We bid Jane good-bye and left her to the remaining cleanup, and the simmering in a saucepan of sugar, lemon juice, and cinnamon in an attempt to fumigate the house. No point in dropping in to see Aleck when he was out of sorts and as Ross was due to walk in through the door at any moment, returning from his New Yorker offices, we wished to avoid Jane’s confrontation.
“It’s back to the Gonk!” she said, knowing full-well that the prospect of returning the weekend poker games to the hotel would be difficult at best. A couple of years back, Frank Case had politely asked the men to properly tip the waiters—who spent their night shifts scurrying up and down the elevator responding to constant room-service demands. He asked the boys to can their trash and to use the ashtrays, because the hotel could not afford to replace carpets riddled with cigarette burns. Aleck, the unofficial leader of the club, took offense, called Frank all sorts of lovely names, and then pulled the game from the hotel. But he managed to wangle having the games in Jane’s dining room, because, he claimed, his section of the house was too small to accommodate the crowd. The winning play by Aleck was to suggest to Jane that she could keep an eye on her husband’s losses, reminding her that, just a few years back, Ross had lost twenty-five-thousand dollars of the couple’s startup money for their new venture into magazine publishing at a “friendly” poker game.
“Back to the Gonk!” hissed Jane, “and if they can’t worm their way back in there, they can go to hell! It couldn’t be hotter than New York in the summer.”
Although the city had been granted a reprieve from the direct assault of a cruel sun for a few desperate hours, the darkness did not lend much relief. No breeze swept through from the rivers hugging the island of Manhattan, and the humid air clung heavily upon its residents. The curbside trash was ripe and sour; the odor of unwashed streets rose from the broiled pavement. It had not rained much while we were away in Boston, I heard tell, and this child of the city would have been content with another night along the seashore.
As we approached our respective homes on West 44th Street, I noticed a familiar figure in front of the Royalton. The fellow was pacing, nervous hands in and out of jacket pockets, lighting a cigarette. With frowning impatience he anxiously looked at his wrist watch and then up and down the street.
“Lamberto!” I said, in greeting, and quickly wiped the smile off my face upon seeing his obvious distress.
“Pleece forgive I come to you.”
“That’s all right,” said Mr. Benchley, leading the Italian into the lobby of his hotel and toward the elevator, past the bug-eyed, disapproving gaze of Uriah Heep behind the desk. “There is more tolerance and hospitality at your residence, Mrs. Parker,” he said to me later. “That nasty little mole should have got used to me and our assortment of friends by now. He should’ve offered Lamberto to sit comfortably in the lobby while he awaited my return.”
Once settled into the “red den,” as I liked to call my friend’s flat, and after much ogling at the extreme décor, Lamberto put down his glass of ginger ale and told us why he had come uptown to see us.
“Giusto, he cut with a knife. Stab-bed!”
“But, who, why?” I screeched. “Is he all right?”
“When did this happen?” asked Mr. Benchley. “How? Where did this occur?”
“For God’s sake, Fred, give the man a chance. You sound like you’re teaching a journalism class.” We shut up long enough for Lamberto to answer all of our queries.
“I take Giusto from house to show bakery. Lots people, street crowded. Children run around open fire hydrant, big group people listen to Leonardo Mostacelli—he communista, speak-a on corner. I think he behind me, Giusto. I turn for find Giusto, I see him fall and people scream.”
I choked out, “Is he—”
“No-no! He be okay. Cut shoulder, only, miss back.”
“Where is he now, what hospital?”
“Oh, no hospit-al, no! He be deport!”
“But, he needs to be seen by a doctor, Lamberto,” said Mr. Benchley.
“Si, si. I take to Signora Natali, she fix him up. She nurse, clean, put stitch. He rest, sleep. But I worry sum-bodie try kill Giusto.”
We all remained quiet for a long moment, each of us thinking, looking at one another in turn. Lamberto searched our faces to see if we agreed with his suspicions that the stabbing was not just an accident or a random act of street violence by an impassioned listener of the speech, but rather a deliberate and premeditated hit on his brother. I could tell that Mr. Benchley didn’t want to alarm Lamberto and his family that the chances were good that there was a connection with the murdered woman on the train; but not to alert them to the danger would be putting the family at risk. Someone had murdered once—the woman who came up to Giusto and offered him employment was dead. It made sense that Giusto might know something about the murder; or perhaps just the fact that he had had contact with the woman was enough for the killer to want him out of the way. Why, though? He was the perfect fall-guy to take a murder rap.
“We led the culprit to him,” I said, and Lamberto seemed to struggle with the strange word. “The person, the culprit, who killed the woman on the train must have followed us here and then down to your home. The killer knew she had hired Giusto to make a delivery and was afraid your brother would to go to the police with information.”
“He would not go to police, no!”
“But, your brother was with me and Mr. Benchley, and that was enough to make the murderer wonder—wonder if Giusto confided in us, wonder if he would go to the police because he knew something that might lead them to the identity of the killer. You see, my bedroom on the train was directly across from the dead woman’s.”
“And mine was located next to Mrs. Parker’s room.”
“And I believe that I have been followed these past few days,” I said, “and the person following me—” I didn’t voice my belief that the person I thought might have been following me was now dead and had been recently removed from the trunk of Mr. Benchley’s borrowed Mercedes.
Mr. Benchley interrupted: “Mrs. Parker! Will you please fill Lamberto’s glass with more soda and ice?”
I got the point. I would not be making things better for the man by updating the list of bodies. As a matter of fact, it would only make Lamberto pack up his family, close down the bakery, and head west just to get away from us, the harbingers of death. Thank goodness Giusto wasn’t on the list of victims!
I filled the glass and handed it to Lamberto. I was about to speak when Mr. Benchley flipped through his address book and then picked up the telephone receiver.
“Forty-four-hundred pounds of steel is this baby! Got a supercharged six-cylinder 6240-cc engine, and with a hundred-forty horsepower, by golly, it’s the fastest touring car on earth!”
Chapter Nine
It was not until noon the following day, an hour before the one o’clock luncheon with my trusty little band of friends, that I learned the exact course of events after Mr. Benchley had dialed the telephone number scribbled in his little address book. He appeared at my door with coffee and several of the morning editions. He was awaiting a return telephone call from Sgt. Joe, for news and answers to our many questions about the dead woman in Bedroom Two.
“I thought it particularly clever of Zeppo and Chico to procure a hearse,” said Mr. Benchley, with a certain amount of pride in his voice at having pulled off the ruse. “And then, after Harpo came into the apartment wearing the toy stethoscope he borrowed from the five-and-dime to proclaim Giusto was dead of his wounds—” He chuckled at the absurdity of Harpo in a white butcher’s coat mimicking a doctor’s lab-coat. “And then Zeppo, collar turned ’round, giving last rites in pig-Latin over the corpse! The amazing thing is the neighbors believed it! In their passionate grief they didn’t notice the details.”
“I suppose we see only that which we wish to see,” I agreed.
“The callywogging widows obviously drowned out the nonsense Zeppo was trying to sell, that’
s for sure!”
“You’ve adopted my new word!”
“Absurd as it is, it fills the bill.”
“Well, now, all is right in the world, or almost. The assassin will think Giusto’s dead and no longer a threat to his identity. And only our little gang knows that he and his family are in hiding up on Aleck’s Neshobe Island,” I said. “Now, did Frank get a mention of the stabbing death in the paper for the morning editions?”
“It was in the World, and should be in all the others by the afternoon editions.”
Mr. Benchley left me to my own devices to drop in at his publisher’s office. At one o’clock, Woodrow and I took the elevator down from my rooms and walked into the Rose Room, the small dining room just off the lobby.
Aleck was back once again, after nearly two months away at his tiny retreat, and holding court as the figurehead of our club. Our waiter, Luigi, was serving up Aleck’s soup, which became fair game when Aleck was called to the telephone. Harpo helped himself to a couple of spoonfuls of the tomato bisque, made a face, and then cut into the cutlet on his own plate. Bunny and Tallulah had had enough of us, I suppose, as they had not appeared at table. (Actually, Tallulah had a first-reading rehearsal for a play set to open in October, and Bunny had a meeting with his publisher.) But Frank was there. Frank Pierce Adams, who wrote for the New York World, was best known to his friends as “FPA.” He was the highest-paid columnist in the country and the man who gave me my start. “He raised me from a couplet,” I always say, because when I was just starting out, he published several of my verses in his Samuel Pepys–styled column, “The Conning Tower.” In his daily column he informed his readers of the goings-on around Manhattan, retelling each day his particular journey through New York City. As he related the clever quips tossed about at our daily luncheons, and tidbits about the plays he and many of us reviewed in the evenings, our gang of friends was often mentioned. Frank was dubbed “the comma-hunter of Park Row,” for he was a fierce and exacting grammarian of the printed word, if not always of the spoken. Frank could be sophisticated and yet, at times, gritty. He was versed in classical literature and drama but had a penchant for the low comedy of Vaudeville; usually sharp, he could often be dense enough to frustrate. He was nobody’s fool, and the Big Man, Aleck, had at times deferred to Frank as I’d never see him do to anyone else in the world.
Heywood Broun joined us, Ruth out shopping with the children, getting them wardrobed for the school session about to start in a couple of weeks. Ross and Jane sat down, followed by George Kaufman, who wanted to see both Aleck and Harpo to discuss a croquet match on Central Park’s Sheep Meadow next Sunday.
Aleck returned to the table: “Little Acky’s back!” he announced, slapping Harpo’s scavenging hand away from the croutons intended for his tomato bisque. He signaled Luigi to bring him a fresh bowl of soup and then took his place just as Mr. Benchley appeared.
My friend looked very excited, very animated with breaking news. He stood next to my chair as he announced: “Newsflash, everybody!” He was beaming. “I just got word that after five miserably successful years, the scourge of Broadway, Abie’s Irish Rose, is closing; the stage door will be locked against the cast and crew! The lobby doors shuttered! To put it gently, they are getting the hell out of town next week!”
“I don’t believe it,” said Frank. “Publicity stunt.”
“Lord help us, don’t say that Frank,” he said, sinking down into the chair next to mine. Woodrow rested his head on Mr. Benchley’s knee and flashed soulful eyes of sympathy at him.
“It’s been my most fervent campaign to shut them down, forever, through my column at Life. That’s it, you know—they couldn’t take the pressure from the stranglehold I’ve had on them.”
In May 1922, Abie’s Irish Rose, by Ann Nichols, opened on Broadway. The next morning Mr. Benchley had to reconsider his assessment of a play that had opened the evening before, The Rotters, which he claimed was “just about the worst show of the season,” to bring the offending Abie’s to the forefront.
One of his duties as theatre editor at Life was to list all the plays on the boards in a section called The Confidential Guide and briefly comment on each show. His first entry under Abie’s title was, “Something awful,” and he expected Abie’s to close any day. A week later, the show was still running, so Mr. Benchley wrote, “Among the season’s worst.” And thus began five years of weekly commentary:
All right if you never went beyond the fourth grade.
People laugh at this every night, which proves why a democracy can never be a success.
Where do people come from who keep this going? You don’t see them out in the daytime.
Eighty-ton fun!
In another two or three years, we’ll have this show driven out of town. Closing soon. (Only fooling!)
“No more striving for a clever putdown each week; no more frustration at the birthday celebration each year!” he said with glee.
“You can say all you like, Bobby, but seeing is believing.”
“You, Ross, are just trying to ruin my day. You hate to see anyone happy!”
Aleck dismissed the conversation with a flick of his wrist before picking up his soup spoon. “By the way, Cousin Joe just telephoned, Bob, and he asked to talk to you about some car you were trying to sell him. I told him you had yet to arrive for luncheon, and that I would relay his request for you to stop at the stationhouse this afternoon, or to telephone, to discuss the particulars. Why he could not leave a message for you at the desk is beyond me—unless it has to do with the dead body that you and Dottie transported over the state line.”
“I’ll call him right back,” said Mr. Benchley, setting down his linen napkin to make for the telephone.
“We didn’t cross any lines,” I said, and everybody laughed. “At least, not any state ones.”
“Isn’t there some law against that,” asked Harpo, “transporting dead bodies across state lines?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane, “but there should be one against transporting dead fish across state lines!”
“No,” intercepted Chico Marx, who’d just arrived and wedged a chair in between me and Ross. “It’s women you can’t transport across state lines. I should know.”
“You mean, under-aged women, don’t you, Chico?” corrected Frank.
“Under-aged, over-aged, middle-aged, barrel-aged—they told me I can’t do it anymore.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” asked Ross. “The police?”
“No!” yelled an indignant Harpo. “The women told him!”
“That’s right,” nodded Chico. “They don’t like the way I drive. So now I let the women transport me across the state line. If they get in trouble with the law,” he threw up his hands and shrugged his shoulders, “it’s not my problem, see?”
“Clearly,” chuckled Frank.
“I keep telling Chico he should take a lesson from me,” said Harpo. “I am not in the transportation business, and he should not be in the transportation business, either. You want women? You chase them across the state line. That way there’s no transporting; they get there on their own steam. And by the time they get there, they’re too exhausted to file a complaint. Do you want the rest of that carrot, Dottie?”
I looked at Harpo with suspicion. “What do you want with a half-eaten carrot? There are a dozen in the pickle dish.”
“I got me a horse outside. She likes carrots.”
“What are you doing with a horse, anyway?” asked George Kaufman, who instantly regretted asking and literally stiffened his spine to brace himself for an off-color reply.
“I asked him the same question,” said Chico. “You’ve got money, now, you can buy yourself a car, I told him, you don’t need a horse to get around town, and you know what he answers me?”
We waited while Harpo gathered in one hand the entire contents of the pickle dish—carrots, radishes, celery, and several slippery pickle slices—and stuffed them in his coat pockets. Then he consi
dered the empty oval dish, picked it up, checked the reverse side for the stamp, “Wedgewood,” and forced it inside of his trouser belt, buttoning his coat over the bulge. He strutted about, patting his “full belly” should the management look suspiciously in his direction when it was time to leave the hotel. He looked at me expectantly, trying to shame me, and I finally relinquished the half-eaten root from my plate.
“Tell them what you told me,” ordered Chico. “Tell them what you said about the horse!”
Shyly, Harpo demurred, and then broke out with, “We just met! It was Kismet! I turned a corner and there she was, as pretty as can be. I took off my sunglasses; she flipped off her blinders. I love the way she coquettishly tosses her head,” said Harpo, batting his eyelids while a goofy grin played stupidly over his face. Of course he wasn’t wearing his curly wig, he wore it only on stage, but he was ridiculous all the same. “Her name is Maggie.”
“Who?” asked Aleck.
“His horse,” said Chico.
“Shush! Don’t you call her that!”
“Well, what is she? Your donkey?”
“My Lipizzaner!”
“What! Before the third date?” I said.
“Here, give her a popover,” said Heywood, tossing a biscuit for Harpo to catch. “That will get you to third base.”
“We’re almost there; I got her a suite on the third floor.”
We watched as Harpo made his way through the long lobby, only to come face-to-face with a mounted police officer, sans cheval, walking right at him. The sight of the two men told the real story: Harpo began unloading the vegetables from his pockets and placing them into the pickle dish, which he handed to the police officer to hold. Then he pointed in our direction, and when the policeman craned his neck to see where he’d pointed, Harpo flew into the elevator just as the operator was closing the gate. The policeman whirled completely around, scratched his head, and then walked out of the hotel cradling the filled pickle dish.
Mr. Benchley returned to our table with news. “Where’s Harpo?
[Dorothy Parker 04] - Death Rides the Midnight Owl Page 15
