Lullaby of Murder Read Free Page A

your friends.”
    Julie addressed herself to the dog. She got a biscuit from the tin box on top of the dresser. Fritzie was already sitting up, supporting himself with one paw on the dresser; his stomach sagged obscenely. “You’re putting on a little weight, old boy.”
    “He’s fading away to a ton,” Mrs. Ryan said, and settled into one of the four director’s chairs that surrounded the cut-down table. A large crystal ball was the table’s only ornament.
    Julie served the tea double strength and blisteringly hot. Mary Ryan paid her a compliment she had heard more than once. “You’ve a drop of Irish blood in you somewhere to make tea like that.” When the old woman had emptied the cup to the last few drops, she turned it round and round to shape a fortune for herself in the leaves. She put the cup aside, however, without a word on what she saw. “Now I did tell you my chum and I went to the movies,” she said, groping her way into the past.
    “It wasn’t even midnight when we got out of the last show. I forget what we saw…. Did I say that we told her parents we were at my house and told mine that we were at hers? They’d have gone out of their minds if they’d known. We went to a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, one of those places you went upstairs and you couldn’t get the smell of the incense out of your clothes for days…”
    Julie gave Fritzie a lift onto the chair he’d been trying to get aboard.
    “I don’t suppose you need all these details,” Mrs. Ryan said, hoping to be contradicted.
    “It’s mostly the dance marathon,” Julie admitted. “Whatever you can remember about that.”
    “What I remember most about it was the way the poor creatures would hang on one another, dying for sleep, and all of a sudden the orchestra would speed them up, playing something snappy like Happy Days Are Here Again. I’m ashamed to say it, but there I was in the front row clapping my hands off.”
    “Spectator sport,” Julie said.
    “Or maybe I was trying to keep myself awake. It was the longest night of my life and as I look back on it now, a wake would have been more fun. If only we’d had the sense to look for a nice Irish wake…” Mrs. Ryan’s voice faded and her eyes misted with some memory she did not share. Then: “Isn’t it a shame about Jay Phillips? Do you know him? But of course you would in the job you have now.”
    “What about him?”
    “He committed suicide last night. I heard it on the radio just as I was leaving the house. He jumped from the George Washington Bridge, but they didn’t find his body until after daylight. It was all the way down near Ninety-sixth Street.”

THREE
    J ULIE TOOK THE GRAFFITI-SPATTERED Broadway train uptown. When she had used to travel to and from Miss Page’s School by public transportation she had felt a comradeship with the other riders. She often made up lives for them between stops. Now people huddled inside themselves as though an outward glance might commit them to something. She kept thinking of Jay Phillips. He’d been putting things in order, in his fuddled way, sitting in Sardi’s Restaurant. She and Jeff had simply fallen within his line of vision and become a brief distraction. She’d left Mrs. Ryan speculating on whether there would be a wake. The old church, she explained, would have denied him Christian burial, a suicide, despair being the ultimate sin. The new church made allowances for most things that weren’t sexual.
    What had Tony done, she wondered, to have turned the man against him. Something recent—or something past but not forgiven? She’d always thought of Phillips as a considerate person with a barely controlled drinking problem. The worst language she had ever heard him use was his reference to Tony as an s.o.b. Practically archaic.
    The Garden of Roses was a huge, baroque edifice, the cornerstone of which had been laid in 1922. A cement bas-relief of roses overhung the entrance. New glass doors were going up where