Lullaby of Murder (18 page)

“Yes. I don’t know what mother’s told them. She won’t talk to me about it.”

“Don’t say anything until I’ve put you in touch with a lawyer. You have that right.”

“Julie, I don’t want a lawyer. I just want you to be there.”

“I’m not equipped to advise you, Eleanor.”

“I don’t care.”

“Is Fran home?”

“No.”

“Don’t leave the house till I get there. Understand? Make them wait.”

T
HE UNMARKED CAR STOOD
in front of the building. In the lobby Eleanor was waiting with her Saturday guards, Detectives Lawler and Ferretti.

“A family reunion,” Julie said by way of greeting, and to Eleanor, “I thought we might get to talk for a few minutes here.”

“It’s all right,” Eleanor said. “Inspector Fitzgerald agrees that you can advise me.”

“I’ll bet he agrees,” Julie cried. “How does he know whether I can advise you or not? You won’t even take the best advice I’ve got, which is to get a lawyer.”

“Please, Madam,” the doorman said. People were entering the building.

“Julie, I’m only going to tell the truth,” the girl said with an air of reproach.

As it turned out, Julie and Eleanor had time alone together in the interrogation room of the local precinct house. It was a small, bare room with a table and four chairs, an air vent, no windows, chalk-white walls. A video tape machine stood in one corner. The ceiling lights were inset and could be raised, no doubt, to high intensity.

“What a place for a graffiti artist,” Julie said, talking to break her own tension. Some advisor.

“Please don’t worry about me,” Eleanor said. “I’ll tell the truth and try to make them understand.”

“Stop saying that. Why didn’t you tell it in the first place?”

“Because I didn’t think anybody would believe me.”

“And what’s different now?”

“Something mother didn’t tell anybody before. She thought I’d taken her revolver all right, but what she was afraid of was that I’d gone homicidal. I guess suicidal would have been all right. Anyway, she called the office and spoke to Tony and told him I might be on my way there. And I was. But I never got there. He was waiting for me, but I never got there.”

“He was waiting for you?” Julie repeated.

“Mother says he was waiting for me. They talked on the phone.”

“You did not kill him,” Julie said.

“No. It was all make believe. I think. But she was right in the first place: I did take her gun.”

“Eleanor, I can’t advise you.”

“Don’t then. Just stay with me.”

“
TELL US
in your own words, Miss Alexander,” Marks said.

They sat at the table as though paired for bridge, Marks opposite Julie, the inspector leaning back, his arms folded, his eyes blue ice, opposite Eleanor. The video tape ran throughout.

“I hated him first because my mother loved him more than she did me. But most of all, for the way he treated me when I was a child. I thought this was a way I could get even. If you don’t believe there was someone in the office with him when he called home, then it’s hard to understand.”

“I think we can agree there was someone there at the time, don’t you, inspector?” Marks said.

Fitzgerald grunted assent.

“I imagined him there with this girl while he was asking me to tell Fran he needed another hour before he could get away…” She turned to Julie. “It doesn’t sound convincing now, but I
was
sure.”

“Tell us what you did,” the inspector said. “Never mind the whys and wherefores of it for now, little lady.”

“I left a note for my mother that I was going to a movie. On the way to the shop I fed a cat outside the apartment building and then two of them in front of the shop. It was in order to feed the cats that I went to the shop at all. Or that’s what I thought of first, but on the way I thought about mother’s revolver, and I had the keys to the shop and the alarm wasn’t on.” Eleanor stopped and frowned as though trying to clarify something. “I didn’t even know if there were any bullets in it. You see, there’s something I’m not really sure of:
when
was it that I thought of killing Tony…”

Oh, Christ, Julie thought: why mention it at all?

“…At first, all I wanted to do was break in on them, catch them right in the middle of—whatever they were doing. That would be true revenge.”

Julie stopped her for the moment, putting her hand on the girl’s arm. “Inspector, Eleanor has always believed that her step-father deliberately exposed her to a child molester when she was eleven years old.”

There was no change of expression on the inspector’s face as his eyes shifted to Julie and then back again to Eleanor. The information, as she had just put it, did Eleanor little, if any, good.

“I
know
it,” Eleanor said. “It isn’t that I have always believed. I have
known.”

“So you took the handgun,” Marks prompted softly.

“It made me feel—strong. Just to have it in my purse, to feel the outline of it in my lap. I took a cab to Forty-second Street and Lexington. It was when I got out in the rain and somebody tried to pick me up outside the hotel near Tony’s building that I became quite violent in my mind. I thought I’d been taken for a prostitute, you see, and that whole feeling came over me of guilt and revulsion and hatred, and I blamed Tony for it. I was sure I could kill him. And I wanted to. Oh, yes. He was with this woman, a young woman…”

“Who?” Marks interrupted.

“I don’t know who,” Eleanor said, furious at being interrupted. The vein was up in her forehead and both detectives noticed it.

“Go on,” Fitzgerald said.

“I stood there wondering if I could get in the building, or if a guard would take me for a prostitute and stop me. I know about Security. And I know how big the building is, though I’ve never been in it at night. I walked all the way around it. I even tried the door, I guess it’s on the south side, which is locked at night. I’m telling you all this although it doesn’t mean anything. When I got back to where I’d started, I went into the hotel and phoned to make sure he was still there. The man in the next booth, I could see his watch where he was resting his arm on the partition: It was ten o’clock.”

She herself might easily have met Eleanor outside the building, Julie thought, but it would not have mattered, for not having yet met, they would not have recognized one another.

“When Tony answered the phone,” Eleanor continued, “I didn’t make a sound. I had my finger in one ear: I kept listening for the other voice, but all I could hear was breathing and then he hung up. I was so tense by then I spilled my change all over the shelf, and then I dropped my pocketbook and it had the gun in it. When someone tried to pick it up for me I grabbed it from him and ran.”

Marks and Fitzgerald exchanged glances. Julie guessed that the witness in the next phone stall had come forth, remembering the girl’s behavior when he learned of the homicide. He would have put Eleanor near the scene so close to the time of Tony’s death that the police had to consider her a prime suspect.

“I don’t remember much about the next hour. I thought a lot about committing suicide. I must have run or walked all the way. I know I passed the movie house where
Stevie
is playing and felt saved. I must have unlocked the padlock on the grille and the shop door and I put the revolver in the drawer and then, like it happens in a dream, I was in the theater and I was terribly glad I got there before Stevie’s aunt was old and going to die. When the movie was over and I got home and mother wasn’t there everything about the whole night seemed even more like a dream, but the lids from two cans of
Nine Lives
were there and I couldn’t find the note I’d written mother. When the police came and I discovered what had happened to Tony, I was afraid to tell the truth. I didn’t even know the truth.”

“Have you told it now?” Marks asked.

“It is much ado about nothing, isn’t it?”

“A man is dead and that isn’t nothing,” the inspector said. “You’ve a good deal to explain yet, little lady. No, indeed: We are not talking about nothing. You can’t just say, ‘like it happens in a dream.’ That won’t do, as experienced counsel will tell you. How do you know—admitting yourself to have been in a troubled state of mind—that you didn’t actually gain access to the building, which is by no means security-tight—and let me say to you now from a long experience of the streets of New York, any man who took you for a prostitute would never have seen one—but how do you know you didn’t take the elevator to… what floor was your step-father’s office on?”

“You don’t need to answer that,” Julie said.

But Eleanor said, “Fifteen.”

“To the fifteenth floor and finding him in his office, how do you know that in this same dream, you didn’t kill him?”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t know?”

“Not for absolute certainty.”

SHORTLY THEREAFTER
, Fitzgerald and Marks left the room. Going, Marks turned off the recorder and assured the young women that they were not being monitored.

“They don’t understand, do they?” Eleanor asked as soon as the door closed.

“I’m not sure I do,” Julie said. “What made you phone Tony from the hotel lobby?”

“Because I was afraid by then. I thought if I heard his voice,
their
voices, it might give me courage.” Eleanor let her head loll back between her shoulders, her eyes closed. Then she came back to life. “That’s not true. I turned to jelly with fear, and gave up. All I wanted when I made that phone call was to interrupt what I imagined they were doing. It was an obscene phone call inside out. I was being a dirty little child again…”

“Okay,” Julie said. “I get it.”

“Julie…are all prostitutes lesbians?”

“Ha! You know, people think I know all about prostitutes because I spend a lot of time in one of the neighborhoods and once I tried to help a street girl. But I don’t know much. I’ve heard they often are.”

“I’ll bet some people think gay is worse.”

“That’s their problem,” Julie said.

A few minutes later Marks returned alone. He sat where Fitzgerald had. “The inspector wonders if you’d consent to what’s commonly called a lie detector test, Miss Alexander.”

“Tonight?” Julie said.

“No, not tonight,” he said impatiently. Then, to Eleanor: “We would also like to arrange psychiatric consultation.”

“No,” Eleanor said emphatically.

“If I may advise you, Miss, I wouldn’t refuse out of hand. Buy a little time that way and get yourself a lawyer.”

J
ULIE PROPOSED TO STAY
only a few minutes when they got back to the Alexander apartment. Eleanor kept saying that if her mother was home she didn’t want to face her alone.

Fran came out to the foyer in nightgown and negligée, her reading glasses in hand. She murmured an apology: she had felt on the verge of collapse after dinner. “I’m so grateful to you for going with her, Julie.”

Julie glanced at the girl. Eleanor’s eyes fell away like those of a child caught in mischief. She had deliberately lied about her mother’s not being home. Julie made no response to Fran: it wasn’t as though she’d gone to the dentist or the hair dresser with her daughter.

Fran offered coffee or cocoa. No one wanted anything. She suggested that they go into the living room.

“Not there,” Eleanor pleaded.

“The picture can be restored. They took it away tonight,” Fran said.

For once Eleanor said nothing.

They wound up in Fran’s bedroom where, when she climbed back into the king-size bed, she looked small and frail. An open copy of Wilder’s
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
lay on the pillow beside her bed rest. “I read it every few years,” Fran said, “as though it foretold my own destiny.” Both mother and daughter had a flare for the dramatic, not to say the melodramatic. Settled, she folded her hands in her lap. “Now tell me.”

Julie sat at the foot of the bed on Tony’s side, Eleanor on a chair near her mother. She couldn’t seem to get started, so Julie said, “She’s got to have a lawyer for one thing.”

“Oh,” Fran said as though she hadn’t expected that.

“Julie’s going to get her husband to recommend someone.”

“I see,” Fran said coldly, rejected. Then: “Do you have urgent need of one?”

“Mother, you were right. I did go to the shop after Tony called. And when you couldn’t find the gun, it was because I’d taken it. And you were right when you called him and said I might come there. I intended to, but I didn’t have the guts.”

“You intended to go there,” Julie said, “but not to kill him.”

“Let her speak for herself,” Fran said.

“I just wanted to break them up,” Eleanor said.

“Break who up?”

“Mother, don’t be stupid. The woman who was with him in the office. The girlfriend.”

“How do you know she was there if you didn’t go there?”

“I just know, that’s all. I heard whispering on the phone. The police believe me.”

“You don’t know that they believe you, Eleanor,” Julie said. “Why don’t you try to tell the whole story to your mother now, just the way you told it to Lieutenant Marks and Inspector Fitzgerald.”

It was the same story and yet it wasn’t: in the first telling, the burden of hatred was on herself and Julie had believed her whether or not the detectives had, but in repeating it to her mother, the girl somehow shifted the emphasis to her loathing of Tony, and now it was obscene.

Julie watched a change come over Fran. Her eyes grew hard and remote, and there came a point at which she looked as though nothing she would hear could change her feelings against her daughter.

“It was like a dream,” Eleanor told again. “I can hardly remember putting the gun away, but I’m sure I did. I must have.”

Fran’s grubby hands clutched the sheet. There was the look of an animal to her. And her voice had a low, rough sound, even a kind of menace. “He was about to come home when I spoke to him and then he waited for you.”

“Fran, he was waiting before that,” Julie said quietly.

“I felt so foolish,” the woman went on as though she hadn’t heard her, “when I found the gun, so ashamed of my fears of what you might have done. Even after what happened
had
happened, I would not tell the police.”