Lullaby of Murder (25 page)

“Who’s this?”

Julie broke the connection.

“If a man answers, hang up, right?” Tim said.

Julie nodded. She was trying to decide whether or not the voice was familiar. She couldn’t.

Tim went down to intercept the special correspondents. Julie worked on the Sunday magazine feature. She jumped every time the phone rang. It was getting on toward Alice’s lunchtime. At twenty past twelve the call came. Julie signalled Alice to stay on the line.

It was Patti. “I need help, sweetie.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at a public phone on West Seventy-second Street, but I’ll come to you if you say where. Not Forty-fourth Street, and not your newspaper office.”

“Okay. Go to my house on Sixteenth Street.” She gave her the number. “I’ll leave now and I’ll be waiting for you in the vestibule.”

Julie waited for an hour downstairs at Sixteenth Street. She went up then and called the office. No word there from Patti. She worked on the article, marking every few minutes while another hour passed. The stillness of the house seemed profound, accented by the chirping of a solitary sparrow in the ailanthus tree at the rear of the building.

Reluctantly, she called Lieutenant Marks.

“P
LAIN COMMON SENSE WOULD
tell you they’re not going to harm the chick about to lay golden eggs,” Marks said.

“Even if she could testify against Morielli?”

“There’s a difference between
could
and
would,
Julie.”

“So you won’t do anything, is that it? You asked me to cease and desist. But what was I supposed to do when she said she needed help: tell her to get lost?”

“You might have suggested she call the police. We’re putting out a thirteen-state alarm for Morielli. I hope we get him in a hurry and that we have enough to hold him on. When that happens I think she’ll surface. Stop worrying.”

“Yeah,” Julie said. “Thanks.”

She called the city newsroom and passed the word to the specials that a thirteen-state alarm was going out for Ron Morielli. Then she looked up the address of Patti Royce’s agent.

“J
ULIE HAYES TO SEE
Mr. Macken,” she said, standing tall at the receptionist’s desk.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Yes,” she lied.

She waited on an ornamental iron bench that must have made an impression on a lot of bottoms. The building was a converted hat factory with fancy metal work and plaster columns topped with art nouveau pediments.

Macken came out almost at once, as though to make up for the phone calls of hers he had ignored that long time ago when she’d wanted to make her first inquiry about Patti Royce. He looked stylish and successful: sculpted dark hair, small grey eyes, dimpled chin that jutted, and a tight dark suit. He held her hand longer than necessary, leading her into his inner office. “Patti told me you were doing a story on her. How can I help?”

His secretary gave Julie a flash smile.

“You can help me find her, first thing,” Julie said. “We arranged to meet but she didn’t show up.” Before sounding the alarm she hoped to learn where Macken’s loyalty was. The office didn’t tell her much about Creative Talent, Inc. From where she sat with him on ice cream parlor chairs at a porcelain topped table, it looked like a one-man operation.

“That’s twice now we’ve stood you up, you might say. I’m sorry about that.”

“Three times if you want to count,” Julie said. “Mr. Morielli and his sister broke up our interview yesterday.”

“A difficult man,” Macken murmured and Julie knew he wasn’t the kind who volunteered.

“Was he the one who chose you as Patti’s agent?”

He looked at her as though he couldn’t believe her naiveté.

“I might as well put my question directly, Mr. Macken: How much did you know about Ron Morielli and Patti when you took her on?”

“I never know more than I want to know. I know him only as Patti’s manager and one of the producers of a film called
Celebration.
I agreed with Mr. Alexander that if she was handled right—and if the picture was handled right—nobody connected with it would ever go hungry again, as Scarlett O’Hara said. It was my idea to put her into daytime television, just to keep her busy until the distribution was set and the picture released.”

“It was a long time between engagements for Patti,” Julie said.

Macken made a noncommital sound. He was doodling on the white table-top, a female head of comic strip beauty. “She told you that she’d been a child star?”

“We talked about it, but we got cut off before we got to Morielli.”

Macken leaned back and played with the pencil for a minute. “She told me once he was a Humphrey Bogart figure to her. Better not use that until you check it out with her. And Morielli.”

“How about Tony? What kind of a figure was he?”

“Daddy-bear,” he said deep in his throat.

That one checked out, and she began to feel that Macken really didn’t know much about the people around
Celebration.
Blind, because he refused to look. “You know Tony’s contribution to the picture, don’t you? He wrote the story. David Clemens is a pseudonym.”

“Doesn’t mean much. It’s Cardova’s picture. He’ll be right up there with Zeffirelli and Zinneman. I wish I had him in my stable.” He was pencilling a mustache on the female profile. “Why don’t you wait for Patti to come to you, Mrs. Hayes? She’ll come, don’t worry. She gets absent-minded, but there isn’t a more sentimental gal in show business, and to her you’re Tony’s alter ego.”

“How does that make Morielli feel about me?”

Macken gave an enormous shrug.

“She tried all morning to reach me by phone, Mr. Macken, and when she did reach me, she said she needed help. I gave her my address and went home to wait for her. She never showed up.”

“Today’s Wednesday, isn’t it? She’s supposed to be home learning her lines.” He put the pencil away in an inside pocket and called out to his secretary to bring him a phone.

She brought the phone, plugged it in, poked out the number for him and handed over the one-piece instrument.

Julie heard the signal, then the click of someone’s picking up, but no voice.

“Patti, is that you?” Macken said. “No games, Patti…”

But no response came from the other end and he hung up, then called another number. “Let me talk to Ron. It’s Ted Macken.” At the end of that call, he told Julie what she already knew: “The police are looking for him.” He seemed genuinely shocked.

“But not for Patti,” Julie said.

“He’ll take her with him, if he’s on the run. Believe me, he isn’t going to let her go. And I’m going to be in trouble with Procter and Gamble.”

“Is that why Tony was going to marry her—to get her away from him?”

“That crossed my mind once or twice. Mrs. Hayes, I don’t have the answers to your questions. And if I had them, I wouldn’t give them to you now without consulting my lawyer.”

“Just let me bounce off a couple more of them: Somewhere in there Patti made a porn film, didn’t she?”

He made a face: what difference? But he said nothing.

“I’ll bet her part in the soap opera is nice and wholesome, right?”

“You don’t watch daytime television, do you? There are no nice, wholesome parts. She’s the hospital lay. Calling all doctors.”

“Oh,” Julie said.

“Where was she when she phoned you?” Macken asked.

“At a public phone on Seventy-second Street.”

“That’s crazy. She lives right there. Somebody’s in the place. Somebody picked up the phone just now.”

There was a lot of street to Seventy-second, east and west. Then it occurred to Julie, the most famous address, east
or
west: “The Dakota?”

He nodded.

“Does Morielli have a key?”

“He owns the apartment.”

“So maybe he’s hiding out there,” Julie said.

“If you were looking for him, where would you look first?”

“I see what you mean,” Julie said. “Then who’s picking up the phone? How about his sister, Mrs. Conti?”

“She and her husband flew down to Key West this morning—to rest up for the opening.”

“Yeah,” Julie said. Then: “I didn’t know she had a husband.”

“In emergencies,” Macken said.

J
ULIE WALKED THROUGH MADISON
Square after she left Macken’s office. There was a wind and the air was clear, and the trees had managed to drop a few leaves of dappled yellow and red among the shrivelled browns and muddy greens. She was closer to home than to anywhere else she wanted to go. She felt very much alone. Not afraid exactly, but vulnerable. And curiously, a kind of ache for Tony had come upon her.

She called the office and the answering service. No one was making immediate demands on her. The story had not yet broken: the midnight edition. She could drop out for the rest of the day and not be missed. Maybe for days…

With a cup of tea in hand, she replayed the tape she had made after Romano’s call. “Given what you know of my filmic and photographic interests…” If there was pornographic film of Patti, he knew it. He probably owned it. If that were so, Tony ought to have known he wasn’t going to get it. Perhaps there was no such film. Nor ever had been. In which case,
Celebration
was principally at issue. Art is never pornography, Miss Julie. He claimed to want the picture protected as a work of art, untouched by scandal. All of this seemed to put him and Tony on the same side. Except that one of them was dead.

“H
E OUGHT TO HAVE
been an investigative reporter,” Fran said. She pressed the soil around a young plant, and gave the plastic pot a little pat as she set it among the others on a tray above the bench. “I’m glad you told me,” she said of the Tripod connection and the producers of
Celebration.
“I suppose it’s all bound to get full press coverage?”

“I’m afraid so,” Julie said. “It will break tonight in the
Daily.
It was Tim’s scoop, really, and he consulted with Mr. Hastings. I wish they’d included me, but I wasn’t there in time. I’d have tried to hold back a while longer.”

“Thank you for that,” Fran said.

Julie thought of telling the truth, that it was for Patti Royce’s sake as much as for the perpetuation of the Tony Alexander legend that she’d wanted to hold back. Tony would become a legend if Fran had her way: the columnist who would infiltrate the mob, if necessary by marriage, if necessary breaking up his own marriage, to conduct the exposé he wanted. In a little while Fran might even come to believe it. It was not a moment of truth on either of their parts.

“All his life,” Fran said, going to the front of the shop with Julie, “he would dig himself into a situation where the only way out was by explosion. And when the dust cleared, he had his story. Ask Jeff.”

“I will. I’ll be talking to him soon. Fran, how did Tony feel about pornography?”

“That it was a form of perversion. He was a puritan, you know. Very straight. I suppose that’s hard for you to believe.”

“No.” It had nothing to do with the Tripod. Nor with his making passes. They were Tony’s kind of tribute.

Fran took a dark, velvety red rose from the refrigerator and laced it through the buttonholes of Julie’s raincoat. She unlocked the shop door. Two black-and-white but mostly dirt-grey cats were waiting. “What do I do about them? Eleanor’s refugees. She goes back to school tomorrow, thank God. Look at them. They expect to be fed.”

“Better feed them,” Julie said.

THE MIDNIGHT EDITION
broke the story of Tony Alexander and Patti Royce, former child star coming back the hard way, via the massage parlor and a sleeper film,
Celebration.
Patti’s one-time boss and lover, the owner of the Tripod Turkish Baths, Ron Morielli, was being sought by the police for questioning in Alexander’s murder. Miss Royce was thought by the police to be in seclusion.

One-time boss and lover, Julie thought. If Patti was twenty-one years old, how long ago could one-time be? The chick expected to lay the golden eggs, Marks had said, and therefore safe. Or could it be that the police were holding her to bait a trap for Morielli? Marks had seemed so very sure of himself. But that was how police had to sound.

SHE WAS OUTSIDE
the television studio in the early morning. So were a lot of reporters. Patti didn’t show. The taping schedule of
Forgotten Splendor
was a shambles. Actors in later-scheduled segments arrived, hair tousled, scripts in hand.

Julie spotted Ted Macken getting out of a cab. She didn’t try to get near him, but from those who did word spread that Patti was suffering from fatigue and nervous exhaustion. She went to the shop on Forty-fourth Street. She felt utterly safe, as though all the action had gone somewhere else and left her. Or as though she was waking from a nightmare and wanted back in instead of out of it. She called Sweets Romano.

As was customary between them, she left her name and he called right back. “I proposed to phone you this morning, Miss Julie. So much, it would seem, has gone awry. I shall send Michael for you. Will you come?”

“Mr. Romano, I’m worried about Patti Royce.”

“I understand,” he said and hung up.

T
HE LAME DRIVER, MICHAEL,
scuttled around the limousine to open the door for her. “I’m glad to see you again, Miss Julie.”

She wished she could say the same. “Thank you, Michael.”

She rode up Eighth Avenue seeing it even a few shades greyer than normal through the tinted glass. Was the glass bullet-proof? She supposed so. Although Romano claimed never to leave his home she knew he sent the car for a variety of associates to meet with him, and having once seen a carload of men he called his “Board” she ought to have been able to accept him at police value. He himself enjoyed suggesting to her his villainous career. And yet he reigned undisturbed by the Law, in a vast and beautifully appointed penthouse in the east Seventies.

Michael opened the panel and said over his shoulder: “Would you like to go through the park, Miss Julie? It’s a beautiful day.”

From where she sat she couldn’t tell.