A Killing in Comics Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER ONE YOU’LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN DIE !

  CHAPTER TWO STRIPPING IS MURDER!

  CHAPTER THREE THAT STABBING PAIN ISN’T FATAL ...

  CHAPTER FOUR WILL YOU RESPECT ME IN THE MOURNING?

  CHAPTER FIVE DON’T WORK YOURSELF INTO A LATHER, MR. STARR!

  CHAPTER SIX FUNNY BOOKS ARE NO LAUGHING MATTER!

  CHAPTER SEVEN NOT THE MEN IN HER LIFE, THE LIFE IN HER MEN!

  CHAPTER EIGHT THIS LOO
  CHAPTER NINE COMIC BOOKS ARE A BAD INFLUENCE!

  CHAPTER TEN DO YOU HAVE A LICENSE TO STRIP?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN THE KILLER’S SECRET IDENTITY IS...

  A TIP OF THE FEDORA

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  “Collins’s blending of fact and fancy is masterful—there’s no better word for it. And his ability to sustain suspense, even when the outcome is known, is the mark of an exceptional storyteller.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Collins displays a compelling talent for flowing narrative and concise, believable dialogue.”—Library Journal

  “No one fictionalizes real-life mysteries better.”

  —The Armchair Detective

  “An uncanny ability to blend fact and fiction.”

  —South Bend Tribune

  “When it comes to exploring the rich possibilities of history in a way that holds and entertains the reader, nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”—John Lutz, author of Chill of Night

  “Probably no one except E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime has so successfully blended real characters and events with fictional ones. The versatile Collins is an excellent storyteller.”—The Tennessean

  “The master of true-crime fiction.”—Publishers Weekly

  “The author makes history come alive. . . . The details of life, the dialogue and the realities of living in London during wartime are meticulously set out for the reader. The nightly blackouts . . . make the perfect setting for criminal activities. The mystery [is] well crafted and quite interesting. . . . A new Collins novel is a treat for lovers of history and mystery alike.”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  “Entertaining . . . full of colorful characters . . . a stirring conclusion.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Collins ably weaves a well-paced, closed-environment mystery reminiscent of Agatha Christie. . . . [He] succeeds in . . . reimagining the Lusitania’s final voyage.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Collins makes it sound as though it really happened.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Collins does a fine job of insinuating a mystery into a world-famous disaster. . . . [He] manage[s] to raise plenty of goosebumps before the ship goes down for the count.”—Mystery News

  “[Collins’s] descriptions are so vivid and colorful that it’s like watching a movie . . . [and he] gives the reader a front row seat.”

  —Cozies, Capers & Crimes

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME TITLES BY MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  THE TITANIC MURDERS

  THE HINDENBURG MURDERS

  THE PEARL HARBOR MURDERS

  THE LUSITANIA MURDERS

  THE LONDON BLITZ MURDERS

  THE WAR OF THE WORLDS MURDER

  A KILLING IN COMICS

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South

  Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2007 by Max Allan Collins.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without

  permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of

  the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging

  to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime trade paperback edition / May 2007

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Collins, Max Allan.

  A killing in comics / Max Allan Collins.—Berkley Prime Crime trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-0-425-21365-0

  1. Comic books, strips, etc.—Authorship—Fiction. 2. Cartoonists—Fiction. 3. Manhattan

  (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.O4753K53 2007

  813’.54—dc22 2006038923

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  IN MEMORY OF

  WILL EISNER

  THE SPIRIT OF COMICS

  “They were a generation of boys who were never adolescents and yet whose fantasies and emotional lives were caught at the cusp of adolescence forever.”

  Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow

  . . . and, in July of 1948, Manhattan is my town.

  Sure, I have to share this island with a few million others, natives and tourists alike, many of whom sleep high up enough to enjoy a cool breeze off the Hudson, cut by boat whistles and the occasional police or fire siren. But if you don’t cliff-dwell, or if you’re a tourist who can’t afford a high-rise hotel, don’t sweat it—my town is air-conditioned, from the TV-rigged gin mills to the mink-lined nightspots.

  For you outdoor types, I suggest spending a buck-fifty by cab from Times Square to any one of the stadium homes of our three major-league ball clubs. Boxing can be viewed under God’s starry ceiling, too—or inside and air-cooled, for you gentle souls, at Madison Square and lesser venues. And Central Park is free, at least before midnight.

  Hungry? On the east side, try the Stork Club’s chicken hamburger with tomato sauce a la Walter Winchell, served up with french-fried sweet potatoes and buttered green peas for not much more than what an average Peoria hotel room would stake you. Or if they won’t let you in at the Stork (which they probably won’t), stop at any Automat and slip in a coin and get back a real burger, quick and hot; or if you like your beef corned and maybe with a slice of Swiss, Reuben’s on East Fifty-eighth is the genuine kosher
article.

  On the west side, four-fifty at Jack Dempsey’s will get you a big sirloin steak with french-fried onions, baked potato and house salad; or three bucks, at the Strip Joint on Forty-second, just a block and a half off Broadway, will entitle you to the best NY strip steak in town with the same trimmings. (I recommend the latter, only in part because I have a piece of the action.)

  Looking for a view? Try an ear-popper of an elevator ride to the observation deck of the Empire State or the Chrysler Building or maybe Radio City. This works for you depressed types, too—if the magnificence of the cityscape doesn’t get your mind off your woes, you can always take a header. That ride, at least, is still free in this man’s town.

  Entertainment? Broadway serves up a dozen shows and, by mid-July, the flops have all flopped and the hits have all hit. I’d recommend Hank Fonda in Mr. Roberts at the Alvin Theater and High Button Shoes with Phil Silvers at the Shubert, or maybe you might want to watch that kid Brando do his magnificent mumble in A Streetcar Named Desire, at the Ethel Barrymore, if you can land a ticket.

  Shopping? I’d have to say Madison Avenue—it’s come on strong, the last decade or so, thanks to being situated between Fifth and Park avenues. More intimate shops can be found below Fifty-ninth, everything from flowers to pets, perfumes to paintings, millinery to luggage, period furniture to furniture period.

  Now it’s pricey, but if you’re going to do any of the above, you might want to bunk in at New York’s unofficial palace, the Waldorf-Astoria—between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets, Park and Lexington avenues. The famous old Waldorf had to get out of the way of the Empire State, but the “new” hotel (1931) has the same old traditions, including Peacock Alley, the Empire Room and the Astor Gallery.

  Even New Yorkers are wowed by the Waldorf. The massive limestone and light-brick building spans the tracks of the New York Central, lending privileged guests private railroad sidings. How the building avoids all that rattle and roar, you’ll have to ask Schultze and Weaver, who put the thing up—a sheer eighteen stories followed by a series of setbacks topped by twin chrome-crowned towers adding up to fifty stories, give or take.

  The interior is impressive, natch—lobby a mile wide, mosaics depicting nude figures, yard after yard of marble and stone and rich wood and nickel bronze, with eighteenth-century English and Early American furnishings, and more paintings by more famous artists than most museums can manage. Two thousand staffers look after guests in as many rooms. But the really toney digs are reserved for the suites in the towers, strictly residential.

  You may wonder how a mug like me would even know about such suites. But this story begins in one of them, and a life key to the tale ends there.

  Interested?

  CHAPTER ONE YOU’LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN DIE !

  The fat man in the blue cape and red tights and blue boots was sweating.

  His brow, balding back to yesterday, was beaded, his upper lip pearled, the damp circles under his arms the size of garbage-can lids and every bit as fragrant. Everybody overlooked it. This was, after all, his birthday—Donny Harrison—and nobody wanted to risk being rude . . . except of course Donny Harrison.

  He was the boss.

  He was the wonder guy behind Wonder Guy, the comic-book sensation that had put Americana Comics on top back in ’38. Every kid in America would have recognized that costume with its big white W sewn center-chest, although five-foot-eight, two-hundred-eighty-pound Donny Harrison’s physique hardly matched their hero’s, nor would their hero likely have a glass of bourbon in one paw and a Cuban cigar in the other.

  Wonder Guy—by day mild-mannered radio reporter Ron Benson—was a clean-cut superhuman from the planet Crylon. He could fly, he could bend steel with his bare hands, he could bounce the bad guys’ bullets back at them just by sticking his chest out. Every boy in America (and quite a few men) harbored fantasies of being a real-life Wonder Guy.

  But Donny had no such fantasies. In his mind, he was a true wonder guy—the small-time publisher/distributor of girlie mags who had slapped together a handful of rejected comic-strip samples as a cheap booklet that had, like Wonder Guy from a rooftop, taken off. That two kids from Des Moines, Iowa, had created Wonder Guy meant little to him. He was the visionary who published it, and whose wining and dining of regional wholesale distributors had made Wonder Guy a household name.

  Watching Donny thread clumsily through the cocktail party—a mix of his friends and enemies from Americana Comics as well as assorted representatives of newspapers, magazines, local theaters and fashionable shops—was a study in absurdity. Not that the crowd was poshly attired—this was a late-afternoon fete attended mostly by business people before heading home. My tan tropical worsted and lighter tan shirt with blue-and-brown patterned tie was fairly typical, even if my brown rubber-soled moccasins were a fashion step nobody else in the room had taken.

  And I was probably the only attendee not taking full advantage of the open bar. I was having rum and Coke, minus the rum. I’d been on the wagon for five years and had no intention of falling off on the occasion of Donny Harrison’s fiftieth birthday.

  This was Wednesday, late afternoon, in the suite of Donny’s executive secretary, Harriet “Honey” Daily. She was the best-looking woman in the place, and perhaps it was no surprise she found her way through the blue fog of tobacco smoke over to the best-looking man, a six-footer with chiseled features, dark blue eyes and dark brown hair (easy on the hair tonic), drinking rum and Coke, minus the rum.

  “It’s too bad,” she said.

  She was a striking blonde in her midthirties, her hair shoulder-length but pulled back off her heart-shaped face to better frame the apple cheeks, big china blue eyes, perfect pug nose, full redlipsticked lips and gently cleft chin. The coral crepe dress was simple but for the white scroll embroidery on her shoulders right up to the keyhole, bow-trimmed neckline. The lines of it didn’t hide her curves but didn’t shout about them, either.

  “What’s too bad?” I asked.

  She sipped her martini. “That Donny’s such an obnoxious drunk. He really can be quite charming, you know.”

  “I’ve managed to miss that, all these years.”

  She eyed me, the full lips pursing in a wry kiss. “And we’ve managed never to meet, somehow. But you’re Jack Starr, all right.”

  “And you’re Miss Daily.”

  “Honey.”

  “This is so sudden.”

  She laughed just a little; it was all my quip deserved. “No, I mean, please call me ‘Honey.’ All my friends do.”

  I glanced around at the little cliques in the spacious suite’s living room, a modern study in coral and emerald leather furniture and all-glass tables on fluffy white carpet. A white baby grand in the adjacent dining room, over by a window on the city, was getting its ivories tinkled by a colored jazz pianist in a white dinner jacket who I recognized from the hotel’s Blue Room. Cole Porter tunes, mostly.

  “Do your friends,” I asked lightly, making sure to attach a smile, “include Mrs. Harrison?”

  Mrs. Harrison was indeed present, currently talking to her husband’s business partner, Louis Cohn, vice president and chief accountant of the funny-book firm. Mrs. Harrison was a stout woman with a round pleasant face, almost pretty; but she had done herself no favor picking out that floral tent she was bivouacked in and her white hat looked like a bottle cap. She was holding a martini, stiffly, as if it might drink her, if she weren’t so very careful.

  Since Honey Daily was Donny Harrison’s mistress—her title of executive secretary was essentially honorary, since nobody at Americana Comics had seen her at the office since that first six months in 1940 when she really had been Donny’s secretary—you might think I’d get slapped for such a rude remark. Or maybe my hostess would just glare and storm away.

  But Honey Dailey was if anything not predictable. She was one of these sophisticated women you hear so much about but rarely meet, even in Manhattan.

  She said, “You�
�ve got cheek, Mr. Starr.”

  “You got your share of cheeks, too . . . Honey. And I’m not complaining.”

  She laughed gently. Sipped more martini. “Mrs. Harrison chooses to accept the pretense that I’m her husband’s secretary. Everyone else has quietly agreed not to make an issue of it.”

  Despite this being afternoon, the pianist was having at “Night and Day.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “But does Donny really have to rub his wife’s face in it? I mean, even when she was your age, you could have made her look like a sofa.”

  “Especially in that dress,” she said, with a smirk that should have made me hate her.

  Instead I was thinking about her various cheeks again.

  “What the hell,” I said. “How many fiftieth birthdays does a guy get?”

  Wonder Guy Donny was across the room, putting his arm around somebody else’s wife and grinning in the poor woman’s face.

  Honey said, “Donny doesn’t drink around me.”

  This seemed slightly out of nowhere. But I managed, “Oh really?”

  Surely cocktail repartee, particularly with jazz pianists noodling Cole Porter in the background, should be sharper than “Oh really”; yet that’s all I had.

  But she didn’t needle me. Just said, “He’s a sweetheart, around home.”

  Apparently “home” was this coral-and-emerald suite at the Waldorf.

  She turned the big light blue eyes on me and her eyelashes fluttered. I wondered for a moment if it was natural or an affection; then I decided I didn’t care.

  “I’d like to get to know you,” she said.

  “What would Donny say?”