Lullaby of Murder Read online

  Phillips started his professional career as an actor and stage manager. He switched to publicity when he returned from World War II. He is survived by two sisters, Eileen and Mary Jean Phillips. His wife, the former Ellen Duprey, died several years ago.

  Shocked and saddened. Nothing to suggest Dorfman had just fired the man. And she would probably never find out now why Jay Phillips felt as he had about Tony.

  Alice Arthur was the only one in the office when Julie got back. She was typing and filling cards for Tony’s “Celebrity bank.” The drawers resembled the card file in any public library. The information was privileged bits on people in the news. The file would have been too hot to store on the newspaper premises, but Tony rented his own office in the Daily building several floors above the editorial offices.

  Julie looked up the Garden of Roses. It was rococo, and a solitary example in the neighborhood, which ran to classic and gothic. She was well acquainted with the whole area by the time Alice filed her last card, covered her typewriter, disconnected the VDT and went home for the day. Julie called Romano again.

  “Fascinating story, Miss Julie. I’m grateful to you for calling it to my attention. I collect political foibles. They tend to become useful in time. This potentially valuable property has been a political plaything for years. It went through a series of tax problems ending in forfeiture which you may detail for yourself from the public records. As for what I am about to say, I needn’t remind you, your source is sacred.”

  “Absolutely sacred,” Julie said.

  “Just so: the most recent private owner seems to have persuaded the Transport Authority that it could be converted into a bus garage. Money was appropriated for one set of plans after another until a certain go-getter in the Council went up there with a plumb line and a pocket calculator and demonstrated the total impracticality of such conversion. The Garden of Roses languished. The building was condemned last year and the university contemplated purchase of the site. Suddenly it was unavailable. The present occupant leased it from the city for five years—I suspect for a pittance. I suppose it can be argued that during that time much of that area will go to public or privately funded housing, which in turn will determine the value of the real estate under that monstrous building. In any case, the gentleman with the curious name of Morton Butts has the lease on the property and has bought the condemned building for a token five hundred dollars. There you have it, Miss Julie, in its broadest outline.”

  “Five hundred dollars! There’s five thousand dollars’ worth of hardwood floors in the place.”

  “And not a trace of a bus skid on them. The operative word, Miss Julie, is condemned. To some, if I may be irreverent, it can mean salvation. Mind now, there is nothing truly sinister that I detect, but then if there were it wouldn’t surface in an inquiry as limited as mine. And let me hasten to add, I should not wish to go further with it myself. My motives are always suspect, and whatever’s afoot might go awry.”

  “I understand,” Julie said, which she didn’t. She knew Romano’s wealth, his underworld reputation; she knew he was called “the king of porn,” films of that ilk having once intrigued him; but she also knew that he had not left his penthouse home for years, that his art collection was famous, his manners impeccable, and his person—to her—a total mystery. He was chortling at his own turn of phrase.

  “I’m very grateful to you, as usual,” Julie said.

  “Any time. Come to lunch soon, Miss Julie.” And he was gone, his abruptness on the phone always putting her in mind of a magician’s vanishing act.

  JULIE BEGAN THE STORY “I never promised you a Rose Garden, only a ten thousand dollar prize,” and wrote it to Butts’ own style. He simply begged to be written as he spoke. She devoted a brief final paragraph to the property, all questions—which were more effective than answers—so if Tony chose, he could simply drop it off. She concluded, “Might it not have become a city garage or a learning site? But the Garden of Roses rises again as it fell, a gaudy citadel of dance.”

  Tim Noble checked in to drop his “items” in the copy box. He offered Julie tickets to an off off Broadway opening in the Bowery. She declined and gave one more polish to her piece and felt that it was good. She slipped it through the slot of the box on Tony’s desk. You could put things in but you couldn’t get them out without the key that Tony carried on a ring at his belt. Somebody, probably Tim, had pasted a legend above the slot: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

  When she got home, all the messages with the telephone answering service were for Jeff, save one from Mary Ryan. Julie phoned her and learned that the friends of Jay Phillips were invited to call at the Murray Funeral Home on Second Avenue the following evening and that there would be a Mass at noon on Saturday.

  “I’m thinking of going over to Murray’s,” Mrs. Ryan said. “He was always good to me—five dollars every Saturday night when he had a show in the house where I worked. Would you like to go along?”

  “Well, yes,” Julie said. “I would.”

  “There’s a lovely pub next door called The Galway Bay. Maybe we could have a bite together first.”

  “I’ll buy you dinner,” Julie said.

  “On the expense account?”

  “Why not?” Julie said, although there was one good reason why not: she didn’t have an expense account.

  She answered those of Jeff’s calls that required answers and declined two dinner invitations that, in politeness, were extended to her even in his absence. She then cleaned house and drew the living room drapes. She was unlikely to entertain in Jeff’s absence, and she’d been getting pretty good at it, so long as he did the cooking. He seemed to have been away a lot longer than twenty-four hours.

  FOUR

  SHE GAVE THE MORNING Times a quick scan. Jeff’s column, still bearing a New York dateline, was headed Industrial Reprisal. She felt guilty about not reading it and thought again of her former therapist, a very direct woman: “Why can’t you simply say the subject doesn’t interest you?” Well, doctor…

  The Times obituary on Phillips was clear and informative. It gave the plays and the theaters with which he had been associated, including summer stock, a species of legitimate theater almost extinct in the time Julie had made her try as an actress. She tore out the obit and put it in her carryall.

  She had not expected Tony to be in the office that early but he was, and from his smile she knew that something was wrong, probably with her story on Morton Butts. He had the copy in hand. With it he waved her into the chair in front of him.

  “May I put my things away first, Tony?” Her carry-all.

  “No.”

  She sat. Alice’s typewriter had the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun. Tim started to leave the office like a stealthy cat. It ought to have been funny but it wasn’t. Tony ordered him back to his desk and then silenced Alice and read aloud, “‘I never promised you a Rose Garden…’ How’s that for originality?” He continued to read, his tone mockingly folksie. The copy sounded awful. He stopped abruptly before the last paragraph and addressed himself to Tim Noble. “Don’t you think the gal ought to be working for The New Yorker?”

  Tim was studying his fingernails. He didn’t look up.

  “Please, Tony, cut it out,” Julie said.

  “You don’t know me very well, sweetheart. I sent you up there for a couple of paragraphs of nostalgia about the dance marathon and you turn me in a tight-assed homily. I ask for feeling and you give me style. Style stinks!” He threw down the single page of copy. “It’s got no guts.”

  Julie would have given a lot to find out what was underneath the tirade. “I think there’s feeling in it,” she said and then plunged ahead although she knew it was a mistake: “I cared about those people lined up with twenty bucks in their hands and the dream of making it to television.”

  “God’s truth, gal: you really cared?”

  Julie bit her lip. She wasn’t going to be able to stand up to him and she knew it.

  “God�
�s truth, do you remember a face among them? One face?”

  She sat mute, determined not to cry.

  “Blacks, Hispanics, poor whites, the bloody masses. Christ! I thought for a while you were a modern woman. Look, sweetheart, any one of them who got his twenty bucks up for a dream can get it up for bread if his hunger’s in his belly. Sure, the dream is tawdry, but it’s his dream, and he’s going to read about it in Tony Alexander’s column. And he’s going to like what he reads.”

  Julie nodded. He’d made his point and she could see it.

  But he wasn’t letting up. “This Morton Butts character is right. I am proud of my varicose veins. I came to New York with one pair of shoes and a Woodstock typewriter. It was ten years before anyone knew I could write my name, much less a sentence.”

  “Okay, Tony. It’s lousy. Let me try it again. What about that last paragraph? Does it interest you?”

  “Not much. I take it you know the answers or you wouldn’t ask the questions.”

  “I’d have to verify them from the public records,” Julie said.

  Tony smiled. Falsely. “What a lucky girl you are to have access to private records. What ever made you think of tapping such a source?”

  It had occurred to her more than once that Tony both resented and coveted her Romano connection; there was no doubt in her mind now that he had correctly surmised of whom she’d asked her questions.

  “It was just that Mr. Butts seemed like such a phony.”

  Tony didn’t say a word. He sat staring at her, letting his eyes do the talking.

  Julie’s ego went down to floor level. “You may not want it for the column,” she said pitifully, “but it’s part of the Butts story all the same.”

  “I don’t want it and I call the signals on this team.”

  “I got the message,” Julie said, and getting to her feet, reached for the copy where it lay on the desk between them.

  Tony thumped his hand down on it. “I said to drop it.”

  “The whole story?”

  “The whole story.”

  “Okay, boss,” she said and walked out of the office. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but she needed to get away. What she wanted was to have another look at the copy herself. Tony had been using her stuff almost verbatim and she didn’t think there was that much difference between today’s copy and yesterday’s.

  Tim Noble caught up with her at the elevators. “Come on, I’ll buy you coffee.”

  “I don’t want coffee.”

  “All right. Orange juice.”

  “Tim, I think I’m going to quit.”

  Tim shrugged. “Sooner or later. It generally happens after he’s stopped playing around with whomsoever.”

  “No kidding. You mean he blows up a storm with someone…after?”

  “Never needed a pension plan for a gal yet. Except for Alice. No passes there.”

  “He’s never made a pass at me either.”

  “He may be a bastard, but he’s not a skunk.”

  “His friend’s wife.” But Julie had the feeling that what had kept her out of Tony’s reach was that he didn’t want to reach. She remembered sitting in a taxi with him once, holding hands. Long ago, before she’d asked him for a job. She had been in such awe of him. God the Father. “Tell me straight, Tim, absolutely straight because I’ve got to know…”

  He anticipated what she was going to say. “It isn’t bad,” he reassured her on the marathon piece.

  “Would you tell me if it were?”

  “It would depend.”

  The elevator dropped them to the ground floor without an intermediary stop. It seemed symbolic. Nothing was accidental, according to the Tarot. She was inclined to agree. “Tim, will he run anything on Jay Phillips?”

  Tim gave a dry laugh. “I asked him that this morning and he says, ‘You want to write obituaries? Write obituaries.’”

  Julie paused at the railing surrounding planet earth. It orbited gently. “Am I crazy or is Tony on a bad trip?”

  “Something.”

  She was tempted to tell him what Jay Phillips had said to her and Jeff at Sardi’s. But why lay that on Tim, besides giving herself a shabby departure if she did quit? And somehow she wanted to quit, wanted more space, deeper waters. She was in a frame of mind that was going to require examination. It could be that she wasn’t facing up. “Tim, it’s great of you to offer me coffee, but I want to go home and think this out.”

  “Look. If you want to quit, don’t. Make him fire you. Unemployment insurance, you know?” Which, though not in so many words, told Julie how tenuous a hold Tim thought she had on the job.

  She managed a smile and stuck out her hand. “Thanks, Tim, for everything. I wouldn’t have made it this far without you.”

  He hung onto her hand, shaking it thoroughly. He was such an odd-looking young man—big ears, a pointed chin—he looked like Fred Astaire in his Ginger Rogers days. “Julie, you’ve got no idea how many times I wanted to make a pass at you.”

  She threw her arms around him for one big hug and then got away quickly.

  FIVE

  JULIE HEADED FOR THE SHOP, not home. The shop could use a good clean-up and she wanted madly to clean up something, to assuage the galloping anxiety. It was the thought of telling Jeff that gave her the most trouble, the humiliation, the helplessness, the old dependency. His little girl again—in whom he had confidence. Like hell. It was easy to say in retrospect. She probably ought to go the unemployment insurance route. From the cradle to the grave. She’d be on welfare if it weren’t for Jeff. She could not think of a single person she wanted to see. Fritzie the dog maybe. But not Mrs. Ryan. Doctor Callahan. She ought to call the doctor and get a booster shot that would keep her on the job: gainful employment was a tenet of the therapist’s religion. She thought of the priest at St. Malachy’s who had told her to come and see him any time. Father Doyle’s best thing was prostitutes. And old ladies who kept telling him the same sins over and over. Pride and penitence.

  She pounded along Forty-second Street as far as Broadway: “Haughty, naughty Forty-second Street.” Another hunk of nostalgia. In song and dance. No pimps or pushers in this version, everybody was for everybody, especially for the understudy who was going to make it big in the Lullaby of Broadway number. A flashy young black who smelled of marijuana sidled up to her where she waited at the curb for a change in traffic lights. “Fifty bucks, doll. I got the best on the street.”

  “Blow away,” Julie said.

  “That’s my song, baby.”

  She changed directions, uptown, and crossed at Forty-fourth Street, shaking off the pusher. The lullaby of Broadway, yeah.

  The trouble with the shop was that there wasn’t much to clean unless you could start with a bulldozer. The vacuum-cleaner kept hiccoughing on bits of plaster. The walls weren’t safe even for climbing. She settled presently with a cup of tea and her notebook, which was a fat record of non sequiturs, part story ideas, part journal, part character speculations on a lot of odd types. She went through the book for past appraisals of Tony Alexander. There was a time when she had liked him, his messy vests, his smelly pipe, but she had always been a little afraid of him, and much fonder of Fran, his wife. Jeff had said they were having trouble. Maybe that was Tony’s whole problem, but she doubted it. There was a daughter whom Fran visited. Where? At school? Julie could not remember hearing of Tony’s visiting her. Nor did he talk about her. Julie didn’t even know her name. For a moment she wondered if the daughter was an invention, if Fran might have a life away from home covered by the daughter story. But who needed a cover story nowadays for anything? She thought about going to see Fran at the flower shop as Jeff had suggested; but if she did that now and word of it got to Tony…. Her pride couldn’t take it.

  By mid-afternoon she had decided to take Tim Noble’s advice and hang in. Her history of hanging in was brief, her record of unemployment impressive. So, it was hustling time. She locked up the shop and walked over to the Actors Forum,
where over the past year she had picked up a few items which Tony ran although he would never mention the Forum. He was not invited to their productions. It did no good to tell him that nobody from the press was invited. “Exactly,” he would say. “That’s what’s wrong with the place. No accountability.” It never occurred to him to wonder why an actors’ workshop should be accountable to a gossip columnist.

  Most of the actors sitting around the green room that afternoon waiting for rehearsal space, or just waiting, were young and only a few knew who Jay Phillips was when Julie asked if any of them had ever worked with him. Somebody recalled one thing about him: he couldn’t stand backstage mothers.

  “Who can? They’re always pushing,” Reggie Bauer said. “I almost made it as a child star and my own mother shot me down. She demanded they put me in Liza Minnelli’s dressing room.”

  “With or without Miss Minnelli?”

  Madge Higgens hung up the phone mid-dial and hooked her coin out of the return box. “Something you just said reminded me of something. Now I forget what.” She came and sat on the arm of the sofa alongside Julie.

  “About Jay?”

  Madge nodded. She was a good actress and she’d been on the scene a lot longer than most of those present.

  “Or about Liza and me?” Reggie prompted.

  “Oh, shut up, Reggie…. When I was in Autumn Tears—it must be ten years ago—Jay was our press agent. Something unpleasant happened during the run and I can’t get hold of it now. Isn’t that ridiculous? I suppose I’d remember if it concerned me.”

  “Did you play the lead?” Julie asked. She had no recollection at all of Autumn Tears.

  “No, and it had a child star, Patti Royce. Funny, nobody’s ever heard of her in years and suddenly she’s in a soap opera. Anyway, it was about a youngster disabled in an accident out to get revenge on the driver of the car. I played her mother. It wasn’t a great play.”