Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) (17 page)

“But you fought with Roddy.”

“Yeah, he attacked me, fact is.”

“You fought with him.”

“He was a wise guy, sarcastic, thought he was better’n me. He even mocked
this
.” He held up the Bible. “No one does that to me. Fancy pants phony. Smug.”

“So you went into his apartment? Looked around. For what?”

He snickered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I know is that boy ain’t belong among decent people, and I told him so. He even shoved me, can you believe it? That fool. I know how to take care of myself.”

“He hit you?”

“No, you ain’t listening. He shoved me when he tried to get past me in the hallway. Like a week before he got murdered. I told him he ain’t welcome in this building.”

“And what did you do?” Waters asked.

“I punched him in the face.”

I started. “You hit him? What did he do?”

The old face moved, the eyes hard and cold. “He said he could kill me with no regrets—that my phony God couldn’t protect me. Jesus be a coward like me.” Now he chuckled. “Hey, I been in jail. I know what’s what. Prison and God temper a man to face anything. I told him he better watch his step.” He started to push through us. “I told him I could kill him if I chose, but God got better punishments waiting for him. So I didn’t kill him, ma’am. Not worth burning in hell for the likes of him. I just punched him one good one, and he squawked liked a headless chicken.” He walked up the steps and opened the front door. “Don’t bother me no more, folks, with your little crusade.”

“But a boy has been murdered!” I yelled out.

“Well, ma’am, seems to me God calls the shots. And some folks are better off dead.”

Chapter Fifteen

Bella was not happy and made certain we knew it, clicking her tongue and biting the broken nail of her index finger. She sat facing me at a round table in Maynard’s, a small grubby diner on 145th and Broadway. Flanked on her left by Waters and on her right by his mother, she hunched her shoulders like a scared and trapped animal. Her chin dipped into her chest protectively, a woman ready to be executed—or, at least, mildly interrogated.

“I think this is unnecessary,” she said, still staring into my face.

I kept my mouth shut, but nodded at Rebecca, then playing with the handle of the coffee cup. Suddenly she reached over and placed one of her hands on Bella’s wrist. Bella stopped fidgeting. “There’s a chance an innocent man is unjustly accused of murder, Bella.”

Her brow furrowed. “Skidder Scott? I just assumed…”

“Well,” I added, “the police have closed the book on it, but Roddy’s notes that were left behind, and the…the activity centering on the apartment that night…and…”

“And the contradictory stories,” Waters threw in, bluntly. “The
lies
.” He stressed the word.

Bella blushed. “No one believes that I
wasn’t
there.”

I drew my tongue into my cheek. “True, Bella, no one does. You and Ellie seem to invent at will.” She frowned and continued to pick at the broken nail. Crimson nail polish flaked off. “But,” I went on, “we’re talking about a night when someone was murdered.”

Venom in her voice: “Well, talk to Ellie. Her life is one big lie.”

“Just what does that mean?” Rebecca asked.

Bella shrugged. “Nothing.” A sliver of a smile. “Ellie doesn’t like me and she’s not my favorite person.”

“Why?” Though I knew the answer.

But Bella closed up. She sipped her coffee and stared out the plate-glass front window.

“Somehow,” I began again, “Jed Harris—a man who should have nothing to do with any of this, surely—is involved, but I don’t know what I mean by that.” I waited and watched her face.

She scoffed. “Jed Harris.” A name said with bitterness.

“There was a time, and recently, when I gather you’d say his name with a certain relish.”

She broke into a laugh that ended in a cigarette smoker’s husky cough. “That fool.”

“Tell me,” I demanded.

“Nothing to tell except that he told me to get lost.”

“But you were having an affair?”

Again, the exaggerated laugh. “If that’s what you want to call it. He can be a charming man, you know, but underneath it all, there’s a cold, cold heart.”

“Tell me,” I repeated.

She shrugged her shoulders. “He took me places, up in Harlem, of course. Never downtown. A pretty silk scarf from Bonwit Teller but, you know, I could never exchange it in a million years. Not that there’s many places we could go except maybe around Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. But up here, yes, clubs where Negroes can mingle socially with white guys. It’s like…a cottage industry up here.” A sardonic tenor to her voice now, but raw, pained. “Lawson knew about it, but he had no say. What could he say? He’s as fiercely ambitious as me. We sort of found each other that way, the two of us auditioning for the rare part of a Negro on Broadway. So we became a couple, and for a while it worked. Then there was Jed, and Lawson was angry, but there was nothing he could do about it.”

“A little unfair, no?”

She shrugged her pretty shoulders. “After the embarrassing fights with Jed on the street, him and Roddy, you know, well, Lawson just assumed a what-the-hell attitude. He was getting on my nerves anyway. It was time to say goodbye. He was like a gnat that keeps buzzing in my ear, annoying, pesky. So I thought I’d hitch my wagon to Jed’s Great White Way down Broadway. Ah, foolish me! You know, I sort of realized what kind of man Jed was by the way he treated Lawson.”

“I never quite understood that,” I whispered.

“Well, it makes no sense. It’s like Jed took this real intense hatred to Lawson just because he
could
. You know, it’s a power thing. Power to Jed, I learned, is more important than sex. Excuse me, Miss Ferber. I don’t mean to…to be indelicate. But Jed…”

I interrupted. “I’m not a child, Bella.”

She shrugged those shoulders again. “So when I told Jed in my most girlie voice that his treatment of Lawson was wrong, he scoffed at me. ‘You and Lawson just want me to produce your simple plays.’ Well, that hurt. I’d
hinted
at him looking at my writing but, yes, I really wanted to
act
in one of his productions.” She sighed. “Suddenly I realized what a fool I’d been. A fool.”

“But you still kept at him, no?”

“He
played
with us, Miss Ferber. You know what Lawson told me—‘Jed Harris took away chance.’ You know, maybe we’d make it, maybe not. Broadway. When Jed blackballed us, when he said we’d never work again, he took away the chance that we could make it. Sabotaged, Miss Ferber.”

Rebecca spoke up. “Bella, it had to be more than Jed’s treatment of Lawson…and you. Why did he end it? You did something…”

Bella waited a long time. “Clever, you are.” She leaned back on her chair, tipping it, and I feared she’d topple. “Clever, really. I’m my own worst enemy, though the handwriting was already on the wall. I’d learned, because I rifled through his wallet, conveniently peeking out of a coat pocket, that he was married. That really surprised me. He just never
acted
married, if you know what I mean. It never occurred to me.” Again, she bit on the broken nail, contemplated it, and frowned.

That news had surprised me, too. In all Jed’s flirtatious moments, in all the chatter about him in the denizens of Schubert Alley and at theatrical parties, nothing had been said about a wife until recently. Her name was Anita, Aleck Woollcott told me, a twinkle in his lascivious eye. A flighty girl who threw Bohemian parties with red light bulbs giving the living room the look of a tawdry brothel, with dripping candles stuck into wine bottles…In fact, Aleck claimed he’d been to one, and Jed sat in a corner doing mindless card tricks and ignoring everyone. I assumed Aleck was making it all up. “Did you confront him?” I asked Bella now.

“Yeah, he admitted it. Says most people don’t know, which is the way he likes it. She certainly isn’t on his arm as he goes to show openings.”

I cringed because suddenly my heart jumped and one of my eyes twitched. I thought of Jed and his anonymous flapper wife. What did it matter? I told myself. But it did—monumentally, devastatingly. “Lord.”

“Indeed. Well, I foolishly sort of blackmailed him. I felt he was ready to dump me anyway—what girl can’t read those signs?—so I said I’d tell his wife about our…tryst…if, well, he didn’t give me a part in something.”

I swallowed my words, sarcastic. “And, knowing Jed, that obviously worked like a charm.”

Bella snickered. “You said it. He howled, burst out laughing, tears in his eyes, and told me to go ahead. I was one of many cheap and available girls, though I was the first Negro he’d ‘entertained’—that was his word—and so, go right ahead, sister. God, he laughed and laughed, drunk with it. And then he got up, cold as ice, those hooded eyes mean and hard, and just walked away from me. I knew it was the end. Which, of course, happened a few days later.” She grinned. “No more baubles from Woolworth’s for me.” She sat forward now. “So here I am. No Jed. No Lawson. No…Roddy.”

“Roddy,” Waters mumbled. “You weren’t seeing Roddy. You only
hoped
to. Because of Ellie.”

Bella shook her head patronizingly. “Dear, dear little Waters, the innocent among all of us libertines.” She smiled, unfriendly. “As it turns out, Roddy and I did have a brief moment this past summer, right after we all met in Miss Ferber’s living room to discuss our great artistic scribbling. So brief sometimes it seemed not to have even happened.”

“I don’t understand,” Waters said.

“Simple. Roddy, despite Freddy’s assertions to the contrary, was, in fact, a petty and creepy womanizer. I’ll never understand Freddy’s nonsense about that episode in the hallway. Maybe I can’t. Roddy was cagey. He had a fling with Ellie that she crowed about at one point—to me. Then, briefly, a moment with me, and then goodbye. To us both, I gather. He just stopped, cold. Maybe Freddy was right. Maybe Roddy was confused. Nice word, no?”

“But,” Rebecca insisted, “this doesn’t sound like Roddy.” She genuinely seemed baffled.

Bella smiled. “Ah, gentle Roddy. Polite Roddy. So-nice-to-older-ladies Roddy.” A pause. “Nasty Roddy. Playboy Roddy. Sissy Roddy. Roddy liked to be mysterious. Who knows? I think he visited both camps, if you know what I mean. But Freddy exaggerated what Roddy did. Maybe not. Roddy was soft and fun and always so charming to everyone, which made us all beat a path to his shuttered door. But he…anyway, Freddy got all bent out of shape over something and ran to tell Harriet, his partner in crime, and I guess her father was there in the hallway and saw something, though probably spied through drunken eyes, which is why he hated Roddy. Well, he hated him in general because he had this thing about girls being in the apartments late at night. Everyone has heard
that
story. And you know he’s crazy religious and that doesn’t fly with him in
his
home, which includes all the apartments. Roddy would sneak Ellie in, too, especially when she got off work early. Lately, she told me that they were just talking, as friends. Late at night. Like I
believed
that.”

“Maybe they did just talk,” Waters insisted.

“Well, that’s what Ellie told everyone. But I suspected that Roddy and Ellie were back together again, which was why he stopped seeing
me
.”

“But you had Lawson,” I insisted.

“Lawson is a leech. No one
has
Lawson. And I told you, it was over because of Jed. Jed told me to get rid of Lawson, and I did. Then Jed got rid of me. Cute, no?”

“What did it matter if Roddy started seeing Ellie again?” Rebecca asked.

The voice hard, flinty. “It
mattered
. Ellie and I have always been rivals. We’re performers, and she gets the jobs. We’re writers, and people praise her archaic sonnets. Look at her, a little dowdy and birdlike, a twitcher. And me…” Her voice soared, triumphant. “It was driving me crazy, the idea that Roddy would take
her
back. But I felt that Roddy was now sneaking Ellie in again, starting up with her again, after Mr. Porter was sleeping, usually drunk on gin, with a Bible under his head. Roddy once told him there was no God—that he was an atheist who supported the Bolshevists in Russia, and Mr. Porter went nuts. Freddy’s nonsense was just the frosting on the cake.”

“But would Mr. Porter kill him?” Waters wondered out loud.

Bella ignored him, lost now in her own thoughts.

“So you
did
go there that night?” I ventured.

Quiet, quiet, her fingers sliding over the tabletop. “Well, yes.”

Waters exclaimed, “You lied!”

“I didn’t want to look…desperate.”

“Desperate?” From Rebecca.

“When Lawson told me that Ellie said she was visiting Roddy that night, it drove me crazy. I mean, I figured she told him
purposely
—to get back at me. To be mean. Ellie was angry and she was up to something. She uses her…charms, limited though they are. I had this panic moment—Roddy and Ellie. Impossible. She’d be in the apartment, sneaking in through the back, and we’re not talking conversation about the Negro revolution and the legacy of Booker T. Washington. I knew I had to be
there
, to be sure. To
see
. Foolish, jealous, irrational, senseless. Ultimately stupid.”

“But you were with Lawson that night,” I said.

“Yeah, and I was furious with Lawson. With Roddy. With Jed. My world crashed down around me. I sneaked there around midnight, unfortunately a little too drunk, and, yes, I hung in the shadows but not for long. If Ellie came, she’d walk through the alley to the back of the building at that hour so she could rap on his window, and she’d find me huddled there. Comical, really. I’d not thought of
that
encounter.”

“So you left?” I asked.

“After a few minutes. Crazed. Yes.” She smirked. “I didn’t realize that Harriet had such a good sense of smell. But then…most hunting dogs do, right?”

“Wait.” I was confused. “Wasn’t Lawson back at your apartment? With
you
?”

“He certainly was, passed out on the sofa.”

Rebecca was shaking her head. “So you left the apartment and he was there, drunk on the sofa? That makes little sense, Bella. What if he woke up and spotted you gone? You’re telling us that you were at Roddy’s place the night he was murdered?”

Fury in her voice. “But I didn’t murder him. You don’t kill someone because they reject you.” A pause. “Well, I guess some women do. Yes, I was angry with him, with everyone, but…that’s why I lied. No one could know I was there, though I guess lots of folks routinely checked out the aromatic shadow in the alley.”

“What if Lawson woke up?” I persisted. “That’s a possibility.”

She debated answering me. Then, grimly, “I took care of that. Since I’m blabbing everything here—in defense of my pretty neck—I might as well confess to nefarious conduct unbecoming a damsel in distress.”

“What are you talking about?” From Waters, exasperated.

“Lawson wasn’t rising from that stupor. I made sure of it.” She arched her neck, insolent, and I thought: my Lord, what a manipulative woman, this vixen, a woman fiercely proud of the vein of evil shot through her gorgeous body. “You see, I knew that I’d planned on going the minute Lawson told me of Ellie’s plans that night. I wasn’t thinking straight—I just wanted to
know
, to
see
for myself. So Lawson and I went to Mambo’s, and we drank, as we always did. But Lawson drank a lot more than I did because I held back, made believe, poured out drinks when he was away from me, and we staggered back to my place around eleven. Earlier than usual because I said I was sick. My brother was just leaving for his night job and wasn’t happy with the two of us reeling on the stairs. He yelled at Lawson, in fact. So Lawson and I fought—or should I say continued our battle?—and I ended the affair. It just came out. It’s over. That much is true. But we had more drinks at my home. At my request.” A sly twinkle in her eye. “I slipped some convenient knockout drops into his drink. Within seconds he was snoring on the sofa, a dead weight. Slobbering, drool at the corners of his mouth. Delightful to see, I must tell you. He’s not so pretty when he’s a puddle of spit. Whatever did I see in him?”