Lullaby of Murder

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  The bus garage idea was apparently before his time, thought Julie. Otherwise what he was saying jibed with the information Romano had given her.

  “Now you may not know it, ma’am, but it’s my philosophic belief and my geographic cure for some of the ills of the city that we can save it by saving the neighborhoods, and I’m by no means convinced that having chunks of city real estate gobbled up by the university complex is going to save the neighborhood for the people who live there. I’m an advocate of the small, privately owned business that services its own community. And I had a feeling that Mr. Butts might come up with something enterprising, and the very least that could happen, I figured, was he’d hold the property in place, you might say, till we see what happens to that wasteland to the east of it.

  “For another thing, if Jay Phillips had faith in him, and I know for a fact that he did—he co-signed eighty thousand dollars’ worth of notes, which is a fair amount of faith by my arithmetic—it was high enough recommendation for me. So, to make a long story short, I went to this city board and that one, and the deal went through. As I said before, I don’t think there’s a dishonest penny anywhere down the line. Not everybody could renovate a building for eighty thousand dollars these days, and not everybody’d want to renovate that one. But if anybody asks you what a dance pavilion’s doing on a million dollar property that belongs to the city, you ask them about the millions and millions of dollars’ worth of city property with nothing sitting on it but a burnt-out shell of bricks.”

  “I see what you mean,” Julie said, and thanked him for talking so frankly with her.

  McCord got up when she did. “I talk straight, Mrs. Hayes. Sometimes I talk too much like most politicians, but you can count on it being straight.”

  “Did you meet Tony at the mayor’s party?”

  “No. Didn’t really want to, to tell the truth. When he came in Butts went straight up and introduced himself. By then he was on his own. I congratulated the mayor and went home to my supper.”

  “Did Butts recognize Tony himself?”

  “His picture’s been running in the paper every day for as long as I can remember,” McCord said.

  “Yes, of course,” Julie said. Back at square one again.

  FOURTEEN

  A GREAT CHANGE HAD come over the Alexander apartment in a few hours. A woman Julie didn’t recognize opened the door. The place looked trampled through or as though an auction had been held there with everything sold in place and now waiting to be carted away. The doors off the foyer, generally open, were closed. The woman was a detective, Julie realized as she followed her to the dining room—a solid person in a dark blue suit and carrying a shoulder bag. The remains of a buffet meal lay on the long table, the salads wilted, the butter soft, cold meats beginning to curl and discolor. Luncheon plates, some with the food on them scarcely touched, had been returned to the table. A big man with luminous eyes and hearty mustache came to meet them.

  Detective Jane Lawler introduced herself and her partner, Joe Ferretti.

  Eleanor rushed from the kitchen and then stopped with almost comic abruptness.

  Julie looked at the detectives: they were tensed as though ready to intervene if the girl had gone further.

  “Something’s happened here since this morning. What?”

  “They’ve taken mother away. I don’t know what they’re going to do about me.”

  The detectives had nothing to say.

  Julie put her carry-all on a chair and suggested to Eleanor that they clean up.

  “I’ve been trying, but I don’t seem to get anywhere.”

  When everything from the table was in the kitchen, Eleanor closed the door. Detective Lawler opened it and set the doorstop in place. She and her partner sat in the chairs nearest the kitchen. There was nothing to do but ignore them. “Do you know where your mother is?” Julie asked.

  “She went to the shop with Inspector Fitzgerald and some other detectives. Some of them stayed here and started questioning people. Everybody cleared out so fast you’d have thought it was a bomb scare.”

  “Then what?” Julie put the meats and cheeses on one plate and covered it with plastic wrap.

  “It got down to them and me.” She indicated the detectives who were dividing a newspaper between them. “They kept getting a lot of gibberish over their intercom system and then Detective Lawler asked me to fix an overnight bag for my mother which the police would pick up. I don’t know where she is and if they know they won’t tell me.”

  Julie’s guess was that the trip to the shop had to do with the other revolver, the mate to Tony’s. Except that they would have picked that up the night before, suspecting that the guns might have been switched. “I assume she’s been in touch with her lawyer?”

  “Yes. He telephoned me and said I wasn’t to talk with anyone unless he was present. But that doesn’t mean you.”

  “It might,” Julie said. She scraped the dishes, rinsed them and handed them one at a time to Eleanor to put in the dishwasher.

  “If only I knew where mother was I’d be more together, you know?”

  “I’ll see if I can find out,” Julie said. “Do you know the lawyer’s name?”

  “I forget his name. He was Tony’s lawyer.”

  “Then I can find out through the office.”

  “If I need a lawyer will you find one for me?”

  That seemed strange from a couple of angles. Julie looked at the girl, who was avoiding her eyes. “Do you expect that to happen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to tell me why?”

  “I can’t prove where I was last night. Mother told the police I was here, but I wasn’t actually. I went to a movie. I went to see Stevie again.”

  Again, Julie noted. “Same theater?”

  Eleanor nodded. “I always cry. It’s so beautiful.”

  “I know.”

  “You saw it?”

  Julie said that she had.

  “I love the aunt more than any character I’ve ever seen in any picture,” Eleanor said.

  Julie put the detergent into the machine. She sneezed several times.

  Detective Lawler called out, “God bless you.”

  “Thank you.” She remembered the cold she had thought she was getting. Aborted. “The police will find someone who saw you at the movie, Eleanor.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “If you were there.”

  Eleanor finally looked at her. Was the girl trying to build a case against herself? She had shed no tears for Tony, not in Julie’s presence. “Julie, would you stay here with me tonight?”

  “I’m not sure I can. I’ve got things I must do.”

  “Night clubs and previews and things like that?”

  “None of those things. They’re not important right now.”

  “Are they ever?”

  “Yes, relatively and sometimes.” The dishes were in the machine helter-skelter, big plates, little ones, cups, more plates, glasses…. She began to rearrange them.

  “What difference does it make how they’re arranged?” Eleanor wanted to know. “A dishwasher is not a work of art.”

  Julie pondered this a moment and then closed the washer door and sent the machine on its way. The dining room table hadn’t been a work of art either. She made a pot of coffee. Eleanor sat on a stool and watched her. Neither of them spoke. When the coffee was ready she poured herself a cup and then took some out to the detectives. Eleanor said she never drank coffee. When Julie proposed to make a few phone calls, the girl asked if anyone minded if she lay down for a while. Nobody did, but when she went through the foyer and on to the guest room, turning on lights as she went, Detective Lawler followed and lugged along a chair from the foyer which she set down opposite Eleanor’s room. Again, when the girl closed the door the detective opened it.

  Julie turned to Ferretti who had joined the procession. “Is she not to be left alone? How come?”

  He opened the living room door and beck
oned Julie to follow him. She waited while he found the light switch. When the lights came on she saw what he had brought her in to see: the portrait of Tony hung in strips, slashed through.

  “Did she do it?”

  “She sure did.”

  “When?”

  “A couple of hours ago. My partner and I were having a bite to eat out there.”

  Strange to do it now, Julie thought, with the man already dead. She asked the cop for an opinion: “Real or acting, do you think?”

  “It’s some kind of real no matter what.”

  Julie stayed in the living room to make her calls. Service first. Saturday night: she reached no one by phone except Alice Arthur whose mother called her from the kitchen where she was doing dishes. How many men were doing dishes at this hour, Julie wondered in a sudden burst of irrationality. She got the attorney’s name from Alice: Allan Zimmerman. Was Allan Zimmerman washing dishes? She marched out to the kitchen with her empty coffee cup. Joe Ferretti was at the sink washing his and Detective Lawler’s cups and saucers.

  FIFTEEN

  “BUT WHY?”

  Eleanor, her back against the headboard, drew up her knees and clasped her hands around them. “I don’t know, except that it made me furious to look at it, that same superior sneer. And they’d taken mother away without any explanation. The paper knife was lying on the table. I hated Tony. There’s no secret about that.”

  “Not now anyway,” Julie said. “How do you think Fran’s going to feel?”

  “I haven’t let myself think about that.”

  “All right,” Julie said. “It’s done.”

  “Would you have taken it away if I’d asked you to?”

  “It’s Fran’s picture, Eleanor. Not yours and certainly not mine. But to answer your question, no. I had my own troubles once, getting rid of a portrait I didn’t like.” Julie thought back: hours of agony over the subject, but the idea of destroying it had never crossed her mind.

  “What did you do about it?” Eleanor wanted to know.

  “About two years of psychiatry. But it was the picture I hated, not what it represented. Actually, it was the artist, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was a portrait of my husband painted by his first wife.”

  “You think I’ve done something terrible, don’t you?”

  Julie shrugged. “Have you always felt this way about Tony?”

  “For as long as I can remember.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Oh, yes. And it wasn’t because my mother loved him more than she did me.”

  “It wasn’t,” Julie said skeptically.

  “I know: There are different kinds of love.” That sounded like a quotation and it was. “Mother took me to a child psychiatrist, but I wouldn’t talk to him.”

  “That’s one place you don’t get very far if you don’t talk. Not that I’m all that sure you get someplace when you do talk. It depends on the individual—and faith.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think I do and I’ve been trying all my life.”

  Julie kicked off her shoes and folded her legs into the lotus position, sitting on the other bed. Detective Lawler returned to her chair in the hallway, having used the bathroom off the master bedroom. “I don’t think it’s something you get by trying,” Julie said, “and whatever I believe in isn’t a literal being—no long white beard or anything like that.”

  “Or dirty white mustaches?” Eleanor said.

  Julie didn’t say anything.

  “Where do you suppose mother is?”

  “We’ll hear from her soon,” Julie said, wishing she felt as confident as she tried to sound. When she had called Allan Zimmerman’s Eightieth Street residence all she learned was that he was with a client.

  “You won’t even say where you think she is?” Eleanor asked.

  “I think she’s with the police, but I think she’ll be home tonight.”

  “Then what about the overnight bag?”

  “I don’t know what that means.” But it implied a lot of possibilities that she wasn’t going to sort out in front of Eleanor: for one, that Fran was being held without bail, which meant that she had been arraigned.

  “Do you know what I think?” Eleanor said. “Asking me to pack a bag for her was psychological warfare. Meant to intimidate me. They think I’ll break down and confess. I’m the one they really suspect.”

  “That’s pretty subtle of them,” Julie said. “Did you have the opportunity? That’s one of the first questions.”

  “Yes. I knew he was back at the office. If nobody saw me at the movie they could say I wasn’t there. After all, I’d seen the picture before so I knew what it was all about. I knew when the show went on, and about the musical interlude.”

  “Eleanor, what are you trying to do?”

  “Maybe I was the one who killed him. People do things and then black out.”

  What she was trying to do, Julie reasoned, was to draw attention away from her mother. And that suggested the girl’s own fear of her mother’s guilt. The destruction of Tony’s portrait could be a deliberate attempt to draw suspicion on herself. If Eleanor had killed him, the picture business would have been anti-climactic, the need for violence sated. Or would it? Coming home to Tony as large as life, as real as Banquo’s ghost, and at his most malevolent if that was how you saw him. The portrait did have a Satanic quality, which was what Tony liked best about it.

  After a few seconds Eleanor said, “Tony wasn’t my real father. My father was killed just after mother and he were divorced. He was killed in a plane crash in the Egyptian desert.”

  And had become a legend, Julie thought, even as her own father had. It was a subject on which they could talk for hours and probably never come near the truth.

  “I was a year old. Mother must have felt very guilty about the divorce. She’d been raised a Catholic and the Church was stricter then. When my father died, she felt it was God’s vengeance on her for wanting to marry Tony.”

  “Is this your version or Fran’s?”

  “She wouldn’t admit it, not to me anyway. Don’t misunderstand. I love my mother…except when she makes me hate her.”

  Love-hate: Julie thought of the hours she had spent on Doctor Callahan’s couch trying to associate her way into understanding how she felt about her own mother.

  “Didn’t Tony adopt you, Eleanor?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he must have cared about you.”

  “He wanted mother to think so. What I remember most about him when I was small was me trying to get even with him for hurting me. He’d step on my foot—hard—and then pretend it was accidental. Or pull my hair and pretend it was caught in the buttons of his cuff. When I said he hurt me on purpose, mother didn’t believe me. It wasn’t until I started making things up about him that she really listened to me. They were horrid things, mostly pertaining to the bathroom. It’s all so disgusting.”

  “It’s symptomatic,” Julie said. “It means something.”

  “Then you believe me?”

  “Yes.” She did believe that the girl herself thought Tony had hurt her on purpose.

  “When I was seven they sent me to live with my grandmother, I kept thinking about her when I saw the picture Stevie. If Granny had lived we could have been like that, and I do write poetry although it isn’t very good. I loved Granny and the farm from the first minute. But she got sick and the farm had to be sold and when I was ten I was sent to boarding school. I’ve been away at school or summer camp ever since. With tiny little duty visits from mother.

  “I used to pretend to myself that the reason she stayed with Tony was because he provided money to take care of me, but she started The Basil Pot with her inheritance from Granny and made lots of money herself…. Did you ever read a poem called Isabella, or the Basil Pot?”

  “Morbid,” Julie said.

  Eleanor smiled, a tight, wicked little smile, so that Julie could envision the
child who made up stories about her stepfather. A child’s vengeance: It was something that would forever fascinate her. That was truly the loss of innocence, more surely than the instance of a child’s victimization.

  “It isn’t that I didn’t try to like Tony or to make him like me. I’d come here summers sometimes, but after a week or so it just didn’t work. All this sounds as though I’m sorry for myself. I’m not, but I do take myself too seriously. You were right.”

  Someone else must have said that, Julie thought, but she let it pass. She unfolded her legs.

  “Please don’t go.”

  “I ought to,” Julie said. “I was hoping Fran would come before I had to leave.”

  “A little while longer,” Eleanor pleaded. Then an instant reversal: “Oh, damn it, go if you have to. I hate myself when I beg.”

  Julie slipped off the bed and into her shoes. “We all beg sometimes. You shouldn’t hate yourself.”

  “I feel like a child when I do it. I think of myself as a child, ugly, dirty-minded and whiny, something even a mother couldn’t love.”

  “Maybe once you were an ugly duckling,” Julie said, “and you know what happened to her.”

  “Was it a her?”

  “Why not?”

  Eleanor smiled. Her face was beautiful then, her eyes warm, intelligent. Julie held her hand out to her, her left hand to be clasped sidewise. Eleanor lifted it to her cheek, then brushed it with her lips.

  Julie kissed the top of her head. Eleanor’s vein grew prominent in her shyness and need for affection. “What are you doing here in New York?” Julie asked. “Hasn’t school started?”

  “Yes, but when Tony called and said my mother needed me, I got here as fast as I could.”

  “When?”

  “He called on Tuesday and I got here Wednesday. And wouldn’t you know, mother was furious? With me.”

  “And did she need you?”

  “Not so that she’d admit it at first…. Julie, can she hear me?” She nodded toward the detective.