Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) (11 page)

But I stopped, struck by the look in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he began, “but your words just reminded me of…Miss Ferber, I have to say that it was strange seeing your name in the
Mirror
. That murder up in Harlem. The young man…”

“Roddy Parsons.” I looked around the room and shuddered. “It was so horrible, that.”

“The article in the paper, of course, had no details, but I gather he was a singer in the Negro Chorus of
Show Boat
, and a writer…”

“A budding writer.”

“Such a sad story.”

“Tragic,” I added. “I’m still rattled by it.”

“Were you his patron?”

“Lord, no.” I flashed to an image of some big-bosomed Fifth Avenue matron, awash in barrels of dirty cash and guilt, smiling her
noblesse oblige
superiority on the young struggling Negro lad. “Heavens no!”

Langston smiled. “I’m living in that white shadow now. It’s not…ennobling for either party.” He nodded toward Carlo, who was recounting some escapade to a small cluster of guests. “Carlo would like to be patron to all of Harlem.”

“You don’t seem happy with that idea.”

He reflected, “Carlo is my good friend.”

I told him about Waters, son of my housekeeper, a boy obsessed with becoming a writer—how he’d become part of a group of young Negroes up in Harlem, including Roddy, most in their early twenties, who met in coffee shops, at the YMCA, in church basements. I mentioned how, last summer, intrigued by Waters’ description, I’d invited them to my apartment, and I became interested in their work.

“Mentor,” he commented.

I smiled. “A better word than patron, certainly.” Then I added, “They’re not much younger than you. Roddy Parsons was just twenty. I liked him.”

At that moment, wildly, my mind tunneled to images of Roddy, Lawson, Bella, Ellie, and even Harriet and Freddy. Somehow, in that second, staring into the serene face of young Langston Hughes, I didn’t think of their talent for music, the stage, for literature—or their desire to succeed—instead, I thought of their rivalries, their romances, their fabrications, their—their angers. And at that instant, unwanted, I found the word
murder
echoing in my head.

“Miss Ferber, what?” he asked, nervous.

“What?”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Perhaps I have.” I shook my head. “I was thinking of that sad young man, Roddy.”

“That must have been horrible—finding the body.” He saw the look on my face and immediately stammered, “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

But I stood and mentioned leaving. After my thank you to Carlo, I left the apartment, escorted downstairs by the young poet who insisted he hail me a cab. Outside it had started snowing, a light, fluffy mix, pleasant, softening the shrill edges of glittering New York so that the streetlights formed fuzzy halos around the traffic. He shook my hand. Just before I got into the taxi, I asked whether he might meet with Waters and his friends. I mentioned how much they venerated him and how Roddy had considered
The Weary Blues
his Bible.

“I’m too young for sainthood,” the poet quipped, to which I replied, “Assume the mantle when you’re young, young man; when you’re my age the devil lurks around every corner, pitchfork at the ready.”

He agreed, yes, after the New Year, he’d love to spend an afternoon at my apartment with them.

I thanked him and as I floated away in the cab, I smiled at the notion of Waters’ young face trembling at the delicious Christmas present I’d scheduled in. With echoes of Langston Hughes’ honey-toned voice in my ears, I swelled from the pleasure of that man’s company.

***

That night, sitting up in bed, I reached for a novel on the nightstand.
Elmer Gantry,
an inscribed copy sent to me by my old newsroom buddy, Sinclair Lewis, whom I still affectionately called “Red.” But my eye caught the pile of Lawson’s manuscript on the bureau. I’d forgotten I’d carried it into my bedroom from the workroom, and now, in the dim light, that pile of poorly typed sheets encased in a torn accordion file beckoned. Let me at least read a chapter or two, hopefully not so soporific I’d drift asleep and scatter the sheets to the floor. Lawson’s manuscript did not need a second spilling onto anyone’s floor.

I felt a tug at the heart as I read the simple, heartfelt dedication to Roddy, and once again read Roddy’s verse. What was there about those simple words that bothered me? I had no idea.
The poet sits in shadows / Waiting for Truth
. I began reading the novel about a happy-go-lucky Harlem boy named Leroy Watkins who is recruited from a cigar store on 132nd Street, joining a revolutionary regiment of idealistic, excited young men. The opening scene, a little sentimental, nevertheless gripped me with its bold, staccato language and its crisp diction. I thought of Langston Hughes’ vernacular poetry as I moved through smudged and wrinkled pages. One page was missing its bottom half. At one point I found myself smiling: Lawson had described the handsome young protagonist—an especially talented and personable young man, ambitious and clever—and I realized he was describing himself.

The next thing I knew it was dawn. I had stayed up all night until, weary-eyed and dizzy, I put down the last page. I never stayed up all night, good book or not; but I found myself moving to a boudoir chair, at one point reaching for a forbidden cigarette. The hero drank and smoked too much, and Lawson’s description of the intake of cigarette smoke filling his lungs had convinced me I needed one myself. I’d wrapped myself in my flannel robe. The pages piled up next to me. It was, quite frankly, a marvel, this wildly erratic book. It was a war novel with all the obligatory battle scenes, stark and gory, but what propelled the book—indeed, what made its language soar—was the sheer exhilaration behind it.

The Negro soldiers, I learned, were the first Allied unit to reach the storied Rhine. I didn’t know that. What white person did? What did we know of Negro life? The prose oozed pride and joy and terror and heartache and despair; it captured the plight of the Negro who excelled on the battlefield, brave to a fault, and then returned home to find, not the equality he’d expected and earned, but a wall of intolerance, discrimination, ignorance. The same old dreadful dismissal as inferior. Lawson had fashioned a gripping scene of the massive company phalanxes marching up Fifth Avenue, led by a jazz band, only to experience jeering and hooting. Yet, in Harlem, they marched under a banner that proclaimed: OUR HEROES WELCOME HOME! The scene tugged at my heart. My eyes teared up.

I thought of Bella and the others, rejected by the downtown producers…groveling for a meager part…mocked by Jed Harris.

I sat back in the chair, exhausted. An unfinished manuscript, I acknowledged, in parts too flowery, other parts sketchy; but mainly an achievement. A loud and vibrant celebration. A roaring hymn to Harlem, writ large. It needed an editor’s sure and deliberate hand, but the essence lay on the white pages: majestic, triumphant, splendid. My fingertips tingled on the typed pages. This book needed to be heard. It was a voice that cried out: Listen. I’m here. I’m here. I’m a Negro man. I am a man.”

I lost my breath.

I slept for a couple of hours, ignored Rebecca’s polite knock on the bedroom door, and rose blurry eyed at ten. I hadn’t done that since…well, I never had. Ever. Usually I woke before the sun decided to rise.

Bathed, refreshed, I called Waters, told him I needed to see Lawson.

At four that afternoon, Waters and Lawson strolled into the apartment.

I hadn’t seen Lawson since the memorial service for Roddy. Then grief had given him a wasted, lost look. Now, time passing, that grief had made him sickly, his earlier cocksureness and hungry eyes lost to an ashy, drawn face, his eyes sunk deep in their sockets so that he looked famished. Where once he swaggered about, his looks displayed like a birthright, he now slumped in a chair, bent over. He looked, well, exhausted. He’d lost weight, I noticed. Unshaven, in unpressed corduroys and scuffed shoes, he scared me. Here was a young man spiraling downward as though he’d been slammed in the gut.

“Lawson,” I exclaimed. He looked up at me. “Are you all right?” A ridiculous question, I knew, but one that needed saying. Waters sat beside him, nodding rapidly, alarm in his face.

“Lawson hasn’t been eating.”

“But you need to deal with…” I faltered. What? The death of his cousin, grotesque in that final bed?

Lawson tried to smile. “I’ll be all right. I just can’t seem to get any…steam.” For a second he closed his eyes, ready to fall asleep.

“Lawson, I asked you here this afternoon because I read
Hell Fighters.
I know it’s not done and perhaps Waters was unwise to put it into my hands.” I glanced at Waters, none too happy with my remarks. “But it’s done—the deed. You captured something here, something glorious, something…” I paused. “What?”

“It’s not ready, Miss Ferber. Next year, maybe. I need to do more research…dealing…”

“Yes, yes,” I said in a hurry. “There are holes. Weaknesses. But over all, it’s a strong work.”

He smiled. “You know, they said that about my play but then no one wanted to produce it—turned it back to me. ‘Wonderful job, young man.’”

“But this will be published.”

His glance was quizzical, unbelieving. “Not now,” he whispered, swallowing his words. Suddenly he glanced at the pile of manuscript I’d foolishly positioned on the coffee table. His eyes narrowed, then widened, as though he were staring into a brilliant sun. “Roddy said it wasn’t ready. He was gonna help…”

“I agree, but…”

He stood up and fumbled with his overcoat, then wrapped a scarf around his neck. “Published.” Not a question, but hardly an affirmation. Then in a peculiar twist, he recited the lines from Roddy’s poem that he’d used in his dedication. “‘The poet sits in shadows / Waiting for Truth.’” The same lines that stayed with me, haunted me. “Tell that to Roddy.” Without another word, he turned and walked out of the apartment.

Dumbly, I turned to Waters. “Is that a yes or a no?”

Waters shrugged his shoulders. “Dunno.”

“He looks ill.”

“Miss Edna, I know why he won’t go back to that apartment. He
told
me.”

“For Lord’s sake, why?”

“He’s afraid the murderer will come back.”

“But why?”

“He thinks someone wants to kill him. They got Roddy. Now him.”

“But what proof?”

“He says, well, the way they tore up the rooms—and his room—somebody they know wanted
something
. Somebody wanted them dead. He’s afraid to stay there.” A pause. “I think he’s afraid of Mr. Porter.”

“Such a hateful man…”

“But he also mumbled something about his friends.”

“You mean, Ellie or Bella or…”

Waters cut me off. “Although he won’t say it, I think he’s afraid one of them is a murderer.”

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 left 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.”