Strip for Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  His eyebrows went up. “What about handwriting experts?”

  “This kind of lettering is out of their purview. And that’s just the start, Hal—Fizer had no powder burns on his hands, and the gun showed no fingerprints. Do you happen to know if Sam was right- or left-handed?”

  “Right-handed. Me, I’m a southpaw.”

  “So I hear. Well, the gun was found next to Fizer’s left hand, and the wound was in his left temple.”

  He squinted at me. “That can’t be right. . . .”

  “I saw it. Also, there was a drink by Fizer’s drawing board that was doped with a sedative. Do you use sedatives, Hal?”

  He looked stricken now. “I. . . I have prescription sleeping pills. I have bouts of insomnia, time to time, but, hell . . . thousands, tens of thousands in this town have sedatives within their reach. And I sure as hell didn’t touch his damn glass! Did that cop say my fingerprints were on the glass?”

  “No. Just on that pen.”

  “What kind of pen?”

  “A Gillott 170.”

  His face lost all expression. “. . . I, uh, use those. Not the only pen I use, of course, but I do use ’em . . . but so do a hundred cartoonists! A thousand cartoonists!”

  “How many of ’em live a floor above their biggest enemy in the business? How many of ’em were likely seen going into and/or coming out of said enemy’s apartment, the afternoon of the night he was killed?”

  Rapp was flicking glances my way as he mostly stared into space. “Has Coe told the cops about my meeting with Sam?”

  “You telling me was the first I heard of it.”

  “Maybe he . . .” Rapp drew in smoke again. Let it slowly out, watching it dissipate.

  “Maybe he what, Hal?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Hal—you have to level with me. Come on, man! Maggie and I want to help you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we need a top strip, now that Mug O’Malley may soon be as belly up as his creator . . . and Lean jean could be the ticket. And maybe, who knows, Tall Paul, too, if that works out.”

  His smile was lopsided. “So you’re trying to get on my good side?”

  “More like, trying to keep you out of the Death House.” I turned over a hand. “Even if they let you draw in there, you’ll eventually face a deadline that won’t help the Starr Syndicate one little bit.”

  “You don’t pull punches, do you, Jack?”

  I shook my head. “I’m maybe a day, half a day, behind Captain Chandler on this. We caught a break with you having that party—the coppers have to wade through everybody in attendance, interview them in some depth, and that’ll slow things down.”

  “Including my arrest?”

  “Hard to say. That’s why I want to crack this thing fast, before you do get slammed in stir . . . even if you eventually get out. Anyway, homicides tend to get solved in the first forty-eight hours or, often, not all.”

  “Should I talk to my attorney?”

  “Haven’t you already?”

  “Yes. But he’s saying I may need a criminal lawyer. What do you think?”

  “I think you need Perry Mason.”

  That made him laugh, his familiar “ha ha ha.” “Okay, Jack. I. . . I appreciate it. Looks like the Starr Syndicate having an in-house troubleshooter can come in handy for talent, from time to time.”

  “This is my first suicide/murder frame-up, but yeah.”

  His brow tensed. “Frame-up? You think I’m being framed for this?”

  “If somebody planted that pen, what else would you call it? Now, before we got sidetracked, you’d just started to say that maybe Murray Coe did something . . . what?”

  Rapp was staring into nothing again, his eyes wide and unblinking. Finally he said, “The kid . . . the kid may be covering for me.”

  Did all cartoonists consider their middle-aged assistants “kids,” I wondered?

  I asked, “Why would he do that?”

  He gestured with cigarette-in-hand again and made trails of smoke. “We go way back. Murray was my assistant for a while, first couple years of Tall Paul, until Fizer hired him away.”

  This was news to me. “Fizer stole your assistant away from you? And that assistant was Murray Coe?”

  Rapp nodded. “Just part of the, you know, back and forth backbiting between Sam and me.”

  I was shaking my head. “Why would Murray Coe cover for you, Hal, just because twenty years ago or so, he used to work as your assistant?”

  “Well, we always got along. We stayed friendly over the years.”

  “You got along.” I just looked at him. “He dumped you for Fizer, but you stayed friendly.”

  Rapp’s eyes flared in the midst of a deeply frowning face. “Fizer offered him twice what I was paying, twice what I could afford! I didn’t resent Murray taking a better position.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what were you paying Coe?”

  Rapp frowned; thought back. “This was 1934 and 1935— depths of the Depression. I believe I paid him twenty-seven fifty a week.”

  Which was what Mug O’Malley assistant Hal Rapp had been paid by Fizer—the amount that Hal had cited in his Atlantic monthly article to demonstrate what a cheap monster his old boss had been, an article that failed to make the point that $27.50 a week in the Depression was good pay, if you were lucky enough to have a job.

  Rapp was saying, “In ’35, when Murray left me to work for Fizer, Sam paid him fifty bucks a week, a small fortune in those days. Must have killed the old skinflint. . . although he probably felt it was worth it, causing me an inconvenience.”

  “How big an inconvenience?”

  “Murray is a great assistant. I always hoped to hire him back someday. Maybe that’s why we stayed friendly.”

  “Is that why Murray came running to you, when he found Fizer’s body? Because you’d stayed friendly?”

  He blinked at me. “What?”

  I served up a two-handed shrug. “Murray Coe finds his dead boss’s body, and what does he do? Scream bloody murder at the top of his lungs? Phone the police? Call the concierge? No—he runs upstairs to his late employer’s worst enemy. What’s going on, Hal?”

  “Who says anything is going on?”

  “Murray Coe doesn’t tell the cops that he saw you in Fizer’s apartment the afternoon of the murder? After Fizer buys it, Murray comes to you, not the cops? What the hell, Hal?”

  Rapp stubbed out the cigarette. He took the package of Lucky Strikes from the coffee table, removed a cigarette, tamped it down on the glass, then used the Zippo again. Took about a minute and a half.

  “Had time to think, Hal?”

  He blew smoke out his nostrils again, dragon-style. “Okay. Here’s the deal. Murray’s still assisting me.”

  “What?”

  He gestured with a cigarette in hand and drew a smoky abstract picture in the air. “That was one of the reasons I took this suite. Just for the damn convenience of it. Murray is a workhorse—he’s divorced, and he’s got a lot of time on his hands, and for the last couple years, I been using him to ink my Sunday pages.”

  “Fizer knew this?”

  Rapp’s eyes widened. “No! Hell no! That’s the thing—it was a secret. Murray has a room here at the Waldorf, just down from Sam’s suite, where he has his own little studio. See, Murray used to live in the bigger suite till Fizer moved out of his town house.”

  “Yeah, I know all about that.”

  Rapp shrugged. “Anyway, if Sam knew Murray was doing work for me on the side, Jesus, would that poor kid have been in hot water.”

  Scalding.

  If Fizer had found out Coe was betraying him by clandestinely assisting Rapp, what would happen to that sweetheart deal Fizer had signed with our syndicate, guaranteeing Coe’s taking over Mug O’Malley after the creator’s death?

  Rapp was eyeballing me. “You sure got less talkative all of sudden, Jack.”

  I nodded. “I don’t think Coe’s covering for you.”<
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  Rapp threw his hands in the air. “Well, sure he is! What else would you call it?”

  “I’d call it covering for himself. He’s almost as big a suspect as you are, Hal.”

  Rapp’s jaw dropped. “Murray? How is he a suspect? He thought the world of Sam!”

  “Yeah, while working for you behind Sam’s back.” I raised an eyebrow. “Suppose Fizer found out Coe was assisting you on the side, and threatened to fire his ass? Murray could have faked that suicide, knowing he’d inherit the strip.”

  “That little milquetoast?”

  “Still waters can run deep . . . and crazy, sometimes.” I shifted gears. “Listen, Hal, last night, when you were hosting—you didn’t slip out or anything? To get more booze or ice or . . . ?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Like I said, Chandler’s going to try to account for your time at the party. That’s good for you—it could take days for his people to talk to all the guests and develop a time line.”

  “What’s this cop . . . looking for?”

  “Hal, ‘this cop’ is looking for fifteen minutes or more where you can’t be accounted for. Where none of your guests were standing chatting with you, or saw you chatting with anybody else.”

  “Oh.”

  “Tell me you were the perfect host, Hal—tell me you didn’t duck into your bedroom studio to work on Tall Paul for half an hour, with the door locked behind you.”

  He smiled at me but it was one of those sick smiles that never portend anything positive. “No,” he said, “but . . .”

  “But? There’s a ‘but’?”

  “I did go in my . . . Look, I was in my bedroom, for maybe twenty minutes, at one point.”

  I was sitting on the edge of the couch, like a kid in the last reel of a monster movie. “Alone?”

  “No. With a guest.”

  “Oh. A female guest?”

  The sick smile again. “Yes.”

  Relief flooded through me. “Well, hell, that’s good! That’s the perfect alibi.”

  From the bedroom door came a husky female voice: “Maybe not the perfect alibi.”

  There, stepping from Rapp’s bedroom was a curvaceous, black-haired, blue-eyed beauty with an ice-cream complexion, wearing the same short-skirted Bathless Bessie costume as the night before. You remember her, don’t you?

  Sam Fizer’s widow?

  Misty Winters.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT’S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE…

  The new widow was wearing black all right, although the Catfish Holler-style sheared-off skirt and low bodice and bare arms were not exactly typical widow’s weeds. The fake dirt applied to her limbs by some Broadway makeup artist, to make Misty look appropriately Bathless Bessified for last night’s Halloween party, she had washed off at some point. But her black hair was as tousled as the comic strip Bathless Bessie’s always was, when sprawled seductively next to a hawg waller keeping company with her pals the pigs.

  Other women might have been embarrassed, might have found something to put over themselves since this outfit covered what at best a bathing suit might; or at least their approach might have been shy, diffident, arms folded, head hanging, skulking over to where Rapp sat on his couch and I sat on mine.

  But Misty hip-swayed over, unashamed, confident and displaying no signs of either embarrassment or grief. She chose not to sit beside either of us, pulling around a vaguely Egyptian-looking curved-back, cushioned chair and sitting between us, brazenly putting her bare feet (and red-painted toenails) up on the coffee table, the long shapely legs on display. Now she did in fact fold her arms, but not in a covering-herself-up manner, rather a matter-of-fact, even bored posture as she leaned back in the chair.

  She gave me a disgusted smirk and arched a dark, well-shaped eyebrow. “It’s not what it looks like, Jack.”

  Her Marilyn Monroe enunciation was wholly absent, though a husky femininity remained.

  The purple-robed Rapp was covering his face with a hand, while the cigarette burning in his other hand was producing a gray snake of ash thinking about coiling itself onto the carpet.

  “I’m not sure what this looks like, Ethel,” I said, resurrecting the former Miss Schwartz’s real name from her Bear Spring, Minnesota, days.

  She shook a scolding finger at me. “Don’t do that. Ethel is dead.”

  “So is your husband. Remember him?”

  Something rose from her chest that wasn’t exactly a laugh. “All too well.”

  “I want to congratulate you on how you’re bearing up,” I said cheerfully.

  Rapp uncovered his face, caught the cigarette ash before it fell, tapping it into an already overflowing ashtray, and said, “Jack, Miss Winters is right—this really isn’t what it looks like.”

  “Miss Winters,” I said, “is really Mrs. Fizer, and you’re lucky it was me who dropped by this afternoon, and not Captain Chandler. Not that he couldn’t show up any second.”

  This got Misty’s attention; she shot a glare at Rapp, then softened her gaze when she turned it on me. “You don’t think the cops are watching the hotel or anything, do you?”

  “Naw. They’re not that organized. Why, are you thinking about taking a powder?”

  She frowned. “Are you for real with that tough guy talk? I thought they took Sam Spade off the radio.”

  “Put it theatrically, then: you want to exit stage right, or maybe stage left?”

  “I want to exit, period.”

  “Okay. You have any other clothes with you?”

  She nodded vaguely toward the bedroom. “Just a wrap. But it covers me up enough that I won’t attract attention in the lobby.”

  This doll could attract attention in Death Valley at midnight, as Sam Spade might have said.

  But I said, “You have a car?”

  “No.” Her attention went back to Rapp. “Call a cab for me, would you, Hal?”

  I raised a hand, as if she were teacher, and said, “No need. I have wheels. Where are you headed?”

  “Our town house on West Fifty-third.”

  “Our?”

  “Sam’s and mine,” she said, with not a twinge of embarrassment or shame. “Actually, mine now, I suppose. Unless the son of a bitch changed his will on me when I wasn’t looking.”

  Rapp gaped at her as if she were a freak of nature. Which maybe she was.

  “For God’s sakes, Misty,” Rapp said, the flesh on his face drooping off the bone. “The man is dead. He wasn’t a goddamned saint, but you were married to him. Have some respect.”

  She frowned at him. “What, are you trying to impress the gumshoe?” She turned back to me. “That’s the right term, isn’t it, Mr. Spade?”

  “ ‘Shamus’ would work, too. Though I’m not exactly Irish. If you want a lift, I’ll give you one. Define that any way you like.”

  Both her eyebrows went up and those big dark blue eyes widened, reminding me how I’d wanted to dive into them the other day. Not now, not without a life jacket.

  “Am I safe riding with you, Jack?”

  “Am I safe riding with you, Misty?”

  “I’ll risk it if you will.”

  With no further fanfare, she dragged her feet off the coffee table, stood up, and hip-swayed back into the bedroom and came back swathed in a black mink coat that came down to her ankles. Some “wrap.”

  Her red-nailed hands gripping the fur lapels, she stopped next to Rapp, who looked up at her like Scrooge contemplating the Ghost of Christmas Future. “Do you trust me to fill Jack in about this? Because I’d like to get out of here, and right now, if there’s any chance the cops’ll show.”

  Rapp pawed at the air with his cigarette-in-hand. “Go, go on! We’ve covered it all, Jack and me.”

  “I was listening, and you haven’t,” she said flatly, if anything about her could be described as flat. “I’m telling all, Hal—any objection?”

  “No.” He gave me a grotesque grin. “I have no secrets from Jack.”

  Right.


  She came over and stood next to where I sat taking all this in. “Listen, Jack, it really isn’t what it looks like. Check under that couch.”

  I frowned up at her.

  “Check under it, I said.”

  Used to doing what I was told by a strong woman, I checked: a pink fuzzy blanket was stuffed under there.

  Mrs. Fizer pointed to the couch I was sitting on. “I slept right there, last night,” she said. “Nothing’s going on between Mr. Rapp and myself, not in the way you’re thinking. After Sam’s death, and considering the nature of Sam’s death, well . . . we had some mutual concerns, and we talked them out last night, and some more today. . . . Right, Hal?”

  The mortified cartoonist swallowed and nodded, but said nothing, which for somebody as talkative as Rapp was saying something.

  I got to my feet, slapped my fedora on my noggin and said to my host, “We’ll be talking later, Hal. Don’t say a word to the coppers without your lawyer present. Got that?”

  He nodded, his face saggy and grooved and about ten years older than yesterday.

  “Shall we go, handsome?” Misty said cheerfully, smiling at me, holding out a mink-draped elbow; with her every move, the fur shimmered like a thumb riffling through money.

  “Sure thing, beautiful,” I said, taking the elbow.

  And she was beautiful: she had no lipstick on, no makeup at all, and yet she was still 100 percent glamour girl. Amazing.

  Frightening.

  * * *

  On the way to West Fifty-third, Misty talked about nothing but my little white Kaiser Darrin convertible. She thought it was the cutest thing she ever did see. How fast would it go? One hundred miles per hour. How many miles per gallon did it get? Thirty. Was it a six cylinder or eight? Eight—V-8, like the vegetable juice. What was the body made of? Fiberglass.

  She seemed genuinely interested, but I figured she was stalling. Mrs. Sam Fizer had hitched this ride on the promise of filling me in on what she and Rapp had been doing all night and all day, before I’d butted in—activities that I’d been assured by both parties were “not what they looked like.” Which was why she had scurried to hide in the bedroom when I made my surprise appearance, I supposed. . . .