Romano, “the king of porn,” art collector, public benefactor, who had been in love with the same woman as Pete, the actress Laura Gibson.

In synopsis, Julie thought, it read distressingly like a soap opera. Only, soaps had more structure. Also, it was lacking its heroine, Julie Hayes, who was going to be even harder to write than Sweets Romano.

By the time Julie had to go home and dress for dinner at the Alexanders’ she was convinced that she was a better detective than she was ever going to be a writer. But she didn’t intend to stop trying.

O
’GRADY HAD SPENT TUESDAY,
the day after Rubinoff took over, putting together his next benefit for Irish victims of the British occupation. He had not set a date or a place for the reading, and try as he might, he was not able to work up his old fervor. He could read his head off and the Committee regale for a month of Sundays and between them not raise a tenth of the sum he’d soon be turning over to the Cause. It was a better thing to do, however, than lying on the daybed dreaming of glory. Or of Ginni.

He dressed Wednesday morning for a trip down to the maritime hiring hall. Not that he intended to throw in his card, but it gave him something to do among men who were familiar to him and a change of vision from the four walls of the apartment. The phone rang just as he was going out the door.

“O’Grady? This is Rubinoff. Something has gone wrong.”

It came like a kick in the stomach. “I’m listening.”

“That stupid boy has taken his pictures from the gallery walls and disappeared with them.”

“All of them?”

“Of course, all of them. Why would I call otherwise? Mrs. Sloan telephoned me. She supposed he might have brought
Scarlet Night
to my office. He didn’t.”

“Holy God. What did he do with it?”

“You’ve got to find him. You’ve got to track him down and persuade him that this sort of thing isn’t done. You don’t walk out on a commitment made by your gallery no matter what your domestic relations with the owner. That’s what this is all about. I told you I thought they were sleeping together.”

“I don’t remember your telling me that, Mr. Rubinoff.”

“Perhaps I didn’t, but it was my observation.”

“Where am I supposed to look for him?”

“I have no idea. Neither does Maude Sloan, and worse, she doesn’t care. It was only to keep on the right side of me that she called at all. We might not have known for two weeks.”

“Unless we landed in jail before it.”

“You’re overreacting, my friend. I don’t believe for a moment that all is lost. He may be in search of another patron. I suggest you inquire around the neighborhood. Someone must have seen him remove the paintings.”

O’Grady thought at once of the youngster. She was all eyes. And maybe no tongue.

“When you find him,” Rubinoff went on, “he shouldn’t be hard to persuade. Maude says he has no money.”

“Then he’d be bound to come around to you, wouldn’t he? Unless he’s decided to deliver it to the other customer.”

A long silence and then, as though the words pained him, “We may have to consider that possibility. But I cannot believe he would throw away a solid sale for a promise to consider. That’s all she was offering—unless a bed: he seems rather talented in that capacity.”

“Not her,” O’Grady said. “I’d take my oath on it.”

“When you find him, Johnny, couldn’t you suggest he bunk in with you for a while? Until he gets relocated, say?”

Johnny, he noted. “I’m supposed to be on the high seas, Mr. Rubinoff.”

“But you’re not, and as you said yourself, we’re in this together. Let me give you my home telephone as well as the office.”

“Wait till I get something to write on.” He took down the numbers.

“The first name is Rubin, Rubin Rubinoff.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Rubin.”

O’Grady glanced around the apartment as he went from the living room to the bedroom to get his pocketknife. He liked to leave the place tidy as his mother had taught him. You never knew who you’d bring home with you when you went out or who’d bring you home if you couldn’t make it on your own. He smiled at himself in the chiffonier mirror, rehearsing what he’d say to Abel if he found him. His teeth needed cleaning or it might be the mirror. His mother had cherished the old chiffonier because she liked the classy sound of the word, he thought: even standing on tiptoe, she’d been able to see no more of herself in the glass than the top of her head. He’d kept it because he kept everything, the washstand and pitcher, the chamber pot (although he now had a bathroom of his own), the bed with lumps like cobblestones under the faded cretonne spread. He slept in the living room on the daybed where he had slept as a child. His button-eyed bear still snuggled among the cushions unless someone was coming into the house. Then it was banished under the bed. The knife he took with him more for luck than need. It was a gift from The Daughters of St. Patrick and he cherished it.