“Rebecca Kurtz, is it? Am I right?”
Before I even really realized I was doing it, I started to laugh.
The eyebrows flexed. “Yes or no. I’m just in San Diego to refuel. I have to be wheels-up in twenty minutes to inspect my factory in Xi’an on time and I have two more meetings to get to after you.”
“Fuck you,” I said with a smile.
Ira looked to McCool, who covered my entire shoulder with his expansive hand. “Let’s keep it civil, hanh?”
I flinched off the ex-cop’s mitt. “Don’t touch me.”
“Why don’t you tell me what the problem is, guy,” Ira said.
“The problem is Ben K died before finalizing your settlement with him over the Mister Mystery rights and you want me to lean on Becca to make sure she signs where her husband was supposed to.”
“Yes. Exactly. And what’s the problem with that again?”
“He created Mister Mystery!”
“For Atlas! It’s called work-for-hire, read a law book. We own that I.P., no matter how his shysters have convinced some liberal activist judge to rewrite copyright laws in his favor.”
“He deserves way more than whatever pittance you’re going to give him.”
“You have no idea what pittance we’re giving him!”
“Let’s all take a deep breath,” McCool said, but both Ira and I ignored him.
“All you care about is the billions you’re going to make off the movies and toys and whatever.”
Ira blinked, puzzled. “Yes. Again: Exactly. You display a staggering command of the obvious.” Baffled, Ira looked again at McCool. “Is this guy for real?”
“I’m afraid so,” McCool said.
“Clean the wax out of your ears, guy,” Ira said. “In addition to the very generous settlement package my lawyers negotiated—over my objections, I might add, that trombenik didn’t deserve a single red cent. I’m supposed to lose money over his inability to read a contract? In addition to the profits I earned that he is taking out of my pocket, we also agreed to help him get his original artwork back, artwork that is worth more than the ink staining the pages only because of the effort I and my people and my company put into promoting his childish characters. Furthermore—”
I could feel the rage building inside of me until it lifted me out of my chair like a balloon. I took a step toward Ira—
—and was abruptly unable to breathe. Gasping, I fell back to the narrow aisle of the private plane, slamming my side on the edge of my seat as I dropped.
McCool stood over me, lowering the arm that he’d just used to clothesline me in the neck. “Sorry about that, sir.”
“Well, that was a complete waste of my time,” Ira said. “Get him out here.”
“I thought it was worth a shot at least.” McCool reached down and hauled me to my feet one-handed. “C’mon, buddy, time to go.”
“Wrong again, Mac,” Ira said. “I need you to do better on that.”
“I will, moving forward, sir. I promise.” McCool still had his hand on my shoulder and practically carried me toward the front of the plane. Before I was hauled all the way to the hatch, I kicked a foot out and braced it against the wall, managing to wriggle from McCool’s vise-like grip.
“Let me ask you a question, Mr. Pearl,” I said.
“If it gets you out of my hair faster, please, I beg of you, ask,” the billionaire said.
“Did you have Danny Lieber killed?”
I swear, the man’s white eyebrows flared directly upward like a Chrysler hood ornament.
“Why the hell would I bother with that?” Ira said. “Murder is for the poor.”
* * *
– – – –
The limo was waiting when we descended the gangway. McCool didn’t say anything until the car turned out of the airport.
“Are you mentally retarded?”
I scowled. “That’s a pretty offensive term.”
McCool leaned forward, tomato red in the face, and roared:
“I know it is. I was trying to offend you. That’s why I said it!”
He leaned back in his seat and wiped his brow with his lapel handkerchief. “I don’t have enough fingers to count how many kinds of stupid that was. That’s a guy you want on your side, not the other way around.”
“I’ve had it with sucking corporate dick, sorry. He wants me to pat him on the back for helping get Ben’s artwork back? That artwork was always Ben’s to begin with. It was thanks to Atlas the artwork got stolen in the first place.”
“That was long before Ira acquired the company. Long before his time. And just now the art started surfacing on the dealers’ market. It’s going for tens of thousands of dollars. Ira was going to use his resources to help get it back, to see that Ben K got as much of that money as possible.”
“You know, this is bullshit, this strong-arming. People have to know about it. This may just become an anonymous sourced item in Bleeding Cool—’Billionaire Leans on Grieving Widow.’ ”
“You’re too dumb to know who’s trying to help you. Here’s what’s going to happen if you blab. Some people will believe you. Mostly the ones who want to believe all the bad stuff about Atlas Comics anyway. And there aren’t enough of them to save you.
“Because—and no disrespect—you seem like a nice guy, but who do you think you are? What did you ever do for people? We’ve been letting them escape their boring nowhere lives since they were four years old. Where does this superhero stuff come from? Who makes it? Nobody gives a flying fig so long as it keeps on coming. That’s all the fans see from this lawsuit is stonewalling. They’re terrified Atlas will lose custody of Mister Mystery and they won’t get their monthly fix. And they don’t need to hear that they’re being cut off by some guy they never even heard of before.
“Who is this Mike M? Who is he to speak out? He’s just another wannabe has-been never-was. Disgruntled that the company never treated him the way he thought he deserved, replaced him with someone else they thought was more promising, never put him on the big-name books like he wanted. He never got to be in the room when the big boys were making the real decisions or I would’ve heard of him before now. So what does he know anyway? He’s trying to make us feel bad. He’s trying to make us feel guilty. He should be lucky Atlas let him work on those characters at all. Screw him, that entitled so-and-so. His art wasn’t that great anyway, that’s why he never got big. How dare he try to make us feel bad for enjoying something we love.”
“That’s what you’ll tell them,” I said, with not as much force as I would have liked.
“We won’t need to tell them,” McCool said. “That’s what they’ll tell themselves.”
I looked out the window as the lights of the city once again became visible on the other side of the harbor. “Your generous offer of help is a little late. The cops aren’t even really on me anymore. They think this girl, this fan did it.”
McCool laughed hollowly. “My God. You really are the biggest dumbbell that ever put on a pair of trousers.”
I turned back to him.
“Who do you think turned SDPD onto that crazy one-armed chick in the first place?” he said.
My brow lowered but I didn’t feel like giving him the satisfaction of voicing an answer.
“It’s my policy to personally follow up on all such direct threats of violence to company assets. My people paid a visit to her dorm room after she posted that video on Facebook and we had a little chat. Talked to her parents. That was a while ago. Is she harmless? Maybe. Who knows? I do know this, though: I can suggest the cops take a different path whenever I feel like it. One that might not make you feel so cocky and comfortable.”
McCool leaned back in his seat, satisfied, as if he could see my stomach tightening through my shirt and my skin and my bones.
“What you should console you
rself with is this: in the end, you never really had a choice.”
We sat in silence for the rest of the drive back to the Bayfront. As the car turned into the pull-around, I said, “I’m surprised Ira doesn’t have guys to do his threatening for him.”
“We used to have a guy who handled sensitive situations like this on the comics side,” McCool said as I got of the limo.
“What happened to that guy?”
“You killed him,” McCool said, closed the car door, and signaled for the driver to leave.
* * *
– – – –
The limo rolled away about the length of the drive, then rocked to a stop with a screech. I tensed, braced for flight—now what?—but the rear passenger door popped open and McCool’s catcher-mitt hands emerged to place my Plasticine Kirby trophy on the curb. Then the door shut and the long black car pulled away into traffic.
A passing group of teenagers wearing cat ears and tails spotted it lying unclaimed on the sidewalk. “Look at the Shiny!” one yelled in a sudden fit of possessiveness.
I ran over and snatched the award away, hissing at the kids like Gollum until they ran away.
I went inside the Bayfront and made a beeline for the Space Bar. Ian Smallwood and a cloud of Brits tried to wave me over, mock-applauding the Kirby trophy in my hands, but I held up a hand. The bar was wall-to-wall humanity, and the two bartenders on call had the desperate, panicked look of hunted animals. I didn’t see Christine anywhere.
I stepped outside to the ocean-side coolness of the back patio overlooking the harbor and called her. No response. I texted:
“Sorry I just got here.”
I waited a couple seconds without an answer, then added:
“I am really sorry I basically got kidnapped. It was crazy.”
Nothing.
“I’ll be at Bayfront for a couple of hours if you still wanna join,” I texted for the third and final time.
I put the phone in my pocket then went back inside to join the boisterous Englishmen. I put the Kirby trophy in the center of the table and we spent the remainder of the night toasting it like it was the translucent idol of some pagan god.
SATURDAY
he portfolio.
The word was waiting in my brain when I woke up the next morning, blasting away any vague memories of the dream I’d had: Violent Violet was pedaling me through the desert, except the pedicab was shaped like the rocket ship that took Baby Superman to Earth, and I was inside, an adult but wearing a diaper—
Come to think of it, the less I tell you about this particular dream, the better I’ll feel.
The abrupt memory of Danny’s portfolio arrived with the sudden clarity of the just-waking hours, when thought could be as present and corporeal as matter. I leapt out of bed and wrestled my sketchbook from my pocket and flipped through the pages, finding the sketch of the crime scene.
Ben K used to say that the true magic of comic art was what happened between the panels. The “gutters,” they used to be called, with comic creators’ mordant immigrant street humor: The magic happened in the gutters. Not in what was drawn, but in what wasn’t—you let the reader’s imagination fill in the blanks between the panels to create the illusion of seamless life.
In other words, what you didn’t see was just as important as what you did.
And what did I not see in either of these drawings?
The portfolio.
The portfolio I had seen Dan the Man carrying that night in the Marriott bar. The cops never mentioned it or asked me about it. So I never drew it in my depiction of the crime scene. And Yu-Gi-Oh, or whatever his name was, the steampunk ninja cosplayer in the Baptists’ bodycam footage, wasn’t carrying it either as he was approaching or leaving the convention center.
I’m not sure my subconscious mind would have drifted toward the portfolio had Ira and McCool not brought up Ben K’s stolen art the night before.
And Becca Kurtz told me she thought Ben K’s apartment had been ransacked around the time of his death.
I sat at the writing desk in my underwear and stared out the window at the Dole banana port. A pair of quad-propped camo-green tilt-rotor aircraft chopped across blue sky with inscrutable purpose. What was the link between Danny Lieber’s portfolio and Sebastian Mod? Or Violent Pilar? And if no one had found it yet, where was it?
Waves of nausea and heartburn hit me all at once, and I was running to the bathroom.
“I swear, I am not drinking tonight,” I said out loud.
* * *
– – – –
I skipped breakfast and elbowed my way into the con instead. On my way to Artists’ Alley I got the idea to head over to the original art dealers section. I discovered my first Ben K original at a booth with the obviously highly focus-grouped name “Buddy’s Art.” It was gingerly binder-clipped on a metal truss behind the tables with the longboxes. On one side was a minor Kirby Mighty Thor page, inked by the much-maligned Vince Colletta, which depicted not the titular Thunder God but a mounted Lady Sif as a leering hag spied upon her in the shimmering waters of an enchanted pool. The price tag said $4,500.
To the right of the Ben K was an extremely rare Wally Wood splash from Tales from the Crypt. A man screamed as the Crypt-Keeper’s head, looming over the hysteric in the upper-right corner, declared, “It was a diabolical plot! Ralph was sure Cora would be…SCARED TO DEATH!” I was a little surprised Buddy even deigned to allow it onto the show floor, because he wanted $15,000 for it.
The Ben K page was from the late 1960s, which I knew because of the stylized Atlas “A” in the upper left-hand corner of the art board. One of the only things the comics publishers ever bothered to do for their artists was to give them free paper, because it gave them one less excuse for missing their deadlines. The board had the active art area, where the page would be printed for the finished book, demarcated with a solid blue line invisible in the photostatting process. You had to make sure to draw anything you wanted the reader to see—characters, dialogue, props, action—within that solid blue line. A dotted blue line a half inch or so outside the perimeter of the live-art line showed the trim, or where the finished piece would be cut off by the printing press. A third and final dashed blue line a half inch from the trim showed the bleed, so if the artist wanted to extend the art all the way beyond where the page would be cut off, she knew how far to go.
Exploding all the way to the bleed line on this particular Atlas art board was a spectacular fight scene, with Mister Mystery singlehandedly taking on the thuggish troops of a madman’s private army. With his trademark design virtuosity, Ben K had used the hero’s swinging limbs and dancing feet to create the boundaries of each panel; then he shrank each subsequent image as Mister Mystery dispatched his attackers, with the borders diminishing along with the number of baddies, decreasing from a dozen to eight to six to four to two. In the lower right-hand corner, the hero’s fist crashed across the last enemy’s jaw, bringing the fight and the page to a close on a single point. It was beautiful. It was amazing.
It was $10,000.
Buddy had a floppy silver mane of aging California surfer’s hair atop an aging body semi-gracefully succumbing to the drag of gravity. His personal style could be described as Grandpa at the Flea Market: 1980 TV-screen glasses, blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, socks with sandals.
Before I had lifted my portfolio on top of the row of longboxes Buddy was walking over with a hand extended. “Good to see you again. How’s Christine?”
People at cons have a disturbing tendency to greet everyone as if the conversation we had had at the last con was just a few hours ago instead of twelve months or even years. I’ve learned to respond with the cool, placid gaze of an Alzheimer’s patient desperately trying to disguise the fact she’s losing her marbles by feigning total comprehension: “I’m great, how’s your, uh, family?”
&nbs
p; “Flown the coop, we’re empty nesters now. College tuition is killing me, so that just means I am even more motivated to sell your pages for absolutely as much money as I possibly can.” Buddy of Buddy’s Art had a gleam in his eyes like a camel dealer in a medieval casbah. “Did you give any more thought to what we discussed last year?”
I had no idea what this guy was talking about. I unzipped my portfolio with a grin anyway. “Have I? I know I’m looking for a new art rep, that’s for sure.”
Buddy rubbed his hands together. “Then you, sir, you have come to the right place. Who was handling your original art sales before, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Ah…” I blinked. “My wife, Christine, handled that, but she, uh, is maybe looking to hang up her hat, move into another part of the industry.”
“Really? She’s sold a couple pages to me in the past year from her other clients.”
“Yeah, exactly, that’s what I mean. She wants to separate business from family.”
“Smart woman. For years I had my wife helping me at shows, but we had to stop or else by Sunday, never fail, we’d turn into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? You ever see that movie? Taylor and Burton. Things are much quieter with just Burton.”
“Depends on the Taylor, I imagine. And the Burton, for that matter.”
“Ain’t it the truth. But yeah, show me what you got here.” Buddy of Buddy’s Art flipped through the pages in my portfolio, which I had carefully selected to front the most spectacular splash pages and covers, followed by heavy-action pages with famous characters, followed by the less valuable, more introspective conversational scenes toward the back. “You got Fantastic Four, Detective, Mister Mystery, even some Gut Check in here. Nice, nice. These pin-ups new?”
“Yeah, they were for the Gut Check omnibus IDW did.”
“Awesome. Hey, congrats on the Kirby win last night, I almost forgot.”
“Thanks. Yeah, it was a real surprise, especially to me. Say,” I nodded at the Mister Mystery page behind him, “that’s a great Ben K you’ve got there.”
The Con Artist Page 15