“Certainly,” Leisure said.
So in the company of the dapper little mayor—who left his limo and driver at the curb on West 44th, proceeding with no retinue other than Darrow, Leisure, and myself—we cut down Shubert Alley over to the Music Box on West 45th.
This was my first Broadway show, but I’d seen snazzier productions on Randolph Street. It was a silly musical comedy about a presidential race; there were some nice-looking girls, and Victor Moore was funny as a dippy Vice President. Nonetheless, mediocre as it was, it remains one of the most memorable shows I ever attended—though that had nothing to do with what went on, onstage.
The mayor, like a glorified usher, had led us to our seats in the front of the orchestra, and a ripple had gone through the audience that turned into a near roar. Walker grinned and waved at the crowd, but it wasn’t him the audience was reacting to, even though the orchestra was graciously playing the theme song Walker had penned himself (“Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?”).
The fuss was over Darrow—he’d been recognized.
Soon the old boy was swamped with autograph-seeking admirers (Walker seemed mildly miffed by the lack of attention), and this went on till the lights dimmed and the overture began.
I was sitting next to Darrow who was sitting next to Leisure who was sitting next to the mayor. Throughout the entire play—which I understand was a Pulitzer prize-winner by George Gershwin, though I couldn’t hum you a song from it if you put a gun to my head—Darrow sat whispering to Leisure. Their sotto voce dialogue continued through intermission to the finale, as Darrow filled the young lawyer in on the facts of the Massie case, as well as his theories and plans concerning same….
Mayor Walker ducked out before the final curtain call, and as we were walking out onto West 45th Street, where a cool spring breeze nipped at us, Darrow was saying, “You know, George, I’ve been retired from practice some time now, and haven’t been regularly engaged in courtroom work for several years…”
“There’s no better man for this job.”
“Well, thank you, George, but I’m afraid I’m getting on in years…” Darrow stopped, flat-footedly, as if he had suddenly run out of gas. “Frankly, I would be very pleased to have a younger man accompany me on this trip. I wonder…would it be possible for you to go to Honolulu with me?”
“I would be honored and thrilled,” Leisure blurted.
“Of course, I have to warn you that the fee involved will not be great. In fact, I can promise you little more than your expenses…and the experience of a lifetime.”
“I see…”
“Will you be my associate counsel, sir?”
Leisure thrust his hand out. “With pleasure!”
The two men shook hands. Leisure said he would need to inform his partners, and Darrow requested that Leisure—and his wife, if he so desired—join him in Chicago within a week, to make final preparations; they would talk on the phone in a day or so, so that Darrow could book passage.
Back in Sardi’s, at another booth, with Leisure on his way home, Darrow and I had coffee again—unspiked, this time.
“I’m impressed,” I said.
“It was a good show,” Darrow said.
“It was a good show, all right, and I’m not talking about Of Thee I Sing, baby. Not a moment of which you witnessed, by the way.”
Darrow just sipped his coffee, smiling.
“How much was Dudley Malone going to soak you as co-counsel?” I asked him.
“Ten grand,” Darrow admitted.
“And you got one of the top lawyers on Wall Street to do the job for you, free.”
“Not free. Expenses, and probably a modest fee. And priceless experience.”
“He’s not exactly a damn law clerk, C.D.” I shook my head, laughed. “And how’d you manage getting the mayor to drop by?”
“Are you suggesting that was prearranged?”
“Playin’ Walker for a sucker, aren’t you, C.D.? I bet that poor bastard thinks if he gets on your good side, you’ll defend His Honor at the inquiry into his administration.”
Darrow shrugged. Definitely not a grandiose shrug.
“Does Gentleman Jimmy know you’re going to be in Hawaii when he comes under the gun?”
“The mayor of New York stops by for cheesecake and a pleasant social afternoon of theater,” Darrow said, “and you make a conspiracy out of it.”
“How much are you getting?”
“For what?”
“For what do you think—the Massie defense.”
He thought about ducking the question, but he knew enough not to lie to me. I was a detective; I would find out, anyway.
The piercing gray eyes had turned placid as he said, casually, “Thirty thousand—but I have to pay my own expenses.”
I laughed for a while. Then I slid out of the booth. “Tell you what, C.D. See if you can swing that leave of absence for me, and I’ll think about it. But I want a hundred bucks a week, on top of my copper’s pay.”
“Fifty,” he said.
“Seventy-five and full expenses.”
“Fifty and full expenses.”
“I thought you were the friend of the working man!”
“I am, and we are both trapped in a bad, unfair system, stranded on this speck of mud, floating in an endless sky. Fifty and full expenses is as high as I’ll go.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “After all, you can’t help yourself—heredity and environment have conspired to turn you into a stingy, greedy old bastard.”
He tried to look hurt. “I picked up the check, didn’t I?”
And then he winked at me.
2
On the train, as our four-thousand-mile journey got under way, I did my best to sleep through the two and a half days from Chicago to San Francisco. My tour of duty on the Lindbergh case had left me wrung out like a rag, and some of the reporters tagging along after Darrow (they were aboard for the duration, steamship tickets and all) had got wind of what I’d been working on, which made me more popular with the press than I cared to be.
“This is like a damn campaign special,” I told Leisure in the club car of the Golden Gate, where I sneaked rum from a flask into both our empty coffee cups.
Leisure’s wife, Anne—an attractive brunette in her thirties—sat with Ruby Darrow, playing canasta at a table nearby. Ruby, auburn-haired, vivacious, was full-figured but not matronly, a young-looking fifty-some years of age.
“I know,” Leisure said, nodding his thanks for my contribution to his cup, “and at every whistle-stop there’s another horde of reporters waiting.”
I smiled a little. “But you notice C.D. hasn’t given them a thing on the Massie case.”
Omaha was a case in point. Changing trains there, out on the platform, the old boy had been swarmed by reporters hurling questions about the Massie affair; hot words and phrases—“rape,” “murder,” “lynch law,” “honor slaying”—peppered the air like buckshot.
Darrow had turned his piercing gray-eyed gaze loose on the crowd, hooked his thumbs in his suspenders, and said with a gash of a smile, “Imagine that—a notorious ‘wet’ like me, stranded temporarily in the heart of ‘dry’ country. Nobody to talk to but upstanding moral folk.”
Several of the newshounds took the bait, and goading questions about Darrow’s anti-Prohibition stance overlapped each other till he stilled them with a raised palm.
“Is there a man here who’s never taken a drink?”
The gaggle of reporters grinned at him and each other, but not a man would admit to it.
“Well, then, what’s your problem?” Darrow growled. “Don’t you want anybody else to have any damn fun?”
And he’d got on the train.
As I sipped my rum from the coffee cup, Leisure was frowning; this was our second day of rail travel and he seemed uneasy.
“Trouble is,” Leisure said, “Mr. Darrow hasn’t said anything to me about the Massie case, either. I get the feeling everything he knows about our clients, and their situation, he whispered to me back at the Music Box theater.”