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 And my comments about Donaldson are also not for publication.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.”
“I don’t know...”
“Well, I do. I’d like to interview you, over the weekend, some time.”
“I don’t think so...”
“You can edit the rough copy, censor anything you like, if something you say looks stupid or harsh on paper.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Dinner still on?”
“You’re from Pennsylvania someplace, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. West Mifflin.”
“Maybe I better introduce you to Chicago-style pizza, then. This evening.”
Wry little grin #458. “Okay. Separate checks?”
“It’ll be my treat,” I said.
“Okay.”
We stood; I pointed to the luncheon check. “You can get that one.”
She laughed. “Fair enough. Heading back to the Congress?”
“Yeah. The dealers’ room should just about be set up. I need to talk to that lovely publisher of yours, and he should be up there.”
She paid at the register and we went out onto the street; there was a breeze, a breeze with a Chicago bite in it, and it was still foggy. I had a light jacket on, dug my hands in my pockets against the cold; she just had the sweatshirt, her breasts poking at the heavy cloth, dotting the eye in Noir a second time—being sensitive, I pretended not to notice. She pretended not to notice me pretending not to notice.
“Are you taking that Crime Tour this afternoon?” she asked; we were walking arm in arm—it was cold enough to justify that, even if our relationship wasn’t that far along yet.
“What Crime Tour’s that?”
“There’s a bus tour of various famous Chicago crime scenes. Think of the history on view—the genre’s dark roots revealed!”
“You really are the editor of Noir, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I am. You comin’?”
“I think I’ll pass.” I’d seen enough crime scenes for one weekend. “You can give me the full report tonight over pizza.”
We stopped at a crosswalk; the Congress was just up ahead.
She looked sideways at me. “Say—what happened between you and Gregg, anyway?”
“Do I need a reason to loathe that guy?”
“No.”
The light changed and we crossed.
“Well,” I said, “it’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime.”
We went in the front hotel entrance, past the doorman through the revolving doors and up the interior ramp to the promenade of shops. A woman in her late fifties, heavy-set in a brown dress, rolled past like an orange-haired tank. Her face, which had been pretty once, was grim.
I stopped in my tracks.
Kathy went a couple steps beyond me, before she realized I’d been left behind; she glanced back with a look of exaggerated puzzlement.
“What’s wrong, Mal?”
“Nothing. Go on up to the dealers’ room, why don’t you. I’ll catch you later.”
She shrugged, smirked wryly, and went on toward the bank of elevators.
I went in the other direction, toward the lobby, where I’d seen Roscoe Kane’s second wife, Evelyn, heading.
7
Evelyn Kane was shouting at a pretty young black woman in a blazer behind the check-in counter; the clerk’s face was as impassively attractive as Evelyn’s was actively unattractive.
“Well, I want to see the son of a bitch!” Evelyn said. “When will he be on duty?”
“You’ll have to speak to the manager,” the woman said.
“Where is the manager?”
“He’s not here at the moment.”
“Well, when will he be here?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to come back later, ma’am.”
“What’s your name, honey?” The honey held no affection.
The faintest of smirks hid in one corner of the black woman’s mouth as she pointed to the name badge that said “Ms. Brown.”
And Evelyn Kane turned, seething, and faced me.
“Just what I need,” she said.
“Hello, Evelyn.”
She pointed a finger at me; her face was a tight mask—like Jack Klugman suppressing gas. “I want to talk to you, pal.”
“Fine. I wouldn’t mind talking to you, either.”
She began walking, toward the nearest exit, apparently; I fell in step.
Stamping on like a drill sergeant, she said, without looking at me, “You saw Roscoe last night, right?”
“Right.”
“I want you to tell me all about it. All right?”
“All right,” I shrugged.
“Let’s have a drink, then.”
I followed her out of the hotel; she stopped and stood just outside the doorway momentarily, as if daring the October breeze to faze her. It fazed me. I dug my hands in my pockets as I followed her down the street and around the corner to a sleazy little bar; the Americana-Congress was a relatively nice hotel, but you didn’t have to walk far from it to find something sleazy—a fact of life in most of downtown Chicago, which seemed a study in side-by-side incongruities. Not the least of which were Evelyn Kane and I, seated now in a corner booth. She was presently answering a question I hadn’t asked, explaining why we hadn’t used one of the several bars in the hotel.
“I hate hotel bars,” she said. “Expensive watered-down
drinks and executives on expense accounts. Executives aren’t people, you know—they used to be people, I suppose. But expense accounts turn people into leeches.”
I liked the way Evelyn talked—she talked like a character in one of her ex-husband’s books—but I didn’t like Evelyn much.
“You don’t like me much, do you?” she asked, smiling over the draw beer that had barely been set down in front of her before she scooped it up toward her face.
I sipped the beer I’d ordered. “I think you’re a peach, Evelyn. I’d give anything for a pin-up of you to hang over my bed.”
She laughed and beer came out her nose. “I like you, kid. You got class.”
“I always thought you hated my guts.”
She shrugged; her eyes were elaborately laced with red, I noticed. “You came around and saw Roscoe and filled his head with how good he was. It was a bad time for him; right about the time he realized he wasn’t going to get published anymore, not in the U.S., anyway. You had a bad effect on him.”
“I thought I cheered him up.”
“Sure. He’d get high off all your hero worship. Then he’d come down. Crash down. To reality. Which is a hell of a place for a writer to have to come, as you probably know. And, I felt you and some other people like you were leeches, looking for free writing help and advice and connections.”
“Can I tell you why I think you didn’t like me, Evelyn?”
“Can I stop you?”
“You were jealous. Your marriage was on the rocks, and I came around and got your husband’s attention and it pissed you off.”
She thought about that while she finished the beer. “You’re right,” she said, waving at the waitress for another. She’d been a waitress herself once but didn’t seem to have any particular empathy for our suspiciously young one.
That’s where she’d met Roscoe, back in Milwaukee in the ’50s—waiting on him in a neighborhood bar. To hear Roscoe tell it, she’d been a bosomy, zaftig blonde, in those days; hard to imagine, looking at her faded orange hair and bearlike body and the face that had more wrinkles and folds than a suit of Goodwill clothes. Still, buried in that face were features that even now seemed pleasant if not pretty, if you dug for them hard enough. Maybe I would have enjoyed a pin-up of her over my bed, if it were of the right vintage.
Part of me wanted to like her. But I remembered how shrewish she’d been around Roscoe—and the impression I’d carried away from meeting her was that she was a lowlife who’d found a meal ticket, a blue-collar gold digger who turned not only fat but bitchy as the meal ticket started petering out.
Now, looking at this woman whose red eyes today came not entirely from drinking, I wondered if I might have misjudged her, at least a little.
“Looking back,” she said, “I think what you gave Roscoe was a good thing. In the long term.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the short term was a high followed by a crashin’ low, yes. But over the long haul I think the correspondence with you and the visits from you built his confidence back up, kept his self-respect more or less in working order. So I want to apologize, Mallory. I was rude to you, way back when. Why don’t we start over, you and me?”
I wondered why she was trying to get on my good side; I wondered it aloud, in fact.
“Looking for ulterior motives,” she said. “Mystery writers are all alike. Being married to a writer is like being married to a psychiatrist. Remember the old joke about the psychiatrist who passes a guy on the street, and the guy says, ‘Hello,’ and the psychiatrist says to himself, ‘I wonder what he meant by that?’ That’s what being married to one of you analytical sons of bitches is like. You keep trying to make sense out of your life. You keep looking for motivations and ‘patterns of behavior,’ when you deal with people. But life isn’t like books. It’s a goddamn mess, Mallory. It isn’t tightly plotted; and people don’t behave rationally. And things don’t work out like they’re supposed to.”
Somewhere in the midst of that speech her red eyes began tearing up; and now, her speech finished, she stared into her beer and tears flowed.
“You must like salt in your beer,” I said.
“Go to hell,” she said, good-naturedly.
“You still love him, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?” she said.
Somebody dropped some money into a jukebox and Willie Nelson began to sing “Blue Skies.”
“That’s a great old song,” she said.
“Maybe, but I don’t like Willie Nelson.”
“Listen to the song, you jerk. You claim to be a writer—listen to the words!” She sat for a moment, lost in the music. Almost wistfully she added, “He sings it real nice, too. That Willie Nelson. What a singer. What a man. Somethin’ about him always reminds me of Roscoe.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They both look like they fell off a lumber wagon.”
That amused her; she didn’t laugh out loud, but she laughed.
“We should’ve been pals, Mallory.”
“Maybe it’s not too late.”
“Maybe not. Why don’t you tell me about seeing Roscoe last night.”
“I’ll get to that. First tell me what that Abbott and Costello routine you were doing with the girl at the front desk at the hotel was about?”
Intensity tightened her sagging face. “I want to talk to the night man. The assistant manager who found my husband’s body.”
“That guy wasn’t who found the body.”
“Yeah, well, the bitch found him. But the night man was first on the scene after that.”
“By the bitch, I take it you mean Mae.”
“Mae, the bitch, right. The home-wrecking goddamn bitch.”
Funny hearing Evelyn call Mae that, considering Evelyn seduced Roscoe away from his first (now late) wife.
“Actually, the night guy was third on the scene,” she said. “I understand somebody else was with the bitch when she found Roscoe, but I can’t seem to find out who—that’s one thing the night manager can tell me, who the guy was that was with her. Somebody she was humping, no doubt. Him, I want to talk to, also.”
“Evelyn, I was with Mae when she found Roscoe.”
Her eyes got very alert. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
“You do now.” I told her about it, but tried to downplay my suspicions. It didn’t take.
“Your instincts are right,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“He was murdered.”
“How can you be so sure?”
She hesitated. “Roscoe was on the verge of something big.”
I sat forward. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you.” She bit her lip. “But not right now. I gotta think it through, first.”
“If you know something that will help convince the authorities that this is—or at least might be—a murder, then don’t hold back, Evelyn. Tell me what you know.”
She smiled, but the smile was oddly private. “Don’t give me that. I read your books, pal.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that. I read ’em. Roscoe loaned ’em to me. He was proud of you. You were his prize pupil. And only.”
A wave of emotion ran through me; I swallowed and tried to keep my own beer from getting salty.
I said, “I still don’t see what that has to do...”
“Those stories of yours, those books, were true, weren’t they?”
“More or less.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said smugly.
“Make your point, Evelyn.”
“I didn’t like the books.”
“So?”
“The writing seemed okay; I’m no writer, but I lived with one long enough to know writing when I see it. I just didn’t like what you did with it. I didn’t like you taking those two real murders you happened to fall into and turnin’ ’em into mystery stories. It’s like I said, writers are always trying to turn real life into stories, nice ’n
’ tidy with beginnings and middles and ends, and real life isn’t like that. And, frankly, pal, I think you were kind of a leech, turnin’ those real-life tragedies into something you could make a buck off of.”
“Your disapproval is noted, Evelyn. But what’s that got to do with what happened to Roscoe?”
She gave me a nasty smile over the lip of her beer glass. “My point is your amateur detective crap won’t cut it here. You’re in Chicago; and you’re in over your head. This should be left to the police, kiddo.”
“I’d love to leave it to the police. Unfortunately nobody but me is convinced Roscoe’s death was murder.”
“I’m convinced. And I’ll talk to the police about it, soon enough. But this is my business, Mallory. I’ll handle this my way, ’cause I’m involved, and you’re not; ’cause I know what’s going on, and you don’t have a clue. So take my motherly advice and keep out.”
“Oh, really?”
“Find some other murder to write your next book about.”
Liking Evelyn had been a short-term event.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” I snapped at her. “Did you come down from Milwaukee this morning when you heard the news of Roscoe’s death, or what?”
She drank some beer. “I was already coming down. I heard about it on the radio coming down, in fact.”
“Why were you coming down?”
“To meet Roscoe, of course.”
“Evelyn—you and Roscoe were divorced a long, long time ago. With little love lost.”
She jerked upright in the booth; the beer in her hand splashed. “You don’t know my life. You didn’t write my life, I’m not a character in one of your goddamn books. So don’t go making... pronouncements... about me or my life!”
“Okay, okay. Maybe that was out of line. But what... business did you have here with Roscoe?”
She smiled enigmatically. “It was partly business. But it was mostly love.”
The jukebox started in on “Blue Skies” again.
“Love?”
Kill Your Darlings (A Mallory Mystery) Page 7