The Fantasy and Mystery Stories of F Scott Fitzgerald

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  She was often asked to dance at these Saturday night affairs, something ‘classic’ or perhaps an acrobatic clog – on one memorable occasion she had annoyed the governing board by a ‘shimee’ (then the scapegrace of jazz), and the novel and somewhat startling excuse made for her was that she was ‘so tight she didn’t know what she was doing, anyhow’. She impressed me as a curious girl, and I was eager to see what she would produce tonight.

  At twelve o’clock the music always ceased, as dancing was forbidden on Sunday morning. So at 11.30 a vast fanfaronade of drum and cornet beckoned the dancers and the couples on the verandas, and the ones in the cars outside, and the stragglers from the bar, into the ballroom. Chairs were brought in and galloped up en masse and with a great racket to the slightly raised platform. The orchestra had evacuated this and taken a place beside. Then, as the rearward lights were lowered, they began to play a tune accompanied by a curious drumbeat that I had never heard before, and simultaneously Catherine Jones appeared upon the platform. She wore the short, country girl’s dress upon which I had lately laboured, and a wide sun bonnet under which her face, stained yellow with powder, looked out at us with rolling eyes and a vacant negroid leer. She began to dance.

  I had never seen anything like it before, and until five years later, I wasn’t to see it again. It was the Charleston – it must have been the Charleston. I remember the double drum-beat like a shouted ‘Hey! Hey!’ and the swing of the arms and the odd knock-kneed effect. She had picked it up, heaven knows where.

  Her audience, familiar with Negro rhythms, leaned forward eagerly – even to them it was something new, but it is stamped on my mind as clearly and indelibly as though I had seen it yesterday. The figure on the platform swinging and stamping, the excited orchestra, the waiters grinning in the doorway of the bar, and all around, through many windows, the soft languorous Southern night seeping in from swamp and cottonfield and lush foliage and brown, warm streams. At what point a feeling of tense uneasiness began to steal over me I don’t know. The dance could scarcely have taken ten minutes; perhaps the first beats of the barbaric music disquieted me – long before it was over, I was sitting rigid in my seat, and my eyes were wandering here and there around the hall, passing along the rows of shadowy faces as if seeking some security that was no longer there.

  I’m not a nervous type; nor am I given to panic; but for a moment I was afraid that if the music and the dance didn’t stop, I’d be hysterical. Something was happening all about me. I knew it as well as if I could see into these unknown souls. Things were happening, but one thing especially was leaning over so close that it almost touched us, that it did touch us … I almost screamed as a hand brushed accidentally against my back.

  The music stopped. There was applause and protracted cries of encore, but Catherine Jones shook her head definitely at the orchestra leader and made as though to leave the platform. The appeals for more continued – again she shook her head, and it seemed to me that her expression was rather angry. Then a strange incident occurred. At the protracted pleading of someone in the front row, the coloured orchestra leader began the vamp of the tune, as if to lure Catherine Jones into changing her mind. Instead she turned toward him, snapped out: ‘Didn’t you hear me say no?’ and then, surprisingly, slapped his face. The music stopped, and an amused murmur terminated abruptly as a muffled but clearly audible shot rang out.

  Immediately we were on our feet, for the sound indicated that it had been fired within or near the house. One of the chaperons gave a little scream, but when some wag called out: ‘Caesar’s in that henhouse again’, the momentary alarm dissolved into laughter. The club manager, followed by several curious couples, went out to have a look about, but the rest were already moving around the floor to the strains of ‘Good Night, Ladies’, which traditionally ended the dance.

  I was glad it was over. The man with whom I had come went to get his car, and calling a waiter, I sent him for my golf-clubs, which were upstairs. I strolled out on the porch and waited, wondering again if Charley Kincaid had gone home.

  Suddenly I was aware, in that curious way in which you become aware of something that has been going on for several minutes, that there was a tumult inside. Women were shrieking; there was a cry of ‘Oh, my God!’, then the sounds of a stampede on the inside stairs, and footsteps running back and forth across the ballroom. A girl appeared from somewhere and pitched forward in a dead faint – almost immediately another girl did the same, and I heard a frantic male voice shouting into a telephone. Then, hatless and pale, a young man rushed out on the porch, and with hands that were cold as ice, seized my arm.

  ‘What is it?’ I cried. ‘A fire? What’s happened?’

  ‘Marie Bannerman’s dead upstairs in the women’s dressing-room. Shot through the throat!’

  The rest of that night is a series of visions that seem to have no connection with one another, that follow each other with the sharp instantaneous transitions of scenes in the movies. There was a group who stood arguing on the porch, in voices now raised, now hushed, about what should be done and how every waiter in the club, ‘even old Moses’, ought to be given the third degree tonight. That a ‘nigger’ had shot and killed Marie Bannerman was the instant and unquestioned assumption – in the first unreasoning instant, anyone who doubted it would have been under suspicion. The guilty one was said to be Katie Golstein, the coloured maid, who had discovered the body and fainted. It was said to be ‘that nigger they were looking for at Kisco.’ It was any darky at all.

  Within half an hour people began to drift out, each with his little contribution of new discoveries. The crime had been committed with Sheriff Abercrombie’s gun – he had hung it, belt and all, in full view on the wall before coming down to dance. It was missing – they were hunting for it now. Instantly killed, the doctor said – bullet had been fired from only a few feet away.

  Then a few minutes later another young man came out and made the announcement in a loud, grave voice: ‘They’ve arrested Charley Kincaid.’

  My head reeled. Upon the group gathered on the veranda fell an awed, stricken silence.

  ‘Arrested Charley Kincaid!’

  ‘Charley Kincaid!’

  Why, he was one of the best, one of themselves.

  ‘That’s the craziest thing I ever heard of!’

  The young man nodded, shocked like the rest, but self-important with his information.

  ‘He wasn’t downstairs, when Catherine Jones was dancing – he says he was in the men’s locker-room. And Marie Bannerman told a lot of girls that they’d had a row, and she was scared of what he’d do.’

  Again an awed silence.

  ‘That’s the craziest thing I ever heard!’ someone said again.

  ‘Charley Kincaid!’

  The narrator waited a moment. Then he added:

  ‘He caught her kissing Joe Cable –’

  I couldn’t keep silence a minute longer.

  ‘What about it?’ I cried out. ‘I was with him at the time. He wasn’t – he wasn’t angry at all.’

  They looked at me, their faces startled, confused, unhappy. Suddenly the footsteps of several men sounded loud through the ballroom, and a moment later Charley Kincaid, his face dead white, came out the front door between the Sheriff and another man. Crossing the porch quickly, they descended the steps and disappeared in the darkness. A moment later there was the sound of a starting car.

  When an instant later far away down the road I heard the eerie scream of an ambulance, I got up desperately and called to my escort, who formed part of the whispering group.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘I can’t stand this. Either take me home or I’ll find a place in another car.’ Reluctantly he shouldered my clubs – the sight of them made me realize that I now couldn’t leave on Monday after all – and followed me down the steps just as the black ambulance curved in at the gate – a ghastly shadow on the bright, starry night.

  The situation after the first wild surmises, the f
irst burst of unreasoning loyalty to Charley Kincaid, had died away, was outlined by the Davis Courier and by most of the State newspapers in this fashion: Marie Bannerman died in the women’s dressing-room of the Davis Country Club from the effects of a shot fired at close quarters from a revolver just after 11.45 o’clock on Saturday night. Many persons had heard the shot; moreover, it had undoubtedly been fired from the revolver of Sheriff Abercrombie, which had been hanging in full sight on the wall of the next room. Abercrombie himself was in the ballroom when the murder took place, as many witnesses could testify. The revolver was not found.

  So far as was known, the only man who had been upstairs at the time the shot was fired was Charley Kincaid. He was engaged to Miss Bannerman, but according to several witnesses they had quarrelled seriously that evening. Miss Bannerman herself had mentioned the quarrel, adding that she was afraid and wanted to keep away from him until he cooled off.

  Charles Kincaid asserted that at the time the shot was fired he was in the men’s locker-room – where, indeed, he was found, immediately after the discovery of Miss Bannerman’s body. He denied having had any words with Miss Bannerman at all. He had heard the shot but if he thought anything of it, he thought that ‘someone was potting cats out-doors.’

  Why had he chosen to remain in the locker-room during the dance?

  No reason at all. He was tired. He was waiting until Miss Bannerman wanted to go home.

  The body was discovered by Katie Golstein, the coloured maid, who herself was found in a faint when the crowd of girls surged upstairs for their coats. Returning from the kitchen, where she had been getting a bite to eat, Katie had found Miss Bannerman, her dress wet with blood, already dead on the floor.

  Both the police and the newspapers attached importance to the geography of the country-club’s second storey. It consisted of a row of three rooms – the women’s dressing-room and the men’s locker-room at either end, and in the middle a room which was used as a cloak-room and for the storage of golf-clubs. The women’s and men’s rooms had no outlet except into this chamber, which was connected by one stairs with the ball-room below, and by another with the kitchen. According to the testimony of three Negro cooks and the white caddy-master, no one but Katie Golstein had gone up the kitchen stairs that night.

  As I remember it after five years, the foregoing is a pretty accurate summary of the situation when Charley Kincaid was accused of first-degree murder and committed for trial. Other people, chiefly Negroes, were suspected (at the loyal instigation of Charley Kincaid’s friends), and several arrests were made, but nothing ever came of them, and upon what grounds they were based I have long forgotten. One group, in spite of the disappearance of the pistol, claimed persistently that it was a suicide and suggested some ingenious reasons to account for the absence of the weapon.

  Now when it is known Marie Bannerman happened to die so savagely and so violently, it would be easy for me, of all people, to say that I believed in Charley Kincaid all the time. But I didn’t. I thought that he had killed her, and at the same time I knew that I loved him with all my heart. That it was I who first happened upon the evidence which set him free was due not to any faith in his innocence but to a strange vividness with which, in moods of excitement, certain scenes stamp themselves on my memory, so that I can remember every detail and how that detail struck me at the time.

  It was one afternoon early in July, when the case against Charley Kincaid seemed to be at its strongest, that the horror of the actual murder slipped away from me for a moment and I began to think about other incidents of that same haunted night. Something Marie Bannerman had said to me in the dressing-room persistently eluded me, bothered me – not because I believed it to be important, but simply because I couldn’t remember. It was gone from me, as if it had been a part of the fantastic undercurrent of small-town life which I had felt so strongly that evening, the sense that things were in the air, old secrets, old loves and feuds, and unresolved situations, that I could never fully understand. Just for a minute it seemed to me that Marie Bannerman had pushed aside the curtain; then it had dropped into place again – the house into which I might have looked was dark now forever.

  Another incident, perhaps less important, also haunted me. The tragic events of a few minutes after had driven it from everyone’s mind, but I had a strong impression that for a brief space of time I wasn’t the only one to be surprised. When the audience had demanded an encore from Catherine Jones, her unwillingness to dance again had been so acute that she had been driven to the point of slapping the orchestra leader’s face. The discrepancy between his offence and the venom of the rebuff recurred to me again and again. It wasn’t natural – or, more important, it hadn’t seemed natural. In view of the fact that Catherine Jones had been drinking, it was explicable, but it worried me now as it had worried me then. Rather to lay its ghost than to do any investigating, I pressed an obliging young man into service and called on the leader of the band.

  His name was Thomas, a very dark, very simple-hearted virtuoso of the traps, and it took less than ten minutes to find out that Catherine Jones’ gesture had surprised him as much as it had me. He had known her a long time, seen her at dances since she was a little girl – why, the very dance she did that night was one she had rehearsed with his orchestra a week before. And a few days later she had come to him and said she was sorry.

  ‘I knew she would,’ he concluded. ‘She’s a right good-hearted girl. My sister Katie was her nurse from when she was born up to the time she went to school.’

  ‘Your sister?’

  ‘Katie. She’s the maid out at the country-club. Katie Golstein. You been reading ’bout her in the papers in ’at Charley Kincaid case. She’s the maid. Katie Golstein. She’s the maid at the country-club what found the body of Miss Bannerman.’

  ‘So Katie was Miss Catherine Jones’ nurse?’

  ‘Yes ma’am.’

  Going home, stimulated but unsatisfied, I asked my companion a quick question.

  ‘Were Catherine and Marie good friends?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘All the girls are good friends here, except when two of them are tryin’ to get hold of the same man. Then they warm each other up a little.’

  ‘Why do you suppose Catherine hasn’t married? Hasn’t she got lots of beaux?’

  ‘Off and on. She only likes people for a day or so at a time. That is – all except Joe Cable.’

  Now a scene burst upon me, broke over me like a dissolving wave. And suddenly, my mind shivering from the impact, I remembered what Marie Bannerman had said to me in the dressing-room: ‘Who else was it that saw?’ She had caught a glimpse of someone else, a figure passing so quickly that she could not identify it, out of the corner of her eye.

  And suddenly I seemed to see that figure, as if I too had been vaguely conscious of it at the time, just as one is aware of a familiar gait or outline on the street long before there is any flicker of recognition. On the corner of my own eye was stamped a hurrying figure – that might have been Catherine Jones.

  But when the shot was fired, Catherine Jones was in full view of over fifty people. Was it credible that Katie Golstein, a woman of fifty, who as a nurse had been known and trusted by three generations of Davis people, would shoot down a young girl in cold blood at Catherine Jones’ command?

  ‘But when the shot was fired, Catherine Jones was in full view of over fifty people.’

  That sentence beat in my head all night, taking on fantastic variations, dividing itself into phrases, segments, individual words.

  ‘But when the shot was fired – Catherine Jones was in full view – of over fifty people.’

  When the shot was fired! What shot? The shot we heard. When the shot was fired … When the shot was fired …

  The next morning at nine o’clock, with the pallor of sleeplessness buried under a quantity of paint such as I had never worn before or have since, I walked up a rickety flight of stairs to the Sheriff’s office
.

  Abercrombie, engrossed in his morning’s mail, looked up curiously as I came in the door.

  ‘Catherine Jones did it,’ I cried, struggling to keep the hysteria out of my voice. ‘She killed Marie Bannerman with a shot we didn’t hear because the orchestra was playing and everybody was pushing up the chairs. The shot we heard was when Katie fired the pistol out of the window after the music was stopped. To give Catherine an alibi!’

  I was right – as everyone now knows, but for a week, until Katie Golstein broke down under a fierce and ruthless inquisition, nobody believed me. Even Charley Kincaid, as he afterward confessed, didn’t dare to think it could be true.

  What had been the relations between Catherine and Joe Cable no one ever knew, but evidently she had determined that his clandestine affair with Marie Bannerman had gone too far.

  Then Marie chanced to come into the women’s room while Catherine was dressing for her dance – and there again there is a certain obscurity, for Catherine always claimed that Marie got the revolver, threatened her with it and that in the ensuing struggle the trigger was pulled. In spite of everything, I always rather liked Catherine Jones, but in justice it must be said that only a simple-minded and very exceptional jury would have let her off with five years.

  And in just about five years from her commitment my husband and I are going to make a round of the New York musical shows and look hard at all the members of the chorus from the very front row.

  After the shooting she must have thought quickly. Katie was told to wait until the music stopped, fire the revolver out of the window and then hide it – Catherine Jones neglected to specify where. Katie, on the verge of collapse, obeyed instructions, but she was never able to specify where she had hid the revolver. And no one ever knew until a year later, when Charley and I were on our honeymoon and Sheriff Abercrombie’s ugly weapon dropped out of my golf-bag on to a Hot Springs golf-links. The bag must have been standing just outside the dressing-room door; Katie’s trembling hand had dropped the revolver into the first aperture she could see.