Lullaby of Murder (26 page)

Alberto, Romano’s young man of many tasks, took her up in the private elevator, and Romano himself opened the door to her. An aging cherub—if cherubs ever aged—the round soft face, pink cheeks and very blue eyes; but the skin was beginning to pinch.

“How kind of fortune to take time out from all its di mal deeds to bring us together! Come in, Miss Julie.” He stepped back and tucked his hands into the pockets of a blue velvet jacket. He ought to have known she would not offer to shake hands, well aware that he could not bear to touch however fond he was of a person. He had once called him self the ultimate voyeur. “Shall we go and sit in the company of our old friend, Vuillard?”

They passed from the foyer into the sky-lit living room and took the same chairs they had sat in before, facing the Vuillard painting of an old man.

“There will be coffee presently,” Romano said. “So: the very exploitation both of us would have avoided has occurred—all the nasty little liaisons of pleasure revealed to the greedy public.”

“It was not my story,” Julie said.

“I observed. Never mind. The film will speak for itself and be heard when all is hushed in Babel.”

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

“So you proposed to tell me on the phone. This is much better: one never knows with whom one is sharing a private line. I should have thought that worry about Patti Royce was an excess of charity, but perhaps I’m wrong. I have never been an astute judge of women. But as a distinguished president once said—I believe it was of art in his case—I know what I like.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. You will have coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“Ah, but you will.” And he turned her attention toward the door then opening. Through it came Patti Royce, bearing, with a total lack of grace, a tray with service for three.

Romano leaped to his feet and took the tray from her. “What a disastrous proposal this was!” he said of Patti’s serving the coffee.

Patti came and seated herself on the arm of Julie’s chair. She folded a purple satin robe over her knees. “Don’t be mad because I didn’t call you, sweetie. I wanted to but he said I’d better not.” The robe kept slipping open all the way up to her thighs.

Julie felt numb. The relief she might have expected was entirely missing. What grew in her was a feeling of foolishness. Then she thought of Tony and anger took over.

Romano, having set the tray on a table near his chair, was watching her, interpreting her every expression. “Please don’t despise your own kindness, or for that matter, Mr. Alexander’s chivalry. He was a most unlikely knight and his armor didn’t fit very well. But let me say, Miss Julie, his cause is won, his dream of fair women quite safe. It is of no significance that I do not share his vision.”

Julie took a deep breath. “Are we talking about a pornographic film Patti made before
Celebration
?”

Patti bit her lip and then said, “I had to make a living some way. How was I to know anything good was ever going to happen to me again?”

Romano clucked disapproval. “I am disappointed. I’d have thought there was no need to be explicit. No one will ever see that obscenity again except Romano—and I very much doubt that he will.” He looked at the actress with an expression of supreme distaste. He poured Julie a small cup of coffee and brought it to her, dispatching Patti from the arm of the chair.

Patti headed straight for the chair under the Vuillard facing them.

“Not there! You must take her out of here with you, Miss Julie. She is a thing of beauty to me only in film, and no joy whatsoever.”

Patti seated herself on the floor at Julie’s feet.

“What happened after you called me yesterday?” Julie asked.

“Michael was waiting to offer our services,” Romano answered for her. “It had occurred to me that rarely in her life had she been given a choice worth the choosing. I was wrong. It was a battle of equal wits between her and Morielli. Even with Alexander on her side, she couldn’t win.”

“I didn’t want to win,” Patti said. “I wanted to run.”

“Then now is the time!” Romano made shooing motions with his delicate little hands. “Gather your clothes and don’t leave anything behind you. You are not to return, you understand. Romano is not a proper instructor for someone who cannot learn.”

“I couldn’t come back if I wanted to,” Patti said. “I don’t even know where I am.”

“You do see what I mean, Miss Julie,” he said when Patti had left the room.

“May I ask a question directly, Mr. Romano?”

“So long as you don’t expect a direct answer.” He chortled and poured his own coffee.

“Tony wanted the film, didn’t he? To make sure it never got out to the public?”

“What difference does it make at this point?”

“I want to know why he died and who killed him.”

“I suppose that is important,” Romano said. “But I assure you this ‘property’ of which you speak was in my possession for many months. My financing of the picture was conditional on its delivery—master print, negative, and all copies—something of which, you will perhaps understand, Mr. Alexander could never have been certain.”

“So Tony didn’t know you had it.”

“I didn’t say that. In truth, I don’t know whether he knew it or not. He was not likely to have trusted me any further than he trusted Morielli.”

“That was too bad,” Julie said.

“Very unfortunate.”

IN THE CAB
, on which Julie insisted instead of the limousine, Patti said, “When I first got there I thought it was like paradise and I could live there forever. Then I got the creeps. I was so glad when I found out you were coming. Do you know who he reminds me of? Jay Phillips in a way—something soft and awful.”

“Patti, Where’s Ron Morielli?”

“Mr. Romano says the police will have to extradite him from South America if they want him.”

“They do.”

“Does that mean he killed Tony?”

“It means they think so. Where was he the night Tony was killed?”

“He was supposed to be at the Tripod—you know…”

“I know,” Julie said.

“The police kept asking me why I said
supposed
, and I always told them that’s just the way I talk. But if he’s gone, I’m glad. See, that’s why I went so easy with Mr. Romano’s man. I’ve always needed somebody to protect me.”

“I understand,” Julie said. “If Ron wasn’t at the Tripod when he was supposed to be there, where was he?”

“I don’t know, Julie. Honest. He kept promising Tony to bring him that dirty old picture, but I don’t know for a fact.”

“Okay. When did Tony find out about the picture?”

“Well, he thought it was so terrible me working at the Tripod: so I told him about the picture. He said I was a white slave, which I didn’t like much.”

“Patti, someone’s in your apartment. Who?”

“Two men Ron gave the key to. They’re supposed to be protecting me. But I’m more scared of them than anybody, and when I got a chance I grabbed my
Forgotten Splendor
bag and ran.”

Which, Julie realized, was where the purple dressing gown had come from.

“Julie, do you mind if we go straight to the Ninth Avenue Studios? I’m late, I know, but you could give them some story while I get into costume. Then you and I could finish the interview when I’m not needed on the set.”

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON
Julie went to the office in the
Daily
building. Alice had prepared three columns of copy that Tim had left for Julie’s approval. In the quiet after Alice had gone she wrote the article for the Sunday magazine…any Sunday. She had missed the deadline. She had no idea whether the piece was good or not. It was the best she could do. She remembered all too well sitting in the same setting and starting out,
I never promised you a rose garden.
Her desk had been positioned differently then. Now she stared across the room at the plastic-shrouded celebrity file. She had some new names since she and Marks had consulted it, and the uneasy feeling that the truth as well as Morielli had somehow escaped them.

She decided to break the law. Carefully. She threw back the shroud, trespassed on Alice’s desk drawer to find a tweezers and, in the manner Marks had taught her, looked up David Clemens. He was there, in Tony’s own hand: “A writer of excellent promise whose trouble is he may have a contract put out on him before he ever has one offered to him.”

She went to the M’s. No entry under Morielli. Back to the C’s. Conti: no entry. Cardova: “Eduardo Cardova, a Latin lover type, and a film director of some promise. A sweets darling.”

Tony had written what he meant, she was sure: sweets, as in Sweets Romano. Knowing Romano’s phobic voyeurism, she had to wonder if by any chance Cardova was involved in the pornography. She had to wonder, but she didn’t have to know.

I
T WAS A FEW DAYS
later that Marks reached her by phone. “I think we have Morielli, what’s left of him. The head and torso surfaced in waters off Staten Island. The feet are probably down there somewhere in cement.” He paused. “Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“This has a way of happening to Romano expendables. I was afraid of it. I wanted to get to him first.”

“I wish you had,” Julie said.

“Now I want Romano and—Julie—I’ll need all the help I can get.”

Turn the page to continue reading from the Julie Hayes Mysteries

“I
REALLY DON’T UNDERSTAND
,” Julie said. “I just don’t.”

Her husband frowned and screwed up his eyes as though searching his mind for another, no more unkindly way to explain something that ought to have been accepted without explanation. Explanations were not going to help.

If only she could do that, Julie thought, if only she could say, “Okay,” and get up and walk out of the room. What she said was, “Why don’t you start from the beginning? I want to be sure I heard what I think I heard.”

“You heard what you heard,” Jeff said: a gentle voice, a message of stone. When Julie shivered in spite of herself, he put out his hand to her. She pulled away, and he turned the gesture into one of flicking dust from the arm of the chair. Despite all her housecleaning, a tiny cloud of dust rose and shimmered in the beam of early summer sunlight that angled across the living room.

“I’ll bet there’s no dust in her house,” Julie said. “Or is she a slob? Am I too fastidious? Too much like you?” She didn’t want to say the things she was saying. They simply spurted out. To forestall any more of them she pressed her knuckles against her mouth.

“You must have known,” Jeff said, his sad eyes coaxing her to agree with him.

“How? Tell me how I was to know.”

“Something. You must have known something.”

“Is it my fault that I didn’t?”

“No. It’s not your fault. We don’t communicate very well. We don’t pick up on one another. You want me to explain, but how can I explain the inexplicable? I’ve fallen in love. I didn’t plan to, but it happened.”

“And what am I to do?” More words to regret. And underneath the pain and panic was the feeling that she had never been in love with him. Lacking in variety of experience she might be, but she knew there was more to loving than occurred between them. And yet there had been love.

“I don’t intend to leave you destitute.”

“I’m not talking about money,” she screamed, and then in self-disgust, “Oh, why can’t I shut up? Christ! Words don’t mean anything. Not to a child, and that’s what’s wrong with me. I’m retarded. I refused to grow after hitting twelve.” She got to her feet and stretched until her bones crackled, trying to break the tension. “Maybe we’re onto a cure now. How about that?” She moved from place to place in this sacred room of his, this so-called living room in which she had not been able to live in all the nine years of their marriage. She was looking for a single object she had added to his exquisite collection of Victoriana, a china giraffe.

“I consider myself at fault there,” he said. “I liked you that way.”

Would it have choked him to say that he had
loved
her that way? Having found the ornament and taken it in hand, she forgot her purpose, if any, in looking for it, and put it back on the shelf. “You’re not at fault, I’m not at fault, my mother wasn’t at fault …”

“Your mother?”

“Phyllis wasn’t at fault either, was she?” Julie ranted on with the pointless mention of Jeff’s first wife. “What you want is a no-fault divorce. Right?”

“Since you put it that way, yes. I suppose that is what I want. I want to be fair to you, certainly.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean by that that I shall always provide for and take care of you.”

“Always?” Julie whirled around on him. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing, what we’re saying to one another.”

“I know,” he said soothingly.

“Let me say something to you, chum. Before I let you take care of me, I’ll find a jumping-off place and celebrate my independence.”

“If that’s to be construed as a suicide threat, it’s not allowed.”

“It’s not a suicide threat! It’s a survival plan.”

“Then I’ll be the first to celebrate your independence. I’m sorry, but you set yourself up for that. I think it’s demonstrable that self-support with you is a recent and tenuous accomplishment. Look at matters squarely, Julie. You finally have a paying job, a column under your own byline …”