“I’ll give it some thought. If I think of something worthwhile, I might ask.”
“I might answer. But you got to promise me something…”
“Okay.”
“Promise me you won’t turn this into a book.”
“All right.”
The pizza came, steaming hot and smelling very, very good. Kathy’d never had Chicago-style pizza before-except the pale shadow of a Pizza Hut variety-and she was an instant convert. Saucy, cheesy, with a pastrylike sweet crust, Gino’s pizza was an Italian-American atonement for the Mafia.
And nearly as fataclass="underline" one small pizza had stuffed us both and we sat and sipped a second beer, each sip painful.
“I never ate so much in my life,” Kathy said.
“You’ll be over it in a week,” I said. “Kathy, is something bothering you besides a full stomach?”
She sighed, nodded; said, “You don’t, uh… really suspect Gregg of…” She couldn’t say it.
I smiled. “The editor of a magazine devoted to fictional crime and violence, and you can’t say that simple word found in so many titles of the books you review: murder.”
She shivered. “Fantasy’s one thing… this is quite apart. Very disturbing.”
“Finding Roscoe’s body was no picnic, either.”
“Do you? Suspect Gregg, I mean?”
“I suspect him of something. Not murder-not yet, anyway.”
“What do you suspect him of?”
“Fraud.”
“How so?”
“The Hammett book. I think it’s a hoax.”
“You can’t be serious….”
“Dead. I think it was ghosted. Probably very cleverly, very well-ghosted. But ghosted.”
“Who by, for heaven’s sake?”
“There’s a couple of possibilities. Tim Culver’s the obvious suspect-he’s the modern ‘prime proponent’ of the Hammett style. His live-in-lady, Cynthia Crystal, had access to the Hammett papers-maybe including other fragments that might’ve proved useful. Also, Cynthia’s a fine writer, with respect for Hammett’s work-her work bears his influence, in a way. She’s a candidate for ghost herself. Or her and Culver together…”
“So you think one, or both, of them-”
“No. I think it was somebody else.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think I’d think it’d be?”
She thought. “You can’t be serious!”
“You said that before.”
“Surely you don’t suspect…”
“I surely do,” I said. “I think Roscoe Kane ghosted The Secret Emperor by Dashiell Hammett.”
She kept shaking her head, finding this harder to swallow than another bite of Gino’s pizza. “But-was Kane a good enough writer to mimic Hammett, of all people, and get away with it?”
I nodded. “Yes. Few people know that, but yes, he was. He was that good a writer.”
“And you think this had something to do with why Roscoe was…”
“Killed. Most likely. This is a big scam, Kathy. Hundreds of thousands of dollars involved, at the minimum.”
The waitress brought our check.
Kathy looked at me almost mockingly, wagging her head; the long brown hair moved in waves. “But you don’t know this for a fact. It may very well be an authentic unpublished Hammett novel; if it’s a fake, it’s fooled all the experts who’ve come in contact with it.”
“So did the Hitler diaries, till the right experts came along.”
She looked at me thoughtfully. “Think you could tell the difference, if you got hold of a copy?”
“I might be one of the few people familiar enough with both Roscoe Kane’s work and Hammett’s to nail it down, yes. Why?”
She shrugged facially. “Just wondering. Shall we go? Old Town’s not getting any younger, you know.”
“True,” I admitted. I left the money on the table and we rose from the booth and slowly, weighted down by the pizza, made our way through the catacombs of Gino’s and up the stairs and onto Rush Street.
“We’ll catch a cab down at the corner,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulder. The evening was chilly, but the neons of Rush Street seemed to warm it. Chicago was a terrific place.
A hand squeezed round my arm and it wasn’t Kathy’s.
I looked back and saw a burly guy about forty in a blue quilted jacket, a guy who looked like he’d been hit in the face long ago with a bag of nickels and had healed improperly; he was smiling at me with false, white teeth. He had a gray, balding butch that looked like a dying lawn; his eyes were a similar gray and deader-looking than his hair.
And he was hurting my arm.
“What do you want?” I said, trying to sound angry rather than scared.
He didn’t say anything; he just proceeded to drag me along with him.
Kathy, speechless, was rushing along after us.
Before I could think of anything clever to say or bold to do, the guy had dragged me across traffic into the alley opposite, where two more guys waited. One of them, a stocky guy in a cowhide jacket, had hippie-length hair, only a love child he wasn’t; the other, a much younger guy in an AC/DC sweatshirt, with pimples on his neck and shorter long hair, grabbed Kathy. Just a few feet inside the mouth of the alley, against the wall, he held a hand over her mouth and put an arm around her waist and she kicked and struggled but it didn’t do her much good. A few yards away, people strolled by on the sidewalk, not noticing the fun and games in the dark alley nearby. Many were nibbling chocolate chip cookies purchased at the Mrs. Fields Cookies shop next to the alleyway.
As for me, I was about to toss mine. I was in the process of getting thrown against a brick wall and having a fist buried in my stomach by the guy who’d dragged me here, a couple of seconds, a couple of lifetimes, ago. I fell to my knees and, like they say at Gino’s, one Chicago-style pizza, coming right up.
“Go back to the farm, smart-ass,” said the guy who’d hit me. He had a voice as harsh as the gravel my hands were touching. I grabbed up a handful and tossed it at him and he went blind, for just a moment-long enough for me to throw a fist up into his groin and double him over.
And I got up on my feet and hit him on the side of the head with everything I had, which was enough, because he went down into what used to be my pizza.
That left the other two guys, and feeling brave and cocksure from my below-the-belt victory over the one in the quilted jacket, I went after the stocky guy in the cowhide, who had been standing near the mouth of the alley opposite the guy clutching Kathy, watching in case anybody tried to get involved (in Chicago?). I dove at him and he swatted me like a fly, over into some garbage cans.
I hit hard, only it sounded worse than it felt, and I saw Kathy’s eyes get even wider and more frightened, and the stocky guy came after me with a nasty smile and two outstretched arms that weren’t planning to hug me, at least not in any affectionate way. I reached for something and my hand found the handle of a garbage can lid. I smacked him in the chest with it, like Prince Valiant using his shield on a barbarian. He went back on his ass, but sprang right up-and into my second roundhouse swing of the garbage can lid, which his face put a nice dent in.
He went down and out.
I turned and looked at the kid holding Kathy; I was splattered with blood and garbage and former pizza, and I had the dented garbage can lid in my hand and must’ve looked meaner than I thought, because he let go of her and ran.
“Let’s get the cops!” Kathy said.
I reached down and pulled the wallet out of the stocky guy’s pocket and checked his ID; he had a couple of business cards, and I took one of them.
Kathy was holding onto my arm now, and I grinned at her. “Was it me that said Gat Garson wasn’t a good role model?”
She had hysteria in her eyes. “Didn’t you hear me? Let’s get the damn cops!”
“What, and lose you your job?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
I pointed at the two unconscious men.