Lullaby of Murder Read Online Free PDF

underneath the tirade. “I think there’s feeling in it,” she said and then plunged ahead although she knew it was a mistake: “I cared about those people lined up with twenty bucks in their hands and the dream of making it to television.”
    “God’s truth, gal: you really cared?”
    Julie bit her lip. She wasn’t going to be able to stand up to him and she knew it.
    “God’s truth, do you remember a face among them? One face?”
    She sat mute, determined not to cry.
    “Blacks, Hispanics, poor whites, the bloody masses. Christ! I thought for a while you were a modern woman. Look, sweetheart, any one of them who got his twenty bucks up for a dream can get it up for bread if his hunger’s in his belly. Sure, the dream is tawdry, but it’s his dream, and he’s going to read about it in Tony Alexander’s column. And he’s going to like what he reads.”
    Julie nodded. He’d made his point and she could see it.
    But he wasn’t letting up. “This Morton Butts character is right. I am proud of my varicose veins. I came to New York with one pair of shoes and a Woodstock typewriter. It was ten years before anyone knew I could write my name, much less a sentence.”
    “Okay, Tony. It’s lousy. Let me try it again. What about that last paragraph? Does it interest you?”
    “Not much. I take it you know the answers or you wouldn’t ask the questions.”
    “I’d have to verify them from the public records,” Julie said.
    Tony smiled. Falsely. “What a lucky girl you are to have access to private records. What ever made you think of tapping such a source?”
    It had occurred to her more than once that Tony both resented and coveted her Romano connection; there was no doubt in her mind now that he had correctly surmised of whom she’d asked her questions.
    “It was just that Mr. Butts seemed like such a phony.”
    Tony didn’t say a word. He sat staring at her, letting his eyes do the talking.
    Julie’s ego went down to floor level. “You may not want it for the column,” she said pitifully, “but it’s part of the Butts story all the same.”
    “I don’t want it and I call the signals on this team.”
    “I got the message,” Julie said, and getting to her feet, reached for the copy where it lay on the desk between them.
    Tony thumped his hand down on it. “I said to drop it.”
    “The whole story?”
    “The whole story.”
    “Okay, boss,” she said and walked out of the office. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but she needed to get away. What she wanted was to have another look at the copy herself. Tony had been using her stuff almost verbatim and she didn’t think there was that much difference between today’s copy and yesterday’s.
    Tim Noble caught up with her at the elevators. “Come on, I’ll buy you coffee.”
    “I don’t want coffee.”
    “All right. Orange juice.”
    “Tim, I think I’m going to quit.”
    Tim shrugged. “Sooner or later. It generally happens after he’s stopped playing around with whomsoever.”
    “No kidding. You mean he blows up a storm with someone…after?”
    “Never needed a pension plan for a gal yet. Except for Alice. No passes there.”
    “He’s never made a pass at me either.”
    “He may be a bastard, but he’s not a skunk.”
    “His friend’s wife.” But Julie had the feeling that what had kept her out of Tony’s reach was that he didn’t want to reach. She remembered sitting in a taxi with him once, holding hands. Long ago, before she’d asked him for a job. She had been in such awe of him. God the Father. “Tell me straight, Tim, absolutely straight because I’ve got to know…”
    He anticipated what she was going to say. “It isn’t bad,” he reassured her on the marathon piece.
    “Would you tell me if it were?”
    “It would depend.”
    The elevator dropped them to the ground floor without an intermediary stop. It seemed symbolic. Nothing was accidental, according to the Tarot. She was inclined to agree. “Tim, will