Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

That seemed a ridiculous question to him, but politeness was his way, so he said, “Most certainly.”

“Where?”

“Just across and down several doors.”

I went out, by myself, and found a numberless door ajar just down the hall and opened it and found a closet with a big hamper with three wet, sopped towels on the top. I didn’t touch anything; just went quickly back.

The man from the coroner’s office came with me reluctantly, sighing the way only a big man sighs, and examined the sopping towels, with his hands.

“Watch it!” I said. “Should you be touching those?”

He looked at me like I was a four-year-old. A stupid one. “Yeah, right, these wet towels pick up the prints of killers like an X ray. Why don’t you give this a rest, and me a break?”

He walked back across the hall to room 714 and I followed him in, not knowing whether to feel angry or idiotic. I settled for a little of both.

“You’re not calling the police in, then,” I said.

“No.” An unfriendly smile and a shake of the head.

“This could be a murder.”

“This is an accident. You’re giving me a real major pain in the ass, pal. What’s your part in this, anyway?”

“I found the body.”

“Yeah, yeah. Who are you? Just a friend of the family?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, go sit with the wife. Be supportive. Leave me do my job.”

“Sir. I think you may be blowing this.” I couldn’t quite get indignant; I wasn’t sure I was right.

“I know my job. Leave me do my job. What do you do for a living, pal, that makes you such an expert?”

Great.

“I’m a writer,” I said.

“What, a reporter?”

“Mystery writer,” I mumbled.

“What?”

“Mystery writer.”

He gave me a big-city smile that said I was the most pathetic thing he’d seen all day, in a day full of seeing pathetic things and feeling superior to all of them.

Part of me wanted to punch him, but part of me also thought maybe his attitude was right on target. My hero had drunk himself senseless and drowned in the tub. Maybe I ought to grow up and accept that sorry fact.

I took one more try.

“Listen,” I said. “I used to be a cop. Please don’t write me off as a kook. Hear me out.”

“Why, you got something new to say?”

“Come with me.”

I walked him into the bathroom; Roscoe hadn’t moved.

“That empty bottle of Scotch,” I said, pointing to it. “I was with Mr. Kane until maybe forty minutes before his wife and I found the body. And you’re saying during that time he supposedly drank this whole bottle of Scotch and passed out and drowned? I just don’t believe it. And where’s the glass? Roscoe Kane didn’t drink out of a bottle.”

“You brought me in here for this twaddle? A drunk who doesn’t drink out of a bottle? You think forty minutes isn’t time enough to drink some Scotch and drown and die?”

“A whole bottle ?”

“Who says it was a full bottle? He had it in his room and ’d been nursing it all day, probably; he just killed it here in the tub. And it killed him.”

I didn’t have anything to counter that with. I found myself looking at Roscoe, nude, old, skinny, dead. I looked at him through a watery haze, not all of it in the tub.

The man from the coroner’s office put a hand on my shoulder; it was a gesture that was meant to be conciliatory, but it was too firm a hand, the impatience in the man getting the best of him. I shook it off.

He raised his two hands in a gesture that sought a truce, and then pointed toward Roscoe Kane. “Come look at something,” he said.

I went closer to the tub; looked where the fat stubby finger was pointing.

“Do you see any bruises?” he said. “Look at his shoulders, where he’d have likely been held down. Take a close look.”

I did.

“No bruises,” he said.

“Suppose he had passed out or fell asleep in the tub or something, but with his head up out of the water-and somebody held him under; even if he woke up during that, it’d be over fairly quick.”

“Sure, but he’d be bruised.”

“Not necessarily. He’s skinny. Frail. It wouldn’t take much to hold him under and…”

“Listen-what was your name? Mallory? — you could be right. One in a hundred is about your odds. But there’s just not enough to go on. He has a history of drinking; a past, recent accident where he drank himself to sleep and almost died because of it. The evidence here indicates no struggle; it, in point of fact, indicates he passed out and died. Now. Let it go.”

Suddenly I felt he was right; I felt embarrassed. I nodded, said, “Yeah, yeah. You’re probably right. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

That was when the ambulance guys from the funeral home arrived with a stretcher and a body bag. I helped them dry Roscoe Kane off before they put him in and zipped him up and wheeled him out. I told them we’d call tomorrow and give them the particulars.

So Roscoe Kane was gone, and soon so was the man from the coroner’s office. Mae was asleep. Fitfully so, but asleep.

I thought about sleeping on the other bed, so she wouldn’t be alone when she woke up; but decided just to leave a note, with my room number, if she wanted me and my help. I was, at this point, intruding.

So I got out of there.

Back in my room, in bed, I kept going over the scene of the… crime? Accident? I couldn’t make up my mind.

Roscoe Kane had never attended a Bouchercon, or any fan gathering before, for that matter; and I was the one who’d convinced him to come to this one. Me. I brought him here. All but put him in that damn tub. Tom, who was the current president of the Private Eye Writers of America, had asked me to get Kane to the ’con, so that the PWA could surprise him with their annual Life Achievement Award.

“We’re a young organization,” Tom had told me over the phone a few months back, “and we need the sort of publicity we can stir up by having a Roscoe Kane on hand. Kane may not be a household word these days, but a man who sold that many books-but who has never been honored for his work, in fact who has been pilloried for it-will make good fodder for the media. We can get ink, we can get on the tube, we can build some recognition for our group, and some credibility. I need you to make sure Kane is there in person, Mal… otherwise we’re dead in the water.”

I’d made sure Kane was here, all right. Dead in the water.

The last thought I remember having, before drifting off to sleep, was, “Where the hell’s Gat Garson when you really need him?”

The phone rang and scared hell out of me.

I’d been sleeping deeply, and was in the midst of a disturbing, just-short-of-delirious dream in which Gat Garson and I were chasing Roscoe Kane’s killer down the corridors of the Hotel Caligari; a faceless killer whose form shifted but who had a gun, and Garson said, “Look out!” as the killer fired the gun at me and the phone-ring came out the barrel. My eyes jumped open and saw the phone, and I stopped it before it could ring again. I spoke thickly into the receiver: “Mae?”

It wasn’t Mae Kane; it was the wake-up call I’d left for ten o’clock, figuring I’d wake before that. But I hadn’t. I thanked the operator, hung up, sat and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. The feel of the dream was still with me, a physical sensation, a film in my mind as real as my morning mouth. I stumbled up out of bed and brushed my teeth, and my mouth tasted better, but the dream was still there.

And so was the death of Roscoe Kane; that wasn’t something I could shake easily, either.