Seduction of the Innocent (Hard Case Crime)

by Collins, Max Allan

  Chandler said, “When was this?”

  “I logged it. I can check. I was on till midnight, so it had to be before that.”

  The timing should have been crucial, but I wasn’t sure it was. After all, if the ice trick—whether cubes or block— really had screwed up time of death, the notion of anybody needing, or having, an alibi became problematic to say the least.

  Chandler asked, “Did you get the kid’s name?”

  He nodded. “Ennis Williams.”

  Chandler glanced at me and I nodded.

  “He gave us an address, too,” Griffin said. “Harlem someplace. I can get that for you, too.”

  “Sounds like he was cooperative,” I said. “Before, you said he was a handful.”

  Griffin shifted on the edge of the couch, stopped turning the hat in his hands. “Yeah, funny thing—he was fine with answering questions, but he got worked up when we wouldn’t let him see Frederick.”

  “Did he say why he wanted to see the doctor?”

  “That’s the funny thing. He said he wanted to apologize! Apologize for what?”

  Again Chandler glanced at me. Did we have a murder suspect, or a kid who regretted waving a knife around at the clinic?

  “Then there’s this other guy,” Griffin said, “but it wasn’t last night. It was night before last. That was a full-blown incident, lemme tell you.”

  “So tell me,” Chandler said.

  “Dr. Frederick called me, or anyway my office. I wasn’t on that evening. One of my guys, Ron Matthews? Had to go up there to the doc’s suite where this wild man was pounding on the door. My guy Ron says this character was seven sheets to the wind, yelling about ‘killing that lousy bastard,’ and when Ron tried to walk him away from there, started shoving him. The son of a bitch took a swing at Ron.”

  “This ‘son of a bitch,’” I said. “Did you call the police and have him arrested? That sounds like assault.”

  “Well,” Griffin said, and he gave Chandler an embarrassed grin, “that’s the thing. Ron’s a big guy himself, and when the guy swung and missed, Ron decked him. So, technically, we hit the guy, and, hell, you both know what kind of red tape we’d get wrapped in if we called that in. So Ron just hauled the bum’s drunken ass out and threw him in the alley.”

  “Who was this guy?” Chandler asked.

  Griffin got out a small spiral notebook and thumbed it a page or two. “Name’s Pine. Pete Pine.”

  “Hell you say,” I said.

  Chandler looked sharply at me. “Know him? Who is he?”

  “A cartoonist,” I said.

  What I didn’t mention was that he drew the Crime Fighter comic strip spun off from the Levinson Publications comic book of the same name.

  A comic strip syndicated by Starr.

  Cabs are always lined up outside the Waldorf, and for half a buck the doorman helped us into one. Sylvia was heading back down to the Village. Like the late Dr. Frederick, she had afternoon patients to attend to; unlike him, she’d be keeping those appointments. I made my own appointment with her for supper tonight, and tagged along for eighteen blocks or so, getting out at East 32nd Street, leaving three bucks with the cabbie to cover the whole ride.

  Soon I was standing before an unimposing nineteen-story office building that was home to the twelfth-floor offices of Levinson Publications.

  The comic book firm’s office space was modest, typical glass-and-wood quarters—just a reception area and private sanctums for Levinson himself and his two editors, who were also writer/artists. No bullpen of artists—the rest of the ink slingers, and script scribblers, worked at home.

  The receptionist was a busty blonde of maybe thirty-five in a pink sweater and red shift skirt. Pretty if pock-marked, she had the haggard look of the constantly pursued.

  Levinson was rarely there, so that pursuit was no doubt the work of those editor/writer/artists—Charles Bardwell and Pete Pine, two skirt-chasing, boozing brawlers, tenement-spawned Dead End Kids not quite grown up, like the Bowery Boys in the movies.

  A similar group called “Little Tough Guys” were, not coincidentally, the sidekicks of Bardwell and Pine’s costumed hero, Crime Fighter. Bardwell, a big bossy guy, had his own sidekick in the pint-sized but muscular Pine. The latter’s bad behavior was a source of amusement for the former, who egged him on at every opportunity.

  The reception area itself was small and drab, with blow-ups of garish color covers of Levinson publications screaming in the otherwise characterless space. These framed oversized covers—Fighting Crime, Crime Fighter, Crime Can’t Win, G-Man Justice—would have been right at home with the exhibits at yesterday’s Senate hearing.

  “Is Pete in?” I asked the receptionist, whose name was Ginny. Her makeup was both heavy and haphazard. “Jack Starr to see him.”

  “I remember you, Mr. Starr,” she said, with a faint smile, as if she were recalling the long-ago day when she still could stand men. “Mr. Pine ain’t been in today. Or yesterday or the day before, neither.”

  If you wanted a receptionist who didn’t say “ain’t” in this town, you hired one with a smaller bosom and stronger defenses.

  Pine not being there probably meant he was still on the binge that had included his rampage at the Waldorf, looking to get at Dr. Frederick. That this hot-headed little booze-hound drew the comic-strip version of Crime Fighter for Starr Syndicate meant he was to some extent my responsibility. I had bailed him out of the drunk tank at the Tombs three times this year, and it was only April, remember.

  “Well, is Mr. Levinson in?”

  “Mr. Levinson is in Europe. With his wife.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “Not today. June maybe?”

  Levinson’s absence came as no surprise, either. He was just the bankroller around here, a far-left character branded a Commie by one and all, though his comic-book line had made him a ridiculously successful capitalist. He had done three months for not naming names to HUAC, back in ’46, so no wonder he didn’t care to be in town for the Senate hearing into the evils of comic book publishing.

  Still, Levinson was a nice guy, smart and shrewd, and he even cut his two top men, Bardwell and Pine, in on the profits (Fighting Crime alone sold three million copies a month). Consensus in the comics field was that all the publishers should be Commies, if Lev was any example. Not that these drab digs reflected the boss spreading the wealth.

  “Mr. Bardwell’s in,” Ginny said, with eyes deader than Dr. Frederick’s.

  I hadn’t asked if he was. That was because I liked the idea of going into Charley Bardwell’s office about as much as this receptionist probably did. But I needed to talk to somebody here besides the ill-used Ginny.

  So she checked with him by phone and why of course he would be glad to see his pal Jack. Ginny and I traded sighs and long-suffering looks, and I went over and opened the door whose pebbled glass said CHARLES BARDWELL, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF. Who did he think he was, goddamn Perry White?

  The office was less than spacious, but it was half-again the size of the reception area, with nice windows onto the city. The plaster walls were pale green with occasional bulletin boards with various paperwork pinned there, printing schedules, cover proofs in black-and-white, full-color printer’s proofs; overflow proofs were Scotch-taped to the plaster. File cabinets were stacked with portfolios and loose original art, and stacks of printed comic books were here and there. To that extent it was a typical comic-book editor’s office.

  The odor that always greeted you upon entering Bardwell’s domain, however, was something unique, if peculiarly so, even in this city of smells good, bad, indifferent. This was the middle one. Part of it was cigars. Another part was perspiration. But the secret ingredient, as the ad boys put it, was monkey shit.

  I will pause for you to process that information, and assure yourself that you did not stumble upon a bizarre typo.

  Against a wall, between wooden filing cabinets, was a steamer-trunk-size cage. Within it were water and food bowl
s and, on the newspaper lining the bottom of the cage, monkey shit. But no monkey was in the cage, because the creature in question was perched on the shoulder of big, brawny Charley Bardwell, whose back was to me as I came in.

  Looking around at me, the monkey was small, scrawny, unhappy, but not making any noise. What variety of monkey this was, I have no idea—organ-grinder type is the best I can do, although it wore no cute little hat nor pants either.

  On the wall behind Bardwell’s desk was a big color painting by someone other than him (though signed by him) of his character Crime Fighter, a teenager like Batwing’s ward Sparrow, who had a pet monkey just like Bardwell’s. I had never asked which came first, the comic-book monkey or the shoulder-perched pet. Some questions just can’t be answered, like the chicken or the egg, and how the hell did Ed Sullivan ever get a TV show.

  As for Bardwell, the big broad-shouldered man—he was six-four, his build athletic—was seated at his drawing board doing rough pencils for a true-crime cover. He was in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, sweat circles, and suspenders.

  The monkey showed me its teeth and its wild eyes, but remained relatively silent. Sometimes when you came to visit Bardwell, the monkey was leashed to a leg of the drawing board; if the animal seemed content, everything was fine—but if the animal was nervous, Bardwell was in one of his moods.

  Today, the ruddy-cheeked Bardwell appeared in high spirits. He grinned at me over his shoulder, which put his face beside the monkey’s (also grinning), and said, “How the hell are you, Jack? Has our strip picked up any new papers?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “No new clients but our list is holding strong.”

  He swiveled toward me, the monkey holding on for dear life, chattering a little (the monkey, not Bardwell). The editor had an oval face with a high forehead and small dark eyes that angled weirdly at the outer corners, giving him a permanent scowl despite frequent toothy smiles. His dark hair was combed carefully to conceal thinning. His nose was a formless lump of clay applied by a careless sculptor.

  I sat on the edge of his desk, facing him at the drawing board. I could see past him to his artwork, which was sketchy and fairly terrible. Word was he only did rough layouts and other artists finished the pencils and inks. Like Walt Disney, Bardwell was only good at one thing—his flourish of a signature, which appeared on every cover and the title page of every story he “drew” and “wrote” (a woman supposedly ghosted his scripts).

  “I hear you were at that dumb-ass travesty of a hearing yesterday,” he said, lighting up a fat cigar with a Zippo. The monkey reacted to the flame about as well as King Kong did to flashbulbs.

  “Easy, Buster,” he told it.

  Buster looked like he (or she) might cry. I thought I might cry myself, thanks to the bouquet of cigar smoke and monkey dung.

  “Yeah, I was over at Foley Square,” I said, my hat in my hands.

  Bardwell wouldn’t know about Dr. Frederick’s demise yet—way too early for it to have made the radio or TV.

  I went on: “They really took poor Bob Price to the woodshed.”

  “Ha! I’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such a goddamn thief.”

  I didn’t respond to that. I knew Bardwell considered the Ghoul character who introduced EF’s horror stories to be a lift of his own ghostly Mr. Murder character, the narrator in Fighting Crime.

  “But that Frederick bum,” he said, shaking his head, frowning. The monkey also shook its head and frowned. “That quack is a goddamn menace. A rat bastard and a public enemy. Bad enough he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, he has to make trouble for a bunch of hard-working Joes and Janes! Doesn’t he know there’s an entire industry out here whose livelihood he’s threatening? You should talk to Pete on the subject!”

  “Yeah? Not a fan of Dr. Frederick?”

  “No!” He began laughing, loud and hearty, the monkey looking at him aghast. “Boy, would I like to see Petey get his hands on that puffed-up windbag. Little wild man would tear him apart! That would be funny as hell.”

  “Pete feels the same way you do about the doc?”

  “Oh, God, yes!” He laughed from his gut, rocking his chair; the monkey held on for dear life. “Just the other day? Why, Petey was up here ranting and raving, buckin’ for a straitjacket. Saying as how he was gonna toss that clown out a window or tear him limb from limb or some craziness.” He shook his head, the permanent scowl fighting his big grin. “You know that cut-up Petey! He’s a looney tune, a certified zany.”

  “I know Pete.”

  Bardwell gestured with the cigar, the monkey clinging to a suspender. “He says, ‘I’ll go over to his ritzy office and shove his goddamn couch up his ass!’” This Bardwell found hilarious, and Buster joined in with the laughter.

  “When was this, Charley?”

  “Yesterday, no, day before yesterday.” The big man gestured toward his crude drawing with a thick-fingered, clumsy-looking hand. “It’s all a blur, the hours we put in, these crazy deadlines we artists put up with.”

  As top editor, of course, he set those deadlines.

  “So Pine really lost his temper, huh?”

  “Oh, God, did he. Standing right there, between where we sit, stomping around like an Indian doing a war dance. But come on, Jack! Don’t give me that look. Pete’s a proud little guy. He come up from nothing, like me. Really cares about his work. You probably think of him as this roughneck who likes a drink now and then...”

  Now and then.

  “...but he’s an artist, man, and all us artists are Bohemians at heart. If you knew him better, Jack, you’d know he’s really just a good-hearted lug. Just another sentimental slob like yourself truly.”

  Bardwell had been penciling a cover on which a wild-eyed maniac was thrusting the face of a screaming woman, her hair already on fire, into the gas burner of a kitchen stove.

  “So you didn’t take Pete seriously?”

  He made a farting sound with his lips; the monkey seemed offended. “Are you kidding? The little squirt was just blowing off steam. Spouting a bunch of b.s.”

  “Such as?”

  “Jack, take it easy. Pete’d had a snootful, I’d had a snootful, and we were discussing the man everybody in comics loves to hate.” The cigar-in-hand waved at me. “I know, I know, with the comic strip and all, how important Pete Pine is to Starr right now. And if you’re worried about him keeping deadline, cause he’s off on a bender, well, don’t. He has plenty of help on that strip.”

  I had doubts Pine was drawing any of the Crime Fighter strip. He was editing three comic books and drawing two more, every month. Though he was a better artist than Bardwell— Faint Praise Department, as Craze would say—I suspected he, like his buddy Charley, was mostly just signing the strip.

  “Humor me,” I said. “What kind of b.s. was Pete spouting?”

  Bardwell painted the air with blue cigar smoke. The monkey and I listened.

  “Silly, ridiculous horseflop,” he said, laughing again, not so loud, but laughing, “about how he was going to go and find that son of a bitch Frederick, and strangle him with his bare hands.”

  I said nothing.

  Bardwell frowned at me. So did the monkey. “What is it, Jack?”

  “Somebody killed Werner Frederick.”

  “Huh?”

  “Killed him. Probably last night or early this morning.”

  He whitened, the cigar dangling from his lips. “Jesus. Hell. First I heard.”

  The monkey nodded.

  “It was murder,” I said, “right there in Frederick’s suite at the Waldorf. Somebody choked him to death, whether strangled him with ‘bare hands’ or using a ligature, I don’t know. Then whoever it was rigged up a rope and left the old boy hanging. Fake suicide. Took the homicide dick maybe two seconds to see through it.”

  Bardwell shook his head and Buster mimicked him. “You don’t think Pete....”

  “Pete was at the Waldorf night before last. In a drunken rage, pounding on
Frederick’s door, yelling out threats.”

  “Oh Christ....”

  “The staff didn’t call the cops, just tossed his ass out...but the cops know. The house dick keeps a record of stuff like that.”

  He made himself smile; it looked sick. “Come on, Jack. You know Pete’s all talk.”

  “No. He isn’t. I’ve exchanged blows with that shrimp myself, trying to help him. While you stood on the sidelines and laughed your butt off, by the way. Where is he, Charley?”

  He frowned in thought, then his tiny eyes blazed. “You want to warn him? That’s great, Jack. Should I round up some dough for him? Should we get him out of town? I’ll do anything—I love that little guy like a brother.”

  It occurred to me then that Bardwell always needed a sidekick. Either the monkey on his shoulder or the one he went carousing with.

  I climbed off the desk, put on my hat. “I’m helping the cops out on this. Maggie wants me to help clear it up fast as possible, to limit the damage. If I get to Pete first, I can maybe sober him up, and get him to turn himself in.”

  Bardwell and the monkey thought that over.

  I said, “It’ll score Pete a few points.”

  “Well,” the cartoonist said softly, “he’s probably at his apartment, his studio.”

  “I’ll check there, but I tried his number from the Waldorf. No answer. Where else would he be?”

  “...He’s been seeing Lyla.”

  “Lyla Lamont?”

  He nodded.

  Lyla was a gifted cartoonist, better than Bardwell and Pine put together. But she lived pretty wild herself, down in the Village, and had even lost a syndicated strip over missing deadlines.

  That strip had been for Starr, so I knew where to find her.

  “Don’t call over there and warn him,” I said, going out. “I’m going to handle this in the best way possible.”

  He nodded glumly, but the monkey grinned.

  It was pretty funny at that.

  A quick cab ride down Lexington brought me to the moderately dingy building where Pete Pine had a second-floor apartment above a drugstore. I pounded on Pine’s door but got no response, and—putting my ear close to the paint-peeling wood—could hear nothing beyond.