Nevermore

by William Hjortsberg

  Tucked between the matching stoops of twin brownstones, the entrance to the Zebra Club on West Forty-eighth Street sported a black-and-white canvas awning stretching to the curb. In the evenings, a uniformed doorman strutted between the polished brass poles. He knew the regulars on sight, greeting them cheerfully; one of the things Damon Runyon liked best about the place.

  The reporter was also quite fond of Leon Fishkin, the jovial proprietor, known as “Smiley” to the racetrack crowd who congregated at his speakeasy. A born handicapper, he could always be counted on for the inside dope. On slow nights, Runyon sat with the rotund little man by the hour, listening to his comic tales of bookies and touts.

  The Zebra Club had a floor show, and a certain long-legged, brunette songbird in the chorus was the main reason Damon Runyon spent so much time in Smiley’s joint. A handsome, dapper Irishman, with a similar eye for showgirls, lounged beside him tonight. Decked out in evening clothes and patent leather shoes, state senator James J. Walker wore the look of success easily. The talk along Broadway was that he planned to challenge Mayor John F. Hylan in the next election.

  The reporter took a keen interest in his friend’s political career, judging its course with the jaded eye of a lifelong newspaperman. From the press perspective, Runyon remarked, it was a damn shame Walker had been handed Kid Dropper’s killer, a losing proposition bound to see a lot of local coverage.

  “Wrong call.” Jimmy Walker sipped champagne. “This thing’s going to make me shine.”

  “Having a client go to the chair never looks too good in the papers, Jimmy.”

  “Relax, pal. I’m going to win this one.”

  “Win…? You’ve got a self-confessed killer who’s made a point of repeating his story to anyone who’ll listen.”

  “Look. I know it’s water-tight. Saving Louis Cohen’s life will be a win.”

  “How you gonna do that?” Damon Runyon lit up a Sweet Cap. “Pay somebody off?”

  Senator Walker grinned. “You know I don’t do business that way. This will be a courtroom victory. I plan to obtain a verdict of second-degree homicide.”

  “You and what magic wand?”

  “If I reveal my strategy to you now, it is with the understanding you won’t use any of it until after the trial.”

  Damon Runyon nodded, at the same time flicking his earlobe with his forefinger. “On the Eire …” He used an underworld expression warning of possible eavesdroppers.

  Walker refilled his glass, pushing the empty bottle neck-first into the ice-filled bucket. “Here’s the law,” he said. “Unless the murder is proven, it is impossible to convict for first-degree murder, even with a signed confession.”

  “So, how do you figure to disprove the murder?”

  “There’s no need to ‘disprove’ anything. I merely have to introduce the shadow of a doubt.”

  Runyon grinned. “Shade on, McJames …”

  “You remember Willemse, the bull-necked captain in charge of the prisoner…? Well, he was in the cab with Dropper, an eyewitness to his untimely end. After the dust settled, he went back in an alley and shot a hole through his straw skimmer. Then he bragged to all the boys about his close brush with death.”

  “I like it,” Damon Runyon said.

  “You’re going to love it.” The elegant politician signaled a waiter, a turn of his hand ordering another bottle of bubbly. “All witnesses agree Cohen fired three shots. That many spent shells were found in his revolver. Three bullets were recovered from the cab. One came out of the roof; one out of the floor. The third was in Kid Dropper. My client’s a terrible shot. Even at close range. No better than one in three. Terrible shot.”

  “So…?”

  A cork popped. The waiter refilled Jimmy Walker’s glass. The senator waited for him to leave before resuming. “So, the one through Willemse’s hat makes four. Four bullets, but only three from Cohen. Which one killed the Dropper? Who fired the other shot…? Voilà! Reasonable doubt.”

  Runyon sipped his cold cup of coffee. “Pretty cute. Think it can win?”

  “Can’t lose. The proverbial sure thing.”

  24

  BUY ME SOME PEANUTS AND CRACKER JACK

  WHEN SIR ARTHUR CONAN Doyle and his family returned to New York on September 14, the desk clerk at the Plaza handed him an envelope emblazoned with the logo of Hearst’s American. A note inside from Damon Runyon: “Tonight! Polo Grounds. 8:00 p.m. Runyon.” Clipped to it, a ringside press pass for the Dempsey vs. Firpo championship bout.

  Although initially Sir Arthur protested he wouldn’t dream of leaving Jean alone on their first night back, she told him not to be silly, what a shame to miss it. She’d have dinner with the children, perhaps take them all to the cinema. Not to worry. She’d be fine.

  The Polo Grounds turned out to be a major league baseball stadium and not the elegant greensward the knight pictured in his imagination. Located alongside weed-choked vacant lots in the far upper reaches of Manhattan, the old, girdered, tin-roofed grandstand looked right at home among the surrounding warehouses and factories. The ring had been set up in the infield. Sir Arthur found his way to the press seats, pushing down a crowded row past peanut sellers and hot dog vendors.

  Damon Runyon stood to greet him at ringside, the roar of the crowd making anything more than perfunctory conversation impossible. Runyon introduced the knight to his fellow sportswriters, Ring Lardner and Gene Fowler. They joked about the million-dollar gate and the slowness of the preliminary card. Sir Arthur marveled at how blasé they seemed, while he soared with giddy excitement.

  After the long-winded oratory of the introductory remarks, the main event exploded in a blaze of savagery. The champion, his blunt, bulldog face a mask of determined rage, stalked the lumbering Argentine, knocking him to the canvas seven times in the first two minutes of round one. Bloody and bewildered, Firpo fought on with pure animal fury. A massive haymaker sent Dempsey hurtling back on the ropes with enough force to propel him through, tumbling pell-mell into the uplifted arms of the startled spectators.

  Sir Arthur and Runyon were among the half-dozen or so laughing men who pushed the dazed fighter upward, eagerly helping him back into the ring. “By Jove,” the Englishman enthused. “Capital sport, what?”

  “Go get him, Jack!” Runyon hollered.

  Although stunned and confused, Dempsey avoided the contender’s wild punches until the bell. At the start of the second round, the “Mauler” surged forth renewed. A punishing series of jabs brought the “Wild Bull of the Pampas” to his knees in the first thirty seconds. Firpo’s massive strength willed him to his feet one more time, but a short right to the jaw floored the Argentine giant for keeps.

  Sir Arthur couldn’t take his eyes off Dempsey as the referee emphatically counted Firpo out. The champion relaxed in a neutral corner, arms angled along the top rope, a confident gladiator, at home in the arena.

  The ref lifted Dempsey’s arm in victory. “Wanna meet the champ?” Runyon shouted into the tumult.

  “By a knockout … ,” the announcer droned.

  Conan Doyle nodded yes.

  It took some time to get past the mob to Dempsey’s dressing room. Damon Runyon knew all the cops by their first names. An obliging patrolman ran interference. The spare, concrete room under the bleachers was already packed when they arrived. Dempsey sat on a workout table. A trainer poured a bottle of champagne over his head.

  Spotting Runyon, the champ waved the reporter over. “Thanks for the lift,” he grinned.

  “Don’t bullshit me. You didn’t know what hit you.” Both men being from Colorado, they shared the Westerner’s instinctive easy familiarity. Damon Runyon introduced Sir Arthur to the heavyweight champion.

  “You the fellow wrote that Roomorg mystery?” asked Dempsey. “The one Runyon told me about?”

  “I’m afraid not. You’re thinking of Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right.” The champ rubbed his thumb along his broken nose. “Poe… . The guy doing all
those killings around town.”

  The final eight weeks of the Conan Doyles’ American visit had been intended as a winding down of official activities. Only five lectures remained on the schedule. The knight and his lady looked forward to evenings at the theater. Sir Arthur began a new Professor Challenger story in California and thought to reserve mornings and most afternoons for spinning the remainder of the tale.

  By the first week of October, Conan Doyle had accomplished no literary work at all. A writer famed for jotting Sherlock Holmes stories in his notebook while chatting and drinking with friends now found it impossible to concentrate in the privacy of his hotel suite. The Poe mystery occupied his every thought.

  Up each morning before dawn, he saw no further manifestation of the author’s spirit. During the day, the knight roamed the victims’ neighborhoods, asking questions of shoemakers, hotel managers, greengrocers; anyone who had served the Esps, Violette Speers, or the Rogers girl. He again carried a loaded revolver in his jacket pocket.

  After pounding the pavement for a fortnight, Sir Arthur learned nothing new of any consequence and had heard altogether far too much scurrilous gossip. He knew the futility of searching for clues in such a random fashion, yet persisted, a gambler’s instinctive hope for the lucky break augmenting his tenacious curiosity.

  One clear morning in early October, the knight prowled the streets of Jim Vickery’s Bronx neighborhood. Broad sycamores shaded comfortable lower-middle-class streets. Movie-music from numberless electric pianos drifted through the open windows of identical semidetached homes. After interviewing a battalion of bored housewives, hearing them repeat pointless stories already told several times to the police and anyone else who’d listen, Sir Arthur conceded he’d had enough sleuthing for the day.

  As they were already in the borough, he instructed the driver of the hired car to motor him over to Fordham, asking directions at two filling stations before finding the Poe cottage on East 192nd Street. Paved streets enclosed the barren little hilltop park crowned by a dilapidated one-and-a-half-story frame farmhouse. A sign erected by the Bronx Society of Arts and Letters identified the hundred-year-old structure as the home of the noted poet from May 1846 to June 1849. The cottage had been moved to the park from an adjacent site in 1913.

  Sir Arthur left the car and walked up the packed red earth of the grassless hill. Standing on the porch, he tried to picture the place seventy years before, when it sat in the middle of rolling farm country surrounded by fruit groves and hay meadows. How isolated from the city Poe must have felt. Did his macabre imagination ever envision this nightmare encroachment of pavement and brick?

  The little farmhouse stood locked up tight. Conan Doyle tried the front door, noting a placard listing the stated hours of public visitation: Open MON. WED. FRI. The knight shaded his eyes, stooping for a look through the front window into a spartan parlor contained no furnishings other than a pair of spindly chairs and a small pine table.

  A shadow flickered across the polished wood floor. Sir Arthur caught a glimpse of Poe passing an open doorway. He rattled the window, finding it latched. Six swift strides carried him around the corner. He peered through the kitchen window with his heart racing. The apparition swayed in the center of the tiny room, a foxfire phosphorescence emanating from the stooped shoulders and tousled head.

  Sir Arthur tapped gently on the pane. Poe’s ghost looked over at the window. His melancholy eyes met the knight’s gaze, an almost palpable sadness hovering between them. The knight cupped his hand, motioning for the spirit to join him. Turning with the underwater sluggishness of someone in a dream, the luminous figure drifted slowly out of the room.

  Conan Doyle hurried around the rear. He glanced through a tiny window into an empty bedroom not three paces across and scrambled in a most undignified manner to complete a circumnavigation of the cottage. Reaching the porch again, he found the apparition standing by a pillar, staring past hanging electrical wires and rooftop water towers.

  The knight stepped up beside the misty specter. Poe glanced at him, expressing less interest than a man encountering his reflection in a glass. “Must you torment me even here?” the spirit asked in weary resignation.

  “You remember me…?” Their last confrontation in Washington, D.C., seemed eons ago.

  “Would one easily forget a phantom from the future?”

  “Tell me what you see.” Sir Arthur pointed toward the surrounding urban blight. “Over there …”

  Poe gazed out across a forgotten landscape. “Cherry trees grow close by. An apple orchard at the bottom of the hill. Beyond the meadow, on the far side of the second fence, stands the Beauchamp cottage. About a half mile beyond their farm you can just make out the Croton Aqueduct. A grassy footpath runs along atop it. I often stroll there as far as High Bridge. Fine view of the city from High Bridge.”

  Conan Doyle shuddered at the discrepancy between what the ghost described and his own dismal urban view. “Have you … lived here long?”

  “Three years; although I’m no longer a tenant. Whenever my journey takes me to New York, I come up here for a visit. A vacant house is memory’s tomb.”

  “What are you searching for?”

  “What, indeed…?” The specter laughed bitterly. “Sadly, such as you, yet at once so different your presence provides a painful rebuke. My own dear wife, my Sissy, died here. A dreadful, cold winter day …”

  Pathos gripped Sir Arthur. “You seek her spirit …”

  “We both find that ironic.” Poe’s ghost grinned in a ghastly manner. “For reasons neither of us will ever fathom.”

  “I find it painfully sad.” The knight sagged against a pillar, grateful for its firm support.

  “Your vicarious sympathy disgusts me! Tell me instead how progresses that clever killer who imitates my tales?”

  Sir Arthur jumped. “There have been no further murders in more than four months,” he said.

  “Ah… . Then, the perpetrator is close to his intended victim.”

  “How do you deduce that?”

  “The first crimes were to establish a pattern of madness. Having achieved that result, the assassin has the leisure to wait. When the time is right, he strikes, confident an unknown lunatic, a character of his own invention, will receive the blame.” The specter began to fade, features a sudden blur.

  “Wait!” Conan Doyle threw open his arms in supplication. “Stay! How can you be certain the killer isn’t simply a madman?”

  “Oh, he’s mad enough …” The ghostly voice sighed like a distant wind. “But not at all simple. His crimes are complex. Although seemingly without motive, we must ask ourselves, for what purpose is such maniacal ingenuity intended? Logic suggests a plan of this complexity must be designed to serve some grand ambition …” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle strained to hear the ghost’s last words even after nothing remained of Poe but a faint dust-devil whisper.

  The end of the second week of their short autumn tour found the Houdinis in Detroit. They had a room at the Statler. Riding back up in the elevator after a shave and a haircut in the basement barbershop, the magician felt a pang of dread at the thought of returning so soon to New York. Out West for the summer, he knew they were safe. No harm would come to Bess as long as they stayed on the road.

  The three days back in the city between tours had been a constant torment. He had the Burns Agency put a man on Bess round the clock and still he worried. Logistics and equipment repair kept him and Dash busy for long hours late into the night. There had been no time to meet with Conan Doyle, but they did speak twice over the telephone.

  Sir Arthur told the magician of his recent detective work, and of the negligible results. The knight warned him to stay on his guard, convinced the length of time since Vickery’s murder indicated the killer prepared for his prime target. Easy enough to theorize, Houdini thought, if you were sailing home to England in two weeks.

  As he let himself into their room, Bessie got up from the desk by the window and approache
d him with a puzzled look. She carried a red, white, and blue Cracker Jack box in one hand. “Harry…?’ she said. “We got something peculiar here.”

  “What is it?”

  She handed him the Cracker Jacks. “This came in the mail.”

  “You didn’t eat any of it, did you, Mike?” He followed her over to the desk, greatly agitated,

  “Didn’t even open it.” She handed him a letter. “This came with it.”

  Houdini stared at the expensive linen stationery. An embossed ancient Egyptian ankh served as a letterhead. In a loopy feminine hand it read:

  Osiris:

  What is sweeter than going for the prize? Do you eat the candied popcorn and peanuts first, or do you immediately dig deep for treasure?

  Guess what I do …

  Consider Cracker Jacks a form of modern augury, dependable as the intestines of doves. The package comes to you at random. The unknown prize within is an omen. Look inside to know the future.

  Isis

  Houdini tore the wrapper and cardboard lid off the oblong box, pouring the contents out onto the desk blotter. “Don’t eat this stuff!” he cried, sifting through the sticky kernels to uncover a square cellophane envelope. The magician scooped it up, the pink rubber pacifier clearly visible inside.

  “What…?” Bess wrinkled her nose in baffled exasperation.

  “That woman means to destroy me.”

  “Who?” Suddenly frantic, Bess grabbed the prize from her husband’s hand. “What’s going on here, Harry?”

  “Opal Crosby Fletcher …” “What does she want with us? Tell me! Harry—”

  The magician’s eyes moistened with guilt. He trembled from an overwhelming urge to confess. To throw himself on his knees before Bess and beg her forgiveness. Unable in the end to confront the shame, Houdini took his wife by the hand and said: “God only knows how her mind works. Maybe she wants me to stick it in my mouth and stop giving lectures exposing phonies like her.”