A Killing in Comics (5 page)

Now you might be so tactless as to point out that just the afternoon before I’d had no trouble at all falling half in love with Honey Daily, who was thirty-five easy. But Honey Daily, to my knowledge anyway, never slept with my father. That I could get past her sleeping with a fat loathsome creature like Donny Harrison (RIP) will just have to remain one of the great enigmas of western civilization that we’ll never solve.

Still, Maggie was, as I’ve said, stunning—even in her recluse-state wardrobe—pale-green scarf over her Lucille Ball hair, the faintest dab of lipstick on her trademark bee-stung lips, her big green eyes unaided by mascara, her pale, faintly freckled oval face as perfect as a carved cameo, her slender if bosomy figure hiding out under a green-plaid lumberjack shirt, sleeves rolled to her elbow. She’d been seated when I got there, but I would’ve bet a month’s pay those long legs were on the lam under baggy blue denims.

Displaying that other trademark of hers—the deep, almost mannish voice coming out of a little-girl puss—she interrupted her troubled reverie to ask, “Too early for a Coke?”

She knew I despised coffee.

“Never,” I said.

She pressed a small red button on her desk and shook her head. “Your poor teeth.”

“My teeth are fine. All mine and nary a filling.”

“The major lost his teeth before he was your age.”

“Well, maybe my mother had nice teeth.”

A little smile twitched. “Maybe she did. Before my time.”

Her assistant Bryce (Maggie did not care for the term “secretary”—nor did Bryce) came briskly in behind me from his reception area-cum-office with tucked-away kitchenette. I liked Bryce, who was funny and smart and (to use the most current term) “gay.” An alarmingly handsome, trimly bearded brown-eyed boy about twenty-five, he wore a black turtleneck sweater and black slacks but white rubber-sole shoes—I never asked.

He had been a dancer in Maggie’s Broadway show during the run of which he’d broken an ankle, ending one career and picking up on another, which was to be chauffeur, secretary and whatever else Maggie might need on a whim. Sort of like that African giant in the leopard skin who follows Mandrake the Magician around.

Bryce had an apartment in the basement, below the restaurant, a rather dank little chamber for such a neat little character to live in. I wasn’t sure I knew what went on down there but was positive I didn’t want to.

Using a tray, Bryce delivered Maggie’s coffee, so cream-laden it was damn near white, and provided me a Coca-Cola on ice.

He hovered over me like a guilty conscience and raised an accusing eyebrow. “What can we do to get her out of that babushka? Is she expecting a stiff wind?”

“That’s not my department,” I said.

“Will you tell her she looks fine. She needs to get out and about.”

I looked at Maggie. “You look fine. Why don’t you get out and about?”

“Mind your own business,” she said, the target of her remark ambiguous.

When I looked back up at him, Bryce was still looming; he’d arched the other eyebrow in the meantime. “Will you tell her there’s nothing wrong with a woman having a little meat on her bones. Will you tell her that men like women with curves? That people haven’t paid good money for all these years to look at her goddamn rib cage?”

Maggie said, “What would you know about what men like? . . . Scratch that.”

With a smile of unmatched superiority, Bryce and his tray took their leave.

“She has her nerve,” I said.

“Don’t be mean.” Maggie sipped her coffee, reacting as if a much-needed blood transfusion had been provided her. “You know you like Bryce.”

“I do. And you should listen to him.”

Maggie sighed and unknotted the scarf, revealing a perfectly fine short-shorn tangle of natural curls—albeit of a shade of red unknown in nature—and stuffed it in a desk drawer. “. . . Any further comments about Donny’s birthday party?”

“Let’s just say I’ve heard of falling on your sword, but this is ridiculous.”

She hiked an eyebrow—she had perfect dark naturally arching ones, requiring little if any plucking (she’s told me so). “Yes. I hardly think it was suicide. Heart attack, I suppose.”

“Well, we’ll know, soon enough.”

“We will?”

I nodded. “I overheard Mrs. Harrison talking to Louis Cohn—after the medics came and carted Wonder Guy away? She said her husband was in perfect health and she was going to know how in heaven’s name this terrible thing could have happened to such a lovely man.”

Maggie was nodding, and not at the notion Donny was a lovely man. “Which you take to mean she’ll have an autopsy performed.”

“Either that or buy herself a Ouija board. I’m gonna go with autopsy.”

She was thinking. Like Honey Daily, she had perfected the art of reflecting without furrowing. “Donny Harrison was a lot of things, but in perfect health wasn’t one of them.”

“He was fatter than Andy Devine and smoked more than Groucho and drank more than Bogart. They should sell his liver to the Stage Door deli—it’s bound to be pickled enough.”

Maggie smiled but said, “Don’t be disrespectful. Your father loved the man.”

“You said that last night. His mistress—Honey Daily? She said he was simply charming at home.” I was just about to ponder aloud why a dish like that would hook up with a fat lout like Donny when I remembered Maggie had married the major.

“You told me last night who was at the party,” Maggie said. “But were there any conspicuous absentees?”

I thought about that, wondering what she was getting at. “Well, Harry Spiegel’s wife wasn’t there, I hear. Rose has never made a great secret of her contempt for the Americana brass, so maybe Harry leaving her home was the better part of valor.”

“What about certain . . . silent partners?”

Now I got it.

I shook my head. “No sign of Frank Calabria or any of his delightful crowd.”

“Well . . . you said there were press people present. That makes sense.”

“Even if Frank does have his own suite at the Waldorf.”

Maggie’s upper lip curled. “You mean,
his
mistress has a tower suite, too. Mr. Calabria and his wife and children live on Central Park West.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot. He just stops by the Waldorf every day for his shave.”

Frank Calabria was thought by those in the know to be the number one mobster in New York. And he had been a silent partner throughout the ’20s and ’30s in various business enterprises involving Harrison, Cohn and the major. All started back in Prohibition days, when publisher Harrison decided to buy his paper in Canada, for some reason. Think about it.

“You know,” I said, “before he did the world a favor, Donny threatened me about us taking on Harry and Moe’s new strip.”

“Really.” She sat forward, elbows on the desk, hands clasped. “You mentioned Louis Cohn . . .”

“Another of my father’s really swell associates.”

“He called this morning.”

“About Donny’s farewell party?”

“No. Which is just like Louis. Not a word of that until I brought it up halfway through the conversation.” She sighed heavily and the breasts under the plaid made their whereabouts known. “He was calling about the same subject.”

“What same subject?”

“What Donny threatened you over—telling us not to ‘humor’ the ‘boys’ on their new strip.”

Now it was my turn to sigh. “Yeah, I forgot to tell you last night—Louie told me to remind you which side of the bread the butter goes on.”

She shook her head. “I used to hear that saying as a kid in Council Bluffs. I never understood it.”

“Yeah, well, I think Louie’s meaning is pretty clear. Does he have any contractual right to screw with us?”

She shook her head. “You know as well as I the major made a clean break with Americana, years ago. Of course, I have a few shares of stock. And we have a first look at comic-strip syndication rights on any new comic-book feature they come up with.”

“Tell you the truth, none of their strips are doing that hot for us.”

We ran three strips derived from Americana comic books:
Wonder Guy
,
Batwing
and
Amazonia
, the latter basically a female version of Wonder Guy melded with the venerable woman warrior legend of the amazons.
Wonder Guy
still held a good list, though we’d lost maybe 20 percent of our papers, postwar.
Batwing
never had a huge list, despite the size of Rod Krane’s ego, but was holding on and had its share of major cities.
Amazonia
looked to be gone in a year or two—a respectable list at the outset that was getting whittled away at every month.

“The bloom’s definitely off the superhero rose,” I said.

She was sipping her coffee. “Yes, but we have the two biggest stars in
Wonder Guy
and
Batwing
.”

“I don’t know—on the newsstands, comic-book market in general?
Marvel Man
’s outselling
Wonder Guy
, these days.”

She nodded. “Yes, and I wish we could take out a strip version of that—nice light touch that appeals to kids
and
parents—but Cohn would foam at the mouth, if we did.”

I had a sip of Coke. “Anyway, rumor is Cohn’s planning to sue Spiggot Publications for plagiarism over
Marvel Man
. We don’t need to be in the middle of that.”

“We certainly do not.” She sorted through some artwork on her desk. “But do we need
this
?”

I rose to take the samples of the new Spiegel and Shulman strip,
Funny Guy
. I’d seen them before but Maggie seemed to want me to have a second look.

Back in the leather chair, I flipped through the large comic-strip originals—like many cartoonists, Shulman worked “twice up,” double the size of the printed version. The originals were beauties in their quirky way—on Crafttint, a chemically treated board that allows the artist to use a brush to bring up tones of shading in black-and-white art.

“Very professional,” I said. “Looks like Moe’s getting some help on the art.”

“I think he
has
to.”

I glanced up. “Oh?”

Maggie shrugged. “You’ve noticed those glasses of his.”

I nodded. “Every time I see him, they seem even thicker.”

Then she waved it off. “But that doesn’t bother me. What cartoonist doesn’t use assistants and ghosts?”

Six daily strips and a Sunday page, every damn week, is a heavy workload, a murderous grind, and Maggie was right about even the most dedicated workhorses among comic-strip artists needing a hand.

And to produce
Wonder Guy
for both the comic strips and monthly books, Spiegel and Shulman had had to assemble a studio of helpers, originally back in Iowa, the last few years here in New York. One bone of contention between the team and Americana was the comic-book company hiring other artists and writers to supplement the work coming from the creators and their studio.

“Sales tells me we can start with a strong list,” she said, “but I doubt it’ll hold up. The concept doesn’t . . . well, let’s just say I wouldn’t consider this for Starr if it wasn’t from a name brand like Spiegel and Shulman.”

Funny Guy
was an odd duck of a strip, no getting away from it—circus acrobat Sammy Laff would fight crime dressed up as the clownish, big-nose, big-shoes Funny Guy, spritzing tear gas from lapel flowers and surprising villains with exploding-cigar grenades, driving his Fun-Mobile and staging elaborate pranks.

I handed the strips back. “Does kind of try too hard.”

Bryce stuck his head in the office. “I have Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Shulman for you, Miss Starr.”

Always “Miss Starr,” never “Mrs.”

“Show them in,” she said.

Harry Spiegel—spiffy in a tan sportscoat with padded shoulders and patch pockets over a green-and-white sportshirt with sporty brown trousers—came in first, of course, rushing over to shake hands with Maggie, who rose for the occasion, and then with me, grinning like Funny Guy himself. Moe Shulman, in that same slept-in-looking brown suit he’d worn yesterday, but with a blue sportshirt underneath, lumbered in after; he was smiling a little but seemed vaguely embarrassed about it. He just nodded at Maggie, politely, and shook my hand, with considerably less force than Wonder Guy might have.

Harry took the center chair and sat forward, while Moe slouched into his.

Bryce followed quickly behind them with a tray of iced teas, having already taken their order. Bryce set the tall, sweating, lemon-slice-sporting glasses on coasters on Maggie’s massive desk nearby; my glass of Coke was on a similar coaster. Moe thanked Maggie’s assistant, who nodded, but Harry hadn’t seemed to notice the inconspicuous figure in full beard, black attire and white shoes.

“Beautiful day out there, Maggie,” Harry said, beaming at her. “You really need to get out in that sunshine.”

“I don’t have the skin for it,” she said with a gentle smile.

I said, “I see you’re over Donny’s death.”

Harry turned to me and his face went blister white. “God, I don’t mean to be a ghoul about it . . . . I mean, like the philosopher said, every man’s death is every man’s loss . . . or something.”

“Or something,” I said.

Maggie said, “A lot of people loved Donny Harrison—he put Americana on the map with his, well, his glad-handing and kick-backs and what have you. But I fully understand that finding any grief for him is a tall order for you and Moe.”

If he’d sat any further on the edge of the chair, Harry would have been on the floor; his voice had something pleading in it as he said to Maggie, “I really don’t mean to be a louse about this . . . but somehow, it’s like . . . like a sign.”

Maggie’s eyebrows hiked. “A sign?”

“Of our new beginning. I mean . . . the sun
is
shining Everything is going great.”

“Including having Donny fall on his birthday-cake knife,” I said.