Lullaby of Murder (2 page)

“Shall we call it a draw?” Julie said with a puckered smile that got to Jeff every time.

He nodded but both of them knew that the eleven o’clock flight was taking off for Paris just in time.

O
N HER WAY TO WORK
in the morning Julie figured out that Jeff would already have had his lunch. In the lobby of the
New York Daily
building the huge globe turned, the world on a sunken axis; a Japanese couple, the man with a camera and numerous attachments slung from straps around his neck, stood at the railing and beamed as Japan went by. On the back wall one of the clocks that told the times around the world showed it to be five minutes to three in Paris, September 15. In New York it was five minutes to ten of the same day. As usual, Jeff was way ahead of her.

Tony sat at his desk looking about as fresh as a ripe avocado. On early morning appearances he often looked as though he had not been to bed, and sometimes he hadn’t. When Julie walked in he checked his watch and said to Tim Noble, the other of his apprentices, “I owe you a buck. She’s early.”

Alice Arthur, everybody’s secretary, was clacking away, transcribing tapes. With Julie’s arrival she took off the earphones and picked up her shorthand book.

Tony lumbered to his place at the head of the conference table. He had to be well into his sixties. His hair was white, his eyebrows black and ferocious, overhanging dark, bloodshot eyes. The white mustache was exotic though slightly tarnished at the tips from twistings. Jeff was right: it was ridiculous that she had worked with him for a year and couldn’t say whether or not he was a bastard. She did have trouble with her father images.

Tony gazed at her morosely. “You’re looking peaked this morning. Too much bon voyaging?”

“No.”

“The eminent journalist did depart, didn’t he?”

Julie nodded.

“In nebulae of self-importance?”

“Come off it, Tony.”

“Tut, tut, tut. Only the truth will set you free.”

He
was
a bastard.

Tony sat back and chortled as though he had read her mind. “Now. What have you got for me to sign off with for the week-end, either of you? I want something both frolicsome and wicked.”

Tim brushed back a wisp of hair from his forehead and told of a presidential widow who was going to play the role of herself in a Broadway musical.

“Danse macabre,”
Tony said: “Write it up. And you, my peaked one, have something too?”

“I understand Jay Phillips has been fired from the Michael Dorfman shows.”

“And do you know the reason?”

“I didn’t ask, but I assume it’s booze.”

“
Assume.
What a fancy word for a leglady, and one too much of a lady to ask.”

“I’m not all that much of a lady.” Not what she meant to say at all, but her reputation for femininity was getting out of hand. “I’ll find out from another source.”

“I wouldn’t bother,” Tony said wearily.

Across the table Tim Noble asked earnestly: “Do press agents ever make news, boss?”

“Only when it’s in very short supply.” Tony swung round on Julie again. “All right, sweetheart: I’ve got a story for you. Let’s see what you can do with it. There’s a place called Garden of Roses on Amsterdam Avenue up near Harlem. In the days of the big bands it was a ballroom. It’s being refurbished by a character who proposes to revive the dance marathon—a fad or a phenomenon, whatever you want to call it—of the nineteen-thirties.”

“I wasn’t even born then,” Julie said.

“I was already a handsome beggar, if I say it myself. I won two hundred dollars in a dance marathon—and these damned varicose veins.” He pushed away from the table and planted a foot on its edge. He pulled up the leg of his slacks.

Tim Noble half-rose and peered down at the hairy leg through which the swollen veins were just visible. He looked at Tony over his glasses. Tim had a pixie-like quality and could get away with almost anything with Tony. “Never saw anything like it, Sir. Can you make them ripple?”

Tony withdrew the leg. He glowered at Tim, then at Julie and smiled ominously. “Why don’t the two of you go up there and sign on as contestants?”

“Please, Tony, I don’t want varicose veins,” Julie said.

“Okay, sweetheart. But do me something with feeling.”

He got up and crossed the room to the video data terminal, settled himself comfortably before the screen, took a handful of notes from his pocket and began to tap out the next day’s column.

Julie searched the movie listings in
The New Yorker
hoping that
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
was playing somewhere. Tim had suggested it for background information on the dance marathon. No luck. She was about to phone the Reference Room of the Public Library when she thought of Mary Ryan, an older friend, who was great on the New York retrospective, the theater, and such events as the blackout, two World Fairs, Mayor LaGuardia reading the funny papers….

“Oh, I remember them well,” Mrs. Ryan said of the dance marathons when Julie reached her, “I wasn’t long in this country. And let me tell you, it wasn’t milk and honey we came over to in those days. Respectable men were on the streets selling pencils and shoe-laces. I must have been in my second or third year of highschool and I remember, this chum and I thought it would be a great lark to stay out all night. Come over and have a cup of tea with me and I’ll tell you about it. We wound up at a dance marathon, you see.”

The trouble with going to Mrs. Ryan’s was that you’d be asked on arrival to take Fritzie for a walk, and Fritzie was an elderly dachshund who took his time about everything. “Mrs. Ryan, let’s meet at the shop, okay?”

“The shop” was a low-rental ground floor in a tenement building on West Forty-fourth Street, not far from the Willoughby where Mrs. Ryan lived. Julie still used it for an office. She had acquired it with Mrs. Ryan’s prodding really. She had been on her way to buy a set of Tarot cards one day, largely for her own amusement, when she chanced to meet Mary Ryan with whom, until then, she’d had but a nodding acquaintance through their mutual interest in theater. It happened at a time when Julie felt rudderless—Jeff was away and her then therapist, Doctor Callahan, had said she couldn’t help her until Julie was serious about helping herself. A job was strongly recommended. With almost childish pique, Julie took to the notion of setting up as a “reader and advisor,” and Mary Ryan had cheered her on.

Julie had long since taken down her sign from the window, but she had hung onto the shop at Jeff’s suggestion, a place of her own. Its location was highly symbolic of a side of her nature that she didn’t understand herself, a fondness for people who worked at humble occupations. Dr. Callahan had called it a cop-out, a place where Julie had no relationship problems, where she didn’t have to compete. Which was partly true, but not the whole story. The shop was less than a block from the Actors Forum, where she had once been an active member and still had many friends. There was always someone on the street to greet her as though she’d been there yesterday even when she hadn’t been around for weeks. Mrs. Rodriguez, her upstairs neighbor, kept an almost constant look-out from her elbow cushion in the window. She had been invaded recently by her husband’s relatives from San Juan. Julie felt guilty about not offering to sublet her place to them when they needed more room, but Rose Rodriguez didn’t like the idea at all. “They pay me,” she said and thumped her bosom righteously. “It makes up.” What it made up for was the “trick” she could no longer entertain while her husband was working. Juanita, Rose’s silent child, had finally gone to school. Now, when she played on the stoop, the dolls were neater and most of them had arms and legs and even hair. Julie figured out that Juanita was playing teacher instead of mother these days, and sometimes her two smaller cousins were allowed to attend school with the dolls. Juanita wasn’t silent anymore either: she screamed at all of them, “Speak English!”

The kettle was boiling on the hotplate by the time Mrs. Ryan arrived. She looked a little more beery every time Julie saw her, the grey hair more straggly beneath the limp straw hat, the pale blue eyes more watery. She had been an usher at the Martin Beck most of her working life and though long retired she still lived a stone’s throw from the theater. “What I like about you, Julie,” she said when she had looked over the shop to see if there was anything new, which there wasn’t, “is the way you never forget your friends.”

Julie addressed herself to the dog. She got a biscuit from the tin box on top of the dresser. Fritzie was already sitting up, supporting himself with one paw on the dresser; his stomach sagged obscenely. “You’re putting on a little weight, old boy.”

“He’s fading away to a ton,” Mrs. Ryan said, and settled into one of the four director’s chairs that surrounded the cut-down table. A large crystal ball was the table’s only ornament.

Julie served the tea double strength and blisteringly hot. Mary Ryan paid her a compliment she had heard more than once. “You’ve a drop of Irish blood in you somewhere to make tea like that.” When the old woman had emptied the cup to the last few drops, she turned it round and round to shape a fortune for herself in the leaves. She put the cup aside, however, without a word on what she saw. “Now I did tell you my chum and I went to the movies,” she said, groping her way into the past.

“It wasn’t even midnight when we got out of the last show. I forget what we saw…. Did I say that we told her parents we were at my house and told mine that we were at hers? They’d have gone out of their minds if they’d known. We went to a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, one of those places you went upstairs and you couldn’t get the smell of the incense out of your clothes for days…”

Julie gave Fritzie a lift onto the chair he’d been trying to get aboard.

“I don’t suppose you need all these details,” Mrs. Ryan said, hoping to be contradicted.

“It’s mostly the dance marathon,” Julie admitted. “Whatever you can remember about that.”

“What I remember most about it was the way the poor creatures would hang on one another, dying for sleep, and all of a sudden the orchestra would speed them up, playing something snappy like
Happy Days Are Here Again.
I’m ashamed to say it, but there I was in the front row clapping my hands off.”

“Spectator sport,” Julie said.

“Or maybe I was trying to keep myself awake. It was the longest night of my life and as I look back on it now, a wake would have been more fun. If only we’d had the sense to look for a nice Irish wake…” Mrs. Ryan’s voice faded and her eyes misted with some memory she did not share. Then: “Isn’t it a shame about Jay Phillips? Do you know him? But of course you would in the job you have now.”

“What about him?”

“He committed suicide last night. I heard it on the radio just as I was leaving the house. He jumped from the George Washington Bridge, but they didn’t find his body until after daylight. It was all the way down near Ninety-sixth Street.”

J
ULIE TOOK THE GRAFFITI-SPATTERED
Broadway train uptown. When she had used to travel to and from Miss Page’s School by public transportation she had felt a comradeship with the other riders. She often made up lives for them between stops. Now people huddled inside themselves as though an outward glance might commit them to something. She kept thinking of Jay Phillips. He’d been putting things in order, in his fuddled way, sitting in Sardi’s Restaurant. She and Jeff had simply fallen within his line of vision and become a brief distraction. She’d left Mrs. Ryan speculating on whether there would be a wake. The old church, she explained, would have denied him Christian burial, a suicide, despair being the ultimate sin. The new church made allowances for most things that weren’t sexual.

What had Tony done, she wondered, to have turned the man against him. Something recent—or something past but not forgiven? She’d always thought of Phillips as a considerate person with a barely controlled drinking problem. The worst language she had ever heard him use was his reference to Tony as an s.o.b. Practically archaic.

The Garden of Roses was a huge, baroque edifice, the cornerstone of which had been laid in 1922. A cement bas-relief of roses overhung the entrance. New glass doors were going up where the carpenters tore away the boards. People formed a line outside, to apply for employment, Julie supposed. There were a table and a few folding chairs in the lobby. A haze of dust made the harsh work lights within the building softer. She inquired where the office was, and then the name of the person in charge.

“I guarantee you’ll never forget it, Miss: Mr. Morton Butts.”

She found Mr. Butts behind a cluttered desk. On top of the clutter were what looked like two sets of blueprints held open by a hammer and a pair of pliers, a Pepsi bottle and a bible. He slipped one of the prints over the other and let them roll up together as Julie approached. He introduced himself and dusted a chair for her with his breast pocket handkerchief.

“Why a dance marathon?” he repeated her first question and took off. “What you got to understand about me, Miss, I’m a student of history. That way when something everybody else thinks is new comes along I know when and where it showed up the last time and what made it click then. If it didn’t click it didn’t make history. See what I mean?”

Julie nodded.

“And there’s always room for improvement. But you got to do everything with heart. You got to believe in it. And in yourself.” He thumped his chest with a chubby fist. “I’ve been working almost a year on this project, and two weeks from now the lights go on. Let me tell you how it works. Ten thousand dollars at the top, winner take all. No second, third, no consolation prize: it’s do or die.” Mr. Butts’ face was ruddy and his thick short greying hair stood up on his head like a scrub brush. Round and plump, he was very little taller than Julie. He had to be about sixty or so. His eyes, with the glint of a zealot in them, were as busy as lightning bugs, and the spittle flew from his mouth with his enthusiasm. Every now and then he would get up from the desk and go to the window, taking the blueprints with him, tapping them in the palm of his hand as he stood on tiptoe to see the lineup below. They were would-be contestants, he explained, who were paying twenty dollars a head for the privilege. Their registration fee would also buy them a good physical examination.