Death in The Life

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “He was lying face down on the bed, a wound in the chest and two more in the back. It was one of the back wounds that was fatal. The weapon was a knife with a narrow, six-inch blade, a wide hilt. There was a lot of blood.” He glanced at Julie. “Are you all right?”

  “Keep going.”

  “He was wearing slacks and a tee shirt, no underwear. There was no linen on the bed, just a blanket, pad, and spread, so if they had sex, it probably wasn’t premeditated. The pathology report isn’t in yet.” He paused.

  “I get it,” Julie said.

  “He didn’t have a key on him. In fact, the only thing in his pocket was a stub of a pencil. We figured at first he’d been rolled—no wallet on him. We found that upstairs afterwards, but still no key, and he had locked his door before going down. Somebody must’ve taken the key with them. There’s no sign of them having gone near his place, but we can’t say that for sure.”

  “What about shoes?”

  “Smart girl. One on, one off. It came off with the lace still tied.”

  “So he probably didn’t take it off himself.”

  “Right.” Russo drew the car up to the curb alongside a fire hydrant and cut the motor. “Let’s just sit for a minute, and you tell me how it looks to you.”

  “It doesn’t look like Rita. I’ll tell you that. Her place wasn’t locked, right?”

  Russo nodded.

  “When she was all set to split, could she have given the key to Pete, maybe to give to somebody? Maybe she was going to sublet. How about that? He went down to show the apartment for her…”

  Russo was shaking his head. “Her pimp paid the rent, Julie. He put her in there and paid the bills.”

  “All right. Let’s say Pete and Rita were friends, just friends. Let’s say she told him the same things she told me about wanting to go home, et cetera…” Julie paused. “I’ve just remembered: I told Pete on the phone about her coming to see me, and he never let on that he knew her.”

  “It’s not exactly the kind of friendship a man boasts about to a respectable young lady,” Russo suggested.

  “I guess,” Julie said, but she was pretty sure that whatever had kept Pete from mentioning it had nothing to do with her respectability. “He did ask me if she’d told me where home was…”

  “I’m going to make a note of that,” the detective said, and did.

  “Then he kidded me about not being able to give her the fare home, something like that. One thing I feel sure about, Pete would have encouraged her.” Even as she said it, Julie wasn’t all that sure. She had done a lot of fantasizing about Pete that had more to do with herself than with him. He was a pretty cynical guy.

  Russo said, “Who’d have wanted to stop her?”

  “Mack, of course. A rough character.”

  “And a petty operator,” Russo added.

  “Hey, if he’d been knocking her around, Pete wouldn’t have just stood by. I am sure of that.”

  “The gallant type?”

  “All right,” Julie said defensively.

  “Could be that,” Russo said. “And while they skirmished she took off. In which case, let me ask you this: Do you think she’ll come back and give testimony against the pimp?”

  “She’d almost have to, wouldn’t she?”

  “Voluntarily or otherwise, yes.”

  “Then she isn’t ever going to get home. Unless she’s already there.”

  “It’ll be a short visit.”

  He put the car into motion again. Presently he said, “His sister was coming out here next week to see this play he was working on. It was rotten, having to tell her what happened to him. On the phone yet. Seems like we could’ve waited and had the local cops break it to her. But, Donleavy’s the boss… and of course we wouldn’t ’ve known about the phone call till later. I did ask her if she knew anybody by the name of Rita Morgan. I also checked the phone company for the name Morgan in Libertytown and environs. Seems like a common name, but not out there apparently.”

  “What’s the sister like? Could you tell?”

  “I couldn’t tell. It was after midnight. I’d woken her up. I did most of the talking. I asked her if there was anyone else in the house or a neighbor she could call to be with her. Name is Helen Mallory so she isn’t married. I got the idea she was a schoolteacher or librarian, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “It gave me a funny feeling, thinking how she’d be finding her way to the phone through one of these small-town houses you see in the movies, turning on lights as she went along. And there I was on the other end of the phone, sitting at her brother’s desk with a swarm of technicians around me, cracking jokes, doing their job like it was all in a night’s work. Which it is.”

  “I wish I could see Pete’s apartment,” Julie said.

  “Ask his sister. We got it sealed up for now, but she’s the one who’s got the say about what to do with her brother’s effects. Do you know anybody by the name of Laura?”

  “Laura Gibson, an actress.”

  “I figured that. Her picture’s on his desk.”

  “She’s dead too.”

  Russo nodded and swore softly at someone who cut in ahead of him. “He’s got an interesting photograph collection. Know anything about that?”

  “Stage design?”

  “Not exactly.” He looked at her and then back to the street. “Stills from a porn movie.”

  “My God,” Julie said, and then, almost to herself, “I didn’t really know Pete at all.” She sighed deeply, needing the breath, and wondered whether she was more surprised at Pete or at herself for being all that surprised. “Hey, I wonder if there’d be a picture of Rita.”

  “I was wondering that too.”

  “So? Where are they?”

  Russo took one hand from the wheel and rubbed the back of his neck. “He wasn’t exactly interested in physiognomies.”

  Julie’s impulse to laugh was cut short. Suddenly she remembered her dream. Physiognomies.

  Russo said: “I’ve got a few of them in an envelope back there.” He indicated the back seat.

  “Shall I look at them now?”

  “They’ll have a magnifying glass at the studio.”

  Julie was quite willing to wait. She thought about Pete’s sister to whom the pictures, whatever their content, whatever they told her about Pete, would now belong. Did she, like Pete, go to church every Sunday, and did she sometimes pray, like Mrs. Rodriguez, to the open heart of Jesus? Russo was probably a Catholic too. For somebody who wanted no part of the scene, she’d sure as hell plunked herself down center stage.

  In the dingy loft studio, Detective Russo introduced her to Sergeant Greenberg who, pleasant enough to Julie, took out his complaint on Russo of having to come in on Sunday and instead of getting time and a half was going to have to take a day off mid-week.

  “You’re going to love your work today,” Russo said, opening his briefcase. “Dirty pictures. These are the ones with faces. Set ’em up so Mrs. Hayes can look at them.”

  “You mean mask them?” Greenberg said with a half-snicker as he turned the eight-by-ten prints around and around to satisfy his own curiosity, viewing them from all angles.

  “You know what we want,” Russo said tersely. His face had taken on a ruddy glow.

  Julie, to clear the air, picked up a photograph, chosen at random, and looked at it. It shocked hell out of her: half a man’s torso, the enormous penis erect, with two nude women, one on either side, facing the camera, lying on their bellies and both about to touch the center piece. The photo had been shot at a slight angle. “The leaning tower of Pisa,” she said. It broke the cops up. “Neither of the girls is Rita Morgan.”

  They were able to proceed with something approaching laboratory conditions. Greenberg provided a magnifying glass and turned on more light. Rita was not in the collection.

  Greenberg brought out an album of pictures of women, some photos, some clipped from magazines. Julie studied them under his direction, looking
for eyes, expression, hairline, any individual feature that looked at all like the missing girl.

  Russo had two other descriptions of Rita besides Julie’s, the building superintendent’s at 741 and the cowboy’s. The latter tallied with Julie’s very closely, even to the “kind of innocent smile.”

  “Give me a couple of hours,” Greenberg said. “Go see a porn movie.”

  Funny.

  Outdoors, Russo proposed to Julie that they go over to Chinatown and have something to eat. She did not expect to have much appetite, but it was something to do. “Are you on the case permanently now?”

  “Nobody’s on any case permanently, not nowadays. But I’ve been temporarily detached to work with Homicide.”

  Temporarily detached. Julie hoped that her present feeling of detachment was temporary. She had only just begun to feel involved with her life when this had happened. Nothing that was coming out about Pete related to the guy she thought she knew. “Who knows anybody?” she said aloud.

  “I see what you mean. There’s times I don’t even know myself. No kidding, sometimes at night, or mornings, when I get home and take off my thirty-eight”—he patted the gun holstered under his arm—“and lock it away the bureau drawer, I’ll look at myself in the mirror and say, Now, who are you, Russo?”

  “There ought to be a pretty good answer to that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Well?”

  He smiled and cocked his head thoughtfully, the ignition key in his hand where it rested on the steering wheel. “Dominic Russo, second-generation American whose grandfather peddled fish from the back of a Ford truck and put his four sons into the wholesale fish business and local politics. I could have gone in a lot of directions. A lot of what they say is crap, but I do have a godfather.”

  “Godfather with a capital G?”

  “He thinks it’s pretty capital, and it probably is. Yeah.” He was about to turn the key in the ignition. “You know, we could walk from here.”

  “Then let’s. I’d rather walk any day. I’ll bet I’ve walked every foot of Manhattan. I ought to be a cop.”

  “They don’t walk much, especially the lady cops. It’s too dangerous.”

  “They ought to dress like me,” Julie said. “I really go around in plain clothes.”

  “You’re a kook,” Russo said, grinning.

  Sergeant Greenberg came up with a good likeness of Rita except for one thing: “She’s not that old,” Julie said.

  “Maybe she will be by the time Russo finds her,” he said grumpily. Then: “Let’s clean it up a little and see what happens.”

  It was remarkable to see the change he wrought with a few erasure rubs.

  “That’s it,” Julie said. “Gosh.”

  “Funny. I’d have thought it was closer the first time,” Greenberg said. He put the sketch in an envelope and gave it to Russo. He left the building with them.

  Russo proposed to show the drawing to the cowboy before sending it to photography. It was the pretext on which the police had delayed his leaving the city.

  In the car Julie said, “Now what?”

  “There ought to be other stuff in the hopper by now. A half-dozen detectives have been on the case since morning. Sift, check out, pray, and needle the lab people.”

  Julie was tempted to ride uptown with him to Forty-fourth Street.

  Russo didn’t like the idea of her going back there right away. “Do you have a phone in the place?”

  “No.”

  “First thing in the morning, get one installed. Have the phone company call me at Midtown if you have to.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of that permanent an establishment when I started.”

  “That’s even better. Stay away from there.”

  “I’ll call the phone company,” Julie said.

  “That’s what I figured you’d do.” Russo drove in silence for a time, spinning off his own associations. “I’d give a lot to know who put in that missing persons squeal. The cowboy swears he didn’t do it, and that makes sense. When a hooker stands a guy up, he generally takes for granted she’s been busted and stays clear.”

  “Where was he going to meet her?”

  “She was to come to his motel room.”

  “But when I saw them, they were going to her place. At least, I think that’s where they were going.”

  “They were. She was the one who changed the locale. Starting Wednesday night, eleven-thirty, which was when she collected the hundred bucks.”

  “It seems to me he’d have wanted to check her place when she didn’t show up the next night. You know, to see if there’d been a mixup.”

  “I’d also like to know if she was on the street Wednesday night before their date. One trick a night isn’t exactly hustling.”

  Julie thought Mr. Bourke might know, but she decided against volunteering him. “Mack would know.” Him she didn’t mind volunteering.

  “If you see him, Julie, stay clear, but let me know. We want him.”

  “You bet.”

  The phone calls began to come in soon after she got back to Seventeenth Street: people she hardly knew at the Forum and friends of Jeff’s… and hers, she supposed, although there were not many friends of Jeff’s whom she considered her friends.

  Anne Briscoe’s call was typical: “Darling, what have you been up to? You are the same Julie Hayes…”

  I’m Janet, she wanted to say, remembering the last time she had spoken to Anne Briscoe to get out of her dinner party.

  Somewhere back there long ago, she had been living a sort of life, shipping between two seas, having her thrice-weekly sessions with Doctor Callahan and writing letters of reassurance to Jeff that she was fine, that everything was fine. She decided not to answer the phone anymore that night and then changed her mind to take one more call.

  “This is Doctor Callahan. I’m sorry about your friend Peter Mallory.” The tone was as brusque as ever.

  “Thanks.”

  “I think it would be a good thing for you to keep your regular Monday appointment.”

  “Me too.”

  “I have made the hour available.”

  “Thank you… Doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Rita call you?”

  Silence.

  “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  “I saw her,” Doctor said and hung up.

  15

  DOCTOR CALLAHAN SHOWED NEITHER welcome nor sympathy. She did take one clean, direct look at Julie at the door. Eye to eye. Then she thumped into her office, leaving Julie to close the door between office and vestibule as always. With a sweeping gesture, she directed Julie onto the couch.

  “Right away?”

  “Yes.”

  Doctor settled in her chair and released the brake. A power break… the arrogance of power…

  “‘Pride comes knocking with thin knuckles on the heart,’” Julie said, prone.

  “What?”

  “It’s a line from a play I just thought of.”

  Silence.

  “Pride, police, passion. Passion. I thought I didn’t have any. That’s crap. I know I do, but I can’t get it out. I can’t bleed. Like a thorn is stuck in me, the sacred heart of Jesus, Pete in church reading during the Mass, a half-assed priest, a prostitute can sing hymns—‘Holy God, we praise thy name.’ Her bouncing ass, my dream, my face turned into my backside with one eye bleeding at me. Pete’s mouth in the morgue like an eye and no eyes, and his arm like jelly under the sheet. I masturbated in bed the next morning. I thought of him, the way he was dead, and I never knew him. I never knew any man. My father using the church to get away, free, home safe in Ireland. Are there any whores in Ireland? Who needs whores if everybody plays? Street games, Pete called it, and everybody plays, the woman upstairs with her stunted child, Little Orphan Annie, empty eyes. She tears her dolls apart and loves them till she hates them. She picked up the pimp’s money and gave it back to the bastard so he could throw it down like seed on the dead
ground. Whore seed. Magdalene’s daughter.”

  Dead. Blank. Nothing.

  “What about Magdalene’s daughter?”

  “I made it up. I wrote it in my notebook the first day on Forty-fourth Street.”

  “Who is Magdalene?”

  “Mary Magdalene in the Bible.”

  “Who was her daughter?”

  “I just made it up. It sounded good, like the title for a book.”

  “You’re writing a book?”

  “Something. I always am, and then I don’t ever finish.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “Failure.”

  “What’s failure?”

  “Not being able to say what I want to say.”

  “What do you want to say?”

  “Something about me. Something that’s real, deep, true. Sure, beautiful. I thought Pete was beautiful. When he said, They don’t know a ceiling light from the star of Bethlehem.’ That’s beautiful to be able to say that. ‘Give me an ocean of stars for an Irish heaven.’ He studied to be a priest. Hey! now I know what was wrong in church when I saw him. It wasn’t obscene, him doing his thing on stage. I was jealous! And ashamed though I didn’t know it. I felt lousy, seeing him behind the altar railing. I wished I hadn’t seen him.”

  “It spoiled your fantasy, perhaps.”

  “Maybe, except I didn’t know I was doing much of that then. He’d stood me up the night before. Just didn’t show up, but sent me a lovely note. I can say it by memory. ‘Friend Julie, I’m sorry to have gone into my vanishing act. A sick friend needed me and since that doesn’t happen very often I stood by. May the gods inspire you and the fates send custom.’”

  She waited for Doctor’s comment. Nothing.

  “That’s all,” she said.

  “Who was the sick friend?”

  “I don’t know. I never really thought about it then. Now…”

  “Then: stay with then. You didn’t think it might be a woman?”

  “You mean Rita?”

  “I’m talking about you. Did you think it might be a woman he was with?”

  “No.”

  “And yet you were jealous of him in the church.”

  “Crazy. No, it isn’t. Everybody at the Forum thinks Pete was homosexual. I don’t think so.”