Free Lullaby of Murder by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

he isn’t going to wait much longer. Please come now before he changes his mind. He wants the column to go on. The police let me in here to wait for your call. It’s weird, like a thousand years since I was here last.”
    “I’m on my way,” Julie said.
    “Don’t walk, for God’s sake.”
    While Julie was amending her lipstick Eleanor brought her a glass of orange juice. “Are you leaving?” the girl said, disappointed.
    “I’ll come back later, and if there’s any way I can help with the arrangements, let me know.”
    “There won’t be any arrangements. Just a messenger with ashes.”
    Tony, death-size, Julie thought, and felt a chilling brush with reality.
    Eleanor drifted from the room when Kate Wylie came out of the bathroom. “Who’s that?” Wylie wanted to know.
    “Fran’s daughter.”
    “Spooky, isn’t she?”
    Julie said, “How was Trish Tompkins last night?”
    “Marvelous. She is Little Dorrit. I intended to give Tony a ring about her. I can’t believe he’s gone…” Kate took a look at her own faded beauty in the mirror and grappled for her lipstick. “Are you staying on with the Daily ? You should go see her and remember who told you first, hear?”
    “What happened to the original Little Dorrit?”
    “Abby Hill. Appendicitis. She’ll be going back in in a couple of weeks. Which is why you should go see Trish now.”
    “Thanks,” Julie murmured. What she resolved to do was to find out where Abby was having her appendectomy and visit her.

ELEVEN
    I N SPITE OF TIM’S exhortation, Julie walked. It gave her fifteen minutes in which to contemplate whether or not she wanted a column of her own—half her own. Very few people would think her in her right mind to even hesitate accepting. Tim had called her sweetheart, à la Tony, already into the fantasy. Like Juanita playing teacher. She was aware of the change in herself in the year she had worked on Tony Alexander Says …. Cynicism was something she had affected in her teens, the epitome of being grown up. But that was a few yesterdays ago and she now considered cynicism a cheap shot, but one she often took just the same.
    She kept going back in her mind to her story of Butts and the dance marathon. The police would now ferret out the connection between Butts and Tony, if there was one—among Butts, Phillips and Tony, if there was one. Jeff was probably right: it wasn’t incumbent on her…damn him. But whatever the source of Tony’s wrath with her, he had raised a question she had to answer: Did you really gut care? She had cared more about her smart-ass portrait of Butts. That was the problem. She had felt superior and that simply was not allowed. Then, as though to justify her portrayal of the man as ridiculous, she had grooved on the city” real estate. And without having properly done her homework, she had exposed the package to Tony. Jeff, in her position, would have known whether Tony was killing the piece or simply knocking her off the assignment, and he’d have known why. She was about as prepared to carry on a newspaper column as she was to birth a baby.
    Tim had already gone down to Tom Hastings’ office, a cubby hole off the Editorial Room. Hastings looked like a sportscaster, breezy, sleek hair, tweeds. Electronic apparatus seemed to be seeking communication, but no one paid the slightest attention. Very hard on Julie’s nerves, for she was trying without much success to drag herself into the computer age. Miss Page, whose prep school she had attended, kept telling her girls that computers were a fad, like technocracy was when she was their age. Hastings rose and shook hands, as did Tim whose face was flushed all the way to his floppy ears.
    “We’ve got it pretty well worked out if you agree,” Hastings said. How was she not going to agree, with Tim’s eyes as eager as bubbles and himself about as fragile?
    She tried to take in Hastings’ outline of the operation: the column would run three days a week