The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  As for Michael Walling, he could well have walked out of the previous century, an odd little man in a well-tailored suit and vest, not a wrinkle on him except around his eyes, where wrinkles lay like folds of draperies. His wide mouth was made wider yet by very prominent teeth and the thin mustache with waxed tips. He handed his spotless gray fedora and his silver headed walking stick to the doorman and suggested we take tea in the Game Room.

  I’d been only once to the Lafayette’s quaintly ornate Game Room, where after dining at the restaurant, a man, or nowadays a woman, could come for a cigar and cognac and French coffee. The ceiling is lofty, the room large yet somehow intimate, with tall windows facing the street. Mirrored walls reflect marble-topped tables lit by green shaded lamps. And of course French magazines and newspapers are available in a corner rack, and domino and chess players are encouraged by reserved tables. In style and grace, the Game Room was a perfect match for our host.

  “So do tell us, Oliver, why you are a tornado cloaked in a hurricane,” Edward said slyly. We’d settled in over little bread and butter squares, short bread and tea, rather churlishly delivered by an ancient waiter with a sibilant accent, more Balkan than French.

  I shook my cigarette holder at Edward and told him in my most severe voice. “You are making fun of me, Edward.”

  “No, I swear –”

  “My dear Miss Brown,” Mr Walling broke in, “I cannot speak for Edward here, but I for one would like to know what caused your unhappiness. And, if you’ll allow me to be your champion, I shall try to make things right.”

  “Well, thank you, Mr Walling, sir.” The short bread could not have melted more sweetly in my mouth. “You are a gentleman, as opposed to Edward-here.” I leaned toward him so he could light my cigarette when he lit his.

  Edward laughed. “Forgive me, Oliver. Do tell your story.”

  I related my disappointment with Mr Harper and the postponement of my book, growing more and more impassioned, my hands moving with my words. Edward captured my hand in his, terribly contrite, as well he should have been.

  Mr Walling set down his teacup, which he’d been holding but not sipping from during my narration. “Miss Brown, I am shocked at the cavalier way you are being treated by one of my publishing colleagues, and I do hope you will not think all publishers are the same. Do you have a contract?”

  I removed the thin envelope from my pocket. “I have not signed it, but I’m afraid I must.” As I sighed, I caught Edward’s eye. “What else is a poor writer to do?”

  “You might,” Mr Walling said, taking charge of my other hand, “consider allowing me to publish your first book of poetry. It would be an honor.”

  “Mr Walling!”

  “Michael,” said he.

  “Michael, I am quite overwhelmed.”

  “You would have a fine presentation, Oliver.” Edward’s enthusiasm was contagious. “Do consider it.”

  “I see a slim volume bound in black cloth, the title and your name in gold lettering. Deckle-edged paper, of course.” Walling looked deep into my rather spectacular, if I do say so myself, green eyes. “We would be prepared to offer you an advance of five hundred dollars, and we can publish when you’re ready. What do you say, Miss Brown?”

  I could hardly believe my good fortune. A beautiful book from a respected publisher, and a five-hundred-dollar advance. What did I say? I said, “If you’ll pardon me for a moment.” I took Mr Harper’s mean contract to the fireplace and threw it in. The fire flared around the paper for a moment and held, as if reluctant to consume it. Whether it was an aberration, or an omen, I couldn’t have cared less. I turned my back on it and gave my new publisher my consent.

  We shook hands and Michael’s nod to our surly waiter produced clean teacups filled with mediocre champagne, but still champagne. As the afternoon faded, the well showed no sign of running dry, and I noticed the waiters begin to scowl and grumble as more and more tables came to be occupied by decorous people.

  “Do you care for archery, Miss Brown – Olivia – if I may?” my host asked.

  “Olivia, of course, Michael. And as for archery, I must confess I know very little about it, but I have been known to be arch.” Edward’s hand squeezed my right thigh.

  “Well, that can be rectified.” Michael smiled at me but took the subject no further, except to say, “You must meet Clara. Perhaps Edward can bring you round next week to one of Clara’s evenings.”

  “Well, I –” Now my left thigh got the squeeze, and I played with the wicked thought that I might press my thighs together and introduce my two suitors to one another. I rose instead and put an end to it. “I’d be delighted, Michael.” Clara Walling is an artist of sorts, a woman with money who had prevailed upon her husband to buy one of the great white townhouses in Washington Square, so she could be closer to her quarry. She enjoys collecting young artists and writers and then showing them off to her Uptown friends. I’d heard about Clara Walling’s evenings, and I am probably the only clever girl in Greenwich Village who’s never been.

  “I must be on my way,” I said, “I have a costume to prepare.”

  “Costume?” Michael said.

  “The Ball, tomorrow night,” Edward said, becoming animated.

  “Oh, yes, of course. That’s what Clara’s been working on all week. I’d quite forgotten.”

  “You must come, too, Michael,” I said. “I’ll save a dance for you.”

  “Then how could I not?” was Michael’s gallant reply.

  “We’re trying to raise money to start a modern magazine,” Edward said.

  Edward had made the arrangements and we advertised our ball as a Feather Ball, the costume left to the attendees’ imaginations.

  I took my leave, but Edward followed me. I thought, oh, dear, I am going to have to be firm with him that there could be nothing between us.

  “Oliver.” He looked down at me with besotted eyes.

  “Edward, dear, you know—” I was resigned that this was to be our eternal relationship. His devotion, my friendship. Still, his devotion was to be treasured. Some day I would be old and gray and there would always be Edward to tell me how much he loved me.

  “Please pretend we are lovers,” he said.

  “Pretend? But Edward, you know we can only be dear friends.”

  “Oh, I know that, Oliver. But I’d like old Walling to think otherwise, because it’s Clara and I who are lovers.”

  Well, I guess that told me.

  I left Edward and Michael, surely two characters right out of Moliere, to discuss whatever it was I’d interrupted, and headed home, my feet fairly skimming the sidewalk, assisted by champagne and good news. The sun had receded, leaving behind a pale, mustardy twilight.

  My Edward and Clara Walling. I had to laugh. You see, nothing is permanent. For all that, I couldn’t wait to meet La Belle Clara in person.

  As I approached Fifth Avenue, I saw someone among a fuzzy cluster wave to me. What was his name? Frank something or other. Calls himself Franz, wears a frayed cloak and a grimy crimson Byronesque tie. Claiming to be a writer, he’s always on our fringe. I hardly knew him. And now didn’t want to know him, as he has begun to conduct guided tours of Greenwich Village for tourists who want to view bohemians and visit our saloons and coffee houses. Our little enclave is being invaded. It’s no wonder so many of us are sailing for Paris.

  I pulled up short, changed direction and once again I caught a momentary glimpse of vivid color, blues, butterfly wings aflutter. I turned back but the vision was gone.

  By the time I reached 73½ Bedford Street and home, the promise of spring was but a distant memory. The afternoon had turned chill and a punchy little wind flicked at my cloak with impudent disdain.

  Home is the three-storey red brick house that had come to me from my great aunt Evangeline Brown, the black sheep of the Brown family. She’d chosen to live in Greenwich Village in a Boston marriage with Miss Alice. In fact, I never even knew of her existence until she died and left m
e her house. The duplex on the second and third floor was available for me, but as to the ground floor, a codicil to her will stated that the tenant in that flat was to live there rent free for the rest of his life. This tenant, I learned from the little brass plate next to his door, was one H. Melville, Private Investigations, Confidentiality Assured.

  This is how I met Harry Melville and learned that my mysterious great aunt Evangeline, or Vangie, as Harry called her, had run a private investigation business and that he had been her assistant. As I am of an inquisitive nature, I saw no reason not to carry on the family business. And I think Harry, though he will protest, secretly relies on my help, from time to time, on his cases.

  I’d just reached the gate, thinking about a lovely martini, when the front door opened and there was Harry himself, and shockingly attired, by which I mean no soiled trousers, but a real suit, looking for all the world like a customer’s man from Wall Street. That is, he would have were it not for his long hair, which he wears, pulled back with a rubber band into a ponytail.

  “Perfect timing.” He took hold of my arm, turned me about and walked me away from my lovely martini.

  I confess I began whining, which is not my nature at all. “Where are we going? I was so looking forward to a lovely martini.”

  “You’ll have your lovely martini if you come along with me.”

  “Aha! A bribe. Why would you have to bribe me? Is this a new client? I would love a new client.”

  “Not this one,” he said.

  Now that was intriguing. Who was this difficult client and why, if the client was so difficult, was Harry on his way to see him. “So why didn’t the new client come to you, or has he heard that the springs in your sofa are lethal?”

  Harry didn’t respond, except for a squeeze of his fingers on my elbow, all the while propelling me back from whence I’d just come. He was in one of his dark moods, I could tell, so I stopped asking questions. When we arrived at his destination, the Brevoort, he guided me through the door to a seat in the lobby and told me to wait.

  I didn’t see why he was being so mysterious, but I was intrigued by his change of costume from seedy Village bohemian private detective to Wall Street broker, a profession for which he has neither use nor admiration. Or so I’d always thought.

  Through the lobby of the slightly shabby, if expensive, continental Brevoort passes a mix of transients, residents and visitors, complementing the shabbiness of the lobby. I reached into my pocket for my pencil and notepad.

  “Come along, Oliver.” Harry pulled me from my chair and I dropped my pencil. And, Good Lord, here was another shock. Harry was wearing real shoes, not his usual scuffed sandals.

  We entered an elegant, intricately carved elevator and went to the third floor. As Harry steered me down the corridor and stopped in front of a door, I decided I’d had enough of the mystery.

  “You had better tell me the name of our client so I don’t look the complete fool.”

  His jaw tightened. “A distant cousin,” he said.

  “Mine or yours?”

  He didn’t see the humor. He knows I have no relatives whatever, only dear Mattie, my friend and companion who lives with me at 73½ Bedford Street. He looked down at me and actually growled, “Let it be.” He pressed the bell on the side of the door and in a short time, the door opened.

  “Harry. Come in.”

  Harry stood in front of me so our client didn’t notice me at first, but silence and I are often at loggerheads. You see, even with Harry blocking my view, which is easy as I’m a bit of a thing – Amy Lowell was impossible to obscure. To say she is vast would be a horrific understatement.

  She responded to my gasp with a grudging, “Oh, I see you’ve brought her. You might as well come in, too, Olivia.” She stepped aside, but there was little space in the small room as she took up most of it. She was wearing a flowing gown of multi-shades of purple, making of herself a floral mountain.

  Amy Lowell is an established poet who does not suffer fools gladly. Her sharp wit and scathing tongue are well known in poetry circles. She is one of the Boston Lowells and unlike us the slovenly bohemians of Greenwich Village, Miss Lowell is a very proper person. Very proper and very enormous. You may think me cruel, but I have been on the receiving end of Miss Lowell’s scathing wit and I’m still bleeding from the carving. She has let it be known in no uncertain terms that my morals are disreputable and that my poems, superficial, tainted with left wing concepts, not to mention feminist causes. As she tarred the great poet Elinor Wylie with the same brush, particularly condemning Elinor’s several marriages, I take no heed of the opinions of Miss Amy Lowell. Well, hardly any.

  Truly, she brings out the very worst in me, not the least because she worked furiously trying to keep women from the Vote. She criticizes feminists and has so many staid and stuffy conventional opinions, she might as well be a banker. Yet her poems are often even more sensual than mine and she lives openly in a Boston marriage. She is nothing but a judgmental snob, not to mention hypocrite.

  Last month, at a reading in Philadelphia, when I was told that Amy Lowell had been their speaker the previous year, I couldn’t help responding flippantly, “Therefore, I deduce that your program plan is one year a fat girl, next year a thin girl.”

  “Distant cousin?” I now said dubiously as I took one of the two chairs in the tiny drawing room. My scruffy old Harry a Lowell? Certainly not.

  Harry sat in the other, held the crease in his trousers and crossed his leg over the other. What was his design?

  “Harry’s mother was a Lowell,” said the largest poet of our generation, male or female, looking down her nose at me from where she sat taking up the entire expanse of the sofa.

  I produced a sound something like “eeek,” and waited for Harry to disprove her.

  “What is it, Amy?” Harry said, passing over my open-mouthed astonishment.

  “Fania. She’s run off again.” She clipped a big Manila cigar, struck a match and lit the tip, proceeding to make unpleasant sucking sounds until she filled the little room with intense fumes.

  “I thought she was being cared for,” Harry said.

  “She’s very sly.”

  “Who is Fania?” I asked when I got over my shock about Harry being a Lowell.

  “A distant cousin,” Harry said.

  “Another one?”

  “Her dear dead mother married a foreigner,” Amy Lowell said, as if that explained everything.

  “What do you mean by she’s being cared for?”

  “The family keeps watch over Fania, for her own good.” Lowell shifted her weight on the sofa and the poor sofa groaned.

  “For her own good?” I directed my question to Harry.

  “Fania has a mania,” Harry said. “A paranoia.”

  “Freud! You give me Freudian diagnoses!” Lowell’s explosion almost blew me right off my chair. “You see, it’s that fraud, that madman’s theories that have destroyed this delightful child.”

  I have to admit that I couldn’t have been more surprised as Harry has never admitted to any real interest in the Herr Doctor, whose influence has seduced almost everyone we know into analysis. Not me, of course. I’ll have none of it.

  “Paranoia?” I asked. I put a cigarette into my ebony holder. Harry came over and gave me a light from his cigarette. He remained standing.

  “Fania is afraid of dying,” Amy Lowell said, hand on her enormous bosom, calming herself.

  “Most people are afraid of death, don’t you think?”

  Harry took his silver flask from his breast pocket and had a long swallow. I shot him a pleading look but he ignored it. How I could have used a good swig of gin. And hadn’t he promised me a lovely martini for coming with him?

  “Fania’s way of dealing with her fear is eccentric,” said Amy, sending another cloud of pungent smoke into the already dense air.

  “How so?”

  “For a time she hides in her rooms, too fearful to even venture into the garden
s. Then she disappears and contrives to embarrass the family by her flagrant behavior.”

  “She tempts death,” Harry said. “Her last adventure was a leap off the Cambridge Street Bridge. She broke both of her legs, but she lived.”

  “Naked,” Amy Lowell said, “She was naked.”

  Horrors, I thought. At least to a Boston Lowell. “It seems to me she’s trying to die, not that she’s afraid of death.”

  Harry said, “She says her friend suggested it.”

  “Well, what kind of friend would do that, I’d like to know?”

  “Fania,” Amy Lowell said, drawing deeply on her cigar, “has an imaginary friend.”

  “Imaginary?”

  “At least no one has ever seen her,” Harry said.

  “Does this friend have a name?”

  Harry looked at his cousin, who said, “Camilla. Camilla Faye.”

  “And you’re sure there’s no such person?”

  Amy Lowell gave me a not at all tolerant look, as if no sane person would ask such a ridiculous question.

  I said, “I suppose it would be terribly expensive for the family to hire a full-time companion.”

  “Fania is a very wealthy young woman,” Amy said. “If something were to happen to her, the money would leave the family.”

  “And go where?”

  “To her unworthy father.”

  Dear, dear, I thought, perhaps Fania has reason indeed to fear death.

  “Do we have any idea where she may be?” Harry said.

  “I’ve had to take time from my speaking engagements to come here because she’s been seen in the city. I want you to find her before she does something dreadfully embarrassing.”

  “You mean like dying?” I asked in my sweetest tone.

  Thus arrived the moment Harry decided it was past time to leave. For my part, it couldn’t have been a minute too soon.

  As he held the door for me, the woman mountain called him back while waving me off imperiously. I was standing at the elevator fulminating when Harry caught up to me.