In the Still of the Night (11 page)

Mrs. Ryan came halloing across the street ahead of a rush of traffic. “Do you have a few minutes, Julie? There’s something I need your advice on.”

Julie had a few minutes. She was of the conviction that a gossip columnist hustled best who hustled least. Her visit to the rehearsal of
Uptown Downtown
could wait. She unlocked the door and led the way back into her apartment-office.

“Do you remember the day we put down the deposit here, Julie?”

Julie remembered, but it seemed a long time ago, her brief sortie into reading and advising. Sheer mischief, she’d say of it now. Now “the shop,” as she’d always called it, was comfortable to live in and equipped as well with the electronics of her trade. She had learned to use the computer and rarely went near the
New York Daily
office at all.

“Friend Julie,” Mrs. Ryan said, her voice lush with reminiscence. Then: “You have such good instincts about people. I want to tell you about a nun I met this morning, a beautiful person, the most spiritual eyes you ever saw.” Mrs. Ryan didn’t exactly proselyte, but she did propagate the faith.

“I’m not great on nuns,” Julie said, and the phrase “a nun and a neck” popped into her mind. Where it had come from she had no idea.

“They’re not much different from you and me,” Mrs. Ryan said.

Julie raised her eyebrows.

“Her name is Sister Justina,” Mrs. Ryan said, and told the story of their encounter.

“Are you sure she’s a nun?” was Julie’s first question.

“I’d swear to it.”

“What does Miss Brennan say about her?”

“Sheila’s on the day shift this week—I wouldn’t go to the hospital looking for her about this. It’s the shopping bags that bother me. What did she do with them?”

“And what was in them? You’ve got to think about drugs, Mrs. Ryan.”

“It crossed my mind, may the Lord forgive me, and I suppose, to be honest, I’d have to say that’s why I’ve come to you.”

“It would seem she wanted most to get into the Willoughby,” Julie reconstructed. “She tried to make it on Miss Brennan’s name and then you came along. It looks as though her purpose was to deliver the shopping bags, but without the doorman or you knowing who she was delivering them to.”

Mrs. Ryan agreed reluctantly.

“How did she get past the doorman in the first place?”

“She must have slipped in the way I slipped out—when he was handing someone into a cab.”

“Were the bags heavy or light?”

“They flopped along, not heavy, not light.”

“And why go out the basement door? Why not sail past the doorman with her head in the air?”

“Ah, she wasn’t the type. She told me right out that she was a beggar—but in the way St. Francis was a beggar.”

“Funny about that cross,” Julie said. “I saw Goldie the other day. ‘Miz Julie, I’m straight as a flagpole,’” she mimicked. “He even gave me his business card.”

“Was he wearing the crucifix?” Mrs. Ryan asked disapprovingly.

Julie grinned. “I doubt it. He was wearing Brooks Brothers.” She took a mug of tea from the micro-oven and set it before the older woman.

“Fancy,” Mrs. Ryan said, “and me still using an electric plate.” The tea was “instant” and she hated it.

Julie wondered how many like Mrs. Ryan and Sheila Brennan were still living in the Willoughby. “What was the name of your actor friend? Remember he took us down to the basement that time to look up his old notices in the trunk room?”

“Jack Carroll. He’s gone now, God rest him. He was a lovely man but a terrible bore.” Mrs. Ryan drank the tea down, trying not to taste it.

“That was one spooky place,” Julie said. “Cobwebs and leaky pipes, and the smell of mold and old clothes when he opened the trunk.”

“It’s all changed down there now with the renovation. The old part’s been sealed off. There’s brand new washers and dryers in the new section and it’s as bright as daylight.”

“She wouldn’t be stealing from the dryers, would she? To give to the poor, of course.”

“She would not,” Mrs. Ryan said indignantly. Then, having to account to herself for the shopping bags, she added, “Besides, she’d be taking a terrible chance of being caught.”

“But wouldn’t that account for her going out without the bags—the fear that someone had seen her?”

“Oh, dear, I hope she doesn’t come looking for me now to let her back in,” Mrs. Ryan said. “I could be out in the cold myself. I’m on severance with the management. They pretend not to know I cook in my room.”

“Mrs. Ryan,” Julie said, “why don’t you forget I said that? It’s wild. I have a wicked imagination. And I’d stop worrying about the nun if I were you. She got into the building before you came along—she’s not your responsibility.”

Mrs. Ryan looked at her reproachfully. Then her face lit up. “Julie, I’d love you to meet her. I’ll bring her around someday if I can get her to come and let you judge for yourself.”

Sheila Brennan stuck her stockinged feet out for Mrs. Ryan to see. “Will you look at my ankles? You’d think it was the height of summer.” The ankles were indeed swollen.

“It’s being on them all day,” Mrs. Ryan said. “Put them up on the couch while I pour the tea.”

Sheila was younger than Mrs. Ryan, a plain, solid woman who dreaded the day of her retirement from St. Jude’s Hospital. “The first I saw of Sister Justina was when she visited someone brought into the hospital with frostbite during that bad spell in December. You know the woman who tries to sell yesterday’s newspapers on the corner of Fifty-first Street? The police brought her in half frozen. I told the nun that if she’d come to the Willoughby when I got off duty, and if she could promise me the woman would wear it, I’d give her a fisherman’s shirt my brother brought me from Donegal. It was foolish of me to put a condition to it and what she said made me ashamed of myself. ‘If she doesn’t wear it, I will,’ she said. I’ve been asking around of this one and that one to give her their castoffs ever since.”

“So she’s on the up and up,” Mrs. Ryan said and put the teacup and saucer in her friend’s hand. “But what was she doing in the Willoughby basement?”

“God knows, Mary. She may just have pushed the wrong elevator-button and wound up there.”

Julie and her imagination, Mrs. Ryan thought.

Sheila Brennan’s explanation satisfied Mrs. Ryan because she wanted to be satisfied with it. And she did believe the nun to be a true sister to the poor. She saw her again later that week. Mrs. Ryan was herself in the habit now of taking her principal meal at the Seniors Center in St. Malachy’s basement, where she got wholesome food in a cheerful environment at a price she could afford. Afterward, that afternoon, she went upstairs to the Actors Chapel and there she encountered Sister Justina kneeling in a back pew, her shopping bags at her sides.

“Sister—” Mrs. Ryan whispered hoarsely.

The nun jumped as though startled out of deep meditation and upset one of the shopping bags. Out tumbled a variety of empty plastic cups.

Mrs. Ryan went into the pew and helped her collect them, saying how sorry she was to have startled her. The containers, she noted, were reasonably clean, but certainly not new. “All I wanted to say,” she explained, “is that I have a friend who would like to meet you. Her name is Julie Hayes. She’s a newspaper columnist. She writes about all kinds of people, and she’s very good to the needy.”

“I’ve heard of her,” the nun said without enthusiasm.

Mrs. Ryan realized she had taken the wrong tack. “Do you mind coming out to the vestibule for a minute? I can’t get used to talking in church.”

In the vestibule, she modified her description of Julie. “It’s true that she helps people. She’s even helped the police now and then. I know of at least two murders she’s helped them solve. It would take me all day to tell you about her. But, Sister, she’s as needy in her way as you are in yours. You both have a great deal to give, but what would you do if you didn’t have takers?”

The nun laughed and then clutched at her throat to stop the cough the laugh had started. “Someday,” she said when she could get her breath.

“Someday soon,” Mrs. Ryan said. “She lives a few doors from the Actors Forum. You know where that is. I helped her find the place. In those days she called herself Friend Julie.”

“Friend Julie,” the nun repeated with a kind of recognition. Then: “I must hurry, Mrs. Ryan. They throw out the food if I don’t get there in time.” She ran down the steps with her bags of containers to collect the leftovers from the Seniors’ midday meal.

“Nowadays it’s just plain Julie Hayes,” Mrs. Ryan called after her.

Julie never doubted that Mrs. Ryan would arrive one day with the nun by the hand, but what she hadn’t expected was the nun’s arrival alone. She didn’t like unannounced visitors, but the ring of the doorbell was urgent and came with a clatter she presently attributed to the nun’s use of the cross as a knocker. In fact, it was by the cross—an ivory figure on gold—that she recognized her as Mrs. Ryan’s friend. She took off the safety latch and opened the door.

“Friend Julie, I need your help.”

“Has something happened to Mrs. Ryan?”

“No,” the nun said. “Please?”

Julie relocked the door after the nun and led the way through the apartment. She was trying to remember the nun’s name.

“Mrs. Ryan has nothing to do with this, I give my word,” the nun said. “She said you wanted to meet me, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m Sister Justina.”

Julie motioned her into a chair and seated herself across the coffee table from her. She didn’t say anything. She just waited for the pitch. It was those big blue eyes, she thought, that had got to Mrs. Ryan.

“All I need to tell you about my mission, I think, is that I try to find temporary shelter for street people who are afraid of institutional places. It’s a small person-to-person endeavor, but I’ve had very good luck until now. I’ve been keeping two people hidden away at night and in bad weather in an abandoned section of the Willoughby basement.”

“You’re kidding,” Julie said.

“I wish I were.” The nun thrust her clasped hands between her knees. “I went to leave them a meal this afternoon.” She took a deep breath. “One man was gone and the other one was dead. His skull was smashed in!” Her amazing eyes were filling.

“You’re lucky it wasn’t you, Sister.”

“I don’t consider myself lucky.”

“Have you gone to the police?”

Justina shook her head. “That’s why I came to you. Mrs. Ryan said you’ve helped the police—”

“Let’s forget what Mrs. Ryan says.
You
have to go to the police. You can’t just close up that part of the basement again on a dead man as though it was a tomb.”

“I don’t want to do that. I only wish I could have got poor Tim out of the city in time. He wanted to go, but he was afraid.” She looked at Julie pleadingly. “I want to do what I have to do, but I can’t.”

“I’ll go with you if that will help,” Julie offered.

“Would you go
for
me?”

“No. If you don’t show up and take the responsibility for trespassing or whatever it was, Mrs. Ryan and Miss Brennan could be evicted, and where would they find a place to live?”

Justina shook her head. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

“I’ll say it again, then: you’re lucky.”

“Yes, I suppose I am,” the nun said with what sounded like heavy irony. “The habit I wear has been my salvation, my hope in life.” She drew a long shuddering breath. “Julie, I’m a man.”

For a while Julie said nothing. She was remembering where the phrase “a nun and a neck” had come from—the poet Rilke commenting on one of Picasso’s acrobats: “The son of a nun and a neck.”

“You can use the phone there on my desk if you want to, Sister,” she said.

“Thank you,” Justina said. She got up. “Who do I call?”

“Try nine-one-one,” Julie said.

The nun identified herself to the police dispatcher as Sister Justina, told of a body in the basement of the Willoughby Apartments, and promised to wait herself at the service entrance to the building.

She gave them the address.

When Mrs. Ryan dropped in at Billy McGowan’s pub for her afternoon glass of lager, Detective Dom Russo was telling of the down-and-outer his detail had taken into custody that afternoon for trying to pass a kinky hundred-dollar bill. Nobody had seen its like since before World War Two. Billy had the first dollar he made in America framed and hung above the bar. He pointed it out to the custom.

“They don’t make ’em like that any more,” the detective said, wanting to get on with his story. “This Bingo claimed first off that he found it, just picked it up off the street. We turned him loose and put a tail on him. You know where the old railroad tracks used to run under Forty-fourth Street? He made a beeline for a hole in the fence, slid down the embankment, and led us straight to where he’d hidden three plastic containers in an old burnt-out stove. I don’t need to tell you—the containers were stuffed with all this old-fashioned money.”

Someone down the bar wisecracked that that was the best kind. But at the mention of plastic containers, Mrs. Ryan could not swallow her beer.

“We took him in again. This time around, he said he found the money right there in the oven of this old stove. He intended to turn it over to the police, of course,” Russo repeated sarcastically, “only first he wanted to look more respectable and went to the thrift shop with one of the C-notes—a silver certificate, they used to call them.”

“He should have gone right to the bank,” someone else down the bar said. “They’d trade it in—dollar for dollar.”

“No questions asked?” someone wanted to know.

“He should have gone to a collector and made himself some real money,” Billy said.

“Look,” Russo told them, “you’re acting like this guy was kosher. Maybe the
money’s
kosher, but he’s not. I don’t believe for a minute he lucked into all that old cash. Anyway, we’ll hold him till we hear from the Feds.”

“A developing story, as they say.” McGowan moved down the bar to Mrs. Ryan. “Drink up, Mary, and I’ll put a head on it for you.”

“I’ll take a rain check, Billy,” she told him. “I’ve got terrible heartburn.” She eased herself off the stool, and by ancient habit looked under it, half expecting Fritzie to be curled up there. Out on the street, she drew several deep breaths of the wintry air. Plastic cups, she told herself, weren’t such a rare commodity.