Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Anytime, Julie. Anytime.”

  He held her hand all the way from the rectory door to the office, no great distance, but far enough for two brief, reassuring squeezes. He looked perfectly in place taking the chair behind the desk under the picture of Pope John XXIII. Julie had the more recent two at her back. She told the priest about her belated start on a search for her father and Mrs. Ryan’s suggestion that she talk to him.

  “So she’s at it again, is she?” the priest said. “God forgive her, I sometimes think she invents miracles on my behalf in order to involve herself in other people’s lives.”

  “You’re right,” Julie said. “Nevertheless.”

  “Nevertheless, the belief in miracles runs deep. … Where do we start?”

  “I’d like to know why the marriage was annulled. They were married at Saint Giles’s Church by a priest, although my mother was a Protestant. I think the proceedings toward an annulment must have started sometime before I was born. I was baptized a Protestant and given my mother’s maiden name. No mention of my father at all on the baptism certificate.”

  “Was it a marriage of necessity?”

  “No, Father Doyle. I’ve done the arithmetic of it. And all my mother ever told me was that he had the marriage annulled and was gone before I was born. She made up lots of stories about him for me, but that was always the beginning.”

  “I’ve never heard of the church making it that simple. If it was a marriage at all. Have you talked with anyone at Saint Giles’s?”

  “I talked with the housekeeper on the phone.”

  “Ah, now, that’s like talking with Mary Ryan.”

  Julie laughed. “But the priest who married them has since died, Father Doyle.”

  “Even so. Your mother would have had to take a certain amount of instruction. …”

  “She did!” Julie remembered that information from Morgan Reynolds.

  “The priest who married them might or might not have been the one to give her instruction, but at very least, that instructor would have been called as a witness before the diocese marriage tribunal.”

  “What are the chances of my seeing those records?” she asked.

  “About equal to seeing a Kremlin confidential.”

  “I figured that,” Julie said. “Could you tell me the grounds for annulment?”

  The priest drew a deep breath. “Assuming the marriage was valid in the first place—and obviously it was—you’d have to look for deception or fraud—one party’s not being free to marry or not being baptized—and that coming out only afterward. Then there are a lot of nasty possibilities: alcoholism, homosexuality, sexual perversion. You don’t have to put yourself through this sort of quiz, do you, Julie? There are reasons and ramifications that wouldn’t turn up in mere words even if you got to see them for yourself.”

  “You’re right,” she said.

  “And as for your father having had the marriage annulled, that’s not the way it happens. Just as it takes two to make a marriage, it takes two to dissolve it. In other words, your mother was a party to the petition.”

  “Oh, boy,” Julie said. “That’s something she didn’t tell me.”

  “Tell me all you know of the man and we’ll see if I have any contribution to make at all.”

  So Julie summarized what she had learned of Thomas Francis Mooney.

  “Do you know where he was born in Ireland?” the priest asked.

  “Wicklow.”

  “If I were you, I’d start there. He might have gone home, you know.”

  FIFTEEN

  DAYS WENT BY, THE bright, quiet days of September, when all the youngsters had new clothes and somewhere to go in them—back to school. Rose Rodriguez, Julie’s upstairs neighbor, came by to ask for a donation, something she could sell in the parish booth on the day of the church bazaar. No problem: Julie still had a supply of gift items. Rose’s husband had been promoted to an inspector for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and even though his relatives had moved to a place of their own, giving Rose back the privacy she’d lost when they emigrated from Puerto Rico, Julie was pretty sure she had given up turning tricks while he was away at work. Juanita, their only child, was suddenly waist high to Julie and missing any number of front teeth.

  The police, so far as she knew, had made no further progress. Neither Russo nor the rape specialists had come around in over a week. It would seem the case had gone on the back burner, despite Detective Russo’s efforts. The crime-scene seal would have been removed from the trailer by now; the child whose doll was stolen would have taken another favorite; some old woman would have gotten herself another pair of heavy stockings. And though Julie felt no physical pain, the scars from the stab wounds were still visible and probably would be for the rest of her life. Whether it was to the purpose of letting go herself or of digging in, Julie was not able to say, for she swung to either extreme from one day to the next, but on a Sunday morning, mid-September, she put on sneakers, slacks and raincoat and returned to the building site on Twelfth Avenue.

  It was hard to tell if the construction site itself had changed, the ground level still boarded up. The heavy machinery had been moved. The trailers were still there. She walked past them, going on for another block on the service road, observing for the first time that across the highway at the river’s edge was the police pound where cars illegally parked in mid-Manhattan were hauled and garaged until redeemed. A high wire fence separated the pound from the southbound traffic. There wasn’t much going on there on a Sunday morning, most parking regulations suspended. A few cars were parked outdoors, but she saw no one. Could her assailants have parked their car there? With or without permission? Did they possibly work there? Were they cops? Was that idea too far out? Yes: a waddling duck of a cop did not make sense. She turned back and imagined them as they drove alongside Missy Glass and left the car. It seemed impossible that no one had seen and reported that encounter when the crime became known—a lone woman scavenging in an area almost a block square. They must have counted on its being that way, and so it came back again: they had to have been familiar with the territory.

  Julie had not wanted ever again to meet the security officer who had found her, but time was an ameliorator. She walked back to the site and found a place where she could peer through the boards. Electric lights were visible among the scaffolding. She cupped her hands to her mouth and called out, “Is anybody in there?”

  No one answered, and she walked halfway around the site until she found the work entrance. The cranes, cement mixers and tractors were all there, twentieth-century dinosaurs. She followed a precarious walkway through the scaffolding. The place smelled of mud and wet cement. Then she caught a whiff of tobacco smoke. She stood where she was and looked around, up to the highest level and down as far as her eye could reach, then up again, and spotted a man watching her from the second-tier ramp.

  He took the pipe from his mouth. “What in hell do you think you’re doing in here, lady?”

  “Looking for you,” Julie called back. “If you’re the security guard.”

  He came down the ramp, bracing his descent with his hand on the guardrail. She was sure he was the man who had unbound her and covered her nakedness. She remembered the way he kept saying, “Oh, my God, oh, my God.” She took him to be in his fifties, his hair gray beneath the cap. He paused a few feet away, shielded his eyes the better to see her, and then came on. “You know you’re trespassing, madam. It’s against the law and it’s not safe. Now turn around and go back out the way you came in and we won’t have any trouble.”

  “Don’t you recognize me?” Julie said, trying to get him to meet her eyes.

  The guard sniffed a couple of times instead of speaking. He let his hand fall idle, a kind of surrender, and looked at her directly. “I’m sorry for what happened to you,” he said then. Terse, reluctant. “You shouldn’t have been where you were that day either. I’m not allowed to talk to you, missus. Not to anyone except the police. So there’s n
o use you being here, is there?”

  “Why can’t we talk? I’m not going to sue you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

  Another sniff, but he was softening, she felt. “They’re afraid I’m going to sue the building contractor or the city, is that it?”

  “It could be they feel that way, yes, ma’am.”

  “It never entered my mind. But what I can’t understand—why hasn’t anybody come forward who saw those men? Why can’t the police find them? I can’t believe that nobody saw them except me and a half-crazy old woman.”

  “It seems strange, don’t it?”

  “It couldn’t have been their first time here,” Julie said. “They’d seen that old woman before. She was the one they wanted—until I came along.”

  “Bastards,” he murmured.

  “A poor helpless old thing,” Julie said. “Only she was smart enough to elude them. Or dumb enough. Not like me—dashing in to save a child, I thought. I don’t suppose you heard what sounded like a baby crying?”

  “No, ma’am, I didn’t.”

  “Was it accidental that you came to the trailer and found me—or was it part of your rounds?”

  “I don’t ordinarily go that way. Strictly speaking, I’m only responsible for the structure site itself. But from where I was I could see the door to the trailer hanging open. Those south doors to the trailers don’t get opened once they’re set on location.”

  “I wonder what I’d have done if you hadn’t found me,” Julie said.

  “I’m not sorry I looked and found you, understand. But if I hadn’t been off-site, like I wasn’t supposed to, I’d never have noticed at all.”

  “So you got in trouble, too.”

  He nodded, a twitch of a smile at the corners of his mouth. Then, at a sound rather like a door slamming except that there were no doors, he tensed and moved warily toward the well of the construction. The sound came again, only more remote, and he returned to Julie’s side. “The wind,” he said. “It’s always playing tricks on me.”

  “Maybe we could talk somewhere later,” she said, and, with a solicitude she hoped did not sound false, “I don’t want to get you into more trouble now.”

  “I think we’d be all right in the place we call the office. I’ll eat my lunch so’s to make it legit. My name’s Sam Togarth, by the way.”

  “Julie Hayes.”

  “I know. Matter of fact, I wanted to come and see you in the hospital, Mrs. Hayes.”

  “I didn’t want to see anybody.”

  “That’s what my wife said, and they wouldn’t let me in anyway.”

  The office was where Julie, peering through a crack in the siding, had seen the lights. It consisted of nothing more than a large table to lay out plans on and a couple of folding chairs. Like those in the trailer. The wind whipped in around the boards; it smelled of a river and nipped at her ankles as well as her nose. Togarth poured two cups of coffee from his thermos, and she was grateful to share it.

  “Seems like the police got a lead on one of them,” the watchman said, not knowing that she’d had a hand in turning up the information. “He’s got red hair and some kind of limp. I never seen him to my memory. Redheads don’t come a dime a dozen. I just don’t think they’re on this project. The guys wouldn’t cover for them, not if they done something like that.”

  “Could they have known where you were, Mr. Togarth? They must have known there was a guard somewhere around.”

  “That’s a touchy question, and I’ll tell you why: I was over in the Traffic Police barn. And if they knew that, if they seen me there … you understand?”

  “I get it,” Julie said.

  “Weekends there ain’t much doing on the streets, so sometimes there’s a running poker game. The guys drift in and out. Somebody could’ve known I was sitting in on the game, but there was no way for them to know when I was going to pull out of it.”

  “They had a car. Could they have left it there?”

  “I don’t think so. I think they come up on the service road, turned in between the construction and the trailers, and parked up a ways. Nobody would’ve noticed.”

  Including Julie Hayes. She had come that way.

  “I got a theory, but I don’t think the police put much stock in it when I told them,” the security man went on. “I think they might’ve started uptown from around Twentieth Street on the docks down there where the fags hang out. Some of these macho guys get charged up just baiting them, and then they go looking for whatever they can find. My brother-in-law works at the Maritime Union headquarters on Seventeenth Street and he says you wouldn’t believe some of the things.”

  “That’s wild,” Julie said.

  “I guess it is,” Togarth said with a sigh.

  “Hey, suppose one of them was a seaman, say the redhead with the wobbly walk of his—if he’d shipped out right afterward, nobody was going to find him, right? Does your brother-in-law work at the hiring hall, Mr. Togarth?”

  “Pension and Welfare. But he’s been around so long he must know someone having to do with hiring.”

  IT WAS SUCH A LONG SHOT Julie decided not to confide her inquiries to anyone unless they yielded stronger results than she could cope with. The identification of the men, even if she got them within her sights and felt reasonably sure they were the right ones, was going to be a tricky business. At ten-thirty Monday morning she walked into the mammoth National Maritime Union building, and a few minutes later Sam Togarth’s brother-in-law, Maurice Lynch, took her downstairs and introduced her to Andrew Carey in the Marine Inspector’s Office.

  The two men had already spoken, she realized, for as soon as Togarth’s relative left them, Carey said, “So you’re looking for a redheaded Irishman?”

  “I don’t know that he’s Irish,” Julie said, startled.

  Carey, whom some might have called red-haired himself, a broad, hearty man, sandy-complexioned and dappled with freckles, said, “I’d give odds on it. Will you go to the police with any information I give you?”

  “Of course.”

  “No personal vendetta or anything like that?”

  Julie just looked at the man.

  “Well, I know you’re a newspaperwoman. You could be losing patience with the police and going out to scoop them.”

  “Exploiting my own humiliation,” Julie said tightly.

  “I guess not,” he said. “All right. I remembered the case when Lynch called me. I didn’t know about his brother-in-law: it’s the curse of a family, a gambler. I don’t know which is worse, that or the booze. Drugs is worse. Anyways, the reason I made the point about going to the police is this: I’ve got a fellow in mind who answers the description. He got his union card only last year, having landed a job with the help of his parish priest.”

  “Oh, God,” Julie said.

  “Well, it may not be him at all, but I remember him because of the priest. The padre’s done a lot of good work on the waterfront, and for his sake I hope we’re on the wrong track. But you’ll want the police to check this man out. He shipped out on an oil tanker, The Candy Kid, June nineteenth from Hoboken. Bound for Bermuda.”

  “The date is right,” Julie said.

  “She’s due back in her berth the day after tomorrow.”

  “With him aboard?”

  “Unless he’s jumped ship.”

  JULIE GOT A MESSAGE THROUGH to Detective Russo and went to see him as soon as he was available. He taped her story, nodding now and then while he listened. When he turned off the machine, he sat a moment looking at her, those big dark eyes warm with pleasure or amusement—something cheerful. “It just goes to prove there’s more than one way to skin a cat,” he said finally. “His name is Frank Kincaid and he lives a few blocks from here on Tenth Avenue.”

  “Oh,” Julie said, feeling foolish. Then: “What about his partner?”

  “We know where he is. Don’t misunderstand, your information is every bit as good as ours. We went a different route, that’s all.”

>   “An informant?” Julie said. “A guy who was in McGowen’s that day you and I were there?”

  Russo gave no sign that she was right or wrong. “We’ll have a tail on the sailor when he lands.”

  “If he hasn’t jumped ship.”

  “He’s aboard,” Russo said.

  “Just so I won’t feel schizoid,” she said, “have you talked with Andrew Carey in the Marine Inspector’s Office? I mean, he wanted to be sure I’d go to the police with anything he told me.”

  “I will now that you’ve made the connection for me.”

  He might be putting her on, Julie thought, but she didn’t care. Another concern entirely had taken hold: now she was wildly anxious at the prospect of confronting the men who had assaulted her.

  SHE RETURNED to the shop and picked up her messages from the answering service. Among them was a call from Ginny Gibbons: her party for the Irish playwright, Seamus McNally, was the next night, nine o’clock, very informal.

  SIXTEEN

  ONE OF THE LAST PLACES she wanted to go that night was to a party at Ginny Gibbons’s. But the very last place she wanted to be was home, counting hours, waiting word of The Candy Kid coming in to port. How familiar the sounds of the party were when she stepped out of the elevator—the voices, the tinkle of glasses, the sense more than the sound of music—and how familiar the feeling of dread, for this was Jeff’s territory, where she had always traveled lightly in his wake. She hung her coat on the rack outside the apartment door and asked herself again why she had come. To meet an Irishman who, by some unlikely, remote chance, might offer another lead to “Father.” It sure as hell would be nice to have one now. She pressed the buzzer.

  Ginny opened the door, a glass in hand, a cigarette in her mouth. She removed the cigarette and turned her cheek up to Julie to be kissed. People glanced her way and kept on talking. “So many men,” Julie murmured. It was always so at Ginny’s.

  “And none of them mine,” Ginny said, bearing her across the room. Virginia Gibbons was slight and very little over five feet tall. She was something of a giant nonetheless. She wrote simply and to the issue, and, unless provoked to the point of insult, exercised a less lethal bite than most New York theater critics. She scattered the guests from around Seamus McNally and introduced Julie to him. “She’s a colymnist, as you call them, on the New York Daily, and her husband is Geoffrey Hayes. Most of us read him for elevation.”