The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  A short time later, Harry returned to his flat, and not long afterward, Ding Dong and Red Farrell joined him. There was no sign of either Kid Yorke or, alas, my feather boa.

  I stood in the doorway with my glass of gin. Red Farrell was stretched out on Harry’s dilapidated sofa; Ding Dong sat cross-legged on his cluttered desk. Harry lit a cigar.

  “What do you know?” I asked.

  “She weren’t on da street,” Red Farrell mumbled without removing the derby from his face. “She were wid some rich people what has a private saloon on da Park.”

  My knuckles went white on the door jam. “I know them. Everyone knows them. Not a saloon, Mr Farrell, a salon. Harry?”

  Harry nodded. “It appears that Fania was befriended by Clara Walling.”

  The drawing room was white, white walls, white rugs; the damask draperies were white, the chairs and sofas covered in white velvet, the chandelier, white porcelain. Our hostess was an imposing older woman, perhaps in her mid-thirties. A brazen silver streak marked her otherwise dark brown hair. She wore a gown lush in pattern and the color of burgundy, made even more outstanding as she was posed in front of a white marble fireplace.

  She greeted me with, “My dear Olivia Brown, I’m so glad to meet you at last. I’ve been telling Edward for the longest time that he must bring you –”

  “I always respond to invitations when I receive them,” I said, smiling away a pinch of tartness. I did not like Clara Walling.

  She locked arms with me. “I’m sure you know most everyone here. Edward, do get Oliver – if I may – some champagne.”

  I dipped my head. “Olivia,” I said. I took the fluted glass from Edward. My friends call me Oliver. Clara Walling would not be my friend.

  “Perhaps you don’t know Jack Dempsey.” She was taking the high ground, as if we were in competition. Maybe we were, if she and Edward had become lovers. “He’s standing in front of the bay window with Lincoln Steffens and –” She rolled her peculiar pale hazel eyes – “all those girls. You’re safe,” she continued, touching my red tresses with what I thought to be too much familiarity. “Jack only likes dark-haired girls.”

  “Bother,” I said. “What a disappointment.” I was saved by the arrival of Hart Crane and Allen Tate, followed by that notorious lecher Max Bodenheim. Every starving poet, not to mention writer and artist, turned up at Clara Walling’s Evenings because she served a sumptuous feast at midnight, a groaning board of ham and turkey and imported cheeses, and the very best of French wines.

  As I greeted my friends, I drifted toward the new heavyweight champion who liked only dark haired girls. I do love a challenge, don’t you know.

  “Oliver!” Lincoln Steffens spotted me – he stood well above everyone but Dempsey. Greeting me with a wet kiss and arm round my shoulders, he pressed his way to the side of the champ. “Champ, meet our resident girl poet, Oliver Brown.”

  Dempsey’s an enormous slab of a man with dark, intelligent eyes. My tiny hand entered a maw of muscle. It was not at all an unpleasant sensation. “Oliver?” he said. His voice was gruff, almost shy. I didn’t think he was terribly comfortable in this setting.

  “My friends think Oliver suits me better than Olivia.”

  “I like Olivia,” the Champ said, my hand still lost in his.

  The dark hair girls round him stirred uneasily. I smiled.

  Then, wouldn’t you know, Michael Walling appeared at my side, apologized to the Champ and whispered in my ear, “Clara likes her guests to circulate and meet other people.” And I was rather unceremoniously plucked from the Champ’s presence.

  In that brief moment, as Michael took my arm and steered me away from Dempsey, my eyes met Clara’s amid the crowd – there must have been close to two hundred people. She did not like me any more than I did her.

  Who was Clara Walling? Where had she come from?

  After Harry and I discovered Fania’s connection to Clara Walling, I toddled off to Vogue to talk with Edward, ostensibly about the half dozen poems they were buying. He took me to lunch at the Waldorf. We talked about the death of the girl, Fania Ferrara.

  “I’m not sure we should plan any more balls,” he said. “We’re just attracting too many people from outside, and we don’t know who they are.”

  “Michael is such a dear man,” I said, moving the corned beef hash round my plate. The Waldorf was Uptown proper, which meant, no alcohol. “I’d heard last year that his press was in financial difficulties, but he was so reassuring.”

  “It’s Clara, her money, you know. First husband was an oil man, died and left her a fortune. You’ll love her. She’s amazing.”

  I would reserve judgment, I thought. “How did Michael meet her?”

  “He’d gone to see a writer in St Louis, and there she was. A hot-house rose among field flowers.”

  Oh, Edward, I thought, what has she done to you?

  He continued, not noticing my horror at his poor metaphor. “Clara had always wanted to live in the Village. She had such a drab and boring existence in St Louis.”

  When I got back to Bedford Street, Harry was in a funk, feet up on his desk, drinking rye whiskey from the bottle. He told me Kilcannon had just left. The police had talked with Clara Walling. She firmly denied knowing Fania.

  “Ding Dong could be mistaken,” I said.

  Harry looked dubious. “They don’t miss much.”

  I agreed. I reported what I’d learned from Edward.

  It turned out that one of Harry’s Princeton chums was from St Louis. “Family publishes The Post-Dispatch,” he said. “I’ll get him on it.”

  We made a plan. I would go to Clara’s Evening with Edward and see what I could glean.

  So here I was, not gleaning very much. I slipped past Hippolyte Havel, one of our resident raving anarchists, who held his champagne glass up high and yelled, “Goddam bourgeois pigs!” then embraced me, blubbering, “Not you, Oliver, never you.”

  When a waiter offered more champagne, I was one of many who held out empty glasses. Beside me stood a girl about my age in a flowing silken dress of shades of blue. Her small face was almost hidden by the fullness of her hair, black with glints of gold and she had black gypsy eyes, touched with kohl. She looked vaguely familiar.

  “You’re Olivia Brown, the poet, aren’t you?” she said in a child-like voice.

  “Guilty,” I replied, taking a hearty swallow of champagne. The room was extraordinary, the ceilings high and molded with cupids and love knots, but it was beginning to undulate. I wondered if we were nearing buffet time as I was more than a little tipsy and I had work to do. “What a beautiful room,” I said. The girl was staring at me expectantly over her fluted glass.

  “Yes,” she said. “My aunt has exquisite taste.”

  Oliver, my dear, I told myself, you live under a lucky star. I turned my radiant smile on her. “Your aunt?”

  “Clara. Yes. She’s invited me to stay while I’m studying painting at the Art Students League.”

  “How very interesting . . .” I said. We were becoming manipulated by the crowd of hungry artists. It was nearing midnight. “In all this,” I waved my hand, “I’ve missed your name.”

  At this moment the butler slid open the doors to the dining room and we were caught in the forward surge and as we became separated, I heard her say, “Camilla Faye.”

  Tipsy I may get, but I never forget a name. Camilla Faye was strung across my brain flashing in red neon. Camilla Faye is the name of Fania Ferrara’s alleged imaginary friend.

  I, being a mere slip of a girl, couldn’t get near the table, but bohemian tour guide Franz, without his moth-eaten cloak, clad in sackcloth and sandals and his filthy crimson Byronesque tie, tried to feed me from his plate of sliced ham and turkey. He stared at me with lascivious eyes.

  I edged my way to the open doorway Edward and I had passed through earlier. A maid directed me up the broad marble staircase to a bathroom, second door on the right of the wide corridor. The staircase, no longer
marble, continued upward to a third floor.

  There were three other doors off the corridor.

  The master bedroom, first door on the left, was obviously Clara’s, a true boudoir, lace and ruffles. A spot of color on the chaise brought me into the room. It was the remains of a brilliant bird costume.

  Michael’s bedroom was across the way, first door on the right, next to the bathroom.

  After a quick peek, I passed both, as this was not in the plan. I opened another door, looking for Camilla Faye’s room, but it was a wood paneled library. Books always seduce. Yes, there were books shelved floor to ceiling. But under glass was a gun cabinet, and beside it, also behind glass, a cabinet filled with archery equipment. Both cabinets were locked.

  I left the library and slipped down the servants’ stairs at the end of the hall. I heard moaning, male and female, and thumping. I peered into the kitchen. The moaning was coming from the scullery where china was scoured and washed, but where the scullery maid had a better idea of how to use her time.

  No one was in the kitchen, at least for now. At any moment someone could be here. The kitchen was warm and steamy, the outside door slightly ajar. I moved quickly, hoping it wouldn’t squeak as I opened it.

  It did squeak but the noisy celebration from the scullery obstructed it. Harry, distinguished in clean corduroys, a flannel shirt, black beret, and an ascot of tiny fleurs-de-lis on a faded blue field, was waiting just as we’d planned. “Any problems?”

  “You may thank the lovers in the scullery, bless them.” I led him up the back stairs, pointed out Clara’s room and Michael’s and the library, where Harry wanted to have a look at the archery equipment. But we heard people talking on the stairs and made it into the bathroom in the nick of time, locking someone out. Whoever it was gave the door a few pounds, complained querulously, then quit. Harry turned the water taps on full. I noted they were gold.

  “What else do you know?”

  “Camilla Faye is a real person.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Clara Walling is her aunt.”

  “Ah, poor Fania.” Harry’s eyes were moist. “We let her down.”

  “Nobody believed her.”

  “We all had other lives to lead.”

  “But am I mistaken, Fania thought this Camilla was her friend?”

  “She trusted her. They went on adventures together, so she said.”

  Someone pounded on the door. “Oliver, are you in there?”

  “Good heavens, wouldn’t you think Edward would be busy with his inamorata?”

  “See if you can use your wiles and lure him away,” Harry said.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Oliver,” Edward said, hand on my waist.

  I walked him firmly toward the stairs. “I couldn’t get near the banquet table and I’m so hungry,” I said, giving him a hint of a kiss under his chin.

  “Well, we’ll remedy that at once,” he said.

  Edward left me to share a sofa with Max Eastman and John Sloan, who kissed me fondly and then went back to discussing the implications of the Sacco and Vanzetti case. I would have joined in but Camilla Faye strayed past and I went after her.

  I touched her arm. “Camilla, I’m sorry we weren’t able to continue our conversation. Do you know we have a mutual friend?”

  She gave me half a smile, indeed a cautious smile.

  “I am new to the city,” she said, moving away from me. “I would be surprised to hear we know someone in common.”

  “Oh, but we do,” I replied, at my most guileless. “Fania Ferrara.”

  Camilla shook my hand from her arm. “I know no one by that name.”

  She fled and I didn’t follow her. Instead, I had another glass of champagne and asked a maid for my cloak, and as Edward had quite disappeared and Harry could take care of himself, I headed home, thoughts jumbling round my brain.

  If Camilla Faye had befriended Fania Ferrara, what was her purpose? And what had Clara Walling to do with this?

  As I neared my house, I saw a Western Union boy park his bicycle against my gate and walk to my door. He was carrying a telegram.

  I rushed the rest of the way. “Is that for me?”

  “It is if your name is Harry Melville,” he said, smartly. “Which it is not.”

  “How do you know it’s not?”

  “Because you’re Olivia Brown the poet and I saw your picture in the paper.”

  Well, I ask you, how can one argue with fame?

  Harry opened his door. “Ah, good,” he said. He tipped the Western Union boy a dime and took the telegram. “Come on in, Oliver. Here’s what I’ve been waiting for.” He opened the telegram.

  I sat gingerly on the arm of his sofa. I know better than to try dodging the springs. “Well? Am I never to know what it says?”

  Harry folded the telegram and put it in his pocket and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I called Kilcannon and told him to meet me at the Walling house.” He was out the door before I got to my feet.

  “Wait, Harry, I’m coming with you.”

  He looked back in time to see me trip over the thick roots of an old tree that were breaking through the sidewalk near Sixth Avenue, then waited for me to catch up. “You need a keeper,” he said.

  “Just tell me what the telegram said.”

  He unfolded the telegram. “Born Claire Kerr. St Louis. Good family. Sent to Florence to study art. Parents die while she’s in Italy. Marries into old but impoverished Italian family. Becomes Clara. Finds that her inheritance comes to nothing because of her father’s unfortunate investments.” He tugged at my hand. “Don’t slow down.”

  “Ah,” I said, “impoverished Italian family. That would be the Ferraras?”

  “Yes. There is a child. Camilla.” He took a drink from his flask and passed it to me.

  I was grateful beyond belief. “The plot thickens.”

  “Here’s what I think happened. Walk, Oliver. Fania’s mother Louisa arrives in Florence to see the museums. She meets Ferrara, who’s a charming cad, and falls for him. She doesn’t know he’s married and he and Clara decide it’s not in their best interest to tell her. Louisa’s wealth is obvious. When Louisa returns to Boston, Ferrara follows her, probably with Clara’s approval.”

  We were rushing across Sixth Avenue against the light. Harry held up his hand like a traffic cop. A town car screeched to a halt. “Bloody hell,” Harry yelled. “You want to kill us?” Further sharp words were exchanged.

  I tugged on Harry’s sleeve. “Let’s go. Finish the story.”

  Safely back on the sidewalk, Harry said, “Where was I?”

  “Ferrara follows Louisa Lowell to Boston.”

  “Yes, and marries her, much against the family’s wishes. Louisa dies when Fania’s born. Ferrara returns to Clara in Italy, leaving Fania to the Lowells.”

  “But Clara is no fool. Fania is an heiress.”

  Harry nodded. “Clara makes plans to come back to the States, but the War intervenes and they must wait.”

  “So she sends Camilla to Boston to befriend Fania, somehow.”

  We turned the corner onto Washington Square.

  “Yes, And Clara goes home to St Louis in the guise of a wealthy widow. She opens the family house, and tries to find a way to Fania’s inheritance. Then by chance she meets Michael Walling.”

  I laughed. “He thinks she’s got money, she thinks he’s got money. A perfect relationship.”

  “Clara sees it as her opening to come East and help Camilla eliminate Fania.”

  “So Michael and Clara marry. And all the while Ferrara is waiting in Florence for his inheritance. These are nasty people, Harry.”

  The Walling house was dark.

  We were too late.

  Ding Dong came out of the park when he saw Harry. “Dey just got a taxi. Da old lady and da goil.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Poor Michael,” I said.

  “Da s
teamship line,” Ding Dong said.

  Harry reached into his pocket. “They can’t go anywhere without these.” He had two passports.

  “Dey won’t get far anyways.”

  “How so?”

  “Kid Yorke slashed da tires.” Ding Dong’s nose twitched as if he detected an odd smell. He faded into the dusky park.

  And Kilcannon rounded the corner with Gerry Brophy.

  Clara and Camilla Ferrara were arrested for Fania’s murder, though neither admitted being the deadly archer. And had Ferrara’s marriage to Louisa Lowell been legitimate, Ferrara might have inherited a fortune. But as it was, even had Clara blamed the plot entirely on her husband, the evidence wasn’t strong enough for the Italian authorities to either charge him or return him to America.

  As for me, having lost both lover and publisher, I went back to my work.

  Dialogue with Butterfly

  Poor butterfly circling round my head,

  “Oh, joy, oh joy,” I hear you cry.

  Poor lovely creature, don’t you know

  That you are doomed to die?

  You flutter softly near my heart,

  Which wounded, still lies bleeding.

  “However short my life,” you say.

  “Mortal love’s more fleeting.”

  Brave New Murder

  H. R. F. KEATING

  Harry Keating has been writing crime fiction – and writing about crime fiction – for forty years now, so hardly needs any introduction. He is best known for his series about Inspector Ghote of the Bombay C.I.D., but he has written much else besides, including several historical mystery novels. This includes a series written under the alias Evelyn Hervey about Victorian governess Harriet Unwin who first appeared in The Governess (1984). Here he turns his attention to the early years of the 1920s and how the old world had to come face to face with the new.

  Perhaps it was the glory of England returning after the grim days of the Great War. Or perhaps it would prove, after all, to be something quite otherwise. It was the day of the first post-war Eton and Harrow match, that annual event, more social than sporting, which in the years up to 1914 had brought together in one place, Lord’s cricket ground, almost all the Upper Ten Thousand. There, on the excuse of watching the next generation bat and bowl, as many of them had themselves in past years generation after generation, they had come once more to parade themselves in the sunshine, to assert their status once again. And in the Pavilion and in beflagged tents, dark blue and light, to have luncheon.