Lullaby of Murder

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “The shop” was a low-rental ground floor in a tenement building on West Forty-fourth Street, not far from the Willoughby where Mrs. Ryan lived. Julie still used it for an office. She had acquired it with Mrs. Ryan’s prodding really. She had been on her way to buy a set of Tarot cards one day, largely for her own amusement, when she chanced to meet Mary Ryan with whom, until then, she’d had but a nodding acquaintance through their mutual interest in theater. It happened at a time when Julie felt rudderless—Jeff was away and her then therapist, Doctor Callahan, had said she couldn’t help her until Julie was serious about helping herself. A job was strongly recommended. With almost childish pique, Julie took to the notion of setting up as a “reader and advisor,” and Mary Ryan had cheered her on.

  Julie had long since taken down her sign from the window, but she had hung onto the shop at Jeff’s suggestion, a place of her own. Its location was highly symbolic of a side of her nature that she didn’t understand herself, a fondness for people who worked at humble occupations. Dr. Callahan had called it a cop-out, a place where Julie had no relationship problems, where she didn’t have to compete. Which was partly true, but not the whole story. The shop was less than a block from the Actors Forum, where she had once been an active member and still had many friends. There was always someone on the street to greet her as though she’d been there yesterday even when she hadn’t been around for weeks. Mrs. Rodriguez, her upstairs neighbor, kept an almost constant look-out from her elbow cushion in the window. She had been invaded recently by her husband’s relatives from San Juan. Julie felt guilty about not offering to sublet her place to them when they needed more room, but Rose Rodriguez didn’t like the idea at all. “They pay me,” she said and thumped her bosom righteously. “It makes up.” What it made up for was the “trick” she could no longer entertain while her husband was working. Juanita, Rose’s silent child, had finally gone to school. Now, when she played on the stoop, the dolls were neater and most of them had arms and legs and even hair. Julie figured out that Juanita was playing teacher instead of mother these days, and sometimes her two smaller cousins were allowed to attend school with the dolls. Juanita wasn’t silent anymore either: she screamed at all of them, “Speak English!”

  The kettle was boiling on the hotplate by the time Mrs. Ryan arrived. She looked a little more beery every time Julie saw her, the grey hair more straggly beneath the limp straw hat, the pale blue eyes more watery. She had been an usher at the Martin Beck most of her working life and though long retired she still lived a stone’s throw from the theater. “What I like about you, Julie,” she said when she had looked over the shop to see if there was anything new, which there wasn’t, “is the way you never forget your friends.”

  Julie addressed herself to the dog. She got a biscuit from the tin box on top of the dresser. Fritzie was already sitting up, supporting himself with one paw on the dresser; his stomach sagged obscenely. “You’re putting on a little weight, old boy.”

  “He’s fading away to a ton,” Mrs. Ryan said, and settled into one of the four director’s chairs that surrounded the cut-down table. A large crystal ball was the table’s only ornament.

  Julie served the tea double strength and blisteringly hot. Mary Ryan paid her a compliment she had heard more than once. “You’ve a drop of Irish blood in you somewhere to make tea like that.” When the old woman had emptied the cup to the last few drops, she turned it round and round to shape a fortune for herself in the leaves. She put the cup aside, however, without a word on what she saw. “Now I did tell you my chum and I went to the movies,” she said, groping her way into the past.

  “It wasn’t even midnight when we got out of the last show. I forget what we saw…. Did I say that we told her parents we were at my house and told mine that we were at hers? They’d have gone out of their minds if they’d known. We went to a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, one of those places you went upstairs and you couldn’t get the smell of the incense out of your clothes for days…”

  Julie gave Fritzie a lift onto the chair he’d been trying to get aboard.

  “I don’t suppose you need all these details,” Mrs. Ryan said, hoping to be contradicted.

  “It’s mostly the dance marathon,” Julie admitted. “Whatever you can remember about that.”

  “What I remember most about it was the way the poor creatures would hang on one another, dying for sleep, and all of a sudden the orchestra would speed them up, playing something snappy like Happy Days Are Here Again. I’m ashamed to say it, but there I was in the front row clapping my hands off.”

  “Spectator sport,” Julie said.

  “Or maybe I was trying to keep myself awake. It was the longest night of my life and as I look back on it now, a wake would have been more fun. If only we’d had the sense to look for a nice Irish wake…” Mrs. Ryan’s voice faded and her eyes misted with some memory she did not share. Then: “Isn’t it a shame about Jay Phillips? Do you know him? But of course you would in the job you have now.”

  “What about him?”

  “He committed suicide last night. I heard it on the radio just as I was leaving the house. He jumped from the George Washington Bridge, but they didn’t find his body until after daylight. It was all the way down near Ninety-sixth Street.”

  THREE

  JULIE TOOK THE GRAFFITI-SPATTERED Broadway train uptown. When she had used to travel to and from Miss Page’s School by public transportation she had felt a comradeship with the other riders. She often made up lives for them between stops. Now people huddled inside themselves as though an outward glance might commit them to something. She kept thinking of Jay Phillips. He’d been putting things in order, in his fuddled way, sitting in Sardi’s Restaurant. She and Jeff had simply fallen within his line of vision and become a brief distraction. She’d left Mrs. Ryan speculating on whether there would be a wake. The old church, she explained, would have denied him Christian burial, a suicide, despair being the ultimate sin. The new church made allowances for most things that weren’t sexual.

  What had Tony done, she wondered, to have turned the man against him. Something recent—or something past but not forgiven? She’d always thought of Phillips as a considerate person with a barely controlled drinking problem. The worst language she had ever heard him use was his reference to Tony as an s.o.b. Practically archaic.

  The Garden of Roses was a huge, baroque edifice, the cornerstone of which had been laid in 1922. A cement bas-relief of roses overhung the entrance. New glass doors were going up where the carpenters tore away the boards. People formed a line outside, to apply for employment, Julie supposed. There were a table and a few folding chairs in the lobby. A haze of dust made the harsh work lights within the building softer. She inquired where the office was, and then the name of the person in charge.

  “I guarantee you’ll never forget it, Miss: Mr. Morton Butts.”

  She found Mr. Butts behind a cluttered desk. On top of the clutter were what looked like two sets of blueprints held open by a hammer and a pair of pliers, a Pepsi bottle and a bible. He slipped one of the prints over the other and let them roll up together as Julie approached. He introduced himself and dusted a chair for her with his breast pocket handkerchief.

  “Why a dance marathon?” he repeated her first question and took off. “What you got to understand about me, Miss, I’m a student of history. That way when something everybody else thinks is new comes along I know when and where it showed up the last time and what made it click then. If it didn’t click it didn’t make history. See what I mean?”

  Julie nodded.

  “And there’s always room for improvement. But you got to do everything with heart. You got to believe in it. And in yourself.” He thumped his chest with a chubby fist. “I’ve been working almost a year on this project, and two weeks from now the lights go on. Let me tell you how it works. Ten thousand dollars at the top, winner take all. No second, third, no consolation prize: it’s do or die.” Mr. Butts’ face was ruddy and his thic
k short greying hair stood up on his head like a scrub brush. Round and plump, he was very little taller than Julie. He had to be about sixty or so. His eyes, with the glint of a zealot in them, were as busy as lightning bugs, and the spittle flew from his mouth with his enthusiasm. Every now and then he would get up from the desk and go to the window, taking the blueprints with him, tapping them in the palm of his hand as he stood on tiptoe to see the lineup below. They were would-be contestants, he explained, who were paying twenty dollars a head for the privilege. Their registration fee would also buy them a good physical examination.

  “There’s something about the dance marathon you wouldn’t understand if you didn’t know your history: it was one of the important ways the American people pulled themselves out of the Great Depression in the nineteen-thirties. Most of the schoolbooks teach you it was Franklin D. Roosevelt that saved the country with his alphabet soup, the AAA and the WPA, and the NRA…. Don’t you believe it. What saved this country was the people with their natural grit and determination to do things for themselves. The dance marathon was a test of that grit.”

  “My boss got varicose veins from the one he was in,” Julie said.

  “And he’s proud of them now, isn’t he?”

  “I guess so,” Julie said, “or I wouldn’t be here.”

  Mr. Butts tucked the blueprints into an already stuffed desk drawer and bounced toward the door. “Let me show you through the plant. We have a few days’ work to do yet, but you’ll get the idea.”

  He smelled of soap, the scouring kind, or else something he used to try to flatten his hair. Taking Julie by the arm, he propelled her into what had been the main ballroom; good hardwood floors, as he pointed out. You couldn’t buy lumber like that anymore even if you could afford it. Workmen were putting up railings, creating what looked like a miniature race course. “We’ll gradually bring down the number of times per day a couple has to circle the track to stay in competition, but the winners have got to make at least one entire go-round the day the dance ends.”

  “And if they can’t?” Julie asked, remembering Mrs. Ryan’s description of “the poor creatures.”

  “No such word, Mrs. Hayes. If they don’t, the prize doubles in a new contest.”

  “I see,” she murmured.

  He took her arm again and steered her from one to another of the rooms at one end of the dance floor: shower rooms and toilets, a room for cots, an infirmary where a doctor would be on duty twenty-four hours a day—an underpaid resident from the nearest hospital, Julie suspected—a snack bar. The contestants would have ten minutes out of every hour to attend to their personal business. He showed her where the sponsors’ boxes would be built and where he would be putting in a bank of seats for the audience. One area was designated “media.” The Garden of Roses had been built to accommodate thousands.

  “Live music?” Julie asked.

  “Three nights a week and Sunday afternoons. Otherwise…” He let go of her arm and rollicked along the railing to a platform where there might once have been an organ console. Now it was an electronic switchboard. He chose from among the rows of buttons and threw a switch. The whole room exploded with rock music. He doused the work lights and pulled another switch: strobe lights streaked across the backs and faces of the men who had been working until the lights went out. The illusion of grimacing faces, disjointed body motions and the hard, loud music: an interlude of madness in what didn’t seem like a very sane operation altogether. Butts switched things back to normal and trotted back to Julie. “Now, what else can I show you?”

  Show, not tell, Julie observed. Quibbling, but for all his volubility, he was talking for the purpose of avoiding questions rather than answering them. “How come the Garden of Roses?” Julie asked.

  “It was here. As simple as that, and rather than let it deteriorate I persuaded the city to lease it to me for five years. There has been talk of its demolition. Talk also of its possible landmark status. I look upon my enterprise as a holding action.”

  “Tell me something about you,” Julie said. “Have you always been in show business?”

  “You might say so. I view life as a showcase and God as producer. I’ve been with the circus, I’ve been real deep in religion. I’ve promoted boxing matches and built gymnasiums to teach the manly art of self defense. But, getting down to the nitty-gritty, I’m just an old-fashioned businessman, American to the core, and it won’t hurt these days to put that in your interview.”

  “Got it,” Julie said. “I’d like to talk to a few of the contestants, if you don’t mind.”

  “Why should I mind? I expect the mayor to show up for the grand opening so you know everything’s got to be kosher. Only remember, they’re not contestants until they’ve passed their physicals.”

  He walked her back to the lobby. The line of registrants was growing, mostly blacks and Hispanics. “A real American mix,” he said and smiled happily. Tiny, sharp teeth, but his own. He gave her a moist marshmallow of a hand to shake and added, “Come to the opening and bring the boss with you.”

  UNEMPLOYED DISHWASHERS, cabdrivers, city layoffs, waitresses, beauticians, hospital workers: they expected to be on television, marathon dancers, and considered Julie their opening round of publicity. Everybody claimed to have heard of Tony Alexander, and by the time Julie moved down the line, they had.

  She crossed the street and looked back. Most of them waved. Was the building rococo or baroque? She tended to mix the two. It might not matter to the readers of Tony Alexander Says…but it had better matter to the wife of Geoffrey Hayes. She proposed to look it up in the Architectural Guide to New York City when she got back to the office. The “Garden” looked as though it would take a fortune to restore. It looked as though it would take a fortune even to demolish. In the distance were vast complexes of public housing, brick, glass and mortar, and if you looked at them in a certain way you could imagine them on a slow march downtown. How many buildings similar to this monstrous citadel of dance had made way? On the other hand, Columbia University at her back seemed eternal. Not far away was St. Luke’s Hospital, and beyond, the massive Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Yet Amsterdam Avenue, as it headed up toward 125th Street, was a parade of small, neighborhood shops, appealing to what Butts had called “a real American mix.”

  There was something incongruous about the whole project, she felt. Or was it the idea of a dance marathon itself? How had it come to Tony’s attention, she wondered. Certainly it had piqued his interest. The building was out of sync with the present neighborhood, too large, too gaudy; why had it survived till now? And a five year lease? She thought of the two sets of blueprints Butts had gathered up and kept with him while she was there. Why hadn’t he said, “Here, look what we’re doing,” and then shown her the actual scene? The property would have fallen to the city for delinquent taxes, she supposed. Was there something in the blueprints, a legend perhaps, that he had not wanted her to see?

  Walking back to Broadway through the Columbia campus, she thought of calling the city public relations office to find out where to seek further information. She envisioned an afternoon of phone calls and days of waiting…only to discover that the Garden sat on a molehill. It occurred to her that she had a source uniquely her own. Sweets Romano reportedly owned more West Side real estate, under a variety of covers, than anyone: She found a pay phone in one of the library buildings and dialed his private number.

  The routine was the same as always: she gave the number from which she was calling to the person answering, and within a couple of minutes the phone rang in the booth. “This is Romano. How pleasant to hear your voice, Miss Julie.”

  “As usual, I want something,” Julie said.

  “Anything within my power.”

  “This time it’s information: a ballroom built in the 1920s called Garden of Roses on Amsterdam Avenue. It’s being reopened and polished up for a dance marathon by a man named Butts. He’s leased the building from the city.”

  “I know
the building,” Romano said.

  “Is there anything strange about its survival till now? I don’t really know what I’m looking for, Mr. Romano. The whole enterprise seems crazy to me. I mean what if it fails? All that money…. There’s got to be more to the operation than putting on a few weeks of nostalgia. Maybe I’m wrong about him, but the entrepreneur seems to me a phoney.”

  “You’ve become a muckraker, Miss Julie?” It was half question, half teasing. She could imagine the cherubic face, ageless, utterly enigmatic. To her. And better that way. If she believed half the things told of him she’d be too scared to approach him at all.

  “I wasn’t sent up here to rake muck, but I have a feeling there’s some of it around.”

  “And Mr. Alexander does cherish an occasional splash of investigative reportage—to clear his palate, as it were.”

  “Mmmm.” What else could she say?

  “Give me an hour,” Romano said, and the phone clicked off.

  Julie bought a Post and caught a bus that would put her down outside the Daily building. The page three story of Jay’s death had the usual Post fillip: a picture of the bagged body being loaded into the mortuary vehicle. The heading read: Theater Publicist Dies in Hudson Plunge.

  Shortly after midnight, popular Broadway publicist J. P. Phillips walked halfway across the George Washington Bridge intent on suicide. He succeeded. A motorist with a CB transmitter in his car saw him hurtle over the railing and alerted the police. The Coast Guard was on the scene within minutes, but it was not until dawn that the body was recovered several miles downstream.

  Reached late this morning, Michael Dorfman, producer of three shows on which Phillips was currently working, said he could not imagine why the publicist would take his own life.

  “Jay was one of the best-liked men in show business,” Dorfman said. “I am shocked and saddened. Why would he do a thing like this?”