Death in The Life

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  She had to turn back to look for Haven House. Rita’s fantasy of being married to a third-world diplomat was wild; her notion of the third world could not be much deeper than Julie’s own and the first thing that came to mind with the phrase was the prevalence of black people. Which, on the surface, made it hard to reconcile the fantasy marriage with Rita’s remark—concerning Goldie—that she didn’t think she could fall in love with a black man. Julie wondered if, asking questions in the thrift shop, she should try to pass as a police investigator. She was about to go public for the first time.

  The woman in charge of the shop—run for the benefit of a school for the severely retarded—looked as though she were an alumna of Miss Page’s School. “Can I help you, dear?”

  All right.

  “Well, yes,” Julie said, and tuned her own accent to the prevailing key. “Detective Russo said you might be kind enough to repeat for me the story Rita Morgan told you. He wants my psychological evaluation of it.”

  “Rita Morgan. Ah, yes. The unfortunate.” Undoubtedly a Miss Page graduate. With a straight “A” in Compassion.

  The one customer in the shop, a teen-aged girl, slipped out the door with a surreptitious glance over her shoulder, “What did she steal?” Julie said.

  “I’m afraid you’re right. Probably a bit of costume jewelry. I follow them sometimes and ask them to pay a token price—I’ll ask for anywhere between a nickel and a quarter.”

  “Killjoy.”

  “You are joking?”

  “You bet… Try to remember from the first time Rita Morgan came in the store.”

  “She only came once.”

  “But she tried first to sell you certain items of apparel?”

  “Yes… some exquisite lingerie which had never been worn. She said she was going to be married and it was part of her trousseau, but her husband-to-be wouldn’t understand such finery. He was a third-world diplomat, she said. But it was rather curious, Miss… Mrs. I don’t even know your name.”

  “Mrs. Julie Hayes. Please don’t stop about Rita. It was curious, you say.”

  “Curious… yes. When I asked if he was with the U.N. she didn’t seem to understand. I know now of course that it was a complete fabrication.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Julie said. “It’s the fabrication that interests me. I think we reveal more of ourselves in the lies we tell than we do when we try to tell the truth.”

  “For me it’s quite the opposite. I don’t find it all that difficult to tell the truth, and I can’t lie worth a darn.”

  Julie smiled and prompted gently, “A third-world diplomat.”

  “She said that in his country only women of the street wore fancy underclothes and she wanted to do everything proper when he took her home. I explained that we have no purchasing budget, and when I think now of what she said, well… she said, ‘I don’t mind donating—if they’re going to bring a good price to somebody.’ I said I’d save them for the summer auction and that seemed to please her. And, of course, I offered to send her the usual tax-deductible receipt. You can imagine how foolish I felt telling that to Detective Russo when I found out what her real occupation was.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That please, I wasn’t to send any receipt. She didn’t want to have to explain it to her fiancé. She also left a box which included two lame dresses, a gold one and a silver. She was gone by the time I got around to opening the box. I did wonder, such a child for clothes like that.”

  Julie nodded. “Any more conversation?”

  “She wanted to know what severely retarded meant as against just plain retarded, and I explained it meant people for whom there was no hope that they would ever be able to help themselves. ‘But they don’t know there isn’t any hope, do they?’ she said. And I told her what I believe is so: If they knew, they wouldn’t be severely retarded and there’d be hope. It sounds like semantics, and maybe it is, but to me it’s worth saying because it sounds cheerful. She smiled when I said that, I do believe gratefully. She said, ‘My brother is retarded.’”

  Julie held back any show of surprise.

  “And that too,” the woman added, “could be something she made up.”

  “It could, couldn’t it?”

  Julie went along to Forty-fourth Street and wrote down Rita’s account of herself as given to the thrift shop woman. Why that story? Why any story? And the retarded brother for whom she bought a teddy bear the next day, and then got as far at least as the Port Authority Building… a couple of hours before Pete Mallory was murdered in her apartment. She wanted to do everything proper when the third-world diplomat took her home. Psychological evaluation. Yeah.

  The morning papers carried Sergeant Greenberg’s sketch of Rita. That was going to be a great help when it came to doing everything proper. The third world. Suppose Rita meant The Life as one world, the straight world as number two, and a kind of limbo as number three, a halfway house… Hey! Then who was the diplomat? Pete?

  Julie locked the shop door so that she would not be disturbed and phoned the Illinois area code for Libertytown Information. She got the number of Helen Mallory and dialed it before she could change her mind. Waiting, listening to the bleeps and buzzings in the few seconds before the connection was completed, she thought of Russo’s picture: the lone woman groping her way through the house to answer the phone in the middle of the night. Did she look like Pete? Younger? Older? The phone was ringing. The voice that answered was strong and resonant. Somehow Julie had expected a mouse.

  “Miss Mallory?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Julie Hayes and I’m calling from New York. I’m a friend of your brother’s and I’ve been wanting to call you and offer my condolences.”

  “I don’t remember Peter’s mentioning you, but I do thank you.”

  Strong and resonant, but a groaner. Julie wanted to say, He didn’t mention you much either, but she said, “I was supposed to meet him the night he was found.”

  “Oh, you’re the one. I should offer you condolences then too.”

  “Thank you,” Julie said. “Are you going to come to New York?”

  “I don’t expect to now. Pete kept trying to get me to visit him. It would be awful for me with him not there anymore.”

  “If you want me to help you with Pete’s things, packing them and sending them on, I will.”

  “That’s real kind of you, but Father Doyle is going to take care of that for me. Were you and Pete engaged?”

  “Engaged?” Julie repeated, wanting to be sure, and wanting a second or two to weigh the idea and where it came from.

  “Engaged to be married.”

  “No. We were only friends. I’m already married. I don’t think Pete was actually engaged to anyone, Miss Mallory.” She could think of no other way to play for more information.

  “I’m glad to hear that. I wouldn’t want to think there was someone who didn’t get in touch with me.”

  “Pete was probably teasing you,” Julie said. Her palms were wet with the tension of trying to coax information without asking directly. Why not ask directly? Something told her not to. The subject might close forever.

  “Well, it did sound a little like that, like he wanted to see what my reaction would be. We were terribly close, you know, for brother and sister.”

  “I understood that,” Julie said.

  “What did he tell you about me?” the sister asked.

  To lie or not to lie? With the truth according to Mr. Bourke, she decided. “Only that you were close—after your parents’ death—and your injuries.”

  “Did he tell you I’m lame?”

  “No.”

  “He used to carry me down the stairs every morning and up the stairs every night. He cooked and washed for me. Completely devoted.”

  Oh, boy.

  “And then he went away so that I’d learn to be self-reliant. And I did. Oh, yes, I learned. I was going to come to New York to see those Irish plays. Our mother was
Irish. A saintly woman, by the values Pete and I were brought up to respect. Well, I shouldn’t run up your phone bill, Mrs. Hayes…”

  “Do. I can afford it really. If it’s important and sometimes it is, just to talk. Please call me Julie.”

  “If you call me Helen.”

  “I will. Helen, what did Pete say about being engaged?”

  “He didn’t say that. He said something like, ‘What if I was to come home—what if I were to come home with a brand-new wife?’”

  Julie waited. So did Helen Mallory. Finally Julie said, “I didn’t know Pete had been married ever.”

  “Well, I think it was only a manner of speaking.”

  “Yes, I see. Of course.”

  “Julie, do you know the woman where the police found his body?”

  “She’s a young girl. I met her a couple of times. She’s disappeared now. I don’t have anything to go on, but I keep wondering if she doesn’t come from Libertytown.”

  “I never heard of her. The police asked me on the phone, and Sheriff Anderson out here. Rita Morgan.”

  “That might be her stage name,” Julie said, forgive me actor of the world. “The sheriff will probably bring you a picture soon. It looks a lot like her.”

  “Is she a fallen woman?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Julie said. Helen sounded biblical.

  “I work in the office of our local paper, the Weekly Chronicle,” Helen said, “and that’s what my boss said it sounds like.”

  “Maybe,” Julie conceded and changed the subject. Rita was not going home anywhere now without the stigma. “If you want to call me for anything, Helen, please do. Let me give you my number here at the shop and at home.”

  Miss Mallory repeated the numbers. “What kind of work do you do, Julie?”

  “I’m a private investigator. Or I will be as soon as I get my license.”

  21

  THE CRACK IN DOCTOR’S CEILING was definitely getting bigger. Julie wondered if any of her patients ever thought of hiding things in it.

  “When I was a kid I used to hide things in the sofa, peanut shells, paper clips, vitamin pills that tasted awful, The Pill… I’m only kidding about The Pill. I’ll have to start taking it again if I go to Paris. Isn’t it funny, I just said it when I was thinking of hiding things?… Maybe I won’t take it and take my chances on getting pregnant. Except if I had a child, I’d want to want it really. I mean, I’d want it to know it was wanted. I’ll say that for my mother, she made me know she’d wanted me. Even if my father didn’t. Mrs. Ryan was funny about Irish women always making excuses for the men. I wonder why Mother told me. I mean she could just as easily have said he died, you know. I think if it’d been me, I’d have got an urn of some sort and put it on the piano or the mantel or someplace and said, That’s your father, Julie. Pay respect. Except him being a Catholic, cremation would be out. But I wouldn’t even have had to know he was a Catholic. Hey, maybe down deep she hoped I’d go looking for him someday. I’d find him and I’d say, Well now, Mr. Hayes, let me introduce myself. Look me over and tell me, do you still want out? Why did she tell me, doctor?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “To make herself look better to me, raising me without him? Wouldn’t it be crazy if she made the whole thing up? If there wasn’t ever an Irish diplomat named Thomas Francis Mooney? God! What a joke…”

  “You just said, Mr. Hayes, let me introduce myself.”

  “Mr. Hayes… Did I say that? Jeff is almost old enough… Oh, Doctor, a million things exploding—thoughts. I can’t hang onto them…”

  “Take your time and tell them as they come.”

  “The church and Pete and me being jealous, the whore of Babylon, I always liked that—the Roman Catholic Church—the whore of Babylon—Mother, Jeff… my saying she was a whore. Sure there were men but that doesn’t mean she was, there weren’t that many, I was exaggerating… I was jealous of her, that’s what it was all about… I wanted Jeff for myself and it was like she wanted him too. And then I did get him mixed up with my father. Does that make sense?”

  “If it makes sense to you.”

  “It’s like he’s always somewhere else where he doesn’t want me and then when he does, I don’t want him. I don’t know. It’s all mixed up.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “It’s like I want it that way, like I’d have to do something if it wasn’t…”

  “Such as?”

  “Grow up, stop blaming everybody else, stop pretending to be a little girl, an angry kid… I keep saying I’m not a little girl, but when Pete said I’d be one at seventy-five it was like he knew me better than I did… I wonder if he knew Rita, really knew her. I don’t know why I keep thinking he was so wise, maybe I think all men are, the very idea of diplomat, of newspaper correspondent…”

  “Why do you think your mother told you about this Thomas Francis Mooney?”

  “She couldn’t have made that name up, could she?”

  “Why not?”

  “I mean it’s corny Irish. And boy, can they be corny. No, his name is on the records, my birth certificate, et cetera, and I do feel at home with the Irish, Doctor. I do.”

  “And you don’t in your own home?”

  “I don’t feel like it’s mine. That picture of Jeff in the living room…”

  “Painted by his first wife?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you ask him to remove it?”

  “I’d have to admit I was jealous or something.”

  “Is that so terrible?”

  “But I’m nobody and she’s a painter. I don’t have the right…”

  “You’re Julie Hayes, the present Mrs. Geoffrey Hayes.”

  “The former… who? Hey, I’ll bet Jeff could find out about my father.”

  “Can’t you find out, if you do want to know? Aren’t you playing the great detective these days?”

  “Am I? You could say that. Absolutely. I told Pete’s sister on the phone that I was a private investigator. Ha! I also told someone I was making a psychological evaluation of Rita’s behavior for Detective Russo.” She looked round at the doctor.

  “That was brave of you,” Doctor said dryly, and with a flip of her hand directed the patient’s head forward.

  “Now how about this? Talk about diplomats. Rita made up this story to tell the woman in the thrift shop where she tried to sell all her fancy clothes.”

  “A third-world diplomat,” Doctor said after Julie repeated the woman’s story. “What an interesting fantasy.”

  “I have a theory about where it came from.”

  “Had you told her about yourself, your natural father?”

  “No. It’s spooky though, her latching onto an imaginary diplomat.”

  “What does the word diplomat suggest to you?”

  “Someone who makes peace, who negotiates. Somebody patient, polished, polite… I don’t think my mother made him up.”

  Doctor said, “But Rita did make up her fiancé and chose a diplomat, someone who makes peace, who negotiates—that’s a fairly general concept.”

  “I think she was talking about Pete underneath. It’s just even possible that Pete was going to marry her.” Julie turned her head quickly and surprised the look of incredulity on Doctor Callahan’s face. “All right, Doctor it’s not all that far out. I talked to Pete’s sister on the phone yesterday. She’s kind of weird too. Who isn’t? I mean I was lying in bed last night thinking about that conversation and what I’d heard about them from Mr. Bourke, but what came up, you know, was how the people in Libertytown would feel about Helen. And about Pete, and I’ll bet those good straight Americans would say, Didn’t the Mallory children turn out fine when you consider how they lost their parents when they were only teen-agers? You and I see the quirky insides of people, Doctor. But there’s Helen Mallory going to work every day at a weekly newspaper and talking to everybody about how devoted her brother is.”

  “And the brother?” Docto
r said.

  “What?”

  “The brother in the New York City morgue, dead of multiple knife wounds he received in a prostitute’s bedroom: is that what you consider turning out fine?”

  “If it turns out the way I think it may, that he tangled with Mack that night, and maybe just had to fight him off Rita, I’ll bet they give him a hero’s funeral in Libertytown. Doctor, would you have recommended that she go someplace, like a rehabilitation center, you know, a halfway house, before trying to go all the way home? You don’t have to tell me, but it sounds like you.”

  “I did.”

  “That’s what I figured. Well, the police are going to find her if there’s some particular place you recommended.”

  “Good.”

  “I don’t think it’s good at all. I’d like to be able… I mean, I’d like to see… All right, I’ll say it the way I started: I’d like to be able to solve what happened to Pete before she surfaces. Maybe that way she’d still have a chance to get out of The Life at least.”

  “She ought to return to New York of her own accord.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know what happened. How about that, Doctor? After all, Pete wasn’t exactly an international figure, and if she’s in some kind of nunnery…”

  “You would like to be able to solve the crime before she surfaces,” Doctor said. “Shall we go into that?”

  “Okay. It sounds arrogant, but…”

  Doctor Callahan interrupted, “Isn’t the word surface often used in a political context these days for someone who has been underground?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t mean it that way. I use words that exaggerate my meaning.”

  “Why?”

  “To get more attention.”

  “So there was no political connotation when you used the word surface?”