Habit of Fear (11 page)

“Oh,” Julie said, feeling foolish. Then: “What about his partner?”

“We know where he is. Don’t misunderstand, your information is every bit as good as ours. We went a different route, that’s all.”

“An informant?” Julie said. “A guy who was in McGowen’s that day you and I were there?”

Russo gave no sign that she was right or wrong. “We’ll have a tail on the sailor when he lands.”

“If he hasn’t jumped ship.”

“He’s aboard,” Russo said.

“Just so I won’t feel schizoid,” she said, “have you talked with Andrew Carey in the Marine Inspector’s Office? I mean, he wanted to be sure I’d go to the police with anything he told me.”

“I will now that you’ve made the connection for me.”

He might be putting her on, Julie thought, but she didn’t care. Another concern entirely had taken hold: now she was wildly anxious at the prospect of confronting the men who had assaulted her.

SHE RETURNED
to the shop and picked up her messages from the answering service. Among them was a call from Ginny Gibbons: her party for the Irish playwright, Seamus McNally, was the next night, nine o’clock, very informal.

O
NE OF THE LAST PLACES
she wanted to go that night was to a party at Ginny Gibbons’s. But the very last place she wanted to be was home, counting hours, waiting word of
The Candy Kid
coming in to port. How familiar the sounds of the party were when she stepped out of the elevator—the voices, the tinkle of glasses, the sense more than the sound of music—and how familiar the feeling of dread, for this was Jeff’s territory, where she had always traveled lightly in his wake. She hung her coat on the rack outside the apartment door and asked herself again why she had come. To meet an Irishman who, by some unlikely, remote chance, might offer another lead to “Father.” It sure as hell would be nice to have one now. She pressed the buzzer.

Ginny opened the door, a glass in hand, a cigarette in her mouth. She removed the cigarette and turned her cheek up to Julie to be kissed. People glanced her way and kept on talking. “So many men,” Julie murmured. It was always so at Ginny’s.

“And none of them mine,” Ginny said, bearing her across the room. Virginia Gibbons was slight and very little over five feet tall. She was something of a giant nonetheless. She wrote simply and to the issue, and, unless provoked to the point of insult, exercised a less lethal bite than most New York theater critics. She scattered the guests from around Seamus McNally and introduced Julie to him. “She’s a colymnist, as you call them, on the
New York Daily,
and her husband is Geoffrey Hayes. Most of us read him for elevation.”

McNally, a large, tousled, youthful-looking man, lunged out of the chair. He slopped beer on himself and had to set the glass down to wipe his hand on his jacket before he offered it to Julie. The hand, still wet, was hard and strong. “Your chairs are too bloody close to the ground,” he said to Ginny, and then to Julie, giving her hand an extra squeeze before he released it, “I’ve heard a bit about you. I’ve even had a peek at your column.” While there was no praise in what he said, there was a kind of special attention paid in the way he said it. “I’ll admit I’ve not read your husband,” he added. “I’m a little too thick to understand him.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Ginny cautioned Julie and went off among her other guests.

“I can’t read him either,” Julie said.

“Ah, but you try.” He spoke with a lilt that almost made it a question. “Can I get you one of these?” He indicated the dark beer. “Or would you like something more transparent?”

“Later,” she said, and motioned to the guests from whom Ginny had parted him; they were on their feet, waiting for him to rejoin them. “Please, I’ve interrupted.”

He ignored her offer to release him. “Will your husband be coming round after?”

“He’s in Paris,” Julie said.

“Then you must trust him.”

“Utterly.”

He took on a look of mock solemnity. “I’ll want to think over the meaning of that. Utterly. I didn’t know Americans used such words. Does it mean what it says—or more than it says?”

Julie grinned and let that be her answer.

“Mind, I’m not making a pass. I’m only exploring the ground in case I might want to later.” He introduced her to the guests awaiting his return, but at the same time propelled her through and beyond them to a quieter place. “When I asked Ginny who, under the age of fifty, she was jamming me in with tonight, you were her first offering.”

“What did she say about me?”

“I’d have to make it up if I told you. I wasn’t paying attention until you walked into the room. Then I wished I had done.”

“I know you’re a playwright and Irish,” Julie said. “I intended to learn something more about you before tonight, but I didn’t get to do it.”

“As my mother used to say of good intentions, they’re fine till the pigs run through them. I’m a bucolic playwright, so be kind to me. There are not many of us left.”

“All right,” Julie said.

He asked himself the question for her, mockingly: “And what have you written, Mr. McNally, that I might have seen on Broadway? Well, now, there was a play you might have seen open—or you might have seen close, for it happened on one and the same night. It was called
The Comeallye
.”

Julie repeated the word. “Is it a dance?”

“You might call it that. You might call it any bloody thing you want, for the word’s neither Gaelic nor English, it’s hillbilly Irish and means whatever you want it to mean in the way of gathering in the folk. She had another description for the dance, did my mother—a come-to-me, go-from-me.”

“Very suitable for disco,” Julie said.

He thought about it and, having the picture, approved. There was a little separation between his front teeth that added to the boyish appearance. Julie found it very appealing. “You belong to the disco set, I suppose?”

Julie’s no was lost in the braying of the buzzer and the imminent entrance of friends boisterous with joy at seeing Seamus McNally: they swarmed across the room and battered him with hugs and thumps. Julie eased herself away and out onto the balcony, which overlooked Central Park. She had observed but one woman among the new arrivals, someone closer to Ginny’s age than her own and whom she recognized from the magazine, a writer of stories of which Ginny had once remarked, “They’ll never make it to television.” Her highest compliment. Julie thought about McNally, or more specifically, about her own reaction to him. He had come on strong, something that made her suspicious; not so much of what he had in mind, but of whether he’d got wind of the rape and was pouring on the kindness. Ridiculous. Or better, so what if that were so? Accept! Looking over the park from the nineteenth story, you could imagine it to be a large game laid out on the floor of the city. The traffic moved at regular intervals, the cars passed in and out of tunnels. Déja vu of a sort: the boys in her godparents’ family had had an electric train with tracks and tunnels and signal lights and switches; actually it had belonged to their father, and the equipment was British, the cars divided into compartments—even into classes. Had the Burlingames known her father? she wondered. Quite probably. And she could have asked Morgan Reynolds about them and hadn’t, damn him. She said it every time she thought of him. Why did she loathe him so much? Because of the deception he had tried to put over on her? Or because of the truth: that he was her mother’s lover?

The sirens in the distance growing ever louder signaled the approach of fire trucks. She leaned over the railing and watched their approach and passing on Fifty-ninth Street. Cars and buses, momentarily halted, moved back into the mainstream of traffic in their wake. And somewhere near the mouth of the Hudson River a tanker called
The Candy Kid
was plowing water, moving toward its dock.

McNally came out onto the balcony and drew the glass doors closed behind him on what was becoming a noisy party. “Aren’t you cold?” he wanted to know.

“Yes, but I like it.”

“I’m glad of that. I won’t offer my coat.”

“Mr. McNally, do you know a newspaperman in Dublin by the name of Michael Desmond?”

“It’s not an uncommon name. I may have seen the byline, but read him I have not. Should I have?”

“I’d like to know if he’s alive, and if he really is in Dublin. And if not—where he is.”

“Wouldn’t it be easy for your husband to find out, being himself an international journalist?”

“Jeff and I are separated, something Ginny hasn’t caught up with yet.” She had thrown off the shield. Deliberately.

“Are you now?” An exaggerated Irishism. McNally grinned and rubbed his hands together.

Julie laughed and moved toward the door. “I am cold,” she said.

“Here. There’s room enough for both of us.” He opened wide his tweed jacket.

She caught the faint smell of perspiration and didn’t mind, something that made her inordinately pleased with herself. She was tempted to take him up on the offer—made in jest, of course. But she was aware of wanting very much to feel the warmth of his body. He opened the door and followed her back in to the party.

“There’s no doubt about your having a drink now,” he said. “Even a doctor would recommend it.” He took her hand and drew her after him through the crowded room to the bar. “Cognac—unless Ginny has hid it away, and I wouldn’t blame her with a mob this size.”

The bartender found the bottle under the bar and somehow managed to pour it out of sight, bringing up a good inch of lovely amber in each of two plastic glasses.

“Slainte,” McNally said.

“Slainte.” Julie remembered the Irish-American seaman from whom she had first heard the word. And again she thought of
The Candy Kid,
and the man aboard—unless he had jumped ship—named Frank Kincaid. She hoped he had jumped.

One of the early guests who’d been with McNally when Julie arrived came up to him now and asked if he’d made up his mind.

McNally introduced Ted Freeburn and then said, “I’ll go if Julie goes with us. How’s that?”

“Fine,” Freeburn said. He was a slender man, not much taller than Julie. She’d have guessed he was a doctor. “This Irish cowboy has never seen the real break dancing,” he told her.

“I should see it before it’s out of fashion,” McNally said.

“It’s out of fashion now,” Freeburn said, “but like most things on the turn, the best is last. This kid is great—Flip Masterson.”

“At the Guardian Angel?” Julie asked after a second or two, trying to place the name with the club.

“Will you come?” McNally said.

She nodded. It was the brandy. Or loneliness. Not the Guardian Angel.

On their way downtown she thought about her first visit to the Guardian Angel. That was where she had first heard of Sweets Romano, the gentleman gangster who had since become her friend, albeit a mighty troublous one. The police, especially Homicide, were likely to exploit the relationship someday, although she was not sure how. What, she often wondered, would she do then? The one thing of which she was certain in this regard: she would never again call Romano on her own behalf. While in the hospital, she had received a basket of tiny golden roses without a card that she felt sure had come from him. He was completely tactful with her and, no doubt, with other straight friends, and completely ruthless with his enemies.

“Long thoughts?” McNally turned to her in the taxi. He was sitting between her and Nancy Freeburn, who was inclined to chatter. Her husband was on the jumpseat at her knees, nodding while he listened to her, or pretended to listen.

“If I could shorten them, I’d tell you,” Julie said of the long thoughts.

“Sure, the night’s young.”

They had a drink at the bar. The small Village cabaret was crowded, patrons waiting for the one o’clock show. The only open space was a few square feet with a microphone center. The walls were painted with murals of the city’s street life—pushcarts, prostitutes, an open fire hydrant gushing water on the children.

“Some poor bastard painted his heart out,” McNally commented.

“A sentimental drunk,” Ted Freeburn said.

Freeburn was a lawyer, Julie discovered from his wife. She stored the information for future reference. Just before one o’clock the headwaiter came and said he had a table for them.

Julie knew one of the partners in the comedy team, Rudy and Hutch, that opened the show. Every year or so they did a return engagement at the Guardian Angel. They didn’t get any better, they didn’t get any worse. It was something she didn’t want to say in the column, so she had said nothing, and Rudy was hurt. He had written her a sad little note to the newspaper, which Julie ignored, thinking to give him mention soon. This year’s routine was built around Hutch’s “talking violin.” It orchestrated Rudy’s antics. Rudy asked the audience to choose a subject. Somebody suggested “Mother.” “What’s wrong with ‘Father’? Why does he always have to play second fiddle?” He asked it of the violin, and Julie thought about how often the word
father
fell about her these days. The fiddle in response to Rudy’s question gave a deep, bored belch. McNally’s laugh caught the comic’s attention, and when he looked around to see where it had come from, he spotted Julie.

He came to the table carrying the mike with him and made a great fuss over “New York’s favorite New Wave gossip columnist …”

“New waves, old wrinkles. … Sorry, Julie. It’s so nice of you to come. …” Laced with sarcasm. Then, just when he was about to leave, he turned back. “Do you know who was here a few nights ago, Julie? Sitting right where you are now?”

“I can guess,” she said, and she could from his nasty air of snide confidentiality.

“With the cutest little French chanteuse, Mimi Monet. Just closed at the Saint Regis, I understand. Ooo, la-la.”

It seemed a very long time until they brought on the break dancer.

T
HE TAXI WAITED
for him while McNally stood by watching Julie turn the keys in two locks. The street was solemnly quiet and desolate under the glare of streetlights so dense they could almost make day of night. From the time they had dropped the Freeburns at their Gramercy Park apartment, she had debated with herself and reached no decision. Now the words seemed simply to spring out of her: “Would you like a cup of tea?”