Lullaby of Murder

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “It’s my story,” Julie said.

  “And my job that’s on the line. We’re collaborators, sweetheart. Remember? Our Beat?”

  It took Julie less than one second to recover. “Then get the hell out of here and start collaborating. I don’t care how many removes you are from Cardova. We need his story of what went into making Celebration.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  MARKS RANG THE BELL three times, paused and rang three times again, probably waking the entire building, but it was an arrangement they had both thought wise. He wanted something, Julie thought. He didn’t come to bear the gift of information. Not at this hour, if ever. His step was heavy on the stairs and the day’s growth of beard was dark on his chin and jaws. In the apartment, he lifted his head and inhaled the aroma of coffee. He put a black letter case on the floor alongside the chair he sank into. Before Julie had poured her own coffee he had drunk most of his. When she marveled that he could drink it so hot, he said, “I have a corrugated gullet,” and accepted another cup.

  He lit a cigarette, reached for the letter case and drew from it a plastic-covered single sheet of typing which he handed to Julie. “I never promised you a rose garden,” he said. It was her article on Butts. “Now look at the back.”

  Julie turned it over and read an agreement hand-written in block letters:

  I, Morton Butts, promise to pay Tony Alexander ten percent of the gross income from the Garden of Roses during my occupancy. The books will be audited twice a year by an accountant agreed to by both of us.

  It was signed with the looped signature through which the t’s were crossed with one long dash. It was dated the day of Alexander’s death.

  “Where did you find it?” Julie asked.

  Marks took another plastic folder from the case, this one containing a Tony Alexander Says…envelope. It was addressed:

  Morton Butts

  Garden of Roses Ballroom

  Amsterdam Av.

  NY, NY

  “That’s Tony’s handwriting,” Julie said.

  Marks nodded. “Butts got it in this morning’s mail—no street number, no ZIP code, therefore delayed. What do you make of it?”

  “Tony didn’t sign it, for one thing.”

  “And it looks now like he went out to the hall chute and mailed it himself soon after Butts left him.”

  “He wanted to get rid of it,” Julie said. “He wanted no part of Butts’ proposition.”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Why would Butts show it to you at all now? Why wouldn’t he eat it first? I mean he came to me so concerned that my article not fall into the hands of an evil doer. It was the agreement written on the back that he must have been most concerned about.”

  “Well, he has fallen into the hands of evil doers, no question of that. We were there this morning when this arrived for him.” He put the two pieces of possible evidence away. “The day he started to register his contestants the mob moved in on him. When we found out the mob’s interest, we also moved in and leaned on him—on the theory that under pressure from them, he might have set Alexander up for his killer and then travelled to Brother Joseph’s temple like clockwork to establish his own alibi: the precision of his arrival at the hour of witnessing has always bugged me.”

  “When you say ‘the mob,’ are you talking about drugs?” Julie asked.

  “No. It’s a different syndicate. I’m talking about the old protection racket with a weekly collection. It’s the protectors who informed him of his drug problems: they guaranteed no interference from the pushers. He bought the protection. I might have done the same thing myself in his position.”

  “I wonder if they moved in before or after my interview with him,” Julie said.

  “Is it important to you?” Marks asked blandly.

  “Maybe…. I can almost feel sorry for him…the Mafia. Phillips’ suicide must have shaken him badly, the one man he really trusted; and then crashing into Tony at the mayor’s party…”

  “Whom he didn’t trust?”

  “More importantly, I think, who wouldn’t have trusted him. Butts was once a preacher called Jeremiah Fox. He did a lot of baptizing in Tony’s home town and got into trouble. He was Tony’s enemy, Tony was his.”

  “Excuse me, Julie, but does it strike you that Butts’ long-range plans could be to set up a religious center at the Garden?”

  “Oh, yes,” Julie said, realizing how close to this conjecture she had come herself. “Of course that’s what it’s all about. He’s got five years to make it, and if he has a congregation by then, is the city going to evict him? No way. He starts out with the ‘dance away the habit’ scheme. Lots of publicity on drug rehabilitation, a television crusade—and that’s where the money is. I could write the scenario. And Tony probably did.”

  “So the ten percent was an attempted bribe? And the rush to Brother Joseph’s was nothing more than Butts kibitzing his competition. He said it this morning: the last place in the world where he wanted to be conspicuous was Brother Joseph’s. But after Alexander’s death, he had no choice.”

  Julie was trying to imagine how Tony would have felt, meeting Jeremiah Fox at the mayor’s party…. The eager, fearful Fox, prancing after him, begging him not to hurt his chance at the ministry again, and all the while, Tony’s mind would have been on Patti Royce. And Morielli? Then came Eleanor’s silent phone calls, and Fran’s alarm about Eleanor and the gun, his own sea of troubles. “I’m thinking about Tony mailing that rotten piece of paper himself,” she said. “He simply had too much worrying him at the time to deal with Butts. I can see him in my mind’s eye—getting up from his desk, stuffing the paper into an envelope, addressing it, and lumbering out to the mail drop with it just to get it off his mind.”

  “So,” Marks said, “we have Alexander returning to the office from the party with a man in tow whom he considered a damn nuisance at the moment. And yet he tried to detain him, if Butts is telling the truth—and I think he is in this instance—the family phone calls, then someone of whom he is afraid, to whom he says, ‘I’ll be here.’ He would detain Butts if he could—safety in numbers? But Butts, having got as far as he could with Alexander, took off. He hasn’t said it, but Alexander’s fear probably made him jittery himself.

  “One of the things the inspector keeps hammering at is why Alexander would open the office door to someone of whom he was that afraid. Now we see he not merely opened the door, but went into the hall and back again. It’s probably irrelevant whether he left the door open or not. Did he carry a revolver at this point?”

  “Yes,” Julie said. “He took it out of the copy box the minute Butts left him.”

  “And kept it within reach from then on. So how did his assailant get hold of it?”

  “By drawing his own gun first,” Julie suggested.

  Marks was staring at her. “Go on.”

  “Maybe that wasn’t necessary,” she amended. “Tony wanted something terribly and he must have thought that someone was about to deliver it to him. It’s possible that they both had to examine it. Or that Tony needed to use his hands to get it out of a container.”

  “And what was in the container?”

  “I’m pretty sure it was pornographic film of Patti Royce,” Julie said and then immediately backed off again. “I shouldn’t say that, Lieutenant. It’s guesswork all the way down the line.”

  “But educated guesswork. You didn’t pick up on my saying we thought the mob might have wanted Alexander set up for his killer. So it didn’t surprise you, did it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then you know that Patti Royce is Mafia owned.”

  “Ron Morielli?”

  “His sister may also own a piece. And you may be onto something with the porn film bit, but that’s all I’m going to say about it for now.”

  “I’ll bet the sister and Patti did a lesbian turn-on at the Tripod,” Julie said.

  Marks sighed deeply. “You are over-educated.” He rubb
ed out the cigarette. “I have a big favor to ask of you, Julie. I’m asking you to go no further with your own investigations.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll be honest with you. It was one thing when the two women were prime suspects. But as things are now, you could do us more harm than good. We need time and space. We can’t move in like a free-wheeling amateur could. What we do, we’ve got to make stick.”

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant Marks, but I can’t stop now. I have an assignment from the newspaper I work for. They’re paying me to do the job I’m doing.”

  Marks flushed and a little white outline became visible around his lips. “We can’t spare the men to protect you, Julie.”

  “I’m not expecting you to. I’m not a witness to anything.”

  “All right,” Marks said. “It’s up to you. But I’m going to tell you something I didn’t intend to until now: the mob moved in on Butts and his marathon dance not because they saw him registering contestants, but because that’s one of Sweets Romano’s enterprises—the protection racket. It’s the mark of an old time gangster. You set Butts up for him with your phone call asking about the Garden of Roses.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  MARKS HAD ONCE AGAIN made it impossible for her to sleep. It did not help to try to deny his information. It did not work to tell herself that Romano was above the petty strong-arm gangsterism of the protection racket. Or that he would not take advantage of an inquiry that came from her. And the hypocrisy of saying he admired Butts’ quixotic war on drugs was the most disillusioning. As though illusions about Mafiosi were allowed.

  The real betrayer she should be concerned with was herself. No, that was excessive, though what it was an excess of she wasn’t certain. She was feeling sorry for Butts, that much was clear; and that was better than feeling sorry for herself. Only when she made up her mind to visit Butts again in the morning was Julie able to get through to her mantra and ease herself into sleep with the remembered, repetitive sound of the sea.

  HE SHOOK HER HAND vigorously and proclaimed himself delighted that she had come to see him again. The carpenters were gone, the painters had come. He took her into the arena with the dance run circling them. “I’ve decided against the strobe lighting,” he said. “It’s not supposed to look grand or glamorous. Nothing more than adequate—and safe. The whole character of the dance marathon is in its intimacy, people sharing a dance for survival.” She could now detect a kind of desperation in his hype, but there was courage in it also. He turned her around to see where rows of seats that looked to have been salvaged in the demolition of an old movie house were tiered on platforms. “How many seats?”

  “Two hundred. Not allowed to have more.” He shrugged resignedly. “It’s the comfort facilities; we need them all for the contestants and I can’t afford to install more.”

  “How many contestants?”

  “We closed out at four hundred. Except for standbys. Are you surprised at the number?”

  Julie shook her head.

  “Shall we go to the office? It’s more comfortable than here. No paint. Can’t afford that either. Oh, I’m not complaining. I’m blessed in having got this far without my poor friend Jay to guide me.”

  In the office where the clutter had become monumental, Butts removed a stack of handbills from a chair so that Julie could sit down. He gave her one of the handbills. It advertised the television kick-off with several name personalities scheduled to take part.

  “Quite a roster,” Julie said.

  “There’s still room for you aboard—if you’ve changed your mind.”

  “I understand my article showed up after all.”

  “Yes,” he said, and thought for a few seconds before saying, “I can’t offer you what I offered Tony Alexander, of course…”

  “Neither expected nor wanted,” Julie said, “but I think I know why you made it to Tony—so that he wouldn’t interfere with the resurrection of the Reverend Jeremiah Fox.”

  The smile he gave her was like that of a little boy, and he gathered his fist at his breast, a submissive, religious gesture. “You can’t know, Mrs. Hayes, the thrill you have given me, saying that name out loud. No matter whether you mean to do good or evil to me now, I won’t forget just hearing you say the name.”

  Julie felt uncomfortable. Power was not her thing. “I don’t intend to do evil, Mr. Butts.”

  “Nobody does except the devil and them he gets possession of. I don’t think Mr. Alexander did, but he was frightened and that frightened me, and that’s what makes people do bad things to one another.”

  “Are you speaking of last week or something that happened long ago in Albion, Ohio?”

  “Of the night he died, the night I ran away and left him to die. If I’d stayed with him, he might be alive today.”

  “Or you might both be dead.”

  “I don’t justify myself,” Butts said. “I don’t believe in self-justification, but I do wonder what he’d have done to thwart my plans for the Garden of Roses if he had lived. I mention it because I am vulnerable if you decide to take advantage.”

  “I have no such intention, Mr. Butts.”

  “Then I am much beholden to you. Do you mind if I ask how you heard about Jeremiah Fox?”

  “Some old newspapers, some old actors. I know you saved Jay Phillips from an awful mess and probably tried to help him with his problem.”

  “I can’t really say I did that, Mrs. Hayes. I did baptize him, satisfying the girl’s parents of his repentance, but in all honesty I must say I felt she should’ve been the repentant one. Very precocious.”

  Oh, men, Julie thought. She said, “And I know that you and Tony traded accusations.”

  “I never heard anything so vicious described so politely. I didn’t know him as Tony Alexander, Mrs. Hayes. Or if I heard the name it wasn’t the one I remembered him by…not till I met him again the night he was going to die.”

  “And I know about the baby,” Julie said.

  “What do you know?”

  “That you accidentally drowned it.”

  Butts doubled his fists and pounded them on his knees. “That just plain isn’t so. That baby was on the verge of death when he was put into my hands. His father wanted a miracle. I wanted one. I needed one, and I prayed for one. But the Lord wanted that baby and he took him right out of my hands. I stood accused and the loudest of my accusers was the young reporter who led the charge when they ran me out of town.

  “It destroyed my ministry. It destroyed my religion. I called myself God’s fool after that. I signed on with a circus as its chaplain, and doubled as a clown. I’ve been on the fringes of show business ever since.”

  “Which eventually brought you back into contact with Jay Phillips,” Julie said.

  “A few years ago when I brought a mini-circus to the vest pocket parks of New York.”

  “I don’t really see where Tony could have hurt you very much at this date,” Julie said.

  “He said that himself. He asked me what I thought he could do. But when you are as badly damaged as I am, Mrs. Hayes, you are like an animal that never gets over its fear of the broom. When he put together your article and my takeover of the Garden, I was sure he would once more destroy me. You must not mock me in this or I may fall again from grace. I have promised the Lord that if my faith is restored I will build Him a new temple, and that is my true plan for the Garden of Roses.”

  “Okay,” Julie said. “Let me know when you’re ready to break it to the press.”

  “I would show you the blueprints,” he said, almost perking up to his old self. Then he flattened out again. “But the fact is, they’ve been stolen from me…and I may never be able to use them anyway.”

  Stolen by Romano’s minions? Julie thought so. “I’m sorry,” she said, and decided that while it might be good for her soul to admit the true nature of her regrets, it would not speed the little minister’s recovery of his faith.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  JULIE ARRIVED AT
THE office to learn that a number of people were looking for her, including Tom Hastings, the executive editor.

  “Tim went down to see him,” Alice said.

  “Great.” A story without much content had run well back in the morning papers. But the tagline read that according to police sources a break in the case was expected soon. “How long since Tim went downstairs?”

  “A half hour. And Duggan called you from the Sunday desk. He wants to know if he can have the Patti Royce story by tonight. With pictures.”

  “Yet,” Julie added.

  “And someone’s been calling you every few minutes. She won’t leave her name or number.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “I think it’s her.”

  “Who’s her?” Julie snapped.

  “Miss Royce.”

  “I’m sorry I snapped,” Julie said.

  “Why should you be any different from everybody else this morning?”

  Julie went to her desk and began making notes on the love story of Tony Alexander and Patti Royce. She saw no point in rushing to Hastings’ office now, not with Tim there that long ahead of her. Better to stay close and hope for Patti Royce’s phone call. If it was Patti Royce.

  “The police are going through the building with a man’s picture,” Alice said. “They’re asking if anybody’s seen him, especially the night of Tony’s death. Tim says it’s the owner of the Turkish bath where he and Tony used to go.”

  “The name is Ron Morielli. Mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  Julie glanced at the celebrity file. It remained under quarantine. Or else the police had forgotten about it. She went back to her notes. Photos. She called Advertising to see if they still had the art work for Celebration. They hadn’t. But a rating had come in for the picture. R, for restricted. Or for Romano, if you saw it that way. Someone on the movie desk explained that there might be two versions, one of which they fired back to the censors to meet certain objections. From the movie desk she also got a still of Patti Royce. She got another break in that Michael Dorfman was out of town; she persuaded his secretary to allow her to use the photograph of Patti from Autumn Tears. Alice arranged the pick-up.