by Manhattan Mayhem: New Crime Stories From Mystery Writers of America
Leon smiled, leaned on his broom. “You’re gonna love this, Mister Delano. You see, I never did tell you what I did before I came here today as a broom sweeper. I worked for the government. Department of Justice. When I started, it was called the Bureau of Investigation, but now you and folks listening to the radio know it as the FBI.”
He wondered if Delano was going to make a break for it and was happy to see the guy stay in one spot, like he wasn’t about ready to back down. “What … the … hell?”
“Got friends in the field office here, pulled a couple of strings—hey, just like you—and got word to you that Ty Mulcahey wanted to meet you here at Spike’s Place. But Ty’s not coming. He’s probably sleeping off a drunk over at Hell’s Kitchen. Nope, Ty didn’t want to meet you, but I sure as hell wanted to.”
“You got nothing.”
Leon laughed. “Hell, tell me something I don’t know! Me and the boys in blue here, we’ve been chasing you for years, right up until I was forced out on retirement. Just like Tom Dewey and Frank Hogan, the DAs. Even the Little Flower called you New York’s Public Enemy Number One last year. He wanted to do to you what he did to Lucky Luciano, arrest him and line him up to get deported, but it never panned out. So here you stand, still a free man. Feel pretty good about yourself?”
More trucks and cars rumbled by. Some horns were honked in a joyful fashion, signaling no more war, no more death, no more waiting to hear bad news.
Leon said, “Cat got your tongue? For real? Let’s talk about real. The last thing I ever heard from my boy”—and damn it, right then, his voice broke, and he hated sounding like a weepy old man—“was a letter from him, sent before Bataan fell. I must have read and reread that one sheet of paper a thousand times over the year. Never heard anything else. Then MacArthur invaded the Philippines and the main POW camp was liberated back in January. I waited, and I waited, and then I got that telegram from the Red Cross. You know what it said?” Delano started to walk away, but Leon got right in front of him. “It said my Jimmy had died one month before the camp was freed. One month. Thirty damn days!”
Leon’s throat constricted again. “So, I’ll let you be. Only if you answer one question.”
“I don’t have to answer a damn thing, old man.”
“Maybe. But maybe it’ll be in your best interest to answer, sonny. Maybe you answer this question, I leave you be, so you can keep on being a parasite.”
Delano tugged at his jacket, straightened his flashy necktie. “Ask your damn question.”
Leon nodded. “Ever since Pearl Harbor, ever since that day … you ever feel sorry, or guilty, about what you did? How you lived off the war, how you let other sons and fathers take your place? Sons and fathers who might have bad eyes, or flat feet, or bad hearing, but were still called up and drafted because they didn’t have your connections, your way of doing things. You ever feel guilty about that?”
Delano reached into an inside jacket pocket, took out a pack of Camels and a gold lighter. He lit off the cigarette, took a deep puff, and returned the cigarettes to his coat; he did the same with the lighter after snapping it shut with one satisfying click.
“No,” he said, smirking. “Not for a goddamn minute. I lived and those dopes died, and that’s all right by me.”
Leon just nodded again, went back to his trash cart, reached down inside, and from a crumpled-up paper bag—the bag the sanitation worker had thankfully overlooked—he took out a .45-caliber Colt model 1911 pistol with a tube silencer screwed onto the end.
“Wrong answer,” Leon said, pointing it at Delano’s chest.
BRENDAN DUBOIS, of New Hampshire, is the award-winning author of seventeen novels and more than 135 short stories. His latest novel is Blood Foam, part of the Lewis Cole mystery series. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (2000) and The Best American Noir of the Century (2010). His stories have twice won the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and have earned three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from MWA. He is also a Jeopardy! game-show champion. Visit his website at BrendanDuBois.com.
SERIAL BENEFACTOR
Jon L. Breen
To start with, I’m a centenarian, Sebastian Grady by name, and still fully marbled. My current address is Plantain Point, a retirement home on the California coast with a lot of residents from the entertainment world. To give you an idea, the president of our association is called the Top Banana, though most of the vaudevillians have died off.
As you can imagine, I’ve seen many younger generations come of age, and the current lot don’t seem too anxious to make the transition to adulthood. Don’t ask me if I blame them.
Evan is my favorite great-granddaughter. I never expected to be so fond of a girl with a guy’s name, but in this century of yours—mine was the last one—I guess one size fits all. I hadn’t seen her since she was an infant when she turned up one day to interview me for a school genealogy assignment, I being the oldest relative available. But once the paper was done and graded, she kept coming back. She seems to enjoy my company.
She’s a mature sixteen by current standards. In some ways, she’s typical of her generation, including being constantly connected to every portable communication device that comes along, but she’s a smart girl, rarely says “like” except as a verb expressing approval or a preposition with a discernible object. She has an active social life, some of it with live people, does sports, gets good grades, loves puzzles, and likes a challenge. Her mind is always on the move. I’d unhesitatingly back her in a timed Sudoku contest.
On one recent visit, we were sitting on my eighth-floor deck looking out at the Pacific Ocean. Family news and current events exhausted, I said casually (but with an ulterior motive), “I’ve got a puzzle for you, honey.”
“Great. What is it?”
“There’s a list of sentences I want you to look up for me, tell me what they mean, where they came from, what they have in common, if anything. You can go on the Internet for this, look ’em up on Giggle or Garble or whatever it’s called. Shouldn’t take you long.”
She gave me that big, braced-teeth grin that always melted my heart. She knew I wasn’t quite as ignorant as I pretended to be. She’d taught me to use the Internet when she was eight years old; I have my own computer, and Plantain Point has Wi-Fi. “Does this have anything to do with one of your investigations?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Gramps, I know you’re an amateur detective.”
“No such thing, except in books.”
“Don’t forget I’ve read all your memoirs.”
Just the published ones, and there were some unpublished ones I hoped she’d never see. Maybe when she was older.
“Okay, you got me. There is a mystery connected to this list, and I’ll tell you all about it when you’ve identified the items.”
I passed it over, neatly printed in my still steady hand:
Massachusetts is a long way from New York.
She’ll start upon a marathon.
You don’t even know a hazard from a green.
You can’t stop the weather, not with all your dough!
She got herself a husband but he wasn’t hers.
That ain’t the highest spot.
“Any of that ring a bell?” I asked.
“Nope, not at all. So what’s my deadline?”
“Try to get it done while I’m still alive.”
“Gramps, you’re full of it.”
“Get it done, and I’ll tell you the wildest story you ever heard, and every word of it true.”
“I’ll be back with the answers tomorrow,” she promised, and I knew she would. In the meantime, I let my mind drift back to the only century where I really felt at home anymore.
Now that I’ve passed a hundred myself, my old buddy Danny
Crenshaw doesn’t seem quite so amazing as he used to. He only made it to ninety-four. But the last time I saw him, 1978 it was, same year he died, he seemed as happy and busy as ever.
I first met Danny in the late 1920s. He was among the Broadway headliners lured west by the advent of talking pictures. A little guy with tons of nervous energy, he always played younger than his age and never seemed to change much as the years went by. Multitalented as Danny was—actor, singer, dancer, songwriter—they never seemed to know how to use him in pictures, and he was homesick for New York.
“Seb,” he said to me one day in the studio commissary, “you heard the latest about the Empire State Building? They’re going to have a mooring mast for dirigibles. They’ll be able to load and unload passengers 1,250 feet above the street.”
“Sounds like a goofy idea to me. What about the wind?”
“They’ve got all that figured out.”
“Okay,” I said. Of course, it didn’t work in the end, but smarter guys than me thought it could.
“Seb, I gotta get back to Broadway. I want to perform for people I can see and hear, not just a bunch of studio technicians. And I want to see that building.”
By the time King Kong took Fay Wray to the top of Al Smith’s folly only to be shot down by airplanes, Danny was back in Gotham City to stay. Over the next years, I’d pay him a visit whenever my work took me to the Big Apple, see him onstage when he was working and at home when he was resting. I was usually there on Classic Pictures business, that being my main employer in those days, and those times I was on my own, not nursing some pampered actor, I’d stay at a not-quite-deluxe hostelry the studio had a special deal with. It was within walking distance of the much classier Hotel McAlpin at the corner of Broadway and West Thirty-Fourth Street, where Danny lived for decades as a permanent resident. His upper-floor quarters were luxurious enough to suit his success, but he’d picked the place for its view of the Empire State Building, just up the street.
It was sunny in Manhattan one day in early 1946 when I walked from my hotel to the McAlpin. Passing through the heart of the Garment District, I dodged those huge clothing racks pushed along the sidewalks by New Yorkers in a hurry. Like the taxicabs, they somehow negotiated the chaos to get where they were going without mishaps.
The McAlpin had been the biggest hotel in the world when it was built in 1912. Impressive as the three-story lobby was, decorated in Italian Renaissance style, filled with marble and murals depicting women as jewelry, the most dazzling sight was the basement Marine Grill, where Danny, between shows at the moment, had invited me to a late lunch—as a celebrity resident, he had an in with the management. The food was undoubtedly fine, but all I can remember of the menu was the oysters—Danny loved oysters, another thing he missed on the West Coast. The whole room, with its curving ceilings, was decorated in colored terra-cotta, and I’ll never forget the spectacular murals showing the history of the New York harbor. I was especially impressed by the depiction of a four-funnel ocean liner.
“Has that been here since they opened?” I asked.
“Sure, I think so,” Danny said.
“Is that ship by any chance the Titanic? I mean, what an irony. Titanic, 1912.”
“I think they actually opened in ’13, had a sort of preview party for VIPs at the end of ’12. And relax. That’s the Mauretania.”
As we ate, Danny told me about the military plane lost in the fog that had crashed into his beloved Empire State Building the year before. He also rhapsodized about the show he would open in later in the year, produced by Belasco.
“David Belasco?”
“No, Elmer. David’s dead. You’ll meet him later. Elmer, I mean.”
When we got upstairs to Danny’s apartment, it was late afternoon. He said he’d invited a few friends to drop in and meet the visitor from Tinseltown, and he was sure his wife would want to say hello. She’d be back any minute. The number of Danny Crenshaw’s wives (four or five, I think) was not unheard of in show business. More unusual, to the end of his life he still seemed to like all his exes, and as far as I knew, they felt the same about him.
This one’s name was Mildred, and, looking back, I think he may have loved her the most, though she drove him the craziest. Like all Danny’s wives, she was lovely, and like most, she was taller than he was. Her bright, carrot-colored hair was her most striking feature, but her mild manner contradicted any redhead stereotype. She entered the apartment that afternoon loaded down with shopping and not expecting to find company, but I guess knowing Danny she was always ready for it. She was stylishly dressed and coifed in the fashion of the times: a brimmed hat with flowers at the front and a bow at the back, shoulder pads, gloves, clutch purse, nipped-in waist on a form-fitting skirt to just below the knee, ankle-strap shoes with wide heels. She greeted me cordially, and the gathering grew from there.
The first drop-in guest was a tall and wispy fellow with a little mustache. From the casual intimacy with which Danny and Mildred both welcomed him, I had the impression he was a frequent visitor. “Seb, meet Jerry Cordova,” Danny said. “My old partner in the Lunchtime Follies.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It was a spin-off of the Stage Door Canteen. We’d go out and entertain the workers during their lunch hours at defense plants and shipyards.”
“I got paid a pittance,” Jerry said, “but Danny did it strictly for the war effort.”
“What a sucker, huh?” Danny said with a wink.
“Headliners worked for free,” Jerry explained. “I’m not a headliner.”
“One of these days, you’ll be another Gershwin!”
Next to arrive was Rosey Patterson, a theatrical agent and an old pal of mine—in our respective roles as herders of actors, we’d been indirectly involved in an early-1930s murder case right there in Manhattan. He wasn’t quite as compactly built as Danny, but he was just as hyper, always on the move. I remember thinking it might be a strain on the nerves to be around both of them at the same time. Rosey embraced me in the best show business fashion and said he wanted to tell me about a great detective story he’d just read. But there were two tall men filling the doorway right behind him, and I don’t think he ever got the chance.
The older one, who had the muscular frame of a body builder, gripped my hand before waiting to be introduced and said, “So you’re Seb, Danny’s Hollywood connection. I’m Elmer Belasco.” He gestured to the younger man. “This is my worthless son, Arthur.”
“Not totally worthless,” Arthur said. “I’m a new father. Baby girl. Fresh out of cigars, though.”
“You fellows related to David Belasco?” I asked.
“When it suits us,” Arthur said. “Back in the twenties, when dad worked for Flo Ziegfeld, he figured the name helped him.”
“Didn’t help at all,” Elmer said. “The opposite, if anything.”
“More likely he reminded Ziegfeld of Sandow the strongman,” Rosey said.
Apparently, these spontaneous gatherings were a regular thing to Mildred. She knew we’d be drinking and gossiping and catching up and drinking—how we drank back then—and that what began in the late afternoon would likely extend into the evening.
It was Jerry Cordova who made it a party. He resembled his late hero George Gershwin in one respect. If he entered a room with a piano—and Danny Crenshaw wouldn’t be without one—he would be asked to play, and if he wasn’t asked, he’d do it anyway, singing along in a reedy voice something like Cole Porter’s. Shortly after he got there, he sat down at the keyboard unbidden, as if this were why he was invited, and maybe it was.
Arthur Belasco was just twenty-two. He was starting to make inroads as an actor on Broadway, though his father constantly grumbled that he had no talent. Father and son were always sniping at each other, with insults that sounded pointed but presumably weren’t to be taken seriously.
“I had to find some way to get into the family business,” Arthur said. “The old man here insisted. Medical s
chool was a dead end, he said.”
“He could do less harm on the stage than in the operating room,” Elmer retorted. It sounded like a practiced routine, and everybody took it as harmless kidding. Except for Mildred, who had a pained look on her face every time father or son launched a zinger.
In later years, remembering Mildred, Danny would say, “She was the kindest, sweetest person God ever put on earth. Imagine a dame with no sense of humor putting up with a joker like me for as long as she did. Mildred was a bleeding heart, full of empathy, but she couldn’t see nuances.”
That day in 1946, I witnessed an example. Jerry Cordova had launched into “Who Cares?” from Of Thee I Sing, written by the Gershwin brothers deep in the Depression. Mildred listened with apparent appreciation and joined the applause when he was finished.
“That was great, Jerry,” she said, “but I’ve always hated that song.”
“Oh, dear, I’ve offended my hostess,” he said.
“No, don’t be silly. It’s a nice tune, but I hate the lyrics. They’re nasty, uncaring, mean spirited.”
“How so, Mildred?” Rosey Patterson inquired.
“You’ll be sorry you asked,” Danny said.
Mildred said, “It’s that line that goes ‘Who cares if banks fail in Yonkers?’ Well, a lot of banks failed in the Depression. We had to go to war to get out of it. When I hear that, I think about all the people I knew and those I didn’t know who had money in those failing banks, who maybe lost everything. How could you not care that banks failed in Yonkers or anywhere else?”
“I’ve tried to explain this,” Danny said with a mock long-suffering expression. “Baby, the people in that song are trying to get through difficult times, like we all were back then. They depend on the power of their love to see them through. Whatever happened, they could handle it because they were in love. That’s the point. It’s called a love song, see? It’s got nothing to do with people who lost money in banks that failed.”
