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

by Ed Ifkovic

  Chapter Ten

  The taxi flew uptown.

  My doorman had secured a yellow checkered cab after Waters came back to the apartment and announced that he’d failed to flag down a taxi outside my building, even though, as he cynically termed it, he was dressed like a fugitive white boy from Phillips Exeter in his tan cashmere topcoat, leather gloves, and, horror of horrors, a suede trilby cap he’d inherited from his dead grandfather. Cabbies, I knew, were sometimes loath to squire a young Negro lad up to Harlem. So Joseph the doorman, obsequious to a fault, hailed one, though he couldn’t resist frowning at the young Negro boy who blithely and slowly climbed into the back seat of the battered cab, sitting between his mother Rebecca and me. We were going up to Harlem.

  After Lawson had vanished from my living room, Waters and I discussed his behavior, befuddled; and Rebecca finally joined us, she conceding, a twinkle in her eye, that “even with the sunken eyes of a cadaver and the haunted look of a dying hero out of a Gothic romance, Lawson looks appealing.” She chuckled. “It’s hard for Lawson to look bad.” Waters groaned and eyed his mother disapprovingly. “But I’m worried about the boy,” Rebecca went on. “Worried to death.”

  Waters was nodding. “You know, I don’t think Lawson thought much about cousin Roddy as a friend until he died. Roddy was just the goofy cousin who shared his apartment, who stayed out of his way. I mean, he liked him, pushed him to be a part of the group way back when, but Lawson probably never really thought about him. For a while they were always together, and then…well, they weren’t. I think they’d started growing apart from each other.” Waters was still tapping his fingers on the manuscript. “When Roddy got murdered, I think Lawson realized he’d lost something. It…you know…jarred him. Lawson doesn’t have many friends because…well, Lawson likes himself too much. The one guy he’d pal around with was Roddy.”

  “It’s also the way he died,” I commented. “The shock.”

  “To all of us,” Rebecca added. “But the body there…there…in his apartment.” She shuddered. “I’d have trouble sleeping in that place, I have to tell you.”

  “People die of sadness, you know,” Waters went on, a line that sounded melodramatic coming from the skinny boy. His mother raised her eyebrows and looked long at him.

  Then Waters, glancing toward the window where the disappearing afternoon sun was painting the Manhattan sky a swirl of orangy red and shrill yellow, told us that Harriet had mentioned that Skidder Scott was arraigned yesterday. “Funny thing is, I asked her how she’d heard about it, and she never answered me. Like she regretted saying anything at all.” Then, Waters said, he saw the front page of the Amsterdam News. There was a photograph of Scott being led out to a sheriff’s van, with stragglers bunched on a sidewalk. And there, bundled against the cold day, stood Harriet, a grainy shot but definitely her, watching.

  “Why in the world would she go to the arraignment?” I wondered.

  Rebecca echoed my thoughts. “Last place I’d want to be.”

  Waters had a reason. “Well, the man killed someone in her building, you know.”

  “What did Harriet tell you?” I asked.

  “Well, before she clammed up, she said that Skidder Scott has been close-mouthed, only saying that he had nothing to do with it. He’s got this public defender who spoke for him in court, but all of a sudden Skidder came out of some haze and began yelling. They had to restrain him.”

  “Haze?” I asked.

  “Like in a fog. Like he hadn’t known where he was. It was the old Skidder Scott. He used to get drunk and stand on Seventh Avenue and scream at cars passing by. I used to stand and watch him. But in court he yelled about being set up for the fall, that people lied to him. The judge tried to shut him up, but once he started going on and on, there was no stopping him.” Waters bit his lower lip. “Just as we suspected, Lawson and me, if you remember. Sounds like someone told him to do it.” A pause. “Except for one thing.”

  His mother twisted her head around to look into her son’s face. “What’s that?”

  Waters smiled. “He started saying that the devil must have made him do it. The devil always gets him into trouble, he shouted.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s probably true, but it doesn’t help us at all.”

  “I told Harriet that I believed Skidder,” Waters went on. “I said I didn’t know if he was innocent but Lawson and me, we think someone who knew Roddy was behind the killing. There had to be a reason for it. That startled her.”

  “What do you mean?” From his mother.

  Waters drew in his cheeks. “She got real mad. She told me to stay out of it. It was all nonsense, but it was over now. Just don’t get the police back into it. It was bad enough that they were crawling all over the place when it happened. I guess her father did some time and, like Harriet, doesn’t trust the cops, afraid they’d railroad someone for something they didn’t do. Anyway, she got a little nuts, and finally warned me.”

  I stiffened. “Warned you?”

  He tried to make light of it. “She said someone could get hurt.”

  “That’s unacceptable.” I raised my voice, angry.

  Rebecca was bristling. “We’ll see about that.”

  Waters insisted, “No, no. Forget it. It didn’t mean anything. You know how people talk.”

  “Waters,” I announced, “people I know do not threaten others with harm.” I thought a second. “Well, that might not always be true. I did hear Dottie Parker threaten to strangle Aleck Woollcott. And we all begged her to do it.” I shook my head. “But I’m making light of a serious threat.”

  “Let’s just forget it, okay? I shouldn’t have told you that.”

  Then he began talking about Roddy’s papers, his notebooks, his cardboard folders of stories and poems. “Harriet told me her father is going to throw it all into the trash bin. All of Roddy’s writing is there, and no one cares.”

  I sat up. “I care. We care. That man is dangerous, and I don’t trust him. Something of Roddy must be rescued…”

  “There is only one solution,” Rebecca remarked.

  She suggested we take a cab to Roddy’s apartment and retrieve his writing. That made sense, and foolishly, caught in the moment, I agreed to go with her and Waters.

  Which was why, as darkness fell on the city and everything looked bitter and icy and desolate, we three huddled in the back seat of a yellow checkered cab that dropped us off on 138th Street. On the corner at Seventh Avenue a Negro Santa clanged a bell for the Salvation Army and was singing “Jingle Bells” in a deep gravelly voice. I’d never seen a Negro Santa before and it jarred me, momentarily, before I smiled. Merry Christmas to all.

  Waters used Lawson’s key to open the apartment door, which the super had obviously repaired because a short strip of unstained wood was nailed where the jamb had been splintered. No one was around, the long hallway eerily quiet and dimly lit. I thought I heard the hum of music from the super’s apartment, but I wasn’t sure. Inside the apartment, as Waters switched on the overhead light, Rebecca and I stopped short, both seized by squeamishness. A violation, this visit. Yet Waters, who’d been methodically emptying out Lawson’s possessions and trekking them off to Queens, seemed at home, the absent tenant returning to a place he knew well.

  “There’s nothing left to take from Lawson’s room,” Waters noted. “Except for the stuff he’s leaving behind. The old bed and bureau. Some chairs. Junk.”

  Rebecca and I peered through the open door of Lawson’s room: we saw a single bed stripped of linens, a stained and ripped mattress, a chipped headboard, a bureau with the drawers halfway pulled out with ragtag unwanted clothing spilling out, a small threadbare wool carpet, a pinewood plank desk. A closet door, ajar, revealed a few items of clothing, neatly arranged on hangers. A stripped-down room. Waters frowned and pointed to the bureau. “Someone’s been rifling through the stuff le
ft here. I leave things neat. I didn’t leave the drawers out like this.”

  The faint patina of pale fingerprint dust covered everything.

  I supposed we lingered there because Roddy’s room felt lit by fire, a telltale heart, something forbidden behind that closed door. Yet we had no choice. The last time I was here my mind was riveted to the dead boy in the bed. Now, surveying Roddy’s room, I saw a bed hidden under a drab patchwork coverlet, a shabby bureau identical to Lawson’s, a blackened hardwood floor with no carpet, and clothing scattered everywhere, as though Roddy had just left and planned on returning shortly. A flannel shirt was draped over a chair, pants crumpled on the floor, socks tucked into shoes in a corner.

  “I don’t want to be here,” Rebecca whispered.

  Glancing at his mother, Waters bustled about, moving to the old oak desk, which, incongruously, someone long ago had painted a hideous deck green. Chunks of the awful paint had chipped away, giving the desk a mottled look.

  “I haven’t been back in this room,” Waters told us. “I mean, I stood in the doorway and looked in. It’s not the way the cops left it.” He pointed to the pulled out drawers of the bureau and the desk. “Yes, the drawers were pulled-out and stuff scattered, but someone has been in here since. Things have been moved around. I can tell.”

  Someone—the murderer?—had hurriedly searched the bureaus. A few dimes and nickels were scattered from an overturned jar, suggesting that Roddy’s amassed subway and bus change had been pocketed. What else had the intruder looked for? On most surfaces there was that awful patina of white, which gave the room a ghostly reflection, as though a fog had settled into the space.

  Quickly, sensing our discomfort, Waters moved through the contents of the desk and finally lifted out a cardboard box. Roddy had been a meticulous young man, organizing his writing, because the box contained a sheaf of poems bound with clips, a folder of one-act plays, and a few short stories, each one labeled “Harlem Jazz,” number one, two, three. Here was Roddy’s life as a writer. In another desk drawer he located Roddy’s scribbled notes, some earlier drafts, bits and pieces, notebooks, all tucked into cardboard cartons. Each drawer was inspected, and Rebecca assembled the pile on top. “Do we take it all?” Waters wondered.

  “Of course,” I said. “If there is something to publish, we may need the background notes.”

  “What about his typewriter?” Waters pointed.

  All three of us stared at the ancient Remington pushed into a corner of the desk. It struck me as some awesome talisman, some instrument that bore Roddy’s precious imprint, his life’s breath.

  “No,” Rebecca said. “We have enough to carry.”

  So we divided the pile into three, each of us carrying a section of Roddy’s brief, aborted literary dream life. My bundle of sheets seemed weighed with a power I truly hoped was really there; otherwise, this was vain pursuit, an exercise of feeble eulogy.

  “We need to leave.” Rebecca looked toward the doorway.

  As we lumbered through the shadowy hallway, folders cradled in our arms and against our chests, the super’s door opened suddenly and Harriet stood there, hands on hips, faced flushed with anger. “I thought I heard you rustling back there,” she said to Waters. “I didn’t know you brought the posse.”

  “Hello, Harriet,” Rebecca said.

  Harriet’s gaze took us all in. “You’re lucky my father isn’t here.”

  “And why is that?” I asked.

  “He’s not too fond of intruders in his hallway.”

  I used my pleasantest voice. “Then the police spending hours in Roddy’s room must have sent him into a frenzy.”

  “He’s not fond of the police.”

  Waters looked puzzled. “Harriet, why are you so…angry?”

  Surprisingly, she smiled. “I’m not angry, Waters. I’m just…surprised, that’s all. It’s just that when cops are around—or when other authority figures stop in”—here she eyed me suspiciously—“well, things fall apart.” She shrugged her shoulders. “The police make frequent stops here anyway because Pop did ten years upstate, and they assume he’s ready for his next batch of years behind bars. Pop and I battle each other and most times we don’t even speak to each other, but I’ve inherited his healthy—or maybe it’s actually unhealthy—dislike of the white men in blue who rat-a-tat-tat on our door late at night.” She actually rapped her knuckles against the open door.

  “No one is accusing your father of anything,” Rebecca said to her.

  “Really?” A broad smile. “Before they rounded up old Skidder Scott, they were dusting my father’s soul for prints.” She turned to Waters. “Waters, are you still insisting Roddy’s murder was some conspiracy, some hired-gun episode, some…revenge against the hapless Roddy?”

  “Lawson and I believe…” he began, defensively.

  Her voice boomed in the hallway. “Based on nothing but wild imagination and folly.”

  Rebecca leaned into her. “Harriet, why did you warn my son…say that someone would get hurt?”

  For a moment she stared at us, as if trying to recall her own words. Then she laughed, a phony sound leaking some fear and panic. “I didn’t mean that, Waters. For God’s sake, a little hyperbole and the battalion of women come charging from the Upper East Side to lambaste the little pickanniny Harriet in her shanty.”

  Rebecca fumed. “It was a threat.”

  “As I said, I didn’t want the police back here.” She shrugged.

  I was frustrated. “Why not? Especially if you—or your father—have nothing to hide.”

  Now she scoffed. “So, Miss Ferber, you believe there’s more to the story of Roddy’s murder than a simple burglary gone really bad?”

  I paused, reflected. “I don’t know what happened here that awful night.”

  “Roddy got a knife plunged into his chest. That’s what happened.”

  “That’s no reason to threaten Waters,” I told her.

  Waters wore a look that suggested he could defend himself, but he kept silent.

  Now Harriet smiled at Waters. “Come on. Think of it. This little boy questioning me? Running off half-cocked, like a darker shade of Sherlock Holmes, strutting his stuff through Harlem dressed like a prep school lad in sweater vest and two-tone shoes.”

  Waters grunted.

  “Just what do you know?” I cut into a speech she obviously found a pleasure to deliver.

  For a moment she swung away, her face closing up. Then, “Nothing.”

  “You think Skidder was involved?”

  “That’s what all the evidence and all the police have concluded. The rest is aimless imagination on your parts.”

  A tenant from the second floor bounded down the stairs, stopped short when he saw us gathered in the hallway. He eyed us warily as he buttoned his overcoat and slipped out the front door.

  “Good,” Harriet announced loudly. “We’re providing entertainment for the winos that occupy the upper floors.” She motioned behind her. “You might as well come in. Pop won’t be back for an hour, if then, so there’s no chance he’ll go into shock at discovering all of you, especially the famous novelist, huddled on his old sofa.” She stood aside and shooed us in, our arms bearing the piles of manuscript.

  I took in the apartment: stark white plaster walls cluttered with gaudy knickknacks bunched onto makeshift shelves, so many that the ceramic ivy planters and orange carnival vases and plaster-of-Paris figurines seemed on the verge of crashing to the floor. It was a hoarder’s dreary paradise, a world in which the smallest object that catches the eye, be it a shiny glass snow globe or a tin ashtray stamped Atlantic City Boardwalk, was pocketed, and then duly displayed. Shelf after shelf of tchotchkes, sagging under the burden of utter kitsch. Harriet spotted me surveying the mad bazaar and said out of the side of her mouth, “My mother, when she was alive, couldn’t pass a church rummage sale wit
hout adopting the most hideous items offered. And,” she summed up, “my father assumes it is some kind of shrine to her, seven years after her death.”

  A quick rapping on the door, and she jumped. Freddy walked in, brown bag in hand and a cloth satchel over his shoulder. He strode in but stopped short, faced us, some fierce judge and jury lined up on the sofa. “What?” he stammered.

  “The Inquisition,” Harriet told him. “Come in. You’re a half-hour late.”

  “Really, Harriet,” Rebecca admonished.

  “Sometimes Freddy surprises me with food. I suspect he works in a restaurant, but he’s taken a vow of silence.” She pointed to the brown bag. “I smell a ham sandwich perhaps.”

  He slid into a chair, mouth shut, but his eyes danced about the room. I caught him glancing furtively at Harriet, but then he lowered his eyes, avoiding us.

  For the longest time we sat there in awkward silence. I kept adjusting the stack of folders in my lap.

  Finally Waters, nervous, spoke. “Guess what, Harriet? Miss Ferber spoke with Langston Hughes at a party and he said he’d meet with us after New Year’s.”

  He had barely got out the excited words when Harriet broke in. “Good Lord, Waters. Listen to you. Langston Hughes is not a god. He’s a young guy. What is he? Twenty-five or -six, maybe. So he’s published. So people know who he is. He’s a Negro like the rest of us, a guy who writes poetry while bumming around Harlem.”

  “He’s successful, that’s why,” Waters answered.

  She drummed her fingers on the table. “And so will we be…without his connections. Think about it, Waters. How did he make it? Didn’t he go to Columbia, a white man’s school? And, like Zora Neale Hurston, he’s got this white woman supporting him, a few dollars here and there, a smile, a biscuit, clothes, some bus fare. Please write me a nice little poem about Uncle Tom and Little Eva. Yes, Massa. Everyone knows about Mrs. Mason, that rich dowager in her Fifth Avenue penthouse. Langston, do this. Zora, do that. Ridiculous.” She turned to me. “Is she your friend, Miss Ferber?”