A Friendly Game of Murder

by J. J. Murphy

  But Mary kept talking, “And look at her in there living it up. She doesn’t think that I know something’s going on? How dumb does she think I am?”

  Dorothy began again to explain, but now Lydia spoke up.

  “Not as dumb as I feel,” she said ruefully. “Bibi’s been upstaging me for months now. At first I figured it was simply a matter of her taking any opportunity she could get. She’s young and hungry and ruthless. But as of tonight I know she’s been trying to upstage me on purpose.”

  “On purpose?” Dorothy asked doubtfully.

  Lydia spoke bitterly; her pale blue eyes were as hard and cold as ice. “Didn’t you notice how she waited until just the moment that Doug introduced me, and then she burst forth like the great whore of Babylon? Not only does she want to take my place on Broadway, but she wants to take my place in society—and humiliate me in the bargain!”

  Before Dorothy could answer, Woollcott sauntered past them and pushed open the door to the kitchen. This was her chance to get him alone! Murdering Woollcott in the kitchen would be perfect.

  Dorothy rose and spoke quickly. “Mary, don’t do anything rash. I know full well that Douglas is not cheating on you with that woman. But wait here, and I’ll explain it all. I just have to kill Alexander Woollcott, and I’ll be right back.”

  She left them with stunned expressions on their faces and pushed open the door to the kitchen. Woollcott stood in front of the wide-open wooden door of the icebox. He was dipping his fingers into a bowl of pink cake frosting. He turned as she entered. He had a pink frosting mustache above his thin upper lip.

  “Ah, there you are!” she said. “I want to have a couple words with you—”

  The next two words from her mouth should have been you’re dead. But a sharp, loud crack made her turn her head. On the other side of the small kitchen stood a man in dark blue overalls. The man faced the sink; his back was to her. He raised his arm—it held an ice pick—and jabbed it into the sink with another loud crack, followed by a clinking sound.

  Dorothy stepped forward to get a better look. There was a large block of ice in the sink, and the man had broken smaller chunks from it. Dorothy recognized him as the workman who had spilled the entire container of ice when Bibi had made her grand appearance. Now he clearly had to make more ice to replace the large amount he’d spilled—no wonder he seemed to be doing it so resentfully.

  The iceman, sensing someone behind him, turned angrily toward Dorothy. He held the ice pick up high; its sharp metal tip glistened right in front of her eyes. She raised her hands in surrender.

  “Okay, I get the point,” she said. “You want to be left alone.”

  The man had a rough young face with a thin, upturned nose. He sneered at Dorothy and spun back around to chip more ice from the block.

  At the icebox, Woollcott looked expectantly at Dorothy as he sucked the last of the frosting from his fingers. “You had something to say to me?”

  Drop dead, she wanted to say.

  She had been thwarted. She couldn’t “murder” Woollcott with a witness in the room. She spoke through gritted teeth. “You have frosting on your lip, fat boy.”

  Woollcott smiled devilishly, licking his lips. “Not quite the cutting remark I expected of you, Mrs. Parker. Better luck next time.” He shut the icebox door and brushed past her; the kitchen door swung behind him.

  Damn! She blew it. Surely now he knew that she was the murderer. Even worse, she had put him on the defensive because now he certainly knew that she was gunning for him. She had completely lost the element of surprise. She stomped her foot in frustration.

  The iceman turned, anger on his dirty face, the ice pick in his hand.

  Indifferent now, she waved at him as though he was a gnat. “Oh, shove it up your ass.”

  * * *

  Back in the parlor, Dorothy faced the cluster of chairs, but Mary Pickford and Lydia Trumbull were gone. She glanced around the noisy, crowded room but didn’t see them anywhere.

  Benchley ambled up to her. “There you are, Mrs. Parker. You said you’d be back in a minute. That was a while ago.”

  “Forgive me, Fred,” she said, truly sorry. She had so wanted to spend the evening with him, and she was doing everything but that. “Let’s get a drink and settle in.”

  They threaded their way to the bar, only to find that most of the booze was gone—casualties of the fracas between Dr. Hurst and Doug Fairbanks and of the other partygoers’ heavy drinking.

  “Now what do we do?” Dorothy asked.

  Together they slowly turned their heads toward the bathroom.

  “The tub,” Benchley said, “is full of champagne.”

  They could see that Bibi was still ladling it out to the hangers-on, while the nuns continued their vigil and observed her disapprovingly.

  Dorothy asked, “Dare we dabble in the devil’s brew?”

  Benchley glanced into his empty glass. “Let’s see, prohibition or perdition? We’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”

  “Then what the hell,” she said, linking his arm in hers. “Let’s go.”

  It was hot inside the crowded little bathroom. Dorothy noticed beads of sweat on the nuns’ heavy brows. As Benchley slowly approached the bath, he leaned momentarily against the radiator beneath the frosted-glass window. He nearly jumped at the heat of it. The only person who didn’t seem bothered by the temperature was the naked girl in the tub.

  Before Dorothy and Benchley even asked, Bibi had filled their glasses. “Two more satisfied customers,” she said merrily. Then Bibi eyed Benchley with that devious look she had first given to Dr. Hurst. “What do you do for a living, sweetie?”

  Benchley smiled genially. “As little as possible.”

  Dorothy had to hand it to him: Benchley was still trying to avoid looking directly at Bibi.

  But Dorothy wasn’t shy about looking at her and evaluating her perfect body, her flawless skin and her pixie nose. Then Dorothy noticed something else about Bibi. . . . She was still wearing the silver locket—the one Mary Pickford was so upset about. Without having thought about it until now, Dorothy had assumed that Dr. Hurst had demanded the locket back when he’d had Bibi alone, yet here it was still around her pretty neck.

  Why would Dr. Hurst be so adamant about Fairbanks protecting his locket, she wondered, yet leave it with this girl when he had the chance to take it back?

  “Excuse me,” Bibi said to Dorothy. “My eyes are up here.”

  “So they are.” Dorothy looked up at her. “But who really cares about your eyes?”

  Chapter 6

  “All right, everybody!” Douglas Fairbanks announced to the crowd of partygoers in his apartment. “It’s eleven thirty. Time to go down to the lobby for the countdown to midnight!”

  Dorothy straightened up in her armchair. Eleven thirty already? How had the time slipped by so quickly? One minute she and Benchley were enjoying a quiet drink together—then another drink, and then another—and the next minute it was only half an hour until midnight.

  She had not talked things out with Mary Pickford, as she had told Fairbanks she would do. And she had not cornered Woollcott alone for the game of Murder either.

  The only thing she had done was to waste time with Benchley. For this, she was happy.

  But she wasn’t done with Benchley yet—she wanted to be beside him at the stroke of midnight to plant a New Year’s kiss on him. What might happen next? she wondered. They were quarantined in this hotel for the foreseeable future. Who knows?

  Benchley stood up. “Shall we go down to the lobby?”

  Dorothy jumped to her feet. “Certainly.”

  In a moment they had crowded into the small elevator with a handful of other guests, including Lydia Trumbull. Dorothy looked around, hoping Mary Pickford might also be aboard, bu
t she wasn’t. Maurice, the elevator operator, strained to close the doors. It was so crowded that he had trouble pulling the lever to make the elevator descend.

  Some of the people on the elevator were grumbling about being kicked out of the Fairbanks’ party all at once.

  “That was the bum’s rush,” said one man—an insurance salesman type, Dorothy thought.

  “Never saw a party end so fast,” said the woman with him.

  Benchley, good-natured as he was, turned to explain. “Don’t hold it against the Fairbankses. It’s the Algonquin tradition. On New Year’s Eve, everyone gathers in the lobby to watch the big grandfather clock count down to the stroke of midnight. People stand on chairs and literally jump into the new year for good luck. The waitstaff parades around and bangs on pots and pans to scare away evil spirits from entering the new year.”

  “Speaking of spirits,” the man said, “are there any drinks available in the lobby?”

  Benchley thought about this. “Did you bring any with you?”

  “No.”

  “Then you might want to make a resolution to do so next year,” Benchley said as pleasantly as possible.

  The man frowned and muttered to the woman. “The Hotel Astor, it ain’t. That’s where we’ll stay next time.”

  And thank goodness for that, Dorothy thought.

  The elevator stopped, and Maurice struggled to open the doors. The passengers on the elevator spilled out into the lobby, where a party was just getting in full swing. Loud jazz music was coming from somewhere—Dorothy was too short to see through the crowd whether there was a real band or a phonograph. In the center of the lobby, the armchairs and coffee tables had been moved away and the carpet rolled up. Young men and women began spinning and bopping to the latest dance craze, the “Black Bottom Stomp.”

  Benchley bent to Dorothy’s ear and yelled to be heard above the din. “That wonderful gent on the elevator needn’t have worried.” He pointed to a number of liquor bottles being passed around the crowd. “The waitstaff—and Frank Case—have their work cut out for them to chase all these spirits away.”

  Dorothy and Benchley weaved their way through the bustling crowd toward the dining room. As they did so, Dorothy managed to grab a bottle. Dinner service was long over, but the dining room was still nearly as crowded as the lobby. Dorothy plucked two empty glasses from the Round Table, poured some booze into them and handed one to Benchley. They clinked glasses and sipped.

  She spotted Arthur Conan Doyle, followed by a young man, entering the room. They must have just arrived downstairs, Dorothy thought, because Doyle seemed to be wandering around, looking for a friendly face. She waved them over.

  “Ah, Mrs. Parker, Mr. Benchley, is your game over?” Doyle shouted genially.

  “Not quite,” Dorothy said, reminded again that she had to somehow get Woollcott alone. Then she looked at the handsome young man with Doyle—but perhaps he was not quite as young as he seemed from across the room. He appeared to be in his thirties. He had bright eyes, a square jaw and a suntanned face. “Who’s this?” she asked.

  Doyle turned as though he had forgotten. “Oh, I beg your pardon. This is Quentin’s new attendant, Mr. Jordan.”

  Dorothy shook his hand. He had a firm, dry grip. “Just Jordan?”

  “First name’s Benedict. Everybody just calls me Jordan,” he said with a wry smile—and an American accent. Dorothy had expected that because Dr. Hurst was British, his attendant would be as well. But he was handsome, she thought, no matter what his nationality was.

  “Nice to meet you, Jordan,” Benchley said, stepping forward to shake the man’s hand, nearly shoving Dorothy out of the way. “Here, have a drink.”

  Benchley took two more glasses from the Round Table, poured a healthy splash from the bottle into each one and handed them to the two men.

  They raised their glasses in a toast.

  “To auld lang syne,” Doyle said in his soft Scottish burr.

  “To better luck next year,” Dorothy said.

  “Two’s company, three’s a crowd,” Benchley said.

  Dorothy gave him a quick, inquisitive look, but he avoided her eyes.

  They clinked glasses and drank.

  “So, where is the good doctor, Arthur?” Benchley asked.

  Doyle knitted his bushy brows in frustration. “Good and drunk, that’s where he is. He threw us out of his room. Wanted to be alone, he said. Quentin always did get into a state when he overdid it on the bottle. I had forgotten. I’ve never seen him like this before, though.” He glanced at Jordan. “We’ll give him a little while to settle down, then perhaps we’ll go up and check on him.”

  Jordan didn’t answer this. He merely nodded his head stoically. He was either too new or too polite to say a harsh word against his current employer—though he likely had a few choice words to say, Dorothy presumed. Dr. Hurst didn’t seem like the sweetest person to work for even when sober, she thought.

  “Where are you from, Mr. Jordan?” Benchley asked. “From your sunny complexion, I’d say you recently arrived from down south?”

  Jordan opened his mouth to answer, but Dorothy interrupted. “Not so fast. Let us guess! What do you say, Artie? How about bringing Sherlock Holmes’ powers of observation to bear on Mr. Jordan? Let’s see if we can figure out everything about him.”

  Doyle rolled his eyes and sighed. “Can you imagine how many times I’ve been asked to do that? If I had a shilling for every such request—”

  “Oh, you’re full of shillings,” she said. “I thought you might get in the spirit of it if we all pooled our thoughts. Never mind. Mr. Benchley and I will give it a try ourselves. Then you be the judge. What do you say?”

  Doyle rubbed his big hand on his chin. “Very well, I won’t be such a spoilsport to prevent you from trying. If Mr. Jordan is willing . . . ?”

  “Sure,” Jordan said, evidently amused to be the center of attention. “Knock yourselves out.”

  Dorothy eyed him from head to foot, taking in every detail. Next to her, Benchley fidgeted. She didn’t look at him.

  Could he be jealous? she wondered. Jeez, I hope so.

  After a moment of examining the handsome man, she said, “I have it. You’re a former cowhand, recently back from the range. But you weren’t born out there. You were raised here on the East Coast. You went to Princeton, I think. But now you’ve returned because you were injured roping cattle or whatever it is cowhands do. You don’t dance, and your favorite food is chili.”

  “Amazing!” Jordan said. “How did you come to those conclusions?”

  Benchley was angry—a rare emotion for him. “Please don’t tell me she’s right!”

  Jordan laughed. “Not even close.”

  Dorothy frowned. “Fine, Fred. You play Sherlock.”

  “Very well,” Benchley said, smiling warmly again. He rubbed his hands together. “My turn. You were a lifeguard on the beaches of sunny Florida. But you left to join the military during the Great War, where you saw action and were permanently injured. So you returned to Florida as a lifeguard. But having seen action on the front, you bored quickly of the quiet, sunny seaside. So you recently moved to New York to try your hand at acting. But with no experience and no luck, you were forced to take a job as the manservant to Dr. Hurst. You love pimentos, and your family is Scandinavian. Case closed.”

  “Brilliant,” Jordan said, laughing.

  Now Dorothy felt her face flush with envy. “Don’t tell me he’s right?”

  “Not by a mile,” Jordan said, laughing even harder. “But how did you get those wild ideas?”

  Dorothy and Benchley looked at each other. Dorothy spoke first. “First, your foot. I couldn’t help but notice—and I gather Mr. Benchley did, too—that you limped when you came this way, and anyone can see you’re wearing an oversized orth
opedic shoe on your left foot. So I suppose each of us concluded you’d been injured not long ago. Not so recently as to require you to wear a cast, but recent enough that you’re still suffering from the injury.”

  “Nope,” Jordan said. “What else?”

  She bit her lip, and said, “You don’t have a particularly noticeable accent or manner of speech, so I assumed that you’re not from, say, Chicago or Boston. Or Albuquerque or Alabama, for that matter. And I figured if you did have an accent before, you lost it at college, because you speak like an educated man. From the ornate ring on your finger, I guessed your alma mater was Princeton.”

  “Nope,” Jordan said.

  “My turn,” Benchley said. “You have the suntan and sort of flashy looks of an actor, so I assumed you wanted to try your luck on Broadway. But, seeing as you’re employed with Dr. Hurst, I gathered it had not worked out.”

  “You gathered wrong,” Jordan said. “But what about my favorite foods? Wherever did you get those?”

  Dorothy leaned close to him. “You have a little fleck of red on your bottom lip. I assumed it was chili, since you came from out west—or so I thought.”

  “I assumed pimento, because it looks red like pimento,” Benchley said. “Maybe from a cocktail olive?”

  Jordan shook his head.

  “Red herring, perhaps?” Benchley asked sourly.

  Jordan laughed. “And my family being Scandinavian?”

  “Well,” Benchley said weakly. “You have blue eyes, like the Swedes often do. . . .”

  Doyle frowned and clucked his tongue.

  “Fine,” Dorothy grumbled at Doyle. “If you’re so clever, you figure him out, Sir Arthur Conan Holmes.”

  Doyle sighed. “He was born and raised in Philadelphia. He never worked as a cowboy or went to war, because he has a clubfoot, which he was born with. But despite his physical impairment, he became proficient as a golfer as a young man—even becoming a private tutor to well-to-do clients. That explains his rather permanent suntanned complexion and his gentlemanly manner of speech. But golfing can be an expensive pursuit, one that he could not pursue without additional assistance from time to time. So he recently used his connections among the wealthy to secure a well-paid but short-term position with Dr. Quentin Hurst, who is traveling for a few weeks in the States. Meanwhile, Mr. Jordan hopes to visit as many golf courses as possible, weather permitting. And he won the ring in a tournament.”