Death in The Life

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Okay, Mack. It doesn’t matter. If I see Rita I’ll tell her you were looking for her. Okay?”

  “Just tell her to get her little ass back on the street. I got a big weekend coming up and I need the cash.”

  “I’ll try and remember that,” Julie said.

  He got up like a model about to promenade. He checked the wave in his hair, the fold in his scarf, using the glass of the door for a mirror when he closed it behind him. Before moving away, he blew a kiss up to Mrs. Rodriguez. Juanita, when he looked down at her, offered him the handful of coins she had gathered, a gesture that made Julie sick. He took them and again flung them over the sidewalk. Across the street a flaming red sports car was waiting for him, a youthful black driver at the wheel.

  Julie went out to where she could speak to Mrs. Rodriguez. “He’s an elegant hunk of shit.”

  Mrs. Rodriguez did not understand. “Bad, bad.”

  “I thought maybe he was a friend of yours.”

  “I don’t want friends like him. Gangsters. I don’t like him coming here.”

  “I don’t much want him either.”

  “You saw with Juanita?”

  “She shouldn’t be down here alone. Why isn’t she in school, Mrs. Rodriguez?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  “Okay. But don’t think I’m going to look out for her.”

  “The street is public. You don’t own the building.”

  “Come on, neighbor. I’m not looking for a fight. I didn’t ask that guy Mack to come here. I don’t want to mess with any of these cats. They’re out of my class.”

  An expression Mrs. Rodriguez probably did not understand. “Don’t you be bad to Juanita.”

  “Oh, hell,” Julie said and went back indoors. Juanita had pretended to give each of the dolls a coin. Now she was slapping the hell out of one of them, taking back the money.

  At noon Julie locked up and headed into the Eighth Avenue traffic. The street was crazy with hookers trying to pick up lunch-time quickies. There wasn’t a cop in sight. Julie went on to Bourke’s Electrical Shop. It felt like a kind of oasis inside.

  Mr. Bourke was mending an old table lamp at the back of the shop. It looked so incongruous, that old fixture, when all around the shop were the modern appurtenances for stage and photography lighting. He glanced at her over his glasses and then back to the work in hand. His fingers were graceful and sure. They seemed to pirouette around the socket. “What can I do for you, Julie?”

  “I was wondering about the girl you sent to see me, Rita.”

  “I wouldn’t say I sent her exactly. She’s always looking for someone to talk to. She picked up one of your cards from there.” He indicated the Friend Julie cards alongside the cash register. “So I said why don’t you go see her? She’s a wise little person.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “She hasn’t been in lately. I was wondering myself.”

  “Maybe she has gone home,” Julie said. “That’s what it was all about”

  “Most of them do, some time or other. But they drift back.” He put the brass casing around the electrical innards and said, “There, that’ll keep Mrs. Ryan out of the dark for a while.”

  “Is that her lamp?”

  He had caught the note of surprise in Julie’s voice.

  “She does talk, doesn’t she?”

  “Some.”

  “It gives her something to do. Now your friend Pete I have seen. Christmas tree lights in April. ‘Give me some stars, Philip Bourke,’ he says.” Mr. Bourke imitated Pete imitating an Irish brogue. “‘Give me an ocean of stars to fill an Irish heaven.’”

  “Will you go to see the play?”

  “I might since I’m a benefactor, you might say. Unless I have to stay open.”

  “At night?”

  “Some of my best customers are moonlighters. I don’t think I could stay in business without them.”

  “From Pete and me you couldn’t make much of a living, that’s for sure.”

  “The likes of you make the living worthwhile.”

  “Thanks,” Julie said, suddenly shy of him. She wanted to go, but not to run.

  “You’re a lovely little lady, I wouldn’t mind coming to you for advice myself.”

  “Don’t!” Which he could easily misunderstand. She sputtered and laughed, trying to explain. “I mean my advice is for fun, not serious. The heavy stuff is for doctors, which is what I told Rita.”

  “I understand.”

  “I guess what I mean is I’m best with strangers, people coming in for kicks.”

  Mr. Bourke just looked at her while he took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief that was as white as snow. “I suppose Mrs. Ryan is saying I’m worse than the whores. And maybe she’s right, but I don’t feel that way. They’re full of anger and hate and greed, and what I feel is love. It may be terrible to some people, but to me it’s tender.”

  Julie was in agony at his frankness. Which was ridiculous. She made herself stand and be silent. Yoga or Doctor. Or herself. She was rewarded by a sudden association: “Do you know the Greek poet Cavafy, Mr. Bourke?”

  “I’m not much of a reader, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll bring you the book if you like. He has a lot to say about love.”

  “My kind of love.” A gentle mockery.

  “Yeah.”

  Mr. Bourke smiled as though he was the one being tolerant. And he was. “All right.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you at the Irish Theatre,” Julie said. She was on her way when Bourke called after her and came from behind the counter.

  “Stay a minute,” he said, peering over his glasses at the street. “We’re being observed by Mack and one of his girls. Don’t look around. That’s what he wants, the bastard. He’ll put on a special show for us.”

  But Julie did look around. In time to see the pimp slap a black girl across the face and then again, this time with the back of his hand. Although Bourke called out to her not to, Julie ran to the door and shouted out at Mack, “Leave her alone, you sadistic bastard!”

  It was the cowering whore who answered: “This ain’t none of your business, little white cow.”

  Mack grinned and said, “Don’t pay her no mind, sugar. She’d like some of the same thing. How about it, Sister Julie?”

  “Shit,” Julie said. She turned and waved at Mr. Bourke.

  He beckoned her into the shop again.

  When the door was closed, he said, “Don’t tangle with him, Julie. He’s a bad one and I’m sorry I was dumb enough not to think about him when I sent Rita to you.”

  “Did she tell you she’d kill herself if she didn’t get out?”

  “She told me.”

  “But you didn’t believe her.”

  “I doubted it, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t telling the truth. It only means that if I believed her, I might have felt I had to do something about it. I’ve got a Catholic conscience, Julie.”

  “A lot of stretch.”

  “You tell it the way it is, don’t you?”

  “When I can find it. Could you give me change for a quarter, Mr. Bourke?”

  She intended to call Doctor Callahan, but the minute she was in the phone booth she decided against it. If Rita had been going to call Doctor, she would already have done it. The whole scene, her hand on the receiver, the dime ready, seemed like déjà vu. If only she knew what came after.

  11

  JULIE ARRIVED AT THE New Irish Theatre at a quarter to eight. Beneath her raincoat she wore white slacks and a silk paisley tunic. To cap her feeling of being well dressed, she had put on a white coral necklace Jeff had brought her from Australia. It was a warm night with the smell of the river in the air. The theater building, on West Fiftieth Street, was a former garage which in turn had been a transformed stable. The patrons were mostly people of the neighborhood with a few hard-core Irish down from the Bronx and over from Queens. They all knew one another and almost all of them, including the children, were dre
ssed with an old-fashioned reverence for “occasion.” Julie rather liked that and took off her raincoat so that it could be seen that she shared their respect. She lingered outside and watched for Pete to come to the door.

  Along the street came Mrs. Ryan. Even without Fritzie she walked as though he was with her. “Well now, I was just wondering if there’d be anyone here I knew,” she said when Julie went to meet her. “Most of my friends came last night for the premiere. They say it’s a lovely production.”

  “Pete designed it.”

  “Ah, that’s why you’re here.”

  “I like Yeats,” Julie said.

  “I don’t know a word he’s saying, but I like the sound of it. I was wondering about you and Peter.”

  “There’s nothing to wonder at,” Julie said.

  “A pity. Will I save you a seat? They’re not reserved. Unless you’re a VIP?”

  “Save me one, I’ll be in in a minute.” She had the distinct feeling by then that Pete was about to stand her up again.

  There was flicker of the light over the door and the men who had smoked until the last minute disposed of their cigarettes and went in. Julie followed and spoke to the young man collecting the donations. “Is Pete Mallory backstage? I was supposed to look for him.”

  “I hope you find him, miss. We can’t. We had to open without him last night… The curtain’s about to go up.”

  Julie paid the two-dollar student rate, having to make up her mind on the spot whether to go or stay. It was one thing for Pete to stand her up, or to stand up some other person, but she did not think he was in the habit of copping out on a job. She found her way to Mrs. Ryan who had spread herself over two chairs.

  “It’s a lovely set,” Mrs. Ryan said, moving over. There was no curtain. A country cottage, props, and bare furnishings. A small hearth glowed downstage. “You can almost smell the peat smoke. I came over when I was a child, you know, from the west of Ireland. It’s the very devil to get to burn.”

  That of the peat, Julie assumed. If you couldn’t get the peat to burn, you could certainly get burned by Pete.

  The house lights went out leaving a wall of light downstage that slowly dimmed and revealed a small forest of tree trunks over which hung a dark green scrim of foliage with tiny remote lights flickering above. Pete’s sea of stars in an Irish heaven.

  “Will you look at that,” Mrs. Ryan said and clapped her hands in delight.

  They would have called the Actors Forum looking for him, Julie thought, and the Peter Mallory listed at 741 Ninth Avenue. But his work was done, actually. He had left them a show they could handle. Kiss-and-Run Pete…

  The actors all but sang their lines and the audience to whom the words meant Ireland rocked to and fro in their seats with pleasure. Julie thought of her father whom she knew only from a handsome face in a photograph. Which made her think of The Glass Menagerie, from which she had once done a scene, playing Laura… Blow out your candles, Laura… She returned to The Land of Hearts Desire:

  …Until she came into the land of the Faery

  Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,

  Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,

  Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

  And she is still there, busy with a dance

  Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood,

  Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top…

  It was Yeats all right, Pete’s nice noise. Damn him.

  The fairy child stole the bride’s soul and left the old priest helpless with the corpse of the woman. Too late, he blamed himself: “For pride comes knocking with thin knuckles on the heart.” Oh, boy.

  The house lights came up at the end of the curtain-raiser.

  Mrs. Ryan gave a deep sigh of contentment. “I’m so glad I met you out there, Julie. I don’t mind going to church alone, but I do like someone to talk to at the theater. Not that I go that often, the prices nowadays, and the things they’re calling plays. Graffiti is more interesting.” She gave a little pinch to her mouth, and then folded her program to point out a name to Julie. “I see Mr. Bourke has a credit for lights.”

  Julie was about to mention her lamp. To hell with it.

  “You’re very quiet,” Mrs. Ryan said.

  “I’m letting the play sink in.”

  “Is Peter here?”

  “No.”

  “Saturday nights are the worst, aren’t they? There used to be a song, Saturday night is the lonesomest night in the week.”

  “You bet.”

  “I wonder if Peter had anything to do with selecting the plays. He was the stage manager with Laura Gibson when they did street theater a few years ago. She played Cathleen ni Houlihan in Chelsea and the Bronx. The longshoremen coming home from the docks stopped and cheered her… and somebody took up a collection. Bernadette Devlin—I wonder what’s happened to her.”

  Julie had missed the connection if there was one.

  “We had such grand times in those days, such grand times.”

  “Did she live at the Willoughby?” Julie asked to hold up her end of the conversation. She had seen Laura Gibson in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire and felt that she was pretty awful.

  “Well, at the end, she did, but when I first knew her she lived at the Algonquin, no less.”

  Mercifully, the second play was about to start.

  It seemed a variation on the same theme as the first. Julie decided she much preferred Yeats a dirty old man to the hung-up young one. Pete in the pulpit, the whore singing hymns. Goldie, Mack, Rita… Rita-Juanita. Julie thought she would suffocate if she did not get out soon.

  After the final curtain calls, everyone was invited to stay for coffee.

  “How nice,” Mrs. Ryan said.

  Julie proposed to escape. “I’m going on if you don’t mind, Mrs. Ryan.”

  “I’ll go with you. Let me buy you a nice glass of lager at McGowan’s. It’s a cheerful place on a Saturday night.”

  “Another time?” Julie said and put on her best smile.

  “Oh, come along. You don’t have to pretend with me. You’ve no place else you want to go or you wouldn’t be here.”

  So they walked down Ninth Avenue, Mrs. Ryan setting the gait that had long ago been settled on her by two dogs. Julie was well aware that they would be passing Pete’s building, a more persuasive circumstance than having a beer with Mrs. Ryan. She would not have gone that way alone… pride’s thin knuckles… but now she was carried along by a fate there was no point in resisting.

  “What was the other dog’s name?” Julie asked.

  “Hans. Hans and Fritz. I named them after the Katzen-jammer Kids.”

  Who else?

  It was not quite ten o’clock and yet the block in which they walked was all but deserted. Farther downtown there was considerable activity, and the few cars passing Julie and Mrs. Ryan soon slowed down to a crawl, then a halt. As the two women moved forward, traffic backed up to meet them. People crowded the sidewalk. Whatever was happening, the police were in its midst, the prowl car light bubbles whirling. A precinct car raced by and opened its siren. Unable to get through, the driver mounted the sidewalk and scattered the crowd. Julie took Mrs. Ryan’s arm and hurried her. She noted the building numbers.

  “It’s near Pete’s. Can’t you hurry, Mrs. Ryan, please?”

  “Oh, my dear. Run on ahead and meet me at McGowan’s.”

  As Julie moved into the crowd, an ambulance pulled out and away, its siren screaming. Julie kept asking what had happened, but no one heard or answered. Like her, everyone else was trying to snake in closer. The police had joined hands and forced the people back. Julie found herself surrounded by a group of weird, giggling, squealing women, jeweled and wildly made up and trying to keep together. Julie was jostled among them, their bodies as hard as telephone poles. Transvestites. The air now crackled with the garble of police communication. Julie made it through to the sawhorses in front of the building. 741.

  “Stay back of the bar
ricade, lady. This isn’t a goddamn carnival.”

  “I’ve got a friend who lives in there,” Julie tried.

  “Then use the telephone.”

  The word “murder” went through the crowd.

  “Who?” Julie kept trying.

  She grabbed the arm of one of the cops and hung on. “Please listen to me!” She felt as sure as of anything in her life that something had happened to Pete.

  The officer looked round to the doorway crowded with cops. “Russo! Talk with this girl, will you?” he shouted. He let Julie through.

  A squarish man in plain clothes intercepted her. “I’m Detective Russo,” he said.

  “I just want to know… Pete Mallory lives here. He was supposed to be at the theater tonight and last night and nobody knows why he didn’t show up.”

  “We don’t know the identity of the victim, miss,” Russo said. “Let’s see if your friend’s been checked out.” He guided her into the narrow vestibule and shone his flashlight over the row of names on the mail panel. Certain of them were chalked, including that of Peter Mallory. “He isn’t answering his bell if he’s home. Do you know anyone else in the building?”

  “I don’t think so.” She couldn’t make her eyes focus on the names.

  Russo said, “Does the name Rita Morgan mean anything to you?”

  The whole scene blurred. Julie caught herself just short of passing out.

  12

  “I’M ALL RIGHT,” JULIE kept saying. “I’m going to be fine in a minute.” She was sitting on the steps, graffiti running crazily up and down the yellow wall alongside her. She breathed deeply of the inhalant Russo held to her nose. It brought the tears to her eyes. The detective rubbed her hands.

  “Feel better now?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Get her into a squad car. We can talk there,” another man said.

  “Yes, sir.” Then to Julie, to whom he offered his hand: “How are the legs?”

  Julie pulled herself up. The legs trembled, but held.

  With Russo and the other detective supporting her, they went out of the building. “I can walk.” She got into the car which had been driven up on the sidewalk.