“The McAlpin, maybe?”
“That’d be an appropriate gesture, I admit, but probably more of a down-market place, not so conspicuous. So, let’s see. I acquired a garment rack and filled it up with long overcoats so the body could be concealed there later. I stationed it in a secluded spot among the trash cans behind the hotel. Meanwhile, Dad was in charge of shooting Spurlock, getting him down a back stairway unseen, and helping me hide the body. We might have tried to hang the guy up in one of the overcoats, but that probably wouldn’t work. Whoever pushed the rack to the spot where it was found would have noticed its unusual weight, so he had to be the murderer or his accomplice. Those racks are so commonplace on the streets in that area, any single one is about as noticeable as Chesterton’s postman. I’d have done the pushing, looked for a spot to disappear quickly, then abandoned the rack, leaving the cops to find the body and wonder. Dad could have disposed of the gun any number of ways.”
“That leaves Gentry.”
Now Arthur gave me a broad satirical smile. “You’ll need a séance to answer that one. I was nowhere near the scene, so my dad must have handled it by himself. Let me just say he was an experienced sailor and very able, despite his advanced years. He could have found a way. So there you have it. That’s how we might have done it—if we’d done it.”
“But you didn’t do it.”
“Heck, no.”
“Now, still speaking hypothetically, if you’d done all this, so successfully, with nobody suspecting, why would you have stopped?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe we planned more that never came off. I’ll bet there were some we wanted to do but couldn’t find a way to do them safely.”
“Safely for yourselves?”
“For innocent bystanders. We were never safe. That was part of the thrill. We might have wanted to do another in tribute to Danny, whose party was responsible for our whole crime wave. What better way than to send some deserving scoundrel off the top of the Empire State Building to be squashed on the street below? Hard to bring off, though, and we couldn’t have the victim take out some poor pedestrian. That would make us murderers rather than public benefactors, wouldn’t it? But if we’d been able to do the Empire State Building job, we’d have had a great line for the newspaper ads, from On the Town. It’s where the sailor on twenty-four-hour shore leave reads in his old guidebook that he should visit the Woolworth Tower for the best view of the city, and the lady cab driver points out to him, ‘That ain’t the highest spot.’ ”
“If all this had happened, do you think anybody might have found you out?”
“Not the cops or some true-crime writer, that’s for sure.”
“Somebody closer. Your daughter Eleanor. She’s a Broadway person, too.”
“She’s gone from ingénues to leading ladies to mother parts to old crones, and she’s seen all the theatrical mendacity we did. Good word, mendacity, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It wouldn’t have shocked her, and she wouldn’t have given us away. If any of this had happened, you understand. Let me have another glass of that brandy, will you, Seb?”
We parted on friendly terms that day. Had Arthur indirectly confessed to the Broadway Executioner murders, or was this just a game two old codgers had been playing to while away the time? Arthur has since died, too—and he’d seemed so healthy and vigorous that day he came to Plantain Point. So no one at that gathering of Danny’s survives, except me.
If all it amounted to was another way to bond with my favorite great-granddaughter, that was okay with me. Evan developed an interest in the music of long before her birth, started listening to original cast albums on whatever her current listening device was, branched out into big bands, swing music, jazz. That was what I’d really been hoping for when I sent her after those old songs.
Then one morning I read in one of the dwindling print newspapers the obituary of a Wall Street investment banker, Edgerton Makepeace, who had blood all over his hands during the financial crisis but was never prosecuted for anything, of course. Not quite in the Bernie Madoff class, but close. He’d backed some Broadway shows, but, more to the point, some Broadway people had lost a ton of money with him. He’d died by drowning in the East River during a visit to the South Street Seaport, a sort of nineteenth-century nautical theme park with a fleet of historic ships. It crossed my mind that the Executioner might be back at it, next generation this time, the little daughter and memoir collaborator, Eleanor Belasco, maybe with an accomplice of her own. I soon dismissed the idea.
But that very day, Evan showed up for one of her regular visits in a state of high excitement.
“Gramps,” she said, “it’s gone viral; it’s being tweeted and retweeted in record numbers—”
“Try speaking English,” I said.
“It’s all over the Internet, and nobody knows where it came from.”