Lullaby of Murder (3 page)

“There’s something about the dance marathon you wouldn’t understand if you didn’t know your history: it was one of the important ways the American people pulled themselves out of the Great Depression in the nineteen-thirties. Most of the schoolbooks teach you it was Franklin D. Roosevelt that saved the country with his alphabet soup, the AAA and the WPA, and the NRA…. Don’t you believe it. What saved this country was the people with their natural grit and determination to do things for themselves. The dance marathon was a test of that grit.”

“My boss got varicose veins from the one he was in,” Julie said.

“And he’s proud of them now, isn’t he?”

“I guess so,” Julie said, “or I wouldn’t be here.”

Mr. Butts tucked the blueprints into an already stuffed desk drawer and bounced toward the door. “Let me show you through the plant. We have a few days’ work to do yet, but you’ll get the idea.”

He smelled of soap, the scouring kind, or else something he used to try to flatten his hair. Taking Julie by the arm, he propelled her into what had been the main ballroom; good hardwood floors, as he pointed out. You couldn’t buy lumber like that anymore even if you could afford it. Workmen were putting up railings, creating what looked like a miniature race course. “We’ll gradually bring down the number of times per day a couple has to circle the track to stay in competition, but the winners have got to make at least one entire go-round the day the dance ends.”

“And if they can’t?” Julie asked, remembering Mrs. Ryan’s description of “the poor creatures.”

“No such word, Mrs. Hayes. If they
don’t,
the prize doubles in a new contest.”

“I see,” she murmured.

He took her arm again and steered her from one to another of the rooms at one end of the dance floor: shower rooms and toilets, a room for cots, an infirmary where a doctor would be on duty twenty-four hours a day—an underpaid resident from the nearest hospital, Julie suspected—a snack bar. The contestants would have ten minutes out of every hour to attend to their personal business. He showed her where the sponsors’ boxes would be built and where he would be putting in a bank of seats for the audience. One area was designated “media.” The Garden of Roses had been built to accommodate thousands.

“Live music?” Julie asked.

“Three nights a week and Sunday afternoons. Otherwise…” He let go of her arm and rollicked along the railing to a platform where there might once have been an organ console. Now it was an electronic switchboard. He chose from among the rows of buttons and threw a switch. The whole room exploded with rock music. He doused the work lights and pulled another switch: strobe lights streaked across the backs and faces of the men who had been working until the lights went out. The illusion of grimacing faces, disjointed body motions and the hard, loud music: an interlude of madness in what didn’t seem like a very sane operation altogether. Butts switched things back to normal and trotted back to Julie. “Now, what else can I show you?”

Show, not tell, Julie observed. Quibbling, but for all his volubility, he was talking for the purpose of avoiding questions rather than answering them. “How come the Garden of Roses?” Julie asked.

“It was here. As simple as that, and rather than let it deteriorate I persuaded the city to lease it to me for five years. There has been talk of its demolition. Talk also of its possible landmark status. I look upon my enterprise as a holding action.”

“Tell me something about you,” Julie said. “Have you always been in show business?”

“You might say so. I view life as a showcase and God as producer. I’ve been with the circus, I’ve been real deep in religion. I’ve promoted boxing matches and built gymnasiums to teach the manly art of self defense. But, getting down to the nitty-gritty, I’m just an old-fashioned businessman, American to the core, and it won’t hurt these days to put that in your interview.”

“Got it,” Julie said. “I’d like to talk to a few of the contestants, if you don’t mind.”

“Why should I mind? I expect the mayor to show up for the grand opening so you know everything’s got to be kosher. Only remember, they’re not contestants until they’ve passed their physicals.”

He walked her back to the lobby. The line of registrants was growing, mostly blacks and Hispanics. “A real American mix,” he said and smiled happily. Tiny, sharp teeth, but his own. He gave her a moist marshmallow of a hand to shake and added, “Come to the opening and bring the boss with you.”

UNEMPLOYED DISHWASHERS,
cabdrivers, city layoffs, waitresses, beauticians, hospital workers: they expected to be on television, marathon dancers, and considered Julie their opening round of publicity. Everybody claimed to have heard of Tony Alexander, and by the time Julie moved down the line, they had.

She crossed the street and looked back. Most of them waved. Was the building rococo or baroque? She tended to mix the two. It might not matter to the readers of
Tony Alexander Says
…but it had better matter to the wife of Geoffrey Hayes. She proposed to look it up in the
Architectural Guide to New York City
when she got back to the office. The “Garden” looked as though it would take a fortune to restore. It looked as though it would take a fortune even to demolish. In the distance were vast complexes of public housing, brick, glass and mortar, and if you looked at them in a certain way you could imagine them on a slow march downtown. How many buildings similar to this monstrous citadel of dance had made way? On the other hand, Columbia University at her back seemed eternal. Not far away was St. Luke’s Hospital, and beyond, the massive Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Yet Amsterdam Avenue, as it headed up toward 125th Street, was a parade of small, neighborhood shops, appealing to what Butts had called “a real American mix.”

There was something incongruous about the whole project, she felt. Or was it the idea of a dance marathon itself? How had it come to Tony’s attention, she wondered. Certainly it had piqued his interest. The building was out of sync with the present neighborhood, too large, too gaudy; why had it survived till now? And a five year lease? She thought of the two sets of blueprints Butts had gathered up and kept with him while she was there. Why hadn’t he said, “Here, look what we’re doing,” and
then
shown her the actual scene? The property would have fallen to the city for delinquent taxes, she supposed. Was there something in the blueprints, a legend perhaps, that he had not wanted her to see?

Walking back to Broadway through the Columbia campus, she thought of calling the city public relations office to find out where to seek further information. She envisioned an afternoon of phone calls and days of waiting…only to discover that the Garden sat on a molehill. It occurred to her that she had a source uniquely her own. Sweets Romano reportedly owned more West Side real estate, under a variety of covers, than anyone: She found a pay phone in one of the library buildings and dialed his private number.

The routine was the same as always: she gave the number from which she was calling to the person answering, and within a couple of minutes the phone rang in the booth. “This is Romano. How pleasant to hear your voice, Miss Julie.”

“As usual, I want something,” Julie said.

“Anything within my power.”

“This time it’s information: a ballroom built in the 1920s called Garden of Roses on Amsterdam Avenue. It’s being reopened and polished up for a dance marathon by a man named Butts. He’s leased the building from the city.”

“I know the building,” Romano said.

“Is there anything strange about its survival till now? I don’t really know what I’m looking for, Mr. Romano. The whole enterprise seems crazy to me. I mean what if it fails? All that money…. There’s got to be more to the operation than putting on a few weeks of nostalgia. Maybe I’m wrong about him, but the entrepreneur seems to me a phoney.”

“You’ve become a muckraker, Miss Julie?” It was half question, half teasing. She could imagine the cherubic face, ageless, utterly enigmatic. To her. And better that way. If she believed half the things told of him she’d be too scared to approach him at all.

“I wasn’t sent up here to rake muck, but I have a feeling there’s some of it around.”

“And Mr. Alexander does cherish an occasional splash of investigative reportage—to clear his palate, as it were.”

“Mmmm.” What else could she say?

“Give me an hour,” Romano said, and the phone clicked off.

Julie bought a
Post
and caught a bus that would put her down outside the
Daily
building. The page three story of Jay’s death had the usual
Post
fillip: a picture of the bagged body being loaded into the mortuary vehicle. The heading read:
Theater Publicist Dies in Hudson Plunge.

Shortly after midnight, popular Broadway publicist J. P. Phillips walked halfway across the George Washington Bridge intent on suicide. He succeeded. A motorist with a CB transmitter in his car saw him hurtle over the railing and alerted the police. The Coast Guard was on the scene within minutes, but it was not until dawn that the body was recovered several miles downstream.

Reached late this morning, Michael Dorfman, producer of three shows on which Phillips was currently working, said he could not imagine why the publicist would take his own life.

“Jay was one of the best-liked men in show business,” Dorfman said. “I am shocked and saddened. Why would he do a thing like this?”

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.