Alice sniffed, and the vituperation began to thin out. She had to stop altogether to use a Kleenex. After a moment or two, she said, “I’ve blown it, haven’t I? I didn’t mean to talk about her. I know you’re friends.”
“You haven’t blown anything,” Julie said. “But we’ve got to talk about Patti Royce—if she’s part of what happened to Tony. You could at least tell me as much as you told the police.”
“What I told them was supposed to be confidential.”
“Nothing you tell them or me is going to hurt Tony now.”
“Won’t help him either, will it?” Alice said and blew her nose again. Fran had said the same thing. “I told the police she was somebody he saw regularly. He’d helped her get a job in this film, Celebration. I said I didn’t know if they were lovers, and I don’t.”
“Do you remember when it started between them?”
“I think the first I knew about it was when he was helping her with the part. It was about a retarded girl. I came across some pages of the screenplay—in the back of the sofa where they’d slipped down behind the cushions.”
“Who sent him the script? Do you know?”
Alice shook her head. “I never even saw it or heard about it till it was in production. Tony called it a sleeper when he talked about it, ‘our little sleeper.’ And believe it or not, Julie, I used to hear him mention P.R. on the telephone—once even to your husband, if I’m not mistaken—and I thought he was talking about public relations. Then I caught on, and all of a sudden things seemed to come together.”
The reference to Jeff wasn’t lost on Julie, but she pressed Alice to remember: “What kind of things?”
“Well, him making an appointment with his lawyer and saying something like, ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ in other words not wanting to talk in front of me. And he would make dates to meet people here when I wasn’t going to be in the office.”
“With whom besides P.R.?”
“I just don’t know. They never went into his regular appointment book.”
“Could I see the appointment book?” Julie asked.
“When Lieutenant Marks returns it.”
Nothing came easy. “How about the screening of Celebration on Friday: was that in the book?”
“Only the address I jotted down. Miss P.R. herself called while Tony was at his gun club. ‘Tell him we’re screening the picture at the Eleven Hundred at five o’clock this afternoon. Tell him I’ll be there. This is Patti Royce speaking.’ Right out in the open. And I swear the way she said it, she’d been practicing in front of the mirror. Practicing to be a star.”
“She was a star once,” Julie said. “A child star.”
“She sounds as though she’s practicing to be a child too.”
“Keep that up and you’ll get a by-line,” Julie said. “When did you give Tony the message?”
“After Mrs. Alexander had left.”
“Also after you’d reserved the table for them at the Samovar?”
“Yes.”
“It makes you wonder,” Julie said, “if whatever delayed him in his date with Fran wasn’t set up at the screening.”
TWENTY-THREE
SHE WENT DOWNSTAIRS TO see the editor of the Sunday magazine section, Ray Duggan. When she started to introduce herself, Duggan waved her down. “I know who you are,” he said. He was what was left of an old-fashioned newspaperman: a palsied hand, a strong lead paragraph, and a preference for language over jargon.
“Any chance of selling you a story on the comeback of a child star?”
“How far back has she come, and how well-known was she compared, say, to Shirley Temple?”
“She did a couple of plays and a movie that wasn’t great. But now she has a lot going for her.”
“Such as?”
“A daytime television series and a new movie called Celebration.”
Duggan ran his hand through his thinning hair, parting it in five places. “What’s her name?”
“Patti Royce.”
“I remember her. The play was Autumn Tears, am I right? She seduced the man who was driving the other car in an accident. From her wheel chair, which looked more like a perambulator.” Duggan made a face. “A terrible play. The movie was even worse. Sorry, Julie, but I must be one in a hundred thousand who’d remember her.”
Julie took a deep breath. “It’s bound to come out soon that she was romantically involved with Tony Alexander at the time of his death.”
Duggan looked at her mournfully. “Girl, when are you going to learn to put your lead in the first paragraph?”
Duggan’s assignment gave her “Feature” status for which she felt the need in order to get through to Patti Royce. She went next to the advertisement department to see if space had been bought for Celebration. A one-eighth page ad was scheduled for the following Sunday, the ad already made up. Julie got a copy of the proof and took it upstairs with her.
While she studied it, Alice looked over her shoulder. You couldn’t tell what Patti looked like from half a face—the other half had gone to black—one eye and that half-closed and half a sulky mouth. The ad was headed: The Story of an Unforgiven Sin. Celebration was due to open at the Spectrum, on Friday—that would be a week from the following Friday.
Alice pointed to the bottom line: This picture is unrated.
“It looks like a ‘Z’ to me,” Julie said.
Between incoming phone calls she read the credits to Alice. The office had come alive. Our Beat was making its own way.
“Ever hear of Venture Films?” Julie asked.
“I can’t remember. Like somebody’s name being Smith or Jones.”
“How about Romulus Productions?” Listed as coproducers.
“Why don’t I call the Film Board?”
“Let me try it another way first,” Julie said. She called the Eleven Hundred and asked for their schedule of screenings. Among the day’s showings was Celebration at five. Her appointment with Dr. Callahan was at three.
TWENTY-FOUR
“I’M NOT A CONSULTING engineer,” the doctor said. “I cannot say to you, add this much pressure to that much jealousy and you will reach the point of combustion.”
“I understand, Doctor. But I’m not very good on mothers and daughters as you may remember, and I guess that’s why I wanted to talk with you.”
“You are still guessing?”
“That is the reason,” Julie amended. Doctor Callahan hadn’t changed much. She looked a little older and her hair was a different shade of brown, confirming the tint job Julie had always suspected, but her psychiatry was as precise as ever.
“I would rather talk about you,” she said.
“I’m fine,” Julie said.
“You are working?”
“In the same job for a year on the very day Jeff left for Paris. That’s when all these things began to happen.”
“He went to Paris again without you?”
“He often does, Doctor.”
“And you are asking about jealousy? Or don’t you care?”
“I sometimes wonder if there’s someone, but I’d rather not know.” Just like that: she had said something of which she had not been aware until in the therapist’s presence.
“It is a way of coping, yes?”
Julie nodded.
“Do you make enough money to support yourself?”
“Yes, but not in the style to which I’ve become accustomed.”
“Good. I am glad you have become accustomed to something besides pimps and prostitutes. How is your friend, the gentleman gangster?”
Julie smiled. She very nearly laughed aloud.
“What?”
“You are a Jewish mother.”
She gave a great shrug. “I have children and I am Jewish. What else could I be? I am also the wife of a man named Callahan. We are in America, yes?”
“Forgive me,” Julie said.
“For what? Admitting your curiosity? Let me say this about jealousy. It is
a most natural thing, but like so many natural things we do, we are ashamed. And therefore we try to suppress it or to hide it. I am more fascinated by the girl than by the mother. Is it possible that she too wanted this man for herself? That from childhood she was doing tricks to make him pay attention to her? And if you are right that the mother was obsessive about him, it might explain why she kept the child away so much of the time. So now you have a lesbian—you understand, I am not talking about cause and effect—I am saying you have this girl with a devotion to an older woman. Who nevertheless comes post haste when her step-father says her mother needs her. Does she come for that reason or because he asks her to come? And when she gets here, why did he want her? So he can escape to another woman, a girl her own age, while she quarrels with the mother? These are all questions. I have no answers. I should like to know how she fantasized about him. This violation you describe, when she was eleven: It is interesting that she would say she was never innocent. But this violation, is it possible she wanted her step-father in that situation?”
“I don’t think so, Doctor.”
“It is far out, yes?”
Julie nodded.
“In any case, child molesters are almost always impotent.”
“No kidding,” Julie said.
Doctor Callahan frowned and Julie silently composed the unspoken retort for her: if you are grown-up, speak like it.
What the doctor said was: “All the same, you might be surprised if you could break into her fantasy. What is there unfinished that she chops up a dead man’s portrait?”
“You don’t buy the idea of her trying to draw the police’s attention away from her mother?”
“I would buy that she was trying to draw attention to herself, yes. Something does not ring true: if she hated him so much, why not celebrate the divorce? Mother and daughter against the world?”
“Because her mother wasn’t about to accept her in that role.”
“Role,” the doctor repeated almost contemptuously. “Everyone is acting, including the mother. She might not tell the daughter who her husband was involved with—but not to want to know herself? That is ridiculous. Believe me, she knows.”
“But, Doctor, when I said I’d rather not know if Jeff had someone, you said it was a way of coping.”
“I asked if it was a way of coping. Situations differ. I will not comment. Needs differ, people differ.” The doctor was becoming exercised, a rare experience for Julie. “It is all fanciful, this conversation of ours. And very unprofessional of me. I would like to help you, but don’t you see that I could be doing you more harm than good?”
“No. This is the environment of discovery,” Julie said. “I am not taking anything literally, just trying to expand on what I do know. In the end it will be the police who decide on whether there’s enough evidence to make an arrest, and the evidence will not be fanciful. It will go to things like witnesses and opportunity and a lot about those two revolvers.” Julie told her then of Tony’s secretary’s tirade against Fran. “We’ve talked a lot here about jealousy, Doctor. But I keep thinking that if jealousy was the motive, Tony’s killer would have wanted to get both him and his friend.”
“His paramour?”
“His paramour.” That was one Julie was not likely to have come up with on her own.
“Then she, the wife, let’s say, would have surrendered to the police and would now throw herself on the mercy of the court,” the doctor summarized, “and she would be acquitted: classic French justice. But in America, remember Scarsdale. Does she have a lover?”
“No, no, no,” Julie said.
“It is not unheard of that women take lovers to get their husbands back.”
“Does it work?”
“I am told so, but I would not look to it for a lasting cure. Why do you smile?”
“I was remembering when you used to say, ‘I am not a marriage counselor.’”
“It is true. But neither do I break up marriages unless it is a last resort. There are reasons people marry one another. The reasons are much harder to change than the partner, but it is the reasons that concern me.”
“Fran married Tony twenty years ago. According to Eleanor she left Eleanor’s father to do it. Then he was killed. Eleanor thinks her mother had terrible guilt.”
“How old was Eleanor then?”
“An infant.”
“So how could she know about her mother’s guilt?”
“It’s a Catholic thing.”
“Pah!” The sound of scorn. “That tells me nothing unless you put it in the context of the human being, a very long process. What about this Tony Alexander? He was a friend of your husband’s. What does your husband say about him?”
“I don’t think he’s been entirely frank with me about Tony. It’s funny: I didn’t know until the other day that he resented my asking Tony for a job without consulting him first.”
“Does that give you anxiety?”
“No.”
“Good,” the doctor said.
“You’re right, though. I don’t know enough about Tony. I don’t know if he was married before. I didn’t know until Fran told me—or else I deliberately forgot—that he was Jeff’s best man when he married Felicia.”
“I thought we were going to get through the hour without her name coming up.”
Julie gazed across the room and said, “I wouldn’t have felt I got my money’s worth, Doctor.”
The doctor gave a curt nod, seeming not to have found Julie’s response as amusing as she had intended. She released the brake on her analyst’s chair, the old signal. “I would ask you one question: why don’t you leave it to the police?”
“Because I am a newspaperwoman.”
“Brava! I like that answer.”
Julie repressed the impulse to modify, to explain. And when she left the doctor’s office, she believed it herself. It was the best session she had ever had. Lying on a couch with your toes in the air was for the birds. Dead birds.
TWENTY-FIVE
JULIE WAITED TILL THE last minute to go upstairs to the screening room at 1100 Sixth Avenue. She slipped in, no questions asked, just before the door closed. The overhead lights were a sickly amber making the selected audience look like hepatitis victims. The scented deodorizer failed to cover the smell of stale tobacco.
Selecting the nearest seat in an empty row, Julie found herself behind a woman sitting alone in the next row, a seat away from the aisle. As soon as Julie was seated the woman, a vivid blonde, turned to speak to her.
“Good evening. I hope you enjoy the picture.” Her large eyes brimmed with friendliness. Her eyebrows and lashes were dramatically dark in contrast to the blond hair. And you could tell from the inflection she had repeated the greeting many times.
Julie murmured her thanks and said she expected to enjoy it.
“My brother is one of the producers,” the woman volunteered.
“Miss…?”
“Mrs. Conti.”
As the lights began to dim, Mrs. Conti faced forward. Then she turned and said, “Tell me later if you think the picture should be given an X-rating.”
Was she for or against it, Julie wondered. The advertisement said the picture had not been rated. The viewers, perhaps fifty of them in the middle section of the theater, shared a camaraderie that suggested common employment, and Julie didn’t think it was in show business. She touched the woman’s shoulder. “Who’s the showing for, Mrs. Conti?”
“Beauticians. People Ron invited through the Convention Bureau.”
The sound was coming up, country fiddle.
“And you?” Mrs. Conti said over her shoulder in the now darkened house.
Julie said that she worked for the New York Daily. She wasn’t sure Mrs. Conti had heard her until the woman gave a tardy and thoughtful “Huh.”
A long-waisted man took the aisle seat alongside Mrs. Conti. Julie moved over a seat to better see the screen. She could also see the man better when lights came up on the screen,
a hard young face with a long nose. Similar to Mrs. Conti’s she noticed in their brief tête à tête.
On the screen the credits ran over a birthday cake with candles while, off-camera, three unharmonious male voices sang, “Happy Birthday.” The camera pulled back to show the birthday girl, Patti Royce, who looked like a child and was so made up and costumed, very blue eyes wide with wonder, brown curls—Julie’d had a doll once with curls just like hers…
Cut to the men: a middle-aged, tired looking father you knew had dandruff and false teeth; the boy also with very blue eyes and straw-colored hair, the wholesome type: father, son and daughter. She had seen the actor who played the father many times; finally, among the principals there was the stranger who looked like, but wasn’t, Jon Voight.
Cut to Patti, mouth puckered, cheeks puffed. Her brother moved into the frame and helped her blow out the candles. The producers’ and director’s credits appeared as Patti cut the cake. Close-up: Patty in deep concentration. Her tongue appeared at the corner of her mouth just for an instant, a quick pink dart. There were whistles from the audience.
The picture was good and Julie became involved. Patti Royce was a perfect twelve-year-old twenty, whose younger brother caught up with and passed her in school work, and protected her from the taunts of the kids who lived around the small-town lumber yard and called her “Dummy.” The incest theme was muted and therefore stronger, and the brother’s jealousy of the stranger more threatening. The bible-reading father was played by a good actor: you hated his rigidity, but at the same time he broke your heart because you knew his was breaking.
The last frames of Celebration showed Patti rocking a doll in a living room desolate of a woman’s care while her father read aloud from the Book of Ruth. The stranger was dead, the brother was wanted for his murder. When the lights came up, most of the women in the audience were dabbing at their eyes.
Lullaby of Murder Page 13