Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) by Ed Ifkovic

Author:Ed Ifkovic [Ifkovic, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2013-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

The taxi flew uptown.

My doorman had secured a yellow checkered cab after Waters came back to the apartment and announced that he’d failed to flag down a taxi outside my building, even though, as he cynically termed it, he was dressed like a fugitive white boy from Phillips Exeter in his tan cashmere topcoat, leather gloves, and, horror of horrors, a suede trilby cap he’d inherited from his dead grandfather. Cabbies, I knew, were sometimes loath to squire a young Negro lad up to Harlem. So Joseph the doorman, obsequious to a fault, hailed one, though he couldn’t resist frowning at the young Negro boy who blithely and slowly climbed into the back seat of the battered cab, sitting between his mother Rebecca and me. We were going up to Harlem.

After Lawson had vanished from my living room, Waters and I discussed his behavior, befuddled; and Rebecca finally joined us, she conceding, a twinkle in her eye, that “even with the sunken eyes of a cadaver and the haunted look of a dying hero out of a Gothic romance, Lawson looks appealing.” She chuckled. “It’s hard for Lawson to look bad.” Waters groaned and eyed his mother disapprovingly. “But I’m worried about the boy,” Rebecca went on. “Worried to death.”

Waters was nodding. “You know, I don’t think Lawson thought much about cousin Roddy as a friend until he died. Roddy was just the goofy cousin who shared his apartment, who stayed out of his way. I mean, he liked him, pushed him to be a part of the group way back when, but Lawson probably never really thought about him. For a while they were always together, and then…well, they weren’t. I think they’d started growing apart from each other.” Waters was still tapping his fingers on the manuscript. “When Roddy got murdered, I think Lawson realized he’d lost something. It…you know…jarred him. Lawson doesn’t have many friends because…well, Lawson likes himself too much. The one guy he’d pal around with was Roddy.”

“It’s also the way he died,” I commented. “The shock.”

“To all of us,” Rebecca added. “But the body there…there…in his apartment.” She shuddered. “I’d have trouble sleeping in that place, I have to tell you.”

“People die of sadness, you know,” Waters went on, a line that sounded melodramatic coming from the skinny boy. His mother raised her eyebrows and looked long at him.

Then Waters, glancing toward the window where the disappearing afternoon sun was painting the Manhattan sky a swirl of orangy red and shrill yellow, told us that Harriet had mentioned that Skidder Scott was arraigned yesterday. “Funny thing is, I asked her how she’d heard about it, and she never answered me. Like she regretted saying anything at all.” Then, Waters said, he saw the front page of the Amsterdam News. There was a photograph of Scott being led out to a sheriff’s van, with stragglers bunched on a sidewalk. And there, bundled against the cold day, stood Harriet, a grainy shot but definitely her, watching.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.