Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page B

unstoppable.”
    He hadn’t touched the sandwich I’d given him, but now, tentatively, he sipped his coffee. His fingers, long and delicate and dark, trembled a bit as he touched the cup, and I thought: he’s still nervous . This conversation was a novelty for him—maybe even a violation of some sort. The nosy novelist was making him nervous.
    “One time I saw Langston Hughes walking on 136th Street,” he said, a hint of awe in his voice. “Ever since he published The Weary Blues poems last year, well, he’s our hero. The way he uses jazz rhythms…” Roddy’s fingers tapped lightly on the table.
    I smiled. “Would you believe I met him recently at a party at Carl Van Vechten’s apartment? He told me he takes the train in from Pennsylvania, where he’s living these days. We had a nice chat, very brief, before he was called away, but he has a way of inviting confidences. I asked him about his poetry, but within minutes he had me talking about growing up in Appleton, Wisconsin. Quite a talent, I thought.”
    Roddy laughed but looked away, glancing at the closed door. “I should go back. I believe in being as visible as possible. I want them to be aware of the overgrown boy in the back row. Maybe I’ll be hired as an understudy. I don’t know.” Again, he glanced at the door. “And Ellie’s meeting me later. She was hoping they might need another girl for the Negro Chorus. You remember Ellie.”
    “Of course. The quiet girl who sat next to Lawson. The sonneteer. I remember her one sonnet last summer.”
    “You know, quiet little Ellie with the freckles on her nose is also a wonderful chanteuse. She has an angel’s voice.”
    “A jazz singer?”
    Nodding, Roddy stared into my face for the first time. “She’s wonderful. Like…like Florence Mills. Sweet but, you know, tough.”
    “She looks so quiet, Roddy. I can’t imagine her on a stage.”
    “She sings in Negro clubs uptown but they don’t pay a hill of beans, Miss Ferber. Especially someone just starting out. But tonight she’s singing a few numbers in the early show at a club for white folks. Small’s Paradise. You heard of that place? Her big break. Maybe.” He reached down into a leather satchel he’d carried over his shoulder and had placed on the floor, and rifled through some papers. He handed me a small flyer, smudged black-and-white type on cheap yellow paper. “We got these done to, well, promote her. Her friends. Me and Lawson, actually. For her brief set at Small’s Paradise up on Seventh Avenue. A real important nightclub, you know.”
    I stared at the crude sheet, and read: “Ellie Payne, Songstress, with the Charlie Johnson Band.” A snippet of a review below a grainy snapshot of her. “A jazz singer with a tear in her voice.” The quote was from some magazine I’d never read. Roddy saw me reading it. “We made that up,” he confessed. “Actually Lawson said it, but no one’s heard of Lawson—yet.”
    “I like it.”
    “You should come hear her,” Roddy said now. “Everyone comes up to Small’s Paradise at night. Up to Harlem, I mean. The clubs there.”
    Everyone except me. The current fad of well-heeled white nightclubers flocking uptown in ermine and pearls held no appeal for me. Lines of sleek limousines idling at curbs, while downtown businessmen ogled the light-skinned showgirls at the Cotton Club or Connie’s Inn. Once or twice I’d been escorted by Noël Coward or Aleck Woollcott or Robert Benchley to glitzy nightclubs where syncopated orchestras played New Orleans ragtime or jazz. One time Noël actually got me dancing and a photographer from the Tribune snapped my picture. I feared I’d see it published one day…to my utter embarrassment. Fun, those times, but not addictive. Giddy flappers with Dutch-boy bobs and batik scarves looked like errant schoolboys at recess. I tried to ignore the current fascination with hidden-away taboo speakeasies and flowing bootleg bathtub gin and the drunken cheers of