Final Curtain: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries)

by Ed Ifkovic

  “Here.” Meaka took a folded leaflet from the purse slung over her shoulder and thrust it into my outreached hand. A quirky, unfriendly smile on her lips, she made a hard, guttural rasp, and turned away. Gus, eyes narrowed, watched her with a curious mixture of adoration and dread.

  My hands trembled on the sheet, this foolscap with the poorly printed message. A bold headline: RALLY THIS SATURDAY! AMERICAN NAZI PARTY! SPRING VALLEY PARK SOUTH ORANGE. NOON. These lines were followed by a mishmash of chaotic sentences—references to German might, Aryan presence, degenerate artists, capitalist vainglory, Hitler Youth, political fury, and…well, the rambling words went on and on. In block letters, crooked, the last brutal line: “International Jews control America’s banks. The world’s scourge.”

  I looked up to watch the retreating backs of the superior race, these two purposeful, lost souls opening the doors of the battered pickup. Gus struggled to start the vehicle which resisted—sputtering, gasping, but finally popping on. They sailed away, and through the open windows Meaka’s throaty laugh punctuated the quiet of the street. A death rattle, that, I thought: personification of all my recent fears about the way the world was sliding into chaos and disaster.

  Just that morning, in the local paper, I’d read that anti-Jewish laws had been enacted in Romania. German artists, dazed, walked off ships in the New York harbor. O my America, my newfound land! And not far away from Maplewood, at Camp Nordland in Sussex County, New Jersey, a Nazi training camp practiced survival skills, and only a few souls, alarmed, voiced their protest.

  I handed the sheet to George, who shook his head. “Perhaps we shouldn’t tell them that we’re Jewish.”

  I fumed. “Ah, but I have every intention of doing so.”

  ***

  That unexpected moment on the front porch cast a pall over the rest of the day. The incendiary broadside, propped up against the mirror in my room, kept catching my eye. Truth be told, I wanted it to jar me. I needed to be reminded of the wholesale—and, to me, illogical—hatred that was growing in America, corrupting, eating into the decent fabric of so many towns. Small towns like Maplewood. Gus and Meaka, Americans in the service of evil. Zealots drawn to subversive lives, into causes that defied reason. Idly my thoughts slipped to Clorinda Roberts Tyler and her Assembly of God. Her deadly serious acolyte Annika Tuttle spotted Satan behind every bush. Well, they were looking in the wrong place. Satan walked among us, true, but he wore a Charlie Chaplin moustache and looked out at the world through a madman’s eyes. And, horribly, he was now planning on invading England.

  George watched me carefully as we sat for dinner at the Marlborough House. “Edna, you can’t let that get to you.”

  “Too late.”

  He tried to make a joke of it. “And Gus is one of the electricians at the Maplewood Theater? Who the hell hired him? If I were you, my dear, I’d be careful with props you pick up.”

  “You’re not funny, George.”

  “I don’t try to be, Edna.”

  I ignored that. “You know, I see it on the streets of New York these days. You do, too. Everywhere, especially after last year’s huge rally at Madison Square Garden, that rollicking meeting of the American Nazi Party. American flags hanging alongside German ones. All the roaring and crowing—and threats. There are training camps everywhere. America is sliding into fascism.”

  Then I recalled my most recent—and oft-told—story of burgeoning Nazism in my own backyard. He’d heard it at my dinner parties, so he was hearing it again now. I didn’t care. When I was scouting for land in Connecticut for my new home—this, mind you, with the Depression still horrible on the land—I’d located a virginal hill with breathless views at Stepney Depot, in Easton, Connecticut, just off the Merritt Parkway. Manhattan would be a scant hour’s drive away. Options taken, lawyers contacted. Deals agreed to—but the craggy old Yankee owner reneged. Over and over the closings were aborted, as the old man dug in his heels. Finally, in desperation, I assailed him. Why, for God’s sake? Why? Reluctantly, he told us he feared I was buying the land to set up a Nazi training ground. We all gasped, of course, me especially, the skittish Jewish lady in the room. It seemed a Nazi camp was then active up Southbury way—you could hear the Heil Hitlers and spy the bayonet-waving folks. The man—this silent, stubborn, and totally decent, old guard American—feared Nazi infiltration on land he loved. Well, disavowed of my use of his property—”You? Jewish? Really?” A wide smile on his face—the land was deeded over to me. No goose-stepping on my territory. No swastikas in my windows. Take that, Herr Schicklgruber.

  In the short time I’d lived there I found a curious comfort knowing the old man lived at the bottom of the hill. My ancient sentry sat in an old rocker on a decrepit porch, pipe smoke circling his head. My hero.

  “I know the story, Edna.” George sounded tired.

  “Yes, but it bears repeating.”

  “But not with me.”

  That irritated me, his dismissal of my words, so I sat there silently.

  “Edna…”

  “Quiet, George. Your indifference indicts you.”

  “And your imperiousness frightens me.”

  Not a jolly dinner, sadly. I kept flashing to that leaflet stuck on my mirror. George looked ready to apologize, and I should have encouraged it, knowing he shared my dread of the nascent Nazi movement, especially in his beloved Manhattan. After all, he and Bea still kept an apartment on East Ninety-fourth Street. George protected Manhattan—his idea of Manhattan—as much as I did, seeing it as the epicenter of sophistication and culture—and outright fun. He was so obsessed that he hated traveling anywhere that would not allow him to return safely to Forty-second Street in under one hour. A touchstone of his security. Broadway and Park Avenue and Central Park and Grand Central and even the Bronx Zoo as stepping stones to his wholeness. So I knew he was bothered by proliferating Nazis, especially in nearby neighborhoods like the German Yorkville, steps from his apartment.

  But I decided to be still now. The mood was too raw. Gus and Meaka, loutish souls, were afoot in the land.

  Back at the inn, sticky from the lingering August heat, we sat on the front porch and watched the daylight begin to fade, darkness seeping across the lazy street. From the bushes, crickets chirped, and cicadas sang out in the hemlocks. I closed my eyes.

  A horn blared, a squeal of tires, and I expected Evan’s sparkling chariot to cruise by, behind the wheel Maplewood’s new Ben Hur in a slicked-back haircut. Instead, a black Buick drew to a stop, a cardboard placard on the dashboard announcing: Constable. The driver stepped out. He stood there, momentarily disoriented, his face drawn. He stared up at us blankly, eyes puzzled. I was tempted to say something. Within seconds two more black cars and a squeaky dump truck pulled up behind the first, a gaggle of men in overalls and denim caps tumbling out, approaching the constable. The constable, emboldened, withdrew his gun and looked at it.

  George leaned toward me. “If they rush the porch, Edna, I expect you to shield me. I have plays to write.”

  The constable was a burly shock of a man. His salt-and-pepper hair was shaggy under a uniform hat, and a bushy moustache was so gigantic it touched the edges of his Burnside sideburns, a look I’d assumed had disappeared with Grover Cleveland. He was dressed for backyard leaf-raking, not for law enforcement, but now, swaggering, he yelled up to us. “This here where Evan Street is staying?”

  “Yes.” From me.

  The constable stepped onto the porch and identified himself as Horace Biggers, “head constable of this here town.” He pointed to the restless men behind him, men who looked like farmers fresh from harvesting cucumbers in the lower forty. “Deputies.”

  “Evan’s not here,” I told him. “He’s sailing around town in a new car like…”

  He shook his head. “No, he ain’t.” He glanced back at the men, then back at me. “Someone put a bullet into his chest back in DeHart P
ark.”

  I stood. “Oh my God. When?”

  “Car still running, the driver’s door wide open. Parked there like he just stepped out. Some kids from town hiking through seen the car, jazzy one, a convertible, and then seen him lying nearby in the bushes. He was shot right in the heart, it seems. They let up a howl, them boys, crying and bellowing. His wallet says Evan Street and Lon there”—he pointed to a white-bearded man nodding furiously—“says Street was an actor and staying here.” Constable Biggers tucked his gun back into his holster and looked a little embarrassed.

  I nodded. “His room is…27.”

  The constable didn’t seem to know what to do next. “If you’ll excuse me, folks.” He walked by us into the inn, tipping his hat. Just inside the front door he called out for the proprietor. Meanwhile stranglers sensing the commotion out front drifted from nearby stores and homes, a gathering of townsfolk who buzzed and whispered.

  Evan Street, the garrulous romantic actor, shot dead in a park. Outside of his car, the driver’s door open, the engine still running. Was he alone in his car? Or had he stepped out to meet someone, fully expecting the visit to be short? An assignation? But not one he was looking forward to, most likely. He was ready to run away. But he never got the chance…surprised, shot in the chest as he faced his murderer. No suspense there. A brief but explosive confrontation in a park, perhaps hidden behind trees and bushes, yet a public park. But Evan Street now lay dead in that park, a hole in his chest. The understudy now starred in a murder.

  The men trailed into the inn after Constable Biggers, but the street was filled with the curious. I felt a tad foolish sitting on that porch, George and I gaping out at the growing crowd. We sat there, the two of us, while people watched us. “Act one,” George announced. “Two cosmopolites silently view the town hoi polloi, expecting disaster. First character speaks…”

  “George, really.”

  “Not a good opening line, Edna.”

  “I feel the need to say something.”

  “Don’t you always?”

  “Your timing is off, George. A man is dead.”

  “I didn’t do it, Edna.”

  At that moment someone pushed through the twittering crowd and rushed up the stairs. Suddenly Frank Resnick stood there, trembling, out of breath. The quiet man was quivering and babbling, his face sweaty, his eyes darting wildly from George to me. The usually neat, debonair man looked disheveled, his dress shirt half out of his pants, his pants cuffs dusty.

  “Frank.” George reached out a hand and grabbed hold of the distraught man. “What?”

  “You heard about…”

  “Evan Street?” My own voice cracked. “The constable, Horace Biggers, is inside now…Evan’s room, I guess.”

  He was paying me no mind, sputtering something that made no sense.

  “What?” From me.

  “Dak.” The word was a plaintive cry, thick with fear. “Dak.” Repeated, louder now. “Where is Dak? I have to find Dak.”

  Chapter Six

  “The fat is in the fire.”

  The following morning, despite the static and panic in the air, George insisted we run through our scheduled rehearsal, which we did, mechanically, though lines were missed, cues ignored, and a distracted stagehand carelessly walked across the stage just as I was dying in the last act. Someone giggled a little too hysterically, and the stagehand toppled over a chair, nearly tipping me from my final sofa.

  George sat in the first row, a notepad in his hand, and I hoped he’d not take this moment to critique my wooden delivery.

  But when I joined him at break, I noticed he’d merely doodled nonsense.

  “This rehearsal is foolish,” I told him.

  “We’re days from opening, Edna. Nothing has come together yet.”

  “But it always does, magically, the first night.”

  Calling us back onstage for another go at two of the scenes, George finally threw up his hands, and dismissed us.

  Few people, it turned out, really knew Evan Street, the anonymous understudy for Louis Calhern—lately he’d spent more time in the streets of Maplewood than in the wings of the theater—but the presence of Constable Biggers was disturbing. Folks didn’t know where to look.

  Last night as George and I sat on the porch and watched Constable Biggers and his Falstaffian posse leave the inn after sealing off Evan’s room, George had observed, quietly, “The fat is in the fire, Edna.”

  “What?”

  “I told you that Evan brought disaster with him. It begins now.”

  Minutes after the caravan of black cars sped off, an agitated Gus Schnelling arrived in his old pickup, one wheel up on the sidewalk, and rushed by us into the inn. The proprietor, Garret Smith, had been standing on the porch, watching the departing cars. Stunned, he trailed Gus inside, the door slamming behind him. Immediately his harried voice carried out to us. “Are you crazy?”

  Gus had rushed up the stairs, banging into a wall and knocking a photograph down the stairs, the glass shattering into pieces. He jiggled the door of Evan’s room, pushed against it with his thick shoulder, only to be grabbed by Garret who told him Constable Biggers had forbidden entry to anyone. Gus ignored him, again fiddling with the lock, damning the proprietor, and fleeing only when a frantic Garret hurried to call the police. Gus tumbled down the stairs, taking two or three at a time, and, red-faced and belligerent, stumbled onto the porch, banging his fist against the railing. George and I watched him, but he ignored us, jumping into his pickup, slamming the door so loudly I jumped, too.

  “The fat is in the fire,” George repeated.

  Now, sitting with George in the orchestra after everyone else had left the stage, relief in their faces, he said it again. “The fat is in the fire.”

  “Please, George,” I pleaded. “Enough of that line. Have you no other words? You sound like a…a spinster in a British mystery.”

  “That’s your role, my dear.” A trace of cruelty in his voice. But then he relented. “Act two. The plot thickens.” He leaned back in his seat, staring up at the empty stage.

  Cheryl Crawford, her usual implacable self, nodded at the two of us as she and Louis Calhern walked from the wings. “Stay out of trouble,” Louis said to both of us.

  “You two are not staying around?” I asked.

  Both looked surprised. ”Why?” Cheryl asked. And they headed out, Louis probably for the train station and Cheryl for the solitude of her bungalow.

  “Well, Constable Biggers got Evan’s personal information from her,” George told me. “And Louis had nothing to tell him. I contacted Evan’s mother.”

  “Did you call Bea?”

  He squinted and waited a heartbeat. “You know, I was surprised at her coolness—I expected sobbing. Instead Bea just said, ‘He was a boy doomed to die young.’”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  George agreed. “In fact, I used those very words, and added, ‘You assume all good-looking young men, to whom you attribute sensitivity and angst, will die young. It’s the liability of attractiveness.’”

  “A sentimentalist, your wife.”

  “To which, she said to me in her blunt fashion, ‘You’ll live forever.’ And I told her, ‘It only seems that way, Bea.’”

  “Did she hang up on you?”

  “She started to, but decided to linger, practicing her lines for Evan’s mother.”

  ***

  Late that afternoon, sitting in the Full Moon Café with Mamie Trout hovering nearby, George and I said very little. The shadow of Evan’s horrible death covered us. When Constable Biggers walked in, he spotted us and drew up a chair. The look on his face suggested he’d been looking for us. Mamie Trout—who, I discovered, was an eager gossip and had peppered us with questions about the murder, none of which we answered—sidled her way to a perfectly clean table, rag suspended i
n hand. But Biggers, eyeballing her with stern look, pointed to the kitchen. Reluctantly, she disappeared. No one else was in the café.

  “Yes?” From me.

  “A minute of your time, folks?”

  “Of course.”

  A bulky man, Biggers settled in, his flesh bulging out of the too-tight murky gray uniform shirt, his yellow-stained fingertips fiddling with a cigar that he now placed in the corner of his mouth. It bobbed there precariously, and ashes drifted onto his shirt. “State police fellow coming over to run the case, I thought I’d tell you. But I’m doing some talking to folks. After all, I seen the victim in town—seemed to be everywhere he wasn’t supposed to be. I figured theater people who knew this Evan Street might tell me a thing or two.” He withdrew a small pad from a breast pocket, found the stub of a pencil that was shorter than his fingers, and waited.

  “What do you want to know?” I asked.

  “From what I hear, this Evan fellow made quite a few enemies, what with his charming the pants off the ladies and punching out the boys. Kind of fellow who’s got murder written on his forehead. Tell me what you know.”

  So we did, George and I both summarizing what little we knew about Evan—his struggling mother, his acquaintances, the little we knew of his acting life. The sudden windfall of cash. Biggers never jotted down a word we said, seemingly interested only in watching the tip of his cigar as though he feared it would fizzle out. He thanked us, snapped shut the notebook, and stood, but I motioned him back down. He looked puzzled, but he dropped back into his seat.

  “Constable Biggers, Evan was shot in the heart?”

  “That’s true. At close range. Someone talking to him, taking him unawares.”

  “So he knew his murderer?”

  He waited a bit. “Looks like it. He hadn’t planned on getting shot.” A dry chuckle. “But then, who does, no?”

  “No leads?” I asked.

  George was tapping his finger on the table, his eyes on me—he was not happy with me. At one point he grunted and Constable Biggers eyed him suspiciously. “Edna!”