The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  “She told you not to bring me, am I right?” I accused.

  He grinned at me and loosened his tie, opened his shirt collar. We walked into Washington Square Park and sat on a bench as the meager sun cantered westward. Harry took off his jacket, though there was a definite chill in the air.

  “It’s hard to imagine that those lovely poems come from that immense barrel of flesh.”

  Smirking, Harry offered me his flask, at long last, and I finished off what little gin was left.

  “And what could possibly be so secret that she had to whisper for your ear only?”

  “That Fania has mutilated herself,” he said, with a total lack of concern.

  “Callous fellow!” I imagined dreadful things consisting of wounds and scars of the ear and nose variety. “Mutilated? In what way?”

  “She has shaved her head and painted her scalp blue.”

  “Ah, an original. I would like to meet this Fania.”

  We smoked our cigarettes in silence. Harry appeared to be thinking, but one never quite knows with Harry. He could have been enjoying the waning light or the slim ankles of the college girls in their short skirts who strolled by.

  “So you’re one of those Lowells, are you?” I said.

  “An accident of birth.”

  “You might have mentioned it in passing.”

  “It’s not a part of my life.”

  “Now it is. Have you considered that poor Fania Lowell may not have a mania?”

  “The Boston doctors diagnosed it. Aggressive behavior in fear of death.”

  “Timor mortis,” I murmured, a poem forming in my mind.

  “And her name is not Fania Lowell. It’s Fania Ferrara.”

  “You Lowells do hide out under peculiar names,” I said. “Melville. Ferrara. What next?”

  We made a detour to the Hell Hole, once known by the gracious but incongruous name of The Golden Swan. It is an Irish saloon, the damp smell of beer ingrained in the wood of the sawdust-covered floor and disreputable tables. A thug named Lefty Louie tends bar, ready to throw out anyone who doesn’t belong. The place is a favorite of Tammany bosses, gangsters, pimps, gamblers, and all sorts of low lifes, including artists and writers, Gene O’Neill being one, and the notorious Village street gang, the Hudson Dusters. The Dusters claim the Village, south of Thirteenth and west of Broadway, as their territory. They cluster in houses below Horatio and around Bethune on Hudson Street.

  Harry steered me past the bar entrance on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, with some sort of mumbled explanation which I could not hear because of the thunderous passage of trains overhead on the Sixth Avenue El. They don’t allow women, not even me, in the Hell Hole’s gents-only Front Room, where above the doorway hangs the original wooden sign featuring a tarnished golden swan.

  We girls are consigned to the so-called Family Entrance, a half glass door on Fourth Street. It leads to the Back Room, dreary and gas lit, smelling of mildew and fermentation, not to mention smoke, more from the blustery potbellied stove than from our cigarettes.

  “Why don’t I just run along home,” I said, churlishly. I didn’t like being consigned to the widows’ closet.

  Harry chucked me under the chin. “Impatience doesn’t suit you.”

  Even after Harry brought me a chary cup of gin, I was not a happy creature sitting there among the piteous Irish widows weeping into their mugs of beer. The shouting and laughter from the Front Room drifted into my dreary spot. I took out my pencil and my little pad and wrote: Timor Mortis.

  I was playing with a fair phrase when my nostrils were assaulted by an acrid, albeit familiar odor. The tenor of the room altered, almost with a concerted shudder. Standing over me was Red Farrell, one of the Hudson Dusters. The few weeping widows in the room cringed and kept their eyes in their beer mugs.

  For some reason – another thing Harry has never shared – the Dusters are totally loyal to him. They have, in fact, watched over me when my life was in danger, and they treat me as some kind of mascot. But I admit, they take getting used to and if I didn’t have this strange relationship with them, they would scare me half to death.

  “Olwer!” Red Farrell doffed his tatty wool cap, releasing a conflagration. He’s nothing short of a terror to behold. His ear is partially chewed. A scar runs down the left side of his face from his brow to his scraggly goatee. His eyes are pale blue, the pupils tiny black dots. The acrid smell was coming from the dark weed clenched between his teeth.

  The Dusters call me Olwer because when Harry introduced us, he was recovering from a bad beating; he’d tried to say Oliver, and it had come out Olwer. They just assumed that’s my name.

  “Mr Farrell,” I said. “How nice to see you again.”

  “Sherlock wants youse.” The Dusters call Harry Sherlock, I suppose for obvious reasons. His breath made my eyes tear. I drank the rest of my gin and put my pad and pencil in my pocket.

  “Olwer!” If Red Farrell is only terrifying, Ding Dong, the Dusters’ leader, who was standing on the street next to Harry grinning at me through discolored teeth, is far worse. His smashed nose is but a small part of the picture. He was wearing a long, dark green velvet jacket, baggy trousers, an aviator silk scarf that had once been white. His derby was squashed down on his head almost to his bushy brows, which hung in wiry threads over his beady eyes.

  “Mr Ding Dong,” I said, flattered that he had come out of his lair to greet me. “You are looking well.”

  “Youse too, Olwer.” He tilted his head at Red Farrell, the motion enough to send Red back into the Hell Hole.

  I glanced at Harry, who seemed pleased.

  “Have you seen our lady of the blue head?” I asked.

  Ding Dong’s hand made a circular motion near his ear. “Nutters, walkin’ round lookin’ like dat.” He nodded to us and went back inside the Hell Hole.

  Harry had an engagement, probably with his mysterious Uptown inamorata, but after I bemoaned the loss of the martini he’d promised, I suggested he soothe my hurt feelings with one of the bottles of gin I knew he had sitting with the cake of ice in his bathtub. I’d heard his bootlegger deliver in the dead of last night, so I was secure that he would come across.

  Hugging the cold bottle to my breast, I climbed the stairs to my flat and found my dear, sweet Mattie at tea in my narrow little kitchen with her betrothed, Detective Gerry Brophy, whom we had met when we first came to live in the Village.

  “Don’t bother, Gerry,” I said as Gerry struggled to his feet.

  “Olivia.” He was a going-to-orange redhead with loads of freckles and blue eyes that all but disappeared when he smiled, which he was doing at the moment.

  “Olivia, tea?” Mattie said, her face flushed from the kettle, and maybe a little more.

  “Something stronger, I think. Something purely medicinal, Gerry.” I carried the bottle into our parlor and fixed myself the longed for martini. Is there nothing better than the tang of gin on the tongue? I came back into the kitchen. “Oh, Gerry, have you possibly heard about a new girl in the Village with a blue head?”

  “Blue hair, you say?”

  “No hair. A blue scalp.”

  He shook his head. “No, I can’t say I have.”

  “I have,” Mattie said. “I saw her in Washington Square the other day. Dancing under the arches, dressed as a butterfly, she was.”

  “You never mentioned it,” I said. But perhaps I too had seen her earlier in the day, the flare of blue behind me, like the wings of a butterfly.

  “Olivia, this is the Village. Everyone is a little strange.”

  “Cept thee and me,” I said, passing her my glass. She took a sip and passed it along to Gerry, who inhaled the fumes, good cop that he is, and passed it back to me and I finished it. “We must celebrate. Walling House is going to publish my first book of poems.”

  “What happened to Mr Harper?” Mattie asked.

  I slipped a cigarette into my holder and bent to get a light from Gerry. “He went up
in smoke.”

  Webster Hall is an auditorium suitable for social functions. For us it is the perfect place for dancing, with boxes overlooking our dance floor and the bar next door that keeps our whistles wet. Amid flying feathers, Kendall held me close as we spun round the floor, colliding now and then with other spinners, releasing more feathers into the air, until it was as if we had burst a multitude of pillows. I, still languid from making love, buried my face in the hollow of his chest. He is an old friend of Harry’s, from the Great War. Kendall and I are, regrettably, only sometime lovers because he works in Washington for the Secret Service as a cryptographer. Still, I think it is the sensuality of anticipation that makes a long distance affair work well for us.

  A girl in a feathered tutu that was disappearing with each movement danced by with a masked man in a white robe, on which someone had stenciled feathers. The costumes varied from original to extreme, though there were more than enough Robin Hoods and Little Johns. I myself wore a delicious green feather boa, which Mattie and I had found amid elegant clothing in one of the attic trunks that had belonged to Miss Alice, the love of my great aunt Evangeline’s life.

  The Victrola music would start and stop when whoever was winding it went off to refill his glass. But it didn’t matter because we could hardly hear over the noise of the revelers and we made our own music anyway.

  Yet, something disquieted me. A foreboding. I couldn’t seem to put my finger on it, this sense that things were off kilter. A whiff of evil in the air. I pushed the presentiment away. We always have fun at our balls.

  The dance floor had gotten crowded with inebriated Pierrots, street urchins, Robin Hoods of every size and shape, sheiks, and artists and their models. We could hardly move, my derriere pressed to that of a Hun in full regalia, feathers like a wreath atop his pronged helmet.

  I saw Harry at a distance, up in one of the boxes, his arm round Norma Millay. The only concession he’d made to a costume was a huge Indian feather sticking out of his ponytail.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I said, trying to get Harry’s attention. The other boxes were beginning to look like love nests.

  “Go ahead,” Kendall said, dropping a welcome kiss on my parched lips. “I’ll get the gin.” Tall as he is, he got lost in the feathered sea almost immediately.

  As I made my way to the stairs, waving off first knight, then tramp, and finally a drunken caveman who pawed my breasts and tried to plant a gin-tainted kiss somewhere on my face, a creature costumed as a brilliant bird bumped me sharply and what seemed to me deliberately.

  My Irish temper might have gotten the better of me had not the double doors to the street sprung open revealing the prancing hoofs of a white stallion. The revelry came to a stunning halt. Its rider, an apparition in multi-colored feathers, urged the stallion forward. Something like lightning flashed through the air. A simultaneous gasp filled the hall. The apparition’s breast turned crimson. The stallion reared; its rider slid to the floor.

  No one moved. Finally, I pushed my way to the injured person, but Harry, the Indian brave, was already there, on his knees beside the still feathers. When I peered through the gathering crowd, I saw a feathered arrow rising from the motionless crimson breast. What I had initially thought were feathers, were shredded bits of colored silk, like butterfly wings.

  With tenderness most unlike him, Harry brushed the silken shreds from the face of the dead girl, the girl who had ridden in on the white horse, and I saw a flash of vivid blue.

  Fania Ferrara was no longer missing.

  By the time the police arrived, four coppers in midnight blue, the hall had emptied out, the bar next door shuttered, and the owner of the Victrola had disappeared with it as well. All that remained were scores of dirty glasses nestled among the feather carpet, and poor dead Fania, her breast dark with clotted blood surrounding the feathered arrow. And of course, Harry, Kendall, and I.

  You well may ask what happened to the white stallion. It was last seen cantering up Third Avenue, sprouting wings and taking flight, according to an inebriated fellow clinging to one of the iron struts of the El.

  Harry, who’d been holding Fania’s white hand, stood. The copper with the most size and the triple chin spilling over his tight collar gave Harry the once-over. “You know her, Melville?”

  “Her name is Fania Ferrara, Grundig,” Harry said.

  Grundig looked round the big hall, took in the evidence of liquored revelry and the feathers. “And I suppose you four were the only ones here.”

  One needn’t respond to a purely rhetorical question.

  “You better get Kilcannon.” Grundig sent one of the other cops off to find this Kilcannon. Averting his eyes from Fania’s nakedness, he then introduced himself as Sergeant Marcus Grundig, took our names, and suggested we wait for the inspector outside the hall. “This is no place for a lady,” he said.

  I suppose he meant me.

  “Olivia?” Mattie’s voice pierced my stupor.

  I had a beastly hangover, and Kendall, before he left for Washington, had asked me to marry him, spelling for me the end of our affair. I’d sent him off with my usual I’ll-think-about-it. I explained to him that my work comes first, that I have no desire to be either wife or mother, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

  “Olivia.”

  “You’re shouting.”

  “I’m not shouting.”

  I peered out from under the bedclothes. The room was swirling and dipping. I ducked back into the cozy darkness.

  “Olivia. You’d better drink this.”

  I peered out again. The room began to calm itself. Mattie was holding a steaming cup in a saucer.

  “I need a cigarette.”

  She set the cup down on the little table next to my bed and lit one for each of us. “What happened last night?”

  “How do you know anything happened?”

  “Gerry was here this morning with an Inspector Kilcannon. They wanted to see Harry but Harry didn’t answer his door.”

  “We were all upset last night.” I took a sip of the hot black tea. My hand was shaking so that a portion went into the saucer. Mattie took charge of it.

  “The ball ended badly. Harry’s missing cousin Fania was shot dead with a feathered arrow.”

  “Dear God,” Mattie said. Then: “Harry has a cousin?”

  “Harry has more relatives than you would believe. He was terribly upset about Fania.”

  “I should think so.”

  “We’d better see how he is.”

  “Not just yet,” Mattie said. “Inspector Kilcannon is in the parlor. And I saw Harry leaving when I brought the milk in.”

  “We talked to the Inspector last night, or this morning, it was. Told him everything we knew. What else can he want?”

  Mattie went down to entertain Kilcannon while I washed my face and wrapped myself in the green patterned Japanese kimono I’d found in the attic. My head was throbbing. The tea hadn’t helped. I knew just the thing that would cure me and it was in the parlor. Fresh air would have to do. I opened the window. Coming down Bedford Street were Ding Dong, Red Farrell, and Kid Yorke. Knowing they wouldn’t be happy to meet up with Kilcannon, I leaned out of the window. They didn’t see me. I looked round for something to toss and there was my feather boa. I sailed it out the window and it landed auspiciously on Kid Yorke’s derby.

  “Hey, Olwer,” Kid Yorke wrapped my green boa about his scrawny neck.

  Red Farrell and Ding Dong looked up at me.

  “Coppers in my parlor,” I stage whispered.

  They took off with such speed that only a few green feathers fluttered to the street where they had stood only moments before.

  Kilcannon, napkin across his knee, was having a cup of tea and a piece of Mattie’s shortbread. He was what they call Black Irish, a descendant of the Spanish Armada sailors who jumped ship and married Irish girls: hair jet black, skin tone olive, and the sharp blue eyes of his Irish ancestor. He was thick torsoed without being fat, and had a fine
black mustache. In vocation and style, he was as far from any of us here in the Village as you could get. But he was a fine-looking man, and I like fine looking men.

  As I waltzed into my parlor, trying to avert my eyes from the liquor cabinet, Kilcannon got to his feet, dislodging the napkin. “Ah, Miss Brown. I hope you’ll forgive me for disturbing your work.” He set down his teacup and seemed suddenly speechless in my presence.

  Mattie choked back a giggle and left us.

  “I want to do everything I can to help find who killed Fania.” I motioned for him to sit and I sat opposite, taking care with the folds of my kimono before realizing I’d forgotten to put on shoes. I waited for him to ask me whatever it was he wanted to ask, but he was definitely distracted by my bare toes. “Inspector?” I tucked my feet up under me.

  The olive skin on his cheekbones flushed. “Perhaps you know where I can find Mr Melville?”

  “He’s probably gone to the Brevoort to break the news to his cousin Amy Lowell, who came down from Boston yesterday to try to find poor Fania.”

  “Then I’ll be heading in that direction.” He rose, almost reluctantly.

  I joined him at the door to my parlor. “Have you any more information about who could have done this?”

  “Only that there were at least a dozen Robin Hoods and a few Little Johns, all with bows and arrows, and even some Indian braves, say like Melville.”

  I admit to getting a bit huffy. “Harry didn’t have a bow or an arrow and he would never have harmed his cousin.”

  Kilcannon didn’t react. “So Miss Ferrara was staying with Mr Melville while she was visiting the city?”

  Was that the point of his visit? “No. He had no idea she was even here until his cousin Amy told him Fania had run away and was somewhere in the city. She asked Harry to try to find her before –” Oh, dear, I thought, now I’ve done it.

  “Before?”

  “I think you should talk with Harry, or Miss Lowell, about Fania, as I only know a few bits and pieces, second hand.” I shut up after that and as soon as Kilcannon left, I had my taste of gin.