In the Still of the Night (12 page)

It was almost dark and there were misty halos around the streetlights—and when she turned the corner she could see rainbows of revolving color: police activity outside the Willoughby. She approached near enough to see that the action was concentrated around the basement entrance, whereupon she reversed herself and headed for Julie’s as fast as her legs would carry her.

Julie was short on patience at the arrival of Mrs. Ryan. For one thing, she was uneasy about not having followed up on the nun’s story. After all, she was in the newspaper business. She ought at least to have called the city desk on a breaking story. Or covered it herself. But she had wanted to give Justina a chance to confront the police on her own. She certainly didn’t want to be the person to blow her cover.

When Mrs. Ryan finished giving out her jigsaw of a tale, Julie asked her if she’d seen Sister Justina after they’d met at St. Malachy’s.

“I haven’t.”

“Well, she’s been here this afternoon, Mrs. Ryan. The police are at the Willoughby to investigate a murder that took place there in the basement. It’s highly possible they’ll connect it with your man with the money in the plastic cups.”

“Holy Mother of God,” Mrs. Ryan said.

“And they’ll be looking for witnesses, for accessories.”

“Sister Justina?”

“And
her
accessories,” Julie said. “Your doorman isn’t about to take credit for letting her into the building, is he?”

Mrs. Ryan sat a long while in silence. “Would you mind walking me home, dear? My legs are so weak I’m not sure they’ll carry me.”

Julie pulled on her coat, put the phone on “Service,” and fastened her press card onto the inside flap of her shoulderbag.

Mrs. Ryan got weaker and weaker on the way. She suggested they stop for a brief rest at McGowan’s, but Julie put a firm hand beneath the older woman’s elbow and propelled her homeward.

By then word of police activity at the Willoughby had reached McGowan’s and most of the patrons were there to see what was going on. Julie spotted Detective Russo as he came out of the building on the run. She planted Mrs. Ryan among her McGowan’s cronies at the barricade and caught up with him as he was climbing into the back of a squad car.

“Okay if I come along?” she asked, halfway into the car behind him. They were on pretty good terms, considering that they weren’t always on the same side.

“Why not?” he said ironically.

By the time they reached the precinct house, she knew how the victim and his assailant had got into that part of the Willoughby. The Environmental Protection Department had ordered a removal of old sewage pipes and part of the wall had been removed, a temporary partition put up in its place. “Like everything else in this town,” Russo said, “they get the job half done and move on to the next one.”

No mention of the nun. “How did they get into the building in the first place, Dom?” Julie asked.

“How the hell do I know? Somebody must’ve left the door open. And no wonder. It stinks to high heaven down back where they were. They buried their own shit like animals. That’s how they found the body—and the tin box with the money in it.”

“The money in the plastic cups you found earlier this afternoon. Do you think there’s a connection?”

“You better believe it,” Russo said. “The victim had one clutched in his hand when he was clobbered with the tin box.”

“How did you know to go to the Willoughby in the first place?”

“We had a phone call,” Russo said. “But the complainant didn’t show. We’d begun to think it was a hoax—but the smell led us to him. A whole section of the wall—we just leaned on it and Jericho!”

“Jericho,” Julie said. “That’s nice.”

So Justina had vanished. No problem: just get out of the habit and grow a beard. Until now she had carried Justina’s confession of identity as a confidence, as though it had been told under a seal. It hadn’t, of course, but since Detective Russo and company had the suspect in custody and enough evidence to detain him for a while she decided to keep the matter on hold.

Mrs. Ryan and Sheila Brennan were waiting for Julie when she arrived at Mrs. Ryan’s apartment. They seemed less chastened than she thought they ought to be, but there hadn’t yet been time for the police to get to them.

“We’re expecting them any minute,” Mrs. Ryan said. “And we’ve decided to tell them the truth about Sister.”

“And that is?”

“How she got into the building in the first place. How she used us.”

Julie felt she was being used herself—that this was a dress rehearsal. “Okay.”

“But she would have used anybody to help those she thought needed help.” Mrs. Ryan drew a deep breath. “Julie, who would you say all that money belongs to?”

“I wouldn’t say.” But she was beginning to see a light.

“Sheila and I have a story to tell you. Remember you mentioned Jack Carroll the other day, and his trunk in the basement? Jack lived here for years before Sheila and I ever heard of the Willoughby and he loved to tell stories of the old days—the circus people, the vaudevillians, and the chorus girls. One of his best stories, and God knows he practiced to make it perfect, was about Big Frankie Malloy. When Frankie moved in, the management renovated a whole suite for him. He had tons of money. He had his own barber sent in every day to shave him, he had his meals catered; he was always sending out for this or that, he was a lavish tipper. And the girls, there were plenty of them. But there was something wrong about big Frankie. After he moved in, he never went outdoors again—except once.

“Madge Delaney was his favorite of the girls, and she got booked into the Blue Diamond nightclub just down the street. Frankie went out the night she opened. It was said afterward that the only reason she got the booking was to lure him out. He was shot dead before he ever got to the Blue Diamond.”

“Wow,” Julie said.

“Don’t you think it could be his money that’s been hidden away all these years?”

“It’s a real possibility,” Julie agreed.

“You see why I asked you who it belongs to now.”

“I do see,” Julie assured her.

Julie’s story made page 3 of the bulldog edition of the
New York Daily
and the police, discovering there was no such religious order as the Sisters of Our Lady of Hope, put out an alert for Sister Justina. The Willoughby claimed all of that very old money. It also threatened to sue the contractor whose procrastination made that part of the basement available to Sister Justina and her friends.

Mrs. Ryan’s faith in the nun remained steadfast: she might herself have got the name of the order wrong. Julie thought about looking up Goldie, the reformed pimp, to ask him what became of the gold-and-ivory cross he used to wear. But she decided not to. It was one more thing she didn’t have to know.

“A
ND NOW, MY GROWN-UP
friends and all my little pals, our revels are almost over, as Shakespeare said.” The magician turned to his assistant who wasn’t much help at magic, an encumbrance really, but he liked to have her on stage. She added class. “Isn’t that what Shakespeare said, Miranda?”

Miranda, whose real name was Maggie, drew herself up to her full five feet one and a half inches. She was a pretty girl with shining brown eyes and a quick smile. She looked wholesome where Christopher would have preferred a sly, seductive woman. Miranda was about as mysterious as a duck. But since she was personable and the partner at hand, Christopher the Great used her to the limits of his imagination. Miranda intoned:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

>As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

>
Are melted into air …
”

Christopher, one hand under his, chin in the manner of a popular vaudeville comedian, mugged amazement as Miranda roundly mouthed the words. A few lines more and he interrupted her and asked the audience, “Ain’t a college education wonderful?”

The audience of eighteen men and seven women sat with the same mute patience they accorded a dull sermon on Sunday morning. The twenty children were restless. The drafts kept gusting through the hall. The flag quivered in its stanchion. The lights flickered on the Christmas tree. The steam pipes hissed and rattled. At a signal from Christopher, Miranda gave a great whang to a Chinese gong. The audience jumped. They were alive.

Christopher announced as the finale the most dangerous feat in his repertoire. The act, he said, had made him famous the world over. He was a dapper man, slight, with hollow cheeks, a sharp nose, pale blue eyes, a thin mustache, and an unmistakable Midwestern accent although he claimed to have grown up in Budapest, Hungary. His hands were graceful and quick and his whole body had a squirrel-like agility. For this trick, however, he stood severely straight and still. He seemed to feed himself, one by one, an entire packet of needles. He grimaced in pain at every swallow. The folding chairs squeaked as his audience sat forward, finally alert. The children’s eyes were popping.

“Hush,” Miranda said to a house already hushed.

Christopher balled a length of thread and stuffed it into his mouth. In his display of agony, he resembled a Christian martyr often featured on funeral cards. His audience belonged to him. The hundred or so empty chairs no longer mattered. Then, with a silent prayer, he extracted an end of thread from between his tongue and his teeth and carefully drew out a chain of neatly threaded needles. He skipped down the steps and invited a youngster in the front row to look into the cavern of his mouth.

Maggie didn’t know how he did it. Nor did she care. It seemed mighty unhygienic. In fact, she hated magic, but she had the only job she could get. The country was in a depression—dust bowls and soup kitchens, Father Coughlin and John L. Lewis, the latter revered in Bluefield, West Virginia, the coal and rail town they were about to pull out of, to head home for Christmas. Home for Maggie was a small town in Michigan, for Christopher it was Fort Wayne, Indiana. Christmas was two days away.

It was ten past twelve when they hit the highway in Christopher’s sedan. It was custom-packed, floorboards to roof, the back seat removed to accommodate his magic, livestock, and luggage. Maggie’s luggage consisted of an imitation leather suitcase and a canvas bag of books for which the only room was at her feet. Two spare tires were strapped to the running boards. Those on the car were as bald as the liners inside them. The car gave a thud at every tar-filled crack in the pavement. There was a strong odor of bird dung in the car—Maggie didn’t think rabbit droppings smelled—but stronger was the smell of the half onion Christopher had at the ready in case the windshield frosted. It was a cold night and grew colder the higher they went into the mountains. An oval moon rode high. It silvered the hills, etched telegraph poles, slag heaps, and occasional cottages in which the lights were long out. Far down in the valley the railroad tracks shone in the moonlight. Their red, green, and yellow signals were cheery. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Maggie observed.

“What I wish—I wish there was more traffic,” Christopher said. “If we were to break down …”

Maggie cut him off. “We won’t.”

“That’s the difference between you and me,” Christopher said. “I look for the worst to happen, you the best.”

“Might as well,” she said.

Christopher sniffed. “Do you smell alcohol?”

“I smell onion,” Maggie said.

“If she boils dry we’re in trouble. She was already overloaded without those books of yours. What do you need with all those books? Why didn’t you sell them?”

“You know why,” Maggie said. What she had sold was her car—for thirty dollars on the spot when Christopher arrived in town and offered her a ride almost all the way home. The booking of Christopher the Great out of Fort Wayne called a minimum of five performances a week; they were promoted, in the name of the sponsoring local charity, by five women, each working a town a week in advance of Christopher, and moving on the day after the performance. There were towns like Glens Falls, N.Y.; Oil Town, Pa.; Pittsfield, Mass.; and Bluefield that Maggie wasn’t ever going to forget.

Christopher took off his mitten and groped for her hand where it was snuggled in her pocket. “I love you, Maggie, books and all. I love you the best of all my girls.”

“I love you, too,” she lied—or half lied—and gave her hand to keep him from groping any farther.

The road soon demanded both his hands on the steering wheel. He started to sing, “You tell me your dreams, I’ll tell you mine …”

Maggie sang harmony, a strong alto to his quavering tenor.

They were almost an hour into their journey when a thump, thump, thump signaled a flat tire. Christopher cursed philosophically and pulled to the side of the road. It took all his wirey strength to jack up the overloaded Chevy, a rock wedged under the other rear wheel. While he removed the loosened bolts by moonlight, Maggie went behind a billboard to pee. The billboard featured Santa Claus, a Coca-Cola in his hand: “The pause that keeps you going.” Christopher was blowing on his hands. A vast silence surrounded them. Then from inside the car came the cooing of his doves. Maggie laughed.

“It ain’t funny, Maggie,” the magician said. “They never coo at night.”

Then came another sound in the far distance, the fluted whistle of a train. Maggie wished she were on the train, but didn’t say so. She needed all her money to buy a few family Christmas presents and a warmer coat. If she had told her dream it was that she could get a job teaching history. She adored history. She was carrying twelve volumes of English history that had belonged to her grandfather, along with several volumes of poetry. An English major, a minor in history, she was overeducated for the jobs available.

A car went by so fast it almost sucked her with it. Christopher shouted curses after it. An echo made them resound. “Helloooooo,” Maggie called and her voice bounced around the hills. “Go to hell!” Christopher shouted. Hell, hell, hell, hell … A few minutes later he eased the car down, strapped the flat tire into place, and put his tools in the trunk. He went behind the billboard. Maggie warmed her hands on the radiator.