Final Curtain: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries)

by Ed Ifkovic

  “And your point in this?” I demanded.

  “I had to deal with her. She unloaded her anger at Clorinda and Tobias, and even at Dak, who was then still on the West Coast. I heard it all. Actually I wanted to hear it. It was news to me, this Assembly of God phenomenon, and…and I was curious.”

  “You’re not telling us something.”

  He fidgeted. “Anyway, Ilona struck me as someone not to be trusted. When I got this job here this summer, I saw her in town, but we didn’t speak. She looked at me, and there was recognition—or at least I think there was—but she purposely drew back, turning away.”

  “What about her and Evan?”

  “Well, that’s the strange part. One day I saw her passing by in her car and in the passenger seat was Evan, chatting up a storm. She’d thrown back her head and was laughing at something he said. You never saw Ilona laugh. Ever. She’d do that false ha ha ha noise that’s more cackle than humor. But she seemed to be enjoying herself.”

  The news bothered me. “Why? What connection? What did he want from her?”

  “That’s what I wondered. I remember asking Dak about it at work. ‘Your aunt Ilona was driving Evan around,’ I said. But he looked stunned and walked away. Evan had to be up to something. Perhaps he thought he’d melt the ice lady, charm her, but for what reason?”

  “Money?” From George.

  “She doesn’t have any. Maybe a few bucks.” Frank waited a heartbeat. “But maybe she does. I don’t know.”

  “Dak.” My voice was hoarse. “Dak. This had to do with Dak.”

  “I dunno. Maybe. But what?” Frank rubbed his chin.

  “He wanted information on Dak.”

  Frank’s voice dropped. “I saw them a second time. Evan was standing on the sidewalk by the train station and Ilona drove by, pulling up alongside him. She was yelling something, but he simply smiled, made an obscene gesture, and actually turned his back on her. She waited a bit—I mean, I didn’t move, frozen there—and then she gunned the engine, sped off, pebbles flying, dirt clouds in the air. As she passed me, I saw her face—fury there. Cold, hard fury.”

  “A woman jilted?” George pondered. “But Ilona? Seems impossible.”

  Frank fidgeted. Sweat on his brow, he kept wiping it with the back of his wrist. “I gotta tell you something. Otherwise I’ll go crazy.”

  “Oh Lord,” George whispered. “Confession in New Jersey usually leads to bodies in murky swamps.”

  “Quiet, George.” I turned to Frank. “Confess.”

  In a ragged, halting voice Frank began. “Evan did know something about Dak. Or he suspected something. Now and then I’d hear him taunting poor Dak about his dead father. He’d slip next to Dak, who was busy shifting a backdrop or something, and lisp menacingly, ‘It’s a wise father who knows his son.’ Something like that. ‘If a streetcar is traveling at five miles per hour and a man is walking at two miles per hour…’ Or: ‘Maybe father doesn’t know best.’ ‘Some boys are raised by old maids.’ I could see it confused Dak no end, but he tried to shrug it off. What was he getting at? I knew Evan was into scandal and Hollywood rigmarole, but what? It’s like he had something to hold over Dak. When I tried to talk to Dak about it, he just walked away.”

  “And yet it bothered you.” I watched him closely. Something was not being said here. “Tell me.”

  He nodded. “You see, I took this job in Maplewood for a reason.”

  “You’ve told us that.” I was getting frustrated. We waited, George and I, pensive.

  Frank closed his eyes for a moment, as though choosing his words carefully.

  “And?” A prompt from George.

  “I believe Dak is my son.”

  Silence in the room, the ticking of a clock, a waitress moving through the swinging doors out of the kitchen. Trays of greasy spaghetti unloaded onto tables. The sound of an automobile backfiring in the street. The grainy rattle of a jukebox tune from the bar.

  “Tell us,” I demanded.

  “I knew Clorinda in Hollywood back in 1916. I was there for a short time.”

  I interrupted. “Less than a year.” Loretta’s research at the New York Public Library.

  He raised his eyebrows. “You do your homework.” He smiled. “But, yes. I hated it out on the Coast—hated silent movies, hated the climate, the people. Hollywood is new, crazy, insane. I met Clorinda at a party after the release of one picture I worked on. She was wild then, she and her roommates. The fa-la-la triplets, we called them. Dancing the night away. Drinking, drugs, you name it. I got caught up in it, too. Suddenly we were having a wild affair, and I really fell for her. Madly. An affair through that summer and into the fall. But I could tell she didn’t care for me. It was just, you know, sex. Her roommate Ginny was worse, let me tell you. She’d just had an abortion, I knew. And not the first. Then, like that, it ended. Just before Thanksgiving. Clorrie got cold and distant. I figured she’d found someone else.”

  “Philip Roberts?” George asked.

  “Maybe. I didn’t know him, although he’d acted in one movie I worked on. I never said a word to him. But he was a party boy, too. She probably met him around then. Anyway, I was dismissed and, depressed, left Hollywood. Some time later I heard through the grapevine she’d married. Out of the blue. Then, later, I bumped into a friend in Manhattan who mentioned Philip had been killed. I learned there was a little boy named Dakota. Born that March. Bits and pieces of information. The timing was all wrong for them. But not for me. I’d learned Dak’s age when I met Ilona, who told me about raising him. His birthday. His age, the month. March. My time with Clorinda the previous summer. My affair. Not Philip’s. Or maybe not. She could have been seeing him on the side, but I don’t think so. I’d have known. Someone would have said something. In June and July we were going…heavy. Exclusive. But I pumped Ilona for information. And I started to believe Dak had to be my son.”

  “My God,” I exclaimed. “This is a new wrinkle.”

  “Tell me about it. That’s why I came here. To Maplewood. I kept asking around, you know. Ilona told me Dak was in Hollywood. But I found out later he was back here. But when Cheryl Crawford opened the Maplewood Theater, I thought it was my chance to see him.”

  “And here he was.”

  “And here he was. I maneuvered him into this job, I hovered over him. Edna, he looks like me. I mean, the olive skin, the cheekbones, the way he tilts his head when surprised, the long, tapered fingers, the walk…I know it.”

  “Do you think Evan knew?” I asked breathlessly.

  “That’s the curious thing. No, he didn’t. He made remarks about Philip Roberts, Some scandal about Roberts, I thought. But there was no way he could suspect me as Dak’s father. I would know. Evan played every card he had. He was looking at the story from a different viewpoint.”

  “I wonder,” George offered.

  “Then where does this lead us?” I wondered out loud.

  “Evan was playing a different game.”

  Frank’s words shook me. At that moment, in a blare of awful light, I believed I knew the answer. Suddenly I stood in Evan’s menacing shadow—and I knew why he had to be murdered.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dak asked everyone to go to his mother’s home the next afternoon, an invitation that made me wonder what he was up to—not a good feeling, indeed. “To clear the air,” he told me that morning at rehearsal. “After my little session in Newark with the impassive Constable Biggers and a very militaristic state police captain named Caruthers, I need to curb some rumors. Rumors of my hanging are premature.”

  “Is this a good idea?” I asked him. “Your mother has deemed me the town leper. I don’t think she’ll welcome…”

  He broke in. “I haven’t been back there. She wants me back. There are conditions, Miss Ferber. I want to do this.”

  George grunted, but finally agreed.
Tomorrow was opening night, and George, given his meticulous, if overbearing, directorial style, had fashioned a tight, seamless production of The Royal Family, our mother lode progeny. One last dress rehearsal in the morning, with full makeup and costume, and by one o’clock we all sat in our dressing rooms, pleased, comfortable. So it begins, my acting debut.

  Something else was beginning—and ending, I realized. Because, quite frankly, the pieces of the other drama I was experiencing had suddenly fallen into place, and the final act was blocked out. At least to my satisfaction—though a couple scenes had loose ends, dark holes, blank pages where appropriate dialogue needed to be inserted.

  Last night, given my epiphany, I’d phoned Loretta in New York, fired off a list of questions and puzzles demanding her immediate research acumen, and, in her inimitable rapid-pace style, she’d phoned me at the inn after I’d returned from lunch. Now I had a couple more scenes fleshed out, polished, and, I hoped, ready to play well with the audience I’d encounter at four that afternoon. The audience as cast, and vice versa.

  “Catch a ride with Frank,” Dak had told me, and that surprised me.

  “Frank will be there?”

  I wondered whether Dak had any inkling of Frank’s belief that he was Dak’s father.

  “Frank’s a big part of this. And Nadine, too. She doesn’t want to venture into the lion’s den, but she’s part of my announcement.”

  As George and I waited outside the inn for Frank, I told him what I needed from him—should I send him a signal—and he looked perplexed, but nodded again. Quietly, methodically, I filled George in on my suspicions—no, my absolute conclusion about this summer’s mystery. And, though he wrinkled his brow and fretted—“Edna, didn’t I tell you to stay out of it? Now look what you’re planning!”—he understood what had to happen. We’d always worked well as a team on our hit plays, me at the typewriter, George pacing the room, the two of us creating dialogue, scenes, and then playing the parts. Somehow, despite different temperaments—my imperiousness, hard-fought, and his what-the-hell cynicism—we fashioned Broadway magic. We’d see now how our talents would translate in tree-shrouded Maplewood.

  So the four of us crowded into Frank’s brush-with-death jalopy and headed to Tobias Tyler’s mansion. No one spoke the whole time, though Frank gripped the steering wheel tightly and Nadine nervously kept checking her lipstick in a small compact that she held in her hand the whole time. As we stepped from the car into the driveway of the mansion, with Frank and Nadine holding back, apprehensive, their shoulders touching, I whispered to George, “Follow my lead, George dear. This will be our best dramatic collaboration yet, though it’ll never preview in New Haven.”

  George whispered back. “I still get to crack the funny lines.”

  My face tightened. “There’ll be no humor at this matinee.”

  Hilda opened the door, and she looked frightened. What had Clorinda told her? She led us into the vast living room. Just the four of us, no one else.

  “Is this a trap?” George quipped.

  But then Tobias, Clorinda, and Ilona walked in, single file, regimented, and sat down. “Well,” Clorinda began, “this is awkward.”

  “Where’s Dak?”

  “Late, as usual.” Ilona glanced toward the window. “The boy was never on time. He’s the one who called this—inquisition.” She stressed the last word, booming it out. Clorinda shot her a look.

  We sat there, all of us, uncomfortable. A tea service and a tray of cookies rested on a coffee table, but no one invited us to partake. I assumed everything was laced with strychnine or tannin or arsenic. I knew how dangerous people died in British melodramas, their murderers wreathed in chilly smiles.

  Clorinda didn’t take her eyes off me. Her cold, wary stare in those scrunched-up eyes told me how unwelcome I was. The interloper in town, the woman who helped her son exile himself out of paradise—Adam leaving the garden of earthly delights. And forgetting to take Eve with him. Edna the scaly serpent, slithering, whispering illicit enticements. Earthly delights, indeed: Clorinda sat there blazing in her diamond earrings and necklace, but today she’d embellished the outfit with a garish brooch, so ostentatious it seemed a midnight sun in the dim room, as well as tinkling bracelets and a hint of some exquisite gem in her hair. Dressed in a rainbow-colored sweeping dress, with a chiffon scarf draped over her head, she looked the part from a once-upon-a-time world. She was obviously telling me—and the world—something. Don’t mess with me, my loves. I got God and cash in my corner.

  Tobias sat still, his face contorted with fury.

  So Clorinda glared, and once or twice she shared that dark glance with Frank and Nadine. Hatred, palpable and raw, in that cursory look. A fleeting look, then a cavalier dismissal. A hand raised so that the bracelets jangled. Frank and Nadine weren’t worthy of her venom. That poison was reserved for me.

  Ilona sat in a side chair, positioned back a bit, as though she were a spectator and not part of the proceedings. She’d donned a severe black dress that ended well beneath the knee, pulled in with a large leather belt. Thick, heavy-soled shoes. The dour chaperone at an Edwardian cotillion. The prison matron sans whip and club.

  Dak suddenly rushed in, out of breath, paused in the archway, and frowned. “Where’s Annika?”

  No one answered.

  He looked at me. I shrugged. “Dak, could we please do this? Everyone here is uncomfortable.”

  Tobias cleared his throat. A jack-o-lantern smile for a brief second, absolutely macabre. “I’m perfectly fine, Miss Ferber. I live here. Perhaps your sins fill you with guilt.”

  George started to laugh, but stopped, and tried to transform his chuckle into a sudden cough.

  “I’ve never committed a sin in my life,” I announced, haughtily. “I’ve done a number of evil things—all on purpose, I might add, with considerable joy—but they weren’t sinful.”

  Tobias seemed to be reaching for some homiletic tracts on a side table, probably ready to do missionary work with one more Manhattan heathen, but Dak’s voice broke the moment. “I think we all got enough sin to go around.” He glanced toward the door. “I wanted Annika here. She needs to hear me out. It’s only fair…to her.”

  “I think she knows the level of your abandonment—and cruelty.” Clorinda’s voice startled me: arctic, venomous, lethal. Even Tobias seemed alarmed by it, furrowing his brow and pointing at her.

  “Anyway,” Dak began, “I’m going to be arrested for the murders of Evan and Gus.”

  Clorinda let out a scream, and Tobias reached out to grasp her hand.

  “There, there,” he soothed. “We’ll take care of it.”

  Nadine started sobbing. Frank put his arms around her shoulders.

  “What? Dak?” I asked.

  Dak shrugged his shoulders and grinned vacantly. “Who else is there to blame? I confessed to following him. I wanted to talk to him, but when I saw him stop in the park, I kept going. I swear I did. He seemed on a mission. But I gather some old lady walking her dog has stepped up to say she saw a young man running down a path and out of the park—uncertain of the time, but definitely that afternoon. In the vicinity of the murder. Her description of the runner fits me. I guess I’m the only young man in Maplewood. But I didn’t kill him.”

  “Of course not!” Clorinda spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Hardly concrete evidence.” From George.

  “But enough to warrant a grand jury probe, it seems.”

  “When?” I asked.

  Again, the shrug. “The state police want me to turn myself in, accompanied by a lawyer, who’ll arrange it all. By next week.”

  Clorinda was seething. “A miscarriage of justice, this…this…”

  “Of course, it is,” Tobias agreed.

  I locked eyes with Clorinda. I saw confusion there, fright.

  “Well, that may not happen,” I ann
ounced.

  To which George added, “Final act, scene one.”

  Ilona grunted. “Can we go now?”

  “Wait.” Dak stood and walked to Nadine who, I noticed, had sunk into her chair, so tiny, as though she wished to disappear into the cushions. “Wait.”

  Nadine looked at him, her eyes moist.

  “Mother, I’ve done some thinking about Nadine and me and…”

  Someone sneezed in the hallway. The sound of shuffling, hesitant feet. Annika drifted into the room, looking down and mumbling an apology for being late. She was looking at her feet as she slid into a chair positioned by the fireplace, a chair turned away from all of ours, so that we saw only the back of her head.

  Her appearance alarmed me. Annika, when first met, had been iron-rod stiff, a martinet with a voice that was as confident as a struck gong, a woman in full possession and unconditional in her fundamentalism. A daughter of Clorinda’s puritanical revival. No nonsense, this young girl, a believer defined by rules and a future written in the heavens. Now, lamentably, she’d undergone a dreadful sea change, understandably brought about by Dak’s desertion of the church—and of her. Her firm moorings loosened, she had only chaos and waste. You saw a young woman who was hunched over, ashy-faced, twitching, frantic, unsure, a woman whose body movements were spastic and sudden. She looked as though any minute she’d topple in a faint.

  We watched her, all of us, and Dak wore a sad look on his face. Slowly, barely audible, he said her name. “Annika.” She glanced back at him and wistfully smiled. “I’m sorry, Annika.” But, again, she faced away from us.

  Clorinda fumed. “You see what you’ve done to her? Annika, you don’t have to stay here. In fact, please go rest upstairs.” She turned to her sister. “Ilona, take her to one of the bedrooms.”

  Ilona’s voice was rich with humor. “Why would she want to miss the show?”

  Dak eyed his aunt. “Ilona, c’mon. Behave.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  Dak glanced at Annika but went on. “What I started to say was that I’ve given a lot of thought to…to what I had with Nadine.” Again, he looked over at Annika, who still faced the fireplace. On the mantel, I noticed, there were two photographs: Clorinda and a boyish Dak, standing next to a bus with a painted-on slogan: God Knows Your Sins But He Forgives You. Sister Clorinda. Dak looked goofy, with cowlick hair and a toothy smile. And another photograph: Tobias and Clorinda on their wedding day, Tobias in a black tuxedo and Clorinda in white satin. Dak was nowhere in sight.