Read Online Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) by Ed Ifkovic - Free Book Online

head briskly. “Sometimes they fight with me, bloodthirsty, like I’m their enemy. It’s just real insane. Like they want to kill me.”
    “And you fight back?”
    He waited a second, reflected on what his answer should be. “I just watch. I figure their battles over me have nothing to do with me .” He seemed puzzled by his own words. “It’s like they discovered how much they don’t like each other and I’m there, stuck in the middle, so they use me as an excuse.” A pause. “Maybe.” He smiled that wide smile. “Although I do got me a fierce temper, Miss Ferber—if the mood is right.”
    “Are you at all interested in Ellie or Bella?” I asked. “A little bit? I’m nosy. Forgive me.”
    He smiled but didn’t answer.
    “Bella is Lawson’s girl,” Waters said.
    Roddy, staring around the room, uncomfortable, echoed the remark. “Bella is Lawson’s girl. I’m not a creeper.”
    Waters added, “Bella and Lawson belong together, I think. I don’t mean just their movie-magazine looks. Both are real talented, I think. But both’ll do anything to get downtown into the money and fame. You know, Miss Edna, Lawson has dreams of having his play produced on Broadway. The new naturalistic drama. Like a Negro Eugene O’Neill.”
    “And Bella would like to star in it,” Roddy added. “I hate to say this, but sometimes I think she stays with him just to see if he’ll make it—and carry her along. Still and all, Broadway?”
    “You don’t seem so sure.”
    Roddy sighed. “The fact of the matter is that there’s only room for this many”—he held up two fingers—“Negroes down here on Broadway. This…this world is hundreds of illusionary miles from Harlem. De lusional miles. You know, Broadway goes up through Harlem, but that’s not Broadway, if you know what I mean.”
    “Broadway is Times Square, the theaters,” Waters added.
    Roddy went on. “Broadway down here changes Negroes. You start out black but get whiter and whiter with each success. Sooner or later, you don’t belong anywhere. Certainly you can’t come back to Harlem.”
    Waters hinted, “And Lawson has made some enemies.”
    That surprised me. “Really? Who?”
    He didn’t respond, but rushed to answer knocking at the door.
    Making an artful entrance, preceded by a strong whiff of heady gardenia perfume, Bella sallied in, dramatically slipping off her gloves. She paused a moment under the hall light, a self-conscious gesture, because the light threw her beautiful face into shadows, the heavily accented eyes gleaming against the skin that was almost translucent white. She was wearing a captivating Charleston flare dress, deep indigo with gold threading. Yes, I thought: Theda Bara, temptress, exotic, definitely menacing, on the prowl. The deliberate vamp for the jazz age. A woman ready to turkey trot the night away. She smiled at me and settled into the sofa with a sensuous twist of her body. It was, I thought, a stage entrance, and marvelous at that.
    Ellie and Harriet immediately followed, both rushing in and complaining about the erratic and oily subway trains. They’d bumped into each other on an uptown Broadway platform, endured an intolerable delay at the 125th Street Elevated, and then ran all the way to Central Park West from Broadway. Out of breath, stammering, they stopped babbling when Bella, glancing up from her seat, rolled her eyes and mumbled a hideous crack about chronic Negro lateness. “C.P.T.” Cynically, she translated for me. “Colored people time.” Ellie, reacting as though slapped, turned away, her lips pursed, but managed to greet me with a thin smile. Harriet simply nodded at me. Bella snarled, “Just put it in a chair, girls.”
    We didn’t wait for Lawson to arrive—“He has to sneak out of his job,” Bella confided—and Harriet said that Freddy might not show up. She shrugged. “He’s that way.” I didn’t know what that meant, but suspected Freddy, the militant Jack London socialist of