by Ed Ifkovic
“My, my, Waters,” I’d said, “you certainly have some gossip to share! How much of this is true?”
Wide-eyed, he assured me it was all gospel.
As I was mulling over this sordid tale about the superintendent, his daughter Harriet emerged from the front entrance. Dressed in a crisp blue-and-white waitress uniform worn under an unbuttoned black cloth coat, her hair tucked under a red-visor cap with the name of a restaurant I couldn’t make out, she seemed harried, stopping at the top of the stoop to adjust the slippery cap, then bounding down the steps onto the sidewalk. I was about to roll down the window to say hello and to ask whether she’d spotted Waters inside, but she hurried away, her coat flapping in the chilly breeze. For a second, as she came within feet of my idling cab, I thought she’d spotted me, my curious face pressed against the glass like an expectant birthday child. But she seemed to have no curiosity about the cab—nor the nosy white woman inside. She bent her body slightly, her face tilted toward me. Her lips were drawn into an angry line, but then, I told myself, she’d worn that same look at my apartment as she sat chummily in a green silk wing chair balancing a cup of coffee.
Twisting my head, I followed her swift movement on the sidewalk, her determined, haughty strut, as she wove around dawdling pedestrians. I didn’t hear Waters approach until he knocked on the cab window. I jumped, startled. He simply stood there, frozen, his face ashen, his fingers trembling against his chest. Panicky, I rolled down the window. “What? For Lord’s sake, Waters…”
He was shaking his head back and forth, his neck stiff.
“Miss Edna.”
“What?” I stammered.
“Roddy is dead.”
His words made no sense. I was sitting in the back seat of a yellow cab on a crisp winter day on a street where Negro children skipped by, their bodies bumping into one another, while mothers dragged tiny metal carts filled with bags of groceries. “What?”
“Murder.” He could hardly say the word.
He stood there, frozen, so I jumped out of the taxi, wildly tossed some dollar bills at a disgruntled cabbie anxious to speed off, and I grasped Waters’ shoulders, shaking him until he opened his eyes. He was sobbing, fat tears running down his cheeks. “Follow me.” Not certain what I was doing or why, I rushed up the steps, my heart thumping. Waters was my hovering shadow, following so close to my back I could smell his hot, nervous breath. I turned to him. “It’s all right,” I sputtered, though I knew, to my marrow, that it wasn’t—that this horrid moment would define his next few months, maybe years, perhaps a lifetime.
Inside I strode down the long narrow hallway, momentarily stopped by the acrid smell of burnt beans, old flaking paint, noxious stomach-turning disinfectant. The walls were painted a deck green, chipped, streaked; the floor was murky gunmetal gray. My eyes kept darting from wall to floor, taking in the revolting colors. Why would anyone choose to color this bleak canyon with paint that took away your spirit? I walked instinctively to an apartment I’d never visited, but at the back of the first floor, turning to the right, I spotted an open door.
Everything about it suggested a picture I didn’t want to see.
What I noticed first was the doorjamb, a few pieces of splintered wood, as if someone had pried open the old lock and gouged the wood. I touched nothing. A tiny living room, boxlike and dark, with a beat-up and stained blue sofa and a straight-backed chair, turned over; a small side bureau with the top drawer pulled out and dropped onto the hardwood floor. A sparse room that looked unlived in. Two bedrooms beyond the messy kitchen: both doors wide open. In the first I could smell something sweet, unpleasant, cloying. There, sprawled in bed on his back, Roddy lay, half-covered with blankets, his bony chest exposed, the shaft of a knife planted where, I supposed, the human heart lay. His eyes were open, a look of absolute bafflement in them, his long, handsome face, convulsed now in a death grimace. Involuntarily, I cried out, and at that moment Waters began to wail.
Blindly, I sputtered, “Help! We must call…”
I staggered out of the room, trailed by Waters, and losing direction, I stumbled into the other bedroom. Lawson’s room. Bureau drawers were pulled out, clothing scattered on the floor, the contents of a desk strewn willy-nilly about, with sheets of white paper, typescript, scattered across the floor as if someone, in haste, had used an impatient hand searching for something else. Waters was mumbling, but I didn’t understand what he was saying.
“We need to call someone,” I told him.
I followed Waters out into the hallway to the front of the building where he pounded on the super’s door. Inside a radio played loud gospel music. The rasping, gargled sound Waters was making—I thought of wounded forest animals, trapped, dying—scared me. Minutes passed, unbearably so, until at last the door opened a crack. A bleary-eyed old man in a ripped undershirt, an unlit cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, seemed ready to berate the offender, but the sight of the pale white woman and the young Negro boy rocking at her side doubtless refocused that plan. “Yeah? What?”
“I need to use your phone,” I sputtered.
“No,” he said. That surprised me.
Waters pushed forward and pleaded. “Roddy’s been murdered.”
His brow furled, the man stuck his head out the door, peered in the direction of Roddy’s apartment, and then frowned. “Yeah?”
“Phone,” I insisted.
But he wouldn’t let us in, though I tried to step around him. He’d place the call, he said. We were to wait in the hallway. The door slammed shut. “Good God,” I roared. “Is the man crazy?”
A few minutes later he opened the door and announced the cops were coming. Then, like that, he slammed the door shut again.
Waters whispered, “That’s Mr. Porter. He doesn’t like people.” As if that explained his bizarre behavior.
“But murder…” I shook my head.
***
Minutes passed. We stood in that awful gray and green hallway, my eyes shifting between the oppressive battleship walls and the depths-of-hell linoleum.
“What are we gonna do?” Waters asked. He’d cradled his arms around his chest and was bouncing back and forth against the wall.
“We wait.”
The front door opened. Lawson strolled in, yawning. When he spotted Waters and me standing beneath the dim hall light, he looked baffled, as if he’d entered the wrong house, but then he smiled. “Are we up to something today?” Light-hearted, bantering. But there was something wrong with his speech, his words slurred, a hesitant drawl. In the faint hallway lighting I thought his eyes looked bloodshot. Could he have been drinking so early in the morning? My Lord, was the lad staggering home from a night at a speakeasy? Dressed in a spiffy charcoal gray suit, the pants wrinkled and the shirt pulled out of his pants, he carried his overcoat slung over his arm. He looked like he’d just tumbled out of bed. Which, no doubt, he had.
“We all going out?” He had trouble saying the line.
“Lawson,” I began. “There’s trouble. Roddy is dead…”
He actually grinned, though his eyes closed dreamily.
“No, Lawson…”
He shuffled by me, a drunk’s lazy walk, though I put out my hand to hold him back. Waters and I followed him into the apartment. He stopped in the kitchen, reached for a glass, and glanced back over his shoulders at the sideboard drawer on the floor, its contents scattered. “What the hell?” Puzzled, he looked at me as though I were the culprit. Then he headed into the small hallway and, though Waters called out his name, he reached the entrance of Roddy’s bedroom. I saw his back stiffen, the muscles in his neck jut out. He turned, tottered against the doorjamb, ready to faint. But still that line of a smile, plastered on now, frozen. “I don’t understand,” he said. He glanced back into the room and from where I stood Roddy’s grotesque corpse stared back, ghoulish now, frightful.
Then Laws
on moved to his own room, and the first words out of his mouth startled me. “Who opened my damn door? No one is supposed…”
Inside, he paced across the mess of typed sheets covering the floor. Staring down at his feet, he seemed suddenly to wake up. “Goddamn it.” He swung his body in circles, taking in the chaos. Frantic, he rushed to a bureau and yelled something about a ring. “Money.” Then, as Waters and I watched, stupefied, he crumbled to the floor, his face trembling with fury, as he grabbed the typed sheets. Some were ripped, crumpled, smudged. Insanely, he cried, “One hundred one, one hundred three. Where, Christ, is one hundred two? I can’t find it.” He started gathering the sheets to his chest.
He had to stop when the cops rushed in and, surprising us in Lawson’s bedroom, demanded that we leave immediately, wait in the hallway until summoned. “What are you doing in here?” one cop yelled. “Get the hell out of here.”
So we stood in the hallway by the front door, waiting for the police detective to call us. I was trying to memorize the details of the apartment. The chaos, the knife, the body. Waters, the tears dry on his flushed cheeks, leaned against the wall with his eyes closed.
Lawson was sitting on the floor next to Waters, his knees up against his chest, his head rocking back and forth. He was sobbing loudly now, little-boy breathless gulps. He kept looking at his hands, as though missing the typed sheets. The police had refused to let him carry them out of the apartment. He wailed so loudly that the super cracked the door and grumbled, though he quickly slammed the door shut. And I didn’t know, as I watched the crazed young man, whether he was sobbing for the dead Roddy or for the destroyed manuscript covering the floor of his bedroom.
Chapter Six
The next morning, battling a headache that crowded my sleep with nightmares, I skipped my usual brisk one-mile walk. Instead, achy with fatigue, I lingered over two cups of hot coffee and buttered toast, then canceled appointments with both my hairdresser and my dressmaker—and ignored a call from Ziegfeld’s office about rescheduling yesterday’s missed meeting. I’d promised Detective Carl Manus that I’d appear at his precinct in Harlem to give my valueless but necessary statement. I had no idea when Waters was expected, though I hoped we’d meet there. I needed a comforting face inside those stark, regimented police walls.
Detective Manus was a gruff, slovenly man, big-bellied and cigar smoking, with a wide moon face, babyish, that belied the penetrating no-nonsense deep blue eyes. He reeked of drugstore cologne, some obnoxious sandalwood confection best left to Arabian deserts and Valentino movies, and what little hair he possessed, once gloriously blond and wavy, now consisted of a few vagrant strands that he looped, embroidery fashion, across his gleaming red cranium. He looked, if you squinted, like a circus clown, but those piercing eyes—did the man ever blink? I wondered—suggested a sheriff who always got his man. A tough cookie, I thought, and totally impressive.
Squiring me graciously into his small, cigar-noxious cubicle, he fawned and flattered and circled around me, and I didn’t trust a bit of it. He knew who I was, he assured me; and, honestly, So Big tugged at his heartstrings. “Really it did.” His wife wept. His ex-wife, actually, though they still talked. And obviously, I thought to myself, discussed current literature. His daughter read it twice. She wept—“What’s that word? Copious, yeah, that’s it”—copious tears. Then a sudden clearing of his throat, and it was down to business. “And why were you there?” He threw out the line so quickly I had to breathe in.
I explained the scheduled lunch date, my casual work with some young Negro writers I’d met through Waters. He was dismissive. “Oh yeah, that squirrelly Negro boy.” As I went on, his face suggested I would better spend my leisure hours volunteering for a Salvation Army soup kitchen or as a pillow-stuffed Santa ringing a brass bell in front of Gimbel’s.
“And you were going to lunch for what reason?”
I sucked in my cheek. I was about to say Because I like to eat at noon but seemed to make it worse with: “The pleasure of that young man’s company.”
He ran his tongue over his lips. “You’re a famous lady.”
“That I am. But what is your point?”
“Traipsing in Harlem can’t help your reputation, ma’am. You did notice you were mentioned in this morning’s News and Mirror.”
“I can’t be concerned with tabloid nonsense.”
“Hey, I make a living off it.”
“Sir,” I broke in, “what are we talking about?”
He ignored me. “Why do you think this Roddy fellow was murdered?”
“I have no idea. Like my young friend Waters, I am stunned.”
“Yes, your young friend Waters. The seventeen-year-old boy.”
I was going to reiterate that Waters, the son of my housekeeper, was a particularly bright though too serious young man, but I decided I’d wasted enough time with this line of chatter.
“You gotta admit it’s bizarre for a middle-aged white lady to be hopping cabs in Harlem with all these Negroes.”
“All these Negroes?” I echoed. “Are you keeping count?”
“You get my point, no?”
“I wasn’t crammed into the back seat with the entire cast of Shuffle Along, sir.” My tone was as biting as possible.
But he ignored me. He looked down at some papers, pushed them aside, and I sensed him closing up. “We’ll have the murderer by tonight.”
Now I was intrigued. “And who will it be?”
His burst of laughter degenerated into a rheumy cigarette rasp. “Let me do my job, ma’am.”
“I have no intention of usurping your detective skills, sir.” A pause. “Of which, I gather, there are many.”
A puzzled look on his face. “And I ain’t gonna write a novel.”
I smiled. “Burton Rascoe of the Herald Tribune, the Book Review Editor there, just breathed a sigh of relief.”
“Whatever.” He stood up and scratched his generous belly.
I wasn’t through, and stayed seated. “You will be arresting someone?”
“We got evidence from the scene.”
“Like what?”
“Good day, Miss Ferber. You’ll read about it in the News and the Mirror. Doubtless. I don’t expect to see your face on a wanted poster.”
I stood. “Not yet, at least. I’ve decided to let my sister Fannie live a few more torturous years.”
He shook his head. Before I left, he handed me a card and told me if I remembered anything else—anything trivial might be of value—to call him. Any time. He even wrote his home phone number on the bottom of the card.
I turned in the doorway. “But why do you need anything more from me…if you’ve solved the crime?”
He snickered. “Maybe I just wanna tell my friends the So Big lady rang me up at home.”
I took a step out of the small office. “Don’t sit by the phone, Detective Manus.”
He chuckled as I closed the door.
***
I had little interest in the dinner Rebecca served me on a tray. Anxiety lacing her gentle features, she served the meal but then left me alone. I craved silence, darkness, the blinds drawn and only a small nightstand lamp switched on. Slowly, methodically, I reviewed the long, unpleasant day, but, of course, my brief hour at the precinct dominated, intruded. I glanced at the clock: early, just seven. The night stretched ahead of me. Lying in my bed with a Joseph Hergesheimer novel unopened in my lap made me seem too much the Victorian invalid—smelling salts and bromides and Japanese lace fans be damned. I needed to act…to locate answers. But how? What could I possibly do?
I carried my tray into the kitchen where Rebecca was sitting with the morning News. Doubtless she’d been reading over and over the small account of Roddy Parsons, “a Negro,” aged twenty, murdered in his own bed up on 138th Street…and the curious and unnerving coda: “The body was discovered by best-s
elling author Edna Ferber, whose Show Boat and The Royal Family are scheduled to open on Broadway right after Christmas.” A cryptic line, that, and one most likely calculated to get idle and possibly malicious tongues wagging. I wondered whether the short paragraph, buried inside the paper, would have even been there (“a Negro”) had I not stumbled onto the murder. A black man murdered in Harlem did not warrant generous copy. Yes, the phone rang throughout the day, ignored by Rebecca and me; and yes, perversely, my publisher Nelson Doubleday sent a wire because he knew I wouldn’t answer the phone. He asked me, point blankly, if I knew what I was doing.
I always knew what I was doing. And Doubleday knew that. A lapse of judgment and character on his part, this nincompoopish telegram. Also ignored.
Rebecca looked up. “Waters told me the superintendent, Mr. Porter, Harriet’s father no less, refused to talk to the police. When he did talk to them, the cops told Waters, he suggested that Roddy was alive minutes before Waters walked in.” She bit her lip, nervous.
“That’s foolishness.” I felt hollowness in my chest.
“I’m worried. Miss Edna. You don’t think…”
I looked into her troubled face. “No.”
“But young Negro boys…”
“No,” I insisted. “Rebecca, don’t worry. Harriet’s father is a mean-spirited man, hardly believable. A drunk no less.”
I could see my words gave her no comfort. But young Negro boys…
