Or is it? At least a writer, even a paperback writer like Roscoe Kane, gets a grab at the brass ring of immortality. You never know; something you write just might last… assuming that all of us, including our books, aren’t turned to radioactive dust any second now, of course. Short of that, the writer, any writer, even the popular-fiction writer like Roscoe Kane-following the tradition of such popular-fiction writers as Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky, crime writers all-has an honest (if long) shot at living on through his words.
On the other hand, royalty checks made out to the author’s estate are not this author’s idea of a good time.
“Is this a private conversation or can anybody join in?”
I looked up.
She was small-petite, even-and her straight, shoulder-length hair was the dark brown you mistake for black if the light isn’t hitting it just right. Her eyes were the same color.
“Was I talking to myself?” I said, embarrassed. I was sitting alone in a booth in the Artistic Cafe, just up Michigan Avenue from the Congress; I’d wanted to get away from the hotel and the Bouchercon guests, and from past experience I remembered the Artistic, in the Fine Arts Building, where young actresses and ballerinas, in tights and leg-warmers and other form-fitting artsy-type duds, often wandered in for coffee. The Artistic was a good place for me to sit and think, and if thinking got old, be distracted by young actresses and ballerinas in tights.
“You were moving your lips,” she said, sitting down. She had a pixie face, pert, cute; she’d have made a great hippie, ten or fifteen years earlier.
“Was I making any audible sounds?” I asked.
“Just a sort of murmur,” she said, her lips doing a wry little dance around the words as they came out.
But she wasn’t a dancer, or an actress, at least not one here to use one of the Fine Arts Building studios. She had on a Noir sweatshirt-black deco letters barely visible on dark blue-and her designer jeans were snug (not that there’s any other kind). Noir was a mystery fanzine I had subscribed to a while back, because somebody had told me the editor’d been reviewing my books favorably; that sounded like my kind of reading, so I sent them a check. So what if Gregg Gorman was the publisher.
Anyway, I figured she was here for Bouchercon, and said, “I figure you must be here for Bouchercon.”
“Shrewd deduction,” she said; the corners of her mouth went up, and the rest of her mouth was a wavering line, making a terrific wry smile. She had a great mouth, this girl. Whoops, make that “woman”: I could tell right off she wouldn’t appreciate being referred to as a girl.
“Do I know you?” I said. “Or is that wishful thinking?”
“Do I look familiar?”
“I’ve seen you before, or somebody who looks a lot like you. Maybe a movie star or something.”
“Brother. Hope that isn’t dialogue you’re trying out for your next story-you usually give that guy in your books better lines.”
I managed a grin. “Things I say often seem more clever on the printed page.”
“The movie star line won’t.”
“Maybe you’re right. So. You know who I am.”
She grinned back at me; she had a thousand smiles, this one, all of them terrific, most of them wry. “Don’t be too proud of yourself. It’s my job to know who you are.”
I snapped my fingers. “Kathy Wickman!”
She nodded; pointed to her Noir sweatshirt, giving me a great excuse to take a look at how the word Noir rolled with the flow of her. She had the sort of breasts Gat Garson would no doubt describe as “pert, perfect handfuls, straining for their independence”; I, of course, would find a less sexist way to put it, though I can’t think of one at the moment.
“It doesn’t take that long to read the word Noir,” she said, with a one-sided wry smile. Make that 1001 smiles.
“I flunked Evelyn Wood,” I explained; I extended a hand across the table and we shook hands-hers was slim, cool, smooth. Mine was-who cares?
“You may remember, I dropped you a note about your first novel,” she said. “I just had to comment, personally, on that chapter about your hero’s rites of adolescence.”
“That was a nice letter; thanks.”
“The letter you wrote back was nice, too. That chapter really hit me; kind of unusual to find it plopped down in the middle of mystery novel.”
“That chapter was all true, every word of it,” I said. “I couldn’t use everything that really happened, actually-some of the things my real first love pulled on me outstrip anything the fictionalized one in my book did.”
“Really? Say-why don’t we get together for dinner, sometime over this Bouchercon weekend? I’d love to hear the stuff that didn’t make it into that chapter.”
“My outtakes would interest you, huh?” I shook my head. “I don’t know if I could be forced to talk about myself like that; I’m really very modest and shy. How about tonight?”
“Okay-” She smiled; this one wasn’t wry. Which was just fine with me.
“Have you had lunch? I’ve got a cheeseburger on the way.”
“Actually, I haven’t eaten.”
I called a waitress over and Kathy ordered.
Kathy, I should finally get around to saying, was the editor of Noir; she was the very person who’d been doing those favorable reviews of my books. So naturally I respected her intellectually, being as how she had such high standards and good taste in matters literary (unless she panned my next book, in which case all bets were off). But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was just as attracted to her physically as mentally.
Frankly, feeling attracted to Kathy, young, pert, pixie-fresh Kathy, helped flush the uncomfortable feeling I had about Mae Kane out of my system.
“I really like your magazine,” I said, between bites of cheeseburger.
“You and our thousand or so other readers.”
“You ought to have a better circulation than that.”
“I know. It’s that screwed-up publisher of mine.”
I lifted my eyebrows and put ’em back down. “I’m glad you brought that up, not me.”
“Oh, really?”
“Your publisher. Gregg Gorman. He’s an s.o.b., you know.”
Taking a bite of her own cheeseburger, she rolled her eyes and nodded, swallowed, said, “You’re telling me. But he pays the bills, and stays out of my way.”
“It’s a nice little magazine.”
“If Gregg’d just promote it, it could be a bigger nice little magazine. He’s stubborn; he sells it to the mystery fan market, and won’t bother trying for newsstand distribution. We’ve got articles, fiction by some up-and-coming writers-you wouldn’t like to try a short story, would you?”
“Sure. What’s your word rate?”
Her mouth and chin crinkled in embarrassment. “Half a cent per.”
“Ouch. I always wanted to know what it felt like to be an old-time pulp writer.”
“Now you’ll know. Unless you’re going to back out…”
“Well, I did say yes, so a deal’s a deal.”
Wry smile; rerun of the first one. “Anyway,” she said, getting back on the track of an earlier train of thought, “Noir’s a slick little ’zine and Gorman’s getting his books into Dalton’s and Walden’s and other outlets, so I keep nudging him to do something on a bigger scale with my little baby. But he doesn’t.”
“He’s a man of vast imagination; some people see a sunset and just see a sunset-Gorman sees a sunset, and belches.”
She nodded. “That’s Gregg. He’s a paternalistic little shit, is what he is, making passes at me every chance he gets.”
“That’s not something I want to hear about while I’m eating.”