[Dorothy Parker 04] - Death Rides the Midnight Owl

by Agata Stanford

  Who among those who had fought so hard for their freedom, for the men’s lives, didn’t feel responsibility for their own failure to succeed in the cause? Aside from Heywood, Ruth, and Mr. Benchley, my other friends did not have the same fevered determination to seek justice for the men. Not all of my friends are politically minded, and those who are do not seem to be very concerned with the plight of “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Not to say they see the new arrivals as “wretched refuse”; no, many of the Round Tablers are first-generation children of immigrants. But none of them are Italian, and the Italians have been arriving in greater numbers since the end of the War. Like the Polish, the Germans, and the Jews arriving decades before them, and suffering the indignities of poverty as they crowded ten to a room in the city’s tenements, despairing of ever assimilating into the New World society, the Italian immigrants have become the new nationality to debase.

  Is mine a delayed, inherited guilt? I used to joke about the Irish, saying that my parents would “go down to Ellis Island and bring them, still bleeding, home to do the laundry.” Of course, my father, Henry Rothschild, was a Jew, and he was not of the famous branch of the Rothschild line. No, he was from the side of the family I like to call “of mud and flame,” poor and self-made (and in the end, un-made, leaving me nothing but alone after his death).

  The Italians are viewed by the other rising classes of last century’s immigrants as the lowest of the low, and unless you are a Caruso, it’s a hard climb to surmount a position above colored folk. And that meant that Giusto was seen as an expendable pawn in this murderous scheme: “just another wop” causing trouble, an easy mark and a fall-guy, another Bartolomeo Vanzetti. A fishmonger, “pic-shov” laborer. The lowest sort with the nerve to want to be paid for his labors a decent wage to feed his family.

  I directed my thoughts to recalling the hours leading up to the death of the woman in Bedroom Two. I reviewed the numerous passengers and eliminated the obviously innocent: the family with the young children, the elderly woman in Bedroom Four, next to the murdered woman, even the Harvard boys. Of course, beside me and Mr. Benchley, there was Ruth and Heywood, and the Mellons. So, in a carload of anarchists, socialists, communists, and syndicalists, there the guilt could lie.

  In my mind’s eye I watched the dramatis personae of the Midnight Owl murder pass the window of the Brouns’ compartment door. I replayed the moment-by-moment movements of all of us throughout that night, searching for a clue, an insight, a trivial and ignored detail that might lead me toward identifying the murderer.

  Too many wild theories, too many crazy motives! I realized that without uncovering the key elements of the case—the clues and evidence on which to build my own conclusions—the answers would amount to forming a baseless theory.

  So, I had to let my mind pick through the few clues we had, search for others, eliminate the red herrings, and then, and only then, form a theory supported by evidence. To do otherwise was like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

  Let the clues build the theory!

  For the moment, everybody was suspect: the anarchists, the socialists, Freddie Trombley, the muckraker, the Harvard boys running amuck from too much drink. Even with names like Beaner and Bobo, they might not be so harmless; they may have tried to rape the woman, and perhaps accidently killed her. And the “little old lady” in Bedroom Four—she might have been wearing a good disguise. Someone staying in another Pullman car could be the culprit.

  I would seek the evidence, the inconsistencies, and the details that were currently floating around aimlessly in my mind, waiting to be picked out and looked at with more scrutiny. That’s how I’d get the square and round pegs to slide easily into their respective holes.

  While deep in thought, I fell deep into sleep.

  Funny, how the mind works. Buried things resurface—like discovering a photo you forgot you took with the Brownie, and then you open a drawer and there it is, the forgotten memory staring up at you. Such was the case when I awoke with a start. I’d connected two seemingly unimportant observations—clues!—and I wondered why I hadn’t seen their relevance before, why had I not seen the obvious. I chided myself for stupidity, and forgave myself an instant later when I realized that my mind had been bogged down with so much mundane clutter that the smallest detail, being the most important of all the clues, had simply been buried under irrelevancies. It was like that junk-drawer everybody has in their home, a receptacle for stuff you don’t have an assigned place for—rubber bands, string, the odd screw from your typewriter (which still works fine without it), a cup hook, ticket stubs, matchbooks, a few pennies, a Cracker Jack prize, and the occasional wing-nut that came from somewhere. While sleeping I had sifted through the debris and come up with a discarded gem!

  I jumped out of bed, my energy renewed. Yes! It’s beginning to fit, I thought, as I paced from the bedroom and back to the living room several times, Woodrow, at my heels, thinking my rapid movements and sudden high mood were all part of a game we were about to play.

  The clues fit a theory, one I had not until now considered. Oh, it was a clever plan, and oh, I didn’t like to think how the murderer might have gone unpunished. I’d lit a cigarette and was headed for the telephone when there was a rapping at my door, which triggered Woodrow’s excited barking. I flung the door open to find Mr. Benchley, who held up an empty glass tumbler and asked, “Ice?”

  Woodrow was all over him, but Mr. Benchley always came prepared with a treat for my pup, which he hurriedly retrieved from his coat pocket in order to get over the threshold unmolested. I was about to extended a hand toward the kitchenette, but he was there before I made the gesture.

  “No ice at the Royalton, or in the bar downstairs? You try the hotel kitchen?”

  He cracked the tray open and then filled his glass and another one of mine with ice. Returning to the living room, he poured a couple of fingers of scotch and squirted a dash of seltzer into each glass and handed one to me.

  He raised his glass and said, “Congratulate me!”

  “You get the Pulitzer?”

  “That would be the day! No, my dear Mrs. Parker, no! I have solved,” and he drew a hand across the air as if to display a newspaper headline, “‘The Case of the Murdered Woman in Bedroom Two.’”

  “Oh, that,” I said, “I solved that murder myself, Fred, and the headlines will not read ‘The Case of the Murdered Woman in Bedroom Two’ but rather ‘Death Rides the Midnight Owl’—how’s that sound?”

  “What?” he said, pounding down the glass on the coffeetable. “You couldn’t have!”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Trying to steal my thunder, are you?”

  “Thunder is nothing more than the gaseous rumblings of hot air between two cumulous majors!”

  “Or a good description of Aleck and Ross exchanging insults,” he considered, before taking my comment personally. “But to think, Mrs. Parker, that you would reduce my keen insights to nothing more than the emissions of a flatulent colon is too much to bear! Why, I came here tonight to share with you the results of my efforts!”

  “I thought you came here tonight because you ran out of ice! Or was it to brag?”

  “Well, that goes without saying, my dear—wait! What do you mean by, you solved the case?”

  “Well,” I said, offering him a cigarette as I sat down on the sofa. I patted the cushion beside me and he and Woodrow sat side-by-side like the good boys they are. I patted Woodrow’s head and Mr. Benchley’s knee. “I went through my junk drawer,” I explained.

  “What does housecleaning have to do with it?

  “My brain.”

  “Oh, well, of course, it is filled with—uh—junk. By the way, when I was snooping through your medicine cabinet the other day, I noticed it’s in a state of disarray, you might want to tackle—”

  “Figuratively speaking.”

  “Oh, very well, proceed,” he replied, officiously.

  �
��No. First tell me what you came up with.”

  “Came up with? I did not simply ‘come up with’ anything you may be comparing to a dashed-up meal of scrambled eggs and ham, and then calling it an omelet!”

  “What? Eggs, ham, omelet? Fred, you’ve lost your mind.”

  “That goes without saying. But my methods were Sherlockian—”

  “Were you playing Sibelius on your violin when you came up with your seven percent solution?”

  “My banjo, actually; helps me think.”

  “Like your Harvard boys?”

  “That institution has lowered its standards, if you ask me. That’s why I’ve withdrawn my membership from the Harvard Club.”

  “You mean they threw you out when you didn’t pay your yearly dues.”

  “Semantics! As I was saying, I recalled William Gillette’s play, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. From there I recalled the plot of a story where Moriarty distracts Holmes with false clues, leading him on a wild-goose-chase to a crime that does not take place, was never intended to take place, but rather was simply a decoy, all so that he, Moriarty, could pull off an even bigger crime.”

  “I see we are on the same page, then,” I conceded, “because I changed my point of view when I realized that what was shown was meant to obscure the truth!”

  “So there! You see! We’re in agreement! We’ve solved ‘The Case of the Murdered Woman in Bedroom Two!’”

  “No, we’ve solved ‘Death Rides the Midnight Owl!’ ”

  “All right, we’ll flip for it,” he said, pulling a coin from his vest pocket. “Whoever wins gets his or her title on the cover of the book! Heads, it’s mine; tails it’s yours.”

  Joe Kennedy—Rumrunner

  John Reed, buried in Kremlin

  Harvard’s finest

  Chapter Ten

  So now we had to gather all of the clues and put each to the test to prove our hypotheses before we pointed a finger at anyone. We were already closing in and needed to confirm a few facts. Just a couple of stops along the way, a telephone call or two would do the trick. We were interrupted in our strategic planning by a telephone call from Tallulah, gushing about the fact that Hermione and Roger Mellon decided to be angels for the play she was about to star in. It was their first venture into the world of backing a theatrical production, and they threw a big chunk of money into the venture once they read in the papers that she was going to be in the play.

  “So now you’re the little darling of the millionaire Mellons,” I said, after she told me the news.

  “Tomorrow evening the Mellons are hosting a gathering of the producers and the show’s cast at their city apartment at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South.”

  “Good God!”

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Goody!’”

  “That’s what I thought you said. Anyway, you and Bobby and Aleck are invited to come, too!”

  “It’s sure to be a wing-doodle, all right.”

  “What?”

  “I said it’s sure to be the thing to do tomorrow night.”

  “That’s what I thought you said, Dottie, stop mumbling and speak up.”

  “Right.”

  “What was that?”

  “We’ll be there, all right.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  “Ta-ta!” she signed off.

  “What’s all this ‘ta-ta’ crap everybody’s throwing around these days? It’s all your fault, Mr. Benchley.”

  “Always you point to me when there’s something you don’t like.”

  “And who else could I rely on to take the blame?”

  “I mean that much to you, don’t I, my dear? Well, you can always rely on my being here when you feel the need to strike out.”

  “Oh, Fred, you’re swell.”

  “Let’s get back to what has got to be done over the next day.”

  How best to proceed needed planning and the help of a couple of friends willing to really step out on a limb, so to speak. And no one I knew of could better fill the bill in theatricality, daring, and just plain chutzpah than our devilish pranksters, the Marx Brothers.

  Mr. Benchley and I arranged to meet the boys at Tony’s, a dozen blocks south of our destination, to go over our plan one final time before setting events in motion. Harpo was ten minutes late and came through the guarded door of the speakeasy winded. “Sorry, I had trouble finding a parking space; traffic is brutal.”

  “Finally!” said Groucho. “He’s bought a car at last!”

  “What are you talking about, a car?” said Chico. “He got a horse!”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘got’ a horse,” said Zeppo.

  “What would you say?” asked Groucho.

  Groucho had been out of town these past few days, romancing a girlfriend on the Jersey Shore, so the situation needed explaining. “What? He got a horse and wagon, or not?”

  “No wagon,” admitted Harpo.

  “No wagon, didn’t ‘get’ a horse . . . . Don’t tell me you stole a horse.”

  “It was she stole my affections!”

  “Not again! That’s what you said about that gorilla you met at the zoo last spring,” said Groucho, “and look how that turned out!”

  “This is different,” said Harpo.

  “That’s what you said the last time and the time before that. Let me see, first it was that cow on Will Rogers’s ranch—”

  “Please refer to her as Henrietta; and she wasn’t just any cow you’d meet on the street.”

  “That’s right,” said Chico, “she was in a meadow.”

  “And before that it was Wally Dunkin’s trained Vaudeville seal.”

  “All right, but I didn’t know that Georgie wasn’t a girl.”

  “That’s right, you were taken in by the fancy fur coat and the way she batted those long eyelashes, I remember that,” said Groucho. “But, when you learned the truth—”

  “He was devastated,” said Zeppo, “weren’t you, Harpo?”

  “Please don’t mention her—his—name again!”

  The afternoon escapade had been carefully choreographed so as to break as few laws as possible. Although there was always a risk of felony charges, I thought most would be considered misdemeanors—if we were lucky. After all, we were gathering a dangerous crew—all four of the Brothers could wreak havoc when loosed upon a city with a mission to fulfill.

  We repeated our assignments and went through a checklist of props. We synchronized our watches and left Tony’s for our destination. We had one plan in mind, and that was to find out the name of the woman murdered on the Midnight Owl.

  She had been wearing a brooch, one created by a brilliant jewelry designer and sold at only one store in the world. The records, a register of sales of such extravagant items, were kept confidential and guarded. But with the help of our Marx Brothers we would prevail in our search and discovery of the name of the woman who had purchased the pin. If we didn’t succeed, we’d appeal to the judge.

  They descended like a pestilence over the city, and when they arrived at the most famous jewelers in America, I could almost feel the trembling of a thousand loose diamonds lying in their velvet-lined trays, locked beneath the counters, and hear the tinkling shiver of fear from the precious bracelets and necklaces at the very prospect of an assault. Mr. Benchley and I had brought bulls into a china shop, and that china shop was Tiffany’s.

  Mr. Benchley and I walked in through the entrance, which was guarded by two very big muscled and liveried guards who doubled as doormen. The showroom was large, and the views of all the counters were unobstructed by any barriers, helping to prevent shoplifting as well as presenting a clean, elegant venue where the sparkle of the merchandise would not be upstaged by the décor. The rows of expansive glass counters were free of objects other than adjustable countertop mirrors, and the lighting was such that the jewels seemed to dance gaily on the trays below and could be seen to best advantage. As one walked between the displays, it was like wa
lking among a thousand constellations of brightly twinkling stars.

  We found the display we wanted. The designs within the case, executed by a noted artist and exquisitely rendered in diamonds, all featured either a single blood ruby or a cashmere sapphire or the deep Brazilian-rainforest-green emerald. The exotic-bird brooches lay like gracefully recumbent creatures, the light imparting to their bodies of cold stones set in platinum a fiery and vibrant life of their own.

  “May we see the bird on the left,” said Mr. Benchley, when the impeccably dressed clerk asked if he could be of assistance. He unlocked the counter with a key, and slid the glass open, lifting out the large work of art and placing it on a flat velvet cushion before presenting it to me to behold its flashing glory.

  “Exquisite!” I said, “But, don’t you think it might be a bit much for a Quaker meeting, darling?”

  I held the thing of beauty up near the neckline of my black dress, adjusting the standing mirror to admire the piece. I also observed Groucho, wearing his usual four-season black tailcoat and carrying an attaché case and escorted by his handsome brother, Zeppo, dressed in the uniform of a Brinks Guard, as they entered from the street. Attached to the attaché case handle was a chain and cuff, and the cuff was around Groucho’s wrist. Zeppo played the role of security guard to the hilt, looking around the store for those who might want to remove the case from the wrist of his brother. That the guards let the men pass into the store was a wonder, but then, Groucho was a master at assuming a stance that demanded a certain amount of respect—if not confusion. The twenty-dollar bill slipped into the handkerchief pocket of the guard didn’t hurt, either. They were right on time, as planned, and were headed for the manager’s office behind shiny birch-wood-paneled doors at the back of the store, while being followed by the ever-suspicious eyes of a store detective or two. While Groucho asked to see the manager, I pretended to admire the jewel-encrusted brooch and then turned to Mr. Benchley once again.