Strip for Murder
STRIP FOR MURDER
DOVER MYSTERY CLASSICS
STRIP FOR MURDER
MAX ALLAN COLLINS
ILLUSTRATED BY
Terry Beatty
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
MINEOLA, NEW YORK
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by Max Allan Collins
Comic book art copyright © 2008 by Terry Beatty
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2015, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published in 2008 by The Berkley Publishing Group, New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collins, Max Allan.
Strip for murder / Max Allan Collins ; illustrated by Terry Beatty.
pages ; cm
eISBN-13: 978-0-486-80347-0
1. Cartoonists—Crimes against—Fiction. 2. Syndicates (Journalism)—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.O4753S88 2015
813’.54—dc23
2014035863
Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
79811901 2015
www.doverpublications.com
FOR DENIS KITCHEN, NATCHERLY
“Goodness is better than evil becuz it’s nicer!!”
Mammy Yokum
“Hatred is idiotic, crazy, low-grade gorilla thinkin’!”
Joe Palooka
. . . but with two r’s: Jack Starr, vice president, chief troubleshooter and occasional bottle washer for the Starr Syndicate.
That’s short for Starr Newspaper Syndication Company, headquartered just a block and a half off Broadway on Forty-second Street. We do have a road show Winchell on our roster— Lou “Eyeful of Broadway!” Eiful—but the “theatuh” isn’t what we are about: we distribute a lovelorn column and a crossword puzzle and a bridge-tips panel and more . . . though what we are mostly about is comic strips.
Still, a small syndicate like ours benefits from its proximity to Broadway—clients and talent alike are impressed, not the least by the Strip Joint restaurant on the Starr Building’s ground floor (best strip steak in Manhattan), with its striptease photos, and drawings on the wall by famous cartoonists, and of course its owner, the diva of the comics world, my stepmother, Maggie Starr, president of Starr Syndicate and the only ecdysiast whose fame arguably eclipsed Gypsy Rose Lee’s, if momentarily.
More about Maggie later. There’s a story to tell, with a murder mystery of course, and lots of characters, Maggie and me included. But we really need to start with the most important character in this book—Broadway.
Note that I call it a character, not a street. And, yes, there is a thoroughfare known as Broadway, but it’s more a state of mind that a stretch of concrete. The literal truth is a meandering former cow path demarcated south of Forty-second by the bustling garment district, and north of Columbus Circle by Central Park around Fifty-ninth Street. The so-called Great White Way can only lay claim to three-fifths of a mile—twelve blocks.
Columnists Lait and Mortimer don’t work for us, but they said it well, in New York: Confidential!—a book published five years ago (1948) and still apt—describing Broadway as “a street of a million lights, of a broken heart for every bulb, and more bulbs every night.”
They also acknowledged that these days (and nights) only four theaters devoted to the legitimate stage can literally be found on Broadway, and even that number fluctuates. The state of mind that is Broadway, however, numbers twenty-five legit theaters, mostly located east and west of Broadway in the narrow side streets of the forties and fifties.
The “real” Broadway—where not so long ago a dozen fabled theaters held sway—has a split personality now. During daytime hours—when the only bright lights are the sun and its reflected rays and maybe a traffic light or ambitious neon sign—Broadway is still the capital of show business. Starr Syndicate is a part of that, but maybe more to the point, so are the offices of agents, theatrical producers and song writers, as well as the studios of scenic artists, costumers and set designers, with the occasional rehearsal hall for hoofers and thesps tossed in.
After dark, when lights are flashing and neon is pulsing, the Great White Way (street-level, anyway) is nowadays (nowanights?) home to dime-a-dance halls, flea circuses, shooting galleries, hot-dog stands, movie grindhouses, souvenir shops, orange juice counters and army and navy stores. You’ll meet an assortment of charming characters right out of Damon Runyon, assuming you find a pickpocket snagging your vacation dough charming or enjoy dating a surprisingly friendly doll plucked right off the street whose bachelorette apartment is nearby, as is her guy with a blackjack.
This is Broadway, for real, and on the map, but not Broadway the state of mind that seizes every tourist and, truth be told, most everybody in Manhattan and its greater environs, which you might as well define as the USA.
By eight P.M. or so, commuters and cliff dwellers have largely disappeared, and a swell of suburbanites and out-of-towners have invaded, looking to establish a Broadway beachhead. This often starts with swarming and swamping the el cheapo ticket outlets, which is fine, just don’t expect to get in to The Teahouse of the August Moon or The Pajama Game.
Behind the Astor Hotel beats the unlikely heart of Broadway, Shubert Alley, a slender private lane that runs from Forty-fourth to Forty-fifth, a three-hundred-foot radius within which the state of mind flourishes. Here are the most important theaters, as well as the offices of the biggest big-shot impresarios and agents. Here, too, you’ll find Sardi’s, a meeting place for lunch, dinner and after theater (no such thing as breakfast on Broadway, except at midnight). The established stars and playhouse patriarchs still seem to prefer the pillars and linen tablecloths of the Astor Hunting Room, while kids trying to make it can only afford (barely) the Walgreens lunch counter at Forty-fourth and Broadway, sipping Cokes (not cocktails) and smoking Lucky Strikes like the grown-ups.
All of these Shubert Alley denizens—including the tourists, suburbanites and even Manhattanites—hold the Broadway show in high regard, no matter how many stinkers they may see. Somehow they know, in their hearts, in their souls, that theater is on a higher plane than movies or radio or (God help us) television. This is art. This is highbrow stuff. Like Guys and Dolls and South Pacific and The King and I. Okay, maybe not highbrow, but high-class and better than Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts on the tube (TV’s new, after all, and low-rent junk like stupid talent shows are to be expected, and will surely fade as the medium grows).
If you aren’t in the mood for song and dance, you can Dial M for Murder or sit in on The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Uncle Miltie and Joe Friday have their appeal, but this is Broadway, alive and vital and expensive as hell. Radio and TV are free—how good could they be?
By now you’re wondering what this has to do with comic strips and a murder mystery. Plenty. For the first time in the twenty-year history of the Starr Syndicate we were working legitimate Broadway—involved in the biggest, splashiest musical comedy of the season, the as-sure-a-surefire hit as the new Rodgers and Hammerstein (actually, surer: the new Rodgers and Hammerstein was Me and Juliet—hum something from that and get back to me).
This was October—Halloween to be exact—and opening for previews on Friday, November 6, at the newly renovated St. John Theatre on Broadway (yes, one of the four theaters actually on Broadway), would be the musical version of the fabulously successful satiric comic strip Tall Paul, everybody’s favorite stupid hillbilly, eternally pursued by blonde and buxom Sunflower Sue, who once a year chased her feller in the annual Batch’ul Catch’ul race in Catfish Holler (a place at least as imagin
ary as Broadway and a state of mind only the legendary cartoonist Hal Rapp could have conjured).
You may think you’re ahead of me. You figure the Starr Syndicate distributed the Tall Paul strip. Well, we didn’t. We wanted to. But we didn’t. And yet we had a major connection to this particular Broadway musical. Namely, my boss and stepmother, Maggie Starr, a woman pushing forty who men under twenty would still gladly pay money to see naked, though she’d given that up. I wonder if anybody ever said that about their stepmother before? In public, I mean.
How exactly was Maggie married to Tall Paul?
Well, that’s where the story starts.
This was only the overture.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
CHAPTER ONE
I’M SUPPOSED TO BE A DETECTIVE!
I can’t say Halloween had made the Waldorf-Astoria give up the ghost.
Those palatial fifty stories—between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets, Park and Lexington avenues—just weren’t up for being haunted. The mile-long lobby was not festooned with cardboard skeletons and lithograph black cats and accordion-paper jack-o’-lanterns, the marble and stone and bronze insisting on more dignity than that; same went for the museum’s worth of paintings by renowned artists overlooking eighteenth-century English and Early American furnishings, none of which bore a filigree of cobwebs, true or false.
Earlier in the evening—from around six thirty to eight—the hotel had allowed any children who dwelled (presumably with their parents) in the high-tone residential suites in the twin towers to become proper little ghosts and goblins and go door-to-door trick-or-treating, but only in those towers, and always with a parent along. A kid asking for candy in Manhattan always called for having a parent along.
Up on the twenty-fifth floor, however, another sort of renowned artist in residence at the Waldorf (albeit one whose work was unlikely to grace a gilt frame in the lobby) had really taken Halloween to heart—a costume party had turned cartoonist Hal Rapp’s swanky digs into the funny pages come to life.
No skeletons or black cats or spun-sugar webs here, either, though several grandly carved pumpkins were spotted around, sporting the fiendish features of Grotesque Gertie, the Tall Paul strip’s resident witch. Mostly the suite was Rapp’s Catfish Holler in the flesh, and I do mean flesh, as “gals” in short ragged skirts and low-cut bare-armed blouses mingled with hillbillies in overalls, including affable Roger Dodge, Tall Paul himself, the army talent show winner whose Ed Sullivan TV spot won him the coveted role.
The occasional interloper from another strip rubbed shoulders with Catfish Holler “sassiety”—Mandrake the Magician in his tux and cloak, Buck Rogers in tights with raygun on his hip, Pop-eye the Sailor with cap and pipe (but no visible spinach), Dagwood in his bow tie and Blondie in her apron, and best of all an unlikely Little Orphan Annie, that is, a showgirl in frizzy red wig and little girl’s short white-trimmed red skirt—enough to make me wish I’d come as Daddy Warbucks.
This wasn’t exactly a cocktail party; though the hors d’oeuvres were plentiful, no bar had been provided. The guests were sipping punch from one of two bowls (spiked and un), both labeled “Mingo Mountain Moonshine” in Rapp’s own distinctive lettering, after the white lightning brewed up in the Tall Paul strip by that unlikely duo, Choctaw Charlie and Bald Moe, both of whom were in residence at the party, or at least the Broadway actors playing them were—a little Jewish guy as the diminutive Indian and a big Jewish guy as his big, bald backwoods buddy, carrying his prop caveman club.
Most of the attendees of this shindig, you see, had a leg up on the costume bit: they were members of the Tall Paul musical’s company. They’d been allowed—actually, encouraged—to come in their character’s wardrobe to give this “Come as Your Favorite Comic Strip Character” party a predominantly Rappian theme. Mixed in with these hillbillies, many last seen in the road show of Guys and Dolls, were other Broadway guys and dolls, including some press types, literary lights and TV personalities.
Most of these wholesome comic strip heroes and heroines were smoking and if the smoke had been any thicker in there, you’d have needed to install a foghorn. Instead, light jazz from a hi-fi made itself barely heard. Here and there cardboard “wooden” signs were stuck on walls or doors in comical Rapp-lettered Catfish Holler fashion: OL’ FISHUN HOLE, INDOOR OUTHOUSE, NO SMOKIN’ (OF HAMS) and other such whimsey.
Otherwise, Rapp’s suite was typical of the high-priced residential layouts at the Waldorf, modernly appointed in shades of tan and brown with an off-white fluffy carpet. I was in the living room, a fairly narrow area dominated by a fireplace on the right-hand wall, near which two brown-leather sofas faced each other over a low-slung glass coffee table. Toward the end of this room, down by the big picture window onto the city, was the left turn into the dining room, where the “Vittles” platters and “Mingo Mountain Moonshine” punch bowls could be found—and opposite was the bedroom, which Rapp had converted a portion of into a mini-studio.
A balcony fronted the living room and extended to the bedroom (I knew this from past experience in a similar Waldorf suite) and the crisp fall night had some hillbillies and other cartoon characters out enjoying it, against a geometric skyline in black and white that might have been drawn by Batwing cartoonist Rod Krane, if Rod Krane had known how to draw (his assistants did the artwork).
Lanky, sleazily handsome Rod was among the attendees, dressed in a rather lumpy, wrinkly Batwing costume, a sight made more ridiculous by his cigarette in holder. He wasn’t speaking to me, because the Starr Syndicate had dropped his strip six months ago (the comic book was still doing okay, but we had only a tiny piece of it). Right now Rod was putting the moves on a curvaceous, short-skirted Nancy, with Sluggo nowhere in sight.
You’re already wondering what comics character I came as. I’d come as a guy six feet tall with dark blue eyes and dark brown hair and not repulsive to women. Not enough clues?
Here’s what I was wearing: a charcoal pin-striped worsted, single-breasted, with a blue shirt and a snappy tie whose red and blue dots on a stitched gray pattern had a certain comic strip flavor, and black leather slip-on shoes that had no flavor but were damn comfortable. Also, I was wearing a light gray hat with a black band and narrow brim.
I had found a hunk of wall to lean against between a bric-a-brac cabinet and the door to the kitchen (“Slop Shoot”) and was sipping my unspiked moonshine when who should saunter up to me but the voluptuous embodiment of cartoonist Rapp’s character Bathless Bessie . . .
. . . a black-haired young woman in a wisp of tattered black dress, covering only enough to make her legal and with splashes of artificial dirt and grime that had been artistically applied onto that pale creamy skin (who had that job?).
We had not met, but I’d been around the St. John Theatre enough lately, talking to my stepmother about this and that, to know Bessie’s real name was Misty Winters. Anyway, her stage name.
“Who are you supposed to be?” she asked, in a breathy, over-enunciated Marilyn Monroe–ish manner that must have taken some real effort.
“You’re Bathless Bessie.”
She had big dark blue eyes under thick black brows provided by God but shaped by somebody else, and a little wisp of a nose also given by God but with finishing touches by a plastic surgeon, and lush, full, moistly red-lipsticked lips on which God had collaborated with Max Factor.
“You’re evading the question,” she said. That’s “quest-i-yun” in Marilyn-speak.
I touched the snap-brim in a little salute. “I’m supposed to be a detective. . . . Haven’t you ever heard of Dick Tracy?”
“Dick Tracy wears a yellow hat.”
“Maybe I’m color-blind.”
The big blue eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Where’s your trench-coat?”
I gestured vaguely across the comics-character-littered room. “On the bed, with all the other coats and most of the hats. Too warm to wear indoors.” I indicated the snap-brim again. “You don’t really think I’d be rude enough to wear this indoors, if this wasn’t my costume, do you?”
“You think you’re funny.”
“I am funny.”
She arched an eyebrow and half smiled.
“You’re smiling,” I pointed out.
“Maybe I’m mocking you.”
“I don’t think so. I think you’d have moved on by now, if you weren’t interested.”
Half a smile blossomed into a full one that seemed about to let out a laugh and instead gave me: “Oh, you think I’m interested.”
“I’m a detective. I can read the signs.”
She sipped her punch. Pursed the full moist red lips. “Your costume is a detective’s. You aren’t really a detective.”
“Sure I am. Want me to prove it?”
Both eyebrows went up now. “What, are you going to show me your gun?”
“My gun’s at my apartment right now, but we can go over there.”
She chuckled and shook her head, black locks bouncing off mostly exposed shoulders. “Try again.”
“Okay. Prove I’m a detective. Let’s see . . .” I put on a mulling face. “. . . your name is Misty Winters.”
Her chin lifted, her eyes narrowed. “That one wasn’t hard. I’ve been in two other Broadway shows.”
I raised a finger. “Ah, but you were in the chorus. This is your first time with lines. Your real name is Ethel Schwartz and you hail from Bear Springs, Minnesota, where what you’re wearing now may well be in fashion, for all I know.”
She was really smiling now, and impressed, despite her best efforts. “What else do you know about me?”