Strip for Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  “I know that I just lied, sort of.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, actually, I’m sure I lied.”

  Her eyes tightened; her forehead didn’t furrow—like a lot of actresses, she had learned to minimize wrinkling. “Explain.”

  “I lied unless you recently went to court and made Misty Winters your legal name. Did you?”

  “No. Someday maybe, but . . . no. Why?”

  I shrugged. “Then your real name is Ethel Fizer. Your married name, I mean.”

  And I took a sip of punch and let her think about that.

  “We’re separated, Sam and I,” she said, quietly. Then the volume came up a little: “None of this takes a detective to know. It’s been in the columns.”

  “I know. I syndicate one of them.”

  Now her eyes widened. She shook a finger at me. “I know who you are!”

  “Yeah, I’m a detective. Supposed to be.”

  She was grinning; she had nice teeth, on the large side but white and straight up top and crookedly attractive below, and this was a genuine Bear Springs grin, not some studied hip Broadway ironic facsimile.

  “Jack Starr,” she said confidently. “Maggie’s stepkid!”

  “Not really a kid. I have a driver’s license and everything.”

  She leaned in accusingly; her nose was inches from mine, and it was one of the more pleasant accusations I’ve withstood. “You’re not a detective! You run that syndicate with her! You sell comic strips to newspapers!”

  As she backed confidently away, I admitted, “Right now I do, ‘cause I’m sitting in for Maggie while she trods the boards. But normally Maggie runs the syndicate and I’m a kind of a . . .”

  She leaned in again, our noses almost touching. “Pain in the keister?”

  “No, I do that full time.” My God those blue eyes were something; endlessly deep—you could dive in and forget to come up for air.

  She backed away and my pulse rate steadied and she said, “How’s that pay, being a full-time pain?”

  “It’s not my official title, or even my job description. I’m the vice president of the company—my late father, the major, founded it. Maggie inherited it.”

  Teasing but interested, she asked, “Why didn’t Daddy leave it to Sonny?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe because I was a wastrel or possibly a ne’er-do-well. One of those. Anyway, I straightened out. This punch? It’s from the kiddie bowl.”

  Her eyes widened, just a little this time. “You don’t drink? I don’t drink, either.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Too many calories.” She tapped her noodle. “And a girl in this business can use every brain cell she’s got. What’s your excuse, big he-man detective like you?”

  “Not as good as yours. I used to drink too much—there’s a certain medical condition you may have heard of. . . .”

  “Alcoholism?”

  “Falling-down drunk. Hard to believe, but I was once a spoiled rich kid who went to college and majored in booze.”

  Another eyebrow arched; she was ambidextrous that way. “And minored in necking?”

  I grunted a laugh. “Too much booze to maintain a minor in anything. Then I went to war and wound up an MP and spent too much time throwing other drunken soldiers in the stockade to consider the hobby an appealing one anymore.”

  “. . . War, huh? My older brothers were in the war.”

  “Did they make it out okay?”

  “Yeah. Alive and well. Where did you serve, Pacific or Europe?”

  “Oklahoma.”

  She giggled.

  “Don’t laugh,” I said. “The Nazis never got past Tulsa. Let me ask you one.”

  “One what?”

  “A personal question that’s none of my business, like the last couple questions you asked me.”

  “Okay.”

  “What is Sam Fizer’s wife . . . all right, estranged wife . . . doing taking a part in a play based on Tall Paul?”

  Everybody in New York—almost everybody in America—knew the basic story: back in Depression days, fabulously successful syndicated cartoonist Sam Fizer had hired young unknown Hal Rapp as an assistant on the popular boxing strip Mug O’Malley, and a year later Rapp quit and started his own successful comic strip. The two artists had feuded ever since, often lampooning each other in their respective features.

  “You are a detective.”

  “Naw. The Fizer/Rapp dustup is common knowledge. Like you said, it was in all the columns.”

  Her head tilted back. “How did Mrs. Sam Fizer get a part in Hal Rapp’s play? By trying out, Jack, at an open audition.”

  The Marilyn over-enunciation was long gone by now. We were actually talking, Misty and me. Her breathiness remained, however—a quality of her alto, not an affectation, I was relieved to learn.

  “I’m not kidding anybody,” she went on. “I got a shape and a nice face and I can sing in key and don’t trip over myself when it’s time to do some simple dance, okay? But that describes half the girls on Broadway.”

  “And three-quarters of the girls in Hollywood.”

  She nodded; no argument there. “So I know I probably got this role ‘cause Hal wanted to rub Sam’s face in it. But I got the role, didn’t I? And I’m doing fine.”

  Now it was my turn to nod. “I’ve sat out in the darkened theater, admiring your work.”

  She liked that. “You’ve been over to the St. John for some rehearsals?”

  “I have. You’re good, Misty. Funny as hell, and real easy on the eyes.”

  She gave me another Bear Springs grin. “Thanks. Couldn’t ask for a better review, Jack.”

  “How is Sam taking it?”

  She rolled the big blues. “Sam is livid. You do know what that means, don’t you?”

  “I could always look it up.”

  “It means white with rage.”

  “It also means red with rage.”

  She rolled them again. “Oh, first his face turns red, all right, but then white. Like a blister.”

  “Does that make you happy? Sad . . . ?”

  She shook her head, black curls flying. “Listen, I gave three good years to Sam Fizer. I put up with more than you could ever guess—he’s a mean, selfish little man who can be kind and generous, when he feels like it . . . but mostly he doesn’t feel like it. He’s paranoid and jealous and I will be divorcing his wealthy rear end very, very soon now.”

  “You were a Copa girl when you two met, right?”

  “Right.” She gave me a funny look, as if she weren’t sure whether to smile or frown. “You said that like . . .”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it didn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She studied me. “You don’t have a low opinion of good-looking women who make their money showing their legs and whatever?”

  “I’m a big fan of good-looking women’s legs and whatever. Anyway, remember, Maggie Starr’s my stepmom.”

  “Oh. Yeah. That’s right.” She studied me some more, but with her face half turned, as if she could only risk one eye on me. “. . . That must be weird.”

  “Why?”

  She nodded across the room toward Maggie, red hair piled endlessly up, a slimly shapely vision in a scarlet low-cut gown, talking to a couple of Broadway hillbillies over cups of Park Avenue moonshine. “Having a ‘mom’ who’s a living doll like that.”

  I shook my head. “Not that way between us. We’re business associates and it ends there.”

  This astonished Miss Winters. “Don’t you like her?”

  “I think she’s aces. I just don’t want to sleep with her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maggie’s my stepmother.”

  She squinted, like she couldn’t quite make me out. “Well, your father’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, over ten years, but—”

  “So there’s no law against it.”

  Now I squinted at her. “Listen, if
you’re interested in finding me a good-looking woman to sleep with, there’s another way we could go here.”

  She chuckled and it was throaty, a kind of purr. “Don’t get cocky, Jack. Say hi next time you drop by the theater.”

  And she hip-swayed off. I watched Misty Winters till she took the left turn into the adjacent room, and did my best to figure out if that was her natural gait, or if she was trying to impress me. Either way, she did.

  Maggie came over, her own gait nicely swaying if diminished by the needs of the very tight, low-cut gown she was wearing. In the musical she played seductress Libidia Von Stackpole, whose gown was a shade of red the costumers had matched to Maggie’s hair, a color that did not exist in nature unless you considered Lucille Ball’s hair color natural.

  “You two talked awhile,” she said. Her voice had a throaty Lauren Bacall timber.

  Let’s get this out of the way: my stepmother, as you’ve no doubt gathered, was a knockout. Almost forty, she looked maybe thirty. Maybe. She’d have looked twenty-five if she hadn’t been in full battle array, phony long eyelashes playing second fiddle to those incredible green eyes, face powder obscuring her freckles, her bee-stung mouth a scarlet kiss, like a calendar girl.

  Right now she weighed 118 pounds. I knew that because that was her fighting weight. She rarely emerged in public if she was an ounce over 120, and currently any time away from the theater she was spending not in the office (where I could have used her) but in her private gym, working her lovely ass off, or I should say keeping her ass lovely.

  The cut of the gown put half of her full bosom on uplift display, and those famous breasts seemed larger than they were on that slender five-foot-nine frame. I liked her better in no makeup and jeans. She was distracting, this way.

  “You know who she is,” I said, referring to my recent conversation partner.

  She gave me the glamour-girl deadpan. “Of course I know who she is.”

  “I don’t mean who she is in the musical, or at this costume party . . . I mean—”

  The green eyes regarded me unblinkingly. “You mean, she’s Sam Fizer’s wife.”

  “They’re separated.”

  One well-plucked eyebrow rose. “But not divorced. Did you pump her?”

  “In front of God and everybody?”

  No smile. “Did you pump her about her husband? His state of mind. You know—vis-à-vis the Starr Syndicate?”

  We were in a potential jam with Sam, and that was no Dr. Seuss deal: Mug O’Malley was still our number-one comic strip, even though circulation was down from the war years. And Sam Fizer knew we were thinking of doing business with Hal Rapp, who had offered us a new strip, a sort of Tall Paul spin-off called Lean Jean.

  “Listen, Maggie,” I said, “you’re over at that theater all day, rehearsing with Misty Winters. Why don’t you get close to her, you want her pumped?”

  “I had the oddest feeling she’d prefer to get close to you. Anyway, we aren’t in any scenes together, except the Batch’ul Catch’ul Ballet, and we don’t have lines.”

  Brother was she wrong; did they ever both have lines.

  “All she said was, Sam is livid.”

  Her eyes widened, just a little. “Turning beet red, you mean?”

  “Yeah, on Sundays for the color section. Daily, he turns white.”

  She got thoughtful, making the tiniest furrow between her eyes. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think this was a mistake.”

  “Talking to Rapp about a new strip?”

  She sighed, shook her head; her pile of red hair stayed in place. “No. Taking on this musical. I haven’t been on Broadway in something like five years.”

  “Twelve. Starr in Garter was ‘41.”

  The green eyes drilled through me. “Thank you for the math lesson.”

  “Hey, what are vice presidents for?”

  She put her hands on her hips, like Wonder Guy, except not at all like any guy. “One of the things they’re for is keeping the peace where our talent is concerned.”

  “Nobody this side of Jehovah Himself could keep peace between Sam Fizer and Hal Rapp, and . . . Do you mean you wish you hadn’t taken this Broadway role because it leaves me in charge of the syndicate? That’s a low blow.”

  She touched my arm briefly, which was something of an event. “I didn’t say that. We’re a good team. You can’t separate Martin from Lewis, you know.”

  “Sure you can. Martin sings, Lewis mugs. What did you mean?”

  Both eyebrows went up. “You want to know the truth?”

  “Sure.”

  Her voice was cold: “I weighed one-twenty-one this morning. Can’t you see me bulge?”

  “No comment.”

  “Damnit, I’m eating carrots and celery and working out three times a day and I’m not drinking anything but water . . .”

  “And a gallon of coffee.”

  “But what calories are in that? And I’m at one-twenty-one.”

  I shuddered. “You know how I hate being seen in public with you, all fat and sloppy like this.”

  “Shut up. It’s the role. I don’t do anything but stand there and look glamorous.”

  “But you do that so well.”

  She shook her head again, slowly this time. “I’ve done that since I was sixteen. But these chorus cuties are running and jumping and square-dancing, while I’m standing there polishing my nails and cracking wise.”

  “You do that well, too.”

  Her expression turned businesslike; funny how she could modulate what was basically a deadpan into so many shades. “Are you up for this?”

  “What?”

  “Finessing the situation.”

  “What situation would that be?”

  She leaned in and, despite the noisy party around us, whispered: “Holding on to Sam Fizer as a client, and taking on Hal Rapp. Those two on the same roster is like booking Jack Benny and Fred Allen on the same radio show.”

  “That’s a fake feud, Maggie. This is a real one. But, yeah, I’m a big boy. I’m up to it. I’ll pander and get tough and everything in between. Because the big prize, if we’re lucky enough to win it, is syndicating Tall Paul.”

  And Tall Paul was in a third again as many papers as Mug O’Malley, and was the hottest strip in the business, with a list that was growing, not shrinking.

  “Well, let’s start with pandering,” Maggie said. “Here comes our host.”

  I was not the only one here who was cheating on the favorite-comic-strip-character-costume score, coming as myself and pretending to be Richard Tracy. Hal Rapp had also come as himself, in a yellow sportshirt and tan slacks and brown loafers; about five-ten, Rapp had India-ink hair and dark, cartoony slashes of eyebrow over laughing, squinty eyes, a Bob Hope-ish nose and a seemingly ever-present, infectious grin in an elongated oval face. He looked a little like Tall Paul, actually, if Tall Paul hadn’t been an idiot.

  Rapp moved with confidence for a man who was missing a leg—his left limb had been lost in a freak childhood accident— and his gait was herky-jerky, as he made his wooden leg do its duty.

  “Ha ha ha,” Rapp said, putting one hand on Maggie’s bare shoulder and the other on my clothed one, “I’ve never seen a finer-looking mother and son.”

  It was a running gag that he pretended Maggie was my real mother. We played along.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I didn’t stop breast-feeding till I was eleven.”

  Maggie pretended not to be amused, and Rapp roared.

  “Listen, this is a great shindig, isn’t it?” he said, gesturing. “Everybody came!”

  As if the cast of Tall Paul had any choice. But he was right: a Saturday night in Manhattan was not spent foolishly, and any number of celebrities were present.

  Candace “Candy” Cain, the lovely blonde playing Sunflower Sue (at the St. John and this party), had even lassoed her popular comedian husband Charlie Mazurki into coming. Dressed as the comic strip kid Henry, including a bald cap (but incongruously retaining Mazurki’s
trademark mustache and ever-present Havana), the droll, sleepy-eyed, surrealistic comic stayed at his knockout bride’s side, standing protective watch.

  “Did you see Mel Norman?” Rapp asked, referring to the director of the show, a Hollywood veteran making his dream of doing a Broadway show come true, thanks to Tall Paul. “He showed up as Dennis the Menace, ha ha ha, right down to the slingshot!”

  Rapp was a commanding presence, and his style of speech was oddly hypnotic and as herky-jerky as his gait. He overemphasized words, sometimes seemingly inappropriate ones, like the boldfaced bursts of text in his comic strip, a graphic technique he used to attract attention to the feature on the funnies page. Right now he was lighting up—like Krane, using a cigarette holder. Like me, he didn’t drink.

  “So where’s your costume, Jack?” Rapp demanded jovially.

  “Can’t you see the hat? I’m Dick Tracy.”

  “J would have guessed Kerry Drake, ha ha ha. How do you like my selection?”

  I said, “You came as your favorite fictional character— yourself.”

  He grinned within a wreath of his own cigarette smoke. “And how, pray tell, Jack, just how do I justify that?”

  “First, it’s your party and you can damn well dress as you please. Second, you write and draw yourself into the strip, at least twice a year.”

  “Yes! Paul and Sunflower Sue and Mammy May and, ha ha ha, Pitiful Pa come into my studio and insist I draw them out of their latest scrape . . . and I tell ’em they’re on their own!”

  “Life is hard for us comics characters,” I admitted.

  “Listen, Maggie,” Rapp said, smoke pluming from his nostrils, “I’ve been wanting to bend your ear.”

  Maggie’s expression turned businesslike again because she, like me, thought this meant he was going to get into the Lean Jean comic strip we were negotiating with him.

  “I always admired you on the stage,” he said with a good-natured leer. “I saw you at Minsky’s when we were both kids—I was too young to get in legally, and nothing you were doing, ha ha ha, was even vaguely legal.”

  “Right,” Maggie said, with remarkable patience.

  “But when you were on Broadway, in Starr in Garter’,” he said, “and when you did your nightclub routine, everywhere from Vegas to Hollywood to Tucumcari, ha ha ha, you had such a satirical touch.”