“I don’t have to put up with your crude sarcasm.”
“You understand that you’re in the business of children’s entertainment—weren’t you the one who gave the edict that Wonder Guy and Batwing and all of your characters were forbidden from killing bad guys? That was unacceptable behavior for an Americana superhero.”
He stiffened and at long last the hands unfolded and disappeared beneath the table. “What’s wrong with developing an acceptable code of behavior for our characters? Why not set a standard of civilized, responsible behavior that the young people of America can embrace?”
That sounded like it came from a speech he’d given at some comics publishers banquet.
“Why not? But what about Donny’s behavior? He has a wife and a mistress, and how many of those Varga girls working for you has he compromised?”
Beet red. “This is outrageous . . . . You’re going to have to leave, Jack.”
“There’ve been rumors for years, Louie, that Donny wanted to leave Selma for Honey Daily—and that you talked him out of it. That’s all you needed, a pissed-off ex-Mrs. Harrison as a stock-holder. I noticed at the party you were pretty chummy with Selma.”
He scooted back the chair and stood. Stiffly. “Jack . . . out of respect to the major—”
“The major would’ve been out of style, too, where you’re concerned, with all his showgirls. You always kept at least a step removed from the likes of Frank Calabria, but Donny relished his mob ties. Big mistake. We’re in the glorious postwar world, Louie, and you have to keep Americana respectable.”
He leaned forward, put both hands on the table and finally showed real emotion—rage. “You’re goddamned right I do! Do you know how I spent this morning, when I wasn’t talking to idiot detectives about this ridiculous thing? I was on the phone with an advertiser willing to fund thirty-nine episodes of a Wonder Guy television show. Television, Jack! The future.”
“A future with no place in it for a glad-handing, womanizing, drunken hale-fellow-well-met like Donny Harrison?”
He stood straight again, chin up. “I have nothing more to say to you, Jack.”
I got up. “Yeah. Well, I understand. You’re grieving.”
Funny thing—when I glanced in at the secretarial pool on my way out, none of them seemed that sad, either.
CHAPTER SEVEN NOT THE MEN IN HER LIFE, THE LIFE IN HER MEN!
When I’d called from the Waldorf this morning, Maggie had requested I join her and Batwing cartoonist Rod Krane for a business supper at the Strip Joint. She’d set it for 7 P.M., to give me plenty of time to go to the Harrison funeral and deal with whatever that entailed.
And it hadn’t entailed much—a fairly quick cab ride to the Upper West Side, and back again.
The Harrisons may have lived in Long Island now, but Donny’s funeral was a Manhattan affair, at the Riverside Memorial Chapel at Amsterdam Avenue and West Seventy-second; and Queens got in the mix when he was buried at Union Field Cemetery. The graveside services and the field trip it would have required I skipped; but the funeral played to a packed house of maybe 250.
No, Donny wasn’t buried in his Wonder Guy outfit. Though he’d been about as religious as a tree stump, his wife or somebody had decided to deck Donny out in a purple-striped prayer shawl and a white skullcap, burying him as an Orthodox Jew. The casket was bronze-trimmed mahogany and probably cost about the same as a new Lincoln.
I picked out Louis Cohn and Sy Mortimer and even Rod Krane among the yarmulkes, though Rod was the only cartoonist I spotted. No surprise that Spiegel and Shulman had taken a pass, and obviously Honey Daily hadn’t been invited. Donny’s big chauffeur, Hank Morella—in a black suit, not his livery—sat next to the two Harrison kids, a boy and girl high-school age or thereabouts, Hank next to the boy (who gave Kaddish), Selma next to the girl. For a gentile employee, Hank rated pretty high, considering there was no shortage of Harrison relatives, not to mention Louie Cohn.
I made myself seen, but managed not to talk to anybody much and, feeling like I’d been sprung from stir, cabbed it back to the Starr Building, where I arrived just after four. The uniformed operator—a bright-eyed, depressingly cheerful eternal kid of forty-five called Pete, who played the horses, consistently lost and would probably kill himself someday with a big smile on his puss—took me up to the third floor. The small pale-walled dark-carpeted landing was home to only two doors, one a fire exit, the other to my apartment.
My three rooms, laid out in boxcar fashion, like the office floor and Maggie’s digs, had been called cold and sterile by some. Those people didn’t get asked back. The windowless living room was off-white walls with Bauhaus furniture, beautifully boxy black leather well-padded stuff with tubular trim and legs, a sofa facing my television set (the midcentury fireplace of American apartments), looking across a glass coffee table on a white area rug on the waxed wood floor with a chair on either side. To be sociable, I keep a well-stocked liquor cart.
The black-and-white motif was echoed by a handful of framed original comic strips, Sunday pages mostly (in their natural black-and-white uncolored state), gifts signed to the major or me over the years by our artists, as well as some of the competitors. Lots of these originals just got tossed or burned, but both the major and Maggie had respect for the work and returned it to the artists.
And the major’s point of view had been that the stuff was better than anything the Picasso crowd was turning out, and if I didn’t wholly agree, I sure couldn’t afford anything by Pablo, so these fun free samples made do. Since the Bauhaus stuff gave the joint a modern look, I went for the more geometric comic strips, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals and, by way of loyalty to Starr Syndicate, Rod Krane’s Batwing.
For a bachelor pad (as Esquire had recently taken to calling modern apartments for unmarried males), decorating the walls with what the unsophisticated female might consider “kid stuff ” was a calculated risk. But it weeded out the humorless candidates, and even the most beautiful, stacked dish had better have a sense of funny if she’s planning to hang around me for any length of time.
The comic-strip gallery also provided an appropriate backdrop when I would invite guests up here for a business talk, which Maggie appreciated, since we could entertain our writers and artists and editors and salesmen and subscribers easier up here than in the office, and more intimately than down in the Strip Joint.
The bedroom was the next link in the chain, the windowless walls a warm yellow and the modern approach continued by blond Heywood-Wakefield furnishings, double bed with rust-color satin spread and twin nightstands, highboy chest with a mirror over it, and a neatly arranged desk, since I didn’t keep an office elsewhere. The desktop was almost always clear, stuff put away when I was done to leave a nice clean surface—clutter kills the modernist look. The only exception was a framed photo of the major and my mother in a sleek silver frame dating to the ’20s.
No comic art in here, but a couple of passable ersatz Pablos were spotted around, thanks to a Village art show where I’d splurged fifty bucks on three paintings. One nightstand had a panther lamp with square Chinese shade, dark green; the other a white phone. I usually keep the paperback I’m reading on it—right now, I, the Jury.
The bathroom was off the bedroom, to the right, small but modern and white with a walk-in shower. During the war, Maggie had thoughtfully remodeled this floor—which had been used for storage by the previous tenants—into living space for her stepson, and it awaited me when I returned from service, a nice surprise. And, in truth, a smart move on her part, because without it (and its rent-free status), I might have turned down the vice presidency.
As for the kitchen, it was modern and white and way too big for my needs, but I did sit at the white-speckled black Formica table from time to time, as I dined on Coca-Cola and deli cold cuts and maybe rye bread, which was about the extent of my mastery of the culinary arts. On the Sunday nights I was in tow
n, the table served up poker and chips (red, blue, white and potato) to some buddies of mine in the newspaper and show business games.
So that’s the layout, and on this particular afternoon the pad was spotless as a furniture showroom, if considerably more eccentric, a combo of my own neatness yen—military school had drilled it in me, and the real army hadn’t exactly cured me—and the twice-a-week cleaning lady.
The only thing that still needed cleaning was me—I admit I’d gone to Donny’s funeral without stopping back to shower, and by late afternoon of a July day, even an overcast one, I was getting ripe. I must have stayed in under the hot needles for twenty minutes, just letting them pound on me, maybe hoping to get some sense drummed in.
Soon I was on my couch, in my boxers and T-shirt and socks, with a bottle of Coke in one hand and today’s Daily News in the other. The coverage of Donny’s death continued to call it an accidental death, albeit “as wild as anything the funny pages could conjure.” Seemed to me that the funny pages didn’t conjure a damn thing—that was the job of writers and cartoonists—but I was starting to wonder if Captain Chandler was a conjurer, keeping the murder aspect hush-hush.
Of course, like Scarlett O’Hara said, tomorrow was another day; and murders don’t stay mum in Manhattan, not with a cast of characters like this one, they didn’t.
I was tired. Partly I was tired because I’d only had a quick bite for lunch at Lindy’s—half a pastrami and Swiss—before my excursion to the west side to pay Donny my halfhearted respects, and after I’d walked over to a building on Forty-third where at the Hirsch chemical laboratory I dropped off the carpet-thread samples from the Donny-sized stain on his mistress’s apartment floor.
But also I was worn out from talking to suspects like Frank Calabria, Sy Mortimer and Louis Cohn, not to mention Hank Morella and Honey Daily herself. I’m sure you’re impressed by how incisive my queries were and how snappy my comebacks; but what you can’t know is how goddamned exhausting it was.
Cops aren’t born with flat feet, you know, neither do they come out of the womb with those hangdog, world-weary, cynical expressions. Or so I’ve been told.
Anyway, I fell asleep on the sofa and the phone called me to the bedroom for an answer and a bartender’s voice I recognized, from the Strip Joint below, said, “Jack, Maggie’s waiting. And some sharpie.”
“What time is it?”
“Quarter after seven.”
“Shit,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“Tell her five minutes.”
“They’re in her private room.”
I thanked the bartender, whose name was Ed, and hung up and threw on a lightweight short-sleeve white shirt, slung on a dark gray silk necktie, and climbed into a lightweight flannel suit, lighter gray, then stepped into my moccasin-style loafers. Since I was just headed downstairs, I skipped the hat.
The fire exit stairs were the only way to access the restaurant from inside the building, and I took those, and went down the little side corridor off the stairs that emptied out toward the rear of the restaurant, into an area of restrooms in the space between the dining room and the kitchen.
Maggie’s small private dining room was tucked back in that same general region, and I opened the door and entered the compact if not quite cramped space whose four white walls each had a different large formal black-and-white photograph of Maggie, glamour head shots but no stripper trappings. The round linen-covered table (with red roses, stem-clipped, floating in a glass bowl as a centerpiece) would accommodate six comfortably and eight when it had to, but normally had four chairs, and right now two were filled by Maggie Starr and Rod Krane.
Maggie wore a form-fitting short-sleeved black dress with a narrow but deep neckline, a double strand of pearls dipping down into her hint of cleavage; her makeup was light but her bee-stung lips were a confident bright red. Her red hair was in a loose-curled do that likely meant a hairdresser pal of Bryce’s had made a house call. She was not quite in full battle array but was obviously a few pounds shy of coming out of her self-imposed exile.
I knew how she would describe herself, in this state: “Almost human.” Most women would kill to look half that human.
Krane wore a white dinner jacket and a black bow tie, stupidly overdressed for the occasion. Blade-thin, well tanned, with a long narrow nose no plastic surgeon had anything to do with, and gleaming white teeth, he was a handsome devil, but too aware of it, always smirking to work his dimples and winking to engage the slashes of dark eyebrow, the black widow’s-peaked hair slicked back like George Raft fifteen years ago.
Maggie’s drink, in a collins glass, was a Horse’s Neck—ginger ale and whiskey, with a spiral of lemon peel and a few ice cubes. That was all she drank—years ago somebody at a party had handed her one, saying, “A peel for a peeler,” and she hated the remark but loved the drink.
Krane was having a martini, probably thinking it went well with his man-about-town attire. At least tonight he was sparing us his cigarette-holder routine.
I had a hunch Krane was on at least his second martini, because he had a loose-limbed manner, waving and smiling too wide upon seeing me. Maggie, I would wager, was on her first Horse’s Neck. She was smiling just a little and her sideways look at her guest indicated her and my purposes would best be served by lubricating him thoroughly.
“We already ordered,” Maggie said, smiling at me but with half-lidded eyes that further endorsed Krane’s pickled condition. “We’re having the strip steak.”
“Fine,” I said, sitting next to Maggie and across from Krane. We all had plenty of arm room at the big round table.
“Best strip steak in town,” Krane said, “for the best strip artist in America, courtesy of the best stripteaser in the world.”
“Why thank you, Rod,” she said, voice warm, eyes icy, “you’re much too kind.”
A barmaid, in white shirt, black tie and tuxedo pants, entered with a tray bearing a fresh martini for Krane and my first Coke on ice. She was a blonde pushing thirty (gently), one of the numerous between-gigs dancers who worked the Strip Joint.
After she replaced his empty cocktail glass with a filled one, he leered up at her and said, “Nicely done!”
She wasn’t good enough an actress for her smile and “Thank you” to play, but Krane didn’t seem to notice, witty bon vivant that he was.
He sipped his martini and said to me, “Saw you at the service this afternoon, Jackie.”
Nobody calls me Jackie. I despise being called Jackie.
“Yeah. Quite a crowd.”
“You know what they say—give the people what they want, and they’ll turn out.”
I actually smiled at that—like they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day—but Maggie said, “You shouldn’t be disrespectful, Rod. Donny was a big part of your life. Gave you your big break.”
“Come on, Maggie,” he said with a leer, teeth startlingly white in that tan face. “Don’t kid a kidder.”
He didn’t notice her tiny, tiny wince; but I did.
Krane sipped his martini and continued: “I mean, you didn’t bother to show. You sent your lackey Jackie here in your place.”
I decided not to hit him for that; would have spoiled the mood.
As for Maggie, she shrugged a little; her faint smile would have appeared amused to anybody but me, who read it as contemptuous. “Somebody had to run the syndicate.”
“Come on, Mag—you didn’t like Donny any better than I did, than any of us did.”
Another modest shrug. “Actually, I didn’t know Donny all that well. The major was close to him. And Jack knew him, growing up. But I’ve done most of my business dealings with Louie Cohn.”
He pointed a gun-like finger at her and winked. “Smart girl. Proof positive that just ’cause a doll has a fine frame on her doesn’t mean she don’t have what it takes, upstairs, in the brains department.”
God, I hated this guy. Donny was no great shakes as a human be
ing, but talk about worthy murder victims . . . .
Maggie was saying, “You prefer dealing with Louie, then?”
His narrow eyes widened. “God, yes! Donny had a wild streak, and he could cop an attitude and just not let it go—if he decided you were trying to screw him over, there was no room for negotiation. No room for reasonable discourse.”
“Whereas,” Maggie said, “Louie is more conservative. Takes a longer, wiser view.”
“Bingo.”
Salads came, crisp lettuce with chopped carrot and celery and a tangy vinegar and oil Italian, the house dressing.
As we ate, Krane bragged about Hollywood interest in a second Batwing serial, and mentioned half a dozen pending licensing deals for toys, Halloween costumes and candy tie-ins. For all his bluster, and for as well as the Batwing book sold, Krane and his feature had never managed the licensing muscle of Spiegel and Shulman’s creation. No radio show, for example, and the TV series talk was strictly Wonder Guy.
When the steaks came, all medium rare with baked potato on a side plate, the talk continued, Krane doing most of it. This was aided by a fourth martini arriving midway through the meal. I mostly ate, being fairly starved and not wanting to waste jaw action on talk. And I was pleased to see Maggie eating more than just a salad, though her potato was jaybird naked of butter or sour cream, and she ate only a third or so of the meat, which was at least as criminal as the murder of Donny Harrison.
Krane’s bragging had to do with his, and our, knowledge that his five-year contract with Starr for the Batwing comic strip would come up next year. We were also aware that his ten-year contract with Americana would be due for renewal next year, as well—about six months after Spiegel and Shulman’s. Krane knew the comic-strip version of Batwing was doing only fair and wanted to keep us impressed with the property—make us perceive it as a going, growing concern and not a fad whose moment had passed.
“There’s a rumor,” Maggie said, “that you and the Wonder boys are throwing in together, to hit Americana up for a negotiation simultaneously. Form a united front.”
A Killing in Comics Page 12