Murder Your Darlings Read online

  “How can you be so sure that there was someone else involved?” Dorothy said. “How do you know it wasn’t a personal matter between the Sandman and Mayflower? For all we know, little old Mayflower may have been puttering along Sixth Avenue when he accidentally poked the Sandman with his walking stick. Perhaps the Sandman followed Mayflower into the Algonquin, saw that Mayflower was alone in the dining room and took the opportunity to take revenge the only way he knows how.”

  “Indeed,” Church said simply, “that cannot be ruled out. And the crime certainly points to a hurried, improvised execution. Sanderson killed Mayflower by stabbing, yet Sanderson’s implement of choice was usually a handgun. He not only stabbed Mayflower; he used Mayflower’s own fountain pen, and he did it in broad daylight, so to speak, where observation of the crime and subsequent capture were all the more likely, even probable.”

  “There you have it,” said Dorothy. “Means, motive and opportunity.”

  “Only one problem,” O’Rannigan snorted. “The Sandman suddenly turned up dead. But there’s no way the Sandman would commit suicide, because he didn’t have a conscience. It ain’t likely that all of a sudden he felt so sorry for what he did that he had to go and stick his head in the oven. Naw, somebody else was involved. Somebody who wanted Sanderson to keep his mouth shut, and for good.”

  “But who?” said Benchley.

  “Again,” said Church, “that is where you may help us.”

  “Help how?” said Dorothy.

  “Help us understand the motives of the members of your Round Table.”

  Dorothy and Benchley both sat up in their chairs. The idea of reporting on their friends to the police was detestable.

  “Say that we don’t want to help you?” she said.

  O’Rannigan growled, “Then say that we charge you with assaulting an officer, withholding evidence and harboring a fugitive?”

  “Go right ahead,” she said. “While you’re at it, charge me with harboring impure thoughts and coveting my neighbor’s oxen.”

  They looked to Benchley. By unspoken agreement, it seemed his response would break some tacit deadlock.

  “Don’t bother charging me,” he said finally. “My credit rating is lousy.”

  Dorothy smirked. O’Rannigan lurched forward as if to throttle them both. Captain Church, like a traffic cop, calmly held up a hand. O’Rannigan stopped in his tracks.

  “Shall we look at it this way?” Church said. “By providing an understanding of your associates’ motives and whereabouts, you will be exonerating them from blame and helping to prove their innocence. By doing so, you will bring us closer to the real killer. That is what we all want.”

  Dorothy remained silent. Under the shadow of her dark bangs, her eyes were hard and her face was sullen. Benchley sat smiling politely and didn’t say a word.

  “Let me add this,” Church continued. “We have already spoken to some of your associates. We have formed opinions and are in possession of certain pertinent facts. Your perspective will certainly do them no harm and could do them a world of good.”

  “And if you don’t talk,” O’Rannigan snarled, “we charge you and toss you in the Tombs.”

  Church stared at them patiently. This time, he did not contradict O’Rannigan.

  She looked out at the darkened window. It was long after midnight. An icy drizzle spattered the glass panes. She thought of Faulkner. He was out there, somewhere, waiting.

  She exhaled softly. “All right. What do you want to know?”

  * * *

  Before resuming the interrogation, Church sent O’Rannigan to get a drink of water for Dorothy and Benchley.

  “He’s a very ... persistent fellow, that Detective Orangutan,” Benchley observed.

  “Say his name correctly, please,” Church replied. “Still, you are right. He is persistent. But you say persistent as if that is a character flaw, or a euphemism for being shortsighted or stupid. Believe me, what the detective lacks in imagination, he makes up for in determination. Unlike what they print in those detective magazines, most police work comes down to simple dogged tenacity. Knocking on door after door. Asking the same questions over and over. Getting evasive variations on the same answer. Detective O’Rannigan is very good at his job. You would be unwise to underestimate him.”

  The door opened and O’Rannigan entered awkwardly. He held a paper cup in each hand, his face intent to avoid splattering the water as he hip checked the door to open it wider. Red faced and pugnacious, he gingerly set the cups down on the table in front of Dorothy and Benchley without spilling a drop.

  “Let us proceed methodically,” Church said, drawing forward a sheet of paper with several names typed neatly on it. “I have here a short list of about a dozen people whom you probably know. These people were acquainted with Mayflower in one way or another. Just tell us anything that may be significant, anything at all, regarding the relationship between these individuals and Leland Mayflower.”

  “All right,” Dorothy said, taking a sip of water. It tasted peculiar. She wondered whether O’Rannigan had spit in it. Or worse.

  “The list is alphabetical by last name,” Church said. “Let us begin at the top. ... Merton Battersby.”

  “Bud Battersby?” Benchley said. “He’s the owner and editor in chief of the Knickerbocker News. Surely you can’t suspect him?”

  “We suspect everybody,” Church said.

  “But Mayflower was the prizewinning horse in Battersby’s stable, just about the only horse in his stable,” Benchley said. “Without Mayflower, the Knickerbocker is falling to pieces. And so, it seems, is Battersby.”

  Detective O’Rannigan leaned forward. “All the more reason to get rid of him. Maybe Mayflower did something Battersby didn’t like. And Battersby called in a favor from the Sandman, or maybe Battersby just paid the Sandman cold, hard cash. Battersby has lots of it, right?”

  Dorothy said, “Battersby is a rich kid whose hobby is running a tawdry little tabloid. He’d be about as likely to hire a gangster to kill his best employee as you would be to hire a dressmaker to make you a gown for the policeman’s ball. And I’m afraid that’s all we can tell you about the motives of Bud Battersby.”

  “Fine,” Church said. “Robert Benchley, you are next.”

  Benchley chuckled. “Oh, I know Mayflower like I know the back of your hand. In other words, hardly at all.”

  “But you are a drama critic, and Mayflower was a drama critic. There must have been some professional rivalry.”

  “Mayflower wrote for a newspaper. I write for a magazine. The only time our paths crossed was on our way out the door after some lousy play.”

  “But you replaced Mayflower as the drama critic in the Knickerbocker,” Church said shrewdly. “The articles appeared just one day after Mayflower was killed.”

  “What do you take me for?” Benchley said. “See here, I could never fill Mayflower’s shoes. For one, he had feet like a little girl. For another, Battersby begged me to write those reviews. It was a onetime assignment. And I never even got the money.”

  He stopped short of explaining that Faulkner not only had written the reviews, but also had apparently pocketed the money.

  Church recorded a short note against his list of names. His penmanship was small, and he pressed his pencil hard against the paper. Dorothy, try as she might, could not make out what he wrote.

  “Moving on,” Church said. “Heywood Broun.”

  “Broun is a sportswriter and essayist for the New York Tribune,” Benchley said. “He had nothing in common with Mayflower.”

  “Nothing in common is putting it mildly. They’re opposites,” said Dorothy. “Mayflower was a shallow, snobbish dandy. Broun is an intellectual but down-to-earth slob.”

  “Mr. Broun is a very large and perhaps very strong fellow—”

  “Stop right there. Heywood is a pussycat. He wouldn’t swat a fly.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Benchley said. “Flies swarm him in the summer. He doesn�
��t even flinch.”

  Church looked at the next name on the list. “Frank Case, the manager of the Algonquin Hotel.”

  O’Rannigan muttered, “Slippery eel.”

  Benchley and Dorothy both smiled at the thought of this very proper, very friendly, very kind man. Dorothy’s smile broadened at the thought of him as a slippery eel. Frank Case, she thought, could make a reprimand seem like a compliment, though he seldom reprimanded. He loved his residents and his guests. He cultivated the Algonquin as a haven for writers, actors, musicians and artists. He actually favored this motley and often impecunious clientele over well-paying, respectable businessmen.

  Indeed, this was the reputation that he strived for. It was almost conceivable—she grinned even wider—that Case could have somehow encouraged or even arranged Mayflower’s murder just for the notoriety.

  She half turned to Benchley and realized by his curious smile that he was thinking the same thing.

  “Well?” Church said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Frank Case is an angel.”

  Church looked at her sternly. “If I find you are withholding vital information—”

  Benchley spoke hurriedly. “Mr. Case didn’t even recognize Leland Mayflower. Remember? He was the one who suggested I identify the body.”

  “True.” O’Rannigan nodded. “That’s true.”

  “See?” Benchley said. “True and true are four.”

  O’Rannigan seemed to suddenly dislike siding with Benchley. “But then again,” he growled, “maybe Case was just playing dumb, to throw us off the scent. And maybe—”

  Uncharacteristically, Church yawned, which caused O’Rannigan to forget what he was saying.

  “Why would a hotel manager murder a man in his own dining room?” said the captain. “Shall we move on? Marc Connelly.”

  Dorothy shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Marc Connelly and George Kaufman have written three smash Broadway comedies in as many years. I seem to recall that Leland Mayflower wrote glowing reviews about each of them. Neither Connelly nor Kaufman had anything against Mayflower. They probably loved him—professionally speaking, that is.”

  Church narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, ‘professionally speaking’?”

  “Just that on a professional level, they probably all admired one another quite a bit,” she said.

  “But on a personal level, they did not?” Church said.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Church nodded slowly and inscribed more notes against his list of names. He looked up. “William Dachshund.”

  She said, “Mr. Dachshund never met, never even knew Leland Mayflower.”

  Captain Church opened a manila folder. “That is what he told us, too. The interesting thing about William Dachshund is that there appears to be no William Dachshund.”

  Dorothy compelled herself to keep still, to show no anxiety. “Well, I’ve met him. You interviewed him. Are you saying we all imagined him?”

  Church reviewed the information in the folder. “There is no William Dachshund in the city directory. No New York tax records ever filed by a William Dachshund. No William Dachshund from the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. As a matter of fact, there is no town of Jefferson, Mississippi.”

  “He’s a writer,” she said. “Perhaps Dachshund is his nom de plume.”

  Church slowly shook his head. “Detective O’Rannigan looked it up. There are no books by a William Dachshund listed in the Library of Congress, and in the last ten years no articles written by a William Dachshund in the Index of Periodicals.”

  Benchley said, “Be that as it may, Mr. Dachshund had no axe to grind with Leland Mayflower.”

  “According to Dachshund’s own account,” Church said, “he was in the lobby at the same time as Sanderson. Perhaps Dachshund was working in conjunction with Sanderson. That would be conspiracy to commit murder.”

  “Impossible,” Benchley said.

  “It’s silly, is what it is,” Dorothy said. “You met Dachshund. Not only has he no motive—he has no backbone and no stomach for such things. He’s as tough as a wet autumn leaf.”

  “And as slippery,” O’Rannigan interjected. “As for being tough, you said yourselves how he knocked down the Sandman. Of course, once the Sandman bumped Mayflower off, Dachshund wanted Sanderson out of the way, too. Dachshund set you up to think he was innocent, that the Sandman had you in his sights. But all the time, Dachshund was working to get rid of the Sandman and make himself look like nothing more than the monkey caught in the middle.”

  Dorothy bit her lip. Could there be any truth to this? In her heart, she felt Dachshund was innocent. But the boy was certainly an odd little duck, and he did some inexplicable things. And it was a strange coincidence that he showed up on the same morning that Mayflower was murdered. ...

  She pushed the thought away. Whatever Faulkner was up to, it certainly wasn’t murder. It just couldn’t be.

  She said, “You asked us here to help you supply any possible motives, to help prove our friends’ innocence. Well, the long and short of it is this: Dachshund is innocent. He had no motive against Mayflower whatsoever.”

  “So you say,” Church said. “Let us move on, then.”

  “Just a moment,” she said. “Are you absolutely positive that the Sandman is dead?”

  “Dead?” Captain Church looked perplexed. “What do you mean? Absolutely he is dead.”

  “I mean, are you sure it’s Sanderson? Are you sure it’s his body you found headfirst in his oven?”

  Church sighed and spoke as if reassuring a child about the boogeyman. “We have the body in the morgue. There is no question that it is Sanderson.”

  “He’s got the scar through the lips, all right. It’s him,” O’Rannigan said.

  “Shall we proceed, then?” Church said. “We have several more of your acquaintances to discuss.”

  She nodded begrudgingly.

  “Continuing alphabetically, the next on the list is Michael Finnegan, also known as Mickey Finn. I believe we have discussed his involvement as far as we could, at least insofar as your input is concerned.”

  “And he’s not, as you say, one of our acquaintances,” Benchley said.

  Church ignored him. “Next is George S. Kaufman.”

  Benchley said, “We’ve discussed Kaufman’s involvement, or lack thereof, when we discussed Marc Connelly. At least insofar as our input is concerned.”

  Church stared at Benchley, and Dorothy felt that they were edging closer to imprisonment yet again. She said, “So who’s next on the list?”

  The captain slowly drew his glare away from Benchley and consulted his list. “Aloysius Neeley.”

  Dorothy and Benchley glanced at each other.

  “Who is Aloysius Neeley?” she said.

  “He is ...,” Church stumbled, looking uncomfortable. “He is ...”

  Dorothy and Benchley glanced at each other again.

  “He was Mayflower’s boyfriend,” O’Rannigan said, with a mixture of menace and glee. “Mayflower was an old fairy. Or didn’t you know that?”

  Of course they knew that, she thought. Everyone knew that. Even if you somehow didn’t know it, you could have seen it a mile away. It was so obvious, and so clearly a part of Mayflower’s persona, that everyone simply took it as a matter of course.

  “So he was queer,” she said. “What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”

  Church opened his mouth to respond, then hesitated as if suddenly unsure what to say.

  O’Rannigan spoke instead. “Neeley is a Broadway chorus boy, and Mayflower was his sugar daddy. They probably had a screaming catfight or something. You know how emotional these fairies are.”

  Benchley shrugged. “Whether he was Mayflower’s boyfriend or not, we don’t know this Neeley fellow.”

  Church straightened in his chair, apparently eager to move on. “Very well. Next, then ... Dorothy Parker.”

  He leveled his eyes at her. She looked up a
t the ceiling.

  “Mrs. Parker,” Church said. “Where is Mr. Parker?”

  Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. “He fell down a coal chute. Two or three years ago. Haven’t seen him since.”

  “Mrs. Parker?”

  She continued looking up.

  “Mrs. Parker.”

  Finally, she lowered her eyes and met the captain’s gaze.

  “Tell me again,” she said. “Are you absolutely sure that the Sandman is dead?”

  Captain Church sat back in his chair. He spoke resignedly, “Would you like to go to the morgue and see for yourself?”

  “Yes!” she said brightly. “Oh, yes, let’s go.”

  Chapter 21

  Detective O’Rannigan sat behind the wheel of a large black Buick sedan. Captain Church sat next to him in the passenger seat. Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley sat on the wide bench seat in the back.

  The car was noisy, drafty and cold. Outside in the dark night, the black rain pelted the metal car roof and leaked through the tops of the windows. O’Rannigan’s lead-foot driving was exasperating—he hit the gas too hard, then hit the brakes even harder.

  They hurtled their way to the city morgue, located deep in the basement of Bellevue Hospital. The hospital, Dorothy knew, was at the easternmost side of Manhattan, where Twenty-sixth Street met the East River—a desolate and mournful place even in daytime, much less in the dead of night.

  The pale face of an illuminated clock in the tower of a church momentarily shone through the gloom. It was just after three in the morning. Soon, she thought, they would be in the depths of the cold morgue to view the corpse of a killer.

  She continued to gaze out at the dark city passing swiftly by, and she reached for Benchley’s hand. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. They did not look at each other.

  “Well, isn’t this a jolly Sunday drive?” she said cheerfully. “Did anyone think to bring a picnic basket for lunch?”

  Church turned around to face them. She quickly let go of Benchley’s hand.