Lullaby of Murder

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Julie, mother says she’ll take us out to dinner if you’ll come too. Please do. It’s terrible waiting for something to happen—just the two of us—as though we were in a cage together.”

  The thought of sitting with them in a crowded restaurant shouting above the din—or in a quiet restaurant whispering lest they be overheard—was too much. “How about this? Come down to our apartment on Sixteenth Street—Fran knows—and I’ll have my Greek friend, Gus, deliver his specialty of the day? Ask Fran if that’s okay.”

  It was okay.

  Julie sat at her desk and closed her eyes. Her old mantra came to mind from the days of meditation: it was a sound from the sea, the sibilant sound of the waves when they had spent themselves on the shore and slowly crawled back to their source. She listened for it in her mind’s ear, and with its gradual coming came serenity.

  It was shattered by a sharp rat-tat-tat at the door. She went to the front window and looked out through a sliver of space between the drapes. There, his umbrella poised for another assault on the door, was Morton Butts. Julie took her time going to the door. If he’d come to her he wanted something, but that in turn should tell her something.

  “You do remember me, Mrs. Hayes…Morton Butts?” His smile was quick and tentative as she opened the door. “I hope you don’t mind that I dropped in this way. It took some coaxing to get your address out of Mrs. Ryan.”

  Julie stifled the impulse to say that Mrs. Ryan also had her phone number, and invited him in. Only as far as the outer room, however, offering one of the two chairs where the only lamp shone between them. He sat forward with the umbrella between his knees. He kept his top coat on, the collar turned up.

  “May I offer my sympathy on the death of Mr. Alexander?”

  Julie thanked him and waited. A fiery little man, whom Mrs. Ryan had taken to despite the born-again Christian handicap. Why? And why did she herself so dislike him? It wasn’t her usual way.

  “I could be the last person who saw him alive. Except one, that is.”

  “Really,” Julie murmured.

  Butts blinked his eyes. “How have I offended you, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “You haven’t. I got into trouble with Tony over my piece on the dance marathon, and I still don’t understand why.”

  “It’s not your thing, that’s all,” he suggested, cheerful the instant she bent forward. “I can tell you, he didn’t think you did me justice. I didn’t think so myself. So, what occurred to me, why don’t you and I go over the story together?”

  “Did Tony give you the copy?”

  “No, he didn’t.” Mr. Butts’ nose gave a little twitch. “Isn’t it in the office?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “It was right on his desk when I left. The police could have it, don’t you think? I don’t like to think of it floating into the hands of an evil-doer. You made some very strong innuendos in the last part of it.”

  “It was meant for Tony only. I wasn’t suggesting that we go public with it in that form.” What she still couldn’t imagine were the circumstances under which Tony would have shown him the piece in the first place. Unless to challenge him on the property deal? Or had Tony got hold of Phillips’ financial support of the little entrepreneur? As Alice said of Tony, he always looked for self-serving behind the act of charity. But Phillips was dead by then. Of only one thing was Julie certain: Tony would not have spent forty minutes on nostalgia.

  “I’d like to explain how I came by the Garden of Roses if you’re thinking of re-doing the piece,” Butts said.

  “How did you know the column was going to continue?”

  “I called the city desk. There’s no grass growing between my toes, Mrs. Hayes. But I ran up against something in the contestants I hadn’t prepared myself for.”

  “Drugs,” Julie said.

  “That’s it. I wondered, you living in this community, it didn’t strike you in the first place. But Mr. A. said you could walk through hell without getting even a hotfoot.”

  So, Julie thought, if Tony had filed a card on her that’s how it would have read—another of his spiritual types. She supposed she’d known it all along, but it was depressing nonetheless.

  “I admire that, you know,” Butts said, reading her like a printout. “In any case, I’m going to offer any of the dance registrants who have a drug problem an incentive to admit it, to kick the habit and start their rehabilitation right then and there during the marathon. I’m going to put them on television to tell their story, and I’m going to find sponsors for that television show. Tony Alexander said he’d do something special for us. He thought he might do some of the interviewing on the air.”

  “Interesting,” Julie murmured. Again she was trying to see Tony as Butts described him. She knew for a fact that Tony did not like the image he projected on television: he’d tried it several times and wound up growling that he came across like a nursing home Gene Shalit. And it was crazy that Jay Phillips, who certainly knew the New York scene, would not have anticipated the drug problem in the first place. “What comes after the dance marathon, Mr. Butts?”

  “Ah, that is the question, isn’t it? What a smart girl you are! I think the marathon is going to catch on all over the country and maybe we can tie in everywhere the idea of dancing away the drug habit. I’d like to do it on the basis of good old-fashioned patriotism, do-it-yourself, America! I know you think I talk in clichés and I do. Clichés are the only truths I know.”

  “All right,” Julie said. Mr. Butts was beginning to get to her. And maybe he got to Tony, who had a strong conservative streak right down his middle.

  “Would you be willing to do some of the interviewing for us on the T.V.? I understand you have a theatrical background. I like your voice and I like that nice open face of yours. I don’t think we’d agree on everything, but…what’s the matter?”

  Julie was shaking her head. “My theatrical background consists of a couple of years training as an actress, but no experience whatever. Thank you, but no, I’m going to have all I can handle to carry my half of the column. But if my partner agrees we’ll try to give your rehabilitation program as much coverage as we can. Okay?”

  “Who am I to say okay or nokay? Every little bit helps.”

  “Did Tony ask you about your future events?”

  “He was interested. I would say that.”

  “He kept you there for a long time—for Tony.”

  “I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, Mrs. Hayes. He kept me there for Tony. I’ve told the police and I’ll tell you: he was waiting for someone. Didn’t say so, but every time I’d get to my feet, he’d insist that I tell him more about the Garden and its ‘happening,’ as he called it. As soon as we got to his office he’d called someone to get in touch with his wife and say he’d be an hour late. I don’t flatter myself, Mrs. Hayes, that he intended to spend all that time with me. The phone rang twice with no one speaking. That upset him. Then the call to which he said, ‘I’ll be here.’ I had an engagement myself and I finally got away. You can imagine how I feel now: If I’d stayed, would he still be alive? Or would I also be dead?”

  “I’ve asked myself a couple of what-if questions, too,” Julie said. She had begun to believe the little man. “Do you think Tony and Jay Phillips were ever friends?”

  “Outside their professional association? I doubt it.”

  “How about enemies?’

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I saw Jay a few hours before his suicide and he referred to Tony as an s.o.b.”

  “Did you know Jay was dead when you came to see me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You could have told me,” he said in mournful reproach. His credibility slipped.

  “I had no idea of any association between you. I didn’t know he was doing your publicity. I suppose Tony did.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Who’s going to handle it now that Jay’s gone?”

  “Mrs. Hayes, what do you think I’m d
oing here on a gloomy Sunday afternoon?”

  She offered him a cup of tea and took him into the back room. He told her essentially the same story about the Garden of Roses as she’d heard from Councilman McCord and from Romano.

  “How did you connect with Jay?” she asked in as casual a tone as possible.

  “Oh, a long time ago. Before I turned teetotaller. Know what that means?”

  “I can figure it out.”

  “Jay wasn’t always an important Broadway publicist, and since you’re checking my credentials, Mrs. Hayes, I better tell you, those Phillips sisters don’t much cotton to me, and I never figured out if it was because I quit drinking or because Jay didn’t.”

  Julie waited until they were having tea to ask, “Mr. Butts, why do you think Jay committed suicide?”

  “Despair. And it’s the one unpardonable sin.”

  “Despair over what?”

  “I am my brother’s keeper. Never in my life have I shirked that duty. But the grave is silent, and he chose the grave. I am also keeper of the silence.”

  Divine hyperbole which translated to: Mind your own business. But he knew all the same, Julie thought. If Jay Phillips’ problem was very young girls, Butts knew it. Had he used it? And now why had he come to her? Several reasons surfaced, but the real one, she suspected, was still buried under the rhetoric.

  When he left she went to her notebook and wrote down their conversation as she remembered it. She thought about the Phillips sisters and whether they would talk to her about him. Or about their late sister-in-law. The trouble with little old ladies like the Phillips sisters was that they often told things the way they wanted them to be or to have been. And they tended to contradict one another. Doctor Callahan had used to say she learned more about her patients from the lies they told than from the truth. Julie had never managed to ask her how she knew the difference.

  TWENTY

  SHE WAS BEGINNING TO feel the strain of confrontation. She needed to be alone or with someone with whom she could relax. But who was that? It certainly wasn’t Fran and Eleanor. On her way home, she even found her friend Gus snappish when she stopped at his restaurant. “What do you think, you get fast food by Gus? Fast food is shit. Here you get good, healthy Greek food. But you want to take out. In a half hour it’s dead.”

  “I’ll have the oven on and pop it in.”

  “So it dries out.”

  “Okay, Gus. Forget it. We’ll eat Chinese.”

  “You will not. Monosodium glutamate. I tell you what: I give you three skewers—lamb kabobs, onion, pepper, whatever I got, everything set: all you got to do is put under the broiler. Tomorrow you bring back the skewers. You got rice? I’ll give you. A little saffron?” He waved his hand in disgust. “I’ll give you.”

  “How about dessert?”

  He looked over the supply under glass on the counter. So did Julie. Most of the flies were outside the glass. “Take the Koulourakia. It already has bicarbonate of soda in the recipe.” Gus grinned. He was enjoying himself. “You got Greek coffee?”

  Jeff always bought a variety of coffees at a shop on Ninth Street. “Turkish,” Julie said.

  “Same thing. Goddamn Turks.”

  THE FRAGRANCE of Gus’ marinade and saffron filled the tiny kitchen. Whatever fragrance there had been to the little cakes had been lost in a week-end under glass. Or to the bicarbonate of soda. Julie set a simple table in the combined dining room and library. She washed and changed, opened the living room doors and had a good half hour of meditation. Much refreshed, she watched at the window for the arrival of mother and daughter.

  Eleanor paid the cab driver. Fran came up the steps slowly, her hand on the rail. She looked like the neighbors’ cleaning lady at the end of her day’s work. The stoop of her back, her step, her indifference to what was happening behind her: she looked burdened. Julie thought of the person she had known in her own early days of marriage, the wife of her husband’s friend who had made her comfortable in an older, sophisticated environment. She went through the house, pressed the lock release and waited in the hall.

  Fran took a long look around her, entering the downstairs hallway, as though she too was remembering, and on the way up she paused to call Eleanor’s attention to the staircase. It rose in narrow grace from the vestibule to the third floor of the early nineteenth-century house. Miraculously, the vases and sculptures had not vanished from the wall cubicles, the architectural purpose of which was to facilitate the passage of furniture up the staircase. “I’d almost forgotten how beautiful it was,” she said to Julie on the top step.

  Julie hugged her. Again she noticed the slightly stale smell to this once elegant woman.

  “I’ve often wondered why we don’t see each other,” Julie said.

  “And now you know?” said with a kind of wryness.

  Julie didn’t answer, greeting Eleanor instead.

  “Who wants what to drink?” she asked as they gave her their coats to put in the closet.

  Dinner did not go badly. The talk was of Julie when Fran first met her. Julie asked questions about Jeff’s former wife, which once would have been an exercise in masochism, and maybe still was. She wasn’t sure of her purpose except that it connected with Eleanor.

  “Talk about shy,” Julie said to the girl, “I was worse than you are. Like Jeff was Maxim de Winter and I didn’t even have a name.”

  “Rebecca,” Fran explained to her daughter. “Didn’t you ever read it?”

  Eleanor hadn’t, which left the comparison without much point.

  “Actually I never read it either,” Julie said, “but I saw the movie.”

  “I don’t go to movies,” Eleanor said. Then after a few seconds of acute silence, “Except Stevie. I’ve seen that five times.”

  Julie marked the apparent guilelessness of the girl, for she was reminded of how the police had trapped her into admitting she had handled one of the revolvers. The pattern here was the same: what appeared to be a tardy attempt at self-protection.

  “Isn’t it amazing,” Fran said. “I think she’s gone to see it every day since she’s been home.”

  “Everybody knows me there. The cashier, the ticket man, and the manager.”

  “How come you went to see it in the first place?” Julie asked.

  “My roommate has a crush on Glenda Jackson and she made me go with her.”

  “It sounds so childish,” Fran said.

  “I have a crush on Mona Washburn, who plays the aunt, and she must be seventy or eighty.”

  “My God,” Fran said.

  Julie said, “I can understand it.”

  “I suppose it’s my fault,” Fran said, but with a curious tone of detachment or resignation.

  “If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s Tony’s.”

  “I thought we agreed before we left the house,” Fran said.

  “I simply stated a fact.”

  “Please, child.”

  “When I was a child I wasn’t allowed to be one. Now you call me a child and say the things I do are childish.”

  “Eleanor, have I ever criticized your life-style?”

  “You don’t even know my life-style.”

  Fran, sitting hunched at the table, put her hand to her forehead. Again Julie observed the condition of her hands. The nails had been scooped out, but the grime of the shop was ground into the skin. No wearer of gloves, she.

  “I like being gay,” Eleanor said after a moment. “That doesn’t mean I hate men. Only some men.”

  “Must you go on like this?”

  “Yes. I want to be understood at least by Julie.”

  Julie realized she had suspected the gay part.

  Fran drew a long, deep breath. Then: “Violence makes us the more violable. Nothing is sacred. Nothing is private.” She looked at Julie after a glance at her daughter. “We are terrible living with one another just now, and you would think we might find consolation in one another’s company.”

  “You would think it, wouldn’t y
ou, now that he’s dead?” Eleanor said to Julie.

  “Really, we should go,” Fran said, “and not embarrass Julie like this.”

  “Are you embarrassed?” Eleanor pounced. There were dabs of color high in her cheeks and the vein was inevitably prominent. Over Julie’s demur, she carried on her attack on her mother. “It isn’t as though I couldn’t understand how hurt she was. All my life I’ve been wildly, humiliatingly jealous. Helpless because of it.”

  “Poor child,” Fran said.

  “Oh, mother, take off.”

  Fran had it coming, Julie felt. She said, “The jealous are helpless—as long as they hang in. I want to ask both of you something: have you been able to talk with one another about Tony’s death?”

  “I cannot, and she won’t stop,” Fran said.

  “That’s not true. I wish I never had to hear his name again in all my life.”

  They hadn’t been able to talk, and it wasn’t going to happen now, not on this tack. Nor could Julie get her fork into the dessert. “These little cakes are pretty awful, aren’t they?”

  “They’re like hockey pucks,” Eleanor said: the perfect image.

  Fran said, “But the rest of the dinner was delicious. And the wine.”

  “Jeff’s selection,” Julie murmured.

  Fran raised her glass and hesitated an instant before drinking. “They were such good friends,” she said.

  Eleanor interpreted to her own bitter taste. “Are you going to break the glass now, mother?”

  “You’re being tiresome.”

  Julie put her hand on Eleanor’s and said, “Look, chum, it was only last night that you told me how much you loved your mother. If you want me to understand, you’d better clarify the issue.”

  “Mother knows what a liar I am.” She stabbed at the little cake and it skittered off her plate and onto the floor. She got the giggles.

  Julie moved away from the table. “How about walking down to the Village and having ice cream?”

  GREENWICH VILLAGE was in its Sunday night lull, which meant that the tourists had given it back to the natives. “Most of the week-end,” Julie said, “you can’t see the poets for the cowboys. If you can see through the pot smoke in the first place.” That reminded her: “Fran, have you ever heard of someone named Morton Butts?”