The thought that she should have a word with Beth Downey crossed Sadie’s mind several times that particular week in August 1949, but The Brownstone on West Forty-sixth Street was overrun with painters and the fifth-floor plumbing went berserk at the same time the air-conditioning in the basement practice rooms decided to pack it in. These, combined with the normal everyday problems inherent in running a boarding house that catered to thirty aspiring stars of Broadway and points west, kept Sadie Gold on the hop. When at last she was blessed with a free moment to take the girl to one side, it was too late. Elizabeth Downey was dead. Somehow she had managed to lose her footing in the subway and fallen into the path of an oncoming train.
It being rush hour at Times Square, everyone on the platform had been blinded by the homing instinct — no witnesses, no evidence of foul play. Reporters camped hopefully outside The Brownstone for a few days, then silently stole away.
Beth’s belongings were taken up to the top-floor storeroom. A pall hung over the boarding house until she was formally laid to rest, then the morning after the funeral the first name on the waiting list was transferred to the Residents Book and life returned to normal. For everyone except Elizabeth Downey’s roommate, Marilu Jennings — and Sadie Gold.
Sadie wished she could shake off the feeling that she had failed the young blonde soprano. Having noticed the girl was as jumpy as a cat in a thorn tree, she should have made time for her. One of her basic rules was to steer clear of involvement with her boarders’ problems, personal or otherwise, but this didn’t mean that her door was locked to any girl who might need a temporary shoulder to cry on. Beth had known this as well as anyone. Why hadn’t she come to her?
A soft knock sounded on Sadie’s door. The big woman glanced up from her book at the ormolu clock on the marble mantelpiece: it was almost 1:00 A.M. “Come in,” she said, not moving from the chaise longue Zeigfeld had given her when she left the Follies to marry. Isaac Gold.
Marilu Jennings poked her head in at the door. She was wearing a blue chenille robe. “I’m sorry, Sadie, I know it’s late—”
“It’s all right. Sit down.”
Marilu sat on a red-velvet chair by the chaise. “I don’t think it was an accident like they say,” she blurted out.
“It’s a kinder verdict than suicide,” said Sadie. “But what could have been so awful that she’d kill herself?”
“She didn’t. I’d bet my life on it.”
“How can you be so sure? Did she tell you why she was so miserable this past week?”
“No — she never confided in me, you know that.” It was true. The roommates hadn’t been the best of friends. Marilu had been jealous of Beth, who listed Bloomer Girl and Annie Get Your Gun among her credits. Beth had always been fortunate. She was hired for one singing chorus after another — then, when her fiancé Carter Harris opened a makeshift theater off Broadway, she was given star billing as the intermission vocalist.
“I thought you might know something,” Marilu said. “It’s true we weren’t close, but I admired her. I can’t let whoever was responsible get away with it.”
Sadie watched her with troubled eyes. “Good luck, dear girl. I’ll help if I can, but I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m not sure you should start.”
For half an hour Marilu watched the first act of East Lynne from the wings. The Irving Place loft Carter Harris had converted into the little goldmine called The Naughty Nineties was packed to the gunwales with an audience eager to pay ten dollars a head for the privilege of perching on the bare boards of a five-tier grandstand, where, dining on beer and sandwiches, they hissed the villain and cheered the hero soundly.
Between the first and second acts, she followed Carter around as he changed the scenery.
“Do you have any idea what was bothering Beth?” she asked him.
“Was something bothering her?” he said, his tiny features bunched around a wisp of a moustache. He was miles away, observing the look of the stage. He had always been an insensitive clod as far as Marilu was concerned.
During a two-hour break between modeling sessions, Marilu dropped by the Palace Theater Building to see Beth’s agent. Max Seneca. “How’s the next Margaret Sullavan?” the compact man greeted her from the ping-pong table that practically filled his office wall to wall. He noted the hatbox she was carrying. “Still modeling. Put down that badge of your profession and share my pastrami on rye.”
Marilu shook her head.
“Thanks anyway, Max. I just stopped by to ask you about Beth.” She asked and he talked, but he proved to be no more aware of Beth’s state of mind before her death than Carter Harris or Sadie Gold.
At dinner at The Brownstone the following evening, Marilu was brought up short by Natalie Norris. The dancer was sitting at their table for six, listening to Marilu natter on about Beth’s strangeness the last week of her life. “You’re getting to be such a pain about Beth Downey, Marilu. Why can’t you shut up? You’d think you were the only one upset by her death. She’s gone — leave her be!” All through the dining room, girls looked up from scripts, musical scores, and paperbacks, then back in embarrassment. Until that moment Marilu hadn’t realized how obsessed she had become.
Back in her room, she wondered if she should stop puzzling about Beth Downey’s death. The other girls in The Brownstone seemed to have forgotten her — including those now charging from floor to floor, borrowing each other’s clothes for the weekend. When you lived under Sadie Gold’s roof, your clothes could automatically become part of a clothes pool to be requisitioned for auditions, photographic sessions, or heavy dates.
Marilu’s door opened wide enough to admit a mudpack, topped by a scarf knotted Aunt Jemima style over a headful of wave clips and pincurls. “Can I borrow your red dress?” the apparition asked.
Marilu looked up from the copy of Dear Brutus she was trying to study. “Andrea beat you to it. I don’t have a thread left.”
After two more interruptions from prospective borrowers, Marilu got out of bed, hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the outside doorknob, and exchanged Dear Brutus for a paperback mystery — one of a half dozen on the shelf above her bed with Stanislavski and Shaw.
Across the room, an identical shelf, now a rat’s nest of soiled underwear, garter belts, and stockings belonging to the new girl (who was home in Connecticut for the weekend) had supported a neat row of books when Beth had been alive. The diaries! Marilu thought, remembering the hours Beth had spent writing in one or another of them in the two years they had shared the room. There had been an even dozen, bound in maroon leather with Diary imprinted in gold on the spine. They dated from 1938 to 1949.
Marilu scrambled into her robe and padded barefoot down to the front hall, where lettered mailboxes and a key rack were set in the wall behind the high teak desk near the front door. Lily Bird, onetime soubrette, lounged on a straight-backed chair, ready to give change for the two pay phones on the landing above and keep all unauthorized males from crossing authorized boundary lines.
“Is it all right if I take the storeroom key for a minute, Lily?” Marilu asked the now plump, grey-haired woman.
“Patsy Fisher has it. She’s up there now,” Lily told her. “Don’t forget to bring it back.”
On reaching the top floor, Marilu found the storeroom door wide open. The key was in the lock and the light was on, but Patsy Fisher was nowhere to be seen. Par for the course, Marilu thought. Patsy was a scatterbrained little blonde who never listened to a word anyone said except when a possible job was involved.