Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries)

by Ed Ifkovic

  Waters, confused by the sudden vitriol, started to babble, deadly serious, about Lawson and his refusal to return to his old apartment. “I make so many trips, you know.” We all stared at him. “I have to get personal toiletries and clothing, a typewriter.” His voice trailed off. But when he sensed Bella about to begin a fresh assault, he said, “I even had to face Mr. Porter in the hallway. The man, I swear he was drunk, demanded the rent that was due the first of the coming year. From me. It’s overdue.”

  “You don’t pay rent to the super,” his mother said, a practical remark that seemed to skirt the real issue here.

  Waters nodded. “I guess he collects it for the owner, some white guy downtown. And I guess the back rent is overdue.”

  “How will Lawson pay his share by himself?” I wondered.

  “Well, he’s not moving in with me,” Bella declared. “I told him we were through the night that Roddy died. Over. Simple as that. Finally. My brother already can’t stand him and is tired of Lawson sleeping on his couch every night. A slobbering drunk. He’s gonna have to move to some hovel…maybe.” Bella withdrew a mirror from her purse, foraged for her lipstick, and, while we watched, meticulously painted smudged lips. I caught Rebecca’s eye. Not happy, the woman.

  Ellie stood up, her face flushed. “Roddy is rolling over in his grave. This conversation is…sickening, Bella.” She threw her cloth coat over her shoulders, gathered her scarf and gloves from the ledge nearby, and, nodding at Rebecca and me, spun around and left the eatery.

  Bella didn’t wait until Ellie closed the door behind her. “Did she really think she had a chance with Roddy?” She slipped the lipstick and mirror back into her purse and snapped it shut.

  Waters squirmed. “Does it matter now, Bella? It seems stupid to talk about it.”

  She interrupted him. “I’ll talk about what I want to, Waters.”

  His mother bristled and seemed ready to defend her son, but Waters, clearing his throat, said, “There’s something called poor taste, Bella.”

  Inwardly I smiled.

  “I’ve never been accused of phony sentimentality,” she said.

  “All sentimentality is phony,” I told her.

  She said nothing, showing at least a modicum of good sense, and collected her things. “All Ellie has going for her is a good voice. I will say that.”

  “Such a generous spirit.” Rebecca’s tone bit in a way I’d never heard her use before.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” Bella confided. “Lawson told me that Ellie had told him she was gonna surprise Roddy the night he died.”

  I sat up, alert. “So?”

  A casual flip of her head backwards. “She was angry at Roddy because they were supposed to check out a new jazz club where she hoped to sing, but he backed out, said he had other plans that night. He told her not to stop in. Ellie told Lawson she suspected him of being up to no good. She was going to surprise him. She thought he’d sneaked some girl into the apartment by the back door, defying Mr. Porter’s Bible-thumping no-girls rule. Of course, she feared it was me—which is why she told Lawson.”

  “You’re…making that up,” Waters boomed, angry.

  “Am I? Ask Lawson. Maybe she’ll deny it, but that night she might have actually been there the same time that Skidder was lurking around.”

  I broke in. “Bella, you have such a good-looking boyfriend. Or had. Lawson is…”

  “Is like an old dog, affectionate but requiring too much attention. I called it quits that night. For good. He holds no…fascination for me.”

  “Like Roddy did?” Rebecca asked.

  “Of course.”

  “But Roddy spurned you, too, Bella,” Waters added.

  Bella was reaching for her coat, but she slipped back into her chair. “End of story.”

  “Tell me about Jed Harris,” I said quickly.

  My abrupt question didn’t seem to take her off-guard. A lazy smiled covered her face. “Nothing to say.”

  Waters waited a second. “Lawson hates him, Miss Edna. Mr. Harris mocked his acting and ignored his play. All because he knew Lawson was going out with Bella and Jed didn’t…”

  “Will you be quiet, Waters,” Bella sniped.

  Waters looked at me. “Miss Edna, we all agreed not to mention it to you…because you…know him. Like your friend. But it seems to me…”

  Bella broke in. “Change the subject, Waters. The only career I care about is mine.”

  “But Lawson is a great playwright,” Waters said.

  “Enough about Lawson. I don’t care. I told Lawson to get lost last Saturday. We’d been out dancing, drinking. We got into our usual shouting match. It got real nasty, both of us tipsy, and he passed out on me. As is his usual amorous behavior. In the morning I had to shove him out the door but he kept walking in circles, claiming he couldn’t find his shoes. Lord, schoolboy delaying tactics, trying to make up with me. Goodbye, Lawson. As I said, enough about Lawson.”

  At that moment, I suddenly pictured Julie LaVerne in Show Boat, the mulatto ingénue who passed for white, the beautiful young woman who fashioned a life singing on the Mississippi. A woman whose marriage to a white man leads to her expulsion from the showboat—and the beginning of a descent into poverty and decay. The price Julie paid to entertain—to use her talent. Here were Bella and Ellie, beautiful, talented…and Negro, hungry for a moment at the downtown strutters’ ball—Broadway. Within days the character of Julie would open in a glitzy, romantic musical on Broadway, life on the wicked stage, but would Bella or Ellie ever shine on the Broadway boards? Julie, a creation of my imagination, singing “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” while, sitting opposite me in a dingy Harlem eatery, two beautiful women could only dream!

  I thought of Jed Harris squiring Bella into clubs. The venal seducer, cynical.

  Empty promises and dashed hopes. An awful price, too dear. For Roddy…and Lawson…

  I shivered in my seat.

  I indicated I was ready to leave, so Rebecca graciously reached for the check. Waters had been fidgeting throughout Bella’s recounting of that night with Lawson. Now, with perfect and calculated timing, he cleared his throat. “When I went to get some of Lawson’s things, I had a talk with Harriet, who heard me in the back apartment.” A pause. “She told me something strange, Bella. Late that night, maybe around midnight, she was coming back from her waitress job and she swears she saw you on her street. A quick glimpse, you hiding in the shadows of the alley next to the building. She swore it was you lurking there as she walked by. The scent of gardenia in the air…”

  Bella’s face closed up. She sat back in her seat, wrapped her arms around her chest, her body stiffening. Then, forcing herself, she loosened up, and said, too loudly, “That’s just absurd. I was not there. That inky-dink Harriet is delusional. She had her own fantasies about Roddy. She told me, though grudgingly. She’s making it all up. Jealous. Of course she is. And a bold-faced liar.” She rose from her seat, clutching her coat. Suddenly, wildly, her hand swept across the table, sending the glasses and dishes flying. A plate smashed into a wall, shattered. “Around that time I was getting furious with Lawson, who was slobbering drunk on my sofa. Around that time, yes, around that time I was slapping him as hard as I could across his pretty face.”

  Chapter Eight

  The following afternoon, tucked into a front row seat during a run-through of The Royal Family, with George Kaufman at my side scribbling notes and muttering sotto voce observations aimed at the director Burton, I could barely sit still, squirming, jittery, until George grasped my wrist and insisted, “Edna, do you have a bodily function it would be indecorous to discuss?”

  Bothered by Roddy’s death, I’d found my sleep disturbed, my attention lacking, my dramatic and purposeful sighs ignored by all. No matter the shifting machinations of Show Boat and The Royal Family: both were entities now beyond my cont
rol, creations conceived and now delivered, and it remained for the world—and the New York Times—to judge their merit and durability. These days I was just the pensive mother—or Show Boat’s surrogate mother—who was nervously expectant after the delivery.

  Sitting beside George, my mind sailed back to yesterday’s lunch in Harlem. The image of Bella sending those dishes flying nagged at me, but, worse, my sudden and unwelcome association of Bella with the doomed mulatto Julie LaVerne in Show Boat. I flashed to images of Bella cast as Julie, betrayed, lost, condemned. But I knew no one would entertain Bella as Julie…a Negro couldn’t play a…Negro in midtown. Not in such a highly charged, big-budget musical. Or Lawson Hicks playing the dashing and maddening John Barrymore-like Tony Cavendish in The Royal Family. Or Ellie as Magnolia Ravenal singing “After the Ball is Over” on the Cotton Blossom stage.

  The house slaves forbidden to enter the front rooms of the mansion.

  And yet, ironically, audiences would applaud those characters onstage.

  Finally, spent, George and I stood up, George intending to berate the director while I planned to stumble home for a rare afternoon nap. At that moment Jed Harris strode into the theater, all swagger and excessive cologne and cigarette smoke, galloping down the aisle, his voice stentorian and vicious as he assailed the faltering cast onstage. “Balderdash!” he roared, reminding me of some Victorian villain, mustachioed and dark-complected, perhaps the heavy from Show Boat itself. As he neared the aisle where George and I stood, tentatively and unhappily, he turned and eyed us both, a look so baleful and dismissive I fairly caught my breath. His hostile look settled over me, finally, and I swear his lower lip trembled with menace. What in the world? Had the man gone mad? Eccentric certainly, delusional perhaps, but some Broadway folks speculated that the wunderkind would invariably sink into utter madness, foam at the mouth, eyes ablaze, tongue flapping in an obscenity-laced mouth. Had that moment arrived? The bus to Bedlam just picked up one more rider?

  But Jed narrowed his eyes and strode away.

  “Ah,” George cried, “fresh as poison ivy.” It was a line he often used, and it never wore thin.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I whispered. “I’m not in the mood for juvenile antics.”

  “If we had a sandbox, we could hide his body.”

  “The world exiles its pompous short dictators. Why can’t we send him to…New Jersey?”

  We fled the theater.

  Back at my apartment, hanging my coat in the closet by the front door, I heard Rebecca singing softly in the kitchen, a melancholy song, and I realized, sadly, that I’d come back to the world of Roddy’s death. Bella, at that awful memorial lunch in Harlem. Ellie, angry, headed that night to Roddy’s apartment. Maybe. Bella, already there in the darkness.

  Hearing me, Rebecca stopped humming and asked me what was the matter. “Is my face so transparent?” I asked her.

  “Miss Edna, you got yourself a poker face about everything but confusion.”

  “These days it’s the only face I seem to have.”

  “Bella,” Rebecca intoned, a declarative word.

  “Exactly,” I sputtered. “Yesterday stays with me like an old dog.”

  “Well,” Rebecca added, “I can’t stop thinking about Bella myself. That thing about her going to Roddy’s apartment and hiding in the shadows, watching, waiting. For what?”

  “If it’s true, Rebecca. We don’t know. That’s Harriet’s take on things. To begin with, it might not have been Bella there. Night shadows, winter chill, fatigue.” I grinned. “There must be other beautiful women who bathe in gardenia perfume. And Harriet obviously doesn’t like Bella.”

  “No one likes Bella.” Flat out, final.

  “I can give you a list of men who do.”

  “That’s not helpful, Miss Edna.”

  “I know, I know.” A pause. “Waters really took me by surprise when he blurted out that remark. He waited, held back the information, perfect timing. For effect, I suppose.”

  Rebecca chuckled. “The little scamp. You know, Miss Edna, he knew all about Bella and Mr. Harris but never opened his mouth. At least to us. But you know people are always confiding in him. Maybe because he looks so proper in those prep school creased trousers and that Harvard College crew neck sweater.”

  “And because he’s so serious all the time.”

  “Until he starts to wisecrack.”

  “Well, he’s your son.” I turned away. “I’ll be in my bedroom. I need to nap.”

  Once in my room, the door closed, I lay wide awake on the bed and gazed around the room, purposely decorated in velvety yellows and greens to relax me, to comfort me. My apple-green bed was supposed to suggest springtime, new-mown lawns, fresh country air. The joy of apple blossom time. Nothing worked now. Both Waters and Lawson believed that something else happened at Roddy’s apartment that night—and that I, for some reason, needed to do something about it. My mind bounced around that foolish, alliterative name: Skidder Scott.

  Of course, he was the murderer, a burglary gone wrong.

  Yet my gut response to Waters’ and Lawson’s sketchy scenario and the violent lunch with Bella and Ellie led me to suspect something else happened at Roddy’s apartment before—or maybe during the time?—Skidder Scott stabbed Roddy with his own knife.

  What did I know about Roddy? He was a charming, good-looking young man, talented, magnetic, someone who seemed soft at the edges, decent and caring. Someone, yes, who drew in, seduced others. Did he have a dark side? Flashes of anger, supposedly. And stubbornness. Did it matter? Roddy was dead. Emphatically. Yes, Bella Davenport had demanded his attention or more, and supposedly he’d rebuffed her. Bella was one hell-bent woman. Or was Bella simply invading territory she wanted to wrest from rival Ellie, that petite girl with the nightingale voice?

  What about Ellie? Had she gone to see him that night? Why? Herself rebuffed, and probably not happy. Did she confront Roddy? Women scorned! A familiar and trite tale, though painfully commonplace. Others? Freddy, who disliked Roddy—irrationally. Even Harriet—or her father, that angry man. Lawson, watching his girlfriend make goo-goo eyes—maybe more?—at his cousin. What was there about Roddy—so deferential to me, so decent—that brought out the venom and the obsessiveness in others?

  It gave me a migraine, those speculations.

  Later, going to get a book from the living room, I heard Rebecca on the kitchen phone talking to her son. “Waters,” she kept saying, “I know you are bothered. I’ll tell Miss Edna. I promise. I know…I know…but…”

  “Rebecca,” I interrupted, “may I speak with Waters?”

  Rebecca gladly handed me the phone, shook her head, and left the room.

  “Waters?” I could hear his deep intake of nervous breath. “What did you want to tell me?”

  I heard static on the line. Waters cleared his throat. “Miss Edna, Ellie wants to talk to you.”

  “She’s there? Now?”

  He rushed his words. “No. I mean, we talked earlier. You know, she heard what Bella said yesterday—about her going to see Roddy that night. About fighting with him. Defiant. Well, I was the one who told her about it because I wanted to hear what she had to say.”

  I broke in. “Waters, what does this have to do with me? For heaven’s sake, why does Ellie want to talk to me?”

  “Well, you heard what Bella said and she thinks she has to explain—that’s her word—explain this to you.” A ripple of soft laughter. “She said that you’re Edna Ferber.”

  “I know who I am, Waters.”

  “You know what I mean, Miss Edna. You’re the only famous person she’s met, and you’re a writer and she’s…”

  “No,” I said empathically. “I’m sorry, Waters. It’s not my place to be involved here. Goodbye.”

  ***

  Hours later, my supper finished and my nose in a short story i
n The Saturday Evening Post, the doorman called to say I had a visitor. I sighed because I knew who it was. Within minutes, Ellie knocked on my door and stood there, dripping with apologies for interrupting my evening but—

  I invited her into my living room. Visibly nervous, she avoided eye contact, her face registering emotions from shame to guilt to embarrassment to triumph. She seemed surprised at her own audacity, and though I didn’t approve of anyone dropping in on me unheralded, her gumption—the passion that made her act so—somehow impressed me. It was the kind of behavior I’d practiced during my young reporter days in Appleton, Wisconsin.

  I told her to stop apologizing.

  She was dressed in a drab gray dress, low slung, with a brilliant crimson band of wide ribbon below the hip. Trendy, especially with the wide-buckle shiny silver high heels; but, curiously, she still seemed a country girl, a startled Mary Pickford in crinoline and pleats. She sat demurely, her hands folded in her lap. There was no make-up on her face except for a trace of lipstick. The good girl vamp versus Bella’s cat’s-meow flapper with bobbed hair and dog-collar choker.

  “Tell me,” I demanded.

  Slowly, her speech building momentum like a prairie windstorm, she told her story. Waters had convinced her that I now believed the full story of Roddy’s murder was not being told. In fact, Waters insisted someone was hiding something—a view, he insisted, both he and I shared. My eyebrows rose at his hyperbole.

  Ellie narrowed her eyes. “I resent Bella saying I was at the apartment that night.” She stopped, breathed in. “I wasn’t.”

  Lord, I thought, Waters stirred the pot—and now I had to deal with it. “So you knock on my door…”

  “I want to explain.” I waited while she chose her words carefully. “When I met Lawson heading home from his job, Roddy had just told me he was busy. Well, we had made plans for that night. Suddenly without explanation, he said—Ellie, don’t show up. I was singing at a small club near where he lives and I’d be free after eleven to stop by, and we’d talk. Just talk.” She bit the corner of a nail, stared at it, bothered.