Manhattan Mayhem (20 page)

“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.