Kill Your Darlings (7 page)

“Yeah”—I grinned—“I am a little long-winded sometimes. I had a critic give me hell for that once.”

“I remember Roscoe mentioning that... in one of his periodic diatribes against critics in general. As I recall, one reviewer called you ‘verbose,’ and another ‘curt,’ for the same piece of work. So what does that make you?”

I shrugged, smiled. “Curtly verbose?”

“Perhaps.” She smiled. “Mal.”

“Yes?”

“Get to the point.”

“Yes. Mae. I think there really
may
be something... ‘mysterious’ about Roscoe’s death. I think he may have been murdered.”

She leaned forward; her dark eyes flared, then narrowed, boring into me.

“Explain,” she said curtly.

I explained, verbosely. I went through what I had told the assistant coroner; she’d been in the room while I did that, but she’d been gin-sedated, so this was all new to her. As I spoke, she reached for her purse on the nightstand and got some cigarettes out, tapped one down on the cigarette pack (Lucky Strikes, like Roscoe and Gat Garson smoked—not a very ladylike cigarette, but she made smoking them a sensuous affair) and lit up, listening intently. When I got to the part about the maid remembering delivering four towels to 714, her eyes got Joan Crawford-wide again.

“My God,” she said. “I believe he
was
murdered.”

And she reached for the phone. Almost lurched for it.

I put my hand on hers, stopping her; her hand was warm, and I drew mine away. I hated myself for the attraction I felt for her. She was old enough to be my mother, almost; she was my hero’s widow of less than a day.

“I thought that through already,” I said. “I even called the police, got the name of the assistant coroner from last night—which is Myers, incidentally—and was ready to make the call, when it occurred to me how little I had.”

With a trembling urgency in her voice, she said, “You can prove the point you were trying to make last night, about the towels! That’s a
lot!
”

I shook my head no. “It’s very little. It’s hardly anything. Oh, it’d be enough for Gat Garson. But I don’t think the Chicago coroner’s office is going to give a damn.”

“Why?”

“Who’s to say that maid’s story’s going to hold up? Why should she remember servicing a specific room, a day later? Will she be so damn sure of herself on a witness stand, at an inquest, as she was when she was looking at my five-dollar bill? Even if she’s believed, how do you build a murder investigation on some wet towels being tossed in a hamper? Who’s to say Roscoe didn’t bathe that afternoon, before going out for dinner with his son? In which case, he’d have gotten several towels wet; perhaps he himself took the wet towels with him, looking for a closet to get some fresh ones. And when he found the closet, he didn’t find any clean towels, but the hamper was right there and so he dumped the wet ones in. Or perhaps another maid came in late in the day and turned down the beds—they
were
turned down, remember?—and got rid of the wet towels, but didn’t have any fresh ones to leave, so... anyway, it would be a fine piece of evidence in a mystery novel. But at a coroner’s inquest, it would be shrugged off twelve ways to Tuesday.”

Her face was damn near as pale as her hair. Her eyes were wet. A tear trickled out of one them, making a shiny trail on her cheek. Her fists were clenched and so was her jaw, which was trembling.

I said, “I’d like to do something about this. My instinct is Roscoe was murdered. Or at least, may have been. But we don’t have enough to go to the police with.”

“I think you should. I think you should call Mr. Myers and tell him what you found out.”

“All right, I will. But nothing will come of it.”

She stabbed the cigarette out in a glass Americana-Congress ashtray on the nightstand. “Damnit, if Roscoe was murdered, we can’t just let it
lay
there! We’ve got to
do
something, Mal!”

“I know. I know.”

We sat and looked at each other; she leaned forward, got a crinkly smile going and stroked my face, in what she probably thought was a motherly fashion. Her skirt was hiked up over her knees, and I wanted to throw myself on her—or out a window.

“Poor Mal,” she said. “Poor, poor Mal.”

“Poor Roscoe,” I said. “I feel fine.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

And her mask of composure slipped and she was crying into her cupped hands.

I stood, hoping how I felt about her didn’t show.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” I said. “I should’ve let it ride.”

“You can’t let murder ride,” she said, sobbing.

“That’s a Gat Garson line,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Chapter One,
Kiss or Kill.”

“You were Roscoe’s fan, too, weren’t you?”

“He was my hero,” she said.

I touched her shoulder. Like a son, I hoped.

I said, “Let me poke around a little. Ask some questions. I’ll keep my suspicions to myself. I don’t want the media to get hold of this, not yet, anyway.”

“All right—” She sniffed.

“And I wanted to ask you a big favor. Stick around till tomorrow.”

She cocked her head, looking at me close. “Oh? Why?”

“There’s a presentation tomorrow afternoon, by the Private Eye Writers of America. They were going to give Roscoe their
Life Achievement Award; now that it’s going to be posthumous, well... they’d like you to be there to accept it.”

She smiled bravely. “I’d like that very much.”

“It
will
attract some media attention, I’ve got to warn you.”

“This sounds like the right kind of media attention.”

“I agree. Enough of that kind of media attention might get Roscoe Kane’s books back into print, where they belong.”

“That would be nice. I’ll be proud to stay, to accept Roscoe’s award.”

“Thanks. Besides, if I
am
going to ask some questions around, about Roscoe, I’d like you available, so I can check back with you... you know, compare notes.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

“It would be, if I knew where to start.”

“Well, nothing was stolen from the room,” she said. “There was five hundred dollars in Roscoe’s suitcase—cash. Plus credit cards and his watch, which was expensive. Some other things.”

“Your point being?”

She had taken a tissue from her purse and was dabbing her red eyes. “It wasn’t robbery. It wasn’t somebody looting a hotel room who happened upon somebody bathing in the room or something.”

“Right. It had to be somebody Roscoe knew. Somebody he knew well enough to be able to let approach him in the tub before he bothered getting up and out.”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “He could’ve been sleeping in the tub, when whoever it was came in. Or he could’ve passed out, like the coroner’s man said—only with his head against the edge or back of the tub, not in the water.”

“True. But how did ‘whoever-it-was’ get in?”

“With a key from the desk, maybe? Why don’t you ask down there. Hotels can be pretty careless, sometimes, about handing out keys.”

“Good thought. Of course, your husband may simply have left the door unlocked, or even ajar. Particularly if he was expecting somebody.”

“Yes, but,
who
?”

“Was there anyone staying in the hotel Roscoe knew?”

“Some of the mystery writers. Gorman, of course.”

“Gorman’s here? In the hotel? He lives in a Chicago suburb; why would he stay overnight in the hotel?”

She shrugged. “I suppose because it’s easier to just stay here, throughout the convention, than drive back and forth. He has a dealer’s table, I understand.”

There was a book dealers’ room, where rare and current books would be for sale throughout the Bouchercon.

“How well do you know Gorman?” I asked.

She grimaced. “Too well. Obnoxious man. I do know Roscoe had business to discuss here with him.”

“I think I better look that s.o.b. up.”

“Oh, you’ve met Gregg Gorman, then? He
is
a charmer.”

“Only if you’re a snake.”

“Mal, promise me you’ll call that assistant coroner. Myers. Tell him you’ve spoken with me, and that I take this quite seriously. Perhaps that will do some good.”

“Perhaps. Can you think of anyone else who might’ve had a grudge against your husband, who’s in the hotel, or in Chicago at all?”

“No,” she said. “But if you’re right about the towels...
somebody
had a hell of a grudge against him.”

“Maybe I can find that somebody.”

“I hope to hell you can,” she said.

She got up and hugged me, gave me a motherly kiss on the mouth, smiled at me.

“I look a mess, don’t I?” she said.

“You look terrific. You always look terrific.”

“You like me, don’t you, Mal?”

“Of course I like you.”

“Why don’t you come see me in Milwaukee sometime? In a few months. When we’re both... feeling a little better.”

“I don’t think so, Mae.”

“Bad taste of me to mention that, hmm, Mal? No respect for my dead husband? Let me tell you something. I loved Roscoe very much. But our relationship... hadn’t been physical for a long time. I wouldn’t like the world to know that—to know that macho Roscoe Kane couldn’t get it up for his lovely bride—but I don’t think he’d mind you knowing.”

“I think he would,” I said, feeling creepy suddenly.

“Maybe,” she admitted; she was still very close to me. Her breath was on my face, and there was still some gin in it; I could forgive her for this, because of what she’d been through, and the gin, but I couldn’t forgive myself for what I felt.

She continued: “You’re like Roscoe. You’re like the young Roscoe I never met. You... you made him very happy, in his last years, Mal. You paid him the sort of... literary respect he never thought to get. When everybody else had forgotten him, you came to him like Milwaukee was Mecca and he was a guru.” She should’ve said Mohammed, but she wasn’t a writer, so she could get away with imprecise metaphors. “You were like a son to him. He never thought much of his faggot boy, Jerome... harsh to say it that way, but Roscoe dearly loved to hate homosexuals. And he and his son could never be close, not the way you and Roscoe were close.”

The tears were back in her eyes; slowly, they began streaming down her cheeks.

“You, Mal,” she said. “You’re the young Roscoe Kane, in a way. The Roscoe I never got to know. Not in the... Biblical sense, anyway....” The wicked little smile, in the midst of the tears, was incongruous, and very, very sexy. “The son he never had, the husband I never quite had....”

“Please, Mae...”

“Mal. Come see me sometime. That’s more Mae West, than Mae Kane, isn’t it? Well, take it any way you like. In a few months, I’ll need to be close to somebody. And I’d like to be close to Roscoe, but he’s gone. Even impotent, he was more of a man than any other man I ever knew. Come see me... it’s the closest I can come to being close to Roscoe again. Could you do that for me?”

“Maybe,” I said. Not ever. No way; despite how much I wanted to.

“And find out what happened to my husband, will you?”

“I’ll try.”

“If anyone can, it’s you,” she said.

“What we need is Gat Garson.”

“I’ll settle for Mallory.”

I touched her wet face and found my way out.

“Bouchercon, Chicago-Style” was the official title of this year’s ’con, though the nickname “Crime City Capers” had appeared on the advance flyers. Chicago, the “fabulous clipjoint” as mystery writer Fredric Brown had dubbed it, was the perfect setting for a mystery convention: the place where the Outfit was born and John Dillinger died, site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, home of the Untouchables, setting for the Gat Garson tales. A fitting spot for mystery writers, critics, publishers and fans to gather, and discuss crime and punishment, fantasy-style.

Bouchercon was founded in 1970, in honor of
New York Times
critic Anthony Boucher, who had died in 1968—actually, “Boucher” was a pseudonym of Anthony Parker White. White was an author of science fiction, and classical, puzzle-style whodunits of the sort Cynthia Crystal was inclined toward, and which interested me about as much as lace doilies and Gilbert and Sullivan revivals. But Boucher was a well-respected critic, and had done perhaps as much as anyone to legitimize mystery fiction, and his was a fine name to grace this annual mystery convention.

The convention rotated annually from a city on the West Coast, to an eastern city, to a midwestern city. The state of my finances had thus far kept me from attending any but those in the Midwest, and I’d missed the last one of those, in Milwaukee,
blowing my chance to meet Mickey Spillane, whose appearance had by all accounts been a show stopper. Spillane, like Roscoe Kane, had rarely had a kind word said about him critically, and, despite his massive man-on-the-street popularity, hard-core mystery fandom hadn’t treated the Mick well, either, as one crowd rallied around the Agatha Christie puzzle school, and the other around Hammett and Chandler, the tough-but-literary mystery school, of which Spillane was thought to be a bastard offspring. Since Kane was thought to be a bastard offspring of Spillane, you can guess how the critics treated Gat Garson—when they treated him at all.

It would’ve been nice to have seen Spillane honored at a Bouchercon, since Anthony Boucher’s
New York Times
reviews had been among the most brutal of the many anti-Spillane critiques. Seeing Roscoe Kane—and Gat Garson—being honored at this year’s Bouchercon, receiving the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, no less, would have been a sweet sort of justice, since Boucher had trashed Kane and Gat Garson in a manner that made his Spillane reviews seem complimentary.

Boucher was an astute critic, but he was wrong about Spillane (and came to admit it, in his later reviews) and he was wrong about Roscoe Kane (though that he never admitted). With Roscoe dead, the honors would still come, and probably would be more effusive, as posthumous honors tend to be; but there would be a hollow ring to them. Honoring the dead is so easy. And so pointless.

Or is it? At least a writer, even a paperback writer like Roscoe Kane, gets a grab at the brass ring of immortality. You never know; something you write just might last... assuming that all of us, including our books, aren’t turned to radioactive dust
any second now, of course. Short of that, the writer, any writer, even the popular-fiction writer like Roscoe Kane—following the tradition of such popular-fiction writers as Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky, crime writers all—has an honest (if long) shot at living on through his words.