Strip for Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  “ ‘He was born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world is mad.’”

  “What?”

  “Relevant quote from Sabatini, or maybe Stewart Granger. What do you make of that funny-pages suicide note?”

  Chandler leaned in to look at Sam Fizer’s last work of art, the two Mug strips speckled with blackening blood, under which was the hand-lettered suicide note with the cartoonist’s flourish of a signature.

  The captain looked back at me. “I’m supposed to believe he lettered that? And signed it like that?”

  “Apparently.”

  Chandler came over and faced me. “I doubt our handwriting experts’ll be able to confirm or deny that.”

  “I know they won’t. Cursive handwriting has nothing in common with block lettering. And Fizer worked with half a dozen assistants over the years, any one of whom could have done the lettering and the signature.”

  His fedora was back on his head far enough to give his deeply furrowed brow plenty of room to breathe. “You say that like it’s significant.”

  “Are you familiar with the Sam Fizer/Hal Rapp feud?”

  Chandler shrugged. “Rapp’s the Tall Paul artist, right? The comic with all the bosomy gals?”

  I grinned at him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Aw, Captain. You are a detective in a million, and an art lover to boot.”

  He made a suggestion as physically impossible as it was unprintable.

  “Listen,” I said, “why don’t you send your little crime scene elves in here to dust for fingerprints and look for clues and shine all the shoes? Meanwhile, let’s find a quiet place where you can sit on my lap while I tell you a story. . . .”

  So we moved to the kitchen, leaving the pipsqueak cartoonist and my gorgeous stepmother seated across the glass coffee table from each other in our late host’s living room, one a study in nerves, the other in poise, while the platoon of police technicians headed in to the crime scene.

  Captain Chandler and I sat at a gray Formica table in a medium-sized white-and-red kitchen and I gave him chapter and verse on Hal Rapp and Sam Fizer, from the day Fizer’s Caddy stopped in Central Park and he offered an out-of-work cartoonist a job on through the Tall Paul musical and the hiring of Fizer’s wife Misty to appear therein, wrapping up with the Halloween party one floor above.

  Captain Chandler had been pretty subdued through all that, but when I started in on Rapp’s Halloween gathering, its significance quickly dawned on him and the copper jumped to his feet like a hotfoot had just kicked in.

  “You wait till now to tell me this?” he demanded, eyes wide, nostrils flaring like a rearing horse.

  “Proper investigative technique demands a chronological accounting of events. Look it up.”

  “My chronological ass! Hal Rapp is the obvious suspect here, and you don’t mention you and your stepmother were at his party when another possible suspect, this Murray Coe character, summons you to the kill scene? Christ, Jack!”

  “Wouldn’t have meant anything,” I said casually, “till you had all the background. Context is everything in the detective game, right?”

  “It’s not a goddamn game, Jack, and goddamnit, you know damn well I should have sealed off that goddamned Rapp apartment as the first damn thing I did in this investigation! How many of those goddamn people have flown the damn coop by now, y’suppose?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I can’t promise you I caught all the “damns” and “goddamns” in that outburst, by the way; I’ve done my best.

  “Like hell you don’t know. . . .”

  I gave him my most angelic smile. “You might want to send somebody up there and see if anybody’s still around. And you might want to talk to Hal Rapp. If you don’t mind me suggesting . . . if I’m not overstepping . . .”

  He went out, trench coat flapping, and I just sat there, playing innocent, even though nobody was around to see.

  Maybe ten seconds later, Maggie stuck her head in; more than her head, the uppermost, most exposed part of her. Very distracting neckline, that red gown.

  She said, “The good captain ran out of here like a bull looking for a china shop.”

  “I just told him about the party upstairs.”

  “Oh.” She smiled. She came in and sat down and folded her gloved hands. “You’re a scamp, Jack.”

  “Also a rascal.”

  “You’re trying to make it hard on your friend, the captain.”

  “No. Not hard. But if you want me to get to the solution of this before him, I can’t make it too easy, either. He’ll haul Hal in for questioning. And he’ll track all of those guests down, but it’ll take him and his squad the better part of a week to do it.”

  A pretty eyebrow arched. “He’ll hold us all night for questioning, too.”

  “That’s okay. Tomorrow’s Sunday. You don’t have rehearsal, do you?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll all sleep in. Busy week ahead. You’ve got a musical to open, and I’ve got a killer to catch.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CAN A FRAME FIT A CARTOONIST?

  Though Maggie and I were stuck in Sam Fizer’s apartment long after Halloween had turned into the early hours of November first, we didn’t really get much of a grilling.

  Captain Pat Chandler had his hands full with the crime scene boys and rounding up a couple more plainclothes fellas to deal with the party up in Rapp’s place. A good number of guests had hung around, it seemed, though Chandler didn’t share a list of names with us or anything.

  Apparently Hal Rapp himself had had the presence of mind to tell his guests that their own interests would be best served sticking around to talk to the authorities. Most of them had.

  Maggie, Murray Coe and myself remained a floor below in Fizer’s apartment and never got back upstairs to witness who had stayed around and how the cops were dealing with them. My guess is they gave everybody a quick interview and took names and addresses, but as many as forty guests had been in attendance, all dressed as Catfish Holler denizens and other comic strip characters, which meant it would have taken a while. And must have been quite a sight.

  Comedian Charlie Mazurki alone, mustached, smoking a cigar, and dressed as mute comic-strip-kid Henry (right down to the bald pate), getting questioned by some poor dick hauled from who knew where in the middle of the night, would’ve been worth the trip upstairs.

  But we were relegated to the living room sofas just outside the murder scene, and one at a time were questioned by Chandler himself in the kitchen.

  The captain didn’t spend much time with me, having already heard more from yours truly than he’d no doubt cared to; but for almost half an hour he indulged himself with Maggie, who must have laid the charm on, because in the midst of all the hassle, Chandler exited the kitchen just behind her with a goofy little grin on his kisser. Of course Maggie’s neckline alone could have accomplished that.

  While we were planted across the coffee table from a devastated-looking Murray Coe, I had nothing to do but sit there with the wheels turning, and along about two A.M., the wheels ground out something I should have thought of a long time before.

  Sam Fizer had sold Mug O’Malley to the major back in ’32 with a long-term contract for the cartoonist to produce the strip itself—ownership of a feature by its syndicator was standard for the industry, as Rapp’s current situation with Tall Paul and the Unique Features Syndicate demonstrated.

  Periodic renegotiations had given Mug O’Malley’s creator the lion’s share of licensing revenue and other benefits, but Starr and Fizer still split the net income from actual newspaper syndication fifty/fifty. And Starr held all copyrights and trademarks.

  So Maggie and I had our own murder motive in this thing: the Starr Syndicate now owned the Mug O’Malley feature, with only a small percentage going to the estate from any revenue the feature henceforth generated.

  It was three A.M. and then some when we were dismissed. Maggie, who as a showbiz gal was used to
late hours, looked remarkably fresh, the only telltale evidence of the ordeal a few strands of the piled-up red hair gone astray. We’d come in a cab and went back the same way, both of us fairly shellshocked, neither saying a word.

  Until we got to the Starr Building, that is, when Maggie said, “Stop up in the office for a minute.”

  I used my key at the street entrance and we stepped into an area far too large to be called a foyer but much too small to be called a lobby. The glass-frame door to the restaurant was dark, a few neon signs behind the bar still aglow, giving it a melancholy ambience. No elevator operator this time of night, so I took us up to the fourth floor, to the landing where I used another key, and soon we were in her office, where she hadn’t set foot in some time, due to the musical.

  To her credit, Maggie made no comment about the mess I’d made on her desk. She even played hostess, excusing herself to slip up into the kitchenette tucked away behind Bryce’s desk in the reception area. I took the tufted wine-colored chair across from hers, just fine with not being in charge of the Starr Syndicate right now.

  She was gone quite a while—I half fell asleep in the chair—and when she returned she was barefoot and bearing a small tray with two cups of steaming hot chocolate on them. Mine had a melting marshmallow, but Maggie hadn’t indulged herself—the hot chocolate was bad enough for the battle she was waging against her rampant obesity.

  “I spent some time alone in that living room,” she said, handing me my cup, “with Murray Coe.”

  “Lucky you. Did you sign him yet?”

  “I won’t have to.” She got behind her desk and rested her hot chocolate on a coaster, which she somehow located amidst the piles of paper. “The current contract we had with Fizer specifies that, should anything happen to Sam, Murray takes over the strip for the duration of the agreement.”

  I sat forward, almost spilling the hot liquid. “Under what terms?”

  “Coe would split Fizer’s take with the cartoonist, in the case of illness, or his estate, in the case of death, for the remainder of the contract, which runs till 1963.”

  “I never heard of anything like this,” I said. “Why did we sign it? And by ‘we,’ I mean you.”

  “Why not?” she said, unpinning the tower of red hair and allowing it to tumble in a delightful mess onto her creamy shoulders. “Sam requested we do so, and he was our top story-strip talent. All it did, from our standpoint, was possibly extend our agreement with Fizer for a few years beyond his death.”

  “Well, that’s a lot. We’d have owned Mug lock, stock and ink barrel.”

  “Yes, but we’d have had to hire Coe, anyway, and probably a top writer. Maybe even a name from the sportswriting field, to try to lend the strip credibility. That would cost money. This agreement acknowledges that if a new writer has to be hired, any salary comes off the top.”

  “Why did Sam want this?”

  She shrugged and red curls bounced off white shoulders. “He didn’t say why, other than he wasn’t getting any younger, and he wanted to make sure his ‘baby’ . . . that would be Mug O’Malley . . . stayed in good hands.”

  I grunted a laugh. “You may have done us a favor at that.”

  “How so?”

  “You’ve removed our murder motive. If you hadn’t signed that new contract, we would be the proud owners of Mug O’Malley’, but for a minimal monthly royalty to the estate.”

  “There won’t be much of an estate. Sam had no children. He had a soon-to-be ex-wife, and a couple of brothers back in Pennsylvania.”

  “We may be off the suspect list,” I said, “but Murray Coe’s up there pretty high, you ask me.”

  Her eyebrows lifted but the green eyes were cool. “Is he? He may be the only person on earth who really liked Sam Fizer. Seems Sam treated him like a son, and rewarded his loyalty with a steady paycheck.”

  “But not necessarily a decent one.”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know what Sam paid Murray. Sam was never known for his generosity, although the terms of the new Mug O’Malley contract might indicate otherwise.”

  I flipped a hand. “If that little assistant was getting a stipend for carrying the bulk of the work on the strip, but knew he’d get a real paycheck with Sam out of the way? Who better to bump off the boss?”

  “It’s possible. But I can’t see that pipsqueak killing Sam Fizer. He had tears in his eyes as we spoke about Fizer, Jack. He seemed to love the guy like a father.”

  “Tell Oedipus,” I said, immediately regretting the remark. With a “mother” who looked like Maggie, that was one myth you didn’t want to dwell on much. . . .

  She sipped her hot chocolate. “The reason I asked you to stop in the office, Jack . . . we need to talk to Hal Rapp, as soon as possible.”

  “By ‘we,’ I trust you mean ‘me.’ And by ‘as soon as possible,’ I sure as hell hope you don’t mean right now . . .”

  “No. Could still be a police presence over at the Waldorf Towers, as far as we know. But you should talk to him tomorrow. He’ll likely be in on a Sunday afternoon, particularly after what went on today.”

  “All right. What do I talk to him about?”

  “In particular, I want you to explore his relationship with Murray Coe.”

  I wasn’t following. “Whose relationship?”

  “Hal’s. I didn’t want to press the jumpy little creature with all those police around, but we both know it’s odd that the first person Coe went running to, after finding Sam’s body, was Sam’s worst enemy.”

  “Yeah. Same thing occurred to me, but I wasn’t ready to share it with Captain Chandler.”

  She nodded. “You need to convince Rapp we’re his friends in this affair. Tell him we’re going to do everything we can to clear him of this.”

  “He could have done it, you know.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She drew in half a bushel of air and let it out and I’m sure it must have done interesting things to her décolletage, but I was fixed on those eyes, which were the color of emeralds and just as hard.

  She said, “I believe you have two mysteries to solve, Jack— who really killed Sam Fizer is just the first.”

  “And the second?”

  “Who framed Hal Rapp.”

  I thought Maggie was getting ahead of herself, but I was as usual behind the curve, or maybe curves, where she was concerned.

  By the time I finally got to bed, dawn was a genuine threat, and when the phone on my nightstand trilled, noon was just a rumor. My hand knocked off the paperback (Battle Cry by Leon Uris) resting there, and somehow my fingers found the receiver and transported it to my ear, where Captain Pat Chandler’s voice asked, “You up?”

  “I seem to be. What time did you get to bed?”

  “I haven’t yet. Look . . . Jack. We got off the on wrong foot on this thing, last night.”

  Was I dreaming? Maybe I wasn’t awake yet.

  “Is that an apology?” I asked.

  His voice took on an edge. “You’re the one who should apologize, holding out on me like . . .” Then he stopped himself. “Can you get over here?”

  “Where? The Bronx? Did your lovely wife set a plate for me at the table?” Mrs. Chandler was a blonde Maureen O’Hara; I kid you not. “Breakfast or lunch?”

  “. . . The precinct house, Jack. My God, you’re hard to be nice to.”

  “You want something, Captain. What?”

  “Cooperation. I spent the night interviewing comic strip characters, and all I can see is a four-color blur.”

  “Most cops who interview a bunch of half-naked Broadway chorus girls into the wee hours would’ve had a better time.”

  “Most cops don’t have a wife as good-looking as mine.”

  “True. But how good-looking would her expression be if she knew you were interviewing half-naked Broadway chorus girls into the wee hours?”

  “Let’s just say she’d have fit right in with Halloween. Jack— please. I could use some help.”
r />   “Who is this, really? What have you done with Captain Chandler?”

  A laugh and a sigh commingled. “Get your ass over here.”

  “So it is you.”

  “Here’s the deal—you won’t apologize to me and I won’t apologize to you; but we will go forward in a new spirit of civic cooperation.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Should I send a car?”

  “I have a ride. Anyway, I try not to be seen in public with cops. The uniformed variety are bad for my reputation, and the way plainclothes guys like you dress is also bad for my reputation. Ciao.”

  And I hung up on him, grinning to myself, fully awake and pleased to know Chandler was probably hanging his head over his desk, wishing he were dead, asking me for help.

  The overcast day was threatening to turn crisp into cold as I walked to the garage on Forty-fourth where I kept my wheels; I was eating the apple that would have to pass for breakfast or lunch until time allowed. I’d left the trench coat at home, figuring the light brown Scottie tweed suit would keep me warm; I figured wrong, the brim of my dark brown fedora snugged down to fight a breeze off the Hudson River where somebody was trying to smuggle in winter.

  I parked the little white Kaiser Darrin convertible (top up) a block down from the precinct house on West Twentieth Street, then strode briskly along underpopulated sidewalks to the six-story graystone with three prominent arches, going up a short flight of stairs under the middle one. I nodded to the sergeant at the judge’s bench of a receiving desk, and headed up the creaking wooden stairs by a sign (with pointing arrow) that said, HOMICIDE BUREAU, 3RD FLOOR.

  A new receptionist—a brunette in her midtwenties whose horn-rimmed glasses and severe white blouse and black skirt were trying to make her less a looker (with little success)—asked for my name, got it, recognized it and sent me right on in through the frosted-glass door saying CAPTAIN.

  The office was big but drab, with cracked, water-stained industrial-green walls, wooden file cabinets on the periphery, windows with views on the city on one side and an alley on the other, and a big, scarred brown desk in the center, where Captain Chandler was the ringmaster of all this carefree fun.