Death in The Life

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  She cleaned house furiously, bathed, and dressed in a change of clothes but not of costume. Whatever she was, she wanted to be the most of it when five A.M. came around. Toward midnight she took a cab back to Forty-fourth Street, taking with her a mohair blanket and the collected poems of William Butler Yeats.

  24

  “MIZ JULIE…”

  The street was so silent that the building itself seemed listening with her. She thought at first she imagined Goldie’s voice. A quarter to five. A night of a thousand hours. And if it weren’t Goldie?

  “Miz Julie,” this time drawn out coaxingly, musically, and with a fingernail tap on the window. Who else would it be, for God’s sake?

  She drew the curtain she had hung on the door between the rooms and lit the light in the front of the shop. There he stood, face close to the window, a black god with white teeth. He was wearing a dinner jacket. The lapels shone with a kind of iridescence and the glittering studs on his dress shirt might well be diamonds. A girl’s best friend. Yeah.

  Julie let herself out and locked the shop door. “When you say a party you mean it, don’t you?”

  “Handsome, huh?”

  “You bet.”

  He pranced ahead and opened the door to a white Cadillac he had parked a couple of buildings down, a yellowed white in the amber of high-security street light.

  “Family morale goes way up when Goldie does his thing,” he said, getting in beside her. He turned up the radio: Barbra Streisand in stereo. She wasn’t singing it, but Julie thought of people who need people. Having given her the full benefit of his sound system, Goldie switched stations to Mozart and turned the volume down again. He drove north on Eighth Avenue and cruised, crossing the whole wide thoroughfare from corner to corner, a smooth, long zigzag in the sparse traffic to make known his passing to the hustlers still shivering at their posts in the chill predawn.

  “My God, this street’s depressing.”

  “It all depends who’s hustling it, honey chile.” His phony dialect.

  He stopped in front of a new apartment building on Fifty-seventh Street and gave the car keys to the doorman. “It’s a private party tonight, Tony. Nobody, right?”

  “Yes, sir.” In his heart, Julie felt, the doorman said, “Yassuh.”

  A penthouse, naturally. In the elevator Goldie did a little dance step all the way to the top.

  House Beautiful plus. White and gold. A waterbed and bean bags. Hi fi and comic books. A white vase with gold-dusted flowers, incense over grass.

  “I’m home,” Goldie sang out. “Let me have your coat, Miz Julie.”

  “I’ll keep it, thanks. It gives me someplace to put my hands.” Julie made a careful choice of a chair, the only straight thing in the place.

  Goldie rolled his eyes and shrugged. “How about a drink? Name it and I got it.”

  “Orange juice?”

  “You’re the healthiest chick I ever tried to hustle. Orange juice. No lace?”

  “No lace.”

  The door opened and three women filed out in the kind of body-conscious sway and swagger you expected in a fashion show, which it turned out to be.

  “Don’t you all look glamorous!” Goldie beamed.

  Two white girls and one black, they wore identically cut lounging pajamas in different patterns, but gold ran through all of them and they all wore gold sandals. Goldie kept talking to them, at them, a kind of jocular praise, and self-praise about what it meant to be a wife of Goldie’s who had a big-time designer on his payroll. Without introducing her he included Julie like someone inside from the outside, like an out-of-town buyer. The girls giggled and seemed shy of her. She had expected hostility. They didn’t look shopworn. Not at first glance anyway, but there was something. They all looked young, but none as young as Rita, and nobody was really pretty. A little blunt of feature was as close as she could come to it.

  “Somebody give Goldie a light,” Goldie said, taking a cigarette from his pocket, and all of them moved at once toward the lighter on the marble-topped coffee table.

  The big thing about them, Julie saw in a sudden insight, was that they weren’t very bright. And maybe that’s what it was with most whores: they wanted money and this kind of look at themselves—there were mirrors all over the place—that told them the same thing Goldie was saying over and over, they could be glamorous. For them, pro tem, the price was right.

  Julie got up and took off her coat. She’d been running away all night, on a downer. “Goldie, how about introductions? Then I’ll have a Coke, please, with a lot of ice. Skip the orange juice.”

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I got carried away with my new chicks.” He took the lighter from the black girl’s hand. “This is May, Friend Julie, meet May in April.”

  “Hi,” Julie said. “We talked on the phone, right? We’re both friends of Rita.”

  May nodded. She glanced at the other girls. Julie guessed that she hadn’t wanted them to know about the phone call. Too late.

  Goldie said, the cigarette in his mouth, an arm about each of the other two, “Here’s Suzie and Lou. Meet Miz Julie. Now let me say, Miz Julie knows you all came to Goldie from Mack, who’s got to be one scared pimp if he abandoned wives like you to save his own skin. I don’t think Julie’s in with the fuzz. If I’m wrong, I’ll make it up to you.” He took his arm from around Suzie and removed the cigarette from his mouth. She brought him an ashtray and held it. “Me, I don’t give a shit about Rita, but I know you all adore her and some Johns like to play that way. It ups the ante, and, chillun, you can up your ante any time you like just so you bring the pot home to Goldie. Now why don’t you all relax, get yourselves drinks, and talk with your new friend, while Goldie does his thing in the kitchen? Didn’t know I was a cook, did you, Miz Julie?”

  “Not surprised,” Julie said. She was reminded by the delivery of his patter of a radio evangelist who liked to talk about “green power.”

  Suzie went to the bar and mixed drinks.

  Julie said, “Mack had the crazy idea I was an evangelist. Trying to cop his girls for Jesus. I mean are there people like that?”

  Lou said, “Honey, there’s all kinds. Some even go to bed for Jesus. Know that?”

  “I guess. But where would Mack have got that idea about me?”

  No answer.

  Suzie brought Julie her Coke and then said to May, “When did you talk to her on the phone?” Meaning Julie.

  “When Rita split. I thought maybe I’d go that way too, a halfway house. I might even go now, if I knowed where to go.”

  “Rita was going home. She really was,” Suzie said.

  “Why shouldn’t I do that if I want to?”

  “You come from Harlem, honey. Get off at Seventy-second Street and you’re halfway home. You could make it for breakfast, how about that?”

  “I ain’t going just now.” May preened herself, looking into the nearest mirror.

  Julie tried a random shot: “Any of you know Pete?”

  It stopped the chatter anyway.

  Lou said, “You mean the murdered John?”

  “Yes.” Murdered, John or no John. “He was a friend of mine.”

  “No, ma’am. He was all Rita’s. The cops tried to figure us in too. No way. Not with that cat.”

  “Why not?”

  “He don’t mess with just plain whores, if you want to know.”

  “I do want to know. I want to know everything.” Julie decided to make the best pitch possible. “Look, Rita trusted me. That’s how I got into the picture in the first place. I hope you’re going to trust me. I’m not planning to run out of here to the cops. Sure, they are looking for Rita, but that doesn’t mean it’s for murder. A material witness: that’s a different collar, right? Personally, I think she was gone before Pete got killed. I didn’t even know till afterwards that they knew each other. Let’s not kid ourselves, the cops are going to find her any day now. And I’ll try to help her again. But first I’ve got to know a few things… like what she a
nd Pete had going between them.”

  The girls looked at one another. Puzzled? Skeptical? Turning off?

  “Come on, kids. Give!” Julie said with all the passion she could put into it.

  Lou, the blond girl, said, “He gave her the oldest line in the world and she fell for it. That’s why she came to New York. He was going to get her a job as an actress, any little old job so’s she could go home respectable.”

  “And what happened?”

  “He didn’t deliver.”

  “I’ll bet he tried,” Julie said.

  All the girls laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You’re hung up on him too,” Suzie said.

  “Okay. When was Pete supposed to have made this promise?”

  “Before she come, Christmas time. She didn’t have no money, so she was an easy cop for Mack.”

  “Then it was probably in Boston that she met up with him,” Julie said.

  “He a priest of some kind?” Lou asked.

  “Of some kind.”

  “She told me it was the worst day in her whole life she got a crush on him.”

  Pete had been in Boston three days, making a porn film, something in which Julie very much doubted he had had experience. The word would have gotten around the Forum if he had really been into the medium. He wouldn’t have had time for much else in Boston, and with Laura Gibson dying in New York: that heavy a scene between him and Rita there and then just did not make sense.

  “Hey. How old is Rita?”

  The girls answered all at once, Lou saying that Rita claimed to be sixteen, May something else without a number. Suzie said, “I’ll bet she’s twenty-six if she’s a day.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I don’t mean I seen her birth certificate, but I know, no matter what she said.”

  “How old am I?” Julie tested.

  “Twenty-five.”

  “That’s what I am. Then what was the whole routine about going home as though she hadn’t been away for more than a year? And the little brother business?”

  “What you don’t understand,” Lou said, “we’re all going home—tomorrow.”

  “That little brother must’ve growed some since she seen him,” May said.

  Julie didn’t know how she felt—hurt, angry, taken in. But Rita had purchased the teddy bear. “I believed her,” she said.

  “So what’s she done to you? Lied about her age?” Lou said. “My own mother says she’s twenty-nine. That means I was born when she was six years old.”

  Julie shook her head, wishing she could clear it. “I’m not with it at five in the morning. All right, let’s say she met Pete in Boston last November…”

  Lou interrupted: “Honey, maybe she met him in Boston last November, but she’d known him all her life.”

  All her life. The words once spoken seemed the obvious truth.

  “You’ve got to be right,” Julie said. She remembered the absolute conviction with which Rita said she wasn’t going to escape The Life, that she’d be standing on a corner waiting for the light to change and a trick would come up and ask her if she’d have a drink… Maybe that wasn’t Pete, but from it Julie could reconstruct a good enough scene in Boston: him coming face to face with someone he recognized from somewhere else, home, it had to be, and then knowing her immediately for a prostitute. It might be the oldest line in the world, but when Pete told Rita he would get her a job as an actress, he meant it, and he’d have done everything he could to help her get home respectable to all those good folk of Libertytown. She could even go home saying they were going to be married…

  But then why would Rita have said it was the worst day in her life that she got a crush on him? Even the word, crush, was crazy in The Life picture. “Lou, the priest bit, what did Rita say about that?”

  “Like when she heard he was going to be a priest she was almost going to be a nun.”

  Not at two years old, she didn’t decide that. Maybe a little younger than Pete, but not much. And by now there was a police photo in Libertytown in which Rita could not look much different than she had when she really was sixteen.

  Julie remembered one of her first insights, talking with Rita: what you really want is some nice young Bible freak from Iowa to take you in his arms and say, I wouldn’t ever do a thing like that to you.

  If there were still missing pieces, she now had some real ones. Julie wanted to think. She didn’t seem able to get hold of any more questions. She got up and took one of her rare cigarettes from the box on the coffee table. May came alongside her and suggested, “I’ll roll one for you special.”

  Grass, Julie figured. “No, thanks.”

  May flicked on the lighter and held it for her. “How come you dress like a boy?”

  “I don’t feel like a boy. I just feel comfortable.”

  “I see,” May drawled. She reached out and brushed Julie’s hair out from beneath the blouse collar. “I like you.”

  “Thanks,” Julie said, and beat it back to the straight chair.

  May came and sat at her feet. Lou and Suzie were having a close-up of themselves in the mirror. They draped an arm across one another’s shoulder, and turned this way and that, liking even better what they saw of themselves together. Julie puffed on the cigarette. Whatever was crawling up her back, May’s fingers were walking up from her toe to her knee.

  “Cut it out, I’m ticklish. Hey. Was Rita really into this scene?”

  “What scene, Miz Julie?”

  “The lesbian bit.”

  “A little fun, that’s all. You’ll like it.”

  Julie got a real stab of alarm. A private party. Do not disturb. The street was twenty stories down. She flailed in her mind for a digression. “What did Rita tell you about the halfway house?”

  May rolled her eyes, thinking about it—or making up. “Oh, all about the kind of work she’d have to do,” she drawled. “You know, with poor kids, and go to school with the sisters and church and going to bed at nine o’clock at night… things like that.”

  It sounded real enough. “Did you tell Mack?”

  “I wouldn’t. Never.”

  “You know what, May? I don’t believe you.”

  “Bitch.” The fingers had stopped walking. The black girl dug them into her own palms.

  The other two came around. “Tell Mack what?” Lou asked.

  “That Rita was going to split. And where she was going, the halfway house run by the nuns. Sisters of Charity, yeah.” Julie was winging it, but she was on the move. Away from any setup.

  “I didn’t know where she was going. I couldn’t of told him if I wanted to.”

  “But you told him all the same, you told him everything you could. And now that he really wants to know where she is, you called me to try and find out. Yes?”

  “For me.”

  “Sure for you,” Suzie said, nudging the black girl with her toe.

  “Keep your fucking foot off me.”

  “For you with Mack. You’re his pigeon, May. You want to be number one. Look at you. Mack wouldn’t make you number one if you was the last whore on the street.” Suzie swung around to Julie and demanded, “What’d she say to you on the phone?”

  “She was trying to find out if I knew where Rita was, the name of the house and where it was.”

  “I’m scared of Mack, if you want to know. I was going to run away myself,” May said.

  Suzie: “When’d you start being scared. Huh?”

  Lou: “If Mack’d hit you, you’d say, Do it again. Hit me, Mack, hit me. More, please give me more! That sound scared to you, Miz Julie?”

  Suzie shook May by the shoulder. “You finked on Rita, didn’t you? Tell the truth for once.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Sure you did. You hated her. You know you hated her.”

  May tried to scramble away, to get to her feet. The other two jumped her, flattened her on the floor, a whirl of pajama legs until the black girl lay still.


  “Admit you hated her.” Suzie hammered away, trying to pound May’s head on the floor.

  “She hated me. I’m black.”

  Julie had to get into it: “Then why in hell would she confide in you about the halfway house if she hated you?”

  “That’s right,” Suzie said. “She wouldn’t, not to you, to us maybe and she didn’t do that.”

  “I don’t know why, teasing me maybe.”

  It was the day after Rita had gone to Doctor Callahan that Mack had come in raging about Sister Julie trying to cop his girls for Jesus. If there was any advice Doctor ever gave, it was “Confront.” You can’t go forward by backing off. Rita herself had told Mack she was going, and for good measure, that she was getting out by way of the halfway house recommended by a friend outside The Life.

  Julie got down on one knee so that she could speak into the girl’s face. “Didn’t Mack tell you exactly what to say to me on the phone?”

  May turned her head away, but Suzie forced it back.

  Julie said, “And didn’t he tell you to try me again tonight for the name of the house?”

  May kept trying to bounce the two women off her. “I ain’t heard from him today. I ain’t heard from him for two days.”

  “Let her up,” Julie said. “For God’s sake, let her up. It doesn’t make that much difference what she says.”

  “Something makes a difference,” Goldie said, having come in from the kitchen. He wore a chef’s apron over his dress shirt. “With one ass a ’ho’ don’t work for two pimps. No way.” He waved the girls off their prisoner. “Now you, little black spider, just take off Goldie’s pajamas and get out. I want you in that elevator in five minutes or it might just happen there was a terrible accident, like you falling off the terrace out there and turning up a grease spot on the sidewalk.”

  “Can we help her, Goldie?” Suzie asked as the unfortunate black one got to her feet.

  “Do that,” Goldie said. “Miz Julie, why don’t you come in the kitchen? Smell that barbecue sauce? That’s Goldie’s own.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’m going to stay here and think things out,” Julie said. She intended to go out the door when May did, even if it took karate to make it.