JULIE TRIED TO THROW OFF the feeling of sadness the priest had left her with. Eighth Avenue wasn’t the place to do it. The whores were out in their Sunday best. Missing, or otherwise occupied, was the red-headed girl who sang hymns of a Sunday as she high-hipped it along the avenue. “Holy God, we praise Thy name…” Did she pray to Mary Magdalen? Did Magdalen wind up a saint?
She passed Kevin Bourke’s electrical shop, where every once in a while she visited the unfortunate man. A born victim, even or especially of himself. His temptation was boys, and since it was known on the street, a vicious band of young male prostitutes would taunt him and solicit and stand outside his shop and salute the cops as they drove slowly by, knowing damn well what the boys were about. Mr. Bourke lived at the Willoughby, and while his sin was known, so was his repentance. He was a source for awed gossip among Mrs. Ryan and her cronies, but like most of them he was in some way associated with the theater—in his case it was lighting equipment for the small amateur and semi-professional groups of the neighborhood—and therefore entitled to their protection. When the Willoughby management attempted to evict him after one of his episodic slips, Mary Ryan and friends blocked the hall until someone ran for Father Doyle to arbitrate the matter.
Something in the Bourke story reminded her of Phillips, something aside from Father Doyle’s knowing them both. As soon as she reached the shop she got out her notebook and reviewed the entries about Phillips. There was his young wife’s suicide—the virginal young wife, ex-nun, who threw herself from the building where Patti Royce, child star, lived; Tony had noted it in the column. Someone at the Actors Forum remembered how Jay hated backstage mothers. Jay was fired from Little Dorrit, the child star of which, Abby Hill, was out for an appendectomy. Julie had her association: young boys, young girls. Could it be that Jay’s problem was very young girls? And did Tony know and torment him for it? Was that the issue? And how about Butts in this context? Eighty thousand dollars of co-signed notes and big time publicity for a small time operation.
She phoned in for her messages. Several had piled up. Again she failed to make contact with Tim; Homicide had called to say that Alexander’s office would be available to them by noon on Monday; the police had sealed the celebrity file, however, which relieved her of one anxiety. She called Alice Arthur to come in Monday afternoon and asked her to try to reach Tim to let him know they had the office back. She sat a moment and thought of what it was going to be like to be responsible for three columns a week. It was a lot of copy, even for two people, when you considered what might get thrown out by Control Central—Editorial and the legal department. And she was going to have to learn to use the video data terminal.
Panic.
She made herself answer every call, the last to the Alexander apartment. Eleanor had phoned twice since noon. It was she who answered.
“Julie, mother says she’ll take us out to dinner if you’ll come too. Please do. It’s terrible waiting for something to happen—just the two of us—as though we were in a cage together.”
The thought of sitting with them in a crowded restaurant shouting above the din—or in a quiet restaurant whispering lest they be overheard—was too much. “How about this? Come down to our apartment on Sixteenth Street—Fran knows—and I’ll have my Greek friend, Gus, deliver his specialty of the day? Ask Fran if that’s okay.”
It was okay.
Julie sat at her desk and closed her eyes. Her old mantra came to mind from the days of meditation: it was a sound from the sea, the sibilant sound of the waves when they had spent themselves on the shore and slowly crawled back to their source. She listened for it in her mind’s ear, and with its gradual coming came serenity.
It was shattered by a sharp rat-tat-tat at the door. She went to the front window and looked out through a sliver of space between the drapes. There, his umbrella poised for another assault on the door, was Morton Butts. Julie took her time going to the door. If he’d come to her he wanted something, but that in turn should tell her something.
“You do remember me, Mrs. Hayes…Morton Butts?” His smile was quick and tentative as she opened the door. “I hope you don’t mind that I dropped in this way. It took some coaxing to get your address out of Mrs. Ryan.”
Julie stifled the impulse to say that Mrs. Ryan also had her phone number, and invited him in. Only as far as the outer room, however, offering one of the two chairs where the only lamp shone between them. He sat forward with the umbrella between his knees. He kept his top coat on, the collar turned up.
“May I offer my sympathy on the death of Mr. Alexander?”
Julie thanked him and waited. A fiery little man, whom Mrs. Ryan had taken to despite the born-again Christian handicap. Why? And why did she herself so dislike him? It wasn’t her usual way.
“I could be the last person who saw him alive. Except one, that is.”
“Really,” Julie murmured.
Butts blinked his eyes. “How have I offended you, Mrs. Hayes?”
“You haven’t. I got into trouble with Tony over my piece on the dance marathon, and I still don’t understand why.”
“It’s not your thing, that’s all,” he suggested, cheerful the instant she bent forward. “I can tell you, he didn’t think you did me justice. I didn’t think so myself. So, what occurred to me, why don’t you and I go over the story together?”
“Did Tony give you the copy?”
“No, he didn’t.” Mr. Butts’ nose gave a little twitch. “Isn’t it in the office?”
“Not that I know of.”
“It was right on his desk when I left. The police could have it, don’t you think? I don’t like to think of it floating into the hands of an evil-doer. You made some very strong innuendos in the last part of it.”
“It was meant for Tony only. I wasn’t suggesting that we go public with it in that form.” What she still couldn’t imagine were the circumstances under which Tony would have shown him the piece in the first place. Unless to challenge him on the property deal? Or had Tony got hold of Phillips’ financial support of the little entrepreneur? As Alice said of Tony, he always looked for self-serving behind the act of charity. But Phillips was dead by then. Of only one thing was Julie certain: Tony would not have spent forty minutes on nostalgia.
“I’d like to explain how I came by the Garden of Roses if you’re thinking of re-doing the piece,” Butts said.
“How did you know the column was going to continue?”
“I called the city desk. There’s no grass growing between my toes, Mrs. Hayes. But I ran up against something in the contestants I hadn’t prepared myself for.”
“Drugs,” Julie said.
“That’s it. I wondered, you living in this community, it didn’t strike you in the first place. But Mr. A. said you could walk through hell without getting even a hotfoot.”
So, Julie thought, if Tony had filed a card on her that’s how it would have read—another of his spiritual types. She supposed she’d known it all along, but it was depressing nonetheless.
“I admire that, you know,” Butts said, reading her like a printout. “In any case, I’m going to offer any of the dance registrants who have a drug problem an incentive to admit it, to kick the habit and start their rehabilitation right then and there during the marathon. I’m going to put them on television to tell their story, and I’m going to find sponsors for that television show. Tony Alexander said he’d do something special for us. He thought he might do some of the interviewing on the air.”
“Interesting,” Julie murmured. Again she was trying to see Tony as Butts described him. She knew for a fact that Tony did not like the image he projected on television: he’d tried it several times and wound up growling that he came across like a nursing home Gene Shalit. And it was crazy that Jay Phillips, who certainly knew the New York scene, would not have anticipated the drug problem in the first place. “What comes after the dance marathon, Mr. Butts?”
“Ah, that is the question, isn’t it? What a smart girl you are! I think the marathon is going to catch on all over the country and maybe we can tie in everywhere the idea of dancing away the drug habit. I’d like to do it on the basis of good old-fashioned patriotism, do-it-yourself, America! I know you think I talk in clichés and I do. Clichés are the only truths I know.”
“All right,” Julie said. Mr. Butts was beginning to get to her. And maybe he got to Tony, who had a strong conservative streak right down his middle.
“Would you be willing to do some of the interviewing for us on the T.V.? I understand you have a theatrical background. I like your voice and I like that nice open face of yours. I don’t think we’d agree on everything, but…what’s the matter?”
Julie was shaking her head. “My theatrical background consists of a couple of years training as an actress, but no experience whatever. Thank you, but no, I’m going to have all I can handle to carry my half of the column. But if my partner agrees we’ll try to give your rehabilitation program as much coverage as we can. Okay?”
“Who am I to say okay or nokay? Every little bit helps.”
“Did Tony ask you about your future events?”
“He was interested. I would say that.”
“He kept you there for a long time—for Tony.”
“I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, Mrs. Hayes. He kept me there for Tony. I’ve told the police and I’ll tell you: he was waiting for someone. Didn’t say so, but every time I’d get to my feet, he’d insist that I tell him more about the Garden and its ‘happening,’ as he called it. As soon as we got to his office he’d called someone to get in touch with his wife and say he’d be an hour late. I don’t flatter myself, Mrs. Hayes, that he intended to spend all that time with me. The phone rang twice with no one speaking. That upset him. Then the call to which he said, ‘I’ll be here.’ I had an engagement myself and I finally got away. You can imagine how I feel now: If I’d stayed, would he still be alive? Or would I also be dead?”
“I’ve asked myself a couple of what-if questions, too,” Julie said. She had begun to believe the little man. “Do you think Tony and Jay Phillips were ever friends?”
“Outside their professional association? I doubt it.”
“How about enemies?’
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I saw Jay a few hours before his suicide and he referred to Tony as an s.o.b.”
“Did you know Jay was dead when you came to see me?”
“Yes.”
“You could have told me,” he said in mournful reproach. His credibility slipped.
“I had no idea of any association between you. I didn’t know he was doing your publicity. I suppose Tony did.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Who’s going to handle it now that Jay’s gone?”
“Mrs. Hayes, what do you think I’m doing here on a gloomy Sunday afternoon?”
She offered him a cup of tea and took him into the back room. He told her essentially the same story about the Garden of Roses as she’d heard from Councilman McCord and from Romano.
“How did you connect with Jay?” she asked in as casual a tone as possible.
“Oh, a long time ago. Before I turned teetotaller. Know what that means?”
“I can figure it out.”
“Jay wasn’t always an important Broadway publicist, and since you’re checking my credentials, Mrs. Hayes, I better tell you, those Phillips sisters don’t much cotton to me, and I never figured out if it was because I quit drinking or because Jay didn’t.”
Julie waited until they were having tea to ask, “Mr. Butts, why do you think Jay committed suicide?”
“Despair. And it’s the one unpardonable sin.”
“Despair over what?”
“I am my brother’s keeper. Never in my life have I shirked that duty. But the grave is silent, and he chose the grave. I am also keeper of the silence.”
Divine hyperbole which translated to: Mind your own business. But he knew all the same, Julie thought. If Jay Phillips’ problem was very young girls, Butts knew it. Had he used it? And now why had he come to her? Several reasons surfaced, but the real one, she suspected, was still buried under the rhetoric.
When he left she went to her notebook and wrote down their conversation as she remembered it. She thought about the Phillips sisters and whether they would talk to her about him. Or about their late sister-in-law. The trouble with little old ladies like the Phillips sisters was that they often told things the way they wanted them to be or to have been. And they tended to contradict one another. Doctor Callahan had used to say she learned more about her patients from the lies they told than from the truth. Julie had never managed to ask her how she knew the difference.