Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) (7 page)

But it wasn’t the abundant confections that attracted folks to the place. Here, according to the ticker-tape scribes in
Vanity Fair
, writers like Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, and even W. E. B. Du Bois, occupied tables with famous whites folks like Carl Van Vechten. Here the painter Aaron Douglas lingered throughout the winter afternoons. Here, once, Aleck Woollcott, meeting Negro novelist Jean Fauset for lunch, drank a whopping twenty-five cups of coffee—according to him. “More like twenty-five slices of sweet potato pie,” I’d jibed. Here, now, I was treating Waters and Roddy to lunch because neither had been there, though both desperately wanted to go. The problem was that The Spot made you wait for tables, customers huddled in an overheated entryway, sometimes for an hour. Once inside they paid fifteen cents for a cup of that horrid coffee. Every other eatery, even down on swank Park Avenue, charged five cents. Yet people clamored to get in. City legend maintained that our beloved jazz mayor, the Broadway dandy Jimmy Walker, once was forced to wait for a table, and wasn’t happy.

The cab cruised past Small’s Paradise, and I noted how drab and downright suspect it looked during harsh daylight; only nighttime, with its glitzy lights and creeping shadows and tinkling streetlights, gave the place its allure. The cab turned down 138th Street, west of Seventh Avenue, and came to a stop midway down the block. I shooed Waters out the door, told the cabbie to wait at the curb, and surveyed the building where Lawson and Roddy lived. A five-story classic brownstone, shabby and dark, with chipped and missing bricks and some cracked windows, one with a board nailed across a shattered pane; a cement stoop, much repaired, with a peeling black wrought-iron railing; and a broken light fixture hanging off loose wires over the entrance. A glass panel in the front door had shattered, a lacy spider’s web. The building looked desperately poor, blighted, though once it had been a stylish structure. The midday sun glinted off the upper windows, but the lower floors lay shrouded in unrelenting shadow.

Waters was taking his time, and I kept checking my watch. The cabbie, a wiry Irish lad with mushroom carrot hair and a slough boy cap, was whistling a tune that was starting to grate. The longer we waited, the shriller the discordant tune. I knew Waters was not idly chatting with Lawson because on the ride uptown he’d mentioned that Lawson stayed most nights at Bella’s, a few blocks away, where Bella’s indifferent and often soused brother didn’t care. He came home simply to change into his janitor’s uniform before heading to work.

The super, Mr. Porter, Waters said, was a born-again Bible-thumper who frowned on young women visiting the back apartment where Lawson and Roddy lived, and more than once raised a stink. Certainly young women could not stay over. Of course, Waters confided, Roddy and Lawson often entered through a little-used back door off the back alley, sometimes with friends.

“I think it’s awful myself, such goings on,” Waters told me, a severe puritanical look on his face. Bella, he told me, lowering his voice, had slipped in by way of the back door one time, but the super heard her raucous laughter at two in the morning and pounded on the door. He’d dragged Bella out, somewhat dishabille, while spouting appropriate Bible verses at her. Interestingly, Roddy claimed, Mr. Porter was a drunk who spent most of his money on the working girls who were housed at Madame Turner’s up on Convent Avenue. On Sundays, all day, he worshiped at the Abyssinian Baptist Church between Lenox and Seventh Avenue, where he prayed for the girls he’d entertained or who entertained him the night before.

“My, my, Waters,” I’d said, “you certainly have some gossip to share! How much of this is true?”

Wide-eyed, he assured me it was all gospel.

As I was mulling over this sordid tale about the superintendent, his daughter Harriet emerged from the front entrance. Dressed in a crisp blue-and-white waitress uniform worn under an unbuttoned black cloth coat, her hair tucked under a red-visor cap with the name of a restaurant I couldn’t make out, she seemed harried, stopping at the top of the stoop to adjust the slippery cap, then bounding down the steps onto the sidewalk. I was about to roll down the window to say hello and to ask whether she’d spotted Waters inside, but she hurried away, her coat flapping in the chilly breeze. For a second, as she came within feet of my idling cab, I thought she’d spotted me, my curious face pressed against the glass like an expectant birthday child. But she seemed to have no curiosity about the cab—nor the nosy white woman inside. She bent her body slightly, her face tilted toward me. Her lips were drawn into an angry line, but then, I told myself, she’d worn that same look at my apartment as she sat chummily in a green silk wing chair balancing a cup of coffee.

Twisting my head, I followed her swift movement on the sidewalk, her determined, haughty strut, as she wove around dawdling pedestrians. I didn’t hear Waters approach until he knocked on the cab window. I jumped, startled. He simply stood there, frozen, his face ashen, his fingers trembling against his chest. Panicky, I rolled down the window. “What? For Lord’s sake, Waters…”

He was shaking his head back and forth, his neck stiff.

“Miss Edna.”

“What?” I stammered.

“Roddy is dead.”

His words made no sense. I was sitting in the back seat of a yellow cab on a crisp winter day on a street where Negro children skipped by, their bodies bumping into one another, while mothers dragged tiny metal carts filled with bags of groceries. “What?”

“Murder.” He could hardly say the word.

He stood there, frozen, so I jumped out of the taxi, wildly tossed some dollar bills at a disgruntled cabbie anxious to speed off, and I grasped Waters’ shoulders, shaking him until he opened his eyes. He was sobbing, fat tears running down his cheeks. “Follow me.” Not certain what I was doing or why, I rushed up the steps, my heart thumping. Waters was my hovering shadow, following so close to my back I could smell his hot, nervous breath. I turned to him. “It’s all right,” I sputtered, though I knew, to my marrow, that it wasn’t—that this horrid moment would define his next few months, maybe years, perhaps a lifetime.

Inside I strode down the long narrow hallway, momentarily stopped by the acrid smell of burnt beans, old flaking paint, noxious stomach-turning disinfectant. The walls were painted a deck green, chipped, streaked; the floor was murky gunmetal gray. My eyes kept darting from wall to floor, taking in the revolting colors. Why would anyone choose to color this bleak canyon with paint that took away your spirit? I walked instinctively to an apartment I’d never visited, but at the back of the first floor, turning to the right, I spotted an open door.

Everything about it suggested a picture I didn’t want to see.

What I noticed first was the doorjamb, a few pieces of splintered wood, as if someone had pried open the old lock and gouged the wood. I touched nothing. A tiny living room, boxlike and dark, with a beat-up and stained blue sofa and a straight-backed chair, turned over; a small side bureau with the top drawer pulled out and dropped onto the hardwood floor. A sparse room that looked unlived in. Two bedrooms beyond the messy kitchen: both doors wide open. In the first I could smell something sweet, unpleasant, cloying. There, sprawled in bed on his back, Roddy lay, half-covered with blankets, his bony chest exposed, the shaft of a knife planted where, I supposed, the human heart lay. His eyes were open, a look of absolute bafflement in them, his long, handsome face, convulsed now in a death grimace. Involuntarily, I cried out, and at that moment Waters began to wail.

Blindly, I sputtered, “Help! We must call…”

I staggered out of the room, trailed by Waters, and losing direction, I stumbled into the other bedroom. Lawson’s room. Bureau drawers were pulled out, clothing scattered on the floor, the contents of a desk strewn willy-nilly about, with sheets of white paper, typescript, scattered across the floor as if someone, in haste, had used an impatient hand searching for something else. Waters was mumbling, but I didn’t understand what he was saying.

“We need to call someone,” I told him.

I followed Waters out into the hallway to the front of the building where he pounded on the super’s door. Inside a radio played loud gospel music. The rasping, gargled sound Waters was making—I thought of wounded forest animals, trapped, dying—scared me. Minutes passed, unbearably so, until at last the door opened a crack. A bleary-eyed old man in a ripped undershirt, an unlit cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, seemed ready to berate the offender, but the sight of the pale white woman and the young Negro boy rocking at her side doubtless refocused that plan. “Yeah? What?”

“I need to use your phone,” I sputtered.

“No,” he said. That surprised me.

Waters pushed forward and pleaded. “Roddy’s been murdered.”

His brow furled, the man stuck his head out the door, peered in the direction of Roddy’s apartment, and then frowned. “Yeah?”

“Phone,” I insisted.

But he wouldn’t let us in, though I tried to step around him. He’d place the call, he said. We were to wait in the hallway. The door slammed shut. “Good God,” I roared. “Is the man crazy?”

A few minutes later he opened the door and announced the cops were coming. Then, like that, he slammed the door shut again.

Waters whispered, “That’s Mr. Porter. He doesn’t like people.” As if that explained his bizarre behavior.

“But murder…” I shook my head.

***

Minutes passed. We stood in that awful gray and green hallway, my eyes shifting between the oppressive battleship walls and the depths-of-hell linoleum.

“What are we gonna do?” Waters asked. He’d cradled his arms around his chest and was bouncing back and forth against the wall.

“We wait.”

The front door opened. Lawson strolled in, yawning. When he spotted Waters and me standing beneath the dim hall light, he looked baffled, as if he’d entered the wrong house, but then he smiled. “Are we up to something today?” Light-hearted, bantering. But there was something wrong with his speech, his words slurred, a hesitant drawl. In the faint hallway lighting I thought his eyes looked bloodshot. Could he have been drinking so early in the morning? My Lord, was the lad staggering home from a night at a speakeasy? Dressed in a spiffy charcoal gray suit, the pants wrinkled and the shirt pulled out of his pants, he carried his overcoat slung over his arm. He looked like he’d just tumbled out of bed. Which, no doubt, he had.

“We all going out?” He had trouble saying the line.

“Lawson,” I began. “There’s trouble. Roddy is dead…”

He actually grinned, though his eyes closed dreamily.

“No, Lawson…”

He shuffled by me, a drunk’s lazy walk, though I put out my hand to hold him back. Waters and I followed him into the apartment. He stopped in the kitchen, reached for a glass, and glanced back over his shoulders at the sideboard drawer on the floor, its contents scattered. “What the hell?” Puzzled, he looked at me as though I were the culprit. Then he headed into the small hallway and, though Waters called out his name, he reached the entrance of Roddy’s bedroom. I saw his back stiffen, the muscles in his neck jut out. He turned, tottered against the doorjamb, ready to faint. But still that line of a smile, plastered on now, frozen. “I don’t understand,” he said. He glanced back into the room and from where I stood Roddy’s grotesque corpse stared back, ghoulish now, frightful.

Then Lawson moved to his own room, and the first words out of his mouth startled me. “Who opened my damn door? No one is supposed…”

Inside, he paced across the mess of typed sheets covering the floor. Staring down at his feet, he seemed suddenly to wake up. “Goddamn it.” He swung his body in circles, taking in the chaos. Frantic, he rushed to a bureau and yelled something about a ring. “Money.” Then, as Waters and I watched, stupefied, he crumbled to the floor, his face trembling with fury, as he grabbed the typed sheets. Some were ripped, crumpled, smudged. Insanely, he cried, “One hundred one, one hundred three. Where, Christ, is one hundred two? I can’t find it.” He started gathering the sheets to his chest.

He had to stop when the cops rushed in and, surprising us in Lawson’s bedroom, demanded that we leave immediately, wait in the hallway until summoned. “What are you doing in here?” one cop yelled. “Get the hell out of here.”

So we stood in the hallway by the front door, waiting for the police detective to call us. I was trying to memorize the details of the apartment. The chaos, the knife, the body. Waters, the tears dry on his flushed cheeks, leaned against the wall with his eyes closed.

Lawson was sitting on the floor next to Waters, his knees up against his chest, his head rocking back and forth. He was sobbing loudly now, little-boy breathless gulps. He kept looking at his hands, as though missing the typed sheets. The police had refused to let him carry them out of the apartment. He wailed so loudly that the super cracked the door and grumbled, though he quickly slammed the door shut. And I didn’t know, as I watched the crazed young man, whether he was sobbing for the dead Roddy or for the destroyed manuscript covering the floor of his bedroom.

Chapter Six

The next morning, battling a headache that crowded my sleep with nightmares, I skipped my usual brisk one-mile walk. Instead, achy with fatigue, I lingered over two cups of hot coffee and buttered toast, then canceled appointments with both my hairdresser and my dressmaker—and ignored a call from Ziegfeld’s office about rescheduling yesterday’s missed meeting. I’d promised Detective Carl Manus that I’d appear at his precinct in Harlem to give my valueless but necessary statement. I had no idea when Waters was expected, though I hoped we’d meet there. I needed a comforting face inside those stark, regimented police walls.

Detective Manus was a gruff, slovenly man, big-bellied and cigar smoking, with a wide moon face, babyish, that belied the penetrating no-nonsense deep blue eyes. He reeked of drugstore cologne, some obnoxious sandalwood confection best left to Arabian deserts and Valentino movies, and what little hair he possessed, once gloriously blond and wavy, now consisted of a few vagrant strands that he looped, embroidery fashion, across his gleaming red cranium. He looked, if you squinted, like a circus clown, but those piercing eyes—did the man ever blink? I wondered—suggested a sheriff who always got his man. A tough cookie, I thought, and totally impressive.

Squiring me graciously into his small, cigar-noxious cubicle, he fawned and flattered and circled around me, and I didn’t trust a bit of it. He knew who I was, he assured me; and, honestly,
So Big
tugged at his heartstrings. “Really it did.” His wife wept. His ex-wife, actually, though they still talked. And obviously, I thought to myself, discussed current literature. His daughter read it twice. She wept—“What’s that word? Copious, yeah, that’s it”—copious tears. Then a sudden clearing of his throat, and it was down to business. “And why were you
there
?” He threw out the line so quickly I had to breathe in.

I explained the scheduled lunch date, my casual work with some young Negro writers I’d met through Waters. He was dismissive. “Oh yeah, that squirrelly Negro boy.” As I went on, his face suggested I would better spend my leisure hours volunteering for a Salvation Army soup kitchen or as a pillow-stuffed Santa ringing a brass bell in front of Gimbel’s.

“And you were going to lunch for what reason?”

I sucked in my cheek. I was about to say
Because I like to eat at noon
but seemed to make it worse with: “The pleasure of that young man’s company.”

He ran his tongue over his lips. “You’re a famous lady.”

“That I am. But what is your point?”

“Traipsing in Harlem can’t help your reputation, ma’am. You did notice you were mentioned in this morning’s
News
and
Mirror
.”

“I can’t be concerned with tabloid nonsense.”

“Hey, I make a living off it.”

“Sir,” I broke in, “what are we talking about?”

He ignored me. “Why do you think this Roddy fellow was murdered?”

“I have no idea. Like my young friend Waters, I am stunned.”

“Yes, your young friend Waters. The seventeen-year-old boy.”

I was going to reiterate that Waters, the son of my housekeeper, was a particularly bright though too serious young man, but I decided I’d wasted enough time with this line of chatter.

“You gotta admit it’s bizarre for a middle-aged white lady to be hopping cabs in Harlem with all these Negroes.”

“All these Negroes?” I echoed. “Are you keeping count?”

“You get my point, no?”

“I wasn’t crammed into the back seat with the entire cast of
Shuffle Along
, sir.” My tone was as biting as possible.

But he ignored me. He looked down at some papers, pushed them aside, and I sensed him closing up. “We’ll have the murderer by tonight.”

Now I was intrigued. “And who will it be?”

His burst of laughter degenerated into a rheumy cigarette rasp. “Let me do my job, ma’am.”

“I have no intention of usurping your detective skills, sir.” A pause. “Of which, I gather, there are many.”

A puzzled look on his face. “And I ain’t gonna write a novel.”

I smiled. “Burton Rascoe of the
Herald Tribune
, the Book Review Editor there, just breathed a sigh of relief.”

“Whatever.” He stood up and scratched his generous belly.

I wasn’t through, and stayed seated. “You will be arresting someone?”

“We got evidence from the scene.”

“Like what?”

“Good day, Miss Ferber. You’ll read about it in the
News
and the
Mirror
. Doubtless. I don’t expect to see your face on a wanted poster.”

I stood. “Not yet, at least. I’ve decided to let my sister Fannie live a few more torturous years.”

He shook his head. Before I left, he handed me a card and told me if I remembered anything else—anything trivial might be of value—to call him. Any time. He even wrote his home phone number on the bottom of the card.

I turned in the doorway. “But why do you need anything more from me…if you’ve solved the crime?”

He snickered. “Maybe I just wanna tell my friends the
So Big
lady rang me up at home.”

I took a step out of the small office. “Don’t sit by the phone, Detective Manus.”

He chuckled as I closed the door.

***

I had little interest in the dinner Rebecca served me on a tray. Anxiety lacing her gentle features, she served the meal but then left me alone. I craved silence, darkness, the blinds drawn and only a small nightstand lamp switched on. Slowly, methodically, I reviewed the long, unpleasant day, but, of course, my brief hour at the precinct dominated, intruded. I glanced at the clock: early, just seven. The night stretched ahead of me. Lying in my bed with a Joseph Hergesheimer novel unopened in my lap made me seem too much the Victorian invalid—smelling salts and bromides and Japanese lace fans be damned. I needed to act…to locate answers. But how? What could I possibly do?

I carried my tray into the kitchen where Rebecca was sitting with the morning
News
. Doubtless she’d been reading over and over the small account of Roddy Parsons, “a Negro,” aged twenty, murdered in his own bed up on 138th Street…and the curious and unnerving coda: “The body was discovered by best-selling author Edna Ferber, whose
Show Boat
and
The Royal Family
are scheduled to open on Broadway right after Christmas.” A cryptic line, that, and one most likely calculated to get idle and possibly malicious tongues wagging. I wondered whether the short paragraph, buried inside the paper, would have even been there (“a Negro”) had I not stumbled onto the murder. A black man murdered in Harlem did not warrant generous copy. Yes, the phone rang throughout the day, ignored by Rebecca and me; and yes, perversely, my publisher Nelson Doubleday sent a wire because he knew I wouldn’t answer the phone. He asked me, point blankly, if I knew what I was doing.

I always knew what I was doing. And Doubleday knew that. A lapse of judgment and character on
his
part, this nincompoopish telegram. Also ignored.

Rebecca looked up. “Waters told me the superintendent, Mr. Porter, Harriet’s father no less, refused to talk to the police. When he did talk to them, the cops told Waters, he suggested that Roddy was alive minutes before Waters walked in.” She bit her lip, nervous.

“That’s foolishness.” I felt hollowness in my chest.

“I’m worried. Miss Edna. You don’t think…”

I looked into her troubled face. “No.”

“But young Negro boys…”

“No,” I insisted. “Rebecca, don’t worry. Harriet’s father is a mean-spirited man, hardly believable. A drunk no less.”

I could see my words gave her no comfort.
But young Negro boys…

In my workroom I picked up the card Detective Manus had given me, and dialed the precinct number. As I expected, he was off duty. “No, I have business with him,” I informed the operator. No, I didn’t need to speak to anyone else. Instead, I dialed his home number, scribbled on the card. He answered on the second ring.

“Yeah?” His gentlemanly opening.

“This is Edna Ferber.”

A deep intake of breath, a slight hint of a cough from an inhaled cigarette. “You remembered something?”

“I remember a lot of things, but nothing that you want to hear.”

“So, you’re calling me because…”

“Because I’m concerned for my young friend, Waters Turpin.”

“Your sidekick?” I could detect the tickle in his voice.

“You’ve watched too many Tom Mix one-reel Westerns, Detective Manus.”

Again, the cigarette rattle. “’Cause the good guy always wins in the movies. It gives me something to believe in, Miss Ferber.” He waited a second. “Nobody is accusing the boy.”

“Mr. Porter, the super…“

“Is a foul-mouthed, lousy drunk with a rap sheet from here to Detroit, where I wish he’d move to, in fact. With that Bible that he uses as a weapon. He tried to smack an officer with it. Praise Jesus he missed, or he’d be in jail right now. Divine intervention, I guess. Getting info from him was like striking up a conversation with a mongrel dog—the breath will kill you if the fangs don’t get there first, and in the end you got nothing.”

“Be that as it may,” I broke in.

“Look, lady. The fool said he heard music from Roddy’s apartment early that morning, thought Roddy walked up front to check for mail, and says he thought Roddy was alone when young Turpin came looking for him, with you keeping the old motor running. The getaway car. But the medical examiner says
rigor mortus
was setting in long before noon, frankly, and he suggests the murder happened at two or three in the morning.”

“So Waters…”

“Is clear. Unless he was in on the planning stages…”

“Absurd.”

“Most things are.”

“Well, It seems we’ve found an issue we can agree on, Detective Manus.”

“Hey, I’m an easy person to get along with.”

“I’m not. Purposely. Less wear and tear on the soul.”

Noise in the background: I could hear a toddler whimpering, crying out. He spoke louder. “Since I got you on the phone, I might as well make your day. We pulled in a suspect a few hours back. You’ll read about it in the morning, and probably see a mug shot, front and sideways, as well as the gentleman, cuffed and cursing, being put into a squad car.”

I held my breath. “Is it someone I know?” Stupid, those words, but they simply escaped my mouth.

“Given your recreational companions, I’ll hazard a guess—yes. But it’s a gent named Harold Scott, a.k.a. Skidder Scott, aged forty-nine, these days a familiar homeless derelict who sets up shop in an alley off 134th Street and Seventh Avenue, in an abandoned building, keeping out of the cold. A squatter. In fact, Mr. Scott is well known to the police, a colorful figure, given his occasional drunken tirades delivered at subway stops, his crazy and non-stop protests against the invention of the automobile. He’s been known to stand in the street and…”

I was impatient. “How do you know he…”

“Well, he made it easy for us. I should send him a thank-you card. First, he’s a documented felon, having a prior for armed robbery when he was a young man, spending a bunch of years upstate. Second, he’s been known to frequent Roddy’s neighborhood, simple breaking and entering, petty thievery, pawnshop stuff. A break-in next door, in fact. This seems to be one break-in that went way off-track. Maybe it was the cocaine dripping from his red, red nose, or the bottle of bootleg whiskey in his hip pocket. Clever enough not to leave fingerprints—winter gives folks an excuse to wear gloves, lucky us—but somehow he dropped a battered pack of cigarettes, Chesterfields no less, by the bed, probably tumbling out of a breast pocket as he plunged a knife into Roddy, who probably woke to find the scum pocketing his bureau change. And there’s the issue of some cheap gold ring, property of Lawson Hicks, as well as some cuff links that were once owned by Mr. Roddy Parsons himself, found wrapped in rags in a corner of the decayed building Mr. Skidder Scott calls home sweet home.”

“So that’s it.”

“Strings tied. I can sleep well tonight.”

“I wish I could.” I breathed in. “I know Roddy Parsons as a decent, talented young man who…”

He cut me off. “Miss Ferber, he
was
a decent, talented young man.” He hung up the phone.

***

Restless, I tottered about my apartment, debated calling George Kaufman or Aleck Woollcott, but my mind kept ricocheting back to Jed Harris, that imp of the perverse.
Call
him
, I thought. I needed to talk to someone. He’d seen Roddy at my apartment. He sat at the same table with him at that chop suey joint up in Harlem. Images of Bella and Lawson and Roddy and Ellie intermingled with quick snapshots of Jed in my living room and uptown. His feigned indifference to Bella. His hostility…His contemptuous attitude that afternoon in my apartment. So what? Like Ellie and Bella and Lawson, even Freddy and Harriet, Roddy was
there
, the tall lad with the grin and the baby cheeks. There, then not there. Yet Jed’s darkswept look annoyed me. It made me think of Roddy, the grotesque, bug-eyed corpse, that dagger in the pale chest.

Rebecca fixed me a bootleg martini. She was always good at reading my mind.

Later in my workroom, I fiddled with letters I had no intention of answering and was relieved to hear two low-rumble voices coming from the kitchen. Waters and Lawson had stopped in. Though Rebecca knew I didn’t welcome impromptu visits to the apartment, especially socializing in the evening, I bustled into the kitchen, almost frenzied, in need of conversation.

“I’m sorry, Miss Edna,” Waters began, “but we won’t stay. Mom just wanted me to let her know I was all right, and Lawson…”

I cut him off. “Stay a while. Sit down. Please.”

“I told my cousin Mary I’d be back right away. She’s worried about me.” When Waters visited his mother in the city, he stayed with relatives in an apartment in New Jersey, an old couple distantly related to his mother’s second cousin.

So we sat in my living room, behaving as though nothing had changed in our lives, Roddy not cruelly butchered in his peaceful bed. Rebecca served us hot cocoa and crispy soda biscuits, turned to leave, but I insisted she sit with us, a shifting of household protocol she always had trouble with, this unorthodox blurring of lines. No matter. I’d come to relish the brief, sensible talks the two of us had, often late at night when neither of us could sleep. Or restless early mornings when the fireball sun over the East River pierced the shadows of the living room.