Habit of Fear

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “I don’t see what good I’m going to be,” Julie said, her anxiety coming back. Which was better than feeling dead.

  “You may be able to pick up on something we can use in combination.”

  “Their faces are going to be an awful distraction.”

  Russo laughed. Gallows humor. Sometimes it was the best kind. “I think the Glass lady will feel better when she knows you’re there.”

  “She’d feel even better if it was May Weems,” Julie said.

  “Otherwise engaged,” Russo said, meaning it to be funny.

  “Yeah.”

  EIGHT MEN walked past on the other side of “the mirror.” Julie watched with Russo and Detective Mabel Hadley. Three of the men rolled with a waddle of sorts. One of them had red hair, but to identify him by that would render useless any other testimony she might give. Another of the shorter men had dirty blond hair, which some might call red, and the head of the one she felt was Kincaid was quite bald, possibly shaved. Some joker had included a black man among the eight. Julie suggested to the detectives that he be eliminated before Missy Glass saw them. She could easily be confused. The decision was to keep him in the lineup: he had asked to be in it.

  So far as Julie was concerned, the black man was the only one of the lot she could eliminate. Her assailants might have been two of several combinations. Or none of them. She felt an equal abhorrence for them all and yet a debilitating fear of implicating innocent men.

  “Well?” Russo said, annoyed when she wasn’t forthcoming.

  “I’d say the bald-headed one is Kincaid. But I wouldn’t say any of them were the men who trapped me. Not for sure I wouldn’t. Is there nothing in the crime lab by which to identify them, for God’s sake?”

  “It takes two sets of everything to make comparisons, Julie. To get their prints and other samples we’ve got to arrest them, and to do that we need probable cause. Let’s listen to some tapes now and see if you can recognize any of the voices. You were right about Kincaid, by the way. He shaved off his red hair while at sea.”

  Several edited recordings were played for her, different voices, all. In one of the segments the speaker responded to the question of where he worked, saying he was a part-time warehouse loader on Greene Street. “Part-time anything else?” his interrogator asked. “Yes sir. I’m learning how to be a mortician. You know, dead people?” “Where?” “My uncle owns a funeral parlor on Forty-ninth Street. Like I said before …” The tape was edited at that point. Julie’s first thought was that the speaker was going to have to improve his speech before he’d be allowed in the parlor to deal with the bereaved. Then she realized and signaled to stop the recorder.

  “I wouldn’t swear to it,” she said. “I couldn’t. But that’s the only voice that seems at all familiar. If it’s his, he’s the other one.”

  A technician marked the segment and removed the tape.

  There was a consultation among the detectives, and one of them then asked Julie if she had noticed any odor on the perpetrator that she could associate with a mortuary.

  “Something medicinal—putrid, stale.” The whole scene flooded back with all its associable smells—grease, vomit and all the rest. “I don’t know!” she shouted. “How in God’s name would I know how a mortuary smells?”

  They left her alone then until a few minutes later, when Russo came back and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “What?” Julie said.

  “The Glass woman refused even to watch the parade. She turned her back on it. They’ll be out on the street before we are and they’ll be a damned sight harder to bring in the next time.”

  SEVENTEEN

  HER DEPRESSION WAS ALMOST overwhelming. She had prepared herself to confront, and there had been no confrontation. And her meeting with McNally now seemed like an illusion. She did not even look like herself in the mirror. She spent most of the workday on the phone and came up with nothing worth the print. Every time she thought of going out, she was put off by the thought that she might meet Kincaid or Donahue on the street and know them instantly. Then what would she do? And what would they do?

  She forced herself to leave the shop and do something as close to confrontation as she could come at the moment. She walked up to Forty-ninth Street and west until she was alongside the Magee Funeral Home. The firm, according to the legend on the bronze plaque, had been established in 1922. A family business. A diminishing family if Donahue, a nephew, had been taken in. Or might it have been on the plea of his parents? Or was he an abused youngster pitied by his uncle? What the hell difference did it make? He was a sodomist. Or else he was the wrong party.

  There was no vehicular entrance on Forty-ninth Street. It would be around the corner on the avenue. Across the street was a school run by the Sisters of Good Hope, and adjoining the school, the convent. It took her a few seconds to remember why that might be relevant: Russo’s saying where the stocking masks might have come from. They were the kind nuns used to wear before they came out of the habit. She certainly wasn’t going to ring the convent doorbell and ask what kind of stockings these reverend ladies were wearing nowadays. Okay. How about this? Did one of your older sisters pass away along about June eighteenth? And was she laid out at Magee’s? The idea was so macabre it cheered her up. She went around the corner and found the business entrance to the funeral home. Crowded against the brick wall near the door stood a bright green Volkswagen bug, the paint looking shiny new. Was it the car Missy Glass said looked like an egg, now painted over? Or just one more coincidence?

  Julie phoned Detective Russo, ostensibly to ask if Kincaid’s and Donahue’s alibis had been checked out by now. He promised to call her back when he could find out, but his voice and manner suggested that he had cooled toward the case. She decided not to lay the Volkswagen speculation on him at the moment. When he called her, then maybe. But the day passed and most of the next day and he had not called back. For all she knew, Kincaid might have gone back to sea.

  Old Mary Ryan stopped by the shop. “Just to see how you’re getting along, dear.”

  Julie made her a cup of tea. Then, against her own better judgment, she asked if she knew a young man by the name of Frank Kincaid.

  “That would be young Frankie.” Mrs. Ryan set her teacup down. “I knew him when he was no more than a whistle. I knew his mother, and I knew his grandmother before that. The father’s a traveling salesman who does more traveling than selling. Now there’s one of those I was telling you about, Julie: Father Doyle got hold of him and for a while he paid up every week. Then he took off again. The Kincaid girls were all pretty little things. And the way Jennie dressed them …” Mrs. Ryan laid her hand on Julie’s. “They were like little dolls. One of them supported the whole family for a while. She got into TV commercials. You’d know her if you saw her. Or would have. I’ve not seen her lately. She turned pudgy the way some girls do when they get to be ten or eleven. But you asked about Frankie. He wasn’t a bad boy, but when he’d get into any trouble, it was always the other fellow’s fault. A whiny youngster. I don’t think he’s very bright. I used to see him in McGowen’s now and then. Nowadays he’s a great show-off, with that red hair of his. He got into the maritime service awhile back, and to hear him tell it, you’d think he was commander of the fleet. What makes you ask?”

  “One of the girls at the Actors’ Forum asked me if I knew him,” Julie lied.

  “I don’t think he’s more than an able-bodied seaman. But I suppose he’s able-bodied enough when it comes to the girls.” Julie did not ask her about Donahue.

  EIGHTEEN

  IT PROMISED TO BE an opening night to remember. Golden Slippers already had a million and a half dollars in the till, and Broadway hadn’t seen such a turnout of celebrities since Cats. At Tim’s suggestion he and Julie attended together. The column, “Our Beat,” was making its way: first-night tickets. They were so gussied up, as Tim put it, they were photographed several times between the taxi and the lobby. Julie wore a silver l
ame dress and an embroidered stole of Chinese silk around her shoulders. As with the real celebrities, a little burst of applause greeted them as they went down the aisle.

  “Who do they think we are?” Tim whispered as they settled into seats far enough to the side to reestablish their second-string status.

  “Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.”

  “Julie, be your own age.”

  “John Barrymore and Theda Bara.”

  “Oi.”

  Ginny Gibbons was sitting on the aisle a few rows down, her chin in her hand, a down coat draped over the back of her seat—a starling among birds of paradise. Her escort was Seamus McNally. He had on the same tweed jacket, and his dark head was wildly tousled. Julie caught at a flash of fantasy: she was running her fingers through his hair, his head in her lap. “Oh, nice!” she said aloud.

  “What?”

  “I feel just fine,” she said.

  “I told you you would. The bad times are behind you.”

  She patted his hand. “We’re a good team, chum.”

  She would not see McNally unless she went to them during intermission. Ginny never left her seat until she fled the theater as the curtain fell. And during intermission Julie had work to do.

  She started with a couple of notes on what people were wearing, something she was not good at; not that it mattered much. She could say they were wearing umbrellas as long as she said they were there. She caught sight of Richard Garvy moving out of the crush at the bar. People were hailing him still by his series name, Mike Bowen, even among this elite crowd. She eased her way to him. “Have you got a commitment yet from your playwright, Mr. Garvy?” During their interview at the Plaza he had refused to talk about his Broadway plans until he was sure of the play.

  “Have you?” he snapped back, a mischievous tilt to his eyebrows. Was he telling her that Seamus McNally was the playwright and that they had spoken of her? He was. “You’re blushing, little lady.” He touched her under the chin. “So I have my answer and you have yours. Come and meet Mrs. Garvy. She doesn’t turn out for these things often.”

  “May I put it in the column that you’re doing a play by Seamus McNally?”

  “You may. It’s called The Far, Far Hills of Home.”

  “Nice,” Julie said.

  “Bucolic.”

  Julie laughed, remembering McNally’s description of himself as a bucolic playwright. Of which there were not many left.

  “We’re going to try to bring it in in the spring.”

  Mrs. Garvy was a tall, shy woman, the very antithesis of Mike Bowen’s noisy television wife. Julie wondered if they had married before or after the series caught on.

  “This is the young lady with whose father I may have gone to Trinity. Remember, I told you how she loved your anemones?” A perfect non sequitur.

  “Wasn’t Seamus talking about her?” Mrs. Garvy asked.

  “The very same,” Garvy said.

  She gave Julie her hand. “I do hope you find your father.”

  JULIE WROTE UP her items for the column that night and phoned them in in the morning. She hadn’t expected Tim to be there that early, but he came on the phone before she cut off. “What do you think, Julie?”

  “About what?”

  “You mean nobody’s called you? You don’t know?”

  “I’m listening,” she said, irritated. She had not slept well.

  “Two guys have confessed to the attack on you. It’s the lead story in the Post.”

  NINETEEN

  SHE PUT ON HER jacket and walked to the corner deli, the nearest place she could buy a newspaper. She ought to have known, she told herself, that the silence of the police did not mean they had abandoned the case. And yet she thought of Russo’s summary after the lineup fiasco: they’ll be a damned sight harder to bring in the next time. Could it be two different men? She ordered an egg salad on rye and a carton of orange juice and opened the paper. Her feeling was one of dead calm as she read the story at a glance.

  At four o’clock that morning two West Side men had walked into the Nineteenth Precinct station house and confessed to the June 18th sexual assault on Julie Hayes, New York Daily columnist. Frank Kincaid, twenty-three, and James E. Donahue, twenty-two, were to be arraigned later in the day in Criminal Court. The men cited conscience as the motive for their surrender to the police. Neither had a previous arrest record. The Daily had offered a five-thousand-dollar reward at the time for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the assailants, an amount subsequently doubled.

  The deli clerk stretched his neck to see what she was reading. “I know those guys. One of them’s old lady comes in here all the time. What gets into kids like that? I mean in this neighborhood—what’d they need it for?” Obviously he did not know he was talking to the victim. Probably didn’t know there was one. “Pickle?”

  “Please,” Julie said.

  “But there’s something phony about it if you ask me. I don’t buy that ‘conscience’ business. I mean three months later? Forget it.” Then a new idea hit him: “Maybe they think they’ll get the reward. How about that?”

  “Very funny,” Julie said, but it crossed her mind that Kincaid’s mother could use it.

  Detective Russo called her after the arraignment. The first thing he told her was that he had been the arresting officer. “I’d just finished my tour of duty, got home and took me shoes off. The chief called me, thought I ought to have the privilege. My wife didn’t think it was such a great privilege. She didn’t want me to come in. You know how superstitious she is.”

  “I know.”

  “With us living in the neighborhood. Maybe she’s right. We’ve been talking for years of moving out to Rockland County. She’s got a sister living there. Maybe this’ll make it happen. I’ll go out of my mind … frogs and crickets—and babies. She wants babies.”

  Julie wondered if the problem was in her own mind: people did not seem to be making sense. This kind of personal chitchat from Russo, and at a time like this? Almost casually he came back to what had to be the focus so far as she was concerned. “Anyway, we’re holding them for the Grand Jury. Their bail’s set at a hundred grand each. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “You know—I am interested,” Julie said. Then: “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I don’t think they’ll have any trouble getting it up. You’ll be asked to testify at the hearing. Detective Hadley’ll get in touch with you.”

  “How come they turned themselves in?” Julie asked finally.

  “Seems like they had a fight. They probably got tanked up, and one of them went soft. I’ll tell you the truth: I didn’t think we’d ever get them up before the Grand Jury. Now I think we can get an indictment. We have a lot of stuff once the DA can start fitting the pieces together. I think we got a good chance.”

  Julie had hung on as long as she could. “Am I crazy, Detective Russo, or are you holding back on something?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing that bothers me, Julie. The lawyer representing them at the arraignment is from Joe Quinlan’s office. You know who he is, don’t you?”

  “I’ve heard the name.”

  “He’s one of the top trial lawyers in the city. Big-shot politician.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, Joe Quinlan is a West Side boy, all the way up from the streets and Our Lady of Good Hope High School. All right. Here’s what I’m afraid of: he’s too big for us, Julie. Do you understand?”

  “I guess so,” she said, but she didn’t.

  TWENTY

  THE LETTER FROM IRELAND came as Julie was leaving the shop on the morning she was to testify before the Grand Jury. She read it while hanging onto a subway pole on the way downtown.

  Dear Miss Hayes:

  Your letter to my uncle, the late Michael Desmond, was received and opened by me. He died last June, may his soul rest in peace. He lived with his sisters until they died and then with my husband and me and our four children until he went into the
hospital. I was his heir, though what he left most of were debts. He did leave me his notebooks and letters, and him being a newspaperman they are important. If you will let me know what information you wish, I will go through them and look for it. I remember him talking about someone named Mooney.

  Can you advise me if his letters are valuable? Are there people in America who would be interested in purchasing them? I am told universities over there are very keen on collecting such papers.

  If I can be of service to you in Dublin here, please let me know. Dear Miss Hayes, I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.

  Yours faithfully,

  Sally O’Rourke

  THE GRAND JURY BEFORE WHICH JULIE APPEARED THAT October morning was composed of seven men and five women—racial, age and economic factors, she assumed, well sorted out. They looked to have grown experienced in their jury tenure, self-assured and compatible. The assistant district attorney who went over Julie’s testimony with her was a well-groomed young man named Eric Amberg. Everything about him, his hair brushed to a crest, his moustache without a straggle, his vested pinstripe suit, everything suggested tidiness and command; he was solicitous without being warm, his eyes fending her off in case she expected too much involvement of him. When he finished rehearsing her, Julie studied the defendants where they sat at the table with their lawyers—two lawyers now. Donahue had the pallor of the mortuary about him; he was sallow and pale, with blackish hair that looked unwashed, a clump of it falling over his forehead. He kept moistening his lips. Afraid? That ought to give her some satisfaction. Kincaid wore a white turtleneck sweater and looked like a retarded choirboy. He wanted to jump up when anyone approached their table. The lawyers kept patting his arm reassuringly. He’d have been brought up scared—of his vagrant father, of the nuns, of every kid on the block bigger than himself. The smaller ones he bullied and, she wouldn’t be surprised to learn, abused.