Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

“What did you and Roscoe Kane talk about?”

“I simply introduced myself to him, told him I’d enjoyed his books, and he bit my head off, the unpleasant little bastard.”

“Why’d he bite your head off?”

“I’d said something deprecatory about him, in passing, in my Hammett book. Mentioned him as ‘one of the lesser lights’ of the original Black Mask crowd. He took offense.”

That sounded like Roscoe.

“That was it, then?”

“That was it,” she said, terse as a telegram.

“Why didn’t you just tell me this in the first place?”

“What business was it of yours?”

She had a point.

“I’m sorry if I’ve been rude,” I told her. “I thought we were friends. I didn’t think you’d mind my…”

“Treating me like a suspect in a Perry Mason story? Why, I love it. It’s more fun than playing strip Clue . Now, go away. You disappoint me.”

I got up, stepped out into the aisle; Cynthia reached a hand out and touched my arm.

“Mal-forgive me. I know what Roscoe meant to you. I don’t mean to make light of that, or of your need to… ask some questions, in the wake of his death.”

“It’s okay, Cynthia. I can understand your attitude.”

“No, I don’t think you do. I’m having a rocky time of it with Tim-this weekend was supposed to be a getaway for us, a place, a time, for us to patch up our problems. But all we’ve done is bicker. And the mood I’m in just spilled over onto you a bit. Forgive me.”

“No forgiveness needed.”

“Maybe I’m just regretting shooing you away, at that Bouchercon, once upon a time.”

I smiled. “I know I still regret that.”

“You would. Now, shoo. Go sit with your little brunette in her sweatshirt.”

“She’s the editor of Noir , you know, not some teenager I picked up.”

“Isn’t that sweet,” she said. As usual, her malice was tempered with good humor. She could be bitchy, my Cynthia, but never a bitch.

Pretty soon I was sitting next to Kathy, and the bus was tooling along Lincoln Avenue. Our driver pointed out the site of John Dillinger’s death, the Biograph Theater-after all these years, still a study in ’30s art-deco black and white, though Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander was playing there, not Manhattan Melodrama . Then a few minutes later we were shown the site of the garage where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre had taken place, on the west side of Clark Street.

“Those two white pillars are all that remain of S-M-C Cartage Company,” he said. A modern housing center for the elderly, set back from the street, was where the garage once had been.

Before long, the bus rumbled over a massive drawbridge, its huge metal shoulders looming, and the driver said, “On our left is the La Salle-Wacker building, where mayor Anton Cermak’s personal police bodyguards, Miller and Lang, attempted the assassination of Frank Nitti in December 1932. The attempt failed, but within weeks, Mayor Cermak himself fell under an assassin’s gun.”

We drove down the concrete canyon of La Salle Street-the driver pointed out the looming city hall at the left, calling it, “The scene of many a Chicago crime”-and dead-ended at the gigantic art-deco Board of Trade Building. Whether or not it, too, was a crime site, the driver didn’t say.

“Well,” Kathy said, as the bus turned left, on its way back to the Congress, “I guess we’ve seen Chicago, all right.”

“Not quite.”

“Oh?”

“Not till you’ve had the deep-dish pizza.”

We smiled at each other, and held hands like kids in love; once Cynthia glanced back at us.

She seemed vaguely sad.

Gino’s on Rush Street was half a flight down off the sidewalk. Once inside, low-ceilinged interconnecting rooms went on forever, rooms whose walls were lined with graffiti and graffiti-carved wooden booths, and so full of people that the place managed to seem simultaneously claustrophobic and sprawling. And also bustling, this Friday night. The smell of tomato sauce in the air was so rich you could gain weight breathing, and it was intermingled with cigarette smoke so thick you could also get a side dish of emphysema. Gino’s was one of half a dozen places in Chicago that claimed to be the originator of Chicago-style, deep-dish pizza; I didn’t know if their claim was the legitimate one or not, but I did know that I hadn’t made a visit to Chicago in the last twenty years without stopping in to sample the evidence.

This was Kathy Wickman’s first time at Gino’s. In gray slacks and a pink Norma Kamali top with padded shoulders, she had a ’40s look appropriate to her position as editor of a magazine called Noir -and for the era when Gino’s had apparently last been redecorated. I guided her by the arm to the narrow main aisle, where I then had to ease her out in front of me, as side-by-side passage was out of the question. We had our work cut out for us, trailing a red-haired, harried, red-aproned middle-aged waitress who went barreling down the labyrinth, and Kathy glanced back with wide eyes and a frenzied smile that questioned my sanity in bringing her here.

Finally we were in a little booth, facing each other, and she glanced at the carvings in the wall next to her-saying, among other things, ComicCon ‘84, Spock Lives and Ed loves Carol -and said, “So this is your idea of ‘atmosphere’?”

“It’s a question of semantics.”

With a good-natured smirk, she said, “It’s a question of building code, is more like it.”

“Hey, this place is Chicago. Fast and obnoxious and fattening. Also, fun.”

“I thought you didn’t like big cities.”

“I like big cities fine. I even like New York. But I also like pretending I don’t when New Yorkers are around.”

“Still, you obviously like Chicago better than New York City.”

“That’s probably only because I know Chicago better. I’ve been coming in here once or twice a year since I was a high-school kid. My kind of town.”

“You and Sinatra. And this is your kind of town’s kind of place, huh. What else do you do in the big city for fun?”

“I’ll show you. We’ll take a tour that’ll beat that Crime bus all silly. We’ll take a cab down to Old Town, after we eat, and walk around and end up at Second City.”

Her face lit up. “Don’t you need reservations way in advance for that?”

“I know a guy in the cast; called him this afternoon and he got us in.”

“That’s great! I always wanted to see Second City.”

“It’s always a good show-they practically invented improv comedy. I’ve followed ’em for years.”

“You’re spoiling your small-town image for me, Mal.”

“Really? I was hoping my books didn’t project the typical small-town image-you know, the notion that Iowa was one big cornfield and a general store with a couple old guys playing checkers and chewing tobacco out front.”

She smiled with her eyes. “I think your novels do, to an extent, knock down that stereotype. But the small-town ambiance comes through….”

“Ambiance. Is that French?”

“Okay, okay-so I’m a pretentious little magazine editor… and don’t ask whether it’s me or the magazine that’s little, okay? But reading a story set in Port City, Iowa, is different than reading a story set in New York or L.A. or Chicago. Like John D. MacDonald doing Florida. So do me a favor and promise not to do any stories set in a big city; stick with your small-town settings.”

“I promise,” I said.

The waitress returned for our order and I asked for a small pepperoni and a couple of Italian salads and a couple of beers.