Julie Hayes: A Death In The Life Part 30

"You're an actor?" Rubinoff asked, harking back to the professional name.

"I'm a merchant seaman, but I read a bit of poetry now and then from the stage-you might say for political purposes."

Rubinoff threw him a furtive glance. You had to know that politics was not his game. An aging f.a.g, O'Grady decided, which was sad. Except that he had money, at least a part of which had to be legitimate. Otherwise he would not have been all that persona grata among the crowd at the gallery. Or with Ginni. This was no caper for a common crook. An uncommon one maybe.

Rubinoff said, "I haven't seen Maude for years. She used to be a beautiful woman. Would you believe it?"

"I would, knowing the daughter."

"Do you know her well?" He trailed the word out in a way that you could not escape its meaning.

"Intimately." O'Grady laid it on heavier than he might have with another man.

"Oh, dear," Rubinoff said, as though he didn't approve of intimacy.

"This operation might never have come off otherwise, Mr. Rubinoff."

The man looked at him with amazement.

"Watch the road," O'Grady said and then went on defensively: "She knew who she was picking. It was no small matter, b.u.mping another seaman from his berth at Naples in order to take his place. Otherwise, how would I have been on the docks here to get our boy through customs?"

"I'm sure I don't know." Rubinoff shook his head. Nor did he want to know.

But O'Grady was determined to rub his snooty nose in the dirty end of the business. "It was a good fight till the police broke it up. And in the end they did my work for me, giving the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d a crack on the skull and carting him off to sober up before presenting him to the American Consul. By that time his boat was well out in the Mediterranean and me in his berth."

"Remarkable," Rubinoff murmured, patient now, as though deciding it was better that O'Grady unburden himself to him than to a stranger.

"Customs was the easy part. I've a friend, an inspector on the Brooklyn docks, see, and every time I'm overseas I bring him back a little vial of Rumanian pills for his mother's arthritis. All I had to say was I knew the boy, and him and his paintings sailed through without a question."

Rubinoff made a noise of approval.

Having told it all, O'Grady wished he hadn't. It didn't sound like much, laid out. "It'll be a trickier business, the return trip."

Rubinoff aimed the Porsche between a bus and a mail truck, both heading into the same lane. The Porsche shot out front like a spurt of toothpaste. Rubinoff drove like a teenager and he had to be fifty.

"You pulled that one off well," O'Grady said, grudging admiration.

"Tell me a little about Ginni," Rubinoff said.

"Have you not met her?"

"No."

"Ah, she's a wild, beautiful woman. Her father's a count or some such. He's well off."

"That I know."

"She plays him like a mandolin, coaxing money out of him for this artists' commune she's set up."

"Are they all as talented as Ralph Abel?"

O'Grady laughed. "Don't be too hard on the lad. Flattery makes fools of the best of us. Ginni's up to a number of things I don't think would interest you, Mr. Rubinoff."

"I dare say."

"She was on the other end of a commission I had once for an organization I belong to."

"Shall we leave it at that?"

"If you like, but they were great days," O'Grady said and lapsed into silence. All in all, they had been the best days in his life.

Johnny, or Sean as he signed himself, was the son of Irish immigrant parents who had nothing in common except their determination to make it to America. With that accomplished, and the seed that became Johnny implanted, the old man took off and thereafter showed up every year or so expecting a celebration of his return. Johnny's chief recollection of him was chasing Ma around the miserable West Side flat trying to get her into the bedroom. Ma generally made it to the kitchen where she kept the bread knife handy. It was a wonder to O'Grady himself that he had not grown up like Rubinoff. He learned his reading and writing from the nuns as well as a love of Irish song and poetry. Everything he knew that was practical he had learned on the streets. When his mother died, their parish priest had been instrumental in getting him the promise of a job on a deep-water vessel and hence his maritime papers.

O'Grady was thirty-three, handsome in a rough, sandy-haired way except for the cold blue eyes, a feature he could not abide in himself. That his voice was rich and warm was some compensation. From childhood he had been devoted to the cause of a united Ireland, and it was in service to the I.R.A. as a gun procurer that he had met Ginni. She was his Italian-Yugoslavian connection.

He had made two successful runs. The third ended in disaster, and he had had to dump the entire cache into the Galway Bay. He had told himself, answering Ginni's call in the present matter, that every cent he made on it would go to the Cause. And so it would. But deep down he knew that wasn't why he was in it. Ginni had set it up, and he was her pigeon.

Stopped at a red light, Rubinoff took a long look at O'Grady. "Now that you have satisfied yourself as to my competence, what do you propose to do for the next two weeks?"

O'Grady overlooked the sarcasm. "Does it have to be two weeks?"

"At least. The show doesn't close until a week from Sunday."

"I don't know. I'm d.a.m.n near broke financing myself."

"You're not to go near the gallery again."

"I don't intend to."

"Nor to get in touch with me. When I'm ready I'll contact you. You ought not to be in the city at all."

"It's my home, man. Where else would I be landside?"

"I understood you would not be landside, as you call it, until afterwards." They moved ahead with the traffic. "That understanding was one of the conditions of my agreement."

"With who?" O'Grady said.

Rubinoff kept his eyes on the street. "With whom."

Buy Scarlet Night Now!.

About the Author.

Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. The author of seventeen crime novels, including the Mrs. Norris Series and the Julie Hayes Series; three historical novels; and numerous short stories; she has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and is a founder of Sisters in Crime.

Born in Chicago in 1916, she grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois and graduated from college into the Great Depression. She found employment as a magic-show promoter, which took her to small towns all over the country, and subsequently worked on the WPA Writers Project in advertising and industrial relations. During World War II, she directed the benefits program of a major meatpacking company for its more than eighty thousand employees in military service. She was married for forty-seven years to the late Harry Davis, an actor, with whom she traveled abroad extensively. She currently lives in Palisades, New York.

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