Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

“I think you should. I think you should call Mr. Myers and tell him what you found out.”

“All right, I will. But nothing will come of it.”

She stabbed the cigarette out in a glass Americana-Congress ashtray on the nightstand. “Damnit, if Roscoe was murdered, we can’t just let it lay there! We’ve got to do something, Mal!”

“I know. I know.”

We sat and looked at each other; she leaned forward, got a crinkly smile going and stroked my face, in what she probably thought was a motherly fashion. Her skirt was hiked up over her knees, and I wanted to throw myself on her-or out a window.

“Poor Mal,” she said. “Poor, poor Mal.”

“Poor Roscoe,” I said. “I feel fine.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

And her mask of composure slipped and she was crying into her cupped hands.

I stood, hoping how I felt about her didn’t show.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” I said. “I should’ve let it ride.”

“You can’t let murder ride,” she said, sobbing.

“That’s a Gat Garson line,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Chapter One, Kiss or Kill.”

“You were Roscoe’s fan, too, weren’t you?”

“He was my hero,” she said.

I touched her shoulder. Like a son, I hoped.

I said, “Let me poke around a little. Ask some questions. I’ll keep my suspicions to myself. I don’t want the media to get hold of this, not yet, anyway.”

“All right-” She sniffed.

“And I wanted to ask you a big favor. Stick around till tomorrow.”

She cocked her head, looking at me close. “Oh? Why?”

“There’s a presentation tomorrow afternoon, by the Private Eye Writers of America. They were going to give Roscoe their Life Achievement Award; now that it’s going to be posthumous, well… they’d like you to be there to accept it.”

She smiled bravely. “I’d like that very much.”

“It will attract some media attention, I’ve got to warn you.”

“This sounds like the right kind of media attention.”

“I agree. Enough of that kind of media attention might get Roscoe Kane’s books back into print, where they belong.”

“That would be nice. I’ll be proud to stay, to accept Roscoe’s award.”

“Thanks. Besides, if I am going to ask some questions around, about Roscoe, I’d like you available, so I can check back with you… you know, compare notes.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

“It would be, if I knew where to start.”

“Well, nothing was stolen from the room,” she said. “There was five hundred dollars in Roscoe’s suitcase-cash. Plus credit cards and his watch, which was expensive. Some other things.”

“Your point being?”

She had taken a tissue from her purse and was dabbing her red eyes. “It wasn’t robbery. It wasn’t somebody looting a hotel room who happened upon somebody bathing in the room or something.”

“Right. It had to be somebody Roscoe knew. Somebody he knew well enough to be able to let approach him in the tub before he bothered getting up and out.”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “He could’ve been sleeping in the tub, when whoever it was came in. Or he could’ve passed out, like the coroner’s man said-only with his head against the edge or back of the tub, not in the water.”

“True. But how did ‘whoever-it-was’ get in?”

“With a key from the desk, maybe? Why don’t you ask down there. Hotels can be pretty careless, sometimes, about handing out keys.”

“Good thought. Of course, your husband may simply have left the door unlocked, or even ajar. Particularly if he was expecting somebody.”

“Yes, but, who ?”

“Was there anyone staying in the hotel Roscoe knew?”

“Some of the mystery writers. Gorman, of course.”

“Gorman’s here? In the hotel? He lives in a Chicago suburb; why would he stay overnight in the hotel?”

She shrugged. “I suppose because it’s easier to just stay here, throughout the convention, than drive back and forth. He has a dealer’s table, I understand.”

There was a book dealers’ room, where rare and current books would be for sale throughout the Bouchercon.

“How well do you know Gorman?” I asked.

She grimaced. “Too well. Obnoxious man. I do know Roscoe had business to discuss here with him.”

“I think I better look that s.o.b. up.”

“Oh, you’ve met Gregg Gorman, then? He is a charmer.”

“Only if you’re a snake.”

“Mal, promise me you’ll call that assistant coroner. Myers. Tell him you’ve spoken with me, and that I take this quite seriously. Perhaps that will do some good.”

“Perhaps. Can you think of anyone else who might’ve had a grudge against your husband, who’s in the hotel, or in Chicago at all?”

“No,” she said. “But if you’re right about the towels… somebody had a hell of a grudge against him.”

“Maybe I can find that somebody.”

“I hope to hell you can,” she said.

She got up and hugged me, gave me a motherly kiss on the mouth, smiled at me.

“I look a mess, don’t I?” she said.

“You look terrific. You always look terrific.”

“You like me, don’t you, Mal?”

“Of course I like you.”

“Why don’t you come see me in Milwaukee sometime? In a few months. When we’re both… feeling a little better.”

“I don’t think so, Mae.”

“Bad taste of me to mention that, hmm, Mal? No respect for my dead husband? Let me tell you something. I loved Roscoe very much. But our relationship… hadn’t been physical for a long time. I wouldn’t like the world to know that-to know that macho Roscoe Kane couldn’t get it up for his lovely bride-but I don’t think he’d mind you knowing.”

“I think he would,” I said, feeling creepy suddenly.

“Maybe,” she admitted; she was still very close to me. Her breath was on my face, and there was still some gin in it; I could forgive her for this, because of what she’d been through, and the gin, but I couldn’t forgive myself for what I felt.

She continued: “You’re like Roscoe. You’re like the young Roscoe I never met. You… you made him very happy, in his last years, Mal. You paid him the sort of… literary respect he never thought to get. When everybody else had forgotten him, you came to him like Milwaukee was Mecca and he was a guru.” She should’ve said Mohammed, but she wasn’t a writer, so she could get away with imprecise metaphors. “You were like a son to him. He never thought much of his faggot boy, Jerome… harsh to say it that way, but Roscoe dearly loved to hate homosexuals. And he and his son could never be close, not the way you and Roscoe were close.”

The tears were back in her eyes; slowly, they began streaming down her cheeks.

“You, Mal,” she said. “You’re the young Roscoe Kane, in a way. The Roscoe I never got to know. Not in the… Biblical sense, anyway….” The wicked little smile, in the midst of the tears, was incongruous, and very, very sexy. “The son he never had, the husband I never quite had….”

“Please, Mae…”

“Mal. Come see me sometime. That’s more Mae West, than Mae Kane, isn’t it? Well, take it any way you like. In a few months, I’ll need to be close to somebody. And I’d like to be close to Roscoe, but he’s gone. Even impotent, he was more of a man than any other man I ever knew. Come see me… it’s the closest I can come to being close to Roscoe again. Could you do that for me?”

“Maybe,” I said. Not ever. No way; despite how much I wanted to.

“And find out what happened to my husband, will you?”

“I’ll try.”

“If anyone can, it’s you,” she said.