Final Curtain: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) (20 page)

He smiled warily, that broken smile that so charmed me. “Are you sure?” He did a little dance step. “I’ve been watching you act from the wings, and I’m loving it. You’re…good.”

“And you’re being kind.”

He bowed. “No, it’s a pleasure.”

“And Frank, I might add, has taken a shine to you, Dak. He’s very protective. And of Nadine, I gather. Perhaps he’s using
you
as a way to get to your mother. Perhaps not—just a thought.”

“That’s preposterous. He’s never mentioned her at all.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not planning something.”

He tapped on the back of a chair. “I like him.”

“He strikes me as a harmless man, but who knows?”

A sudden lightning flash in his eyes. “Miss Ferber, you don’t think Frank is the murderer, do you?”

“I don’t know who the murderer is.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

“Because I have no answer—yet.”

That thin, infectious smile, the mouth crinkly. “But you will.”

I thought about Ilona’s remarks—the
other
Hollywood. “Maybe Frank’s tempestuous sojourn in Hollywood, back when your mother was acting in the silents, is the genesis of murder in Maplewood.”

“That seems impossible.”

“Well, this is the summer of our discontent. The world is crumbling. Hitler walks under the Arc de Triomphe. The Battle of Britain begins. Gestapo troops march across farm fields. Bombs destroy cities. When the axis of the Earth shifts and all the players topple into Maplewood, then there’s havoc on the land.”

“You’re a cheerful lady, Miss Ferber.”

“Yes, everyone says that about me.”

***

I skipped lunch, stopped back at the inn where a message was waiting for me. I’d called Loretta Dawson, a part-time researcher I sometimes employed. Loretta, a down-to-earth buxom woman with an intelligent, adventurous mind, had the uncanny capacity to ferret out arcane facts and anecdotes worth their weight in gold. Yes, her message informed me, she was free to meet me that afternoon at the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street. “I’ll be in the reading room all afternoon. I’m intrigued by your request—but, Edna, all your requests intrigue me.” I checked my wristwatch. I’d be able to grab a sandwich and catch the 2:11 into Manhattan. Loretta, I knew, would have stacks of reading materials assembled on a table, notepad at the ready.

By the time I arrived at the reading room, Loretta was already sequestered at a library table in a back corner, pasty-looking under two green-shade lamps, piles of books at her elbow. She looked up and smiled. “Quite the assignment, Edna. And I thought you’d have a peaceful, though challenging, respite acting in Maplewood. This is a whole different world.” Loretta indicated the stacks of books, and smiled.

An efficient woman, thorough, her iron-gray hair pulled into a severe bun and her schoolmarm reading glasses tipped on the front of her nose, Loretta understood the dark recesses of any library—where exquisite treasures were hidden.

“What do you have for me?”

She started handing me bound volumes, slips of paper indicating pages. “Here.” She pointed to a copy of
Variety
. “You asked about Nadine Chappelle.”

While Loretta busied herself with other pursuits, I read the short article, a brief account of Nadine represented by the Caldwell Agency, scheduled to play the role of “sister” in
Rainy Summer
, a minor part, but pivotal, according to the notice. She’d taken courses in Los Angeles at the Leland Pouten School of Dramatic Arts, did some summer stock in Anaheim, and was signed to do a second movie titled
Chicago Moonlight
. Four or five lines of laudatory prose, with a picture of her. A promo squib, doubtless paid for by her agency. A studio shot, head tilted coyly, lips parted seductively.

Loretta looked over as I closed the volume. “And then she disappears from the trades. Another Hollywood almost-was. They never made
Chicago Moonlight
.”

Another volume, tiny pulp print, flaky to the touch. A Los Angeles directory. I had no idea what I was looking at. Loretta cleared her throat. “It’s a 1934-35 municipal guide. Sort of a Chamber of Commerce business and residence directory. Where people are.” She indicated Nadine’s address on Sepulveda, and then flipped one page. “Two blocks away, Dakota Roberts and Evan Street, obviously in the same rooming house—or even roommates. Maybe. Hard to tell.” Another volume: 1935-36. “Nadine and Dakota married, new address. Evan Street in an apartment on the same street. Your Gus Schnelling”—she flipped another page—“across town.” Then finally: “Dakota gone. Nadine alone. Evan and Gus gone from the records, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t in town.”

“Dak’s short marriage.”

“Which leads to the best article of all.” She reached for a volume of
Hollywood Beat
, some yellow-pulp tabloid with grainy pictures and bold-font headlines, a gossip sheet of intrigue and scandal. I thought of Evan’s collection of sordid Hollywood stories.

The headline read: “Famed East Coast Preacher Squelches Nuptials.” A revelation, this article. Given Clorinda’s fame as spiritual leader—particularly her earlier association with Aimee Semple McPherson—it was not surprising her sudden descent in Hollywood garnered some yellow press. The article spoke of “newcomer Nadine Chappelle, a pretty ingénue” who was married to stagehand Dakota Roberts, son of famed evangelist Clorinda Roberts Tyler. “Mommy frowned on her boy’s quickie marriage to the once-divorced young starlet whose first husband committed suicide in a prison cell.” I gather Clorinda created a ruckus, involving the police, and Dak was cited for public nuisance—an explosive scene in a restaurant. What I also learned was that Clorinda made two visits to California—the first to try to extricate Dak diplomatically—and quietly—from his marriage, the second with a team of lawyers to complete the annulment.

“Interesting,” I told Loretta. “A powerful woman. She got what she wanted.”

Loretta looked up from her reading. “But they never win in the end, do they, Edna?”

“No, they don’t.”

The rest of the article caught my attention because it focused, with silly titillation and innuendo, on Clorinda’s own brief Hollywood career, mentioning her brief acting in silent pictures during the Great War, an uneventful career that ended when she became a follower of Aimee Semple McPherson and her “Knock Out the Devil” crusade. “Screen siren goes angelic”—so read the sub-headline. The article mentioned the streetcar death of her husband Philip Roberts, who played the romantic sidekick in two or three Fatty Arbuckle two-reelers at Keystone Pictures, including
Fatty’s Day Off
and
The Village Scandal
. The writer speculated that Clorinda—Clorrie House then—met Philip when she appeared in
She Did and She Didn’t,
a movie being
filmed on some back lot during the production of one of Arbuckle’s movies. Clorinda had been roommates with two other starlets, and the three played “three young beautiful sisters” in
A Foolish Romance
. But Clorinda turned her back on Hollywood after finding God. The writer embellished the information, talking of Clorinda’s Assembly of God “cathedral” in New Jersey, her “many thousands of worshippers. “The stink of Hollywood transformed her into the perfume of heaven.” I cringed. And reviewers lamented
my
purple prose?

“Clorinda must have cringed when the article appeared,” I said to Loretta. I pointed to the stack of volumes. “Anything of Frank Resnick?”

“Not much. A short time doing production work at Universal. A year or so. He worked on a movie that Philip Roberts was in, but I don’t know if they knew each other.”

“Supposedly they did. Friends, until Frank tried to move in on Clorinda and Philip, then an item.”

“Yeah, sure.” Loretta the cynic.

For the rest of the afternoon, absorbed, I read back issues of
Moving Picture World, Screenland, The Motion Picture News
, and
Variety
, even searching through bound L.A. newspapers. Dakota’s life in Hollywood. Clorinda’s life in Hollywood. Parallel disasters. Late in the afternoon I found a piece in the
Los Angeles Times
about the streetcar death of Philip Roberts, a “budding actor in Fatty Arbuckle’s comedies and in one-reel westerns with William S. Hart.” He was killed when a passing streetcar jumped the tracks. He died immediately. He left behind a wife who was expecting a child. A brief, sad coda to a short life. The obituary, though vague, spoke of his “presence” on the screen, and quoted Buster Keaton who praised him.

Then, in
Hollywood Scoop
, two years after Philip’s death, a bizarre obituary: Maddy Olivia Roberts, once married to dead actor Philip Roberts, died of influenza, leaving behind a young daughter, Marcella.

Loretta and I talked about it. Had Philip been married earlier? To the mysterious Olivia? Possibly. Was Clorinda his second marriage? We backtracked our research, but found nothing. The tidbit fascinated, but did it mean anything?

Throughout the afternoon I became absorbed in Hollywood stories, particularly the scandals that so fascinated Evan Street. Fatty Arbuckle, the baby-faced slapstick comic with the bowler derby and bowtie and spats, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, more popular than Chaplin, enmeshed in a drunken sex orgy in a San Francisco hotel on Labor Day, 1921, at which a minor-league starlet Virginia Rappé died. There were accusations of rape, cruelty, cover-up. The scandal encapsulated all the worst stories of Hollywood as suspected by the America out there in small towns and on farms: sexual romps, drunken sprees in the middle of Prohibition, drugs, booze, rampant disorder. And Fatty’s illustrious career crashed down. The Prince of Whales, destroyed. Three trials, and he was finally found not guilty. But a career over.

As I read about Fatty Arbuckle’s fall from celluloid grace, I wondered how much Philip Roberts had been a part of the riotous abandon. How well did he know Fatty? Mabel Normand of the pie-in-the-face fame? Yes, on the set—but in private life? Did Philip carouse with the wild revelers? Partying in Catalina, Tijuana, San Francisco? What about his young pregnant wife? The baby Dakota, born after the accident, sent back East for puritanical upbringing. Did Clorrie House join the revelers? Did she indulge in rotgut gin and cocaine? Had Philip’s involvement in the dark side caused Clorinda to seek peace in the stained-glass reflection of Sister Aimee?

Who were these people?

Late that afternoon, exhausted, Loretta and I had an early dinner at Mannie’s Deli on Second Avenue. Then she taxied to her studio apartment in Washington Heights while I caught a cab to Penn Station.

As the train chugged back to Maplewood I drifted off, a fitful nap. When I woke, disoriented, I realized what I’d been dreaming: a runaway streetcar ended the life of a mysterious young man. Philip Roberts, who never saw his son. What about his first wife? And the daughter, Marcella? Suddenly, like a blow to the head, I believed that the answer to murder could be found in the short, unhappy life of a long-forgotten, small-time Hollywood actor.

Chapter Seventeen

Dak’s father.

Philip Roberts. Who was this man?

“What do you know about your father?” I asked Dak. He was walking past me during the end of a rehearsal, carrying a ladder, and my question, sprung out of the blue, caused him to twist his body around, the ladder clanging against a steel girder. He said nothing, but scrunched up his eyes, baffled.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not really apologizing, “but I’ve tried to get your attention all morning.”

His reply sounded disingenuous. “I had something on my mind.”

“Can we talk about some things?”

He glanced around backstage. “Yes. This afternoon. But”—the smile more hesitant, disappearing—“I gotta meet with Annika at the Full Moon Café at two.”

Now I was curious. “Something has happened?”

He put down the ladder. “Well, I won’t go to see my mother, though she’s demanded I show up. Tobias even sent Alexander to my rooms late last night. And Annika is frantic. She phoned last night. She was crying.”

“Are you sure she’s not an emissary
from
your mother?”

A vigorous shake of his head. “No—I mean, maybe a little.” A mixture of confusion and suspicion in his look. “I just don’t know. She’s worried about me.”

“Well, when can I…”

“Meet us there. I
want
you there.”

I shook my head. “No. Annika won’t like that.”

He shrugged. “I’m getting a little tired of doing what makes other people happy.”

I smiled and clapped twice. “It’s about time.” But I deliberated. “I’ll arrive an hour later. You talk to her first—that’s appropriate.”

“My father?”

“I have some questions.”

He started to walk away, forgetting to pick up the ladder. “I might not have any answers for you.”

George walked by and hissed at me. “Opening night in two days, Edna, and you’re disappearing. I knock on your door—silence. You got lost in New York yesterday.”

“Research.” I sighed. “I told you I was leaving.”

“We’ve already written
The Royal Family
. No more research.”

“George—the murder.”

“A good title for a melodrama.
George—the Murder
.”

I bit my lip. “
George—the Murdered
.”

“Edna, be careful.”

“I am.”

“Edna, Edna. The liar.
Edna the Liar: A Cautionary Tale
.”

“That’s what fiction writers do.”

“Edna, Edna.” With a tilt of his head and a nervous pushing at his eyeglasses, he turned away. “When you need me, call me.”

Later, he walked with me toward the Full Moon Café. Pausing in front, peering through the front window—Mamie had taped a
de jour
menu left of the door, a hand-written sheet that highlighted her dessert list, with peach cobbler underlined twice, the best advertisement there was!—I could see Dak sitting with a stiff-backed Annika. George warned me off, saying, “Edna, into the lion’s den…again.”

I smiled. “At least I’ll die with peach cobbler in my system.” I peeked back through the window. “No one is armed, George.”

He shook his head.

Both Dak and Annika appeared nervous at my approach, but I slid into a chair.

Dak’s voice was low and rumbling. “Annika isn’t happy I invited you. I seem to make everyone unhappy.”

“Hello, Annika. I’m sorry, my dear, but I need to talk to Dak, too.”

She kept silent, but I noticed her eyes were red-rimmed. Her chin trembled when she turned her head.

“I haven’t been to see my mother,” Dak told me. “That’s what we’ve been talking about—for an hour. I won’t—
yet
. I need time to think about things. When I go into that house, I…weaken.”

Annika spoke for the first time, addressing me, her voice scratchy. “I’m worried about him. The silences. I don’t like Dakota drifting away.”

“Well,” I began, “things are happening.”

“What things?” From Dak.

“Well, I have questions, I should say.”

Suddenly Annika was not paying attention to me, her eyes in her lap. She was talking to herself. “Clorinda is in a horrible state. Oddly, she blames
me
.” A weak, unhappy smile, as she finally looked from Dak to me. “You, of course, Miss Ferber. You’re the principal culprit in this drama. But she says
I
scared him away.”

Annika had undergone a troublesome change. The severe young woman, driven and fierce, had been transformed into a shaky, troubled wreck. She fidgeted, elbows on the table, then elbows off. A bead of sweat trickled down her chin, and she ignored it. Those agate eyes—a zealot’s determined stare—were cloudy and distant. When she spoke, her sentences trailed off into faint whimpers. Her “scared him away” remark was ragged and sputtering.

Dak looked concerned. “Annika, I’ll get back home soon enough. You’re taking this too hard.”

She shook her head languidly, as though under water. “But I doubt that you’re coming back to the church.”

A long hard look. “No, I’m not.”

She gasped and cried out, “Or to me.”

He didn’t answer.

“Annika,” I started.

She held up her hand. Her nails were bitten to the quick: lines of dried blood.

“This is all wrong.” Her head swung back and forth. “Wrong, wrong, wrong. Mistakes made.” Then in a measured voice, “I must have prayed to the wrong God.”

That made no sense. Dak looked helpless, his eyes catching mine, pleading. He didn’t know what to do with her, so catastrophic the change in her.

“I thought I owed Annika this meeting,” Dak said. “It isn’t fair to her.” He nodded at her. “I haven’t been fair to you.”

“I have to know,” she pleaded. “I’m left in the dark, Dakota.”

I looked at Dak. “Annika’s right, Dak. And you know it. You have to be honest with her. Play fair.”

That seemed to surprise Annika. Her eyes got moist. She mumbled, “Yes.”

“I know, I know.” Dak was breathing in short bursts.

“You know, I listen to Clorinda,” Annika went on. “She’s wise and God-like and…Dak’s mother…and I
listen
to her. But now she’s screaming and cold and bitter and—” she tapped the table furiously—“she tells
me
I should have listened
better
. I somehow missed the word of God.”

“For heaven’s sake, Annika.” I touched her wrist gently. “You’re too hard on yourself. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

For a second the old fierceness in her eyes. “Of course, I did. I
listened
.”

She sat back, dropping her hands into her lap, resigned, her eyes closed. Her body swayed back and forth. “I’m guilty of leaving my old world behind, as bad as it was. The emptiness. But that emptiness wasn’t filled with all
this
.”

Dak and I both exchanged looks.

I cleared my throat. “Dak, would you mind answering that question I asked you earlier?”

He glanced at Annika, tucked into her shell, and nodded. “All right, Miss Ferber. But I don’t know much about my father. Just what my mother told me. Why is it important?”

“I don’t know if it is. But humor me.”

“Well…” He scratched his head. “Let me see. An actor in Hollywood, he partied hard with my mother’s crowd, had bit parts in some Fatty Arbuckle comedies, really loved to play in westerns with William S. Hart, which is why I got this strange name, and then a streetcar hit him. I guess he was around my age now. My mother says I look like him—dark, olive-skinned, slim reedy body, high cheekbones, the black hair, even the loping walk.” He shrugged. “Devilishly handsome, as my mother says.” But the last sentence was caustic, cold.

Annika looked up. Her voice echoed, “Handsome.” Then she looked back at her hands.

“I get those things from him—plus my last name.”

I waited a moment. Then the shocker: “Did you know he was married before he met your mother?”

Dak sat up. “What? No, really?” A puzzled look. “What?”

I filled him in on the tidbit unearthed from old Hollywood magazines. “And it seems you have a half-sister.”

A crazy grin covered his face. “You’re kidding.” But immediately his eyes darkened. “A sister. That seems impossible.”

“Why?”

He glanced at Annika. “I mean, of course, it’s possible, but…but wouldn’t my mother have known?”

“Maybe she does.”

He yelped, slammed his palm on the table, then seemed embarrassed. “Maybe she does. But why not tell me?”

“Maybe she had her reasons.”

He shook his head vigorously, a flash of anger. “A sister. This is…nice.”

“Nice?” Annika’s voice broke. Her eyes betrayed fear.

Dak’s voice rose. “Hey, I just thought of something.” He swallowed and reached over to touch Annika’s arm. She jerked her hand back so quickly she nearly toppled a water glass. “My marriage. Nadine.” His eyes on Annika, a pleading look. “One of the reasons she fought my marriage, so she said, was because Nadine had been divorced. That is forbidden, a stain, a curse. Unacceptable. Nadine was damaged goods—important for me, the heir apparent to the Assembly of God kingdom. Divorce—and her husband’s suicide. Tobias despises—forbids—divorce. A betrayal of the sacred marriage covenant.” He bit his lip. “So if my father was divorced, well, she’d want to keep that a secret.”

“A divorce? Scandalous?”

He tapped his tongue with his finger. “Think of Tobias. The church. Tobias often rails out against divorce. The decline of Western civilization. The death of the family. Right, Annika?”

Annika lifted a trembling hand. “Your mother sermonizes against divorce.”

“Well,” I said, “it wasn’t Clorinda who got the divorce. Yes, she married a divorced man, but…”

“It doesn’t matter. That’s why.” Dak concluded, “So Nadine and I were annulled…never married. But, you know, I’ll tell you something, Miss Ferber. As a little boy, I always
felt
something was strange. I could never put my finger on it, but whenever my mother talked of my father to me—this is after she returned to take over my life and I drove her crazy with questions—she always got a faraway look in her eyes, her voice hesitant, and she’d stammer. She always said the same few lines—like a part in a play. It always troubled me in the way unsaid things stay with you, and she’d shift the conversation.”

“A divorce that bothered her. And a little girl growing up somewhere. Marcella Roberts.“

“Somewhere,” Dak echoed. He punched the air dramatically. “I love the idea of a sister.”

I thought of Loretta in New York, following up on that tidbit. I’d asked her to locate that young woman, if possible. What would that tell us? Philip’s first wife. The divorce. A mystery. Another Hollywood piece of the puzzle.

The news seemed to exaggerate Annika’s depression. She sagged deeper into the chair, shoulders slumped. Dak kept eyeing her, concerned. Now, solicitous, he reached over and touched her shoulder. “Annika, you all right?”

She shrugged him away. Then, quietly, “Why wasn’t
I
told about that? Clorinda told me everything. Why wasn’t I told? I had a right to know.”

“Dak.” I shifted the subject, drawing his eyes away from her. “Another problem I have.”

Annika was speaking over my words: “I need to leave. I’m expected back. Your mother…”

“Did she send you?” I asked.

Quietly, “No. She wouldn’t
allow
it, you know. But I had to know…to see Dakota.”

“Good for you, Annika.”

Surprise in her eyes as she looked at me, mixed with gratitude. “I’ve made a mistake, I know.”

“Stop saying that.” Dak’s words came fast.

Silence, then I repeated what I’d said. “Something is bothering me, especially after this conversation. Two things, actually.”

They waited, the two of them, Dak anxious, Annika the picture of a slapped-around child. Then Dak grunted. “Sometimes your words alarm me, Miss Ferber.”

No humor in my voice. “They’re meant to.” A pause. “Ilona told me you lay in wait for Evan that day, idling in your car, waiting. You purposely stalked him.”

Dak’s face blanched and his mouth dropped open. “Why would she say that? Yes, as I’ve told Biggers, I spotted him, and followed. But I didn’t
wait
for him. Why would she want to get me in trouble?”

I drew my tongue to the corner of my mouth. “Have you met your aunt?”

“She’s wrong, Miss Ferber.” He looked shell-shocked.

“Another thing. I’ve been thinking about that threatening note you received—the one that said you were next, presumably to be murdered, after Evan and Gus. And that strange note I received, telling me to back away.”

Annika gasped out loud, then apologized.

Tense, Dak whispered, “What about it?”

“Ilona thought you wrote the first note to get attention. Which, of course, made little sense to me. Your mother was terrified but wanted to keep it away from Constable Biggers, though she knew he’d have to see it. Last night something dawned on me. Not so much the words, which were slapdash phrases from a dime novel perhaps, but the…the spelling.”

Dak laughed nervously. “The spelling? Did you parse the grammar, Miss Ferber?”

“I remember clearly the word ‘you’re’ as in ‘you’re next’ was misspelled ‘y-o-u-r’—a common enough misspelling, an indictment of the American school system.”

“So?”

“So when you sent a note to Evan, the one that was found in Gus’ satchel and shown me by Meaka, you used a similar construction but the correct spelling of ‘you’re’ in your note. Simple as that. The realization came to me suddenly—always there, nagging, until last night.”

Dak waited, pensive. Then he said, “I didn’t think anyone thought that I wrote those stupid notes.”

Annika spoke up. “Ilona shouldn’t have said that. Of course, Dak wouldn’t write such a foolish letter to himself. Or the note to you, Miss Ferber.”

Dak was nodding.

“It was an attempt to steer the police—however bumbling Constable Biggers might be perceived—away from Dak.”

Dak was watching me closely. “What are you saying, Miss Ferber?” An edge to his voice.

“I think you know where I’m going with this. Someone is obsessed with your innocence—and the need to provide cover. At first I thought it might be Annika here”—Annika made a gurgling sound, unattractive, then covered her mouth—“because of her devotion to the Cult of Dakota, newly established, Maplewood branch.”