The Paperback Show Murders (4 page)

“YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND”

Saturday, March 26

“‘You don't understand, Jesse, you just don't,' Laura gushed, reaching one lovely, lanky hand ‘south of the border.' ‘A girl has her needs, too!'

“‘But I promised Father Fritto that I'd keep myself pure,' her boyfriend said, ‘that I'd drink only distilled water and eat unleavened bread, and abstain from the, uh, baser acts of life, until, until….'

“‘Until what, my love?' she asked, panting to keep her rubbed-raw emotions in cheek. She was a sprightly girl raised on goat's milk and chocolate balls, and she had a Pollyanna's picture of life in the Big Palooza. Still, she'd kept her goal firmly planted in front of her eyes—and she wanted it now!

“‘Until I found “urbvana,”' he said, ‘Father Fritto's life-freeing, formal “D” hybrid.' He showed her the elongated bulb of the carefully cultivated plant.

“‘But I can give you something more!' Laura exclaimed, smiling her cheery, toothy grin at him.

“‘What?' Jesse asked, leaning towards her expectantly.

“‘Silly boy!' she said, grasping both her lover's root—and his prompt attention. ‘Nervana!'

“‘Ohm, my God!'”

—Urban Commune Nurse
,

by Kitty Gaylord (1963)

Margie returned ninety minutes later. She looked shaken and drawn—and more than a little distracted.

“What did they want to know?” I asked her, when she'd settled in her seat.

“Uh, what?” she whispered, head cast down.

“The police,” I said.

“Well, someone claimed to have seen me in front of Lissa's door a little after nine o'clock last night.”

“Who?” I asked.

“They wouldn't say.” My partner's head continued to droop, and I could barely hear her mumbles over the conversations behind me.

“And
were
you there?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Why, Margie?
Why?
”

I was really getting concerned now. Maybe she needed an attorney.

“I…you don't understand. You…you just don't.” She was back to whispering again.

“Try me,” I said.

“I wanted to save an old friend's reputation, that's all. I wanted to talk some sense into Lissa. But when I got to her room, the door was cracked open; I went inside and saw her lying there dead, with the book already gone. I found a small corner of the cover grasped between her fingers, and I took it from her. Whoever killed her had literally snatched it from her dying hand.

“That's what I told the cops. I don't know why they didn't arrest me—I can't prove any of it.”

“
What
friend?” I asked. “
What
reputation?”

“That was
my
copy of
Castle Dred
. It was inscribed to
me
, OK? I knew the writer almost fifty years ago, during my last year of high school, just before I came to New York. We were…well, we were close. I wound up writing some of those gothics too, as well as porn books and other stuff, in the mid-1960s and '70s. But I
didn't
write
Dred
—my best friend did. We had a kind of contest going, over which of us would get published first—and she won!” A streak of tears furrowed down both sides of her face.

“But she never came to the Big Apple, like me. I urged her to join me, I really did; I told her that she could find acceptance there, that she had talent to spare, but she was afraid to leave her family. Instead, she married a local banker and had a couple of kids, and…I don't really know what. She got divorced and moved away from that small town, finally, and I lost track of her decades ago. I don't know what became of her. I didn't have any family left myself, so I never went back—didn't
want
to go back.”

“But who
was
she?”

“Just a sweet girl whose head was filled with dreams—like mine. We loved literature, we loved the great authors, we wanted to become just like them. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Beats, everything old and new excited us. We were young then: we thought all things were possible. They weren't! She didn't have the gumption to take it to the next step. I did, although I never amounted to much as a writer. I was just a hack. Turned out my talent—and hers—didn't measure up, really. So, maybe she was wiser than me, I don't know.”

“Was Lissa right in saying that she's here at the con?”

“How would I know?” Margie said. “I haven't seen or talked to her since 1964. I don't know if I'd even recognize her now. We were both twenty back then, so she'd be about sixty-six or –seven if she were still alive. And what difference does it make anyway? I lost track of my copy years ago, during one of my frequent moves. I probably traded the book for something else to read, or gave it to a friend.”

“Well, it obviously made a difference to someone—enough of a difference to kill for,” I said.

“If she had a position in society, she might have been concerned about having it compromised.”

“In this day and age?”
I said. “Who cares anymore whether you're straight or gay?”

“A
lot
of people care, particularly in business and professional circles,
particularly
in small towns,” my partner said. “That's why I went to see Lissa. I thought I could buy the book back for the business, and just write it off
my
account. I thought I could take care of the problem once and for all. If my friend wanted her pen name kept secret, I could at least do that much for her. But….”

I sighed. “What
was
her name?” I finally asked.

“That's my business, OK?”

“Did you tell the cops all this?”

“Of course.”

“Did you tell them her name?”

“Yes.”

“Then why not me?”

She looked up at me then, and after a long pause, said: “I don't think I really want you to know.”

“I DON'T KNOW WHY”

Saturday, March 26

“The
Sundogger
came roaring out of the nebula, zap guns blazing at both ends.

“‘Bzzzt, bzzzt,' they went, as they chewed through the hull of the Kymkurdashianan battleship.

“‘Burka, burka,' the alien vessel responded, sending a stream of supercharged x-beams back the other direction.

“‘They're outgunned! Why don't they surrender?' Sergeant Mazeltoff yelled over the steam jetting into the control room. He wiped the sweat from his overheated brow.

“‘I don't know why,' I shouted back at him, adjusting the valve to inject more super-coal into the engine. Trying to predict what a Kymkurdashian might do was almost impossible, since they acted only from irrational premises. They built beautiful hulls, no question, but their control-and-command functions were mostly lacking—and that made them very dangerous foes indeed.

“‘They're a-comin' right at us!' Scottie the Res-geek said in an even tone of voice. Only an insufficiency of test-tubes ever bothered him.

“‘Then blast the buggers!' I ordered. I pressed the big red button on the console.

“The resulting ‘Boom!' rattled the whole ship. I glanced out the porthole. A giant brown projectile was hurtling right towards the oncoming enemy cruiser. It spattered over their space-wind shield, rendering them effectively blind.

“‘Right turn! Right turn!' I told the helmslady, and she grabbed the great wheel and rotated it ninety degrees. The
Sundogger
slid just under the alien ship. We all turned to watch the alien metal cylinder plow a furrow into the third planet of Rastus.

“‘Gee! That was close!' Scottie mumbled.

“‘Yeah,' I said, ‘but I never had any doubts when I saw that turd from the sun!'”

—Third from the Sun
,

by Cole Spayze (1957)

My conversation with Margie had left me very unsettled, and I spent the rest of the afternoon in a semi-daze. We'd never had a romantic relationship—I mean, I understood that much about her from the beginning—but we had been close friends for a great many years, and I thought I knew all of the important things that there were to know about her. Obviously, I was wrong.

I couldn't possibly imagine Margie as the killer—she was just too down-to-earth, it seemed to me. I didn't think she had the willingness to kill that seems innate in certain individuals, although I knew that almost anyone could be pushed to murder under the right circumstances. But she was one of those individuals whom I regarded as solid and practical and not likely to allow herself to be upset in the kind of way that I envisioned killers to be. But I'd been wrong before, and there was much about her that I clearly didn't understand.

What I did know was this: Margie had just become the prime suspect for the murder of Lissa Boaz, at least from the point of view of the cops. I assumed that they had her prints in Lissa's room, in addition to the supposed eyewitness account of her visitation there at the right time of the evening. I wouldn't think that a boa would retain prints, but these days, with the technology that the cops have available, there could be a DNA residue or something like that—although those kinds of tests took longer than overnight to gain results, I knew.

The problem was this: in order to disprove Margie's connection with the murder, I had to find the real killer, and do so in a way that that individual's guilt was established beyond any doubt. But there were any number of possible murderers available. Paperback mongering had become a cutthroat business in the past decade. I knew all of the vendors at the show, if not in person, at least by reputation; and perhaps a third of them had been accused or suspected, at one time or another, of questionable business practices. It's not much of a jump to go from cheating someone (semi-legalized robbery) to banging them over the head to steal their property, which is what might be involved here.

And then there were the possible personal motivations. What if Margie's former “friend” was indeed present at the proceedings, perhaps greatly aged or disguised in some way, having been tipped off by Lissa that the one thing that might identify her after all these decades was about to be revealed? This seemed far-fetched to me, because I still couldn't imagine why anyone would actually care about something that had occurred a half-century earlier; but people do strange things sometimes, and reputation, status, and position mean just about everything to certain kinds of individuals. So it was a possible motive—just barely, in my estimation.

Also, Lissa was not, shall we say, well-liked. She had an acerbic, biting personality that rubbed many people (including myself) the wrong way. She gave feminism and lesbianism a very bad name. She enjoyed deliberately doing things that punished or hurt other people, for reasons that only made sense to her. So, she might have been killed by one of her myriad enemies, from both inside and outside the business.

The only thing that I could think to do that might eventually lead me to the murderer was to track the book.
What
had happened to the inscribed copy of
The Secret of Castle Dred
? According to the rumor mill, the police hadn't located it in her room. Someone—the killer or an onlooker—had walked away with it. Someone had it now. They wouldn't be able to sell it openly, not with the notoriety that had now been attached to it; but there would be a buyer, sooner or later, who would agree to purchase it under the counter. I knew this business, and I knew that lack of scruples went both ways.

“Have you thought about getting an attorney?” I asked Margie.

“I have a friend who's a lawyer,” she said. “I phoned him an hour ago. He recommended a good criminal practitioner, but I'm hoping it won't come to that.”

“Unless they find someone better, I think you'll almost certainly be arrested,” I said. “You need to be prepared for that possibility.”

She sighed. “I don't know why I went to Lissa's room last night, I really don't. In retrospect, it seems so damned stupid. I know what kind of person Lissa is. She'd only have been interested in hard cash, cash on the line, and I don't bring very much to these shows. She had to have someone—or someones—on her string, or she never would have brought the book with her. She
knew
an interested party would be here. But
who
?”

“You're sure it wasn't your friend?”

“How would I recognize her? I haven't seen anyone here that reminded me of her—not even close. But it's been so long. She's never made any effort down the decades to contact me, and on the one occasion when I went back home in the late '60s, she refused to meet me—I think she was afraid that her husband would realize that our friendship was more than that. A few years later, when I returned for my Mom's funeral, she was gone—no one knew where. My brother had left town not long after I did for the city lights, and there was no one still close to me that I could ask. Someone told me later that she'd left her husband and remarried—but they had no contact information. I have no idea even what her name might be now—or if she's still alive.”

“OK,” I said, “so let's assume Lissa knew what she was doing. She may have been a real shit, but she always made a profit. She must have had at least two possible bidders for the book who'd agreed to come here. They could have been dealers themselves, or ‘interested parties,' or both. How would she have handled it?”

Margie thought for a moment. “Well,
I
think she would have called both of them, told them what she had, and said that she was initially going to conduct a private auction; and then, if the bids were insufficient, she would have told them that she'd go public, and try to sell it that way. She might have given them a window between, say, seven and nine
p.m
., and made appointments for specific times for each of the interested parties—with the most interested individual being left for last. And then she'd try to jack up the price while reaming them out with the threat of revelation.”

“And if that final potential purchaser couldn't match the price…?”

“Maybe they slipped over the edge—and killed her.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Now all we have to do is find the culprit!”