Show Business Is Murder (3 page)

THE BASEBALL MOVIE
was corny, although Birch had liked Betty Garrett, the lady with the husky voice who chased after Frank Sinatra the same way she'd chased after Enid the summer before. It made her blush to think of how young she'd been then, what a fool she'd made of herself. Frank Sinatra looked so different, young and skinny and kind of innocent and sweet, not like he was today, all tough-guy.

In the intermission she waved at Mendy, who raised his espresso to her. It was too crowded to get to him so she mouthed “Ratner's” at him several times. He gave a vigorous nod and she turned away, satisfied.

She hoped it would be okay with the others that she invited him, and then decided, hell, she was as much a part of the group as they were and she could invite whoever she wanted. And besides, they liked hearing his stories, so what was the harm?

THE OLD MAN
stood out the first time I noticed him. Not that being old called my attention to him; many old people loved Theatre 80 for taking them back to a time they'd been young and in love.

But that was what set him apart: He didn't look happy to be there. He looked grumpy, as if his wife had dragged
him to see a musical and he'd grumbled all the way, telling her he couldn't understand what she saw in a lightweight like Gene Kelly, not a real man like John Wayne or Kirk Douglas.

I had the whole dialogue worked out in my head. I knew this guy; he was my father, a man who never admitted enjoying anything if he could help it.

Funny part was, no wife ever showed up to sit next to him.

When the twenty-minute ballet that closed
American in Paris
ended, there was silence for a solid minute, and then the theater erupted in loud, sustained applause.

All except for the man in the last row. He sat stolid, his face a mask of indifference.

So why had he paid three-fifty for a seat? If he only wanted to warm up, the subway was seventy-five cents.

Then I noticed something else. His eyes were fixed, not on the screen, but on a man who sat three rows in front of him.

Mendy. The man's attention was wholly occupied in watching Mendy, who clapped with apparent enjoyment, oblivious to the fact that he was being stared at so persistently.

The curtain's close had us racing for the lobby, hoping to beat the crowd. The boys were already there, putting on leather jackets and wrapping scarves around necks in preparation for the cold October evening. Patrick was gesticulating, showing Stanley something he'd noticed in Gene's dancing. Unusually clumsy in his exuberance, Patrick bumped into the man who had stared, and received an unusually harsh epithet in return.

“Pardon
me,
Mary,” he said with an archness I would have advised against.

The old man glared and replied, “You stupid fool. You made me—” He broke off, and I realized with a shock what
he'd been about to say: “You made me lose the man I was following.”

It was true. Mendy, easily visible earlier in his wine-colored beret, had disappeared. I'd had my eye on him, hoping he'd come out with us again for coffee, but he was gone. Had he slipped out to avoid the man who was following him?

And why would anyone follow him?

Roberta
TUES-FRI
11
AM,
3:30
PM,
8
PM

“Smoke gets in your eyes” when Fred and Irene Dunne run a dress shop in Paris. Ginger's “hard to handle,” but oh, so much fun to watch.

Funny Face
1:15
PM,
6:15
PM,
10:15
PM

Yes, Fred's too old for her, but Audrey Hepburn makes us believe. The real gem is the elegantly butch Kay Thompson and the Gershwin score.

WHAT WAS IT
about musicals that grabbed me so in those days?

The boys—well, the boys loved the fashions, the campy lines, the red lipstick, even though neither was a cross-dresser. They loved the romance, too, and so did I in spite of myself. I might identify more with Fred the wooer than with Ginger the wooed, but still, the act of wooing, of loving so completely at first dance, had me in its thrall. I was, after all, a child of the fifties, of Loretta Young and her swirling skirt.

I'd always pictured my ideal lover wearing that skirt, a
little Kim Novak evening sweater over her creamy shoulders, hair piled into an elegant French twist.

Instead, I had Birch, whose knees had barely healed from childhood skinnings, whose frayed bell-bottoms picked up the dirt of Manhattan streets, whose sad eyes reminded me that she'd lost everything dear to her when she came out: home and father, friends and family, everything she'd ever known. It was up to me to fill all her empty places, to show her a new life beyond the village of Woodstock, to buy her egg creams at Gem Spa and introduce her to Twyla Tharp's dance company.

There were times I wondered if I'd taken on too much.

BIRCH HAD MISSED
Mendy at Ratner's the time before. With Stanley along, Patrick and Scotty had really done a number, remembering old movies Birch had never heard of, talking about favorite scenes, quoting lines, arguing about which studios had the best stock companies. Birch had gazed out the window into the crisp fall night, watching people walk past Kamenstein's hardware store across the street, wondering what the hell she was doing here with these people.

She didn't belong with Scotty and never would. She was only staying with her because she had no place else to go, nobody else to turn to. Scotty didn't love her and never would. She was only being nice to a waif from the country.

The mood passed as soon as they left the dairy restaurant; Scotty took her hand as they walked home along Bleecker Street, past the welfare hotels and jazz joints, and Birch felt okay again.

But still, she was pleased to see that tonight Mendy was
in his accustomed seat in the fourth row right, two rows down from where she and Scotty sat.

THE SONG I
love from
Roberta
is “Yesterdays.” It's a wonderful Jerome Kern ballad, filled with a very Russian sense of longing for the past, and it's sung by Irene Dunne just as her mentor, played by Helen Westleigh, lies on a couch dying one of those picturesque Hollywood movie deaths.

And perhaps Mendy died while that number played on the screen. I don't know. All I do know is that when the curtain closed and Birch and I went over to him, he was no longer alive.

I'd shaken his shoulder after saying his name brought no response. He was slumped as if in sleep, but too still, too eerily silent, for death's younger brother.

“He must have had a heart attack,” Patrick said, no trace of campy playfulness in his reedy voice.

We hung around the corridor, oddly reluctant to leave, yet having no real reason to be there. Sure, we'd known Mendy, shared food and stories of Hollywood, but we weren't really friends. Still, leaving wasn't an option any of us considered, at least not out loud.

The police arrived after the ambulance. I waited to be questioned, wondering whether I should tell them about the mystery man who'd followed Mendy.

But what did it matter who was following him if Mendy died of a heart attack?

The words “bitter almonds” caught my ear, reminding me of English murder mysteries set in enormous country houses. What did bitter almonds smell like, anyway, and how were they different from ordinary almonds? For a wild second, I wanted to ask the nearest cop if I could go
in and sniff Mendy's breath so I'd know for good and all.

I restrained myself. This wasn't a Dame Agatha story; it was the real death of a real man I'd known and liked.

Correction: it was the real
murder
of a man I'd known and liked.

Because Mendy wasn't a suicide. This I knew. He'd been wholly alive, not a thought of death in his head. He'd reveled in the discovery that there were people like us out there, people who wanted to hear his stories and relive his Hollywood glory days. People to whom the blacklist was an outrage and he a hero for enduring it.

Next question: How did you get cyanide—because that was the poison that smelled like bitter almonds—into someone's coffee? Had Mendy put his cup down somewhere, just long enough for the killer to slip in the poison? Was it liquid or solid? Mrs. Christie's
Sparkling Cyanide
made it sound liquid, which would be easier to administer—but wouldn't it make the coffee taste bad?

The biggest question of all was
why.
Why was someone following Mendy? Why would anyone want him dead?

I went over to one of the cops and told him what I'd seen. The response I got was less than satisfactory.

How did I know it was Mendy he was following? How did I know he was following anybody at all? Couldn't he have just been annoyed that Patrick bumped into him?

It wasn't just that the police weren't listening, I realized after a few minutes. They weren't listening because of who we were. One cop kept looking at Patrick as if viewing a giant cockroach, and his partner asked me several times just how old Birch was. I had a sudden realization that in the eyes of the law, I was taking advantage of a minor.

I wound up the conversation quickly, leaving the theater dejected because of Mendy's passing, but also frustrated that the police were going to call it suicide.

But what could I do about it?

GOING TO RATNER's
was like holding a wake for Mendy. At least, that was how Birch Tate saw it. They were eating Jewish food and talking about the old man and how much they'd liked him and how his death wasn't suicide, and that was as close to a memorial as they were ever going to get.

Scotty and Patrick were deep in discussion about how somebody could have slipped poison into Mendy's coffee when the guy at the counter took out a little pillbox and popped a tiny white pill into his coffee and then stirred. Funny way to take a pill, Birch thought and then realized: saccharin. People put saccharin in coffee when they wanted to lose weight or if they were diabetics or—

“That's it,” she said, so loudly that even the man at the counter turned around. “Because you would,” she added, turning to Scotty.

“Would what?”

“Take a saccharin tablet if somebody offered it to you. Just like you'd take a joint. You wouldn't say, no thanks, and take out your own because that would be rude. Mendy was a diabetic, remember?” Now Birch had Scotty's attention, and Patrick's too. “He put saccharin in his coffee the night we talked to him.”

“That is sheer brilliance,” Patrick said, and Birch blushed.

“That means the killer was in the theater,” Scotty pointed out. “Mendy always had espresso from the coffee bar.”

“Yeah, somebody walked up to him, opened his little pillbox first and offered him one and he said, sure, thanks, and didn't think twice.”

“Which means one more thing,” Patrick said, his blue eyes alight. “The killer was somebody Mendy trusted. Or, no, maybe not trusted exactly, but not somebody he didn't trust. Does that make sense?”

“I think so, Watson,” Scotty replied thoughtfully, her chin resting on steepled fingers.

“Why do I have to be Watson?” Patrick said, polishing off the last of his potato pierogies with onions. “What makes you think I'm not Holmes?”

“What makes you think
I'm
not Holmes?” Birch cut in, surprising herself at her own boldness. “I thought of the saccharin thing.”

“If you're Holmes, then explain what Patrick just said.”

“It's like the dog in the night-time,” Birch began.

“My God, you're a Sherlockian!” Scotty reached over and took Birch's powdered-sugary hand, lifted it to her lips and kissed it.

“If you mean, have I read the Canon, then I guess I am,” Birch replied, deliberately (and for the first time) using the term she'd read in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
.

“It's love, folks,” Patrick said with a wide smile. “Birch, honey, Scotty here has been looking for you all her life. A girl who gets Sherlock. When's the wedding?”

The warm feeling coursing through Birch like heated maple syrup wasn't a bit dimmed by the dirty looks she received from two old ladies at the next table. Who cared what anybody thought about her and Scotty being together? Who cared whether or not some guy named Gershwin was writing songs of love for two girls—what mattered was the love itself. And this, thanks to Sherlock Holmes, she had.

“Right now, I think I'd rather come up with Mendy's killer,” Scotty said, releasing Birch's hand. “And I suspect we've all hit the same mental obstacle. If the killer is someone from Mendy's blacklist days out to avenge an old wrong, why would Mendy take a saccharin tablet from him?”

“Exactly.” Birch leaned back in the booth with a satisfied expression on her face. “Just like the dog not barking. If
Mendy didn't recognize the guy who gave him the poison, it couldn't have been an old enemy.”