THE SMOKE STACK MURDERS (Part Five)
MARGYEE WENZEL . . .
. . . JUST A GIRL WHO WAS BORN TO ENTERTAIN! MOTION PICTURE PRODUCTION, MUSICAL TALENT AND STAGE PERFORMANCE GENES WERE PASSED DOWN TO MARGYEE FROM AN ABUNDANTLY GIFTED FAMILY. NUMEROUS CREATIVE PATHS BECKONED, BUT STAND-UP COMEDY WAS HER CHOICE! AFTER APPRENTICING HERSELF TO HUDSON BEECHER, A RISING COMEDY STAR, SHE GETS A CRASH COURSE IN SHOW BUSINESS CRAFT, MERCURIAL ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT . . AND MURDER! HUDSON IS SECRETLY A PSYCHOPATH, AND SHE'S BENT ON FRAMING HER YOUNG APPRENTICE FOR A RECENT KILLING! MARGYEE HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME A GREAT COMEDY STAR BUT THAT WON'T HAPPEN UNLESS SHE SURVIVES HUDSON'S LETHAL PLANS FOR HER!
POP CULTURE CANTINA
presents
A MARVELOUS LIE PRODUCTION
"THE SMOKE STACK MURDERS"
A Graphic Novelette in Six Parts
featuring the Songs of
SMOKEY ROBINSON
"Take This Heart Of Mine"
THE TIME: THE YEAR 2063
(with flashbacks to the year 1990)
THE PLACE: NEW YORK CITY
THE NARRATOR: MARGYEE WENZEL
Some teenagers have no idea what they want to do as a profession. My problem was that I had too many choices! My family was active in the arts, and I grew up surrounded by creative people. All of them influenced me to some degree: My older brother was an opera singer. I can sing a little bit! My younger sister was a budding ballerina. I can dance, too. My father was a stage actor, and we used to rehearse his roles together. My mother was involved in all kinds of musical projects: Concerts, musicals, films and TV shows, most of which she directed or produced. Mama thought I showed promise as a movie director, and she was grooming me in that direction; but oh, no! Margyee had to go her own way!
I wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and it seemed like a good idea to apprentice under one who was already successful. That's how I ended up working for Hudson Beecher. It was just my verdammt dumb luck that she ended up being a psycho killer! So now, after I'd stumbled across her hideous secret, Hudson had me at her mercy: Gagged, hogtied and helpless inside a dressing room wardrobe at the Apollo Theater! Let that be a lesson to all of you: This is what can happen when you don't listen to your mother!
Hudson smiled that awful smile at me, the one that resembled a crocodile’s grimace! “Windsor Joy's killer will commit suicide and leave a note explaining that her motive was jealousy,” she explained. “That killer will be you, Margot! And tagging you as the murderer of Glammus Vidal's boyfriend won’t be difficult. It's been obvious to everyone how infatuated you are with her; that disgusting look of Lesbian perversion was all over your face, every time the two of you were in the same room! I’ll make sure the police are convinced of your guilt: The nude pictures I secretly took of Glammus will be found among your belongings!”
Mein Gott! And that bitch had the nerve to call me a pervert! I was numb with shock and pain, but a surge of adrenaline shot through me as I saw the wardrobe door budge behind her. Was someone coming in? Somebody must have heard what Hudson had said to me; but my heart sank when I saw that nobody was there. The door was only cracked open slightly; it had never closed properly, and a gust of wind from the open window in the dressing room must have blown it ajar.
Hudson didn't even notice. She kept talking to me, in a wheezy, hoarse whisper: “Since you’re such a nosy little dyke, I might as well tell you everything; you won’t live to repeat what I’m going to say! For once, Nicholas Freund told the truth. He didn’t kill Lover Ramos; but what Nicholas did do is poison him against me. Me, who adored the ground that Lover walked on!
"I offered him my mind, my body and my very soul but he laughed in my face! And then he said such cruel things, Margot. Things he had no doubt heard that despicable Kraut say about me! They'd had a violent argument and broken up, but Lover told me he was going to go crawling back to Nicholas. I just couldn’t allow that, so . . . I hit him. Again and again! I was trying to knock some sense into his head!"
Hudson began to sob softly. “I didn’t want Lover to die", she insisted, "but I didn't know my own strength! I slapped him so hard that he fell over backwards and broke his neck. That’s how my precious one lost his life, by accident! It happened about half an hour before that freight train ran over him.”
I groaned, and she viciously jammed the gag further back in my throat! But she kept on talking to me in that same raspy drone: “As Lover fell, his signature gold guitar pick fell from his pocket. I’ve worn it on a neck chain ever since, as a testament to my eternal love for him! I told everybody that it was his gift to me. I had asked him for it several times, and I'm sure he would have given it to me . . . eventually . . .
"Oh, Margot! It nearly destroyed me to drag Lover's corpse to those train tracks, tie it down, and then watch his gorgeous Puerto Rican body turned into hamburger!" A sob caught in her throat. "That bastard Nicholas," she hissed, "He was to blame for it all! He had to be punished. That unpleasant task was necessary, so that I could make him pay for destroying my happiness. How delicious it was when, largely on my testimony, Nicholas took the fall for what they thought was a ‘gangland’ crime!”
Hudson's face was horribly distorted as she told me this story, but it softened when she began speaking about Glammus Vidal. “It’s amazing, isn’t it, that all these years later I would fall in love with Nicholas's daughter?" she swooned. "And that she would be transsexual, too? Fate has finally seen fit to replace the love I lost so long ago. I know that Glammus is a half-nigger, but the girl is so beautiful, I don't even care!
"Already, Margot, I’ve held her tight in my arms. That surprises you, doesn’t it? She tried to resist me, the little tease! Playing hard-to-get; but I’ve known from the first time I saw Glammus that we were meant to be together. I’ll make her understand that, no matter what it takes! And Nicholas had better not stand in our way.”
Hudson’s face hardened again, and she glared down at me with a look of pure contempt! “I’m doing what you wanted to do with Glammus; but you never had a chance, you pathetic rug-muncher! You're better off dead than spending the rest of your life pining after what you aren't meant to have. So yes, Margot, you're going to die! And you'll take the blame for killing Windsor Joy; but not until I finish doing my set tonight.
"This dressing room is close enough to the stage that you'll be able to hear the laughs I get with those last jokes you wrote for me. Your last laughs!” The thought seemed to delight Hudson no end, and for a minute, she was overcome by a grotesque fit of giggles! Then she bent close, and I was nauseated by the smell of her reeking salmon breath: Just as rancid and evil as she was!
“I’m going to miss doing your material," she rasped, "even though it always needed my magic touch before it was truly funny! We made a great team; but sometimes one team member has to be sacrificed in order to reach an important goal. That’s what’s going to happen a few minutes from now, when I come back here and twist a noose around your fat neck! But there’s my cue . . . it’s showtime again. Auf Wedersehen, Margot!”
Before leaving, Hudson changed her mind about letting me hear her do one last comedy routine. She grabbed her barbell and whacked me in the head again! No doubt the maniac wanted me unconscious so I wouldn’t struggle or make any noise; but I didn’t black out a second time. I just lay there in agony, bruised and bleeding, with my heart racing and my mind in turmoil.
Hudson Beecher was mad - stark raving mad! Why hadn’t I seen it before? It’s because I'd been a fool, always writing off her erratic, disturbing behavior as eccentricity. Not for one minute did I believe she killed Lover Ramos by accident; that bitch snuffed him out on purpose, just like she schemed to murder Windsor Joy. And now I was about to become her third victim! Her plan to make it look like I hanged myself could never work; the police were sure to notice the wounds on my head. She’d probably be caught this time, but that wouldn’t change my fate: I’d still be dead!
But obviously, I didn't die that night. I'm still very much alive at age 93! I never heard Hudson Beecher deliver that last comedy monologue. She never showed up to perform it! Glammus Vidal, Wanda Sykes and The Apollo Dancers had to improvise to cover her absence. While I lay there, a prisoner inside that wardrobe, what I did hear was The Archies’ closing night performance. Maybe as a coping mechanism, I focused on their music instead of on my physical pain and dread of what Hudson would do to me. The sound of that closing night show got seared into my memory!
The audience began cheering when they heard the iconic guitar opening of The Temptations’ world-famous hit “My Girl”. That was the first song in Rod Mack's Motown Medley, and Jughead sang it. His baritone growl was the perfect substitute for Temptations lead singer David Ruffin’s voice, and Juggy tore up the place with a back-to-back quartet of Temptations covers: His “My Girl” segued into “Since I Lost My Baby” which ran up against "Beauty's Only Skin Deep" and then morphed into an explosive performance of “(I Know) I’m Losing You". He gave Ruffin’s original interpretations a solid run for the money!
Veronica was the next featured singer, and she swung right into Martha Reeves + The Vandellas' smash hit "Dancing In The Street!" With its whiplash boogaloo beat and hard Rock edge, this song was perfect for Roni; but she handed off the mike to Chuck Clayton for the second verse, who then segued into a pair of Four Tops classics. Chuck convincingly evoked lead singer Levi Stubbs on excerpts of “Ask The Lonely” and “Standing In The Shadows Of Love.” Then Chuck leaned hard into "There's A Ghost In My House", a cult favorite originally written and recorded by Motown singer/songwriter R. Dean Taylor. Archie joined in for duet vocals on this dynamic dance rocker, and his lead guitar really rang out while he and Chuck sang. That guitar had to be loud for me to hear it, because the SRO crowd was going wild!
The Salsa Soul Brothers kept a wicked rhythm churning as Veronica introduced The Archies' special guest star: Rod Mack! The audience grew quiet as the Brothers' lead guitarist lay his version of “What Becomes Of The Broken-Hearted” on them. That silence might've signaled displeasure, but Rod's rendition was definitive; I soon realized that listeners were awestruck by his performance! That particular Motown standard will always belong to Jimmy Ruffin, but The Apollo's answer to George Benson staked a claim on it that night; I was told later that Rod brought many people in the crowd to tears! I was sniveling myself, but frankly, that had less to do with his singing than the dire predicament I was in!
The applause for him still hadn’t died down when Veronica tore into a hot merengue arrangement of "Let Me Go The Right Way". This song had been The Supremes' very first hit 'way back in 1962, and Roni's energetic reading evoked the raw appeal of a young Diana Ross, hungry for fame! She wailed the coda to a crescendo of bongó drums, and then the big band launched into a swinging samba treatment of “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me”. That's a non-Motown number that was popularized by The Supremes and The Temptations in 1969.
This time, the crowd showed its appreciation by singing along and punctuating the verses with fervid shouts of “sing, children!” I heard loud whistling and cooing at the end of Arch and Roni's duet performance; that must have been the moment when he kissed her on stage. Then the whistles got even louder, and I didn't have to guess why: "Miss Thing", better known as Mary Elizabeth Cooper, had the honor of closing out the Medley!
The Apollo's huge brass section played the famous fanfare that opened "My Guy". Those horns were so sharp and tight, they were almost like a duet partner for Betty, but she wasn’t overshadowed. Her bold, resonant alto grabbed hold of that beloved Mary Wells oldie and never let go! And from all the commotion men in the audience were making, she must've been rolling her shapely hips in that special way of hers as she sang. Betty had one of the sexiest wiggles since Marilyn Monroe, and she certainly learned how to use it to advantage at the Apollo. After she sang the last chorus, the cheers seemed to go on forever!
Finally, Jughead reclaimed the mike to lead the Motown Festival's closing number: A floor-shaking revival of the 1965 Contours hit "First I Look At The Purse!" The street classy sneer in Juggy's phrasing was perfect for this song: A gigolo's boast set to a wicked denbow beat! Archie and Chuck kicked the song into high gear by yelling sugar mamas rule, go for yourself, dude! and other humorous asides between verses. Their combined efforts made the performance of this great Smokey Robinson tune a major crowd-pleaser.
By then, the audience was so pumped up, they didn't want the show to end; they screamed for The Archies not to leave! After an extended encore of "Goin' To A Go-Go", security men had to escort them off stage. I saw this later, in film footage taken by the Apollo Theater's staff photographer. The group looked Fantastich in provocative stage costumes; I recall that they were designed by Boyd Clopton, a couturier who was popular with Seventies R & B acts. If only I’d been there to see them in person! But I couldn't even enjoy listening to the show.
I’m not sure how long I stayed trussed up in Hudson's dressing room before I was finally rescued. A beautiful Black angel found me! By then I had probably slipped into delirium and was hallucinating; but somehow I knew this angel was real! She was dressed to the nines, dripping with diamonds, and she had a very regal bearing. What's more, my rescuer had sparkling brown eyes, honey-blonde hair and was almost as stunningly beautiful as Glammus Vidal.
I later learned that her name was Claudette Robinson. She had been Smokey Robinson’s first wife, but most important she was a founding member of his band The Miracles. As such, she was the first female artist ever signed to Motown. That’s why they called her Motown’s First Lady! The Archies were honored to have Ms. Robinson visit them backstage that night; she’d attended the festival finale just to see them perform.
Lady Motown was passing by Hudson’s dressing room when she noticed Hot Dog whimpering loudly and scratching at the door. She sensed that something was wrong and went for help. I remember staring into Claudette Robinson's sweet, worried face as somebody else removed my gag and cut loose my wrists; but then everything went black again! I guess I fainted. When I came back to my senses, I was in the hospital.
THE ARCHIES KILL IT DURING THEIR
CLOSING NIGHT PERFORMANCE
@ THE MOTOWN FESTIVAL
Hudson had left me with a concussion, and I was hospitalized overnight. It was at Bellevue where I found out why she never came back to finish me off. Somebody had finished her off! I couldn't believe it. Detective Weezy Nelson came to interview me in my hospital bed, and after I gave her my statement, she confirmed that Hudson was dead. Then she reconstructed the events leading up to my late boss's demise.
"The festival's comedy segment had been expanded for closing night," she explained. "In addition to a comedian, there was a skit." I already knew that. The Apollo Theater was famous for its Amateur Night shows, when prospective singers, dancers and jokesters tried their luck in front of the notoriously hard-to-please Harlem crowd. If they bombed, a tall man would snatch them off the stage with a big, long hook! It was a decades-old tradition dating back to vaudeville.
Well, this closing night skit was a mini-version of Amateur Night, and there was a change: Instead of a hook, the guy was going to use a toy machine gun to “rub out” the no-talent performer. Lieber Himmel! Can you even imagine them doing something like that on stage today? They wouldn’t dare; but the Nineties was a very different era. Lots of people still thought mock violence was funny! In fact, I briefly considered having Hudson use that same toy gun as joke prop. Ironically, the joke concept I had in mind didn't appeal to her so I tossed it.
Anyway, back to Detective Nelson's explanation: "That modified skit was supposed to segue into Hudson Beecher's spot. Geraldine Grundy, one of the festival's music arrangers, portrayed an audience member who came up on stage to sing." I knew about that, too. Deanie Grundy could really sing, but she played along with the ruse. She pretended to be this arrogant White lady who thought she could do justice to a Motown classic! As Deanie deliberately mangled The Supremes' 1964 hit “Where Did Our Love Go?" I heard a chorus of boos, hisses and catcalls from my backstage prison.
"When Ms. Grundy got to the third verse," the detective continued, "a dancer costumed like the Mardi Gras character Baron Samedi stepped forward and aimed the prop gun at her. After getting 'shot', she staggered off into the wings. That's where she found the victim, Hudson Beecher, laying on the floor in a pool of blood!" Hudson was mere seconds from death when Deanie stumbled across her body. In a grim tone of voice, Detective Nelson confirmed that "Ms. Beecher died gasping and murmuring incoherently."
Someone had shot Hudson through the heart! Investigators would later conclude that the sound of the fake machine gun drowned out the blast that killed her. When The Apollo’s stage manager saw the body, he made the questionable decision not to raise an alarm. He had it carried into his office - something he later got in trouble for doing - and nobody on stage or in the audience knew what had happened until after the show! Glammus Vidal was told that Hudson had suddenly taken ill, so she ad-libbed a monologue of her own until Wanda Sykes could be summoned from backstage.
But later, Glammus was shocked to find herself a murder suspect! Evidently, Hudson had whispered her name just before dying. Under Detective Nelson's questioning, she admitted that the victim had tried to blackmail and sexually assault her; so she did have sufficient motive for murder. Then, when Nicky Álvarez was revealed as Glammus's father and he admitted that he'd threatened Hudson, Nicky became a suspect, too!
But there was no way either one of them could have killed her: Both were on stage in full view of hundreds of people when she got shot! The dancer who impersonated Baron Samedi wasn't guilty, either, because his prop gun had no loading chamber. It wasn't even equipped to hold blank cartridges! The investigation stretched on for weeks but the NYPD ultimately failed to identify any other suspects; an unidentified intruder got blamed for the crime. Hudson's killer was never apprehended! But I know who it was.
PROMO FOR THE INDEPENDENT ARCHIE
RECORDS LABEL, OWNED BY ARCHIE
AND VERONICA AND ACTIVE
BETWEEN 2000 AND 2015
END OF PART FIVE
"I'll Be Doggone"
