Habit of Fear (5 page)

Julie picked up on this: “A container of grease?”

“Speaking of klutzes,” Hadley said, shaking her head at her partner’s gaffe.

It was Russo who explained: “They collected a small amount of grease. The lab traced it to a used drum in the dumpster.” He went on hurriedly, “Let’s talk about those stocking masks.”

“Yeah, let’s,” Julie said tightly, having figured out what the grease was used for.

“Have you ever heard of lisle stockings?” Russo wanted to know. “I guess you’re too young for that. My grandmother wore them. The immigrants coming over, the nuns when I was a kid, before they shortened the habits. I don’t even know if they’re manufactured anymore, but I thought of them from your description … holes for the eyes and mouth, but you didn’t see any runs where they’d been cut out and the stocking stretched. Right?”

“I think that’s right. And I couldn’t see through the material. But you can buy panty hose like that, the cheaper the heavier.”

“But it’s the runs I’m thinking about. I was talking about it with my wife last night. We experimented with an old pair of hers. Zip—runs up and down. Then she called her friend Mary Ryan—you know Mrs. Ryan—and went over and got a real strong pair from her.”

Everybody on stage, Julie thought. She said, “Support hose.”

“They didn’t support much when we cut holes in them.”

“I could be wrong about the runs,” Julie said, becoming wildly impatient.

“And the doll?”

“I would not recognize it if I saw it again,” she snapped.

“I don’t blame you for being uptight. Just the same, it’s the little things that work when the big ones don’t. You know that from your own experience.”

“Yeah,” Julie said. Rare praise from a professional for an amateur detective. Sheer cajolery.

“Remember a black street girl named May Weems?”

“Yes.” May Weems had been an acquaintance of a young prostitute Julie had tried to help. “Is she still in the life?”

“She’s got so many arrests, so many collars now, we call her Ring-Around.”

The other detectives were amused. Julie waited. Everything he’d said so far, she felt, had been leading up to this.

“These days she’s hustling down in the thirties. I talked to her—about the bag lady. I think she’s seen her, but there’s no way that girl is going to cooperate with the police.” He paused. Then: “She might talk to you, Julie.”

T
HEY WANTED HER TO
go after May Weems, Julie reasoned, and she wasn’t going to do it. Russo had conveniently forgotten how he had used her to lure Weems out of hiding back then. Julie had listened to the young prostitute’s life story, buying her breakfast at six in the morning, gaining her confidence. May had wanted to be the first black ice-skating star. “How about that, Friend Julie?” Russo had picked May up as soon as she stepped outside Friend Julie’s shop. No, sir, Julie decided, she was not going out to look for May Weems. She was going out to look for news fit to print in a gossip column.

“
YOU’RE A BORN PSYCHIC
!” Reggie Bauer cried when she walked into the Actors’ Forum. He kissed her on both cheeks. “I just left a message with your service.” Reggie was slight and blond and difficult to cast, but everybody at the Forum said he was a good actor. What Julie knew of him was his natural ability to pick up a story that might make her kind of news.

“What’s the message?”

“Guess who’s coming to the session this morning.”

“Mother Jones,” Julie said. “Reggie, I’m a poor guesser.”

“Richard Garvy … Mike Bowen of ‘Seventeen Orchard Terrace.’”

“I know who Richard Garvy is,” Julie said. The television series “17 Orchard Terrace” had gone off the air that spring after ten fabulous years. You could still turn on a rerun at almost any hour of the day. The main character, Mike Bowen, was the owner of a garage in a New York suburb, a volunteer fireman, small-town politician, embattled family man whose kids were sometimes proud and sometimes ashamed of him. As he was of his children. “How come the Forum? Business or pleasure?”

“Somebody said he has a play he wants to do.”

“Here?”

“Oh, my pet,” Reggie said. “With his ego even Broadway is too small a grave. Actually, he’s a friend of our esteemed director. It could be a scouting expedition. That’s such stuff as dreams are made on around here this morning. Will you stay? I’ll get you coffee.”

“Coffee, yes, thank you.” Julie did not like to attend the acting sessions. She was a member of the Forum, acting being one of the many careers to which she had once aspired. She had surprised everyone, especially herself, by winning her audition. But she was not an actor and she would not take advantage. She loved the Forum and the friends who came there to hone their craft between and sometimes during engagements. She was comfortable there, even now, when she was comfortable practically nowhere else. The actors came and went, passing through the Green Room where she sat on the arm of a sofa, some saying, “Hi,” some, “How are you?” and some who wouldn’t speak if spoken to, afraid it might break their concentration. If what had happened to her was known among them, no sign of it was evident; after all, it was not as though she had been replaced in rehearsal.

The office door opened and Bradley Holmes, the artistic director of the Forum, emerged. He was a slight, handsome man in his fifties with strong academic and theater credits. He greeted Julie more warmly than was his habit and, almost out of the room, paused and turned back. “Is there anything I can do for you, Julie?”

She took advantage. “Help me get an interview with Richard Garvy.”

“Not in the Forum,” Holmes said sharply.

“Certainly not. He can name the place.”

Holmes made a sound that lacked promise. Reggie approached with a container of coffee out in front of him like the Olympic torch. “For God’s sake, watch it, Bauer!” The director got out of his way.

“It won’t hurt you,” Reggie said. “It’s only lukewarm.”

W
HEN HOLMES HEADED
for the reception room, the word passed, swift as telepathy, that Richard Garvy was about to arrive. Actors converged there from all directions. Even Reggie Bauer. Julie stayed where she was and sipped her coffee. When Garvy arrived, the director brought him through the Green Room on the way to his office at the back of the building. Garvy walked with the springiness of a big man who kept in shape. Like a politician, he shook hands with those who got up close, and his very blue eyes had the same sparkle that came across on television. Julie kept her feet out of the way.

But Holmes stopped. “Here’s someone who wants to meet you, Dick. Julie Hayes is one of our people who’s gone over to newspapering. Very good, too—a column in the
New York Daily
.”

She could not have asked for more. Garvy told her to call his secretary at the Plaza. Her name was Mary Tumulty.

O
NE THING IN FAVOR
of Richard Garvy from the outset, so far as Julie was concerned: he was staying at the Plaza. The only reason she wanted to leave New York someday was so that she could come back and stay at the Plaza. She remembered as she went up in the elevator how, on her way to or from Dr. Callahan’s office, she had used to route herself so that she could stop at the Plaza to use the powder room. Days of idleness and dashed careers and playing at being in love with a husband who called her his little girl.

Garvy came out to the elevator and met her himself. It was very good for her ego, never mind why he did it.

The Plaza suite was exactly what she had expected, not a piece later than Edward VII, except Miss Tumulty’s electric typewriter and its stand. Just passing through. Miss Tumulty herself belonged. She was round-faced, made up softly and wore her hair in a braid that circled her head, a silver tiara. They had talked on the phone a couple of times. Neither was surprised at the other’s appearance.

“You have such a nice voice,” Miss Tumulty said, “and I knew your eyes would be as big as saucers.”

“I love your name,” Julie said. And she liked the pleasantness of the woman’s face.

Garvy touched Julie’s arm, and they went on to a small sitting room. A crystal vase on the center table was crowded with anemones, an explosion of colors.

“Oh, boy!” Julie cried.

“The simple things in life, eh? They’re my wife’s favorite. How the management found out … oh, I suppose Miss Tumulty. She knows when to talk and when not to. And they don’t know downstairs yet that ‘Orchard Terrace’ has folded for good.”

“Why? Everybody wants to know.”

“Oh, now, admit:
everybody’s
a slight exaggeration.”

“Very slight.” She took the chair he wanted her to have. It gave her a fine view of the anemones. She got out her notebook.

Garvy drew up a side chair. “I want to see if I’m still an actor. I felt as though a block of ice was building up around me in the series—Mike Bowen being preserved for exhibit as the typical American clown of the late twentieth century. The bottom line, however, is I’ve got a play I’m in love with. I want to direct it as well as play the lead. You couldn’t recommend a producer who’d put up with the likes of that, now, could you?”

“Go for broke,” Julie said. “Produce it yourself.”

“I may have to at that.”

“Is it Irish?”

He cocked his head and looked at her. “How did you arrive at that deduction?”

“The lilt in your voice when you spoke of it.”

“Ah, now, I come by the lilt naturally. My people on my mother’s side come from Ireland. I’ve a grandmother still alive in Sligo. She was responsible for my having a couple of years at Trinity College, Dublin. She’s ninety-two and full of charms and incantations. Look, for the space you have in your column, you don’t want my life story, do you?”

“I’d like more about the play,” she said.

“And that I can’t give you till I’ve got a better hold on it than a handshake with a playwright.”

One last try: “Is
he
Irish?”

Garvy scowled reproachfully and said nothing.

“My own father was Irish,” Julie said, as though that was relevant. “But I never knew him.” She was backing off from having pressed the question.

“He died young, did he?”

“He skipped out,” Julie said. “Actually, I don’t know what happened. He was gone before I was born.”

“Have you ever tried to find him?”

“No, but I’ve been thinking about it lately.”

“It would make a hell of a story, wouldn’t it?”

“Shouldn’t we get back to the main subject, Mr. Garvy?” She had never been as easy with a “star” before.

His eyes were almost mischievous. “Was he a handsome devil?”

Julie nodded. “I do have a picture.”

Garvy leaned back and folded his arms. His white shirt was gleaming, and with him in that position the buttons were at a great strain. “When you get to Ireland, you must go to see my grandmother. She’s a witch and she might just conjure for you. Now, what else do you need in your notebook there?”

“Something about Trinity. You started acting then, didn’t you?”

“With the Dublin Players. For which I was paid by being allowed to attend all rehearsals.” He talked for a few minutes about his two years in Ireland in the 1950s. As a student abroad he had escaped the Korean War. “Better not put that in. The Mike Bowen fans would lower the flag.” Then, without a change of beat: “What was his name?”

“My father’s? Thomas Francis Mooney.”

“He’d be about my age, would he?”

Julie nodded.

“Is it possible he and I might have been at Trinity together?”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

“Your face seems familiar to me, and you don’t have a familiar kind of face at all.”

Julie met his eyes, which still had a mischievous gleam. “You’re putting me on, aren’t you, Mr. Garvy?”

“I wouldn’t say that, the way the world’s shrinking. Bring his picture around sometime and let me have a look at it.” He tapped her notebook. “Do you want a mug shot of me for the column?”

“Please,” Julie said.

“O
H, NOW, AREN’T YOU
the lucky one?” Mary Ryan said, holding Garvy’s picture at a distance that best accommodated her eyesight. “Isn’t it remarkable how that man put his finger on the pulse of the nation?” She set the picture facing her up against the crystal ball and volunteered the opinion that it was unwise for Garvy to do a play. “Unless it’s a play about Orchard Terrace. Wouldn’t that be fun?” As Julie had anticipated, it wasn’t long after Detective Russo’s visit until Mrs. Ryan arrived with a round loaf of soda bread. She wore her summer straw hat, her gray hair straggling out in wisps beneath it. Her face was getting puffy and her pale blue eyes more watery and bloodshot. She’d been either drinking or crying, Julie thought. Suddenly she realized that the old lady had come without her constant companion, an aged dachshund.

“Where’s Fritzie?”

Mrs. Ryan straightened herself up and pulled in her chin. “I had to put him to sleep a week ago Friday.”

The tears flooded Julie’s eyes. There was no holding them back.

“There, dear, I’ve cried myself dry. It’s why I didn’t come any sooner. But he’s better off. He couldn’t do this and that and he couldn’t contain himself any longer.”

“Sorry,” Julie said and wiped away the tears.

“Don’t be. I know it’s me you’re crying for.”

“Or me maybe.” She went to the dresser to get a tissue, and there stood a tin box in which she kept dog biscuits for Fritzie.

“What a terrible thing happened to you,” Mrs. Ryan said while Julie’s back was turned.

Julie blew her nose. “Shouldn’t we go to the ASPCA and get you another dog?”

“I think not. Fritzie was fourteen years old, and fourteen years from now I’ll be way over eighty. No, I just don’t think so.” She leaned back in the chair and took another look around the room. She had foreborne until then commenting on the new pieces of furniture and the bedding. “Something’s different,” she said, knowing well that the place was completely rearranged from when she had last been there.

“I’ll be living here for a while,” Julie said. “Jeff and I are separating.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” The eagerness quickened in her eyes to be carrying the news to the few friends they had in common. Mary Ryan had lived over forty years in the neighborhood. She’d worked as an usher at the Martin Beck Theater. Theater was her life, and she told over and over, like the beads of her rosary, the names of actors and producers she had known. “Still, I don’t suppose you’re celebrating,” she added.