Lullaby of Murder

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “I think she’s a bit strange,” Julie said, “but not a murderer.”

  “Why don’t you have her give me a ring and I’ll set it up with whichever counsel she chooses. Is she a seemly chick?”

  “Well, yes,” Julie said, although it was not the description she’d have applied to Eleanor. Or anyone else, for that matter.

  JULIE CALLED Eleanor and then weighed calling Marks on the various bits and pieces she had been able to pick up. She put it off until after the interview with Patti Royce. Her newspaperwoman’s instincts were getting stronger.

  On her way crosstown she stopped at 1440 Broadway where Michael Dorfman had his office. Dorfman, of whom it was said that in the old days when actors made the rounds, he’d come out from his inner sanctum and give those waiting in the lobby a two minute lecture on the state of the theater and on the importance to each of them of appearing in Equity Library productions. He was also known to have remarked to a critic that he had never hired an actor from an Equity Library production yet.

  When Julie walked in he was handing the receptionist a stack of typing. He finished his instructions without a word, a smile, or a nod to Julie. She waited. In her acting days she would have shrunk so small you could have swallowed her with a glass of water.

  “So you’re the Tony Alexander replacement,” he said without preliminaries. “You should call it the Phoenix Nest.”

  “Not bad,” Julie said. It had been used often enough, but she didn’t say that. “Could we talk for a few minutes, Mr. Dorfman?”

  “Why not?” He looked at his watch.

  She followed him into his private office where the phone was ringing. While he took the call Julie made a quick tour of the gallery of stars in bygone and current Michael Dorfman productions. If you didn’t know who he was, she thought, you’d say you were in the office of a small town booking agent or a packager of summer road shows. Except for the pictures. The glamor was all up front. He was stingier with no one more than he was with himself.

  “Looking for anyone special?” he asked, off the phone.

  “Patti Royce.”

  “Autumn Tears,” he said. “Look over next to Carol Channing.” He joined her where she gazed at the over-wise child, her lips a provocative pout. “Is it true she’s making a comeback in daytime television?”

  “I’ve heard,” Julie said.

  “Well, it took Shirley Temple forty years and a California president…. Tell me, who do you think Patti looks like?”

  She was not going to say Marilyn Monroe. “A kid wearing her first bra. I have an interview coming up with her. We’ll be talking about Autumn Tears.”

  Dorfman cut off the incoming calls and sat down with Julie at a low table devoted to a stack of Variety dailies and an ashtray the size of a hubcap. He took a single cigarette from his inside pocket and lit it. He inhaled and let out a slow stream of smoke. “And Jay Phillips and his wife’s suicide and all that dead shit. What do you want from me, Julie?”

  “The true story about Jay and why you fired him. I think it connects with Tony and I want to know where.”

  Dorfman sat, a stone monument with a live cigarette.

  Julie said, “Let me put it together for you the way I see it: Jay did your publicity for a long time, one of the best in the business. Maybe you owed him a lot, maybe you’re just a decent human being who felt sorry for a man with a problem. Jay had a real one: girls around the age of puberty, especially theater types. I don’t know how far he got with Patti Royce, but I do know how far he got with Tony Alexander’s step-daughter, and so did Tony. After every incident, and maybe there weren’t all that many—I mean how many roles are there for girls of that age?—but every time something happened, Jay did penance, saw his priest, saw his doctor maybe, and swore it would never happen again, and drank more heavily than before. You might not even have known about it sometimes. The victims feel guilty too. But when the stage mother finds out, you’ve got real trouble. Take Madame Defarge: I’m going to guess now. Abby Hill got into trouble early; it wasn’t with Jay Phillips, but Jay must have laid himself open. He must have been available when Abby’s mother found out her star-child was pregnant, and Abby, not wanting to name the boy who had already left the show, or maybe to get even with Jay, blamed him. As I said, I’m guessing: Madame Defarge threatened to sue the management if her daughter’s career was damaged, etcetera, etcetera. Abby came down with appendicitis. But for you it was the last straw with Jay. Did he swear up and down that he was innocent?”

  Dorfman opened wide his puffy, hitherto half-closed eyes and looked at her over another long pull and expulsion of smoke. “No comment,” he said.

  “Because I’m sure he was innocent. Of Abby’s condition anyway. Child molesters are almost always impotent.”

  Dorfman looked as though he had found himself the butt of a bad joke. “Where does Tony Alexander come in?”

  “I hoped you’d be able to tell me,” Julie said.

  Dorfman put out his cigarette. “You know, I’ve been around for a long time. I’m reminded of the old vaudeville joke about the Irishman just off the boat. A fella went up to him and said, ‘Pat, can you tell us what time it is?’ ‘How did you know me name is Pat?’ says the Irishman. ‘I guessed it,’ the fella said. ‘Then,’ said Pat, ‘guess the time.’”

  Julie left, chagrined and furious, but Albion, Ohio, had jolted into place: the “boys” of seventy or so at Jay Phillips’ wake. One of them had been talking about his season many years ago at the Albion Playhouse.

  And then, at the bottom of her carry-all, she found the Times obituary for Jay Phillips, which listed the Albion Summer Playhouse among his credits.

  THIRTY-ONE

  AS MARY RYAN PREDICTED they would, she and Julie found Jack Carroll at St. Malachy’s Seniors’ Center in the cafeteria lineup for lunch. The whole large room, which even Julie could remember as the Actors Chapel, was a lot more cheerful in its conversion; there were more lights, white garden furniture, and an aviary at one end. The public telephone was in what had once been a confessional box. Talk about sacrilege.

  Mrs. Ryan selected a table where she seated Julie. “I’ll go up and speak to Jack,” she said. “And as long as I’m here I might as well have a bite and save having to fix for myself. Can I bring you something, dear? I don’t think they’d quibble over a glass of tomato juice.”

  “No, thanks,” Julie said. “I’m fine.”

  Mary Ryan got her ticket and insinuated herself next to Jack Carroll. She brought him to the table, both with their trays: pea soup, ham, potato and broccoli and a pudding that put Julie in mind of lunch at Miss Page’s School.

  Carroll shook Julie’s hand and then, letting his soup cool, started to talk about himself to Mrs. Ryan. “Did I tell you, Mary, they called me from the New Irish Theatre for the revival of Juno? I told them right off I wasn’t going to read for them. ‘I’ve been in this business sixty years and if you haven’t seen me in that time, it’s your hard luck,’ I said to him. Then this voice on the other end of the phone said, very polite, mind you, ‘Mr. Carroll,’ he says, ‘I’m twenty-seven years old and this is my first job as a stage manager.’” Carroll paused to test the temperature of his soup.

  “Was Jay Phillips stage manager at the Albion Playhouse?” Julie asked.

  “He was,” Carroll said, and continued his own story. “‘In that case I’ll come round and you can look me over,’ I said and I did. He wanted me to read for the part of Needles Nugent. ‘Not Joxer?’ said I, for in my heart I’ve been Joxer all my life. And he said, still very polite, mind you, ‘Mr. Carroll, don’t you think Joxer is a little young for you?’ ‘Young man,’ I said, ‘Joxer is ageless and so is Jack Carroll.’ Ach, it won’t run anyway. There’s nobody around today that can play O’Casey. Now that company Dorfman sent out—it was the summer of…well, it was about the time of the draft, I remember, 1940, was it?—we did Juno…and The White Steed. Ha! The farmers all thought they were coming to see a play about a horse�
��Mary, do you remember Bridie Meath? I was thinking about her the other day at the wake when I saw Mike Dorfman. She used to say about Mike, ‘He’s so stingy he could squeeze a ha’penny out of a mouse.’ And look at him now: three shows on Broadway, and all of them hits.”

  “He was loyal to Mr. Phillips, wasn’t he?” Mrs. Ryan said, and gave Julie a nudge under the table.

  “That he was. He’s always liked the Irish. God knows why. He’s never made a nickel out of an Irish play. We’re not a money-making people, by and large, are we, Mary?”

  “For the love of God, Jack, will you tell the girl what you remember about Jay Phillips and the Albion Theater?”

  Carroll had a few schlurps of soup. Then he straightened his hunched, narrow shoulders. “It wasn’t the sort of place you put in your memory book, Mary. It was as Godforsaken a town as I’ve ever been in. this side of the Atlantic. There were two things going on in the town that whole summer, two things: the playhouse and a religious tent show, a revivalist preacher who led his followers down to the river’s edge every Saturday morning and conducted wholesale baptisms.”

  “What was his name, Mr. Carroll?”

  “I couldn’t tell you that, Miss. I wasn’t among the converted. But I’ll tell you who was—Jay Phillips. And I think I can tell you how it came about.” He paused and picked up the soupbowl in both hands and gradually emptied it, removing his face from sight except for the ears, which stuck out like clay handles. When he put the bowl down he took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, dabbed his lips, and refolding the handkerchief, returned it to his pocket. “Jay had a drop taken one night, as the Irish say. It was a Sunday night and God knows where he found a drop in that town on a Sunday night, but he went along by himself—or with this girl he picked up, it was probably that—to the prayer meeting. Well, during the meeting, I heard tell, and I don’t remember who told it, he persuaded the girl to walk out with him. And where did he take her? The only place they could find with privacy was the cemetery. And then, by God, if her parents and the preacher and a sheriff’s deputy didn’t find them there. We could all have been run out of town, you know, all of us bearing the onus of being strangers and actors besides. And the girl, it turned out, was a minor. But Jay converted, or as they say, he bore witness and was born again. The preacher—there, I almost had his name—stood by him and the charges were dropped and the whole thing kept out of the paper, the way it can only happen in a small town.”

  “Was his name Butts?” Mrs. Ryan asked, by then caught up on Julie’s thinking. “Morton Butts?”

  “No, it was nothing like that.”

  “He could have changed his name,” Julie said.

  “I never seen him myself to my knowledge,” Carroll said. “Some of the company, including Bridie Meath, went down to see Jay baptized. But they’re all gone now. Bridie died last year, may she rest in peace. All of us, being Catholics, thought it a great sin, him switching over that way, but we were grateful all the same…. Isn’t Butts the name of the wee firebrand you were talking to after the funeral, Mary? Couldn’t you ask him?”

  “If he changed his name to Butts, I don’t think he’d want to talk about it…. But, a friend of Mr. Phillips and a Born Again Christian, Julie, couldn’t you chance their being the same until you find out different?”

  Julie nodded. “Mr. Carroll do you remember the newspaper in the town?”

  Carroll pulled at one of his marvelous ears. “Ah, it was a weekly, and a weakly weekly, if you know what I mean.”

  “Do you remember anything about it, any of the staff?”

  “Dear girl, the staff couldn’t have been much more than a man and a boy. I remember they gave us very nice notices. I kept mine in my portfolio for years. The trouble was very few people ever heard of Albion, Ohio.”

  “Tony Alexander grew up in Albion, Ohio,” Julie said, “and what I’d like to find out is whether he worked on the newspaper there at that time.”

  “He grew up there, did he?” Carroll said with an air of wonder. “But then, why not? We all have to grow up somewhere. I think I’d remember all the same, seeing the Tony Alexander Says…column all these years in the Daily.”

  “How about the name David Clemens?”

  “Ah, now that rings a bell. As soon as I can get to my trunk in the Willoughby storeroom, I’ll have a look.”

  “Couldn’t we go back there after lunch?” Mrs. Ryan said.

  “Instead of playing bridge?” said Carroll.

  “It is urgent, isn’t it, Julie?”

  “Very.”

  IT WAS AFTER THREE when Jack Carroll finally neared the bottom of the trunk and brought up his portfolio. The clippings of theater reviews were all neatly pasted in. But those appearing in The Albion Messenger bore the name of Andrew Mason as reviewer. Which did not prevent Mr. Carroll from reading them aloud. Julie and Mrs. Ryan were kneeling alongside him, the sharp edge of the open trunk making ridges in their elbows; an extension lamp hung over the lid, blinding them. Newspapers, to the depth of a couple of inches, covered the bottom of the trunk. Mrs. Ryan shielded her eyes with one hand and groped among the papers with the other.

  “They’re all duplicates of what I read you,” Carroll said. “You’d never know when an extra would come in handy.”

  “Is there an Albion Messenger?” Julie asked.

  “You’ve a longer arm than me, dear,” Mrs. Ryan said. “You look. Give us the light, Jack.”

  “You don’t mind, do you, Mr. Carroll?” Julie asked.

  “Root away.”

  They could not take much rooting, the papers brittle, orange-colored and mottled with mould. Julie lifted them carefully. A Columbus paper, one from Louisville, another from Oil City, Pennsylvania, one from Wheeling, West Virginia, and before she reached the bottom, a copy of the four-page Albion Weekly Messenger.

  Julie and Mrs. Ryan took it to a table alongside the washer-dryers and left Carroll to repack his trunk.

  The front page carried stories of the war in Europe, of the local young men drafted, and of the General Motors plant about to be built on the old fairgrounds where at the present time the Reverend Jeremiah Fox was holding his summer encampment. Julie pointed out the name to Mrs. Ryan and she called across the basement to Carroll, “The Reverend Jeremiah Fox, Jack…”

  “That’s it! He’s the one!”

  Julie turned with great care to editorials on page two. The editor and publisher of the paper was Andrew Mason. An editorial recalled historic warnings against foreign entanglements…

  “Oh, my God,” Mrs. Ryan said. “Will you look at the price of a pound of coffee? And eighteen cents for a dozen eggs.”

  Among the social events on the opposite page was the entertainment column which included Mason’s review of The White Steed, something Jack Carroll had already read to them. Julie turned to the back page. The top story was headed, Fox Predicts Thousand Witnesses Saturday Dawn. The reporter was David Clemens.

  “Isn’t that the name you asked him about?” Mrs. Ryan wanted to know.

  “That’s the name,” Julie said. She had finally forged the link among Phillips, Tony Alexander, and the man she knew as Morton Butts.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “YES,” FRAN SAID, “THE Reverend Fox had a great deal to do with the direction of Tony’s life. And it’s quite possible Tony had something to do with his being run out of Albion. That’s something even a loving Christian would find hard to forgive. Are you sure it’s the same man, Julie?”

  “Almost certain.”

  “But Tony hadn’t mentioned him for years. I don’t think he even knew he was in New York.”

  “Probably not until they came face to face at the mayor’s birthday party.”

  “Of course. I’m very slow. You must forgive me.”

  Julie shook her head that there was nothing to forgive, and waited. They were sitting in the living room, their backs to the bare wall where Tony’s portrait had hung. The opaque curtains were closed, but Eleanor was a shimmering s
ilhouette where she sat reading on the terrace in the afternoon sun. Calmly waiting for the next police move.

  “I wish my mind would clear,” Fran went on. “There must have been hatred between those two. I remember Tony’s saying there wasn’t much difference between fox and skunk when it came to smell. You have to take into account what the country was like at the time—just before World War Two, isolationism, patriotic and religious fervor—not that I was paying that much attention myself, not at the age of three. But I think we can get the best idea of it if we think of the ‘moral majority’ closer to our own times.”

  “Got it,” Julie said.

  “Tony had already tried to strike out on his own—to get away from Albion. I may be wrong on dates, but I know it had to be earlier because on that occasion he got as far as Pittsburgh and went broke. This is a story I heard many times: he partnered with a hymn-singing girl from Cheyenne, Wyoming, in a dance marathon. Tony always said she prayed them through the horrors. The rowdies in the audience taunted them—‘Ride ’em, cowboy!’ That sort of thing. They won two hundred dollars, but Tony’s health broke down and he went back home. I think that’s when he got the job on the newspaper. He swept floors, made coffee, even set type—Tony the ‘gopher.’ I suppose that’s why he wanted a fancier name for his by-line.

  “About Jeremiah Fox—the way I remember hearing it—with his fundamentalist preaching and showcase baptisms (Tony’s words, but not at the time, of course), he emptied the churches that summer, all except the Roman Catholics. And there weren’t many of them in Albion. I won’t go into why Tony distrusted Fox—I’m not sure I know its origins—but he wrote a story, and set it in type himself, which he called an exposé of religious fakes. I think he probably said there was more true religion in the girl from Cheyenne. But Fox was very popular and he struck back. It got the publisher into real trouble. Tony lost his job. He went back to work on the farm. His brother had been drafted by then, the one who later died at Guadalcanal.