[Dorothy Parker 02] - Chasing the Devil

by Agata Stanford

  I followed and let out another scream that could land a person in an asylum. It was the right thing to do, however, for I had actually forged my own path. Frightened, people got out of my way, and when I reached the landing I was met by half-a-dozen cops charging down from the two stairways leading from the street.

  They looked at me, and they knew who I was, and that the assassin was close to their grasp.

  But where, exactly, was he? Suddenly I’d no idea where he’d disappeared.

  Mr. Benchley made it painfully up the stairs, and we were surrounded by a crowd of passengers and police officers. One woman pointed to the street, saying, “He went that way.” A young couple pointed to an archway in the distance, and we decided the man couldn’t have gone up the stairway at the same time the cops were descending from the street. The only other path of escape was through the door beyond the arched opening, just off the downtown platform of the Broadway Line, around the corner from where we stood. And that door led directly into Hubert’s Museum.

  Mr. Benchley and I, followed by at least six uniformed men, bolted through the Museum’s entrance. Only a half-dozen years ago this was the subway entrance to one of the most spectacular lobster palaces in New York, Murray’s Roman Gardens. Its doors closed after the war, when drink became illegal. People must have been more thirsty than hungry, for they turned to the speakeasies for quenching.

  Hubert’s Museum was a freak-show exhibit, and a very successful one at that. Mr. Benchley and I had intended to take a drunken tour through the place someday—it was the kind of lunacy that one needed to be tight to enjoy—but it appeared that that “someday” had arrived dry. The night had been freakish enough already—I could do without any more freaks. But as we entered the dark, gloomily lit entry and raced toward the ticket booth and turnstile, we encountered the first of many.

  A woman in the ticket booth was pointing at the curtain just beyond the entry turnstile and ranting her displeasure. As Mr. Benchley lifted me over, before leaping over it himself, followed by the cops, she continued raving over the dime admission we’d failed to pay.

  The long corridor we entered was lined on both sides by four-foot-high velvet curtains topping waist-high platforms, on which, when the curtains parted, were displayed the various advertised oddities. There were only a handful of people viewing the exhibits in the dimly lit room, as it was nearing midnight and the greater attraction tonight was the countdown to the ball dropping outside in the square.

  We ran past the display of shrunken heads, two-headed snakes, and the three Filipino midgets on their little stage, one of whom asked why we were in a hurry, and “why the cops?” Mr. Benchley asked if a hatless man had run past, and they nodded and pointed the direction.

  Martha, the Armless Wonder, one of the advertised headliners, couldn’t point when we stopped at her vignette, but with a toss of her head in the same direction she wished us luck.

  The Carlson Sisters, “Twin Fat Girls,” finished each others’ sentences:

  “A hatless man?” He went—”

  “—that way, toward the—”

  “—flea circus!”

  Once arrived at Professor Heckler’s Flea Circus, where sixty trained Pulex irritans were performing gymnastic leaps and summersaults, playing football, carrying flags, and jumping ropes, we were ignored. If we hadn’t been pressed by a more urgent purpose, we might have been so transfixed by the talent and skill displayed before us that we’d have forgotten we weren’t at all tight.

  We exited the museum the way we’d arrived, and the screaming ticket seller was soon soothed into silence when Mr. Benchley pushed a dollar bill through the hole in her glass booth.

  “He’s gone,” she said, “the man you were chasing.”

  We piled out through the door and onto the subway platform where we were in time to watch the scuffle between our prey and one of the police officers.

  Mr. Benchley grabbed my arm and placed me behind him, shielding me from danger.

  A shot fired, thunderously, for the echo reverberated within the tunnel, and I struggled to get free to better see what was happening. A policeman down, shot in the foot, the assassin on the run with the cop’s service revolver.

  It’s dangerous to shoot off a gun in such a confined space with hundreds of people going to and fro like ducks in a shooting gallery. People were scurrying for the stairs up to the street, their screams of fear mingled with the screams of celebration a few feet above us out in Times Square.

  Our man was searching for escape, and with every turn he had to retreat and try another path. And in the confusion of the crowded subway, passengers made mad dashes for cover. Mr. Benchley held fast my hand, dragging me along.

  “I saw that door open,” he said, while assisting a young woman fallen down in the rush before him. “The old loading platform of the building.”

  I knew what he meant: When the New York Times built its offices marking the cross-point on the X that was Times Square back at the turn of the century, the company had created a loading dock area to more quickly transport newspapers by means of special trains traveling along the tracks of the subway system. It worked efficiently until, in 1913, the newspaper moved its presses to the current building occupying the slice of real estate between 43rd and 44th Streets. Now, One Times Square houses the Times’s pressroom and administrative offices, but is best known and used as a gigantic advertising billboard towering over the square. And just before midnight on December 31, it is the tower from which a ball descends, marking the beginning of a new year.

  We looked around at the ghostly, barren loading platforms, saw the closing of the huge double doors, and followed in through them to the cement room in the foundation of the building. There was no escape but by the freight elevator or a stairway, and from the hum of pulleys and wheels it appeared that our man was taking the easy way up. All that was left for us to do was to travel the hard way. We climbed the stairs.

  “Fred,” I whined, “what are we doing?”

  “Going up to the roof.”

  “It’s too many flights, I’m all rung out.”

  “But, the thrill of the hunt!”

  “My dogs are spent!”

  “Then, stay here!”

  “I will not! I’m coming with you, soon as I get these shoes off.”

  The T-straps had to be unbuckled, and by the time I got them off my feet Mr. Benchley was already at the top of the first landing. The icy-cold cement was heavenly on my feet, and I was able to sprint up the first two flights with new ease. But by the time I started on the third flight, it felt like Everest would be easier to scale. And finally on the roof level, where twenty years ago extravagant New Year’s Eve parties were held with fireworks that threatened to repeat the San Francisco fire in this East Coast city, I was so breathless that I couldn’t speak at all.

  The roof was ablaze with electric lights. A party was going on under stars outshone by the great expansive fields of electric lights that swept the distance beyond and below us, known as the Great White Way: swells and gals and a band tootling out Sweet Georgia Brown; champagne glasses raised and spilled. Mr. Benchley was at the roof’s railing, one of many men shouting down into the crowd through the lofty night sky. The sound of a hundred thousand or more drunken fools pressing forth to fill Times Square, like a Texas cattle roundup, rose up in hissing whines. So extraordinary and infectious was the sound of cheers rising from the cavernous space formed by the surrounding buildings that I was overcome, startled by the effect. In a city where, surrounded by millions of people, one can wither from lonesomeness, it is at times like this, times of celebration, like the Armistice celebration in ’18, when citizens come together with camaraderie and renewed hope for a better future.

  “The assassin,” I choked out to the policeman, “where’d he go?”

  “Over the top,” he replied, and then tried to prevent my progress.

  Suddenly, a fight broke out between a couple of drunks and soon spread like a disease to the
party guests. Hair was pulled, a dress torn, beads scattered as three women engaged in a cat fight. As the officer holding me was suddenly distracted by an elderly matron’s elbow to his ribs as she attempted to back away from a flying punch, I broke free, ducked a right hook, took a splash of champagne in the face, and made it through the obstacle course to Mr. Benchley’s side.

  I wedged myself in between him and a policeman, and looked down into the crowd, expecting to see a dead man fallen down into the street.

  The glow of the brilliantly lit ball obscured the view of the undulating mass of humanity below. The sight of the killer standing on the ball, light bulbs rupturing from his weight and sparking in bursts of cinders as he gripped the connecting rod that was suspended over the street, sent my stomach to my knees.

  The crowds were chanting something in a singsong rhythm, and I realized they were counting down the seconds: “—eight, seven, six—”

  If he fell or was electrocuted, how many people would he kill or injure other than himself?

  “—four, three, two—”

  The ball stopped on its track.

  “—one!”

  It was like having your ear at the track of a speeding freight train. The mindboggling roar from below was the emanation from the throats of a hundred thousand children behaving badly. Confetti and streamers and tickertape rained down from the windows and rooftops of the buildings lining Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Noisemakers cranked, tambourines rattled, paper whistles shrieked, streetcar bells rang, and every automobile horn in the city honked—it was loud enough to awaken the dead. The people of New York City were celebrating in toto voce their mantra: Live for today, for tomorrow we will all be dead.

  There was nowhere for him to go. If he thought that ball would carry him down into the crowd and then into freedom, he miscalculated. The ball stops two stories above the street, and a fall would kill him.

  As the crowd continued rejoicing, and the pickpockets made hay before the pickin’s grew slim, the lights on the ball were extinguished and the engineers were ordered to bring the ball back up to its container, suspended off the edge of the roof. In less than a minute, “Timothy Morgan,” the imposter priest and murdering assassin, was properly ensconced in a metal cage.

  The real Pinchus Seymour Pinkelton standing alongside his Doozie

  That's Father Tim (a.k.a. Rowdy Healy) next to the Reynolds woman in the white hat just below Clarence Darrow’s raised hand!

  Boaters appeared to float along Times Square in the daytime as we awaited news of winner of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight.

  The Final Chapter

  André Peer and his ten-man Cotton Club Orchestra were really cookin’ tonight, and as usual, by two o’clock in the morning the musicians were caught up in their hypnotic jazz reverie. The atmosphere had turned from red-hot and pulsing to blue and sultry.

  But the party was far from over, although its remnants lay crushed on the floor beneath our feet, the dots of confetti and curling streamers brushed off the dance floor and gathered aside like old memories in corners and under tables and chairs.

  Mr. Benchley and I missed the midnight show—Earl “Snakehips” Tucker and Evelyn Welsh burning up the stage with their new dance routine.

  But, as we sat at the big round table surrounded by our friends, we rather enjoyed the somber blues ballads weeping softly from the bandstand.

  When we arrived at the club half an hour before, the celebratory spirit was still high. We were greeted by Aleck and Edna, FPA with a little chorine he'd picked up at the Friars Club, and Jane and Ross, who were bored at the party they’d attended and decided to take up the standing invitation to join us. George and Ira and Irving rounded out the table. Arthur Garfield Hays, his wife, and Clarence Darrow decided not to join the midnight soireé. Darrow was leaving on an early train; he was tired after the lecture, and the Hayses took him home for a late dinner. But, the tab was on Hays, anything we wanted, and that meant that the champagne flowed and several good, genuinely imported bottles of scotch poured freely.

  “Looks like you’ve been dragged through the city, Dot,” came the strident tones of Edna Ferber. She ended her observation with a chuckle, which did nothing to endear her to me. But, she had been a sport yesterday, during our foray as Marx Brothers at the University Club. I think she was flattered that I had asked her to help, and I knew she’d had fun playing Zeppo for a day.

  “I have been dragged through the city, Edna,” I said.

  My satin coat and dress had not faired all that well; there were streaks of soot I hoped the cleaners might remove. My hose was snagged and a run ran up from my right foot, the look reminiscent of a Hell’s Kitchen hooker. I’d managed to comb my hair and apply lipstick after wiping off the smudges from my face. I figured everyone was, by that time, so very sloshed that no one would notice I’d been ravaged in my adventures.

  Mr. Benchley, on the other hand, looked fresh as the morning dew, the rat!

  There were questions after questions: To where had we run off from the Friars Club affair? Were we frightened? What did they do with the monster when they brought him up in the cage?

  Frank told us he’d called the city desk with his comments for his morning column about the goings-on at the Friars Club party, and then had spoken to the crime reporter who scooped the story that Hermione Reynolds, the girl in the Scopes Trial photo, had been caught with her mother, Winnie Winkle, as they were leaving their apartment across from St. Agatha’s, toting luggage. Left behind in the apartment was the leg-cast she wore to make her appear an invalid. Found inside one valise was a book with the names of her criminal contacts. She did break down and tell the police that she was the girlfriend of Rowdy Healy, a.k.a. “Father Timothy Morgan,” the man who killed both Father John O’Hara and Father Michael Murphy when the latter discovered the real Father Tim, the godson of his friend John, had never left Grosse Pointe, according to a letter the Jesuit priest had sent a few days before Christmas after hearing of his godfather’s murder. That letter prompted Father Michael to call us for help, soon after he realized the man posing as Father Timothy was an imposter. Timothy, I mean Rowdy, suspected Father Michael was onto him; something was fishy, and after he pretended to leave town, he snuck back in through the back garden door, killed the priest, and destroyed the incriminating letter.

  “But he didn’t kill Father John,” I said. “I saw who did it. It was the Wild-Haired Man.”

  “The Wild-Haired Man was a good guy! He was Rowdy’s older brother, Harlow,” said Frank. “Harlow tried to stop his brother and the conspiracy to kill the lawyers. He was chasing his brother Rowdy with Father John when John was murdered by Rowdy in the crowd on Thanksgiving morning.”

  “Why didn’t Harlow go to the police?”

  “The killer was his little brother, and killer or not, he wanted to stop his brother, not turn him in.”

  “But who fired the shot at Mrs. Parker?”

  “Rowdy.”

  “He could have done it, of course. Remember Father Michael told us that Father John’s godson would be arriving shortly? The day we went to speak with him that first time?”

  “He, Rowdy Healy, was waiting for us to come out of the rectory! The shot was fired from across the street in the apartment taken by Hermione Reynolds.”

  “Rowdy was out to kill you. Harlow was not the shooter, but he was trying to get us out of harm’s way, not lead us into it! But, he ran right into the street and got struck by a car.”

  “How did Father John get involved in all of this?”

  “He knew Rowdy was one of the men who set the darktown fire, but he must have suspected there were other plans brewing. Then he found out about the Klan’s plan to kill Darrow from a parishioner in the confessional. One can only suspect that the parishioner was Harlow, converted to Catholicism several years earlier for his marriage to a young woman who died a year later in childbirth. Whichever it was that set them in motion, Father John and Harlow joined forces to track down Rowdy an
d stop the assassination. John went to Detroit, trying to see Darrow there, and when he found out he was out on a lecture tour, he followed him to New York. A letter was found among the young Jesuit’s things—the real Father Tim—from Father John, to be opened in the event of his death. Timothy thought the envelope contained John’s will, and when he heard that his godfather had been murdered he opened it and found, not a last will and testament, but Father John’s confession in handwriting: He was disgusted by the hatred he’d witnessed during his years in the small Southern town, and a crisis of faith had made him reluctant to stand up, if only in his pulpit, against the prejudice he abhorred. Finally, he could stand by no longer. The first-hand knowledge of the arson and the planned assassination made him culpable if he did not take action. Thus the trip to Grosse Pointe, where he knew plans were shaping up, the hatred for Darrow brewing because of the upcoming Sweet Trial. Harlow was close by, in Detroit, hoping to find and convince his brother, Rowdy, to stop the madness. The priest and Harlow left for New York together. The letter to his godson was insurance that if anything happened to him Timothy should call in the authorities.”

  “Who killed the godson?”

  “A Klansman, probably; I don’t know if we’ll ever know who actually sabotaged the Jesuit’s automobile or what was in the letter that the real Father Tim wrote to Father Michael, when he heard about his godfather’s murder. That letter is probably what got them both killed,” said Frank.

  “Why didn’t Timothy call the Detroit Police?” I asked.

  “He did. Problem is, the department is pretty corrupt, and it’s suspected the Klan has a number of members on the force. Going to them probably was the worst thing he could have done. It brought Timothy his death sentence.”