Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 6. Whole No. 511, December 1985

1944 Diary by Jean Darling[5]

The thought that she should have a word with Beth Downey crossed Sadie’s mind several times that particular week in August 1949, but The Brownstone on West Forty-sixth Street was overrun with painters and the fifth-floor plumbing went berserk at the same time the air-conditioning in the basement practice rooms decided to pack it in. These, combined with the normal everyday problems inherent in running a boarding house that catered to thirty aspiring stars of Broadway and points west, kept Sadie Gold on the hop. When at last she was blessed with a free moment to take the girl to one side, it was too late. Elizabeth Downey was dead. Somehow she had managed to lose her footing in the subway and fallen into the path of an oncoming train.

It being rush hour at Times Square, everyone on the platform had been blinded by the homing instinct — no witnesses, no evidence of foul play. Reporters camped hopefully outside The Brownstone for a few days, then silently stole away.

Beth’s belongings were taken up to the top-floor storeroom. A pall hung over the boarding house until she was formally laid to rest, then the morning after the funeral the first name on the waiting list was transferred to the Residents Book and life returned to normal. For everyone except Elizabeth Downey’s roommate, Marilu Jennings — and Sadie Gold.

Sadie wished she could shake off the feeling that she had failed the young blonde soprano. Having noticed the girl was as jumpy as a cat in a thorn tree, she should have made time for her. One of her basic rules was to steer clear of involvement with her boarders’ problems, personal or otherwise, but this didn’t mean that her door was locked to any girl who might need a temporary shoulder to cry on. Beth had known this as well as anyone. Why hadn’t she come to her?

A soft knock sounded on Sadie’s door. The big woman glanced up from her book at the ormolu clock on the marble mantelpiece: it was almost 1:00 A.M. “Come in,” she said, not moving from the chaise longue Zeigfeld had given her when she left the Follies to marry. Isaac Gold.

Marilu Jennings poked her head in at the door. She was wearing a blue chenille robe. “I’m sorry, Sadie, I know it’s late—”

“It’s all right. Sit down.”

Marilu sat on a red-velvet chair by the chaise. “I don’t think it was an accident like they say,” she blurted out.

“It’s a kinder verdict than suicide,” said Sadie. “But what could have been so awful that she’d kill herself?”

“She didn’t. I’d bet my life on it.”

“How can you be so sure? Did she tell you why she was so miserable this past week?”

“No — she never confided in me, you know that.” It was true. The roommates hadn’t been the best of friends. Marilu had been jealous of Beth, who listed Bloomer Girl and Annie Get Your Gun among her credits. Beth had always been fortunate. She was hired for one singing chorus after another — then, when her fiancé Carter Harris opened a makeshift theater off Broadway, she was given star billing as the intermission vocalist.

“I thought you might know something,” Marilu said. “It’s true we weren’t close, but I admired her. I can’t let whoever was responsible get away with it.”

Sadie watched her with troubled eyes. “Good luck, dear girl. I’ll help if I can, but I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m not sure you should start.”

For half an hour Marilu watched the first act of East Lynne from the wings. The Irving Place loft Carter Harris had converted into the little goldmine called The Naughty Nineties was packed to the gunwales with an audience eager to pay ten dollars a head for the privilege of perching on the bare boards of a five-tier grandstand, where, dining on beer and sandwiches, they hissed the villain and cheered the hero soundly.

Between the first and second acts, she followed Carter around as he changed the scenery.

“Do you have any idea what was bothering Beth?” she asked him.

“Was something bothering her?” he said, his tiny features bunched around a wisp of a moustache. He was miles away, observing the look of the stage. He had always been an insensitive clod as far as Marilu was concerned.

During a two-hour break between modeling sessions, Marilu dropped by the Palace Theater Building to see Beth’s agent. Max Seneca. “How’s the next Margaret Sullavan?” the compact man greeted her from the ping-pong table that practically filled his office wall to wall. He noted the hatbox she was carrying. “Still modeling. Put down that badge of your profession and share my pastrami on rye.”

Marilu shook her head.

“Thanks anyway, Max. I just stopped by to ask you about Beth.” She asked and he talked, but he proved to be no more aware of Beth’s state of mind before her death than Carter Harris or Sadie Gold.

At dinner at The Brownstone the following evening, Marilu was brought up short by Natalie Norris. The dancer was sitting at their table for six, listening to Marilu natter on about Beth’s strangeness the last week of her life. “You’re getting to be such a pain about Beth Downey, Marilu. Why can’t you shut up? You’d think you were the only one upset by her death. She’s gone — leave her be!” All through the dining room, girls looked up from scripts, musical scores, and paperbacks, then back in embarrassment. Until that moment Marilu hadn’t realized how obsessed she had become.

Back in her room, she wondered if she should stop puzzling about Beth Downey’s death. The other girls in The Brownstone seemed to have forgotten her — including those now charging from floor to floor, borrowing each other’s clothes for the weekend. When you lived under Sadie Gold’s roof, your clothes could automatically become part of a clothes pool to be requisitioned for auditions, photographic sessions, or heavy dates.

Marilu’s door opened wide enough to admit a mudpack, topped by a scarf knotted Aunt Jemima style over a headful of wave clips and pincurls. “Can I borrow your red dress?” the apparition asked.

Marilu looked up from the copy of Dear Brutus she was trying to study. “Andrea beat you to it. I don’t have a thread left.”

After two more interruptions from prospective borrowers, Marilu got out of bed, hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the outside doorknob, and exchanged Dear Brutus for a paperback mystery — one of a half dozen on the shelf above her bed with Stanislavski and Shaw.

Across the room, an identical shelf, now a rat’s nest of soiled underwear, garter belts, and stockings belonging to the new girl (who was home in Connecticut for the weekend) had supported a neat row of books when Beth had been alive. The diaries! Marilu thought, remembering the hours Beth had spent writing in one or another of them in the two years they had shared the room. There had been an even dozen, bound in maroon leather with Diary imprinted in gold on the spine. They dated from 1938 to 1949.

Marilu scrambled into her robe and padded barefoot down to the front hall, where lettered mailboxes and a key rack were set in the wall behind the high teak desk near the front door. Lily Bird, onetime soubrette, lounged on a straight-backed chair, ready to give change for the two pay phones on the landing above and keep all unauthorized males from crossing authorized boundary lines.

“Is it all right if I take the storeroom key for a minute, Lily?” Marilu asked the now plump, grey-haired woman.

“Patsy Fisher has it. She’s up there now,” Lily told her. “Don’t forget to bring it back.”

On reaching the top floor, Marilu found the storeroom door wide open. The key was in the lock and the light was on, but Patsy Fisher was nowhere to be seen. Par for the course, Marilu thought. Patsy was a scatterbrained little blonde who never listened to a word anyone said except when a possible job was involved.

Although less than a week had passed since Beth’s three suitcases had been placed on top of Sadie’s old Follies trunk, they were already covered with a faint film of dust. Amazed by her own affrontery, Marilu was relieved to find the diaries in the very first case she opened.

With her bed pulled away from the wall to catch any vagrant breeze through the window, Marilu glanced through several of the diaries, noting that in each one the last section, though headed Notes and Addresses, had been used instead as a date book and monthly accounts were summed up on the two end pages.

Deciding that the sensible thing would be to read the entries made on the last few days of Beth’s life, Marilu reached first for the 1949 diary. Each page accommodated two days. A gold ribbon lay between the pages dated July 30 and 31 and August 1 and 2. Both pages were covered with Beth’s neat southpaw script in purple ink. The single entry read:

There was a space, then the writing continued:

That was all. The rest of the diary was blank except for the pages in the back.

Marilu’s first impulse was to show the diary to Sadie. She was halfway to the stairs before she realized there was nothing to show anyone. The fact that seeing a man with pale eyes had frightened Beth Downey was meaningless unless the circumstances in which she first had seen the pale-eyed man were known. Even then there might not be much to go on unless a name was mentioned. Marilu retraced her steps. She would have to go through the diaries until she found the man — if she did.

Reading back through the years, she found nothing about a man with pale eyes in the rest of 1949, in 1948, 1947, 1946, or 1945. By then it was almost two A.M. and she was sleepy and discouraged. She turned out the light and fell into a troubled sleep.

The first thing she saw in the morning was the unread diaries. She had no plans, but she needed to get out, take a walk along the semi-deserted Sunday streets, and have something to eat.

Less than an hour later, she was settled at a table on the balcony of the Fifth Avenue branch of Bickfords at Forty-second Street reading the 1944 diary over an order of scrambled eggs and sausages. In this one, Beth related her adventures while singing with USO camp shows in the States and overseas.

Reading her roommate’s innermost thoughts filled Marilu with regret that envy had kept her from seeing her as she really was — wide-eyed and enthusiastic. She had seen New York as Walter Winchell saw it, as “Bagdad on the Hudson” — unlike Marilu, who thought of it as a dog-eat-dog jungle. And Beth’s romanticism became even more evident when she chronicled her months in Italy, especially Naples.

Moving from the peaceful Caserta Vecchio to Bagnoli on the outskirts of the city, she had raced to the topmost balcony of a jam-packed San Carlo Opera House to hear Jascha Heifetz play. She had sung for soldiers while Vesuvius spewed molten lava high into the sky before falling back on the mountain and inching its way down to the valley below. She had heard Padre Pio say Mass in San Giovanni the same week she was photographed at the Army airfield in Foggia, painting Happy Birthday to Hitler on a fat silver-grey bomb. When the USO unit she had come with left to return to the States, Beth had stayed on in Italy, singing in hospitals.

And then Marilu found what she had been looking for — the reason why Beth had been so terrified of the pale-eyed man.

Running up the stairs to Sadie’s room, she knocked and Sadie said to come in. Marilu burst through the door. “Oh!” she was brought up short by the sight of a man wearing mirror-lensed glasses over by the window.

“Marilu,” Sadie said.

Carter Harris took off the glasses and put them in his shirt pocket.

Marilu looked away from him to Sadie. “I’d like to talk with you in private.”

“Look, Miss Jennings, no matter what you may think, I had nothing to do with Liz’s death. I loved her.” Harris’s voice held the ring of truth.

Marilu fumbled in her bag for Beth’s diary, found the place, and handed it to Sadie. She pointed to the first of a series of short entries. “It’s Beth’s diary for 1944.”

Sadie read from it aloud.

“ ‘After I saw Garfield, Foy, and the rest off on the plane I moved from the Parco to my new billet at the Terminus Hotel beside Garibaldi Railroad Station. It’s lit up night and day. Ruby, a First Lieutenant who eats at the hotel, has invited some of us with USO to a bath-and-cocoa party at his apartment on the other side of the city. As most of the heating, as well as the elevators, were sabotaged by the retreating Germans, a hot bath sounds delicious.’ ” Sadie looked up at Marilu. “I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

“Keep reading.”

Looking from Marilu to Carter and back to Marilu, Sadie shrugged and read on. “ ‘With eight of us there, clutching soap and towels, it looked like an all-night affair. Finally, at three A.M. I decided to leave. The pick-up time was only four hours away and I needed some sleep. With the clouds reflecting the station lights, it was easy enough to find the way. But when I was almost back to the hotel, the air-raid siren went off and the street was as bright as day. I started toward the nearest shelter, then I heard sounds that drew me to an archway near the comer of the street. And there in the shadows a bare-headed American soldier was systematically beating a fellow officer’s head to a pulp. The double silver bars gleaming on his shoulder told me he was a captain.

“ ‘I cried out and he turned his head in my direction, rose to his feet, and came toward me, gripping a blood-stained stone in his hand. He was slim and dark, not very tall. His eyes chilled me to the marrow. They were like two ovals of white marble centered with tiny specks of jet. I suppose they were a very pale blue or green but in the light from the flares they appeared to have no irises at all. I stood there pinned to the cement, then a hand grabbed my arm and I was pulled along the street to the air-raid shelter by a Scottish soldier.’ ”

Sadie turned a page. “ ‘The body was found in the doorway the next day, beaten beyond recognition. Identified by his dogtags, he was Marvin Kane.’ ”

“Marvin Kane, the actor?” Harris said. “I thought he was killed in an airplane accident.”

“What has this to do with Beth?” Sadie asked Marilu.

Marilu presented the 1949 diary. “Read that.” She’d marked the place.

When Sadie had read the passage aloud, Carter Harris poured himself a Scotch. “So what? This all happened so long ago. When Liz knew Martin Kane was the victim of the attack she’d witnessed, why didn’t she report it?”

“She was young and scared, I suppose. But there’s no use speculating.”

“Sadie, in the back of the 1949 diary are Beth’s appointments. She had two interviews the day she saw the man with the pale eyes. One was with Zane Gerson, who produces those awful South Sea girlie movies — he’s been casting for the past six months. The other one was with Stephen Browne.”

Max Seneca was holding court in Lindy’s, surrounded by a half dozen show girls he left reluctantly when Sadie beckoned. When he slid in the booth beside her, facing Marilu and Carter, and heard about their suspicions, he helped them prepare a plan of action.

Seneca booked a rehearsal hall at Nola Studios on West Fifty-seventh Street every Wednesday from 3:00 to 5:00 P.M. As both Zane Gerson and Stephen Browne were still casting, he would phone to invite them to auditions to be held on the upcoming Wednesday. In order to insure their attendance, he would promise them mention in a column or two — Leonard Lyons and Winchell for sure. Sadie would supply the pretty girls as well as act as accompanist. Carter, an ex-Marine, volunteered to provide muscle in case Marilu’s suspicions were correct and Max offered to borrow a blackjack to supplement the knuckledusters that lived in his jacket pocket.

At 2:50 on Wednesday, Sadie was at Nola Studios seated by the baby grand piano at one end of the 20 x 30’ rehearsal room. Midway toward the other end, a table with four chairs awaited the producers. Carter Harris lounged in the doorway, watching Max fidget. Seven Brownstone girls with nothing better to do that afternoon were scattered around the room, the dancers limbering up at the bar along the mirror wall, the singers, including the flighty Patsy Fisher, humming through their noses and making other noises peculiar to their breed. Marilu stood by the open window clutching Beth’s diary for 1944. As the wall clock approached three, Max once again reminded the girls that they were to leave directly after they had auditioned.

Stephen Browne, casual in seersucker, was followed out of the elevator by Zane Gerson, who wore a collar and tie beneath a navy mohair suit. Both men wore dark glasses, neither of the mirror-lensed variety, during the auditions that began as soon as they sat themselves at the viewing table.

While the singers sang and the dancers danced, Marilu watched the two men with growing doubt that either one could be the man mentioned in Beth’s diary. The chain-smoking Browne looked rumpled and inoffensive. Zane Gerson seemed too self-possessed to place himself in any situation that might require such an extreme measure as murder.

By four o’clock Patsy Fisher and all of the other girls had auditioned and were gone and it was Marilu’s turn. She was rattling with nerves and made two false starts before managing to arrive at the key in which Sadie was playing “Lili Marlene.”

After singing one scene-setting chorus, she began to read from Beth’s diary, beginning where the air-raid siren sounded. As she read, she moved slowly toward the men at the table until, as the pale-eyed Captain was mentioned, her skirt brushed the table edge. For a moment she looked up and, with lashes lowered, she asked, “Why did you kill Marvin Kane, Captain?”

In answer, Zane Gerson swiftly rounded the table and grabbed Marilu backward against himself. A single bound carried Carter from the door to the table. Max felt in his briefcase for the blackjack. “All of you stop where you are,” Gerson said quietly, allowing the revolver that was now pressing into Marilu’s ribs to underline the words. Suddenly the door burst open.

“Max, I’m sorry to bother you, but I forgot what you told us — oh!” Patsy Fisher inadvertently attracted Gerson’s attention away from Marilu long enough for Marilu to drive her heel into his instep. Startled by the pain, he loosened his grip and Carter brought him to the floor with a flying tackle. The gun, released, skittered toward the piano, where Sadie kicked it to Max, who snatched it up.

“Call the police!” Harris said.

As Max ran to a phone, Sadie came away from the piano. “And now, my dear Captain, I think we should have a look at those famous eyes of yours,” she said, and removing Gerson’s dark glasses. The jet-centered irises now revealed were so pale a blue that it was almost impossible to see where the whites of his eyes began.

In Sadie’s room later that night, after hours at the police station, Max, Carter, Marilu, and Sadie rehashed Gerson’s statement.

Both Marvin Kane and Gerson had been captains with Army Special Services when Kane had found out that Gerson was involved in the black market operating in North Africa. The actor threatened to blow the whistle on Gerson and Gerson had agreed to desist — and kept his word until Kane was transferred to Naples a month later. Then Gerson had hitched a ride to Naples on a courier flight, attended to Kane, and was back in Algiers before anyone had noticed he was gone.

The only problem remained the girl who had caught him in the act of dispatching Kane. When she didn’t come forward, Gerson began to forget her and feel reasonably safe. Then, five years later, she had walked into his office. They had talked for a quarter of an hour and he was sure she hadn’t recognized him, but when she returned for her gloves and saw him without his dark glasses, her sudden pallor was a dead giveaway. Because she had been seen coming in, Gerson let her leave, but there was no way he could trust that she would keep silent a second time. A meeting would have to be arranged without involving her agent.

She had mentioned living at Sadie Gold’s Brownstone. Two days later, Gerson had left a message there for her to be at the Empire Theater that afternoon for an audition for a new Vinton Freedley musical.

A few minutes after five, Beth, having found the theater doors locked, stood under the marquee wondering whether to leave. Gerson watched from a distance. Then, swept up in a rush of homeward-bound workers, she was no longer visible to him. He followed the crowd in the direction of Times Square and saw her again. It was difficult to keep her in sight. If the traffic lights hadn’t changed, momentarily clearing the sidewalk, he wouldn’t have seen her descend into the subway.

He raced down the stairs and found change for the turnstile. As she pushed through the crowd waiting for the next train, Beth had kept looking back with terror-filled eyes. A rumbling had sounded in the tunnel. Gerson had to hurry now if he was to reach her in time. But he never caught up with her. Beth had just kept on shoving and glancing back over her shoulder until there was no platform left and she stepped down into the path of the onrushing train.

“That’s his story,” said Max.

“Patsy Fisher probably saved our lives,” Marilu reflected.

“And Gerson’s.” Max was unhappy.

“Not if I can help it,” Sadie assured him. She smiled at Marilu. “Five years probably seems like a long time to you, Marilu, but it isn’t. The United States Army doesn’t forget its men and women and those who put themselves in danger to entertain them. Patsy didn’t save Zane Gerson. You and I and the Army will see to that.”