Habit of Fear (12 page)

While Julie drew water for the kettle at the bathroom sink and put it on the hotplate, McNally stood gazing at the crystal ball and the collection of Yeats’s poetry. “Do you think in symbols, Julie?”

“I do look for signs. I don’t always believe them.”

“Is there magic in the ball here?”

“Only for the believers. It belonged to a Gypsy woman. She must have believed in it.”

“I’d never have thought of you in a place like this, though I suspected you might be unconventional.”

“I’m not really. I hadn’t expected to live here—until recently.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

She shrugged. “You heard it yourself tonight—he fell in love with someone else … Mimi Monet. I wish I could laugh.”

“Do you want him back?”

“Yes.” She turned away. “There’s beer in the fridge.”

“The tea will be fine. Was tonight the first time you heard who she was?”

Julie nodded. “Life seems to be full of surprises for me these days.” She turned back to him. “I’m not sure I want Jeff back. …”

“You just don’t want him taken away from you.”

“That’s it.” She went to the chest and got out cups and tea. “I’m sorry, all I have are tea bags.”

“It’d be better if he had died,” McNally said.

Julie laughed.

“Your grief wouldn’t be so humiliating.”

True, all too true.

The next thing she knew, while she watched a kettle that refused to boil, he was reading “Where the Wild Geese Fly No More” where she had tacked the typed copy of it on the wall above her desk. He glanced at her over his shoulder. “I’m a rude bastard, but the words
Wild Geese
caught my eye. Thomas Francis Mooney … I never heard of him either. Who was it you asked me about at Ginny’s? I must write down the name.”

“Michael Desmond. I thought Ginny might have told you about the poem and how I came to find it in the magazine.”

“I love the way you all call it ‘the magazine,’ as though there was none other in the world.”

“Is there?” Julie set out the tray—milk and sugar, cups and saucers. The kettle was on the boil, as Mrs. Ryan always said.

He came to where she was bringing the tray and made her stop and hold it between them while he looked at her. “I like your eyes,” he said and took the tray from her. “How did you come on the poem in there?”

It was not to be told that night. The telephone shattered the quiet of which their very voices had seemed a part.

“At three in the morning?” McNally said of the phone call.

“The answering service will pick it up.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

She shook her head. “I used to worry that something might have happened to Jeff.”

“And you don’t now?”

“It wouldn’t be me they’d call.”

The stillness when the ringing stopped seemed more ominous. Neither of them was able to break it before the phone rang again. This time she answered it.

It was Detective Russo.
The Candy Kid
had docked early. “We’ve picked up the two suspects for questioning. We can’t hold them for long, and we’ve got the Glass woman in a hotel. We can’t hold her either. She’s a wild bird.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“We’ll pick you up in five minutes.”

“In five minutes,” Julie repeated, looking at McNally. “Okay.”

The Irishman was on his feet before she hung up the phone.

“I’m sorry, Seamus. Drink your tea until they come for me. It’s the police. I’m going to have to try to identify two men.”

“Criminals? That’s a ridiculous question, isn’t it?”

Julie smiled wryly. “I’m not sure I can identify them. I probably can’t. They were wearing masks.”

“And their crime, may I ask? Alleged crime, is it?”

Yes, Julie decided. It might as well be told him. She would never know how the night might have gone if Russo hadn’t phoned. She said the words: “Sexual assault.”

He did not speak. A gesture questioned whether she had been the victim and she nodded that she had. He sank back down to the chair and put his hand to his forehead, concealing his eyes.

Just saying the words had numbed everything within her. Her heart simply froze over. Even anxiety was dead. She gathered their cups and saucers onto the tray and took it to the kitchen table.

“I’ll go with you if you’ll have me,” McNally said. “It’s no time for you to be alone.”

“It is, though. I couldn’t stand it otherwise.” She brought his coat from the clothes tree and held it for him. “You’ll get a cab on Broadway, but be careful.”

“Do you want to see me again?” he asked at the door.

She shook her head. It was the truth. The very thought of his maleness revolted her.

“Ring me up in Donegal if you change your mind,” he said.

Russo drove her uptown in an unmarked car. Julie slouched down in the seat beside him and dug her hands deeply into her pockets.

“We’ve got them at Eighty-second Street. They’ve got special facilities up there in case we get lucky. You know where we picked them up, don’t you?”

“McGowen’s?”

“We nabbed them coming out. Kincaid came into town on a bus and went there straight from the terminal, seabag and all. His pal was waiting for him. Name’s Jim Donahue. It wasn’t five minutes until they came out. I don’t think McGowen was very hospitable.”

“Do you know anything more about them? Family? Oh, Christ, what I really mean is, do they have wives? Children? Where did the doll come from?”

“Don’t know that. Neither of them’s married, as far as we know. They’ve got relatives all over the place. I don’t know, Julie: they claim they’ve got witnesses to where they were the entire morning of June eighteenth. They’re a couple of lunkheads, but they’ve stone-walled some pretty smart cops all night. They even volunteered to stand in a lineup, and that’s what we’re going after now—unless their lawyer’s changed their minds for them.”

“I don’t see what good I’m going to be,” Julie said, her anxiety coming back. Which was better than feeling dead.

“You may be able to pick up on something we can use in combination.”

“Their faces are going to be an awful distraction.”

Russo laughed. Gallows humor. Sometimes it was the best kind. “I think the Glass lady will feel better when she knows you’re there.”

“She’d feel even better if it was May Weems,” Julie said.

“Otherwise engaged,” Russo said, meaning it to be funny.

“Yeah.”

E
IGHT MEN
walked past on the other side of “the mirror.” Julie watched with Russo and Detective Mabel Hadley. Three of the men rolled with a waddle of sorts. One of them had red hair, but to identify him by that would render useless any other testimony she might give. Another of the shorter men had dirty blond hair, which some might call red, and the head of the one she felt was Kincaid was quite bald, possibly shaved. Some joker had included a black man among the eight. Julie suggested to the detectives that he be eliminated before Missy Glass saw them. She could easily be confused. The decision was to keep him in the lineup: he had asked to be in it.

So far as Julie was concerned, the black man was the only one of the lot she could eliminate. Her assailants might have been two of several combinations. Or none of them. She felt an equal abhorrence for them all and yet a debilitating fear of implicating innocent men.

“Well?” Russo said, annoyed when she wasn’t forthcoming.

“I’d say the bald-headed one is Kincaid. But I wouldn’t say any of them were the men who trapped me. Not for sure I wouldn’t. Is there nothing in the crime lab by which to identify them, for God’s sake?”

“It takes two sets of everything to make comparisons, Julie. To get their prints and other samples we’ve got to arrest them, and to do that we need probable cause. Let’s listen to some tapes now and see if you can recognize any of the voices. You were right about Kincaid, by the way. He shaved off his red hair while at sea.”

Several edited recordings were played for her, different voices, all. In one of the segments the speaker responded to the question of where he worked, saying he was a part-time warehouse loader on Greene Street. “Part-time anything else?” his interrogator asked. “Yes sir. I’m learning how to be a mortician. You know, dead people?” “Where?” “My uncle owns a funeral parlor on Forty-ninth Street. Like I said before …” The tape was edited at that point. Julie’s first thought was that the speaker was going to have to improve his speech before he’d be allowed in the parlor to deal with the bereaved. Then she realized and signaled to stop the recorder.

“I wouldn’t swear to it,” she said. “I couldn’t. But that’s the only voice that seems at all familiar. If it’s his, he’s the other one.”

A technician marked the segment and removed the tape.

There was a consultation among the detectives, and one of them then asked Julie if she had noticed any odor on the perpetrator that she could associate with a mortuary.

“Something medicinal—putrid, stale.” The whole scene flooded back with all its associable smells—grease, vomit and all the rest. “I don’t know!” she shouted. “How in God’s name would I know how a mortuary smells?”

They left her alone then until a few minutes later, when Russo came back and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“What?” Julie said.

“The Glass woman refused even to watch the parade. She turned her back on it. They’ll be out on the street before we are and they’ll be a damned sight harder to bring in the next time.”

H
ER DEPRESSION WAS ALMOST
overwhelming. She had prepared herself to confront, and there had been no confrontation. And her meeting with McNally now seemed like an illusion. She did not even look like herself in the mirror. She spent most of the workday on the phone and came up with nothing worth the print. Every time she thought of going out, she was put off by the thought that she might meet Kincaid or Donahue on the street and know them instantly. Then what would she do? And what would they do?

She forced herself to leave the shop and do something as close to confrontation as she could come at the moment. She walked up to Forty-ninth Street and west until she was alongside the Magee Funeral Home. The firm, according to the legend on the bronze plaque, had been established in 1922. A family business. A diminishing family if Donahue, a nephew, had been taken in. Or might it have been on the plea of his parents? Or was he an abused youngster pitied by his uncle? What the hell difference did it make? He was a sodomist. Or else he was the wrong party.

There was no vehicular entrance on Forty-ninth Street. It would be around the corner on the avenue. Across the street was a school run by the Sisters of Good Hope, and adjoining the school, the convent. It took her a few seconds to remember why that might be relevant: Russo’s saying where the stocking masks might have come from. They were the kind nuns used to wear before they came out of the habit. She certainly wasn’t going to ring the convent doorbell and ask what kind of stockings these reverend ladies were wearing nowadays. Okay. How about this? Did one of your older sisters pass away along about June eighteenth? And was she laid out at Magee’s? The idea was so macabre it cheered her up. She went around the corner and found the business entrance to the funeral home. Crowded against the brick wall near the door stood a bright green Volkswagen bug, the paint looking shiny new. Was it the car Missy Glass said looked like an egg, now painted over? Or just one more coincidence?

Julie phoned Detective Russo, ostensibly to ask if Kincaid’s and Donahue’s alibis had been checked out by now. He promised to call her back when he could find out, but his voice and manner suggested that he had cooled toward the case. She decided not to lay the Volkswagen speculation on him at the moment. When he called her, then maybe. But the day passed and most of the next day and he had not called back. For all she knew, Kincaid might have gone back to sea.

Old Mary Ryan stopped by the shop. “Just to see how you’re getting along, dear.”

Julie made her a cup of tea. Then, against her own better judgment, she asked if she knew a young man by the name of Frank Kincaid.

“That would be
young
Frankie.” Mrs. Ryan set her teacup down. “I knew him when he was no more than a whistle. I knew his mother, and I knew his grandmother before that. The father’s a traveling salesman who does more traveling than selling. Now there’s one of those I was telling you about, Julie: Father Doyle got hold of him and for a while he paid up every week. Then he took off again. The Kincaid girls were all pretty little things. And the way Jennie dressed them …” Mrs. Ryan laid her hand on Julie’s. “They were like little dolls. One of them supported the whole family for a while. She got into TV commercials. You’d know her if you saw her. Or would have. I’ve not seen her lately. She turned pudgy the way some girls do when they get to be ten or eleven. But you asked about Frankie. He wasn’t a bad boy, but when he’d get into any trouble, it was always the other fellow’s fault. A whiny youngster. I don’t think he’s very bright. I used to see him in McGowen’s now and then. Nowadays he’s a great show-off, with that red hair of his. He got into the maritime service awhile back, and to hear him tell it, you’d think he was commander of the fleet. What makes you ask?”

“One of the girls at the Actors’ Forum asked me if I knew him,” Julie lied.

“I don’t think he’s more than an able-bodied seaman. But I suppose he’s able-bodied enough when it comes to the girls.” Julie did not ask her about Donahue.

I
T PROMISED TO BE
an opening night to remember.
Golden Slippers
already had a million and a half dollars in the till, and Broadway hadn’t seen such a turnout of celebrities since
Cats.
At Tim’s suggestion he and Julie attended together. The column, “Our Beat,” was making its way: first-night tickets. They were so gussied up, as Tim put it, they were photographed several times between the taxi and the lobby. Julie wore a silver lame dress and an embroidered stole of Chinese silk around her shoulders. As with the real celebrities, a little burst of applause greeted them as they went down the aisle.