Lullaby of Murder (13 page)

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.”

J
ULIE 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 the 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.

“Julie, mother says she’ll take us out to dinner if you’ll come too. Please do. It’s terrible waiting for something to happen—just the two of us—as though we were in a cage together.”

The thought of sitting with them in a crowded restaurant shouting above the din—or in a quiet restaurant whispering lest they be overheard—was too much. “How about this? Come down to our apartment on Sixteenth Street—Fran knows—and I’ll have my Greek friend, Gus, deliver his specialty of the day? Ask Fran if that’s okay.”

It was okay.

Julie sat at her desk and closed her eyes. Her old mantra came to mind from the days of meditation: it was a sound from the sea, the sibilant sound of the waves when they had spent themselves on the shore and slowly crawled back to their source. She listened for it in her mind’s ear, and with its gradual coming came serenity.

It was shattered by a sharp rat-tat-tat at the door. She went to the front window and looked out through a sliver of space between the drapes. There, his umbrella poised for another assault on the door, was Morton Butts. Julie took her time going to the door. If he’d come to her he wanted something, but that in turn should tell her something.

“You do remember me, Mrs. Hayes…Morton Butts?” His smile was quick and tentative as she opened the door. “I hope you don’t mind that I dropped in this way. It took some coaxing to get your address out of Mrs. Ryan.”

Julie stifled the impulse to say that Mrs. Ryan also had her phone number, and invited him in. Only as far as the outer room, however, offering one of the two chairs where the only lamp shone between them. He sat forward with the umbrella between his knees. He kept his top coat on, the collar turned up.

“May I offer my sympathy on the death of Mr. Alexander?”

Julie thanked him and waited. A fiery little man, whom Mrs. Ryan had taken to despite the born-again Christian handicap. Why? And why did she herself so dislike him? It wasn’t her usual way.

“I could be the last person who saw him alive. Except one, that is.”

“Really,” Julie murmured.

Butts blinked his eyes. “How have I offended you, Mrs. Hayes?”

“You haven’t. I got into trouble with Tony over my piece on the dance marathon, and I still don’t understand why.”

“It’s not your thing, that’s all,” he suggested, cheerful the instant she bent forward. “I can tell you, he didn’t think you did me justice. I didn’t think so myself. So, what occurred to me, why don’t you and I go over the story together?”

“Did Tony give you the copy?”

“No, he didn’t.” Mr. Butts’ nose gave a little twitch. “Isn’t it in the office?”

“Not that I know of.”

“It was right on his desk when I left. The police could have it, don’t you think? I don’t like to think of it floating into the hands of an evil-doer. You made some very strong innuendos in the last part of it.”

“It was meant for Tony only. I wasn’t suggesting that we go public with it in that form.” What she still couldn’t imagine were the circumstances under which Tony would have shown him the piece in the first place. Unless to challenge him on the property deal? Or had Tony got hold of Phillips’ financial support of the little entrepreneur? As Alice said of Tony, he always looked for self-serving behind the act of charity. But Phillips was dead by then. Of only one thing was Julie certain: Tony would not have spent forty minutes on nostalgia.

“I’d like to explain how I came by the Garden of Roses if you’re thinking of re-doing the piece,” Butts said.

“How did you know the column was going to continue?”

“I called the city desk. There’s no grass growing between my toes, Mrs. Hayes. But I ran up against something in the contestants I hadn’t prepared myself for.”

“Drugs,” Julie said.

“That’s it. I wondered, you living in this community, it didn’t strike you in the first place. But Mr. A. said you could walk through hell without getting even a hotfoot.”

So, Julie thought, if Tony had filed a card on her that’s how it would have read—another of his spiritual types. She supposed she’d known it all along, but it was depressing nonetheless.

“I admire that, you know,” Butts said, reading her like a printout. “In any case, I’m going to offer any of the dance registrants who have a drug problem an incentive to admit it, to kick the habit and start their rehabilitation right then and there during the marathon. I’m going to put them on television to tell their story, and I’m going to find sponsors for that television show. Tony Alexander said he’d do something special for us. He thought he might do some of the interviewing on the air.”

“Interesting,” Julie murmured. Again she was trying to see Tony as Butts described him. She knew for a fact that Tony did not like the image he projected on television: he’d tried it several times and wound up growling that he came across like a nursing home Gene Shalit. And it was crazy that Jay Phillips, who certainly knew the New York scene, would not have anticipated the drug problem in the first place. “What comes after the dance marathon, Mr. Butts?”

“Ah, that is the question, isn’t it? What a smart girl you are! I think the marathon is going to catch on all over the country and maybe we can tie in everywhere the idea of dancing away the drug habit. I’d like to do it on the basis of good old-fashioned patriotism, do-it-yourself, America! I know you think I talk in clichés and I do. Clichés are the only truths I know.”

“All right,” Julie said. Mr. Butts was beginning to get to her. And maybe he got to Tony, who had a strong conservative streak right down his middle.

“Would you be willing to do some of the interviewing for us on the T.V.? I understand you have a theatrical background. I like your voice and I like that nice open face of yours. I don’t think we’d agree on everything, but…what’s the matter?”