[Dorothy Parker 06] - The Murder Club Read online

  “A regular kaleidoscope of hoodlums,” said Ross.

  As the captain recited the ever-lengthening list of culprits in the New York City Police Department’s war on crime—“Bugsy Segal, Arnold Rothstein”—I looked out through the curtained window at the street, my eyes traveling toward a familiar figure: The writer, Ernest Stringer, was weaving through the pedestrian traffic at a faster pace than the usual brisk New York stride. Ernest, best known as “Ersatz” to his friends, was in a hurry to get someplace.

  And then there appeared a fellow who reminded me a little of another writer I knew slightly, Trevor Hunter, zigzagging closely behind in Ersatz’s footsteps.

  This must be what it is like to be a cat, perched in a windowsill, watching the comings and goings of life outside the window. I spied a new, shiny-blue Dodge slowing to a stop from which three pretty girls fluttered out to disappear under the canopy of the hat shop on the south side of the street; a Chinaman walked out of the Bradley Bank and Trust and rode off on his food-delivery tricycle parked in front of the Pagoda restaurant next door; a mother struggled with an armload of packages and three rambunctious kids; a sophisticated boulevardier in dove gray swung his walking stick with practiced finesse as he paraded along the sidewalk, his standard poodle taking the lead. A teenage newsie hawked the afternoon editions, shouting the headlines; two men argued animatedly in front of the barbershop Indian, who I imagined assumed the role of silent referee. Two police officers escorted a burly mobster out from the police station and into a squad car. Reporters crowded in around them, cameras angled to capture the event for their evening papers.

  And then the clang and whine of a fire engine sounded along Eighth Avenue, its horn blast repeatedly warning to clear a way through the traffic. A sudden end to the racket came as it turned just off the corner onto the street below; men were leaping down from the truck and searching for signs of a conflagration after a firebox alarm had been pulled. The reporters quit the precinct house for the newly arrived drama.

  Watching the world outside the window was better than listening to Delaney drawl on about the less salubrious elements of our fair city. Jane asked me a question, but before I could turn in reply, this cat spied something more engaging than the proverbial mouse making a dash for the cheese.

  “I think the bank across the street is being robbed,” I said.

  Mr. Benchley leaned over my shoulder and peeked out the window. “Why, so it appears, Mrs. Parker. But isn’t it past banking hours?”

  “What are you talking about?” said Captain Delaney, cutting short his recitation with a chuckle of disbelief. His attention was on the plate of steaming spaghetti and meatballs Gino was placing before him. “What makes you think that?”

  “The man with the machine gun backing out through the doors, I’d say.”

  “By gosh, Mrs. Parker, you’re right!” nodded Mr. Benchley, lighting my cigarette.

  Captain Delaney pushed his great girth between us to peer out toward the scene on the street below.

  “I don’t fuckin’ believe—McCarthy! Jones! Get down there. They’re making off—Holy shit!”

  This was no time to raise an alarm about the captain’s language, I told Mr. Benchley, who was often critical of my own. The cops thundered out of Gino’s and down the flight of stairs leading to the street. The big axe-wielding federal lug who had been leashed by his master and was now straining at the bit followed suit on the nod of his superior, Morton, who remained at the table stuffing his face with pastry. The rest of us crowded at the windows to watch as the bank robbers got in their getaway car, tires screeching as they stuttered off. The car stalled for a second, and with a loud backfire sent a puff of black exhaust into the air and onlookers to seek cover. The bank dick, staggering out, blood dripping down his forehead, yelled a warning that sent more people scattering for safety, some hitting the sidewalk, some running for cover behind parked automobiles at the sight of his drawn weapon. He fired at the robbers, which triggered a return hail of bullets from the getaway car, ricocheting with a pinging tattoo on a metal restaurant sign, piercing a stack of afternoon-edition newspapers into a confetti celebration over the newsstand, and splintering the wooden slates of a delivery wagon and sending forth a cascade of toothpicks and chicken feathers onto the street. One bullet hit its mark in the security guard’s shoulder, the sting of pain and surprise knocking the gun out of his hand before he slumped to the ground.

  Screams of panic propelled the wave of pandemonium in the wake of the getaway car’s exhaust fumes. The short route to Seventh Avenue was blocked by traffic, so the robbers took to the sidewalk, riding the curb like a rail, sending screaming pedestrians to fly for cover against buildings and into doorways, skimming a mailbox and then a firebox, and knocking a fire hydrant a-kilter. The hydrant keeled over like a dead man, and after a breath-holding moment, followed by a portentous rumbling from the depths of the earth, it exploded. The gusher rose thirty feet into the air, obscuring our view just as the car disappeared around the corner.

  The icy spray prompted more shrieks of cold surprise before people scattered away from the soaking deluge. A dozen of New York’s Finest stormed out from the precinct house, weapons drawn as they ran toward the bank in a better-late-than-never, if ineffectual, show of strength.

  As the drama outside dampened and the springtime sunshine cast a rainbow over the spray, I thought: Only in New York does one rise in the morning to a day of exciting possibilities. As I watched the shimmering effects of sunlight on the mist rising from the geyser, I thought of how my friend, Scott Fitzgerald, said it right: “New York has all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.” Yes, great things begin here.

  As I turned away from the street scene, my eyes landed on Captain Delaney’s untouched plate. I stabbed a fork into one of Gino’s fabulous meatballs. Big, black, soulful, needy eyes looked up at me. Woodrow Wilson had the power to shame me or con me. There was no use trying to ignore those liquid peepers boring a hole through my resolve. I tossed him a meatball.

  Chapter Two

  October 12, 1929

  The crush of reporters blocked my view of the disembarking passengers from the S.S. Mauretania, docked at New York Harbor’s Pier 54. Flashbulbs brightened a steel-gray day as the newsmen shouted the usual queries:

  How’s it feel to be back in the States, Mr. Fairbanks?

  Are you looking forward to presenting your new theories to the Society, Mr. Einstein?

  All New York is talking about you and your new play opening tomorrow, Mr. Coward.

  Miss West, it’s said that the King of England is your greatest fan. . . .

  And then I heard the rich, bell-like voice floating over the tops of fedoras and bowlers—the reason for my gang’s sojourn down to the docks: Miss Soleil, your new book is a bestseller! Are you moving back to New York permanently?

  I turned to smile at Mr. Benchley, who was dutifully holding Woodrow in his arms to spare my pup getting trampled in the crowd. Aleck waved and bellowed out a contralto singsong, “Yoo-hoo!” to get Soledad’s attention. She spotted us and nodded as she replied to the reporter from the Daily News, “I’m a homing pigeon, don’tcha know? And New York is forever my nest,” she said with dramatic gestures.

  “Oh, brother!” said Jane Grant at the hyperbole. “Just what New York City needs: another pigeon.”

  “Behave yourself,” said her husband Ross. “She was taking poetic license.”

  “Well, someone should revoke it!”

  “I thought you liked Soledad,” I said.

  Jane rolled her eyes.

  “I absolutely adore the woman,” Ross replied at the sight of the flamboyant mystery writer cutting through the crowd toward us. “Look at her! She doesn’t walk, she floats! She’s no pigeon; she’s a swan!”

  “Oh, brother,” said Jane, not a little jealous, especially when Ross dove through the crowd to meet the beautiful woman.

  “Darlings!” Soledad gushed. There followed cheek-kisses and hugs all around.

  Aleck was beside himself, for he, too, adored Soledad Soleil from the moment I introduced them to each other in Paris a few years ago. Mr. Benchley and Ernest Hemingway and I got to know her during our crossing to France on the S.S. Roosevelt. But that is another story.

  She gave me a squeeze and we squealed with delight, like bouncing schoolgirls. I couldn’t help but giggle with joy at our reunion. It had been a year since we’d been together in New York, and it was grand that she would be taking up permanent residence here. I took a long look at my friend, who smelled of Shalimar and rice powder. And now she had succeeded in seducing the sun out from behind the clouds to shine on her sleek, dark waves. Her powder-blue ensemble—dress, duster, and matching chapeau—brought out the vivid blue of her eyes, and she was dripping rows of pearls. Her glossy-red smile dazzled. If I didn’t love her so much, I’d be furiously jealous of her, like Jane.

  The smile compressed, her voice dropped an octave, and her eyelids narrowed as she leaned in to whisper in my ear in a conspiratorial tone, “I could use a stiff one.”

  “Alas, what girl couldn’t?” I replied, picking up on the double entendre.

  She fluffed off my remark with, “Pshaw! You’ve a dirty mind, Dory darling.”

  “I wash and press it every morning, but by noon—well, you know how it is.”

  She turned her appeal on Aleck, who handed her a fabulous bouquet of lilacs and pink roses.

  “Don’t look at him!” I said, referring to Aleck’s dubious nature, and we all laughed because no one has ever been quite sure about our friend, who likes to dress up as literary and historical heroines whenever he has the chance. He flashed me a withering glare.

  Ross opened his mouth to speak, but Jane cut him down with an elbow to h
is gut.

  Mr. Benchley opened his mouth to speak, but uttered only a gasp when I said, “You hound, you!”

  “What?” he replied, feigning injury, while reaching into his coat pocket and removing his flask to offer a swig to Soledad. “Nothing wrong with being a hound, now, is there, Woodrow, old boy?” he said, nuzzling and scratching my pup behind the ears.

  “All right, Bob, I’ll settle for a drink, then,” said Soledad.

  After Soledad’s trunks were sent on to the Plaza, we hustled her into a taxi, destination the Algonquin Hotel for lunch with the rest of the gang: George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, Frank Pierce Adams (a.k.a. FPA), me, Mr. Benchley, Aleck, Jane, Ross, and, arriving in a huff, playwright Marc Connelly, who squeezed a chair between Aleck and FPA.

  As he took his place, Frank ran his hand lovingly over Marc’s bald head.

  “As soft as my wife’s behind,” he said.

  Marc followed the gesture with his own

  hand. “So it is, so it is.”

  Frank chuckled good-naturedly. After all, a good comeback was always expected, and I knew he’d have wanted to include it in his column tomorrow, but for the editorial censor. There was no doubt that Soledad would be the main focus of his Samuel Pepys–styled column in tomorrow morning’s paper, which was syndicated across the country.

  “Marc,” said George to his sometime-collaborator, “I understand your new play is full of single entendres.”

  “You know, it’s just not the same without Harpo,” said Soledad, when she asked about the Marx Brothers. “Everything is so . . . pleasantly subdued.”

  “We are basking in the funereal quiet, if you don’t mind,” remarked Ross.

  “The boys have no time for lunch these days,” said Aleck, presiding over the table like a mother superior. “They are too busy playing in Animal Crackers at night, just down the street at the Forty-fourth Street Theater—we’ll see the show tomorrow, if you’re free Soledad—and during the day they rush out to the Astoria Studios to make a talkie motion picture of their last show, The Cocoanuts.

  “George wrote Animal Crackers, you know,” I said.

  George S. Kaufman raised his dark pompadour, which canopied his plate of ham and beans, at the sound of Soledad’s exclamation. He replied with sullen resignation.

  “Yes, yes, I wrote the book of their show, yes, with Morrie Ryskind. Let me rephrase that: Morrie and I wrote a play. But the brothers perform a different play every night, some thing of their own concoction. Our plot and their story may converge at times—the sets are the same, the songs don’t vary—but as in every actor’s nightmare, where the poor fellow cannot remember his lines, I wander around backstage unable to find a word I’ve written in the script. I didn’t learn my lesson the first time.”

  “George wrote the book for The Cocoanuts, too, the Broadway show they are now filming,” interjected Jane.

  Big, lumpy, disheveled Heywood Broun, political and social columnist, sports writer, theatre critic, and all-around raconteur—the term sorry-sack comes to mind—chuckled and said: “George took the bowdlerization of his book very hard—lots of head-banging during rehearsals and while watching from the wings on opening night.”

  “At rehearsals, the only author that’s better than an absent one is a dead one,” said George. “Still, the Brothers manage to bring down the house every night at eight, and I get full credit, so who’s complaining?”

  “I’m not!” said Broun. “I saw The Cocoanuts thirty-three times, didn’t I? And the boys always kill me. Fact is, Georgie-boy has absolutely nothing to do with the show.”

  “They kill you every time, do they?” said George. “Why, oh, why, doesn’t it stick?”

  “Broun’s a zombie,” said Ross.

  “Ah, the undead!” said Soledad. “What a wonderful protagonist for a book!”

  “Truth is, Sollie,” said Ross. “George may not be bright, and he may not be dead between the ears, like Broun over there, but he isn’t stupid enough to get in the Brothers’ way, that’s all.”

  “Thank you, Ross,” said George. “I think?”

  “Yes,” said Broun, waxing dramatic, “when I leave this crazy world, I want written as my epitaph: ‘Killed by getting in the way of some scene-shifters at a Marx Brothers’ show.’”

  “What this country needs are more zany creatures like the Marx Brothers!” Mr. Benchley announced like a politician.

  “God forbid!” I said. “Isn’t there a big enough infestation of fools in Congress?”

  “I’ll tell you what this country needs,” said FPA, his small and compact figure garbed in an excellently tailored cloth as always. He is the driving force behind the national fame of our little luncheon club, the bon mots of which he would recount in print in his daily column, The Conning Tower.

  He pushed back from the table and then leaned back in his chair for the first step in his ritual cigar lighting. “There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in this country.” He flicked his lighter. “The trouble is they cost a quarter.” He puffed hard and then regarded the stinker he had just lit. “What the country needs is a good five-cent nickel.”

  “What the country needs,” began Aleck as he slathered butter onto yet another popover, “is the stinkless cigar!”

  “Who’s the pretty one over there?” asked Soledad, admiring a rugged-looking man in a trench coat talking with Frank Case, the hotel manager. Frank pointed in our direction.

  “Beats me,” I replied.

  “The brute!” she said with a scowl. “Look! He’s headed our way!”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch—” he began in a polite tone. His voice was a warm, rich baritone, with just the hint of a smile simmering deep within.

  His jaw was strong, a prominent feature. His eyes were a clear-blue sky set against a snowy field, with serious, straight, wheat-colored brows. This was the countenance of Adam, or of a less-than-perfect Adonis for the little scar above his lip that marked his humanity. Embodied was the driving sexuality of Tristan, the might of Apollo, and the appeal of Dionysus I fancied, and if I weren’t careful, I would see him in my dreams. But this appealing package all wrapped up in a trench coat was a man you didn’t want to mess with, unless it left one’s sheets a jumble.

  “The Statue of David,” whispered Soledad, as if she were reading my mind.

  “You’ve undressed him already?”

  “Mr. Benchley, stand aside!” she giggled in my ear.

  Aleck gazed starry-eyed at the new arrival, if one can gaze starry-eyed through thick spectacles. But, that is how best to describe Aleck’s admiration for the fellow standing over us, other than to say that Aleck suddenly stopped shoveling apple pie into his face, and it takes a lot to stop the momentum of his steam-shovel dining style.

  If the rather unattractive jokers at the table wished they were seated under it for a time, they put up a good bluff. After all, these men were the greats of the newspaper and entertainment industries, so even if they were suddenly self-conscious in the light of this Greek God standing before them, they could hold their own for brains if not beauty and brawn. I looked at Ross: a sullen scowl with a Fuller Brush haircut. I glanced at the unkempt, matronly Broun, and turned to the gangly, large-beaked, black-haired buzzard that was George. I appraised the shiny, freckled, bald dome of a chubby Marc Connelly, and the rodent in the fancy suit, FPA, with his rattail comb-over, and decided that none of them, not even my debonair Mr. Robert Benchley, could hold a match, much less a candle, to this Adonis, this Billy Bud, this Titian-patrician.

  “Do sit down and join us, young man,” said an ingratiating Woollcott, signaling our waiter, Luigi, to fetch a chair. “Move over, will you, Connelly!” he ordered roughly.

  The playwright did as he was told with grudging speed. He knew enough to move fast, for Aleck could easily, by his massive girth alone, shove him over if he chose.