“When you’re in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out.” Groucho Marx is telling a reporter through the glass of the prisons visiting room, a black telephone pressed to his ear, “A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying; damn, that was fun.”

He laughs maniacally, his taped-on moustache flapping loosely above his top lip.

Jack Hollis was a young, ambitious reporter looking for his first break.  When the opportunity to interview the world famous comedian, actor, writer and serial criminal Groucho Marx had come along, he had jumped at the chance. Now, sitting here in front of a man wearing black duct tape for a moustache, pretending to hold a cigar to his lips and laughing spit onto the glass that separated them, he wasn’t quite sure this was the break he was looking for after all.

Groucho’s wheezing cough had left small spatters of spit on the glass, but honestly, the glass was already pretty filthy anyway.

Jack had dressed down for the occasion. He knew that a maximum security prison would welcome all types of visitors, but in his experience those who arrived in the designer suits he would usually wear to a celebrity interview tended to me lawyers. And lifers like Groucho, they fucking hated lawyers.  He had instead opted for a smart polo shirt, fastened all the way to the neck, some smart blue jeans and his nicest trainers. He looked smart, but not so smart as to be misidentified as a lawyer, the connotations of which in a place like this he was keen to avoid.

“The funny thing is,” Groucho said into the phone, “the chap in the cell next to me, I don’t like him at all. He’s not one bit of fun.”

“Well,” Jack begins asking, regretting his question before he even finishes it, “what is it about him you find so—”

“Boring. The word is boring. All he wants to do is exercise and eat noodles. No, no. Not my idea of a good time. Not at all.”

“And what is your idea of a good time?”

“Ha!” Groucho laughs. His eyes glass over as he sends his mind back into the past.

He remembers the first arrest. How they had locked him in a cell next door to his best friend, who was referred to as his accomplice, rather than friend, in the papers; famed Pulitzer Prize winner, Carl Sandburg. What a riot that day had been. A couple of best friends, out on the town, having a roaring good time.

Of course, once Groucho had started to smear his own shit on the cell walls the guards had no choice but to bring in the fire hose and spray him down.

“You think you can dampen my spirits?” he had shouted over the roar of the high pressure water. A quip thinks quite clever even now as he sits in his maximum security prison, “but how can you dampen my spirits on a day my best friends and I hurled an elderly woman into traffic? Ha-ha! What a riot!”

“Oh,” Groucho said, his mind wondering back to the conversation with the journalist, “just the usual. Spending time with friends. Having a hoot together.”

Jack takes notes as the insane comedian speaks, but isn’t sure they’re going to lead to anything he can publish. The man is quite obviously unwell. From the false moustache to the stories of grandeur, Jack isn’t sure what to believe, and therefore what he could publish.

“Such as grand theft auto? Manslaughter? Outraging public decency?” Jack lists just a few of the crimes listed off at Groucho’s public hearing.

“Yes. Yes.” Groucho says as he twists the edge of his false moustache. “Yes, something like that I suppose.”

Groucho’s mind wanders again, floating back into a past memory where he had been on top of a high rise building with his best friend Carl. He remembers how funny it had been for Carl to be hanging that prostitute off the balcony by her ankles.

“You wanna die tonight, or see tomorrows sun shine bright?”

“Ah,” Groucho thought, “how he always spoke in rhymes. No wonder he had won the Pulitzer not once but twice. He was quite the genius.”

He recalls how funny it had been when he had told the woman, between her screams, that Carl was incredibly ticklish. He started to tickle Carl under the armpits, and the two of them had started a tickle fight before realising that one of them really ought to have kept a hold of the poor woman’s ankles.

“Oh well. She was well paid at least.”

“Sorry?”

Groucho had forgotten to tell the journalist the story. He realised he had disappeared into his own little world again. A force of habit having been incarcerated for so long now. How many years had it been? Seven? Eight? He couldn’t be sure.

“Oh, nothing my boy. Nothing. Just a thought of mine.”

“Mr. Marx, you have hardly said a word to me since I got here. You just keep… Glazing over.”

“Ah, sorry my boy.” Groucho says, smoking his imaginary cigar, “I mean no disrespect to you. Sometimes I just forget to tell the story I’m thinking of.”

“Can you try to focus, just a little bit for me? What were you thinking of just now, after I asked you about some of the things you like to do with your friends?”

“Yes, of course.”

Groucho regaled in great detail the events of the evening which had lead to a prostitutes brains splattering all over the pavement of a street in downtown Manhattan, laughing at the end as if he had reached a punchline.

“And of course, her head just went pop, like it was one of those watermelons wrapped in elastic bands. Ha, ha!”

Jack was pale by the end of the story.

“That’s what you were thinking about?”

“Yes. Yes.” Groucho says, his eyes wandering again as he puffs on his imagined cigar.

“I’m sorry. I have to ask. What is that?” Jack gestures broadly at the thin air around Groucho’s face.

“A nasty habit indeed, boy. You must promise me you will never take it up yourself.”

“I see. And so, the evening of the murder, that to you was a good time?”

“Which one, darling?”

Jack’s mouth was dry. It always got dry when he was uncomfortable, and this was about as uncomfortable as he had ever been.  He knew that there were eyes on him back at the office. People expected this interview to go well. It needed to sell, and it needed to sell well. But he feels out of his depth. Not only is he sat in front of a world-famous comedian, but also one of the most prolific criminals in recent history. The juxtaposition was a lot to take in even from afar, but when he sat himself down in front of the great Groucho Marx he realised the questions neatly presented in his notepad were never going to garner interesting answers. Certainly nothing that would make a decent front page headline. Who wanted to read the headline, ‘Duck Soup – Groucho Marx’s favourite film’, or ‘Margaret Dumont was a lovely woman, says Marx’?

Suddenly it occurred to Jack that of all the crimes on Groucho’s charge sheet, murder had only appeared once. But what had he asked Jack just now? ‘Which one’.

“Well, which was your favourite?” Jack asks, leaning in and showing interest with a dry lick of his lips.

Groucho taps the end of his imaginary cigar, watching the ash drop, then looks at the tip of the cigar, watching the smoke gently rise, swirling in a purple haze towards the ceiling.

“Did you ever hear the one about the woman in the trunk?”

“Go on.”

“Oh she was wonderful. A contortionist from a travelling circus. The longest legs I’ve ever seen, and oh, Jacky boy, the things she could do with her body.” Groucho sucks the tip of each of his fingers, “Divine. Simply divine.”

“And you killed her?”

“Well, not at first. First I had to convince her to get into the trunk of course.”

Jack nodded. Of course.

“Which was relatively simple. I just lamped her over the head with a claw hammer a few times and in she popped.  But getting that blasted trunk down to my car was a real pain.”

“Wait, Didn’t you just say you stuffed her in your trunk?”

“No. You haven’t been listening.” Groucho snapped, his neck twisting and his expression instantly changing from happy to irritated. His hands stretch out in front of him, his index and middle finger still clinging to the imaginary cigar, “I stuffed her in her trunk, then I had to get that trunk down the stairs and into the car.”

“Her car trunk?”

“No fool. Her trunk. Her trunk!”

“Her suitcase?”

“It really was more of a trunk.” Groucho explains, his mood slowly settling.

“And you had to drag it out to the car?”

“Down a flight of stairs you see. And a body even as petite as hers is quite the dead weight. I should say a corpse weight three times more than a living person.”

Groucho puffed on his cigar and checked the tip.

“And of course once she was in the car I had to get rid of her. But these things aren’t especially easy to get rid of on account of how buoyant they are, and how bloody cumbersome.”

“So what did you do?”

Jack’s interest had grown, and his mouth was overfilled with spit. He had an exclusive on his hands. A story so big it would no doubt lead to yet another public prosecution of the former comedian. And he would be the one to break the story. 

A buzzer rang and quickly a guard ushered Groucho away from the table.  Jack stood up, his body pumping with adrenaline all of a sudden.

“Groucho!” he shouted through the glass, “Groucho, I must know! What did you do with the body?”

Groucho turned to look over his shoulder, the guard still holding him by his arm.

“I never forget a face,” he told Jack, “but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.”

His maniacal laughter echoes down the hallway as the heavy metal door slowly creaks closed.