Kill Your Darlings (9 page)

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?”

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?

The ’con registration desk was a long banquet table against the wall at the top of the escalator. The two young women and the young man behind the table were mystery fans enlisted for this dirty work, and they were eagerly chattering about the mystery writers they’d been meeting. They put me in my place by having obviously never heard of me. I had prepaid, so all I had to do was check in, pick up my plastic name badge, pin it to my sweater and be humiliated by the lack of recognition. Bouchercon was under way for me.

The dealers’ room (which actually sprawled over several rooms adjacent to the large Gold Room, site of most of the ’con’s major activities) hadn’t been open long and some of the dealers were still in the process of setting up. The Mystery House table
was one of the latter, and one of Gorman’s flunkys was doing the setting up, a thin, acned kid in a plaid shirt; the enormous pleasure of seeing Gregg Gorman himself would have to wait.