Lullaby of Murder

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

“She thinks she’s a suspect,” Julie said.

  “She is. There’s something she’s not telling us either. But we’ll get to it. That’s where you could help.” He held up his hand as Julie was about to protest. “Not as an informant. As a persuader. If she thinks we don’t believe her, and she keeps saying that, encourage her to lay it all out. It’s our job to understand the incredible.”

  “The business of nobody believing her goes back to her childhood,” Julie said. “I’ll see what I can do. I know some pretty decent cops and I’ll tell her that.”

  “Thank you!” Marks laughed at the modest compliment.

  “I hope it doesn’t close her up even tighter.”

  “If it does we’ll shake her loose—the hard way. The inspector is a bulldog.”

  As the waiter approached with Marks’ second drink, Julie thought back to Mrs. Ryan and her triumphant cry on providing information Julie hadn’t known: “Then I’ve earned my supper!” She wondered if she had earned hers.

  Marks took a long pull at his cigarette and then put it out. “Do you know an actress named Patti Royce?”

  Julie’s heart gave a leap. “I’ve heard of her.”

  “She’s in a new picture called Celebration. It was screened for Alexander before he went on to the mayor’s party.”

  “A special screening?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “I wonder if Jay Phillips was supposed to do the publicity,” Julie said after a moment’s thought.

  Marks sighed. “Phillips again.”

  “I don’t know that he was. It just went through my mind. Who are the producers?”

  “A company called Venture Films.”

  “I never heard of them, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “And Patti Royce: you have heard of her.”

  “She’s in a new soap opera—a one-time child star making a comeback. I tried to get an interview with her last Thursday, but I couldn’t get past her agent.”

  “On assignment from Alexander?”

  “On my own initiative.”

  “Mere coincidence?” Talk about a bulldog.

  “It seemed like a good item for the column.” At least part of the truth.

  “Did you discuss it with the boss?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Any particular reason you didn’t?”

  “I didn’t get a chance. Besides, that’s not how we worked. If Tim or I got hold of something useful, we’d research it, write it up, turn it in and pray.”

  “I see,” Marks said. “But if you didn’t get a chance to talk with the boss, doesn’t that mean that the idea was a recent one? In other words, Miss Royce had only, within a day or so, shall we say, come to your attention. Or am I wrong?”

  Part bulldog, part fox.

  “I met an actress who’d played her mother in a Broadway play ten years ago,” Julie said. “Jay Phillips was the press agent. During the run his wife committed suicide. She jumped from the building where Patti Royce lived.”

  “I see,” Marks said. “You were working the Phillips connection.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not knowing of the possibility of an Alexander connection?”

  “With Patti Royce? Is there one?”

  Marks looked at her wistfully over the top of his glass and then drank down the whisky. “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  SEVENTEEN

  SLEEP SIMPLY WOULD NOT come. The day’s discoveries—or deceptions—kept repeating themselves in her tired mind, changing in juxtaposition but refusing to go away. She turned over onto her back and stared at the ceiling: charcoal grey in the middle of the night. On the therapist’s couch she’d had a terrible time getting into associations. Now she couldn’t turn them off.

  She lit the lamp beside the phone. When her eyes became accustomed to the light she dialed Mary Ryan, who was always saying to phone her at any hour.

  “I THOUGHT MAYBE you’d called me today while I was out with the dog. He’s such a burden, poor thing, but he won’t use the papers. He must be the only dog in New York who won’t go on the Daily in an emergency. How are you, dear? I’ve been thinking about you all day. What are you doing up at this hour?”

  “I can’t sleep. Too much has happened.”

  “It’s terrible about your Mr. Alexander. You wouldn’t have wanted that to happen to him, no matter what.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t,” Julie said.

  “That’s what I told the two detectives who came by to check your alibi.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing they didn’t ask, you may be sure. I said I wasn’t a bit surprised at you walking alone in the rain at night, but you know, Julie, and you coming down with a cold…”

  “I’m fine,” Julie said.

  “What I wanted to tell you, I went to the Phillips funeral after all, and I met your Mr. Butts. He’s a born-again Christian, so I don’t think he could be Irish though you never know nowadays what they’re into. What a fiery little man!”

  “Is he a family friend or what?”

  “More a business associate of Mr. Phillips’, I think. He’s too exotic a bird for the sisters. He used to be part owner of a circus and travelled the world with it. We had grand talk, him and me, when we went back to the house after the service—we didn’t go to the cemetery—about the old days when people took responsibility for their own selves. When bootstraps were in fashion. Isn’t that a lovely turn of phrase, When bootstraps were in fashion?”

  “Very colorful,” Julie said. “What else did you talk about? Did he mention Tony?”

  “We talked about you.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “He felt you thought he was exploiting the contestants. You know, in the marathon dance? As though they’d enter it if they had anything better to do. What worries him is if drugs get into the picture: it’s part of the physical examination now to look for needle marks. Isn’t that horrible?”

  Julie agreed. “Nothing about Tony?”

  “I didn’t say nothing. He said his death was a terrible personal loss to him. He’d been counting on his support.”

  “What kind of support?”

  “It was my impression he meant moral support, both of them being do-it-yourself sorts. But I couldn’t very well ask, could I?”

  “What came up about Jay?” Who, according to Councilman McCord had co-signed eighty thousand dollars’ worth of notes for Butts. Speaking of moral support.

  “It was my impression, Julie, that Mr. Phillips was deeply in his debt. I got that mostly from the attitude of the sisters. They don’t like Mr. Butts, but they were kow-towing to him all the same. They turned very chilly toward me when they came back from the cemetery and saw the two of us together.”

  Yet the sisters had arranged with McCord to take Butts to the mayor’s party. He must have told them of their brother’s promise. And did they know of the co-signed notes? Eighty thousand dollars out of Jay’s estate if Butts went bust. As for the promoter’s going back to Tony’s office with him after the party, why hadn’t he told Mrs. Ryan about that? “When did he line up all this moral support from Tony—did he tell you?”

  “I don’t think he said. I got the impression they were buddies, but he’s like that, you know. He’s pals with everybody, especially the big shots to hear him tell it. But we know lots like him in show business now, don’t we?”

  Julie agreed.

  “The nicest thing about the whole day when you put it all together was Father Doyle’s sermon. You felt he was talking about a human being, not just reciting something out of a book. It made me proud to be in his parish.”

  “Father Doyle from St. Malachy’s?”

  “The same. After all, it’s the Catholic actors’ church and in the theater district.”

  “Of course,” Julie said, and her tired mind began turning over approaches to the priest on the life and death of Jay Phillips. She heard a stifled yawn at the other end of the line. “Go back to sl
eep, Mrs. Ryan. It was great to be able to talk to you.”

  “Any time, dear, but I’d better hang up before you-know-who wakes up and wants to go for a you-know-what.”

  EIGHTEEN

  THE PRIEST MADE A soft clucking sound when the infant screeched at the splash of water on its little bald head. He gave it back to its mother and continued the baptismal prayers while she tried to muffle the protest. The cries subsided, but from where Julie sat at the back of the church she couldn’t hear the prayers anyway.

  An altar boy took away the basin and Father Doyle came down the aisle with the family, a freckle-faced Irish lot, and as happy as from a wedding ceremony. The child, now in the state of God’s grace, was safe from the devil until he could do battle for himself. Julie wished she had such faith. And then there were times when she feared she might succumb to it falsely by the mere wish. She went to the steps and watched the priest where he waited with the family until one of the men in the party brought the car—a Chevrolet of age and dignity, as pristine as the flowing white baptismal gown, the train of which Father Doyle tucked in before he closed the car door. He took Julie’s hand when she went to meet him. His face was rounder and puffier than when she had last seen him, his hair thinner, and beneath the vestments his greening black cuffs were shinier. “I certainly do remember you, though I might not get the name right away. You were going to choose something for me to read by William Butler Yeats. You see, I remember his name at least,” he added slyly.

  Julie identified herself. Then: “My friend, Mary Ryan, said you preached a beautiful sermon yesterday at Jay Phillips’ funeral, and I wanted to ask you about him.”

  The priest sighed. “Mary Ryan is a great talker, isn’t she? All right, come back to the sacristy with me while I put away the vestments, thought I don’t know what I can tell you about the man.”

  “You don’t have many baptisms in St. Malachy’s, do you?” Julie said, not wanting to leap into a subject about which he seemed reluctant.

  “Not as many as we used to. But you’d be surprised.”

  They went past the entrance to what had once been the Actor’s Chapel in the church basement; it was now a seniors’ center. Closed: Sunday. “We’d have a hard time without the center,” the priest went on, “though what’ll happen now with the government tightening our belts for us, I’m not sure.”

  “I remember Mrs. Ryan was outraged when the center opened, taking over the chapel for a lot of old fogies.”

  “She’s still outraged—except when she wants a warm meal cheap and a few scraps from the kitchen for that corpulent canine of hers. There’s no snobbery like that of the poor toward one another.”

  In the sacristy he removed the stole from over his shoulders, touched it to his lips and laid it away in a long drawer. Julie asked him the name of the white, see-through vestment, hip length, that he lifted over his head: a surplice. He took her through to the rectory, to the same tiny square parlor they had sat in once before. The only change was two new popes on the wall. “If I wrote down my sermons I’d give you a copy, for the best things I knew about the man were in it. But I say a prayer and think about the departed, and the family sitting out there, wanting to hear the best, feeling guilty themselves about the worst, needing what consolation I can give them. Then I take off, and most of what comes out fits in. It’s not as though I was writing for a newspaper. Accuracy is not a requisite, thank God.”

  “I’d like to do something on him in our New York Daily column,” Julie said carefully.

  The priest looked at her a little sadly. “Why don’t you let him rest in peace?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of writing anything that would disturb him, Father Doyle.”

  “A figure of speech. Anyone who takes his own life goes to an uneasy grave.”

  “I wouldn’t want to distress the Phillips sisters either.”

  There was skepticism in the quick glance the priest gave her, but he nodded solemnly.

  Julie felt the color in her cheeks. “Also a figure of speech.”

  They both smiled.

  “Would you talk a little about Jay when you first knew him?” Julie asked.

  “It goes back quite a few years,” the priest said, “to when I married him to Ellen Duprey, an actress of sorts. That was before your time. He was a good deal older than her, and he suffered a bad case of scruples over it. She was a shy young woman.”

  “Hadn’t she been a nun?”

  “I don’t think she finished her novitiate, and many a girl has gone in and come out finding herself unsuited for the discipline. That’s what the novitiate is all about. But the two Phillips sisters made such a fuss about it when they found out, you’d have thought…well, I don’t know what you’d have thought. They’d had this one and that one in mind for him over the years, but the plain truth was they didn’t want him to marry at all. Look now, I’m talking gossip in spite of myself. You won’t use it?”

  “I won’t,” Julie said.

  “All I’m saying, he expected them to be pleased, one of their own kind, you might say. And as for the girl, well, he was a nice man and the theater is a hard place to make your way alone.”

  “You’re a nice man too, father,” Julie said.

  “It’s one of my many temptations.” He smiled broadly so that she saw that the missing back tooth had not been replaced.

  “You know that she was also a suicide,” Julie said.

  “I do know that.”

  “Did you say the funeral Mass for her, too?”

  “I didn’t,” he answered hastily, warily. Then, straightening up in his chair: “I’m not going into that, young lady, if that’s where you’re trying to lead me.”

  Which meant there was something there to be avoided, Julie thought. “I think my late employer, Tony Alexander, nosed out some scandal there and held it over Jay for the rest of his life.”

  “I know nothing,” the priest said.

  “I understand. I shouldn’t have come to you with the kind of questions I want to ask. It’s not scandal for its own sake that I’m after, Father Doyle—only for why Tony Alexander was murdered.”

  “Aren’t the police any help?”

  Julie had to laugh at herself. And to be honest. Her credentials were those of a gossip columnist.

  “I didn’t mean to put you down, now,” the priest said.

  “But you were right. I keep thinking of myself as some sort of crusader, and I’m not really.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, some of those crusaders were pretty rough fellows and they were absolutely sure that, as the song goes, they had God on their side.”

  “Father Doyle, did you meet a Mr. Butts at the funeral or at the house?”

  “A short, round man with a bounce to him?” Julie nodded. “I did meet him, and I know what made you think of him: he has God on his side.”

  “That’s it,” Julie said.

  “He introduced himself to me on the church steps. I’m always uncomfortable when somebody compliments me on a sermon for the dead. It generally means I’ve left out something important.”

  Julie grinned, but persisted: “Had you met him before—or heard about him?”

  The priest smiled happily. “I can truthfully say no to that one.”

  NINETEEN

  JULIE TRIED TO THROW OFF the feeling of sadness the priest had left her with. Eighth Avenue wasn’t the place to do it. The whores were out in their Sunday best. Missing, or otherwise occupied, was the red-headed girl who sang hymns of a Sunday as she high-hipped it along the avenue. “Holy God, we praise Thy name…” Did she pray to Mary Magdalen? Did Magdalen wind up a saint?

  She passed Kevin Bourke’s electrical shop, where every once in a while she visited the unfortunate man. A born victim, even or especially of himself. His temptation was boys, and since it was known on the street, a vicious band of young male prostitutes would taunt him and solicit and stand outside his shop and salute the cops as they drove slowly by, knowing damn well what th
e boys were about. Mr. Bourke lived at the Willoughby, and while his sin was known, so was his repentance. He was a source for awed gossip among Mrs. Ryan and her cronies, but like most of them he was in some way associated with the theater—in his case it was lighting equipment for the small amateur and semi-professional groups of the neighborhood—and therefore entitled to their protection. When the Willoughby management attempted to evict him after one of his episodic slips, Mary Ryan and friends blocked the hall until someone ran for Father Doyle to arbitrate the matter.

  Something in the Bourke story reminded her of Phillips, something aside from Father Doyle’s knowing them both. As soon as she reached the shop she got out her notebook and reviewed the entries about Phillips. There was his young wife’s suicide—the virginal young wife, ex-nun, who threw herself from the building where Patti Royce, child star, lived; Tony had noted it in the column. Someone at the Actors Forum remembered how Jay hated backstage mothers. Jay was fired from Little Dorrit, the child star of which, Abby Hill, was out for an appendectomy. Julie had her association: young boys, young girls. Could it be that Jay’s problem was very young girls? And did Tony know and torment him for it? Was that the issue? And how about Butts in this context? Eighty thousand dollars of co-signed notes and big time publicity for a small time operation.

  She phoned in for her messages. Several had piled up. Again she failed to make contact with Tim; Homicide had called to say that Alexander’s office would be available to them by noon on Monday; the police had sealed the celebrity file, however, which relieved her of one anxiety. She called Alice Arthur to come in Monday afternoon and asked her to try to reach Tim to let him know they had the office back. She sat a moment and thought of what it was going to be like to be responsible for three columns a week. It was a lot of copy, even for two people, when you considered what might get thrown out by Control Central—Editorial and the legal department. And she was going to have to learn to use the video data terminal.

  Panic.

  She made herself answer every call, the last to the Alexander apartment. Eleanor had phoned twice since noon. It was she who answered.