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

by Ed Ifkovic

  “No reason to.” He smiled and I saw missing teeth, blackened teeth. “Place like this you best hide away and not make nice with the pretty boys in the back apartment.”

  “Have you had any break-ins?” Rebecca asked.

  He shook his head. “Nah.” A pause. “Ain’t got a dime to steal.”

  “What do you remember about the night he was murdered?” I asked.

  A long silence, then a quick intake of breath. “Who are you again?”

  I pointed at Waters and his mother. “Friends. Seeking justice.”

  He chortled at that. “Police done talked to me already. I tole them the little I knows.”

  “And that is?” I persisted.

  “Not much.”

  “Could you tell us?” Rebecca asked, politely. And he smiled at her. She was smiling back at him.

  “Most times the house is real quiet, you know,” he began, still looking at Rebecca, who kept her beatific smile plastered on, her eyes warm. “But I stepped out a few times that night, it being Saturday night, come back for cash, left, you know, back and forth.”

  “And?” I probed, impatient.

  He didn’t look at me, his eyes now cast downward. “First time I left, I was coming down the stairs and someone had just rushed by, headed down the hallway. I didn’t pay no mind, and don’t know if she went to Roddy’s apartment, ‘cause it happened so fast. I figured it was one of the tenants in the apartment across from Roddy’s. They got a girl living there. Paid it no mind, but she was running.”

  “She?” Waters asked. “You sure it was a girl?”

  “Yeah, a girl.” He bit his lip. “But don’t ask me to describe her. As I tole the police, I just sensed it was a girl, you know, rushing back there.” He looked up the street, his feet moving. “Up to the club, but I come back fifteen minutes after, forgot my cash, and I seen someone move in the shadows. There.” He pointed to a narrow alley, dark even in broad daylight. “Like someone just stepped then and there into the alley like they seen me stepping out of the house.”

  “Some girl?”

  He fidgeted. “I tole you, I barely sensed the first and the second, well, maybe it ain’t even a girl. I paid it no mind but the police sat me down and made me go over and over it. What can I say?”

  I smiled at Waters. “Bella in the bushes.” I pointed at the narrow alley, hugging the building, filled with litter, scraps of blown paper, an icy canyon. Waters nodded. “So you were out all night?”

  “No, I tole you I was back and forth. The club I go to is one block over. Most times I come back, get me more cash, you know, hallway is quiet like a graveyard. Except the last time. Sometimes some Victrola gospel coming from Mamie Johnson’s in the apartment next to me, old lady can’t sleep at night and Sundays she just play the phonograph when she ain’t in church…”

  “Except what last time?” I asked.

  Well”—he enunciated the words—“as I tol’ the police, I come home dog-tired after two or so, dunno the exact time, and I’m ready to climb the stairs when I think I hear rustling back down the hall. A noise I can’t make no sense of. So I step back there, real dumb of me, you know, peek around the corner, and it’s real dark, but I seed their door a little bit open, just a foot or so, and I pay it no mind, one of the boys coming or going. After all, it’s Saturday night”—a thin smile, the broken teeth dull in the daylight—“but I realize later, talking to the cops, that there ain’t no light on from inside the apartment. Nobody there, door open, but no light shining in the hallway, like you’d expect. So I figure it ain’t my business and start to walk up the stairs, a little woozy, you know, and then I hear—I think I hear—this rattling around back there.”

  “Like?” From Waters, eager.

  “Like someone bumping around in the dark, crashing into chairs. Then it stopped. Or—I don’t know—maybe it went on, but I was upstairs in the hallway then, and stumbling to my bed.”

  “And that’s it?” I asked.

  He ran his tongue over his lower lip. “Ain’t much, but more’n most folks would tell the police.”

  “Do you know Skidder Scott?” I asked.

  “Everyone round here knows Skidder. Fact is, he was up on the corner begging that night. I seed him, clear as day.”

  “What time?” I asked.

  “When I come back the last time, when I see the door is cracked open.”

  “So he wasn’t down here then?” I asked.

  “Not unless he flew.”

  “You don’t think that Skidder Scott killed Roddy?” Rebecca wondered.

  The man shook his head. “Skidder scared of his own shadow, that one. He was working the crowd coming out of Mambo’s. No time to murder nobody in their bed. I tole that to the police but they don’t count my words.”

  With that, his antsy feet shuffled, and the man, bending into the cool breeze, moved away, his hand touching the brim of his fedora.

  “What have we learned?” I stared at the departing back.

  Waters smiled. “Bella in the bushes and, maybe, inside.”

  “Or Ellie actually making it inside,” Rebecca offered.

  “Then why didn’t Bella see her?” Waters asked.

  “Because, if we can believe the man’s story, the person entered the shadowy alley minutes after he sensed the woman in the hallway.”

  Someone was crossing the street, weaving between parked cars, and I heard grunting, a slurred curse. “Well, well.” Mr. Porter was returning home, a well-worn Bible cradled under his arm. “My, my, the kind of folks daylight brings to Harlem.”

  “Mr. Porter,” I started, “we wanted to talk to you about…”

  “Ah, a trio of vigilantes.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “Roddy was writing an essay addressed to a ‘Mr. P.’ Perhaps it was you, a piece about the conflict of generations among Negroes and…”

  His hand flew up into my face. I sputtered, but stopped. “It ain’t got nothing to do with me.”

  “But,” Waters added, “Roddy made notes about not trusting you…about how you went into his apartment…”

  “I’m the super and I gotta do things.” A pause. “I check on things.”

  “Does that mean rifling through his possessions?” Waters asked.

  He looked toward the entrance to his building. “You people are bothering me. I didn’t do nothing. I go to church and I pray for the likes of Lawson and Roddy. Especially Roddy.”

  “Why Roddy in particular?” I asked.

  He sucked in his cheeks. “Two lost boys, them two. Lawson is a liar and a cocky boy, a boy who hides from me ‘cause he won’t pay his rent. In my house. And Roddy. That sick Roddy. Well, Freddy could tell you some things about him. It was my Christian charity that kept forgiving and forgetting. But even God gets impatient.”

  “But you fought with Roddy.”

  “Yeah, he attacked me, fact is.”

  “You fought with him.”

  “He was a wise guy, sarcastic, thought he was better’n me. He even mocked this.” He held up the Bible. “No one does that to me. Fancy pants phony. Smug.”

  “So you went into his apartment? Looked around. For what?”

  He snickered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I know is that boy ain’t belong among decent people, and I told him so. He even shoved me, can you believe it? That fool. I know how to take care of myself.”

  “He hit you?”

  “No, you ain’t listening. He shoved me when he tried to get past me in the hallway. Like a week before he got murdered. I told him he ain’t welcome in this building.”

  “And what did you do?” Waters asked.

  “I punched him in the face.”

  I started. “You hit him? What did he do?”

  The old face moved, the eyes hard and cold. “He said he could kill me with no regr
ets—that my phony God couldn’t protect me. Jesus be a coward like me.” Now he chuckled. “Hey, I been in jail. I know what’s what. Prison and God temper a man to face anything. I told him he better watch his step.” He started to push through us. “I told him I could kill him if I chose, but God got better punishments waiting for him. So I didn’t kill him, ma’am. Not worth burning in hell for the likes of him. I just punched him one good one, and he squawked liked a headless chicken.” He walked up the steps and opened the front door. “Don’t bother me no more, folks, with your little crusade.”

  “But a boy has been murdered!” I yelled out.

  “Well, ma’am, seems to me God calls the shots. And some folks are better off dead.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Bella was not happy and made certain we knew it, clicking her tongue and biting the broken nail of her index finger. She sat facing me at a round table in Maynard’s, a small grubby diner on 145th and Broadway. Flanked on her left by Waters and on her right by his mother, she hunched her shoulders like a scared and trapped animal. Her chin dipped into her chest protectively, a woman ready to be executed—or, at least, mildly interrogated.

  “I think this is unnecessary,” she said, still staring into my face.

  I kept my mouth shut, but nodded at Rebecca, then playing with the handle of the coffee cup. Suddenly she reached over and placed one of her hands on Bella’s wrist. Bella stopped fidgeting. “There’s a chance an innocent man is unjustly accused of murder, Bella.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Skidder Scott? I just assumed…”

  “Well,” I added, “the police have closed the book on it, but Roddy’s notes that were left behind, and the…the activity centering on the apartment that night…and…”

  “And the contradictory stories,” Waters threw in, bluntly. “The lies.” He stressed the word.

  Bella blushed. “No one believes that I wasn’t there.”

  I drew my tongue into my cheek. “True, Bella, no one does. You and Ellie seem to invent at will.” She frowned and continued to pick at the broken nail. Crimson nail polish flaked off. “But,” I went on, “we’re talking about a night when someone was murdered.”

  Venom in her voice: “Well, talk to Ellie. Her life is one big lie.”

  “Just what does that mean?” Rebecca asked.

  Bella shrugged. “Nothing.” A sliver of a smile. “Ellie doesn’t like me and she’s not my favorite person.”

  “Why?” Though I knew the answer.

  But Bella closed up. She sipped her coffee and stared out the plate-glass front window.

  “Somehow,” I began again, “Jed Harris—a man who should have nothing to do with any of this, surely—is involved, but I don’t know what I mean by that.” I waited and watched her face.

  She scoffed. “Jed Harris.” A name said with bitterness.

  “There was a time, and recently, when I gather you’d say his name with a certain relish.”

  She broke into a laugh that ended in a cigarette smoker’s husky cough. “That fool.”

  “Tell me,” I demanded.

  “Nothing to tell except that he told me to get lost.”

  “But you were having an affair?”

  Again, the exaggerated laugh. “If that’s what you want to call it. He can be a charming man, you know, but underneath it all, there’s a cold, cold heart.”

  “Tell me,” I repeated.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “He took me places, up in Harlem, of course. Never downtown. A pretty silk scarf from Bonwit Teller but, you know, I could never exchange it in a million years. Not that there’s many places we could go except maybe around Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. But up here, yes, clubs where Negroes can mingle socially with white guys. It’s like…a cottage industry up here.” A sardonic tenor to her voice now, but raw, pained. “Lawson knew about it, but he had no say. What could he say? He’s as fiercely ambitious as me. We sort of found each other that way, the two of us auditioning for the rare part of a Negro on Broadway. So we became a couple, and for a while it worked. Then there was Jed, and Lawson was angry, but there was nothing he could do about it.”

  “A little unfair, no?”

  She shrugged her pretty shoulders. “After the embarrassing fights with Jed on the street, him and Roddy, you know, well, Lawson just assumed a what-the-hell attitude. He was getting on my nerves anyway. It was time to say goodbye. He was like a gnat that keeps buzzing in my ear, annoying, pesky. So I thought I’d hitch my wagon to Jed’s Great White Way down Broadway. Ah, foolish me! You know, I sort of realized what kind of man Jed was by the way he treated Lawson.”

  “I never quite understood that,” I whispered.

  “Well, it makes no sense. It’s like Jed took this real intense hatred to Lawson just because he could. You know, it’s a power thing. Power to Jed, I learned, is more important than sex. Excuse me, Miss Ferber. I don’t mean to…to be indelicate. But Jed…”

  I interrupted. “I’m not a child, Bella.”

  She shrugged those shoulders again. “So when I told Jed in my most girlie voice that his treatment of Lawson was wrong, he scoffed at me. ‘You and Lawson just want me to produce your simple plays.’ Well, that hurt. I’d hinted at him looking at my writing but, yes, I really wanted to act in one of his productions.” She sighed. “Suddenly I realized what a fool I’d been. A fool.”

  “But you still kept at him, no?”

  “He played with us, Miss Ferber. You know what Lawson told me—‘Jed Harris took away chance.’ You know, maybe we’d make it, maybe not. Broadway. When Jed blackballed us, when he said we’d never work again, he took away the chance that we could make it. Sabotaged, Miss Ferber.”

  Rebecca spoke up. “Bella, it had to be more than Jed’s treatment of Lawson…and you. Why did he end it? You did something…”

  Bella waited a long time. “Clever, you are.” She leaned back on her chair, tipping it, and I feared she’d topple. “Clever, really. I’m my own worst enemy, though the handwriting was already on the wall. I’d learned, because I rifled through his wallet, conveniently peeking out of a coat pocket, that he was married. That really surprised me. He just never acted married, if you know what I mean. It never occurred to me.” Again, she bit on the broken nail, contemplated it, and frowned.

  That news had surprised me, too. In all Jed’s flirtatious moments, in all the chatter about him in the denizens of Schubert Alley and at theatrical parties, nothing had been said about a wife until recently. Her name was Anita, Aleck Woollcott told me, a twinkle in his lascivious eye. A flighty girl who threw Bohemian parties with red light bulbs giving the living room the look of a tawdry brothel, with dripping candles stuck into wine bottles…In fact, Aleck claimed he’d been to one, and Jed sat in a corner doing mindless card tricks and ignoring everyone. I assumed Aleck was making it all up. “Did you confront him?” I asked Bella now.

  “Yeah, he admitted it. Says most people don’t know, which is the way he likes it. She certainly isn’t on his arm as he goes to show openings.”

  I cringed because suddenly my heart jumped and one of my eyes twitched. I thought of Jed and his anonymous flapper wife. What did it matter? I told myself. But it did—monumentally, devastatingly. “Lord.”

  “Indeed. Well, I foolishly sort of blackmailed him. I felt he was ready to dump me anyway—what girl can’t read those signs?—so I said I’d tell his wife about our…tryst…if, well, he didn’t give me a part in something.”

  I swallowed my words, sarcastic. “And, knowing Jed, that obviously worked like a charm.”

  Bella snickered. “You said it. He howled, burst out laughing, tears in his eyes, and told me to go ahead. I was one of many cheap and available girls, though I was the first Negro he’d ‘entertained’—that was his word—and so, go right ahead, sister. God, he laughed and laughed, drunk with it. And then he got up, cold as ice,
those hooded eyes mean and hard, and just walked away from me. I knew it was the end. Which, of course, happened a few days later.” She grinned. “No more baubles from Woolworth’s for me.” She sat forward now. “So here I am. No Jed. No Lawson. No…Roddy.”

  “Roddy,” Waters mumbled. “You weren’t seeing Roddy. You only hoped to. Because of Ellie.”

  Bella shook her head patronizingly. “Dear, dear little Waters, the innocent among all of us libertines.” She smiled, unfriendly. “As it turns out, Roddy and I did have a brief moment this past summer, right after we all met in Miss Ferber’s living room to discuss our great artistic scribbling. So brief sometimes it seemed not to have even happened.”

  “I don’t understand,” Waters said.

  “Simple. Roddy, despite Freddy’s assertions to the contrary, was, in fact, a petty and creepy womanizer. I’ll never understand Freddy’s nonsense about that episode in the hallway. Maybe I can’t. Roddy was cagey. He had a fling with Ellie that she crowed about at one point—to me. Then, briefly, a moment with me, and then goodbye. To us both, I gather. He just stopped, cold. Maybe Freddy was right. Maybe Roddy was confused. Nice word, no?”

  “But,” Rebecca insisted, “this doesn’t sound like Roddy.” She genuinely seemed baffled.

  Bella smiled. “Ah, gentle Roddy. Polite Roddy. So-nice-to-older-ladies Roddy.” A pause. “Nasty Roddy. Playboy Roddy. Sissy Roddy. Roddy liked to be mysterious. Who knows? I think he visited both camps, if you know what I mean. But Freddy exaggerated what Roddy did. Maybe not. Roddy was soft and fun and always so charming to everyone, which made us all beat a path to his shuttered door. But he…anyway, Freddy got all bent out of shape over something and ran to tell Harriet, his partner in crime, and I guess her father was there in the hallway and saw something, though probably spied through drunken eyes, which is why he hated Roddy. Well, he hated him in general because he had this thing about girls being in the apartments late at night. Everyone has heard that story. And you know he’s crazy religious and that doesn’t fly with him in his home, which includes all the apartments. Roddy would sneak Ellie in, too, especially when she got off work early. Lately, she told me that they were just talking, as friends. Late at night. Like I believed that.”