Habit of Fear by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

looking for trouble? One is medium tall and dark—not a black man—and he’s got a lot of hair on him. The other’s a redhead, shorter, and rolls like a sailor when he walks.”
    Julie felt uncomfortable. She watched the barkeeper’s eyes turn stone cold.
    “Nope, can’t say I have.”
    A few stools down a customer looked their way. His eyes and Julie’s locked just for an instant. He looked up at the television and kept watching it while he groped an inside pocket for a cigarette. Something had clicked with him, Julie thought. Something.
    McGowen picked up the five-dollar bill, went to the cash register and rang up a dollar fifty. He returned with the change and said a curt “Thank you.” The message was pretty clear.
    On the street, Russo proposed to walk Julie to Forty-fourth Street. “What do you think?” he asked.
    “They don’t like informers.”
    “But did he recognize the description?”
    “I think so. Somebody in there did.”
    “I noticed. You’re very popular in the neighborhood, Julie. Somebody’s going to turn them in.”
    “Maybe.”
    “The question is can we hold them when it happens.”

FOURTEEN
    J OHN WALSH LIVED IN an apartment hotel on lower Fifth Avenue and explained of the chaos of papers into which he conducted Julie that since his retirement he had been working on his memoirs. He swept a pile of letters to the floor so that she might have a chair.
    “Now you should know why I did that,” he said, “so that you won’t think I’m a madman. There is something in one of those letters I simply cannot find. I know it’s there, mind you, and this will give me a fresh approach. All the same, there’s advice I’d give to anyone writing his memoirs. Like Macbeth on murder: if ’twere done, ’twere best done quickly. Sit down and don’t look so worried. They can’t find anything in the office these days either—Kendall has too many associates.”
    He removed a tiger cat from an Eames chair, swung the chair around to face her and seated himself. The cat leapt up on his lap. A slight man with a tint of gold in his eyes and in his gray hair, he was someone Julie could fall in love with, so to speak, on the instant: amiable and soft-spoken … nonaggressive. “So, it’s a poet you’re interested in, and Ginny Gibbons told you to come and see me. …”
    It hadn’t gone quite that way, but Julie let his version stand.
    “It’s more than she’s done herself lately, you might remind her.” He drew from his pocket an envelope on which he had written the information Julie had given him on the phone. “Nineteen fifty-five—it’s not so long ago.” He looked at her quizzically. “To me. Were you born then?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    He put on his glasses and looked again at his notes. “Someone possibly your father. I’m not about to get your hopes up falsely, young lady, but I feel I’ve come on the name Mooney recently, and I can only suppose it would be in this conglomeration of hopes and miseries.” He tossed a hand to encompass the roomful of papers. “I don’t suppose you have a copy of the poem with you?”
    “No, but I could recite it,” Julie said. “Or I could write it out for you. It wouldn’t take long.”
    He smiled. “I’d much prefer that you recite it to me.” He leaned back, closed his eyes and with one finger scratched the cat’s head.
    Julie was on the last stanza when he began to nod in recognition. She closed her own eyes in order not to falter with the new feeling of excitement.
    “Historically inaccurate, but emotionally sound—if one can be emotionally sound.” He sat up and sent the cat off on its own. “I’d have thought it was written by a Michael Desmond.”
    “His best friend,” Julie cried. “Or at least the best man when he married my mother.”
    “And your mother’s name?”
    “Katherine Richards.”
    “Ah, well, now I have it. I came on the name in a letter from Michael Desmond. It was a letter of introduction of his friend,