Manhattan Mayhem

SERIAL BENEFACTOR by Jon L. Breen

To start with, I’m a centenarian, Sebastian Grady by name, and still fully marbled. My current address is Plantain Point, a retirement home on the California coast with a lot of residents from the entertainment world. To give you an idea, the president of our association is called the Top Banana, though most of the vaudevillians have died off.

As you can imagine, I’ve seen many younger generations come of age, and the current lot don’t seem too anxious to make the transition to adulthood. Don’t ask me if I blame them.

Evan is my favorite great-granddaughter. I never expected to be so fond of a girl with a guy’s name, but in this century of yours-mine was the last one-I guess one size fits all. I hadn’t seen her since she was an infant when she turned up one day to interview me for a school genealogy assignment, I being the oldest relative available. But once the paper was done and graded, she kept coming back. She seems to enjoy my company.

She’s a mature sixteen by current standards. In some ways, she’s typical of her generation, including being constantly connected to every portable communication device that comes along, but she’s a smart girl, rarely says “like” except as a verb expressing approval or a preposition with a discernible object. She has an active social life, some of it with live people, does sports, gets good grades, loves puzzles, and likes a challenge. Her mind is always on the move. I’d unhesitatingly back her in a timed Sudoku contest.

On one recent visit, we were sitting on my eighth-floor deck looking out at the Pacific Ocean. Family news and current events exhausted, I said casually (but with an ulterior motive), “I’ve got a puzzle for you, honey.”

“Great. What is it?”

“There’s a list of sentences I want you to look up for me, tell me what they mean, where they came from, what they have in common, if anything. You can go on the Internet for this, look ’em up on Giggle or Garble or whatever it’s called. Shouldn’t take you long.”

She gave me that big, braced-teeth grin that always melted my heart. She knew I wasn’t quite as ignorant as I pretended to be. She’d taught me to use the Internet when she was eight years old; I have my own computer, and Plantain Point has Wi-Fi. “Does this have anything to do with one of your investigations?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Gramps, I know you’re an amateur detective.”

“No such thing, except in books.”

“Don’t forget I’ve read all your memoirs.”

Just the published ones, and there were some unpublished ones I hoped she’d never see. Maybe when she was older.

“Okay, you got me. There is a mystery connected to this list, and I’ll tell you all about it when you’ve identified the items.”

I passed it over, neatly printed in my still steady hand:

Massachusetts is a long way from New York.

She’ll start upon a marathon.

You don’t even know a hazard from a green.

You can’t stop the weather, not with all your dough!

She got herself a husband but he wasn’t hers.

That ain’t the highest spot.

“Any of that ring a bell?” I asked.

“Nope, not at all. So what’s my deadline?”

“Try to get it done while I’m still alive.”

“Gramps, you’re full of it.”

“Get it done, and I’ll tell you the wildest story you ever heard, and every word of it true.”

“I’ll be back with the answers tomorrow,” she promised, and I knew she would. In the meantime, I let my mind drift back to the only century where I really felt at home anymore.

Now that I’ve passed a hundred myself, my old buddy Danny Crenshaw doesn’t seem quite so amazing as he used to. He only made it to ninety-four. But the last time I saw him, 1978 it was, same year he died, he seemed as happy and busy as ever.

I first met Danny in the late 1920s. He was among the Broadway headliners lured west by the advent of talking pictures. A little guy with tons of nervous energy, he always played younger than his age and never seemed to change much as the years went by. Multitalented as Danny was-actor, singer, dancer, songwriter-they never seemed to know how to use him in pictures, and he was homesick for New York.

“Seb,” he said to me one day in the studio commissary, “you heard the latest about the Empire State Building? They’re going to have a mooring mast for dirigibles. They’ll be able to load and unload passengers 1,250 feet above the street.”

“Sounds like a goofy idea to me. What about the wind?”

“They’ve got all that figured out.”

“Okay,” I said. Of course, it didn’t work in the end, but smarter guys than me thought it could.

“Seb, I gotta get back to Broadway. I want to perform for people I can see and hear, not just a bunch of studio technicians. And I want to see that building.”

By the time King Kong took Fay Wray to the top of Al Smith’s folly only to be shot down by airplanes, Danny was back in Gotham City to stay. Over the next years, I’d pay him a visit whenever my work took me to the Big Apple, see him onstage when he was working and at home when he was resting. I was usually there on Classic Pictures business, that being my main employer in those days, and those times I was on my own, not nursing some pampered actor, I’d stay at a not-quite-deluxe hostelry the studio had a special deal with. It was within walking distance of the much classier Hotel McAlpin at the corner of Broadway and West Thirty-Fourth Street, where Danny lived for decades as a permanent resident. His upper-floor quarters were luxurious enough to suit his success, but he’d picked the place for its view of the Empire State Building, just up the street.

It was sunny in Manhattan one day in early 1946 when I walked from my hotel to the McAlpin. Passing through the heart of the Garment District, I dodged those huge clothing racks pushed along the sidewalks by New Yorkers in a hurry. Like the taxicabs, they somehow negotiated the chaos to get where they were going without mishaps.

The McAlpin had been the biggest hotel in the world when it was built in 1912. Impressive as the three-story lobby was, decorated in Italian Renaissance style, filled with marble and murals depicting women as jewelry, the most dazzling sight was the basement Marine Grill, where Danny, between shows at the moment, had invited me to a late lunch-as a celebrity resident, he had an in with the management. The food was undoubtedly fine, but all I can remember of the menu was the oysters-Danny loved oysters, another thing he missed on the West Coast. The whole room, with its curving ceilings, was decorated in colored terra-cotta, and I’ll never forget the spectacular murals showing the history of the New York harbor. I was especially impressed by the depiction of a four-funnel ocean liner.

“Has that been here since they opened?” I asked.

“Sure, I think so,” Danny said.

“Is that ship by any chance the Titanic? I mean, what an irony. Titanic, 1912.”

“I think they actually opened in ’13, had a sort of preview party for VIPs at the end of ’12. And relax. That’s the Mauretania.”

As we ate, Danny told me about the military plane lost in the fog that had crashed into his beloved Empire State Building the year before. He also rhapsodized about the show he would open in later in the year, produced by Belasco.

“David Belasco?”

“No, Elmer. David’s dead. You’ll meet him later. Elmer, I mean.”

When we got upstairs to Danny’s apartment, it was late afternoon. He said he’d invited a few friends to drop in and meet the visitor from Tinseltown, and he was sure his wife would want to say hello. She’d be back any minute. The number of Danny Crenshaw’s wives (four or five, I think) was not unheard of in show business. More unusual, to the end of his life he still seemed to like all his exes, and as far as I knew, they felt the same about him.

This one’s name was Mildred, and, looking back, I think he may have loved her the most, though she drove him the craziest. Like all Danny’s wives, she was lovely, and like most, she was taller than he was. Her bright, carrot-colored hair was her most striking feature, but her mild manner contradicted any redhead stereotype. She entered the apartment that afternoon loaded down with shopping and not expecting to find company, but I guess knowing Danny she was always ready for it. She was stylishly dressed and coifed in the fashion of the times: a brimmed hat with flowers at the front and a bow at the back, shoulder pads, gloves, clutch purse, nipped-in waist on a form-fitting skirt to just below the knee, ankle-strap shoes with wide heels. She greeted me cordially, and the gathering grew from there.

The first drop-in guest was a tall and wispy fellow with a little mustache. From the casual intimacy with which Danny and Mildred both welcomed him, I had the impression he was a frequent visitor. “Seb, meet Jerry Cordova,” Danny said. “My old partner in the Lunchtime Follies.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It was a spin-off of the Stage Door Canteen. We’d go out and entertain the workers during their lunch hours at defense plants and shipyards.”

“I got paid a pittance,” Jerry said, “but Danny did it strictly for the war effort.”

“What a sucker, huh?” Danny said with a wink.

“Headliners worked for free,” Jerry explained. “I’m not a headliner.”

“One of these days, you’ll be another Gershwin!”

Next to arrive was Rosey Patterson, a theatrical agent and an old pal of mine-in our respective roles as herders of actors, we’d been indirectly involved in an early-1930s murder case right there in Manhattan. He wasn’t quite as compactly built as Danny, but he was just as hyper, always on the move. I remember thinking it might be a strain on the nerves to be around both of them at the same time. Rosey embraced me in the best show business fashion and said he wanted to tell me about a great detective story he’d just read. But there were two tall men filling the doorway right behind him, and I don’t think he ever got the chance.

The older one, who had the muscular frame of a body builder, gripped my hand before waiting to be introduced and said, “So you’re Seb, Danny’s Hollywood connection. I’m Elmer Belasco.” He gestured to the younger man. “This is my worthless son, Arthur.”

“Not totally worthless,” Arthur said. “I’m a new father. Baby girl. Fresh out of cigars, though.”

“You fellows related to David Belasco?” I asked.

“When it suits us,” Arthur said. “Back in the twenties, when dad worked for Flo Ziegfeld, he figured the name helped him.”

“Didn’t help at all,” Elmer said. “The opposite, if anything.”

“More likely he reminded Ziegfeld of Sandow the strongman,” Rosey said.

Apparently, these spontaneous gatherings were a regular thing to Mildred. She knew we’d be drinking and gossiping and catching up and drinking-how we drank back then-and that what began in the late afternoon would likely extend into the evening.

It was Jerry Cordova who made it a party. He resembled his late hero George Gershwin in one respect. If he entered a room with a piano-and Danny Crenshaw wouldn’t be without one-he would be asked to play, and if he wasn’t asked, he’d do it anyway, singing along in a reedy voice something like Cole Porter’s. Shortly after he got there, he sat down at the keyboard unbidden, as if this were why he was invited, and maybe it was.

Arthur Belasco was just twenty-two. He was starting to make inroads as an actor on Broadway, though his father constantly grumbled that he had no talent. Father and son were always sniping at each other, with insults that sounded pointed but presumably weren’t to be taken seriously.

“I had to find some way to get into the family business,” Arthur said. “The old man here insisted. Medical school was a dead end, he said.”

“He could do less harm on the stage than in the operating room,” Elmer retorted. It sounded like a practiced routine, and everybody took it as harmless kidding. Except for Mildred, who had a pained look on her face every time father or son launched a zinger.

In later years, remembering Mildred, Danny would say, “She was the kindest, sweetest person God ever put on earth. Imagine a dame with no sense of humor putting up with a joker like me for as long as she did. Mildred was a bleeding heart, full of empathy, but she couldn’t see nuances.”

That day in 1946, I witnessed an example. Jerry Cordova had launched into “Who Cares?” from Of Thee I Sing, written by the Gershwin brothers deep in the Depression. Mildred listened with apparent appreciation and joined the applause when he was finished.

“That was great, Jerry,” she said, “but I’ve always hated that song.”

“Oh, dear, I’ve offended my hostess,” he said.

“No, don’t be silly. It’s a nice tune, but I hate the lyrics. They’re nasty, uncaring, mean spirited.”

“How so, Mildred?” Rosey Patterson inquired.

“You’ll be sorry you asked,” Danny said.

Mildred said, “It’s that line that goes ‘Who cares if banks fail in Yonkers?’ Well, a lot of banks failed in the Depression. We had to go to war to get out of it. When I hear that, I think about all the people I knew and those I didn’t know who had money in those failing banks, who maybe lost everything. How could you not care that banks failed in Yonkers or anywhere else?”

“I’ve tried to explain this,” Danny said with a mock long-suffering expression. “Baby, the people in that song are trying to get through difficult times, like we all were back then. They depend on the power of their love to see them through. Whatever happened, they could handle it because they were in love. That’s the point. It’s called a love song, see? It’s got nothing to do with people who lost money in banks that failed.”

“Well, it’s just not right to be so cavalier about it, that’s all,” she said. “Play something else, Jerry.”

“Give me a minute while I run through all the lyrics in my head,” the pianist said.

Everybody laughed. Mildred didn’t-she seldom did-but she was a good enough hostess not to throw a wet blanket on the evening, even providing an improvised meal from a nearby deli when it became apparent nobody was going anywhere till well after nightfall.

I’m sure we covered a lot of subjects that night. Did we touch on peacetime transition, the bomb, our relationship with the Soviet Union, prospects for the returning veteran, President Truman’s job performance, the Yankees and the Giants and the Dodgers? Maybe. But these were Broadway folks, so mostly we talked about Broadway. Could Tennessee Williams duplicate his great success with The Glass Menagerie? Opinions were mixed, but most thought he couldn’t. How did Maurice Evans’s current production of Hamlet stack up against his predecessors’? Rosey Patterson swore nobody ever topped Barrymore, but Danny made a case for Gielgud as the dean of Danes, and Mildred mentioned Leslie Howard. Who was the greatest composer of Broadway musicals? Jerry loyally argued for Gershwin, others countered with Jerome Kern or Richard Rodgers, and Elmer Belasco shocked everybody by insisting it was Kurt Weill. Was Adele Astaire really a greater talent than Fred? Danny said so with a straight face, and a lot of old-timers agreed with him, but when he claimed Gummo was the funniest Marx Brother, I doubted he was serious.

One topic was inevitable for theater people that particular day. I was surprised we’d been there for two or three cocktails before anybody mentioned it.

“So, I guess you all heard about Claude Anselm,” Rosey said.

Heads all nodded.

“What happened exactly?” Arthur Belasco said. “I mean, was he murdered?”

“Papers say he was mugged,” Rosey said. “Back alley thing late at night. He’d been to see some avant-garde artist who was staying with all the other bohemians at the Chelsea Hotel down in the Village.”

“Anton LeMaster,” Danny supplied. “Anselm wanted to get him to design a set for his next production, thought his surrealistic style would fit the creative concept.”

“More important,” Rosey said, “he’d work cheap.”

“Yeah, old Claude would have made a lot of promises, appealed to the vain artist’s ego and the starving artist’s wallet. I think somebody had warned LeMaster what a bastard Anselm was, and he’d turned him down. Not two blocks from the Chelsea, somebody clubbed Claude to death.”

“The poor man,” Mildred said. “I know what he did to people, but even so.”

“Nobody here’s going to mourn that guy,” Jerry Cordova said, picking out the melody of “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” but sparing us his Louis Armstrong imitation.

“Most hated man on Broadway,” Danny said.

“In the running, anyway,” Rosey said. “Who cheats my client cheats me. And he didn’t just cheat actors. He cheated backers, playwrights, theater managers-and always got away with it. Wanted to add a scenic designer to his trophy case, I guess.”

“I used to see Anselm on the golf course,” Elmer Belasco said. “Never played a round with him, thank God.”

“Too good?” Arthur kidded. “Dad can hit the ball a mile, but you should see the yardage he gets on his putts.”

“Hey, why don’t you go learn your lines or something and not smart off at your elders?”

“What do you mean? I’ve memorized the whole play.”

“It’s true,” Elmer told us. “Kid has a photographic memory. He could do Hamlet for you right here if he’d ever learned how to act. Anselm was as bad a golfer as the kid is an actor. Couldn’t play worth a damn, but for some reason he kept at it. I think he looked for opponents who were even worse than he was. Or were motivated to pretend they were.”

“Too bad some anonymous mugger got him,” Danny mused. “Lot of people on Broadway wish they could have done the job.”

“I can just see the full obits in the papers tomorrow,” Rosey said. “ ‘Broadway’s lights grew a little dimmer with the shocking death of a beloved man of the theater.’ And they’ll be able to get plenty of quotes from mourners who are secretly cheering.”

Elmer nodded. “Scoundrels die, but deals live on.”

Rosey had a mischievous gleam in his eye. “Here’s an idea. Let’s say I was the person who bumped off Anselm, revenge on behalf of my clients and all the bastard’s other victims. I wasn’t seen, covered my tracks, managed to make it look like a routine mugging.”

“Congratulations,” Jerry said, playing a snatch of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

“Yeah, great, but I think I’d feel something was lacking.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Rosey loved to have a straight man to feed him cues.

“It wouldn’t be enough that the guy was dead. I’d want to claim credit.”

“And get yourself fried in that nice comfy electric chair they got up at Sing Sing?” Danny asked.

“No, I’d do it indirectly and anonymously. It wouldn’t be necessary to put my own name on it, but I’d want the world to know he was executed on behalf of Broadway and all the people whose careers and lives he stomped on.”

“And once you did that fine gesture, would you be able to stop at just one?” Arthur Belasco asked.

“Yeah,” Danny chimed in. “I can suggest some other vermin in our fine theatrical profession that are just as deserving.”

I hadn’t contributed much, not being a Broadway insider like these folks, but now I decided to go along with the gag. “Rosey, it’s an attractive idea, but you have to think this through. The mistake those clever murderers in books make is getting too cute for their own good. Gilding the lily. Giving the supersleuth a way to get at them in the last chapter. Why provide a deliberate clue that could be traced back to you?”

Rosey shrugged. “Anonymous letters to the cops or the press maybe. I’d give myself a name. The Stage Door Avenger?”

“Naw, the newspapers would do it for you, and they’d come up with something better than that,” Danny said.

“Jack the Ripper named himself,” I pointed out.

“Let’s get to the important stuff, Rosey,” Danny said. “Who’d you pick as your next victim?”

Mildred had been silent through all of this. Now she raised her hands as if in surrender. “Fellows, I just hate this kind of talk. Can we change the subject, or can you play something else for us, Jerry?”

Jerry launched into a medley from Show Boat, and that was that.

The next day, a cryptic message in all capital letters appeared in the personals columns of all the evening papers, and there were a slew of them in New York at that time: “YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW A HAZARD FROM A GREEN.” At the time, nobody knew what it meant or had any reason to connect it to the death of Claude Anselm. By the time anybody made the connection, three more Broadway scumbags had died.

As I knew she would, Evan turned up the next day with the answers. When I kidded her about visiting two days in a row, said they’d have to put her on the payroll with the nurses and maids and social directors and therapy dogs, she rolled her eyes impatiently.

“I did them in the order you listed them. Is the order significant?”

“Not really, but go ahead and do ’em that way.”

“Okay. ‘Massachusetts is a long way from New York.’ That one threw me for a while. I kept getting bogged down with driving distances between cities in Massachusetts and New York, but then I remembered an obvious trick to using a search engine. To get the exact words, you put the whole phrase in quotation marks. Then it was easy. It’s a line from a song called ‘Lizzie Borden’ written by Michael Brown. Wasn’t Lizzie Borden a famous murderer, Gramps?”

“Many people think so, if murderers can be famous.”

“At that point, I thought the other lines might have to do with murderers, too, but they didn’t. Pretty soon I knew what they had in common. They’re all from songs in old Broadway shows. I took down some more relevant information about each one, not knowing what was important and what wasn’t, and I made a little chart for you.” She handed me a sheet of paper.

“Great work, Evan, very thorough. What did you think of the songs?”

She made a face. “I just read the lyrics for most of them. In that Gallagher and Shean thing, one of them doesn’t know what the game of golf is called and is ridiculed for it by his partner, but his partner thinks it’s called lawn tennis. Did people think that was funny in those days, Gramps?”

I shrugged. “I guess you had to be there.”

“Now,” she said, “when are you going to tell me about the Broadway Executioner?”

“How do you know anything about that?” I really was surprised, but she quickly reminded me why I shouldn’t have been.

“Did you think I could Google all those song lyrics and not find out they were clues in a serial murder case? References kept turning up in the results lists.”

“Then I suppose you must know all the rest of the details, too.”

“No, I wanted to get the list back to you today, and I figured you could tell me more about the murders than the Internet could.”

“A rare compliment. Well, here goes.” I began with a description of that spontaneous party in Danny Crenshaw’s apartment. Then I gave her a brief account of the deaths that followed.

“The second victim was Monique Floret. I never saw her, but I’m told she was a beautiful woman and a lousy actress. Sometimes affected a French accent, they tell me, but she came from New Jersey; don’t remember what her real name was. She was notorious for breaking up Broadway marriages.”

“Some hobby,” Evan said, “but how long could you keep it up?”

“In Monique’s case, she had quite a run. One night she’d gone dancing at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. That was a great place, Evan, class all the way, home of the lindy hop and the jitterbug. For a long time, it was the one truly integrated nightspot in Harlem. The Cotton Club catered to white audiences but didn’t welcome black faces except onstage. The Savoy welcomed everybody. They had continuous music, two bandstands and two big bands, one playing while the other one was on break. Back in the 1930s, there was a famous Battle of the Bands between Chick Webb’s orchestra and Benny Goodwin’s, a black band versus a white band for a mixed audience that loved the music and didn’t care who was playing, as long as they were good.”

“So, this Monique was murdered there?” Evan asked, cutting to the chase, as usual.

“No, it was later that same night. Plenty of witnesses saw her there dancing, but they couldn’t say if she’d been accompanied when she left or had been alone, which wasn’t likely in her case. Her death was written off as a suicide, jumping in front of a subway train. But that same day, before her death even happened, the personals columns carried the message: ‘SHE GOT HERSELF A HUSBAND, BUT HE WASN’T HERS.’ People who noticed it probably thought it was part of some creative but subtle advertising campaign. Nobody figured murder, least of all the police.”

“And who was the third one?” Evan prompted.

“Xavier Esterhazy was a fashionable director who was notorious for his casting couch, exploiting young hopefuls. Of both genders, actually. Sort of the mirror image of Monique Floret. He had made plenty of enemies, and not just for his sexual sins. He was found frozen to death in a snowdrift after the big post-Christmas blizzard of 1947. In his case, the message in the papers the day he was found was ‘YOU CAN’T STOP THE WEATHER, NOT WITH ALL YOUR DOUGH.’ ”

“That was a long time between victims.”

“Yes, and the next one didn’t come along until summer 1949. Ned Spurlock was a sleazy producer who’d had a couple of mild hits but made most of his money by overselling shares in shows and pocketing the difference when they flopped.”

“Can you do that?”

“You can, but again, how long can you get away with it? He was under investigation by the district attorney’s office at the time he was shot to death. His body was found abandoned in one of those clothing racks I used to dodge when I walked through the Garment District. It was clearly murder this time, but the weapon was never found, and the case remained unsolved. The message in the personals the day it happened: ‘SHE’LL START UPON A MARATHON.’ ”

Evan said, “On the others I can see the connections. A terrible golfer, a husband thief, the weather quote for a person left in a snowdrift. But what was the point of this one? Did it have something to do with the New York Marathon? My friend Gwen has run in three L.A. Marathons and wants to run in that one, but her mom doesn’t want her to go. Was the place they found his body somewhere on the marathon route maybe?”

“Nope. New York Marathon didn’t start ’til 1970. But one of Nat Spurlock’s lucrative flops was a musical that closed out of town called Boston Marathon.”

“Weren’t the police suspicious by this time?”

“If they were, they never admitted they had a serial killer on their hands. Some true-crime writer made the connection around 1950, published a book about it, and came up with the Broadway Executioner tag. He got half the details wrong. It was a crummy book, what we’d call in Hollywood an exploitation job, but the name stuck, and the case still turns up in books about unsolved murders.”

“Wait a minute, Gramps. We have two quotations left. What about them?”

“I’ll get to that. First, I have to tell you about another visit to Danny Crenshaw.”

Every time I visited Danny at the Hotel McAlpin after that, we’d talk about the case. We had one of our most interesting postmortems one day in late 1951, around the time the Broadway Executioner took a curtain call. Danny was still busy, doing a lot of television now. He groused that live TV combined the worst features of legit and pictures, but he seemed to thrive on it nonetheless.

“Seb,” he said, “you remember that little get-together we had here around the time of the first murder?”

His I-don’t-know-what-number wife peered into the living room. This one was named Suzy, blonde, cute, ’50s fashionable, and funny as hell, or at least Danny thought she was. “Hey, can I join you guys? I love murder talk.”

“Sure, honey,” he said. “But this is serious.”

“I can be serious,” she promised.

“I’ve got a little theory about those murders,” Danny said. “You remember who was there, Seb?”

“Sure, I think so.”

“You in touch with any of them?”

“No. Rosey Patterson’s the only one I knew well, and I haven’t seen him in years.”

“Rosey used to drive me nuts,” Danny said. “All that excess energy got on my nerves.”

I smiled. Danny had the same effect on people.

“Anyway, they’re all still around. Rosey doesn’t run around like he used to, but he’s held on to some big-money clients. Elmer Belasco’s pretty much retired but still in good health, as far as I know. His son Arthur finally took his dad’s advice and gave up acting. Got into behind-the-scenes work. Last I heard, he has a job on some show in preparation, satirical revue with young unknown talent. Jerry Cordova works for a record label, and I still see him around once in a while, at parties, doing his Gershwin number. As for Mildred-”

“Poor Mildred,” Suzy sighed. “How she ever put up with you, I can’t imagine.”

“You know her?” I asked.

“Sure,” Suzy said. “We have lunch once in a while to compare notes. Sometimes we think all Danny’s ex-wives ought to get together, expand our horizons. How many are we now, Danny?”

“You’re no ex-wife, baby. Never will be.”

“So, what’s Mildred doing?” I asked.

“Good works,” Danny said. “Her new husband could buy and sell me a hundred times over. Anyway, let me get to the point. We’d talked about Anselm’s death, and somebody mentioned what a lousy golfer he was. Then the next day that first message hit the personal ad columns. Then three more murders, three more messages. All the times after the first, the message ran much closer to the crime, not two days later. Sometimes the messages had to have been placed before the murder even happened. So what does that mean, Seb?”

I had a hunch what he was getting at, but I wanted to hear it from him. “I don’t know. What’s it mean?”

“The Broadway Executioner murders were hatched in this apartment, that’s what. I don’t know who killed Anselm. Maybe a personal enemy, maybe a random mugger. But somebody at that party got the idea for a series of do-gooder murders of theatrical villains. They put that ad in the papers, whether they’d done the original killing or not, and then they continued on the same path and had a lot of crazy fun doing it. Somebody in this room that day took that idea and ran with it. Maybe Jerry. Maybe Elmer. Maybe Arthur. Maybe Rosey.” He smiled now. “Maybe me. Maybe you. Maybe Mildred.”

“No, not Mildred,” Suzy said. “She’d have killed you next.”

“Yeah, probably.” Danny was obviously obsessed with the case. He’d even checked out alibis for his roomful of suspects-how he managed to do that, I’m not sure. Unfortunately for his theory, none of them could have done all the murders, according to his charts. Elmer and Rosey were both out of the country at the time of the Floret killing. It was hard to see how Mildred could have physically managed the Esterhazy job, and I couldn’t see her in the serial killer role anyway. Arthur was in London when Esterhazy died. Jerry was working in Florida when Spurlock got his. As for me, I was in Hollywood the whole time. Danny didn’t mention his own alibis. For a minute I wondered if he was going to confess. He didn’t.

Danny was taking his detective work very seriously, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t even sure the Broadway Executioner existed, though how some opportunist could have entered those pointedly appropriate ads in the personal columns before the fact, short of psychic powers, stumped me.

That same day, maybe while we were kicking around theories, the Executioner was up in Cape Cod taking his fifth victim, Justin Gentry, an aging matinee idol best known for getting supporting players, stage hands, directors, dressers, and anybody who annoyed him fired. He’d even tried to dismiss the playwright on one production. Died in a boating accident, but what about that newspaper personal item that said “MASSACHUSETTS IS A LONG WAY FROM NEW YORK”?

“So,” I said to Evan, “that finished out the career of the Broadway Executioner, at least as far as I know.”

“But that isn’t all. What about the last one, about the highest spot? Who got killed to that melody?”

“As far as I know, nobody.”

“Then why was it on the list?”

“Because there’s a little more to the story.”

Danny had retired from the stage, but he was still doing occasional TV, on videotape now, when he died in 1978, right around the time they were turning his beloved Hotel McAlpin into an apartment building. At least he wasn’t around to see the Marine Grill torn up and replaced by a Gap store a dozen years later. In one of our last conversations, Danny noted that Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’s The Producers could have been inspired by Ned Spurlock, though much more amusing and less villainous. Danny never lived to see the stage musical with Nathan Lane, but he loved the movie with Zero Mostel.

Life went on, and for years I didn’t think much about the Broadway Executioner. Lots was happening. My eighties may have been busier than my seventies. It was only a couple years ago, a happy centenarian living out my days at Plantain Point, that I thought about the mutual interest Danny and I had in those killings, and I considered taking a crack at solving them, just as an intellectual exercise, of course. And so I did, after a fashion.

I’d put together certain clues and got a very rickety theory that sounded good to me, but it might not convince anybody else-and certainly wouldn’t fly in a court of law. Besides, all my suspects from that long-ago New York cocktail party were dead. Weren’t they? Well, not quite. Arthur Belasco, Elmer’s son, had put together quite a career as a Broadway producer-an honest one, I should add-in the last quarter of my century. He was still working and still vigorous, as why shouldn’t a young man barely in his eighties be, and he’d come to California on a book tour, promoting his newly published memoirs. Plantain Point has a lot of showbiz residents, and I suggested to our energetic young program director, always looking for diversions for her geriatric charges, that she call Arthur’s people and arrange for him to drop in during his California visit, give a little talk maybe, sell and sign some books. Once he was in town, I called his hotel and invited him to pay me a little visit while he was here.

Some people change less than others with the years, and I could see in Arthur’s wrinkled face the brash twenty-two-year-old I’d met back in 1946. He remembered me, too, though we hadn’t seen each other since. He glanced around at all the entertainment memorabilia in my living room and said it brought back memories. I wanted to bring back one particular memory over a glass of Remy Martin XO.

When he noted a signed photo of Danny Crenshaw in my rogues’ gallery, I said casually, “I guess you remember that get-together at Danny’s place, back in 1946?”

“Vividly. Hotel McAlpin. It’s now called the Herald Towers. They tore out those incredible murals in the basement restaurant. I think they’re in a subway station now. Can’t argue with progress, can we?”

“We can, but progress won’t listen. Did you put anything in your memoirs about that day?”

“No, there was nowhere to go with it, so it wound up on the cutting room floor, as you Hollywood types might put it. We did write it up, though. My daughter Eleanor helped with the book, and that day was so imprinted on my memory that I was able to reconstruct it pretty much word for word onto a tape recorder. Didn’t miss a thing.”

“As I remember, Eleanor was just a baby at the time. But she joined the family business, too, didn’t she?”

“In a big way. She’s a better actor than her old man, as my father constantly reminded me. Does plenty of TV, plays, pictures.”

“But about that day in Danny’s apartment. I know you have a great memory, but I doubt if you can remember every conversation you’ve had and every social event you’ve been at since World War II.”

“No, but that one was unforgettable. Especially a little colloquy between Danny and his wife and Jerry Cordova about an old Gershwin song. Eleanor really enjoyed that part.”

“Any chance you or she could send me a transcript of your notes on that party? I might have a use for it.”

“Sure. Be happy to. Why the special interest, Seb?”

“I think that was when you and your dad hatched the Broadway Executioner murders.”

Arthur Belasco’s eyes widened, then narrowed. He looked around for a moment like a hunted animal. Then he intoned, his voice dripping with menace, “Seb, I don’t know what you think you know or how you know it. But if you hope to still be breathing when I leave, we need to come to an understanding.” His hand had moved to a bulge in his jacket pocket.

“You can’t get away with it,” I said. “You’re not going to shoot me in my own apartment.”

“There are other ways,” he said, a gleam of madness in his eyes. “I’m an expert at that, aren’t I?”

I’d kept a straight face as long as I could. I laughed at him. “Your dad was right. You are a lousy actor.”

Then he laughed, too, and pulled out a pipe. “I had you for a second, though, didn’t I?”

“Maybe for a second,” I agreed.

“Well, for a second, you had me, too. I heard about Danny’s crazy theory, you know, and maybe there’s something to it. But the old man and me as the murderers? Very far-fetched, and I’m glad you don’t really think that.”

“Oh, but I do,” I said. “Arthur, you and I both know the chances of getting anybody charged with a series of crimes the police don’t even admit were crimes after all these years is zero, and there’s nothing to prove my theory in a court of law. We also know that no matter what I say, you have nothing to fear from me and have no reason to pull out your roscoe and ka-chow it at me this pleasant afternoon. But I’d be happy if, just between us, you could admit what happened and tell me how you brought it off.”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” he said, still taking it as a joke. “First, tell me what your evidence is.”

“Okay, here goes. First, look at the songs. Two of the ones that carried clues were in productions of the Ziegfeld Follies, and we know your father worked for Ziegfeld in that period.”

“Uh-huh. So what?”

“How about this? Most of the songs, except for the Irving Berlin, were from lesser Broadway composers. No Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Kern. Instead Shean, Blitzstein, and Brown. But one song was by Kurt Weill, and he was your father’s choice as greatest Broadway composer.”

“Philo Vance and Charlie Chan would have thrown that one back.”

“Okay, but look at the alibis. Elmer couldn’t have committed all of the murders. You couldn’t have committed all of the murders. But between the both of you, you could have done them all. You and Elmer joked about his wanting you to join the family business. Could it be that he asked you in on this project as well?”

“Oh, if he’d been a serial killer, he probably would have. Great family man, my father. You got anything else?”

“The clue on Ned Spurlock referred to somebody running a marathon. The connection wasn’t as immediately obvious as some of the others. But Ned Spurlock and Elmer Belasco both worked on a flop musical called Boston Marathon.”

“I remember that one. It died in Boston, where else?”

“Maybe Elmer had been one of Ned’s victims.”

“Well, he hated him enough. Still, that’s pretty thin.”

“Oh, it’ll stay pretty thin, but I did save the best clue for last. The line about Massachusetts and New York came from a show called New Faces of 1952, which didn’t open till May of that year. In late 1951, when the murder of Justin Gentry occurred, you were working on a satirical musical revue that would introduce young talent. Sounds like New Faces to me.”

“It was. I’m proud to have worked on that show. Incredible cast. Paul Lynde, Eartha Kitt, Carol Lawrence, Alice Ghostley, Mel Brooks. But what was your point?”

“Just this. Before it opened, when it was still in preparation, how many people would have known the lyrics to that Lizzie Borden song? Somebody involved with the production would. Whoever put that line in the personal columns to foretell Spurlock’s murder had to have been involved with the show before it opened.”

“That one’s a little better, Seb, I have to admit. But you’re still talking through your hat. How do you know how long that song was in gestation before the show opened and who else might have heard the lyrics? The author might have been singing that at Broadway cocktail parties for a year. Jerry Cordova might have been playing it, for all we know.”

“Okay, it’s speculation, but I don’t expect to satisfy anybody else. I just want to satisfy my own curiosity. So, why don’t you just admit to me that you did it? You and your father.”

Arthur shook his head. “Sorry to disappoint you, Seb. Your theory is clever. Rosey Patterson would have loved it. But my dad and I weren’t murderers.” After a moment’s silence, he grinned slyly. “We could have done it, though, and if we had, it wouldn’t have been a crime. It would have been a public service. Remember that book O. J. Simpson did?”

“Where he said he didn’t do it, but this is how he’d have done it if he did it?”

“That’s it. Just for fun, I’ll use my imagination and do an O. J. number for you on the Broadway Executioner murders.”

“Starting with Claude Anselm.”

“Oh, that one would have been Dad’s alone. Assuming, that is, that it was really part of the series at all, and not just an anonymous mugging, like everybody thought. Dad hated Anselm’s guts. He’d worked with him, knew how he operated. He could have stalked the guy and killed him and left the scene knowing he’d never be suspected. But let’s say I found out about it. Maybe I saw him just after the killing, spotted something that tipped me off. Maybe he was disposing of the weapon. A bloody golf club would be appropriate. So, I’d get him to tell me the truth, and he’d make me agree to stonewall it. Certainly, I’d have had no problem with the morality of the thing. Then Rosey’s brainstorming on it might have inspired us. Dad had done it once. Why couldn’t he do it again, especially with me helping him? Put that line about Anselm’s lousy golf game in the personals the next day. It was no great trick to place a classified ad anonymously in those days. Then after that, we’d make it harder on ourselves, give ourselves a challenge. Sort of predict the murder to the papers before we actually committed it. Maybe I had this desire to show my dad I really was a good actor, that I could put on a fright wig and do a righteous killing and cover my tracks. Hey, this makes such a good story, I almost wish it really had happened this way. So, let’s see, what was the next one?”

“Monique Floret.”

“Ah, yes, that bitch. That woulda been mine alone. I would have altered my appearance so I wouldn’t be recognized, easy for an actor. ‘Even a crappy one,’ I hear my dad saying. Blackface maybe? No, I wouldn’t risk that in Harlem. But add a moustache, comb my hair a different way, dab on a little gray to make me look older. I’d have gone to the Savoy, danced with her to the alternating bands-”

“How’d you know she’d be at the Savoy?”

“Made a date by phone to meet her there, used a phony name, dropped a few famous ones she’d know to make me look like an insider, pretended I could help her career or something, said my wife didn’t understand me. Monique couldn’t resist that stuff. She’d tried to frame my dad one time. Didn’t know that, did you? It would’ve killed my mother, but he got out of it before it boiled over. Then I’d have left the Savoy with her, walked the streets looking for my opportunity, pushed her in front of a train in the subway station.”

“It wouldn’t be crowded enough at that time of night. It sounds risky.”

“Having embarked on this plan, you think we were worried about risky? Anyway, I’d have had a chance later if the platform wasn’t nearly empty. I had to do it that night, you know. The message was already in all the papers, and you don’t pay to advertise a show and then cancel it.”

“How about Esterhazy?”

“That would have been Dad’s. I wasn’t even in town at that time. Esterhazy loved cloak-and-dagger stuff. If Dad had called him and arranged to meet him somewhere secretly, in some cheap and anonymous hotel room, he’d come even in a blizzard, wouldn’t tell anybody about it. I’d learned something about drug actions during my short stint in medical school, and that would come in handy faking a natural death. Telling Dad how to do it could have been my contribution. Dad would have drugged him, carried him out by a back exit, and buried him in the snow before he could wake up. Cause of death: freezing.”

“Quite a job for a man of his age.”

“Seb, you remember how strong my father was, and Esterhazy was the size of a jockey. He could have done it.”

“What about Spurlock?”

“Hmm, yeah, that was a tricky one, wasn’t it? Shot to death, weapon never recovered, cops had to know it was murder. How the hell would we have done that one?”

“You mean you’re stumped?”

“No, no, give me a minute. This is fun, isn’t it? We’d have got together on Spurlock, too. Once again, Dad was in a position to arrange a meeting surreptitiously, maybe in a hotel near the Garment District.”

“The McAlpin, maybe?”

“That’d be an appropriate gesture, I admit, but probably more of a down-market place, not so conspicuous. So, let’s see. I acquired a garment rack and filled it up with long overcoats so the body could be concealed there later. I stationed it in a secluded spot among the trash cans behind the hotel. Meanwhile, Dad was in charge of shooting Spurlock, getting him down a back stairway unseen, and helping me hide the body. We might have tried to hang the guy up in one of the overcoats, but that probably wouldn’t work. Whoever pushed the rack to the spot where it was found would have noticed its unusual weight, so he had to be the murderer or his accomplice. Those racks are so commonplace on the streets in that area, any single one is about as noticeable as Chesterton’s postman. I’d have done the pushing, looked for a spot to disappear quickly, then abandoned the rack, leaving the cops to find the body and wonder. Dad could have disposed of the gun any number of ways.”

“That leaves Gentry.”

Now Arthur gave me a broad satirical smile. “You’ll need a séance to answer that one. I was nowhere near the scene, so my dad must have handled it by himself. Let me just say he was an experienced sailor and very able, despite his advanced years. He could have found a way. So there you have it. That’s how we might have done it-if we’d done it.”

“But you didn’t do it.”

“Heck, no.”

“Now, still speaking hypothetically, if you’d done all this, so successfully, with nobody suspecting, why would you have stopped?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe we planned more that never came off. I’ll bet there were some we wanted to do but couldn’t find a way to do them safely.”

“Safely for yourselves?”

“For innocent bystanders. We were never safe. That was part of the thrill. We might have wanted to do another in tribute to Danny, whose party was responsible for our whole crime wave. What better way than to send some deserving scoundrel off the top of the Empire State Building to be squashed on the street below? Hard to bring off, though, and we couldn’t have the victim take out some poor pedestrian. That would make us murderers rather than public benefactors, wouldn’t it? But if we’d been able to do the Empire State Building job, we’d have had a great line for the newspaper ads, from On the Town. It’s where the sailor on twenty-four-hour shore leave reads in his old guidebook that he should visit the Woolworth Tower for the best view of the city, and the lady cab driver points out to him, ‘That ain’t the highest spot.’ ”

“If all this had happened, do you think anybody might have found you out?”

“Not the cops or some true-crime writer, that’s for sure.”

“Somebody closer. Your daughter Eleanor. She’s a Broadway person, too.”

“She’s gone from ingénues to leading ladies to mother parts to old crones, and she’s seen all the theatrical mendacity we did. Good word, mendacity, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It wouldn’t have shocked her, and she wouldn’t have given us away. If any of this had happened, you understand. Let me have another glass of that brandy, will you, Seb?”

We parted on friendly terms that day. Had Arthur indirectly confessed to the Broadway Executioner murders, or was this just a game two old codgers had been playing to while away the time? Arthur has since died, too-and he’d seemed so healthy and vigorous that day he came to Plantain Point. So no one at that gathering of Danny’s survives, except me.

If all it amounted to was another way to bond with my favorite great-granddaughter, that was okay with me. Evan developed an interest in the music of long before her birth, started listening to original cast albums on whatever her current listening device was, branched out into big bands, swing music, jazz. That was what I’d really been hoping for when I sent her after those old songs.

Then one morning I read in one of the dwindling print newspapers the obituary of a Wall Street investment banker, Edgerton Makepeace, who had blood all over his hands during the financial crisis but was never prosecuted for anything, of course. Not quite in the Bernie Madoff class, but close. He’d backed some Broadway shows, but, more to the point, some Broadway people had lost a ton of money with him. He’d died by drowning in the East River during a visit to the South Street Seaport, a sort of nineteenth-century nautical theme park with a fleet of historic ships. It crossed my mind that the Executioner might be back at it, next generation this time, the little daughter and memoir collaborator, Eleanor Belasco, maybe with an accomplice of her own. I soon dismissed the idea.

But that very day, Evan showed up for one of her regular visits in a state of high excitement.

“Gramps,” she said, “it’s gone viral; it’s being tweeted and retweeted in record numbers-”

“Try speaking English,” I said.

“It’s all over the Internet, and nobody knows where it came from.”

“What is?”

“WHO CARES IF BANKS FAIL IN YONKERS?”

JON L. BREEN is the author of eight novels, two of them shortlisted for Dagger Awards, and over one hundred short stories. His most recent book is The Threat of Nostalgia and Other Stories. A long-time reviewer and columnist for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Mystery Scene, he has won two Edgar Awards for his critical writings. A resident of Southern California, he nevertheless loves New York.