Aleck said, as we moved through the crowds of spectators and attendees gathered at the entry of the synagogue, “After it’s all over today, we’ll have to have a sit-down talk about this. But for now, if what you’re saying is true, that there’s a murderer around, let’s keep our eyes open and our mouths shut.”
“. . . And to my wife of 27 years, Myrtle Price Pierce, I leave the balance of my estate.”
Wilfred Harrison moved aside the document that was the last will and testament of Reginald Ignatius Pierce, and then removed his glasses. I noted in the natural light pouring through the windows that his eyes were blue and his hair was so black that it had a bluish sheen. Actually, I had paid attention to little more than the man’s physical attributes. It’s just that his very presence kept distracting me.
We were gathered together in Reggie’s apartment above the theatre that bore his name, in the very room, the library-slash-office, where my friends and I had recently found refuge behind blue velvet curtain panels. The half-dozen of us who had been named in the will, or had an interest in the disposing of his estate, were scattered around the room, and the principal players—Myrtle, the sons, Robert and Raymond, and Gerald A. Saches—were seated before Wilfred Harrison at the refectory table.
Myrtle rose from her chair, quite shaken, her expression dour, and requiring the assistance of her sons to walk from the room. Once she had risen, it was a cue for all to follow.
But I didn’t want to leave just yet. I wanted to snoop around a little, see what I might find, as I sensed that in this room there might be answers to identifying Reggie’s murderer. And, to be completely truthful, I wanted to see if I might turn Wilfred’s interest toward me, now that the business of the day had been set aside. I remained quietly seated in the wing chair beside the huge fireplace mantle as the others filed out of the room, watching as Wilfred filled his briefcase with the many documents that littered the table. When the last stragglers retreated through the open door to the salon, I made my move.
“Mr. Harrison,” I purred, gliding to his side as he prepared to leave. I shined my best smile in his direction, but he was certainly not blinded, for he hummed, “hmmm?”
“I was wondering . . .”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Parker. Dorothy,” he said, looking up, while patting the breast of his suit jacket for the various tools of his profession—pen, eyeglasses, and so on. He came around the table on his journey toward the door.
“Yes, I do prefer being called ‘Dorothy,’ Will. How do I . . .? What I mean to ask is, will the . . .bequest be sent to me at my residence, or should I take it with me now?”
“Oh, no,” he said, halting his progress toward the door. “You can’t take it now. Although there is no law that says you can’t. But you’ll want to have it insured and have professional movers come to crate it properly and deliver it to you. I’ll make the arrangements.”
He continued toward the door, but then stopped and turned to address me. “After all, Dorothy, it could get damaged if you took it home now in a cab.” As I wasn’t budging, he said, “Are you coming?”
“Where? What do you have in mind?” I said.
“Out of the room.”
He wasn’t asking me out for a drink, damn! Probably had women waiting for him all over town.
“Ah, yes, in a minute,” I said, defeated so soon. “I just want to look at it before I go,” referring to the lovely Renoir pastel of a girl who looked very much like me. I was thrilled that Reggie remembered how much I’d wanted the painting and touched that he had been generous enough to leave it to me. Ours had been a casual acquaintanceship, and it was because of the Renoir that we had met.
Several years ago I attended an auction, and with money I had scraped together, along with a loan from my sister, Helen, I had hoped to bid on and buy back the picture that had once belonged to my Uncle Martin and Aunt Lizzie Rothschild, but that had been sold by my aunt soon after a tragic event.
In 1912, while sailing home from England on the Titanic, the ship hit an iceberg, and the rest is history. Aunt Lizzie was put into a lifeboat by her husband, my Uncle Martin, who remained aboard the sinking vessel. She watched in horror as the ship nosed under the icy waters. Not long after returning home, she sold off parts of his estate. Why she sold the Renoir, I’ll never really know. I recall something about Uncle Martin buying it, not so much because he liked it very much, but because it was part of a deal in the purchase of a Manet that Lizzie adored and had hung in their parlor. Six years after my aunt had sold the painting, its new owner liquidated his assets, and the Renoir was again put up for sale at auction.
The bidding reached the sky soon after the auction began, and I was way out of my league. Reggie was bidding furiously against several others for the picture, and finally won with his last bid of twenty-three-hundred dollars!
After the auction we spoke, but I was shy about telling him of my personal family interest in the picture, so I didn’t. I said, if he ever wanted to sell it, and I was flush, to let me know (such bravado!). He was very gentlemanly in not alluding to my reputation for rarely being able to pay the rent, much less ever having the cash to buy such a work of art, but nodded assent before taking a good look at me and saying, “By God, Dottie, you’re the girl in the picture!”
Not long after that day, as he later told me, he was discussing the Renoir’s provenance with Bernard Berenson. “It had once belonged to the Rothschilds,” boasted Reggie.
“Oh, not those Rothschilds,” said the art expert. “The Rothschilds from the Upper West Side, the coat manufacturers, you know, Dorothy Parker’s family.”
So I was touched that he should think to leave me the picture. Now, not only did I have something back that had belonged to my mostly dead family, but besides Woodrow Wilson, it would be the most valuable thing I owned.
But I digress, and now go back to Wilfred Harrison.
As he appeared to have no interest in getting to know me as more than a bequest in a will, I wanted to take the opportunity of looking more closely at different items in the room. He left the room and the door ajar. I idled up and gently closed it against possible witnesses, before making a bee-line for the desk. I found the key under the cushion of the chair and unlocked the desk. It took me a couple of minutes to find the secret cabinet at the back. The door swung open when I pressed a metal lever, so small and inconspicuous that I only found it by running my hand along the smooth wooden edge before being stopped by a protrusion embedded in the wood. And it was in that cubbyhole that I found the little gun with the mother-of-pearl handle. It was small but weighty; I wondered if it was loaded. Knowing nothing about handling firearms, except what I’d learned from crime novels, or from melodramas I’d seen played out on stage, I knew enough not to look down its barrel. Holding it at arm’s length I saw where the chamber could be opened and the cylinder moved away from the body of the gun. Five bullets and one empty place for a sixth one. I could smell gunpowder, and wondered if the gun had been used recently. I was nervous in handling it. I've never liked guns, and I was afraid it might go off even with the gentlest handling. Replacing the cylinder to its closed position, I put the gun back into the secret compartment.
I thought back to the other evening. The Oriental man had taken something from the desk. I was unsure what, exactly, as his back was to me and blocking full view. Had he also placed the gun in there, too? What else had been in the desk compartment?
The only items I could see in the desk were bills and letters that appeared to be from friends or family. So I closed up the desk panel and locked it, returning the key to its hiding place under the seat cushion of the desk chair.
If the gun had been there all along, I mused, why hadn’t the Chinaman taken it, too, along with whatever else he had taken? Another thought: Could the gun have been placed there after our visit?
It was no longer a mystery of identifying the Oriental. He had been employed, I heard tell during the reception, by Reggie, to serve as houseboy in his new apa
rtment. But since Reggie’s death, there was no sign of him.
I needed to think, to sort it all out, but before I left to join my friends at Tony’s for a drink and a talk, I had to see if there was something obvious I was missing that might lend a clue to why Reggie was murdered. This was the very room he was found in, after all. He was found dead at the refectory table, in front of a steak, baked potato, and string beans—half-eaten—and with a cherry tomato stuck in his throat.
I paced around the room, trying to take its inventory to store in my little brain for later consideration. As I had never been in the room before the other night, I couldn’t tell if anything was out of place or missing. I checked over the fireplace; there was nothing stuck up the flue. I lifted a potted plant and a couple of statues and found nothing. I opened a door, but found only a small bar set-up. I wanted to pour a drink, but knew I’d best not, as I was moments from discovery. People would be leaving the apartment, and I heard voices exchanging farewells.
I closed the bar and moved toward the Egyptian collection. The sarcophagus coffin stood upright against the wall; the image of an ancient queen with huge, compelling, black-rimmed eyes stared at me as if demanding answers. What secrets was she privy to? I doubted the coffin contained the dusty mummified remains of her majesty, but with nowhere else to look, I stepped closer to her, drawn by the hypnotic bidding of those painted eyes.
There was a scuffle at the library door, and I feared discovery of my snooping. So on an irrational impulse to seek a hiding place, I opened the lid of the ancient coffin just as the library door swung open.
In through the door walked Wilfred Harrison; out from the sarcophagus fell a very dead Lucille Montaine.
Sarcophagus—
I never guessed what I’d find inside.
Lucille Montaine—
Posed for this risqué photograph back in ’19 when she first came to New York and needed the money.
Times Square from 46th Street—
Looking down towards the Times tower during the daytime. The busy streets inspired my friend George Gershwin to compose Rhapsody in Blue. Can you hear it?
Chapter Three
“A bullet through her head,” I said, in answer to Mr. Benchley’s question.
The three of us were commiserating at a table at Tony Soma’s.
Aleck looked soulful, full of remorse. “I am sorry to have said all those things about her, even though they were true, and she was dreadful, but when I wrote that somebody should put her out of her misery—”
I said, “I believe you said something along the lines of, ‘clunked around the stage like a swaybacked cart mare on the way to the glue factory.’ And you added, ‘It would be kinder to put her out of her misery—’”
“Oh, Lord! I did say that, didn’t I?” groaned Aleck.
Mr. Benchley added, “You did go on to say, Aleck, you’d’ve shot her yourself, but you knew your pen would do the trick, requiring little to no cleanup from the janitorial staff.”
“They don’t suspect me, do you think?”
“I’d not worry about being arrested, Aleck,” I said. “Your motive—to ban Lucille from the Broadway stage—is not so compelling to the police.”
Mr. Benchley wouldn’t let Aleck off the hook so quickly, however; he believed Aleck should be more contrite, so he added, “Although, you are rather violent against the desecration of The Stage.”
Aleck waved for the waiter to refill our drinks, and then sank back into his chair, a hand rubbing a troubled brow. Mr. Benchley turned his attention back to hear the rest of the account of my day. I relayed the events immediately following the discovery of Lucille Montaine’s dead body: how Wilfred Harrison entered the library just as I had opened the standing sarcophagus coffin; how the very stiff and wide-eyed corpse of the late actress came crashing, face down, to the floor at my feet; how the scuffle of people, remaining mourners, and later, police and coroner, had piled into the apartment to question me and the others about the events leading up to the discovery of the body.
“I told the police the truth, that I had been admiring the Renoir that Reggie had left to me, and that on the way out, I was curious to peek inside the sarcophagus, which was—‘only natural, don’t you think, Detective, to want to see if there was a mummy inside?’ There was no reason to complicate things by saying that I was snooping, or that I had gone through the desk and found a gun hidden in a secret compartment.”
“But, the gun might be the murder weapon, Mrs. Parker,” noted Mr. Benchley.
“How was I to explain why I was riffling through the desk in the first place? How was I to explain where I got the key to open the desk? How was I to tell them about the secret compartment? As far as anyone knew, I had never been in the apartment before this afternoon, so how would I explain how I knew my way around, unless I told them we had broken in the other evening?”
“I see your point,” said Mr. Benchley. “All right, let’s put together what we do know, and see where that gets us,” he prefaced.
“Reginald was found dead in his apartment Thursday morning,” said Aleck. “Nobody had seen Lucille since Thursday, too. She missed her Thursday-night performance, and that raised a red flag that something was wrong,” I said.
Mr. Benchley asked, “But, what was she doing in Reginald’s apartment that got her killed and put in the coffin? Could she have had anything to do with Reggie’s murder? Or witnessed it or seen the killer?”
“My God!” yelled Aleck. “Do you think she was in the box when we broke in Thursday night?”
“If so, did the Oriental or Marion have any idea that a dead Lucille was in there? Had one of them known, he or she could be the murderer,” said Mr. Benchley.
I shook my head, “If she was in the coffin while we were there hiding behind the window curtains, neither acted like they knew about it. Remember, I could see them through the break in the draperies,” I said. “Each had only one intention, and that was to find something in the room that they wanted to take away. I didn’t get the impression that they had any idea about Lucille. And she might not have been in the sarcophagus at that time; she might have been killed elsewhere, or after we left the apartment. But, let’s go back to the first problem, the cause of Reggie’s death.”
“Yes, Dottie,” said Aleck. “I think if we know why, and by whom, Reginald was murdered, we might be led to Lucille’s killer.”
“As far as I know, after spending the past few hours with the family and the police, nobody has mentioned the fact that he was allergic to tomatoes!”
“Why not, do you think?” asked Mr. Benchley, and then proceeded to answer his own question: “Because any one of those people who knew of Reginald’s allergy would immediately become suspect.”
“But, who else knew?” asked Aleck. “Dottie and I, who sat with Myrtle at an opening-night party two years ago when the dog-meets-skunk story was told; his sons; probably Gerald Saches; his cook and house staff. Damn! Probably everybody.”
“But not everybody had a strong motive,” said Mr. Benchley.
It was six o’clock in the evening and Tony’s place was packed with businessmen stopping in for cocktails before catching trains to the suburbs, friends gathering for drinks before going off to one of the many restaurants around town, and a few hard-drinking regulars seeking solace in their cups. Our discussion was interrupted several times by friends who stopped at our table to say “Hello.” I knew that in order to sort things out we would have to find a quiet place to do so.
I thought about the odd behavior of all those who knew of Reginald’s allergy, but had failed, as far I as could see, to bring it to the attention of the police. Perhaps my thinking was too linear. Maybe I was looking at the situation from the wrong point of view. Maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see, what seemed obvious. What if I was just grabbing at the easiest solution?
Groucho Marx came to mind. Our friend, whose one-liners were often built upon ambiguous and misleading sentence structures—“I once saw an
elephant in my pajamas”—made me realize that perhaps we were looking at things the wrong way.
“Maybe he didn’t die from the allergy,” I said. “What if the tomato was placed in his throat to make it look like he choked? A way to eliminate from consideration the way he really died? What if the murderer didn’t even know about his allergy?”
“If that were the case, then the suspects are not limited to the few who did know. Was there an autopsy?” asked Mr. Benchley.
“Aleck?”
“I’ll call Cousin Joe at the Twentieth. He can get us a copy of the coroner’s report with no questions asked.”
There was little time left to talk further on the subject as Aleck had an opening-night show to review. From the bar he put in a call to Sergeant Joe Woollcott at the Twentieth, who promised to get him the report by the following morning. Later this evening, Aleck would come to my rooms, after he handed in his review of tonight’s show. In the meantime, Mr. Benchley and I would be making a short trip up to the murdered actress’s apartment on West 51st Street.
Mr. Benchley and I walked several blocks north and then turned west toward the brownstone apartment of Lucille Montaine. We dodged automobiles as we crossed under the Sixth Avenue El, over the trolley tracks on Seventh Avenue toward Broadway, and into the traffic-congested streets of the Theatre District.
Trains rumbled like snare drums overhead, shaking the ground with deep bass tones; trolley car bells clanged, amusingly sprite-like; motorcar horns blasted brazen brass, or hee-hawed like a chorus of donkeys on the run; a cabbie and a motorist shouted obscenities at each other, and police whistles, blocks away, flitted lightly through the air. Scraps of syncopated songs spilled out from honky-tonk gin joints and tacky dance halls. Capricious tunes rang up from the streets like jazz, an improvisational melody reverberating along the strings of towering structures. The city was bright, vibrant with life and the excitement of rich possibility, its people racing in pursuit of inspiration or whimsy. Even the cold, determined wind from off the Hudson would slap your face, stiffen your back, or nip at your heels; revive the spirit, or knock you for a loop; quicken your pace, quicken your pulse, and give renewed purpose to the pursuit of success, and meaning to the phrase, “If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.” My friend George Gershwin feels the rhythm of this city, hears its ever-changing tune, rejoices in its singularity, and has so well captured the heart and spirit of New York in his new Rhapsody in Blue.
[Dorothy Parker 01] - The Broadway Murders Page 5
