Lullaby of Murder

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  But Eleanor said, “Fifteen.”

  “To the fifteenth floor and finding him in his office, how do you know that in this same dream, you didn’t kill him?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Not for absolute certainty.”

  SHORTLY THEREAFTER, Fitzgerald and Marks left the room. Going, Marks turned off the recorder and assured the young women that they were not being monitored.

  “They don’t understand, do they?” Eleanor asked as soon as the door closed.

  “I’m not sure I do,” Julie said. “What made you phone Tony from the hotel lobby?”

  “Because I was afraid by then. I thought if I heard his voice, their voices, it might give me courage.” Eleanor let her head loll back between her shoulders, her eyes closed. Then she came back to life. “That’s not true. I turned to jelly with fear, and gave up. All I wanted when I made that phone call was to interrupt what I imagined they were doing. It was an obscene phone call inside out. I was being a dirty little child again…”

  “Okay,” Julie said. “I get it.”

  “Julie…are all prostitutes lesbians?”

  “Ha! You know, people think I know all about prostitutes because I spend a lot of time in one of the neighborhoods and once I tried to help a street girl. But I don’t know much. I’ve heard they often are.”

  “I’ll bet some people think gay is worse.”

  “That’s their problem,” Julie said.

  A few minutes later Marks returned alone. He sat where Fitzgerald had. “The inspector wonders if you’d consent to what’s commonly called a lie detector test, Miss Alexander.”

  “Tonight?” Julie said.

  “No, not tonight,” he said impatiently. Then, to Eleanor: “We would also like to arrange psychiatric consultation.”

  “No,” Eleanor said emphatically.

  “If I may advise you, Miss, I wouldn’t refuse out of hand. Buy a little time that way and get yourself a lawyer.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  JULIE PROPOSED TO STAY only a few minutes when they got back to the Alexander apartment. Eleanor kept saying that if her mother was home she didn’t want to face her alone.

  Fran came out to the foyer in nightgown and negligée, her reading glasses in hand. She murmured an apology: she had felt on the verge of collapse after dinner. “I’m so grateful to you for going with her, Julie.”

  Julie glanced at the girl. Eleanor’s eyes fell away like those of a child caught in mischief. She had deliberately lied about her mother’s not being home. Julie made no response to Fran: it wasn’t as though she’d gone to the dentist or the hair dresser with her daughter.

  Fran offered coffee or cocoa. No one wanted anything. She suggested that they go into the living room.

  “Not there,” Eleanor pleaded.

  “The picture can be restored. They took it away tonight,” Fran said.

  For once Eleanor said nothing.

  They wound up in Fran’s bedroom where, when she climbed back into the king-size bed, she looked small and frail. An open copy of Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey lay on the pillow beside her bed rest. “I read it every few years,” Fran said, “as though it foretold my own destiny.” Both mother and daughter had a flare for the dramatic, not to say the melodramatic. Settled, she folded her hands in her lap. “Now tell me.”

  Julie sat at the foot of the bed on Tony’s side, Eleanor on a chair near her mother. She couldn’t seem to get started, so Julie said, “She’s got to have a lawyer for one thing.”

  “Oh,” Fran said as though she hadn’t expected that.

  “Julie’s going to get her husband to recommend someone.”

  “I see,” Fran said coldly, rejected. Then: “Do you have urgent need of one?”

  “Mother, you were right. I did go to the shop after Tony called. And when you couldn’t find the gun, it was because I’d taken it. And you were right when you called him and said I might come there. I intended to, but I didn’t have the guts.”

  “You intended to go there,” Julie said, “but not to kill him.”

  “Let her speak for herself,” Fran said.

  “I just wanted to break them up,” Eleanor said.

  “Break who up?”

  “Mother, don’t be stupid. The woman who was with him in the office. The girlfriend.”

  “How do you know she was there if you didn’t go there?”

  “I just know, that’s all. I heard whispering on the phone. The police believe me.”

  “You don’t know that they believe you, Eleanor,” Julie said. “Why don’t you try to tell the whole story to your mother now, just the way you told it to Lieutenant Marks and Inspector Fitzgerald.”

  It was the same story and yet it wasn’t: in the first telling, the burden of hatred was on herself and Julie had believed her whether or not the detectives had, but in repeating it to her mother, the girl somehow shifted the emphasis to her loathing of Tony, and now it was obscene.

  Julie watched a change come over Fran. Her eyes grew hard and remote, and there came a point at which she looked as though nothing she would hear could change her feelings against her daughter.

  “It was like a dream,” Eleanor told again. “I can hardly remember putting the gun away, but I’m sure I did. I must have.”

  Fran’s grubby hands clutched the sheet. There was the look of an animal to her. And her voice had a low, rough sound, even a kind of menace. “He was about to come home when I spoke to him and then he waited for you.”

  “Fran, he was waiting before that,” Julie said quietly.

  “I felt so foolish,” the woman went on as though she hadn’t heard her, “when I found the gun, so ashamed of my fears of what you might have done. Even after what happened had happened, I would not tell the police.”

  “Why didn’t you tell them, mother? What’s made it so awful is both of us not telling. Why didn’t you tell them?”

  “Because the gun was there in the drawer and I thought I had misplaced it. I thought it was all in my own imagination. But I knew you better than I thought, didn’t I, my daughter?”

  “I didn’t kill him, mother.”

  “He was waiting for you and he died.”

  “Fran,” Julie tried again, “how long did he wait for Eleanor? It couldn’t have been more than a half hour.”

  Fran shook her head that she did not know.

  “He’d been waiting all evening for someone—from the time he first called home and said he’d be an hour late meeting you at the restaurant. He went back to the office to meet someone and it wasn’t Eleanor. He took this man named Butts with him. I think because he was afraid, but I don’t really know that.”

  “He said to me on the phone that he was about to come home,” Fran repeated stonily. “Whoever he’d been waiting for had come and gone by then.”

  Julie threw up her hands. “He said he was about to come home. That doesn’t make it the truth. The situation he was in isn’t exactly truth inspiring, is it?” She made herself calm down. “All I’m saying, Fran, someone could have arrived after your call. Not only could have, must have. Didn’t you phone back after you found the gun?”

  “There was no answer then,” Fran said.

  “How long between your two calls?”

  “The police have calculated it at a half hour. It was ten forty-five when I called back and didn’t get him. I looked at my watch and wondered if he’d be home ahead of me. I wanted it that way, not my sitting here waiting for him. In fact, that’s why I cleaned and polished the revolver, taking it apart and putting it together again—it was something that would occupy and delay me.”

  “Fran, did you know the person Tony was involved with?”

  “Of course, I knew.”

  So, Julie thought, Doctor Callahan was right.

  “You said you didn’t want to know,” Eleanor charged.

  “What I have wanted lately has had very little relevance.”

  Juli
e put the question carefully: “What do you know of Tony’s interest in a movie called Celebration?”

  “Nothing,” Fran said, “I didn’t know he was interested—or for that matter that there was a film called Celebration.” Her tired eyes wandered around the room as though looking for a place to settle. “I’m trying to remember—was it last spring? We were sitting on the terrace having a drink, and he asked me whether I thought an idea he had would make a good movie. Actually, it was about a farm family he knew as a boy. I didn’t pay much attention. Whenever we needed money, he’d say he was going to write a screen treatment he was sure he could sell, but he never did it.”

  “What do you remember about the family in this story?” Julie prompted, her heart beating a little faster.

  Fran’s eyes came back to hers. “Was the girl retarded?”

  “That’s it,” Julie said. She rummaged in her carry-all and brought out the proof of the advertisement. She gave it to Fran without comment. Fran put on her glasses.

  Eleanor twisted around in her chair so that she could see it. “Yuk,” she said.

  Fran traced the copy with her finger as she read. The print was very small. “Oh, now—‘Based on a story by David Clemens.’ Julie, I’m quite sure that’s the name Tony wrote under for a weekly newspaper before he came to New York. He made it up from the names of two writers…”

  “Samuel Clemens and David Thoreau,” Julie said.

  “Of course!”

  Julie felt on the verge of understanding something if only she could ask the right questions. At the moment the only thing she could remember about Tony’s background was the dance marathon. “Fran, where did Tony come from?”

  “A small town in Ohio you’ve probably never heard of, Albion.”

  She had heard of it, but for the life of her she could not remember where or when.

  TWENTY-NINE

  SHE WAITED UNTIL MIDNIGHT to call Jeff. The concierge or whoever finally picked up the phone was not friendly. Five A.M., Paris time. Her husband wasn’t any friendlier when she said, “Jeff? C’est moi.”

  “What?”

  “It’s me, Julie.”

  “I know it’s you, Julie. Do you know what time it is?”

  “I was afraid I’d miss you later on. And you always say you can fall asleep anywhere, any time.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I think she’ll be all right, but I’ve promised Eleanor to ask you to recommend a lawyer.” She recounted Eleanor’s interrogation and the scene at home with Fran. Then: “Jeff, did you know Tony was serious about a young actress named Patti Royce?”

  “I knew he was interested in someone young,” Jeff said, and tried to get back on the subject of Fran and her daughter.

  “I’m interviewing Patti Royce tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I met her once,” Jeff said.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know where. With Tony.”

  “Thanks, chum,” Julie said.

  “I thought he’d get over it at the time. He half-thought so himself. In fact, I thought it was finished or I’d have mentioned it the last time we talked.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Julie, be fair: think of how things stood when I woke you up Saturday morning. The investigation had only started. Why hurt Fran unnecessarily—and be the source of that hurt—if the matter was irrelevant?”

  “Why not trust my discretion?”

  “I wish I had now. I’m sorry about that.”

  “So am I,” Julie said. She was thinking back to their discussion at Sardi’s on how well or ill either of them knew Tony; another time when it might have been told.

  “There’s a locker-room syndrome among adolescent boys which sometimes recurs with older men,” Jeff said. “It has to do with so-called machismo.”

  “How boring.”

  “That’s what it’s about,” Jeff fired back. “Boredom.”

  In similar snapping matches Julie customarily retreated, hurt. Now she said, “Jeff, do you ever go to Turkish baths?”

  He burst out laughing, and then managed: “Every time I have wine on top of three martinis.”

  That brought them down more easily than seemed possible the moment before. But when he presently said that she was not to worry if he was out of reach for the next week, she instantly felt the pangs of concern.

  “About the lawyer for Fran’s daughter,” Jeff said, “if it’s up to you, why don’t you call our attorney, Dave Lieberman? He’ll give you a couple of recommendations.”

  “I should have thought of that myself,” Julie said. The blockage was that she never thought of Lieberman as our lawyer. He had predated her in Jeff’s life. “I’ll call him in the morning. Jeff, did you know Tony wrote the story for a movie called Celebration?”

  “I knew he always wanted to write one.”

  “It’s a good picture and it stars Patti Royce.”

  “I hope Fran gets some money out of it, at least.”

  “I have another name to ask you about—Ron Morielli. Does it mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “He’s Patti’s manager.”

  “The fast talking, high pressure kind?”

  “Not much of a talker at all,” Julie said. “I wish I knew more about him.”

  “Maybe you will after the interview.”

  “If I don’t,” Julie said, “there’s something wrong with the whole set-up. And maybe that’s what Tony was into.”

  “Something of that nature sounds more likely than his dying at the hands of either of those neurotic women in his own family.”

  “Or any of the other connections I was trying to make.” She thought then of Butts and his saying he wouldn’t want her marathon dance piece to fall into the hands of an evildoer. “Jeff, Tony came from Albion, Ohio, a place I swear I’ve heard of recently, but I can’t remember where.”

  “In one of the obituary columns?”

  She almost had it then, but something else spun off from Jeff’s suggestion: Tony saying to Tim Noble when Tim asked if they’d run anything about Jay Phillips, “You want to write obituaries? Write obituaries.”

  “Damn, damn, damn,” Julie said. “I almost had it again. It’s right in there with Jay Phillips and Morton Butts and City Councilman Whatshisname…”

  “Julie, go to bed. Let it come to you. You can’t go to it.”

  “David Clemens,” Julie said.

  “Who’s he?”

  “A pseudonym Tony wrote under before he came to New York.”

  “In Albion, Ohio?”

  Fran hadn’t actually said so, only that the paper was a weekly, and Julie had slipped in not asking for specifics—if Fran knew them. “I’ll go after it tomorrow. Thanks, Jeff.”

  “What about the column? Is the Daily dropping it?”

  “I forgot to tell you—Tim Noble and I are carrying on. It’s now called Our Beat. I’ve got my own by-line, Jeff. Only I wish I’d got it under different circumstances.”

  “‘There is nothing dies but something lives,’” Jeff said, quoting a favorite poem. “I know we don’t exchange cautions, Julie, but for someone to have taken Tony’s gun away from him without a struggle took remarkable cunning.”

  Or persuasiveness, Julie thought. Which suggested murder by an intimate. And who was left after Fran and Eleanor? Patti Royce. Why hadn’t Marks and Fitzgerald grilled her? Or had they?

  THIRTY

  JULIE WENT FIRST TO Forty-fourth Street in the morning, wanting to drop off a tape recorder for the afternoon interview. She arrived to find Reggie Bauer, her Forum informant, sitting on an ashcan waiting.

  “May I?” He hopped down and took the keys from her. He was a time diddling between the two locks.

  Rose Rodriguez opened her window and leaned out to see what was going on. Julie greeted her cheerfully. Reggie, the door open, stepped back and saluted the woman upstairs. He asked Julie, “Does she have a solicitor’s license?”

  Julie lit up the two rooms. “L
et me guess what you found out,” she said. “The original Little Dorrit dropped out of the show for an abortion.”

  “That’s not fair,” Reggie said and pointed at the crystal ball. “You’ve been reading that bloody thing.”

  “Am I right?”

  “That’s the backstage scuttle. She was getting a lot too plump for a jailhouse stray, and that’s not one of the symptoms of appendicitis. Now here’s the added attraction: During rehearsal—that’s five months ago—Abby developed such a passion for one of the chorus boys, the straight one, that she almost got him fired from the show. Whatever happened, he gave notice himself right after they opened. Which you must admit doesn’t make much sense. He’s the undeveloped character so far. I haven’t had time to locate him. But now let me tell you about Abby’s mother. They call her Madame Defarge, which shows how deep everybody is into Dickens, and Abby’s out of the show temporarily, right? Well, Madame Defarge goes to the theater every night, takes her knitting, and sits outside the star’s dressingroom.”

  “No kidding,” Julie said.

  “Not much. She’s backstage every night and nobody’s asked her not to come. She bad-mouths Trish Tompkins every opportunity she gets. And everybody says Tompkins is better than Abby Hill in the part. They say Michael Dorfman would like to see her take it over for good and maybe send Abby on the road with the National Company when it gets organized, but he doesn’t dare.”

  “Actors Equity or Madame Defarge?”

  Reggie smiled wistfully. “I’ll try and find out, but inner Dorfman is a little out of my reach.”

  Which admission, Julie thought, gave Reggie Bauer credibility. Michael Dorfman wasn’t going to take anyone with less than star status into his counsel. Unless he was compelled to.

  “No. Let me take it from here, Reggie. You’ve done a great job. I talked with my partner. We can’t really afford a legman, but if you want to go on a free-lance basis, we’ll pay you twenty bucks for every item we use. How does that sit?”

  “My mother’s going to be so proud of me,” Reggie said with such dryness you could almost hear the crackle.

  JULIE CALLED David Lieberman who, first thing, congratulated her on Our Beat and remarked on now having two Hayes careers to follow. He gave her the names of two criminal lawyers and an order of recommendation after drawing her out on Eleanor.