Passing Fancies (A Julia Kydd Novel)

by Marlowe Benn

  “Breathing helps. Where are we?”

  “In a room between the lavs we dignify by calling the SHH, the Secretary’s Hidden Helper. It’s where we stash all the work that will never get done, mostly filing and correspondence. Any decent secretary would take care of this stuff, but Horace is such a bear to work for we can’t keep the good ones. Terrible way to run a business, but Horace scrapes along.”

  He turned to grope ahead, Julia following, her hand on his back. He found the light cord, and a feeble yellow light revealed they were in a small anteroom. Between the two lavatory entrances was a door opening into another narrow space. Thick black pipes flanked it, disappearing like snakes into the shadows overhead.

  “Would that manuscript be in here?” Julia asked, stepping in to pull another light cord.

  The SHH was well named, about six feet wide and some twelve or fourteen feet deep. Each long wall was lined with shelves crowded with boxes, bundled papers, and precarious mounds of loose pages. Against the back wall was wedged an ancient sofa, possibly kin to the one upstairs in the ladies’ lavatory. Overhead loomed a web of more black pipes, glistening in the glare of the suspended light bulb.

  “Maybe.” Austen pulled down a large box and sank with it onto the sofa’s splotched concave cushions. It groaned in a cloud of stale dust. “It’s our best bet, after Horace’s office.”

  It was their only bet. Julia would turn over every piece of paper in here if she had to. She pulled down the box next to where his had been.

  “It could be anywhere,” he said, “but I’m guessing it’s somewhere on this side.” He waved to his right. “The other stuff was here before I came.”

  He set the box at his feet, between his knees, and began pulling out bundles of pages, most tied with string. He considered each, sometimes peering under a curled-back corner to read bits on inside pages. He sorted them into two groups: some he set aside on the floor, and others he piled on the sofa beside him. When he had reviewed all ten or twelve bundles, he returned those on the floor to the box and shoved it aside. Picking up one of the remaining manuscripts, he looked at Julia. “It’s not any of those,” he said with a nod toward the half-full box, “so let’s start reading.” He patted the cushion next to him, then looked at his hand with distaste. He took off his jacket and laid it over the stain.

  Julia lugged her box over and sat. Her shoulder knocked his as the springs pitched them together. He laughed. “This is the last thing I’d dreamed of for tonight.”

  She already had the string off one of the bundles.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m pretty sure the characters’ names were different, so we’re just looking for a similar prose style and the same basic situation, more focused on the boyfriend. I seem to recall it was written mostly from a man’s point of view, probably third person, but I can’t swear to it. Definitely set in New York, a young man having trouble getting settled—that sort of thing.” He settled down to read.

  Julia fetched her spectacles and did the same.

  The first six manuscripts were easy to dispatch. Julia got faster as her impatience grew, pressing Austen to hurry too. Over and over he rose and sorted through more large boxes, but none yielded anything hopeful. He then tackled the unboxed bundles stacked haphazardly on the shelves, dividing them into two high piles on the floor. After hoisting the not-possibles back onto the shelves, he dragged the remainder over to the couch. They didn’t speak as they dived again into the herculean task.

  Julia awoke with a start. She lay across the sofa, her feet in Austen’s lap, wrapped in the untucked hem of his shirt. “No,” she exclaimed. How could she have fallen asleep?

  He jiggled her foot again. “Morning, bean.”

  A weak light shone in under the door. Papers and bundles were strewed across the floor. Her hat and shoes were off, and her spectacles had been tucked into the toe of one shoe. “Any luck?”

  He patted a thick stack of pages on his knee. “Just now. The names are different, but it’s the passage we read last night. Almost word for word.”

  He held up a page, and Julia recognized it at once. The sentences were identical. She threw her arms around him. “Brilliant man!”

  A hundred thoughts stampeded through her mind. What did this mean? Eva had been more sly than anyone knew. But Julia understood how desperate authors could feel, fearing that their years of hard work might languish unappreciated and even unread on publishers’ desks, awaiting their brief chance to garner attention. She knew of authors who changed their titles to snag another chance. Some even changed their names. Perhaps Eva had spent the past year creating mystery and drama for her “secret” and “new” novel as a way to incite fresh eagerness when she submitted the old manuscript again. It was a bold strategy, and it had worked—too well.

  “What do you think?” she asked Austen. “This must mean she tried to publish it earlier and Liveright rejected it. Maybe she tried again this spring with a new title.”

  Austen teased her with the grin of a boy prankster. “Better than that.”

  He turned over the stack in his lap. The top sheet was blank except for the title and author’s name. He held it close for Julia to read: Till Human Voices Wake Us. By Jerome Sanford Crockett.

  Jerome. Jerome!

  “A shock, huh?” Austen said. “Opened my eyes too.”

  “Jerome? What does this mean?”

  “Not sure. All I do know is something’s crawling under my shirt.”

  Julia jumped up. She shivered inside her wrinkled dress and rubbed her arms and stockinged legs, whisking away unseen insects. He collected his jacket and the manuscript as she gathered up her hat and shoes.

  “My guess is he stole Eva’s work,” Austen said as they hurried back to his office. “Maybe this is an early version of Harlem Angel he tried to pass off as his own. It explains why he’s so jumpy around editors and why he won’t come to Horace’s parties.”

  Austen locked the door and whisked off his shirt. He flapped it like laundry, shaking out any fleas and the worst wrinkles. “It’s possible he killed Timson to get the manuscript before Eva could give it to Goldsmith. After all, he probably submitted Voices to Arthur too. He couldn’t risk him recognizing it and exposing his fraud.”

  He clapped his hands, palms a pair of jubilant cymbals. “That’s got to be it. It means Jerome killed Timson. And you know where the cops can find him. By lunchtime Eva can breathe easy and come out from hiding. You’re the brilliant one, bean.”

  He reached for the telephone. But Julia pried it from his hand and returned it to its cradle. “Hold on a tick. We need to be sure.”

  One more minute wouldn’t matter if they were right. It was important to be sure. Julia had witnessed how Eva was treated in police custody—and she was a woman not even under arrest. Jerome would fare far worse.

  “Everything you say makes sense,” Julia said slowly. “But I would swear he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t have the manuscript or know where it was.”

  Could she have been fooled? Maybe she was more gullible than she thought. She was proving to be wrong about many things she’d thought she understood about herself.

  “Maybe he panicked and gave it to her to make her look guilty,” Austen said.

  Julia’s nostrils flared in distaste. Could Jerome do something so despicable?

  Her heart heaved with the answer. If he was a murderer, then yes, of course he could. Had she been duped so easily? Did she believe poets inhabited a higher order, above the fray of powerful emotions like ambition, jealousy, and hate? In fact a poet could burrow into deep feelings better than anyone. Jerome had every reason to hate Timson, and witnessing his cruelty to Eva could easily have been the final straw. Julia may have been blinded by Jerome’s suffering in the dark recesses of the Half-Shell, but now she could see a larger reason for his agony. If Austen’s theory was right, it suggested Jerome was what he’d seemed from the start—a cold and selfish man, a schemer, even a killer.

  “
That would explain why Eva’s hiding,” Austen went on, warming to his notion. “If she thinks she can’t trust anyone to believe her, she would send out passages focused on the boyfriend character, who sounds a lot like Jerome. She wants us to see that he’s the killer, not her.”

  He poked his arms into his crumpled shirtsleeves and fastened the buttons. He loosened his trousers and began shoving in shirttails.

  “Maybe,” Julia murmured, her mind still struggling as she fastened the strap of her shoe. Could she be sure? Alerting the police meant putting a noose around Jerome’s neck.

  “You don’t think so? Makes perfect sense to me.”

  Rationally, he was right. It did make sense. Julia could see it laid out neatly, all the things that pointed to Jerome as the murderer. So why did her brain not feel exultant, the past weeks’ cobwebs swept clean with fresh light? It only felt shrouded in a darkness more ominous than ever.

  She heard herself whimper. “I can’t help feeling something’s not right. A week ago I would have leaped into your arms, deliriously happy we’d discovered this and figured out everything. Now I have trouble imagining the Jerome I saw last week could either murder a man or shift suspicion onto Eva. I know he’s proud and unpleasant, but I’m convinced they love each other. He’s terrified for her, not for himself. I believed him, Austen. I still do.”

  “If he’s desperate, if his life depends on it, he’d believe his own lies. Then you’d believe them too.” He buttoned his trousers, then his cuffs.

  “Maybe.” Julia straightened as a new thought began to glow, then blaze. “But there’s another reason I don’t think he stole her work. I saw a note she’d written. And something he said—he called her style clean and easy.”

  She slapped at the desk. “I’m a bloody fool. I should have seen it right away. You read those pages. Would you call this prose clean and easy? No. Nowhere near. It’s elaborate, dramatic, even melodramatic. Eva didn’t write this.”

  Austen sat down. He stared at Julia. “It’s the other way around? Eva stole Jerome’s manuscript?”

  He rubbed his chin. His shadowy beard made a faint rasp under his palm. “That would mean we were right in the first place. If she stole Jerome’s novel, she has every reason to want us to think he killed Timson. But what a grim way to hide a secret. Getting a book published isn’t worth sending a fellow to the chair over.”

  Julia stared at the floor, barely listening to him. Then she laughed. Tears started to her eyes as light finally dispelled the morass in her brain. “No, no. She didn’t steal it. She’s not trying to pin the murder on him. They planned this together.”

  “What the—?”

  “Jerome wrote the book, but Eva is pretending to be the author.”

  Julia hobbled peg-leg around the office, pacing with only one shoe fastened. “It makes sense, the most perfect sense. Publishers don’t want what he prefers to write, and Eva’s a ready-made icon for the kind of Harlem Pablo’s wild to promote. I’m guessing they decided to give him the author and book he wants, one with big sales possibilities, and use the money to get away and start a new life together. I knew that’s what she wanted, but I never realized she wasn’t working alone.

  “Come on. We have to talk to Jerome.” She scrambled to find her other shoe. “Eva’s been passing all along—as a writer.”

  CHAPTER 30

  They hurried down the six steps to the Half-Shell’s entrance. Eva’s secret didn’t explain why she would send out cryptic batches of manuscript, but Jerome might be able to.

  The door was locked. Julia peered through its round porthole window into the shadowy club. An old man in baggy trousers stood about ten feet inside, leaning on a broom handle and lighting the mangled stub of a cigarette. She gave the doorknob a vigorous shake.

  The old man started and shook his head. When she persisted, he sidled to the door. “Closed,” he said, or something like it, through a gargle of phlegm.

  Julia pressed her face to the window and smiled with every sparkle she could manage on a gray, humid morning. “Please,” she mouthed, reaching into her handbag.

  The old man shuffled closer. “Closed.”

  “Our maid’s desperately ill, and her brother works inside,” Julia said into the grimy glass.

  He fumbled at the lock and cracked open the door. “Can’t come in, miss. Closed.”

  Julia leaned so close her nose would be mangled if the door shut. “Jervis Carter? We must talk to him. We’ll be quiet as lambs, I promise.” She held a folded bill below her chin.

  “Carter?” the old man croaked, the grooves in his face deepening with suspicion.

  “It’s a terrible emergency.” The bill danced.

  Julia hadn’t seen what denomination she’d pulled from her bag. Perhaps it was sizable. The old man studied it and opened the door just wide enough for them to slip inside. Nodding at his toothless “Make it quick, miss,” she pressed the money into his hand.

  They threaded their way through the narrow aisles, chairs atop the bare tables. Swept-up piles of litter lay about the floor, waiting for the man to follow with the dustpan. Stale smoke deepened the gloom.

  Julia retraced her steps of the other evening, pausing only to get her bearings before plunging into the backstage maze. Fortunately, the space was deserted and silent, and high clerestory windows offered some dim light. She picked a course in the general direction of the back hallway that led to Jerome.

  She hesitated outside the door to his cell. The door was again propped open with the rusty iron. Nothing stirred. A drab light from the window in the alcove revealed the drifting lint and desiccated brick walls she remembered. Crumpled and smoothed newspapers lay stacked on the scarred table. Julia took a deep breath. “Jerome?”

  Nothing. Then a scrabbling and the creak of bedsprings. More shuffling and the sound of shallow panting. A shadow fell across the table. Jerome moved warily into view, gripping his trousers at the waist. “Miss Kydd?” His voice was thick and hoarse.

  “We’ve come to talk with you. It’s important.” She edged forward, brushing Austen’s hand to warn him of the heat and stench.

  Jerome watched them approach, eyes not yet focused. His cracked lips gaped open. He didn’t move, except for the rippling of sinews in his bare feet as he fought a slight sway.

  “Something strange has happened, and I think you can help us make sense of it.” Julia stopped about five feet from him. “We think Eva is sending out sections of her manuscript, to Pablo and now to Austen.”

  Jerome dragged his tongue over his lips. He fumbled to roll his trousers waistband for lack of a belt, and he pulled back his shoulders in search of his once-perfect posture. “What do you mean? How?” His mouth worked stiffly, lips, tongue, and teeth in clumsy collision. When had he last spoken to anyone?

  Julia felt Austen slip away behind her. “We don’t know how. Or even why. But please look at this.” She took a thin envelope from under her arm and laid its four pages on the table.

  Jerome held the top page close to his face with both hands. He read the first several lines in the dim light and dropped his arms with a thud. He nodded.

  “You recognize it?” Julia tapped the manuscript.

  “Of course. It’s from Eva’s novel.”

  “Funny thing is,” Austen said, “I’ve read it before. In a manuscript sent to Boni & Liveright sometime in the past couple of years. A novel called Till Human Voices Wake Us.”

  Jerome’s fingers curled and uncurled a corner of the top page. “Funny, all right.”

  They waited.

  When he looked up, it was with relief. “That’s all it was meant to be. Our little joke. Putting one over on all you editors who decided I couldn’t write anything you’d ever publish.”

  “You wrote Harlem Angel, and Eva claimed to be the author.” Julia spoke it as a fact but held her breath, waiting for Jerome to admit or deny her conjecture.

  He nodded.

  “It’s mostly her story,” Julia went on, “plus so
me parts from your first book, the one you couldn’t sell.”

  He accepted this with a sigh. “After the writing, being an author is mostly just selling anyway.” He lowered his eyes and stroked his dense new beard. When he glanced up, a glimmer of his old pride returned. “We knew Eva would be a dream author—pretty, glamorous, star purveyor of Harlem strut and shine. Pablo loved it from the start, and we kept adding the things he liked. The things that make him, you know, squeal.”

  Julia nodded. She knew the exact sound. “Wasn’t it risky?”

  She remembered Eva’s hesitations during their first conversation, asking if Julia had written Wilde’s Salome. Those tentative comments must have been among her first spoken as an impostor writer. Perhaps this was why Eva had talked so much about passing after Billie Fischer had accused her of being a fraud, to divert attention from this other deception. And no wonder Eva had looked at Jerome with such alarm, even terror, when Timson had refused to return the manuscript.

  “We were going to drop the charade once Duveen delivered the contract and payment,” Jerome said. “But Eva discovered she fancied the ruse. She loved being taken seriously as a writer, and she thought all the attention would mean more money in the end. She wanted to wait until after we were safely in Paris before coming clean about the hoax. I thought that was asking for trouble. We argued about it. The more attention she got, the more I worried something would go wrong.”

  He stopped fidgeting. “I’m glad someone knows. Has Duveen figured it out?”

  “I doubt it,” Julia said.

  “Hold on. This doesn’t make sense.” Jerome leaned against the filthy bricks. “How could Eva send these? She doesn’t have the manuscript. She wrote to me begging for it.”

  He was right. Julia’s mind had narrowed too quickly to the mystery of authorship, forgetting the problem of the missing manuscript. She answered slowly, formulating a new theory. “Maybe we’re wrong to assume Eva is sending the pages. But if not her, then who?”

  “Whoever stole it from Timson’s safe.”