My cab was still waiting.
“What scenic part of the city do want to view next?” the cabbie asked.
“The Waldorf.”
“Astoria?”
“Cafeteria. Near MacDougal Alley.”
7
Late Sunday afternoon at the Waxworks was pretty slow: a sprinkling of hipsters, a handful of civilians catching an early supper or a slice of pie before heading back to the real world after a few hours in Little Bohemia.
The skinny redheaded busboy, whose horn-rimmed glasses were patched at the bridge with adhesive tape, his pimples mingling with freckles to create a Jackson Pollock canvas, was taking a break, slouched in a chair propped against a wall, smoking beneath a no smoking sign decorated with cigarette burns. He had the gawky, geeky look of a teenager having a hard time with puberty; but on closer look he was probably in his midtwenties, and he had a tattoo of a hula girl on his thin right forearm. His busboy’s tray was on the table before him like a grotesque meal.
I sat down beside him and he frowned, irritably, but said rather politely, “You want this table, mister?”
“No, Allen,” I said, and smiled, “I want to talk to you.”
His eyes, which were a sickly green, narrowed. “How do you know me?”
“Friend of a friend.”
“What friend?”
“Joe Greenberg. Or do you know him as Harold Weinberg?”
He swallowed nervously, almost lost his balance in his propped-back chair; righting it, he sat forward. “Joe just works here is all. He’s off right now.”
“He’s off, all right. You wouldn’t happen to know where I could I find him?”
Another swallow. He started drumming his fingers on the table and he didn’t look at me as he said, tremulously, “No. I ain’t seen him today. You try his flop?”
“Matter of fact, yeah. He wasn’t there.”
“Oh, well…”
“Two friends of his were. Dead ones.”
The eyes locked right onto me now; he was surprised, genuinely surprised—these murders were news to him.
“Oh, didn’t he mention that, Allen? That he killed two people? Maybe you knew ’em—Max Bodenheim and his wife Ruth. Good customers.”
The ruddy flesh around the pimples and freckles got pale. “Hell. Shit.”
“If you’re letting him hole up at your place, Allen, you’re putting yourself in line for an accessory to murder rap.”
His lips were quivering. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ…. Are you a cop?”
“Private. I was hired to find Bodenheim on a business matter. I don’t want to get involved any more than you do.”
His voice lowered to a whisper; what he said was like a profane prayer: “Shit…I gotta get him out of there!”
Sometimes it pays to play a hunch.
“Allen, let’s help each other out on this….”
In 1954, I was licensed in five states to carry firearms in the course of my business, and New York was one of them. I had learned long ago that while my need for a weapon was infrequent, traveling naked could be a chilly proposition; after all, even the most innocuous job had the potential to turn ugly.
So, after a detour back to the Lexington to pick up my nine millimeter and shoulder harness, I took a cab to the address Allen Spiegel had given me: 311 East 21st, near Second Avenue. Joe/Harold had come up in the world, all the way from the bleak Bowery to the godforsaken Gashouse district.
A wind was whipping the remnants of yesterday’s snow around in a chilly dust storm. Stepping around a derelict huddling in the doorway, I entered the four-story frame rooming house, a cold, dank breeding ground for cockroaches. Allen was waiting just inside, a frightened host in a shabby sweater and faded jeans.
“The pay phone’s on the second floor,” he whispered, nodding toward the stairway. “Should I go ahead and call ’em?”
“After you see me go in. It’s down that way?”
He nodded and pointed.
“Don’t let him see you,” I advised.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
The busboy’s room was toward the back of the first floor, with (Allen had informed me) a window that looked out on a backyard that served as a courtyard for adjacent tenements. I glanced around to see if anyone was looking—nobody was but Allen, peeking from beside the stairwell—and I took out my nine millimeter and, with my free hand, knocked.
The voice behind the door was Joe’s: “What?”
“Allen sent some food over from the Waxworks,” I said. “He thought you might be hungry.”
The silence that followed lasted forever. Or was it ten seconds?
Then the door cracked open and I got a sliver of Joe’s pasty face before I shouldered my way in, slamming the door behind me, shoving the gun in Joe’s face.
“You want to tell me about it, Joe?”
He backed away. He wore a blue work shirt and jeans and he wasn’t smiling, anymore; his eyes bore raccoon circles. He didn’t have to be told to put up his hands.
The room was no bigger than the one at the other rooming house—another of those “furnished rooms,” which is to say a scarred-up table, a couple ancient kitchen chairs, a rusty food-spotted electric stove, unmade Army cot and a flimsy nightstand, fixtures any respectable secondhand store would turn down. The wallpaper was floral and peeling, the floor bare, the window by the bed had no curtains, but a frayed shade was drawn.
On the nightstand was a hunting knife in a black sheath. No sign of a gun.
“You,” he said, pointing at me, eyes narrowing, “you’re that guy from the Waxworks…”
“That’s right.”
“What are you doing here? What are—”
“I had an appointment this afternoon with Max and Ruth. They couldn’t keep it, so I’m keeping it with you.”
He ventured a facial shrug. “Gee, I haven’t seen them since last night at the Waxworks.”
“Gee, then how’d they wind up dead in your flop?”
He didn’t bother trying to take his lame story any further. He just sat, damn near collapsed, on the edge of the cot. That hunting knife was nearby but he didn’t seem to notice it. Anyway, that was what I was supposed to think.
I dragged over a kitchen chair and sat backward on it, leaning forward, keeping the nine millimeter casually trained on him. “What went wrong with your little party, Joe?”
He exploded in a rush of words: “They were just a couple of low-life Communists! Mad Max, hell, he was a walking dead man, and his wife was a common slut! A couple of lousy Reds, through and through!”
“Not to mention inside and out,” I said. “When you hit that artery, it must have sprayed like a garden hose.”
His eyes widened with the memory I’d just triggered.
“You didn’t mean for this to happen, did you, Joe? You just wanted to get laid, right?”
And that wide smile flashed, nervously. “Yeah. Just wanted to tear off a little piece from that gutter-trash quail, like half the fucking Village before me….” The smile turned sideways, and he shook his head. “Shit. She sure was cute, wasn’t she?”
“How’d it happen, Joe?”
Slumping, staring at nothing, he spoke in the singsongy whine of a child explaining itself: “I thought he fell asleep, reading, the old fart. When he ran out of whiskey, you know, I gave him some wine, and after he drained that, I thought the bastard was out for the night. Or I else wouldn’ta, you know, started fooling around with Ruth on the bed…”
“Only he woke up and caught you at it.”
He shrugged, said, “Yeah, so I took my knife off the table and kind of threatened him with it, told him to get back away from me…then the old fucker took a swing at me…I think he cut his arm when he did…and the knife, it kind of went flying.”
“What did you shoot him with?”
“I kept this old hunting rifle, .22, next to my bed. That’s a rough neighborhood, you know. Bad element.”
“No kidding. So you shot him point-blan
k with the rifle.”
Another shrug. “It was self-defense.”
“Why did you do the woman, Joe?”
His face tightened with indignation; he pointed to himself with a thumb. “That was self-defense, too! She started screaming and clawing at me, after I shot her old man, so I threw the bitch down the bed, and started just kind of slapping her, you know, just to shut her up, but she wouldn’t put a lid on that screaming shit so I hit her a couple times, good ones, only she just yelled louder, and so what the hell else could I do, I grabbed that knife off the floor, and…”
He stopped, swallowed.
So I finished for him: “Stabbed her in the back four or five times. In self-defense.”
That’s when he lunged for me, launching himself from the bed and right at me, knocking me and the chair over, ass over teakettle. Then he dove for the knife, but I was up and on him and slammed the nine-millimeter barrel into the back of his hand, crushing it against the nightstand. He yowled and pulled the hand back, shaking it like he’d been burned, and I laid the barrel along the back of his neck, hard, sending him to the floor, where he whimpered like a kicked dog.
I tucked the sheathed knife in my waistband. “Where’s your damn rifle?”
“Down…down a gutter….”
I gave the place a quick toss, looking for the other weapon, or any other weapon, but he was apparently telling the truth. He sat on the floor with his legs curled around under him, like a pitiful little kid who’d just taken a fearsome beating; he was crying, but the eerie thing was, he had that big crazy smile going, too.
“You stay put, Liberace,” I said. “I’m calling the cops.”
I shut him in there, tucked my gun away, and listened for the sound of the window opening and him clambering out into the courtyard.
It was muffled, but I heard it: “Hold it right there!”
Then a gunshot.
And Joe’s voice, pleading: “Please don’t kill me! I’ll tell you everything!”
Seemed the cops had been waiting when Joe went out that window.
Seemed my friend Allen had spotted a suspicious character in the rooming house hallway, trying various doors, then out back, trying windows, and Allen, being a good citizen, called it in. He thought it might be a fellow he knew from work, a dishwasher named Joe Greenberg with scars on his face and a greasy pompadour, and sure enough, that’s who’d been caught, climbing out Allen’s window, then trying to scramble over a fence when that cop fired a warning shot. Seemed the police were looking for an individual on a Bowery killing who answered Greenberg’s description. Later, a sheathed hunting knife used in the Bowery slaying turned up on the grass by some garbage cans behind Allen’s rooming house.
Anyway, that’s what the papers said.
How I should I know? I was just the Little Man Who Wasn’t There, slipping out the back.
8
Harold Weinberg (Joe Greenberg was an alias) had a history of mental illness, having been first institutionalized at age ten; in 1945, at seventeen, he’d been medically discharged from the Army, and had since racked up a long record of vagrancy and breaking-and-entering arrests. He confessed to the police several times, delivering several variants of what he told me, as well as a version that had Bodenheim killing Ruth and prompting Weinberg to retaliate with the .22, as well as my favorite, one in which a person hiding under the bed did it. Weinberg sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at his arraignment, bragged about ridding the world of two Communists, assured spectators he was “not crazy,” and was promptly committed to Bellevue, where Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife Ruth were also registered, albeit in the morgue.
I claimed the bodies, at Ben Hecht’s behest, who shared funeral expenses with Bodenheim’s first wife, Minna, subject of Max’s first book of poetry. Three hundred attended the poet’s funeral, including such leading literary lights as Alfred Kreymborg and Louis Untermeyer, among a dozen other nationally known figures in the arts, who mingled with lowly Village poets, painters, and thespians. Kreymborg gave a eulogy that included the prediction, “We need not worry about Maxwell Bodenheim’s future—he will be read.”
And Bodenheim’s murder did receive enormous national coverage—probably no Bowery bum in history ever got such a send-off—and by dying violently in a sexually charged situation, the one-time bestselling author of Replenishing Jessica gained a second fifteen minutes of fame (to invoke a later oddball Village luminary).
But Kreymborg’s prediction has otherwise proved less than prescient. Every one of Bodie’s books was out of print at his death, and the same is true as I write this, forty-some years later. As far as I’m aware, the last time a Bodenheim book was in print was 1961, when a low-end paperback publisher put some sexy babes on the cover of the Greenwich Village memoirs he was writing at the time of his death.
The body of the former Ruth Fagan was claimed by her family in Detroit.
As I had intended, and done my best to arrange, my participation in the official investigation into the murder of Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife Ruth was minimal; I gave a statement about the argument I’d seen at the Waxworks on the evening of Saturday, February 7. I was not required to testify, and while I’m sure at some point Weinberg must have told the cops about the guy with the automatic who took a confession from him in Allen Spiegel’s rooming-house room, it was likely written off as just another of the numerous ravings of a madman who was eventually committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane; he was released in 1977, and was behind bars again within a year on an attempted murder charge.
Until his death in 1964, Ben Hecht continued to write (and doctor) movie scripts, if with far less distinction than the glory days of the ’30s and ’40s. His real comeback was as a writer of nostalgic, wry memoirs, including A Child of the Century in 1954, in which he waxed fondly of Max; he tended to write of Chicago, not Hollywood or New York, and glorified the Chicago Renaissance (and himself) whenever possible, never letting the truth stand in the way of a good yarn.
He also completed the Marilyn Monroe “autobiography,” which was entitled My Story, but the project hit an unexpected snag.
“Looks like I won’t be paying you to make goo-goo eyes at Marilyn Monroe at this year’s ABA,” Ben said to me on the phone, in April of ’54.
“Hell you say. Why not? Isn’t she making an appearance?”
“Yeah, but not at the ABA. In court. That bimbo’s suing me!”
Ben’s British agent had peddled the serialization rights to the book overseas, without Marilyn’s permission. Her new husband, Mr. DiMaggio, convinced her she was being swindled and, besides, he didn’t like the idea of the book, anyway. Ben’s agent had violated the agreement with Marilyn, who hadn’t signed a final book contract; the book was pulled, the lawsuit dropped. My Story wasn’t published until 1974, when Marilyn’s former business partner, Milton Greene, sold it to Stein and Day, without mentioning Hecht’s role.
I did, however, encounter Marilyn again, and in fact had heard from her prior to Ben’s news about the busted book project. About a week after Bodenheim’s death, when I was back in Chicago, I received a phone call, at home, at three in the morning.
“I’m sorry to call so late,” the breathy voice said.
“That’s okay…” I said, sitting up in bed, blinking myself awake, pretty sure I recognized the voice, but thinking I was possibly still dreaming.
“This is Marilyn Monroe. You know—the actress?”
“I think I remember you. Very little gets past me. I’m a trained detective.”
She laughed a little, but when the voice returned, it was sad. “I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about what I read in the papers.”
“What did you read?”
“About that poor man. Mr. Bodenheim.”
“He was cruel to you.”
“I know. But life was cruel to him.”
We talked for a good hour, about life and death and poetry and her new husband and how happy she was. It was a sweet
, sad phone call. Delicate, gentle, poetic in a way that I don’t think Maxwell Bodenheim ever was, frankly.
The best thing you can say about Max is that, unlike a lot of writers who hit the skids and the bottle, he never stopped writing. He never stopped filling paper with his poetry.
On the other hand, I think about the sign I found in that ten-by-ten hellhole where he died, the cardboard on which he’d scrawled the words: I AM BLIND.
Probably the truest poem he ever wrote.
STRIKE ZONE
1
My buddy Bill Veeck made many a mark in the world of big league baseball, owning his first club at twenty-eight, winning pennants, setting attendance records. Two of Bill’s teams beat the Yankees in their heyday—the ’48 Cleveland Indians and the ’59 White Sox; only one other team managed that feat, the ’54 Indians, which was mostly made up of Veeck’s former players.
And, of course, Bill Veeck was a character as colorful as his exploding-paint-factory sport shirts—one of his many trademarks was a refusal to wear coat and tie—a hard-drinking, chain-smoking extrovert with a wooden leg and a penchant for ignoring such quaint customs as doctors’ orders and a good night’s sleep. Veeck thought nothing of commuting from Cleveland to New York, to hang out with showbiz pals like Frank Sinatra and Skitch Henderson at the Copa, or to fly at the drop of a cap out to Hollywood for a game of charades with Hope and Crosby.
“Baseball is too grim, too serious,” he liked to say. “It should be fun. Most owners are bunch of damn stuffed shirts.”
Many of Veeck’s stunts and promotions and just plain wild ideas indeed had irritated the stuffed shirts of baseball. During World War Two, when the draft had drained the game of so much talent, Veeck told Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that he planned to buy the Phillies and fill the team with black ballplayers (another buyer was quickly found). Still, Veeck did manage to put the first black player in the American League, Larry Doby, and even brought the legendary Negro Leagues pitcher, Satchel Paige, into the majors.
Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook Page 14
