Seduction of the Innocent (Hard Case Crime)

by Collins, Max Allan

  She said, “I understand he’s written, or anyway is writing, an opening statement that he’s quite proud of.”

  “I have no doubt it will be a masterpiece. But once he’s given his golden spiel, he’ll have to answer questions, and he won’t be prepared for that. I promise you.”

  “He’s a very intelligent man.”

  “And an excitable boy. I saw him shortly before I phoned you this afternoon, Sylvia. He’s hopped up and strung out, as we hip Village types put it. My guess is he’s popping Dexies like they were Lifesavers. And they’re not. Life savers.”

  She nodded, but said nothing. Patient/doctor thing again.

  I leaned forward, took advantage of the nice rapport we’d established. “Look. I’m not asking for you to reveal anything about Bob. Frankly, I think I already understand him perfectly. His father made him feel worthless, and now he’s beating his dead dad at his own game, the funny-book business. Then this Doc Frederick comes along, playing disapproving Daddy again, not just where Bob’s concerned but everybody in America, which Bob is resentful as hell about. Pissed-off is the psychological term, in case you skipped class that day.”

  Her chin lifted, and her eyes were no longer hooded. “That wasn’t bad. Maybe you should take night school and join my profession.”

  “Maybe. I do some of my best work with a couch.” I gave her half a smile and she gave me the other half.

  “So you’d like me,” she said, “to advise Mr. Price not to testify.”

  I flipped a hand. “He volunteered. He can back out the same way. He can give a statement to the press saying he did not feel he could get a fair hearing in that kind of witch-hunt atmosphere, and just walk.”

  She was thinking.

  “Well?” I asked.

  She sighed. “I agree with you. I know what lousy shape Bob is in. He didn’t get those pills from me, by the way. I’m not a medical doctor, remember.”

  “I remember. So will you advise him to bail out?”

  Her eyes, her smile, were unfathomably sad. “Jack, I have. I already have.”

  Shit.

  “I was afraid of that,” I said. This time I sighed. “He is strong-headed. Would you call him, and give it one last try?”

  “Certainly. I’m happy to. But I don’t hold out much hope. Was there...anything else?”

  She just might have been fishing for a date—hey, I am pretty cute—but then I recalled Maggie’s other agenda.

  “Sylvia, I need to ask you about another patient of yours.”

  This time her smile wasn’t at all amused. She folded her arms. “Really, Jack? Maybe I should hand my notes over to you on all of my patients.”

  “Just Will Allison.”

  Her head moved to one side, slightly, and she frowned in thought; the arc of platinum hair covered her face slightly. “Will?”

  “Yeah. That kid really lost his head the other night at the Strip Joint. The Barray Soiree?”

  Her expression softened but her eyes remained sharp. “Oh. Yes. I saw that.”

  “Listen, I’ve been around violence. I was an MP during the war. I thought there was edge in that kid’s attitude. I had the weird feeling, if he hadn’t been camera-shy, he might have slugged that Lehman character, and maybe Barray, too.”

  “...What do you want to know?”

  “Would he do something violent like that? Could he? More generally, does the boy have mental problems that make him a bad risk for us?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’re thinking of taking him on as a cartoonist for Starr?”

  “Very preliminary thinking, but yeah. What do you say?”

  “I really can’t say, Jack.”

  I winked at her. “Which translates as, the kid’s screwed up. A bad risk.”

  “I didn’t say that!” She touched her forehead. “Jack, completely off the record...nothing you can hold me to...I will tell you I think Will’s just a young, insecure kid, messed up but no worse, or more dangerous, than any other typical young guy starting out in a tough field. You can report that to Maggie Starr, but I won’t put it in writing.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  But something she’d said nudged me: I won’t put it in writing.

  “Listen, what’s your opinion of Dr. Werner Frederick? He isn’t your patient. That you can tell me.”

  Still, she thought for a moment. The waitress came over and refilled Sylvia’s coffee. The girl asked me indifferently if I wanted another Coke and I said I didn’t. I asked her how she liked that Craze comic book she was reading and she said it was okay. But she quickly returned to it like a seminary student reading “The Song of Solomon.”

  That had given Sylvia enough time to think, and she said, very evenly, “I am not a fan of Dr. Frederick’s work on juvenile delinquency as it relates to comic books.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d rather not say anything negative about a man who I otherwise admire. He spends much of his time working with underprivileged children, and his examination of the effects of segregation upon Negro youth is brave work, important work.”

  “Have you ever met him?”

  “No. I would like to. I might enjoy arguing the case for comic books in child development.”

  “Well, I’d like to ask you to table that particular discussion.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you might be working with Dr. Frederick.”

  She straightened and her smile was unguardedly enthusiastic. “Really? How is that, Jack?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Syl—right after I take you out for supper. How does El Chico sound?”

  It sounded fine. But it wasn’t until much later when we’d necked on her couch in her hundred-buck apartment for maybe half an hour that I sprung the idea on her of ghosting the doc’s advice column.

  I said I did some of my best work on couches.

  The morning was overcast and cold, not terrible weather but hardly the best spring might offer Manhattan. I’d left the top up on my snazzy little white Kaiser-Darrin when I escorted Bob Price to the federal courthouse at Foley Square. At the Entertaining Funnies office on Lafayette Street, his partner Hal Feldman declined to come along.

  “I’ve tried to talk him out of testifying,” Feldman had said. He looked like a cop who’d been trying for hours to talk a jumper in off a ledge. “He won’t hear it.”

  “I know,” I said. “I tried, Maggie tried, even his shrink tried.”

  “Stubborn jackass,” he said, his Brooklyn-tinged baritone ragged. “Well, I can’t watch it. I don’t go to public executions. Somebody oughta shoot that damn Dr. Frederick.”

  Normally Hal was a dapper guy, but this morning his tailored blue suit seemed rumpled, his John Garfield-ish mug hadn’t seen a razor yet, and his wavy dark hair was like a squirmy nest of black snakes. In his mid-twenties, Feldman clearly had been sitting up all night. With a sick friend, as it turned out.

  He sighed, grinned wearily, clasped my shoulder. “I’m just glad Bob’s got you to babysit him now, Jack.”

  “Happy to, Hal. Just so everybody understands I don’t change diapers.” I checked my watch. “We ought to head out.”

  The editor shook his head. “He’s still working on that goddamn opening statement.”

  I frowned. “Hell, I thought sure he’d be finished by now. Hasn’t he been working on it for days?”

  “More like weeks.” Feldman lighted up a Camel. His eyes were bloodshot. “All night, he’s been alternating NoDoz and that diet medication of his.”

  “Dexedrine, you mean?”

  Feldman nodded wearily. “He’s eager to go down there, Jack, into that lions’ den, can you buy it? Thinks he’s doing the right thing, the noble thing. Says he’s a friendly witness, and certainly these senators, as good patriotic Americans, will wanna do what’s right, too. You know, listen to reason.”

  “That isn’t the way things work in real life.”

  “Jesus,” Feldman said, rolling his eyes, “that ain’t even t
he way it works in our comic books.”

  Not surprisingly, I’d found Bob Price at his desk, typing away, wadded balls of discarded typewriter paper overflowing his trash can, cigarette stubs overflowing his ashtray, desktop littered with empty paper coffee cups.

  “Time, Bob,” I said.

  Fingers flying at the typewriter keys, he said, “Just a second. Just a second.”

  I dragged him out of his office and into the waiting arms of the unshaven Feldman, who had gotten his partner in front of a mirror with an electric razor, and helped him into a clean suit. Price was like a prospective groom who’d tied one on the night before, and had to be pieced and patched together for the big ceremony.

  Which made me the ring bearer, I guess.

  At least we weren’t late. In fact, we were fifteen minutes early, and we had to move through a group of reporters, their cameras and notepads at the ready, before we could get past the Grecian columns that flanked the entry. Somehow Harry Barray had wrangled a press pass, though if the big blond disc jockey with the puffy features was a reporter, I was J. Edgar Hoover.

  But Barray was the only member of the press contingent who recognized the comic book publisher, or at least the only one who accosted Price with any pre-hearing questions, shoving a microphone in his face and saying, “Good morning, Bob. Are you anticipating any trouble inside?”

  In Barray’s defense, this was hardly a hostile question, but Price snapped at him like a bulldog on a short leash.

  “Any trouble I get is the fault of people like you,” Price said, eyes bulging, spittle flying, “who trample the rights of good Americans to read and write what they please! Comic book readers are citizens, too, you know!”

  Barray backed away, looking damn near scared. I could hardly blame him.

  Inside the courthouse, where footsteps echoed like one gunshot after another, Price grinned at me, his eyes glittering behind his round-lensed dark-framed glasses.

  “See, Jack? I set that character straight, didn’t I? Show guys like that the error of their ways, and they’ll come around. They will come around.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “You scared the shit out of Barray. He’ll tell his listeners you behaved like a maniac.”

  He blinked, eyes owlish behind the lenses. “Why would he do that?”

  I ignored that absurdity and instead said, “You still have time to head out a side door. I’ll go in and say you were too sick to testify.”

  His cheeks reddened—he might have been blushing, but he wasn’t. “Goddamnit, Jack, I want to testify! This is my big chance!”

  “Well, ease off. Stay calm and don’t look and act like a monster that jumped out of one of your funny books.”

  That threw him, even hurt him a little, but he said nothing, and I escorted him by the arm into Room 110, where the Kefauver crime hearings had first been held, till the public interest sent them into larger quarters upstairs.

  We found our way into the good-sized chamber where burnished oak rode the walls and floors and even the furniture. Reserved seats awaited us at the front of the ten-row spectator section at left. At a long central bench four congressmen (including Senator Estes Kefauver himself) were taking their seats. The room was cool and they left their suit coats on as they settled in.

  Near their bench was an astonishing display that disrupted the courtroom’s austerity in an explosion of garish colors and grotesque images. On easels were two dozen blow-ups of full-color comic-book covers: Tales from the Vault, Fighting Crime, Weird Fantastic Science, Suspense Crime Stories, Weird Terror, True Criminals, Beware!, and more. Starring in these poster-size exhibits were walking corpses, machine-gunning gangsters, rampaging werewolves, drooling space creatures, and leggy gun molls showing off their .38 revolvers and heaving “headlights.”

  Possibly also 38s, come to think of it.

  I pointed out this display to Price.

  “You’re screwed,” I whispered.

  He glanced at the array of covers—potentially the most damaging witnesses of all, and most of them EF publications—and shrugged as if to say, “So what?”

  The witness table sat before the bench but at a forty-five degree angle, so that the spectators could also view the testimony. The witness chair was angled to prevent eye contact between those testifying and those questioning (and, for that matter, those observing). A trio of stenographers were positioned nearby, one man, two women.

  On both the witness table and bench were arrays of microphones with a nest of heavy cables on the floor, snaking behind the spectator seating, where (up on a platform) TV and newsreel men, their cameras as big as robots in a science-fiction film, were waiting for the fun to begin. As the seats around and behind us quickly filled in, I was reminded of the bustling tension you encountered on a movie set.

  Senator Kefauver was the draw here—his crime hearings had been a big hit on TV, making a star out of him (and the sweating, twitching manicured hands of camera-shy witness, gangster Frank Calabria). But the man in charge was New Jersey Senator Robert C. Hendrickson.

  So it was Chairman Hendrickson who, at 10 A.M., spoke into the microphone and called the proceedings to order. He was a straight-laced type, mustached, bespectacled and in his mid-fifties, his thinning, silver hair combed slickly back on a bucket head. He had the humorless demeanor of a high school principal in a Henry Aldrich movie.

  “Today and tomorrow,” he began lugubriously, “the United States Subcommittee on Investigating Juvenile Delinquency is going into the problem of comic books...”

  So, they’d already decided it was a problem.

  “...illustrating stories depicting crime or dealing with horror and sadism.”

  To be fair, the committee chairman did claim that their work was not as a board of censorship.

  “We want to determine what damage, if any,” Hendrickson declared, “is being done to our children’s minds by certain types of publications.”

  First up was not a witness, but a slide show of comic-book panels that alternately depicted scenes of blood-spattered horror or bullet-spraying crime, with occasional “headlights” panels tossed in. Some images were genuinely disturbing, as when a hypo wielded by a madman seemed poised to plunge into the wide-open eye of a lovely young woman. This stuff made the array of violent covers on those looming easels look like kid’s stuff.

  Which of course was the problem—the assumption by these stuffed shirts that only little kids read these comic books. Hell, the EF line was clearly for teenagers and adults. Despite the vivid, detailed horrors of the artwork, you couldn’t tell what was going on if you didn’t read the captions and speech balloons. Feldman was a guy who seemed to be getting paid by the word.

  No kid under eleven would be able to read this copy-heavy stuff, much less understand it. And those older kids who could read it needed to be smart. You know—literate.

  But that wasn’t touched on, not at all. Committee executive director Richard Clendenen—lean, middle-aged, with a square jaw right out of an Americana superhero comic book —narrated the slide show with unctuous pre-judgement: “Typically, these comic books portray almost all kinds of crime, committed through extremely cruel, sadistic and punitive acts.”

  At several points, Clendenen singled out particularly violent, disturbing panels as prime examples of the content of comic books published by Entertaining Funnies.

  “I mention this,” Clendenen said, “because the publisher of that firm will be appearing before this committee later this morning.”

  The implication was that Price had been summoned, when of course he had volunteered.

  Following the slide presentation, various documents were introduced as exhibits from assorted government agencies, as well as newspaper and magazine articles criticizing comic books and linking them to juvenile delinquency—the majority written by one Dr. Werner Frederick.

  Then the first witness was called, a mental health expert with New York’s so-called “Family Court.” Surprisingly, he did not
join in on the anti-comics theme. Some of his colleagues (he said) considered certain comic books potentially worthy of “stronger criticism,” while others found them essentially harmless.

  The second witness was a representative of a comic-book association of publishers, printers and distributors that had attempted, without any particular success, to provide the comics business with a self-monitoring group like Hollywood’s Breen Office. This testimony was long-winded and flip-flopped between pandering to the panel, and defending comics as “a great medium.”

  But it managed to go on long enough that Bob Price— scheduled for the morning—got bumped to the afternoon. I hauled him off to a deli for lunch, and he had a sandwich and a Coke, just like me. But I passed on dessert—Price’s choice, more Dexies and NoDoz, killed what was left of my appetite.

  “You should lay off that stuff,” I said.

  “If I do, I’ll fall asleep up there.”

  “How long has it been, Bob, since you had a decent night’s sleep?”

  “...What day is it?”

  The sky was almost black as we walked back. Price didn’t seem to notice. He was smiling. He had bounce in his step.

  “I can’t wait to get up there,” he said, raising victory fists to his paunch.

  “Just stay cool,” I said.

  “You bet, boy. You bet.”

  But his eyes were as wild as a zombie’s on an EF cover.

  After lunch, however, Price was not (as we both had expected) the first witness up.

  Dr. Werner Frederick was.

  With his background as a forensic psychiatrist for the city, the doc was an old hand at testifying—he knew it was theater, and had dressed for the occasion: a white jacket over a white shirt with a simple black necktie. As if he’d just arrived from the lab, where he’d found a cure for cancer or, better yet, comic books.

  He even turned his chair to the right, a little, so he could face the committee.

  Initially he was asked to describe his new book Ravage the Lambs, a softball question if ever there was one. He replied by detailing the work with troubled children and adolescents that had gone into this “sober, painstaking, laborious clinical study.”