Lullaby of Murder (17 page)

“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.

J
ULIE 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.

Mrs. Conti turned and introduced Ron Morielli, her brother and Patti Royce’s business manager. He was already on his feet and lighting a cigar. “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Conti said, “I didn’t get your name.”

“Julie Hayes. It’s a good picture, and I don’t see why, Mrs. Conti, it has to be X-rated.” She caught a reaction from Morielli that showed him to be less than pleased, and added, “Unless for some reason you want it released that way.” She assumed that the removal of some of the brother-sister footage would upgrade the rating to R, restricted.

Morielli took the cigar from his mouth. “Are you a reviewer, Miss?”

“I want to write a feature article on Patti Royce for the Sunday Magazine.”

“So you want to meet the kid?”

“I do.”

“Let me introduce you before she comes out to take a bow,” Morielli said. “We got her meeting fans as fast as she makes them.”

Julie, already propelled toward a door beneath the projection booth by Morielli’s hand at her elbow, called back that she was glad to have met Mrs. Conti.

A publicity man was talking to the audience.

Patti was sitting alone in a smallish room with easy chairs, a bar and a conference table. An ash blonde off screen, she sat, languid, a cola-colored drink in her hand, her attitude one of relaxed expectation. She wore a beige wool dress that showed a lot of cleavage.

“Hi,” she said to Julie before the introductions. Throaty voice. A real, old-fashioned sex object.

When Morielli said Julie’s name aloud it seemed to register with him that he had heard it before.

Julie got her pitch in fast. “I’d like to do a story on you, Miss Royce, for the Sunday Magazine of the
New York Daily.
I enjoyed
Celebration
very much.”

Patti looked from Julie to Morielli and back as though she wondered how they impressed one another.

“It’s a good art film besides whatever else it is,” Julie added.

“That’s nice,” Patti said, making two syllables of the word
nice.

“Explain to her what you mean,” Morielli said.

“Ron, I know what she means. She means any jerk can understand it, only some understand more than others.” Then to Julie, “Sweetie, pull one of those chairs over close and tell me what you want to say about me in the Sunday paper.”

“Not now,” Morielli said. “They’ll want you out front in a couple of minutes…. Ma’am, why don’t you send us a list of questions and take it from there?”

Patti said, “Do me a favor, Ron? Go tell them I need a few more minutes to relax.” Her hand at the neckline of her dress, she gave it a scarcely noticeable tug that exposed another swatch of breast. If she were any more relaxed, Julie thought, her clothes would fall off.

He went, but after a hesitation that made him look like a character in an Edward G. Robinson movie.

“Maybe we could set a date and place,” Julie said, and pulled the nearest chair a little closer to the actress. “I don’t care for the idea of written questions.”

“You worked for Tony, didn’t you?” Patti said in a soft drawl.

“Yes.”

“Is that why you want to interview me, because of Tony?”

“That has something to do with it,” Julie admitted.

“I didn’t bring him much luck, did I?”

“Afraid not,” Julie said.

Patti glanced toward the door. “You say where we should meet. Make it in the early evening and I’ll try and be there.”

“You’re filming in the Ninth Avenue Studios, right?”

“Almost every day.” She sighed. “Life is funny.” She sounded like every actress Julie had ever known on the verge of a first success: life is funny.

“How about tomorrow if you can make it?” Julie took a card from her purse. “I have an office of sorts on Forty-fourth Street. I’ll pick you up in a cab at the studio entrance and we can get there in about five minutes.”

Patti looked at the card and then gave it back. “You keep it. That’s not far from the Actors Forum, is it?”

“Down the street.”

“I adore the Actors Forum. I’d love to be a member some day.”

“You will be,” Julie said. She was not about to say that she was herself a member. Not to the actress she had just seen in
Celebration.

“You’re sweet,” Patti said. “Pick me up at six at the side entrance on Fifty-eighth Street, and we won’t tell a soul. Okay?”

“Okay,” Julie said, but it seemed a mighty strange condition to put on a newspaper interview.

“Y
OU’VE GOT TO GO
see it, Tim,” Julie said over a beer at Downey’s. They had finally caught up with one another and just had time for the corned beef and cabbage special before Tim went to a preview of
Alice the Wonder Child.

“I’ll go,” Tim said. “Would you like me in on the interview?”

“No.”

“I’ll trade you
Alice.
”

“Be serious, Tim. We don’t have much time.”

“Don’t say that. It sounds like prophecy. Doomsday ahead.”

Julie thought of Reggie Bauer from the Forum who was looking into
Little Dorrit
for her. She told Tim about him, suggesting that he might qualify if they ever needed a legman. “He’s a lot like you.”

“Isn’t one of me enough?” Tim said. “I know one of you would do me just fine.”

Julie reached across the table and gave his hand a squeeze. It was nice noise, nothing more. “Will you find out for me all you can about the producers and maybe even the distributor?”

Tim had the
Celebration
hand-out in front of him. The only art work was a birthday cake: they were keeping Patti under wraps. But they couldn’t really, with her shooting daytime television. And her Tony Alexander connection: that was bound to break any minute. Julie wondered about having a photographer on hand for the interview.

Tim’s mind was running in the same channel. “Shouldn’t we break this in the column, Julie? Or else give it to somebody downstairs. The boss-man won’t like it if he finds out we’re sitting on something as hot as this could be.”

“The police are sitting on it too. I’m praying it holds that way till I get my interview.”

“I hope it works,” Tim said doubtfully. He turned back to the
Celebration
hand-out. “The only name I know—the director, Ed Cardova. I’ve met him a couple of times. He’s one of those guys always about to do his big picture. Then somebody pulls out the money…Romulus Productions: wasn’t Romulus a wolf?”

“Romulus and Remus, twin brothers who were nursed by a wolf. They founded Rome.”

Tim handed back the literature. “Mafia money?”

“Shame on you,” Julie said.

“Why not? There’s art lovers among the Family—as you ought to know.”

“Yeah.” Julie was herself thinking of Morielli who didn’t greatly take to the notion that the picture could escape the X-rating. As though that was where the money was. It wasn’t. So why would he think so? Illogical, Julie. She had already thought of asking Sweets Romano about him, and then, uncomfortable with the idea, let it slip out of mind. One of these days she was going to have to face up to her feelings about Romano. “How do you face up to an ambivalence?” she asked.

“It’s easy if you’re two-faced.”

“Thanks,” Julie said and changed the subject. “Who are you taking to the theater with you?” She knew he had two seats.

“Would you have gone?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I’d known. I’m taking her namesake. Who else, for God’s sake. Our own Alice.”

“You’re a good boy,” Julie said.

She walked back to the shop from Downey’s, watching, for a little part of the way, Tim lope ahead of her. It was curtain time. She got an eerie feeling approaching the shop after dark, standing out in the open to insert keys into two separate locks. Nobody who knew its contents would try to burglarize the shop, but it had been broken into once and she had learned caution from that and other people’s experiences. She did not enter until there were passersby, then she lit the lights and looked beyond the curtain into the back room before closing the outside door. But the precautions set her nerves on edge, and the rooms were cold and damp. She touched her hand to the radiator. Stone cold dead. By Halloween maybe, or Thanksgiving there’d be heat. After which the place would always be too damned hot.

From upstairs came a barrage of tiny footfalls and the screech of maternal wrath: bedtime for Juanita and her cousins. She found herself wondering what Mrs. Rodriguez would think of Patti Royce if she was at her window looking out when Julie brought the young actress here. There was nothing whorish about Patti, but what was that associate quality? No question it had to do with sex. She was also disarming. She kept thinking of the droop to Patti’s wrist as she played her fingers inside the neckline of her dress. Was it instinctual or a calculated gesture? Come on, Julie: it was an instinct, the effects of which were calculable. Ron Morielli had been both provoked and appeased. Question. Who was Ron Morielli—besides being Patti’s manager?

She jumped when the phone rang, a shattering noise in the quiet, sparsely furnished room.

“Julie, I’m in trouble. It’s Eleanor. The police want to see me. They’re sending a car.”

She had quite forgotten that Eleanor had asked her to find a lawyer for her in case she needed one. “Now?” She asked.