Strip for Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  We were waiting for Jack Dempsey’s Famous Cheesecake, which was so very different from Lindy’s Famous Cheesecake or the Stork Club’s Famous Cheesecake (all stolen from Reuben’s Famous Cheesecake), when Fizer said, “So, kiddo, I want you to know I take no offense, Maggie’s Broadway turn.”

  I thought we’d established that.

  “Good,” I said.

  “And if that’s what you called this luncheon meeting for, we can consider the matter closed.”

  “Actually, it wasn’t.”

  The tiny eyes under the heavy brows tightened. “Oh?”

  I started with what I hoped would be the easier of the two matters I wanted to discuss. “These story lines, the, uh, anti-Commie stuff, in Mug this last year or so . . . it’s been very exciting.”

  “Good, good! Glad you approve.”

  “But both Maggie and I, as well as Ben . . .” Ben Mathers was Starr’s managing editor. “. . . think it’s time you back off this political stuff, and get Mug back into the ring.”

  Fizer looked like a boxer who’d been sucker punched. He blinked a few times, then leaned in and said, almost whispering, “You want me to back off on the anti-Commie stuff? Are you kidding, kiddo?”

  “No. Listen, you’re a Democrat. A self-professed liberal. Everybody knows FDR personally praised you for having Mug enlist in the army well before Pearl Harbor, hell, well before the draft. The late president considered you a great patriot, Sam.”

  Yeah, I know. Laying it on pretty thick. But you deal with temperamental talent, you get used to puckering up where the trousers wear out first.

  Fizer said, “I am a Democrat. And I like to think Sam Fizer holds liberal views. But I also consider myself a patriot, an American, Which is exactly why I can’t understand why you would take anything but pride and pleasure out of my campaign against these damned Commies.”

  I shrugged. “Taking Mug behind the Iron Curtain for some spy stuff, in a story or two, that’s fine, Sam. Doing continuities about traitors in the government, Commie congressmen and even army generals? That borders on McCarthyism.”

  He stiffened; swallowed. I was reminded of a frog on a lily pad suffering indigestion.

  Regally, he said, “I happen to believe Senator McCarthy is a great man.”

  Okay. Enough ass-kissing.

  “I happen to believe he’s a fourteen-carat nincompoop,” I said, “and so do about half of the citizens of this great country, and it’s a growing number. Haven’t you seen the public-opinion polls?”

  A tiny sneer formed on a thick upper lip. “Why should I care what a bunch of idiots think in the face of an increasing national peril?”

  “You should care because those idiots used to read Mug O’Malley. Sam, we’ve lost one hundred papers in the last eight months. We’re bleeding clients.”

  His cheeks, beneath the five o’clock shadow, were reddening. “What are you suggesting I do?”

  “Get Mug back in the ring. It’s a boxing strip, for chrissake. Sam, we’re sitting in Jack Dempsey’s, and the champ himself obviously thinks the world of you.”

  Okay, I was puckering up again; you caught me.

  I went on: “Right now the boxers and sports writers and managers and a boxing commissioner or two sitting in these booths are thinking of you as ring royalty. Don’t let ’em down.”

  “Sam Fizer never lets his readers down!”

  “When McCarthy has one of his hearings, at the Senate, where are you?”

  “What?”

  “Where are you seated, Sam?”

  “Why . . . nowhere. By the radio, maybe, in my studio.”

  “Right. And when there’s a championship heavyweight bout at Madison Square Garden, where are you sitting?”

  “Ringside.”

  “That’s right. Think about it.”

  He got that sucker-punched look again. His jaw was slack. His eyes were wide. He was thinking.

  Finally he said, “Well, kiddo . . . I wouldn’t want to disappoint my readers. I guess it has been a while since Mug put on the oP gloves. . . .”

  I nodded emphatically. “Mug hasn’t had a title defense since before the war. Maggie and I and Ben were talking, and we were hoping you’d work up a Rocky Marciano-type character for Mug to take on.”

  Fizer was nodding. “Okay. All right. I’ll grant you that’s not a bad idea. I stayed away from a Joe Louis-type boxer in the strip for obvious reasons.”

  Having Mug fight a colored opponent was a big no-no—if Mug had won, we’d have lost northern papers, and the southern papers wouldn’t have run any such continuity at all.

  “Good,” I said. “You can have lots of fun with getting Mug back into shape, training camp stories, his missus worried about his health after so many years out of the ring, sportswriters saying he’s over the hill. . . . Lots of possibilities.”

  “Don’t oversell it, kiddo,” Fizer said tightly. “I said yes, didn’t I?”

  The cheesecake came, and if it wasn’t famous like the menu said, it deserved to be. Or maybe it was just the sweetness of knocking Sam’s anti-Commie crap right out of his strip. . . .

  Now came the real challenge—I’d got the pin back in the grenade, where shutting down these reactionary story lines was concerned; could I figure out which wire to cut, the red or the blue, to defuse the bomb that seemed sure to go off next?

  “Listen, Sam,” I said. Cheesecake was over and I was having a cup of coffee; Fizer was having another Rob Roy and smoking a cigarette in a holder. “Speaking of Hal Rapp . . .”

  “Are we still on that unpleasant subject?”

  That cigarette holder in his pudgy hand seemed ridiculously pretentious, but plenty of other guys in the comics business were doing the cigarette holder bit these days, Batwing’s Rod Krane and a certain Hal Rapp included. Was it a coincidence that all three of these top cartoonists did almost none of their own drawing? That even to smoke a ciggie they had to be assisted?

  “I’m afraid so, Sam,” I said. “Hal brought us a new strip. . . .”

  Fizer grunted a sort of laugh. “Lean Jean, I suppose?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “I know all about it. Everybody in this business knows he’s been working that thing up. Fool is stretching himself too thin, don’t you think?”

  I shrugged. “Mostly he’ll just write it. I don’t have to tell you about the importance of good writing. And he’s got a first-rate artist lined up.”

  “Right—Lou Roberts. Very professional boy.”

  Fizer did know all about it.

  I said, “I’m not sure why Hal brought it to us. I mean, King Features or the Tribune Syndicate would be sure to snap it up, but—”

  He cut me off with a single laugh, exhaling smoke through the too-perfect nostrils in the otherwise less-than-perfect puss. “Don’t be naive, kiddo—or are you just pretending to be? The ingrate came to you with his new strip for the same reason he had his director cast my wife in that stupid play—to rub my nose in it!”

  And he touched a fingertip to his nose.

  Immediately I thought of one of the most famous instances of Hal Rapp needling Fizer in Tall Paul—after Fizer had very obviously gone to a plastic surgeon to get his nose fixed, Rapp had written a horse-race continuity into the strip, dubbing a losing nag “Sam’s Nose Bob.”

  Both cartoonists, for twenty years, had mercilessly tweaked each other’s egos in their respective strips. Once a year, Fizer would run a Little Luke story line, each day accompanied by a box saying, “The Original Comic Strip Hillbillies,” while Rapp would strike back, poking vicious fun at his old boss, including a sequence in which cartoonist Sammy Fissure hires Tall Paul to assist him on a big-time syndicated strip.

  In the story, Fissure keeps Paul in a closet with no light on, and when Paul creates some hilarious new characters based on the folks back home in Catfish Holler, Fissure takes the credit, but generously buys his assistant a lightbulb.

  “Let me give you some free advice, kiddo,” Fizer s
aid. The little dark eyes were glittering. “Stall a few weeks, before you sign onto this new strip.”

  “It’s bound to take a few weeks, anyway—lawyers and so on. But why. . . ?”

  “You may not want to be in business with that crooked, perverted son of a bitch, not in the near future, that is.”

  I leaned forward. “What are you talking about, Sam? This isn’t that silliness about Rapp slipping dirty stuff into Tall Paul, is it?”

  “I don’t think the New York state legislature would agree with your definition of ‘silliness,’ kiddo.”

  “It’s a sexy strip, Sam, but it’s hardly pornographic. . . .”

  His tiny eyes blazed under the dark brows. “Really? Why does the number sixty-nine appear so frequently? What about the phallic mushrooms around trees? Trees with suspiciously female knotholes?”

  I didn’t have a reply to that. I’d never really thought about suspiciously female knotholes before, though I might have finally just grasped my Freudian aversion to mushrooms.

  “You know, Sam,” I said, in as friendly a way as I could, “it’s not really good for the comics business for you to go after another cartoonist like this. Is this what you ‘have’ on Rapp? Sixty-nine mushrooms and knotholes?”

  Fizer was reddening again, and waved my question off like an annoying fly. He tried to stay jovial, but clearly wasn’t happy with me. His full little lips were quivering as he said, “Just be careful who you get in bed with, is all. You tell that to Maggie, okay?”

  “Is this or isn’t this about Rapp sneaking filth into the funnies?”

  But he was shaking his head. “This is a legal matter. I have to be discreet. I’ve already said more than I should. . . .”

  I squinted at him, as if that might bring the conversation into focus. Maybe it wasn’t Rapp’s supposed smut sneaking. Maybe it was something else. . . .

  “You’re not really considering this plagiarism lawsuit?” I asked. “Sam, with all due respect, that’ll be tossed out. Surely your own lawyers—”

  “I’m just trying to give you fair warning, kiddo. We’ve done business for years, after all. The major was a real friend, and you’re his son. You want to be careful where Rapp is concerned. A word to the wise, Jack. Word to the wise.”

  He removed the spent cigarette from its holder, deposited it in the JD-monogrammed glass ashtray, put the holder away, and slid out of the booth. He made a quick exit, not even stopping to schmooze with the boxing crowd in the booths he passed by, pausing up front only long enough to get his topcoat out of the check stand and nod, as if to an insignificant underling, to Jack Dempsey in his window booth.

  I just sat there, remembering how Hal Rapp had said Sam Fizer wouldn’t be a problem much longer, thinking that Fizer had just said pretty much the same thing about Rapp.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BLACK AND WHITE AND DEAD ALL OVER . . .

  The moment we left the Halloween party, Maggie and I started arguing in the hallway outside Hal Rapp’s suite and continued in the elevator going down and then in the hallway leading to Sam Fizer’s suite, and guess who won?

  I didn’t think she should go anywhere near the crime scene, which this was even if we were dealing with a suicide, since killing yourself is a crime in the state of New York, though for some reason no successful suicides have ever been prosecuted.

  Heading to Fizer’s suite, as we followed the diminutive, trembling Murray Coe to the door, I was still insisting that if Maggie went in there, the cops would have to know about it, and if the cops knew about it, the papers would, meaning nasty and massive publicity fueled exponentially by her presence.

  “You think so?” she asked.

  “I know so,” I said.

  Murray Coe, Fizer’s bald little assistant, had thick-lensed glasses, not much chin, a red bow tie, a white shirt, dark slacks and a key to his boss’s apartment, which he was using.

  I was saying, “The papers love it when a world-famous striptease chanteuse shows up at a crime scene.”

  “I wasn’t set to come in tonight,” Coe muttered mile-a-minute in a mid-range nondescript voice, as he nervously worked the key in the lock, “but I had nothing else to do and thought I’d stop by and put in a few hours at the drawing board. Always a good idea to get ahead, deadlines always snapping at our heels, and I just came in on this . . . this terrible scene.”

  We hadn’t asked for details yet, too busy arguing all the way here.

  “Oh . . . okay, folks,” he said, shivering, as if the hall were freezing and not on the warm side. “It. . . it’s open.”

  Maggie said to me, “First of all, you only know the word ‘exponentially’ because of the crossword puzzles we syndicate, which is also why know you know ‘chanteuse,’ although you used it incorrectly . . . I don’t sing . . . and—”

  She was trying to edge in front of me, all 121 pounds fitted nicely into the red low-cut gown her character Libidia Von Stack-pole wore in the musical, right down to the elbow-length pink gloves; but I stopped her with a warm hand on a cool shoulder. She gave me a clear-eyed, half-lidded look that would’ve frozen a cobra in midstrike.

  “Hey,” I said, gentle but firm. “Normally I’m a ladies-first kinda guy. But I’m going in ahead of you. No discussion. Got it?”

  I didn’t have a gun with me—my .45 Colt automatic, which the major had brought back from the First World War and bequeathed to me, was in a drawer between my socks and boxers, and anyway, I didn’t imagine I’d need firepower in this apartment. . . but I wished I’d had the damn thing, so I could have taken it out and made a point, maybe intimidated her a little.

  Like a measly .45 automatic would have intimidated this dame.

  But for once she deferred to me, granting me a little nod.

  Blinking, bespectacled Murray Coe—one of those guys in his thirties who looked like he was in his forties and probably had since his teens—was holding the door open for us, even gesturing in an “after you” manner more befitting a ballroom than a suite where somebody might be dead.

  I instructed Maggie and Coe to wait in the hall, and I went through the deserted living room whose cookie-cutter resemblance to the Rapp digs above was, in this context, weirdly unsettling. The only difference was the color scheme, which was shades of green, not brown. A table lamp beside one of two facing couches near the fireplace provided the only light.

  Throwing dark inky shadows Will Eisner would be proud of, I moved across the white mohair carpeting and, down by the windows on the city (curtains drawn), took a right into the bedroom.

  Like Rapp, Fizer had set up the recessed area by the windows (also curtains drawn) as a mini-studio—two drafting tables with slanting drawing boards with file cabinets and such in between. Otherwise this remained a bedroom, with a double bed whose green satin spread was made, the bathroom door open, the light on. A very nondescript chamber, furnished in an anonymously modern way, with only one outstanding feature: the dead man seated at the first drafting table.

  Sam Fizer, in rolled-up white shirtsleeves and no tie and brown slacks and in socks with no shoes, was slumped heavily against the slant of the drawing board with one hand, his left, dangling and a .38 blue-steel revolver on the carpet just below the still fingers. He might have been a kid resting on his desk in grade school, if that kid had a gunshot wound in his left temple.

  His eyes were shut, and the blue of his five-o’clock shadow and the black of his slicked-back hair were stark against otherwise pale flesh. He looked at once big and small, like a grossly overweight child. I touched his neck—no pulse, obviously, but the skin felt cool, not cold.

  I was no expert, but I figured this had happened within half an hour. The smell of cordite was fresh enough to back that theory up. Cigarette smoke was mixed in, too, and a small table at Fizer’s right had an ashtray with his cigarette holder angled in it among assorted spent butts; also on the stand was a tumbler with an inch or so of dark liquid (whiskey?), and various sharp-nosed pens and pencils and gum era
sers and ink bottles and scraps of cloth splotched with black.

  On the slanting drawing board, pinned there, were two Mug O’Malley daily strips on a single sheet of bristol board, the thick-tooth cotton-fiber drawing paper used by most cartoonists. The strips were completely drawn and inked, including the faces of Mug and Louie and the other characters, in that simple cartoony style Fizer imposed on the otherwise realistically drawn figures, courtesy of Murray Coe. The ghosts of underlying pencil drawings had been erased, as speckles of eraser on the paper attested.

  Fizer’s head rested just on the lower edge of the sheet of bristol, which was pinned rather high on the board, and some red blood spatter dotted the black-and-white drawings; but the bulk of the blood would be under the dead man’s head. Off to the left of the sheet of bristol board were the perfectly inked words:

  GOODBYE,

  MUG.

  GOODBYE

  EVERVBODY

  LET ME GO OUT

  UNDEFEATED.

  And below this was the thick, distinctive signature that had adorned so many Mug O’Malley comic strips over the years:

  I went out where Maggie and a nervous Coe were waiting. I took her gently by the arm and walked her across the hall and spoke quietly to her. Coe, sensing I was after privacy, did us the courtesy of turning away.

  “Sam’s dead,” I said. “At his drawing board.”

  Maggie’s eyes flared. Nostrils, too. “Suicide?”

  “Maybe. Listen . . . you don’t have to go in there.”

  “I’m a big girl.”

  “Yeah, I know. I didn’t figure somebody who shared a dressing room with Abbott and Costello backstage at Minsky’s would be too squeamish. It’s just. . . set foot in there, and you’re not a quote in the story, you are the story.”

  Her eyes locked on to mine. “Jack, Sam is . . . or was . . . Starr’s star client. It will look worse if I don’t go in there. I have a responsibility to go in there.”

  You know, I could have kept arguing, but I’d have been alone in the hall, so what good would it do?