Murder Your Darlings (2 page)

“I want to be a writer.” He clutched a handful of dog-eared pages. “I was hoping you might take a look at what I’ve written and give me your honest thoughts.”

She looked at him squarely. Her voice, as always, was just above a whisper. “My honest thoughts would curl the wallpaper, sweetie.” But she accepted the papers he handed to her. “What’s your name?”

“Billy—William Faulkner.”

“Billy Faulkner, you came all the way up from Mississippi to hand this to me?”

“Well, not exactly.” He continued to shift from foot to foot. “You see, I’ve been working in New York a few weeks. I’m a great admirer of your poetry, and I read about you in the newspapers—”

She interrupted. “When in doubt, tell a lie, my boy. Save the truth for your writing.”

“Well, then, yes.” He smiled halfheartedly, still fidgeting. “I came up from Mississippi just to show this to you.”

“That’s better.” She sensed instinctively that he was a kindred spirit. And she usually followed her instincts—much to her despair. “Now, why are you quaking like a snake before Saint Patrick? Are you nervous to speak to me, or do you just have to go to the lavatory?”

“Both, ma’am. I’ve been waiting here for quite some time—”

“The men’s room is down that way. Come back and join us for lunch, won’t you? The conversation is lively—though the company today quite literally pales in comparison,” she said, thinking of the lifeless body under the table.

“I’d be honored. Thank you.” He gently shook her hand and headed to the men’s room.

She continued across the lobby to her old friend, who was now preoccupied with a pack of matches.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Benchley,” she said.

Robert Benchley looked up and smiled as he lit his pipe, the corners of his merry eyes creasing.

“Mrs. Parker. How are you today?”

“Just dreadful,” she said cheerfully. “And you?”

“Couldn’t be worse, Mrs. Parker,” he said brightly. “Ready for lunch?”

“Not quite.” She’d tell him about the dead man—at just the right moment to make his jaw drop. Instead, she said, “I found another stray dog.”

“Oh, Dottie, not again.”

“The poor thing was lingering right by the door,” she said. “He tiptoed up to me as if he knew me. I saw immediately that he needed someone to protect him, to shelter him from the storm.”

“Storm?” he cried. “It’s a lovely spring day. The birds are shining. The sun is chirping.”

She sighed. “The forlorn in New York face a storm every day, Fred.”

“Let’s save the drama for the theater. And stop calling me Fred.” He exhaled a puff of smoke. “Is the poor thing even housebroken? You never clean up after these wretched mongrels.”

“Is he housebroken? Why, he’s in the men’s room right now.”

Benchley tilted back his hat and scratched his head. He had an expressive oval face that usually framed a wide smile. But now his mouth and brow were knotted as tightly as his bow tie.

“Ah,” she said. “Here he comes now.”

Benchley turned to see not a mangy stray dog, as he had expected, but a skinny, bearded young man in a baggy suit.

“That’s your stray dog?” Benchley said.

“Mr. Robert Benchley, meet Mr. Billy Faulkner. He’s a writer, too.”

The young man lowered his chin in modesty. But there was an eager glint in his drooping eyes.

“That’s my hope.” He held out a slim hand. “That’s why I came to New York, to meet famous writers like yourself and Mrs. Parker. Very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Someone misdirected you,” Benchley said, shaking Faulkner’s hand obligingly. “Most writers in New York don’t do much writing. They spend their time talking and drinking bootleg liquor. That’s what we do, at any rate.”

Faulkner hesitated. “I presume you’re pulling my leg.”

“I never joke about such serious things as writing or—”

“Or liquor?” Faulkner said.

Benchley grimaced. “You’ll find yourself in jail for stealing a man’s punch line like that.”

A rising clamor on the other side of the room caught their attention.

“What’s the hullabaloo?” Benchley said, peering at a small throng that had now gathered at the partition dividing the dining room from the lobby. A bellhop was busy attaching a makeshift curtain—apparently a bedsheet—between the partition and the wall, closing off the view to the dining room.

“Nothing much,” Dorothy said. “Just a dead man under the Round Table. Perhaps he passed out, and then he passed on.”

“Passed—
what?
” Benchley was more perplexed than aghast.

“A dead man,” she repeated, “under the Round Table.”

“Dead? You mean dead drunk or—”

“Just dead. Stabbed, apparently.”

Benchley considered this. “What a peculiar way to check out of a hotel,” he said. “Did you see the body?”

She nodded.

“So whose body is it—or rather whose was it?” he asked.

She bit her lip. After seeing the dead man, she had quickly turned tail and run away. She hadn’t even looked at his face.

Across the lobby, two men at the edge of the gathering noticed Dorothy and Benchley and made their way over. The two men couldn’t have been more different.

Alexander Woollcott was short, plump and imperious, with a round, pale face like a snowman’s. Behind owllike glasses were hard, glinting eyes like little lumps of coal. Despite his girth, Woollcott had the quick, nervous movements of a bumblebee.

The other man, Robert Sherwood, was startlingly tall—more than six and a half feet—and uncommonly thin. His straw boater sat askew on his narrow head as if it hung carelessly on a hat rack. Just above his upper lip perched a fuzzy black caterpillar of a mustache. Sherwood moved like a giraffe, with a methodical, stiff, cantilevered grace, as he crossed the lobby. The pompous, pudgy Woollcott reluctantly followed.

Benchley said into Faulkner’s ear, “Do you recognize those gentlemen?”

Faulkner’s nod was like a genuflection.

Benchley smiled warmly and put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “The walking telegraph pole is Robert Sherwood. He works with Mrs. Parker and me at
Vanity Fair
magazine. Why, I’ve known Mr. Sherwood since he was just this tall.” Benchley raised his hand as high as he could reach. “The overstuffed sausage next to him is—”

“Alexander Woollcott,” Faulkner mumbled. “The drama critic for the
New York Times
. I’ve read a ponderous amount about him.”

“Ponderous indeed,” Benchley said. “Then you should know he doesn’t pronounce his name
wool-cot
, but
wool-coat
. He’s very particular about it.”

“Now, now, Mr. Benchley,” Dorothy said. “Don’t poison impressionable young minds.”

“No, I’ll leave that to you,” he said.

Woollcott snorted as he greeted them. “It’s not their minds that she’s interested in.”

“Put the daggers away,” said Sherwood, towering over them. He looked amiably toward Faulkner. “Did a new cowboy mosey into town?”

Dorothy began to speak, but Woollcott snapped, “Introduce your snot-nose yokel some other time. Right now, a very serious matter is much more pressing.”

“And what’s so dire?” she said, casting a silencing glance at Benchley and Faulkner. “Are they not serving rice pudding today?”

“They’re not serving lunch whatsoever,” Woollcott said. His nasal voice was high and rising. “The dining room is closed off. The police have been summoned.”

“No meal for Aleck,” Benchley cried. “Muster the police! Police the mustard!”

“Apparently it is a matter for the police,” Sherwood said in an even slower, graver tone than usual. “I overheard the waiters chattering. Something very bad has happened.”

Woollcott dabbed a silk handkerchief at his glistening forehead. “Of course it had to happen today of all days. Today, when I invited Leland Mayflower to join us.”

Dorothy had a sickening feeling all of a sudden.

“Leland Mayflower, the drama critic for the
Knickerbocker News
?” she said, genuinely alarmed. “Why in the world would you invite him to lunch with us? He’s your fiercest competitor. You two hate each other.”

Woollcott’s beetlelike eyes became slits. “Because he sent me word that he had some extraordinary news he wanted to share in person. Probably some little unnoteworthy achievement of his that he wants to brag about. By allowing him to lunch with us, I had hoped I could parade the shriveled old crow in front of you all and finally demonstrate what a scheming, backbiting fraud he is.”

“Sounds like it would have been a jolly good time,” Benchley said drily. His glance to Dorothy conveyed that he also had a suspicion. “Perhaps you can intercept him on the street.”

“Excellent idea,” Woollcott said, oblivious to Benchley’s sarcasm. He floated off like a hot-air balloon.

Sherwood watched him go, then turned to his friends. “Truth be told, I’m no fan of Leland Mayflower either. I wouldn’t mind seeing him get his comeuppance.”

Dorothy put a hand on Sherwood’s elbow. “You have every right to begrudge old Mayflower, of course. He didn’t give your play a review. He gave it an obituary. He was a malevolent old shit.”

“Was?”
Sherwood said.

“Never mind Leland Mayflower,” Benchley said hurriedly. “You haven’t met our new friend, here.”

“This is Billy Faulkner,” Dorothy said, ushering him forward. “He’s a hopeful young writer from the South.”

“Hopeful, eh?” Sherwood said. “Don’t pin your hopes on a writing career, my son. It’s not too late to consider more lucrative and honorable employment, maybe as a tax collector or a gigolo.”

“Those didn’t really pan out,” Faulkner said.

Sherwood’s laugh was deep and resonant.

“I’ve decided to take him under my wing,” Dorothy said.

“Watch out, Billy,” Benchley said. “She’s no mother hen. Cuckoo bird maybe.”

Sherwood said, “Birds of a feather flock together.”

“Go flock yourself,” she said. Then she saw a knot of men arrive. “Now what fresh hell is this?”

Three policemen entered the hotel. The first man was a heavyset detective in a snug brown suit and a brown derby hat two sizes too small. Two officers in navy blue, brass-buttoned uniforms followed him. They quickly crossed the mosaic-tiled floor and were met at the front desk by the manager of the hotel, Frank Case.

The solicitous Mr. Case had sensitive, apologetic eyes and a bald head like the dome of a cathedral. Dorothy, Benchley and Sherwood knew him well. They watched him, his hands clasped, talk tactfully with the policemen. Then they watched Mr. Case lead the men through the crowd, between the curtains and into the now well-lit dining room.

A few moments later, Frank Case and the policemen reappeared. One of the white-aproned waiters, Luigi, joined them. From across the lobby, Luigi looked right at Faulkner and pointed him out to the other men. The policemen moved forward. Frank Case and Luigi followed.

Dorothy didn’t like the belligerent look in the detective’s dull gray eyes.

“You,” the detective barked at Faulkner. “What’s your name?”

Faulkner trembled. “William—”

“Dachshund,” Dorothy said.

“William
Dachshund
?” the detective said, shouldering his way past Benchley and Sherwood. “A German, are you? I’m not surprised.”

Dorothy said, “And you are?”

She noticed that the heavyset detective seemed to have no eyebrows. It gave the man an appearance of constant alarm. His small, almost clownlike derby hat seemed about to tumble at any moment from his big head.

He looked down at her as if just noticing her. “Detective O’Rannigan.”

“Orangutan?” Benchley muttered. “A monkey, are you?”

“What was that?” he spat.

Benchley merely smiled innocently.

Sherwood addressed the hotel manager. “What’s this all about, Frank?”

Now Woollcott reappeared, still agitated. “Yes, what the devil is this all about?”

It took a lot to disrupt the sangfroid of a hotelier such as Frank Case. He attempted his usual calm demeanor, but not entirely convincingly.

“Oh, it’s nothing much,” Case said, rocking back on his heels. “A little matter of a dead man in the dining room. Your waiter, Luigi, found him under your celebrated Round Table.”

Benchley, as if reading Dorothy’s mind, said, “You think it was something he ate, Frank?”

Case frowned at him.

“Not a chance,” O’Rannigan said in all seriousness. “It was murder. He was stabbed.”

“Stabbed?” Woollcott said. “In the middle of the Algonquin dining room?”

“Stabbed through the heart,” the detective said.

“Just a minute,” Sherwood said. “Was this someone from our circle?”

Frank Case shook his head.

“That ain’t the half of it. He was stabbed,” O’Rannigan grumbled emphatically, “with a fountain pen.”

Benchley looked to Dorothy. “Mightier than the sword, indeed.”

She replied, “He took his writing a little too close to heart.”

“Shut up, wiseacres,” the detective said. Then he jerked a thumb at Luigi. “Here’s the good part. The waiter here says he saw your Mr. Dachshund loitering suspiciously in the lobby late this morning.”

Luigi hunched his shoulders innocently. Dorothy patted his arm as if to say not to worry.

“You can’t blame the wop for squealing,” the detective said, then turned to Faulkner. “As for you, Dachshund, don’t move from that spot. We need to have a little talk with you.”

Chapter 2

The detective and uniformed officers moved away, with Case and the waiter following. As soon as they were out of earshot, Dorothy grabbed Faulkner’s sleeve.

“Let’s get him out of here,” she said to Benchley.

“Okay,” Benchley said. “Why?”

“We have to hide him,” she said, “so he’ll be safe.”

“Well,” Benchley said, “there’s the matinee of Ziegfeld’s
Hotsy-Totsy Hootenanny!
, which is playing to an empty house. You can bet no one will see him there.”