[Dorothy Parker 01] - The Broadway Murders

by Agata Stanford

  The discovery of Lucille’s body had been the most stunning event I told my friends about when I had arrived at Tony Soma’s. But there was quite a bit more. As we braced ourselves against the sharp wind, I told Mr. Benchley the gossip and the few facts I’d gleaned from my afternoon at the reception and reading of the will: Reggie had never filed for divorce to be with his mistress, Marion. Myrtle hadn’t wanted the divorce, either, just a separation, so Reginald and Myrtle were still married at the time of his death. Also, Mistress Marion had not been seen anywhere near the funeral home, or at the service, or at his interment.

  According to the terms of the will, aside from bequests to friends and employees, gifts for medical research, charities for the poor, a foundation in his name to fund artistic development in the Theatre, and his collection of Egyptian artifacts bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all was left to his wife. He left modest amounts of money in trust for his sons, but with stipulations: not to be received until reaching the age of 26 and the completion of their university educations. As for my observation of the young men, they appeared sullen and impatient with the traditions of the past couple days, rather than mournful; they had obviously been at odds with their father, for what reason I would have to investigate, and they did not bother to hide their resentment.

  When we arrived at Lucille’s apartment building, a four-story brownstone on 51st Street just west of Eighth Avenue, we were unsure what we might be walking into, so we stopped at the stoop leading up to the front entry door. If the police had not been to her apartment yet, they surely would be soon. There was no patrol car parked on the street. There was nothing for it but to buck up and press on, so we braced ourselves and climbed the steps.

  The front door was unlocked. We found Lucille’s name and apartment number on one of five letterboxes. The house was quiet as we climbed the stairway up one flight. The sound of a tune playing on a Victrola from rooms on the floor above was the only sign of life. Her door led to rooms at the front of the building. Its lock was easily jimmied by Mr. Benchley, a.k.a. Bobby the Burglar.

  Light filtered in from street lamps and lit a path to the windows, where I lowered the shades and pulled the draperies closed before Mr. Benchley hit the light switch on the wall. Light fell in pools from table lamps around the room and onto a red-plush sofa and a matching easy chair. A thick, cream-colored acanthus-leaf-sculpted carpet anchored the living room suite set before bay windows. Lots of photos, all containing images of the dead woman posed with Broadway’s stars, stared back at us from sparkling silver frames grouped on various mirror-topped tables and on the fireplace mantle. A sleek mirrored bar separated a small kitchen just off the entry foyer and a door leading to a bedroom and bathroom.

  “What now, Mrs. Parker?”

  “I’m not sure, Mr. Benchley.”

  “Well, we didn’t come here out of simple curiosity.”

  “I suppose we came to search for . . . what are we searching for, anyway?”

  “Something that might give a clue as to why she was murdered and who may have done the gruesome deed.”

  “Right! And while we’re at it, anything that might tell us more about who Lucille Montaine really was.”

  “What do you mean? Her real name? You think Lucille Montaine was a stage name?”

  “Well, yes, that, too, but what I mean is, if we know more about the victim, who she really was, who were her friends, what were her habits, her troubles, maybe we will know why she was murdered.”

  “Very good,” said Mr. Benchley, looking over the room. “Well, we know that the last time she was in the apartment it was during the daytime because when we entered, the window shades were up.”

  “Very good deduction, indeed, Mr. Benchley. So that means she’d been missing since Thursday, but before five o’clock in the evening. Why don’t you look around the living room and gather up anything interesting. I’ll search the bedroom.”

  I pulled the shades and curtains before turning on the bedroom lamps, and then went through her bureau drawers, the vanity, and bedside table. Aside from the usual array of lingerie—camisoles, slips and panties, hosiery—and jewelry boxes, perfume bottles, and face creams, there was little of anything that might tell me more about her than that she shopped at Bendel’s and Bergdorf’s. The armoire and closet boasted numerous hat boxes and dozens of pairs of shoes and purses, as well as many shimmering gowns, a silver fox fur-trimmed coat, a couple of evening capes, four or five suits, silk blouses, and negligees.

  I quickly went through pockets and purses and gathered up note slips, sales receipts, business cards, and several theatre tickets and programs, to more closely scrutinize later. I was about to pull the chain of the closet light when I noticed that the lid of a wardrobe box was slightly a-kilter. I lifted the lid, and behold! A treasure trove of letters, a scrapbook, photos, and news clippings! Quickly, I checked the other boxes lying beside it and found in one of them a man’s shirt and suit jacket tossed and wrinkled, the clothing labels from a more pricey men’s tailor in midtown, and in another, a costume of black trousers, turtleneck sweater, and knitted cap. Tossed in a corner of the closet was a pair of very soiled tie-up flat-heeled shoes. Encrusted mud caught in the step where sole meets heel made me wonder where in the city one could find such heavy mud, except maybe in Central Park. I made a decision to leave the clothes and shoes but take with me the box of papers.

  After shutting the bedroom lights and raising the shades, I went in to join Mr. Benchley, who had collected several items from the living room, which we added to the box of mementos.

  Just as we took a final turn around the room, the telephone bell rang, causing both of us to freeze. We looked back and forth from the phone to each other with dreaded expressions, as if we were certain that whoever was on the other end of the line knew we were in the apartment. We were like kids caught with our hands in the cookie jar, like teenagers caught necking on the living-room sofa, like—oh, what were we to do? Hide behind the draperies from some omnipotent entity seeping through a telephone receiver? I’m getting too old for intrigue, I thought.

  But the bell seemed to ring more loudly and more insistently, as if demanding to be answered with every consecutive jangle. I reacted on instinct. I picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?” I said in a weak monotone, expecting the deep, resonant voice of The Lord to bellow out, before reaching out through the receiver to box my ear.

  A woman immediately chattered on about a problem with the laundry, and it took me a minute to decipher that the caller was Lucille’s house maid, and she was so sorry, but she could not get the stain out of the negligee. “What should she do?”

  When I had an opening to speak at last, I informed the woman that she had reached the wrong number, and I hung up.

  It was time to leave before we were discovered, and we set about shutting lights and raising shades. But as we were peeking out the door into the hallway to see if the coast was clear, the telephone bell began its sharp jangling again. We both jumped in surprise, and irrational fear sent my heart flying up to my throat. When I looked over at my friend, Mr. Benchley’s usually cool demeanor was betrayed by droplets of moisture on his neat moustache; his normally expressive face looked not unlike that of the proverbial deer-caught-in-the-headlights.

  Neither of us wanted to move, nor look at the source of the ringing, but when I finally turned to face the thing that beckoned unrelentingly, I had the impression that the apparatus was actually shaking furiously, jiggling on the table; if the candlestick had had feet, it would have been stamping its demand. I knew it would not be the house maid calling again. Somehow, ridiculous as it sounds, the ring was different, meaner, more menacing. Perhaps it was that we were rooted stock-still in shadowy darkness, on the verge of discovery by the police or a murderer, and that was why the phone rang out with a shrill, unworldly and sinister bent. I was as afraid not to answer the frenetic appeal as to answer it. I have always believed that, at times, to learn the truth is to s
hine light on the unknown, and in so doing, menacing shadows are chased away. It is far less scary than blundering around a problem, ignorantly and idiotically, in the dark.

  Ignoring Mr. Benchley’s head shaking, I picked up the receiver, but cupped the mouthpiece and said nothing.

  I could hear his breathing. Yes, there was a man on the other end. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. Finally, I whispered, “Hello?”

  There was a pause, a long pause, enough time for me to know that wheels where turning in the caller’s brain, spinning in search of explanations. A click, and the line went dead.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” I said, just as we heard the screeching of tires on the street.

  We closed the door after engaging the lock and hurried down the staircase, reaching the bottom landing and the foyer just as a pair of police officers arrived at the outer door. I was worried that they would recognize me, not necessarily for my celebrity, but as the woman who had released Lucille Montaine from her exotic casket.

  The interior layouts of most brownstones in Manhattan are identical. As this house had been only modestly modified to convert from private residence to apartment living, I hoped that the stairway leading down to the basement apartment wasn’t blocked off. I had hoped right, it wasn’t, so Mr. Benchley and I ducked out of sight around the stairwell and down the stairs, aware that the stairway would end at a locked door to the basement apartment, but at least out of sight of the police officers coming through the main entry door. We waited as the footfalls on the creaking stairs overhead diminished, and then we came up to peek around into the hall to see if the coast was clear for our escape.

  A few minutes later we were safely in a cab heading downtown to my rooms at the Algonquin, laughing and joking inanely in an effort to release the tension of the past hour. It would be quite a while before Aleck joined us, but that gave us time to look through all the papers and pictures we’d carried out of Lucille’s apartment. As none of us knew Lucille Montaine very well, I was hoping these items would give up any secrets in the dead woman’s past.

  Woodrow Wilson greeted me enthusiastically when we walked through the door, and then slunk away across the room to lie beneath a chair when he remembered his shameful behavior while I was out; I discovered the puddle on the floor; it wasn’t the first time. . . .

  I grabbed a towel, cleaned up the mess, and then took my neglected pup out for a spin along the street, leaving Mr. Benchley to begin organizing our stash. Before I came back up on the lift, I ordered room service at the desk. A plate of sandwiches to tide us over until Aleck arrived, and a snack for Woodrow Wilson, compliments of Henri, the chef of the Algonquin dining room, who saved special morsels for his most beloved and appreciative pooch. By the time I returned to the apartment, Mr. Benchley had not only spread all the papers around the room, but also fixed us a shaker of Tom Collinses.

  “But, Fred,” I said, looking around the room at the scores of items strewn on the floor. “What fresh hell is this? How the hell do we make sense of this madness?”

  “Ah, my dear girl, but there is method to this madness.”

  “More like madness to the method, if you ask me!”

  “Well, I’m not asking; I’m telling,” he said, handing me my drink. “Now take a sip and tell me that isn’t the best Tom Collins you’ve ever tasted.”

  “I cannot say such a thing. It is the best Tom Collins I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Good,” he beamed, then took my hand to lead me through a path of uncluttered carpet. “Now, if we stand right here we can turn in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree—”

  “Please! I’m not a mathematician!”

  “—and we have it all spread out at our feet.”

  “You remind me of the Kaiser standing on a map of Europe.”

  “It’s more like a labyrinth, really,” he said, considering the layout with a frown. “Make fun, if you want, Madame, but there is science here!”

  “Math, and now science!”

  “There you see?” he said pointing to the floor. “First circle: letters in chronological order; second tier: photos—Lucille was organized and marked the dates and events, and identified the people in the pictures; and then, there,” he pointed, vaguely, “are receipts: ticket stubs, programs, store charges, notes. Voila: Last circle—news clippings, mementos, and a scrapbook!”

  “Fred, you are brilliant! But where is the Ninth Circle of Hell?”

  “Let’s dive in.”

  An hour later, after a short break (we’d finished off the last crumbs from our turkey sandwiches, and licked out the last dregs from a second shaker of drinks), we went back to the task of sorting through Lucille Montaine’s life.

  Soon we’d learned that she had been born Ethel Mae Herring, was raised in Des Moines, Iowa, one of two children to middle-class parents, her father, a pharmacist, her mother, a homemaker, who also gave piano lessons, and that Ethel Mae had been the star of her high school’s senior production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which we might have learned had we read the Playbill biography from one of her Broadway shows. There was a cast photo in her yearbook, where she was flanked by wood nymphs and a Puck who wore his mischievous grin for the camera.

  Through several letters from her mother, we discovered that she had come to New York to make a career in the Theatre. As if that was news! And from several love letters we learned that Lucille had had a very serious romance, which she had abandoned for the Great White Way.

  From a much-handled scrapbook of clippings and theatre photos, many of which had come unglued, leaving behind yellowish, rectangular ghosts on its pages, we learned that she had appeared in several chorus lines with touring companies across the country. For two years she’d traveled the circuit from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, even returning to her hometown’s Palace Theatre in a Lee Shubert extravaganza. Her biggest out-of-town role was as the Month of April, for which she wore a gown of cherry blossoms and carried a silver umbrella, while being rained upon with silver confetti. She had cut out the reviews from each newspaper of the cities on the circuit, which noted her delightful costume and graceful form. Soon, she’d advanced to a walk-on in the 1922 production of Fashions for Men, and later that same year, a walk-on in the production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, which starred Pauline Lord. She’d yet to cut out the notices from her first starring role in RIP’s show that had opened only a week earlier to mostly dreadful reviews. But then, she probably would not have pasted them in the book, except for the benign, if syrupy, notice by critic Ralph Chittenham.

  Also among the usual debris of useless, little used, or forgotten items in the wardrobe box were such things as an old powder compact, hairclips, hat feathers, a tired-looking box of blue note cards, a broken comb, a rolled-up high school banner, a bottle of glue, manicure scissors, and a wrinkled red satin ribbon.

  The items that Mr. Benchley had taken from the living room included a notepad from beside the telephone, several pearls found under the sofa seat cushion, a torn-off high heel tossed behind a chair, and a box of matches from the 21 Club.

  Mr. Benchley rubbed the angled point of a pencil across the blank surface of the notepad paper to reveal the ghost of messages past: “Biltmore 1130,” it read. Was it A.M. or P.M.? We didn’t know. A meeting? Under the Biltmore’s famous clock in the lobby, the designated meeting place for thousands each day?

  Obviously, a strand of pearls had been broken, whether by Lucille or a visitor was anyone’s guess, and several pearls had rolled back into the crease of the sofa cushion. That lent little information, as I have a box chuck full of bits and pieces of broken jewelry in my closet. No sinister meaning in that, anyway.

  But the discovery of a broken heel—likely from a dress shoe, as it was covered in satin—coupled with the loose pearls, gave rise to visions of a struggle in the living room. (Although, you never know what you’ll find under my sofa.)

  As for the matches, Mr. Benchley pocketed them, having used his last
one for lighting his cigarette.

  After three hours of rearranging items and taking an inventory for quick reference in the future, we returned everything to the wardrobe box, having found nothing that could explain her murder or be a connection to anyone who might have had reason to kill her.

  Aleck arrived at midnight, having filed his review of Irving Berlin’s new Music Box Revue of 1924. Entering, with a flourish of his hand, he removed his red-satin-lined black opera cape and laid it across a chair, resting his top hat, opera scarf, and gloves in a neat stack.

  “I thought you’d be ready for a night on the town,” he scolded. “First to the opening-night party at the Waldorf for the Revue; I thought it would be fun to say ‘Hello.’ Fanny Brice was hilarious, the little yenta; Grace Moore, Bobby, was magnificent, as usual, but I did miss you in this production, kiddo!”

  “Did you really, Aleck?”

  “Go home, Bob, and get some duds on. We’ll go on to dinner—What have we here? Reluctance?”

  “Let me slip into something for the occasion,” I said, retreating to the bedroom.

  In the bathroom, I rinsed off the day’s grime, and then pulled from my closet a simple black satin sheath dress, changed into nonsensical shoes, powdered and rouged my face, put on lipstick, darkened my eyes with mascara, pushed my untamed locks under a sleek, purple satin evening hat, decorated with gold fringe that frames the face, wrapped a gold-threaded shawl around my shoulders, grabbed an evening purse, and then finished with a cloud of Coty’s Chypre, my favorite cologne. All in all, a record-breaking six minutes, start to finish.