Murder Your Darlings

by J. J. Murphy

  Within an hour, a dozen players had arrived, and more were coming. The room was soon filled with smoke, the clink of whiskey and martini glasses, the clatter of poker chips and a barrage of insults and excuses as the stakes of the game rose.

  This was the less public gathering of the Round Table members and many of its ancillary members and regular guests. The weekly Saturday night poker game (or the Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Club, as it was more formally called) had been going on for as long as the daily Round Table lunches. Longer even, as it had originated with Woollcott, Ross and Adams from their Stars and Stripes days covering the war in France. It was more like a party in a fraternity house than a star-studded gathering of New York’s intelligentsia.

  At the poker table, Woollcott had squared off against the stage comic Harpo Marx, who was nearly unrecognizable offstage without his trademark curly wig. Next to Harpo slouched Ross, who flung his cards down. “Son of a bitch.”

  Harpo looked at his hand. “Don’t you know when to call a spade a spade?”

  Next to Ross sat the yeast tycoon Raoul Fleischmann, who laid down his perfect hand of cards with a sheepish grin. Seated next to him, cigar-chomping Franklin Adams threw down his useless hand. “Who do you think you are? Royal Flushmann?”

  The others at the table—Connelly, Kaufman, Heywood Broun and publicist John Peter Toohey—cursed and tossed down their cards as well. Standing behind the table to observe the game were Robert Sherwood and Dorothy Parker.

  “Why don’t you play a round, Mrs. Parker?” Sherwood said.

  “I do play around,” she said. “And just like in poker, I always wind up losing my shirt.”

  Several others—the hugely successful novelist Edna Ferber, the magazine illustrator Neysa McMein and the Broadway composer Irving Berlin—loitered about the room. They all smoked. They all drank. They all cracked jokes and cracked peanuts, letting witticisms and shells drop to the floor.

  “I have a legal question,” said Robert Benchley as he emerged from the bathroom with a glass of gin and orange juice. “If an illegal drink, such as this orange blossom, makes me an outlaw, then does a legal substance, such as tea, make me an in-law?”

  The door flew open and Luigi burst in. The waiter’s breathless, heavily accented voice was barely intelligible.

  “The police—they are here! Dump your liquor. It’s a raid!”

  Everyone jumped up and rushed to the bathroom to pour the contents of their glasses, cups and bottles down the sink or into the toilet.

  Detective O’Rannigan strode through the door of the suite with hotel manager Frank Case in tow.

  The room was empty. The chairs and poker table were deserted. A half-eaten pastrami sandwich teetered on the edge of a side table. In ashtrays, the cigarettes and cigars released ribbons of smoke that curled upward to meld with the gloom of the empty room.

  O’Rannigan tipped back his tiny brown derby and scratched his big round head. “What kind of nonsense is this?”

  He looked into the bathroom. More than a dozen people were crammed inside, silently, expectantly peeking out at the police detective.

  “Where’s Robert Benchley?” O’Rannigan yelled. “Get out here now. You’re coming with me.”

  Due to the crush of bodies, Benchley was pressed like a pancake against the far wall of the bathroom. Fortunately, he did not even have room to quake or quiver because, if he’d had the room, that was exactly what he would have done.

  Chapter 19

  Benchley and Dorothy sat in a small, cold, colorless room on the second floor of the dingy, crumbling stone Sixteenth Precinct Station on West Forty-seventh Street. The floor of the narrow little room was bare gray wood and speckled with stains of varying types and colors—tobacco juice certainly, urine likely, and blood possibly. They sat in hard wooden chairs and faced a battered maple table. They waited.

  Some Saturday night this turned out to be, Dorothy thought.

  She should not have been there. At the Algonquin, Detective O’Rannigan had demanded only Benchley accompany him. The detective refused her request to come along. So she kicked him in the shins.

  Now, despite her devotion to Mr. Benchley, she realized she may have made a mistake.

  He seemed to read her thoughts. He smiled warmly. “Kicking that cop in the leg—that was the greatest act of friendship I have ever seen. Thanks for coming along.”

  She almost choked up. She clasped her hand in his. All she could say was, “Forget about it.” Then she cleared the lump in her throat. “There’s no one in the world with whom I’d rather be trapped in a police interrogation room than—”

  The door behind them opened with a creak.They heard a soft thump and dropped each other’s hand. Entering the room was the thin, solemn man with the natty suit and the wooden stump. Detective O’Rannigan trailed behind him like a humble caboose.

  “I am Police Captain Philip Church,” the man said. His voice was as cold and flavorless as ice water. With a certain mechanical grace and precision, Captain Church sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the table. “Mr. Robert Benchley, do you know why you are here?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell us why your writings were found in a notebook in the possession of Knut Sanderson, also known as the Sandman?”

  Benchley swallowed. “My writings? How could Sanderson—”

  He stopped to reconsider.... The notebook, he thought. Leland Mayflower’s notebook. Benchley’s notes for his drama reviews were in Mayflower’s notebook.

  Dorothy said, “What makes you so sure that it’s Mr. Benchley’s writing?”

  Church opened a large envelope and pulled out the small black notebook. He held the book open for them to see. Benchley’s signature was written a dozen times on a single page.

  Benchley looked sheepish.

  “Practicing your autograph?” she said to him.

  “Never know when you’ll be called upon to sign a tax form or a Magna Carta or something.”

  Church said, “We found this notebook hidden on Sanderson’s person. Can you explain its presence there?”

  “Well, I guess you could say that Sanderson stole the notebook from me, the night he attacked us. I was under the impression that Mr. Dachshund gave Detective Orangutan a full description of the evening’s events.” Benchley looked up at O’Rannigan, who grimaced.

  “Dachshund never mentioned any notebook,” the detective muttered.

  “Sanderson stole the notebook from you?” Church repeated. “And where did you get the notebook in the first place?”

  O’Rannigan’s grin was a gloating one.

  Benchley swallowed. “I must have picked it up from the Round Table, when the good detective here asked me to identify Mayflower’s body.”

  Church’s voice remained flat. “So you took an item of police evidence from a murder scene? Is that correct?”

  Benchley bit his fingernail, thinking.

  Dorothy spoke quickly. “Since you have the notebook from the Sandman in your possession, that must mean you have the Sandman, too?”

  Church’s level gaze shifted to her. “Yes, we have him.”

  “We have him, and how,” O’Rannigan said.

  “That’s marvelous,” she said. “You already know, or at least you strongly suspect, that he was the one who killed Leland Mayflower. Now all you have to do is give him your famous third degree, or what have you, and make him confess. Right?”

  “A confession is not necessary,” the captain said. “We found Knut Sanderson’s fingerprints on the fountain pen lodged in Mr. Mayflower’s chest. We found Mr. Mayflower’s notebook, albeit with your notes in it, inside Sanderson’s pocket.”

  “Then it’s all wrapped up,” Benchley said, rather gleefully. “Let the State of New York put the Sandman to sleep, if it must.”

  O’Rannigan leaned back. “Too late. Sanderson took care of that himself.”

  “I don’t understand,” Dorothy said.

  “He’s dead,” O�
�Rannigan said.

  She nearly gasped, but she held it in.

  Captain Church explained, “Sanderson switched residences frequently, so we have had trouble finding exactly where he lives. Finally, earlier today, police officers found his body in a tony Park Avenue apartment, dead of apparent suicide. He had his head in the oven, and the apartment was full of gas.”

  “Funny,” she said. “I would have figured him to choose a Smith and Wesson over a Westinghouse.”

  “Funny?” O’Rannigan sneered. “What’s so funny about it? It’s nuts—that’s what it is. A raving animal like the Sandman doesn’t up and commit suicide.”

  Captain Church, a very patient, methodical man, didn’t directly contradict O’Rannigan. Church didn’t even look at him. “Let us stick to the facts, since they are all we have at this point. The facts indicate that Sanderson committed suicide. This much we believe to be so. Let us test this theory as a scientist tests his theories, by attempting to disprove it.”

  Dorothy was thinking of Faulkner. She reasoned that if everyone believed that the Sandman indeed murdered Mayflower, then Faulkner would be free.

  “Disprove it?” she said. “What’s the use? Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Dead dogs, too,” Benchley added.

  Captain Church’s thin mouth tightened. His pale eyes stared at them. She wondered whether Church was about to throw them in the hoosegow and throw away the key. Then the captain said something odd.

  “Detective, in the bottom drawer of my desk is a paper bag. My wife packed me a midnight snack. Please get it for me.”

  O’Rannigan left the room without a word.

  Church’s glare never wavered. “I know you, you know.”

  Out of the sides of their eyes, Dorothy and Benchley glanced at each other.

  “You know us? You know of us?” she said. “You’ve read the drivel we’ve written in magazines?”

  Church shook his head, almost imperceptibly. He stared at Benchley. “I know you from Harvard. I was a year above you.”

  Benchley shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Dorothy thought she understood why: Church looked many years older than Benchley, and Benchley certainly hadn’t recognized him.

  The police captain continued, “I know your antics from your performances in the Hasty Pudding club, and your writing in the Harvard Lampoon. That is where you learned you could make a living out of clowning around. But this is no time for funny business. One cannot cut his way out of a mess like this with a sharp little joke.”

  Benchley, a very sensitive man, didn’t answer right away. He thought this through.

  “I think you misunderstand,” Dorothy said. “A joke isn’t a sword. It’s a shield.”

  “Yes,” Benchley said. “We laugh to keep from crying. It’s a constant battle.”

  “Battle?” Church’s taut mouth compressed into a short frown. “I gather you did not fight in the war.”

  “I don’t believe in war,” Benchley said simply.

  For the first time, Church displayed naked emotion. His face screwed up in disgust.

  “You don’t believe in war?” he spat. “War is not Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. You cannot choose to believe in it or not. War is a fact. It happened.”

  Now Benchley looked emotional. “I lost my older brother in the Spanish-American War. I was nine.”

  “All the more reason to fight,” Church said. “Thousands of boys lost life, limb and sanity in the war. That doesn’t give you the option to choose to not believe in war, as though it doesn’t exist.”

  Benchley reddened. “Obviously, I know it exists—”

  Detective O’Rannigan came bustling through the door. He placed a small brown paper sack on the table in front of the captain. Church unrolled the top of the paper bag, dipped his hand inside and pulled out an egg. This process seemed to have a calming effect on him.

  “See this egg?” he said evenly. “Do you think something like this could start a war?”

  They didn’t answer.

  Church then placed the egg upright on the table and spun it like a top. Dorothy knew the egg must be hard-boiled. (This was her principal meal at the Algonquin, as it was just about all she could typically afford.) An uncooked egg spins wobbly. This egg, like the captain himself, she thought, was hard-boiled.

  Church said, “As a boy, did you ever throw an egg at a comic in a bad vaudeville show?”

  Benchley admitted a guilty grin.

  Church said, “Imagine you threw an egg or two, and it started a war, a war that killed tens of thousands. Things like this happen all the time.”

  “An egg that started a war?” Dorothy said. “If that happened even once, I think we might have heard about it.”

  Church’s mouth tightened again. He reached for something below the table and laid it on the tabletop with a thump. It was a dull gray metal service revolver. It was extremely large, Dorothy thought. The barrel pointed almost directly at her chest, which made her decidedly uneasy. She tried not to show it.

  “Unload a cartridge from the barrel,” Church said to her.

  She looked down at the heavy pistol. “No, thank you.”

  Captain Church didn’t move. He stared at her.

  “I mean, I don’t know how,” she said.

  Church picked up the gun and snapped it open. He dug one of the cartridges out of the barrel and then tossed it at her. Benchley jumped like a housewife from a rat, but Dorothy sat frozen as the cartridge landed in her lap.

  “Pick it up,” Church said.

  She didn’t like being told what to do. But it was pointless to try to assert herself at this moment. She picked up the cartridge. It was less than an inch and a half long, with a dull lead bullet poking out of the shiny brass cartridge jacket. It was heavier than it looked.

  “Now hold this.” Church lobbed the egg at her. Instinctively, she caught it.

  “Weigh them in your hands,” he said. “What do you conclude?”

  She compared the bullet in one hand against the egg in the other. “I suppose they weigh about the same.” She placed them gently on the table.

  “The same,” he said, picking them up. “Now maybe you understand my point. Something the weight of an egg can start a war. Look at this bullet. It is small. Much smaller than an egg. But just a few of these little things, shot by a Serbian terrorist into the body of Archduke Ferdinand, set off the spark that ignited the Great War. Every time I load this gun, I think about that.”

  As he spoke, he removed the shell from the egg. Then he popped it whole into his mouth. He continued to stare at them with his hard eyes, though his cheeks bulged with the egg. Dorothy found this action to be grotesque, even somehow obscene. It was as though he intended to entirely swallow up every protestation or defense she and Benchley might raise, without acknowledgment or consideration. She realized it was an exhibition intended to disarm her, to make her feel defenseless. She was annoyed that it succeeded in doing just that.

  The egg was gone in two gulps, and Church’s long, thin face returned to its tombstone solidity.

  “Now,” he said, “shall we continue? I assume you have heard of the bootlegger Michael Finnegan?”

  Chapter 20

  Dorothy and Benchley shook their heads. No, they had never heard of a bootlegger by the name of Michael Finnegan. Even if they had, they wouldn’t admit it to Captain Church.

  Church continued, “Michael Finnegan is a major underworld crime figure. He is a bootlegger, a racketeer and the leader of a large, notorious gang of confidence men, extortionists, thieves, violent criminals and petty swindlers.”

  O’Rannigan, still standing, appeared to be growing restless. He shifted from foot to foot.

  “Mickey Finn!” O’Rannigan blurted. “Everyone calls him Mickey Finn.”

  “Oh ...,” said Dorothy and Benchley together.

  They knew about Mickey Finn, of course. They’d never met him or even seen him, but they knew that Finn supplied Tony Soma’s and many other good spea
keasies with top-shelf European liquor smuggled down from Canada.

  “The Sandman worked for Mickey Finn,” O’Rannigan continued quickly. He was like a bottle uncorked—his words poured out. “Finn used him for muscle and, we think, for the occasional murder. But we’ve never been able to nail Sanderson or Finn for anything. Witnesses keep changing their stories or disappearing, often turning up dead.”

  “So, you think the Sandman killed Leland Mayflower on Mickey Finn’s orders?” Dorothy said. “Gambling debts, something like that?”

  Church shook his head. “We were able to secure an interview with Finnegan—not an interrogation exactly. Finnegan is too canny for that. He was genuinely surprised when we told him that we believed Sanderson had killed Mayflower, and he was positively shocked when we informed him that Sanderson was dead.”

  “Shocked doesn’t cover it,” O’Rannigan said. “He hit the roof. I thought he might explode on the spot.”

  “Finnegan is a very volatile individual, definitely,” Church said.

  “Let’s see if I have this right,” Benchley said. “Mickey Finn ordered the Sandman to do his dirty work, threatening and even killing snitches and welshers and such.”

  The streetwise words sounded silly coming out of Benchley’s mouth, Dorothy thought. The conspicuous way he said snitches and welshers, he might as well have been talking about pixies and unicorns.

  “But,” Benchley continued, “Finn did not send Sanderson to kill Mayflower. Didn’t even know about it. So, the question is, who did order the Sandman to murder Mayflower?”

  “That,” said Church, “is what we hope you can tell us.”

  They stared stupefied at the police captain for a long moment. Apparently, he was serious.

  Finally, Dorothy said, “How the hell can we tell you that? We don’t know ourselves.”

  “You may help us determine the killer’s motive—the real killer, that is, as Sanderson was apparently only an instrument in this whole affair,” Church said. “Let us approach the question methodically. To perpetrate a crime, a criminal usually possesses three things: means, motive and opportunity. With Sanderson providing both the means and the opportunity, that leaves us with motive. Someone else—the one who hired or otherwise contracted with Sanderson—supplied the motive. Now—”