[Dorothy Parker 04] - Death Rides the Midnight Owl

by Agata Stanford

  In telling about Charles Featherstonhaugh’s death, we made sure to eliminate the harsher details of his trip in the trunk of a car, and then corrected the assumption that Mr. Benchley was somehow a police officer, saying that he was “in the vicinity” at the time of the murders.

  How much can the man take? I thought as the tears began to stream down his reddened cheeks.

  “It may be coincidence that Charles Fanshaw was murdered soon after a woman passenger on the Midnight Owl train from Boston was killed. And, remember for now, that woman may not have been your wife, Joan,” I said.

  “But, if that were so, if it wasn’t she, he wouldn’t have cabled me to come on the next available ship!” He sunk back down in despair.

  “It is possible the murdered woman is someone else. Someone he may have chanced upon, and then, gaining the knowledge of a conspiracy—there are some suggestions that the dead woman may have been part of a conspiracy to explode a bomb in New York City as part of an anarchist protest to the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti,” said Mr. Benchley. “That seems to be the more likely reason for his murder—to prevent him from going to the authorities.”

  “Now, the only way you can find out whether this woman was your wife is by identifying her body,” said Mr. Benchley.

  “May I be so bold as to ask, was your wife sympathetic to the anarchists’ cause?” I said. “Is that why you were trying to find her—to stop her?”

  “Joan?” said Freddie Trombley with a gasp of utter amazement. “An anarchist? A political sympathizer!” And then, breaking down into peels of near-hysterical laughter, causing the conversation to abruptly stop at the nearest table as its occupants turned to stare for a long moment, Freddie choked out between breaths, “Joan didn’t care a rat’s ass about anything to do with politics. The only political philosophy she ever had was purely capitalistic!” He shifted from mindless laughter to a sneering, biting attack as he hissed out, “That nasty little piece of work! That money-grubbing cow!”

  Suddenly, he leaned back in his chair, a lump of saggy flesh, like something had sucked out all the bones from his body and just left him there, spent.

  “She’s dead! I know it!” The man was stunned, I realized, by the shock of it all and probably by his own unusual and unchecked passionate display of rancor. Mr. Benchley moved the glass of gin-laced juice closer to the man, who then belted down the liquid. Mr. Benchley refilled the glass with another straight shot of gin, which the fellow downed in one sobbing gulp.

  “I hated her—no! I loved her; I never wanted her to die. But she got what she deserved!”

  I wasn’t sure what the man was saying: He loved her; he loved her not? “No, no, that’s not true! I wanted her to come home to me,” he moaned. “I wanted her to forget that fellow she ran off with! How did it happen?”

  Mr. Benchley went over the events on the train, minus the Giusto factor, replacing the word bludgeoned as the cause of death with crowned.

  After regaining a modicum of composure, I asked if his wife had any distinctive scars or birthmarks that might help identify her.

  “What do you mean? Oh, well, she was a brunette, blue eyes—I can identify her.”

  “Well, you see, she suffered some head trauma—”

  “Oh, my God!”

  There was no easy way of saying any of it, but what had to be said needed delicacy so that the man need not suffer the mental “bludgeoning” of learning that his wife’s face was battered beyond recognition. And yet he had to understand that identifying her body had to be done through other means.

  “A scar on her right leg from surgery after an automobile accident a dozen years ago. She’d also broken her arm then. And she had a birthmark on her breast—like a little quarter-moon. Oh, my God!”

  After another round of grief, he looked up, sniffled, and sat erect in his chair. Now he was ready to tell us a little bit about why he’d sought the help of his cousin, Charles, a detective, to follow his wife to the United States. But, he couldn’t tell us whom she ran off with because he didn’t know.

  Mr. Benchley and I settled in at a checker-clothed table for refreshment and private talk about what we’d found in the dead man’s pants, and in his room at the Sherry. We ordered bowls of spaghetti as well as G-and-Ts, as it was almost dinnertime and we’d not eaten anything more than the donuts we’d gotten from the bakery in the village where we stopped for gasoline on the way home from Last Call. Woodrow was brought steak bones and a plate of meatballs by a waiter who was particularly fond of my little mutt.

  Mr. Featherstonhaugh was the topic of our discussion. “Look, what if Fanshaw was in cahoots with Joan Trombley? Maybe they were planning a jewel heist?”

  Mr. Benchley put down his fork, leaned back in his chair, and narrowed his eyes. “Heist? Where did you pick up the term, ‘heist’? You been hanging around with the Damon Runyon crowd?”

  “I heard Ross use the word once to describe what the boys did to him at poker one night.”

  “Well, that would imply a band of thieves, would it not?”

  “How the hell would I know? I just thought it meant stealing.”

  “All right, my dear,” said Mr. Benchley with a chuckle. “Perhaps he wasn’t planning a burglary as a cat thief; maybe he had been nasty Joan’s lover all along, and together they were part of a gang or a syndicate, even. Those jewelry sales sheets we found weren’t meant for the eyes of the general public, you know. Maybe he had an inside man at those concerns.”

  “‘Inside man’? Where’d you pick that up?”

  “Damon Runyan.”

  “Others, huh? You think, maybe his confederates killed him?” A thought hit me. “My God, do you think there was a robbery last night at the Mellons’, and it had yet to be discovered when we left? He was at Last Call, and I’ll bet there were millions of dollars in hot rocks all over the place. You should have seen the ice scattered all over Hermione’s dressing table.”

  “Hot rocks? Ice?”

  “Damon Runyon.”

  “I’m sure it is a point that the police will be investigating as soon as they find those papers in his room.”

  “Let’s call Roger and Hermione and ask about it.”

  “I’m sure the police are already at the house, as that was the last place Fanshaw was seen—by Tallulah, in fact—before someone tried to make his narrow bed in my trunk.”

  “But there has got to be a connection to the Mellons, considering that he came over on the same ship, took the same train—shit!”

  “What is it?”

  “He wasn’t following me. Fanshaw was following the Mellons. He was probably planning on robbing them!”

  “It fits . . . .”

  “And his partner, or partners, done him in.”

  My friend shook his head indicating dismay, stuck his fork upright in a meatball, and said: “Your language is appalling, Mrs. Parker. Done him in, my word! I’ve got to introduce you to a better class of people who speak the King’s English.”

  “Cut the crap, Fred,” I said, grabbing the fork and biting into one of his meatballs. “Done him in is a perfectly good term to express murder.”

  “You’re right; it was probably his partners in crime who knocked him off.”

  That fact agreed, we ordered another round and plowed through our spaghetti for the next few minutes.

  “So, what do we do now?” I asked, sated, and wiping the tomato sauce off my chin.

  Mr. Benchley gave me the look, the wide-eyed, oh-no-not-that-again! look. “We do nothing. Not a thing. We mind our own business.”

  “But they made it our business when they put Mr. Fanshaw to rest in your Mercedes.”

  “Not my Mercedes, a loaned automobile, remember?”

  “If you want to be picky about it, yes. But—”

  “No buts about it! I won’t be sticking my nose in crime this time.”

  “All right, y’old bag, if that’s how you feel.”

  “It is how I feel,” he said, pushing back h
is chair to stand and grabbing the check off the table. He reached into his trouser pocket for cash to pay the bill, and came up instead with the small wedding photograph of Freddie Trombley and his wife, which he’d pocketed at the hotel room of the mysterious Mr. Featherstonhaugh.

  “Why, look what you took, you old heel!” I said, grabbing the picture.

  “I didn’t realize—I mean, I meant to return it for the police to find.”

  “Now look what you’ve done! How are you going to explain stealing evidence?” I stared at the image of the woman, and there was a fleeting glimmer of recognition, like when you have the name of an acquaintance on the tip of your tongue before it escapes your grasping memory. It is at times like these that I awaken at three in the morning with the name ringing in my ears . . . .

  “I got it!” I said.

  “Whatchagot?”

  “The woman in the photo—she reminds me of Katherine Cornell.”

  “I don’t see it,” he said. ”We’ll have to return the picture.”

  “Whaddayamean, we?” I say we just forget about it. We know who the woman in the photo is. Joan Trombley.”

  “I suppose it’s of little importance, anyway.”

  As we emerged from Tony’s, dusk had begun to cloak the city. As we walked, the slanting sunlight bounced along the lower-story windows of the buildings. The overflowing trashcans, the litter at the curb, and the scarred surfaces of the sidewalks were vividly rendered in the intense light. It felt even hotter than it had at noontime. The coming of dusk did not cool the pavement; it would be another torrid night in the city when rich and poor alike would sweat it out in the dark. Some would drag their mattresses out onto fire escapes, and those unfortunates who lived five to a room in the tenements, in the windowless railroad flats, might venture, from desperation and exhaustion, up to the flat, tarred roofs with the prayer of catching a breeze and a few hours of untortured sleep. It was not much better on the rooftops—people had been known to succumb from the heat rising from off the sun-baked tar.

  We’d decided to try to forget all the problems of the past few days. Freddie Trombley would identify the body of the murdered woman, and so it was out of our hands. It was time to get back into a routine. In a couple of weeks the Broadway theatres would reopen with the cooler weather, so there would be opening nights to attend and reviews to write and lots of parties to enjoy. All of our friends would return to town, and my apartment would be open for cocktails every day at five o’clock.

  To help along that feeling of getting back to normal, we decided to pop in for a visit with our friends and fellow Round Tablers, Harold Ross and Jane Grant. Their home was just a few avenues over at 412 West 47th Street, in the house they had bought and shared with Alexander Woollcott.

  The sun was sinking fast into the Hudson River when we arrived at number 412, and an uncharacteristically disheveled Jane answered the bell.

  We entered through the foyer into the parlor, where we could see into the dining room beyond. Woodrow wouldn’t pass over the threshold; he looked like he was about to drop an offering on the hall rug. Perhaps it was the noise, a cacophony of squeals and an odor that even a dog who usually likes to explore dead things would cower away from. I picked him up, and he shivered in my arms.

  “Don’t go in there!” Jane said, “You might step on something and hurt yourself.”

  It was a real obstacle course of debris—her dining room, where the ravages of the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club were strewn over every surface. There were islands of trash on the carpet—a medley of overflowing ashtrays, empty cigarette and cigar wrappers, and chunks of unidentifiable foodstuffs—Friday night’s bologna sandwiches, chips, olive pits, and shriveled pickles. Smudgy-looking drinking glasses, crumpled napkins, newspapers, peanut shells, waxed-paper bags, and empty bottles of scotch lay among playing cards, slips of scrap paper, and sleeve protectors. Worse was the smell! What was that awful smell?

  Jane’s appearance was not one the outside world had ever seen. This otherwise-chic number was padding around in galoshes and wore a frazzled, wild-eyed look. Her hair and face were dripping sweat, her house dress hung damply from her shoulders and was stained with something that looked like mustard but might have been egg-yolk, and you could tell she was angry.

  “Holy mackerel! I started, pulling a face. “That smell—”

  “How’d you guess? It is a dead mackerel, yes!”

  “Why is it lying on the floor—there are flies all over it.”

  “Harpo left it here. He said he caught it in Lake Bomoseen last Monday, and had the nerve to ask me to fry it up on Friday night. I told him to throw it out or stick it in the icebox.”

  “But it . . . it reeks! What fresh hell! Didn’t he put it on ice—?” I said, gagging.

  “Not in the icebox! It didn’t smell that bad on Friday night.”

  Mr. Benchley corrected her gently, “Jane, dear,” gingerly touching her shoulder. She looked about to sink to the floor from heat prostration at the gesture, and taking her elbow instead, for support, he said: “There are no mackerel in Lake Bomoseen, and from here I can smell it is a trout.”

  “If you wish to remain in this house, Bobby, you’d better—”

  “What is all that callywogging?” I asked, because since we’d entered there had sounded a constant yowling, not unlike the cries of an infant, coming from the back of the house, and now Woodrow Wilson was shaking, violently.

  “What is ‘callywogging,’ Mrs. Parker, may I ask?”

  “That noise! The screaming like angels boiled alive in oil.”

  “No such word as ‘callywogging.’”

  “There is now; I just made it up.”

  “The neighborhood cats are trying to break in through the garden door,” said Jane. “They smell the fish.”

  “Why not get rid of it?”

  “I told Harpo I refused to cook the fish—it was seven days old and it smelled. I went away on Friday night and returned an hour ago, and this is what I find! It wasn’t in the Frigidaire, and he hadn’t put it out in the garbage. I couldn’t find it—he forgot where he’d put it—and then he went upstairs to see Aleck, and—”

  “Aleck is back?” he asked.

  “This morning, and you know how he hates to leave that island of his; he’s really out of sorts. He just had the nerve to telephone me to insist I stop the callywogging! I told him to get out his shotgun and do it himself, or better yet, send that ‘clown’ Harpo back down here to clear away that mackerel!”

  “Trout, Jane, trout.”

  Jane glared. Mr. Benchley, miraculously dry under his collar, made amends. “I shall deal with this, don’t you worry, Janie my girl!” With that he maneuvered a path through the obstacle course and disappeared through the kitchen door, returning with a broom and shovel with which he scooped up the fish to a flurry of flies and popped it in a paper bag lying handily on the dining room table. He then set aside the broom and shovel and proceeded through the foyer to the upper level of the house, bag in tote, flies on the wing. Within seconds came the shouts of Alexander Woollcott cursing Mr. Benchley and his offering, and then Harpo’s voice loudly arguing that the fish was indeed a mackerel, not a trout, as Mr. Benchley kept insisting, until the crash of glass and metal silenced the house. Even the cats stopped their callywogging.

  Footsteps on the stairs—and then reappeared Mr. Benchley, holding the fragrant bag at arm’s length, followed by his buzzing air support, and behind him a repentant-looking Marx Brother, rubbing his crown where the glass-and-metal object had struck. Mr. Benchley held open the front door for Harpo to pass through and handed him the bag before shutting the door on the culprit, the fish, and the flies. The callywogging had ceased. Through the parlor window we watched as a dozen cats arrived en masse to greet Harpo, having bounded from the back of the house to the front to follow our friend along the sidewalk in a frenzied feline entourage. As a couple of the cats tried to climb his trouser legs, Harpo placed the bagged fish in
the letterbox of the brownstone that housed the offices of the DAR and walked up to the corner, alone.

  “I don’t understand why he brought the fish,” I said, following Jane around the house after she dragged in the garbage barrel from off the back porch to the dining room. She’d not been able to open the back door earlier to fetch it, because of the cats threatening to rush in. She started dumping the trash from off the table, sideboard, and floor into the big metal can, making grunting noises of disgust with every toss. Two table fans were adjusted to draw out toward the windows the odor of tobacco butts, stale whiskey, and male sweat—after all, there had been, for the past thirty-six hours, eight sweaty men gathered around that table, eating, drinking, smoking, cursing, and farting; add to that the stink of rotting fish and it was a lethal blend. It nearly knocked me out cold, sent Woodrow into shock and Jane to consult an alienist in the morning, and turned Mr. Benchley into an even-more-annoying grammarian. It would take some doing to clear the air.

  “There is no point in wondering why Harpo brought in the trout,” said Mr. Benchley. “Why does Harpo do anything? There is no rhyme or reason that anyone other than Harpo could explain.”

  “He claimed he was carrying the fish instead of a gun—defense against muggers, or some such nonsense.”

  “It’s an ‘evil eye’ that’s for protection, not a mackerel,” I said.

  “A trout! If you were a mugger, would you go after a man carrying that fish?”

  “Certainly not,” I agreed.

  “I think he had planned to leave it hidden upstairs in Aleck’s place, just to cause him grief when he arrived home from Vermont—” said Jane.

  “Welcome-home gift? Like stocking up the icebox with milk and eggs?” I said.

  “—but Aleck arrived home earlier than he expected and before he could put it there. It took me some time to find that mackerel—”

  Mr. Benchley sighed; it was useless.

  “—hidden in the breakfront. Wait until I get my hands on Ross’s neck.”