Murder Your Darlings

by J. J. Murphy

  He handed the tabloid newspaper to Benchley, whose sunny face went cloudy. Dorothy leaned against him to read it.

  “Well, spit it out, then,” Woollcott said impatiently. “What does it say?”

  “This is disastrous,” Benchley said.

  Woollcott’s voice rose. “What’s it say?”

  Benchley spoke solemnly. “Harvard lost to Princeton. Fourteen to zip. And the shortstop sprained his ankle.”

  “Go ahead,” Dorothy said. “Read it.”

  Benchley looked hurt. “I had two dollars on that game.”

  “Knock it off, Fred. Read it.”

  Benchley shrugged. “Here’s the headline: POLICE GRILL FAMOUS WRITERS IN MAYFLOWER MURDER.”

  “Keep going,” she said.

  Benchley read the article:

  Late Saturday night, police officials apprehended two writers from the celebrated Algonquin Round Table. Police detectives detained Mrs. Dorothy Parker and Mr. Robert Benchley for questioning until nearly four o’clock Sunday morning about the cold-blooded murder of Knickerbocker News columnist Leland Mayflower.

  Police Det. Albert O’Rannigan tracked down Mrs. Parker and Mr. Benchley at a smoke-filled, booze-fueled secret card game at the famed Algonquin Hotel, 59 W. 44th St., where the two are members of the well-known Algonquin Round Table, an exclusive clique of intellectual writers, editors and other assorted literati, who were discussed in depth in last week’s editions of this newspaper.

  After a short but violent scuffle, in which Mrs. Parker deliberately assaulted Det. O’Rannigan (who later reported he suffered no lasting ill effects—nor ill will!—from Mrs. Parker’s beatings), Det. O’Rannigan transported the two famed writers to the 16th Precinct Station House, 345 W. 47th St. Once there, Mrs. Parker and Mr. Benchley were questioned intensely about their involvement in the murder of Mr. Mayflower.

  The Knickerbocker’s own Leland Mayflower, as all New York now knows, was found stabbed dead last Wednesday directly underneath the famed Round Table. The murder instrument was, of all things, a fountain pen. Rampant rumor—as well as common sense—suggests that one (or more) of the members of the Round Table committed the crime. (They call themselves the Vicious Circle, after all!) But police have yet to determine the cold-blooded killer.

  To that end, Police Capt. Phillip Church and Det. O’Rannigan exhaustively questioned Mrs. Parker and Mr. Benchley about their motives and those of their wordsmithing compatriots. Police could not reveal the results of the questioning, but much controversy swirls around a shadowy figure named William Dachshund, a name that may be fictitious. Indeed, Mr. Dachshund, whose whereabouts are unknown, as described in Saturday’s edition of this newspaper, apparently bills himself as a fiction writer, and is also apparently a newly appointed member of the Vicious Circ—

  “Give me that.” Dorothy grabbed the newspaper from Benchley’s hands. She rapidly scanned the remaining few paragraphs of the article, then hurriedly flipped through the pages of the paper.

  “Damn that bastard,” she said.

  “Damn who?” Benchley said. “Dachshund?”

  “No. Damn that Battersby! He goes on and on about the Round Table and about Billy. But again he makes no mention of Knut Sanderson. He doesn’t bother to say that the reason we were questioned was because the Sandman had Mayflower’s notebook with your notes in it. He doesn’t say that the Sandman tried to kill us. He doesn’t mention that we went to get a good, close look at the Sandman’s dead body. Nothing. Battersby only wants to paint the picture that one of us or Billy Faulk—Billy Dachshund was behind Mayflower’s murder.”

  Franklin Pierce Adams leaned back in his chair, his cigar in his mouth. “So, what are you going to do about it? Take it lying down?”

  “Isn’t that the way you deal with most men?” Woollcott sneered before she could answer.

  “Not this time,” she said with a smirk. “Time to stand up for the truth. Let’s pay Bud Battersby a little visit.”

  Chapter 27

  The Knickerbocker News was housed in a gigantic, dingy industrial building in Lower Manhattan, within spitting distance of the docks on the Hudson River.

  Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley approached the large, battered, wooden front door. A small, old tin sign read: NEW AMSTERDAM SUPPLY CATALOGUES AND CALENDARS, INC.

  “Is this the right place?” Benchley said, looking cheerfully doubtful. “It makes the newspaper buildings on Publishers’ Row look like palaces.”

  Dorothy held the copy of the Knickerbocker News that Robert Sherwood had given to her. In tiny print on the second-to-last page was the newspaper’s masthead. She read the address again.

  “Seventy-five Clarkson Street. If you can believe what the Knickerbocker prints, then this must be the place.”

  “Isn’t the whole point why we’re here is that you don’t believe what the Knickerbocker prints?”

  “Don’t confuse me by making sense. Anyhow, that’s not the point we’re here.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. It’s only the side point.”

  “What’s the main point? The one on Battersby’s head?”

  “Mayflower visited a lawyer for some unknown reason. We need Battersby to tell us the name of that lawyer. That’s the point.”

  “Point taken,” Benchley said. “Point, set and match.”

  “Thanks for playing,” she said. “Now, the door. Don’t try it until you knock it.”

  Benchley knocked on the wide door. They waited, but there was no answer. Then he tried the knob. The door swung open to reveal a narrow, shadowy, marble-floored entranceway. A woman was crossing the foyer. She wore an ink-stained leather apron, and her hair was pulled back in a kerchief. She stopped abruptly at the sight of the two visitors.

  Dorothy stepped forward. “We’re here to see Mr. Battersby.”

  The woman frowned and made a hollow, hoarse sound.

  Dorothy turned her head to her companion. “What do you make of that?”

  “I’d say that means ‘no dice’ in whatever language she speaks.”

  Benchley then stepped forward, speaking loudly and slowly. “Where is Mr. Battersby? It is very important that we speak to him.”

  The aproned woman shook her head and responded with a throaty bark. She pointed to her head. Then she pointed toward the door, as if shooing them away.

  Benchley said to Dorothy, “Maybe this isn’t the right place after all.”

  “One more try,” Dorothy said. She unfolded the newspaper and located the masthead again. She scanned the short list of names. She showed the woman the newspaper and pointed at Battersby’s name at the top.

  The woman grunted in assent and turned back the way she had come. Dorothy and Benchley glanced at each other, then followed the woman along a dark, dusty hallway. They heard a deep, distant, thunderous sound, as though several chugging steam locomotives were hurtling full speed somewhere inside the building. Through their shoes, they felt thrumming vibrations come up through the wooden floor of the hallway. But the sound didn’t die away as the sound of a steam train does as it passes by. It only became louder.

  The woman yanked open another door and went through it without looking back. Dorothy and Benchley followed. Now they were in a wider corridor, not quite as dark. Here the rumbling sound was even louder, and it grew louder still as they walked farther into the building. It was a pounding, grating, chattering sound. Dorothy could feel the vibrations in her stomach and in her teeth. The corridor ended at an archway, and they entered a cavernous room. The sound was almost deafening.

  This was the main floor of the printing plant.The space was three stories high and a football field long. Three enormous printing presses, each as large as, though longer than, a steam locomotive, were chugging and banging away. Enormous rolls of white paper, as long as tree trunks and twice as wide, spooled out faster than Dorothy’s eyes could follow. Within the printing press, this endless ribbon of paper zipped in and out of a dozen or more pairs of gigantic, barr
el-thick metal rollers.

  A web of stairs and catwalks covered each printing press in a latticework of metal. Little men (they appeared to be miniature in comparison, anyway) scurried up and down the stairs and along the catwalks. They tended to the machines—pulling levers, adjusting controls, squirting tiny cans of oil—like Lilliputians who had roped down a giant.

  The aproned woman was already several paces away from them, moving quickly along the length of the nearest press.

  In that direction, at the far end of the room, Dorothy could see the paper being slit and divided, like a sluiced river, then slid into slabs, which were cut in quick succession by a long guillotine-like blade. These pages were whisked along to be folded, then folded again, and spit out onto a conveyor belt. More men, their forearms darkened by newsprint, grabbed the newspapers and piled them into bundles on wide metal tables. They stacked the bundles on pallets; then other men carted them away.

  She wanted to hold Benchley’s hand. Instead she merely linked her arm through his. He stared at the immense machines with a mixture of awe and apprehension, as though he gazed upon a terrible wonder of nature, like an earthquake or Niagara Falls.

  At the far end of the room, the aproned woman ascended a well-worn wooden staircase. Dorothy and Benchley hurried to catch up with her. At the top of the staircase, the woman entered a room that jutted like a wide balcony over the printing-room floor. They followed her in.

  The room was just as noisy inside. Three of the four walls of the large room were nothing but windows that looked out over the printing presses, eye level with the catwalks. Inside the room, a dozen or so men and women worked at tables and desks. It was the typesetting room, Dorothy realized. The men and women—each in an ink-stained apron, like the woman they had followed—darted from a desk, where they gathered up lead letters, to a table, where they inserted their letters into a frame. This frame eventually became a printing plate for the newspaper. At the back of the room were three tall Linotype machines, each manned by an operator at a keyboard. The Linotype machine looked like a hissing, clacking hybrid of a pipe organ and a steam shirt press. It formed molten lead into lines of type that were attached onto a large cylinder, which was used to print pages on the printing press.

  Dorothy made a mental note to remember these people the next time she felt like complaining about her lousy job.

  She saw that the woman they had followed now approached a man who stood staring out through the glass to the printing floor. The woman tapped the man on the shoulder. The man turned around, and Dorothy was somehow surprised to see it was Battersby, even though they had come specifically to talk to him. It was just that when she had seen the timid fellow before, he seemed to be nothing more than a newspaperman whom everyone just called ‘Bud.’ But here, he was the captain of the ship, the chief of an enormous operation.

  Battersby approached them sheepishly. He had to yell to be heard above the cacophony of the printing presses.

  “Mr. Benchley, Mrs. Parker, what brings you here?”

  “We’d like a word with you,” she yelled. “Can we talk somewhere more private?”

  “Private?” Battersby looked around at the typesetters. “Don’t worry about them. They’re all deaf. That’s why I hire them. Say what you want. They won’t hear a thing.”

  She glanced at the workers. If she didn’t get out of this room quickly, she’d soon be deaf, too.

  “I mean,” she yelled, “can we talk somewhere more quiet?”

  “Ohhh,” Battersby said. “Come with me.”

  They followed Battersby to a huge basement room just under the printing presses. Here, three massive boilers generated the steam to power the presses. Not only was this room even louder—as if that were possible—it was hellishly hot. Three burly men covered in soot shoveled coal into the roaring, insatiable, infernolike mouths of the boilers.

  They kept walking. Battersby led them down to yet another subterranean level. It was much quieter here, much cooler, too.

  “I take it from your expressions that you’ve never seen a large press operation before,” Battersby said, leading them onward.

  It was true that although they’d both been involved in publishing for several years, neither she nor Benchley had seen such an enormous machine, much less three of them going full tilt side by side. But for what? To print a crappy tabloid newspaper.

  “It’s not the size that matters,” she said. “It’s what you do with it.”

  Battersby opened a vaultlike door to a series of offices. The first was a wide, windowless newsroom, with some two dozen desks stationed in rows as though it was an enormous classroom. However, only three or four unknown reporters (unknown to Dorothy and Benchley, anyhow) were in the room, seated behind typewriters or talking on phones.

  Battersby opened another door and entered a small, nondescript office. Dorothy assumed this was Battersby’s secretary’s office; then Battersby dropped into the wooden swivel chair behind the desk.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  But there were no other seats in the room.

  “Where, exactly?” she said.

  Benchley dropped to the floor and sat cross-legged.

  Battersby hustled from around his desk. “I beg your pardon,” he said, extending a hand to Benchley to pull him up off the painted-concrete floor.

  “If you want to beg our pardon,” Dorothy began, “you can start by apologizing for the flaying you gave us in today’s edition of your newspaper.”

  “Ah, that’s what brought you down here, is it?” Battersby said with an anxious look.

  “No, you brought us down here,” Benchley said. “How many leagues beneath the surface are we?”

  “Maybe we’d be more comfortable in Mr. Mayflower’s office,” Battersby said. “Please follow me.”

  Dorothy was tired of touring around this place. It took something of an effort to remain righteously angry, and all this walking about was taking the piss right out of her.

  Battersby opened a large, well-varnished wooden door and stepped aside to let them enter. The other side of the door was upholstered in cranberry red leather. The inside of the room held a great deal of red leather furniture to match—several armchairs, a chaise longue and a couch or two.

  Ornate brass lamps sat glowing on either end of the monstrous mahogany desk, which squatted like a hippopotamus at the far end of the large room. A large brass chandelier, with burning gas jets, hung from the tiled ceiling. A plush Turkish carpet covered the floor. The walls were paneled in chestnut. A brick fireplace, unlit, took up half of the wall to the right.

  Battersby closed the door, and the last faint sound of the printing presses faded out. Dorothy could feel only the faintest vibration, and once she sat down in a comfortable leather armchair, even that feeling disappeared.

  She noticed that on the big wooden desk was a leather cup that held a handful of Saber fountain pens—the same as the one found lodged in Mayflower’s heart.

  Battersby didn’t sit behind the big desk. He dragged a chair to a halfway spot in front of Benchley and Dorothy, as if to be put on the spot.

  “So you came here to give me what for about the article in today’s Knickerbocker?” He crouched in his chair, almost wincing, like a dog expecting a smack on the nose for punishment.

  It’s easy to give hell to an arrogant jackass, Dorothy thought. Why couldn’t Battersby be an arrogant jackass, instead of this timid, nearly middle-aged man who seemed as wide-eyed as a child?

  “This was Leland Mayflower’s office?” Benchley said incredulously.

  “Yes,” Battersby said.

  “And that nondescript little room out there, the one desperately lacking in chairs—that’s your office?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. Yes, that’s as clear as mud. Now, indulge me—why did Mayflower have this luxurious room while you continue to use a dank antechamber without sufficient furniture?”

  “Let me explain. . . . Do you have children, Mr. Benchley?
”

  “Yes, two or three. I lose count now and again. And you?”

  “Unfortunately, I’m not married, unless you count this.” He gestured with both hands to encompass the building, the newspaper, his enterprise. “Nor have I been blessed with children. Unless you count my workers as my children. And if you do, then Mayflower would have been my highly favored son—my prodigal son, for whom I’d slaughter the fatted calf.”

  Battersby leaned forward and continued. “I would have done anything to keep him happy. When I bought the Knickerbocker a few years ago, no one read the darn thing. The circulation was in the toilet. Then I lured Mayflower over from the Daily News to be my star columnist. He was a spoiled so-and-so, no question. But he gave the Knickerbocker a recognizable name, a recognizable style. Sure, it can be an acerbic, corrosive style—call it what you will—but it set us apart. It gave us an identity. Circulation went up. People took notice. Now Mayflower’s gone, and I’m doing my best to carry on without him.”

  His chin sank into his hands. “I’m running around, trying to write most of the stories and edit the rest, but I also oversee the printing and advertising, and the day-to-day operation of this entire plant—the accounts, the bills, the inventory, the employees. It’s a kick, I’ll tell you. I love it all. But it’s killing me. It’s just killing me.”

  Here they were to tear the guy to shreds, Dorothy thought, and he was doing it for them. How could she slap his wrist when she felt the need to pat his hand?

  “We can see that this place isn’t King Solomon’s mines,” she said, “but can’t you afford to hire a few more people, at least temporarily?”

  Battersby brightened. “Oh, you’re mistaken. It’s extremely profitable. I’m bringing it in hand over fist. The Knickerbocker, my pride and joy, does little more than break even. That’s true. But most of my business is industrial catalogues, seed catalogues, several trade publications, company and commercial directories, hymnals and religious tracts. We do a big calendar business that keeps growing every year. Those printing presses are running around the clock. We can barely keep up. The money is practically pouring in.”