Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries)

by Ed Ifkovic

  I waited a bit. “Tell me, Ellie. Were you involved with Roddy?”

  The question stopped her. After a long pause, she swallowed. “No.” But then she held my eye. “I wanted to be. But Bella thought I was.”

  “Roddy wasn’t interested?”

  She shook her head. “He had been, I thought. A little fling. But I thought that, maybe, well…” Her voice trailed off. “Miss Ferber, we had good talks, the two of us. Late at night, after my shows, he’d sneak me in by the back door. We just talked.” She smiled. “Actually, lately, I was the one who talked. But he always listened to me. He was that kind of guy. I felt he was actually listening to what I was saying. Most guys don’t do that.” She sighed. “So when he said, no, not tonight…”

  “You were angry.”

  She nodded. “Maybe he thought I was too much trouble. That’s why he told me not to come. Maybe he had other plans.”

  “So late at night?”

  A wistful smile. “I think his plan was to sleep in.” For a second her eyes closed. “Maybe he didn’t want to see the longing in my eyes.”

  “But you went anyway.”

  Her voice rose. “Oh, no. I didn’t go. Bella was wrong. I mean, when I saw Lawson, I was furious. Kind of like—I’ll show that roommate of yours. I’ll see what he’s up to. But then I calmed down. What was I gonna do? Break in?” Her cheeks flushed as she turned her head away, her voice strained; so I knew, to my soul, that Ellie was lying to me about something. She stammered, “I couldn’t bring myself to go there.”

  “You say you always talked. What did Roddy talk to you about?”

  She looked back at me, her voice firmer. “Roddy liked his secrets. He liked to be mysterious. But he did tell me a week or so back that he wanted to move away from the apartment. They got this month-to-month lease, and he didn’t like it there any more.”

  “Well, what’s the problem? You’re unhappy—you leave.”

  “It’s not as easy as that. Lawson is family, sort of. A distant cousin. But it wasn’t working out with him. Lawson is a shirker, Miss Ferber. He’s been late month after month with his share of the rent because he spends too much at the clubs. Roddy had to pay the difference. Then he’d be late, too. Mr. Porter was on his case.” Ellie blushed, which surprised me. “He didn’t like Roddy because one time, months ago, I slipped into the apartment from the back and we were just talking. Sometimes Roddy liked to talk the night away…when he was in that sort of mood. You know, talking about dreams…poetry and singing and…our futures. Innocent stuff. I forgot to keep my voice low and Mr. Porter heard me laughing. He raised hell. He’s got this rule about girls staying after ten at night—like he’s running a monastery. And once before, I guess, he caught Bella back there. She flaunted it, of course. In his face. Arrogant. It drove him wild. So Mr. Porter, I think, sometimes put his ear against the door, if he heard noise. You know, he’s crazy. He used to like Lawson because Lawson flattered him, played big man with him, two men of the world. They got drunk together. But lately he wanted both boys out of the building. I know Roddy hated Mr. Porter because he didn’t like to be told what to do. So Roddy was delaying telling Lawson about moving.”

  “Because?”

  “I told you. Family. He didn’t want to hurt Lawson’s feelings.”

  I’d been nodding to her rambling narrative, but this last line struck me as fanciful. “That’s absurd, Ellie. As I said, he’s not happy—he moves.”

  Ellie widened her eyes. “No, no. It’s not that easy to do. It wasn’t only the rent not being paid. Lawson is like…a gigolo. And Roddy thought he was too ambitious. ‘He scares me because he wants to win the moon.’ That’s how Roddy said it. I guess Lawson’s hard to live with—Romeo in the next room, you know. With Bella talking about ending it with Lawson for some time now, that meant Lawson would have to be back in the apartment and not at Bella’s brother’s place, wooing this one and that, partying all night, getting on Roddy’s nerves. Roddy liked being alone.”

  “Did Lawson know Roddy was planning to move?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe he suspected, but Roddy kept talking to me about it. What was the best way to do it. ‘What do you think, Ellie?’ You know, maybe it was a lot of talk. He probably wasn’t going anywhere soon.”

  “Then why talk?”

  “Roddy lacked courage, Miss Ferber.”

  “Bella cheats on Lawson. We know that. So Lawson cheats on Bella?” I waited. “Did he pursue you?”

  The question stopped her dead. She began a garbled lie, then began again. “Once. Drunk.” She scoffed. “He even made a pass at Harriet, the tribal princess herself. God, she slapped him in the face.” She smiled. “Sooner or later, every girl finds an excuse to slap Lawson in the face.”

  “You don’t like Lawson, do you?”

  Again the deliberate hesitation, the measured words. “Once, drunk again, Lawson announced he planned to leave us all behind.” An exaggerated, phony laugh. “There were people in his future who would be exciting and available and rich and…probably downtown among the white folks.”

  “He’s a cocky lad, this Lawson.”

  “It doesn’t always work and sometimes he miscalculates. Like Bella introduced him to your friend, Jed Harris. She got Mr. Harris to read Lawson’s full-length play. But Mr. Harris rebuffed him, and I heard there were nasty words exchanged. Probably because Bella was in the middle of it all. I never got the full story, but Roddy was there when Mr. Harris embarrassed Lawson and hinted it wasn’t pretty. Roddy wouldn’t tell me the details. It got real ugly. Lawson came crawling back to Harlem with his tail between his legs. He used Bella, and it fizzled out.” Her voice was suddenly arch and thin. “Your Mr. Harris can be…vicious.”

  “He’s not my Mr. Harris.”

  “Sorry,” A sigh. “So that’s why Roddy wanted to move away. In a nutshell. It’s hard being in the shadow of a bright sun.”

  I waited a long time, then asked, “Is all this true, Ellie?”

  She hesitated, avoided eye contact. “You mean, why was I going there that night?” A sliver of a smile. “I planned to go there. Well, I enjoyed our late night talks, mostly in some café or coffee pot after I’m through singing. He waited for me many nights.”

  “And you fell in love with him.”

  “Maybe, a little.” She pouted, her eyes darkening. “I made the mistake of telling Bella I had a crush on Roddy. Of course, she told Lawson, who found it funny. ‘That’s a dead-end street,’ he told her. She then told me what he said. But Lawson’s words were like a challenge to her.”

  “But Bella suspected you and Roddy now, no?”

  She nodded. “Jealousy.”

  “Hence her fury.”

  “What Bella knew was that Lawson would leave her soon. I don’t know if she told us the truth when she said she broke up with him that night Roddy died. They’re always breaking up.”

  Ellie reached for her coat, draped over the back of the chair. “I didn’t mean to get into all this…this boy-girl nonsense, Miss Ferber. I’m sorry. You can’t be interested in the romantic and unromantic lives of a bunch of misguided boys and girls.”

  I wasn’t through. “Roddy’s murder changed everything, Ellie. Everything stands out now. A spotlight shines on even the smallest detail.”

  I could see her struggling for the right words. “You don’t think any of this is related to his…murder, do you?” Her hand rose to cover her mouth, but the gesture seemed exaggerated. “God, no! That was Skidder Scott, the derelict.” She was buttoning her coat. “It was. It had to be.” Then, suddenly she sat back down. “You have to believe me when I said I didn’t go there that night. I planned…to check up…I didn’t want to go. It was cold, chilly, I was tired…”

  “Harriet claims she saw Bella lurking in the shadows outside the apartment that night.”

  “I know. Waters told me. She�
�s a sneak, that Bella. I think she spied on Roddy more than once.”

  “Harriet didn’t see you?”

  She looked at me strangely. “Because I wasn’t there.” She caught herself. Then, in a thin, sad voice, she said, “Miss Ferber, Roddy wrote a poem for Bella. A simple little lyric, like an Elizabethan celebration of her beauty. Can you believe it? He actually asked me to read it before he gave it to her.” A moment of anger, her eyes blinking wildly. “To Bella. A woman who calculates…evil. I couldn’t even comment on it because I was so surprised.”

  “You still seem angry about it, Ellie.”

  She made a false laugh, held onto it too long. “Yes, I was. Then. It’s okay now.” She looked me full in the face. “But I wouldn’t kill Roddy because of a mediocre poem.”

  “I didn’t accuse you, Ellie.”

  Sharp, biting. “Are you sure?” An awkward pause. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be snide with you, Miss Ferber.”

  I echoed her own words. “Are you sure?”

  ***

  I walked her out, rode with her down the elevator to the lobby, headed as I was to the newsstand on the corner. The New York Times morning edition would be out, with a piece on Ann Andrews, the unfortunately wrong actress playing Julie Cavendish in The Royal Family. Like Jed, I didn’t trust her to do well with the play. The part called for a sophisticated woman born to serve high tea, a woman who put on her gloves in such a way that the act itself defined the word patrician; Ann Andrews was born to play women who sling hash in Jersey shore roadhouses. Ellie tagged along beside me, nervous now, not speaking, looking for the chance to break away and head to the subway. Finally, as I paused at the crosswalk, I waved goodbye, and she scurried up the block.

  I stood there watching her, contemplating the gravity and tenor of her words. Had I been duped? Manipulated? My reportorial nose suggested blatant half-truths, perhaps a colossal fabrication. But for what end? Why lie to me? Did Waters unduly magnify my concern with Roddy’s murder—and the murderer?

  The light changed, and I started across the street. I glanced back up the block to see Ellie standing at another crosswalk. She was bent into the slight breeze, head inclined, hands tucked into her pockets.

  But in that instant, looking back toward the news kiosk, I saw a dark figure slip quickly behind a parked bus. Standing just a few yards from the murky specter, I realized it was Freddy, that strange and quirky street lad. He hadn’t spotted me, I knew, because his body was turned toward Ellie’s stationary figure. The streetlight lit his face and, in the moment before he disappeared, I recognized him, remembered him lingering outside Small’s Paradise in Harlem, that first night I heard Ellie sing. He’d been watching Ellie that night, not Roddy, not Bella. Ellie. He was following her. And in the fleeting seconds before the bus shielded him, I saw how the tough guy pose was defeated by the abject longing in his face.

  Chapter Nine

  Two days before Christmas I panicked: presents for my nieces, for Fannie, for my mother who’d persistently hinted at a particular mink wrap at Saks. For a prideful Jewish family, we spent an inordinate amount of time orchestrating a happy Christmas holiday! So the morning was spent shuffling among the maddened shoppers on Madison Avenue, jostled but a little thrilled by the bubbly cheer that would evaporate the day after New Year’s. Clerks knew me in the stores, of course; the simple pointing of a finger had a sycophantic clerk scurrying to put aside, wrap, and ultimately deliver the chosen booty.

  Done by noon, I met Waters in the entrance of Bloomingdale’s where, in response to an earlier plea on the phone, I was to help him choose a fashionable scarf for his mother. The seventeen-year-old, squirreling away part of his allowance, wanted something special, and, clueless, he turned to me. As we rifled through the racks of silk scarves, I found myself enjoying the experience. Waters seemed to be enjoying my company, and I enjoyed his, of course. There was something in those dark, flickering eyes that suggested a real thrill of being with me. I wasn’t used to people liking me. Being famous and wealthy, I spent too many hours in the presence of fawners, flatterers, and manipulators, to the point at which I sometimes believed the world was one gigantic Uriah Heep, hunch-backed and whispering buttery blather in my ear.

  Waters and I spent most of the hour together laughing.

  Back at the apartment, the wrapped scarf hidden in his oversized briefcase, we settled in for a lunch prepared by his mother, who, savvy lady, had intuited the reason for her son’s meeting up with me.

  Afterwards, sitting with cocoa in the living room, Waters became serious. His spine stiffened and the endless rocking and leg jiggling that adolescent boys seemed to perfect now ceased. Dramatically, he withdrew a thick accordion folder from the same battered briefcase. I could see the jagged edges of typed sheets spilling out, bound by a thick black cord.

  “You know, Miss Edna,” he began, breathing in deeply, “I’ve been going back and forth to Lawson’s place, bringing a lot of his stuff to Queens. Way out there, an hour by subway. And then an hour back, even longer to where I stay in New Jersey. It’s a different world out there.” His voice sounded amused. “Anyway, we gotta get everything out because they didn’t pay the rent, and Mr. Porter wants to let the place in January.” Waters was thumbing the sheets of a manuscript, trying to align the sloppy edges. The ungainly mess seemed ready to slide to the carpet.

  I smiled. “You are going to get to the point?”

  “Sorry.” But I noticed he had no intention of abbreviating his rehearsed story. “I brought over some of his folders of stories and poems, but he never looked at them. He doesn’t care and I don’t understand that. I picked up the pages of Lawson’s work that were scattered all over the place, knocked off a desk when it was rifled through. I told Lawson I was doing it but he just shrugged. It didn’t matter, he said. Just throw it all in a box. But slowly I found all the sheets—Lord, some had slid under the bed and I swear the corners were nibbled at by a mouse or something—and I put them in order. Sheets were ripped, smudged, bent. I took it home with me. I wasn’t supposed to but…”

  I interrupted. “I just thought of something, Waters. What about Roddy’s writing?”

  He seemed flummoxed. “It’s there in his room, but I don’t know if I can touch it.”

  “What’s there?”

  “You know, folders of stuff. Everything in a drawer, organized, neat. Lawson is a slob, but Roddy was, well, the opposite. He told me he’d finished three short stories about Harlem jazz life. And poems, too. I suppose they’re all in those folders.” He paused. “I won’t go into that room.”

  “They can’t be left there.”

  “No one in his family cares. They didn’t come for him.” Angrily, Waters emphasized the word.

  “Then we have to.”

  Wide-eyed: “You think we can publish Roddy’s stuff?”

  “I don’t know if it’s any good, but we have to look it over, Waters. We just can’t let Mr. Porter throw it all out with the trash.”

  Waters was waving the manuscript at me, anxious. “That’s why I got the rest of Lawson’s work, Miss Edna. Even though he doesn’t seem to care one way or the other.”

  I smiled. “I’m sure he’ll forgive you. Eventually he’ll want to start writing again.”

  Waters looked impatient, thumbing the loose sheets. “Miss Edna, I stayed up last night and read all of this. I like it.” He tapped the pile of typescript with his fingers. “I always liked Lawson’s plays, but I liked this…novel. I mean, I can tell it’s not finished, but there are parts of it, well, I liked it.”

  He pushed the manuscript toward me and I took the stack of sheets from him. The title caught my eye: Hell Fighters. He saw my quizzical look because he jumped in, excited, “Ten years ago, during the Great War, Harlem sent a regiment to fight in France. The 15th Infantry Regiment. All Negro volunteers, in fact. Most people don’t even know that. His novel is
about Negroes eager to fight for America in France in 1917. These groups were recruited from a cigar store on the corner of 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue. They drilled at the Lafayette Dance Hall with broomsticks. With broomsticks, Miss Edna. Imagine that? They even dug trenches in tenement alleys. Ask my mother about it. She knows.”

  “I never knew this, Waters. How many folks do?”

  He nodded quickly. “Then they went to France, fought in the trenches even though the regular Marines scorned them. Pershing assigned them to the French 4th Army and called them Hell Fighters because of their bravery. In 1918 they fought at the front for almost two hundred days. Heroes, all of them. Every man. When they got home, they marched proudly up Fifth Avenue, led by a jazz band. When they marched in Harlem, people went nuts. They played ‘Here Comes my Daddy Now.’” Waters’ voice had been filled with excitement, but now it dropped, somber. “They thought America would be a better place now.”

  “But everything went back to what it was before.”

  He nodded. “The KKK is bigger than ever.”

  “Unfortunately,” I added. “So this is the background of the novel?”

  “Yes.” The enthusiasm appeared again. “Imagine Negroes playing jazz on the streets of France.”

  I got curious. “Lawson was just a young boy, then, no?”

  “But he must have listened to stories. Talked to veterans. He talked to people. I remember the time he told me it was a good subject for a novel, but I didn’t pay that much attention.” He pointed to the manuscript. “The way he wrote war scenes…”

  I smiled. “Stephen Crane writing The Red Badge of Courage.”

  “What?” He looked confused.

  “A lesson in American literature, Waters. Stephen Crane never experienced the Civil War but he wrote the best novel on that horrid war.”

  Now Waters smiled. “Lawson does, too.”

  I didn’t know about that, but, at Waters’ urging, I agreed to give the novel a glance, though I promised nothing. I slipped off the title page and there, badly typed, was a simple dedication page. Waters noticed me looking at it.