A Killing in Comics

by Max Allan Collins

  “What? He’s lying! That’s crazy!”

  “Nobody at all in your life, who had anything to do with Americana—Louie Cohn, maybe?”

  Her face turned white. “Louie Cohn? My idea of having someone besides Donny Harrison in my life would have been to entertain Louie Cohn? That bloodless bastard?”

  I knew it was a dumb thing to say. Cohn really was a bloodless bastard. You can’t have an erection without having blood to send in that general direction.

  She sat with her arms folded and the white in her face was going away and red coming in. Very tightly she said, “Jack, right now there is only one man in my life. Or at least there was—you. If you want to pursue that role, you need to get off this subject.”

  “Honey, it’s not jealousy, or prying. I need the information to—”

  Without looking at me, she said, “Jack, I need you to leave. I need you to leave right now.”

  Actually, that was fine with me.

  But I said, “I hope we can get past this. I really do care about you, Honey.”

  “I care about you, too. But, Jack?”

  “Yes?”

  “Next time—call.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT THIS LOO
  They called Jackson Heights the cornfields of Queens, because this middle-class community of single homes and garden apartments had been carved out of farmland. North of Roosevelt Avenue, centering around Eighty-second Street, the Heights was an active, well-off (if not quite well-to-do) Jewish enclave. On one of its greenest streets, in a colonial-style apartment building, Harry Spiegel lived with his young bride, Rose.

  Their place, on the top floor, was spacious with the sort of nice, new furnishings a young couple starting out might assemble, assuming they had a little mazuma. The rose-color walls had ivory-framed pastel airbrushed floral prints that seemed an unlikely backdrop for a frenetic guy like Harry, who had whipped up the world’s first comic-book superhero out of his adolescent imagination. Feeling like I’d walked into a Better Homes & Gardens layout, I was seated on a wine-color mohair sofa next to Harry, and in a nearby matching lounge chair was Harry and Moe’s attorney, Bert Zelman.

  This was the morning after Honey Daily turned me away from her Waldorf suite. First thing, after breakfast at Walgreen’s off Times Square, I had set up several meetings today—two in Queens and another out on Long Island, which meant I’d had a good excuse to play with my newest toy, my military-green ’48 Ford Super Deluxe convertible, which I kept in a garage on Forty-fourth.

  And the day was beautiful and sunny and pleasantly warm, perfect to glide along with the top down (my fedora on the rider’s side floor) and go out to see how the other half lived. I was wearing a sky-blue shortsleeve shirt with striped tie under the cream-color linen jacket of my lightweight summer suit.

  In the living room of the apartment, I met Rose Spiegel for the first time, but can’t say I got to know her much. She was a small, pretty, dark-haired woman, just a little plump, in a yellow house-dress; she smiled and said hellos and got everybody glasses of iced tea with lemon and coasters for the end tables. And disappeared.

  Yet her presence was all around me. The Sears catalogue decorating and the absence of any Wonder Guy trappings gave me the feeling she was not vitally involved in her husband’s work.

  Bright-eyed Harry was in a sportshirt—light yellow, with brown trousers—but the big, blocky lawyer wore a suit, a blue and white striped seersucker, with a blue-and-red bow tie on a pale blue shirt. About forty, Zelman had broad shoulders and, despite his sizeable gut, looked more square than round. The lawyer had the kind of jagged, expressive dark eyebrows cartoonists specialized in, a strong jaw worthy of Wonder Guy, and intense, intelligent brown eyes, with wavy brown hair swept back off a broad, expansive brow. A big man, he made Harry look like a kid on the couch next to me, or a midget.

  “You understand I’m not a criminal lawyer,” Zelman said, chewing on a big unlighted cigar (Rose had sweetly forbidden him to smoke), “but when Harry called me, and said you were coming over, I thought I should sit in. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “More the merrier,” I said, took a sip of iced tea (sweetened—ugh!) and returned the tall glass to its coaster. “My role in this is to help clear Harry and Moe.”

  The expression on his pie-pan mug painfully earnest, Harry said, “Listen, Jack, I don’t mean to be ungrateful to you or Maggie, but I don’t need clearing. I didn’t do anything.”

  “I don’t think you did,” I said.

  He gestured with both hands; he did that a lot. “So why not wait for the cops to just do their job?”

  I glanced at Zelman, who smiled knowingly as he rolled the cigar around in thick lips.

  “Harry,” I said, “the cops move slow. The Homicide Bureau has probably ten more murders on their hands, since Donny belly flopped on that blade.”

  “Fifteen,” Zelman said.

  I went on: “Plus, the coppers have to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t.’ Add to that my inside knowledge of the business, and the players, and I may be able to do us all some good.”

  Zelman leaned out from his comfortable chair to put a supportive hand on his client’s arm. “Harry, I think Mr. Starr is right. He can only help in this matter.”

  I said, “We have another day gone by without the press picking up on the murder aspect. Captain Chandler is keeping the lid on, God knows how.”

  Harry frowned. “Why is that a good thing?”

  Brother. “Oh, I don’t know, Harry—maybe you think it’d be good publicity, having Wonder Guy in the headlines next to a murder?”

  The writer frowned in embarrassment. “Oh. I hadn’t thought about it like that . . .”

  “No,” I said, and let the edge into my tone, “you’re too relieved to have Donny Harrison out of the way to look at this in the cold, hard light it deserves.”

  His pupils were like exclamation marks in his wide eyes. “Jack! That’s not fair!”

  “Neither is life, except maybe on the funny pages.” I braved another sip of the sweetened tea. “Harry, you and Moe are prime suspects here—not the only ones, but—”

  Harry was shaking his head so hard, his hair was flapping. “Jack, Donny had more enemies than Hitler. Why look at us?”

  “You’ve talked to Chandler? Or did he send some of his men around?”

  Harry glanced at Zelman, who gave him nothing, just kept chewing that cigar. Finally the writer said, “It was Chandler, personally. He was nice enough. Had me sign a couple comic books to his kids. Would he ask me to do that if he suspected me?”

  Zelman closed his eyes.

  I said, “Did Chandler mention the theory they’re pursuing, about how Donny died?”

  “Yeah.” Harry paused to have a sip of his own iced tea. “He said Donny was poisoned.”

  “Did he say what kind of poison?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ask you whether you knew about Donny’s diabetes? About the insulin Donny took regularly?”

  Harry frowned in confusion. “Yeah. But he didn’t say why.”

  “Did he ask you whether you knew Donny kept insulin bottles at various locations? Like at home, and at work, and his girlfriend’s?”

  “Yeah, he did.” Harry shrugged. “And I said I did.”

  “Did he question you alone, or with Moe present?”

  “Alone.”

  “Did he mention Moe’s diabetes?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Did you mention it?”

  “No.”

  I glanced at Zelman, who looked grave and a little ill. Then to Harry I said, “They think somebody spiked Donny’s insulin. The fact that Moe has diabetes, and is familiar with the trappings, well . . .”

  Zelman straightened and said, “You don’t have to have diabetes to know about sufferers giving themselves insulin shots.”

  “No,” I admitted. “But it’s just the kind of suggestive detail that starts cops thinking, and sways juries.”
>
  The lawyer couldn’t argue against that point.

  Harry’s complexion was white and his expression grim. “Are you trying to scare me, Jack?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? What good does it do?”

  I bled all of the smart-ass tone from my voice, which took some doing; I met the writer’s eyes and held them. “First, if you did this—or if you know or believe that Moe did it—you need to say nothing more to me, and you need to have Mr. Zelman here get you a good criminal attorney.”

  “Jesus . . .”

  “And, Harry, I’d advise you to tell that attorney to call Maggie or me, so I can back off on this investigation, and not bring you any more trouble than you already have.”

  He was shaking his head again, hair flopping. “Jack, I swear on my mother’s grave that I did not do this thing. And I don’t have any reason to believe Moe did, either—and, please, be serious . There’s no gentler soul on the face of the earth than Moe Shulman!”

  I glanced at Zelman, who smiled a little around that cigar. I allowed myself a smile, too.

  “Okay,” I said. “I believe you. And I’m going to stay at it. Actually, I’ve been at it ever since I got that call in the office, from the cops, while you and Moe were in to talk to Maggie about Funny Guy.”

  Harry brightened. “Have you decided? Do we have a deal?”

  Zelman closed his eyes again.

  I said, “Harry—do you really think the Starr Syndicate is going to sign a new contract with the prime suspects in a murder case? That’s a big part of why I have to clear this thing up, and fast.”

  “Oh. Oh, God. I see.”

  This time I was the one who gestured with both hands. “We would love to keep doing business with you and Moe. But we aren’t prepared to accept packages of comic strips from a studio based out of Sing Sing.”

  “I . . . I understand. This is terrible. Really terrible.”

  Finally Donny’s death seemed something other than a boon to Harry Spiegel.

  I addressed Zelman. “There’s no shortage of suspects in this case, but I can tell you that the renegotiation of the Wonder Guy . . . and, for that matter, Batwing . . . contracts may well play a role.”

  Zelman said, “If so, let me assure you, Mr. Starr, that Harry and Moe had no reason to do away with Donny Harrison. If all I wanted to do was sue for back compensation—the licensing money that the boys have been diddled out of—a fortune could be made. But I have a way to get them the full rights back . . . putting us in the catbird seat, and Americana in, if you’ll pardon my French, the shitter.”

  I nodded. “Mortimer’s screwup with Wonder Boy, right?”

  Zelman flinched just a little, not pleased that I knew about his secret weapon; but otherwise he only smiled. “Yes. That opened the door. Americana will soon be doing business on our terms.”

  “And Harrison wasn’t a stumbling block?”

  His smile was wide and a touch patronizing. “Hardly. It’s Louis Cohn who’s the negotiator.”

  One more sickening-sweet sip of iced tea; then, casually I said to the lawyer, “And I understand you plan to join forces with Rod Krane.”

  Again Zelman was clearly not pleased that I was ahead of his game. He removed the unlit cigar and gestured with it. “We are considering that. Krane’s father is a shrewd if self-taught attorney, who has his own barrel to put Americana over.”

  I nodded. “The ‘barrel’ being that Krane was a minor when he signed the original contract. Do you believe that?”

  Zelman’s small self-satisfied smile was of a type that had in human history appeared on no face other than a lawyer’s.

  “No,” he said. “But I also know there’s no way for Americana to prove Krane wasn’t underage. Their whole comic-book apple-cart could turn over on them, in an instant—where are they without their two top superheroes?”

  Forest Hills, another popular Queens middle-class garden community, rested on the wooded heights at the northeast end of Forest Park. Colonial and English Tudor homes abounded, as did apartment houses, almost all with well-tended landscaped lawns that made a piker out of anything in Jackson Heights.

  In a ten-room colonial, Moe Shulman lived with the family he’d brought out from Des Moines—parents, two brothers and a sister. In a large upstairs room, which must have started out in life as a master bedroom, Moe had fashioned a studio for himself and four assistants.

  This was a smaller version of the bullpen of cartoonists at Americana, a suburban bedroom transposed into a blue-smoke-filled den of creativity, with considerably more mote-dappled sunlight coming in than you’d find on Lexington Avenue.

  The cartoonists hunkered at their drawing boards—this one inking, this one penciling, this one lettering, another inking a cover—were men in their late twenties and early thirties, in sportshirts or short-sleeve white ones, sans tie. Three of the four assistants wore glasses, though none could compete with the bug-eye-inducing lenses of the man in charge, Wonder Guy co-creator Moe Shulman.

  Moe and I sat on a couch against one wall as the men worked, rarely talking to one another, sunk deep in their artistic efforts. I had a bottle of Coke that Moe’s mom had given me, before showing me to the stairs, and Moe was drinking hot black coffee, despite the warmth of the July day and the lack of air-conditioning (a window fan was doing a pretty decent job of stirring up a breeze).

  Moe was in a short-sleeve white shirt. He’d been working at a drawing board, penciling rough layouts. This didn’t surprise me—I doubted with his eyesight he could manage much more, these days.

  He had taken time to introduce me around—two of the four guys had made the trek from Des Moines, childhood friends of the boys from their fanzine days; two others had names I recognized, because Maggie had done some snooping a while back to see which Shulman ghosts might come in handy for the syndicated strip version of Wonder Guy, should the boys ever get forced out by Americana. The latter was not a possibility we looked forward to, but reality is reality.

  Now we were on the couch, an old springy thing, and Moe said, “I’m glad you came to see me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I mean . . . without Harry around.”

  “Why is that?”

  His expression was at once sad and kind, the enlarged eyes behind the lenses wide but not childlike. He was a bigger man than his partner, with a full head of dark brown hair graying here and there.

  He said, “Harry gets upset. There are things I can’t say to Harry.”

  “I can imagine. I just got finished filling him and your lawyer, Zelman, in on the state of the investigation into Donny’s murder.”

  Unlike with Harry, I had explained to Moe on the phone this morning about my looking into the case for the Starr Syndicate and their interests.

  Moe said, “I spoke to Captain Chandler from Homicide. All smiles, Mr. Nice Guy. I did a drawing of Wonder Guy for his children. But he didn’t fool me.”

  “Is that right?”

  “He thinks I did this. Me, or Harry and me. I don’t think he thinks Harry has the . . . this sounds bad . . . the brains to pull this off alone.”

  “I see.”

  The big eyes behind the glasses narrowed in concern. “You must understand—Harry is a sort of a genius. Do you know the term—idiot savant?”

  “Yes.”

  But he defined his version of it anyway: “A simple soul with a God-given talent for something complex. Do you have any idea how Wonder Guy has changed the world?”

  That sounded grandiose, but it wasn’t really. In 1938, Wonder Guy had been just this oddball comic book on the fringes of newsstands. By early the next year, Wonder Guy was syndicated by Starr, growing quickly to a list of close to a thousand papers. By the end of ’39, countless new superheroes and new comics publishers were on the stands, and by early 1940 Wonder Guy was a hit on the radio, and before long the animated cartoons, and . . .

  “I didn’t create Wonder Guy,” Moe said. “Harry did. He may seem like an ex
citable boy, and he is, but always remember what he accomplished. Always remember his genius.”

  “You really are friends.”

  He sipped the hot coffee. “We are. We will be for life. I love him. He frustrates me, but what a gift he shared with his high-school buddy. Did you know, we both were left back a year?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Jack, we were the butt of jokes. We were bullied, or were till I took that Charles Atlas course, anyway. I kind of muscled up, to defend the both of us.”

  I took a swig of Coke. “He was Ron Benson, mild-mannered radio reporter, and you were Wonder Guy.”

  “Don’t kid yourself—we were both Ron Benson. We understand how a young boy feels, what kinds of things kids dream about. Flying. Being strong. Being loved by a pretty girl.”

  “You touched a nerve, all right.”

  He frowned, shook his head. “I’m afraid that dope Mortimer is going to screw it up. He keeps after us, Harry and me, to make the stories more real—make them scary, put more science fiction in, make the drawing less cartoony.”

  “Times change. Styles change. Is that why?”

  He lifted one big shoulder. “I don’t know. All I know is, the dream behind Wonder Guy—the dream of a lonely kid—is to be powerful and invulnerable, right? But you can’t let the world know how bad you want it. You have to dream this dream with . . . with a light touch. They make it too serious, they screw it up. They lose the dream. Make it some kind of damn nightmare.”

  I’d known Moe a long time, or at least I’d met him a long time ago. He had never opened up to me like this. He’d always played a quiet second fiddle to Harry. And unlike Harry, Moe was clearly troubled by the death of Donny Harrison.

  Quietly, not wanting any of his staff to hear, I asked, “Did you kill him, Moe?”

  He shook his head. “I know I’m on the firing line. Even for all his smiles and excuse-me-for-intruding, Chandler asked questions that . . . that told me I was in trouble.”

  “About your diabetes. And the insulin.”

  He nodded gravely. Had another sip of coffee, then set cup and saucer on the scarred-up end table nearby. “Sure, I knew about Donny’s diabetes, and the bottles he kept around and about. But putting poison in his insulin, anybody could’ve done that. Me having diabetes, and being familiar with the process of . . . what’s that really mean?”