Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not sure myself, what to do or what to think. All I know is I’m depressed at losing a friend.”

Tom smiled tightly. “He was more than a friend. He was your damn idol. Your hero.”

I nodded. “You’re right. He was my hero. I’ve always been something of a hero worshipper. When I was a little kid my hero was Peter Pan; I even had a little green outfit I wore around-quote me, Sardini, and your ass is history! Then it was Batman, and I wore a mask and swung around on a rope for a couple of years. And then around junior high, the Saint was my main man… first the TV version, then the books. And then I discovered Gat Garson, and you know those pictures of Kane, in muscleman T-shirts, posing with guns and dogs and such on the backs of his books?”

“Yeah,” Murtz said. “He was spoofing Spillane doing the same thing.”

“I didn’t know that at the time,” I said. “I discovered Kane and Gat Garson first-Spillane and Mike Hammer came later, for me. My uncle Richard had some Gat Garson paperbacks in his attic, and I found ’em, and my uncle found me , looking at them. He only grinned and said, ‘Take ’em home with you if you want,’ and I did… under my coat. The pictures of Kane on the back of the books made me transfer my hero worship from Gat Garson to the guy who thought up Gat Garson. It was exciting to me, seeing these pictures of a tough-looking writer, who was a real person; I could never hope to be Gat Garson-by twelve, I was hip enough to know that-but I could be Roscoe Kane when I grew up, if I worked at it hard enough. And in high school I started trying to write my little stories. Sending ’em out in the mail. Piling up rejections. My detective was called Matt Savage. You probably had a Matt Savage, too, Sardini; you, too, Murtz.”

They were smiling, nodding.

“I had about three heroes, in my life. Real-life heroes I looked up to. During my teen idol phase, I liked Bobby Darin-probably ’cause ‘Mack the Knife’ was a blood-and-guts crime yarn-had pics of him plastered all over the walls of my room… next to the Elke Sommer pics, that is. She wasn’t my hero, but there was a place for her. And I liked Jack Webb. That movie, ‘Pete Kelly’s Blues,’ you guys ever see that? That shootout in the ballroom at the end, the rainstorm outside? Great! I always wanted to write Webb a letter and tell him how much I admired his work, but I wanted to wait until I’d written something I was really proud of, a book I could send him, as a fan who made good. Then last Christmas he died. I felt like I’d lost my best friend. I moped around. Everybody thought I was nuts. I took it damn near as hard as when my folks died. Crazy. Darin and Webb and Kane, they weren’t my only heroes, of course; I had the usual ones… John Wayne, Bogie, JFK. They’re all dead. Darin died after open-heart surgery at age thirty-seven, you know. Kane was the last one. The last living one. I’m thirty-three years old and feel old as hell, ’cause all my goddamn heroes are dead.”

I pounded the table with my fist; I surprised myself with the force it exerted, coffee cups jumping all around.

Sardini reached across the booth and put a hand on my arm. “Mal. Are you all right?”

“Haven’t you ever seen a tough guy cry before? I’ll see you guys later.”

I went back up to my room; the maid, a black woman about twenty-three, was in there and said, “You didn’t have no sign on the door.”

I didn’t follow that. I said so.

“You don’t want the room made up,” she said, defensively, “you gots to leave the do-not-disturb sign on the door.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Sorry to interrupt-you go on with your work. I’ll go for a walk or something.”

I was to the elevators when it occurred to me to go back and ask her something.

“Miss?”

She turned and gave me a sullen stare. She said nothing.

“Did you work yesterday?”

“I work damn near every day, mister.”

“Please back off a little. I’m not trying to give you a bad time or anything. I just wondered if you worked yesterday, because I wanted to ask you if you’d run short of towels.”

“Huh?”

“Let me start over. Do you work just on this floor?”

“No such luxury.”

“Did you happen to make up room 714 yesterday afternoon?”

She smirked and pointed upward with a thumb. “Yeah, so what?”

“It was a late make-up, wasn’t it? The guest had left the do-not-disturb sign on his door till late afternoon, right?”

Unimpressed, bored, she nodded. “I gots work to do, mister.”

“Were you short on towels?”

“No, I wasn’t short on towels.”

“You weren’t. How many towels did you leave in 714?”

“You’re crazy, man. I gots work to do.”

I showed her a five.

“How many towels?”

She snatched the bill out of my hand.

“Four,” she snapped. “How many you think?”

There was a do-not-disturb sign on the knob of door 714.

Hardly surprising, considering what Mae Kane had been through; but an unpleasant little ironic reminder of why I was here….

I knocked, and when there was no answer, knocked again, then paused to say, “Mae? It’s me-Mal.”

A few seconds later the door opened a ways and Mae’s face appeared over the taut nightlatch chain, a game little smile in the midst of the pretty but puffy face.

“Hello, Mal,” she said. “You’re a dear, but… I’m not really up to visitors right now….”

“Sure,” I said. “I understand. But we need to talk, soon as you’re up to it. It’s important we talk.”

The big brown long-lashed eyes, which had a red filigree this morning, narrowed and the lipstick-free lips pursed; she nodded and let me in.

Her bags were packed, by the door.

“When are you leaving?” I asked her.

She went over to the far bed and sat down, crossing pretty, nyloned legs; though she wore no make-up, she was a stunningly beautiful woman: her high-necked dress, brown and silky, clung to her trim figure, and her hair was its wig-perfect twin arcs of silver.

Her sexual attractiveness had always bothered me when her husband was alive, constantly made me feel ashamed of the impulses she stirred; now that he was dead, the guilt was like a heavy coat I was required to wear, perhaps because the zipper was caught.

“I’ll be driving back to Milwaukee this afternoon,” she said finally. Her voice was husky; it was always husky, but it was especially husky today. Alcohol husky; grief husky.

I sat on the edge of the other bed and faced her. “I really don’t mean to be a bother,” I said.

She managed a sad little one-sided smile. “You’re no bother,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d ’ve done without you there last night. I came completely apart.”

“I wasn’t the epitome of cool myself. I suppose you need to get right home, to make arrangements and everything.”

She shook her head. “I made all the arrangements by phone, this morning. A local funeral home is driving Roscoe back this afternoon to a funeral home in Milwaukee. There’ll be a little service Monday afternoon. Roscoe didn’t have many friends, you know. Some reporters, some people in a writer’s club he had helped out. A few blue-collar drinking buddies. Just a handful.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Drive all the way to Milwaukee just for that? It’s a sweet thought, Mal, but Roscoe would tell you to save your gas.”

I smiled. “He would at that. But I’ll still be there. Have you contacted Evelyn?”

Her face turned into a cold, stony mask.

“I tried,” she said. “She wasn’t home.”

Evelyn was Roscoe’s second wife; she lived in Milwaukee, too. There was much bad blood between Mae and Evelyn, though why Mae was so bitter when, to be frank, it was she who stole Roscoe away from Evelyn, I couldn’t say. I did know, from personal experience, that Evelyn and Roscoe had built a marriage on combat: Evelyn, like Roscoe, was a heavy drinker, and they had battled verbally almost constantly, occasionally getting physical, their hostility erupting in mutual slap-’n’-slug fests. It hadn’t been an idyllic marriage, by any means.