She waved a hand that had a little catsup on it. “Don’t worry, Gregg’s too much of a coward for there to be any gory anecdotes behind what I said. Fortunately we live half a continent apart and get together only rarely, and his come-ons are restricted primarily to the phone. But that’s bad enough, believe me. He comes on to me in the sleazy, chauvinistic way that went out with Gat Garson.”
I’d put Roscoe Kane’s death almost out of mind, for a few minutes; her flip remark brought it back to me, and my face must’ve shown it, because she said, “Oh. I’m sorry. That wasn’t in very good taste, was it? With Roscoe Kane dying last night and everything. I just could never read those stupid books, frankly.”
A wall came up between us.
“I loved those books,” I said. A little coldly.
She didn’t pick up on the coldness. “That’s just ’cause you’re a man. You grew up in the ’50s, and that was your era, and it hits you in a way that just goes right past me. I look at those macho private eye books and my stomach turns the corner, y’know?” She noticed the catsup on her hand and kissed it off; an unconsciously sexy little move. Seeing her do that, I would have had a hard time not warming back up to her. Which proved I was the chauvinistic boor she apparently suspected me of being.
Or did she?
“See,” she was saying intensely, her dark eyes looking at me with a naive sophistication, “your books are worlds apart from that tough-guy tripe. Your hero is sensitive. He thinks of women as persons, not sex objects… he sees women as…” And she looked upward for the word; while she did that I studied the word Noir. “… existential beings trapped in the same absurd world as he is. Don’t you agree?”
I raised my eyes, if not my consciousness. I smiled at her. “Completely. Does this mean separate checks?”
She stopped and her face was a blank for a moment, and then one of her repertoire of wry smiles found its way to her face, and she said, “I sound like a pretentious jerk, don’t I?”
I shrugged. “You sound like somebody who writes reviews for Noir.”
“Is there a difference?”
“That depends,” I said, placing tongue firmly in cheek, “on whether you’re praising G. Pompous Donaldson, or me.”
She shook her head, the smile shifting to one side of her face. “How a writer as sensitive as you can dislike Donaldson, and deify Kane, is beyond me.”
“The last time anybody called me sensitive was when I got my flu shot. And how somebody as insightful as you can fall for Donaldson’s bombastic claptrap is beyond yours truly, Johnny Dollar.”
“Huh?”
“Old radio show. You’re too young to remember it, and too literary to have heard of it. Listen, Donaldson’s guy is named Keats-a private eye named after a poet! Gimme a break!”
“That’s no more pretentious than calling your hero Mallory. That’s a reference to Sir Thomas Malory, and Morte d’Arthur, I assume. Linking your hero to knights, rather obviously.”
“Like hell! It’s my name!”
“Oh. Well, why do you only use one name? You’ve got a first name, don’t you?”
“People call me Mal.”
“But that’s short for ‘Mallory.’ What’s more pompous than signing your work with one name?”
“Using a first initial, a middle and last name; or, God forbid, three names! Look, I have a first name, but nobody, including me, uses it, except on official documents.”
“What is it, then?”
“Something that wouldn’t sound good in print.”
“It couldn’t be that bad.”
“Oh, no?”
“Oh, come on, tell me. What is it? I won’t tell.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Not in Noir?”
“Nowhere.”
I told her.
It sobered her.
“I see what you mean,” she said. “Maybe just ‘Mallory’ is wiser.”
“Perhaps in the future you’ll learn to trust me. And my comments about Donaldson are also not for publication. Panning one of my peers in print is definitely not cool. Okay?”
“Sure,” she said, sipping at her Coke with a straw, looking fifteen years old, making me glad she was really ten years older. “Still, you seem to have the sort of outspoken notions that Noir readers would get a kick out of reading about.”
“I don’t know…”
“Well, I do. I’d like to interview you, over the weekend, some time.”
“I don’t think so…”
“You can edit the rough copy, censor anything you like, if something you say looks stupid or harsh on paper.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Dinner still on?”
“You’re from Pennsylvania someplace, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. West Mifflin.”
“Maybe I better introduce you to Chicago-style pizza, then. This evening.”
Wry little grin #458. “Okay. Separate checks?”
“It’ll be my treat,” I said.
“Okay.”
We stood; I pointed to the luncheon check. “You can get that one.”
She laughed. “Fair enough. Heading back to the Congress?”
“Yeah. The dealers’ room should just about be set up. I need to talk to that lovely publisher of yours, and he should be up there.”
She paid at the register and we went out onto the street; there was a breeze, a breeze with a Chicago bite in it, and it was still foggy. I had a light jacket on, dug my hands in my pockets against the cold; she just had the sweatshirt, her breasts poking at the heavy cloth, dotting the eye in Noir a second time-being sensitive, I pretended not to notice. She pretended not to notice me pretending not to notice.
“Are you taking that Crime Tour this afternoon?” she asked; we were walking arm in arm-it was cold enough to justify that, even if our relationship wasn’t that far along yet.
“What Crime Tour’s that?”
“There’s a bus tour of various famous Chicago crime scenes. Think of the history on view-the genre’s dark roots revealed!”
“You really are the editor of Noir, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I am. You comin’?”
“I think I’ll pass.” I’d seen enough crime scenes for one weekend. “You can give me the full report tonight over pizza.”
We stopped at a crosswalk; the Congress was just up ahead.
She looked sideways at me. “Say-what happened between you and Gregg, anyway?”
“Do I need a reason to loathe that guy?”
“No.”
The light changed and we crossed.
“Well,” I said, “it’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime.”
We went in the front hotel entrance, past the doorman through the revolving doors and up the interior ramp to the promenade of shops. A woman in her late fifties, heavy-set in a brown dress, rolled past like an orange-haired tank. Her face, which had been pretty once, was grim.
I stopped in my tracks.
Kathy went a couple steps beyond me, before she realized I’d been left behind; she glanced back with a look of exaggerated puzzlement.
“What’s wrong, Mal?”
“Nothing. Go on up to the dealers’ room, why don’t you. I’ll catch you later.”
She shrugged, smirked wryly, and went on toward the bank of elevators.
I went in the other direction, toward the lobby, where I’d seen Roscoe Kane’s second wife, Evelyn, heading.
7
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.