[Dorothy Parker 04] - Death Rides the Midnight Owl

by Agata Stanford

  “Let’s get back on track, all right? From the beginning, please.”

  “I heard tapping sounds, like someone knocking on a door, not my door necessarily, but a door, nonetheless.”

  “And then?”

  “Woodrow growled and I knew he wouldn’t be satisfied that nothing was wrong until I opened the door and let him see for himself that nothing was wrong.”

  “And then?”

  “I got back into bed and fell back to sleep—”

  Mr. Benchley cut in. “Back up a minute: Was that when I peeked out my door?”

  “No, that was the second time.”

  “Wait. I thought you said—” said Mr. Benchley, “that Woodrow was scratching at your door. Wouldn’t that make three times?”

  “No. There were two incidents of knocking and one incident of scratching. It was after the second time—or was it the first—now I’m getting confused—that I noticed the woman’s bedroom door was ajar.”

  My friend scratched his head, the others sighed, and Detective Gum lost it. “Everyone just shut up!” The steam released, he said, “You, Mrs. Parker. What did you see?”

  “Well, the door to her room was open, just slightly ajar. I thought she must have been peeking out, too, to see what all the fuss was about. I thought for a moment about pulling the door shut, and then realized it was not my door to close. Do you think she was lying there, dead, all that time?”

  The order of events was sorted out, and after giving a description of the fellow whom Woodrow had pursued, I was asked to be available to the Detective and the police at our arrival in New York City to identify the apparent killer from the disembarking passengers. Then we were told to return to our respective rooms.

  “I hear my husband was a hero tonight!” said Hermione, gazing up lustily at her husband.

  What a catch—rich and a hero! I wondered if he was any good in bed, too. I suppose rich and a hero might just be enough for some women.

  “Detective, keep this quiet, please,” said Roger. I don’t want it getting around town—out to the press or anything. It’ll just make our lives hell, and my wife, here—”

  “As you wish, sir!” said Gum, with overdone admiration just short of clicking his heels and saluting the millionaire. All right, he did save the day, I suppose.

  “I will instruct my men to keep this evening’s events confidential. But, we will be in touch concerning particulars about the construction of the bomb if it becomes necessary to do so, you understand?”

  On a train filled with reporters, and columnists like Heywood Broun among them, how was this story to remain untold? Funny, but Roger didn’t even look over at Heywood, who was standing right next to him, when he made his request. False modesty? Half-a-dozen people, from the conductor to the engineer to little old Mrs. Meriwether, had seen him in action. Did he really expect that no one would retell the exciting episode of murder and terrorism on a train, if only to bask in the bystander’s glory of having been witness to the event?

  Within half an hour the train was again moving at a fast clip toward New York City, after a thorough but unfruitful search of the cars for the suspected murderer. It was assumed that, at the time that the body of the woman in Bedroom Two was discovered by the porter, and the train had been stopped a few miles north of Westport, the culprit must have fled from the train.

  Mr. Benchley and I were more than a bit shaken by the events of the evening and having experienced the high drama of the failure to stay the anarchists’ executions, so we dressed and packed our night bags and joined the equally strung-out Brouns in their compartment for the last hour of our journey.

  The porter brought us coffee, which we improved upon with the contents from Mr. Benchley’s hip flask.

  Mr. Benchley said: “The murderer must be part of a band of conspirators, because someone had to have sent the wire to this train from elsewhere.”

  “Perhaps, but why that kind of distraction?” asked Ruth. “The murderer merely brought attention to the crime sooner than was necessary. The woman’s body might not have been found until the train reached New York, or not until after the bomb had gone off at Grand Central as planned. Someone was trying to stop the crime!”

  “It might not be that obvious. The train had to be stopped on some pretext,” said Heywood.

  “—so that the murderer could hop off!” said Mr. Benchley.

  “Before we pulled into Grand Central. Get off the train where he could find shelter in the woods around Westport or thereabouts,” nodded Heywood.

  “Any closer to a big town boasting a large police force would have increased his odds of getting caught,” said Mr. Benchley.

  “And considering this train has a cargo of what the politicians are calling ‘bomb-throwing arnycists,’ how else to stop a train heading into Manhattan but with the knowledge that a bomb was on board ready to take down Grand Central Terminal and kill God-knows-how-many people? With what better threat do you stop a train in its tracks?” said Ruth.

  “A herd of cattle? A gander of geese? A brace of pheasant? A klatch of coffee?”

  “That’s enough, Mr. Benchley.”

  “I don’t feel comfortable about pointing a finger at the Italian man Woodrow followed. The fellow may have just been taking a stroll through the cars. Perhaps he couldn’t sleep. There could be a dozen reasons why he was passing through the hall at that time. Why, we’ve just come from protesting the unjust death sentences of a couple of men who were tried and convicted on circumstantial evidence. I won’t be party to another anarchist witch-hunt.”

  “Well, the point is that the culprit probably bolted from the train when it was stopped,” said Mr. Benchley, “if that’s any comfort.”

  The Midnight Owl entered the tunnel on Upper Park Avenue in Manhattan, signaling our imminent arrival at Grand Central.

  Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco

  Chapter Four

  I was escorted off the train by Detective Gum, with Mr. Benchley close behind and the Brouns fending for themselves and seeing to our luggage, the purpose being for me to stand watch alongside the one ramp that led up to the concourse, the other exits having been closed off from the stream of departing passengers for our review. New York City policemen, several with bomb-sniffing German shepherds, were awaiting the train’s arrival, having been wired ahead of the crime committed and the possibility of a real bomb on board the train.

  The crowd ascending the ramp was a heterogeneous mix of the cultural and economic classes befitting a city as diverse as New York. But, too, in this crowd the majority of people possessed a political bent that under ordinary circumstances would not have been so obvious.

  Many of the socialists bore the carelessly dressed air of the Bohemian. Whether this was an intentional affectation, I cannot say for certain except, perhaps, they were expressing their disdain for our consumer society. They looked hungry, feral, and reckless. The deliberate costuming coupled with a predatory gaze to some diminishing point far off in the distance gave these characters an air of martyrdom, a die-for-the-cause aspect. These poorly recompensed, underfed labor organizers and activists were soldiers always marching purposefully toward the next battleground.

  As for the anarchists, most were blessed with the dark, soulful faces right out of Caravaggio masterpieces, their dark, arched brows and long thin noses refined through centuries of Italian ancestry. These were mostly immigrants, some laborers, whose fathers had dug the subway tunnels or built the great hand-hewed Croton Dam in Westchester County—men who knew the backbreaking work of the pickaxe. They walked by me in their Sunday suits, shiny and frayed with age and wear, with dignity. They were cleanly shaven, moustaches groomed, collars gleaming, shoes buffed to a shine even though the polish brought attention to the cracks across the toe leather or to the tilt of worn heels. These men set their brows with a look of determination, too, but just as the cracks along their shiny leather boots gave evidence of their poverty, so did their feelings of last night’s defeat s
hine through their eyes.

  One doesn’t distinguish the anarchist from the socialist from the capitalist so easily while watching passersby on the street. But this train was packed with the politically charged, coming from an event that was politically charged. They moved like separate schools of fish, the anarchists, the socialists, and a sprinkling of the devil-may-care capitalists weaving their way through the hoi polloi, flashing their Brooks Brothers linen suits and Hattie Carnegie accessories to the disgust or envy of their fellow man. And those capitalists included the Roger Mellons, who, with an entourage that greeted them as they stepped from the car, were shielded as they were whisked away up the ramp. Hermione was blowing me a kiss off her lavender-gloved little hand, and braying, like a Cockney Music Hall chorine across her audience, “See you a week from Friday, Dot!” before turning to pose for the newspaper photographers who were shooting in great puffs and flashes for the society pages. As the passengers filed through, I felt not unlike a general reviewing his haggard troops.

  And then I saw the Italian man who was the alleged suspect, hat low over his brow and clutching his small valise as he approached inconspicuously toward the ramp. His eyes cut to the left, caught mine, and then quickly darted away. In that split-second of visual contact much had been discussed between us. Had he held my gaze a moment or two longer I would have believed he was a criminal. But, for some reason, in just that short glance, I knew he was not guilty of any crime. A decision had been made; whether for good or for bad I was not to know for some time.

  Detective Gum, alert and scrutinizing, had to be distracted, so I turned to look behind us, standing on my toes, as if I had at last recognized the fellow I had sought to identify walking up the ramp. I quickly dropped my purse, and as Gum bent down to retrieve it, I conspired with Mr. Benchley, who nodded and then moved around us to depart in the flow of ascending passengers.

  “It’s been grand, Mrs. Parker, but I have to be on my way. Late, I’m late, for a very important date—the Brouns will see you home. Ta-ta!”

  Jeez! I said under my breath. Ta-ta? Did he really say ta-ta?

  And when Gum asked me to repeat what I had said, I answered, “—that fellow! The one passed us in the straw boater.”

  “Which one? There are dozens of men with those hats.”

  “Exactly!”

  The flow of people was thinning, and as the last of the stragglers cleared the platform I turned to Gum and said, “I suppose he got off the train when it stopped in Westport or thereabouts.”

  Before the detective could reply, our attention was drawn toward the dogs coming out from the Pullman cars, their police officers at the ends of taut leashes. No bomb had been found, the police lieutenant was told, and then through the chain of command informed Gum, just as the rubber-bagged corpse of the dead woman in Bedroom Two was carried out on a stretcher. The Coroner addressed the lieutenant with his findings: “Bludgeoned.”

  As if we didn’t know.

  When Woodrow and I arrived home and I checked at the front desk for messages, atop the score of sheets was one from Mr. Benchley asking me to come to his rooms across the street immediately.

  I was anxious to find out if he had spoken with the Italian man I had sent him to follow, and why in Heaven’s name he was going around saying ta-ta. So I fed and watered Woodrow and, leaving my valises unpacked by the door, departed from my rooms to traipse across the street to see what was so urgent it couldn’t wait.

  Mr. Benchley keeps rooms at the Royalton, the bachelor hotel directly across the street from the Algonquin Hotel, where I live and where I lunch with my famous friends. We have been dubbed the Algonquin Round Table. We call ourselves The Vicious Circle, a name I sort of thought up, because we often ruthlessly and generously toss vitriol around regarding lots of things that we encounter in our work, and that includes people. That’s what we critics do when we can’t find anything nice to say about a play on Broadway that we’ve reviewed or a book that’s just been published that really stinks, or an actor who should have chosen another profession. When we love something or someone, we of the Round Table like to shout it from the rooftops through Aleck Woollcott’s column, or Frank Pierce Adams’s, or Heywood Broun’s, or Robert Benchley’s, or, of course, my own bylines in various publications. And those brilliant people that we do love and admire have often become precious members of our little circle, like Harpo Marx and Helen Hayes and Irving Berlin and George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Jascha Heifitz, and Tallulah Bankhead, and the wonderful acting couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

  We’ve been meeting for lunch most days at one o’clock since 1919, and we have become more than just friends; we are family. And like members of any family, we have our disagreements, our petty fights, our nasty moments. But, at the end of the rants and the grudges and the day, we come together, because the truth is we love, admire, and depend on each other. Being summer, and all the theatres closed (meaning there is scant stuff to attend and review until the fall), we are scattered about—Aleck on his island on Lake Bomoseen in Vermont, wielding a croquet mallet while holding court over vacationing friends, mostly Round Tablers, and others traipsing about the Cote d’Azur at the hospitality of the Gerald Murphys, or, having survived tagging behind Hemmingway through the Pamplona Bull Run, enjoying the relative tranquility of an English countryside summer.

  While the Algonquin is a rather warm and cheerful place, in spite of its dignified wood-paneled Edwardian interior with its palms trees and plush furnishings, the lobby of the Royalton has the uninviting air of a Dickensian Workhouse. One expected to see Uriah Heep lurking about, and he was there, all right, slumped behind the desk when I entered through the lobby door. As I whisked past the ugly little man for the elevator, I cut him off before he could ask my business by saying that Mr. Benchley expected me. He made a small croaking sound, an ineffectual effort to halt my progress, and then, with a look of alarm, picked up the telephone, most likely calling up to the room to alert an unsuspecting Mr. Benchley of the imminent intrusion on his privacy.

  So for this my friend had given up his perfectly fine rooms at the Gonk? I thought, as I went up in the elevator. Enforced discipline, it was!

  A while back, Mr. Benchley had made his home-away-from-home in an apartment on Madison Avenue that he shared with Charles MacArthur, and later, at the Algonquin, as the need for a weekday residence had become a necessity during the time he headlined on Broadway in Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue of 1924. Taking the train after evening performances to return to the home he shared with his wife, Gertrude, and their small sons in Scarsdale proved exhausting. His schedule was grueling and resulted in his being in a sad state of health for a time. So an apartment in Manhattan seemed the best solution. When he and Charlie gave up the apartment, Mr. Benchley took rooms at the Algonquin, even though the run of the show was over, because he became theatre editor of Life magazine, a position that required his reviewing the opening nights on Broadway for the rag—as many as a dozen plays or movies every week. But there was a problem: The Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club—an ongoing poker game of Round Tablers—met on Saturday nights in a room on the floor below. There were also the many after-luncheon and after-theatre cocktail-party shenanigans going on in my rooms, or in Tallulah’s, or in any of the rooms of the Round Tablers who happened to be residing at the hotel.

  My friend would sit down at his desk to work, crank a sheet of paper through the roller, fingers poised at the keys of his Royal and about to diligently write the review of the previous evening’s play or that humorous piece for Harold Ross’s New Yorker, when, as he searched the ceiling for the opening sentence, there would drop into his head the idea that he was missing something that was going on down in the lobby. Wasn’t Coward in town? Didn’t Mrs. Parker say that F. Scott was stopping by for a drink today after a meeting with his editor, Max Perkins? Wonder what the stakes are in the game downstairs? Aleck said Swope was playing tonight . . . .

  Ten minutes, twenty would p
ass, maybe an hour without a key-stroke to mar the pristine white glare of the stationery. He had to start somewhere, so he’d type in T-h-e.

  The! The perfect start! T-h-e! Such articles eventually lead to nouns and verbs with a spattering of adjectives here and there, and it’s a good place to start!

  Ten minutes later, after a flurry of activity that had him twisting and turning about the room like a whirling dervish—pouring a drink, arranging his sharpened pencils according to length across the desk—he would leap head-first into an ocean of contemplation on the philosophical insight of a Schopenhauer quote as the possible explanation he’d been looking for all these years to describe the astonishing success of Abie’s Irish Rose. This play was considered by Mr. Benchley and other critics to be the greatest abomination ever to open on Broadway. Yes! That was it! Schopenhauer said it more than sixty years ago, the reason that damn show won’t ever close: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

  From the profound he would leap to the profane: Why are those birds making such a racket out there? Don’t forget to return the telephone call from George! What was the Christian name of the second Duke of Wellington? Time to take a break, to clear the mind, to let those next good words take form.

  So down to the lobby he would go to see whatever it was he might be missing. An hour later, if the gang didn’t move on to a tour of the speaks, he’d determinedly return to his work, refreshed by drink and socialization. He’d sit at his desk, rub his hands together, look up toward the ceiling for inspiration, fingers hovering over the keys, and the Muses would mischievously lodge a splinter in his brain: Charlie [MacArthur] and Sherry [Robert Sherwood] are meeting Bunny [Edmund Wilson] at Tony’s [Tony Soma’s speakeasy]!

  Swiftly typing E-N-D, Mr. Benchley had, for the present, completed the opening and closing words and was now free to gallivant about town for the rest of the evening.