The last thought I remember having, before drifting off to sleep, was, “Where the hell’s Gat Garson when you really need him?”
FRIDAY
The phone rang and scared hell out of me.
I’d been sleeping deeply, and was in the midst of a disturbing, just-short-of-delirious dream in which Gat Garson and I were chasing Roscoe Kane’s killer down the corridors of the Hotel Caligari; a faceless killer whose form shifted but who had a gun, and Garson said, “Look out!” as the killer fired the gun at me and the phone-ring came out the barrel. My eyes jumped open and saw the phone, and I stopped it before it could ring again. I spoke thickly into the receiver: “Mae?”
It wasn’t Mae Kane; it was the wake-up call I’d left for ten o’clock, figuring I’d wake before that. But I hadn’t. I thanked the operator, hung up, sat and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. The feel of the dream was still with me, a physical sensation, a film in my mind as real as my morning mouth. I stumbled up out of bed and brushed my teeth, and my mouth tasted better, but the dream was still there.
And so was the death of Roscoe Kane; that wasn’t something I could shake easily, either.
I drew a bath.
I went to the window and looked out at Michigan Avenue; the park was across there, but you could barely see it. Fog had settled on Chicago like a private eye’s porkpie hat. It would’ve struck me as nice, appropriate weather for a Bouchercon; only,
fun-and-games murder à la mystery books and movies seemed, after last night, trivial, in bad taste.
I got in the hot tub. A lot of people prefer taking showers these days, particularly in hotels; but writers—like Roscoe Kane and I—like to take baths. We can sit and soak and ruminate, or maybe read; a bath is passive, and lets you do that. Showers are entirely too active for my taste. It’s tough to read in a shower.
But I wasn’t reading, I was ruminating. Thinking about Roscoe sitting in the tub last night, a floor above me, sitting and soaking and drinking and passing out and dying. Had he done that? Had he really done that?
I washed up and got the hell out of the tub.
I sat naked on the edge of the bed and called down to the desk to see if there’d been any messages from Mae; there hadn’t been. Perhaps she was still sleeping. I could check later.
I threw on a sweater and jeans and went down to the lobby. The coffee shop was called the Gazebo and was an affair full of latticework and lawn chairs and fake foliage. The convention didn’t begin officially till late this afternoon, but most of the mystery writer guests were already here, so the booths and tables in the restaurant were filled with familiar faces. William Campbell Gault and his wife were having a leisurely late breakfast at one table; at another, Tim Culver and Cynthia Crystal were finishing up theirs. Cynthia, a lovely Grace Kelly blonde in her midthirties, had won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award last year for
The Children Are Hiding
. Mystery-magazine columnist and short-story master R. Edward Porter was having coffee with Bill DeAngelo in a side booth.
DeAngelo was a big, gregarious guy in his early thirties, with the usual beard and Poe-ishly long hair of the younger mystery
writer. He was wearing a black suit with a tie but was not quite getting away with it—the suit meant for us to take him as a serious-minded adult, but his good-humored enthusiasm for his work, and for life, was childlike and endearing. DeAngelo had won two Edgars, once for a hardcover mystery novel and again the next year for a paperback; he was a very young man to have pulled that off—I couldn’t seem to find a way to resent or dislike him for it, though, try as I might.
He smiled when he saw me, and stuck his hand out to be shaken; I complied.
“I understand we’re on another panel together,” he said.
We’d been on a panel at the last Bouchercon I’d attended, also in Chicago, years before; I was a little surprised—and flattered—he remembered that, and me.
“Really?” I said. “I haven’t seen the program listing yet. But I did tell the ’con organizers I was willing to make a fool out of myself, if they wanted me to.”
“I think we’re on the catchall panel,” he said. “We’re supposed to talk about the ‘state of the mystery’—that’s so general a topic as to be meaningless.”
“Is Donaldson on it?”
“The Guest of Honor? No. Disappointed?”
“No.”
A wicked little smile formed under the mustache. “Don’t you like Donaldson?”
“Never met him.”
“I meant his books.”
“I know you did. I’m just being evasive.”
Ed Porter smiled a little. “Care to join us?”
“Thank you, no—I see Sardini and Murtz over there. I have to go talk over some things with Tom.”
Porter, a soft-spoken, gentlemanly man in his fifties, said, “Sorry to hear about Roscoe Kane.” His concern was genuine, his manner somber.
DeAngelo’s cheery look dropped away. “Terrible thing. Hell of a way to start a Bouchercon. It’s like a bad joke.”
“I wish it were a joke,” I said.
“Roscoe was a nice man,” Ed said, “and an underrated writer.”
I nodded.
DeAngelo said, “I never got to meet the guy, but he was very, very good. I think he was better than Chandler.”
That was a controversial thing to say out loud at a Bouchercon, Chandler having achieved a sort of sainthood approaching Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s. I liked DeAngelo for that—even if he had won two Edgars.
I stopped at the table where Tim Culver and Cynthia Crystal were just finishing up what appeared to be a rather silent breakfast. Cynthia smiled briefly on first seeing me, then apparently made the Roscoe Kane connection, because her expression turned sympathetic.
“Mal,” she said, rising, holding a hand out to me, which I took. She still had the same trim model’s figure, in a stylishly cut gray slacks outfit; she was wearing her pale blonde hair short these days.
“Hi, Cynthia,” I said.
There was something besides sympathy in her eyes; nervousness, maybe. It was impossible for Cynthia to be anything but graceful, yet somehow this seemed an awkward moment for her. “I’m very, very sorry to hear about Roscoe Kane’s death. I know what he meant to you.” She let go of my hand; swallowed. “Do sit down for a moment.”
Culver, without rising, motioned toward an empty chair—they were two at a table for four—and I sat.
“It’s been a long time, Cynthia,” I said.
“Since that other Bouchercon, here in Chicago. How many years ago?”
“I’ve lost track.”
“Don’t you ever get to New York?”
“Once in a while.”
“Call next time.”
“I will.”
Culver searched for words. “This must be a rough morning for you,” he said. “I know Roscoe Kane meant a lot to you.”
“Yes, he did. We sort of had the final audience with him, I guess, last night in the bar.”
Culver sipped some coffee, sighed heavily. “At least I got to tell the man how much I admired his writing. For all the money he made, he had precious little recognition.”
“I would have thought money was his primary goal,” Cynthia said, with a little shrug. She turned to me, still sympathetic. “I don’t mean to be unkind, Mal. I know Kane was your mentor, of sorts. I just mean, I don’t think we should feel too sorry for him, in terms of his writing career. Beyond the publishing problems of his later years, I mean. Because I don’t think Roscoe Kane had any literary pretentions; he was a craftsman, if you will, and he made his fortune, and I’d imagine he felt quite content having done so.”
Culver shook his head no. “I disagree. Kane wasn’t a hack by any means”—he glanced at me—“you must remember that ‘craftsman’ is Cynthia’s euphemism for hack.” He looked back at her sharply. “You seem to have forgotten he was a peer of Hammett and Chandler’s, the last ‘star performer’ of the original
Black Mask
crowd....”
Cynthia half-smiled. “Don’t you think I know that?” she said, with the gentlest condescension.
Something was going on beneath the surface of this literary discussion that I couldn’t quite pick up on; and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Culver looked at me again. “Anyway, I’m very sorry, Mallory. Just wanted you to know.”
“I appreciate that. And I’m sure Roscoe appreciated hearing your words of praise, too. You’re one of the few modern mystery writers he had any respect for.”
Culver smiled a little. “That’s nice to hear.”
“I’m glad to meet you, too,” I said. “I’ve always admired your McClain series. And I’m also a big fan of your brother’s. Is he attending the convention?”
Culver’s face froze.
“No,” he said. He plucked the check from the table and stood. “Excuse me while I take care of this,” he said, and rose and strode off toward the mini-gazebo housing the cashier.
“What was that all about?” I asked Cynthia.
“He and his brother don’t speak,” she said. “It’s simple envy on both their parts.... Tim gets the good reviews, and Curt gets the Hollywood sales.”
Culver’s twin brother, Curt—who wrote under the name Curt Clark—was the author of numerous comedy caper novels, a good half dozen of which had been snapped up by the movies. But it was Culver’s Hammett-like novels about professional thief McClain that had earned the critical raves, as well as a couple of Edgars and several overseas awards.
“Didn’t mean to step on any toes,” I said.
“Oh, he’s just in a gloomy mood today,” she said. “I think being with Roscoe Kane so shortly before his death made Tim
a little dour, shall we say. Contemplating his own mortality—which of course is the male equivalent of the navel.”
She said this with the tiniest cocktail-party smile, and got a genuine smile out of me, despite my own mood. She was able to get away with saying the nastiest things by saying them in the most good-natured, offhand way.
“I liked your Hammett biography,” I said. “How’d you swing the cooperation of the estate?”
“Tact and patience,” she said. “Something the men who’d approached the estate hadn’t bothered trying.”
“I have to admit I was surprised you wrote a book about a tough-guy writer, what with your leaning toward the more genteel sort of mystery.”
Cynthia had made her reputation writing drawing-room mysteries, intelligent, urbane American versions of the Agatha Christie formula. Lately she’d begun doing occasional “big” books, suspense novels in the vein of Mary Higgins Clark; at this she’d again been critically and commercially successful, and was similarly successful with her Hammett bio.
“I’ve always admired Hammett,” she said. “That’s no secret. My own work is sort of an unlikely marriage between Hammett and Christie. But the tough mystery story beyond Hammett gets silly very quickly. Chandler has his merits, I suppose, but who else? Mickey Spillane? Don’t spoil my breakfast. Ross Macdonald? Possibly. But how you can take the likes of Roscoe Kane seriously—and I mean no disrespect, I’m talking about the man’s work, and nothing else—mystifies me.”
The table tension hadn’t departed with Culver.
“You’re embarrassed to see me again, aren’t you?” I said.
She shrugged; the cocktail-party smile settled uneasily on one side of her face. She lit a cigarette and handled it gracefully,
almost regally, but underneath it were nerves. Even nervous, though, she seemed somehow calm; a bundle of contradictions, Cynthia Crystal was—cool and warm, bitchy and sweet. Whatever, she was a beautiful woman. I had told her so, once.
“I still have a crush on you,” I said.
She laughed. “That’s so like you, that word. ‘Crush.’ Are you destined to be an overgrown adolescent your entire life, Mal? Will you never grow up?”
I shrugged. “Yes and no,” I said.
Her smile turned gentle and suddenly her brittle manner fell away.
“Yes, damnit,” she admitted, “I
am
embarrassed at seeing you again. The last time I saw you, I treated you badly. I know it. And you know it.”
I shook my head no. “You treated me the way I deserved to be treated. I misread the situation, and you put me straight. Let’s leave it at that.”
She leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
“Friends?” she said.
I held a hand out and she took it, shook it.
“Friends,” I said.
Culver was on his way back to the table, finally having worked his way through the line to pay the check.
“You just like older men, that’s all,” I said.
“He’s a better writer than you, too,” she said with a wicked smile, and the sort of natural charm that made a remark like that seem a compliment.
I smirked. “You’re just saying that ’cause it’s true.”
She patted my hand and I rose.
I nodded to Culver as he approached and he at me, and I went on to join Sardini and Murtz in a booth.
“Mal!” Tom said, having been too deep in conversation with Murtz to notice me come in. “Jesus, sit down! You must’ve been through it last night.”
“The news about Roscoe Kane sure got around fast. I didn’t tell anybody. Has Mae Kane been down or something?”
Murtz made a disgusted expression under the every-which-way-but-trimmed mustache. “The hotel leaked it, apparently; reporters were around for a couple of hours, starting about eight, questioning every mystery writer they could get a hold of. I’m surprised they didn’t track you down.”
“They’ve talked to Mae, then?”
Tom said, “My understanding is she gave them a brief statement this morning. She mentioned that she’d been with a friend of the family when she found Kane’s body, but didn’t give ’em your name. I figured it was you, since you went up with her from the bar last night, and I mentioned that to some of our fellow wordsmiths—but not to the reporters. The word spread among the people here—but nobody tipped the reporters off that a mystery writer helped find the body. Nobody said much to the reporters at all, frankly, let alone hand ’em a juicy sidebar like that.”
“Why’s that?”
Murtz had a cynically amused smile going. “Well, the press sure wasn’t here ’cause Kane was a public figure; they vaguely knew who he was, of course. It’s more the sick joke novelty of a mystery writer dying at a mystery convention. An oddity, a cute ironic sidelight.”