Strip for Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  A standard investigatory technique is to arrive unannounced at a witness or suspect’s residence for an interview. You catch them off guard, and it’s not as easy for them to duck you.

  But that wasn’t my intention when I dropped by Hal Rapp’s suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, late Sunday afternoon. After spending ninety minutes with Captain Chandler at the Homicide Bureau, I had worked up enough of an appetite to justify stopping by the hotel coffee shop for a late lunch. I placed my order, then stepped back into the lobby and used a house phone to try Rapp’s suite.

  Busy signal.

  After my egg salad sandwich and chips and Coke, I went out and used the house phone again. Again a busy signal, which meant the cartoonist was either home on the phone and yakking to his lawyer or rabbi or somebody, or home with the phone off the hook, not wanting to be bothered.

  Whether the cartoonist wanted to be bothered or not mattered to me not a whit, so I took a tower elevator to the twenty-fifth floor and knocked on Rapp’s door.

  No response.

  I leaned my ear against the wood and thought I could hear Rapp’s loud, distinctive nasal whine in there . . . and also a woman’s voice.

  But I couldn’t be sure about the latter. The female tones were much softer (no surprise there), and I might be misinterpreting: maybe Rapp was talking on the phone with the radio or TV on in the background. That might be Our Miss Brooks or Faye Emerson I was hearing. . . .

  So I knocked some more.

  And I kept at it until I heard a night latch unlatching; then the door cracked open and Rapp peered out, exposing a single bleary bloodshot blue eye.

  Though all I got was a slice of that familiar oval face, I could see enough to tell he was in rough shape—the dark hair mussed and hanging in ragged commas on his forehead, the mouth yawning open like one of the idiotic hillbillies in his strip. He hadn’t shaved yet today and his cheeks were heavy and blue with a beard worthy of his late boss.

  His forehead frowned and his mouth smiled. “Jaaaack?” he said, like a guy coming out of a coma, struggling to identify somebody hovering over his hospital bed.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  A smile managed to form. “No conversation in human history that started with those four words,” he said, “was ever worth having.”

  “This is the exception. Maggie sent me. We want to help.”

  He winced; I might have been standing on his toes. “Couldn’t it wait?”

  “Till after Captain Chandler comes around later tonight, or tomorrow morning? Sure. Of course I just spent an hour and a half pumping him about the case, and you just might find some of what I learned helpful in dealing with his questions.”

  His eyes tightened; then he opened the door a fraction wider. “Case?”

  “Say again?”

  His brow was creased in thought and worry. “You said you talked to that detective . . . about the ‘case.’ Is this a ‘case’?”

  “It’s a case, all right.” I gave him a sunny smile. “Fizer was murdered, Hal. You want me to leave, so you can take a couple hours, and get back to me about who you think the Homicide Bureau’s top suspect might be?”

  The cartoonist turned very pale—deathly pale under the blue of his unshaven cheeks and chin, like the dead Fizer’s face last night. I thought he might be getting sick.

  And it’s a wonder I didn’t get sick: Rapp reeked of cigarettes—no booze on his breath, though. Like me, he wasn’t a drinker.

  “Maybe you should step in, Jack,” he said with a weak smile.

  “Maybe I should.”

  He ushered me into the suite, which looked a little like the day after a college fraternity had thrown a girl-chases-boy Batch’ul Catch’ul party. The hand-lettered cardboard signs were still pinned on walls and doors: INDOOR OUTHOUSE—ONE-HOLER; MINGO MOUNTAIN MOONSHINE THAT A WAY; CATFISH HOLLER POP. 69—and cocktail glasses and tumblers with the weak residue of booze and melted ice rested on various surfaces, usually (but not always) on napkins, while paper plates adorned by the remains of now-unappetizing appetizers resided similarly here and there, as did overflowing ashtrays. The odor was worthy of Tall Paul’s resident pig-wallowing beauty, Bathless Bessie, that curvy lass who “fellers adores but thar nostrils abhors.”

  No radio was on, nor television; but neither was a female guest waiting in the living room that Rapp showed me into.

  Looking vaguely debauched, Rapp was wearing a purple silk dressing gown, knotted at the waist, over yellow pajamas mono-grammed with a fluid HR. Despite the pj’s, he wore shoes and socks—maybe the artificial limb was unfriendly to slippers.

  “Get you anything, Jack?” he said with a puppetlike gesture toward the kitchen. “Plenty to drink left from last night. . . oh, but you don’t drink, either. Another damned tee-totaler like me. Say, I have some coffee made. . . .”

  “No. No, thanks, Hal.”

  He seemed to be limping more exaggeratedly today, almost dragging the damn thing, and I wondered if his mood affected his gait. His spirits were noticeably low—he hadn’t laughed once, although under the best of circumstances that laugh was as much nervous habit as an expression of glee, nor was he underlining his words as much.

  With a sigh that had a smoker’s rasp in it, he took a seat on the couch and gestured for me to sit across from him, the glass coffee table between us. That this arrangement eerily mirrored Maggie and me sitting across from Murray Coe last night, one floor down, was not lost on me.

  I apologized for coming unannounced and explained that his phone had been busy; he acknowledged that he’d taken it off the hook. I removed my fedora and sat it next to me.

  Using a shiny steel Zippo from a robe pocket to light up a cigarette, sans holder, he said, “I guess it’s nice of you to want to help, Jack. But I don’t really see how any of this is a concern of yours and Maggie’s.”

  He tossed the Zippo, which clunked onto the glass beside a deck of Lucky Strikes and an overflowing ashtray, several butts in which bore lipstick stains. Also on the coffee table were two empty coffee cups, one on Rapp’s side, the other on mine—and the one nearer to me had lipstick on its rim.

  You’re probably not a trained detective, so I’ll clue you in that this almost certainly meant I had not heard Our Miss Brooks or Faye Emerson through the door from the hall.

  But if I had, one of them was likely in Rapp’s bedroom right now. . . .

  “Maggie and I are very concerned about your welfare,” I said. “But our motivation isn’t entirely altruistic. The creator of our top story strip was murdered last night, which is a blow to our business.”

  Rapp nodded. He made a three-syllable word of his response: “Yeaaaah.” Then his eyebrows went up and he said, “You people won’t replace Sam Fixer easily.”

  I gaped at him. “Getting sentimental about your old enemy, Hal?”

  He blew out a little vertical mushroom cloud of tobacco smoke; he was staring, but not at me. Not at anything, really. “Call it sentiment, Jack—I’m not very much keen on sentimentality.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  He grunted a laugh. “Ask Maggie. She’s smart. She’ll know.”

  I considered calling him a patronizing prick, but instead said, “Call it what you want, Hal—it still sounds funny, coming from you. And I don’t mean ha ha ha.”

  He didn’t respond right away—just sat there with a shell-shocked expression, staring past me, a hand-with-cigarette raised in a frozen gesture, a curl of smoke rising in a near question mark.

  Then he sucked in enough air to send up the Goodyear blimp, exhaled it like the blimp was deflating and actually deigned to meet my eyes.

  “Hard to believe, Jack, but Sam and me? We were close once. He taught me most of what I know about the comics business. No, not just the business, but the art of comic strips.”

  “Art? Sam Fizer?”

  His voice had a faint tremor; he was looking past me again. “Sam Fizer was a better artist than anybody knew, and I’m sure t
hat’s part of why my goading got to him so. Having somebody who worked for you, as an assistant, go on to fame and fortune? If you’re as insecure as Sam was, that’s a tough pill to swallow.”

  I would almost have said Rapp was on the verge of shedding a tear or two for his old boss.

  Almost.

  Eyes meeting mine again, Rapp was saying, “See, Jack, back when I bolted Mug to start up Paul, I don’t think the average person even knew that cartoonists had assistants—maybe they still don’t, ha ha ha. But I was the first assistant to . . . well, graduate to the big time, like I did. A lot of interviews covered it, papers and radio alike, and after Sam made such a public fuss about me ‘stealing’ his hillbillies, well, ha ha ha, the secret was out. I was his ‘ghost’ artist, in some accounts, which ironically enough wasn’t really accurate.”

  I frowned, confused. “I thought you ghosted the first Little Luke sequence.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I did. In the sense that I wrote it, and I drew it. . . but I still left the Mug and Louie faces blank for Sam to fill in, when he got back from his European vacation.”

  “Everybody says he insisted on drawing the faces.”

  Rapp nodded emphatically. “Sam was fetishistic about that—only he could draw Mug and Louie. And as for the story line, truth be told, the idea of the hillbillies was mine, all right . . . but the two of us kicked it around in a story conference before Sam got on that steamship.”

  A wide smile blossomed and Rapp’s eyes disappeared into slits. The nasal quality had left his voice, and a melancholy tinged his tone.

  “Funny thing, Jack . . . Sam liked to say he identified with Mug . . . a good-natured small-town innocent, an all-American hero with a heart of gold who believed in Mom and apple pie and fought his way to the top, honest as George Washington or Abe Lincoln. But it was Louie, the rascal of a boxing manager, willing to wheedle or weasel or do whatever it took to win, who was the real Sam Fizer.”

  About now my eyes were bigger than Little Orphan Annie’s. “My God,” I said. “I never expected to hear Sam Fizer’s eulogy from Hal Rapp.”

  His eyes were moist but no tear slid out from those slits. “You don’t understand, Jack. Even being in the business like you are, you can’t comprehend the relationship that forms between a syndicated cartoonist and his top assistant. You spend hour upon hour together—you’re in the trenches shoulder to shoulder, you battle deadlines, you chase ideas like goddamn butterflies, you rail against the demands of stupid editors. . . .”

  He swallowed.

  “Jack, I understand why you’re staring at me like I’m Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy at the carnival. Believe it or not, as Mr. Ripley says—Sam Fizer was like a father to me, for two years at the start of my career, and I owe him everything. Everything. Who the hell do you think taught me the importance of story, Jack? That it was the writing that mattered in a strip? You can always find some idiot artist.”

  Walking down through Central Park with cartoons rolled up under an arm . . .

  “If you felt that way,” I said, “why the damn feud, all those years?”

  He sucked in smoke, exhaled it, and said, “Well, Jack, ha ha ha, I’m a kid from the slums. You don’t expect a kid from the slums to roll over when a bully kicks him.”

  “I guess not.”

  “He attacked me, Jack—the man I respected, the man I looked up to, the man I wanted one day to be like, that man told the press, told the world, that I stole Tall Paul from him. That I was a thieving ingrate, and I. . . I reciprocated. I reciprocated with the truth . . . but I reciprocated.”

  I half smiled. “The truth, Hal? Mostly you made fun of him—I mean, ‘Sam’s Nose Bob’?”

  He grunted a non-laugh. “I knew Sam was hiding an inferiority complex beneath all that bluster, so I ridiculed him, lampooned his precious strip, poked holes in the overinflated balloon of his ego. He sniped at me, I sniped at him, and pretty soon we had ourselves a feud worthy of the Catfish Holler hills. And that feud, like any feud, well . . . it took on a life of its own.”

  “Here I always thought you hated him.”

  “Well, I came to hate him, I suppose. That’s what the love turned into. I don’t know if he ever loved me, you know, in that father-and-son way that grows up between a cartoonist and his right-hand man. . . . I had hoped that was why he invited me . . .” His expression curdled. “. . . Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  I sat forward. “Invited you what, Hal?”

  He sighed smoke. “It’s not important.”

  “I think it might be. Spill.”

  His shrug was too expansive to serve its purpose, emphasizing the importance, not the smallness, of the matter at hand. “Sam invited me to his suite yesterday afternoon.”

  I goggled at him. “And you went?”

  “Yes.”

  “Christ. Does anyone know?”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “Well, Murray Coe was there. I don’t believe I mentioned it to anybody.”

  “Did anybody see you in the hall, going in? Coming out?”

  “I really don’t recall, Jack. But they could have. Why? Is that important?”

  “Why? You may have been seen going into the murdered man’s suite, and you wonder why that’s important?”

  Absently Rapp flicked cigarette ash off his purple silk robe. “He wasn’t murdered in the afternoon, was he?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Why the hell did Fizer invite you down? Had he ever done that before?”

  “No! It’s the funniest thing. . . .”

  Maybe it was the funniest thing; but I had a feeling I wouldn’t bust out laughing when I heard about it. . . .

  Rapp was saying, “Sam called me out of the blue and said, ‘This has gone on long enough. It’s stupid, Harold. We should talk.’ ”

  Rapp’s expression grew distant.

  I nudged him with: “And he asked you to come downstairs for a meeting? What, of reconciliation?”

  The dark eyebrows rose in a facial shrug. “That’s what I thought. Jack, he hadn’t called me ‘Harold’ in years—not since I was a kid working for him. His voice was . . . Sam could be kind. When he dropped all the Broadway big-shot bullshit, he was just another guy who’d started out as a little kid who dreamed of growing up and drawing comics for a living. All cartoonists have that in common, and, boy, ha ha ha, we sure did.”

  “So it was a patch-things-up meeting?”

  He smirked, gesturing with cigarette-in-hand in that loose-limbed characteristic fashion of his. “I thought it would be. But after I got there, it only lasted a few minutes. He was at his drawing board—inking faces, of course. Murray was at the other drawing board, penciling figures.”

  “What, the door was open and you just walked in?”

  “Of course not! Murray answered my knock and walked me in to see the ‘great man’ in his bedroom studio. He just sat there at his board, barely glancing back at me as we spoke.”

  “But you did speak.”

  “We spoke, all right. I said, ‘Sam, maybe you’re right, maybe this has gone on long enough. I’ll lay off it if you will.’ He just said, ‘Drop Misty from the cast. It’s an embarrassment to me. If you don’t, I’ll get an injunction slapped on your damn musical for plagiarism.’ Or words to that effect.”

  “So he talked one game on the phone, and then when you got there . . . ?”

  He gestured with cigarette-in-hand again. “Same old Sam—bitter, demanding. I don’t know whether he suckered me down there, or I just, ha ha ha, read in what I wanted to, from what he said on the phone.”

  “He insisted Misty leave the Tall Paul cast—and that’s all you talked about?”

  Rapp’s shrug was elaborate. “Yeah, uh, well, pretty much. We didn’t talk for more than, oh, a minute or two. When I saw that nothing had changed in his attitude, I just got the hell out of there.”

  It was my turn to draw in a big breath, but when I did, I wished I hadn’t, sucking in all that s
tale tobacco and after-party smell.

  “Tell me, Hal—did Fizer drop his pen, and did you pick it up for him?”

  “His pen? No!”

  “Did the assistant drop a pen? Or did you maybe stand by a tray of pens and nervously finger them?”

  He frowned. “What the hell are you talking about, Jack?”

  “Captain Chandler says a pen with your fingerprints on it was found by the body.”

  His eyes popped. “What? Well, it’s a goddamn plant, then! I don’t remember touching anything in that apartment!”

  “Think hard.”

  “I can think till doomsday, but I didn’t touch a damn thing!” He leaned forward, shaking his head. “Look, it’s suicide, it has to be suicide—Sam Fizer always had an overemotional streak a mile wide. He was one of these enormously successful guys who spends half his time envying other people, and the rest of it feeling sorry for himself. And for once, ha ha ha, he actually had a reason to feel sorry for himself.”

  “Which was?”

  Rapp seemed momentarily flustered by the question, then said, “Well, uh, I just mean, think about it: his wife leaves him, and she’s in my play, and his strip is failing, right?”

  “No. It’s still going strong.”

  He shifted on the couch. “Come on, Jack, it’s fading, you know it and I know it! His wife had ditched him, and he wasn’t on top of the strip world anymore, so the guy took the easy way out.” His features darkened. “He was a coward at heart, the miserable son of a bitch.”

  Well, so much for the sentimental side of Hal Rapp.

  “Hal,” I said, raising a traffic-cop palm, “relax. Settle down and just listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It was murder. No question.”

  “He left a damn note, Jack!”

  “The suicide note was hand-lettered, strip-style, and signed with Fizer’s comic strip flourish. . . .”

  Rapp sneered, waving that off. “Hell, Sam could do his trademark signature, no problem. That was one thing he didn’t need help doing. He wasn’t much of a letterer, I admit, but—”

  “Any decent cartoonist, and certainly anybody who had ever assisted on the strip, could have lettered and signed that suicide note.”