Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

Wry little grin #458. “Okay. Separate checks?”

“It’ll be my treat,” I said.

“Okay.”

We stood; I pointed to the luncheon check. “You can get that one.”

She laughed. “Fair enough. Heading back to the Congress?”

“Yeah. The dealers’ room should just about be set up. I need to talk to that lovely publisher of yours, and he should be up there.”

She paid at the register and we went out onto the street; there was a breeze, a breeze with a Chicago bite in it, and it was still foggy. I had a light jacket on, dug my hands in my pockets against the cold; she just had the sweatshirt, her breasts poking at the heavy cloth, dotting the eye in Noir a second time-being sensitive, I pretended not to notice. She pretended not to notice me pretending not to notice.

“Are you taking that Crime Tour this afternoon?” she asked; we were walking arm in arm-it was cold enough to justify that, even if our relationship wasn’t that far along yet.

“What Crime Tour’s that?”

“There’s a bus tour of various famous Chicago crime scenes. Think of the history on view-the genre’s dark roots revealed!”

“You really are the editor of Noir , aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I am. You comin’?”

“I think I’ll pass.” I’d seen enough crime scenes for one weekend. “You can give me the full report tonight over pizza.”

We stopped at a crosswalk; the Congress was just up ahead.

She looked sideways at me. “Say-what happened between you and Gregg, anyway?”

“Do I need a reason to loathe that guy?”

“No.”

The light changed and we crossed.

“Well,” I said, “it’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime.”

We went in the front hotel entrance, past the doorman through the revolving doors and up the interior ramp to the promenade of shops. A woman in her late fifties, heavy-set in a brown dress, rolled past like an orange-haired tank. Her face, which had been pretty once, was grim.

I stopped in my tracks.

Kathy went a couple steps beyond me, before she realized I’d been left behind; she glanced back with a look of exaggerated puzzlement.

“What’s wrong, Mal?”

“Nothing. Go on up to the dealers’ room, why don’t you. I’ll catch you later.”

She shrugged, smirked wryly, and went on toward the bank of elevators.

I went in the other direction, toward the lobby, where I’d seen Roscoe Kane’s second wife, Evelyn, heading.

Evelyn Kane was shouting at a pretty young black woman in a blazer behind the check-in counter; the clerk’s face was as impassively attractive as Evelyn’s was actively unattractive.

“Well, I want to see the son of a bitch!” Evelyn said. “When will he be on duty?”

“You’ll have to speak to the manager,” the woman said.

“Where is the manager?”

“He’s not here at the moment.”

“Well, when will he be here?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to come back later, ma’am.”

“What’s your name, honey?” The honey held no affection.

The faintest of smirks hid in one corner of the black woman’s mouth as she pointed to the name badge that said “Ms. Brown.”

And Evelyn Kane turned, seething, and faced me.

“Just what I need,” she said.

“Hello, Evelyn.”

She pointed a finger at me; her face was a tight mask-like Jack Klugman suppressing gas. “I want to talk to you, pal.”

“Fine. I wouldn’t mind talking to you, either.”

She began walking, toward the nearest exit, apparently; I fell in step.

Stamping on like a drill sergeant, she said, without looking at me, “You saw Roscoe last night, right?”

“Right.”

“I want you to tell me all about it. All right?”

“All right,” I shrugged.

“Let’s have a drink, then.”

I followed her out of the hotel; she stopped and stood just outside the doorway momentarily, as if daring the October breeze to faze her. It fazed me. I dug my hands in my pockets as I followed her down the street and around the corner to a sleazy little bar; the Americana-Congress was a relatively nice hotel, but you didn’t have to walk far from it to find something sleazy-a fact of life in most of downtown Chicago, which seemed a study in side-by-side incongruities. Not the least of which were Evelyn Kane and I, seated now in a corner booth. She was presently answering a question I hadn’t asked, explaining why we hadn’t used one of the several bars in the hotel.

“I hate hotel bars,” she said. “Expensive watered-down drinks and executives on expense accounts. Executives aren’t people, you know-they used to be people, I suppose. But expense accounts turn people into leeches.”

I liked the way Evelyn talked-she talked like a character in one of her ex-husband’s books-but I didn’t like Evelyn much.

“You don’t like me much, do you?” she asked, smiling over the draw beer that had barely been set down in front of her before she scooped it up toward her face.

I sipped the beer I’d ordered. “I think you’re a peach, Evelyn. I’d give anything for a pin-up of you to hang over my bed.”

She laughed and beer came out her nose. “I like you, kid. You got class.”

“I always thought you hated my guts.”

She shrugged; her eyes were elaborately laced with red, I noticed. “You came around and saw Roscoe and filled his head with how good he was. It was a bad time for him; right about the time he realized he wasn’t going to get published anymore, not in the U.S., anyway. You had a bad effect on him.”

“I thought I cheered him up.”

“Sure. He’d get high off all your hero worship. Then he’d come down. Crash down. To reality. Which is a hell of a place for a writer to have to come, as you probably know. And, I felt you and some other people like you were leeches, looking for free writing help and advice and connections.”

“Can I tell you why I think you didn’t like me, Evelyn?”

“Can I stop you?”

“You were jealous. Your marriage was on the rocks, and I came around and got your husband’s attention and it pissed you off.”

She thought about that while she finished the beer. “You’re right,” she said, waving at the waitress for another. She’d been a waitress herself once but didn’t seem to have any particular empathy for our suspiciously young one.

That’s where she’d met Roscoe, back in Milwaukee in the ’50s-waiting on him in a neighborhood bar. To hear Roscoe tell it, she’d been a bosomy, zaftig blonde, in those days; hard to imagine, looking at her faded orange hair and bearlike body and the face that had more wrinkles and folds than a suit of Goodwill clothes. Still, buried in that face were features that even now seemed pleasant if not pretty, if you dug for them hard enough. Maybe I would have enjoyed a pin-up of her over my bed, if it were of the right vintage.

Part of me wanted to like her. But I remembered how shrewish she’d been around Roscoe-and the impression I’d carried away from meeting her was that she was a lowlife who’d found a meal ticket, a blue-collar gold digger who turned not only fat but bitchy as the meal ticket started petering out.

Now, looking at this woman whose red eyes today came not entirely from drinking, I wondered if I might have misjudged her, at least a little.

“Looking back,” she said, “I think what you gave Roscoe was a good thing. In the long term.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the short term was a high followed by a crashin’ low, yes. But over the long haul I think the correspondence with you and the visits from you built his confidence back up, kept his self-respect more or less in working order. So I want to apologize, Mallory. I was rude to you, way back when. Why don’t we start over, you and me?”