[Dorothy Parker 03] - Mystic Mah Jong

by Agata Stanford

“‘Finger us,’ eh? You sound like you’ve been gadding about with the less salubrious characters of New York society.”

  “I certainly have,” I shot back, referring to the members of our “Vicious Circle” at the Gonk. “And given the body count over the past couple years, and the number of times we’ve been thrown in the pokey and have sat in the hot-seat with the flatfoots giving us the third degree, it’s a wonder we haven’t been sent to fry!”

  “Why, Mrs. Parker—or is it ‘Flo,’ Lefty’s moll? You’ve been sleeping with Damon Runyon.”

  “Most unlikely.”

  “Yes it is: He’s not your type. You said two murders? You don’t think we’ll be implicated in Madame Olenska’s murder, do you?”

  “We were there last night, remember? And we don’t have alibis for later in the evening—at least, I don’t. You have any number of Polly’s friends to vouch for you.”

  “I didn’t go to Polly’s last night after I dropped you home. I went back to my apartment and fell asleep on the couch listening to Rudy Vallee on the radio. That man puts me to sleep.”

  “Woodrow Wilson’s testimony won’t be admissible in court, so I’m sunk, too.”

  “But what’s our motive? Why would we kill these two women? We have no motive.”

  “You think the cops won’t find one?”

  He lit our cigarettes, poured himself another scotch, and then turned to look at me, expressionlessly. Then, with a twitch of his neat moustache, his features relaxed into a smile: “We shall be fine. All we need to do is tell the detectives the truth, don’t you know. The truth will set us free.”

  “That’s just swell,” I said sardonically. “The truth, like: We were setting up our new residence in the front closet? We were spying on Miss Ada and her visitors?”

  “Well, they needn’t know all the gory details. Anyway, I—I mean we—called in the discovery of the tragedy.”

  “They always suspect the one who raises the alarm,” I said, throwing back the dregs of liquor from my glass. “I’m not going to wait around and be the patsy.” I started out of the room. “Let’s blow this joint! Well, are you coming, Lefty?”

  Before my accomplice could reply, I heard a noise coming from the direction of the foyer. Through the reception room I could see the red curtains that led to the entry. The curtains were slightly parted, and I watched as a light was switched on in the foyer.

  “Police?” I whispered.

  “That was awfully quick.”

  “Too quick.”

  And then we saw him in the rectangle of space visible from where we stood: a big, bulky, hulk of a man passing through the velvet curtains and into the reception room. I picked up Woodrow and scurried for cover like a frightened mouse behind the elaborately carved black-and-gold Chinese screen, urging Mr. B to join me.

  “Why are we hiding?” asked Mr. Benchley.

  “Seems the best thing to do,” I said, peeking between the hinged sections of the tall lacquered screen, Mr. Benchley’s chin resting on my head to catch a glimpse. Giant fern fronds obstructed much of the view.

  The big man entered the drawing room and stood not ten feet from us, facing our direction. He looked over the room with his fierce, black, heavy-lidded eyes, his brows tightly knit, and a drooping handlebar moustache that made his appearance seem all the more fiendish. And then, he found Miss Ada’s corpse. I watched as his expression changed. A cruel little smile lifted the hairy cheeks, and he went directly behind the davenport to where Miss Ada was lying.

  He bent down over her body and without regard to modesty began to unbutton her shirt. The bright, musical jingling of her many necklaces as he roughly removed them from her neck made his actions seem all the more brutal. He stood up abruptly, untangling and discarding chain from chain to the floor. Crystal and beaded necklaces, their strings snapped, scattered beads all over the floor, and the cats leaped and pawed and batted them about in a game of feline handball.

  He held something in his large mitt of a hand, which he regarded with obscene satisfaction. He put his find in a pocket and in three steps was out of the room. We heard the front door slam and knew he was gone.

  We abandoned our hiding place, and I looked down at the molested Miss Ada. I shooed the cats away, with a little help from an eager Woodrow Wilson, who daringly followed my example with gentle, if insistent nudges, hoping to shift the balance of power back to the canine kingdom. Cats tumbled about him as if laughing at his gall.

  “It’s gone,” I said. “He took it.”

  “Yes, but what did he take?”

  “It’s not here, so he must have taken it—the thing he pocketed—the cylinder,” I said. “Looked like a short, gold-plated salted pretzel stick.”

  “Oh, the key.”

  “Key?” I said with disbelief. “No, the gold pretzel-stick-shaped thingamajig.”

  “Yes, my dear; the odd-looking thingamajig shaped like a whistle or a small recorder or flute is, in fact, a key.”

  “You don’t say?” I said, as I covered the corpse with a shawl from off the chair.

  “I do say.”

  “But, what kind of key is that? I mean, it’s not an ordinary door key.”

  “If we find out who that man is, we might learn why the key was of such importance to him that he should so brazenly molest Miss Ada for its acquisition.”

  “Oh, damn,” I said with a whine, “things are getting confusing. Just when I thought it was Franken who killed Miss Ada, I wonder if it was not that demonic-looking creature who done her in.”

  “Could have been Lord Whimsy—”

  “Wildly.”

  “And Brooklyn Betty.”

  “Think she’s from Brooklyn? I thought I heard a little bit of the Bronx . . . .”

  “Definitely the boroughs,” he agreed. “But the point is: That man who took the key might have killed her, and either we, at our second arrival, or the arrival of Franken, forced him to retreat before getting the key off her neck.”

  “The key could be the motive for murder, is what you’re saying.”

  “Actually, I don’t know what I’m saying; just speculating, thinking out loud.”

  “Well, stop it, if you please,” I said, rescuing my pup from behind a desk where the fiendish felines had him cornered against the wall. “There’s been so much traffic running through this place that anybody could have murdered the woman.”

  And then there was the “Screaming Mimi,” the domestic, appearing out of nowhere, flying out of the apartment, screeching like a fire siren upon seeing us lounging about on the couch with our drinks, like people at a cocktail hour, our hostess prostrate, wide-eyed and quite dead on the floor behind us.

  I said, “That maid, or whoever she was—you know, that woman looked vaguely familiar.”

  “She should. If she’d have unscrewed her face and pulled back her hair, you’d have seen she was none other than Fraulein Franken, Siegfried’s little sister, Frances. As I am an aficionado of the new abstract art, I recognized her right away.”

  “What was she doing here, do you think?”

  I walked nervously around the room, and it suddenly dawned on me that it was the perfect opportunity for a bit of a snoop. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has dared to check out the medicine cabinet when using a friend’s bathroom, or accidentally opened the second door on the right instead of the third, as directed, for a peek into a bedroom. Sometimes you just want to look behind a curtain, or spend some quality time rummaging through the pornography collection under the floorboards in the closet, or measure the advance of green mold encasing the block of cheese in a friend’s Frigidaire.

  “What are you doing?” asked Mr. Benchley.

  “Looking around,” I said, absently, as I shuffled through things on the desk. Lots of doodads—paperweights, charms, a fountain pen, a bottle of glue, an inkwell filled with blue ink, white stationery with Miss Ada’s name atop the logo of a lone, lidded eyeball reminiscent of the one on the dollar bill.

 
“I just told you, Joe Woollcott said not to touch anything.”

  “You reminded me of the opportunity. Aha! Looky here! An appointment book!”

  “Leave that right where you found it.”

  “Here we are: Jane’s name penciled in for this morning’s appointment.”

  Mr. Benchley took the book from my hands. “Franken’s name is not here, nor are Wildly’s or Bette Booth’s.”

  “She won’t need the book anymore, but it might tell us a little bit about who she saw regularly and what else she did with her time.”

  “We should leave it right where we found it,” said Mr. Benchley.

  “We should,” I said, about to slip it into my handbag. “Here, you look it over and see if there’s anything we should know.” I handed the book to my friend for his perusal. Finding nothing, he replaced the book on the desk.

  “What are we going to tell the police about what we were doing here?”

  “The truth: interviewing Miss Ada for the Equity Ball.”

  I set about opening drawers and picking through correspondence and bills and paper clips and stamps. She’d kept an orderly desk; personal letters were bound in ribbon or held together with string. There were decade-old love letters from a lover signing “L.” I hurriedly read a couple; they were mostly letters of flattery and sex, until I went to the last postdated one, November 1917. The tone was now one of pleading—obviously a response to Ada’s last letter to L, ending their affair. I pitched the letter over to Mr. Benchley. Perhaps he could decipher the reason for the breakup.

  The file drawer was labeled and alphabetized, and riffling through I found bills, personal documents, and banking statements. Her bank balance was a healthy eighty-two-thousand-seven-hundred-fifty-two-dollars and fifteen cents. She had lots of stock certificates and negotiable bonds: Standard Oil, Union-Pacific, RCA, Western-Electric, and interests in a pharmaceutical company, Johnson & Johnson. In a folder labeled “real estate” were a collection of bills pertaining to renovations made on the Dakota apartment, a house in Connecticut, and an apartment house in Boston. It was in this folder, among the tax receipts, that I chanced upon a bill from a roofer for repairs on a house at Washington Square. This I hurriedly tossed to Mr. Benchley.

  I pulled out another drawer. My stepmother had a desk like this, and I watched her once as she removed a false bottom from a deep drawer where she hid a box filled with her better jewelry. I slid back the piece of wood. The space was empty of any secrets. Returning the drawer to its opening, I felt resistance. Something was jamming the smooth return. Reaching underneath, my fingers found a crumpled paper blocking the easy slide. I yanked, and pulled out a letter envelope. Inside was a canceled check made out to Finders Detective Agency for two-hundred-twenty dollars, along with the last page—page three—of a report on a person named Lee Pigeon, last-known address, Philadelphia. Apparently, the first two pages of the report were missing. I stuck my hand back into the hollow casing, feeling around for the missing pages, and after a few minutes of failing to find them, gave up the fight. I read page three.

  This fellow, whoever he was, was a petty criminal: bad checks, shoplifting, embezzling from a Brookline shopkeeper. This was someone Miss Ada had spent quite a bundle investigating. Where were the first two pages of the report?

  There was no time for speculation, as the troops had finally arrived on the scene of the crime, along with an entourage of reporters ordered to remain outside the door of the apartment, though champing at the bit for a hot scoop. Mr. Benchley crammed the receipt and the letter into his coat just as the first officers came into the room.

  And, of course, I was proven right, because after the two detectives arrived, and flash pictures were taken of Miss Ada from every angle, and the coroner followed the stretcher out of the apartment, we were interviewed at length.

  Detective Morgan is a balding little rat terrier of a man—no offense to my canine friends around the world—who set about with an attitude of pinning the blame on anyone who was handy for the task. His sloppy coat bore the remains of many meals eaten on the run, cigar ash, and God-knows-what that had produced that stain. Head raised and looking down his nose, he made the oddest gesture of turning his head to the side as I answered his questions, eyes remaining fixed on my face. At one point it looked as if he had sniffed something in the air, detecting some gamey scent I threw off instead of the Coty’s Chypre perfume I’d spritzed on earlier.

  “You see, Mr. Benchley forgot his gloves . . .”

  “And you came back up the elevator to revisit the scene of the crime.”

  “It wasn’t yet a crime scene, though.”

  “I meant the scene where Mr. Benchley misplaced his gloves.”

  “Oh, well, in that case, yes.”

  “But they were in your coat pocket.”

  “Silly of me.”

  “How did you happen to find yourself in the hall coat closet?”

  “It seemed the best place to go.”

  “The elevator attendant told us she took you and Mr. Benchley up to this floor the second time at around eleven forty-five.”

  “Yes, I suppose . . .”

  “And Miss Ada was alive when you returned?”

  “Quite.”

  “And Mr. Benchley, you called the station house at twelve-thirty, which means you were here for almost an hour before informing us of Miss Ada’s death.”

  “That long?”

  “You were together, here, the entire time?”

  “Yes, we were together. Whatcha think, one of us snuck out of the closet and popped the woman on the head?”

  “She was strangled.”

  “That’s right. So I couldn’t have conked her on the noggin!”

  Detective Rat Terrier narrowed his eyes and bit his lip. “What were you two doing all that time?”

  “This and that.”

  “According to the concierge, Miss Ada had two visitors announced at around eleven forty-five. Lord Tristan Wildly and Mrs. Betty Booth.”

  “Oh?”

  “Did you speak with them?”

  “Why do you think . . . ?”

  “Did they not arrive at the apartment right after you came back looking for Mr. Benchley’s gloves?”

  “We were in the closet, you see.”

  “When they arrived?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Looking for gloves?”

  “Yes, but they were in Mr. Benchley’s coat pocket all the while.”

  “So I understand. So you would have seen Lord Wildly and Mrs. Booth when they came to the apartment.”

  “Actually, not.”

  “We were in the closet, you see.”

  “So you said.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you would have seen them when they came to the door.”

  “But they didn’t see us.”

  “And why is that?”

  “We were in the—”

  “—closet.”

  “Yes.”

  Soon the little sheriff began to scoot around us as he posed his questions, like a dog worrying an old bone: “You didn’t want to be seen?”

  “We were just preoccupied.”

  “You met Lord Wildly and Mrs. Booth last night, did you not, at the home of Madame Olenska?”

  “Why, yes, last night at the séance.”

  “And another man, Siegfried Franken, had been here before you arrived.”

  “Oh?”

  “Did you see him here when you first came up?”

  “Actually, he was on his way out when we got here.”

  “Do you know what his business was with Miss Ada?”

  “No,” I answered, “Why was he here?”

  “I was asking you that question, Mrs. Parker.”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “So you say you came to this apartment to meet Miss Ada about performing in some show or other?”

  “For the Actors Equity Halloween Ball, yes.”

  “And what did yo
u discuss with her while you were here?”

  “Mr. Benchley, mostly, about his being a big moving-picture star.”

  “Well, I thought it was ridiculous, of course; I’m a Broadway sort of guy, you know—”

  “Some nonsense about him displacing John Gilbert in Garbo’s affections—”

  “I was only joking, Mrs. Parker. I’m much more the Barrymore type, profile and all, you know.”

  “You’re not taking any of this seriously,” hissed the little detective.

  “That’s exactly what Miss Ada said to us.”

  “But, we really do take things seriously,” I defended. “And that’s why we are always so gay, Officer!”

  “Detective!”

  “Yes, sir, I meant to say, Detective!”

  “The little shit,” I said in an aside to Mr. Benchley.

  “What was that?” said the rat terrier, sharply, ready to gnaw on my ankle.

  “I said, I wonder if we could sit?” I sat down on the desk chair.

  “Did you see anyone else come to this apartment?”

  “Why didn’t you just ask that question in the first place,” I shot back, “instead of worrying so much about a missing pair of gloves that really were never missing after all, just buried deep in the pockets of Mr. Benchley’s topcoat?”

  The rat terrier stopped in his tracks and shot me a beady-eyed glare. “Who was here?”

  “Lord Wildly and Mrs. Booth, but we’re not sure they went beyond the foyer. Mr. Franken returned, and then there was the maid, his sister, Frances; she was screaming when she saw us, but Mr. Benchley is sure the maid was in fact Frances. Then came a big, dark, hairy fellow; we’ve no idea who he is.”

  “Joe Woollcott vouched for you two,” the detective said resentfully. “Don’t leave town.”

  On Detective Morgan’s orders we were escorted out of the apartment through the service entrance so that we would not be seen leaving by any of the reporters. As key witnesses to the murder—forgetting the fact that we didn’t actually see the committing of the dastardly deed—we were not to tell anyone, particularly members of the press, that we were even present in the apartment at the time Miss Ada was killed. That little bit of information, whispered in the wrong ear (namely the killer’s) or shouted from a front-page headline, could get us killed if the killer believed there was a possibility we’d witnessed his crime. I shivered at the detective’s warning and Mr. Benchley took my arm protectively.