Scarlet Night Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS

  “Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —The Denver Post

  “Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —The Miami Herald

  “Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes, Los Angeles Times

  “A joyous and unqualified success.” —The New York Times on Death of an Old Sinner

  “An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —Daily Mirror (London) on Death of an Old Sinner

  “At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —The New York Times on A Gentleman Called

  “Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —Chicago Tribune on A Gentleman Called

  “An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —The New Yorker on The Judas Cat

  “A book to be long remembered.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch on A Town of Masks

  “Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —The New York Times on The Clay Hand

  “Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —The New York Times on A Death in the Life

  “Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —Library Journal on The Habit of Fear

  “Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and Shock Wave is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —The New York Times Book Review on Shock Wave

  Scarlet Night

  A Julie Hayes Mystery

  Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  For Sarah at seventeen

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Preview: Lullaby of Murder

  About the Author

  ONE

  WHILE JEFF WENT DOWNSTAIRS again for the rest of the luggage Julie opened doors and windows. She had been gone a month—a month in Paris—but the feeling when she opened the folding doors to the living room was of a room closed up for years. And in a way it had been. With her husband away so much of the time, she rarely entered it, never sat in it when she was alone, and always hurried the cleaning of it. It was a Henry James kind of room, full of Victorian furniture, valuable bric-a-brac, and presences. The objets d’art suggested a collector who was at home abroad. And that was Jeff, a New York newspaper columnist with carte blanche to the world.

  Julie opened the inside shutters, letting in the sunlight, and turned then as though drawn by an evil spirit to the one thing she truly hated in the room, the painting of Jeff over the mantel. It was the artistry of his first wife, Felicia, a tricky piece of work which Julie had once compared in her own mind to the crabbed “Judgment” card in her Tarot deck. Wherever you went in the room Jeff’s eyes pursued you. Only they weren’t Jeff’s eyes, they were Felicia’s Jeff’s eyes.

  The man himself came in, sniffed the dry muskiness, and took a long homecoming look around him. The smell, Julie thought, suggested elegant old ladies in taffeta shaking out lace handkerchiefs. What it was, actually, was the moth repellent exhaled by the vacuum cleaner.

  “Don’t you use this room when I’m not here, Julie?”

  “Not much.”

  “Why not, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Ghosts,” Julie said, not altogether flippant.

  Jeff looked at her, an eyebrow raised.

  “I’m kidding. No! I’m not…Jeff, are you passionate about Felicia’s portrait of you?”

  He looked at it from across the room as though he had forgotten it was there.

  Having at long last brought up the subject, she plunged ahead: “It’s spooky. It isn’t you, really. Those eyes are nasty. You know what it’s like? It’s as though she wanted to paint a judge and used you for a model.”

  Jeff grinned. “That’s very funny. Her father was a judge.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  He flinched. “I wish you’d stop saying that.”

  “I’ll try. I will try.”

  He came and stood beneath the portrait and looked up at it.

  “You’re better looking than that,” Julie said.

  “I’d have to agree with you,” he said dryly.

  It was his distinguished air that Felicia had tried to catch. He had a strong face with wise dark eyes, and the tough mouth of someone who had to be shown. There were little pouches under his eyes that Felicia had overlooked. Or maybe they weren’t there in her day. His hair was starting to gray now—at forty. He was a head taller than Julie, just under six feet, slight, but muscular, and fifteen years older. Which sometimes seemed a lot.

  He took the picture from the wall and Julie thought of her psychotherapist and all the time they had spent on the subject of that painting until the doctor had finally said, “Couldn’t you simply ask him to remove it?”

  The mountain had turned out to be a molehill after all.

  Jeff said: “We can take it up to the attic when we take the luggage and hide it there.”

  “Why don’t we pack it up and send it to Felicia?”

  He made a face of mock reproof. Felicia had recently remarried. “The question is, what do we do for a replacement?” The outline of where the painting had hung was plainly visible.

  Julie almost said, “Move.” But she didn’t.

  “We ought to look at pictures,” Jeff said. “That’s something we do nicely together.”

  Which confirmed her suspicion that he had been sorting out the days and nights ahead, his, hers, and theirs, now that he was to make New York his headquarters for a while.

  “I wish I’d said something in Paris.”

  “We’ll find something. I shouldn’t want a reproduction. I’m sure you wouldn’t either.”

  “Let’s take our time,” Julie said, which wasn’t like her. But whatever c
ame in was going to have to make it among some pretty exalted company—a Rembrandt etching, an early Picasso, a Daumier drawing, two good Impressionists.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” Jeff said, on his way to answer the first telephone call since their return.

  Julie went to the window and looked down on the street traffic—light on Sunday: a few cars, more taxis. The apartment was the second floor through of one of the last of the nineteenth-century townhouses left on Sixteenth Street. It faced a church and backed against the outer reaches of the garment industry, with a tired catalpa tree slouching in a garden where no flowers grew. But the house itself was well kept up. Jeff had lived there before his first marriage. In his and Julie’s four years together it remained his in character. Not because he wanted it that way, but because Julie had not known how to change it. One thing she hadn’t wanted to do was make a hash of the place just to prove that Julie as well as Geoffrey Hayes lived there. And now that Felicia’s painting was going, she thought, she might not want to change it at all. Furthermore, she decided almost at the same instant, she was through with psychotherapy. Until further notice.

  They agreed that night, having coffee in the living room, that something had to be done soon about the bald spot over the mantel.

  “What would you say to a good mirror if we can find the right style?” Jeff suggested.

  “Not much.” She wasn’t fond of mirrors. But if Jeff wanted one…“Maybe,” she added, trying to sound hearty.

  “What we had better do,” Jeff said, quite aware, “when either of us has an hour or two to spare is drop in on some of the better galleries—and if we see something we like, we can go back together and give ourselves time to consider it.”

  “Fine,” Julie said. An hour or two to spare…that was Julie’s whole problem: she had far too much time to spare and Jeff no time at all. The old floundering feeling and the depression that came with it began to descend. Do something, Julie.

  She got up instantly and went to her desk in the bedroom. She looked up the phone number for Lieutenant Donleavy, Mid-Manhattan Homicide. He might or might not be on duty, Sunday night. He was there.

  “This is Julie Hayes, Lieutenant. I don’t know if you remember me…”

  “The little fortune-teller. I’m not ever going to forget you, Mrs. Hayes. What can I do for you?”

  Julie was chagrined at the description, the little fortune-teller. She had come close to serious trouble that spring—before she joined Jeff in Paris—by setting up as “Friend Julie, Reader and Advisor” in a shop on West Forty-fourth Street. She said, “I wondered if you could tell me what happened to Rita Morgan.”

  Rita Morgan was the prostitute she had mistaken for a child and tried to help.

  “She’s still under psychiatric observation, but I’ll give you an educated guess as to what will happen.”

  “Please.”

  “Off the record, you understand. I don’t think she’ll ever come to trial.”

  Rita Morgan had murdered Julie’s friend, Pete Mallory, who also had tried to help her.

  “She’d be a great witness for the prosecution,” Julie said. “I never knew of anybody so self-destructive.”

  “It’s a pity she didn’t do herself in, instead of Mallory,” Donleavy said, going short on sympathy. “Do you want to see her?”

  “I don’t think so, and I don’t think she’d want to see me. There’s not much point.”

  “That’s being sensible.”

  “Lieutenant, I’ve gone out of the fortune-telling business.”

  “I was teasing you. I don’t think you were ever really in it. Were you now?”

  “Not for long. It was a lark. You’re right. Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “Any time, Mrs. Hayes.”

  It was like a dream and more bizarre than most, Julie thought, sitting a moment after she put down the phone. She remembered very clearly leaving her therapist’s office that April morning, angry and hurt because the doctor had said that until Julie was ready to find gainful employment and help herself, the therapy was a waste of Jeff’s money. It didn’t wash with Doctor Callahan that Jeff liked “his little girl,” his “child bride,” his wife the dilettante. “Rubbish. He will like a woman better. And so will you, which is more important.” She had known even then that Doctor was right, but she had felt abandoned, and when someone handed her a flyer on Fifth Avenue, advertising “Madame Tozares,” like a mischievous child, she had decided to go into the business of reading the Tarot cards and advising.

  Her rationalizations were numerous, of course. She had expected to meet, and God knows she had met, a lot of troubled people about whom she hoped to write someday. Of all the things she wanted to do, writing was foremost. But she lived in the shadow of a master whose work she had reverenced from the time he’d lectured on campus when she was in college, and the more he encouraged her, the less capable she felt. No, she decided, Forty-fourth Street had meant more to her than mere spite of Doctor Callahan: she had attempted to create an environment for herself among people who would not intimidate her intellectually. She had subsequently learned that the simplest people were by no means simple. And she had learned about herself that she functioned well in emergencies, even while pumping adrenalin. She had taken all her notes to Paris with her and Jeff had said he did not know an investigative reporter who could have done better at collecting material.

  She went back to Jeff in the living room and told him what Donleavy had said about Rita Morgan, that she was probably incompetent to stand trial. “It’s a sort of ending, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Or a beginning,” Jeff said, looking at her over his reading glasses.

  “Yeah.”

  Jeff took off his glasses and put them in his pocket. “Julie, keep the place on Forty-fourth Street for a while. I don’t know how much I’ll be at home, but you ought to have a place of your own to work in.”

  Julie’s spirits took an upward leap. She said, “You’re great, Jeff, absolutely great.”

  “Well, it’s time there was a Geoffrey the Great,” he said in mock seriousness. “There’s been a Geoffrey the Handsome, a Geoffrey the Bastard—Archbishop of York, by the way—and a Geoffrey the Cat that I know about, but to my knowledge, I am the first Geoffrey the Great.”

  Julie’s impulse was to throw herself into his lap, something she knew pleased him very much, but that was part of the “little girl” pattern, and the time had come to break it. She went around the back of his chair and hugged him. Straightening up, she faced the empty wall over the mantel. “Before anything, I’d like to find a picture,” she said. “I’d like this room to be right, somehow. It’s like starting a sentence and never finishing it.”

  “Then look. Go out and look at pictures. There must be a hundred gallery owners in New York waiting for you.”

  TWO

  THE GALLERY DOOR STOOD open and a young man with a broom noticed Julie at about the same time she noticed him. “Come in if you want to.”

  Julie walked into the Maude Sloan Gallery. She had already seen too many paintings for one day, but the poster out front announcing the opening that afternoon described Ralph Abel’s first American show as “Parisian fantasies.” It wasn’t so bad, only fourteen paintings when she got to counting them, with a lot of wall space and light around them. She strolled from one canvas to the next, not greatly impressed. They all had names, but so far as she could see, there was not much relationship between the name and the picture. Julie the art critic, she mocked herself. Except that once she had studied art…but then, what had she not studied at one time or other?

  She had the feeling that the young man was painfully aware of her. He took plastic glasses from a box and lined them up alongside a punch bowl. Was he the artist? She felt that he was, although his attitude was uncharacteristic of any artist she knew. He put the box away and went back to work with the broom.

  “Hey!” Julie came up to a splash of city colors—or so she saw them, a lot of red, blue,
purple, and black. Nonobjective. But she could sense the presence of the lurking whores. She swung around to where the young man had stopped in his tracks to stare at her. The color leaped to his face. “Are you Mr. Abel?”

  “Yes, I am.” But he fled with the broom to the closet at the back.

  Julie read the legend beneath the frame: SCARLET NIGHT.

  “I’m going to have to close up for an hour, ma’am.” He really could not bear to be in the room alone with someone looking at his paintings, not today anyway.

  Ma’am, Julie thought, and wondered if there was a Paris, Nebraska, or Iowa or Illinois. “I’ll go peaceably. No problem.”

  “I didn’t mean to be impolite,” he said, still blushing to the roots of his corn-colored hair. It made his eyes seem very blue. “It’s nerves, that’s all.”

  “I kind of like that,” Julie said, indicating Scarlet Night.

  His smile was beatific. “I’m sorry the wine hasn’t come yet.” He made a helpless gesture toward the empty bowl.

  “Is everything here Paris? I’ve just got back from there.”

  “No kidding? I’ll tell you the truth, I painted most of them in Naples. I couldn’t get with Paris until I got away from there. I guess that doesn’t make much sense…”

  “You bet it does. I’d never make it in Paris alone.”

  “Funny. I thought at first you were a critic.”

  “No way. I don’t even know why I like things.”

  “Do you think any of the critics will come? Do you live in New York?”

  “All my life—except for a month in Paris.”

  He was on a single track. “And you go to a lot of openings. Right?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “But you look like you do,” he persisted. “The way you dress, you know—a certain style, good material. My father was a tailor.”

  Julie was beginning to feel the whole scene wasn’t happening—not in SoHo, New York. “I usually wear sneakers and a raincoat.”

  “That wouldn’t matter. I’d say the same thing. Even the bones in your face.”

  Julie turned her wide gray eyes upon him. “Look, I’m curious. This is your first exhibit, right?”