Death of a Showman

by Mariah Fredericks

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Forsaking all others, isn’t that somewhere in the vows? For a year at least? I would have thought you could manage that.”

  Leo kept smiling. But his neck and ears went red. Usually, I liked being right. Now it gave me no pleasure at all.

  “Just don’t be a complete idiot and let her husband find out.”

  “Husband?”

  He had not contradicted my charge that he had already wandered, but his confusion sounded genuine. Then again, I reminded myself, Leo said many things that sounded genuine, only to forget them when it suited. Given the peril the show already faced, a public affair with his leading lady, when his wife and her husband were also in the show, would not help matters. A betrayed Violet Tempest could be noisy, and she had friends in the press. And the prickly Claude Arden would not welcome the humiliation of having his wife’s affair with an energetic young composer become common knowledge.

  Nor, it occurred to me, would he welcome the knowledge that it was an affair and not just flirting. Some husbands were sanguine about infidelities. Mr. Arden didn’t strike me as one of them.

  “Anyway,” Leo said with a bit of his old insouciance, “it’s nice to know you care.”

  “I care”—I emphasized the point by giving him a sharp shove—“because you’re spending Mrs. Tyler’s money. That means your success is her success. And I will treat anything that threatens that success, including and especially stupidity on your part, in the harshest possible manner.”

  Going inside, I regretted I had not shoved Leo harder. My shoulders were agitated, my hands humming; I felt the need to do something. The word “care” jangled in my mind, discomfiting and accusatory. I thought of Louise’s happy, eager face, Leo’s red ears, my own snappishness. I had talked too much, said too much. And yet, I still felt the need to talk, talk, talk …

  Quickly, I took up the telephone and asked to be connected to the number for Anna’s family’s restaurant. It was not time for the dinner rush, but her uncle sounded harried and so I kept my message short.

  “Please ask Anna to call me. Tell her I’m sorry—she’ll know why. I think. Only … please ask her to call. I need…”

  I meant to say, I need to talk to her. But nervous and not wanting to keep her uncle, I finished, “I need her. Please tell her. Thank you.”

  The next day, rehearsals resumed under Leo’s direction. It was important, he said, that the press see that the show was in no danger and that while “of course no one can ever replace Sidney,” he was now firmly in charge. Two Loves Have I would open on schedule. Sensitive to Nedda Fiske’s particular predicament, he gave her the first few days off, rehearsing instead the guest acts, mostly vaudeville stars who would be performing well-honed routines to presumably rapturous applause. Junie Nichols rolled out her comic bit of Baby WahWah, the juvenile relative of Nedda’s character who ruins one date. Horrocks and Whey did their routine of two drunks whose shoelaces become entangled. And Bill Davidson played a waiter who “learned” the cakewalk by watching the Ardens dance.

  I was happy to see Harriet Biederman in her customary spot in the second row—and concerned. She would have taken Sidney Warburton’s death harder than anyone; I wanted to be sure someone had assured her of employment as long as she wanted it.

  “How are you, Miss Biederman?”

  She looked up, startled to be addressed. “Oh, Miss Prescott. I am sad. Like everyone. But…”

  She gestured to the stage as if to say, This is still here, what else matters?

  I asked if someone had spoken to her about work, and she answered, “Yes, Mr. Hirschfeld was very kind. He says I can work right up to the wedding.” Her eyebrows jumped in imitation of Leo. “‘And after! During, even!’”

  “I’m so sorry. I know you held Mr. Warburton in high esteem. At least…” I groped for comfort. “You were not there when it happened.”

  Her smile dimmed. “I am very upset with myself for leaving. It was kind of Mr. Warburton to ask me to such an important dinner. To run out like that was disgraceful.”

  “You’re being hard on yourself. I’m sure you had a reason.”

  She glanced at me, cheeks showing high color. “I thought so at the time, but it was not a good reason. I should have stayed and not been such a child.”

  Puzzled, I tried to feel out the source of her embarrassment. If she had left to please her bullying fiancé, would she call that childish? It seemed proper—wrongheaded, but proper. Perhaps something had offended her? There had been a fair amount of bad behavior at the table that night.

  That phrase—bad behavior—reminded me: it was time to seek out and remove Mr. Harney’s bottles. I said as much to Miss Biederman, adding, “It seems cruel somehow. Especially after Mr. Warburton’s death. I feel I should leave him his comfort.”

  “If people cannot give up things that are dangerous to them, you take those things away.” She met my eye as if to reassure me. “It’s for his own good.”

  Then Leo called, “Did you get that change, Miss Biederman?” Caught, she riffled through the notebook, coming to a fresh page so she could take down the new staging. I withdrew.

  When I came to Mr. Harney’s first hiding spot—behind the fire bucket, stage left—I found the bottle untouched and the comic chatting with Mr. Davidson, Peanut in the crook of his arm like a stuffed toy. Unlike the rest of the cast, Mr. Harney wore a black armband. This reminded me of his growling accusation. Which one of you bastards did it? His first thought had not been to accuse Floyd Lombardo, but one of his own colleagues.

  Harney murmured compliments, Davidson condolences. The two men shook hands and parted. Thinking of the scrapbook, all those performers who owed Warburton their careers, I asked, “Did Mr. Davidson know Mr. Warburton?”

  “Of course. Anyone who joked, sang, danced, or self-immolated onstage knew Sidney Warburton.”

  “Not everyone mourns him, though.”

  “No. Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn’t, it’s not my place to say. But there are some”—he nodded to the Ardens, now taking their place onstage—“who’d be digging ditches and scrubbing floors were it not for him. Sidney Warburton deserved far better than to meet his end at the hands of Floyd Lombardo.”

  Curious that he now acknowledged Lombardo’s guilt, I said, “You asked which of us had done it, the night he was shot.”

  “I was drunk the night he was shot. Perhaps you noticed.”

  There was no disputing that. “I feel so sorry for Miss Fiske.”

  A heavy sigh. “Nedda Fiske, now there’s a woman of genuine talent—and all the madness that goes with it. What she’ll do when they catch Lombardo, I don’t know. They’ll give him the chair and that could be the end of her.”

  No sooner had he said Nedda’s name than we heard it echoed by Leo in a tone that drew us out from the wings. Blanche and Claude had been dancing. Now the music came to an abrupt halt. I watched as Nedda Fiske made her way down the aisle. Blanche broke away to say, “Nedda, what’s wrong?”

  This surprised me; Blanche Arden was not one to notice—or care much—about the suffering of others. But then looking at Nedda Fiske, I realized you would have to be blind not to notice and made of stone not to care. Her wonderfully comic mouth, usually so animated, was slack. Her hair was roughly put up and coarse from lack of care. Her face was heavy, eyes shadowed and staring. Normally, she was a stylish dresser whose witty fashion sense transformed her homeliness into what the French called jolie laide. But her clothes were not only drab, they were none too clean. Her coat was buttoned wrong, the heel of one shoe broken. Adele St. John would later say she looked like a dustwoman who’d gotten lost on her way to drown herself.

  Now she stopped halfway down the aisle. “I just thought…”

  She broke off as if she’d forgotten what she’d thought. Or that she could think. It occurred to me that she might be drunk.

  Tentative, Louise said, “You don’t look well, Miss Fiske. Please, ta
ke my car. Go home and get some rest.”

  “I don’t want to go home.”

  From the stage, Claude Arden called, “If Floyd turns up, you’ll want to be there for him, won’t you? He’ll need you, Nedda…”

  “Floyd’s not coming home.”

  “Nonsense,” said Blanche. “He’ll run back to you just as he always has.”

  “He won’t,” said Nedda, anguish seeping into her voice like acid. “He can’t.”

  Her face began to crumble, her fists rising as she said again, “He can’t.” She repeated the phrase over and over. Then she struck herself, tore at her hair. Falling to her knees, she wailed, “He can’t, he can’t…” until grief became so great she could no longer form words. Leo ran over and tried to gather her up, but she beat him off, clawing at her face and wrists, desperate to do herself damage. Hurrying down the steps, I took hold of one flailing arm, catching a blow to the jaw in the process. Claude Arden took the other arm, and the three of us managed to subdue her. Prone, she twisted in our grasp, her back arching with each wracked “ah” of despair.

  The doctor was called.

  9

  Floyd Lombardo had been pulled from the river. The police could not say how long he had been there—or how he had gotten there in the first place. That grisly determination would be made by the coroner at Bellevue.

  The particular timing of Floyd Lombardo’s demise weighed on my mind long past the hour I was dismissed. I pondered it on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, so lost in thought that I jumped when Ethel the parlormaid knocked on my door to say I had a telephone call.

  “It’s a gentleman,” she said with a coy smile.

  I took the call in the kitchen where the servants’ phone was kept. It was late and Mrs. Avery had gone home. For a moment, I thought of turning on the lights, but there was a summer moon and so I left them off and settled myself on a stool by the phone.

  It was a gentleman, a very tired-sounding gentleman by the name of Michael Behan. He was still at the Herald, writing up the latest on Mr. Lombardo, and wished to know: Had I just eaten dinner?

  “No, why?”

  “Because I heard from my friend at the morgue.”

  “And?”

  “Lombardo was shot in the gut, which is a nasty way to go. The body was in a certain condition that indicates it had been in the water quite some time.”

  “How can they tell?”

  “When they pulled him out, he was missing a few things. And when they cut him open, he was pretty ripe.”

  I pressed the phone to my stomach, inhaled. “It is summer.”

  “It is. Only—are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “I’d like to know when he died and I’d like to be certain. So, go ahead.”

  “His skin was coming off him. That only happens after a few weeks.”

  The briefest vision of that vain, dapper man, his skin sagging off him like fat off a boiled ham. I swallowed sharply, called forth thoughts of meadow. Daisies. Birdsong.

  “I see.”

  “I hope you don’t, frankly. But tomorrow the city finds out Floyd Lombardo didn’t kill Warburton. And that in fact someone killed Floyd Lombardo. The police know he owed money all over town. They’re going on the assumption that one of his backers realized he had lost his main source of income in Miss Fiske and decided to be shot of him. I’m sorry, that was tasteless.”

  I reminded him we had started the conversation with the effects of water on dead bodies; taste was beside the point.

  My mind went back to Nedda’s fretting over Floyd’s absence. He hasn’t been home in days. Good riddance, we all thought about a man who might have been dead in the river as we smirked. How soon after his banishment from Nedda’s life had Floyd Lombardo been killed? The question tugged at me, but before I could think why, Behan asked, “How is Miss Fiske?”

  “Brokenhearted,” I said. “Please don’t put that in the newspaper.”

  “Come on, everyone knew she was running around with Lombardo.”

  “Leave her with some dignity, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “This would be a woman who clutched a man’s legs to be pulled across the stage?”

  That had been one of Miss Fiske’s signature acts at the Follies. How funny, I thought, onstage, she mocked the devotion she felt so deeply in real life. There were worse ways of managing, I supposed.

  “I hear she’s at home, under a doctor’s care. Is she coming back to the show?” Like a dog, he had his nose to the ground, fixed on a new scent: the collapse of Sidney Warburton’s last production.

  “Remember Mrs. Tyler.”

  “You’ve now got two dead bodies and a missing star. Those who care for Mrs. Tyler might advise her to cut her losses and invest in swampland.”

  “Remarkably, she doesn’t pay me for financial advice.” Hearing the clock in the hall chime midnight, I asked, “Why aren’t you at home?”

  He sighed. “For a lump, Tib has remarkably refined tastes. His requirements are many and expensive. Hence old Dad, who gets paid by the article, is churning out the verbiage. Maeve’s mother always thought Maeve made the mistake of her life marrying a grubby reporter. So, with Tib on the way, she’s keeping a sharp eye on my ability to provide.”

  “Who was she supposed to marry?”

  “Oh, there’s an answer to that: Dermot Mulcahy, dentist of renown. You ask my mother-in-law, she’ll be only too happy to tell you. He courted Maeve for years; she was all set to be Mrs. Dentist. Then I showed up.”

  Someone had once called Maeve Behan the most beautiful woman at St. John’s parish and Michael Behan had not disagreed. It was a love match then. A defiant one. Maeve Behan had a chance to marry for money and had chosen love instead. And Michael Behan had persuaded her, because …

  A vague comforting notion I had not even known I clung to disintegrated and fell away, leaving me with an empty feeling.

  “Not to mention, poor Maeve’s at the point where sleep is a distant memory and it’s hot enough without me in the bed.”

  At the mention of the marital bed, I toyed with the phone cord.

  He asked, “Just in case Miss Fiske doesn’t return, what happens then?”

  That decision had been made at the end of the day after a tense conference between the principals. “The world sees a whole new side of Violet Tempest.”

  “Really? And how is this new side of Jelly on Pins?”

  Nervous, was my first thought. The news that Violet would replace Nedda as the factory girl had not been well received. The Ardens had demanded that the part should be cut altogether. Any one of the vaudevillians could fill the time. It had been one thing to expand the show to accommodate a star like Nedda Fiske. But now that she was gone … well, time to let the Darling Ardens take over. It would be madness to trust a buxom chorus girl with such an important part. Perhaps it was my imagination, but Blanche had seemed particularly annoyed by Leo’s advancement of his wife.

  Faced with such hostility and the prospect of doing more than descending and bending, Violet had been anxious. After the announcement, I overheard her ask Leo if he was sure. When he said yes, she said, “No, I mean really sure. With the singing.” If he had a reassuring answer to that, I had not heard it.

  The Ardens had won one concession. As the French maid was now consigned to oblivion, Claude Arden would sing “Why Not Me?”

  “Enchanting,” I said. “And on that, you may quote me.”

  “‘Source closely connected to the production says, ‘Enchanting, world to see Violet Tempest a whole new way. With actual clothes on.’”

  I laughed. “Leave it at ‘enchanting,’ please.” There, I had done Violet Hirschfeld a favor. I was not a jealous shrew in the slightest.

  Then Behan asked the question I had hoped he would not: “So, if Floyd Lombardo didn’t kill Warburton—who did?”

  Images flitted through my mind. The eager faces that had greeted the stars on their arrival, even Leo, dressed as one of them, accepted a
s one of them. The handsome brunette, so breathy in her admiration. Excited whispers of Owney Davis’s presence. The whirl and hubbub of the dance floor—why had that young man come to our table? The raging ragged lunatic who had accosted us outside the revolving door …

  “It was a crowded restaurant, Mr. Behan. Full of people who knew Mr. Warburton and more than a few who had reason to hate him.”

  “But they found Lombardo’s gun at the scene.”

  Lombardo’s gun. I’d forgotten Lombardo’s gun. Petulant, I made excuses. It was late, I was tired. Lombardo’s gun—what did it matter?

  Except if Lombardo was already in the river by that time, he could not have shot the gun—much less dropped it at the scene.

  I need it, Nedda!

  And I’m telling you, I don’t have it!

  That argument with Nedda Fiske. At the time, I thought he wanted money. But perhaps it was the gun? Lombardo owed money to impatient people. He felt a need for protection. And when that protection went missing, he had gone directly to Nedda.

  Who had said she didn’t have it.

  A thought curled into being. I snuffed it out. Nedda Fiske had been heartbroken when Lombardo’s body was found. Truly, genuinely …

  Although she was an actress.

  Not that good an actress. No one was.

  I looked at the facts plainly: the person who shot Sidney Warburton had used Floyd’s gun to do it. Meaning whoever it was had known both men.

  I tried to reason a way out of the ugly implications. Lombardo could have dropped the gun on the street, had it stolen at a gambling den. Someone had mentioned a Syndicate, powerful financial interests who had reason to hate Sidney Warburton. It didn’t have to be someone involved with Two Loves Have I …

  “Thoughts, Miss Prescott?”

  “Not at this time, Mr. Behan.”

  “Ah, remember when there were no secrets between us?”

  Because it was late, he had slipped into his old teasing tone, the lazy charm that had no doubt gotten many a waitress, hatcheck girl, and yes, maid, to tell him stories. All in fun, just a joke, only he never quite got around to mentioning he was married. In fact, he had never told me directly; I had overheard him talking to his wife on the phone.