Murder Your Darlings

by J. J. Murphy

  Battersby shook his head. “I understand the notion. That’s what got me into this business. But people just do not read to be educated. That’s a fact. A newspaper isn’t a Princeton education for a few pennies. Now, sleaze and slaughter—that’s the news they want. Bullets, blood, sex and booze. That’s what they want. And you can’t tell me different, because I learned it the hard way.”

  “Sensationalism!” Sherwood cried. “That’s another thing. Your headlines are positively explosive. They shout at passersby from the newsstand. Let me sum up the problem in four words. Too! Many! Exclamation! Points!”

  “Sherwood is right, Bud,” Benchley said. “The Knickerbocker puts the ‘yell’ in yellow journalism.”

  “Is that why you’re here?” Dorothy said. “Chasing down another screaming headline?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” Battersby said, the journalistic gleam returning to his eye. “That pal of yours, Dachshund? I hear he’s now in custody for Leland Mayflower’s murder.” He looked at Benchley. “I wish I’d known that when he came to my office at the paper. Still, I guess the wheels of justice move fast in this town.” He moved up the stone steps toward the door of the police station.

  “The wheels move faster than you can follow,” she said.

  Battersby halted. “How do you mean?”

  “Mr. Dachshund has been released. The police have posted an all-points bulletin for the man who tried to kill us—Mr. Dachshund, Mr. Benchley and myself—last night. The police think that this gangster, the Sandman, is the one who cut down Mayflower in the full bloom of his life. But you can read all about that in tomorrow’s New York Times. Look for it in Alexander Woollcott’s column.”

  They turned and walked away, leaving a gape-mouthed Battersby on the steps of the police station.

  “You should talk to Detective Orangutan,” Benchley called over his shoulder. “Lovely fellow. He’d be happy to answer all of your questions. Tell him we sent you.”

  Dorothy and Woodrow Wilson approached the entrance to the behemoth of a building that was the Lord & Taylor department store. An explosive boom suddenly drowned out the din of the midday traffic. Woody hunched down like a frightened toad. Dorothy spun around to see a sooty black cloud of exhaust belch from the tailpipe of a nearby double-decker bus. Its engine, she gathered, had just backfired.

  “There, there.” She picked up the dog, cuddled it in her arms and pushed open the large glass-and-brass door of the department store. As she walked past the cosmetics counter, she caught sight of her gaunt reflection in a mirror.

  Nowadays, women of all kinds wore lipstick and rouge. The cosmetic industry should invent something for the bags under one’s eyes, she thought. I could carry my groceries in these.

  She consulted the directory and found the bookstore. She didn’t consider bookstores heartrending, as Benchley did. Then again, she didn’t find them magical or wondrous, as Faulkner seemed to. To her, a bookstore was the equivalent of a hardware store—a place to obtain one’s necessary tools, equipment and supplies.

  Once inside the bookstore, she stopped an aproned salesclerk and asked him to point out the manager. The clerk, with an odd look in his eye, directed her to the back of the store.

  At first, Dorothy assumed the clerk reacted strangely because she carried a dog—and not a very handsome dog, she conceded—in her arms. Then, when she spotted the bookstore manager, she understood the clerk’s surprise, for she had the same reaction.

  The manager looked almost exactly like her. The woman was about the same age and height as she. The woman had dark, bobbed hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses. Dorothy’s hair wasn’t quite a bob, and she wore her glasses only for reading. Still ... the main difference between them: The woman wore a crimson dress, while Dorothy’s dress was dark blue.

  Also, the woman held a pen and clipboard in her hands, not a gargoyle-like Boston terrier.

  Dorothy approached her. “Pardon me.”

  The woman turned. She had a sober, discriminating face, which tightened when she saw the dog.

  “Customers are not to bring dogs into the store. I’m sorry.” She didn’t seem sorry in the least.

  “I’m not a customer,” Dorothy said. “I’m a friend of one of your employees, William Faulkner.”

  The woman’s face softened. She forgot about the dog.

  “William? He gave his notice all of a sudden a few days ago. Is he all right?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “I haven’t seen him. I was very sorry to say good-bye. Not a very earnest worker, I’m afraid. But he’s a dear boy, isn’t he? I felt I had taken him under my wing.”

  Dorothy was surprised to feel a sting of jealousy. As they talked further, she learned this woman’s name, Elizabeth Prall.

  She also learned that Ms. Prall had no idea where Faulkner lived. He had his personal mail sent in care of the store, which was against the rules. Several times, packages and letters from Mississippi arrived, along with stern admonishments from one of the department store’s directors. To these admonishments, Faulkner paid no heed, as Ms. Prall recalled with a wistful smile.

  “Did he explain why he gave notice?” Dorothy said.

  “He said he could no longer sell books that other people wrote. He wanted to sell books that he wrote. He wanted to find his voice as a writer.”

  “That sounds like our Billy. Well, if you hear from him, would you please contact me at the Algonquin Hotel?”

  “Certainly, and may I trouble you to contact me likewise?”

  Dorothy politely, albeit rather unwillingly, said she would, and bid Ms. Prall good-bye.

  Back outside the store, she unloaded Woodrow Wilson to the sidewalk. The dog hesitated and sat cowering at her feet, apparently recalling the bang of the bus’s backfire from before. She goaded him along.

  But, like the dog, she felt an anxious twinge, too. She had come to a dead end. She didn’t know how to locate Faulkner. She didn’t even have the hope of knowing how to find him, and she worried where he might be. Maybe he was held against his will in some dank basement. Maybe he’d been tied up and plunked like a potato sack into the East River. Maybe ...

  But then she reconsidered. If she couldn’t find Faulkner, perhaps others couldn’t find him either. Neither the police nor that Sandman thug knew his real last name. They’d have been looking for William Dachshund. She allowed herself a smile; she’d thoughtfully provided him with an alias—it just might save his life.

  After all, the Sandman was a well-known criminal. He couldn’t hide for long. The police would track down his hideouts. Or one of his partners in crime would rat him out. Soon, once the gunman was locked up, Faulkner could show his innocent face again.

  Innocent. Innocent? It gave her pause. She literally stopped in her tracks. Woody jerked to a halt at the end of his leash. Passersby grumbled as they maneuvered around her. But she didn’t take notice.

  If Faulkner was indeed innocent—if he had told the police all he knew—why did they need him anymore? Why had that police captain wanted to keep him in custody? Why did they so desperately want him back in custody?

  This was too much for her. This was more worry than she had ever expected when she first took the bedraggled young man under her wing just a few days ago.

  Mr. Benchley was right, she realized. She had to stop picking up strays.

  Chapter 18

  Late that night, Dorothy Parker stood alone amid the crowd inside Tony Soma’s speakeasy and waited for Mr. Benchley to arrive. Then, like a genie, he materialized at her side, with his pipe in his mouth contributing to the haze of smoke.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Parker.”

  He handed her a teacup, which held two fingers of good hard scotch.

  “Fred, I’ve been waiting for you for a dog’s age. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  He merely smiled, raised his coffee mug and clinked it with hers, and they drank.

  “There are a lot of jokes going around
,” Benchley finally said. “Did you hear the one about Leland Mayflower?” He paused. “One of the Round Tablers took a pen and wrote him off.”

  She frowned, offended more by the joke’s lack of wit than by its lack of truth.

  “Here’s another one,” he said. “What do the Pilgrims and the notoriety of the Vicious Circle have in common?” Again he paused. “They all rode in on the Mayflower.”

  “Is that the best that people can do?” she said sourly. “Wit and scandal make strange bedfellows and lousy jokes.”

  Despite her frown, she was glad to see Benchley again. After her fruitless visit to the bookstore, she had dutifully spent the afternoon at her desk at the offices of Vanity Fair, but she performed as little work as possible.

  Her editor, Frank Crowninshield, had given her a book to review. Her mind was distracted, and she wasn’t willing to commit herself to writing the full review just yet. She merely jotted some notes, her first impressions of the book.

  You simply cannot put this book down, she wrote, fast enough.

  But you can put this book down by other means: It’s boring, it’s repetitive, and it uses words in ways not found in Webster’s. I could construct other put-downs, but they involve the kind of colorful expletives not permitted in this publication.

  That’s a start, she thought.

  She left the office at the stroke of five o’clock. Then she spent the early part of the evening restlessly lingering in her apartment, hoping once again that Faulkner might appear, safe and sound, at her door. She knew that Mr. Benchley was busy with an assignment to review a Broadway play and wouldn’t be available until later. And now, finally, that hour had arrived.

  And here he was, his cheerful grin and merry wink in place, as reliable as Christmas. The scotch made her feel warm, and she wanted to hug him.

  Of course, she did not.

  “How was the play?” she asked blandly.

  “Just dandy,” he said. “It was a romantic comedy about Eskimos. You could half shut your eyes and almost kid yourself into believing you were at the North Pole. Then again, you could entirely shut your eyes and almost kid yourself into believing that you were counting sheep. I opted for the latter.”

  “Benchley’s two-word review,” she said. “‘Very restful.’”

  “And did you have an equally productive day?”

  She recounted her largely uninformative expedition to the bookstore, her futile afternoon at the office and her wasted evening at home.

  “Fear not for young Faulkner,” Benchley said. “Think about this. Now that Detective O’Tannenbaum and the other Keystone Kops know that this Sanderson fellow is at the heart of the mystery, they’ll forget all about Billy. Some other explanation is bound to come out. Likely, Mayflower had some long-standing gambling debts with some dicey characters. And that elderly ninny probably thought that no gangster would ever so much as lay a hand on the sleeve of his old-fashioned topcoat. So, Lucky Lou or Diamond Harry called in some muscle in the form of the Sandman.”

  “And?”

  “And Mayflower probably sneezed on the fellow. Or jabbed him with a barbed quip. The thug responded the only way his kind knows how, with violence. That’s probably the story in a nutshell.”

  “In a nutshell?” she said. “That’s where your story belongs. If the man is a real gangster, why would he stab Mayflower in the heart with a fountain pen? Why not use a gun, or at least a knife? And why do this at our Round Table in the middle of the day? Why would this gunman not handle such a task at his typical time and in his typical element—a silent, darkened alley in the middle of the night, pistol in hand?”

  But to these questions Benchley had no answer. He thought for a moment, and he brightened.

  “Have you read the latest restaurant review of the Algonquin?” he said finally. “They say the food won’t kill you, but the customers might.”

  The following afternoon, Dorothy sat in a plush lounge chair in the Algonquin lobby. In front of her, on the low coffee table, was a bell. It was the silver half-dome type with a button on top. When rung, it would summon a waiter. She had the urgent desire to slam the bell repeatedly. She resisted the maddening urge to kick the damn thing right off the table.

  But the bell, she realized, was not at fault. It sat there innocent, squat and silent. Rather, it was the open newspaper in her lap—the Knickerbocker—that had raised her anger.

  The cover headline blared, POLICE HUNT MISSING “DACHSHUND”! Inside, the main article described William Dachshund as a “morose, sullen, disaffected itinerant—his face half-hidden by an unkempt beard—who apparently hails from the deepest regions of the South, although this is uncertain, as Mr. Dachshund is also reputed to be a charlatan and compulsive liar.”

  The article went on to say that “Dachshund is wanted desperately by the police in regard to the dastardly and cowardly murder of the Knickerbocker’s own esteemed drama critic and columnist, Leland Mayflower.”

  The article glossed over how Faulkner had been released, even implying that he had as good as escaped. “Through an inadvertent administrative error, the suspect was temporarily given leave of police custody. That was when Mr. Dachshund, as any guilty party would, took the first opportunity to slip free and hied away immediately, disappearing into the anonymity of the city streets. But he won’t remain anonymous for long.”

  The article continued, providing a detailed description of Faulkner’s physical appearance and manner of dress, and assuring readers that the public could soon rest easy thanks to the “dogged pursuit and eventual swift capture” by Detective O’Rannigan. Although this was annoying enough, what really enraged Dorothy was that Battersby (for his byline was on the article) never once mentioned that the reason why the police brought in “Dachshund” in the first place was to provide a description of the gunman. Indeed, the article included no mention of the gangster, nor the name Knut Sanderson, nor even the more sensational sobriquet of Sandman.

  That this was Saturday—the day of the week that newspapers receive the least readership—was no consolation to her. Neither was the article in the New York Times, authoritatively penned by Alexander Woollcott, that described in detail the nearly fatal encounter that she, Benchley and “Dachshund” had had with the Sandman.

  It was some time before she realized that three of the members of the Vicious Circle had dropped into the other chairs around the coffee table.

  “Dottie, did you even hear me?” said Marc Connelly, sitting at her left. Directly opposite her, George Kaufman sat slumped in his chair. To her right sat Harold Ross.

  Connelly and Kaufman were a successful playwriting duo. Connelly was a fast-talking showboat. He had sharp features and a round, bald head. Kaufman, his opposite, was a sly sourpuss. The mournful eyes under Kaufman’s knitted brows tended to gaze over his spectacles. Where Connelly was energetic, Kaufman was laconic. They were something like the quibbling but inseparable old married couple often depicted in the kind of conventional Broadway plays that they themselves satirized in their own plays.

  “Did you hear what I just said?” Connelly repeated.

  Dorothy looked quizzically at him. “Did you say something worth hearing?”

  “Ross has been beating our ears about this new magazine he wants to launch,” Connelly said. “Tell her about it, Ross. Let’s see what she thinks.”

  Harold Ross (everyone simply called him Ross) was the black sheep of the Round Table, or perhaps the dark horse. He didn’t speak in quick wisecracks or enlightened insights. Just the opposite. He was often slow to catch on to the joke or understand an esoteric reference. But he absorbed all they said, and he was a hell of an audience for them.

  Ross had the face of a gap-toothed gargoyle and a spiky head of hair like an upturned shoeshine brush. Despite his homely appearance, he had a discerning, even wry gleam to his eye.

  “Okay, here’s the idea.” Ross leaned forward on the edge of his seat, elbows on his knees, his jacket sleeves hitched up to his forearms.
“I know I’m just the editor for American Legion Weekly. But I think—goddamn it, I know—there’s room for a smart, high-class magazine that covers all the goings-on in New York. It will be by New Yorkers and for New Yorkers. The hell with the old lady in Dubuque; this won’t be for her. And the hell with Vanity Fair and Collier’s and the American Mercury . This magazine won’t have an article about pets, or ladies’ fashions, or lawyers. It’ll have some news articles, some fiction, some poems, some cartoons. ... It won’t be snobbish or arty or high-minded, but God damm it, it’ll be smart. What do you think?”

  “I’m impressed. I’m all for it. I’m sure it will be a huge success,” she said. “And I’m the Queen of Romania.”

  Ross frowned; his shoulders drooped.

  “See?” Connelly cackled. “Your magazine will fly when pigs do. Now, never mind that nonsense. How about a game of cribbage? We have a foursome right here. We’ll play teams.”

  Connelly drew a deck of cards from his jacket pocket and dealt them. Dorothy folded up the Knickerbocker News and picked up her hand. Cribbage was just a warm-up for these boys, of course. The main event for them was the poker game that night.

  The game flew by, and Kaufman and Connelly wound up winning. They were playing another game (with Dorothy and Ross in the lead) when Frank Case strolled by. The genteel and solicitous hotel manager said politely, “Looks like great fun.” They understood immediately what he meant: Please don’t play cards in the lobby of my hotel.

  Connelly picked up the deck of cards and cribbage board. “Boy, cribbage works up a man’s thirst.”

  They migrated to the usual room on the second floor. Heywood Broun was there by the door, setting up bottles of gin, scotch and beer. Alexander Woollcott sat ensconced behind the round table (not the Round Table). He shuffled the cards and stacked up poker chips.

  Dorothy stopped in the doorway and watched what they were doing. “You boys sure know how to treat a woman,” she said. “Liquor in the front and poker in the rear.”