Strip for Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  Coe, who had led us here, now trailed after Maggie as she headed in. For as tight as that gown was across her fanny, she could move quick.

  In the bedroom, she kept a respectful distance from the corpse at the drafting table—she really wasn’t squeamish, but she knew enough not to disturb the evidence—and studied the tableau for all of thirty seconds before saying, “If that’s a suicide, I weigh one-eighteen.”

  I came up beside her and we regarded our dead client. “Yeah, I know. Staged. Pretty badly, too.”

  Maggie, confirming something we already knew, raised her voice to speak to Coe, who was poised in the bedroom doorway, behind us. “He was right-handed, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked back at the nervous little guy. “He wasn’t secretly ambidextrous or anything, was he?”

  “No.”

  I curled my finger at him. “Come over here.”

  He frowned; with all that bare forehead, it was a lot of frown. “Do I have to?”

  “No. I could carry you over.”

  He sighed and joined me. I pointed at the signature under the comic strip lettering of the suicide note. “Is that really Fizer’s work?”

  “Seems to be.”

  “Who usually signed the strips?”

  “He did.” Coe swallowed, a protuberant Adam’s apple hobbling on his long neck.

  I grunted. “I always figured his assistants signed the strip for him. That’s a pretty assured signature for a guy famous for not being worth a damn as an artist.”

  “It is self-assured,” Coe admitted, eyes blinking a repeated SOS behind the thick glasses. “But Mr. Fizer wasn’t as hopeless an artist as some people thought.”

  Maggie turned to us, an eyebrow arching. “No?”

  “He was a pretty fair big-foot cartoonist,” Coe said.

  A “big-foot” cartoonist was an artist who drew in a humorous style, particularly that of the old-time strips like Mutt and Jeff and The Katzenjammer Kids.

  Thinking back, I said, “Early days of Mug were done in a more cartoony style—that was Fizer’s own work?”

  Coe nodded; he was smiling, faintly, some affection for his late boss working its way through the nervousness. “That’s why he took such pride in drawing and inking the faces of the main characters—even when he hired guys like me to draw the strip more realistically, after the public’s tastes changed? Mr. Fizer insisted on putting in the original, cartoony faces himself. Whether it’s a strip from ’33 or one from last week, Mug always looked pretty much the same, his face, anyway.”

  “And Sam could do his own fancy signature?” I asked. “I hear Disney can’t do his.”

  “Actually, Disney can,” Coe said, the conversation settling his nerves some. “But they say Walt had to work at it a long time before he could pull it off.”

  “But that hand-lettered suicide message,” I said, shaking my head. “Surely Sam couldn’t have managed that,”

  “No, actually he could’ve—Mr. Fizer lettered the strip himself in the early days, and he always had assistants like me do the lettering in his own style.”

  That kind of thing wasn’t unusual. Cartoonists working with assistants usually put together “style sheets” for the hired help: character designs, showing cast members in various views (front, three-quarter front, profile) and displaying assorted expressions. Sometimes these reference sheets included the alphabet in upper and lower case, indicating the desired look of the lettering for the strip.

  Maggie studied Coe through narrowed lids. “You’re saying Sam really could do his own comic strip signature? And could have lettered that suicide note?”

  “Think back,” Coe said, looking first at Maggie, then at me. “Almost all cartoonists do speeches and make public appearances, and part of that is doing big grease-pencil drawings of their characters, on big pads of paper on easels, for the audience, right?”

  I nodded. That was very common.

  “I saw Mr. Fizer do that a dozen or more times,” Coe said. “Didn’t you ever see him do that?”

  I had, actually.

  And Maggie was nodding, saying, “I remember the night Sam did the picture of Mug on the wall in our restaurant.”

  Recalling that myself, I said, “And he signed it with his own famous signature. . . .”

  “But I can’t say one hundred percent that that’s his work,” Coe admitted, nodding toward the drawing board where the dead cartoonist slumped near the hand-lettering and the flourish of signature. “I could have done that. Any of Sam’s assistants could have—he’s worked with half a dozen over the years.”

  I glanced at Maggie; her pretty face was frozen into a grave mask. But she gave me the barest nod that I had no trouble interpreting.

  I said to Coe, “Go wait in the other room, would you, Murray?”

  “Uh, sure.” The little cartoonist swallowed again, Adam’s apple bobbling. “Should we, uh . . . ? Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “. . . Should we call the police?”

  “I’ll handle that.” I gestured toward the living room. “Just go take a seat out there, would you?”

  Anybody who’d worked for Sam Fizer was used to being told what to do, and Murray Coe was no exception. He went out and, presumably, took a seat.

  Maggie and I went over by a dresser near the bathroom and stood close enough to kiss or clunk heads. Instead we confabbed.

  I hiked a single eyebrow. “So any assistant of Sam’s could have lettered that note and done that signature. . . .”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Like Hal Rapp, for instance?”

  “I told you not to say it.”

  I nodded across the room toward the dead man. “What if Hal staged this slice of dark comedy?”

  Now she hiked an eyebrow. “With a suite full of guests?”

  “A suite full of guests one floor up. You know how easy it is to get lost at a cocktail party?”

  “Even your own?”

  “Sure. If he had this carefully planned enough, Hal could’ve popped down here, done the deed, and popped back upstairs in under ten minutes.”

  “And forged the suicide note?”

  I shrugged. “For a skilled artist, that wouldn’t have taken long.”

  Maggie frowned; not a wrinkle formed on that lovely brow, but you’d have to call what she was doing a frown, just the same. “Why would a smart guy like Hal Rapp be dumb enough to foul up this faked suicide? Surely he knew Fizer was right-handed.”

  “Yeah, but Maggie, you’re forgetting something.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Rapp is left-handed.”

  “Oh. That had slipped my mind.”

  “If this was something Hal planned, something that required him to work quickly in order for his Halloween shindig alibi to hold? As a left-hander himself, he just might make a dumb mistake like that.”

  “Maybe.” The big green eyes fixed on me unblinkingly. “You’re going to have to handle this.”

  “Handle this how?”

  “Handle this like the top-notch detective you are.”

  I wished I could have found sarcasm in there somewhere, but I couldn’t. “You’re not serious. . . .”

  “As serious as that stiff over there. Listen, think about where the Starr Syndicate sits right now.”

  I folded my arms. “Well, we’re sitting prettier than Sam Fizer.”

  “Not much. We’ve just lost our star cartoonist—yes, Mug O’Malley will continue, we’ll hire little Murray Coe to draw the strip and . . . jot him down on your suspect list, would you, Jack?”

  “Oh, I’ll be sure to do that.”

  She continued on, as if this were an editorial discussion in her office and an apparently murdered man weren’t slumped across the room. “As I was saying, we’ll hire Murray to draw Mug, but the strip will exist under a black cloud, whether Sam killed himself or got murdered . . . and the only brain on the planet that can write Mug is over there with a hole in it.”
>
  “Yeah. Whoever shot Fizer put a bullet in our bank book, all right.”

  Okay, so neither one of us was Saint Francis of Assisi. But at a murder scene, a certain pragmatism comes into play, or else you bust out crying or do Daffy Ducks around the room.

  “Mug O’Malley may not be as dead as his creator,” Maggie said, “but he’s on the critical list. So what could the Starr Syndicate really use to pick up the slack?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you, Jack?”

  Actually I did. “Another top strip . . . like Lean Jean?”

  “Or, better still, Tall Paul.”

  I grinned at her. “I like the way you think. Did anybody ever tell you you have a sweet face for a heartless bitch?”

  “My third-grade teacher.” Her head tilted, the green eyes narrowed. “Think about it, Jack—if we can clear Hal Rapp, we’ll have the top cartoonist in America in our pocket, beholden to us in a big way.”

  “But what if Rapp did it? What if he killed Sam? Glorioski, Maggie, some people might just think there was bad blood between those two.”

  “Some people might.”

  “You know, Hal bragged to me that Fizer wouldn’t be a problem much longer.”

  She shook her head, her expression as confident as it was cold. “I don’t think Hal Rapp did this.”

  “Any evidence to back that up, besides wishful thinking?”

  Her eyebrows went up and so did one corner of her red-lipsticked mouth. “How about the unlikelihood of a guy with one leg setting himself up for a marathon murder run? You’ve seen how Hal hobbles along. And if somebody had seen him in the hall, odds are a celebrity like Hal would be recognized. And even if he weren’t, just how conspicuous is he with that wooden leg?”

  She had a point. A couple of good points, and I don’t mean that in a double-entendre way.

  “We could just leave this to Chandler,” I said. “He’s a good enough cop.”

  Captain Pat Chandler of the Homicide Bureau was a friend, or anyway not an enemy.

  “He might crack this,” Maggie admitted. “Then Hal Rapp will be beholden to the Homicide Bureau. Maybe they’d like to syndicate Tall Paul.”

  I sighed. “Okay. I get it.”

  She raised a gloved finger. “But there is one thing you should do, where Captain Chandler’s concerned.”

  “Which is?”

  She nodded over toward her dead talent. “Call him before rigor starts to set in.”

  There was a better chance that the Yankees wouldn’t be in the next World Series (they’d just won their fifth straight) than me finding Captain Chandler in his Tenth Precinct office on a Saturday night.

  But the desk sergeant bounced me to Chandler’s receptionist, who put me right through.

  “What are you doing working nights?” I asked him. I was using a white phone in Fizer’s white marble foyer.

  “Homicide always works Halloween,” the familiar baritone informed me.

  “Why?”

  “We always seem to catch more than our share of oddball killings, Halloween. Worse than a full moon. Why, Jack, do you need a fifth for that poker game of yours?”

  “No, Captain, you were right the first time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Got an oddball murder for you.”

  “You’re not as funny as you think you are, Jack.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure I’m exactly as funny as I think I am. And I do have an oddball killing for you. At the Waldorf in a residential suite.”

  “. . . You had one of those before.”

  “It’s a big hotel. You still think I’m kidding, don’t you, Captain?”

  “Yeah. You moved straight to trick without asking for a treat.”

  I grinned into the phone. “Seeing you will be the treat. Got a famous corpse for you—Sam Fizer, the Mug O’Malley cartoonist.”

  He was rocking in his swivel chair: I could hear it creak over the wire. “. . . If you aren’t pulling my leg, Jack, you’re awfully calm for somebody calling in a murder.”

  “I said ‘killing.’ Might not be a murder. Might be a suicide. It’ll take an expert like you to tell.”

  Now he started to sputter. “Don’t touch anything! For God’s sake—”

  “A little credit, please, Captain. I was an MP in the war, remember? I’m a licensed private detective. You want the address, or would that squeeze all the fun out of it for a sleuth like you?”

  He took the address.

  Maggie and I got comfy on one of two pastel-green couches that faced each other over a glass coffee table beside the unlighted fireplace. Murray Coe sat opposite, hands folded in his lap, knees together, like a kid waiting to see the principal.

  On the coffee table were National Cartoonists Society newsletters and annuals, as well as assorted copies of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter—all had cover stories pertaining to Mug O’Malley and his papa, and were hardly the latest periodicals: some dated to the mid-’30s, though others were as recent as this year.

  On the mantel along a mirror over the fireplace were framed photos of Fizer with national figures—FDR, Bob Hope, Joe Louis—as well as Sam on the sets of various Mug O’Malley motion pictures. There’d been a big musical film in the ’30s with Max Baer as Mug and Jimmy Durante as Louie the manager, then a series of shorts with Crash Corrigan as Mug and Shemp Howard as Louie, and most recently a long run of B movies starring James Gleason as Louie and, as Mug, a good-looking golf pro whose name escapes me.

  Also on display were various honorary awards, mostly citizenship-type plaques and sports world honors, but also a bizarre statuette of comic figures seemingly wrestling, designed by cartoonist Rube Goldberg and named after him. This was the Oscar of the comics world: the Reuben award. One of the founders of the organization, Sam had won the very first Reuben, in 1944. Hal Rapp winning the next one, at the NCS awards banquet in 1945, must not have been Sam Fizer’s happiest hour.

  I said to Coe, “Sam seems to have brought a lot of his personal memorabilia over from the town house.”

  Coe nodded, his folded-hands-knees-together posture retained. “Yes. He was very angry with his wife—Misty Winters, the showgirl. He didn’t trust her—thought she might ruin precious things, break picture frames and smash trophies and so on. But there’s a lot more of this stuff in storage.”

  Maggie asked, “Isn’t it odd that Sam Fizer happened to have the suite right below Hal Rapp’s?”

  “It’s the other way around. This was my suite, paid for by Mr. Fizer, for several years. We both used it as a studio but I worked and slept here. I’m a bachelor, or I am since my wife divorced me five years ago.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Hard on wives, living with a nationally syndicated cartoonist; anyway, living with the assistant to one is. I have my own suite down the hall now, smaller but very nice. Mr. Rapp’s only been our neighbor for seven or eight months—he took that suite in anticipation of being in town for the musical, I understand.”

  Rapp’s main studio was on Long Island, I knew, part of his palatial home; several assistants lived nearby. I hadn’t realized the cartoonist’s Manhattan move had been motivated by the upcoming musical—I just thought Tall Paul’s pappy wanted to get closer to the action, since all Manhattanites knew that all the action anywhere was in New York.

  Maggie asked Coe, “Why did you come running to Hal Rapp’s apartment, of all places, when you found the body?”

  “I. . . I don’t know. I just thought Mr. Rapp, being a cartoonist, would know what to do.”

  I glanced at Maggie; Maggie glanced at me. Neither one of us thought much of that answer.

  Uniformed men arrived, summoned by Chandler by radio, to guard the way in. The one in charge tried to get us to vacate the sofa and stand out in the hall, but I said I’d cleared it with the captain for us to camp out in the living room till he got there. It wasn’t true, of course, but sufficed.

  And Chandler didn’t even give me a bad
time about it. He even corralled his little army of technicians—medical examiner, photographer and lab boys—in the living room while he and I had a look at the corpse.

  Chandler was a broad-shouldered six-footer with brownish blond hair and a narrow oval of a face complete with light blue eyes and cleft chin and a general ruggedly handsome quality that would have made him perfect for a TV or movie cop, except for the rumpled brown trench coat, baggy brown suit and darker brown fedora that no self-respecting wardrobe department would allow on screen.

  His maroon tie was already loose around his collar—it was pushing eleven P.M., after all—which indicated it had been a rough day, or maybe a rough night. He had a kind of crush on Maggie—her pinups had got him through World War II—and for him not to snug his tie in place in anticipation of seeing her, well, that meant he was not at the top of his form. And he’d barely nodded to her, coming in.

  His hands were on his hips as he surveyed the death scene: Fizer slumped at the slanting board of his drafting table; on either side of the corpse was the rest of his ministudio—at left, a sideways desk with the kind of drawers that large drawings could be stored in. At right stood the little stand for his ashtray and drink and such, then a three-door filing cabinet with various art supplies on top, bristol board, ink bottles, trays of pens and pencils. Next to that was the second drafting table and an empty, well-padded office-style chair on casters identical to the one Fizer occupied.

  Of course the homicide captain’s attention wasn’t on the furniture, rather his eyes fixed upon the dead man whose hand dangled over the revolver on the carpet.

  “Was Fizer a leftie?” Chandler asked.

  “No. He hated the Communists.”

  Chandler closed his eyes. Then he opened them and said, “I mean, was he left-handed?”

  “No.”

  “Sure of that, Jack?”

  “Yeah.”

  He shook his head and let out the first of what would no doubt be many world-weary sighs. “First rule of staging a suicide—get the gun in the right hand.”

  “Unless the victim’s a leftie.”

  “I meant ‘correct’ hand.”

  “I knew that. That was humor.”

  He gave me a sideways glare. “Appropriate in this setting, you think? Humor?”