Kill Your Darlings (8 page)

On the other hand, royalty checks made out to the author’s estate are not this author’s idea of a good time.

“Is this a private conversation or can anybody join in?”

I looked up.

She was small—petite, even—and her straight, shoulder-length hair was the dark brown you mistake for black if the light isn’t hitting it just right. Her eyes were the same color.

“Was I talking to myself?” I said, embarrassed. I was sitting alone in a booth in the Artistic Café, just up Michigan Avenue from the Congress; I’d wanted to get away from the hotel and the Bouchercon guests, and from past experience I remembered the Artistic, in the Fine Arts Building, where young actresses and ballerinas, in tights and leg-warmers and other form-fitting artsy-type duds, often wandered in for coffee. The Artistic was a good place for me to sit and think, and if thinking got old, be distracted by young actresses and ballerinas in tights.

“You were moving your lips,” she said, sitting down. She had a pixie face, pert, cute; she’d have made a great hippie, ten or fifteen years earlier.

“Was I making any audible sounds?” I asked.

“Just a sort of murmur,” she said, her lips doing a wry little dance around the words as they came out.

But she wasn’t a dancer, or an actress, at least not one here to use one of the Fine Arts Building studios. She had on a
Noir
sweatshirt—black deco letters barely visible on dark blue—and her designer jeans were snug (not that there’s any other kind).
Noir
was a mystery fanzine I had subscribed to a while back, because somebody had told me the editor’d been reviewing my books favorably; that sounded like my kind of reading, so I sent them a check. So what if Gregg Gorman was the publisher.

Anyway, I figured she was here for Bouchercon, and said, “I figure you must be here for Bouchercon.”

“Shrewd deduction,” she said; the corners of her mouth went up, and the rest of her mouth was a wavering line, making a terrific wry smile. She had a great mouth, this girl. Whoops, make that “woman”: I could tell right off she wouldn’t appreciate being referred to as a girl.

“Do I know you?” I said. “Or is that wishful thinking?”

“Do I look familiar?”

“I’ve seen you before, or somebody who looks a lot like you. Maybe a movie star or something.”

“Brother. Hope that isn’t dialogue you’re trying out for your next story—you usually give that guy in your books better lines.”

I managed a grin. “Things I say often seem more clever on the printed page.”

“The movie star line won’t.”

“Maybe you’re right. So. You know who I am.”

She grinned back at me; she had a thousand smiles, this one, all of them terrific, most of them wry. “Don’t be too proud of yourself. It’s my job to know who you are.”

I snapped my fingers. “Kathy Wickman!”

She nodded; pointed to her
Noir
sweatshirt, giving me a great excuse to take a look at how the word
Noir
rolled with the flow of her. She had the sort of breasts Gat Garson would no doubt describe as “pert, perfect handfuls, straining for their independence”; I, of course, would find a less sexist way to put it, though I can’t think of one at the moment.

“It doesn’t take
that
long to read the word
Noir
,” she said, with a one-sided wry smile. Make that 1001 smiles.

“I flunked Evelyn Wood,” I explained; I extended a hand across the table and we shook hands—hers was slim, cool, smooth. Mine was—who cares?

“You may remember, I dropped you a note about your first novel,” she said. “I just had to comment, personally, on that chapter about your hero’s rites of adolescence.”

“That was a nice letter; thanks.”

“The letter you wrote back was nice, too. That chapter really hit me; kind of unusual to find it plopped down in the middle of mystery novel.”

“That chapter was all true, every word of it,” I said. “I couldn’t use everything that really happened, actually—some of the things my
real
first love pulled on me outstrip anything the fictionalized one in my book did.”

“Really? Say—why don’t we get together for dinner, sometime over this Bouchercon weekend? I’d love to hear the stuff that didn’t make it into that chapter.”

“My outtakes would interest you, huh?” I shook my head. “I don’t know if I could be forced to talk about myself like that; I’m really very modest and shy. How about tonight?”

“Okay—” She smiled; this one wasn’t wry. Which was just fine with me.

“Have you had lunch? I’ve got a cheeseburger on the way.”

“Actually, I haven’t eaten.”

I called a waitress over and Kathy ordered.

Kathy, I should finally get around to saying, was the editor of
Noir
; she was the very person who’d been doing those favorable reviews of my books. So naturally I respected her intellectually, being as how she had such high standards and good taste
in matters literary (unless she panned my next book, in which case all bets were off). But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was just as attracted to her physically as mentally.

Frankly, feeling attracted to Kathy, young, pert, pixie-fresh Kathy, helped flush the uncomfortable feeling I had about Mae Kane out of my system.

“I really like your magazine,” I said, between bites of cheeseburger.

“You and our thousand or so other readers.”

“You ought to have a better circulation than that.”

“I know. It’s that screwed-up publisher of mine.”

I lifted my eyebrows and put ’em back down. “I’m glad you brought that up, not me.”

“Oh, really?”

“Your publisher. Gregg Gorman. He’s an s.o.b., you know.”

Taking a bite of her own cheeseburger, she rolled her eyes and nodded, swallowed, said, “You’re telling me. But he pays the bills, and stays out of my way.”

“It’s a nice little magazine.”

“If Gregg’d just promote it, it could be a bigger nice little magazine. He’s stubborn; he sells it to the mystery fan market, and won’t bother trying for newsstand distribution. We’ve got articles, fiction by some up-and-coming writers—you wouldn’t like to try a short story, would you?”

“Sure. What’s your word rate?”

Her mouth and chin crinkled in embarrassment. “Half a cent per.”

“Ouch. I always wanted to know what it felt like to be an old-time pulp writer.”

“Now you’ll know. Unless you’re going to back out...”

“Well, I did say yes, so a deal’s a deal.”

Wry smile; rerun of the first one. “Anyway,” she said, getting back on the track of an earlier train of thought, “
Noir
’s a slick little ’zine and Gorman’s getting his books into Dalton’s and Walden’s and other outlets, so I keep nudging him to do something on a bigger scale with my little baby. But he doesn’t.”

“He’s a man of vast imagination; some people see a sunset and just see a sunset—Gorman sees a sunset, and belches.”

She nodded. “That’s Gregg. He’s a paternalistic little shit, is what he is, making passes at me every chance he gets.”

“That’s not something I want to hear about while I’m eating.”

She waved a hand that had a little catsup on it. “Don’t worry, Gregg’s too much of a coward for there to be any gory anecdotes behind what I said. Fortunately we live half a continent apart and get together only rarely, and his come-ons are restricted primarily to the phone. But that’s bad enough, believe me. He comes on to me in the sleazy, chauvinistic way that went out with Gat Garson.”

I’d put Roscoe Kane’s death almost out of mind, for a few minutes; her flip remark brought it back to me, and my face must’ve shown it, because she said, “Oh. I’m sorry. That wasn’t in very good taste, was it? With Roscoe Kane dying last night and everything. I just could never read those stupid books, frankly.”

A wall came up between us.

“I loved those books,” I said. A little coldly.

She didn’t pick up on the coldness. “That’s just ’cause you’re a man. You grew up in the ’50s, and that was your era, and it hits you in a way that just goes right past me. I look at those macho private eye books and my stomach turns the corner, y’know?” She noticed the catsup on her hand and kissed it off; an unconsciously sexy little move. Seeing her do that, I would have had
a hard time not warming back up to her. Which proved I was the chauvinistic boor she apparently suspected me of being.

Or did she?

“See,” she was saying intensely, her dark eyes looking at me with a naïve sophistication, “your books are worlds apart from that tough-guy tripe. Your hero is sensitive. He thinks of women as persons, not sex objects... he sees women as...” And she looked upward for the word; while she did that I studied the word
Noir
. “... existential beings trapped in the same absurd world as he is. Don’t you agree?”

I raised my eyes, if not my consciousness. I smiled at her. “Completely. Does this mean separate checks?”

She stopped and her face was a blank for a moment, and then one of her repertoire of wry smiles found its way to her face, and she said, “I sound like a pretentious jerk, don’t I?”

I shrugged. “You sound like somebody who writes reviews for
Noir
.”

“Is there a difference?”

“That depends,” I said, placing tongue firmly in cheek, “on whether you’re praising G. Pompous Donaldson, or me.”

She shook her head, the smile shifting to one side of her face. “How a writer as sensitive as you can dislike Donaldson, and deify Kane, is beyond me.”

“The last time anybody called me sensitive was when I got my flu shot. And how somebody as insightful as you can fall for Donaldson’s bombastic claptrap is beyond yours truly, Johnny Dollar.”

“Huh?”

“Old radio show. You’re too young to remember it, and too literary to have heard of it. Listen, Donaldson’s guy is named Keats—a private eye named after a poet! Gimme a break!”

“That’s no more pretentious than calling your hero Mallory. That’s a reference to Sir Thomas Malory, and
Morte d’Arthur
, I assume. Linking your hero to knights, rather obviously.”

“Like hell! It’s my name!”

“Oh. Well, why do you only use one name? You’ve got a first name, don’t you?”

“People call me Mal.”

“But that’s short for ‘Mallory.’ What’s more pompous than signing your work with one name?”

“Using a first initial, a middle and last name; or, God forbid, three names! Look, I have a first name, but nobody, including me, uses it, except on official documents.”

“What is it, then?”

“Something that wouldn’t sound good in print.”

“It couldn’t be
that
bad.”

“Oh, no?”

“Oh, come on, tell me. What is it? I won’t tell.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Not in
Noir?
”

“Nowhere.”

I told her.

It sobered her.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “Maybe just ‘Mallory’
is
wiser.”

“Perhaps in the future you’ll learn to trust me. And my comments about Donaldson are also not for publication. Panning one of my peers in print is definitely not cool. Okay?”

“Sure,” she said, sipping at her Coke with a straw, looking fifteen years old, making me glad she was really ten years older. “Still, you seem to have the sort of outspoken notions that
Noir
readers would get a kick out of reading about.”

“I don’t know...”

“Well, I do. I’d like to interview you, over the weekend, some time.”

“I don’t think so...”

“You can edit the rough copy, censor anything you like, if something you say looks stupid or harsh on paper.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Dinner still on?”

“You’re from Pennsylvania someplace, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. West Mifflin.”

“Maybe I better introduce you to Chicago-style pizza, then. This evening.”

Wry little grin #458. “Okay. Separate checks?”

“It’ll be my treat,” I said.

“Okay.”

We stood; I pointed to the luncheon check. “You can get that one.”

She laughed. “Fair enough. Heading back to the Congress?”

“Yeah. The dealers’ room should just about be set up. I need to talk to that lovely publisher of yours, and he should be up there.”

She paid at the register and we went out onto the street; there was a breeze, a breeze with a Chicago bite in it, and it was still foggy. I had a light jacket on, dug my hands in my pockets against the cold; she just had the sweatshirt, her breasts poking at the heavy cloth, dotting the eye in
Noir
a second time—being sensitive, I pretended not to notice. She pretended not to notice me pretending not to notice.

“Are you taking that Crime Tour this afternoon?” she asked; we were walking arm in arm—it was cold enough to justify that, even if our relationship wasn’t that far along yet.

“What Crime Tour’s that?”

“There’s a bus tour of various famous Chicago crime scenes. Think of the history on view—the genre’s dark roots revealed!”

“You really are the editor of
Noir
, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I am. You comin’?”

“I think I’ll pass.” I’d seen enough crime scenes for one weekend. “You can give me the full report tonight over pizza.”

We stopped at a crosswalk; the Congress was just up ahead.

She looked sideways at me. “Say—what happened between you and Gregg, anyway?”

“Do I need a reason to loathe that guy?”

“No.”

The light changed and we crossed.

“Well,” I said, “it’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime.”

We went in the front hotel entrance, past the doorman through the revolving doors and up the interior ramp to the promenade of shops. A woman in her late fifties, heavy-set in a brown dress, rolled past like an orange-haired tank. Her face, which had been pretty once, was grim.

I stopped in my tracks.

Kathy went a couple steps beyond me, before she realized I’d been left behind; she glanced back with a look of exaggerated puzzlement.

“What’s wrong, Mal?”

“Nothing. Go on up to the dealers’ room, why don’t you. I’ll catch you later.”

She shrugged, smirked wryly, and went on toward the bank of elevators.