I had done my collecting years and years ago, in secondhand stores where I’d gotten dog-eared paperbacks of Spillane and Prather and Roscoe Kane and the like with gloriously tacky covers, babes and bullets and blood-what more could an impressionable teenager ask? And I’d paid a nickel or a dime apiece for them. The dealers here were asking (and sometimes getting) ten dollars and up. It wasn’t unusual to see a paperback (The Marijuana Mob by James Hadley Chase; Five Murderers by Raymond Chandler) go for thirty dollars or more.
And all the Roscoe Kane first edition paperbacks-which yesterday would have brought perhaps five dollars per-were marked twenty-five dollars and up. Dying can do wonders for a guy’s career. Gat Garson would’ve cheerfully shot the dealers who’d indulged in this overnight grave robbing; Gat wasn’t around, so I shot them for him-using dirty looks for ammunition, instead of.38 slugs. Not that any of them noticed, or anyway cared.
I caught up with Kathy and her Noir sweatshirt at a table where a lavish paperback selection had every passerby’s eyes popping out at the bright colors and sexy, gory subject matter. This particular dealer was a guy I knew-Bob Weinberg, a bearded guy with glasses and a sense of humor so dry you didn’t laugh till a day later; his prices today were, as usual, not out of line. And he hadn’t raised his Roscoe Kane prices, either. I complimented him on that.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. He wore a green sweater and cream button-down shirt and gray slacks, a conservative contrast to the excesses of the covers of his wares, spread out before him like a kitsch banquet. (Do real men eat kitsch?)
“It’s just refreshing to run across a dealer who isn’t a ghoul.”
“Dealers are rumored to be human,” he said, as if not entirely in agreement with that notion. “I do have a Roscoe Kane item you might be interested in. In fact, I brought it with you in mind.”
“I have all the books, Bob. And I don’t have the patience to go after the short stories in the pulps.”
“No, this is something special. I think you’ll like this. Let me check with my wife and see where we put it.”
Bob’s wife was his business partner.
Meanwhile, Kathy was looking at the cover of a Kane book called Hearse Class Frail.
“Don’t tell anybody,” she said, “but I have to admit I like these covers.”
This particular one portrayed a beautiful busty blonde in a negligee looking out her bedroom window where, in the blue darkness of the night, Gat Garson was punching out several thugs.
“You don’t like the books,” I said, “but you like the covers.”
She shrugged. “It evokes an era. And I have to admit something…”
“Feel free.”
“I never read one of these Gat Garson things all the way through. Maybe if I got into one…”
“I’ll buy you a copy of one of his better ones.”
“That’d be nice. I’d like to give Roscoe Kane another try.”
“As a gesture to me.”
She gave me wry smile #764. “Maybe I’m just trying to keep on your good side. I’m counting on that interview with you.”
“Your publisher might have some objection to your running an interview with me, you know.”
“Gregg gives me free editorial rein. The interview’s still on, then?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“After you take me out to dinner, that is.”
“Right. I’m all for bribing journalists before they interview me; it’s good for my image.”
“What image is that?”
I scowled at her. “The Gat Garson of the ’80s.”
Weinberg was back and he had a big twenty-by-twenty-five piece of bristol board covered with a protective sheet of tissue paper through which I could, barely, see something-something I liked very much.
“I don’t collect that stuff,” I said, not very convincingly.
“It’s up to you,” Weinberg said. Not the hardest sell.
“It’s beautiful,” Kathy said, something like awe in her voice.
And so it was: the original cover painting to Murder Me Again, Doll, my favorite Gat Garson novel; the very painting that had adorned the cover of the novel’s original publication in 1958, which I had read a battered used copy of in 1961, the first Roscoe Kane novel I ever read, the book that gave me Gat Garson fever.
The painting showed Gat on a fire escape, a lithe brunette beauty in a negligee huddling next to him as he fired his.38 down toward several armed thugs climbing up toward them. It was a night scene, blue tones shattered by bursts of red and orange from Gat’s gat.
“It’s by Kinstler,” Weinberg said. “He’s a big-time portrait painter now, you know-his paperback covers are getting collectible.”
“I believe it.”
“Imagine,” Weinberg said, “having a painting by somebody who did both Gerald Ford’s portrait and Gat Garson’s.”
“I don’t think I can afford it.” I was holding the painting in my hands, which were shaking-Gat seemed to be moving; I could almost hear the gun going KA-CHOW….
“I was going to ask two hundred for it. Unless you wanted it, in which case I’d settle for one seventy-five. Of course, that was before Roscoe Kane died on us.”
“Now what do you want?”
“One seventy-five.”
“It might be worth twice that, now that Roscoe’s gone.”
“I brought it here to offer you for one seventy-five. Do you want it or not?”
I handed the painting back to him-and wrote him out a check.
“Keep it for me till I’ve been around the room, would you, Bob?”
“Sure,” he said-shrugging, as if this deal couldn’t have meant less to him. But he’d gone out of his way to be nice to me, and had managed to confirm the rumor that some dealers were human, after all.
Kathy and I walked along, glancing at the various tables of colorful paperback and pulp covers.
“Did you notice how much the ‘doll’ Gat’s holding onto in the painting looked like you?” I asked her.
“I was afraid to point it out without sounding like an egomaniac,” she admitted. “That’s some pretty girl in that painting.”
“Don’t you mean pretty ‘woman’?”
Her smile went crinkly on me. “No, Mal. That was definitely a girl.”
“You, on the other hand, are…”
“Definitely a woman. But is that so bad?”
“You don’t hear me complaining.”
We each picked up a few books as we wandered through the adjacent rooms-she bought an extra copy of guest-of-honor Donaldson’s most recent novel, Poisonous Wine, to get an autograph later; and I found a couple of novels I’d been looking for by Jim Thompson, an underappreciated crime novelist of the ’50s whose bleak books made James M. Cain seem like Louisa May Alcott. Phyllis White, the widow of the ’con’s namesake, Anthony Boucher, and a regular, treasured guest of the Bouchercon, was chatting with Otto Penzler at the Mysterious Press table. Kathy and I stopped so I could pick up the Spillane collection Penzler had recently published and I exchanged smiles with Otto and Mrs. White. Tim Culver had joined Cynthia at the autograph table; they were cordial to the fans, but I still sensed a tension between them.
Then we came to the Mystery House table. Various Gorman publications were on display-including that slipcased set of Carroll John Daly that both Tom Sardini and I had sprung for by mail-and so was Gorman.
So much for dealers being human.
I hadn’t noticed him come in, which was like failing to notice a garbage scow pull into your marina. I must’ve been caught up in that deal with Weinberg and the painting, and Gorman must’ve been uncharacteristically close-mouthed for the past few minutes, because normally his loud and obnoxious voice would have carried like a bad smell in a small room.
“Well,” he said. “It’s Mallory. The asshole.”
He wasn’t a big man, at least not tall; maybe five-eight. He had a beer belly and a goatee in which flecks of his last half-dozen meals hung on like bad memories. His hair was a washed-out, colorless red and thinning, and his nose was roadmapped darker red. His eyes were little dark beady things that looked out from under bushy eyebrows like bugs hiding under weeds. His thick upper lip curled up under the mustache part of the goatee and revealed teeth as yellow as the sun, but not shining.