Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

I wondered why she was trying to get on my good side; I wondered it aloud, in fact.

“Looking for ulterior motives,” she said. “Mystery writers are all alike. Being married to a writer is like being married to a psychiatrist. Remember the old joke about the psychiatrist who passes a guy on the street, and the guy says, ‘Hello,’ and the psychiatrist says to himself, ‘I wonder what he meant by that?’ That’s what being married to one of you analytical sons of bitches is like. You keep trying to make sense out of your life. You keep looking for motivations and ‘patterns of behavior,’ when you deal with people. But life isn’t like books. It’s a goddamn mess, Mallory. It isn’t tightly plotted; and people don’t behave rationally. And things don’t work out like they’re supposed to.”

Somewhere in the midst of that speech her red eyes began tearing up; and now, her speech finished, she stared into her beer and tears flowed.

“You must like salt in your beer,” I said.

“Go to hell,” she said, good-naturedly.

“You still love him, don’t you?”

“Don’t you?” she said.

Somebody dropped some money into a jukebox and Willie Nelson began to sing “Blue Skies.”

“That’s a great old song,” she said.

“Maybe, but I don’t like Willie Nelson.”

“Listen to the song , you jerk. You claim to be a writer-listen to the words!” She sat for a moment, lost in the music. Almost wistfully she added, “He sings it real nice, too. That Willie Nelson. What a singer. What a man. Somethin’ about him always reminds me of Roscoe.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They both look like they fell off a lumber wagon.”

That amused her; she didn’t laugh out loud, but she laughed.

“We should’ve been pals, Mallory.”

“Maybe it’s not too late.”

“Maybe not. Why don’t you tell me about seeing Roscoe last night.”

“I’ll get to that. First tell me what that Abbott and Costello routine you were doing with the girl at the front desk at the hotel was about?”

Intensity tightened her sagging face. “I want to talk to the night man. The assistant manager who found my husband’s body.”

“That guy wasn’t who found the body.”

“Yeah, well, the bitch found him. But the night man was first on the scene after that.”

“By the bitch, I take it you mean Mae.”

“Mae, the bitch, right. The home-wrecking goddamn bitch.”

Funny hearing Evelyn call Mae that, considering Evelyn seduced Roscoe away from his first (now late) wife.

“Actually, the night guy was third on the scene,” she said. “I understand somebody else was with the bitch when she found Roscoe, but I can’t seem to find out who-that’s one thing the night manager can tell me, who the guy was that was with her. Somebody she was humping, no doubt. Him, I want to talk to, also.”

“Evelyn, I was with Mae when she found Roscoe.”

Her eyes got very alert. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“You do now.” I told her about it, but tried to downplay my suspicions. It didn’t take.

“Your instincts are right,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“He was murdered.”

“How can you be so sure?”

She hesitated. “Roscoe was on the verge of something big.”

I sat forward. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you.” She bit her lip. “But not right now. I gotta think it through, first.”

“If you know something that will help convince the authorities that this is-or at least might be-a murder, then don’t hold back, Evelyn. Tell me what you know.”

She smiled, but the smile was oddly private. “Don’t give me that. I read your books, pal.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that. I read ’em. Roscoe loaned ’em to me. He was proud of you. You were his prize pupil. And only.”

A wave of emotion ran through me; I swallowed and tried to keep my own beer from getting salty.

I said, “I still don’t see what that has to do…”

“Those stories of yours, those books, were true , weren’t they?”

“More or less.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said smugly.

“Make your point, Evelyn.”

“I didn’t like the books.”

“So?”

“The writing seemed okay; I’m no writer, but I lived with one long enough to know writing when I see it. I just didn’t like what you did with it. I didn’t like you taking those two real murders you happened to fall into and turnin’ ’em into mystery stories. It’s like I said, writers are always trying to turn real life into stories, nice ’n’ tidy with beginnings and middles and ends, and real life isn’t like that. And, frankly, pal, I think you were kind of a leech, turnin’ those real-life tragedies into something you could make a buck off of.”

“Your disapproval is noted, Evelyn. But what’s that got to do with what happened to Roscoe?”

She gave me a nasty smile over the lip of her beer glass. “My point is your amateur detective crap won’t cut it here. You’re in Chicago; and you’re in over your head. This should be left to the police, kiddo.”

“I’d love to leave it to the police. Unfortunately nobody but me is convinced Roscoe’s death was murder.”

“I’m convinced. And I’ll talk to the police about it, soon enough. But this is my business, Mallory. I’ll handle this my way , ’cause I’m involved, and you’re not; ’cause I know what’s going on, and you don’t have a clue. So take my motherly advice and keep out.”

“Oh, really?”

“Find some other murder to write your next book about.”

Liking Evelyn had been a short-term event.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” I snapped at her. “Did you come down from Milwaukee this morning when you heard the news of Roscoe’s death, or what?”

She drank some beer. “I was already coming down. I heard about it on the radio coming down, in fact.”

“ Why were you coming down?”

“To meet Roscoe, of course.”

“Evelyn-you and Roscoe were divorced a long, long time ago. With little love lost.”

She jerked upright in the booth; the beer in her hand splashed. “You don’t know my life. You didn’t write my life, I’m not a character in one of your goddamn books. So don’t go making… pronouncements… about me or my life!”

“Okay, okay. Maybe that was out of line. But what… business did you have here with Roscoe?”

She smiled enigmatically. “It was partly business. But it was mostly love.”

The jukebox started in on “Blue Skies” again.

“Love?”

“Roscoe and I were getting back together. He was planning to divorce Mae.”

“Oh, come on, Evelyn…”

She looked hurt; defensive. Suddenly the pretty woman she had once been became more apparent; the fat old woman faded for an instant, and the ghost of the zaftig blonde asserted itself.

“You think you know so much about Roscoe Kane,” she said. “Well, here’s something you didn’t know: we’d been having an affair the past six months. The bitch thought ol’ Gat Garson couldn’t get it up anymore, but he got it up for me just fine. Pick up the check, would you, honey?”

And she was up and out of there, moving faster than a big woman like her had any right to, and by the time I paid the check and went out after her, she was gone.

I rode the escalator up to the hotel’s second floor, where the dealers’ room was, feeling dazed, even a little battered, from my confrontation with Evelyn Kane. I didn’t know what to make of much of what she’d said; her revelation about having an affair with her ex-husband seemed like lunacy. That didn’t mean it might not be true, of course. I had just checked at the front desk and Evelyn Kane had not-at least not yet-checked in at the Americana-Congress. She’d disappeared in a cloud of hot air-which was what her story about getting back together with Roscoe had to be. Didn’t it?