“Oh, you’ve met Gregg Gorman, then? He is a charmer.”
“Only if you’re a snake.”
“Mal, promise me you’ll call that assistant coroner. Myers. Tell him you’ve spoken with me, and that I take this quite seriously. Perhaps that will do some good.”
“Perhaps. Can you think of anyone else who might’ve had a grudge against your husband, who’s in the hotel, or in Chicago at all?”
“No,” she said. “But if you’re right about the towels… somebody had a hell of a grudge against him.”
“Maybe I can find that somebody.”
“I hope to hell you can,” she said.
She got up and hugged me, gave me a motherly kiss on the mouth, smiled at me.
“I look a mess, don’t I?” she said.
“You look terrific. You always look terrific.”
“You like me, don’t you, Mal?”
“Of course I like you.”
“Why don’t you come see me in Milwaukee sometime? In a few months. When we’re both… feeling a little better.”
“I don’t think so, Mae.”
“Bad taste of me to mention that, hmm, Mal? No respect for my dead husband? Let me tell you something. I loved Roscoe very much. But our relationship… hadn’t been physical for a long time. I wouldn’t like the world to know that-to know that macho Roscoe Kane couldn’t get it up for his lovely bride-but I don’t think he’d mind you knowing.”
“I think he would,” I said, feeling creepy suddenly.
“Maybe,” she admitted; she was still very close to me. Her breath was on my face, and there was still some gin in it; I could forgive her for this, because of what she’d been through, and the gin, but I couldn’t forgive myself for what I felt.
She continued: “You’re like Roscoe. You’re like the young Roscoe I never met. You… you made him very happy, in his last years, Mal. You paid him the sort of… literary respect he never thought to get. When everybody else had forgotten him, you came to him like Milwaukee was Mecca and he was a guru.” She should’ve said Mohammed, but she wasn’t a writer, so she could get away with imprecise metaphors. “You were like a son to him. He never thought much of his faggot boy, Jerome… harsh to say it that way, but Roscoe dearly loved to hate homosexuals. And he and his son could never be close, not the way you and Roscoe were close.”
The tears were back in her eyes; slowly, they began streaming down her cheeks.
“You, Mal,” she said. “You’re the young Roscoe Kane, in a way. The Roscoe I never got to know. Not in the… Biblical sense, anyway….” The wicked little smile, in the midst of the tears, was incongruous, and very, very sexy. “The son he never had, the husband I never quite had….”
“Please, Mae…”
“Mal. Come see me sometime. That’s more Mae West, than Mae Kane, isn’t it? Well, take it any way you like. In a few months, I’ll need to be close to somebody. And I’d like to be close to Roscoe, but he’s gone. Even impotent, he was more of a man than any other man I ever knew. Come see me… it’s the closest I can come to being close to Roscoe again. Could you do that for me?”
“Maybe,” I said. Not ever. No way; despite how much I wanted to.
“And find out what happened to my husband, will you?”
“I’ll try.”
“If anyone can, it’s you,” she said.
“What we need is Gat Garson.”
“I’ll settle for Mallory.”
I touched her wet face and found my way out.
6
“Bouchercon, Chicago-Style” was the official title of this year’s ’con, though the nickname “Crime City Capers” had appeared on the advance flyers. Chicago, the “fabulous clipjoint” as mystery writer Fredric Brown had dubbed it, was the perfect setting for a mystery convention: the place where the Outfit was born and John Dillinger died, site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, home of the Untouchables, setting for the Gat Garson tales. A fitting spot for mystery writers, critics, publishers and fans to gather, and discuss crime and punishment, fantasy-style.
Bouchercon was founded in 1970, in honor of New York Times critic Anthony Boucher, who had died in 1968-actually, “Boucher” was a pseudonym of Anthony Parker White. White was an author of science fiction, and classical, puzzle-style whodunits of the sort Cynthia Crystal was inclined toward, and which interested me about as much as lace doilies and Gilbert and Sullivan revivals. But Boucher was a well-respected critic, and had done perhaps as much as anyone to legitimize mystery fiction, and his was a fine name to grace this annual mystery convention.
The convention rotated annually from a city on the West Coast, to an eastern city, to a midwestern city. The state of my finances had thus far kept me from attending any but those in the Midwest, and I’d missed the last one of those, in Milwaukee, blowing my chance to meet Mickey Spillane, whose appearance had by all accounts been a show stopper. Spillane, like Roscoe Kane, had rarely had a kind word said about him critically, and, despite his massive man-on-the-street popularity, hard-core mystery fandom hadn’t treated the Mick well, either, as one crowd rallied around the Agatha Christie puzzle school, and the other around Hammett and Chandler, the tough-but-literary mystery school, of which Spillane was thought to be a bastard offspring. Since Kane was thought to be a bastard offspring of Spillane, you can guess how the critics treated Gat Garson-when they treated him at all.
It would’ve been nice to have seen Spillane honored at a Bouchercon, since Anthony Boucher’s New York Times reviews had been among the most brutal of the many anti-Spillane critiques. Seeing Roscoe Kane-and Gat Garson-being honored at this year’s Bouchercon, receiving the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, no less, would have been a sweet sort of justice, since Boucher had trashed Kane and Gat Garson in a manner that made his Spillane reviews seem complimentary.
Boucher was an astute critic, but he was wrong about Spillane (and came to admit it, in his later reviews) and he was wrong about Roscoe Kane (though that he never admitted). With Roscoe dead, the honors would still come, and probably would be more effusive, as posthumous honors tend to be; but there would be a hollow ring to them. Honoring the dead is so easy. And so pointless.
Or is it? At least a writer, even a paperback writer like Roscoe Kane, gets a grab at the brass ring of immortality. You never know; something you write just might last… assuming that all of us, including our books, aren’t turned to radioactive dust any second now, of course. Short of that, the writer, any writer, even the popular-fiction writer like Roscoe Kane-following the tradition of such popular-fiction writers as Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky, crime writers all-has an honest (if long) shot at living on through his words.
On the other hand, royalty checks made out to the author’s estate are not this author’s idea of a good time.
“Is this a private conversation or can anybody join in?”
I looked up.
She was small-petite, even-and her straight, shoulder-length hair was the dark brown you mistake for black if the light isn’t hitting it just right. Her eyes were the same color.
“Was I talking to myself?” I said, embarrassed. I was sitting alone in a booth in the Artistic Cafe, just up Michigan Avenue from the Congress; I’d wanted to get away from the hotel and the Bouchercon guests, and from past experience I remembered the Artistic, in the Fine Arts Building, where young actresses and ballerinas, in tights and leg-warmers and other form-fitting artsy-type duds, often wandered in for coffee. The Artistic was a good place for me to sit and think, and if thinking got old, be distracted by young actresses and ballerinas in tights.
“You were moving your lips,” she said, sitting down. She had a pixie face, pert, cute; she’d have made a great hippie, ten or fifteen years earlier.
“Was I making any audible sounds?” I asked.
“Just a sort of murmur,” she said, her lips doing a wry little dance around the words as they came out.
But she wasn’t a dancer, or an
actress, at least not one here to use one of the Fine Arts Building studios. She had on a Noir sweatshirt-black deco letters barely visible on dark blue-and her designer jeans were snug (not that there’s any other kind). Noir was a mystery fanzine I had subscribed to a while back, because somebody had told me the editor’d been reviewing my books favorably; that sounded like my kind of reading, so I sent them a check. So what if Gregg Gorman was the publisher.
Anyway, I figured she was here for Bouchercon, and said, “I figure you must be here for Bouchercon.”
“Shrewd deduction,” she said; the corners of her mouth went up, and the rest of her mouth was a wavering line, making a terrific wry smile. She had a great mouth, this girl. Whoops, make that “woman”: I could tell right off she wouldn’t appreciate being referred to as a girl.
“Do I know you?” I said. “Or is that wishful thinking?”
“Do I look familiar?”
“I’ve seen you before, or somebody who looks a lot like you. Maybe a movie star or something.”
“Brother. Hope that isn’t dialogue you’re trying out for your next story-you usually give that guy in your books better lines.”
I managed a grin. “Things I say often seem more clever on the printed page.”
“The movie star line won’t.”
“Maybe you’re right. So. You know who I am.”
She grinned back at me; she had a thousand smiles, this one, all of them terrific, most of them wry. “Don’t be too proud of yourself. It’s my job to know who you are.”
I snapped my fingers. “Kathy Wickman!”
She nodded; pointed to her Noir sweatshirt, giving me a great excuse to take a look at how the word Noir rolled with the flow of her. She had the sort of breasts Gat Garson would no doubt describe as “pert, perfect handfuls, straining for their independence”; I, of course, would find a less sexist way to put it, though I can’t think of one at the moment.
“It doesn’t take that long to read the word Noir,” she said, with a one-sided wry smile. Make that 1001 smiles.
“I flunked Evelyn Wood,” I explained; I extended a hand across the table and we shook hands-hers was slim, cool, smooth. Mine was-who cares?
“You may remember, I dropped you a note about your first novel,” she said. “I just had to comment, personally, on that chapter about your hero’s rites of adolescence.”
“That was a nice letter; thanks.”
“The letter you wrote back was nice, too. That chapter really hit me; kind of unusual to find it plopped down in the middle of mystery novel.”
“That chapter was all true, every word of it,” I said. “I couldn’t use everything that really happened, actually-some of the things my real first love pulled on me outstrip anything the fictionalized one in my book did.”
“Really? Say-why don’t we get together for dinner, sometime over this Bouchercon weekend? I’d love to hear the stuff that didn’t make it into that chapter.”
“My outtakes would interest you, huh?” I shook my head. “I don’t know if I could be forced to talk about myself like that; I’m really very modest and shy. How about tonight?”
“Okay-” She smiled; this one wasn’t wry. Which was just fine with me.
“Have you had lunch? I’ve got a cheeseburger on the way.”
“Actually, I haven’t eaten.”
I called a waitress over and Kathy ordered.
Kathy, I should finally get around to saying, was the editor of Noir; she was the very person who’d been doing those favorable reviews of my books. So naturally I respected her intellectually, being as how she had such high standards and good taste in matters literary (unless she panned my next book, in which case all bets were off). But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was just as attracted to her physically as mentally.
Frankly, feeling attracted to Kathy, young, pert, pixie-fresh Kathy, helped flush the uncomfortable feeling I had about Mae Kane out of my system.
“I really like your magazine,” I said, between bites of cheeseburger.
“You and our thousand or so other readers.”
“You ought to have a better circulation than that.”
“I know. It’s that screwed-up publisher of mine.”
I lifted my eyebrows and put ’em back down. “I’m glad you brought that up, not me.”
“Oh, really?”
“Your publisher. Gregg Gorman. He’s an s.o.b., you know.”
Taking a bite of her own cheeseburger, she rolled her eyes and nodded, swallowed, said, “You’re telling me. But he pays the bills, and stays out of my way.”
“It’s a nice little magazine.”
“If Gregg’d just promote it, it could be a bigger nice little magazine. He’s stubborn; he sells it to the mystery fan market, and won’t bother trying for newsstand distribution. We’ve got articles, fiction by some up-and-coming writers-you wouldn’t like to try a short story, would you?”
“Sure. What’s your word rate?”
Her mouth and chin crinkled in embarrassment. “Half a cent per.”
“Ouch. I always wanted to know what it felt like to be an old-time pulp writer.”
“Now you’ll know. Unless you’re going to back out…”
“Well, I did say yes, so a deal’s a deal.”
Wry smile; rerun of the first one. “Anyway,” she said, getting back on the track of an earlier train of thought, “Noir’s a slick little ’zine and Gorman’s getting his books into Dalton’s and Walden’s and other outlets, so I keep nudging him to do something on a bigger scale with my little baby. But he doesn’t.”
“He’s a man of vast imagination; some people see a sunset and just see a sunset-Gorman sees a sunset, and belches.”
She nodded. “That’s Gregg. He’s a paternalistic little shit, is what he is, making passes at me every chance he gets.”
“That’s not something I want to hear about while I’m eating.”
She waved a hand that had a little catsup on it. “Don’t worry, Gregg’s too much of a coward for there to be any gory anecdotes behind what I said. Fortunately we live half a continent apart and get together only rarely, and his come-ons are restricted primarily to the phone. But that’s bad enough, believe me. He comes on to me in the sleazy, chauvinistic way that went out with Gat Garson.”
I’d put Roscoe Kane’s death almost out of mind, for a few minutes; her flip remark brought it back to me, and my face must’ve shown it, because she said, “Oh. I’m sorry. That wasn’t in very good taste, was it? With Roscoe Kane dying last night and everything. I just could never read those stupid books, frankly.”
A wall came up between us.
“I loved those books,” I said. A little coldly.
She didn’t pick up on the coldness. “That’s just ’cause you’re a man. You grew up in the ’50s, and that was your era, and it hits you in a way that just goes right past me. I look at those macho private eye books and my stomach turns the corner, y’know?” She noticed the catsup on her hand and kissed it off; an unconsciously sexy little move. Seeing her do that, I would have had a hard time not warming back up to her. Which proved I was the chauvinistic boor she apparently suspected me of being.
Or did she?
“See,” she was saying intensely, her dark eyes looking at me with a naive sophistication, “your books are worlds apart from that tough-guy tripe. Your hero is sensitive. He thinks of women as persons, not sex objects… he sees women as…” And she looked upward for the word; while she did that I studied the word Noir. “… existential beings trapped in the same absurd world as he is. Don’t you agree?”
I raised my eyes, if not my consciousness. I smiled at her. “Completely. Does this mean separate checks?”
She stopped and her face was a blank for a moment, and then one of her repertoire of wry smiles found its way to her face, and she said, “I sound like a pretentious jerk, don’t I?”
I shrugged. “You sound like somebody who writes reviews for Noir.”
“Is there a difference?”
“That depends,” I said, placing tongue firmly in cheek, “on whether you’re praising G. Pompous Donaldson, or me.”
She shook her head, the smile shifting to one side of her face. “How a writer as sensitive as you can dislike Donaldson, and deify Kane, is beyond me.”
“The last time anybody called me sensitive was when I got my flu shot. And how somebody as insightful as you can fall for Donaldson’s bombastic claptrap is beyond yours truly, Johnny Dollar.”
“Huh?”
“Old radio show. You’re too young to remember it, and too literary to have heard of it. Listen, Donaldson’s guy is named Keats-a private eye named after a poet! Gimme a break!”
“That’s no more pretentious than calling your hero Mallory. That’s a reference to Sir Thomas Malory, and Morte d’Arthur, I assume. Linking your hero to knights, rather obviously.”
“Like hell! It’s my name!”
“Oh. Well, why do you only use one name? You’ve got a first name, don’t you?”
“People call me Mal.”
“But that’s short for ‘Mallory.’ What’s more pompous than signing your work with one name?”
“Using a first initial, a middle and last name; or, God forbid, three names! Look, I have a first name, but nobody, including me, uses it, except on official documents.”
“What is it, then?”
“Something that wouldn’t sound good in print.”
“It couldn’t be that bad.”
“Oh, no?”
“Oh, come on, tell me. What is it? I won’t tell.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Not in Noir?”
“Nowhere.”
I told her.
It sobered her.
“I see what you mean,” she said. “Maybe just ‘Mallory’ is wiser.”
“Perhaps in the future you’ll learn to trust me. And my comments about Donaldson are also not for publication. Panning one of my peers in print is definitely not cool. Okay?”
“Sure,” she said, sipping at her Coke with a straw, looking fifteen years old, making me glad she was really ten years older. “Still, you seem to have the sort of outspoken notions that Noir readers would get a kick out of reading about.”
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