DEATH RIDES
THE
MIDNIGHT OWL
DEATH RIDES
THE
MIDNIGHT OWL
Agata Stanford
A JENEVACRIS PRESS PUBLICATION
DEATH RIDES THE MIDNIGHT OWL
A Dorothy Parker Mystery / November 2011
Published by
Jenevacris Press
New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, character, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2011 by Agata Stanford
Edited by Shelley Flannery
Typesetting & Cover Design by Eric Conover
ISBN 978-0-9827542-8-3
Printed in the United States of America
www.dorothyparkermysteries.com
For my parents, Angelo and Angela Puccio
Also by Agata Stanford
The Dorothy Parker Mysteries Series:
The Broadway Murders
Chasing the Devil
Mystic Mah Jong
Acknowledgments
I’d like to extend my thanks to Ray Cooney, of the National Railroad Historical Society, for answering my long list of questions about the New Haven Line’s Midnight Owl Pullman service during the 1920s. Thank you, Stanley Werner, for many years of encouragement and for helping to make it possible for me to write this mystery series. My appreciation goes to Eric Conover, without whose design talents my books would not look nearly so good. I give a special thank-you to my friend and editor, Shelley Flannery, for her expertise as copyeditor, proofreader, and historian. She is also responsible for the title of this novel. My appreciation goes to artist Rob Smith, Jr. for the wonderful illustrations of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Heywood Broun for this book. www.robsmithjr.com
Table of Contents
Cast of Characters
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
The Final Chapter
Afterword
About the Author
Who’s Who in the Cast of
Dorothy Parker Mysteries
The Algonquin Round Table was the famous assemblage of writers, artists, actors, musicians, newspaper and magazine reporters, columnists, and critics who met for luncheon at one P.M. most days, for a period of about ten years, starting in 1919, in the Rose Room of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in Manhattan. The unwritten test for membership was wit, brilliance, and likeability. It was an informal gathering ranging from ten to fifteen regulars, although many peripheral characters who arrived for lunch only once might later claim they were part of the “Vicious Circle,” broadening the number to thirty, forty, and more. Once taken into the fold, one was expected to indulge in witty repartee and humorous observations during the meal, and then follow along to the Theatre, or a speakeasy, or Harlem for a night of jazz. Gertrude Stein dubbed the Round Tablers “The Lost Generation.” The joyous, if sardonic, reply that rose with a laugh from Dorothy Parker was, “Wheeee! We’re lost!”
Dorothy Parker set the style and attitude for modern women of America to emulate during the 1920s and 1930s. Through her pointed poetry, cutting theatrical reviews, brilliant commentary, bittersweet short stories, and much-quoted rejoinders, Mrs. Parker was the embodiment of the soulful pathos of the “Ain't We Got Fun” generation of the Roaring Twenties.
Robert Benchley: Writer, humorist, boulevardier, and bon vivant, editor of Vanity Fair and Life Magazine, and drama critic of The New Yorker, he may accidentally have been the very first standup comedian. His original and skewed sense of humor made him a star on Broadway, and later, in the movies. What man didn’t want to be Bob Benchley?
Alexander Woollcott was the most famous man in America—or so he said. As drama critic for the New York Times, he was the star-maker, discovering and promoting the careers of Helen Hayes, Katherine Cornell, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and the Marx Brothers, to name but a few. Larger than life and possessing a rapier wit, he was a force to be reckoned with. When someone asked a friend of his to describe Woollcott, the answer was, “Improbable.”
Frank Pierce Adams (FPA) was a self-proclaimed modern-day Samuel Pepys, whose newspaper column, “The Conning Tower,” was a widely read daily diary of how, where, and with whom he spent his days while gallivanting about New York City. Thanks to him, every witty retort, clever comment, and one-liner uttered by the Round Tablers at luncheon was in print the next day for millions of readers to chuckle over at the breakfast table.
Harold Ross wrote for Stars and Stripes during the War, where he first met fellow newspapermen Woollcott and Adams. The rumpled, “clipped woodchuck” (as described by Edna Ferber) was one of the most brilliant editors of his time. His magazine, The New Yorker, which he started in 1925, has enriched the lives of everyone who has ever had a subscription. His hypochondria was legendary, and his the-world-is-out-to-get-me outlook was often comical.
Jane Grant married Harold Ross but kept her maiden name, cut her hair shorter than her husband’s, and viewed domesticity with disdain. A society columnist for the New York Times, Jane was the very chic model of modernity during the 1920s. Having worked hard for women’s suffrage, Jane continued in her cause while serving meals and emptying ashtrays during all-night sessions of the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club.
Heywood Broun began his career at numerous newspapers throughout the country before landing a spot on the World. Sportswriter and Harlem Renaissance jazz fiend, he was to become the social conscience of America during the 1920s and beyond through his column, “It Seems to Me . . . .” His insight and commentary made him a champion of the labor movement, as did his fight for justice during and after the seven years of the Sacco and Vanzetti trials and execution.
Edmund “Bunny” Wilson: Writer, editor, and critic of American literature, he first came to work at Vanity Fair after Mrs. Parker pulled his short story out from under the slush-pile and found it interesting.
Robert E. Sherwood came to work on the editorial staff at Vanity Fair alongside Parker and Benchley. The six-foot-six Sherwood was often tormented by the dwarfs performing—whatever it was they did—at the Hippodrome on his way to and from work at the magazine’s 44th Street offices, but that didn’t stop him from becoming one of the twentieth-century Theatre’s greatest playwrights.
Marc Connelly began his career as a reporter but found his true calling as a playwright. Short and bald, he co-authored his first hit play with the tall and pompadoured George S. Kaufman.
Edna Ferber racked up Pulitzer Prizes by writing bestselling potboilers set against America’s sweeping vistas, most notably, So Big, Showboat, Cimarron, and Giant. She, too, collaborated with George S. on several successful Broadway shows. A spinster, she was a formidable personality and wit and a much-coveted member of the Algonquin Round Table.
John Barrymore was a member of the Royal Family of the American Stage, which included John Drew and Ethel and Lionel Barrymore. John Barrymore was famous not only for his stage portrayals, but for his majestic profile, which was captured in all its splendor on celluloid.
The Marx Brothers: First there were five, then there were four, then there were three Marx Brothers— awww, heck, if you don’t know who these
crazy, zany men are, it’s time to hit the video store or tune into Turner Classic Movies!
Also mentioned: Neysa McMein, artist and illustrator, whose studio door was open all hours of the day and night for anyone who wished to pay a call; Grace Moore, Broadway and opera star, and later a movie star; Broadway and radio star Fanny Brice—think Streisand in Funny Girl; Noel Coward, English star and playwright who took America by storm with his classy comedies and bright musical offerings; Condé Nast, publisher of numerous magazines including Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House and Garden; Florenz Zeigfeld—of “Follies” fame—big-time producer of the extravaganza stage revue; The Lunts, husband-and-wife stars of the London and Broadway stages, individually known as Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; Tallulah Bankhead—irreverent, though beautiful, southern-born actress with the foghorn drawl, who later made a successful transition from the stage to film—the life of any party, she often perked up the waning festivities performing cartwheels sans bloomers; Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Jascha Heifetz—famous for “God Bless America” and hundreds more hit songs; composer of Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess and many more great works; and the violin virtuoso, respectively.
DEATH RIDES
THE
MIDNIGHT OWL
“I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth—I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian and indeed I am an Italian . . . if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.”
—Bartolomeo Vanzetti
“If this is a lynching, at least the fish peddler and his friend the factory hand may take unction to their souls that they will die at the hands of men in dinner coats.”
—Heywood Broun (New York World)
Chapter One
There was death that day, whichever way we turned, coming and going. We couldn’t escape it. Like the oppressive August heat wave, death hung heavy on the air and would not relent. What a way to spend my thirty-fourth birthday.
Suicide tomorrow.
“By golly,” said Mr. Benchley as our taxi pulled up to the curb, breaking the long, funereal silence of the cab ride from my hotel to South Station. “Why, I could swear that that’s Roger Mellon.”
“Don’t swear; I do enough of it for both of us,” I said, mindlessly.
“What’s he doing taking the train with us plebes?”
“Slumming, I suppose,” I replied, not really interested, but craning in the direction in which he pointed, glad that something, someone, had brought my friend out of the funk of the last few hours, if only temporarily. Once out of the taxi, a Red Cap leading the way through the terminal with our luggage, we walked toward the departure platform of the New Haven Line.
South Station was unusually crowded for the late hour, but of course that was to be expected, given the events of the past week—the events of the past seven years!—when all that had been dreaded by observers and critics around the world, would, at the stroke of midnight and the very same hour of our train’s departure for New York, most tragically culminate with the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
The world press had converged on Boston, as had thousands of protesters from all walks of life and political persuasions. Among those represented were leaders and organizers of labor, communism, socialism, and syndicalism and celebrated artists, poets, authors, representatives of the ACLU and the IWW, and persons from all social classes possessing a conscience and who wanted to add their voices to the protests. Sacco and Vanzetti were to be executed, convicted of the murder of a paymaster and his guard during the robbery of a factory payroll on an April morning of nineteen-hundred twenty, in the small industrial town of South Braintree, Massachusetts.
The trial from beginning to end smacked of prejudice, miscarriage of justice, and blatant disregard for the civil liberties of the two men, and, as repeatedly pointed out by tireless supporters of the Bill of Rights as well as by our friend Heywood Broun through his column in The World, so threatened the rights of all Americans.
From what I’d been hearing over the radio as I was packing my bags in my hotel room, protestors were demonstrating all over the world: New York, Amsterdam, London, and as far away as Tokyo. There were riots in Paris—the façade of the Moulin Rouge had been defaced; there were uprisings in Germany, Switzerland, and in South Africa; factory worker walkouts were happening throughout South America. But nothing could stop the executions, except, perhaps, to bomb the jailhouse, and that was too radical for me to imagine anybody doing, although there had been many bombings attributed to anarchists in New York and other cities of late.
I wanted to get out of town before the stroke of midnight, away from the calamity, not because I was afraid, but because there was nothing I could do to stop the madness! I’d tried, in my own way; I’d stuck my nose into the nasty business, and where did it get me—what did I accomplish after two weeks of protests? Getting arrested and hauled down to jail for leading the march down Beacon Street and belting out “The Internationale,” while that glory-seeking John Dos Passos, covering the execution for The Daily Worker, nearly knocked me over to assume the lead, and then, with a not-so-tuneful booming of “The Red Flag,” tried to turn the entire march into a Communist Party rally! Really!
Mr. Benchley and I were glad for any distraction from the gloom of the sad events about to take place, so as we waited for the porters to load our valises onto the train, we watched as the Mellons, one of the richest couples on the planet, began boarding. Roger spied Mr. Benchley through the crowd and raised a hand in recognition. The old schoolmates exchanged words of greeting to the effect of an invitation from Roger for Mr. Benchley to stop in for a nightcap in his drawing-room once everyone was settled. Camera flashes lit up the gloomy platform, as press photographers shot pictures of the couple for the morning papers. Hermione Mellon shielded her face and, in spite of a hat pulled low and dark glasses, visibly winced from the terrible onslaught of flashbulbs as she climbed into the car, porters fussing over her.
I dreaded being spotted by the reporters in the state I was in. Tired, hot—the ninety-degree-plus August heat had left me wilted. My disappointment and frustration with a judicial system gone bad had left me spiritually spent. For a woman who was famous for her quick wit, it was the first time in my life I’d been rendered speechless. A photographer would expect me to smile and say something clever for the caption. The irony was that this was the perfect time for gallows humor and I couldn’t find anything funny to say tonight.
Heywood Broun, Crusader!, appeared on the platform, having taken a cab with several other reporters who would not remain for the execution. “I just saw Roger Mellon and a woman who must be that strange wife of his, Hermione, is it? The Kenyan Coffee woman?,” he said while tipping the Red Cap for his services.
Struggling in my closely fitted skirt in order to ascend the dropped step before being spotted by the reporters, I felt hands encircling my waist, and soon I was hoisted into the waiting arms of Mr. Benchley, who had already boarded.
“Thanks for the lift, Hey,” I said to Broun, who smiled up winsomely, yet with an under-painted hangdog expression bleeding through. I ached in my heart for his wretchedness, for the sad state of his body and spirit.
During the past few weeks Heywood had spent much time in the same sorry suit. Boston’s steamy weather—and no doubt the waistcoat’s multiple uses as pillow and bib—had stretched and curled the garment’s fabric, making him appear to be dressed in wilted lettuce, like a character out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a vision faithful to the very fitting description of him by a fellow journalist as “an unmade bed.” In spite of the ink smudges from cuffs to elbows, the shine of well-worn trousers, the unidentifiable remai
ns of Tuesday’s dinner on his tie, and Wednesday morning’s egg on a lapel, he smelled not unpleasantly of tobacco, whiskey, and shaving lather.
But the man looked even more deflated and defeated than did the suit. He had tried so hard, for so long, to change the fate of the two Italian immigrants. We believe wholeheartedly in their innocence, and it is principle that drove Broun to write about the miscarriage of justice in the case against them. He’d been warned by Pulitzer, his publisher, to quit the campaign he’d been waging through his column, It Seems to Me . . . , to bring to light the injustices carried out against Sacco and Vanzetti, and to save the lives of the convicted Italians. Heywood said he’d quit before he would stop. Last week he wrote a letter to his publisher in his column and resigned his position at The World. I am so proud to know him! He turned at the sound of his wife’s voice.
Ruth Hale, my traveling-companion-slash-jailhouse-cellmate (we were arrested, after all), appeared through troops of travelers to announce, “Wonder of wonders! I just spotted royalty boarding the train. Roger Mellon finally brought his wife here to the States.”
“Ain’t that just dandy?” I said. “But are you certain that’s his wife, and not just a current paramour?”
Ruth laid a narrow-eyed expression of contempt on me. “Of course it’s his wife, Hermione; he’s not the type to—”
“Awww, c’mon!” I said, shaking my head as Heywood offered a hand to help Ruth onto the car, “He’s a man, is he not? And therefore he is the type.”
“Really, Mrs. Parker,” said Mr. Benchley, leading the way toward the compartment, “your cynicism increases with your years.”
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