“Ah, she wasn’t the type. She told me right out that she was a beggar—but in the way St. Francis was a beggar.”
“Funny about that cross,” Julie said. “I saw Goldie the other day. ‘Miz Julie, I’m straight as a flagpole,’” she mimicked. “He even gave me his business card.”
“Was he wearing the crucifix?” Mrs. Ryan asked disapprovingly.
Julie grinned. “I doubt it. He was wearing Brooks Brothers.” She took a mug of tea from the micro-oven and set it before the older woman.
“Fancy,” Mrs. Ryan said, “and me still using an electric plate.” The tea was “instant” and she hated it.
Julie wondered how many like Mrs. Ryan and Sheila Brennan were still living in the Willoughby. “What was the name of your actor friend? Remember he took us down to the basement that time to look up his old notices in the trunk room?”
“Jack Carroll. He’s gone now, God rest him. He was a lovely man but a terrible bore.” Mrs. Ryan drank the tea down, trying not to taste it.
“That was one spooky place,” Julie said. “Cobwebs and leaky pipes, and the smell of mold and old clothes when he opened the trunk.”
“It’s all changed down there now with the renovation. The old part’s been sealed off. There’s brand new washers and dryers in the new section and it’s as bright as daylight.”
“She wouldn’t be stealing from the dryers, would she? To give to the poor, of course.”
“She would not,” Mrs. Ryan said indignantly. Then, having to account to herself for the shopping bags, she added, “Besides, she’d be taking a terrible chance of being caught.”
“But wouldn’t that account for her going out without the bags—the fear that someone had seen her?”
“Oh, dear, I hope she doesn’t come looking for me now to let her back in,” Mrs. Ryan said. “I could be out in the cold myself. I’m on severance with the management. They pretend not to know I cook in my room.”
“Mrs. Ryan,” Julie said, “why don’t you forget I said that? It’s wild. I have a wicked imagination. And I’d stop worrying about the nun if I were you. She got into the building before you came along—she’s not your responsibility.”
Mrs. Ryan looked at her reproachfully. Then her face lit up. “Julie, I’d love you to meet her. I’ll bring her around someday if I can get her to come and let you judge for yourself.”
Sheila Brennan stuck her stockinged feet out for Mrs. Ryan to see. “Will you look at my ankles? You’d think it was the height of summer.” The ankles were indeed swollen.
“It’s being on them all day,” Mrs. Ryan said. “Put them up on the couch while I pour the tea.”
Sheila was younger than Mrs. Ryan, a plain, solid woman who dreaded the day of her retirement from St. Jude’s Hospital. “The first I saw of Sister Justina was when she visited someone brought into the hospital with frostbite during that bad spell in December. You know the woman who tries to sell yesterday’s newspapers on the corner of Fifty-first Street? The police brought her in half frozen. I told the nun that if she’d come to the Willoughby when I got off duty, and if she could promise me the woman would wear it, I’d give her a fisherman’s shirt my brother brought me from Donegal. It was foolish of me to put a condition to it and what she said made me ashamed of myself. ‘If she doesn’t wear it, I will,’ she said. I’ve been asking around of this one and that one to give her their castoffs ever since.”
“So she’s on the up and up,” Mrs. Ryan said and put the teacup and saucer in her friend’s hand. “But what was she doing in the Willoughby basement?”
“God knows, Mary. She may just have pushed the wrong elevator-button and wound up there.”
Julie and her imagination, Mrs. Ryan thought.
Sheila Brennan’s explanation satisfied Mrs. Ryan because she wanted to be satisfied with it. And she did believe the nun to be a true sister to the poor. She saw her again later that week. Mrs. Ryan was herself in the habit now of taking her principal meal at the Seniors Center in St. Malachy’s basement, where she got wholesome food in a cheerful environment at a price she could afford. Afterward, that afternoon, she went upstairs to the Actors Chapel and there she encountered Sister Justina kneeling in a back pew, her shopping bags at her sides.
“Sister—” Mrs. Ryan whispered hoarsely.
The nun jumped as though startled out of deep meditation and upset one of the shopping bags. Out tumbled a variety of empty plastic cups.
Mrs. Ryan went into the pew and helped her collect them, saying how sorry she was to have startled her. The containers, she noted, were reasonably clean, but certainly not new. “All I wanted to say,” she explained, “is that I have a friend who would like to meet you. Her name is Julie Hayes. She’s a newspaper columnist. She writes about all kinds of people, and she’s very good to the needy.”
“I’ve heard of her,” the nun said without enthusiasm.
Mrs. Ryan realized she had taken the wrong tack. “Do you mind coming out to the vestibule for a minute? I can’t get used to talking in church.”
In the vestibule, she modified her description of Julie. “It’s true that she helps people. She’s even helped the police now and then. I know of at least two murders she’s helped them solve. It would take me all day to tell you about her. But, Sister, she’s as needy in her way as you are in yours. You both have a great deal to give, but what would you do if you didn’t have takers?”
The nun laughed and then clutched at her throat to stop the cough the laugh had started. “Someday,” she said when she could get her breath.
“Someday soon,” Mrs. Ryan said. “She lives a few doors from the Actors Forum. You know where that is. I helped her find the place. In those days she called herself Friend Julie.”
“Friend Julie,” the nun repeated with a kind of recognition. Then: “I must hurry, Mrs. Ryan. They throw out the food if I don’t get there in time.” She ran down the steps with her bags of containers to collect the leftovers from the Seniors’ midday meal.
“Nowadays it’s just plain Julie Hayes,” Mrs. Ryan called after her.
Julie never doubted that Mrs. Ryan would arrive one day with the nun by the hand, but what she hadn’t expected was the nun’s arrival alone. She didn’t like unannounced visitors, but the ring of the doorbell was urgent and came with a clatter she presently attributed to the nun’s use of the cross as a knocker. In fact, it was by the cross—an ivory figure on gold—that she recognized her as Mrs. Ryan’s friend. She took off the safety latch and opened the door.
“Friend Julie, I need your help.”
“Has something happened to Mrs. Ryan?”
“No,” the nun said. “Please?”
Julie relocked the door after the nun and led the way through the apartment. She was trying to remember the nun’s name.
“Mrs. Ryan has nothing to do with this, I give my word,” the nun said. “She said you wanted to meet me, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m Sister Justina.”
Julie motioned her into a chair and seated herself across the coffee table from her. She didn’t say anything. She just waited for the pitch. It was those big blue eyes, she thought, that had got to Mrs. Ryan.
“All I need to tell you about my mission, I think, is that I try to find temporary shelter for street people who are afraid of institutional places. It’s a small person-to-person endeavor, but I’ve had very good luck until now. I’ve been keeping two people hidden away at night and in bad weather in an abandoned section of the Willoughby basement.”
“You’re kidding,” Julie said.
“I wish I were.” The nun thrust her clasped hands between her knees. “I went to leave them a meal this afternoon.” She took a deep breath. “One man was gone and the other one was dead. His skull was smashed in!” Her amazing eyes were filling.
“You’re lucky it wasn’t you, Sister.”
“I don’t consider myself lucky.”
“Have you gone to the police?”
Justina shook her head. “T
hat’s why I came to you. Mrs. Ryan said you’ve helped the police—”
“Let’s forget what Mrs. Ryan says. You have to go to the police. You can’t just close up that part of the basement again on a dead man as though it was a tomb.”
“I don’t want to do that. I only wish I could have got poor Tim out of the city in time. He wanted to go, but he was afraid.” She looked at Julie pleadingly. “I want to do what I have to do, but I can’t.”
“I’ll go with you if that will help,” Julie offered.
“Would you go for me?”
“No. If you don’t show up and take the responsibility for trespassing or whatever it was, Mrs. Ryan and Miss Brennan could be evicted, and where would they find a place to live?”
Justina shook her head. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”
“I’ll say it again, then: you’re lucky.”
“Yes, I suppose I am,” the nun said with what sounded like heavy irony. “The habit I wear has been my salvation, my hope in life.” She drew a long shuddering breath. “Julie, I’m a man.”
For a while Julie said nothing. She was remembering where the phrase “a nun and a neck” had come from—the poet Rilke commenting on one of Picasso’s acrobats: “The son of a nun and a neck.”
“You can use the phone there on my desk if you want to, Sister,” she said.
“Thank you,” Justina said. She got up. “Who do I call?”
“Try nine-one-one,” Julie said.
The nun identified herself to the police dispatcher as Sister Justina, told of a body in the basement of the Willoughby Apartments, and promised to wait herself at the service entrance to the building.
She gave them the address.
When Mrs. Ryan dropped in at Billy McGowan’s pub for her afternoon glass of lager, Detective Dom Russo was telling of the down-and-outer his detail had taken into custody that afternoon for trying to pass a kinky hundred-dollar bill. Nobody had seen its like since before World War Two. Billy had the first dollar he made in America framed and hung above the bar. He pointed it out to the custom.
“They don’t make ’em like that any more,” the detective said, wanting to get on with his story. “This Bingo claimed first off that he found it, just picked it up off the street. We turned him loose and put a tail on him. You know where the old railroad tracks used to run under Forty-fourth Street? He made a beeline for a hole in the fence, slid down the embankment, and led us straight to where he’d hidden three plastic containers in an old burnt-out stove. I don’t need to tell you—the containers were stuffed with all this old-fashioned money.”
Someone down the bar wisecracked that that was the best kind. But at the mention of plastic containers, Mrs. Ryan could not swallow her beer.
“We took him in again. This time around, he said he found the money right there in the oven of this old stove. He intended to turn it over to the police, of course,” Russo repeated sarcastically, “only first he wanted to look more respectable and went to the thrift shop with one of the C-notes—a silver certificate, they used to call them.”
“He should have gone right to the bank,” someone else down the bar said. “They’d trade it in—dollar for dollar.”
“No questions asked?” someone wanted to know.
“He should have gone to a collector and made himself some real money,” Billy said.
“Look,” Russo told them, “you’re acting like this guy was kosher. Maybe the money’s kosher, but he’s not. I don’t believe for a minute he lucked into all that old cash. Anyway, we’ll hold him till we hear from the Feds.”
“A developing story, as they say.” McGowan moved down the bar to Mrs. Ryan. “Drink up, Mary, and I’ll put a head on it for you.”
“I’ll take a rain check, Billy,” she told him. “I’ve got terrible heartburn.” She eased herself off the stool, and by ancient habit looked under it, half expecting Fritzie to be curled up there. Out on the street, she drew several deep breaths of the wintry air. Plastic cups, she told herself, weren’t such a rare commodity.
It was almost dark and there were misty halos around the streetlights—and when she turned the corner she could see rainbows of revolving color: police activity outside the Willoughby. She approached near enough to see that the action was concentrated around the basement entrance, whereupon she reversed herself and headed for Julie’s as fast as her legs would carry her.
Julie was short on patience at the arrival of Mrs. Ryan. For one thing, she was uneasy about not having followed up on the nun’s story. After all, she was in the newspaper business. She ought at least to have called the city desk on a breaking story. Or covered it herself. But she had wanted to give Justina a chance to confront the police on her own. She certainly didn’t want to be the person to blow her cover.
When Mrs. Ryan finished giving out her jigsaw of a tale, Julie asked her if she’d seen Sister Justina after they’d met at St. Malachy’s.
“I haven’t.”
“Well, she’s been here this afternoon, Mrs. Ryan. The police are at the Willoughby to investigate a murder that took place there in the basement. It’s highly possible they’ll connect it with your man with the money in the plastic cups.”
“Holy Mother of God,” Mrs. Ryan said.
“And they’ll be looking for witnesses, for accessories.”
“Sister Justina?”
“And her accessories,” Julie said. “Your doorman isn’t about to take credit for letting her into the building, is he?”
Mrs. Ryan sat a long while in silence. “Would you mind walking me home, dear? My legs are so weak I’m not sure they’ll carry me.”
Julie pulled on her coat, put the phone on “Service,” and fastened her press card onto the inside flap of her shoulderbag.
Mrs. Ryan got weaker and weaker on the way. She suggested they stop for a brief rest at McGowan’s, but Julie put a firm hand beneath the older woman’s elbow and propelled her homeward.
By then word of police activity at the Willoughby had reached McGowan’s and most of the patrons were there to see what was going on. Julie spotted Detective Russo as he came out of the building on the run. She planted Mrs. Ryan among her McGowan’s cronies at the barricade and caught up with him as he was climbing into the back of a squad car.
“Okay if I come along?” she asked, halfway into the car behind him. They were on pretty good terms, considering that they weren’t always on the same side.
“Why not?” he said ironically.
By the time they reached the precinct house, she knew how the victim and his assailant had got into that part of the Willoughby. The Environmental Protection Department had ordered a removal of old sewage pipes and part of the wall had been removed, a temporary partition put up in its place. “Like everything else in this town,” Russo said, “they get the job half done and move on to the next one.”
No mention of the nun. “How did they get into the building in the first place, Dom?” Julie asked.
“How the hell do I know? Somebody must’ve left the door open. And no wonder. It stinks to high heaven down back where they were. They buried their own shit like animals. That’s how they found the body—and the tin box with the money in it.”
“The money in the plastic cups you found earlier this afternoon. Do you think there’s a connection?”
“You better believe it,” Russo said. “The victim had one clutched in his hand when he was clobbered with the tin box.”
“How did you know to go to the Willoughby in the first place?”
“We had a phone call,” Russo said. “But the complainant didn’t show. We’d begun to think it was a hoax—but the smell led us to him. A whole section of the wall—we just leaned on it and Jericho!”
“Jericho,” Julie said. “That’s nice.”
So Justina had vanished. No problem: just get out of the habit and grow a beard. Until now she had carried Justina’s confession of identity as a confidence, as though it had been told under a seal. It ha
dn’t, of course, but since Detective Russo and company had the suspect in custody and enough evidence to detain him for a while she decided to keep the matter on hold.
Mrs. Ryan and Sheila Brennan were waiting for Julie when she arrived at Mrs. Ryan’s apartment. They seemed less chastened than she thought they ought to be, but there hadn’t yet been time for the police to get to them.
“We’re expecting them any minute,” Mrs. Ryan said. “And we’ve decided to tell them the truth about Sister.”
“And that is?”
“How she got into the building in the first place. How she used us.”
Julie felt she was being used herself—that this was a dress rehearsal. “Okay.”
“But she would have used anybody to help those she thought needed help.” Mrs. Ryan drew a deep breath. “Julie, who would you say all that money belongs to?”
“I wouldn’t say.” But she was beginning to see a light.
“Sheila and I have a story to tell you. Remember you mentioned Jack Carroll the other day, and his trunk in the basement? Jack lived here for years before Sheila and I ever heard of the Willoughby and he loved to tell stories of the old days—the circus people, the vaudevillians, and the chorus girls. One of his best stories, and God knows he practiced to make it perfect, was about Big Frankie Malloy. When Frankie moved in, the management renovated a whole suite for him. He had tons of money. He had his own barber sent in every day to shave him, he had his meals catered; he was always sending out for this or that, he was a lavish tipper. And the girls, there were plenty of them. But there was something wrong about big Frankie. After he moved in, he never went outdoors again—except once.
“Madge Delaney was his favorite of the girls, and she got booked into the Blue Diamond nightclub just down the street. Frankie went out the night she opened. It was said afterward that the only reason she got the booking was to lure him out. He was shot dead before he ever got to the Blue Diamond.”
“Wow,” Julie said.
“Don’t you think it could be his money that’s been hidden away all these years?”
“It’s a real possibility,” Julie agreed.
In the Still of the Night: Tales to Lock Your Doors By Page 9
