A Killing in Comics Read online

  “You get tied up in court,” I said, with a nod, “or things go badly, you’ll need work. And cash flow.”

  Harry said, “I don’t think of it that way.”

  But Moe admitted he did, saying, “Can’t have all our eggs in one basket.”

  Harry shot Moe a nasty look, which was rare between them; they really were friends since high school. In Iowa. Christ.

  From behind us came Bryce’s voice in the doorway. “Miss Starr? . . . Sorry, I know you said no interruptions. But I have a Captain Chandler on the line.”

  “Captain of what?” Maggie asked, mildly irritated.

  “The police, I suppose,” Bryce said, with a grandiose gesture. “Isn’t that what he meant when he said, ‘Homicide’?”

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

  The heat was enough to make me wonder if I looked wilted in my single-breasted tropical worsted, which was blue; my tie was bluer, with cheerful brown birds painted on—they had a right to be happy, they couldn’t feel the heat—against a Sanright to be happy, they couldn’t feel the heat—against a Sanforized blue-and-white-striped cotton shirt. But only a lingering sense of style and a dab of dignity kept me from running out into the spray of the fire hydrant that was blasting half a dozen kids in swim trunks, urchins splashing and dancing around out on the pavement in front of the Tenth Precinct Station House at 230 West Twentieth Street.

  The Tenth Precinct’s home lacked both style and dignity, a dingy six-story gray stone building fronted by three prominent arches framing a window, the entrance and a garage. Up two little steps and I was into the high-ceilinged reception area, decently cooled by overhead churning fans. At left was the receiving sergeant behind his judge’s-bench-like desk, where I stopped for directions.

  The sarge didn’t even look up, just pointed over at the stairs where a painted sign with an upward-slanting arrow said HOMICIDE BUREAU, 3RD FLOOR. The stairs were creaky and the two flights stuffy, but soon I was through a door and under another whirring ceiling fan, trying to talk myself into thinking I was as cool as those kids out in the fire hydrant spray.

  This medium-sized room was home to a reception desk and a small bullpen of four more desks for detectives (unmanned at the moment), as well as the expected pale green plaster walls, wire wastebaskets, hat rack, wooden benches, chairs and mismatched filing cabinets. Nothing about the dreary, institutional chamber built my confidence that the solving of Manhattan’s many murders was in good hands.

  The receptionist, a severe woman in her forties in a white short-sleeved blouse and glasses and a black ribbony thing at her throat, was expecting me; or anyway Captain Chandler was, and I only sat on a wooden bench for five minutes before being summoned to enter through the wood-and-frosted-glass door reading CAPTAIN. Another door read COMMANDING OFFICER, so I was not at the top of the ladder; but in New York police department terms, captain’s up quite a few rungs.

  Interestingly, Chandler had offered to come over to the Starr Syndicate personally, which raised all sorts of questions, complete with troubling potential answers.

  I hadn’t actually talked to the captain, Bryce having been in full protective intermediary mode; but when Maggie’s assistant conveyed the captain’s desire to talk specifically to one Jack Starr and could he come over to our offices to do so, she said crisply to Bryce, “No,” then to me, “You go to him.”

  In her reclusive phase, Maggie sees as few of her fellow human beings as possible.

  So at 2 P.M., give or take, I was inside Captain Chandler’s private domain, a dreary office with a few wooden files, a bench against a wall, a window onto the city to my left as I entered, a window on a neighboring brick wall to my right. Under that window, where wainscoting met plaster, nails on the wooden trim held various well-thumbed manuals and directories on metal loops. The light green walls otherwise held scant decoration—a framed police department seal, a framed picture of a graduating class at the academy and assorted cracks and water stains.

  Chandler’s desk, big and dark brown and beat-up, was in the middle of the room, putting the brick wall at his back, as well as a corner-positioned two-drawer file atop which were two framed photos (a pretty blonde wife posing alone and then with a boy and girl of grade-school age), a pipe rack and a coffee mug with CAPTAIN on it. Just in front of the file was a hat rack with one lonely brown fedora.

  My lonely fedora, dark blue, was in my hands as I stood and waited for Chandler to get off the phone. He hadn’t seemed to notice me yet.

  He was maybe thirty and, if his legs weren’t sawed off, my guess was he was in the six-foot range, a broad-shouldered guy in rolled-up white shirtsleeves and red-and-blue striped tie. He was handsome enough to hate—brownish-blond hair, dark eyebrows over light blue eyes, strong cleft chin and an easy smile; if Hollywood had been casting him, he’d have been wrong for the part, unless the homicide cop was the star of the picture.

  The ceiling fan was going full throttle, ruffling his hair, and he had various objects—coffee cup, box of .45 ammunition, handcuffs—weighting down stacks of fluttering papers on the desk; his two telephones were positioned to hold down other stacks. He was just finishing up on one of those phones—apparently talking to a pathologist—when he finally glanced up at me, flashed that smile and motioned me toward the waiting chair.

  He hung up, stood and held out his hand. “Pat Chandler,” he said, proving he was six foot. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Starr.”

  We shook hands, firm but not trying to impress each other.

  Sitting, I said, “You didn’t tell Miss Starr’s assistant what the purpose of the visit was. He said you were a little . . . coy.”

  “Well, so was he,” Chandler said, and laughed. Then he frowned a little: “Miss Starr? Isn’t it Mrs. Starr?”

  “Well, she’s still in show business. She retains her theatrical maidenhood.”

  He was rocking in his swivel chair, chuckling to himself; the blue eyes seemed distant. “You know, your . . . she’s your stepmother, right?”

  “Yes. And my boss.”

  He twitched an embarrassed half smile. “Have to admit one of her pinups was plastered in every barracks and foxhole I ever found myself in. I was in the Pacific Theater.”

  “She’s played plenty of theaters.”

  His eyes narrowed, but his expression remained friendly, and he continued to rock. “You were in the service, too, I understand. Army?”

  “Yes.”

  He thumbed his chest. “Marines.”

  I shrugged. “Takes all kinds. Anyway. What was it you were going to—”

  “You won the Silver Star.”

  Not this.

  “Uh, yes, I did.”

  The eyes in that casual expression were studying me. “But I’m told you were stateside. How do you win a Silver Star stateside? I was on Guadalcanal and all I managed was a Purple Heart and a Ruptured Duck.”

  The Ruptured Duck was the Honorable Service lapel button everybody got who served.

  “Gee, Captain Chandler,” I said through a smile considerably less charming than the ones he was tossing around, “maybe you should’ve tried harder.”

  Finally I’d said something that didn’t make him smile.

  “I meant no offense,” he said. He’d stopped rocking. “I just heard you got the Silver, and were stateside. You can’t win a Silver Star without engaging enemy combatants, right? I just couldn’t put one and one together and come up with two.”

  “Well, mine was the only stateside Silver Star, if you must know.”

  He raised a hand. “Again—no offense meant . . .”

  “I was an MP.”

  He nodded. “That much I knew. So you were a cop, too.”

  “Yeah. You could say that.”

  Still trying to understand, shaking his head a little in mild confusion, he asked, “Where were you stationed?”

  “Couple of places. In ’45 I was one of sixty-four MPs watching a POW camp.”

  “In America?
”

  “Oklahoma—you know, like the Broadway show. We had fourteen hundred supermen who decided to break out one night. And things happened, and I got the Silver Star. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, and—”

  “Not proud of! Jesus, man, you should be—”

  “How much do you talk about Guadalcanal, Captain?”

  That stopped him; his face whitened and he said, “Sorry. I get your point. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “Yeah, but, well, you kinda did, didn’t you?”

  He flashed the grin. “Hey, I’m a paid professional snoop. Allow me to thank you for keeping the Nazis out of the Bronx, and away from my wife and kids.”

  His grin, goddamnit, was working on me; so I grinned, too, and said, “Glad to. Now, what in the hell is so important that you were willing to hoof it over to our offices?”

  He had all kinds of smile and grins, and this one was shy and self-effacing. “I just wanted to meet Maggie Starr, is all. Her picture got me through a lot of rough nights.”

  “Well, spare me any details you wouldn’t also want to share with your wife and kids.”

  Now the grin cut itself in half and dug a dimple in one cheek. “I understand you’re the VP at the Starr Syndicate . . . what does the vice president of a comic-strip syndicate do?”

  “Whatever the president asks him to.”

  He flipped at the edges of one of the stacks of weighted-down papers. “I mean, I ask because . . . frankly, Jack, I did a little checking on you.”

  “I’d be disappointed if you hadn’t.”

  “And it turns out you’re a licensed private investigator. Why is that, Jack? Why does the vice president of a comic-strip syndicate need to carry a private-eye ticket?”

  I scratched my head, where my hair was getting riffled by the overhead fan blades. “Actually, we also syndicate crossword puzzles, and recipes, and a bridge column, several gossip—”

  “Why, Jack?”

  I sighed. “Captain, I sometimes have to protect our talent from everything from lawsuits to death threats. That license allows me to poke around, sometimes working with our attorneys, in areas a private citizen could not.”

  “So you’re a licensed private investigator with one client.”

  “That’s right—the Starr Syndicate. So if you want to have somebody check up on whether your brother-in-law is cheating on your sister, better have one of your dicks do that in his spare time.”

  He didn’t waste a smile on that one. He just went to another of the piles of papers and tapped the top sheet with a finger. “Listen, I looked over your statement, taken by the officers at the Waldorf the other night.”

  The chair squeaked in protest as I shifted my weight in it. “So that’s what this is about—Donny Harrison’s death.”

  “Yes.”

  I shrugged. “Well, I didn’t give a statement, exactly. Certainly not a full one. I don’t suppose anybody did. There were four officers talking to sixty-some people, all of whom didn’t want to be at that party anymore, especially with the bar shut down. So if you have further questions, I’m glad to accommodate. But I fail to see why the Homicide Bureau would be looking into an accident, even a bizarre one like this.”

  No smile; no grin. “When you were an MP, didn’t you look into suspicious deaths?”

  “Half a dozen times or more, sure. It was a long war. But what’s suspicious about a fat sweaty bastard passing out and falling on something sharp? In front of umpteen witnesses?”

  He also had a sizeable supply of frowns and showed me one of those. “You didn’t like Donny Harrison?”

  “He was one of my late father’s best friends, and yet the thing I remember the major . . . my father . . . saying about Harrison, most often? Was that he was a first-class genuine horse’s patoot.”

  His face had settled into a professional blankness, but the eyes were sharp. “But you did business with him.”

  “Not much. We syndicate three comic strips to newspapers, all across this great land, that are licensed to us by Americana Comics. Donny Harrison and Louis Cohn, the two principle stock-holders in the company, the publisher and treasurer respectively, started out in printing and publishing with the major. In the early ’30s the major . . .”

  “Your father.”

  “. . . my father . . . broke off to try the syndication business. He retained a small interest in the company, which was passed on to my stepmother, and we have ‘first look’ at any new properties they develop.”

  He frowned. “Properties they develop?”

  “New comics characters. Anything they decide to publish in comic books, we have the opportunity to take out into newspaper syndication. It’s only happened three times.”

  “But in a big way, right?”

  “Well . . . yes. Wonder Guy and Batwing. And Amazonia is doing okay. Why?”

  He shrugged. “Just gathering some background. That’s the other reason I wouldn’t’ve minded coming over and talking to your . . . do you prefer I refer to Miss Starr as your boss, or your stepmother?”

  “I don’t care. Commanding officer is fine, too . . . . Why are you gathering background on a suspicious death, if that’s all it is?”

  He cleared his throat. Sat forward. Found an open space on the desktop to fold his hands.

  Serious time.

  “Donny Harrison’s death is a murder, Mr. Starr.”

  “Why don’t you call me ‘Jack.’”

  “All right, Jack. You can call me Pat, if you like.”

  “I kind of prefer ‘Captain.’ It reminds me that even if I won the Silver Star in Oklahoma and all you could manage out of the Pacific was a Purple Heart and Ruptured Duck, well, nonetheless you still outrank me.”

  He just looked at me, clearly offended. But then he broke out laughing. “You are a hell of a piece of work, Jack. Hell of a one.”

  I wasn’t laughing, but I almost was, and a smile was taking place on my face no matter how hard I told my mouth to behave itself.

  “Captain,” I said finally, leaning back, “I have to say I am impressed with you, and with the Homicide Bureau.”

  “Really.”

  “Really. It takes a crack detective to determine that a guy who falls on a cake knife has been murdered. Was a midget hiding under that table with the cake on it? And crawled out behind Donny and shoved him onto that knife and then scurried back under? Best theory I can come up with.”

  He wasn’t laughing when he said, “Mr. Harrison wasn’t killed by that cake knife; or, if he was, he would have been dead soon, anyway.”

  “Then . . . must have been a heart attack. He was a big fat guy, in case you haven’t made it around to the morgue.”

  With an air of infinite patience, he said, “I was over at Roosevelt Hospital this morning, and I did see the body. And, yes, he was on the rotund side. But his girth had nothing to do with his cause of death.”

  I held up a “stop” palm. “I still don’t see why a guy falling on a knife is ‘suspicious,’ in the first place. I mean, call Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, fine; zany as hell, yes. But suspicious?”

  “The suspicions came after the autopsy, which his wife requested.”

  Of course I knew Selma Harrison intended to take that step; but Chandler had given me the impression the police department suggested or even required the procedure.

  He was saying, “Except for a medical condition that Mr. Harrison kept in check, he was supposedly in good health.”

  “According to his wife . . . . What medical condition?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll get to that. A routine step in the autopsy procedure caused the hospital to notify the medical examiner’s office.”

  “What routine step?”

  “In the autopsy? A toxicity screen of the blood. Mr. Harrison had something unusual in his bloodstream—a quantity of a chemical compound, an organophosphate, highly poisonous, found chiefly in pesticides.”

  I sat forward. “Then Donny Harrison was poisoned?�
��

  “That’s the opinion of the pathologist.”

  “And he . . . he was either dead, or dying, or passing out, when he fell on that knife . . . .”

  Chandler was nodding all through that. “Exactly. His symptoms were consistent with organophosphate poisoning—sweating, salivation, nausea, dizziness . . .”

  My mind was whirling like the overhead fan blades. “If somebody put foul crap like that in his food, or drink, wouldn’t Donny have tasted it?”

  He shook his head. “The contents of his stomach did not include the pesticide. Ingestion was not the means of delivery.”

  “Well, how the hell was it delivered?”

  “I’ll duck that for the moment, Jack . . . but I will answer the question you posed earlier—what was the medical condition that Mr. Harrison was ‘keeping in check’? . . . I take it you weren’t aware that Mr. Harrison was a diabetic.”

  I sat back. Shook my head. “I had no idea. Look, I wasn’t close to the guy, particularly not in recent years. Did others, closer to him, know?”

  “Definitely. Donny gave himself up to four shots of insulin a day, Jack—and he kept supplies of insulin, refrigerated of course, at three locations. Can you guess what those locations were?”

  “Sure. His home, his office, and his mistress’s. By refrigerated, do you mean . . . in the refrigerator?”

  Chandler nodded. “A refrigerator at home, another in the break room at Americana headquarters and another in the kitchen at Miss Daily’s Waldorf suite.”

  “And your theory is, a dosage of the insulin was fatally doctored?”

  “Yes, or switched.” He stopped rocking and made an elaborate openhanded gesture. “We think the last dose he took was . . . the last dose he took.”

  I thought about that for a few seconds. Then I asked, “Does the medical examiner say how long that pesticide mickey would take, before kicking in? In other words, did it have to be a dose he took at Miss Daily’s, minutes before he stabbed himself?”

  Chandler shook his head. “It might have taken up to several hours to take full effect, I’m told. That puts all three locations of the insulin in play.”

  Now I was shaking my head. “Christ, dozens of people had access. Scores. His wife and children and household staff, at home; his partners and employees at work; and all those guests at the birthday party at the Waldorf. Plus, at the latter, the Waldorf staffers he had in, to handle the party.”