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

by Ed Ifkovic

  Though no orchids or gardenias had been delivered yet, I imagined I could smell the cloying, overly sweet aroma, caught in thoughts of funeral parlors and high-school proms.

  Later, lying in bed, listening to the tinkle of radio music drifting in from the kitchen, I ate the meal Rebecca served me on a tray: chicken salad sandwich with diced celery and onion on dark pumpernickel bread, a side of cold potatoes chopped with some ground nuts, string beans I didn’t touch, and a slab of German chocolate cake bought at a York Avenue Hungarian pastry shop, so sweet that the first and only bite made my front teeth ache.

  Restless, I wandered into the living room and stared, numb, out over the tops of the skeletal winter trees of Central Park. The stark branches were illuminated with spotty halos from the streetlights, eerie and windblown. Down below, in the street, the tops of cabs moved, blotches of dark-lit yellow, a checkerboard that shifted, fragmented, disappeared. I touched the icy windowpane, though a dry hot heat seeped up from the floorboards. Dark night, and lonesome. Lonely. Alone.

  Walking back to my bedroom, I glanced at the sideboard by the front door. There was the slim manila envelope that must have been delivered earlier. Roddy’s short story. Langston Hughes’ name and the word Opportunity written in the upper left corner. Rebecca must have placed it there. Idly I picked up the slender envelope and carried it to my room, sliding into bed, pulling up the covers to my chin, and unsealing the flap. A brief note from Langston fell out. “Thank you. Langston.” That was all. Thanks for what? I wondered. What was I going to do with all these typed and handwritten pages piling up in my life? Lawson’s unfinished—maybe never to be finished—novel. Roddy’s poetry and that helter-skelter collection of notes and diary entries. Mr. Porter is rifling through my stuff. I don’t trust him. Those cryptic jottings that conveyed no real message, lost now with Roddy’s death. And now this failed piece of fiction, forgotten in the files of Opportunity. Ironic, that name now.

  I didn’t know why I decided to read it, given my already dour and darkened mood. But I did.

  And, surprisingly, I was swept with myriad emotions.

  The sloppily typed story, nearly twenty pages long, though unpaged, struck me immediately as a young boy’s story, a neophyte writer’s attempt at the grand theme. Roddy had called the story “Time to Die,” and quoted a few lines from a Negro spiritual I’d never heard before:

  Lord, I keep so busy servin’ my master

  Keep so busy servin’ my master

  Keep so busy servin’ my master

  Ain’t got time to die.

  The first paragraph, overwritten and ponderous, identified the piece as a Civil War story, but it was so classically a familiar scenario, a narrative borne out of too many viewings of Birth of a Nation perhaps, though told from a Negro slave’s viewpoint. I cringed as I moved through the stereotyped and wooden black characters, little Sambo automatons, crowing and bellowing before the onslaught of Yankee blood and thunder. No wonder Langston had immediately dismissed the story after glancing at the first few pages. This was not a little embarrassing. And yet I read on.

  The story charmed me, finally, though the tale was dark and gloomy. It was Roddy’s early work, a young writer’s grappling with fiction—a boy’s venture. I felt my mood rise. There was something sweet and tender about the words, a boy’s pleasure at the use of language, albeit trite, the conscious play of sentence against sentence. Removed from its hackneyed story line, the piece hinted at Roddy’s evolution as a poet, a fiction writer. Lyrical moments were scattered throughout like isolated shiny quartz stone speckling a prosaic beach. Finally, I sat back, snuggled into my pillow, and found myself grinning. Here, then, was a cheeky freshness, though static—an evident intoxication with words. But I couldn’t fault the young voice. Of course, I realized that the young Negro of today would naturally look back to Civil War days, to the Old South, to plantations, the slave huts—all indelible daguerreotypes of the racial tragedy that had become the modern Negro’s brand and inheritance. What other story did the budding writer have…that is, the young black writer? Charmed by it, caught by it, I lingered over the paragraphs and for the first time that day I felt a tick of life in me.

  But it passed because I remembered, shot to the quick, that Roddy was dead. There’d be no more evolution, no transcending the stale claptrap out of Thomas Dixon’s wildly popular romance The Clansman or the film epic The Birth of a Nation, so that a real voice would emerge, No, Roddy was dead. And so, unrelenting, the dark imagery smacked up against me and I felt my eyes tear up, my smile twisted into pained grimace.

  I expected nightmares.

  At the hint of daybreak seeping past the drawn curtains, I found myself awake, so suddenly it seemed a brutal slap across the face. I struggled to sit up, pulled my nightclothes tight around me because I was chilled, but then realized the room was hot, clammy. Yet I shook from the cold. My mind rumbled with images. Something had happened. Something lay on the edge of my mind. Waiting, insisting. I knew something now, but what? I knew, as I shivered there in the steam-heated winter room, that it was awful and deadly and…and it had to do with the murderer.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I left the apartment for my morning walk. One mile or more, though I dragged myself along, dispirited. Once back at the apartment, bathed, dressed, I went into the kitchen.

  “So it begins,” Rebecca smiled as she put pancakes and blueberry syrup before me at the breakfast table; and I thought, perversely, So it does, this day. But though I knew she was referring to that night’s opening of Show Boat and tomorrow’s opening of The Royal Family, my mind riveted, willy-nilly, to the murder of Roddy. Something had happened as I slept. Somehow I knew something. But what?

  “Yes,” I answered her, a little feebly.

  In my workroom I fiddled with unanswered letters. It would be a jittery, vacant day, unproductive and unsettled. I had nothing to do with the night’s Show Boat, save attend and smile, and tomorrow’s The Royal Family, save attend and smile. And then, each successive morning, rush for the reviews in the Times and the Telegraph and the Herald Tribune. Other papers. Vague, empty daytimes that were a preamble to illustrious and scintillating evenings, the huzzahs of friends, the nods of strangers sitting across the aisles.

  The Ferber season, Jed had called it.

  Restless, I made phone calls to Neysa McMein, Dorothy Rodgers, Peggy Wood, anyone who was home to answer. No one was.

  Late morning, dressed and ready to haunt both the Selwyn and the Zeigfeld theaters, I heard Waters chatting with his mother in the kitchen. Before he could join what would be a daylong chorus of what-a-day-for-you-Miss-Edna, I mentioned that Langston Hughes had sent me Roddy’s failed short story.

  “Roddy? An old story? How was it?”

  I sighed. “Perfectly awful.”

  He started. “I’m sorry.”

  “Waters,” I kidded him, “you didn’t write it.”

  He laughed. “I’m headed uptown this afternoon to visit with Ellie. She’s rehearsing for a show at the Spider Web.” A pause. “Lawson was invited but begged off. He’s avoiding Harlem these days.”

  “You can’t run forever,” I announced, imperious.

  Rebecca leaned in. “Some people try.”

  Waters started to say something but I waved, turned, and readied to leave. As I put on my overcoat in the hallway, I could hear Rebecca warning Waters about too much running around town, too many days spent up in Harlem. “After New Year’s, it’s back to school. You need to finish high school,” she emphasized. “Next year college.” I smiled. I heard Waters grumbling, a dutiful son talking to his concerned mother.

  Ordinarily I thrilled to sit in the seats or pace the aisles or linger backstage at Broadway theaters. There was something about the rattling, hissing steam pipes, the odor of well-worn and stacked costumes, the hum and bustle of crews with their hammering and sawing and painting, t
he cursing and hilarity, the sudden shriek of humor, the garish lighting, the cacophony of instruments being tuned. Above all, the electricity of movement, the jagged flash of lightning in the dim-lit sky. But not that day. For some reason theaters have a kind of eerie quiet the day of the opening, a holding of a collective breath, some last minute surrender to Fate. The stark, flattened conversation and the heartbeat calm before a dreaded storm. A purple aura covered the stage, perhaps illusionary. Within hours, there would be deafening applause or, everyone’s nightmare, deafening silence.

  No one spoke to me. A crew member, adjusting an electrical cord beneath a rafter, stared down at me as if I were Marley’s ghost, come to wave a bony, skeletal finger at him. Worse, at the Selwyn, Jed Harris bounded in just after two or so, unshaven, his fedora crumpled, glassy-eyed. When he spotted me standing there, looking lost as a Pilgrim on a wilderness shore, he turned on his heels and stormed backstage. Immediately, I could hear his raised, censorious voice, followed by a woman’s apologetic and teary response.

  No place to be today, so I left.

  I sat with an untouched coffee at a counter in Clark’s Deli, just off Eighth Avenue, and waited for something to happen.

  Then, white with an anger I couldn’t define, I hailed a cab that pulled in front of the deli to release a gaggle of midwestern sightseers. The cabbie sputtered at me in a coarse Neapolitan dialect and balked at an afternoon fare up to Harlem, though one glance at me through his rearview mirror told him Mount Edna was ready to erupt. He had no idea where the Spider Web was located and seemed intent on dropping me off anywhere up there. He cursed and belched. But a simple query to a young man waiting to cross the street directed us up Seventh Avenue. The cabbie squealed his tires pulling away, and I complained loudly. Finally he dropped me off in front of the nightclub and seemed displeased with the meager tip I deposited into his grubby hand. I was in no mood for anything less than pure and medieval chivalry.

  Even before I opened the front door, I could hear the hum and tinkle of piano and saxophone. It jarred, as when you sense a bumblebee or nagging wasp flitting near your head. It made me wary, tentative and unsure, with a sense of foreboding.

  Yet inside the cool, shadowy room there was a relaxed, peaceful feeling. I felt it at once, a wave of ease covering me. Ellie stood on a small stage back from the door, waiting, a piano player hitting a key, the sax player reading sheet music in a corner. Ellie muttered something about a chord, her tone pettish and whiny, and tapped her foot. The piano player hit a note, and waited. She was still complaining. Down front, sitting together at a table, were Waters and, to my surprise, Freddy.

  Ellie spotted me. “Miss Ferber.” Hardly a welcome, her voice tremulous.

  Waters and Freddy jumped up and faced me.

  “What happened?” Waters asked.

  I approached them. “Nothing.” A pause. “Well, maybe everything.”

  Confused, Waters took a step toward me, though I noticed Freddy sat back down, his body turned away.

  I tucked myself into a seat, but my eyes were focused solely on Ellie, who’d stepped forward, away from the pianist, and was eyeing me cautiously. I stared back. The piano player, oblivious, hit some keys, as if he expected her to sing the line she’d complained about. He was a chubby man in a flashy blue tuxedo shirt worn out of his pants, and long hair so excessively conked it caught the overhead light and seemed, grotesquely, some polished plum. He hit the chord again, and Ellie, looking back, actually yelled at him. “I need ten minutes, all right?”

  The man shrugged, stood up with difficulty because of his overflowing bulk, and lit a cigarette before lumbering off, followed by the saxophonist, who swung his instrument back and forth, a lance at a joust. Out of sight, they laughed raucously, and Ellie, glancing back toward the disappeared players, frowned. She walked toward the table where the three of us sat. “This rehearsal stinks,” she announced. “I don’t know what I’ll do tonight.”

  She was paying me scant attention, which rankled. So I cleared my throat and blurted out, “How about you begin by telling me why you came to my apartment, a guest, and lied, straight faced, to me. You lied.”

  She actually trembled, dropped into a chair, and sobbed. Waters immediately reached out and touched her wrist, though I saw Freddy bristle, twist away, his mouth skewered into a tight, disapproving line.

  “I didn’t mean to lie to you.”

  “Well, that’s the most disingenuous response I’ve ever heard in defense of a blatant fabrication.”

  She faltered. “I mean, well, yes, I lied.” A deep gasp of breath. “But I had to. People would think I killed Roddy.” Fresh tears, perhaps genuine.

  “Tell me,” I demanded.

  “How did you find out I was there?”

  “Ask Waters. Ask Freddy.” I shot them both a dark look. “Waters was there when the upstairs tenant said he sensed a woman in the hallway headed to Roddy’s apartment.”

  Waters defended her. “But it could have been someone else.”

  “Well, true,” I agreed. “We know it wasn’t Bella. That girl was still on her way, headed to the alley at the side of the building. Before she arrived…well, you were there.”

  Freddy looked squeamish. “I’m sorry, Ellie, but I told Miss Ferber I saw you at the subway stop that night. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

  She shot him a harsh look, then turned away. She looked defeated. “All right, I was there. At the apartment.”

  “But why lie about it?”

  She waited a moment, then shut her eyes. “After Roddy was found the next day, I got scared. I was in his building. I couldn’t admit that. Yes, I’d told Lawson I was headed there. Roddy told me to stay away, but I needed to see him. He called me from his job, whispering because he didn’t want his boss to hear him. We fought. He said some nasty things to me. I was going there to see if…if Bella was there. In my place. Maybe she was back…”

  Freddy was fretting. “He was a sissy boy.”

  Ellie erupted in anger. “No, he wasn’t. That was just some nonsense you came up with. Maybe…”

  “No, I’m not a fool, Ellie.”

  She watched me carefully. “Roddy was, in his own way, a cad. I know he came off as caring and kind and gentle, but Roddy could be mean. Icy cold. He could go into a rage. He’d flirt, you know. Then he’d be like ice. We saw each other a few times, you know, romantically, but then he stopped. Just like that. But we still had our long talks, and he walked me home at night sometimes. I loved him, Miss Ferber. And I knew he loved me.”

  Freddy fidgeted. “Shut up, Ellie.” But the words were said gently. Freddy, Ellie’s dogged pursuer with his blind and juvenile infatuation, the man who hid behind cars and spied on her.

  Ellie looked at him, pityingly. “Freddy, it’s true. I know you don’t want to hear it.”

  Freddy slumped back in his seat, arms folded, his lips drawn into a thin line. Bested.

  “But you went anyway?”

  “I had to. I knew Bella was jealous and when he begged off that night, I thought, well, she’s back.”

  “Did Lawson know about Bella fooling with Roddy?” I asked.

  Ellie laughed. “He encouraged it, I think. Not that he could have stopped her. Bella does what she wants.”

  “Have you two always disliked each other?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  “So,” I continued, “you went there anyway?”

  “Stupidly I rushed in, came in by the front door and not the back, which I never did at that hour, and then I thought I heard Mr. Porter banging around his apartment. I thought he heard me. I didn’t want to be caught. For a second I stood by Roddy’s door, expecting music. He played music on the radio when he stayed up late. Or maybe Bella was with him, I thought. I put my ear against the door, just for a second. Then I could hear Roddy talking, I think, harsh, but like to
a person he knew. Little periods of silence, so I figured he was on the phone. I couldn’t tell what he was saying but he sounded angry. Then I heard banging from Mr. Porter’s apartment. Lord, I didn’t want Roddy to catch me there, standing in his hallway, outside his door, eavesdropping—or Mr. Porter. If he was drunk, there might be some tirade. I had trouble with him before.”

  “Like what? You seem frightened of Mr. Porter.”

  She sighed. “I came there one afternoon and he, you know, made moves, flirted, a little drunk, still with that fool Bible in his hands, but drunk. ‘Come on in, sit, rest, baby, baby.’ That sort of line. I had run away from him. So I was afraid he’d open the door, see me there so late, and, well, you know…”

  Freddy spoke up. “Did you tell Harriet this?” A rasp in his voice.

  Ellie nodded. “I shouldn’t have. She hates her father, but after that she didn’t want me around.”

  My mind was racing. “You say Roddy was on the phone?”

  “Sounded like it. I thought it was strange, so late at night.”

  Waters spoke up. “Well, Ellie, it was only around midnight.”

  Ellie looked perplexed. “No, it wasn’t.”

  “But the tenant heard you—or a woman, someone—around twelve,” I insisted. “Just before Bella arrived outside.”

  Ellie spoke in a low gravelly voice. “Well, then, that wasn’t me. There are other tenants on that floor, you know. I know that I arrived around two in the morning, real late. I’d planned on going earlier, but then felt silly.” She looked at Freddy, frowned. “I guess you saw me at the subway stop around midnight.” He nodded. “I was at Small’s Paradise, hanging with Mary Turner, the singer that night, backstage, in her dressing room. We talked between her sets, had a few drinks. Then, leaving around two, I decided—why not? Go see Roddy.” She smiled. “Make him angry at such a late visit. Disturb him and Bella, maybe. I’d had too much to drink. Phony courage.” A pause. “No, it was two o’clock or so. I know that for a fact.”