Strip for Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  “Don’t give it another thought,” Maggie said. “Thanks for coming—I know you’re drowning in deadlines. But we need to talk some business. We’d like you to sign an agreement with Starr for you to take over Mug.”

  His eyebrows rose above his glasses. “Well, isn’t that more or less automatic? Sam showed me his will, and how it was all set up––”

  “We’ll make the contract consistent with Sam’s will, and his wishes,” she said. “Actually, we intend to improve on those terms, somewhat. That’s part of what we want to discuss this afternoon.”

  He damn near glowed; he was sitting on the edge of the chair now, hat still turning nervously in his hands. “Really? Well, that’s very generous of you, Miss Starr.”

  She gave him a smile both beautiful and businesslike. “I admit to a certain element of self-interest, Murray . . . and do please call me Maggie. I feel like we’ve been through quite a lot together, after that long night with the police at the Fizer suite.”

  “I suppose we have.” He frowned curiously. “But what do you mean, self-interest?”

  She gestured with a graceful hand. “The unusual circumstances of Sam’s death make delays and inconveniences inevitable. There’s not even been a funeral date set as yet, because the police are holding on to the body as evidence. There may well be a struggle between Sam’s widow, Misty Winters, and his two surviving brothers; the probate of the will, and the unavoidable red tape, mean that settling Sam Fizer’s affairs will take many months.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  She shrugged. “We simply can’t afford to sit around for all those months, waiting for legal ducks to be lined in rows. The Starr Syndicate is in the business of delivering its features in a timely fashion to its subscribers. How far ahead were you and Sam, on Mug, at the time of his death?”

  “Three months on the Sunday pages, two months on dailies. And Sam left enough script behind for me to stay in production for another month before a new writer is hired.”

  Maggie arched an eyebrow. “Do you think you could handle the writing yourself, Murray?”

  An astonished grin blossomed above the lack of chin. “Actually, I do. I was going to ask you if I might submit a sample story line and several weeks of script. . . . I took the liberty of bringing them along.”

  He set his hat in his lap and reached a hand in his suitcoat and withdrew a folded manila envelope from the inside pocket. Gingerly, almost embarrassed, he placed the folded envelope on Maggie’s desk, smoothing it out with two hands, like a student with high hopes turning in an assignment that lots of extra effort had gone into.

  “I look forward to looking at this, Murray,” she said, and took the envelope and placed it atop one of the neat new piles she’d made out of my sloppy old ones.

  I said, “Have you ever done any writing on the strip before? Or was your assisting strictly on the art?”

  He swung eagerly toward me. “Oh, I helped Mr. Fizer work out lots of the plots over the last decade or so. I admit I haven’t done any of the dialogue, and Sam had a real flare for that . . . but I think I worked with him long enough for it to, you know, seep in.”

  “After all,” Maggie said, “you did the lettering, so every line of dialogue Sam wrote, you’d have studied, in a way.”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  She gestured with two hands. “Well, Murray, we’re anxious to give you full rein on Mug. Everyone knows you’ve essentially ghosted the artwork for many years, and Jack and I and everybody in editorial feel the strip couldn’t be in better hands. We’ll keep Sam’s name on it, of course, for the first year.”

  He nodded some more. “Of course. We can retain it permanently if you like. I could just add a little ‘M. Coe’ beneath Sam’s signature block . . .”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think that will be necessary, Murray. At any rate it’s a trifle . . . ghoulish. Sam’s death isn’t exactly a secret; the public will grasp that we need to move on, and a year from now your name can be the sole byline.”

  “Understood.”

  Her expression a combined frown and smile, Maggie said, “There is one delicate issue that, uh . . . Jack, perhaps you’d best take it from here.”

  Coe turned to me, his thick-lensed glasses magnifying his eyes, turning cartoonist into cartoon.

  “Murray,” I said, “we’re going to have to include a clause that releases us from the contract, in its every particular, should what you did ever come out.”

  The big eyes under glass blinked. “What. . . ? What I . . . did?”

  I nodded, my manner nonchalant. “You see, Murray, we know all about the role you played in Sam’s death.”

  He sat up sudden and straight, a jack-in-the-box effect. “Role! I didn’t play any role in—”

  “Of course you did.” I sat forward and grinned at him obnoxiously. “You played the role you always played—Sam Fizer’s assistant.” Then I sat back and shrugged. “And we get it—we understand. We’re not sitting in judgment.”

  He was trembling now; it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad. “You’re . . . you’re mistaken. . . . You’re seriously mistaken. . . .”

  I grinned some more. “Murray! We don’t care about what you did. We neither approve nor disapprove. For us it’s strictly business. But we have to be protected should the police stumble onto the truth . . . not that I think that dimwitted dick Chandler ever will.”

  Coe was shaking his head, his manner desperate, the hat sliding onto the floor without him noticing. “Please . . . I don’t know what you think I did, but I didn’t. You’re making an awful mistake, and putting me in a terrible position.”

  I turned from him to Maggie. “Maybe you’d better take over for a while.”

  She nodded crisply, then she gave him a direct, firm look. “Murray, I don’t share Jack’s disdain for the police. I believe they may well put the pieces together, here; and they have already come up with a certain amount of evidence that confirms what I’ve suspected from the start.”

  “What. . . what did you suspect from the start?”

  “That Sam Fizer did commit suicide,” she said firmly. “And that you helped him.”

  He turned white as a ghost. But then he was a ghost, wasn’t he?

  “Sam’s behavior these last six months or so had been very uncharacteristic,” Maggie said. “Oh, he was outwardly his usual self-centered self. But his reckless behavior indicated something in his life had gone terribly wrong.”

  Rather timidly, Coe said, “Something bad—he and his wife broke up. Everyone knows that.”

  She smiled and shook her head, the red locks bouncing on the shoulders of the severe gray suit. “That’s the excuse everyone has for Sam’s reckless behavior—but why would a marriage breaking up explain his sudden love affair with high-stakes gambling? Or explain why his longtime feud with Hal Rapp had escalated to dizzying new highs? Or perhaps I should say lows.”

  He was shaking his head insistently. “Sam was mad at Hal because of Misty, because Hal had slept with her before casting her in that musical.”

  Maggie shrugged. “I’m sure that was part of it. But Jack met with Ray Alexander yesterday, and saw the doctored and forged strips that Sam created to try to ruin Rapp. I’m assuming you didn’t doctor those strips for Sam?”

  “No!”

  I said, “Murray didn’t do those forgeries, Maggie. They were too crude—only Fizer himself could have.”

  “Right,” she said, as if she should have known. “So why such harebrained behavior? I could think of only one possibility: illness. Impending fatal illness. So through Jack I asked the police to request a full autopsy, and the coroner . . . taking a closer look, second time around . . . found cancer.”

  “Sam’s organs,” I said, “were riddled with the stuff.”

  Coe shivered and swallowed. “Please. Some respect, please. I knew Sam was dying, but he never spoke of suicide. That’s just. . . just crazy’, a vital man like Sam. Anyway,
the evidence doesn’t support suicide. And besides, wasn’t there a second murder? Didn’t someone kill that Carmichael character, from Sam’s poker game?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Only it had nothing to do with Sam’s death. . . . Or actually, it did, but in an indirect way.”

  “I. . . I don’t follow. . .”

  “Tony Carmichael, alias Tony Carmine, was a big-time gambler, and he had overextended himself, in part due to debts incurred in that poker game that weren’t getting paid off. Someone above him made an executive decision to remove him, taking care of a problem while making an example.”

  Coe was shaking his head again, but slowly now, and the eyes were staring, not blinking. “How could you know this?”

  I grunted a laugh. “To give the devil his due, Captain Chandler got a lead to a defrocked underworld doctor with links to gamblers—you see, I wounded the guy when we had our little stairwell scuffle at the Brill Building. The coppers watched the doc’s place and nabbed the guy.”

  Maggie said, “But Jack knew from the start that the second murder was almost certainly unconnected to Sam’s suicide.”

  Nodding, I said, “Nobody in this case has any underworld connections except Tony himself. And maybe me, a little. Anyway, Tony’s killing was a professional job—shooter used a silencer on an automatic, not the kind of thing that, say, a cartoonist or a comedian would have access to, much less use.”

  “So,” Maggie said, “we’re back to the suicide.”

  He about fell off the chair. “But it wasn’t a suicide! You were there, both of you! You saw the evidence.”

  Maggie smiled patiently. “We saw the faked evidence, designed to implicate Hal Rapp in murder, and to take the onus of suicide off Sam Fizer.”

  “If Sam committed suicide,” Coe demanded indignantly, “how did he manage it? That police captain told me Sam had been drugged! Sam was asleep when that gun was fired!”

  “You should know,” I said. “You fired it.”

  He seemed to shrink back into the chair. If he’d been any whiter, he’d have been dead.

  “Sam Fizer was a terrible boss to Hal Rapp, those many years ago,” I said. “But Sam learned his lesson, and he was always good to you. He paid you well, and treated you like a son, and he even set up his will to guarantee that you would continue the strip.”

  “That. . . that much is true.”

  “But when Sam’s forgeries and doctored strips were exposed to his own peers—when instead of Hal Rapp being disgraced for sticking smut into the funnies, Sam Fizer faced disgrace for trying to smear a colleague, well, the only way out for a proud, insecure guy like Sam was suicide. He’d been kicked out of the cartoonist organization he’d helped form; in a matter of days, his shame would be on every front page in the country, coming out of every radio, jumping out from every television. He couldn’t face that.”

  Maggie said, “Sam was dying anyway—by hastening that process, he would avoid the public humiliation. Perhaps his old colleagues would even see fit to bury what he’d done with him, so he didn’t have to go out a disgraced man.”

  “And then Sam, that clever comic-strip plotter,” I said, “came up with a scheme. He would make his exit in a dramatic fashion, in a way that made him a victim, and not just any victim: a murder victim. And the murderer? Hal Rapp, natch.”

  Coe looked from Maggie to me and back again, as if one of us had to be reasonable. “This is really . . . it’s not fair. It’s just a bunch of preposterous presumptions pulled out of thin air.”

  Maybe so, but he didn’t make a move to leave.

  “I have a hunch,” I said, “that Sam Fizer knew damn well you were ‘secretly’ assisting Hal Rapp on Tall Paul, You were a spy for Sam, weren’t you? Keeping an eye on his nemesis? And then, when Sam came up with this ingenious scheme to turn his own suicide into a murder committed by his worst enemy, you—the only person with access to both suites—were in a perfect position to lift that pen, with Rapp’s fingerprints, and plant it in Fizer’s studio.”

  He swallowed.

  “It was a two-man job,” I said. “Sam invited Rapp over that afternoon to help set him up—so you could tell the police you saw Rapp in there, hours before the murder. And I have no doubt that Fizer signed his own suicide note. But Rapp told us that Fizer wasn’t much of a letterer—you were the one who assured us and the police that Fizer could do his own lettering. Truth is, he wasn’t up to the job. You even had to assist on the suicide note. Where did the sedatives come from?”

  “I. . . I use sleeping pills, sometimes,” he said. He looked even smaller now, lost in the chair.

  “So Sam went to sleep there at his drawing board,” Maggie said, “and somehow you found the terrible courage to use the gun that Sam had bought. . . . He bought it six months ago, right after he learned he was dying and began contemplating the deed you eventually helped him with.”

  “You must’ve worn a glove,” I said, double-teaming him, “and disposed of it before going upstairs to Rapp’s to announce the suicide you’d ‘found.’ Or maybe you didn’t wear a glove—I don’t imagine these thickheaded cops thought to do a paraffin test on you.”

  “I. . . I wore a glove.”

  Maggie gazed at him with genuine sympathy. “It must have been horrible.”

  Coe stared at Maggie, but was looking through her. “It was, Horrible. Hardest thing I ever did. But Sam didn’t feel it. He was asleep. It put an end to his pain, and he’d grown so miserable. . . . Sam really loved that stupid woman, that floozy Misty. She broke his heart, right after he’d found out he was dying. He didn’t tell her, of course, because then she’d have stayed around and pretended to love him just to get his money. She has a big surprise coming when she sees his will—she’s out, she’s gone, the horrible witch.”

  Maggie leaned forward and asked, “Murray, why would you help frame Hal Rapp? Hadn’t Hal always been good to you? You were working for him, on the side, after all?”

  For a moment he sat expressionless. Then that nondescript face of his twisted into a mask of contempt. “He’s a monster. . . . Rapp’s an utter monster, don’t you know that? When I was first working for him, he got fresh with my wife. More than just. . . . fresh. He was my boss, and she demanded I confront him about it, and I just couldn’t. . . . It was the Depression, I needed the money, we needed the money. My marriage lasted for a long while after that, but it was never the same. My wife still loved me, I think, even the day she left me. But she’d stopped respecting me, long ago. That’s what Hal Rapp took from me.”

  There was warmth in Maggie’s voice: “You were just helping Sam. Assisting him, like you always had, loyally.”

  “Yes.” He stared blankly straight ahead. “I would never hurt him. He was like a father to me.”

  There was no warmth in my voice: “You said that before, Murray. Trouble is, Sam didn’t squeeze the trigger, you did. You were right the first time—it was a murder. And you committed it.”

  Eyes, full of rage and denial and pain, flared big behind the exaggeration of the thick lenses. “But it was Sam’s idea! It was his plan!”

  “I thought you guys worked the stories out together,” I said, but now I was starting to feel sorry for the little bastard myself. “For Christ’s sake, how much more do you need?”

  Coe looked at me, confused. “What?”

  But I wasn’t talking to him.

  Captain Chandler and Sergeant Jeffords, a colored plainclothes officer, came in through the connecting space between the office and the gym, where Chandler had been listening as a tape recorder picked up the conversations from a microphone planted on Maggie’s desk between those neatly stacked piles.

  Murray Coe made no protest; he knew he’d been had. He just sort of collapsed in on himself, looking tiny and deflated. Jeffords, a big guy, cuffed the little guy’s hands behind his back and trooped him out past Bryce, who was watching with horrified eyes, a splayed hand covering his mouth.

  Captain Chandler, hands on hi
s hips, fedora pushed back on his head, said to me, “ ‘Dimwitted dick,’ am I? ‘Thickheaded cops’?”

  I grinned up at him. “You can’t deny me the occasional small pleasure.”

  “What was that nonsense about Tony Carmine getting shot ‘cause he was overextended with his bosses, and me staking out an underworld doctor, and hauling in the guy you shot?”

  “That was color. Artistic license, we call it in the comics business.”

  His eyebrows climbed. “Yours should be revoked. You’re right about that silencer, though—that should have told me that the Carmine kill had nothing to do with Fizer’s murder.”

  “Yeah. It should have.”

  “But Carmine’s murder isn’t solved!”

  I shrugged. “Maggie and I cracked this one. Shouldn’t the Homicide Bureau do some of the work?”

  He tried not to smile, as he headed back into the gym, where a technician waited with the tape recorder.

  Maggie was still seated behind her desk, looking a little dazed.

  “You okay, boss?”

  “I can’t help feeling sorry for Murray.”

  I smirked. “Feel sorry for us—we don’t have anybody to draw Mug O’Malley now.”

  She smiled at me rather sadly. “You’re all heart, Jack.”

  “You ever think maybe it was a murder? Not just legally, not just technically a murder, but Murray Coe wanting to get out from under Sam Fizer’s thumb, and do the strip himself? Be in charge for a change?”

  She shook her head. “No. I think he was doing Sam a favor.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. That Fizer was something, huh? Even had to have his own damn suicide ghosted.”

  “True,” Maggie said. Her sigh took a long time. “But it was Murray Coe who signed the murder.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  OPENING NIGHT, CASE CLOSED . . .

  The audience at the opening of a Broadway show is anything but representative. Many attendees are relatives of the thirty performers in the company, or of the dozen stagehands or the unit manager or press agent or director or assistant director or author or . . . you get the point.