Death in The Life

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Julie felt profoundly that he was right.

  Oh, Jeff, I hardly knew you. Or you me. That was for sure.

  28

  WHEN JULIE LEARNED THAT she could see Rita Morgan at three on Sunday afternoon, she weighed calling Doctor Callahan. Doctor had seen Rita as her present observers had not, but there was bound to be protocol, and she knew in her heart Doctor wasn’t going to volunteer. The best way to get her in was to persuade Rita herself to ask to see her. Nor did Julie want to run the risk of jeopardizing her own visit. She had not seen Russo or Donleavy again, and the newspaper coverage told her nothing she did not already know.

  She waited in one of those small consultation rooms which itself suggested madness. One barred window looked out on the tubes and funnels connected to the heating and ventilation of a vast institution. In the room was an empty desk and three chairs. The door had a small window which Julie would have had to stand on tiptoe to look through. The attendant who brought Rita was as body-beautiful as Mack, but he was there for his brawn, not his beauty. He said he would be right outside the door. Julie understood the minute she saw his charge. Rita came in carrying the teddy bear.

  It was the size of a year-old child. She set it down in one of the chairs, and drawing the other chair close, sat down beside it and folded her hands in her lap. She was clean, she wore a sweater and slacks, but the gloss was gone from her hair and her eyes seemed almost as empty as the bear’s. There were greenish bruise smudges beneath them. She still looked like a child, but an abused one. The teddy bear looked the worse for a week’s wear, as though he’d been wept over or left out in the rain.

  Julie chose to sit on the desk and dangle her legs down the side. “Remember me, Friend Julie?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I tried to help you. I thought you were going to make it. What went wrong?”

  Rita gave a great sigh, a little shrug at the end of it.

  “It’s funny, both of us knowing Pete Mallory, and not knowing the other knew him. Or maybe you knew. I didn’t. I’ve been trying to figure out if it was Pete who sent you to me.”

  “No.”

  “Did you love him, Rita? I did.”

  Something stirred in the girl’s eyes, but she would not look at Julie. She reached out and put a finger to the toy bear’s leg. But no answer.

  “I’ve been talking to his sister on the telephone. Helen. She seems to think Pete and you were going to be married. And you know, Rita, it might have been all right. Pete was a kind of third-world diplomat… I figured out that you were talking about him when you made up that story for the thrift shop woman. She said you were very happy.”

  “Stupid bitch.”

  So. Something. Something new.

  “You or her, Rita?”

  Silence, but a little clutch at the bear’s foot. Security blanket.

  “Or me?”

  “Not you, ma’am. You’re okay.”

  “Thank you. I wish there were something I could do to help you.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  Julie was avoiding mention of Mack. The police would have gone over that part of her story again and again. She did not want to associate herself with them if she could help it. “Would you like Doctor Callahan to come and see you?”

  “No.”

  “She’d be on your side.”

  “They all say that. Nobody’s on my side, except…” She gave the bear a tug upsetting him and then set him upright in the chair again. He did look odd. Or else it was the eeriness of the whole scene.

  “I am too,” Julie said.

  “You wouldn’t be.”

  “If what?”

  “If you knew all about me.”

  At least she was talking a little. “I think I do,” Julie said. “I think you’ve been trying to go home for years and years and telling yourself that as long as you could stay sixteen you could make it. From city to city—where did it start? Chicago? San Francisco? And then you met Pete in Boston last fall, of all the people from home you wouldn’t have wanted to meet…”

  “I could have killed myself. I should have.”

  “But you didn’t, and Pete gave you hope again. Right?”

  No answer.

  “What will you do when all this is over?”

  “All what?”

  “When the police let you go,” Julie said carefully. For the first time, Rita’s eyes met hers. Briefly, a fleeting hope. “They won’t ever let me go until I tell them what happened and I can’t.”

  “You mean what happened to Pete?”

  Silence again.

  Julie chanced the name. “When they find Mack, maybe they’ll know.”

  Nothing.

  “I do wish there were some way I could help you. Why did you come to me… when there was Pete?”

  “Because I don’t trust any man alive.”

  Only dead men? Odd… “Rita, did you know that your father died a couple of years ago?”

  Her expression changed. Surprise? Satisfaction? She almost smiled.

  Julie slipped from the desk and went to the window. All those appurtenances. Phallic. What wasn’t if you got fixed on the idea? “Did he violate you as a child?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked down at the girl, over the chair with the teddy bear. “More than once?”

  “Lots of times. He wouldn’t let me be a child.”

  “I get it,” Julie said. Almost.

  “Leave me alone,” Rita said. She lowered her head so that her chin was all but between her breasts.

  Julie leaned on the back of the bear’s chair. He was coming apart between the ears… or had come apart and been sewn together again. She could feel her own heartbeat.

  “What happened between you and Pete in your apartment?”

  Rita grabbed for the bear, but Julie was quicker, snatching it up and locking it under her arm. “Don’t try to get it, Rita, or they’ll come in and take you away and we won’t ever be able to talk again.”

  “I don’t want to talk. Give him to me! He’s mine.”

  “Not until you tell me what happened the last time you saw Pete.”

  “I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember. The last thing I remember was Mack.”

  “All right. What happened with him?”

  “I told him I was going home. I was going to the Sisters first. I told him everything.”

  “Even about you and Pete getting married someday?”

  “No… Yes.”

  “Which is it, Rita? It’s important.”

  “I hope he’s in hell… where I’m going as soon as I can get there.”

  “Maybe that’s where you are. Ever think about that?”

  “Give me my bear.”

  “Soon, Rita. But first I’ve got to know about Pete. You were all ready to go, even the bus ticket, and the bear for your brother. You’d already said good-bye to Mack and he’d beaten you up for it. What happened when Pete came downstairs? You were waiting, weren’t you? He was the only decent man you’d ever known. He’d just spoken on the telephone with his sister in Libertytown… home for both of you… Did you quarrel? He quarreled with Helen. He always did. It always ended up that way. Did he ask you why in the name of God you wanted to go back there?”

  “No. He said he’d go with me if I’d wait.”

  “Then why didn’t you wait?”

  “I told him to go to hell. Don’t you see?”

  “I don’t see,” Julie said. She found herself backing away and stopped.

  “He was going to get even with his sister, with the whole town. It was a joke! He was marrying a whore!” Her face was like the Tarot Star, a two-hundred-year-old child.

  “That’s your sickness, not Pete’s. Pete wasn’t like that.”

  “Give me…” Her voice rose to a shriek and the attendant threw open the door. He pinned the girl’s arms behind her back. Julie turned to the window, not wanting to see the way he would subdue her. Then she did the one thing more she had to
do: She took the teddy bear by the ears and ripped him asunder. The knife clattered to the floor.

  29

  “AND YOU THINK HE was being altruistic,” Doctor said. “Does that really sound right to you?”

  “Knowing Pete, yes.”

  “It amazes me that you think you know such a complicated man. I think she was right about him. That does not mean he deliberately set out to make a mockery of her. For all we know, he may even have thought his intentions were the noblest. Even you will admit that some of his noble intentions bordered on the bizarre, yes? But as for the Morgan woman herself, she would have had to do some violence in any case, unless the Sisters had been able to help her, to take away some of that self-loathing. That was my hope. She would never have gone home in any case. There would always have been one more man in the way. Am I right?”

  “I don’t know, Doctor. Are you?”

  “I think I am.”

  “Why didn’t she commit suicide?”

  “I don’t like pat answers, but I do think her murder of Mallory was a kind of suicide, and she did keep the knife—but where? It is too—Freudian. If I am appointed by the court, I will see her. Whether I shall know more then than I do now, I can’t say. And for what I’ll be able to say then, there are undoubtedly persons as eminently qualified as myself who will say the opposite. It takes me years to know a patient. I hope I’m quicker in helping patients to know themselves.”

  “I’ll bear witness,” Julie said.

  “Be careful it isn’t false witness.” Doctor picked up her appointment book. “Now you want the month of June off to go to Paris…”

  “You bet.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Julie Hayes Mysteries

  ONE

  WHILE JEFF WENT DOWNSTAIRS again for the rest of the luggage Julie opened doors and windows. She had been gone a month—a month in Paris—but the feeling when she opened the folding doors to the living room was of a room closed up for years. And in a way it had been. With her husband away so much of the time, she rarely entered it, never sat in it when she was alone, and always hurried the cleaning of it. It was a Henry James kind of room, full of Victorian furniture, valuable bric-a-brac, and presences. The objets d’art suggested a collector who was at home abroad. And that was Jeff, a New York newspaper columnist with carte blanche to the world.

  Julie opened the inside shutters, letting in the sunlight, and turned then as though drawn by an evil spirit to the one thing she truly hated in the room, the painting of Jeff over the mantel. It was the artistry of his first wife, Felicia, a tricky piece of work which Julie had once compared in her own mind to the crabbed “Judgment” card in her Tarot deck. Wherever you went in the room Jeff’s eyes pursued you. Only they weren’t Jeff’s eyes, they were Felicia’s Jeff’s eyes.

  The man himself came in, sniffed the dry muskiness, and took a long homecoming look around him. The smell, Julie thought, suggested elegant old ladies in taffeta shaking out lace handkerchiefs. What it was, actually, was the moth repellent exhaled by the vacuum cleaner.

  “Don’t you use this room when I’m not here, Julie?”

  “Not much.”

  “Why not, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Ghosts,” Julie said, not altogether flippant.

  Jeff looked at her, an eyebrow raised.

  “I’m kidding. No! I’m not…Jeff, are you passionate about Felicia’s portrait of you?”

  He looked at it from across the room as though he had forgotten it was there.

  Having at long last brought up the subject, she plunged ahead: “It’s spooky. It isn’t you, really. Those eyes are nasty. You know what it’s like? It’s as though she wanted to paint a judge and used you for a model.”

  Jeff grinned. “That’s very funny. Her father was a judge.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  He flinched. “I wish you’d stop saying that.”

  “I’ll try. I will try.”

  He came and stood beneath the portrait and looked up at it.

  “You’re better looking than that,” Julie said.

  “I’d have to agree with you,” he said dryly.

  It was his distinguished air that Felicia had tried to catch. He had a strong face with wise dark eyes, and the tough mouth of someone who had to be shown. There were little pouches under his eyes that Felicia had overlooked. Or maybe they weren’t there in her day. His hair was starting to gray now—at forty. He was a head taller than Julie, just under six feet, slight, but muscular, and fifteen years older. Which sometimes seemed a lot.

  He took the picture from the wall and Julie thought of her psychotherapist and all the time they had spent on the subject of that painting until the doctor had finally said, “Couldn’t you simply ask him to remove it?”

  The mountain had turned out to be a molehill after all.

  Jeff said: “We can take it up to the attic when we take the luggage and hide it there.”

  “Why don’t we pack it up and send it to Felicia?”

  He made a face of mock reproof. Felicia had recently remarried. “The question is, what do we do for a replacement?” The outline of where the painting had hung was plainly visible.

  Julie almost said, “Move.” But she didn’t.

  “We ought to look at pictures,” Jeff said. “That’s something we do nicely together.”

  Which confirmed her suspicion that he had been sorting out the days and nights ahead, his, hers, and theirs, now that he was to make New York his headquarters for a while.

  “I wish I’d said something in Paris.”

  “We’ll find something. I shouldn’t want a reproduction. I’m sure you wouldn’t either.”

  “Let’s take our time,” Julie said, which wasn’t like her. But whatever came in was going to have to make it among some pretty exalted company—a Rembrandt etching, an early Picasso, a Daumier drawing, two good Impressionists.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” Jeff said, on his way to answer the first telephone call since their return.

  Julie went to the window and looked down on the street traffic—light on Sunday: a few cars, more taxis. The apartment was the second floor through of one of the last of the nineteenth-century townhouses left on Sixteenth Street. It faced a church and backed against the outer reaches of the garment industry, with a tired catalpa tree slouching in a garden where no flowers grew. But the house itself was well kept up. Jeff had lived there before his first marriage. In his and Julie’s four years together it remained his in character. Not because he wanted it that way, but because Julie had not known how to change it. One thing she hadn’t wanted to do was make a hash of the place just to prove that Julie as well as Geoffrey Hayes lived there. And now that Felicia’s painting was going, she thought, she might not want to change it at all. Furthermore, she decided almost at the same instant, she was through with psychotherapy. Until further notice.

  They agreed that night, having coffee in the living room, that something had to be done soon about the bald spot over the mantel.

  “What would you say to a good mirror if we can find the right style?” Jeff suggested.

  “Not much.” She wasn’t fond of mirrors. But if Jeff wanted one…“Maybe,” she added, trying to sound hearty.

  “What we had better do,” Jeff said, quite aware, “when either of us has an hour or two to spare is drop in on some of the better galleries—and if we see something we like, we can go back together and give ourselves time to consider it.”

  “Fine,” Julie said. An hour or two to spare…that was Julie’s whole problem: she had far too much time to spare and Jeff no time at all. The old floundering feeling and the depression that came with it began to descend. Do something, Julie.

  She got up instantly and went to her desk in the bedroom. She looked up the phone number for Lieutenant Donleavy, Mid-Manhattan Homicide. He might or might not be on duty, Sunday night. He was there.

  “This is Julie Hayes, Lieutenant. I don’t know if you remember me…”
>
  “The little fortune-teller. I’m not ever going to forget you, Mrs. Hayes. What can I do for you?”

  Julie was chagrined at the description, the little fortune-teller. She had come close to serious trouble that spring—before she joined Jeff in Paris—by setting up as “Friend Julie, Reader and Advisor” in a shop on West Forty-fourth Street. She said, “I wondered if you could tell me what happened to Rita Morgan.”

  Rita Morgan was the prostitute she had mistaken for a child and tried to help.

  “She’s still under psychiatric observation, but I’ll give you an educated guess as to what will happen.”

  “Please.”

  “Off the record, you understand. I don’t think she’ll ever come to trial.”

  Rita Morgan had murdered Julie’s friend, Pete Mallory, who also had tried to help her.

  “She’d be a great witness for the prosecution,” Julie said. “I never knew of anybody so self-destructive.”

  “It’s a pity she didn’t do herself in, instead of Mallory,” Donleavy said, going short on sympathy. “Do you want to see her?”

  “I don’t think so, and I don’t think she’d want to see me. There’s not much point.”

  “That’s being sensible.”

  “Lieutenant, I’ve gone out of the fortune-telling business.”

  “I was teasing you. I don’t think you were ever really in it. Were you now?”

  “Not for long. It was a lark. You’re right. Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “Any time, Mrs. Hayes.”

  It was like a dream and more bizarre than most, Julie thought, sitting a moment after she put down the phone. She remembered very clearly leaving her therapist’s office that April morning, angry and hurt because the doctor had said that until Julie was ready to find gainful employment and help herself, the therapy was a waste of Jeff’s money. It didn’t wash with Doctor Callahan that Jeff liked “his little girl,” his “child bride,” his wife the dilettante. “Rubbish. He will like a woman better. And so will you, which is more important.” She had known even then that Doctor was right, but she had felt abandoned, and when someone handed her a flyer on Fifth Avenue, advertising “Madame Tozares,” like a mischievous child, she had decided to go into the business of reading the Tarot cards and advising.