“Well, thank you. That was the point.”
“Otherwise it would just be bump and grind, ha ha ha, but you transcend the form. Why I bring this up is I’ve taken some barbs from little Miss Cain over there and her, ha ha ha, illustrious husband, the intellectual’s answer to Groucho Marx.”
I said, “I always thought Groucho Marx was the intellectual’s answer to Groucho Marx.”
Rapp snorted. “Come to think of it, I didn’t know Groucho Marx was a question, ha ha ha . . . but Maggie, dear . . . I’ve been told the book just isn’t satirical or sharp enough.”
By “book” he meant the script for the musical, which he’d written himself; the music and lyrics had been provided by a top Hollywood team who director Norman had brought aboard.
Maggie said, “I disagree—I think you take on all the usual Tall Paul sacred cows—big business and government and advertising and the rest.”
His smile blossomed into an ear-to-ear affair. “Well thank you, dear, thank you, because I admit I may have relied more on slapstick than satire. It’s this goddamned McCarthy nonsense, blacklisting and what have you, these nincompoops make it seem unpatriotic to lampoon America, when we all know there’s nothing more patriotic, ha ha ha, than making fun of your leaders.”
I said, “It’s a hilarious show. The strip jumps right out of the funny pages onto the stage.”
Not pandering. Much.
“Can I quote you in the ads, Jack, ha ha ha . . . but look at what Fizer’s doing in that imbecile comic strip you syndicate—his boxer doesn’t get in the ring anymore, instead he dukes it out with Commies, who he, ha ha ha, finds under the nearest bed.”
“We’ve noticed the shift, of course,” Maggie said.
“Hard to believe,” Rapp said, as if sorrowful and not gloating, “that Fizer used to be an FDR liberal—now this conservative nonsense he’s wrapped himself up in, along with the flag, of course.”
I said, “Hal, Mr. Fizer is on our talent roster. I may agree with you—you’ll have to read between the lines for that—but I don’t think it’s right to discuss the content of one strip with the creator of another.”
“Creator of another strip also on your list? Not yet, Jack. Not yet. But, ha ha ha, I’m pretty sure it will be. I like the way you stand up to authority, Jack, even, ha ha ha, when that authority is me. . . . Excuse me.”
The door buzzer was making itself known over the din. Our host kissed Maggie on the cheek, patted my shoulder and disappeared into the throng of guests, navigating effectively on the artificial limb as he made his way toward the front door.
“Did I piss him off?” I asked Maggie.
She was watching him go, as well. “I don’t think so. He’s too much of a gadfly himself to take offense. Anyway, he was just answering the buzzer.”
“Little late for trick-or-treaters—or a new guest, either. What is it, ten o’clock? Everybody else was here an hour ago, or more. . . .”
I gazed over the heads of assorted comic-strip characters and saw Rapp in the entryway at the door, where a small man in a white shirt and bow tie was speaking quickly and gravely.
“Maybe it is a trick-or-treater, at that,” I said. “That may be no goblin, but it definitely is a ghost. . . .”
The new arrival was Murray Coe, officially Sam Fizer’s assistant, more accurately his “ghost” artist. That Fizer drew almost none of his own strip was the worst-kept secret in comics.
Maggie said, “Sam Fizer’s assistant, at a Hal Rapp party? How unlikely is that? And he’s not in costume, either, unless he’s come as the Timid Soul.”
“Fizer has his studio and apartment just one floor down,” I reminded Maggie. Another irony in a situation fraught with the stuff: Rapp and Fizer were neighbors of sorts in these Waldorf towers.
Then Rapp came threading back through toward us, proving that his smile wasn’t ever-present after all, because that was one long, drawn-out somber mug he was suddenly wearing.
Again he positioned himself between us, and stared right at me. His face looked like melting putty.
“You’re a kind of cop, aren’t you, Jack?” he asked.
“Licensed private investigator.” With one client: the Starr Syndicate. “Why?”
Now his smile returned, but it was flickery and nervous, as if it were shorting in and out. “I think you should handle this, Jack.. . .”
Maggie asked, “What’s happened, Hal?”
“There’s been a suicide or a killing or . . . Could you go down there with Murray, and check it out?”
“Okay,” I said. “Don’t call anybody yet, not the desk or the cops, either. Let me handle that.”
He nodded emphatically and a dark comma of black hair tumbled down onto his forehead. “I’m in your hands, Jack. . . . Maggie, maybe you oughta go with Jack and Murray.”
She frowned at him curiously. “You’re not coming?”
“I. . . I need to stay up here. I shouldn’t be seen down there.”
“Down where?” she asked.
But I knew.
“Down in Sam’s suite,” Rapp said. “Sam Fizer?”
As if we’d been thinking he meant some other Sam. . . .
CHAPTER TWO
CARE TO SIGN A STAR, MR. STARR?
The Starr Syndicate’s business relationship with cartoonist Hal Rapp had begun only a few days before—Monday to be exact.
I’d been manning the woman-in-charge’s desk for just over a month. The Tall Paul musical had been doing its pre-Broadway stint on the road, starting in Washington, D.C., and moving on to Boston. That run ended Saturday night, with only days of rehearsal in New York remaining before preview performances.
Sunday evening, coming down by train, Maggie had returned to Manhattan, and to the Starr Building; but we’d spent only forty-five minutes together, having dinner in her private alcove in the Strip Joint.
The Strip Joint, by the way, is the restaurant Maggie owns, having refused to renew the lease of the Chinese restaurant that had been in that space when we moved in. Maggie used to have a yen for Chinese food, till said restaurant served her up a fingernail in an egg roll. She replaced her evicted tenants with a steak house and bar, hiring a chef from St. Louis who almost never included fingernails in his recipes.
Surprisingly, in a town as wide open as Manhattan—I’ve already mentioned the sleazy, cheesy nature of much of nearby Broadway—the long-ago ban on stripteasing, courtesy of Mayor La Guardia, remained in force. So Maggie, in a typically astute combination of compassion and business sense, hired New York-based striptease artistes to work as waitresses at the Strip Joint, when they weren’t on the road raising the artistic awareness of their mostly male audiences.
In addition, retired strippers from Manhattan were hired as permanent staff—some of these ancient retirees were all of thirty or even thirty-five—so you might guess (and you’d be right) that the Strip Joint was a popular lunch spot for businessmen. Don’t get the impression that the waitstaff served in pasties and G-strings—strictly black tie, white shirts and black tuxedo pants. But in the bar at the front of the place, fairly racy photos of these same women did adorn the walls.
Not that the Strip Joint didn’t attract families and tourists— opening night in ‘42, Maggie had invited many of the most famous cartoonists in America to dine on her, imposing on them only to decorate the walls of the rear restaurant area with grease-pencil renditions of their famous characters: Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Nancy and Sluggo, Wonder Guy, Alley Oop, Mug O’Malley, and many more. And anytime cartoonists visited the Starr Syndicate offices upstairs, they were encouraged to stop downstairs for a free drink or meal and to add a new addition to the comic art gallery.
On top of this, the Strip Joint served up the best strip steak in town, doing steady business, lunch, dinner, after-theater. The darn place turned a profit. Still, I suspected Maggie got in the restaurant game so she could quietly sneak downstairs during her not-infrequent reclusive phases; she didn’t keep a cook o
n staff, after all, and was hardly known for her prowess in the kitchen.
By the way, here’s a little geography lesson: the Starr Building is a six-story brick structure on Forty-second Street a block and a half off Broadway. Street-level is the restaurant, the first floor houses the editorial offices of the syndicate (eight employees), the second floor is distribution and sales (twelve employees), the third is given over to my digs, the fourth includes a reception area, Maggie’s office and her private gym, while the fifth is Madame Starr’s suite of rooms.
While we’re doing this, I might as well give you the office layout—the long, narrow dark-paneled room has a parquet floor with an Oriental rug; a wall of leather-bound classics provides a library feel, made less stuffy thanks to framed posters of Maggie’s trio of Hollywood movies, burlesque bills she’d headlined (above Abbott and Costello in one case) and other stripper-a-bilia. A dignified portrait of my pudgy papa, the major, resided on the rear wall above some filing cabinets, while at the other end of the room, behind Maggie’s desk, a full-figure fancy-framed pastel portrait of herself in feathers and glittery stuff loomed over her desk—which she kept obsessively neat, piles of this and piles of that. The desk was cherrywood and about the size of a twelve-burner stove.
But the office wasn’t where we were meeting, which was good, because I kept a somewhat messier desktop—aftermath-of-a-hurricane messier. We confabbed instead in that little private dining room at the rear of the Strip Joint, a compact space just big enough for a table that could sit no more than six.
This alcove was decorated—one per wall—with framed black-and-white portraits of Maggie, no stripper schtick, strictly glamour poses, mostly shoulders up. If she was entertaining a guest or guests (I did not count), a single signature rose might grace a slender vase on the linen cloth.
No rose that Sunday night.
I sat with Maggie (in jeans and plaid shirt and recently washed hair in a turbaned-up towel—her, not me) and we talked as I dug into a rare strip steak, a baked potato with butter, sour cream and chives and a side of onion rings (a boy needs his vegetables). She was poking at a salad that might have delighted Bugs Bunny, but nobody else I can think of. Not even any dressing—if Maggie had been as bare at the end of her act as those lettuce leaves, she’d have still been in jail.
It wasn’t like we’d been out of touch—a nightly long-distance call had become de rigueur, with Maggie on the road. But just to be polite, pretending we were catching up, I said, “The critics love you.”
She had no makeup on, not even a dab of lipstick; in her natural freckle-faced state, she looked like a teenager. “In Washington they did. They loved the whole show, all of the songs, everything about it and everybody in it, even a fat old hag like me.”
That was where I was supposed to say, “Nonsense—you look great.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “You look great.”
The green eyes rose from the salad to shoot daggers. “And in Boston—did I tell you about that one review?”
“Yeah.” I gnawed at an onion ring. “Guy loved it—just said the show ran a little long.”
“Long? He suggested the audience pack a lunch.” She shuddered. “Some nasty things on the horizon.”
“Oh?”
“I can almost guarantee Lucille’s going to lose her song.” Lucille Rayburn was a very funny actress playing the diminutive Mammy May. “And one of Candy Cain’s numbers is bound to go. Those two keep making the mistake of asking the director what their motivation is.”
“And right now his motivation is to come up with a shorter show.”
“Half an hour shorter.” She chewed salad and allowed herself a swallow. “Thankfully I don’t have a song to cut. But it will be brutal this week. We start previews before you know it, and open the week after that.”
We ate in silence for perhaps a minute.
“Listen,” I said, “has Hal Rapp been around much?”
She shrugged. “He caught the show in Washington, D.C. Said he adored it—you could hear his cackle in the audience a mile away. He’s given the director carte blanche to cut and revise the book, you know.”
“Really?” I sipped my drink, a rum and Coke without the rum. “He’s that cavalier about it?”
She raised an eyebrow; without eye goo, those green lamps were something. “He seems mostly interested in putting the make on the girls in the chorus. He’s a lovable letch, our Mr. Rapp.”
“Has he bothered you?”
“A woman my size? My age?”
This was where I was supposed to say, “Don’t be silly. You are young and beautiful.”
But all I mustered was, “Don’t be silly.” May have hurt her feelings.
“I only bring this up,” I said, after enjoying a bite of rare steak, “because he called and made an appointment through Bryce.”
She frowned, eyes tight, forehead smooth. “Who did?”
“Hal Rapp.”
“What kind of appointment?”
I shrugged. “He asked to see me. Didn’t specify, but a guy running a comic strip syndicate doesn’t exactly turn Hal Rapp away.”
Both eyebrows went up. “Is that what you’re doing? Running a syndicate? I told you just to keep my desk clear and keep things moving.”
Well, I’d done the latter, but was hoping she didn’t actually take the time to step into her office and see how I’d done on the former.
“I merely wondered,” I said, “if you knew what it was about. . . .”
We ate in silence some more.
Then she said, “You mentioned Bryce. How is he?”
Bryce was the former Broadway dancer who some years back, after suffering an injury, had become Maggie’s major domo around the office; he was handsome, bearded, prone to black clothing, with a persona somewhere between Satan and Joan Crawford, if there’s a difference.
“Oh, he’s thrilled to be stuck at his reception desk,” I said archly, “when you’re going to be over at the St. John Theatre, starring in a new musical. Why don’t you take him with you, and let him do your hair or something?”
“Just because Bryce is gay,” she said with regal condescension, “that doesn’t mean he is a hairdresser. That’s a dreadful cliche, and you know it.”
I bit into another onion ring, and talked and chewed, just to annoy her a little. “What’s dreadful is what you show people are doing to the perfectly respectable word ‘gay.’ “
She smiled icily. “Yes. Why couldn’t we have just stayed civilized and stuck with ‘queer’ or ‘fairy.’ “
“Whatever happened to ‘fop’? I always kind of liked that one. . . . You should take Bryce with you. He’s your personal assistant, isn’t he?”
Green eyes flashed. “What, and leave you in charge? . . . No, Mr. Rapp said nothing to me about anything regarding business, and we sat together in the theater in D.C. several times and chatted. He did rest his hand on my shoulder a few times and once on my thigh, which I decided to take as a compliment.”
“You should ride the subway. You’d get lots of compliments. What if he pitches a strip?”
She shook her head, and the towel turban almost toppled. “That won’t happen. It’s not exactly like he can bring Tall Paul to us—he’s been with Unique Features since 1934.”
“I know. Plus he writes Amy and Slip for King Features with Van Allen drawing. How does he do it?”
She shrugged. “I think he considers himself mostly a writer. He has those two assistants out on Long Island who do almost all of the drawing these days.”
We both knew this was not unusual in the world of comics.
“No,” Maggie said, in her I’m-never-wrong voice, “Hal is just dropping by Starr to pay his respects, because the musical’s opening and I’m in it. After all, he knows we distribute Mug O’Malley . . .”
“By Sam Fizer,” I said, “his fiendish foe.” Work in comics long enough, you start to sound like the comics.
“. . . and Hal probably just wants us to know t
hat even though we do business with Mug O’Malley’s maker, Tall Paul’s papa bears us no grudge.”
“Fine.” I cut meat. “What if he offers us a new strip?”
“You’re just filling my chair. Don’t overstep.”
“I promise. But what if he offers us a new strip?”
“He will not offer us a new strip.”
The next morning, Hal Rapp, in that drag-a-leg-along gait so at odds with his exuberantly confident manner, was accompanied by man-in-black Bryce to the wine-colored tufted leather visitor’s chair opposite Maggie’s desk, behind which I stood at the moment, grinning like a goof at my famous guest. . . knowing that the brown-paper-wrapped package he bore was exactly the shape of original daily comic strip art.
“Jaaack,” Rapp said, in that familiar nasal voice. He wore a beautifully tailored brown pinstripe suit with a matching vest, pale yellow shirt and brown striped tie. Saville Row, I would say. “Ha ha ha, you must feel pretty uneasy’, with your mother looking over your shoulder like that.”
He meant the huge framed portrait behind me.
“Mr. Rapp,” I said, since I really only knew the cartoonist from National Cartoonists Society events and other social occasions, “you know very well Maggie is my stepmother. Otherwise, she’d’ve had to be ten when she bore me.”
“That woman doesn’t bore anybody, ha ha ha.” He gazed up at the pastel, which was the size of a dining-room table standing on end, with the leaves in. “That’s a Rolf Armstrong, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Fine artist.” He hadn’t sat down yet; Bryce hovered waiting for our guest to do so, and looking irritated about it (but he’d been looking irritated about everything for weeks).
Rapp was saying, “Back when illustration had its place in this country, men like Armstrong were gods. Not like this abstract art of today—a product of the untalented, ha ha ha, sold by the unprincipled, ha ha ha, to the utterly bewildered.”
I’d heard him say that before, on a television show, but I chuckled like it was fresh.
Strip for Murder Page 3