“And get yourself fried in that nice comfy electric chair they got up at Sing Sing?” Danny asked.
“No, I’d do it indirectly and anonymously. It wouldn’t be necessary to put my own name on it, but I’d want the world to know he was executed on behalf of Broadway and all the people whose careers and lives he stomped on.”
“And once you did that fine gesture, would you be able to stop at just one?” Arthur Belasco asked.
“Yeah,” Danny chimed in. “I can suggest some other vermin in our fine theatrical profession that are just as deserving.”
I hadn’t contributed much, not being a Broadway insider like these folks, but now I decided to go along with the gag. “Rosey, it’s an attractive idea, but you have to think this through. The mistake those clever murderers in books make is getting too cute for their own good. Gilding the lily. Giving the supersleuth a way to get at them in the last chapter. Why provide a deliberate clue that could be traced back to you?”
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.”