A Killing in Comics

by Max Allan Collins

  None of this had stopped me from half-loving Honey Daily, however; in the days to come, I’d find out just how many men had fallen for her.

  But right now I was making small talk with Selma, asking about their two children, a daughter in junior high, a son in high school (neither present, thankfully).

  Then, out of nowhere, she said, “I liked the major very much.”

  “My father? Well . . . thanks.”

  “Were you close?”

  “Yes and no.”

  Louis Cohn—tall and dark and mustached, thinning hair combed back, looking severe in his tux and bow tie—said, “That’s a hell of a thing to say, Jack. What do you mean?”

  “We weren’t close like some fathers and sons. He was gone a lot, on the road—you know what his business was like, Louie.”

  Cohn’s chin went up defensively; he seemed to think we were arguing. “He built the Starr Syndicate from scratch.”

  I nodded. “He had a knack for the common man’s tastes—when he picked up Mug O’Malley, every syndicate in the country had already turned it down.”

  Sam Fizer’s Mug O’Malley, the boxing strip, was one of the nation’s top features, fifteen years later.

  Cohn was nodding now, not frowning, which was about as affable as he got. “Your father had an eye for talent.”

  And the ladies, but that was another story.

  I said, “He made a point out of spending one week a year with me. For that week, we’d be close.”

  Selma, her dark blue eyes sparking with interest, asked, “What would you do?”

  “All sorts of things. We tried hunting one year, fishing another—he wasn’t an outdoorsman, and neither am I, so it was always a comedy of errors. But we had great fun together. Couple times, we spent a week going to one Broadway show after another. One year we went to Hollywood, and he used his contacts there to introduce me to all my favorite movie stars. Visited soundstages, got glossies hand-signed to me, the works. More than once we went to the World Series together. He was a great father.”

  One week a year.

  “A whole week a year,” Selma said wistfully. “That’s a lot for a man like the major. That’s a big gift he gave you. I hope you know it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “I miss the major,” Louis said with absolutely no emotion.

  Did he mean it? Or was that some kind of rote gesture?

  Then he dropped a small bombshell. “Are the rumors about the boys true?”

  The “boys” again—Spiegel and Shulman.

  I managed not to sigh. “What rumors would those be, Louie?”

  “That they’ve taken their new strip idea to you.”

  “You’d have to take that up with Maggie.”

  His hard eyes narrowed; his was a face full of creases.“Your stepmother hasn’t been returning my calls.”

  “Well, she’s been up to her famous backside in work, Louie. I’m sure she means no offense.”

  I knew Maggie was waiting to talk to Cohn until after we’d met with the “boys” ourselves, a meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning, actually.

  “Tell your mother something, would you?” he asked, coldly polite. He had dark tiny eyes, like a shark. But that isn’t fair . . .

  . . . to a shark.

  “What’s that, Louie?”

  “Ask her to check her toast tomorrow morning.”

  “Her toast?”

  “Yes. Her toast. Ask her to check and see which side it’s buttered on.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just nodded to Mrs. Harrison and said, “Selma. Pleasure. Louie—always a treat.”

  I hit the john and cursed Louie Cohn while I pissed, and was heading back to the bar to work on refilling my bladder with another rum and Coke (you do the joke) when someone slipped her arm into mine.

  Honey.

  She beamed up at me, batted her lashes and asked, “Miss me?”

  “I was wondering if that was heartburn or heartache.”

  “Like I’m wondering if you’re a rat or not?”

  “It’ll come to you.”

  She squeezed my arm and pressed a breast against me, which was the most fun I’d had in a couple of days. “Listen, Jack—Donny’s going to cut the cake.”

  “Just so long as he doesn’t cut the cheese.”

  “You’re evil,” she said, but she was laughing as she walked me along. We were clearly headed toward the table where the cake and mints and nuts (including Donny) awaited.

  She was almost whispering. “I’d just like you at my side, is all.”

  I got it: I was the temporary beard. She wanted a front-row spot for Donny’s birthday speech, and needed a male arm to hang on to that wasn’t Donny’s. That was fine. I’d always wanted to be used by a woman who looked like Honey Daily.

  Sy Mortimer—a short, balding, pear-shaped fellow in a brown suit and a flapping Wonder Guy tie (the hero was in full flight)—was calling the meeting to order, clapping and yapping.

  “Everybody! Everybody!” Sy was yelling. “Time for the man of the hour! Time for our wonderful Wonder Guy birthday boy to say something!”

  Just behind and to the right of Sy, the sweat-drenched paunchy Wonder Guy was standing near the linen-covered table, with a big pointy knife in hand, ready to cut the huge sheet cake (white frosting trimmed with red and blue), which was garishly emblazoned with a stuck-on cut-out of Wonder Guy in flight with a frosting speech balloon saying HAPPY 50TH, DONNY! KEEP FLYING!

  Sy—the recently appointed top editor at Americana, an ass-kisser of the first order—was clapping so insistently that everybody followed suit. The entire cocktail party had gathered around now, and the pianist was playing a jazzed-up version of the theme from the Wonder Guy radio show.

  “Speech!” Sy called, and coaxed the audience, perhaps half of whom joined in. “Speech!”

  Donny waved, knife in hand, at the crowd, for them to quiet down, which they were only too happy to do.

  Then he spoke: “This is a happy day for me. Half a century, you believe it? . . . I see so many friends here . . . my lovely bride, Selma . . . .”

  The most enthusiastic applause so far followed, and even Honey clapped politely, at my side, as Selma nodded around and smiled in acknowledgment.

  “I been blessed to have business partners who was also my friends . . . I see young Jack Starr, there—your pop, the major, where would we all be without him?”

  More applause. Nothing major.

  “And Louie, who counts every penny—is that a rental tux, Lou?”

  A little laughter.

  “And we want our talented boys to know we appreciate what they done over the years—Moe, Harry, Rod. . . .”

  Real applause. I glanced over and saw Harry beaming, bright as a beacon, but Moe looked glum and Krane smug.

  Donny was weaving through all this speechifying. He looked, frankly, a little sick, pale around the gills. And that costume was sopping.

  With his free hand he gestured, like a man trying to clear smoke, and with all the cigarettes and cigars in this room, there was some.

  “I want you people to know I love you all . . . I love you all . . . . Wonder Guy himself never had it better.”

  That was when he started to totter—a collective gasp went up—and then his legs went out from under him like a wobbly card table folding up and suddenly he belly flopped onto the floor, with a crunch . . . right onto the hand clenching the knife.

  I was the first one to him, and when I turned him over, it was the damnedest thing: the blade was stuck almost dead center in the W, jammed to the hilt from all that blubber hitting the white carpet so hard. Women were screaming, Honey and Mrs. Harrison included, and men, most of them Jewish, were yelling, “Jesus Christ!”

  A gray-faced, silent Donny hadn’t even had time to stop smiling. He was grinning up at the ceiling, or maybe the sky, as if Wonder Guy might be up there waving at him.

  If so, he was waving good-bye.

  CHAPTER TWO
STRIPPING IS MURDER!

  I settled into the comfy wine-colored tufted leather chair across from Maggie Starr, president of the Starr Newspaper Syndication Company (Starr Syndicate for short).

  Maggie’s chair was tufted leather as well, and even more comfortable, but deep brown and swivelable behind a cherry desk smaller than a Buick, just. The desk was stacked with work, neat little obsessive piles—letters and comic-strip submissions and color proofs and columnist copy.

  The office is a large narrow room with dark rich wood paneling, a very male bastion dating to when the major bought and remodeled the six-story brick building back in ’32. The floor was parquet and mostly covered by a massive Oriental rug, with the left wall taken up by bookshelves still holding a leather-bound collection of classics the major bought but never cracked; the right wall displayed an array of framed posters of Maggie’s Broadway revue, her three movies and two burlesque cards, one showing her billed above Abbott and Costello. The rear wall was wooden filing cabinets over which hung a dignified portrait of the major, framed in gilt. Various dark wood seat-upholstered chairs were lined against the walls, making it possible for a sizeable meeting to be held before Queen Maggie’s throne.

  Right now, next to me, were two of those chairs, awaiting our guests, Harry Spiegel and Moe Shulman. They were due in twenty minutes, at 10 A.M.

  I’d filled Maggie in about Donny Harrison’s memorable birthday party last night, over dinner, in the private room in the Strip Joint, the restaurant that takes up the first floor of the Starr Building.

  I believe I mentioned the Strip Joint in passing, but you deserve more. When the major bought the building, a Chinese restaurant was in that space, and so it remained till Maggie ran across a fingernail in her eggroll, after which she refused to renew the lease, and put in her own restaurant (and hadn’t eaten Chinese since). The chef she imported from a chophouse in St. Louis, but the layout and decor of the place was all her own doing.

  When you come in off the street, the bar is at left and the bar-room area takes up the front third of the long, narrow space. The front area is dark wood trim and glass and chrome, and the tan plaster walls are arrayed with signed framed photos of Maggie and her fellow (if “fellow” is the word) strippers. The barmaids wear white shirts with black tuxedo ties and black tuxedo pants and, often, the same faces as certain of the girls in the framed pics. Since stripping was still illegal in New York—part of Mayor La Guardia’s lasting legacy—Maggie provided work for retired Manhattanite striptease artists, as well as currently practicing ecdysiasts, when they were between gigs on the road.

  The rear two-thirds of the space was given over to the restaurant, wooden booths and linen-covered tables, and the walls were white but covered with cartoons drawn right on the painted plaster. Maggie’s grand opening, in ’42, had been cartoonists only, the night before the National Cartoonists Society had their annual dinner; so not only had the Starr Syndicate talent drawn their famous characters on the walls, so had King Features luminaries like Alex Raymond and his Flash Gordon and Chic Young and Blondie, and the Tribune Syndicate’s Chester Gould with Dick Tracy and Harold Gray with Little Orphan Annie, and even NEA’s V. T. Hamlin (Alley Oop) and Roy Crane (Captain Easy).

  So the Strip Joint served up both brands of strippers, the burlesque kind and the funny-paper variety, not to mention its famed strip steak. Lunch attracted businessmen who enjoyed being fussed over by pretty (if fully clothed) peelers; and supper, early and late, brought in a largely out-of-town crowd, particularly with the theater scene so nearby.

  Even so, the restaurant business is rough, and I suspect Maggie kept the Strip Joint going so she didn’t have to either hire a live-in cook or sling a pot or pan herself. When she was at her fighting weight (118), she might doll up and mingle with the guests and take a table out with the public, signing autographs and flirting with the men and telling the women how stunning they looked and pointing out Popeye and Nancy and Wonder Guy on the walls to the kiddies.

  But when she was in her reclusive mode, Maggie had her meals sent up on trays, which she ate either in her office or up in her top-floor living quarters. Occasionally she ate in a small private room in the restaurant—designed to accommodate a single table for no more than six—when she had a guest or when she needed to talk business over a meal with one of her minions. Like me.

  I guess while I’m at it I should give you the full layout. Street level is the restaurant. What we call the first floor is the editorial offices of the syndicate, the second floor is sales and distribution, the third is my apartment, the fourth is a reception area, Maggie’s office and her personal gym, the fifth is her suite of rooms. These are all laid out boxcar-style, with a street entrance separate from the restaurant and a postage-stamp entry with an elevator including uniformed operator, eight to six, door locked otherwise.

  So in that private Strip Joint alcove last night, over a bowl of potato soup (Donny dying took a bite out of my appetite), I’d filled Maggie in on the birthday party. She was eating a meal consisting strictly of salad with lots of rabbit food in it and vinegar and oil dressing. She was doing this because she was “huge” (my guess: 135 pounds). She hadn’t said much, except, “The major loved Donny. I never understood why.”

  Mostly I reported everything I’d witnessed and everyone I’d seen there, not detailing my flirtation with Honey Daily. I have a near-photographic memory, although Maggie has on occasion accused me of having a pornographic memory instead, which is partly why I left out having developed a real rapport with the late birthday honoree’s mistress.

  But that was last night.

  This morning, she’d clearly been giving Donny’s demise some thought. At least, she was plainly troubled by something other than her excess seventeen pounds. She was leaning back in the chair, rocking gently, her long tapering fingertips (no nail polish but well-groomed long nails) tented, her face taut with thought.

  Even sitting down, Maggie Starr looked tall—she was five-nine, after all—but the point was made by the huge, elaborately framed full-length portrait of her (in a form-fitting outfit of pink feathers) that hung right behind her. It dated to her 1941 Broadway revue, Starr in Garter, a gigantic pastel by Rolf Armstrong. Whether commissioned by the show’s producer or Maggie herself, I never asked.

  If you’re thinking Maggie had a hell of an ego, you’re right; but she mostly seemed to view the looming portrait as a reminder of what she was supposed to look like—like a woman hanging a new dress a size smaller than she is on a hanger on the refrigerator. I would see her steal glances up at the thing, and her expression would be as sour as a bitter-lemon cough drop.

  Something else we should get out of the way: she was in fact my stepmother. She didn’t give birth to me but she did use to sleep with the major, and that disquieting but undeniable reality cancelled out for me the fact that she was a stunning beauty. Anyway, she was older than me. She’d be forty before I was thirty.

  Now you might be so tactless as to point out that just the afternoon before I’d had no trouble at all falling half in love with Honey Daily, who was thirty-five easy. But Honey Daily, to my knowledge anyway, never slept with my father. That I could get past her sleeping with a fat loathsome creature like Donny Harrison (RIP) will just have to remain one of the great enigmas of western civilization that we’ll never solve.

  Still, Maggie was, as I’ve said, stunning—even in her recluse-state wardrobe—pale-green scarf over her Lucille Ball hair, the faintest dab of lipstick on her trademark bee-stung lips, her big green eyes unaided by mascara, her pale, faintly freckled oval face as perfect as a carved cameo, her slender if bosomy figure hiding out under a green-plaid lumberjack shirt, sleeves rolled to her elbow. She’d been seated when I got there, but I would’ve bet a month’s pay those long legs were on the lam under baggy blue denims.

  Displaying that other trademark of hers—the deep, almost mannish voice coming out of a little-girl puss—she interrupted her troubled reverie to ask, “Too e
arly for a Coke?”

  She knew I despised coffee.

  “Never,” I said.

  She pressed a small red button on her desk and shook her head. “Your poor teeth.”

  “My teeth are fine. All mine and nary a filling.”

  “The major lost his teeth before he was your age.”

  “Well, maybe my mother had nice teeth.”

  A little smile twitched. “Maybe she did. Before my time.”

  Her assistant Bryce (Maggie did not care for the term “secretary”—nor did Bryce) came briskly in behind me from his reception area-cum-office with tucked-away kitchenette. I liked Bryce, who was funny and smart and (to use the most current term) “gay.” An alarmingly handsome, trimly bearded brown-eyed boy about twenty-five, he wore a black turtleneck sweater and black slacks but white rubber-sole shoes—I never asked.

  He had been a dancer in Maggie’s Broadway show during the run of which he’d broken an ankle, ending one career and picking up on another, which was to be chauffeur, secretary and whatever else Maggie might need on a whim. Sort of like that African giant in the leopard skin who follows Mandrake the Magician around.

  Bryce had an apartment in the basement, below the restaurant, a rather dank little chamber for such a neat little character to live in. I wasn’t sure I knew what went on down there but was positive I didn’t want to.

  Using a tray, Bryce delivered Maggie’s coffee, so cream-laden it was damn near white, and provided me a Coca-Cola on ice.

  He hovered over me like a guilty conscience and raised an accusing eyebrow. “What can we do to get her out of that babushka? Is she expecting a stiff wind?”

  “That’s not my department,” I said.

  “Will you tell her she looks fine. She needs to get out and about.”

  I looked at Maggie. “You look fine. Why don’t you get out and about?”

  “Mind your own business,” she said, the target of her remark ambiguous.

  When I looked back up at him, Bryce was still looming; he’d arched the other eyebrow in the meantime. “Will you tell her there’s nothing wrong with a woman having a little meat on her bones. Will you tell her that men like women with curves? That people haven’t paid good money for all these years to look at her goddamn rib cage?”