Strip for Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  “Am I?”

  “What am I getting close to, that you don’t want to share?”

  “Nothing.” He sipped the martini. “Ask me whatever you like.” He drew on his cigarette-in-holder. Blew out smoke. “I’m happy to help out where Hal is concerned.”

  “The thing is,” I said, “I had conversations with both Hal and Sam, shortly before Sam’s death. Hal seemed positive that Sam Fizer wouldn’t be a problem to him, much longer . . . but he didn’t specify why . . .”

  Alexander appeared cool, unless you noticed his eyes had gone unblinking and hard. And I noticed.

  I went on: “But the funny thing is, Sam said the same damn thing to me about Rapp—I came away thinking Fizer had something on Rapp, something that would destroy him, professionally, maybe even personally.”

  “Interesting,” he said, as if I’d just shared the least interesting thing imaginable.

  “The only thing I can come up with, and I don’t have anything solid, is Hal’s propensity toward . . . as you put it. . . randiness. He’s put the make on every pretty girl in the Tall Paul cast, from my stepmother and Candy Cain to the underage chorus cuties whose charms could land you behind bars.”

  “That’s not it,” Alexander said, with casual finality.

  I just looked at him.

  He smiled at me.

  And I looked at him some more.

  Finally his smile wilted. “Wait here,” he said.

  The big man rose from the wicker chair and strode from the sunporch with a speed and purpose quite at odds with the relaxed nature he’d displayed till now. I wondered if he was going out to count the Renoirs and Cézannes and so on. My Coke was watery, the ice half melted, but I steeled myself and drank it anyway. Alexander wasn’t the only man’s man around this joint.

  When he returned, perhaps two minutes later, he carried in both hands—like a country preacher protecting a Bible—a 9-inch-by-12-inch black leather pouch. He sat on the edge of the wicker chair and unzipped the pouch and removed a fat manila folder. The pouch he rested beside him on the floor, against the chair; the folder he began to thumb through.

  “Jack,” he said, in a businesslike voice entirely new to this conversation, “you’re aware of Sam’s efforts to embarrass Hal with these accusations of sticking smut into Tall Paul.”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “Saying Tall Paul is a sexy strip is like accusing you of putting spaceships in Crash Landon. Or should I say phallic symbols?”

  I thought that would get a smile out of him. It didn’t.

  “Take a look at these,” Alexander said, and handed me a small stack of slick sheets of paper.

  “Syndicate proofs,” I said, thumbing through.

  Six daily strips printed on a long glossy sheet, a week’s worth as sent to subscribing newspapers—this was what they printed the strips from in their individual papers.

  As I swiftly scanned the art, I said, “Full of the supposed offensive mushrooms and knotholes, I see, and occasional appearances of the dread number ‘sixty-nine.’ ”

  “Over the last five or six months,” Alexander said, “Fizer was going around to newspaper editors and showing them examples of the offensive material Rapp is supposedly sneaking into his strip.”

  “This stuff?” I asked, holding up the proof sheets.

  Ducking that, Alexander, his face somber, raised a hand. “Understand that these were private meetings between a very prominent cartoonist and newspaper editors all across the country.”

  I nodded. “Not just phone calls, or things Sam said if he happened to bump into one of these editors, socially or on a promotional jaunt. This was a . . . campaign?”

  Alexander was nodding, too. “Definitely a campaign. In addition, Fizer submitted his examples of Rapp ‘pornography’ to the New York state legislature’s inquiry into the relationship between juvenile delinquency and comics.”

  “I have heard about that. I guess I wasn’t aware of the extent of Fizer’s efforts to embarrass Rapp, but—”

  “And,” Alexander cut in, “there’s a similar inquiry on the docket in Washington—a senate witch hunt into our business. The kind they televise, coast-to-coast.”

  I grunted a dismissive laugh. “Well, the do-gooders are mostly concerned about comic books, not syndicated strips, right?”

  Raymond’s expression was grave; the Fifth Avenue bon vivant was gone and the marine captain was there in his stead. “We strip people get tarred with the same brush. Jack, you are aware that I’m president of the National Cartoonists Society?”

  “Sure. Starr Syndicate has a company membership.”

  The blue eyes were steely now. “And you can imagine that, in this atmosphere of fear generated by Senator McCarthy and his followers, the last thing the comics field needs right now is this kind of bad publicity.”

  “Sure. So I guess the NCS wasn’t getting ready to vote Fizer a public service award?”

  He let out a weary, frustrated sigh. “Over the years, every president of the NCS has written both Rapp and Fizer requesting that they abandon their embarrassing, childish public feud. Our last president, Milton Caniff, a close friend of Hal’s, made a personal appeal to Hal, after that article in the Atlantic appeared that called Fizer a monster. And Hal finally agreed to back off.”

  “Didn’t anybody talk to Fizer?”

  “Of course they did, myself included. I made it clear to Sam that he was giving not just Hal Rapp a black eye, but comics in general. And that for the good of our field, he needed to back off.”

  “His response?”

  “His response was that the field would be better served by the exposure, and removal, of this ‘sick pervert.’ ”

  I gestured with the syndicate proof sheets. “And this was his evidence?”

  “Unfortunately . . . no.”

  And Alexander thumbed through the manila folder again and handed me a second stack of paper sheets, not syndicate proofs, rather photostats and blowups of individual Tall Paul panels. They were bleary and the drawing was, in places, crude, as was the subject matter. Those earthy mushrooms and knotholes were less symbolic and more overt; a male character, talking to a female one, leaned close with a large nose that was not exactly a nose. The wish-granting critter, the Shlomozel, was carried by Paul in a manner that made it unmistakably suggestive of a male member.

  These were Tall Paul drawings that had poorly drawn or redrawn elements that inserted truly troubling elements into the original drawings.

  I took a few moments to compare the syndicate proofs Pd first been handed with this second stack of blurry photostats. The panels as they’d appeared in newspapers had been blatantly doctored after the fact, fairly amateurishly, to look offensive. Others were outright forgeries. Bad ones.

  “Fizer did this?” I asked.

  Raymond nodded. “Hal Rapp hired his own documents experts, including an ex-FBI man, and submitted the evidence you’re looking at, to the executive committee of the NCS.”

  And now I knew what Fizer “had” on Rapp, or thought he did; and what Rapp really did have on Fizer.

  “This is fraud,” I said. “Fizer could face criminal and civil charges over this.”

  And the Starr Syndicate’s top story strip would be finished. Not that this occurred to me immediately. All right, it did.

  “Hal was gracious,” Alexander said, “considering—all he asked was for the NCS to deal with Fizer.”

  “How did you do that?”

  Alexander looked past me, his expression rather glazed. “Last Wednesday night, Sam was called here for a meeting. We met right here on this sunporch, and Milton and other top cartoonists were present. We showed Sam the evidence, he offered no defense, and we expelled him.”

  “You kicked him out of the NCS?”

  “Yes.” The rugged cartoonist had the expressionless expression of a judge passing a death sentence. “The first time in the history of the organization.”

  The irony was bittersweet, except for the sweet part:
the former assistant had been assisted, even ghosted, by his old boss, whose clumsy touch had been evident.

  I asked, “Did you tell Sam you’d go public with this garbage?”

  “We told him that would be Hal Rapp’s call, not ours.”

  “How did he react?”

  “Quietly. Hardly uttered a word. Turned fish-belly white on us. Just sort of . . . stumbled out of here.”

  I indicated the material he’d handed me. “Could I borrow these?”

  “No. I’ve spoken with Milton and the others, and it’s the executive committee’s decision not to have this material made public. We see no reason to embarrass a deceased member of the society.”

  I wasn’t sure you could embarrass a dead guy, but I said, “Fizer wasn’t a member, anymore.”

  “Technically true . . . although for many years, he was—he’d been a founding member, in fact. And he was obviously a sick, troubled man, doing these forgeries, mounting this sad vendetta against his former assistant, who happens to be one of our top cartoonists now. We decided not to sully Sam’s memory with this . . . this embarrassing lapse in a career that was otherwise one of the great success stories in our field.”

  “Plus, it wouldn’t do Rapp’s reputation any good—that he exposed Sam and pushed him into suicide.”

  Alexander frowned. “That’s a little harsh, Jack.”

  “Yeah, but accurate, except for one thing: Fizer was murdered, remember. So you, Ray, and the rest of the executive board of your society need to regroup, and quick—you need to share what you know about this sad situation with Captain Chandler of the Homicide Bureau.”

  His frown deepened. “Is that really necessary?”

  “Oh, no—it’s strictly optional. Only, you big-shot cartoonists won’t care much for the morning light that comes in your new studio windows after you’re arrested as material witnesses. The bars play hell with it.”

  “. . . Captain Chandler, you say?”

  “Yeah. Why don’t I call him, and we’ll ask him over?”

  Maggie had the evening off from rehearsal, as a freshly written song for Sunflower Sue was in the process of getting inserted into the show, and that—and other musical numbers—was tonight’s focus.

  So I found her in the gym beyond the office; she was in black leotards riding a stationary bike, hair still pinned up Libidia Von Stackpole-style but face free of makeup.

  The room was carpeted in tumbling mats and arrayed with all the latest exercise equipment, to help her work off that excess flab she was carrying round (all two or three pounds of it), plus a punching bag for me to take out my frustrations on.

  Except I was in no mood or shape to punch the bag. I was still aching from my stairwell fight, and just standing in that gym, thinking about exercise, made me ache more. She pedaled and I sat in the nearby rowing machine, not rowing, and gave her the lowdown on what I’d learned at Ray Alexander’s. Her face gave nothing away, remaining as blank as a bisque baby’s throughout my account, as she listened and pedaled and listened and pedaled.

  The last thing I shared with her was the conversation with Captain Chandler I’d had on the phone at Alexander’s, when I called him to come over to the cartoonist’s Fifth Avenue penthouse. Chandler had shared several interesting tidbits with me, including the results of the full autopsy performed on Fizer.

  Finally I said, “That’s the whole boat,” which struck me as clever, since I was sitting in that rowing machine. But Maggie was tough to amuse even with a good joke. And right now she had stopped pedaling.

  “I guess we both know what really happened here,” she said.

  “I guess we do. Did you know before or after Captain Chandler’s report?”

  “Before.”

  “Well, then, it’s just barely possible you’re smarter than me. I needed that last puzzle piece.”

  She climbed off the bike, picked up her towel from the tumbling-mat floor and patted off pearls of perspiration from her improbably young-looking face.

  “I guess I’ve known all along,” she said. “I just didn’t have any evidence.”

  “Do we have any now?”

  She offered up a glum smirk. “Not really. Nothing that would hold up. Do you think Chandler has anything we don’t?”

  “No,” I said, climbing out of the rowing machine. “What do you suggest?”

  “We have full dress rehearsal tomorrow night,” she said absently. “That means I have the afternoon off.”

  “And?”

  She shrugged. “That should be time enough to put on our own little show.”

  “Okay, Judy,” I said. “I’ll be Mickey . . . just as long as you provide the barn.”

  HAVE YOU FIGURED OUT KILLED SAM FIZER? JACK AND I KNOW ONE THING FOR SURE . . .

  “. . . A RIGHT-HANDED MAN DOESN’T SHOOT HIMSELF IN THE LEFT TEMPLE, ESPECIALLY WHEN HE’S UNCONSCIOUS FROM A DOPED DRINK.”

  “MAGGIE’S RIGHT – THIS IS NO SIMPLE SUICIDE. YOU HAVE PLENTY OF CANDIDATES FOR THE MURDERER, STARTING WITH GRIEVING WIDOW MISTY WINTERS. . .

  “. . . AND DON’T FORGET CANDY CAIN! SHE SAYS HAL RAPP GOT FRISKY, BUT DID HE GET EVEN MORE OUT OF LINE?

  “AND DID ‘SUNFLOWER SUE’ FRAME THE LECHEROUS RAPP TO GET RID OF SAM FIZER, WHO HER HUSBAND, CHARLIE MAZURKI OWED MONEY TO? OR WAS IT CLEVER FUNNYMAN CHARLIE HIMSELF?”

  “A POSSIBILITY, JACK – BUT DON’T RULE OUT THE EQUALLY CLEVER HAL RAPP. HE MIGHT’VE RIGGED A SLOPPY FRAME-UP AGAINST HIMSELF, KNOWING IT WOULD FALL TO PIECES. . . ”

  “MAGGIE, ISN’T IT POSSIBLE ANOTHER PLAYER IN FIZER’S POKER GAME DIDN’T LEVEL WITH US ENTIRELY? . . . CRASH LANDON’S CO-PILOT RAY ALEXANDER, MAYBE?”

  “JACK, YOU’LL NEVER FIGURE THIS OUT UNTIL YOU UNDERSTAND WHY STINGY SAM FIZER STARTED THROWING MONEY AROUND, THE LAST SIX MONTHS OF HIS LIFE . . .

  “. . . AND IT WASN’T JUST BECAUSE MISTY WINTERS DUMPED HIM TO TAKE PART IN THE TALL PAUL MUSICAL, EITHER.”

  “YOU MAY BE THE BOSS, MAGGIE, BUT I’M THE DETECTIVE IN THE FAMILY. AND WE HAVEN’T EXHAUSTED ALL THE SUSPECTS . . . .

  “. . . STARTING WITH FIZER’S LOYAL ASSISTANT, MURRAY COE, WHO INHERITED MUG O’MALLEY, AND PRODUCER/DIRECTOR MEL NORMAN, WHO WAS THREATENED BY FIZER WITH A LAWSUIT . . .

  “AND WINDING UP WITH THE UNKNOWN PARTY WHO CASHED IN TONY CARMINE’S MARKERS, THE HARD WAY. OR WAS THE MASKED ASSASSIN ONE OF OUR OTHER SUSPECTS?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DON’T GIVE UP THE GHOST, MAGGIE!

  The next afternoon found Maggie holding down her desk during business hours for the first time since she’d accepted her role in the Tall Paul musical. She had traded in her low-cut scarlet gown for a man-tailored gray suit with black braid trim and a collarless white blouse; her red hair, however, fell to her shoulders, providing a nicely feminine contrast to the executive fashion.

  She had restrained herself and tidied my mess on the desk only so much as to stack and straighten: she knew I’d be in that chair again soon enough, although once the play opened she intended to hold down two jobs, syndicate magnate by day and Broadway siren by night.

  The lighting in the large, narrow windowless office was subdued, supplemented by a green-shaded banker’s lamp on the massive cherrywood desk. Maggie didn’t like harsh light, not wishing to subject her eyes to it or her carefully maintained beauty. Ironically her elaborate makeup—false eyelashes, freckle-disguising face powder, scarlet mouth, phony beauty mark (war paint, I called it)—only made her look older, if still ten years short of her age. Behind her on the wall loomed the ghost of her younger self, that massive pastel portrait of her in a clinging pink-feathered getup, circa 1941.

  In a dark blue Botany 500 suit with a darker blue tie and a lighter blue shirt, I was every bit the syndicate VP, comfortably arranged across the desk from her in the wine-colored tufted-leather chair, angled somewhat so I could maintain eye contact with whomever might sit in the visitor’s chair on my left.

  We’d already had one meeting this afternoon, having to do with synd
icate business, and were waiting for our two o’clock. It was ten after.

  “Maybe he’s not going to show,” I said, slouching in the chair, hands tented, right leg crossed over left knee, foot dancing nervously in midair.

  She pointed at my wiggling Florsheim. “Stop that. . . . He’ll be here. He wants to get the terms on the new contract settled just as badly as we do.”

  She was right. At twenty after two, man-in-black Bryce ushered diminutive, unassuming Murray Coe into Maggie’s chamber. He approached with literal hat in hand, a bald, bespectacled man in an off-the-rack dark brown suit with a blue bow tie, a prominent Adam’s apple bobbling under his excuse for a chin.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Murray Coe said, flashing a nervous smile at Maggie and then at me. He settled into the dark wood, dark leather padded chair, the hat—a narrow-brimmed felt number—still in his hands. He reminded me of a child taking a place at the grown-up’s table, his feet barely reaching the floor. “Actually, I’ve been here since ten till two.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Get lost on the elevator?”

  That got another nervous smile out of him, which was more than it was worth. “I stopped at the editorial office, downstairs. Ben and I got to talking about whether I should work up a memorial strip to Sam.”

  Maggie said, “I think that would be a good idea.”

  Murray nodded, his smile turning brave now. “I do, too. I was thinking . . . Mug and Louie and the rest of the cast at Sam’s graveside, with Mug and Louie wiping away tears, and in the sky, in a cloud? Sam smiling and saying, ‘So long, gang! Keep up the good fight!’ . . . You think that’s too . . . too corny?”

  The little assistant had tears in his eyes.

  “No,” Maggie said, her smile gentle, supportive. “It’s in keeping with the strip.”

  I said, “You bet. Sam always had a sentimental streak a mile wide.”

  “Didn’t he, though?” Murray said, a little embarrassed, shrugging, turning the hat in his hands like a wheel. “Anyway, I do apologize for being late. I should’ve called from downstairs and let you know I was in the building.”