by Ed Ifkovic
“So Jackson must have heard about her new interests,” I said.
“The way you talk. ‘Her new interests.’ A nice way to put it.”
“That’s what it was,” I said grimly.
“I know. But”—a faraway look came into his eyes—“when I went back to the theater after Belinda died, Jackson didn’t know how to deal with me.”
“Understandable,” I said. “The police…”
He spoke quickly, his hands waving in the air. “When Jackson was out of the room, that Millie Glass hugged me. Said how sorry she was. ‘Oh, what a loss!’ Then, batting her eyes, she said that if I ever wanted to talk, she was there.”
Noel stormed, “She flirted with you?”
“She always flirted with me. I paid no attention.”
“Did Jackson know?”
“Not on your life.”
I clicked my tongue. “It seems the women around Belinda wanted what she had.”
Dougie’s voice dragged. “You know, I spotted Kitty on the street the other day. Another one who avoids me. She actually ducked into a green-grocer when she saw me on the sidewalk. I followed her, tried to get her to talk to me. Like Corey, she sees me as a murderer.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Noel interrupted.
“You know, I never trusted her either.” A crooked smile. “I guess I don’t trust a lot of people. But there’s something petty about her. A schemer in her own right. Those eyes always on me. No—worse, those eyes on Belinda. I never thought she was good for Belinda.”
“Why?” From Noel.
“I think Kitty saw herself as one of the…as a darker planet hidden behind the sun, and she resented it. She tried to get close to Belinda. Yeah, the four of us went out together all the time. She flirted with Corey, yes, and he flirted back. But Corey told me he wanted his own sun—his own Belinda.”
“Maybe he wanted Belinda,” Noel remarked suddenly.
Dougie snapped, “He knew better.” He paused. “Kitty was no friend of mine. She poisoned the well. She was afraid Belinda might abandon her. If Belinda rose in the world, maybe Kitty could rise, too. More than once she asked Belinda to help her get back onstage. A chorus part. Anything.”
“And what did Belinda say?”
“She never answered.” He leaned forward. “Belinda told me Kitty was a drone. Never the queen bee. Worse, a drone that had outsized dreams.”
“Could Kitty have killed Belinda?” I asked. “Yes, she caught a taxi, but she could have circled back, gone in by way of the alley.”
He cut me off. “No.”
“You seem so sure.”
A helpless gesture. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” A deep sigh.
“What about Jackson and Millie?”
“I assumed they were lovers,” Dougie said. “In fact, I mentioned that to Belinda once and she flew into a rage. That led to another argument.”
“Why would that bother her?” I asked.
He shrugged. “She didn’t like Millie Glass.”
“And she liked her brother?” I asked.
He waited a heartbeat. “That’s another thing. Recently it was clear that she disliked him, wanted him away from her. She didn’t want to talk about him. I guess they—fought. I mean, even physical.”
Noel wondered out loud, “That’s the wrinkle here, no?”
“They’d struggled to find a life in theater in this city,” Dougie said. “They clung to each other—shared a dream. They managed to get out of that small village in…”
“In Connecticut,” I finished. “Sayville. Outside Bridgeport. I’ve seen the signs on the New York New Haven line.”
“That’s another thing,” Dougie added. “I wanted to go back there with her. To visit. She said their farm had been sold. Her family died. I said, so what? A day’s car ride. ‘I want to see where you were born.’ She refused. ‘That’s a world that’s over and done with.’ Her words. ‘A graveyard.’”
“Sometimes we have bad childhood memories. I cringe at the idea of Ottumwa, Iowa, a backwater village that treated my family horribly. Dirty boys in knickers trailing after me and shouting, ‘Sheeny, sheeny, kike, kike.’”
“Good God.” From Noel, furrowing his brow.
“Nightmares for me.”
Noel was tapping his finger on his knee. “Maybe her life in that village holds some answer.”
“Maybe her brother is her killer,” I said, again emphatically.
Dougie twitched. “God, Edna, you do it again.”
“Possible.”
“No.” Dougie looked into my face. “No.” He shuddered. “When I went there, he looked at me like I was a killer. I felt like an alien. Out of place. Yet I can’t stop going there. It’s like—Belinda calls me there. Back to days when everything was good for us. Beautiful. The laughter. The joy.”
“Are you still sending him money?” I asked.
Dougie looked puzzled, “You know, I haven’t thought about it. But, no, how can I pay someone who accuses me of murder?”
The evening was coming to an end. Dougie started moving around the apartment, picking up a jade figurine, leafing through a copy of Vanity Fair, staring at the small Chagall lithograph over the fireplace. He wanted to leave but didn’t know how to do so. Watching him, I experienced a welter of conflicting emotions. A wave of sympathy, yes, and compassion. Concern. But also wariness, a sudden need to distance myself.
Despite the cold night, I left the two men and strolled out onto my terrace, stepping on the ice-crusted snow. From my lofty penthouse, my rarefied aerie up in the sky, I gazed down at the street below. Quiet now, a few cars passing. A few stragglers, pinpoints from outer space. A hum of distant noise. A horn wailed. In the inky blackness strands of purple and blue—specks of gold as cars inched along.
The door opened, and Noel joined me.
“You’ll freeze to death.”
“I need some cold air.”
“What to make of that man.” He pointed back at Dougie who was leaning against the piano, watching us, his eyes hooded.
Noel took out his long cigarette holder and inserted a cigarette, struck a match. I nodded toward the pack in his breast pocket. Surprised, he offered me one, and lit it.
“A cigarette a month,” I told him. “At moments like this.”
We both watched the trail of gray-white smoke curl and drift into the night sky.
From across the way a hint of music. “Another party I was invited to,” I told him.
My neighbor across the terrace was Richard Rodgers, and through the lighted windows I could see his holiday guests moving, dancing, laughing. Richard was playing carols on his piano, and his guests sang along. Robust snatches of “Twelve Days of Christmas” drifted out onto the terrace.
Noel grinned. “My true love sent to me…” He waited. “Finish the line, Edna.”
“Okay. Sent to me…the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
His hand swept the city beyond my terrace. He sang another line. “For purple mountain majesties.”
“No fruited plains here.”
He pointed to the rising skyscrapers, some soaring higher than my penthouse refuge. The dark canyons far below. The low-lying clouds. A few lights switched on in nearby buildings. A hazy skyline, mauve-tinted, speckled white.
“Somewhere out there,” he whispered, “is a murderer we can’t identify. Somewhere celebrating Christmas Eve maybe. Or wandering the streets, tormented. Or glad. Triumphant. Somewhere, Edna, out there.”
“Or,” I whispered back, “or he’s leaning on a grand piano and watching us freeze to death.”
We both turned to face Dougie who was still watching us.
Chapter Fourteen
Early on Christmas morning Noel and I headed into Connecticut for a holiday breakfast with actor Clifto
n Webb, who lived with his mother Mabelle in an over-heated Colonial in High Acres, Greenwich. Flush from cash from his widely popular Broadway smashes like Flying Colors and Three’s a Crowd, Webb had moved with his imperious mother into the gigantic house. A precious man I’d never taken to, Clifton was Noel’s good comrade, which explained our two-hour trek into Connecticut. Earlier that spring, with Aleck Woollcott, the trio had sailed to England. Noel confided that Aleck spent much of his time complaining about me—and Clifton kept tsking, agreeing that I could be difficult.
“I defended you,” Noel insisted.
“I can just imagine. The three of you—Macbeth’s sinister witches jabbering on webbed deck chairs.”
Noel had rubbed his hands together maliciously. “The cauldron boils over.”
I expected to be annoyed in Connecticut—I was, of course. Not so much by the theatrical guests at the gathering, many of them my friends from the city, but by the posturing and saloon performance of Webb’s starstruck mother. Her first comment to me on entering: “Oh, good, you’re both properly dressed.”
As she glared at me, I told her, “I assumed it was hobo outfits optional.”
Her son spent most of the time drifting around his mother like a feather duster looking for a dust mote.
The first hour was passable, with Neysa’s husband, Handsome Jack, ribbing a bashful Irving Berlin. Jack sat on the piano bench and delighted everyone with a mildly ribald parody of Irving’s hit song “Always.” In an affected squeaky falsetto he sang out:
Not in rumble seats,
Not in taxi cabs
Not in telephone booths
But hallways.
Laughing so hard, Mabelle slipped off her chair, complained that the schoolmarm bun atop her gray head was askew, and downed the tumbler of potent whiskey in one gulp. After eggs Benedict and Monte Christo cigars and too much badinage, the maid cleared the table for backgammon and Russian banque. A young man in a tight-waisted sports jacket started to sing off-key while a slender platinum-blonde showgirl hiccoughed. The chauffeur drove the Berlins to the train depot, and I nudged Noel, who was having a good time.
“I have a plan,” I whispered.
A knowing nod. “Your plan is to escape folks you can barely tolerate.”
I smiled. “That, true, but another plan.”
“Darling, you’re driving.”
And I was, in the long black Packard I’d commandeered from the doorman, secured with a generous tip. Noel had dressed for the motor ride—sleek sealskin jacket, a jazzy bowtie, and a plaid driving cap. A raspberry-colored scarf, very Isadora Duncan. We said our goodbyes, but as we were pulling out of the driveway, a local cab drove up. A blasé Tallulah Bankhead sauntered from the rear seat, her face nearly disguised under a gigantic Tyrolean mountaineer’s snow hat. Noel wanted to socialize but I pressed the accelerator, the car lurching, sliding against a frozen snow bank.
“Really, Edna,” he said, “you insist on making our adventures together the stuff of Buster Keaton slapstick.”
I nudged him. “Take the map out of the glove compartment, Noel.”
He was grinning. “Edna, I can read your mind. I knew your nefarious intent when you insisted on driving into Connecticut hinterlands, refusing a perfectly good ride with Cole Porter’s crowd.” A phony, shocked expression covered his face. “And I thought you were more mysterious.”
He wrestled with the road map, but shortly his fingertip tapped a dot. “This what you’re looking for, darling?”
Sayville, Connecticut. A minuscule dot next to Bridgeport.
I headed in that direction, Noel sputtering out directions.
“It looks like snow, Edna. Are you sure…” He peered out the window. “And it’s Christmas day.”
“Perfect. It’s Connecticut. You’ve seen the movies, no? We’ll be driving into one of those evocative Christmas cards you see everywhere—rolling snow-covered hills splashed with shiny glitter that you can’t get off your clothing, wisps of black smoke from the blazing fire of a saltbox farmhouse. Children sledding down those hills. A sleigh. Santa maybe. The horse knows the way…”
“Santa’s stuck in a chimney in Bridgeport. The stockings are filled with coal. Merry Christmas afternoon to all, and to all a…”
“There.” I jumped. “A sign for Bridgeport.”
After the heated opulence of Webb’s home, nestled as it was on a street of expensive if cookie-cutter Colonials—all that chalky white clapboard and forest green shutter and wrought-iron lamppost—Bridgeport stunned: weathered steel or iron mills in the hardscrabble city cast deadened shadows on the landscape. Boarded-up factories. Deserted storefronts.
When we crossed the line into Sayville, a farm town of perhaps a hundred homes, maybe less, I maneuvered the Packard down a tight lane of small, green-asphalt-covered bungalows, most likely homes for workers, some with sagging porches and dipped roofs. Packed snow everywhere, gray and dim.
But Sayville had the feel of a Western ghost town, a farming village that once sent its sons into the nearby factories and mills of Bridgeport. One house had an abandoned jalopy in the front yard, a rusting dump truck tipping on flattened tires. The house had a boarded-up front door, its windows smashed in. A faded For Sale sign nailed to the front door. Next door another bungalow with a foreclosure sign tucked into a cloudy front window.
“How do we find the Roswell farm?” Noel wondered out loud.
Baffled, I pulled the car to the side of the road, staring up and down the quiet street. No life—stolid, unassuming homes dotting the landscape. Silence, deadly.
“There.” I pointed to a small town green up ahead where a tiny Congregational Church sat on a rise of land. Garlands of green pine were strung over the ancient windows. As we idled in front, someone stepped quickly from the entrance, headed to the rectory next door. I leaned on the horn.
“Really, Edna.” Noel shook his head. “It’s Christmas.”
“I know what day it is, Noel. Horns work on Christmas.”
The old man stopped, squinted at us through the wisps of falling snow, and then approached the car. A shabby overcoat, unbuttoned, a pastor’s white collar. He smiled at us. “Lost?”
“Yes, quite,” Noel told him. “We’re looking for the Roswell farm.”
He shook his head. “Nobody lives there now. Empty.”
“Still and all,” I insisted, “we’d like to see…”
A sudden blast of cold air rocked the car. The pastor shivered and rocked backward. He tugged at the overcoat, wrapping it tightly around his skinny body. In a hurried voice, though still with that polite smile on his face, he said, “At the end of this road, a sharp left, then down a mile or so into farm country. You’ll see a cluster of hemlocks to the right. A dirt road afterward. A mile or so down there. Can’t go any farther. A gray farmhouse with a fallen-down red barn to the right of it. Roof mostly caved in. Can’t miss it.” He backed up. “You’ll miss it if you wait for dark, coming soon.” He waved. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” I told him, then added, “Happy New Year.”
“Yes, Edna,” Noel mumbled as I sped away, “it is Christmas, and here we are on this wild good chase.”
I ignored him.
The pastor was right, of course: deserted, that house, weathered, boarded up. A ripped foreclosure sign in the window. As we walked onto the rotting porch, a field mouse squealed and disappeared into a crevice. Looking in the windows, I saw a few pieces of furniture: a broken Windsor chair by the fireplace, an enamel table on its side, one leg missing, even a scattered stack of old Everybody’s magazines piled by some broken crockery.
Noel groaned, “Any other ideas, Miss F?”
“I don’t know what I was hoping for.”
Nervous, Noel looked back to the road. “Let’s go. If darkness falls and the snow picks up and we have to sleep here, I’
ll never forgive you for my early death.”
“The world will miss your tremendous ego.”
Disheartened, but perhaps not surprised, I drove away. What had I expected to find? A craggy old uncle, sequestered among the decaying rafters, mad as a barnyard hen, ready to blather hideous family secrets? Rochester’s maddened wife cowering in the attic?
Cruising through the center of town, eyeing the shuttered businesses—an Esso filling station with two bubblehead pumps, a feed and grain store, a mom-and-pop luncheonette, a lawyer’s office with the shingle flapping in the wind and loosened from its pole. Dead: Christmas day. Families celebrating. At the end of the lane was the Sayville General Store. Est’d 1891—according to the sign on a front post.
“Getting dark, Edna,” Noel muttered. “I understand darkness only when surrounded by city cabs and subway entrances.”
“Look.”
In front of the general store someone was shoveling the snow off the landing with an old coal shovel. Bent against the wind, hunched over, stabbing at the snow, chipping ice at the corners. When the figure turned to face us, I could see it was an old woman dressed in a man’s long overcoat, her head swathed in a scarf and a man’s bulky hunting cap. She paused as I pulled the car over. Leaning on the shovel, breathing hard, she tucked her head into her chest like a curious bird.
“Help you?”
“We were visiting the Roswell farm…”
She chuckled. “The squirrels and you have a conversation?”
“We used to know a girl who lived there.”
“Yeah, that Linda Roswell. Her, I suppose you mean.”
“We knew her as Belinda Ross.”
“So the papers say. Got herself kilt.”
“We were hoping to find family.”
“Hope is a worthless occupation sometimes. Like this trek you two took upon yourselves today. No one left, so far as I know.”
“Nothing is open today.” I motioned back toward the closed shops.
