Rosey shrugged. “Anonymous letters to the cops or the press maybe. I’d give myself a name. The Stage Door Avenger?”
“Naw, the newspapers would do it for you, and they’d come up with something better than that,” Danny said.
“Jack the Ripper named himself,” I pointed out.
“Let’s get to the important stuff, Rosey,” Danny said. “Who’d you pick as your next victim?”
Mildred had been silent through all of this. Now she raised her hands as if in surrender. “Fellows, I just hate this kind of talk. Can we change the subject, or can you play something else for us, Jerry?”
Jerry launched into a medley from Show Boat, and that was that.
The next day, a cryptic message in all capital letters appeared in the personals columns of all the evening papers, and there were a slew of them in New York at that time: “YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW A HAZARD FROM A GREEN.” At the time, nobody knew what it meant or had any reason to connect it to the death of Claude Anselm. By the time anybody made the connection, three more Broadway scumbags had died.
As I knew she would, Evan turned up the next day with the answers. When I kidded her about visiting two days in a row, said they’d have to put her on the payroll with the nurses and maids and social directors and therapy dogs, she rolled her eyes impatiently.
“I did them in the order you listed them. Is the order significant?”
“Not really, but go ahead and do ’em that way.”
“Okay. ‘Massachusetts is a long way from New York.’ That one threw me for a while. I kept getting bogged down with driving distances between cities in Massachusetts and New York, but then I remembered an obvious trick to using a search engine. To get the exact words, you put the whole phrase in quotation marks. Then it was easy. It’s a line from a song called ‘Lizzie Borden’ written by Michael Brown. Wasn’t Lizzie Borden a famous murderer, Gramps?”
“Many people think so, if murderers can be famous.”
“At that point, I thought the other lines might have to do with murderers, too, but they didn’t. Pretty soon I knew what they had in common. They’re all from songs in old Broadway shows. I took down some more relevant information about each one, not knowing what was important and what wasn’t, and I made a little chart for you.” She handed me a sheet of paper.
“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.