Lullaby of Murder Read Free

Reference Room of the Public Library when she thought of Mary Ryan, an older friend, who was great on the New York retrospective, the theater, and such events as the blackout, two World Fairs, Mayor LaGuardia reading the funny papers….
    “Oh, I remember them well,” Mrs. Ryan said of the dance marathons when Julie reached her, “I wasn’t long in this country. And let me tell you, it wasn’t milk and honey we came over to in those days. Respectable men were on the streets selling pencils and shoe-laces. I must have been in my second or third year of highschool and I remember, this chum and I thought it would be a great lark to stay out all night. Come over and have a cup of tea with me and I’ll tell you about it. We wound up at a dance marathon, you see.”
    The trouble with going to Mrs. Ryan’s was that you’d be asked on arrival to take Fritzie for a walk, and Fritzie was an elderly dachshund who took his time about everything. “Mrs. Ryan, let’s meet at the shop, okay?”
    “The shop” was a low-rental ground floor in a tenement building on West Forty-fourth Street, not far from the Willoughby where Mrs. Ryan lived. Julie still used it for an office. She had acquired it with Mrs. Ryan’s prodding really. She had been on her way to buy a set of Tarot cards one day, largely for her own amusement, when she chanced to meet Mary Ryan with whom, until then, she’d had but a nodding acquaintance through their mutual interest in theater. It happened at a time when Julie felt rudderless—Jeff was away and her then therapist, Doctor Callahan, had said she couldn’t help her until Julie was serious about helping herself. A job was strongly recommended. With almost childish pique, Julie took to the notion of setting up as a “reader and advisor,” and Mary Ryan had cheered her on.
    Julie had long since taken down her sign from the window, but she had hung onto the shop at Jeff’s suggestion, a place of her own. Its location was highly symbolic of a side of her nature that she didn’t understand herself, a fondness for people who worked at humble occupations. Dr. Callahan had called it a cop-out, a place where Julie had no relationship problems, where she didn’t have to compete. Which was partly true, but not the whole story. The shop was less than a block from the Actors Forum, where she had once been an active member and still had many friends. There was always someone on the street to greet her as though she’d been there yesterday even when she hadn’t been around for weeks. Mrs. Rodriguez, her upstairs neighbor, kept an almost constant look-out from her elbow cushion in the window. She had been invaded recently by her husband’s relatives from San Juan. Julie felt guilty about not offering to sublet her place to them when they needed more room, but Rose Rodriguez didn’t like the idea at all. “They pay me,” she said and thumped her bosom righteously. “It makes up.” What it made up for was the “trick” she could no longer entertain while her husband was working. Juanita, Rose’s silent child, had finally gone to school. Now, when she played on the stoop, the dolls were neater and most of them had arms and legs and even hair. Julie figured out that Juanita was playing teacher instead of mother these days, and sometimes her two smaller cousins were allowed to attend school with the dolls. Juanita wasn’t silent anymore either: she screamed at all of them, “Speak English!”
    The kettle was boiling on the hotplate by the time Mrs. Ryan arrived. She looked a little more beery every time Julie saw her, the grey hair more straggly beneath the limp straw hat, the pale blue eyes more watery. She had been an usher at the Martin Beck most of her working life and though long retired she still lived a stone’s throw from the theater. “What I like about you, Julie,” she said when she had looked over the shop to see if there was anything new, which there wasn’t, “is the way you never forget