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

by Ed Ifkovic

  “Ma’am.” Howie was pointing behind me at the sidewalk. “There.”

  I turned to see a figure bundled against the cold in a long black coat, someone who’d been huddled on the stoop of the boarded-up building directly across from Roddy’s apartment. A homeless person, perhaps, but someone now rushing away from us, hunched over, stumbling.

  “Howie, what?”

  “Well, I glanced out the window and seen this movement in the dark there, someone hidden there. In the cold. Real strange. When I looked closer, whoever it is pushed back into the shadows. When I tossed out my cigarette, I heard a cough. He’s running, see?”

  The dark shadow was rushing away from us, weaving, dipping behind a parked car, bent over, shuffling.

  “Don’t want you see them,” Howie said.

  I glanced back at Roddy’s building. All the lights were now on in Mr. Porter’s apartment. That jarred, though I didn’t know why.

  “Did you see what he looked like? A face? A man? A woman?”

  “I couldn’t tell. Too bundled up, bent over. But a head wrapped in a bright red scarf or hat. Like a lady would wear. Maybe.”

  I rushed my words. “Can you follow?”

  A slick grin covered his face. Coolly, his shoulders forward, he jerked the steering wheel, maneuvered an impossible U-turn on the tight street with rows of double-parked cars, and zoomed to the corner. But our elusive shadow was nowhere to be seen. At the corner of Eighth Avenue there was too much congested traffic, too many bustling people out in the cold. A cop’s shrill whistle caused two drivers to blare horns. Jaywalkers shuffled and blocked cars. A man banged on a fender. Howie quickly moved through the intersection, running a red light—I gasped and he swore under his breath—and the car pulled to the opposite curb. I looked up and down Eighth Avenue, a vain pursuit, surely, but Howie was madly drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “You know, he figures we’d cruise the avenue.” He bit his lip. “This avenue.” He banged the steering wheel. “He’s running the cross streets, avoiding the avenues.” He placed the car in gear and moved through the cross street, narrowly missing the open door of a yellow cab. In the middle of a block of shabby brownstones he stopped so quickly I bounced forward, grabbed the seat in front of me. “There.”

  I saw nothing. “What?”

  “You gotta watch the dark doorways, ma’am. Not the lit ones. Or the open sidewalk. There.”

  Night and silence…

  A shock of red on a dark figure who was pressed against a doorframe.

  I strained to see in the darkness—and then imagined there was no one there. Crazily, Howie flung open the door, though I yelled for him to stop, and he jumped out. “You!” he yelled into the darkness.

  …Who is there?

  But, through some nighttime sleight of hand, the red scarf disappeared, though in seconds I spotted the figure hurrying toward the corner. “There!” I screamed.

  Howie slipped back into the driver’s seat and the car sped on.

  “Foolish, this chase,” I sputtered, but Howie was having none of my reservations now. His hands fumbled on the steering wheel, his back stiff, his face beet red. Somehow, he managed to slip a cigarette between his lips and light it. I’d missed that trick, too. It bobbed up and down as he whistled softly. “Howie, enough.” But he wasn’t listening, and I realized I wanted this pursuit to go on, Howie and I gallivanting madly through the darkened streets. Wyatt Earp and Annie Oakley. He sped west, maneuvering around cars and walkers. At one point, dead-ended, he turned onto 141st Street and crossed Convent, then nearly collided with a taxi cruising up St. Nicholas Avenue.

  “We may be ahead of him!” Howie yelled. “He’s headed west.”

  “To where?”

  He didn’t answer. The elusive figure, I knew, could be anywhere now, sheltered in an apartment, hidden in a park. Anywhere. But Howie was resolute. “Howie…”

  He broke in. “West,” he blurted out. “I think I know…”

  We stopped at a red light on Amsterdam Avenue, and Howie flicked his ashes into the ashtray. Finally, nodding, he pulled over to the curb, and we waited. “This avenue, maybe. He’s running away from us. A busy street, a place to get lost.” He smiled at me. “We wait.”

  The town car blocked part of an intersection. Behind us a horn honked, but Howie raised his arm cavalierly in the air, shrugged. The car squealed by us, the driver shaking his fist at us.

  We waited. The light went red, then green, then red again.

  A half-hour now, at least, this chase, and…nothing.

  My mind reeled. “That could be…anyone…”

  He cut me off. “Not a chance. Somebody was watching that building, ma’am. You know it. And when they seen you, they run off. No reason to run, you know.”

  “But…”

  His voice erupted. “There!”

  I saw nothing, though he pointed across Amsterdam, down a cross street. Shadows, headlights, the rumble of a car on the bumpy pavement, the distant whine of a bus stopping. The blaring horn section of a jazz record on someone’s gramophone.

  “That fool is hell-bent toward Broadway. I should have guessed it. The subway, maybe. Lots of people out tonight. Lots of…” His voice trailed off as a taxi behind us leaned on a horn.

  Howie careened onto Broadway, tires squealing, heading north, weaving around cars and jaywalkers, his head twisting left and right, frantic. A chaotic street, this Broadway, uptown in Harlem, crowds on the sidewalks, venders still hawking wares this late at night, newsstands with lines of people, buses chugging by, a pack of jazzy young men in purple suits, their bodies bumping one another and blocking the intersection. Howie leaned on his horn. I didn’t know where to look. We drove up three or four blocks, then down six or seven, up and down, crazily—all around the town, boys and girls together—crazy, crazy. Then, suddenly, we idled by the subway stop. Nothing. No red scarf.

  Howie swore under his breath.

  “What?”

  “I used to track folks for Pinkerton’s. In Chicago. Five years back.”

  “And?”

  “And I like to believe I think like a runner from the law.”

  “We’re not the law.”

  “Hey, you’re acting like it, ma’am.”

  I grinned. “Well,” I began, sitting back, “this is a big city…here…and…” I sighed. “Enough, Howie. This little adventure is over, foolish though it might have been. We’ll never know.”

  Howie pointed to a black-clad figure rushing by, a floppy scarlet cap covering the face, the body stooped against the cold. But the figure paused and stepped off the curb, turning in front of us. A young woman clutched an infant protectively tucked into her chest. A gust of wind hit her face and the scarlet hat flew off. The hat slammed against a brick wall.

  Howie laughed. “If she didn’t have no baby…”

  “No,” I said emphatically. “No.”

  The town car merged into the flow of traffic on Broadway, headed now back downtown, moving slowly. We stopped at a red light. I glanced back. A city bus pulled up to a stop, and a rush of frozen folks bustled from behind a kiosk and hurried onto the bus. Within seconds the bus chugged away, backfiring once.

  Darkness shrouded the kiosk. But, surprisingly, another bus unexpectedly appeared, pulling over and illuminating the dark space. Standing back against the kiosk, bent away from the wind, was the elusive dark figure with the brilliant red scarf, caught now unawares under the sudden stream of powerful light.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. “Oh my God.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Welcome. Happy New Year.”

  My voice was scratchy and hesitant.

  At three o’clock on New Year’s Day everyone gathered at my apartment for tea. I’d thought of an early brunch, but Rebecca reminded me that young folks usually went to New Ye
ar’s Eve revels and doubtless would stagger bleary-eyed from bed late the next morning or early afternoon. Then a simple tea, I told her: with chicken salad sandwiches, fluffy blueberry muffins, and one of her trays of mouth-watering lemon chiffon cookies. Simple fare, nothing to upset the hangover or indigestion. Frankly, I’d provide the bile and the acid in the belly.

  “What are you up to, Miss Edna?” Rebecca questioned, but I shrugged her off.

  It had been a hectic few days since the successful opening of The Royal Family. The bouquets and accolades still poured in, floodtide, and everyone wanted at me. But I made myself available only to family visiting from Chicago. My mother had returned to the city from Connecticut for the openings—“Edna, what’s the matter with you? You weren’t there!”—but now was headed back to Chicago with relatives—my real Christmas present, indeed. And I saw George Kaufman and Noël Coward and Dick and Mary Rodgers, dinners or lunches with these friends. Other than that, I was busy. I had my homework to do, and I did it studiously, methodically, hidden in my workroom, out of sight of Rebecca. I had to be certain my late-night revelations were on target, and of course they were—for the most part—though I hated to qualify that statement. I had motive, guessed at but logical; I had evidence, grim and stunning. What I lacked was the how—because that seemed impossible, given the facts as amassed, digested, debated. But I trusted my instincts.

  Chomping on a muffin, Waters innocently commented, “Here we are again. All of us, just like a couple weeks back. Sitting here in your living room.” He waved his hand around the room.

  “Except,” Harriet smiled, “there were more of us. Someone named Roddy is missing.”

  Waters looked sheepish and stared into his lap.

  He had spent the morning in the kitchen with his mother, the two laughing and leaning into each other, familial and warm. He was relieved when Ellie arrived, a half-hour early. Doffing her coat and gloves and rubbing her hands over her chilled face, she spoke to Waters, “So Langston Hughes is coming today?”

  The question surprised him. “No, not that I know of.”

  Overhearing her, I came in from my workroom. “Not today, Ellie. I hope you weren’t misled.” I paused. “Langston Hughes did say he’d talk to the group but…not today.”

  She looked perplexed. “Then what?” She stepped back, as if planning to flee.

  I didn’t answer, and Ellie went to the sideboard, eyed some water chestnut and bacon canapés Rebecca had just placed there. Her lips were drawn into a severe line, and I noticed that she kept glancing at me, wary. Dressed in a spangly dress, cut above the knee, very flapper, with a bodice pulled tight across her chest, an attempt to flatten what nature had abundantly provided, she also wore sparkly drop earrings, ruby-colored ovals. The total effect of her look was New Year’s Eve, dance hall, jazz cabaret, Clara Bow “It” girl—and not, obviously, a sobering and questionable afternoon tea at Edna Ferber’s sensible abode.

  When I employed Waters and Rebecca to engineer the invitations to this gathering, I’d been purposely mysterious, though Rebecca, sly dog, had grimly nodded, suspecting something. For the past couple of days she’d spied me scurrying about, a dervish in the apartment, note taking, reviewing, staring out the window, becoming at times unnecessarily testy and abrupt with her. So she knew something was up. Waters, ready to return to classes in Maryland after the holiday, piddled about, an annoying lap dog at times, though he relished this gathering of his friends; yet, at times, prescient, he paused and quietly watched me, ready to ask me why. Why now? What was I up to? His mother’s wariness clued him in a bit, but Waters knew better than to probe the feisty lady novelist who paid his boarding school fees.

  Dressed in a pale blue shirt tucked into dark gray woolen slacks, with an oversized vaudeville red bowtie, with black tie shoes so shiny they seemed glass, Waters, as always, looked like a runaway from a British public school, a boy seemingly removed from the decade’s oh-you-kid frivolity and outré costume, as evidenced by Ellie, the chanteuse with the sparkles in her hair. Joe College meets the cat’s meow.

  I knew it had taken some maneuvering to assemble the crowd, but, though no reasons were given other than a casual New Year’s Day tea, they were all assembled in my living room. No one dared refuse the invitation. Bella had come alone, a few steps ahead of Lawson, and I suspected they probably rode up the elevator together but chose not to talk.

  Bella, the temptress, looked ready for battle. She wore the opposite of what I’d expected, the negative to Ellie’s glossy print: a burlap-textured smock belted around her hips with a thick round cord, an outfit that made her look like a chic Benedictine monk, her dress cut short above the knees, but high in the neck. A dramatic turquoise necklace draped down the front. She wore high heels with thick, shiny red ankle straps, patent leather, and on her head a black cloche of coarse material pulled so tight across her forehead her face seemed meshed into it: shadowing her light-skinned black face. Very dramatic. She looked, well, warrior princess. It both attracted yet jarred, the beautiful face stark now, bold, without lipstick or rouge. She snuggled into the end of the sofa, nodding at Waters who seemed mesmerized by her, yet I noted she did not acknowledge Ellie, who sat away from her. The coldness filled the room like a low-hanging cloud.

  Lawson looked better than I expected. The last few times I saw him, days after the murder, he’d been shattered, pale. Now, dressed in a double-breasted charcoal gray suit with a snazzy blue tie, he looked debonair and alert, though his eyes betrayed melancholy and unease. How freakish that his persistent grief somehow enhanced his beauty, a kind of Sorrows of Werther Weltschmerz perhaps, the vagabond poet, lonely and aimless. He shook Waters’ hand, graciously thanked me, and sat down next to Ellie, who was unhappy with his proximity. She turned her body away, but only slightly, as if to make a point but not too much of one.

  Harriet and Freddy came together, standing so close in the entrance that their shoulders touched. They looked a couple, save for one thing: Freddy’s possessive eye immediately focused on Ellie, glittering there on the sofa, though she purposely ignored him. Sad, that doomed romance, one-sided, blighted, though a little scary, too. Harriet acted oblivious, nudging Freddy to a wing chair. I recalled Harriet’s comment about her discomfort in my apartment, it being so removed from the hardscrabble, workaday Harlem street life. And yet, Waters told me, of them all she was most eager to come to tea. She wore a simple dark brown smock, unadorned, but in her straightened hair she’d tucked a large silk magnolia blossom, so emphatically at war with her pouting face and drab attire. Yet when she shook my hand, I noticed her fingers were resplendent with rings: silver filigreed pieces imbedded with cheap stones. Only her thumbs were free of the ornaments.

  Freddy wore a Sunday-go-to-meeting broadloom suit, a size too large and two decades out of fashion, though his necktie was a jazzy cobalt blue, wide and popular. I assumed he’d borrowed the suit, given how ill-fitting it looked on him, his reluctant concession to New Year’s Day tea on the Upper East Side. Rebel though he might be, and rightly so, he nevertheless understood where he was headed that day.

  Talking with Rebecca in the kitchen, I could hear the nervous buzz and hum of the voices—small talk, with long spaces in between. Where’d you go last night? Was Mabel singing there?…I hear that Valaida Snow was…Did you read that poem in the Mercury? Have you…well…should…I thought…maybe…well…well…

  The only person missing was someone I had insisted be there: Jed Harris. The other night I’d phoned him, only to learn that he was packed and headed to Idlewild for a morning flight to Florida. I’d avoided talking to him after the opening, largely because he’d skirmished with George Kaufman about the play, which had been well received and gloriously reviewed. But only decently attended. Because ticket sales were sketchy, Jed insisted he’d close the play after New Year’s. Horrified, George explained that openings right after Christmas had limited exposure, and that the audience wou
ld grow. If Jed insisted on closing the play, George had told him, he would take him for an unpleasant spin into the New Jersey hinterlands, probably with me riding shotgun. Jed had hung up.

  “You’re going where?” I’d demanded the other night.

  “Florida. I’ve worked too hard.”

  “Jed.” I was not certain how to approach the subject. I told him about the tea on New Year’s Day. He needed to be there.

  “Why, for God’s sake? I have nothing to do with that maddening crew.”

  “You have everything to do with them. Bella, Lawson, Roddy.”

  I could hear him chuckle. “Miss Edna, the detective.”

  “I know what happened, Jed.” A pause. “I think I do.” I hated equivocation, not in my character, but there were loose ends…

  “Tell me.”

  “No, not yet. And you are part of this, Jed.”

  “No, I’m not. I didn’t murder that young Negro.”

  “True,” I said. “You slaughter people in another, much more lethal fashion.”

  “What does that mean?” A snarled response, though whispered.

  “I don’t want to get into it now, but your treatment of Bella and Lawson and Roddy, for one.” Again I could hear his nasty chuckle. “Jed, really! You tried to destroy Lawson’s career, purposely so, dismissing his obvious talent. You mocked Roddy, scuffled with him. And Bella, well, you used her body with the promise…”

  “She used me,” he interrupted. “Me! They’re all a bunch of ambitious Negroes. Bella is a cutthroat. Lawson is, well,” a pause, “that was just pure fun for me. The boy takes himself too seriously. Messing with him was like a chess game that is too easy to win. People let themselves be manipulated, you know. When people want something from you, you can get them to jump hoops. And Roddy was a buffoon. I told Bella to drop Lawson, and she did. If I’d told her to kill that Roddy, well, she would have. Maybe she did, in fact. Maybe she misunderstood me…In any event, Edna, I’m not to blame.”