Murder Your Darlings Page 10

  “This will not do!” the admiral huffed.

  “Beg your pardon.” Benchley slipped another quarter into the admiral’s hand. “Much obliged.”

  He slammed the door and the cab sped off, leaving the navy officer on the sidewalk in a cloud of exhaust and exasperation.

  Inside the cab, Woollcott and Benchley sat with Dorothy in between them, while Sherwood sat on the fold-down jump seat at the side, extending his long legs in front of theirs.

  Woollcott smirked. “I suppose your Mr. Dachshund is going up the river now. What do you possibly think you can do for him?”

  Dorothy said, “Your ability to distinguish an innocent man from a guilty man is as good as your skill in distinguishing a military man from a doorman.”

  “The police don’t seem to think he’s so innocent,” Woollcott said.

  “They will once they hear about the man Billy saw in the lobby,” she said.

  “What proof does Dachshund have that such a man exists?” Woollcott cried. “This mystery man is no more real than the bogeyman.”

  “He’s real, all right,” Benchley said jovially. “The gunman tried to rob and kill the three of us—Mrs. Parker, Mr. Dachshund and myself—last night.”

  Woollcott drew in a sharp breath. His eyes bulged. He loved hearing about the crises and misfortunes of others.

  “Rob you and kill you?” he said breathlessly. “Last night?”

  “Exactly,” Benchley said matter-of-factly. He tried to put on a pair of moleskin gloves he found in Fairbanks’ suit pocket. But, like the suit, the gloves were also too small.

  “Don’t stop there, man,” Woollcott sputtered. “Tell us more.”

  Sherwood also stared back and forth at Dorothy and Benchley in astonishment.

  Benchley blankly returned their stares, as if surprised they’d want to hear about such a trifling matter. He looked to Woollcott. “Are you going to finish that cigarette? It’s nearly kaput.”

  “Damn the cigarette!” Woollcott cried. “Tell us about the gunman. Who was he? When was this? Where was this? Why did he try to kill you?”

  Benchley smiled, as if comprehending. “Well, Mrs. Parker had his silver dollar, you see.” He stopped there, as if that cleared up the matter.

  Woollcott turned pink. “No, I don’t see,” his nasal voice whined. His small, round, gloved fists pounded the air. “Explain yourself. Commence at the beginning and relate the events in chronological order. Can you do that?”

  But Benchley couldn’t. As he meandered his way through his telling of the encounter, and as the cab plodded its way through midday traffic, Dorothy watched with amusement. Benchley’s face was blank, innocent. But she knew he was having fun taunting Woollcott.

  “And that’s when Mrs. Parker stomped on the man’s toes. He fell down, and we got away,” Benchley said.

  Woollcott looked at her, his mouth agape. “You toppled this murderous brigand by means of stomping your little shoe on his toes?”

  “No, no, certainly not,” Benchley said. “Dachshund launched himself from the alleyway, tackling the man. That’s when his tooth went flying.”

  Woollcott gasped, “Dachshund lost a tooth in this fracas?”

  “Of course not. It was the gunman’s tooth.”

  “Dachshund knocked out the gunman’s tooth?”

  Now Benchley appeared frustrated. “No. The gunman’s tooth was on his watch chain.”

  “The gunman’s watch chain pulled out his tooth?”

  Benchley shook his head. “The tooth was a fob on the chain. But this is when the windshield shattered, and we left the notebook behind.”

  Woollcott rested his head in his hands. His nasal voice came muffled between his thick fingers. “I believe that’s enough. I think I get the gist. You’ve had your fun, Benchley. Thank you for your story.”

  Benchley was sorry to see it end. “Then Dachshund wound up in the tub. And, as I explained, that’s how he wrote the reviews.”

  Woollcott lowered his hands. His beetle eyes were slits behind his owlish glasses. “That will do, Robert.” His voice was solemn, his tiny eyes sincere now, even to the point of tears. “Indeed, Mr. Dachshund talks like a Mississippi mammy and dresses like a ragamuffin bohemian poet from Greenwich Village, but he’s nothing less than an all-American hero.”

  Dorothy turned to Woollcott. This was typical of him—a mercurial change of opinion. But something else had been nagging at her mind since they left the Algonquin.

  “Aleck, how did you guess that Billy wrote Mr. Benchley’s reviews?”

  “Elementary, my dear Dottie,” he sniffed. “Mr.Benchley, by his own admission, did not submit the reviews. And you said he was with you last night, and we all know you don’t care a fig about deadlines. And you wouldn’t use his name in vain regardless, even as a prank.”

  She nodded.

  He continued, “That leaves us with one would-be writer trying to impress his newfound literary friends. But what he lacks in the written word, he has made up for in valiant deeds.” Woollcott laid a white-gloved hand on her sleeve. “He saved your lives, my dear comrades. And for that, he has my earnest and heartfelt esteem. I shall immortalize his heroics in my next column in the Times. Ah, here we are.”

  The cab pulled up in front of the New York Times Building.

  Dorothy said, “Aleck, this is one can of worms you might want to keep a lid on.”

  He either ignored her or didn’t hear her. He swept up his cape and flung it over his shoulder. “Thankfully not for the last time, mes amis, I bid you adieu.” And he quickly went out the door.

  The cab rolled on.

  Sherwood said, “Like you two, I took a liking to Billy from the start. But if your encounter last night happened as you say, then Billy—what’s his real name again?”

  “Faulkner,” she said.

  “Then Billy Faulkner has jumped in my esteem, too,” Sherwood said. “Still ...”

  “Still something leaves you wondering?” she said, voicing her own hidden doubts.

  “I’m wondering, if he did write those reviews, how did he do it? Did he have help? I mean, is there more to Billy Faulkner than we know?”

  She quickly detailed for Sherwood what she knew: Billy lived in a hallway apartment far uptown, that he had come up from the South several weeks beforehand, that he had apparently been working in the bookstore at Lord & Taylor until recently, that he aspired to be a writer, and that he came to New York to find his voice.

  Sherwood nodded slowly. “He seems a decent fellow on the whole. But then again, there’s something about him. Something—”

  “Peculiar?” Dorothy said.

  “Precisely,” Sherwood said.

  Benchley said, “I chalked that up to artistic temperament.”

  “I don’t know about artistic temperament,” Sherwood said. “But I do know this. Many great artists are merely lunatics with talent.”

  Benchley smiled. “I guess that leaves me out on both counts.”

  Dorothy thought about Faulkner’s other admission that, after the war, he had pretended to be a wounded veteran. What did that make him, an artist or a lunatic?

  Chapter 16

  “Dachshund?” said Detective O’Rannigan. His small brown derby tilted forward over his big sweaty forehead. “We grilled him, and how. Which is probably what we shoulda done to you. Why didn’t you tell us right from the get-go that he saw the Sandman? You coulda saved everybody, including your boy Dachshund, a bunch a trouble.”

  Dorothy, Benchley and Sherwood spoke in unison. “Who’s the Sandman?”

  “I thought you’re newspaper people,” he sniggered. “You don’t read the papers? You don’t know who the Sandman is?”

  “We’re magazine people,” Dorothy said. “We don’t fold as easily as newspaper people and we have staples in our middles. So enlighten us.”

  O’Rannigan leaned his wide backside against the low wooden balustrade that divided the entrance hall of the police station between a foyerlike co
mmon area and a bustling police-only receiving area. All around them, brass-buttoned officers strode purposefully. People of all stripes and classes stood about as they waited for their bit of justice to be served.

  But the detective chatted casually as though this was nothing more than a friendly conversation among old friends.

  “The Sandman, otherwise known as Knut Sanderson,” O’Rannigan said. “Sanderson used to be known as the Sinister Swede. That was back in his nicer days, before the war, when all he’d do was deliver a little love note by breaking your kneecaps or chopping off a couple of fingers. Now everybody just calls him the Sandman. You know why, don’t you?”

  “Let me guess,” she said drily. “He puts people to sleep?”

  “Puts ’em to sleep, but for good. We’ve been looking to nail him for a while. We know he works as a gunman for bootleggers. You’re lucky. I never heard of anybody getting the best of the Sandman. You have your pal Dachshund to thank for that, sounds like. Yup, Dachshund told us all about it.”

  Benchley said, “So if this Sandman is your man, why don’t you let Billy go?”

  “What, are you my boss now?” O’Rannigan said, his color rising. “Anyways, we did. Just got the release order. Took him a little while, though. Dachshund yapped and yapped about all kinds o’ hooptedoodle. Finally he coughs up a description we can hang our hat on—the vertical scar down Sanderson’s mouth and the tooth on his watch chain. That’s the Sandman, all right. Once we heard that, we knew your boy Dachshund was nothing more than just a dopey schnook. Mayflower’s killer wasn’t Dachshund. It was Sanderson. So we let Dachshund go.”

  They simultaneously shot questions at O’Rannigan.

  “You let Billy go?” Dorothy said.

  “Where is he?” Benchley said.

  “Why would Sanderson kill Mayflower?” Sherwood said.

  Before the detective could answer, a uniformed policeman hurried by.

  “Watch out, sir,” the policeman said. “Captain’s looking for you, and he don’t look happy.”

  O’Rannigan straightened up and twisted his head around like a barn owl. A tall man with the somber face of an undertaker moved slowly toward them. The man wore a gray suit. His right pant leg was cuffed just below the knee, and below this was a wooden stump in place of his lower leg.

  “C-Captain,” O’Rannigan said. “You needed to see me?”

  The man spoke in a low monotone. “Where is William Dachshund?”

  “Dachshund? He’s released. Just like you ordered.”

  The man didn’t say a word. O’Rannigan began to fidget.

  Finally, the man said, “Did you read the order?”

  “Of course, sir, I—” He grabbed at a sheaf of papers on a nearby desk. “I have it right here. Here’s—no, wait. That’s the release order for Dunkelmann. Here it is, the order for Dachshund. It says—” O’Rannigan went pale. “For cripes sake.”

  The captain turned away. “Find Dachshund. Get him back in custody. And release Dunkelmann, as ordered.”

  O’Rannigan muttered to himself, “Goddamn German names!”

  Chapter 17

  It was half past eleven o’clock the next morning—Friday morning—by the time Dorothy Parker hooked the leash onto Woodrow Wilson’s collar to take him for a morning walk.

  She had intended to get up early. But a pound of intention is worth an ounce of chores, she acknowledged. She had been up late the night before, just floundering in her apartment alone, hoping for Faulkner to return. She nearly worried herself sick. She had a drink and a cigarette to soothe herself and to while away the time, and one led to another and another. Still, Faulkner never knocked on her door.

  Now, this morning, instead of waiting around for Faulkner to show his face, she would find him. She and her dog were on the hunt through the streets of Manhattan.

  Benchley, that other stiff, had taken a train back to the suburbs yesterday afternoon. He had finally tired of the stunt of wearing Douglas Fairbanks’ short suit, so he had gone home to take it off and to put on the mantle of father and husband, since he hadn’t seen his wife and family for nearly two days.

  And, she thought, why shouldn’t he? Why not indeed?

  She realized she was suddenly walking faster, nearly stepping on poor little Woody’s stubby tail. She slowed her pace and took a deep breath, and shoved aside the thought of Benchley in the bosom of his family.

  Never mind; she would see him tonight at Tony Soma’s.

  She lightly tugged the leash to prompt the dog to turn up busy Fifth Avenue. Faulkner had told her where he worked, at the Doubleday bookstore inside the Lord & Taylor department store.

  Was he still working there? She wasn’t sure. Faulkner had been unclear, and she hadn’t pushed him for answers. Whether or not he had a steady job hadn’t seemed important before. And if, for whatever reason, he no longer had the job, and was trying to avoid the embarrassment of explaining this, that hadn’t mattered either. She knew plenty of people who flitted from one job to another much like bumblebees meandering from flower to flower.

  But now ... Now that Faulkner was missing, there was something about his evasiveness—about his job, about where he lived, about where he came from, even about his ambitions of being a writer—that bothered her. It itched at the back of her mind. So she wanted to see for herself—where he worked, where he was living and what, if anything, he was doing here in New York.

  She had intended to set out earlier. Now she would miss lunch at the Algonquin. Ah well, Benchley wouldn’t be there in any case. And he would have refused to join her on this little errand anyway.

  “I can’t bear to enter a bookshop,” he always said, his mustache drooping. “To see all those thousands of brightly bound volumes, each with its author’s dreams and hopes and passions tucked tightly inside, like thousands of dear little mummies entombed, waiting in vain to be set free.” Fortunately, as soon as talk of bookshops ended, so, too, did Benchley’s melancholy.

  Her mind turned back to Faulkner. She worried that he could be anywhere out on the street, in danger of being captured by Detective O’Rannigan—or worse, the one they called the Sandman.

  Then she brightened. Maybe Faulkner was safe (a relative term, she conceded) in police custody. Better yet, maybe the Sandman was in custody. Fear—or at least caution—had been another reason she had stayed in last night.

  O’Rannigan, after that curt reprimand by his superior, had had a big bee in his bonnet when they left the police station yesterday afternoon.

  “If you see that Dachshund, you turn him in but quick, understand? Or, by God, I’ll lock the bunch of you stuck-up snobs into cuffs and toss you all into the Tombs!”

  By the Tombs, she knew, O’Rannigan meant the medieval Manhattan House of Detention. So Dorothy, Benchley and Sherwood made a hasty departure. Outside, on the steps of the police station, whom should they bump into but Bud Battersby.

  “Well, if it isn’t the publisher, editor and now ace reporter for the Knickerbocker News,” Sherwood said. “Where do you find time to give people the old screw, Bud? Because you’re doing a bang-up job of it.”

  Battersby’s boyish face looked wounded.

  Sherwood persisted, as though in a vaudeville act. “Say, Mr. Benchley?”

  Benchley, always game for a joke, replied, “Yes, Mr. Sherwood?”

  “Mr. Benchley, how do you make a small fortune in the publishing business?”

  “I can’t say, Mr. Sherwood. How do you make a small fortune in the publishing business?”

  “Start out with a large fortune, and buy a printing press.” Sherwood guffawed.

  Battersby’s lips tightened; his face reddened.

  “What’s the matter?” Sherwood taunted. “Silver spoon got your tongue? You have plenty to say about us in your tabloid rag of a newspaper. Too scared to say it to our faces?”

  Battersby scanned each of their faces in turn and pleaded to the only one that seemed at all sympathetic.

  “Mr. Benchl
ey,” he said, struck by a new thought, “I gave the money for your reviews to the man who delivered them. I trust he passed the cash along to you. The amount was acceptable, I hope?”

  Benchley considered this. “Yes, I guess so. Certainly, the amount of money I received corresponded to the amount of work I put forth. Tell me, though, was the man who delivered the reviews the same one who sat at our table at the Automat? Thin, young, scruffy fellow with a hangdog look and an unsuccessful beard?”

  “Oh, yes,” Battersby said. “Was there any question? Fellow had a funny name—Mr. Dachshund. He called in the reviews by telephone in the middle of the night. Then he came in yesterday afternoon to collect the payment. I assumed it was the same man.”

  “Oh, I’m certain it was,” Benchley said wryly. “Lovely fellow, Mr. Dachshund. Have you seen him lately, by any chance?”

  During this conversation, Sherwood stood simmering.

  “Benchley, that’s enough. How can you even be civil to this man? You of all people. One minute he’s begging you to write drama reviews for him. The next minute, he’s scandalizing all of us in the very same ratty newspaper.”

  Battersby sighed, his face perplexed and his voice defeated. “Sherwood, you know how it is. You’re in the business. Mayflower was the best attraction I could have. Now what do I do? I have to sell newspapers. The police have nothing to tell me. And Mayflower was found under your Round Table. Of course I have to write about you and your friends. It pains me to do it, honestly. But I have to follow the story. I have to give the people what they want. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Sherwood was livid. His large hands darted into the air like bats fleeing a belfry. “The hell I do! The news isn’t a commodity, to be sold for mass enjoyment like candy bars and Cracker Jack. You can’t simply give the people what they want to know. You have to give people what they ought to know. Newspapers have a sacred covenant to educate, not to placate. Don’t you understand that?”