Run Cold Read online

  RUN COLD

  The Tenth Edna Ferber Mystery

  “Distinctive characters, intelligent dialogue, and a credible solution to the crimes ensure that the series ends on a strong note. Fans will be sorry to see the last of Edna’s sleuthing adventures.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  MOOD INDIGO

  The Ninth Edna Ferber Mystery

  “Ifkovic sets the bar terrifically high for future Ferber mysteries, but it’s probably a safe bet that he can meet his own challenge.”

  —David Pitt, Booklist (starred review)

  “Ifkovic adroitly squeezes huge amounts of research into the story, with glimpses of people in the arty New York scene as well as the poor on the streets. The novel’s main strength, though, is its vivid depiction of a country in crisis in the depths of the Depression.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Ifkovic has done his research and brings the world of the 1930s rich and famous to life, but readers don’t have to be fans of the period to enjoy Mood Indigo; they only have to enjoy a well-written mystery.”

  —Mystery Scene Magazine

  “Ifkovic’s dialog is the star. The witty banter between Edna and Noel is engaging and fun to read.”

  —Historical Novel Society

  OLD NEWS

  The Eighth Edna Ferber Mystery

  “This is Ifkovic’s eighth outing with Edna Ferber as sleuth, and he brings the characters of post-Great War Chicago to life: the accents, the clothes, the food, the traditions. The story itself is fairly gritty, with few details spared of the emotional and physical trauma that happened behind closed doors and is now being relived. Readers will be front and center for the action, the pain, and Edna’s plans to trap the real killer.”

  —Historical Novel Society

  COLD MORNING

  The Seventh Edna Ferber Mystery

  “Like Max Allan Collins in Stolen Away, Ifkovic develops a realistic scenario for what might have really happened to the Lindbergh baby. Largely unknown today, Ferber has emerged in this series as perhaps the most compelling of all the many real-life authors turned fictional sleuths in the genre.”

  —Booklist

  “The seventh entry in Ifkovic’s historical series continues to entertain with Woollcott and Ferber trading barbs and bon mots with Walter Winchell and Adela Rogers St. John from the Hearst syndicate.”

  —Library Journal

  “The little town of Flemington, N.J., provides the setting for Ifkovic’s intriguing seventh mystery featuring novelist Edna Ferber....History buffs will enjoy this one.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Now that he’s seen her through six murder cases, Ifkovic turns sleuthing novelist/playwright Edna Ferber loose on the biggest game of all: the Lindbergh kidnapping....Perhaps the finest hour yet for a fictionalized heroine who defends herself against undue prejudice in favor of a supremely unpopular defendant by saying, ‘I have taken no position—except doubt.’”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  CAFÉ EUROPA

  The Sixth Edna Ferber Mystery

  “It’s as smartly written as its predecessors, but, as each book does, it shows us a slightly different Ferber—here, she’s not quite a girl anymore, but neither is she the experienced woman we see in other series installments. Another totally successful entry in a consistently interesting series.”

  —David Pitt, Booklist

  “...Ifkovic successfully blends homicide with a loving homage to Budapest on the eve of World War I.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  FINAL CURTAIN

  The Fifth Edna Ferber Mystery

  “The story unfolds Agatha Christie-style, with an assortment of likely suspects, but it’s best if one thinks of the novel as a Christie story written by, say, someone of Ferber’s, or indeed Kaufman’s, witty sensibilities. This is the fifth Ferber mystery, and she continues to be one of the more interesting of the historical figures who have found new life as fictional sleuths.”

  —Booklist

  “Ifkovic’s fifth Edna Ferber mystery provides a splendid view of the highbrow theater culture of another era.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  DOWNTOWN STRUT

  The Fourth Edna Ferber Mystery

  “Ifkovic is assembling a sort of literary collage, building a picture of Ferber (this fictionalized Ferber, anyway) one piece at a time. Fans of mysteries featuring literary figures as crime-solvers will thoroughly enjoy this series.”

  —Booklist

  MAKE BELIEVE

  The Third Edna Ferber Mystery

  “A vivid, atmospheric mystery about 1951 Hollywood. I loved Edna Ferber as a detective investigating a murder behind a film of her classic Show Boat. Add fascinating portraits of Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra, and this is a winner.”

  —David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author

  “This series is a lot of fun. Ifkovic has made a clever decision not to take the stories in chronological order, and his Edna Ferber is a wonderful creation, smart and sassy and determined and immensely likable. Fans of Hollywood-themed mysteries featuring real people—Stuart Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels, for example—will have a great time here.”

  —Booklist

  “Ifkovic’s series jumps ahead to author Edna Ferber’s Hollywood days, when her novel Show Boat is being filmed and a blacklisted friend is killed. Mix in Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner for an unforgettable read.”

  —Library Journal

  “A host of Hollywood and Broadway personalities from Hedda Hopper to George S. Kaufman provide period color as a sharp-witted Edna probes for the reason behind Max’s murder.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Come for the whodunit, stay for the stargazing.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  ESCAPE ARTIST

  The Second Edna Ferber Mystery

  “Only a nitpicker would even wonder how much Ifkovic’s version resembles the real woman, for the reader is entranced by her plucky spirit and sharp-witted investigative skills. Houdini, too, is a very well designed character. This isn’t his first fictional appearance, but it’s definitely one of his best, and if Ifkovic can manage it without overstretching the bounds of credibility, it would be great to see the escape artist and the girl reporter team up again. Who would have thought that, of all the real-life characters to have a second life as detectives, Edna Ferber, now largely forgotten as a writer, would emerge as one of the best?”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “The author does a fine job of writing a sequel to Lone Star, set at the opposite end of Edna’s life. Stylistically, it’s as if we’re in Booth Tarkington country, with a leisurely pace and a society with clearly defined boundaries. A gentle read.”

  —Library Journal

  “Set in Hollywood in 1955, Ifkovic’s debut...depicted Edna Ferber as a matronly but shrewd established author. This excellent prequel, set in 1904, shows her at the start of her career, a recent high school graduate working as a reporter for her hometown newspaper in Appleton, Wis.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  LONE STAR

  The First Edna Ferber Mystery

  “A pure delight.”

  —Jeffery Deaver, award-winning author of

  The Bodies Left Behind

  “A promising debut in what could be a long-running and highly entertaining series.”

  —Booklist

  “Ifkovic handles the mystery plot competently, but the main pleasure is looking beneath the surface of the movie business to see the stars as people,
in particular the doomed Dean.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Ferber makes an appealing if unlikely detective and Jimmy Dean a splendidly charismatic enigma.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Run Cold

  An Edna Ferber Mystery

  Ed Ifkovic

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Ed Ifkovic

  First Edition 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949100

  ISBN: 9781464211133 Hardcover

  ISBN: 9781464211164 Ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Poisoned Pen Press

  4014 N. Goldwater Blvd., #201

  Scottsdale, AZ 85251

  www.poisonedpenpress.com

  [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Run Cold

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  For my good friends,

  Susan and Dave Bogush

  “There are stranger things done, in the midnight sun,

  By the men who moil for gold;

  The Arctic trails have their secret tales

  That would make your blood run cold.”

  —Robert W. Service,

  “The Cremation of Sam McGee”

  Chapter One

  Jack Mabie claimed he was the meanest man in Alaska. Yet the old man said it with a smart-aleck grin on his whiskered face, his watery eyes dancing with mischief. But something else was in those eyes—cruelty. I shivered, turned away. Miffed by my silence, he cleared his throat and repeated it. “Takes a lot of gumption and spit to get folks to hate your guts, ma’am.”

  I smiled at him. “Strangely, I get my enemies to hate me simply by being myself.”

  The old sourdough irritated me. First impression, indeed, but my first impressions were reliable. Not that I didn’t believe he’d been a notorious frontier bad man from the icebox of the Yukon—there seemed to be a baker’s dozen of such crusty geezers in every tin-roofed log-cabin roadhouse across the desolate Alaskan landscape—but Jack Mabie savored a reputation constructed decades ago in his younger years, lawlessness now recollected in a new world he had trouble understanding. The simple, venal soul of the old-time pioneer had watched as his frontier morphed into the pastel 1950s world of martini cocktail bars up and down Fairbanks’ Second Avenue, pink and turquoise colors blinding a man who’d once only dreamed in gold.

  A man in his late seventies—skinny as taut barbed wire, untrimmed whiskers tinted dirty yellow and charcoal, rheumy eyes in bloodshot sockets, scraggly hair dropping over his frayed flannel collar—he wore a drunkard’s perpetual hangdog expression. A small man, slightly taller than my own five feet, but hunched over, a bony left shoulder prominent now, a jawline that sagged and trembled, the result of a stroke he’d suffered during the last dark winter. Discovered half-dead in a wilderness cabin near Chena, delirious, feverish, he’d been carted to Fairbanks and restored to his grumpy self. He’d been forced to live in the Frontier Home, a house of craggy prospectors, wizened trappers, doddering men who drifted from their cot-like beds to the makeshift squalid bars nearby, like Omar’s, a log-cabin shanty with fireweed growing from its sod roof. In the hazy blue light of morning, ambling through the ice fog that lay across the town like dust on old furniture, they’d stumble back for a fitful sleep and dream of timber wolves baying at the Northern Lights.

  Jack Mabie wasn’t happy there. City lights—and Fairbanks had more blinding neon and sparkle than he remembered—made him antsy.

  Newfound notoriety came to him when Sonia Petrievich, editor at The Gold, her father Hank’s weekly paper, learned through the mukluk telegraph about the meanest man in Alaska. Her breezy profile on Jack, filled with the over-the-top bravado and swollen exaggeration he generously provided, garnered attention. His cavalier account of strings of murders and robberies and shell games was a whole basket of evil gleefully recalled.

  Suddenly, after dragging his feet on the frozen pavement and staggering back to the Frontier Home as the midnight sun hurt his eyes, Jack was greeted with hearty cheer and back-slapping camaraderie, and offered shots of whiskey and beer. A septuagenarian outlaw, the guy in the black hat from the old Republic Westerns out of Hollywood, was now applauded.

  Jack became a ragtag remnant of old Alaska, the gold rush days. The Klondike of ’98. Fairbanks in ’02. He reveled in it. He ratcheted up his stories of meanness—he boasted of murders he’d happily committed, his arthritic fingers counting them off, and got away with. “Don’t got law on the Chilkoot Trail.” As Sonia quoted him, “Ain’t no peace officer around when you hang a man you don’t like.”

  I’d first met Sonia Petrievich last summer when I visited Fairbanks doing research for my book, Ice Palace. For a week she was my constant guide, a warm, spirited woman who became my friend. Arm in arm, we wandered through Fairbanks streets, talking. I’d met her father years back in New York, a savvy newsman I’d taken a liking to, so I was not surprised I found his daughter frank and engaging and ready for battle. When I left, I had no plans to return, but a year later, driven, I flew back. Ice Palace was scheduled for publication the next year, in the spring of 1958, but Alaska drew me back—loose ends, haunting stories, unanswered questions.

  I’d arrived yesterday, a chilly March day, slept the long night in my room at the Nordale, only to have Sonia meet me in the lobby the next afternoon and insist I meet Jack—“the meanest man in Alaska. Today. You can’t say no. An original.”

  “I’ve met a dozen old-timers, Sonia. They tell me the same story.”

  Her eyes got wide with amusement. “He claims he’s killed—indifferently murdered—dozens of men up North. Decades back.”

  I sighed. “Every pioneer I’ve met makes up stories, trying to top the one just before. Bonanza Creek. The gold rush of ’98 was their idea. They dreamed it. They found the biggest gold nugget in recorded history in the golden sands of Nome. They almost married Klondike Kate.”

  Laughing, she held up her hand. “The meanest man in Alaska.” Her fingers drummed the article she’d written in The Gold—as part of a popular series called “White Silence,” the title taken from a Jack London story of the bitter Arctic—and announced, “I’ve interviewed eight old men so far…he’s the cream of the crop.” She’d leaned in, confidential, “Edna, he’s a gold mine.”

  “Yes,” I told her, “the one he never found.”

  So, one day after touching down in Alaska, I found myself in the Model Café, sitting across from Sonia and Jack, Sonia grinning mischievously and Jack obviously a little tipsy at two in the afternoon. Sonia and I munched on mooseburgers while Jack kept looking toward the bar.


  Jack had demanded we meet him at a sawdust dive near the Frontier Home. Sonia described it as a peeled log-cabin tavern with Western-style swinging doors and a giant chromolithograph of a spangled dance-hall girl hanging over the bar. I’d balked at that. Exhausted from my trip across the country—New York to Seattle to Fairbanks—I had little patience with the tinny jukebox ditties of tractor infidelity and hoedown romance. No, I’d said, the Model Café was a pleasant coffee shop I recalled from last summer, perfect for conversation.

  Of course, there was little conversation. Jack eyed me closely, his look sassy. “So I’m gonna be in your book, lady?” Before I could answer, he mumbled, “You gonna pay me, yeah?”

  I didn’t answer at first, but finally said, flatly, “No.”

  That surprised him, but he barely suppressed a belch, looked at Sonia as though she’d betrayed him, shrugged his shoulders, and whined, “But I’m the meanest man in Alaska.”

  I counted a second. “You’ve already said that.”

  His eyes got wide. “And you ain’t believing me?”

  I tilted my head to the side. “Why should I?”

  “Lady,” he sucked in his breath, “I’m a dangerous man.” He hesitated. “Was, maybe...before that goddamn stroke.” Then, reconsidering, “Still am.” A deep sigh, almost an afterthought. “Mean.”

  I caught Sonia’s eye. She was enjoying this.

  From a satchel she’d slipped over the back of her chair, Sonia pulled out a clipping of her profile of Jack and spread it on the table. Jack, squinting, grinned, showing a mouth of missing teeth, blackened teeth, an ugly blister on his lip. He pointed. “See?”

  I already knew the piece but glanced down.