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

by Ed Ifkovic

  He’d gone to see Jed at the Buckingham Hotel, where Jed was holed up to work on dialogue changes, only to have Jed answer the door stark naked. George didn’t miss a beat, ignored the blatant affront, and conducted his business. When he readied to leave, he turned in the doorway, looked back, and said calmly, “Oh, by the way, Jed, your fly is down.” How we all chortled over that anecdote, George telling it over and over at dinner parties.

  But now, alone with him in this dank, renegade flat, I feared an unwanted reprise of that suspect and bawdy one-act play. But no, Jed slipped into a seat opposite me, wrapped his arms around his bony chest, and said, “Yes, I was with Bella the night Roddy was murdered. It was also the night I told her to get lost. To go away. I bumped into her as she rushed by on the sidewalk. Imagine my surprise, seeing her bustling by like that.”

  “What time?”

  “I dunno. Midnight maybe. I was going to Barron’s Exclusive Club by my lonesome. She was…” He stopped.

  Suddenly Jed stood up and moved to the small window. He stared, entranced, into the darkness, though I could see his neck muscles tighten, his shoulders hunch up. He swiveled, almost a calculated, rehearsed movement, and through clenched teeth said, “Edna, Bella isn’t a murderer.”

  “I didn’t say she was.”

  “Really? I sensed that was the direction of this conversation.”

  “Jed, stop this evasion. Right now, for God’s sake. A young man is dead. Just tell me about it.”

  He slipped back into the chair, reached for the empty highball glass, and regarded me coolly. “She didn’t want to come with me. To Barron’s. I know she didn’t like the place because they frown on white men bringing their black girls there. But Bella always agreed with anything I suggested. But not that night, which was unusual. I’d flash wads of cash, and women like Bella who instinctively don’t trust the world will follow you to the ends of the globe. But she was anxious to get away. She kept saying she had something to do at her apartment. ‘What?’ I demanded. I figured she had to meet that lout Lawson, and she didn’t want me to know. But she wouldn’t answer me. Instead, she was nervous and sweating, even though it was numbing cold outside.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t say much, Edna. She started to annoy me almost immediately with her inattention to me.”

  “Seven deadly sins rolled into one, I suppose.”

  He ran his tongue into the corner of his cheek. “If you’re with me, you act like you enjoy it.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “I doubt if you forget—or forgive—much, Edna.”

  “Go on, Jed.”

  The grin disappeared from his face. “So I took her to the Nest Club, not Barron’s Exclusive. Because I’m a kind guy. Some jazz cabaret, whites mainly but Negro guests—that is, girls—barely tolerated.”

  “Did she mention Roddy?”

  “No, but she started to babble on about Lawson. I guess she had finally told him to get lost. Ended whatever they had.” His smile turned into a frown. “That had been my…well, mandate a while back. You want me, well, you have to lose Lawson, the neophyte actor/playwright/preener/fool.” The sickening smile reappeared. “And, I gather, she listened to me.”

  “Maybe it had nothing to do with you, Jed.”

  “I told her to shut up about Lawson. So she clammed up. We listened to jazz, drank, and she kept trying to get away.”

  “How late did you stay?”

  “I put her in a cab around three. This was after I told her we would not be seeing each other any more. No calls, no letters, no tears, no boo-hoos, no nothing. Get lost—in other words.”

  “How did she take that?”

  “Stunned at first, I don’t think she believed me. She just stared. I had to shove her into the cab.”

  “So she was with you from about midnight until three in the morning.”

  A pause. “I guess.”

  That frustrated me, “What kind of answer is that?”

  “I mean, yes, she was. She left to use the toilet somewhere in the street. Negroes aren’t allowed to use the facilities at the Nest Club.”

  “How long was she gone?”

  “Half hour, hour. I don’t recall. I got to talking with friends. I was surprised she came back, but, of course, I hadn’t told her to get lost yet. I saved that wonderful announcement to the end—just as the cab pulled up. Theater is exquisite timing, dear Edna. You should write that down for future reference.”

  I ignored that. “So she could have slipped back to Roddy’s apartment.”

  “For what? Murder? Edna, Edna, you melodramatic spinner of airy tales. Bella only has sex and money on her pretty brain. If anything, she wanted sex, not death, from this Roddy.”

  “Women have been known to kill for want of love.”

  “Listen to you! ‘Want of love.’ You talk like a starved pullet in a Victorian romance written by The Duchess.”

  I bristled at that. The Duchess’ novels, admittedly gushy with purple prose and preposterous situation, had given me constant comfort when I was a little girl in Appleton, Wisconsin. Instead, I wondered out loud, “And you don’t know if the taxi took her home, do you?”

  He was shaking his head. “Edna, Edna.”

  “Tell me, Jed. This is all information that you should have given to the police. You have a duty…”

  He held up his hand. For a second anger flashed across his face, replaced at once by a cool, hard countenance. “I choose not to. I don’t want my name involved with this, much as yours was in the tabloids. It’s”—a sheepish grin—“unseemly.”

  “I’ll be responsible for my own reputation, thank you. But the police must investigate…”

  “Investigate what? They’ve arrested the bum, with oodles of evidence. It’s over, finis, complete. Edna, don’t you have enough to do with Show Boat and The Royal Family? I’m predicting Show Boat will sink into the muddy waters of the Mississippi. And as for The Royal Family…”

  “I have nothing to do with them except watch rehearsals and go to the openings.”

  “So you play detective?”

  This was getting nowhere. I stood. “I’m leaving.”

  Jed watched me, eyes slatted, a twinkle in them. “It’s late, Edna.”

  “Not for New York. Maybe for Hoboken or wherever you hang your married hat.”

  He chuckled, long, hard, phony. “Edna, you could stay here.” His hand reached out and touched my elbow, an electric shock to the body, a grazing touch that seemed curiously volcanic, riveting. It was a quick, calculated move, his body inclined toward mine, and I stepped back, as though contaminated. Of course, all along, I understood that I had a kind of schoolgirl infatuation with the smoldering, arrogant man, involuntarily so, since I’m usually good at resisting the fools and cads that life puts in my path. Even when whole parts of me despised Jed, his manipulations and cruelties—even though I saw him as a soulless man, a Parisian gigolo with swagger, Iago with a five o’clock shadow, even then—there was often a fluttering in my chest, a hint of perspiration on my brow, ringing in my ears. But now, suddenly, his crude gesture of reaching out to touch my elbow squelched whatever sensation—is that the word I want?—I had for him: killed it, stamped it out, obliterated it. Thank God.

  It was, joyously for me, a moment of intoxicating release.

  His eyes widened, alarmed, as my hand swung free and slapped him soundly across his rough cheek. He fell back, stumbled, one hand grasping his bruised face, the other flaying wildly as if in search of his bruised ego.

  He snarled. “I have my way with any woman I want.”

  I headed to the door. “Well, after tonight you’ll have to amend that declaration. Lower the percentage.”

  He laughed. “For now.” He rocked on his heels. “You have a crush on me.”

  “Had. Before I s
aw the darkness in you.”

  “Some women find the darkness appealing.”

  I turned and walked out the door. Over my shoulder I said, “Little boys like you are afraid of the dark.”

  He looked puzzled. “What does that mean?”

  I had no idea. I was simply looking for an exit line. I slammed the door.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Rebecca knocked on my closed workroom door at eleven the next morning, something forbidden when I was working. It was the day before the opening of Show Boat and I was vigorously answering letters, penning a short retrospective on the genesis of Show Boat that was intended for the Saturday Review, a day swamped with catching up. I pecked at the Remington, my one finger flurry of activity, because I wrote nothing in pencil or pen any more, the instruments leaden in my fingers. I typed notes to the hairdresser, the doorman, even to my sister Fannie who found it questionable, though she never returned the check that fluttered out of the folds of my letter. “Miss Edna, a call.”

  I bristled. “Rebecca.”

  “Langston Hughes.” She swallowed. “I told him you were working but I thought I’d check with you first.”

  “Of course.” I picked up the phone.

  I was surprised at the call because, indeed, just yesterday, he’d returned the opening chapters of Lawson’s novel by messenger. His brief note had repeated what he’d told me at George Kaufman’s Christmas party, and he reiterated that the work needed to be published. He asked that I send him the entire novel after New Year’s. He also wanted to talk with Lawson. His note concluded with congratulations on the opening of Show Boat and The Royal Family. “You’re entering a cornucopia of success most of us dream of, but I can imagine the stress.”

  “Hello, Mr. Hughes.”

  “Miss Ferber, hello.”

  “Perhaps Mr. Hughes, we can use our first names. After all, I keep meeting you in town. Call me Edna, please. I’ll call you Langston.”

  I could hear the humor in his voice. “Old habits die hard, Miss…Edna.”

  “That’s better,” I said, “though I sound like a hectoring schoolmarm with a hickory stick.”

  He laughed. “An old custom I recall from my boyhood in the Midwest.” The squeak of an opened door, someone whispering behind him. “My apologies for calling, but perhaps I’ll distract you from the horrible burden of two back-to-back openings on Broadway.”

  “Not at all.”

  “The reason I’m calling now…I’m sitting at the editorial rooms of Opportunity, which is edited by my friend, Charles Johnson, who’s sitting across from me and smiling. I just told him I was calling Edna Ferber and he didn’t believe me.” I could hear laughter in the background. “I don’t know if you know Opportunity.”

  “I do, in fact.” I’d seen copies of the journal, a sensible, earnest periodical devoted to furthering the cause of the Negro writer. Waters faithfully deposited them at my breakfast table. To be sure, I’d first read Langston’s poem “The Weary Blues” in its pages. “I know of the magazine,” I said into the phone.

  “I stopped in to see Charles about an essay I wrote, and we were talking about the literary contests that Opportunity runs now and then. It’s his way of discovering new talent. He’s been clearing out a file cabinet, unwanted correspondence, loose ends, flyers, folders of old submissions to the contest, somehow saved and filed but now being discarded.”

  I waited. Surely he was not going to inflict a packet of inane juvenilia on my doorstep. “Yes?” Tentative, wary.

  He chuckled. “No, no.” A pause. “Charles has been going through the files and he found a short story by someone named Roderick Parsons. But a note clipped to it, hand-written, boyish, was signed ‘Roddy Parsons.’ He realized that the story was submitted by the poor lad who died. He remembered the news accounts of Roddy’s murder up here, of course. So he showed it me…”

  I breathed in, bothered. “Good Lord.”

  “He must have sent it some time ago, but Charles and I don’t want to throw it out.” He said something away from the phone, and I could hear Charles Johnson’s whispered voice. “I only read the first pages and skimmed the rest. It does go on a bit, and sadly it’s a bit sophomoric and stilted, a young writer’s attempt to tell a story. It’s historical fiction, taking place in Alabama during the Civil War. Cardboard characters, you know—Mammy, Southern colonels, Yankee invaders, Southern belles with mint juleps and foxhunts. A battle scene in front of the old plantation with the house slaves up in arms. Some surprisingly decent writing but…quaint, failed.” I could hear him sigh. “Nothing to be done with it, but it seems a sacrilege to discard it. I was wondering if…”

  “Of course,” I said. “I want it. I’ll put it with his other writings. I don’t know what’s to be done with them, except for his wonderful poetry, but it’s not for me to decide.”

  “I’ll send it by messenger.” A deep intake of breath. “It made me melancholy, glancing through it. A boy obviously starting to grow, to find a voice.”

  We said goodbye, and I sat there, a little teary-eyed, not wanting to move. Then I found myself smiling. Roderick Parsons. The oh-so-serious man. The boy writer.

  ***

  The afternoon was a blur of meeting, pique, and ego, the first the catalyst for the second two. My publisher Doubleday, without my permission, scheduled a press conference at two o’clock to promote both the book Show Boat and the musical. Begrudgingly, I sat with Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, both men looking like my shady protectors.

  I survived the decorous photographic ritual with Hammerstein and Kern, though Jerome sensed I was out of sorts. “What?” he muttered as the photogs snapped.

  “Jed Harris,” I seethed, and he grinned.

  Everyone had heard the stories of the beast. My explosive slap against Jed Harris’ rough cheek last night still resounded in my head, a moment that made me proud but also deeply ashamed, like the harried housewife who, driven, speaks her mind at a church meeting and then is bothered by her own ferocity. So be it: Jed Harris was a man born to be slapped…if not hanged in a public square. Jerome Kern, an old-fashioned dapper gentleman, now hummed an off-key bar of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” a joke I found not at all amusing.

  But then I skedaddled through Schubert Alley and arrived at the Selwyn Theater to hear Jed’s bilious roaring and condemnation. Throughout a disastrous dress rehearsal, Jed, cranky as an old well handle, kept stopping and starting the run-through, nasty, nasty. I bumped into George Kaufman, who told me he’d seen enough hell in one afternoon to last a lifetime. That made me laugh, which caused Jed, up front, to swivel and spot the two of us.

  Snarkily, a voice aimed at the players: “Perhaps if the two simpering playwrights had penned better lines, you all wouldn’t sound so stale.” He turned to look at us.

  “Ignore the boor,” George whispered.

  But I couldn’t. “Perhaps if you listened to the play, you might understand where your own humanity has failed.”

  Ice in the room: tension on the stage. The director, menaced already, shuddered. Not good, my outburst. Not good to rattle the already-harried and abused troupe onstage.

  “Leave it,” George whispered. So I sat down.

  I sat there for a half hour, jotting notes on what was happening, though I knew Jed and the director would toss my advice into a waste bin. Jed, the cocky producer, had his own ideas of how a play is built though he’d never written one…and, I sometimes believed, never really read one.

  Following the run-through, the cast fled, relieved to be alive, and our short, unhappy meeting was held in the front seats of the orchestra, facing a stage where the curtain had not been dropped, so that, ominous, the elegant East Side apartment of the Cavandish clan kept intruding on our humdrum words about pace, timing, projection.

  I smelled disaster, and said it.

  Jed ignored me and mumb
led something to the director, who nodded and then glanced at me apologetically. Then Jed tucked his tongue into his cheek. “Edna, you seem to cultivate disaster.” A pause. “Or is it murder you cultivate?”

  “Easy now,” George whispered, touching my elbow.

  He was baiting me, I knew, this irascible rapscallion. “Jed,” I began.

  “But you’re right. It is a disaster. I’ll close it before New Year’s.”

  I stood up and walked out of the theater.

  ***

  The telephone rang all afternoon and into the evening, but I instructed Rebecca not to answer it. The combative afternoon at The Royal Family and the seamy presence of a purposely-snide Jed Harris both conspired to make me headachy and weak, so I shut it all out, so easy to do in a high-floor doorman building with a sky of gray clouds hovering just outside my window. Rebecca, sworn to silence and obedience, was the dedicated sentry. No, I told her, no calls. No family wishing me well, no editors, no publishers, no press. Jed Harris had left a bad taste in my mouth, like the ingestion of a sweet but toxic elixir. So the phone rang, and we let it ring.

  Rebecca spent the evening readying my clothing for both openings: the periwinkle blue dress for Show Boat, with the ermine wrap and the garish orchid; the pearl-colored dress for The Royal Family, with the ruffled silk across the bodice, to be worn under a mink coat with scarlet lining. For both nights I’d bought voguish sequined cloches, one hat gold with a rhinestone band across the front, the other hat black velvet. We’d planned the looks for weeks. I loved the way Rebecca ran her gentle hand across the smooth silk, the sheen catching the overhead light. Her eyes shone: wonderland. Dancing the night away.

  Walking through the rooms, watching her careful attention to wrinkles and creases, I suddenly was filled with a marrow-deep despair, my insides hollowed out, a vacant feeling of loss and disaster. What was the matter with me?