“You didn’t, Nate.”
He held out his big hand and I shook it.
Shook the hand of one of the likely assassins of John F. Kennedy.
Chapter 16
The brown-brick facade of the five-story town house on East Sixty-eighth Street, squeezed between similar nondescript buildings, concealed a glittering twenty-two-room world as imagined and executed by Flo Kilgore.
I had never set foot in the place before. Despite her fame and fashion, Flo had always struck me as a scrappy small-town kid who made it big. But this decadently elegant display — French doors, chandeliers, gilt-framed landscapes, rosewood furnishings — made sense only if Flo had seen Gone With the Wind at an impressionable age and grew up determined to replicate Tara in Manhattan. Hell, she even had black servants, although I didn’t see any that looked like Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben.
Of course, the blackest thing in this otherwise opulent town house was the unique room on the third floor, its four walls and ceiling black, as if painted overnight to mourn the town house’s late hostess. It was filled with bizarre bric-a-brac — shelves of sculpted and wooden hands, toy banks, music boxes, and numerous variations on the American eagle. A big antique Revolutionary War — style snare drum had been converted to a coffee table with two red child-sized chairs. A gigantic oil painting of General Custer and his men chasing Indians (wishful thinking?) dominated the room, hanging over a low-slung sofa with black cushions and an intricately carved wooden frame painted an iridescent blue. Cigar-store Indians, positioned here and there, seemed to be viewing Custer with understandable skepticism.
Still, it was a lived-in space. Black throw pillows were on the dark-green carpet near a 21-inch TV (its cabinet painted black, of course) in one corner. Those kid-sized chairs by the drum table indicated this wasn’t a living room so much as a family room, a rec room.
I’d worn a black Botany 500 suit with a black tie, out of respect, but I felt like I was disappearing into the stygian surroundings as I sat beside Frank Felton on the sofa. He was in a black suit, as well, with a black necktie, and we might have been two undertakers waiting to talk to the family, when of course he was the family.
“I’m afraid this room represents something of a practical joke,” he said with forced cheer.
“Joke?” I said. I felt like I’d walked into a Charles Addams cartoon, in search of the punch line.
Felton was in his mid-fifties but looked ten years older. You could just barely see, in that reddish, puffy, vein-shot face, the handsome young comic actor he’d once been. His dark eyes had the seldom-blinking, slightly widened look of a man on a bridge admiring a sunrise as he contemplated jumping off. Only his voice retained its radio youth — Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar...
“Well, Florrie Mae was so determined to make a gleaming showplace out of these digs,” he said, “I suggested we have one fun room.”
“Ah,” I said, noticing on a nearby shelf a rustic wooden hand with candle-speared spikes rising out of the fingertips.
“Just a space where we could let our notions of the bizarre run wild.” He grinned, displaying yellowed, questionable teeth. “A lot of times, we’d play ‘Count the Eagles.’”
“Oh?”
He nodded. His eyes were staring past me into a memory. “We’d ask guests to close their eyes and test their powers of observation — how many eagles had they noticed in the Black Room? That’s what we call it, the Black Room.”
“Catchy,” I said.
“You wouldn’t believe the parties this space has seen,” Felton said. “I loved to plan the things, stage them like a film or Broadway production.”
“Ah,” I said.
“On one anniversary bash, we turned the Black Room into an inferno — simulated, of course — for a ‘Saints and Sinners’ costume party. So many beautiful people, frolicking among the faux fire and brimstone. We had gambling in another room, a small orchestra for dancing downstairs, an arcade with pinball machines, Moviolas playing silent movies. That ebony baby grand over there, top recording talent performed just for the privilege of being part of it all.”
Probably not Sinatra — he and Flo had carried on a famous feud, her calling him a gangster, him calling her “the chinless wonder.” I’d seen her cry over that.
Felton was saying, “Guests were challenged to come as their favorite sinners from mythology, literature, history. I left it up to Florrie Mae what sinners to choose for us. You will never guess what she picked.”
“Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler,” I said.
He smiled in surprise and really looked at me for the first time. “Flo told you?”
“No,” I said.
That stopped his incessant chatter, which was what I’d hoped it would do, whether I’d guessed right or wrong.
“Frank,” I said, “I know this is difficult. But I want you to tell me what happened, in as much detail as you can manage. As much you can stand.”
We sat in silence for perhaps thirty seconds.
“I didn’t really see her the night before,” he said finally, with a frustrated shrug. The dark unblinking eyes took on a desperate cast. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“No thanks.”
Felton got up and, moving more side to side than straight ahead, went over to a liquor cabinet converted from an old wooden highboy icebox, painted black, of course. He was perhaps five nine, and looked more bloated than overweight. He poured himself several fingers of Johnnie Walker and returned, not sitting, though, standing before me, feet planted but weaving just slightly.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Nate,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve stopped drinking since this happened.”
I didn’t think he’d stopped drinking since 1948, but at least right now he had a damn good excuse to drown himself in booze and sorrow.
“You were friends with Florrie Mae. You know about... us. Right? Right. You know how we didn’t, well, stand in the way of each other’s extracurricular activities. We just didn’t... flaunt it at each other. Tried not to embarrass each other.”
“They’re calling it ‘open marriage,’ these days. You were one of the first couples I ever knew who so indulged.”
His shrug was as overly elaborate as the house. “Well, we were grown-ups, Nate. We still loved each other, we were pals, and we... had our romantic moments, even after things cooled. I mean, we must have loved each other, right? We married each other often enough!”
“The night before she died, Frank. Tell me about that.”
“The last time I saw her was with Julian Rusk, her hairdresser — he always comes here Sunday afternoon, to do her hair at home, before the show. Late afternoon. I said... break a leg, and she just... smiled and nodded. I rarely went to the broadcast with her and this was no exception. She and one of her producers went to P.J. Clarke’s for a quick drink, after.”
“Was that out of the ordinary?”
“No, no quite the opposite. From there she took her limousine — CBS provided that — to the piano bar at the Regency. Going there for cocktails was also customary — in fact, the show’s staff always invited the contestants to join them and usually some of the stars, depending on who was available or anyway in the mood.”
“What time did she get home?”
“I don’t really know, Nate. I was in bed already. No one else was in the house — the servants don’t sleep in, and our kids are in boarding school. Well, they’re home now, but... anyway, she was here at 2:20, that much I can tell you.”