Lullaby of Murder (14 page)

Julie was shaking her head. “My theatrical background consists of a couple of years training as an actress, but no experience whatever. Thank you, but no, I’m going to have all I can handle to carry my half of the column. But if my partner agrees we’ll try to give your rehabilitation program as much coverage as we can. Okay?”

“Who am I to say okay or nokay? Every little bit helps.”

“Did Tony ask you about your future events?”

“He was interested. I would say that.”

“He kept you there for a long time—for Tony.”

“I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, Mrs. Hayes. He kept me there for Tony. I’ve told the police and I’ll tell you: he was waiting for someone. Didn’t say so, but every time I’d get to my feet, he’d insist that I tell him more about the Garden and its ‘happening,’ as he called it. As soon as we got to his office he’d called someone to get in touch with his wife and say he’d be an hour late. I don’t flatter myself, Mrs. Hayes, that he intended to spend all that time with me. The phone rang twice with no one speaking. That upset him. Then the call to which he said, ‘I’ll be here.’ I had an engagement myself and I finally got away. You can imagine how I feel now: If I’d stayed, would he still be alive? Or would I also be dead?”

“I’ve asked myself a couple of what-if questions, too,” Julie said. She had begun to believe the little man. “Do you think Tony and Jay Phillips were ever friends?”

“Outside their professional association? I doubt it.”

“How about enemies?’

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I saw Jay a few hours before his suicide and he referred to Tony as an s.o.b.”

“Did you know Jay was dead when you came to see me?”

“Yes.”

“You could have told me,” he said in mournful reproach. His credibility slipped.

“I had no idea of any association between you. I didn’t know he was doing your publicity. I suppose Tony did.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Who’s going to handle it now that Jay’s gone?”

“Mrs. Hayes, what do you think I’m doing here on a gloomy Sunday afternoon?”

She offered him a cup of tea and took him into the back room. He told her essentially the same story about the Garden of Roses as she’d heard from Councilman McCord and from Romano.

“How did you connect with Jay?” she asked in as casual a tone as possible.

“Oh, a long time ago. Before I turned teetotaller. Know what that means?”

“I can figure it out.”

“Jay wasn’t always an important Broadway publicist, and since you’re checking my credentials, Mrs. Hayes, I better tell you, those Phillips sisters don’t much cotton to me, and I never figured out if it was because I quit drinking or because Jay didn’t.”

Julie waited until they were having tea to ask, “Mr. Butts, why do you think Jay committed suicide?”

“Despair. And it’s the one unpardonable sin.”

“Despair over what?”

“I am my brother’s keeper. Never in my life have I shirked that duty. But the grave is silent, and he chose the grave. I am also keeper of the silence.”

Divine hyperbole which translated to: Mind your own business. But he knew all the same, Julie thought. If Jay Phillips’ problem was very young girls, Butts knew it. Had he used it? And now why had he come to her? Several reasons surfaced, but the real one, she suspected, was still buried under the rhetoric.

When he left she went to her notebook and wrote down their conversation as she remembered it. She thought about the Phillips sisters and whether they would talk to her about him. Or about their late sister-in-law. The trouble with little old ladies like the Phillips sisters was that they often told things the way they wanted them to be or to have been. And they tended to contradict one another. Doctor Callahan had used to say she learned more about her patients from the lies they told than from the truth. Julie had never managed to ask her how she knew the difference.

S
HE WAS BEGINNING TO
feel the strain of confrontation. She needed to be alone or with someone with whom she could relax. But who was that? It certainly wasn’t Fran and Eleanor. On her way home, she even found her friend Gus snappish when she stopped at his restaurant. “What do you think, you get fast food by Gus? Fast food is shit. Here you get good, healthy Greek food. But you want to take out. In a half hour it’s dead.”

“I’ll have the oven on and pop it in.”

“So it dries out.”

“Okay, Gus. Forget it. We’ll eat Chinese.”

“You will not. Monosodium glutamate. I tell you what: I give you three skewers—lamb kabobs, onion, pepper, whatever I got, everything set: all you got to do is put under the broiler. Tomorrow you bring back the skewers. You got rice? I’ll give you. A little saffron?” He waved his hand in disgust. “I’ll give you.”

“How about dessert?”

He looked over the supply under glass on the counter. So did Julie. Most of the flies were outside the glass. “Take the
Koulourakia.
It already has bicarbonate of soda in the recipe.” Gus grinned. He was enjoying himself. “You got Greek coffee?”

Jeff always bought a variety of coffees at a shop on Ninth Street. “Turkish,” Julie said.

“Same thing. Goddamn Turks.”

THE FRAGRANCE
of Gus’ marinade and saffron filled the tiny kitchen. Whatever fragrance there had been to the little cakes had been lost in a week-end under glass. Or to the bicarbonate of soda. Julie set a simple table in the combined dining room and library. She washed and changed, opened the living room doors and had a good half hour of meditation. Much refreshed, she watched at the window for the arrival of mother and daughter.

Eleanor paid the cab driver. Fran came up the steps slowly, her hand on the rail. She looked like the neighbors’ cleaning lady at the end of her day’s work. The stoop of her back, her step, her indifference to what was happening behind her: she looked burdened. Julie thought of the person she had known in her own early days of marriage, the wife of her husband’s friend who had made her comfortable in an older, sophisticated environment. She went through the house, pressed the lock release and waited in the hall.

Fran took a long look around her, entering the downstairs hallway, as though she too was remembering, and on the way up she paused to call Eleanor’s attention to the staircase. It rose in narrow grace from the vestibule to the third floor of the early nineteenth-century house. Miraculously, the vases and sculptures had not vanished from the wall cubicles, the architectural purpose of which was to facilitate the passage of furniture up the staircase. “I’d almost forgotten how beautiful it was,” she said to Julie on the top step.

Julie hugged her. Again she noticed the slightly stale smell to this once elegant woman.

“I’ve often wondered why we don’t see each other,” Julie said.

“And now you know?” said with a kind of wryness.

Julie didn’t answer, greeting Eleanor instead.

“Who wants what to drink?” she asked as they gave her their coats to put in the closet.

Dinner did not go badly. The talk was of Julie when Fran first met her. Julie asked questions about Jeff’s former wife, which once would have been an exercise in masochism, and maybe still was. She wasn’t sure of her purpose except that it connected with Eleanor.

“Talk about shy,” Julie said to the girl, “I was worse than you are. Like Jeff was Maxim de Winter and I didn’t even have a name.”

“
Rebecca,
” Fran explained to her daughter. “Didn’t you ever read it?”

Eleanor hadn’t, which left the comparison without much point.

“Actually I never read it either,” Julie said, “but I saw the movie.”

“I don’t go to movies,” Eleanor said. Then after a few seconds of acute silence, “Except
Stevie.
I’ve seen that five times.”

Julie marked the apparent guilelessness of the girl, for she was reminded of how the police had trapped her into admitting she had handled one of the revolvers. The pattern here was the same: what appeared to be a tardy attempt at self-protection.

“Isn’t it amazing,” Fran said. “I think she’s gone to see it every day since she’s been home.”

“Everybody knows me there. The cashier, the ticket man, and the manager.”

“How come you went to see it in the first place?” Julie asked.

“My roommate has a crush on Glenda Jackson and she made me go with her.”

“It sounds so childish,” Fran said.

“I have a crush on Mona Washburn, who plays the aunt, and she must be seventy or eighty.”

“My God,” Fran said.

Julie said, “I can understand it.”

“I suppose it’s my fault,” Fran said, but with a curious tone of detachment or resignation.

“If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s Tony’s.”

“I thought we agreed before we left the house,” Fran said.

“I simply stated a fact.”

“Please, child.”

“When I was a child I wasn’t allowed to be one. Now you call me a child and say the things I do are childish.”

“Eleanor, have I ever criticized your life-style?”

“You don’t even know my life-style.”

Fran, sitting hunched at the table, put her hand to her forehead. Again Julie observed the condition of her hands. The nails had been scooped out, but the grime of the shop was ground into the skin. No wearer of gloves, she.

“I like being gay,” Eleanor said after a moment. “That doesn’t mean I hate men. Only some men.”

“Must you go on like this?”

“Yes. I want to be understood at least by Julie.”

Julie realized she had suspected the gay part.

Fran drew a long, deep breath. Then: “Violence makes us the more violable. Nothing is sacred. Nothing is private.” She looked at Julie after a glance at her daughter. “We are terrible living with one another just now, and you would think we might find consolation in one another’s company.”

“You would think it, wouldn’t you, now that he’s dead?” Eleanor said to Julie.

“Really, we should go,” Fran said, “and not embarrass Julie like this.”

“Are you embarrassed?” Eleanor pounced. There were dabs of color high in her cheeks and the vein was inevitably prominent. Over Julie’s demur, she carried on her attack on her mother. “It isn’t as though I couldn’t understand how hurt she was. All my life I’ve been wildly, humiliatingly jealous. Helpless because of it.”

“Poor child,” Fran said.

“Oh, mother, take off.”

Fran had it coming, Julie felt. She said, “The jealous
are
helpless—as long as they hang in. I want to ask both of you something: have you been able to talk with one another about Tony’s death?”

“I cannot, and she won’t stop,” Fran said.

“That’s not true. I wish I never had to hear his name again in all my life.”

They hadn’t been able to talk, and it wasn’t going to happen now, not on this tack. Nor could Julie get her fork into the dessert. “These little cakes are pretty awful, aren’t they?”

“They’re like hockey pucks,” Eleanor said: the perfect image.

Fran said, “But the rest of the dinner was delicious. And the wine.”

“Jeff’s selection,” Julie murmured.

Fran raised her glass and hesitated an instant before drinking. “They were such good friends,” she said.

Eleanor interpreted to her own bitter taste. “Are you going to break the glass now, mother?”

“You’re being tiresome.”

Julie put her hand on Eleanor’s and said, “Look, chum, it was only last night that you told me how much you loved your mother. If you want me to understand, you’d better clarify the issue.”

“Mother knows what a liar I am.” She stabbed at the little cake and it skittered off her plate and onto the floor. She got the giggles.

Julie moved away from the table. “How about walking down to the Village and having ice cream?”

GREENWICH VILLAGE
was in its Sunday night lull, which meant that the tourists had given it back to the natives. “Most of the week-end,” Julie said, “you can’t see the poets for the cowboys. If you can see through the pot smoke in the first place.” That reminded her: “Fran, have you ever heard of someone named Morton Butts?”

“Not that I remember. Except for the police asking it also. An odd name. I think I’d remember it.”

“You don’t approve of pot?” Eleanor wanted to know.

“Let’s say I don’t like it. No, let’s say I don’t approve of it. If it was legal maybe I’d have to rethink it.”

“You’re funny,” Eleanor said.

“What about Morton Butts?” Fran asked.

“I wrote an article about him and the dance marathon that Tony hated.”

“Tony was in one once, you know.”

“Mmmm. Varicose veins.”

“He was so vain,” Fran said forlornly.

Eleanor made a noise of distaste and dropped behind to look in a shop window.

“This Butts went back to the office with Tony from the mayor’s party. He stayed till nine thirty. Would they talk about a dance marathon all that time?”

“Julie, please don’t put me through a police-like inquisition. They have already done it rather thoroughly.”

“Sorry,” Julie said.

“You don’t need to be sorry.”

Just shut up, Julie told herself, but she couldn’t. “It’s important that the police find out why Tony went back there, Fran.”

“Then let them find it out. I will not participate further.”

“Then you already know,” Julie said. “Or think you know and don’t want to face it. Don’t you want to know who killed him?”

Fran stopped abruptly and let the people close behind them pass on. “Will that bring him back?” she asked, and turned back to where Eleanor had gone into the store. Julie had no choice but to follow her. They waited at the window. Leather goods and Indian beads. Eleanor was deciding on a string of beads.

“For her roommate no doubt,” Fran said. “She adores her.”

“An older person?”

“She’ll be looking for a mother all her life.”

“Or a grandmother,” Julie said.

“I have tried to love her,” Fran said. “Isn’t that a cruel thing for a mother to have to say?”

Julie nodded, watching Fran’s eyes reflected in the store window. Anger started in them.

“She simply would not allow me to—as long as there was Tony. And now…” Fran shook her head vehemently. “And now, as though his death were not enough, she would destroy even his picture on the wall…. And she told you how much she loved me?”