by Ed Ifkovic
“But the second marriage to Jason Fargo ended quickly, too.”
“But not by suicide. Just decay and blunder. Everyone knew him—still sort of does. He was a known entity back then, almost overnight, a minor league producer, a protégé of Sam Harris in some failed review, but he lingered on the scene long after Carlotta dumped him. Even after he bought a home in Connecticut, he kept a New York apartment, produced shows that failed, used up family money, tried to borrow coin from Flo Ziegfeld, in fact. I think Ethel Barrymore lent him a few measly bills for some show, which she regretted. And then he left Broadway. I guess he still runs that lame summer-stock playhouse in Weston. I was dragged to a godawful production of A Doll House there. I think the director thought it was a comedy.”
“Do you know him socially at all?”
“Yes, still do, sort of. Not these past few years. He seems to disappear now and then. But I’d heard he was trying to be literary agent for Carlotta’s memoirs. Quite boisterous about it, rather. Can you believe that?”
“Funny, but I’d never met him before this.”
“Because he’s not invited to the parties where Carlotta Small is invited. The places you and I go to. Howard Swope’s. The Rodgers. You see him at places like Tony Soma’s speakeasy on Forty-Third, a little sloshed and boringly mouthy.”
“Tell me. Is he capable of murder?”
Aleck eyed me, a glint in his eye. “Everyone is capable of murder, Edna.” He smiled. “Especially you.”
“Yes, Aleck, but you’re always in hiding, cowering under your satin sheets, when I have my loaded revolver on me.”
He chuckled. “Dear Edna. Annie Oakley changing her ribbons on her Smith-Corona.”
“Nothing else about him that surprises you?”
“I always sensed that he disliked Carlotta. Felt that his life as a producer hit the skids when she divorced him. That his suburban life with real estate and kiddies and a hag of a wife bored him. Like he wanted to get back into this world”—he waved a plump hand around the Rose Room—“but never could. Drunk, he’s always filled with resentments. And anger. But, to answer your question—yes, I can see him killing Carlotta. As for killing Martha, I don’t know.”
“What about his romantic escapades?”
“Do you mean sex, Edna? It is a word in Webster’s Unabridged, if not in your Show Boat lexicon.”
“Nor, I hazard a guess, in your billowy boudoir, Aleck.”
“My, my,” he said. “Of course, he bragged about his trysts, that one.”
“He had a fling with Martha years back.”
Aleck paused. “I remember now Carlotta talking about her sister as a loose woman. Of course, Carlotta told all of us this tidbit while drunk out of her mind one night, with her hand on Charlie MacArthur’s boney but very handsome thigh.”
“What about Carlotta?” I asked. “She had three husbands. Affairs that you heard of? All the years I’ve known her—admittedly superficially, at parties, a lunch, here and there, a premiere—I never saw her leave with anyone, though one of Dottie’s lovers used to cast amorous glances at her, with mooncalf eyes and stinking gin breath.”
He laughed. “Men talk, though not to you, Edna. We talk to Dottie, because she’s one of the boys. You’re the Virgin Queen.”
“Aleck, I’d appreciate it if . . .”
“No talk of indiscretion, Edna. None whatsoever. Carlotta was very flashy and loud and partied hard with some of the questionable Broadway sots and sinners, but was oddly . . . staid. I guess that’s the word. Decorous.”
“What about husband number three, Nathan Brosnan?”
“Never met him. He was a country-bumpkin hayseed she married just before her much-ballyhooed return to Broadway. I gather he’s a decade younger than she is. He supposedly engineered her reentry. He knew the fool who wrote The Slave to Love, and he helped finance the production. But by the time she was back to Broadway and that show was a minor hit, she’d separated and soon he was a distant memory. I know nothing about him. Never met him. Carlotta always referred to him as the ‘dark side of ugly.’ Rather cruel.”
“But suddenly he’s also back in her life now—and just before the murder.”
Aleck downed another cup of coffee in one gulp, licked his lips. “They must both want something, then. Carlotta always attracted men who wanted something from her. And it wasn’t homemade mincemeat pie or walks along grassy lanes with Priscilla Alden. If they’re back now, maybe one—or both?—is connected to the murder.”
“Well,” I summed up, “could you ask around, Aleck?”
He chortled. “Be your spy, Edna?” He narrowed his eyes.
I drew my lips into a tight line. “Don’t you want to play Sherlock Holmes, Aleck?”
“I think you’re better suited for making people uncomfortable with untoward questions. You’ve had more practice.”
“But sometimes a man can ask questions a lady can’t.”
“How very true! As I say, Ferb, you’re perfect for the job.”
I attended a small dinner party at George and Bea Kaufman’s on Central Park, just six people, including the Kaufmans and me. That meant there were three other guests I resented for being there because I wanted to talk to George. And the three—a handsome but vacuous athlete from Princeton whom I disliked and therefore addressed as Bub until he said his name was not Bub but Bob, or whatever—and a lionizing married couple who collected Broadway playwrights as hobbies—all grilled me about Connecticut, Carlotta Small, and Murder with capital M. I became catatonic, and, when forced to comment, was so acerbic George Kaufman himself started to hiccough. He caught my eye, and I could spot the twinkle there. He was mighty fond of me, I knew, but only when I was at my most lethal. And venomous. “I came for the roast duck with orange glaze,” I said, cavalierly. “And the cherry popovers. Not to find myself grilled like an Oklahoma steak.” Kaufman smiled.
George, sensing my unrest, managed to end the evening early, backslapping the three guests out the door, and Bea dutifully went to bed. “You and George want to talk.”
So I had the same conversation I’d had earlier with Aleck, without the bile, belching and narrow-eyed readiness to attack. I wrote hit plays with Kaufman. We understood each other, I felt, dramaturgical soul mates, practitioners of the ancient craft, and thus a real bond between us. “I’m worried for Carlotta,” I told him. “There’s a chance she could be guilty.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“I hope not.”
“Your instinct, Ferb. Your instincts.”
“Instincts get dulled by friendship and conviviality.”
George smiled. “You’re never been one to have self-doubt, dear Edna.”
“I have it all the time,” I protested. “As you well know. It’s just that I don’t allow it to win.”
“So you’re really enmeshed in this investigation.” He rubbed his eyes under his thick glasses. He looked tired. “Sounds like you and this Officer Wolniak are a team.”
“Not really, George. Well, maybe a little. But I like him a lot. I do. He’s the kind of young man I want in my novel. Polish-American robust lad, purposeful, dedicated, a lawman with a sense of humanity. And humor.”
“And good looking?”
“Of course.” I smiled. “All my heroes are. But this one isn’t flawed, no swaggering Gaylord Ravenal or bombastic Yancey Cravat, this lad. There’s mettle in that Slavic blood, and power.”
“Intoxicating, Ferb?”
“Exactly, Kaufman.”
“Well, I heard the same stories Aleck told you. They’re commonplace, really. Some of which you already know, of course. Carlotta liked to be out there with the public. She believed if she was vampish like Theda Bara, or like some Broadway ‘It’ girl, she’d be famous forever. But she kept changing her mind. I want it, I don’t want it. She’d hide away for months at a time, then reappear. Usually, sadly, intoxicated. Those times she wasn’t pretty.”
“You know Jason Fargo?”
&nb
sp; “Yes, but years back. Never liked him. Smarmy, Ferb—a bad seed. A cad, really. Talked about Carlotta in tasteless fashion. One time, drunk, he even mocked her poor dead first husband by calling him a doomed leech. With Carlotta right there in the room. And she didn’t open her mouth. Just accepted it. That wasn’t like Carlotta. You’d think she’d speak her piece, allow no putting down of a dead husband. She’d been stunned, I heard, at his suicide. Just stunned.”
“She prefers to divorce her husbands,” I remarked, biting my lip, “rather than let them leap over the roof.”
“Edna!” He shook his head.
“I’m having trouble liking Carlotta these days,” I blurted out, suddenly.
“That’s understandable.” He thought for a while. “Jason is a superficial man, a money-grubber. I always thought him dishonest. The way he looked at you, like he was adding the change in your pocket.”
I laughed. “Brother, can you spare a dime.”
Kaufman didn’t laugh. “He’s a charlatan, and you can’t get a bead on a charlatan.”’
I sank into the cushions of the comfortable armchair, gazed out the window at New York at night. “But a murderer?”
“Why not? But of Martha?”
“They had a brief affair, if you could call it that. Long ago. Short lived.”
“And now?”
“Now he’s back, pestering Carlotta, who thinks he and Martha were, well, rutting again in the old barnyard.”
“Quite the domestic imagery, Edna.”
“But to kill her?”
“Maybe if the sex was not so good as he remembered.”
“Really, George!” Suddenly I thought of George’s own amorous flings with chorus colleens. He hadn’t touched Bea in years, New York gossip—Dottie Parker, that slinger of dirt—insisted.
“Sorry!” But he was grinning.
“What about Nathan Brosnan?”
“Husband number three. The overnight guest, she once called him. I met him a couple of times. Wheeler-dealer, something to do with money, managing her career, a Broadway angel of sorts, minor league, ready cash. Rumors of notorious Mafia connections, unfounded. Then he disappeared, too. Broke.”
“Now he’s back, mysteriously.” I explained the letter and Carlotta’s rushing off to see him.”
“He’s up to no good then.”
“Supposedly another conquest of Martha’s.” I paused. “The mother of our countryside.”
He laughed. “Are you getting that view of prim Martha?”
“I have no choice. Only Peter seems to adore her for her virtue.”
George sighed. “I must tell you, Ferber, and this is a secret between you and me. Years back I visited the Inn and Carlotta for a weekend—quite boring, that time, no murder to speak of—and, lounging in my pajamas in the kitchen before Carlotta left her bedroom, well, Martha flirted with me. The one and only time I met her. I’m not making this up. She was amazingly forward, even suggested that I was having an affair with Carlotta.”
I emitted a harrumph sound, full of displeasure. “And I assume you rebuffed her.”
“Of course. Wouldn’t you?”
I smiled. “Are you trying to sound like that pipsqueak, Aleck?”
“He’s better at it than I am.”
“Because you have a heart somewhere in there.”
He shook his head. “Well, I did say no to her advances.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you why. There was such a raw hunger in those eyes it fairly took my breath away. The woman scared me.”
“Lord, George! I would not have thought of Martha as . . .”
“A slut!” He laughed. “Strangely Carlotta is the New England nun, Edna. Who dresses like Little Egypt!”
We talked some more, casual and friendly chatter, and I prepared to leave. “I’m going back to Connecticut tomorrow. George, do me a favor. Please ask around. See what you can find out. Men talk—but not to me. They say things in the dark corners of speakeasies. My lovely terrace is fine for looking at total eclipses of the moon but no one there, I fear, reports back from the gutter.” I laughed. “Or give me a call if you find something out sooner.”
Kaufman nodded, approvingly. He saluted me. “I’ll seek out a gutter tomorrow,” he said. “God know what I’ll find there.”
“Or who,” I said, nodding back.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Back in Connecticut on Friday afternoon, picked up by a moody Eben who, again, barely spoke, I found myself sitting in the kitchen, nibbling on a cold roast beef sandwich Julia had left in the refrigerator, and wondering about Carlotta. I’d found a note on the table, scribbled in Carlotta’s frantic penmanship, all curlicues and dips and blotches, announcing that she’d left for the day with Peter. “I find I could not sit here all day, alone—lonely, really—although I wanted you back here. Peter will entertain me by driving me to Hartford to see a cousin. I’ll make him bring me home early. I promise. Carlotta.” Then she added, near the bottom of the sheet, “I just don’t know what to do with myself. I’m expecting disaster.” I read and read the note, folded it, clicked my tongue, and then sat there, quiet.
But within the hour, summoned to Millicent’s by a phone call (“I saw Eben dropping you off like a delivery from the general store”), I found myself sitting with the old woman and Stas, who’d stopped in to see her. The three of us sat in Millicent’s tidy parlor, the scent of old lavender and yellowing lace pervading the room, and I served tea. Stas, I noted, put in too many lumps of sugar and so much milk the delicate tea looked like murky snow.
We were discussing the weekly issue of The Connecticut Valley Gazette, which Roger Emerson issued faithfully each Thursday afternoon. Quickly, I’d scanned a copy, supplied by Stas, and we stared, transfixed, at the oversized boldface headline and the huge black-and-white photograph on the front page: Carlotta and me leaving the state police barracks in Danbury, a fresh-scrubbed, hulking Stas between us. Headline: Local Broadway Actress Interrogated for Murder.
Millicent smirked, “Isn’t ‘local Broadway’ some sort of oxymoron?”
Stas stared at me and shook his head.
The article was pure sensation, innuendo, barely concealed distaste, all revealing, according to Millicent, the indelible hallmark of the scurrilous Emerson. “Not known for objectivity in the press, you’d say.” There were one-lined paragraphs, each one more sensational than the last, building to a crescendo of accusation. Phrases like “suspect in her sister’s murder,” “imminent arrest,” “overwhelming evidence,” “falsehood and prevarication on Miss Small’s part,” and, grandly arrogant, “the town has accepted the fact that its most famous resident, admittedly more flamboyant and outrageous than the quaint New England village is used to, is probably a vicious murderess.” Emerson droned on and on, packing the columns with nonsense.
I shook my head. “What a vile creature!”
Millicent, who’d read the paper earlier was grinning. “Oh, my dear, it gets better. He saves his most colorful invective for you, Edna.”
“What?” I flipped through the skimpy paper and came upon my photograph, a press photograph used by Doubleday to tout Cimarron. Headline: NY Novelist Decides to Enter the Fray. “What does that mean?” I wondered, to no one in particular. But I read that “Edna Ferber, author of popular fiction like Show Boat and So Big, books that have made her a rich if eccentric woman, was in town visiting her close friend, fellow partygoer Carlotta Small, ostensibly to do research for her own book on Connecticut but, most insist, as a ghostwriter for Miss Small’s long-talked-about memoirs dealing with her risqué life on the New York stage—as well as her three failed marriages. Miss Ferber, unmarried herself, is known to like the night life of New York.” Emerson went on to talk about how I had “elbowed” the local constabulary—the unnamed Johnny Marks—out of the way, demanding that I be an “agent of investigation,” claiming, by working with the state police, namely “local farm-boy-turned-cop Stanislaus Wolniak,” I would solve any cri
me. He quoted me: “‘Living in New York I understand corruption and evil-doing.’” I looked up. “I never said such a thing to him. Or to anyone.” Emerson continued: “The presence of the celebrated Jewess, however, is not without censure. Some believe her insistence on doing Connecticut State Police work is an attempt to whitewash the investigation of her friend.” The article continued, absurdity piled upon absurdity.
“Well,” I grunted, “what a scoundrel!”
Millicent shook her head. “No one with any sense pays the man any mind. I’ve always wondered who in these towns around here reads his propaganda.”
Wolniak nodded. “He’s a troublemaker, though mainly a windbag. It’s best to ignore him—for now. I’d actually like to catch up on where we stand, Ferb.”
I smiled. “Stas, I don’t know if we stand anywhere.”
“Let’s just talk it out. Sometimes something emerges out of, well, talk. Maybe Miss Wright here, listening to us, can hear something we can’t spot.”
Millicent beamed at the young man, reached out to tap him on the wrist. “Ah, the flattery of lovely youth!”
He looked at her. “Fact is, it isn’t flattery.”
I began reviewing the conversations I’d had in New York with Aleck Woollcott and George Kaufman, referring to both as Aleck and George. Stas, looking sheepish, acknowledged that he’d never heard of either man, which surprised me: I simply assumed the whole world understood (and was titillated by) the vagaries and turns of my smart New York set. But maybe not.
“I’ve come to believe,” I concluded, “that the husbands have some place in this murder. But I’m not sure how.”
Millicent asked, “All of them?”
“Or both of them,” Stas said. “The first one wasn’t around long enough to make himself remembered.”
“Hard to say,” I added. “Maybe his suicide tells us something, all these years later. Especially if, somehow, it connects to Jason Fargo, who seemed to be hanging around the edge of Carlotta’s life at the time her first marriage was falling apart.”
