by Ed Ifkovic
“Of course.” I smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that. Somehow, facing Dougie tonight alone is…daunting.”
The minutes passed. No Dougie. I worried, but thought he was hiding in his room, shutting the door to keep Lady Maud and the world away. When Noel arrived, he asked, “Where is he?”
“Perhaps he changed his mind. He sounded—hollow, lost.”
Noel was drumming his fingers on his chin, his gaze faraway. “We need to talk to him.”
“Tonight?”
“As good a night as any.” He looked around my apartment, a clownish grin on his face. “I hope he’s not distracted by your gaudy Christmas tree over there and the excessive red-and-green garlands festooning your draperies. The partridge in the pear tree. The lords a-leaping. The star of Bethlehem on your terrace. The sudden appearance of the Magi sans camels, I trust.”
I laughed. “I figured you’d arrive with an appropriate wreath around your neck.”
“Father Christmas with an ivory cigarette holder and a terribly British public-school ascot. My impression of Oscar Wilde singing ‘Deck the Halls.’”
“With boughs of…folly.”
“You know, dear Edna, I’ve always thought ‘The First Noel’ was written about me. A birthday song to cheer a lonely boy.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
When Dougie did arrive, apologizing and saying that he had to sneak away from Lady Maud’s persistent control and some drunken souls arriving to celebrate the birth of Christ—“The help have the dual role of keeping the whiskey flowing but also guarding the murder suspect so he doesn’t venture astray”—he was overjoyed to see Noel sitting in the wing chair, his head lost in a cloud of smoke. Immediately Dougie settled on the piano bench, leaned into it, and hit a few notes. I groaned—not a pathetic reprise of his last visit, the Johnny-one-note mournful display he’d shared with us.
Noel told him to close the keyboard. “We’re not taking requests quite yet, Dougie.”
Dougie sat across from me on the divan. “Thank you.” For some reason he was dressed in formal wear, an elegant dinner jacket and nattily knotted black tie, yet his shoes were scuffed. The creases in his trousers so sharp they could be knife blade. The debonair man-about-town, to be sure, but something had shifted, and when I caught Noel’s eye, I was certain he noticed what I did.
Gone was the boyishly handsome face, that wide-eyed babyish innocence, that boys’-choir openness. What had appealed about him had always been that inviting face—not a grown man’s rugged look, perhaps weathered skin and pronounced jawline, a hint of five-o’clock beard stubble. No. Dougie appealed because of the huckleberry boy in the man. A mischievous Tom Sawyer, grown now but still brandishing a whitewash brush. Peck’s Bad Boy chomping on a piece of Spearmint. The boy next door, trusted, welcome to marry your daughter. A Congregational Church boy, sort of.
But Dougie had undergone a startling transformation, the charming face now haggard, his eyes cloudy. Dark blotches under those haunted eyes, a web of wrinkles radiating from his mouth. Pale lips, chapped even, a spot of dried blood on one corner of his lower lip. An uneven toilet, minuscule tuffs of missed hair at the jawline. He looked—beaten. The Hoover hobo dressed up for the cotillion and then refused at the door.
Under his breath Noel mumbled one word in my direction. “Wounded.”
We sat at my mahogany dining room table, the three of us bunched at one end, and I served the dinner Rebecca left me: marinated cold chicken, a German potato salad, a loaf of rye bread Rebecca had picked up at Katz’s Delicatessen on First Avenue, sour cream cauliflower. Picnic in Central Park food, though I lit two candles and dimmed the lights. Dougie absently nibbled on a chicken leg and with his fork pushed away the cauliflower, though he squinted at it, as if trying to identify it as flora or fauna. He did sip the tumbler of whiskey I provided, a generous Christmas gift from Neysa McMein, who insisted the coming end of Prohibition meant she’d have to invent new Christmas gift ideas in future years. “Damn that Roosevelt.” Her favorite curse these days. Dougie idly poured himself a second glass, though I considered stopping him. I didn’t.
“Talk to us,” Noel began.
Dougie waved his hands in the air aimlessly. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Start,” I jumped in, irritated, “with why you are back at your mother’s.”
He sighed. “I never really left. After our problems, those arguments, I did stay mostly at the Stanhope.”
“So you’ve given up your rooms there?” From Noel.
He nodded. “Yeah, I had to. Everyone looks at me. Everyone accuses with their eyes.”
“That’s to be expected.”
A flash of anger. “You’d think people would be better behaved. Especially at a place like—the club.”
“Rich people aren’t excluded from incivility.” Noel said. “Usually they perfect the art.”
“Whatever that means,” Dougie grumbled. “It’s just that people avoid me. You know, I never really had close friends—somehow my parents didn’t allow it—and no one from school. Lord, even at my mother’s the staff turns away from me. They hide away from me, they whisper, they approach me as if I’m a leper.” His voice got raspy. “I am a leper.” He twisted around. “I have trouble looking in a mirror.”
“For now,” I said, comforting. “This will end. When…” My words trailed off.
“Will it?” Another flash of anger. “For God’s sake, this will be the story of my life forever more.”
I finished my sentence. “When they find the murderer, Dougie. That’s what has to happen.”
“How? How?” His voice broke.
A moment of silence, Noel gazing out the dark window and me—I stared into Dougie’s shaking face and didn’t know what I hoped to see. Noel was obviously troubled—puzzled. You could see it in his eyes. I had a harder edge, I realized—I was bothered by Dougie’s anger, his weakness. Maybe I sensed that he was callow. And yet—and yet there was that soft spot in me that wanted to hug him. An amazing man, I thought—he elicited such a welter of conflicting emotions in me. I found myself looking away, like Noel who was gazing toward the window at the black night.
“What about your buddy, Corey?” I asked. “You mention having no friends, but Corey…” I stopped as I recalled Corey’s own dismissive remarks about any friendship with Dougie.
His laugh was mocking. “Fair weather friend, Edna. You’ve met him. I mean, at the Stanhope I saw him all the time—that’s really how we reconnected after all these years. We’d always nodded at each other at clubs. We’d even talked. We made up memories from our days at New Haven. There—back then he snubbed me. His folks summered near us, but he ran with a livelier crowd. Jazz babies. In the city he sought me out.” A harsh laugh. “He’s really broke—sort of. My dollar bills fueled his attention to me. We went to places.”
“That night at the automat he was with you and Belinda and even Kitty. When we met on that sidewalk. You all seemed—longtime friends then.”
He scoffed. “Yeah, but when he left the automat, he took that long walk down Broadway and disappeared from my life.”
“Not really,” I insisted.
“Might as well be. You know, I call him up and he’s distant. I can tell by the tone of his voice that he wants to get off the phone. It’s like he believes I’m—I’m a murderer. That scares me. I asked him to leave the city for a few days, the two of us, maybe skiing in Vermont, a long weekend at our lodge, but he didn’t even answer.” A sliver of a smile. “Yeah, I know the cops told me to stay in the city, but…” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Dougie, granted you two were never close, but lately you did spend a lot of time together.”
He looked perplexed. “You know, I thought I could tell him anything.”
I counted a heartbeat. “And did you?” My tone sharp.
He watched
me carefully. “There was nothing to tell.”
“What are you getting at, Edna?” Noel asked. He rested his fork on his plate and dropped his hands into his lap.
I hedged a bit. “Corey struck me as a little bit of a troublemaker, no? He passes on gossip—rumors. He seemed to enjoy telling tales of Belinda’s behavior. That idea rankles me a bit. “
Dougie’s voice got heated. “That’s what frat buddies do, Edna. Would you have me stumble around in the dark? A fool. A laughing stock. A…a cuckold of sorts.”
“That’s a little extreme, no?”
He sighed heavily. “I never questioned it.”
“Maybe you should have,” I said, but regretted my harshness. He looked at me with sad, questioning eyes. I attempted a feeble, reassuring smile—but failed. I dabbed at my lips with my napkin.
He sat back, eyes wide. “What I do know is that the police are breathing down my neck.” A slight smile. “My lawyers’ necks. I know that because Lady Maud’s voice gets shrill —maybe shriller is the word—when she talks to them on the phone. The police have no other suspects. They aren’t even looking for other suspects.” His voice trembled. “It’s—me! I don’t want to go to jail.” His eyes got moist. “Or—the chair. The electric chair. My God.”
Exasperated, rushing my words, “You must have thought about that night, Dougie. Who would have killed Belinda?”
He threw back his head and groaned. “I don’t know. I can’t sleep at night. In the morning I’m so tangled in my blankets that I feel roped in. Belinda…Belinda spoke her mind, yes, and there are always folks who resent other people’s success, rising in the world. Especially theater. Jealous. Anger. Pettiness. Right, Noel?”
Noel pursed his lips together. “Yes, I still resent that pedestrian George Bernard Shaw’s inglorious rise to fame.”
Dougie simmered. “Christ, no, I’m serious. Listen to me. Belinda didn’t step on people to get ahead. She just kept…stepping. Moving.” He reflected, “Though her brother cajoled…pressured maybe…” He shook his head. “No, that’s what people do.”
“She had to have enemies, no?” I insisted.
“Everybody’s got enemies.”
“That’s a glib answer,” I told him, my voice stern. “The people she worked with at the Paradise. Millie Glass. Kent LaSalle. Chauncey White. Others. Tommy Stuyvesant. Cyrus Meerdom.” I narrowed my eyes. “The men she saw before—you.”
He fumed. “Not that again. C’mon, Edna. Please. A laundry list of make-believe suitors. Yeah, I’ve heard it all before. I’ve seen it. Remember that—slap at your party?” He looked at Noel. “She only saw—me.”
“Yes,” Noel said quietly. “The bell that was rung to tell everyone that it was time to stop having fun.”
For a while we watched one another, silent. Noel reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Dougie nodded at him and Noel handed him one. When Noel looked at me, a cigarette extended, I shook my head. No thanks. Dougie waited for Noel to light him, and for a second his eyes got dreamy as he drew in the smoke. Fascinated, I watched the two men watching each other smoke. The narcotic walls they built around themselves. Boys’ club, I thought.
“You know,” I said, “your mother told me she wanted us to stop helping you.”
He put his cigarette out in an ashtray. “I know. She told me. She said a photographer staking out the Paradise spotted the two of you going in and snapped your picture. I guess Winchell made a snide comment in his column in the Mirror.” He smiled. “‘Paradise lost,’ he wrote.”
I grumbled, “Walter Winchell thrives on innuendo and malice.”
“What else did he say?” Noel asked. “I missed that.”
“He said, ‘Ferber and Coward are asking the questions we all know the answer to. Who’s the coward here?’”
Noel grinned. “That gnarly boy sure do know how to turn a phrase. I bet his mamma is plum proud of her little boy Wally,” he said with a peach-blossom Southern accent.
My mind was racing. “Okay, Dougie, think. You must have ideas about that night at the automat. Who else was there? Someone must have followed you all there. How else to know Belinda was there? Or spotted her there? Who? I know that Buzzy Collins supposedly was there earlier but left with his party. The police, I know, talked to him—he was with the same people he left with. Long after midnight. Could he have called someone?”
Dougie’s lips twitched. “You mean like Cyrus Meerdom?”
“For one.” I sighed. “A man who couldn’t let go of Belinda’s attention.”
“But,” Noel added, “even if Buzzy called Cyrus to come and strangle Belinda, there’s the time factor. Cyrus, probably across town, an old man readying for bed, scurrying to the automat?”
“Impossible,” I said. “What? Sneaking into the back door, waiting for Belinda. What are the odds?”
“Nil,” Noel said.
“Unless,” I mused, “Cyrus was hovering around the neighborhood, following in that town car.”
“Edna, Edna,” Noel laughed, “you do paint an improbable scenario. Rudolph Valentino slinking around the oasis looking for Theda Bara.”
Dougie hadn’t said anything while Noel and I ran on with our impossible speculation. Suddenly, his features contorting, he stood up. At the sideboard he poured himself some whiskey, drank it down in one gulp. “Lady Maud said Tommy refused to talk to the detective she hired.”
“I know. Your mother told me. Why? That struck me as strange,” I admitted. “Perhaps your mother’s detective is not the right person for the job.”
Noel smiled. “Maybe Edna Allan Poe knows best the means of ratiocination.”
Pushing my plate away, I stood up, signaled to the two men as I blew out the candles and moved from the table into the living room. They followed me, Dougie avoiding the piano bench—my baleful eye guaranteed that—and choosing the wing chair he’d sat in earlier. Surprisingly, Noel dragged a chair close to Dougie, facing him, a few feet apart. A curious tableau, I thought: Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer. Well, not quite.
“Help us,” Noel said, looking into his face.
Dougie looked stunned, sputtering, “I don’t know how.”
“We’re stumbling in the dark.” I threw my hands in the air.
“I know.” A whine to his voice, unattractive.
Watching that mobile face, so hangdog now, I realized at that moment how easy it would be to dislike the young man. Yes, I’d found him appealing in a fresh, engaging way, the new kid in my town—my small circle of acquaintances—who looked with wonder at everything. But more so—I admitted to being flattered by his servile attention to me, his delight when I approached him. It baffled me because young men ran from me—I had little patience with their posturing and vainglorious love of themselves. Cruelly, I called them all one derisive word—Bub. But now, suddenly, I wondered about Dougie offering his devotion to me. That annoying whine that sometimes laced his words, his noisome passivity, his—avoidance. Here was a man who had stepped outside of heaven and wondered how to get back in.
Road maps to paradise were not available in my living room.
“Tell me,” I began, another attempt to get some answers. “Any idea who this new person was that Belinda was supposedly leaving you for? The rumored interest?” Blunt lines, said purposely, and Dougie stared, mouth agape. Even Noel arched his eyebrows, though his eyes twinkled.
“Belinda’s infidelities.” Noel’s coda to my harsh words.
Dougie floundered, uncomfortable. He wrapped his arms around his knees, leaning forward, the little boy in the principal’s office, squirming.
“No,” he said finally. “Just the stories told to me.”
Another blunt line. “I know you worried about Wallace Benton. Richer than any of us. That new skyscraper. The invitation to dinner. The roses sent to her dressing room.”
He bunched
up his face. “Which I stupidly smashed to the ground.”
“He was wooing her?” asked Noel.
“Him—or someone else.” Frustrated, swinging his arms around. “I don’t know. But I know it drove me crazy. I was afraid Belinda had her eye on the horizon.”
“We all do,” I insisted. “What else is there to do?”
“That’s not what I mean, Edna. I think her louse of a brother programmed her like that Czech robot to do his bidding.”
Frustrated, I challenged him. “So she had no say at all in her own destiny?”
“A little extreme, no?” From Noel.
“But she did love you,” I added. “And you loved her.”
For a moment Dougie’s eyes got moist, glassy. “God, yes. We did love each other.”
“But you fought tooth and nail,” I went on.
His fist pounded his knee. “My damned fault. I know that now. You know she didn’t fight me. She answered me. She resisted. She rejected what I said. ‘Only you, Dougie, you.’ A litany for her. ‘You!’ And I still didn’t listen.” His eyes got wide now. “I ruined everything because I didn’t trust any more. Every rumor I ran with—brought it to her doorstep like a cat dragging a mouse to its owner. Look! Look! Answer me. I—I tired her out. She had no energy left. It was all my fault.”
“No matter, really, if, indeed, she was stepping out on you.”
“I hate that,” he thundered. “Even if I knew it, I hated the idea of it. You know, I’d go to the Paradise, stop into see her brother early on, and the way he acted got me nervous.”
Noel spoke up. “The time we all had lunch—you, me, Belinda and Jackson—the let’s-introduce-Noel tour, he bothered me. ‘I have ideas for plays. We need to talk.’ No, we didn’t have that need. I found him unpleasant. Those eyes.”
Dougie was anxious to talk. “I didn’t trust him—ever. I mean, I’d go with Belinda and he was all fussy and nice, but I knew he was a weasel. Money-grubbing. Hands out. Alms for the poor theater player. But when I was out of earshot, I’d hear him whisper to Belinda. Things like—‘What the hell you think you’re doing? Behave yourself. You think I don’t hear the stories? He’s gonna hear, too.’ The “he,” I knew, was me. When I got near, he was all smiles. But Belinda was grim-faced, sober.”
