I tried to smile but it went sour. “I don’t know. Maybe I wrote too many. I found a body one other time, and it was murder—clearly murder. Remember? Maybe I’ve got delusions of being an amateur detective now.”
“Maybe you’re just researching your next book,” Tom offered, then realized that sounded uglier than he’d meant it to, and added, “I didn’t mean that exactly that way, Mal....”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not sure myself, what to do or what to think. All I know is I’m depressed at losing a friend.”
Tom smiled tightly. “He was more than a friend. He was your damn idol. Your hero.”
I nodded. “You’re right. He was my hero. I’ve always been something of a hero worshipper. When I was a little kid my hero was Peter Pan; I even had a little green outfit I wore around—quote me, Sardini, and your ass is history! Then it was Batman, and I wore a mask and swung around on a rope for a couple of years. And then around junior high, the Saint was my main man... first the TV version, then the books. And then I discovered Gat Garson, and you know those pictures of Kane, in muscleman T-shirts, posing with guns and dogs and such on the backs of his books?”
“Yeah,” Murtz said. “He was spoofing Spillane doing the same thing.”
“I didn’t know that at the time,” I said. “I discovered Kane and Gat Garson first—Spillane and Mike Hammer came later, for me. My uncle Richard had some Gat Garson paperbacks in his attic, and I found ’em, and my uncle found me, looking at them. He only grinned and said, ‘Take ’em home with you if you want,’ and I did... under my coat. The pictures of Kane on the back of the books made me transfer my hero worship from Gat Garson to the guy who thought up Gat Garson. It was exciting to me, seeing these pictures of a tough-looking writer, who was a real person; I could never hope to be Gat Garson—by twelve, I was hip enough to know that—but I could be Roscoe Kane when I grew up, if I worked at it hard enough. And in high school I started trying to write my little stories. Sending ’em out in the mail. Piling up rejections. My detective was called Matt Savage. You probably had a Matt Savage, too, Sardini; you, too, Murtz.”
They were smiling, nodding.
“I had about three heroes, in my life. Real-life heroes I looked up to. During my teen idol phase, I liked Bobby Darin—probably ’cause ‘Mack the Knife’ was a blood-and-guts crime yarn—had pics of him plastered all over the walls of my room... next to the Elke Sommer pics, that is. She wasn’t my hero, but there was a place for her. And I liked Jack Webb. That movie, ‘Pete Kelly’s Blues,’ you guys ever see that? That shootout in the ballroom at the end, the rainstorm outside? Great! I always wanted to write Webb a letter and tell him how much I admired his work, but I wanted to wait until I’d written something I was really proud of, a book I could send him, as a fan who made good. Then last Christmas he died. I felt like I’d lost my best friend. I moped around. Everybody thought I was nuts. I took it damn near as hard as when my folks died. Crazy. Darin and Webb and Kane, they weren’t my only heroes, of course; I had the usual ones... John Wayne, Bogie, JFK. They’re all dead. Darin died after open-heart surgery at age thirty-seven, you know. Kane was the last one. The last living one. I’m thirty-three years old and feel old as hell, ’cause all my goddamn heroes are dead.”
I pounded the table with my fist; I surprised myself with the force it exerted, coffee cups jumping all around.
Sardini reached across the booth and put a hand on my arm. “Mal. Are you all right?”
“Haven’t you ever seen a tough guy cry before? I’ll see you guys later.”
I went back up to my room; the maid, a black woman about twenty-three, was in there and said, “You didn’t have no sign on the door.”
I didn’t follow that. I said so.
“You don’t want the room made up,” she said, defensively, “you gots to leave the do-not-disturb sign on the door.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Sorry to interrupt—you go on with your work. I’ll go for a walk or something.”
I was to the elevators when it occurred to me to go back and ask her something.
“Miss?”
She turned and gave me a sullen stare. She said nothing.
“Did you work yesterday?”
“I work damn near every day, mister.”
“Please back off a little. I’m not trying to give you a bad time or anything. I just wondered if you worked yesterday, because I wanted to ask you if you’d run short of towels.”
“Huh?”
“Let me start over. Do you work just on this floor?”
“No such luxury.”
“Did you happen to make up room 714 yesterday afternoon?”
She smirked and pointed upward with a thumb. “Yeah, so what?”
“It was a late make-up, wasn’t it? The guest had left the do-not-disturb sign on his door till late afternoon, right?”
Unimpressed, bored, she nodded. “I gots work to do, mister.”
“Were you short on towels?”
“No, I wasn’t short on towels.”
“You weren’t. How many towels did you leave in 714?”
“You’re crazy, man. I gots work to do.”
I showed her a five.
“How many towels?”
She snatched the bill out of my hand.
“Four,” she snapped. “How many you think?”
5
There was a do-not-disturb sign on the knob of door 714.
Hardly surprising, considering what Mae Kane had been through; but an unpleasant little ironic reminder of why I was here....
I knocked, and when there was no answer, knocked again, then paused to say, “Mae? It’s me—Mal.”
A few seconds later the door opened a ways and Mae’s face appeared over the taut nightlatch chain, a game little smile in the midst of the pretty but puffy face.
“Hello, Mal,” she said. “You’re a dear, but... I’m not really up to visitors right now....”
“Sure,” I said. “I understand. But we need to talk, soon as you’re up to it. It’s important we talk.”
The big brown long-lashed eyes, which had a red filigree this morning, narrowed and the lipstick-free lips pursed; she nodded and let me in.
Her bags were packed, by the door.
“When are you leaving?” I asked her.
She went over to the far bed and sat down, crossing pretty, nyloned legs; though she wore no make-up, she was a stunningly beautiful woman: her high-necked dress, brown and silky, clung to her trim figure, and her hair was its wig-perfect twin arcs of silver.
Her sexual attractiveness had always bothered me when her husband was alive, constantly made me feel ashamed of the impulses she stirred; now that he was dead, the guilt was like a heavy coat I was required to wear, perhaps because the zipper was caught.
“I’ll be driving back to Milwaukee this afternoon,” she said finally. Her voice was husky; it was always husky, but it was especially husky today. Alcohol husky; grief husky.
I sat on the edge of the other bed and faced her. “I really don’t mean to be a bother,” I said.
She managed a sad little one-sided smile. “You’re no bother,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d ’ve done without you there last night. I came completely apart.”
“I wasn’t the epitome of cool myself. I suppose you need to get right home, to make arrangements and everything.”
She shook her head. “I made all the arrangements by phone, this morning. A local funeral home is driving Roscoe back this afternoon to a funeral home in Milwaukee. There’ll be a little service Monday afternoon. Roscoe didn’t have many friends, you know. Some reporters, some people in a writer’s club he had helped out. A few blue-collar drinking buddies. Just a handful.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Drive all the way to Milwaukee just for that? It’s a sweet thought, Mal, but Roscoe would tell you to save your gas.”
I smiled. “He would at that. But I’ll still be there. Have you contacted Evelyn?
”
Her face turned into a cold, stony mask.
“I tried,” she said. “She wasn’t home.”
Evelyn was Roscoe’s second wife; she lived in Milwaukee, too. There was much bad blood between Mae and Evelyn, though why Mae was so bitter when, to be frank, it was she who stole Roscoe away from Evelyn, I couldn’t say. I did know, from personal experience, that Evelyn and Roscoe had built a marriage on combat: Evelyn, like Roscoe, was a heavy drinker, and they had battled verbally almost constantly, occasionally getting physical, their hostility erupting in mutual slap-’n’-slug fests. It hadn’t been an idyllic marriage, by any means.
“I did get through to Jerome,” she said. “He took it hard. I was surprised, actually; he and his father had hardly seen each other in recent years.”
Jerome Kane was Roscoe’s only child, though he wasn’t a child any longer, but a man in his forties whose profession—fashion designer—had embarrassed his macho old man. Roscoe had never come to grips with his son’s homosexuality, either, and would deny it if it came up in conversation. “Just because the kid designs dresses,” Roscoe would say, “that doesn’t make him a fruit salad—that’s a bigger cliché than Gat Garson!” (As a matter of fact, some critics in The Armchair Detective and other mystery fanzines had built a case for Gat Garson being a latent homosexual; to my knowledge, Roscoe never saw those articles—he didn’t follow the fan magazines, and I certainly would never show such articles to him.)
“Will Jerome be flying in for the funeral?” I asked. I felt awkward referring to Roscoe Kane’s son by his first name, since I’d never met him.
“Actually, he’s already here,” Mae said.
“What? I thought he lived in San Francisco—”
“He does, but he’s visiting friends in Chicago, coincidentally. Apparently he and his father had dinner together last night.”
“That’s funny. Roscoe never mentioned it. And when I ran into him in the lobby last night, he’d just gotten back from dinner, he said.”
“You would think Roscoe’d have mentioned it, wouldn’t you? Well, Jerome mentioned it to me, right off. In fact, he said he and his father had gotten along ‘famously.’ Their best meeting in years.”
“I hope Jerome isn’t exaggerating. It’d be nice to think Roscoe and his son came to terms with each other, after all these years.”
Mae’s smile was almost wistful. “Yes, it would. I’d like to think Roscoe had some happy moments on his last day. His last months have been... well... stormy.”
“What was bugging him?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. You’d think with Gorman planning to publish the Gat Garsons, it would’ve given him a shot in the arm. But I can’t say it did.”
“Getting back to Jerome,” I said. “He’s staying over for the funeral, I take it.”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to meet him.”
“I can give you the number where he is staying.”
“That’d be nice. Thank you.”
There was a brief, awkward silence, which Mae broke after a few moments: “I talked to some reporters this morning.”
“I heard you did.”
“I was surprised they’d be interested in my husband. I thought Roscoe was... well, sort of a has-been. Is it cruel of me to say so?”
“Not really,” I said. “Realistic, maybe. Not cruel. I’m afraid... and I don’t mean to be cruel by pointing this out... but I’m afraid the media folks are just picking up on the fact that a once-famous mystery writer died a somewhat mysterious death on the eve of a mystery convention.”
She nodded, her smile a bitter line. “I’m afraid you’re right. I sensed that, from the tenor of their questions. I didn’t give them your name, for that very reason. I thought if they found out another mystery writer had discovered Roscoe’s body, they’d make something out of it.”
“I quite agree with you.”
“I haven’t seen any of the papers yet....”
“Too early.”
“Well... do you think they’ll say anything about—how was it you put it?—the somewhat ‘mysterious’ nature of Roscoe’s death?”
I shrugged.
“I certainly hope not,” she said. “This is unpleasant enough without that sort of exploitation creeping in. As an old media maven myself, I can just see them stooping to that. Ugh.”
That made it harder for me to say what I’d come here to say.
“Mae,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I said I needed to talk to you.”
“You implied it was urgent, as a matter of fact. Is there something you’re having trouble getting to? Something you’re having trouble saying?” She smiled, and there was no bitterness in it, but plenty of sex appeal, damnit. “That isn’t like you, Mallory. You usually have plenty to say.”
“Yeah”—I grinned—“I am a little long-winded sometimes. I had a critic give me hell for that once.”
“I remember Roscoe mentioning that... in one of his periodic diatribes against critics in general. As I recall, one reviewer called you ‘verbose,’ and another ‘curt,’ for the same piece of work. So what does that make you?”
I shrugged, smiled. “Curtly verbose?”
“Perhaps.” She smiled. “Mal.”
“Yes?”
“Get to the point.”
“Yes. Mae. I think there really may be something... ‘mysterious’ about Roscoe’s death. I think he may have been murdered.”
She leaned forward; her dark eyes flared, then narrowed, boring into me.
“Explain,” she said curtly.
I explained, verbosely. I went through what I had told the assistant coroner; she’d been in the room while I did that, but she’d been gin-sedated, so this was all new to her. As I spoke, she reached for her purse on the nightstand and got some cigarettes out, tapped one down on the cigarette pack (Lucky Strikes, like Roscoe and Gat Garson smoked—not a very ladylike cigarette, but she made smoking them a sensuous affair) and lit up, listening intently. When I got to the part about the maid remembering delivering four towels to 714, her eyes got Joan Crawford-wide again.
“My God,” she said. “I believe he was murdered.”
And she reached for the phone. Almost lurched for it.
I put my hand on hers, stopping her; her hand was warm, and I drew mine away. I hated myself for the attraction I felt for her. She was old enough to be my mother, almost; she was my hero’s widow of less than a day.
“I thought that through already,” I said. “I even called the police, got the name of the assistant coroner from last night—which is Myers, incidentally—and was ready to make the call, when it occurred to me how little I had.”
With a trembling urgency in her voice, she said, “You can prove the point you were trying to make last night, about the towels! That’s a lot!”
I shook my head no. “It’s very little. It’s hardly anything. Oh, it’d be enough for Gat Garson. But I don’t think the Chicago coroner’s office is going to give a damn.”
“Why?”
“Who’s to say that maid’s story’s going to hold up? Why should she remember servicing a specific room, a day later? Will she be so damn sure of herself on a witness stand, at an inquest, as she was when she was looking at my five-dollar bill? Even if she’s believed, how do you build a murder investigation on some wet towels being tossed in a hamper? Who’s to say Roscoe didn’t bathe that afternoon, before going out for dinner with his son? In which case, he’d have gotten several towels wet; perhaps he himself took the wet towels with him, looking for a closet to get some fresh ones. And when he found the closet, he didn’t find any clean towels, but the hamper was right there and so he dumped the wet ones in. Or perhaps another maid came in late in the day and turned down the beds—they were turned down, remember?—and got rid of the wet towels, but didn’t have any fresh ones to leave, so... anyway, it would be a fine piece of evidence in a mystery novel. But at a coroner’s inquest, it wo
uld be shrugged off twelve ways to Tuesday.”
Her face was damn near as pale as her hair. Her eyes were wet. A tear trickled out of one them, making a shiny trail on her cheek. Her fists were clenched and so was her jaw, which was trembling.
I said, “I’d like to do something about this. My instinct is Roscoe was murdered. Or at least, may have been. But we don’t have enough to go to the police with.”
“I think you should. I think you should call Mr. Myers and tell him what you found out.”
“All right, I will. But nothing will come of it.”
She stabbed the cigarette out in a glass Americana-Congress ashtray on the nightstand. “Damnit, if Roscoe was murdered, we can’t just let it lay there! We’ve got to do something, Mal!”
“I know. I know.”
We sat and looked at each other; she leaned forward, got a crinkly smile going and stroked my face, in what she probably thought was a motherly fashion. Her skirt was hiked up over her knees, and I wanted to throw myself on her—or out a window.
“Poor Mal,” she said. “Poor, poor Mal.”
“Poor Roscoe,” I said. “I feel fine.”
“Do you? Do you really?”
And her mask of composure slipped and she was crying into her cupped hands.
I stood, hoping how I felt about her didn’t show.
“I shouldn’t have told you,” I said. “I should’ve let it ride.”
“You can’t let murder ride,” she said, sobbing.
“That’s a Gat Garson line,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Chapter One, Kiss or Kill.”
“You were Roscoe’s fan, too, weren’t you?”
“He was my hero,” she said.
I touched her shoulder. Like a son, I hoped.
I said, “Let me poke around a little. Ask some questions. I’ll keep my suspicions to myself. I don’t want the media to get hold of this, not yet, anyway.”
“All right—” She sniffed.
“And I wanted to ask you a big favor. Stick around till tomorrow.”
She cocked her head, looking at me close. “Oh? Why?”
Kill Your Darlings (A Mallory Mystery) Page 5