Murder Your Darlings (26 page)

Benchley stood up quickly—too quickly—and the room started to swim. He braced himself against the wall. His eyes came to rest on the only picture in the apartment. It was a large black-and-white photograph, about a foot and a half wide. The photo was of some fifty men in army uniforms, posing in rows for the picture. A few men in the bottom row held a sign: THE FIGHTIN’ THIRD: 3RD NEW YORK INFANTRY, 108TH INFANTRY REGIMENT, 54TH BRIGADE, 27TH DIVISION. BELLICOURT, AISNE, FRANCE. OCTOBER 1918.

So, Sanderson had fought in France.... Benchley scanned the cheerless gray faces for a young, doughboy version of the Sandman. But doing this made Benchley’s head swim again.

There was a sound. Someone was at the door. On blind instinct—rare for him—Benchley switched out the light and turned to hide in the darkness.

As soon as he did this, he silently cursed himself for a fool. It was probably just that nice young couple coming over to check on him.

He shuffled to where he thought he had switched off the light, but he couldn’t find the switch, couldn’t even find the wall. Now he was stuck, and he cursed himself again for acting so rashly.

Then he heard a metallic squeak—someone was testing the doorknob. Something told him it wasn’t the nice couple. Had he locked the door behind him? He didn’t think so. Of course he’d left it unlocked so that any murderous stranger could come in and strangle him in the pitch dark.

He turned around and banged his leg against something hard. It was the cast-iron bed. As quickly and quietly as he could, he dropped to the floor and slid under the bed.

The door opened. The light clicked on. Someone stood in the doorway. Under the bed, Benchley could see only a nondescript pair of men’s black shoes and men’s dark trousers. The shoes didn’t move for a very long time. The man, whoever he was, seemed to suspect there was someone else in the room, Benchley thought.

Almost imperceptibly at first, Benchley began to feel a tingling sensation. His face had been against the floor for only a few moments. Could his cheek be falling asleep already? The tingling turned into a prickling sensation, an unsettling feeling of movement along his skin. Then there seemed to be a shadow in his vision. He realized he was staring into the eyes and antennae of a large brown cockroach perched on his cheek.

It took every last ounce of courage and nerve for Benchley not to scream and flail about like a six-year-old girl.

 

Woollcott seemed almost giddy as he climbed into a taxi with Dorothy and Faulkner bound for the Algonquin Hotel. He reevaluated Faulkner with approval, chattering ridiculously.

“You’ve certainly cleaned yourself up, my lad,” Woollcott said. “You’ve shaved. You’ve lost that bohemian coat. Good for you, young man. Writing is a business, after all, and one must dress for business, don’t you agree? That isn’t to say that one should lack style or go without a measure of artistic flair. . . .”

Dorothy’s mind wandered. She was feeling guilty about letting Benchley go to the Sandman’s apartment alone. Still, the Sandman was dead. And as long as there was nothing mechanical there for Benchley to get entangled with, he should be fine.

Woollcott and Faulkner were hitting it off, talking about their favorite books—Woollcott doing most of the talking while gobbling up the liquor-filled chocolates.

Soon, they arrived at the Algonquin. Woollcott bounded out the door, leaving the empty box of chocolates on the seat. Dorothy looked at Faulkner apologetically.

“I don’t have a dime to pay the fare.”

Faulkner pulled out a carefully folded bill. “It’s my bottom dollar.” He handed it to the taxi driver, received a dime in change, and they got out.

Upstairs, Dorothy unlocked the door to her small suite. The room, as usual, smelled like dog. Woodrow Wilson jumped off the couch and trotted over. She scratched the dog behind the ears, feeling guilty and sorry for the third time in almost as many minutes. Here she was, about to leave the poor pooch all alone with Woollcott. And how did Woody respond to her treachery? With a cheery little four-step dance and a frenetically wagging tail. How she adored and envied the boundless optimism of dogs!

Woollcott, for his part, was staggering around nearly half-drunk and looking out of the corner of his eyes for more of the as-promised booze-filled chocolates.

“Perhaps you might have something a man could eat?” he said, not so obliquely.

She ignored him and hurried to her bedroom, quickly stuffing clothes in an overnight bag. She cursed herself for not thinking of doing this beforehand.

She slung the bag over her shoulder and went back into the living room. She patted Woody—now looking puzzled—on the head. Then she turned to Woollcott.

“Now, I have your word that you won’t mention to anyone where we are, right?” she said.

“As a man of many words,” he said, “you may rest assured that your secret is safe with me.”

She motioned to Faulkner that it was time to go.

Woollcott followed them to the door. “One other thing ... You had mentioned that carton of chocolates—”

“Oh, look around,” she said. “It’s here somewhere. Unless the dog ate them all.”

She left Woody and Woollcott sizing each other up as she closed the door.

 

The pair of shoes crossed the hardwood floor of Knut Sanderson’s nearly empty apartment. Under the cover of the sound of the clacking shoes, Benchley slapped the cockroach off his face.

The man went to the far wall and stopped.

The cockroach landed beside Benchley’s ear. He could feel its hairy legs flutter beside his earlobe.The sensation—its presence—was intolerable.

The man in the shoes was doing something—pulling something, disrupting something—Benchley didn’t know what.

Benchley knew he should pay attention to what the man was doing, but the cockroach was driving him mad. It quivered and clawed at his hair, his scalp, chilling him and making his skin crawl.

That was it. He couldn’t take it anymore. He clutched at the cockroach and flung it away. The huge brown insect skittered across the polished wood floor, skidding to a stop in the dead center of the room.

The man in the shoes spun around. The shoes raced across the floor—the clattering, thumping sound reverberated in Benchley’s ear like thunder. The man stopped just before the cockroach. Benchley could see the bug helpless on its back, its tiny clawlike legs grasping and flailing desperately. The man raised one shoe and stomped the bug without hesitation.

Benchley held his breath. Did the man know he was under the bed? The man stood still a moment, as though looking around. Then the man came toward the bed. The shoes were inches from Benchley’s face. The man raised the shoe that had stomped the cockroach—Benchley could see its liquefied, flattened body on the sole—and wiped the bottom of the shoe against the edge of the mattress. The shoe came down. The cockroach was gone.

The shoes moved toward the door. The light went out. The door closed with a bang.

 

Dorothy and Faulkner had settled in nicely at Woollcott’s apartment. They were lounging on his sofa, wearing his robes, smoking his cigarettes and sipping his hidden stash of brandy.

“I wonder how Aleck is holding up right now at the Algonquin,” she said lazily, although she was more concerned about Woody than Woollcott.

“What’s next?” Faulkner asked. “Are you any closer to finding who killed Mayflower—that is, who killed the Sandman?”

“In a word, yes. And no.”

She described how she and Benchley had almost been flattened by the Bible truck. “So we hit a nerve with someone. We just don’t know which nerve we hit.”

“Or who the someone is.”

“As for finding the someone, we have until Friday. Otherwise, Finn will put an end to Tony Soma’s.”

And put an end to Faulkner, too, but she didn’t mention that. She merely described to him how Mickey Finn had shaken them down for some answers and had given them the Friday deadline.

“What will you do between now and then?”

She shrugged and sucked her cigarette.

“What about that Bible truck?” he said.

“What about it?”

“Did you look up the company?”

“The New Canaan Bible Company? It wasn’t in the directory. Heywood Broun has a friend at the
Wall Street Journal
. Tomorrow I’ll ask him to call his friend to track the company down.”

“And what if he can’t?”

“Oh, don’t worry.” She sipped the brandy. “Something will emerge.”

 

Benchley poked his head out from underneath the bed and exhaled. Before this, he had waited a moment to be sure that the man was gone. It seemed he had been holding his breath for an eternity. Finally, he crawled out from under the bed before any more cockroaches decided to use his face for a playground.

He stumbled toward the wall and flicked on the light.

He looked around the room. Something was different.

Then he figured it out. The far wall was bare.

The Sandman’s army photograph was gone.

Chapter 31

Wallace Ramshackle, Esquire, had a face like an Easter ham: round, plump and pink. His oily gray hair was parted neatly down the middle. He gazed at Dorothy over half-moon glasses.

“You’d like what?” he croaked.

She shifted in her chair. She wore the closest thing she had to a formal suit, a slender wool serge ensemble in gray with a black felt cloche. She felt fairly presentable and, having had an excellent night’s sleep in Woollcott’s plush feather bed, she felt fairly confident for this morning’s meeting with this aging attorney.

“I’d like to see your contract with Leland Mayflower. I was an acquaintance of his.”

“Out of the question. That’s an outright violation of the attorney-client privilege.”

She batted her eyelashes. “I was under the impression that, since the party of the first part has departed, then the attorney-client relationship would no longer apply.”

“You are under a misapprehension, Miss—”

“Apprehension?”

“No, your name. Miss—”

“Parker,” she said. “
Mrs.
Parker, actually.”

“Mrs. Parker,” Ramshackle said, rising from his chair, “I cannot divulge any business of another client, living or deceased. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other business to attend to.”

“So,” she said, “you haven’t discussed Mr. Mayflower’s contract with anyone? Even the police?”

“Not without a court order.”

“The police haven’t even contacted you?”

“No, they have not. Now, if you would excuse me, I have many other clients—”

That was good,
she thought. From what Lou Neeley had told her—that Mayflower had visited this lawyer shortly before his murder—she felt certain that Mayflower’s death was tied to his business with Ramshackle. Even the police hadn’t figured this out yet. Somehow, that seemed like a good sign for Faulkner. She felt closer to proving his innocence and having this whole business done with.

Ramshackle hobbled around the desk and stood over her. He smelled of hair tonic and cough lozenges. “I said, I have many other clients, Mrs. Parker. Good day.”

“But that’s why I’m here. I’d like to be a client. A
paying
client.”

Despite’s Ramshackle’s self-importance,she had noticed that his vest needed mending, his carpet was well-worn, and his office seemed less frequented than it probably had once been. His gruff manner changed immediately.

“Well.” He beamed. “Why didn’t you say so? Now what sort of legal representation do you require?”

She hesitated. How should she put this?

“Ah, I see,” Ramshackle said, settling again into his desk chair. “You needn’t worry. I am discreet—the absolute apex of discretion. So it is a divorce, then?”

Her jaw dropped. Did she look like a divorcée? Was that the first thought that came into a person’s mind?

“These things can be messy, of course,” he continued, smiling, “but lucrative. Oh, yes, you needn’t subsist on a pittance as spinsters did in the old days.”

“No, no, no,” she blurted. “I’m not getting a divorce. I want what Mayflower had. Just write me up one of those.”

His Easter ham face reddened. “You want indemnity for libel?”

Indemnity for libel?

Ramshackle stammered, “B-but Mr. Mayflower was a writer—a famous columnist—working on his memoirs. He had reason to be cautious about being sued for libel. I-I take it you are just a housewife, are you not?”

Now it was her turn to be indignant. “Just a housewife? I’m a writer. A goddamn writer for
Vanity Fair
! And a goddamn poet, too. People quote me. Franklin Pierce Adams quotes me in the goddamn
New York World
.”

Ramshackle was flustered. He grabbed a handful of papers to busy himself with. “Forgive me; please forgive me. I read only legal journals and—and occasionally
Reader’s Digest
. My humblest apologies.” He shuffled the papers. “Now, let me see, let me see. Yes, here we are. To protect you from libel—”

She stood up. “No, thank you. I think I’ll seek representation elsewhere.”

She had learned what she wanted to learn about Mayflower. That was good enough.

But she had also embarrassed herself, and she wanted to leave quickly. What bothered her wasn’t that Ramshackle didn’t recognize her name. (Well, that bothered her a little.) But what really bothered her was that she had stooped to boasting.
People quote me. Franklin Pierce Adams quotes me in the goddamn
New York World.

How shameful. She was thankful Benchley hadn’t accompanied her to hear her talk like that. She could barely look at the lawyer as she turned to leave.

Wallace Ramshackle, for his part, was dumbfounded. He pushed his half-moon glasses up his nose.

“Please come again,” he mumbled.

She closed the door.