You Might As Well Die (3 page)

 

About twenty blocks farther, with Officer Compson parting traffic before them, they reached the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge was brightly lit—like a stage, Dorothy thought. And MacGuffin was making his final bow. If he hadn’t made it already.

Compson slowed his motorcycle and took out a flashlight, which he shined toward the railing of the bridge. He crept along the length of the bridge, the taxi following. At the midpoint of the bridge, Compson halted.

The taxi driver was visibly shaking. He stopped the cab. He turned to face Dorothy and Benchley. His skin was pale, sweating.

“Okay, you nuts, we’re here. Brooklyn Bridge. Now get the hell out of my cab.”

They got out. The cabbie reached back and pulled the door closed.

“Wait,” Benchley said, reaching for his wallet. “Your fare.”

“Forget it,” the man said. “Just never get in my cab again.”

The cab sped off, tires squealing.

“Huh.” Benchley shrugged. “Who says New York cabdrivers are rude?”

“Look out!” Dorothy shouted.

The Somas’ car came hurtling toward them. Dorothy and Benchley ran around behind Officer Compson’s motorcycle for protection. Tony Jr. hit the brakes. The car screeched to a halt just inches from the motorcycle.

Next came an ambulance and six squad cars, lights flaring and sirens wailing.

Dorothy turned to Officer Compson. “Did you find something?”

He nodded and pointed the beam of his flashlight toward the railing. An unframed painting leaned against it. Compson lowered the flashlight beam and illuminated a beat-up pair of brown wingtip shoes. The shoes were positioned neatly side by side.

Dorothy sighed. “We’re too late. He’s gone.”

A booming voice called from behind them. “Well, look who it is.”

Dorothy and Benchley turned to see a plainclothes police detective. The big man wore a light brown suit and a brown derby hat; both were a size too small.

“O’Rannigan,” Dorothy said.

“Got a report of a suicide,” the detective said. “Too bad it wasn’t either one of you. So what do you think you’re doing here?”

“Don’t look at us,” Benchley said. “We’re as innocent as two little white lambs.”

Mrs. Soma yelled from the window of her car. “Innocent, my eye! You pay your liquor tab, you lousy freeloaders. Or else!”

“Or else you’re a rotten egg!” Tony Jr. cackled, and flung something white.

The rotten egg—they could smell it instantly—missed Dorothy but splattered O’Rannigan’s tight trench coat.

“The yolk’s on you,” Benchley said meekly to the detective.

“And I guess I have egg on my face,” Dorothy said, wiping away a few flecks from her cheek.

O’Rannigan looked like a volcano about to erupt. He moved toward the Somas’ car, but Tony Jr. quickly stepped on the gas and the car sped away in a small cloud of exhaust. O’Rannigan signaled to one of the squad cars, which zoomed after it.

“Now,” the detective said, turning back toward them and addressing Officer Compson, “what do we have here?”

Dorothy glanced over the handrail at the inky rippling water of the East River more than a hundred feet below. Then she looked across to the buildings that lined the Brooklyn side of the river. They were lit as if in miniature, like an elaborate toy train setup in a darkened room. She saw a factory with an illuminated clock, which read ten minutes after midnight.

“Well?” O’Rannigan barked.

“Forget it,” Dorothy said. “It’s water under the bridge.”

A
t lunchtime the next day, Dorothy absentmindedly dunked a popover in her coffee. She and Benchley were gathered with the other members of the Round Table in the dining room of the Algonquin Hotel.

Dorothy dropped the popover back on her plate. She didn’t feel like eating.

She was depressed, more so than usual. She was depressed about not being able to return to her favorite speakeasy for the foreseeable future. She was depressed that she didn’t even earn enough money to pay her bar bill. But mostly, she was depressed about Ernie, that she hadn’t been able to do anything to help him.

Alexander Woollcott—the imperious, overweight
New York Times
drama critic and occasional mother hen of the Vicious Circle—eyed her narrowly through his spectacles. “Dottie, if you’re going to be a bump on a log, then go back out to the forest. Don’t dishearten our
déjeuner
.”

Dorothy ignored him. She was mulling over Benchley’s question from the night before. “Why
would
a guy like MacGuffin take his own life? I don’t understand it.”

George Kaufman, a successful Broadway playwright and perpetual worrywart, said, “Who knows why anybody does anything? You can never know what’s inside someone’s head.”

“MacGuffin?” Woollcott sneered. “If he ever had a thought in his head, it would have died of loneliness.”

“Aleck, what would we do without you?” Dorothy sighed. “How I’d love to find out.”

Robert Sherwood turned to her. “Mrs. Parker, forgive me for saying so, but I’d think if
anybody
would understand why MacGuffin would take his own life, it would be you.”

Benchley shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“Yes, Dottie,” Woollcott said, “you attempted to cross the river Styx with an overdose of sleeping pills. So surely you understand what would compel the erstwhile MacGuffin to such an extreme.”

“Oh, I understand suicide, all right,” Dorothy said. “Just not Ernie MacGuffin’s suicide.” Then she turned to Neysa McMein, who sat next to Kaufman. “Neysa, you knew MacGuffin the best of any of us. He orbited around you like the moon. Did he ever talk about suicide?”

Neysa shook her head. “I’m as surprised as anyone. Frankly, I would have said Ernie was too shallow to commit suicide. He was self-absorbed and self-pitying, certainly. But self-loathing? Not a bit.”

Dorothy leaned back in her chair. “Suicide is not done only by the Vincent van Goghs of the world—the geniuses, radicals or deep thinkers who carry sorrow around like a heavy suitcase. It’s also done by regular people who just can’t stand to get out of bed one more day and face the ugly world.”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. No one looked at Dorothy. Benchley, who hated to discuss such topics (especially in reference to Dorothy, his closest friend), ostentatiously clapped his pipe in his palm and got up to go outside for a smoke. Dorothy felt like a fool.

Then Neysa considerately picked up the conversation where Dorothy had left off. “Ernie wasn’t a deep thinker, that’s true. But afraid to wake up and greet the world? I think not. You all know what he was like. He was full of energy. Always bugging anyone who could help him for a leg up. Always had another idea he was working on.”

“Maybe this was simply his last idea,” Kaufman said morosely.

Dorothy shook her head. “No. Neysa hit the nail on the head. MacGuffin wasn’t a misunderstood genius, nor was he a dope at the end of his rope. When he last talked to me, he seemed—I don’t know—
excited
by the idea.”

“Could it be,” Sherwood asked, “that he was so fixated on the idea of fame and notoriety that he killed himself to achieve it?”

“I don’t think so,” Neysa said. “Success seemed like the thing he wanted most in this life, not in the next. What good is success if you’re not alive to enjoy it?”

“Exactly,” Dorothy said.

“Pshaw!”
Woollcott fluttered his hands. “A fool like MacGuffin? Suicide is the ultimate selfish act, and MacGuffin was a self-absorbed nincompoop. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that he would take the coward’s way out. It makes perfect sense to me.”

“I don’t know,” Dorothy said. “It takes more than a coward to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Franklin Pierce Adams, the elder statesman of the group, spoke contemplatively from behind his cigar. “Can you please read his note again?”

Dorothy simply handed it to Adams, and he read it aloud. “‘Then the world will know I’m not a hack. A new and better life awaits me. Good-bye, cruel world,’” Adams finished.

Woollcott wiped jelly from his mouth and sneered, “He writes like a melodramatic teenage girl.”

“Takes one to know one,” Dorothy said.

Woollcott frowned. “Highly amusing. You should submit that riposte to a suitably intellectual journal, such as
Boys’ Life
. That aside, all that young fellow MacGuffin needed was a healthy outlet for his energy, such as a dose of vigorous exercise. Would have perked him right up.”

Everyone looked skeptically at Woollcott, who was notoriously—almost proudly—as fat and round as an overfed baby.

“And what would you know about exercise?” Dorothy asked. She was still annoyed by his comment that
suicide is the ultimate selfish act
.

“I know everything about exercise. I’m madly taken with it.” Woollcott beamed through another mouthful of jelly tart. “I’m disappointed that no one here has noticed the phenomenal changes in my physique, all thanks to healthy exercise. My spirits are soaring. My skin is pink and glowing. My weight is down. My appetite is up.”

“Haven’t noticed any change in your healthy appetite,” Dorothy said. “And none of those other changes you mentioned either.”

“Aleck,” Sherwood jeered. “The only exercise you get is exercising your right to free speech.”

Adams asked, “What sort of healthy exercise are you talking about? Skewering playwrights? Elbowing out old ladies at Macy’s?”

Woollcott laid his hands on the table and pronounced, “Croquet.”

They all laughed.

“Croquet is not exercise,” Adams declared. “It’s puttering in the yard wearing a bad sweater.”

“Croquet is just an excuse to wander around the lawn drinking gin and lemonade,” said Marc Connelly, who was Kaufman’s writing partner.

“Croquet requires all the physical exertion of a game of checkers,” Dorothy said.

Woollcott sneered, “Not the way we play.”

“
We?
We who?” Adams said.

“Harpo Marx and I.”

Again they all laughed.

“You can’t play croquet with Harpo,” Dorothy said. “That’s not a game. It’s a circus.”

Harold Ross, another member of the Round Table, came rushing into the dining room, followed by Benchley.

“Big news, everyone,” Ross exclaimed. “Raoul Fleischmann had a great second quarter in the baking business. So he’s finally going through with the loan. My magazine for New Yorkers is officially in business. Now, who wants to write an article for the inaugural issue?”

They had been enjoying heckling Woollcott and now extended their scorn to Harold Ross.

“Ross,” Adams said, “you’ve been talking about launching that magazine for years. Do you really think we believe you’ll get it off the ground now?”

Ross was born out West and still retained some of the earnest sincerity of a country boy. “Why, sure! Now, come on, who wants to contribute to the first issue and make history?”

“Forget it,” Dorothy said. “Even if you do launch it, that magazine is going to sink faster than the
Titanic
.”

Ross looked over the group seated around the table and eventually turned to the good-natured Benchley.

“Benchley, you can do it. You can write something light and funny and urbane.”

“Such as?” Benchley said.

Dorothy spoke. “Give it a rest, Ross. We’re busy with something just a bit more serious right now.”

Ross said, “More serious than a dream that I’ve been trying to make real for years?”

“Yes, believe it or not, more serious than that,” she said. “We were wondering why a chipper fellow such as Ernie MacGuffin would suddenly throw himself off a bridge.”

Ross’ bright expression darkened. He rubbed his big chin, thinking. “Yeah, I heard about that. MacGuffin is the talk of the town.” Then Ross snapped his fingers. “That’s it, Benchley! Write a story about why MacGuffin committed suicide.”

“That’s what you mean by light and funny and urbane?” Benchley said drily. “I’d hate to see what your more serious articles will cover.”

Ross was unperturbed. “That’s just what such a story needs. Your light touch. Not irreverent, just witty. Respectful yet affable.”

“Aff yourself, Ross,” Dorothy said. “It’s a macabre idea.”

“No, it isn’t!” he insisted. “You just said you were asking yourselves why a guy like MacGuffin would throw himself off a bridge. Everyone in town is wondering the same thing. Now here’s your chance to find out. You and Benchley can write it together.”

Dorothy and Benchley looked at each other.

She said, “I couldn’t possibly write such a thing.”

“Five hundred bucks says you can,” Ross said.

That caught their attention. Everyone at the table sat up.

Ross didn’t stop there. “Come on, Benchley. You can do it. And, Dottie, if you don’t want to write it, you can help him out with interviewing MacGuffin’s friends and next of kin. Then the two of you split the fee however you want.”

Dorothy and Benchley looked at each other again. They were thinking the same thing. Five hundred would pay off their liquor bill at Tony Soma’s, with money to spare.

“Come on,” Ross implored. “This story needs you. And you need this story.”

“Oh, do it,” Adams cried, “if only to shut Ross up.”

“Fine,” Benchley said. “I’ll do it.”

“Great,” Ross said. “I need it in a week.”

A week?
Dorothy thought. Benchley looked equally doubtful.

Woollcott said, “Well, you have your first story, Ross. But do you even have a name for this new magazine of yours?”

Ross nodded. “
New York Life
.”

“Sounds like an insurance company,” Kaufman said. “Do you have any other ideas?”

“
The Metropolitan
?”

“Another insurance company,” Connelly said. “Anything else?”