Death in The Life

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Julie provided the word, “Clout.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But he paid the bill.”

  “Oh, yes. Neither of them would have it any other way. So I created a project. Instant money.”

  “Pete made a porn film for you.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Three days of shooting in Boston. The two of them wrote the script or whatever.”

  “You are informed.”

  “Why Boston, Mr. Romano?”

  “I prefer not to be seen in any of the local—let’s use the word studios.”

  “I see,” Julie said, but she didn’t actually.

  “What puzzles you? That I was present?”

  “Maybe. But what I really don’t dig was what Pete could do. I mean Pete used photography a lot in his stage design, but a porn film—that’s a different art form. It has to be.”

  “Oh, yes, and you are quite right, it is an art form. Mallory was on camera throughout, the male lead. My identification was with him, not Laura.”

  “Okay,” Julie said. The ultimate voyeur. Yeah.

  “You are naïve,” he said solicitously.

  “I guess I am.”

  “Now. What did you want to ask me about Maccarello?”

  “The big question, Mr. Romano: did he kill Pete?”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t prove it.”

  “That’s always a problem isn’t it? Especially for the police. Shall I tell you how my reconstruction goes? You understand, it is entirely the product of my imagination. This child-whore must have ingratiated herself with Mallory—but that is of no concern to me—except that if Maccarello, in his obscene, brutal habit, chose to abuse her in the presence of Mallory, that young Quixote would not have tolerated it for a moment. And knowing Maccarello as I do, I can say without doubt, he did it to the very purpose of angering Mallory, of provoking him to bodily combat. That would have given him exquisite satisfaction. Having said that, I leave the rest to your imagination. You do have some imagination?”

  That thrust of contempt from any other source would have destroyed her. Any minute he was going to turn her out. Exquisitely. Okay. “But Pete was killed with a knife.”

  “There are many kinds of knives—a long thin blade, according to the Times. A stiletto perhaps? It is an ancient weapon.”

  “And what was Rita doing all this time?”

  Romano stood up. “Well, she wasn’t screaming for help, was she?”

  Nor had she returned to give testimony. Julie was as willing to depart as he was to have her go. “You’ll have to show me how to get out of here, Mr. Romano.”

  He nodded, but stood where he was a moment longer. “Are the police looking for him at least?”

  “For Mack? I think so.”

  “And do you think they’ll find him?”

  Julie met the cold blue eyes. It was a chilling moment. “No.”

  He smiled. “I apologize for underestimating your imagination.”

  26

  JULIE DECLINED THE SERVICES of Romano’s limousine. Nor did she intend to front a luncheon at Sardi’s. As soon as she got out on the street, her legs began to tremble. She could hardly make it into a cab. The doorman at Doctor’s building told her that Doctor Callahan had left the office. She would return in time for her next appointment. Julie had the cabbie wait while she left the envelope containing a copy of her updated letter to Jeff at Doctor’s vestibule door. Then she went home to Seventeenth Street. This time it was home, oh, yes, it was home.

  She picked up the morning paper in the vestibule. No letter from Jeff. She had just had one… when? The days and nights had run into one another. She called Mr. Bourke and told him she was home safe. There was nothing about Pete’s death in the paper. She went through it twice. Not a word… fit to print. It was almost noon. There was such stillness throughout the house. Like the deadly quiet of the early hours on Forty-fourth Street when the rats could be heard frolicking in the walls and upstairs Juanita had suddenly started to cry as though awakened from a terrible dream. She had cried and cried almost beyond Julie’s endurance so that she had found herself cradling an invisible child in her arms and rocking it until, upstairs, the real one fell asleep again. Across the Seventeenth Street garden, where a single tree was squeezing out spring leaves, the sewing machines were hooded. Spring came in winter over there; even summer had passed.

  She bathed and set the alarm for a little before two and then stretched out on the library couch. She would not have called it sleep, but she wasn’t awake either when the phone rang.

  “I’ve been trying your office all morning, Julie. This is Helen Mallory… Pete’s sister?”

  Julie tried to wake up. “Yes, of course. How are you, Helen?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really know. What I called for, to thank you. Father Doyle told me about the memorial Mass. That’s real nice of you. I wish I could attend myself, but I just couldn’t stand all the publicity.”

  “Maybe there won’t be so much.”

  “Did they find—her?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Everybody here is talking about it. Her family gave her up for dead, not hearing in all these years. Mr. Moran died two years ago. I don’t understand Pete. But then I never did.”

  “Moran,” Julie repeated.

  “Betty Moran. The police know all that now.”

  “I’ve been out of touch with them,” Julie said.

  “The person it’s hardest on is her brother. He’s just started in business, a bicycle shop. They had the grand opening last week.”

  “She intended to come home,” Julie said.

  “So did Pete. But he never did. I’m not going to keep you on the phone. I just wanted to thank you. It’s nice to know there’s someone human left in the world.”

  “Don’t go yet. Or let me call you back.”

  “I don’t know what else there is to say.”

  “Pete was great, you know. He really was. I’m pretty sure he did everything he could to try and help this… Betty Moran to make it home. I wouldn’t be surprised if he even offered to marry her. Remember?”

  “Oh, I do remember. I surely do. All these years, I’d been begging him to come home, or to let me come out and make a home for him—like he did for me when I couldn’t take care of myself.” Suddenly she went out of control, her voice high and shaking: “All the love he said he had for me, and what was he going to do? He was going to marry a prostitute and bring her home to live with me. In my house. I thought he was teasing me about being engaged. He wasn’t teasing, he was testing. He meant it.”

  “He probably did,” Julie said. “Only Rita wouldn’t have any part of it. It had to be on her own or not at all.”

  “I don’t care what Father Doyle says, I can’t grieve for my brother. Maybe I should, but I haven’t got it in me.”

  Maybe I have now, Julie thought.

  The woman on the other end of the phone began to sob. “I can’t talk anymore… I’m so miserable.”

  Julie wanted off the phone, and yet she could not bring herself to cut the woman off. She was Pete’s sister. “I don’t know what to say, Helen. Pete must have loved you.”

  “He always said he did, he always promised. Only last week, we were planning such a wonderful reunion. He was going to meet me at the airport and I was going to see those beautiful plays. I’ve read every word of them.”

  Julie got the feeling that this was the way every conversation between Pete and his sister went, from tears to promises, from love to hate, and back to love again, or whatever kind of facsimile you could transmit over a telephone.

  “I wished we hadn’t quarreled. I hate him most for that. He didn’t have to leave me that way…”

  But he did. There wasn’t any other way. Before Julie could think of anything else to say, the unhappy woman hung up.

  Those beautiful plays… pride knocking with thin knuckles on the heart.

 
Julie dressed as she would going to see Doctor Callahan. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but she turned off the alarm and watched the hands of the clock. At exactly two she phoned the analyst. Doctor’s advice was firm: she must go to the police with the story of her encounter with Romano. Not to do so would be to accept the gangster’s assessment of police capabilities. It would be capricious, wrong, and dangerous not to go to them. Doctor had all the words. She was at bottom on the side of law and order. Toward which Julie felt a strong inclination herself at the moment. Doctor promised to read her log over the weekend.

  She was unable to reach Detective Russo at headquarters, but when she gave her name and the matter on which she had called, the Mallory murder, she was asked to hold on.

  A moment later: “Lieutenant Donleavy of Homicide speaking, Mrs. Hayes. What can I do for you?”

  Julie got no further than telling him where she had been that morning.

  “Why don’t you come in and talk to me about it? I’ll be here for a while. Detective Russo is on his way to Philadelphia to pick up the Morgan girl. She’s waived extradition.”

  27

  “SOME GOOD DETECTIVE WORK on Russo’s part,” Donleavy said, sitting across from Julie at the table in the small airless room with the recording equipment. “A street informant told him that she was headed for a halfway house. He canvassed three or four of them in the East and turned up one in Philadelphia run by the Sisters of Charity. A New York doctor had called them last week to make inquiries on behalf of a girl who’d come to her. The girl never arrived at the hostel, but Russo alerted the Philly vice squad. They picked her up this morning, working her trade.”

  Working her trade. Boston, New York, Philadelphia. Run it through in reverse and what came before Boston?

  “Now tell me about Romano and how you got to him. You haven’t been carrying on your own investigation by any chance?”

  “In a way I have, but I couldn’t help it. I kept finding out things about Pete, psychological things, and I kept wanting to know more.”

  “So you parted company with Detective Russo,” Donleavy said shrewdly.

  “I turned off, but it wasn’t his fault.”

  The lieutenant smiled and said, almost with a lilt in his voice, “Let me see if I can turn you on again.”

  Julie had the distinct feeling that she had not helped toward Detective Russo’s promotion. “Where to start,” she murmured.

  Donleavy shook out a cigarette, lit it, and left the package on the table between them. “I was talking with Father Doyle, by the way, and your name came up. Isn’t he a grand fellow?”

  Julie nodded.

  “Now there’s a man who won’t get a promotion till the Last Judgment.” She’d been right about Russo’s chances, Julie thought, tracking Donleavy’s association. “And if he got one, he wouldn’t be nearly as effective as he is now. Well, shall we try to get on with Romano? It will bring us around to Mack the pimp, right?”

  “Mack used to be his bodyguard,” Julie said. “You’ll have to let me tell it my own way.”

  “I wouldn’t have it otherwise. Shall we put it on tape while we’re at it?”

  “All right—if I could have three copies of the transcription.”

  “A deal.”

  Julie covered her eyes with her hands to help her concentration while he turned on the machine. She plunged in at the hospital scene, going from that back to the street theater and forward to Romano’s own account of his vicarious pursuit of Laura Gibson and his prognosis of how and why Pete died.

  Donleavy turned off the recorder when she finished. “A voyeur and an exhibitionist. He gave you quite a performance, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you that Mack is dead. That’s the word on the street this morning, rumor, that’s all. But there’s nothing in what he said to you to implicate Romano legally.”

  “I guess not,” Julie said.

  “Nothing that would stand up even before a magistrate. I wonder if we really have it.” He lit a fresh cigarette and watched the smoke for a moment. “Suppose Mack is not dead: Romano certainly laid out the way the investigation ought to go. What did he say? ‘The police have not been to see me.’ The arrogant bastard. But he’s right. We ought to have got to him before now. It’s interesting that when the Philadelphia boys picked up little Miss Morgan this morning, she claimed not to know how or when she got there. The last thing she remembered in New York was telling her pimp that she was going and giving him back the key to the apartment. Somebody gave her a beating, that’s certain.”

  “What about Pete’s key?”

  “Still don’t know. He might have dropped it in the fray. If there was one. The two locks are similar: there could have been confusion about the keys. The time comes out well enough. She was seen at the bus terminal at five. We now have a witness who’s pretty sure he saw Mack going into the building on Ninth Avenue before seven o’clock. She could have been back there by then. Mallory left the Irish Theatre at six-thirty, had a bite to eat, and called his sister at seven forty. Then what happened?” Donleavy shook his head. “It doesn’t seem possible in a building that size that there weren’t any other witnesses. Scared. It’s a bad scene.”

  “Who did finally call the police?”

  “My guess is Mack—with raw nerves by that time.”

  “I do think Mack is dead,” Julie said, “and I’m not ever going to forget that man Romano’s eyes, but it does seem incredible.”

  “Not really. I can’t think of a more worthless member of society than Mack, and Romano does consider himself a benefactor. Maybe he thinks he’s saving the taxpayers’ money.”

  “Do you really believe that, Lieutenant?”

  “No, I don’t, and the more I think about it now, I’m not at all sure I agree that Mack is dead. The street rumors: it could all be a scenario. Mack could be hiding out—possibly from Romano—waiting for the police to catch up.”

  “What happens to Rita now?”

  “Bellevue… for psychiatric observation. That’s her immediate address.”

  “Could I see her, Lieutenant?”

  “Check with me in a day or so. We’ll see what the medics have to say.”

  After she left Donleavy, she went to her shop for the volume of Yeats and then walked over to St. Malachy’s. Father Doyle was out on a sick call. Julie told the housekeeper she would wait for him in the actors’ chapel.

  It was a low-ceilinged room with a few pale saints in their shrines illumined by the flickering candles. She had used to, with the sudden fervors of adolescence, swallow chunks of Catholicism, only to violently disgorge them afterwards. Longing and revolt. It had a lot to do with that mythical father whose name was real enough on her birth and baptismal certificates; the myth came afterwards. Someday she might pursue him when the need seemed fierce again. And it would happen, but she didn’t think she’d ever find him. Or God. Whom she didn’t know any better than she did her father. Sometimes she pretended. She tried. And then in anger cursed Him. Which was pretty hard: goddamn God. What had she said to Rita? Something outrageous… Sometimes I think of God as one big penis. You wouldn’t say that to me if I wasn’t a whore… Why had Pete kept those photographs? Were they stills from the porn film? My God, that day in Sergeant Greenberg’s studio they had been looking at Pete! The male tower. Babel. She slipped from the bench to the kneeler and tried to pray. But it didn’t work. Only a little when she prayed for understanding. Her only peace was understanding… For peace comes dropping slow. Was that Yeats again? It was.

  Father Doyle had not come, so she left the chapel quickly. She would not have had much to say to him that day anyway. But as a kind of punctuation—a half-way pause—leaving, she dipped her fingers into the holy water font and made the sign of the cross. It was something she had often practiced. She left the book with the housekeeper.

  A letter came from Jeff that night by way of diplomatic pouch. Very dramatic. He had written it t
he night before with her last letter in front of him. He started out saying, “I had no idea you had made such progress with Dr. Callahan.” An irony of course. He went on to praise her logic and her ability at organizing her material… as though it hadn’t organized itself. The odd thing was that if he found anything remarkable in her participation in such a scene, he did not mention it, except insofar as it was contained cryptogrammically in “progress with Dr. Callahan.” “My dear little puzzle is going to solve herself.” All right. Skipping through the letter, she read the last sentence: “I am reserving a bedroom-sitting room in an old hotel on the Left Bank to which I have always been partial. It may not have the charm for you of Forty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, but you will recognize certain human universals.”

  Well, Jeff. Then she went back to read a middle paragraph more carefully.

  “I want to comment on that production of Streetcar to which I seem to have reacted so violently. I am quite willing to concede Williams to be one of the great modern playwrights, but for my part, I find the virgin who tries to cure herself of the affliction by turning whore an unpleasant phenomenon. Why not enter a convent, make love to God, and get drunk on sacramental wine? I understand whores and I understand nuns, but it’s these nunning whores and whoring nuns which confuse me. That way lies madness. Which, I should suppose, was what Williams had in mind. I did not believe Laura Gibson in the role for a minute, and that psychedelic production was designed to cover her ineptness. One man’s opinion. But when I was a young blade cadging theater handouts for somebody else’s column, I had the opportunity to observe Miss Gibson. She made good copy, talking extravagantly of her lovers, their prowess, and their appetites. She was a bawd and proud of it, but I have come to believe that most bawds are likely to be sexually frustrated, their bawdiness a rich cloak under which they are making anything but love. My guess is that Miss Gibson and the much younger Mallory played lovers for an audience who wanted lovers and then played tiddledywinks in “bed.”