A Killing in Comics (21 page)

I didn’t know what else to ask. Surely she knew she was at least as prime a suspect as Spiegel and Shulman. Donny’s insulin was in her kitchen, and he had died in his mistress’s living room with his wife watching. Which most humiliated wives would find a perfect way to watch a cheating husband die.

So I asked the only question I had left: “Donny had more than his share of enemies, Selma. But do you suspect any one of them, in particular?”

She frowned at me, as if in shock. “Enemies? Donny didn’t have an enemy in the world. If you’re going to say mean things like that, Jack, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

CHAPTER NINE COMIC BOOKS ARE A BAD INFLUENCE!

Damon Runyon called it Dream Street, a block’s worth of Forty-seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues; but these days, nightmare was more like it. Two hundred yards of ratty hotels and ramshackle rooming houses where the owners of dreams-turned-to-dregs resided—grifters, horse players, dope addicts, pickpockets, washed-up vaudevillians, actors on the way down who were never very far up.

I made a point of calling on Will Hander, who roomed in this negative Valhalla, while the sun was still up, if barely. Not that you couldn’t walk Dream Street at any hour—Broadway was just around the corner, the mink and pearls of Fifth Avenue one block east. The poor souls you encountered, in sunshine or neon, were no threat—peroxided old women walking their mutts; a panhandler seeking a quarter for “coffee”; a skinny streetwalker whose charms promised pleasure but boded penicillin. Here a bearded bum studied a scratch sheet on church steps; there a dipso sat in a doorway, shivering with something that wasn’t cold, not on a late Saturday afternoon in July.

The danger, particularly after dark, was upstairs in the dismal, shabby buildings, in the ancient cubicles that passed for rooms, where vice of every stripe was available, from watered-down whiskey to hypos of H, from con games to crap games, from adulterous quickies to assorted versions of the Old Army game for sailors on leave of their senses.

Maggie had provided the address, and suggested I carry my gun. Unfortunately, “my” gun was the major’s bulky Colt .45, brought home from the war before the last one; and none of my suits were cut to conceal it. And since my troubleshooter role had only recently gone private eye on me, I—unlike Bogart or Alan Ladd—had not got round to getting fitted for a shoulder holster.

So I went armed only with a sharp wit and the confidence of youth . . . and a roll of quarters, which made a nasty lump in the pocket of my lightweight suit jacket, but then could also make a nasty lump on anybody who gave me a problem, so call it a fair trade.

The stairs and walls hadn’t seen paint since George M. Cohan was Broadway’s fresh new face; they hadn’t seen disinfectant, either, judging by the smell of urine, which was delicately laced with the bouquet of hotplate hash. But Hander was only three flights up, and I encountered no one on my climb. You might have thought the (what we’ll charitably call) residential hotel was empty, if not for sounds behind closed doors, ranging from noisy bedsprings to hysterical laughter, with a shout of “Baby needs a new pair of shoes!” counterpointing the wail of an actual crying baby, to make the experience wholesome for the entire family.

I had tried to call Hander, but the only number Maggie had on the
Batwing
writer was a general one for the flophouse, and the three times I tried (right in a row), I got three different people who uttered three different expletives and hung up on me. None of them, apparently, Hander.

So once again I was dropping in unannounced. But on the third floor I realized I was in trouble—not danger, trouble. Hander was in Room 307, according to Maggie’s info; but none of the doors had numbers. Well, some had numbers—for example, one said 6, another said 09 and another said 30, the remnants of once-proud three-digit designations fallen away like the sands of time (and flakes of paint).

I could really have used the help of a detective.

Anyway, I resorted to math, which I admit had been my worst subject, although considering the kind of all-around grades I racked up, the best wouldn’t have been that encouraging, either. But figuring out that 09 had once been 309, and 6 had likely been 306, I thought Hander likely lived one door to the right of the latter.

This brilliant deduction was underscored by noise coming from behind that numeral-less door: typing.

A sound a writer makes. I smiled. Finally I had made my math teachers proud. . . .

I knocked and set free half a dozen or more little green chips of what a stickler would still call paint.

The typing continued.

I knocked again and dislodged more green dandruff.

The typing stopped.

“Will!” I said to the door. “It’s Jack Starr—from the Starr Syndicate. Need a word!”

I heard a wooden chair squeal on a wooden floor, and hurried footsteps, then what I thought to be a drawer opening, and finally something glass go clunk. And a drawer slam shut?

Then the door opened and a guy who was maybe two steps above the bums on Dream Street below filled the space.

“Jack,” he said, and grinned at me, like an old friend had just blown in. We’d met maybe three times.

Lanky, loose-limbed, Will Hander had a boyish face, despite the couple days’ growth of beard, and a musical tenor. He looked forty breathing down fifty’s neck, and was maybe thirty. His jet-black hair was curly, a full unruly head of it, and his bloodshot eyes added up to a patriotic red, white and blue. He was in a sweat-circled white shirt, sleeves rolled up, open at the throat showing black curly chest hair. His pants were lightweight and brown, and he was in his stocking feet. Something about him said he’d been an athlete once.

“Jack,” he said. The smile took on an embarrassed edge. “You should’ve called.”

“I tried. I talked to three of your secretaries, who all had physically impossible suggestions for me.”

He laughed, a little too loud. “Yeah, this is a dump, and the clientele’s a bunch of rummies.”

Spoken with great conviction for a guy with liquor on his breath.

“Could I come in?” I asked. “My uncle lives down the hall, and if spots me, he’ll want a five-spot.”

Hander shook his head and laughed. “You are a cutup, Jack. You should write a strip for your stepmother.”

Following him into the room, I said, “I don’t think my sense of humor is ready for public consumption just yet.”

Neither was Hander’s apartment, if you could call it that.

One shabby little room, with an unmade single bed, a couple sheets and, folded at the foot, a threadbare blanket. The cracked walls were the color of chocolate, only not at all sweet. The furniture consisted of a cloth-covered wine-color couch and a green easy chair, both of whose cushion springs were making a break for it, and a battered dresser with a few water glasses on it and a smoky mirror over it.

A window on an alley was open, looking out onto a brick wall, but that was the source of air, which kept the box less than stuffy. In front of this scenic view, a black metal typing stand was set up, with a heavy oak wooden chair that had more scars than an over-the-hill boxer.

Hander, smiling big but the humiliation coming through, gestured me to the couch, and pulled his heavy typing chair away from the stand, whose two wings were spread, one holding a box of typing paper, the other its lid with script pages in it, another page curling in his portable Underwood.

We sat. The clunking sound I’d heard was him putting a bottle away, I figured. Judging by his breath, I’d say rye whiskey. And before you dismiss that deduction as one even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t make, remember I was an MP in the war.

“I thought you lived out in the Bronx,” I said, trying not to make it an accusation.

He folded his hands in his lap; slumped a little. Grinned like a kid caught playing with himself. “Yeah, I do. But, uh . . . a little family trouble.”

“Sorry. None of my business . . .”

“No! No, that’s fine. I got a beautiful wife and a beautiful kid, and sometimes . . . sometimes I fall off the wagon.”

“I been there.”

He gestured with open hands. “And Molly said, clean myself up. Looks bad in front of my boy.”

“Sure.”

His shrug was too big. “So I just burrowed in up here, to get ahead on some scripts.”

“Yeah,
Batwing
and
Blue Barracuda
and some
Wonder Boy
. Mortimer likes my stuff. Keeps me alive, God bless him.”

I shifted on the couch, trying to get comfortable. “Not everybody has kind words for Sy or, frankly, any of the higher-ups at Americana.”

A smaller shrug. “Well, it’s just a writing market for me. I freelance there and a few other places. Just, until . . . you know.”

“Actually, I don’t. Know what, Will?”

The half smile that came to the boyish mug was unforced. “Oh, this comics junk is just a means to an end. Just to get enough cash to keep the wife and kid afloat, till my ship comes in.”

“What ship would that be?”

He laughed, and it was one of the worst laughs I ever heard. “I’m like every writer—when I get ahead on freelancer work, I’m digging in on the Great American Novel.”

I smiled. “Ah. Nobody’s got around to writing that one yet, huh?”

“No, sir.”

And here my money was on
Huckleberry Finn
.

“Not that I’m a snob,” he said. “Some of the pulps, the better pulps, they have really good writing in them. That’s where Chandler started. And Hammett. And lots of people.”

Again I shifted on the couch, attempting to find an angle where my behind didn’t receive unwanted acupuncture. “You had many pulp sales?”

“A few. It’s just . . . comic books, that’s a market I lucked into, and it’s been a way to keep head above water.”

I would question using any form of the word “luck” with a career choice that included this particular writer’s garret. But that’s just me.

“Having flat feet, being 1-A, was a kind of a break for me. So many in the business off to war, and not a lot of good comics writers around, if there is such a thing.”

“It’s a craft few can master,” I said, meaning it. I saw the kind of submissions that came into Starr every day.

“You really think so?” He stood. “Say, can I get you a drink? I’ve been working all day, and I think maybe I could stand to wet my whistle.”

“No, that’s okay. I swore off the stuff for Lent.”

He frowned at me, by the dresser now. “Aren’t you Jewish?”

“Not very, but that was an attempt at a joke.”

Now that my remark had been properly categorized, he laughed heartily, and opened a drawer and got out the rye whiskey bottle—I will pause for you to be impressed by my deductive skills—and filled one of the water glasses, halfway.

Dark bronze liquid sloshing in the glass (and probably in his stomach, too), Hander returned to the heavy, heavily scarred-up chair and sat. He sipped, obviously wishing for a gulp. Impressive self-control.

His smile turned serene. “What brings you around, Jack?”

“Missed you at Donny’s funeral.”

And now, finally, his expression darkened. “Yeah, well . . . I didn’t suppose I was on the guest list.”

“Not many artists or writers were there. Harry and Moe took a pass, too.”

He was shaking his head. “I didn’t hate the guy. I didn’t wish him dead.”

“Somebody did. Somebody who made that wish come true.”

He’d been in the process of raising his whiskey glass to his lips when I said that, and my words actually interrupted that process. “You’re not . . . looking into it, are you, Jack?”

“I am.”

He looked at me like I’d just insisted the world was flat. “But the cops are doing that, aren’t they?”

“Why, have you talked to Captain Chandler of the Homicide Bureau?”

He shook his head. “No, but I guess he went looking for me, all the way to the Bronx. I talked to Molly on the phone this morning, and she told me. But she hadn’t given my address to him.”

“To protect you?”

His previously chipper expression, however forced, had melted into hangdog despair. “No. So she wouldn’t be embarrassed, when he saw where I . . . where I was staying, temporarily.”

“Did she invite you back, then?”

His face bore the kind of sadness that tears just didn’t do the trick for. “No. No, she’s got it in her head that my drinking is out of control.” His forehead tensed. “Jack, this is the first drink I’ve had, all day. I swear on my kid’s head.”

“Not my business, Will.”

He sat forward, eyes glittering. “I mean, could a drunk turn out the scripts I do?”

Having read Hander’s
Batwing
stuff—outrageous death traps and acrobatic fights interspersed with lunatic wisecracks often set in fun house-type settings with huge oversized props and looming grotesque faces—I’d have to say . . . hell, yes.