“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.
Life went on, and for years I didn’t think much about the Broadway Executioner. Lots was happening. My eighties may have been busier than my seventies. It was only a couple years ago, a happy centenarian living out my days at Plantain Point, that I thought about the mutual interest Danny and I had in those killings, and I considered taking a crack at solving them, just as an intellectual exercise, of course. And so I did, after a fashion.
I’d put together certain clues and got a very rickety theory that sounded good to me, but it might not convince anybody else-and certainly wouldn’t fly in a court of law. Besides, all my suspects from that long-ago New York cocktail party were dead. Weren’t they? Well, not quite. Arthur Belasco, Elmer’s son, had put together quite a career as a Broadway producer-an honest one, I should add-in the last quarter of my century. He was still working and still vigorous, as why shouldn’t a young man barely in his eighties be, and he’d come to California on a book tour, promoting his newly published memoirs. Plantain Point has a lot of showbiz residents, and I suggested to our energetic young program director, always looking for diversions for her geriatric charges, that she call Arthur’s people and arrange for him to drop in during his California visit, give a little talk maybe, sell and sign some books. Once he was in town, I called his hotel and invited him to pay me a little visit while he was here.
Some people change less than others with the years, and I could see in Arthur’s wrinkled face the brash twenty-two-year-old I’d met back in 1946. He remembered me, too, though we hadn’t seen each other since. He glanced around at all the entertainment memorabilia in my living room and said it brought back memories. I wanted to bring back one particular memory over a glass of Remy Martin XO.
When he noted a signed photo of Danny Crenshaw in my rogues’ gallery, I said casually, “I guess you remember that get-together at Danny’s place, back in 1946?”
“Vividly. Hotel McAlpin. It’s now called the Herald Towers. They tore out those incredible murals in the basement restaurant. I think they’re in a subway station now. Can’t argue with progress, can we?”