Lullaby of Murder (7 page)

“She told you about it?”

“She did.”

“Boy, she got here in a hurry,” Julie said. “All the way from Brooklyn.”

“There are investigative facilities in Brooklyn, Mrs. Hayes, and excellent police liaison.”

“Oh,” Julie said.

S
LEEP CAME, FINALLY, HALF-WAY
through the four
A.M.
showing of
Boston Blackie
starring Chester Morris. It was not the picture that tranquilized her. Julie escaped the endless repetitions of the day’s trauma by thinking of names she considered unsuitable for an actor: Chester, Elmer, Archibald, Percy…. The phone wakened her at nine. It was Jeff. The first thing she asked was where he was.

“At our Paris office.”

“Jeff, do you know about Tony?”

“It came over several hours ago. I thought you might be trying to reach me.”

“I was with the police until almost four. Jeff, they even tested me to see whether I’d fired a gun. I haven’t ever in my whole life. Did you know Tony kept a gun in the office?”

“I knew he had one, a thirty-eight revolver. Fran has its mate. They belong to a gun club in Queens. But you probably know that.”

“I didn’t know it,” Julie said. “I seem to have known very little about them.”

“You’ll find that information in the morning paper,” Jeff said. “It’s in the
Herald
here. They took practice together yesterday afternoon. Do you have anything recent on Fran? I gather she’s a prime suspect.”

“Is she? I didn’t know. Jeff, when you said they were having trouble, did you mean with their marriage?”

“I purposely did not say and I think now it’s better to leave it that way.”

“Okay,” Julie said. “What else did you purposely not say that might help me figure out why Tony was murdered?”

“Is it incumbent on you to participate in the investigation?”

“Jeff, I’m going to hang up on you. What’s the matter with you?”

His voice grew even colder. “I’m upset at Tony’s death. There ought to have been more I could have done at our last meeting than exchange epithets with him.”

“I’m sorry,” Julie said. “I didn’t know about Fran, only that the police had talked with her and with the daughter. I don’t even know the girl’s name.”

“Her name is Eleanor. I don’t know much more about her than you do. She’s Fran’s daughter by a previous marriage. Tony adopted her as an infant. She’d be twenty-one at least. Tony and Fran were married while I was working for him.”

“All I know,” Julie said, “is that Fran was visiting her once when I went somewhere with Tony. That’s the only mention I ever heard him make of her. Could she be retarded or anything like that?”

“It’s possible.”

“Didn’t Tony ever talk to you about her, for God’s sake?”

“Not one word that I can remember.”

“That’s crazy—like somebody they kept in a closet. Anyway, the police talked with her, wherever she is.”

“She’s home,” Jeff said. “She’s the last known person to have spoken with him—on the phone last night.”

“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” Julie said. “Some crazy things have happened since you left. Besides Tony’s death. Can we talk for a few minutes?”

“Take your time. It’s on the WATS Line.”

“Remember the press agent who came to our table at Sardi’s—Jay Phillips?”

“I remember. He had no use for Tony and he’d lost his biggest account—and you know, it skipped through my mind later that Tony might have had something to do with his troubles. But I’ve interrupted you. What were you going to say about him?”

“He committed suicide a few hours after we saw him.”

Jeff whistled softly.

“What made you think Tony might have something to do with his troubles?”

“Some pretty free association, I’m afraid. Tony was like a lot of other people with a taste for power, always on the lookout for more. There was something of the bully in him…”

Now he tells me, Julie thought.

She might as well have said it aloud, for Jeff went on: “There was no point in my ever saying this to you. Remember, you asked him for the job yourself, without consulting me. So it was up to you to make your own evaluation and your own adjustment. Tony and I did not become friends until we reached parity, not long before you and I were married. I doubt we’d ever have become close friends if I hadn’t acquired a certain reputation of my own.”

Jeff always took time to say what he wanted to say, the way he wanted to say it. Much as he wrote. Julie hung on, knowing he would come back to Phillips, and that everything in-between would be relevant. And so it happened. “Now to connect all this to your press agent friend, and the connection is weak, to say the least, one of the Broadway tokens of power Tony coveted in my day was first night tickets.” (What he usually got, Julie knew, was second night or preview; only the major critics were sure of opening night.) “Something that came back to me on the plane was having heard Tony on the phone bullying someone for opening night tickets to a show called
Lollopaloozer.
I have a hunch it was Phillips. You ought to be able to look it up if you think it might mean something to you. What I especially remember was his not letting up, a sort of harassment. I was uncomfortable listening to it.”

“Jeff, could I try a couple of names on you and see if they ring a bell?…Morton Butts.”

“No, and I think I’d remember that one.”

“Ellen Duprey.”

“Oh, yes. An actress who gave up the theater to become a nun and after a year or so came out of the convent and took the part of a nun in a play that closed overnight. Don’t remember the name of the play. Tony had me interview her, but he never ran the piece. It irritated him for some reason. I remember his saying, ‘I didn’t ask you for
Song of Bernadette,
kiddo.’”

Déjà vu. Of sorts. “Listen, Jeff. Ellen Duprey was married to Jay Phillips. Ten years ago
she
committed suicide, and Tony used it in the column. Unnecessarily, I’d say. There is a connection but I’ve got to find it before I can tell you where.”

“Put a carbon in your typewriter for me.”

“I will. How about your work?”

“In progress. Julie, you will go to see Fran, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Please give her my sympathy. I’ll write to her myself. But do what you can for her—for the both of us.”

She was tempted to say that she felt it incumbent on her, for those words from Jeff had stung as no words of Tony’s ever had. But all she said was, “I will.”

JULIE WENT DOWNSTAIRS
for the newspaper as soon as she got off the phone. It would have pleased Tony to know that he had made Page One of the
Times,
she thought upon seeing it.

From the paper Julie learned that Inspector Joseph Fitzgerald interrogated both Mrs. Alexander and her daughter. The daughter had failed to reach her mother with a message from Alexander saying that he would be delayed. Alexander returned to the office after attending a cocktail party at Gracie Mansion. And Mrs. Alexander, after waiting a half hour for him at a midtown restaurant, left and went directly to her flower shop on Lexington Avenue. The police reached her there at midnight.

Alexander had been shot at close range, apparently with his own revolver, but not by his own hand. His body was discovered shortly after eleven
P.M
., when the cleaning crew detected a strong odor of gunpowder outside his office and alerted the security police.

Julie could almost feel the apartment’s quietness; there was not even the usual hum of morning traffic. It was Saturday, she realized, and for a disoriented instant she enjoyed the thought of not having to go into the office. Wake up, Julie. It’s nightmare time again.

T
HERE HAD BEEN A
time when the Alexanders were the only friends of Jeff’s whom Julie enjoyed visiting. That was mostly Fran’s doing. Fran accepted her in her own right, not simply as Jeff’s wife. She sympathized with Julie’s assorted failures and tended to discount them as expecting too much of herself too soon. It was to Fran—and only to Fran, outside of Dr. Callahan, that Julie was able to say,
My whole trouble is that Jeff expects too little.
She had been fonder of the Alexander apartment—the penthouse in a turn of the century Park Avenue building—than of her own home. There were plants and books and modern pictures, including a portrait of Tony at his most sardonic, one eye almost closed, at which she always found herself winking back. The memory of those cherished times not so long ago flooded in on her as she went up in the elevator. Even the elevator had used to please her with its little round seats to be lowered from the wall for a leisurely ascent.

People were scattered through the apartment and on the terrace. The sun was shining, a welcome change in weather. A uniformed maid was pouring Bloody Marys.

She found Fran propped up on a chaise longue in the master bedroom accepting condolences. With a shawl over her shoulders and a mohair blanket over her knees, Fran didn’t merely look older, she looked elderly. Her face was strained, her hair peppery and dull. When she saw Julie her eyes seemed to brighten and once more Julie wondered at herself for not having seen her for so long. But she did know why: She was not one ever to take the initiative. If Fran had called her she would have come on the instant. Now she waited her turn to speak to her.

The room had been thoroughly tidied, the king-size bed made up as though forever. A great bouquet of red and white carnations stood on the bedside table. From Fran’s shop? The shop was called The Basil Pot. She grew herbs as well as plants, buying only her cut flowers on the wholesale market. The Basil Pot was named after a poem by Keats that, as Julie discovered on a reading she could have done without, was pretty macabre: a lover’s head is buried in the pot.

Fran took both Julie’s hands and pulled her down to kiss her. Her grip was fierce and boney and she held on until she had drawn Julie down beside her on the chaise. She smelled of earth and maybe even of sweat; her fingernails were dirty. Nothing seemed left of the chicness Julie had so admired, and her eyes were tired and bloodshot with no particular color of their own.

“It shouldn’t have taken something like this to bring you here,” she said, and the tears welled.

“I’m very sorry,” Julie said.

“I haven’t had much sleep and I don’t seem able to stop crying.”

“What can I do?” Julie asked.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything. It’s all been done. Are there police outside, did you notice?”

“I didn’t see any. Jeff called from Paris. He’s terribly concerned. He wanted you to know.”

“I do know,” Fran said and smiled a little. “Has he been away for long?” Which showed how much communication there had been between her and Tony.

“Since Wednesday.”

“Tony would never go anywhere outside New York.”

“Not even Staten Island,” Julie said.

“He was afraid his life would turn out to have been a dream, that he’d wake up back on the farm.”

“Isn’t it crazy,” Julie said, “how little we know one another?”

“Ha! Sometimes the more intimate, the less.”

People were standing in line waiting to speak to her, but she kept her eyes down to delay acknowledging them. “The police keep coming at me. And at my daughter. I’m surprised we’ve had this much privacy.” She paused and then, as though reminding herself, “I don’t think you’ve met Eleanor, have you?”

“No.”

“She’s here…somewhere.”

“I’ll find her,” Julie said.

“Tom Hastings called this morning.” Hastings was the executive editor of the
New York Daily.
“He wanted to know what I thought about having the column go on—perhaps with you and Tim. I said I thought it was a fine idea.” She spoke slowly as though an inner clock had run down.

“Thank you,” Julie said. She couldn’t imagine Tony taking to the idea at all.

“I think you’re supposed to call the office. Or Hastings’ office. I forget. There will be a message out there.”

“I’d better go and let other people have a word with you,” Julie said. “It isn’t fair not to.”

Fran looked up at her. “You still believe in fairness?” Then she gave Julie’s arm a squeeze. “You’re right, and I may need all my friends. Will you come back this afternoon?”

Julie promised.

She found Eleanor in the guest room and knew her instantly to be Fran’s daughter, the set of the eyes, the high, rounded forehead. But the face was longer, the features severe, ascetic-looking. Tall and a bit awkward, the girl was trying to help old Mary Ann Stokes of
The Village Voice
into her coat.

“No flowers,” Eleanor said. “He despised flowers unless he could pick them himself.” Which was nonsense when you thought about it. Or metaphor: that possibility was intriguing.

“I’ll make a donation to the anti-nukes in Tony’s name,” Miss Stokes said, on her way, “since obviously gun control was not in his purview.”

Julie’s eyes and Eleanor’s met and told that both of them appreciated the gallows humor. When the girl smiled a vein appeared down the center of her forehead. Large dark eyes, no tears, brown hair cut short. She seemed not to know what to do with her hands and finally stuck them in the belt of her jacket.

“You’re Eleanor, aren’t you? I’m Julie.”

The young woman nodded and the vein became even more pronounced.

“I don’t know why we haven’t met before,” Julie said.

“I’m never here for long at a time.”

“Are you in school?” Julie found the going difficult.

“Veterinary college. I’m good with animals.”

“I’ll bet you are,” Julie said. “I’ve heard that’s one of the hardest schools to get into.”

“Especially Cornell.”

“I’m sorry for what’s happened here,” Julie said.

“Are you?”

Which brought a desultory conversation to a dead halt. “I ought to make a phone call,” Julie murmured.

“You’re supposed to call the office,” Eleanor remembered. “What I meant was that the police have gone away. They were here all night asking the same questions over and over.”

“They do that,” Julie said.

“Do you think they’ll come back again?”