We smiled at each other, and held hands like kids in love; once Cynthia glanced back at us.
She seemed vaguely sad.
13
Gino’s on Rush Street was half a flight down off the sidewalk. Once inside, low-ceilinged interconnecting rooms went on forever, rooms whose walls were lined with graffiti and graffiti-carved wooden booths, and so full of people that the place managed to seem simultaneously claustrophobic and sprawling. And also bustling, this Friday night. The smell of tomato sauce in the air was so rich you could gain weight breathing, and it was intermingled with cigarette smoke so thick you could also get a side dish of emphysema. Gino’s was one of half a dozen places in Chicago that claimed to be the originator of Chicago-style, deep-dish pizza; I didn’t know if their claim was the legitimate one or not, but I did know that I hadn’t made a visit to Chicago in the last twenty years without stopping in to sample the evidence.
This was Kathy Wickman’s first time at Gino’s. In gray slacks and a pink Norma Kamali top with padded shoulders, she had a ’40s look appropriate to her position as editor of a magazine called Noir-and for the era when Gino’s had apparently last been redecorated. I guided her by the arm to the narrow main aisle, where I then had to ease her out in front of me, as side-by-side passage was out of the question. We had our work cut out for us, trailing a red-haired, harried, red-aproned middle-aged waitress who went barreling down the labyrinth, and Kathy glanced back with wide eyes and a frenzied smile that questioned my sanity in bringing her here.
Finally we were in a little booth, facing each other, and she glanced at the carvings in the wall next to her-saying, among other things, ComicCon ‘84, Spock Lives and Ed loves Carol-and said, “So this is your idea of ‘atmosphere’?”
“It’s a question of semantics.”
With a good-natured smirk, she said, “It’s a question of building code, is more like it.”
“Hey, this place is Chicago. Fast and obnoxious and fattening. Also, fun.”
“I thought you didn’t like big cities.”
“I like big cities fine. I even like New York. But I also like pretending I don’t when New Yorkers are around.”
“Still, you obviously like Chicago better than New York City.”
“That’s probably only because I know Chicago better. I’ve been coming in here once or twice a year since I was a high-school kid. My kind of town.”
“You and Sinatra. And this is your kind of town’s kind of place, huh. What else do you do in the big city for fun?”
“I’ll show you. We’ll take a tour that’ll beat that Crime bus all silly. We’ll take a cab down to Old Town, after we eat, and walk around and end up at Second City.”
Her face lit up. “Don’t you need reservations way in advance for that?”
“I know a guy in the cast; called him this afternoon and he got us in.”
“That’s great! I always wanted to see Second City.”
“It’s always a good show-they practically invented improv comedy. I’ve followed ’em for years.”
“You’re spoiling your small-town image for me, Mal.”
“Really? I was hoping my books didn’t project the typical small-town image-you know, the notion that Iowa was one big cornfield and a general store with a couple old guys playing checkers and chewing tobacco out front.”
She smiled with her eyes. “I think your novels do, to an extent, knock down that stereotype. But the small-town ambiance comes through….”
“Ambiance. Is that French?”
“Okay, okay-so I’m a pretentious little magazine editor… and don’t ask whether it’s me or the magazine that’s little, okay? But reading a story set in Port City, Iowa, is different than reading a story set in New York or L.A. or Chicago. Like John D. MacDonald doing Florida. So do me a favor and promise not to do any stories set in a big city; stick with your small-town settings.”
“I promise,” I said.
The waitress returned for our order and I asked for a small pepperoni and a couple of Italian salads and a couple of beers.
“Anyway,” Kathy said, “I guess your fair-to-middling Chicago savvy is supposed to fool me into accepting this basement as a restaurant, and these subway walls as atmosphere.”
“Are you really put off by this place?”
Wry grin #459. “Not at all. I love it, actually. It’s just not my idea of atmosphere. I think the word is more like… ambiance.”
Our beers arrived just in time for us to toast the joint.
“Spoken like a true editor of Noir magazine,” I said.
Her expression shifted; the shadow of the wry smile remained, but she was suddenly, vaguely, somber.
“I ran into my publisher,” she said, “when I was on my way down to meet you in the lobby, for dinner.”
“I ran into him, too. I punched him in the stomach, actually.”
She nearly did a spit-take; she said, “No fooling?”
“Hey, I’m not proud of it, really. I don’t go around punching people.”
Revving up the wry smile again, she said, “Why not? Gat Garson did.”
“Gat Garson’s a fun character in a book. But a less than sterling role model.”
“What happened between you and Gregg, anyway?”
“We just did some name calling, followed by an attempt to bury the hatchet-in each other’s heads. The usual. What was your conversation with him like?”
She paused, then said, “He stopped me in the hall and invited me up to a cocktail party in his room tonight.”
“When?”
“The ’con’s showing the first movie version of The Maltese Falcon at midnight, the 1931 version with Ricardo Cortez, and Gregg’s never seen it, so he’s rounding some people up to go and then after go back to his room for expensive nightcaps.”
“You’re sure you’re not the only one invited?”
She laughed, a little. “Gregg doesn’t have the courage to come on to me, not overtly. He likes to play little games. He’s into a more paternal trip, actually.”
“That’d make it incest.”
“No, really. Those little passes he makes, if I took him up on one of ’em, he’d fold up like a folding chair. He’s married, you know-his wife’s ill and he treats her like a princess. His one redeeming trait, it would seem. I’d also guess he’s faithful to her.”
“Doesn’t sound like the Gregg Gorman I know and love to hate.”
“Nobody’s perfect, Mal, and nobody’s perfectly rotten, either. Even Gregg. Of course, I could be wrong about his being a faithful hubby. Still, I don’t think he’d fool with me; I’m too valuable to him-Noir’s a feather in his cap, and, not to sound too very egotistical, I am Noir. And, as Gregg might say, you don’t defecate where you dine.”
“That’s not exactly how he’d put it.”
“True. But, shit, I’m much more elegant than Gregg.”
This time I smiled wryly, and we toasted beer glasses again.
“He also warned me,” she said guardedly, “about hanging out with you. He said he’d prefer it if I didn’t.”
“Is that how he put it?”
“Not exactly. That’s the elegant version. But he says you’re just using me.”
“I’d kind of like to, at that.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, now, Mal. Here are our salads.”
We began eating, and I said, “What did he mean by that, exactly?”
“What?”
“What did he mean, I’m ‘using’ you?”
“Oh! To get at him.”
“To get at him, how?”
“He said you’re trying to pin something on him. That’s all he said.” She shrugged and returned to her salad.
“He means Roscoe’s murder,” I said.
She looked up from her salad, gave me a sharp, stunned look. “Murder?”
I sighed and poked at my salad. “Yeah. Murder.”
And I told her about it.
“Hell!” she said. �
��You’re playing detective, aren’t you? Just like your books…”
“Oh, please, don’t start.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everybody and his duck thinks I’m poking around Roscoe’s death looking for a book to write. That isn’t it at all.”
“What is it, then?”
“Come on, Kathy-Roscoe Kane was my friend. He was… more than that. He was… well, as other people have put it… my mentor.”
“He was your hero.”
“Yeah. He was my hero.”
“And a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
“Bullshit. If the assistant coroner would’ve listened to me, and brought the cops in, I’d’ve done a fast fade by now. You think murder’s my idea of a good time? God!”
Eyeing me with poorly hidden suspicion, fork in her salad jabbing at the side of the bowl, missing the few remaining shreds of lettuce entirely, she said, “Are you using me? Or planning to use me, to spy on Gorman or something?”
“It hadn’t even occurred to me.”
“Good.”
“Though it isn’t a bad idea.”
She smiled in spite of herself; one of her rare open-mouth smiles that showed a little too much gum, like Norma Jean Baker before she and Hollywood conspired to invent Marilyn Monroe.
“You,” she said, “are incorrigible.”
I shrugged. “Then don’t incorrige me.”
She smiled some more, but her smile was back to its usual wry-pixie self, and she shook her head and pushed her now-empty salad bowl aside. She said, “If you want some help, I might give it to you.”
“I’ll give it some thought. If I think of something worthwhile, I might ask.”
“I might answer. But you got to promise me something…”
“Okay.”
“Promise me you won’t turn this into a book.”
“All right.”
The pizza came, steaming hot and smelling very, very good. Kathy’d never had Chicago-style pizza before-except the pale shadow of a Pizza Hut variety-and she was an instant convert. Saucy, cheesy, with a pastrylike sweet crust, Gino’s pizza was an Italian-American atonement for the Mafia.
And nearly as fatal: one small pizza had stuffed us both and we sat and sipped a second beer, each sip painful.
“I never ate so much in my life,” Kathy said.
“You’ll be over it in a week,” I said. “Kathy, is something bothering you besides a full stomach?”
She sighed, nodded; said, “You don’t, uh… really suspect Gregg of…” She couldn’t say it.
I smiled. “The editor of a magazine devoted to fictional crime and violence, and you can’t say that simple word found in so many titles of the books you review: murder.”
She shivered. “Fantasy’s one thing… this is quite apart. Very disturbing.”
“Finding Roscoe’s body was no picnic, either.”
“Do you? Suspect Gregg, I mean?”
“I suspect him of something. Not murder-not yet, anyway.”
“What do you suspect him of?”
“Fraud.”
“How so?”
“The Hammett book. I think it’s a hoax.”
“You can’t be serious….”
“Dead. I think it was ghosted. Probably very cleverly, very well-ghosted. But ghosted.”
“Who by, for heaven’s sake?”
“There’s a couple of possibilities. Tim Culver’s the obvious suspect-he’s the modern ‘prime proponent’ of the Hammett style. His live-in-lady, Cynthia Crystal, had access to the Hammett papers-maybe including other fragments that might’ve proved useful. Also, Cynthia’s a fine writer, with respect for Hammett’s work-her work bears his influence, in a way. She’s a candidate for ghost herself. Or her and Culver together…”
“So you think one, or both, of them-”
“No. I think it was somebody else.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think I’d think it’d be?”
She thought. “You can’t be serious!”
“You said that before.”
“Surely you don’t suspect…”
“I surely do,” I said. “I think Roscoe Kane ghosted The Secret Emperor by Dashiell Hammett.”
She kept shaking her head, finding this harder to swallow than another bite of Gino’s pizza. “But-was Kane a good enough writer to mimic Hammett, of all people, and get away with it?”
I nodded. “Yes. Few people know that, but yes, he was. He was that good a writer.”
“And you think this had something to do with why Roscoe was…”
“Killed. Most likely. This is a big scam, Kathy. Hundreds of thousands of dollars involved, at the minimum.”
The waitress brought our check.
Kathy looked at me almost mockingly, wagging her head; the long brown hair moved in waves. “But you don’t know this for a fact. It may very well be an authentic unpublished Hammett novel; if it’s a fake, it’s fooled all the experts who’ve come in contact with it.”
“So did the Hitler diaries, till the right experts came along.”
She looked at me thoughtfully. “Think you could tell the difference, if you got hold of a copy?”
“I might be one of the few people familiar enough with both Roscoe Kane’s work and Hammett’s to nail it down, yes. Why?”
She shrugged facially. “Just wondering. Shall we go? Old Town’s not getting any younger, you know.”
“True,” I admitted. I left the money on the table and we rose from the booth and slowly, weighted down by the pizza, made our way through the catacombs of Gino’s and up the stairs and onto Rush Street.
“We’ll catch a cab down at the corner,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulder. The evening was chilly, but the neons of Rush Street seemed to warm it. Chicago was a terrific place.
A hand squeezed round my arm and it wasn’t Kathy’s.
I looked back and saw a burly guy about forty in a blue quilted jacket, a guy who looked like he’d been hit in the face long ago with a bag of nickels and had healed improperly; he was smiling at me with false, white teeth. He had a gray, balding butch that looked like a dying lawn; his eyes were a similar gray and deader-looking than his hair.
And he was hurting my arm.
“What do you want?” I said, trying to sound angry rather than scared.
He didn’t say anything; he just proceeded to drag me along with him.
Kathy, speechless, was rushing along after us.
Before I could think of anything clever to say or bold to do, the guy had dragged me across traffic into the alley opposite, where two more guys waited. One of them, a stocky guy in a cowhide jacket, had hippie-length hair, only a love child he wasn’t; the other, a much younger guy in an AC/DC sweatshirt, with pimples on his neck and shorter long hair, grabbed Kathy. Just a few feet inside the mouth of the alley, against the wall, he held a hand over her mouth and put an arm around her waist and she kicked and struggled but it didn’t do her much good. A few yards away, people strolled by on the sidewalk, not noticing the fun and games in the dark alley nearby. Many were nibbling chocolate chip cookies purchased at the Mrs. Fields Cookies shop next to the alleyway.
As for me, I was about to toss mine. I was in the process of getting thrown against a brick wall and having a fist buried in my stomach by the guy who’d dragged me here, a couple of seconds, a couple of lifetimes, ago. I fell to my knees and, like they say at Gino’s, one Chicago-style pizza, coming right up.
“Go back to the farm, smart-ass,” said the guy who’d hit me. He had a voice as harsh as the gravel my hands were touching. I grabbed up a handful and tossed it at him and he went blind, for just a moment-long enough for me to throw a fist up into his groin and double him over.
And I got up on my feet and hit him on the side of the head with everything I had, which was enough, because he went down into what used to be my pizza.
That left the other two guys, and feeling brave and cocksure from my
below-the-belt victory over the one in the quilted jacket, I went after the stocky guy in the cowhide, who had been standing near the mouth of the alley opposite the guy clutching Kathy, watching in case anybody tried to get involved (in Chicago?). I dove at him and he swatted me like a fly, over into some garbage cans.
I hit hard, only it sounded worse than it felt, and I saw Kathy’s eyes get even wider and more frightened, and the stocky guy came after me with a nasty smile and two outstretched arms that weren’t planning to hug me, at least not in any affectionate way. I reached for something and my hand found the handle of a garbage can lid. I smacked him in the chest with it, like Prince Valiant using his shield on a barbarian. He went back on his ass, but sprang right up-and into my second roundhouse swing of the garbage can lid, which his face put a nice dent in.
He went down and out.
I turned and looked at the kid holding Kathy; I was splattered with blood and garbage and former pizza, and I had the dented garbage can lid in my hand and must’ve looked meaner than I thought, because he let go of her and ran.
“Let’s get the cops!” Kathy said.
I reached down and pulled the wallet out of the stocky guy’s pocket and checked his ID; he had a couple of business cards, and I took one of them.
Kathy was holding onto my arm now, and I grinned at her. “Was it me that said Gat Garson wasn’t a good role model?”
She had hysteria in her eyes. “Didn’t you hear me? Let’s get the damn cops!”
“What, and lose you your job?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I pointed at the two unconscious men.
“Haven’t you ever seen angels before?”
She didn’t know what I was talking about, but the confusion helped; we were in the first passing cab before she knew it.
14
We never did make it to Old Town that Friday night; we didn’t get to use those coveted reservations at Second City. I was bloody and just generally a mess, and Kathy was more or less hysterical herself, so we took the cab back to the hotel and ended up in my room. I was sorry we were going to miss North Wells Street and the funky shops and the good restaurants and the great show at Second City; but not sorry that I was alone in my room with Kathy Wickman.
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