The room was cavernous, dwarfing the crowd, packed so tightly the people could only shuffle forward as they entered. Signs and banners identified the booths, and barn door–size blowups of movie posters and book covers made startling splashes of color: The scarlet lips of the slinky temptress on Chinese Checkers were as big as a sofa.
“Mr. Holly?”
“Heppleman.” He shook the young man’s hand.
“I’m Earl Frame. We spoke on the phone.”
Frame wore a sportcoat over a T-shirt and blue jeans.
“My daughter, Mildred.”
He colored before the tall redhead at Jacob’s side. She took his hand, smiling. “Hello.”
“Hello. Um, has anyone ever told you that you look like the woman on the original cover of The Fence?”
“No, but I’m told I resemble my mother.”
He cleared his throat. “Mr. Heppleman, you’re scheduled to sign at two, after you deliver the keynote. That’s when the interest is highest. Is that all right?”
Jacob had leaned in to hear him. “I don’t guess it matters. I’m not Erica Jong. In the old days, we didn’t bother with signings. Back then people read paperbacks and threw them away or passed them on. No one collected them.”
“Times have changed. I’ll show you where you’re speaking.”
The banquet hall was nearly as large as the exhibition room. Waiters were setting out dishes and flatware on round linen-covered tables, with numbers clipped to stands in the centers and eight chairs to each. A wooden lectern stood on a riser at the far end. On the wall behind it hung a swallowtail-shaped banner with a dozen of Jack Holly’s covers reproduced on it in full color.
“Amazing,” he said. “And in broad daylight. But I’ll never fill the joint.”
“We’re sold out, at a hundred dollars a plate.”
He touched the gizmo in his ear. There must have been some distortion.
Millie patted his arm. “You’re too modest, Dad. Mom would’ve been so proud.”
“She was proud of me regardless. Her one blind spot.”
She’d had two, actually, counting cigarettes. Don’t be sad, Jakey. I had the time of my life.
Frame interrupted his thoughts. “The fund’s intended to provide aid to struggling writers and graphic artists.”
“Where was it when I needed it?”
“We’re really delighted you could make it, sir. There aren’t many of your colleagues in condition to attend. Phoebe Sternwalter died while we were in correspondence. Burt Woods and Paul Arthur won’t share the same building; they write on opposite coasts and mail pages to each other. We offered to fly Robin Elk from the U.K. at our expense, but he declined through a secretary.”
“I heard he became a recluse after he sold his father’s firm.”
“The artists are a special challenge. Phil Scarpetti’s old address is no good. He did all your covers, didn’t he?”
“Most of them, yes.”
He’d spotted Phil five years ago on the subway, or thought he had. He’d aged badly; but who’d ever had practice at that? He was in the company of a young man. He met Jacob’s gaze, briefly and without sign of recognition. The pair got off at the next stop. For Jacob it was like reading the obituary of someone he’d once been close to.
Back in the exhibition room, a woman passed wearing a skin-tight gold lamé jumpsuit with brass-embossed breasts. He remembered the series. Glamazons, by Hugh Brock.
Brock’s wife woke up one morning while he was pouring gasoline on a pile of her clothes in the bedroom. He’d died in Bellevue.
Someone spoke. He started. “What?”
“You’ll have to speak up,” Millie said. “My father’s a little hard of hearing.”
Earl Frame raised his voice. “You knew Cliff Cutter, didn’t you?”
“Not well; but I admired him.”
“I think you’ll appreciate this.” The young man walked away briskly.
Millie said, “I guess we’re supposed to follow him.”
“I should’ve brought a bicycle.”
They stopped at a booth at the end of a long aisle, where a crowd was dispersing. A stout old woman busied herself arranging items in a sort of museum display. Panels of weathered barnwood had been erected to form a room within the room. A Winchester carbine, an ivory-handled Colt in a worn holster, lariats, coppertone photos of Indian braves shared the space with a rolltop desk and a battered old Underwood typewriter. Cutter might have just stepped out of the rustic study for a breath of desert air.
“We trucked it all in directly from his place in Denver,” Frame said. “Everything’s just as he left it. He wrote most of his westerns in that room. It’s the most popular booth in the exhibition.”
“Jack?”
He stared at the old woman. “Nayoka?” It was Cliff Cutter’s Navajo wife. He recognized the bright black eyes, sunk deep in folds of fat. He took her hand gently.
She beamed first at him, then at Millie. “How old are you, child?”
The question surprised her into laughter. “I’ll be thirty next March.”
Nayoka turned back to Jacob. “I told you. Indian medicine is still strong.”
“We put that carving in a safe-deposit box when Millie was teething.” He changed the subject. “This is an impressive display. I can feel his presence.”
“He’d be furious. They put everything in wrong. He wouldn’t let me in even to clean. You know how he died.”
“I heard it was a stroke.”
“That happened in the hospital after they set his hip. He fell off his horse galloping down a ravine: showing off for his young ranch hands. He was ninety-two.”
Earl Frame introduced him to a hall filled to capacity. He’d expected wheelchairs and trifocals, and there were some of those among the white heads, but younger people as well. A little girl in the front row reminded him of Millie when she was ten. He’d raised her alone.
He started strong.
“Um.”
A shrill electronic whistle made many in the audience clap their hands over their ears. He’d leaned in too close.
“Forgive me,” he said, increasing the distance. “The last time I spoke into a microphone, I was in a Congressional hearing room.”
This brought laughter. It was a savvy crowd.
His remarks were brief. He gave thanks for the invitation and warm reception and told anecdotes about the writing life. After prolonged applause, Frame stepped up to encourage questions.
Most were routine: where he got his ideas, his working method, his opinion of the movies based on his books. One he mulled over. It was asked by a young woman in a business suit with a floppy bow tie. “Mr. Holly—”
“Heppleman, please.”
“I’m sorry. Under what authority did the United States Congress claim the right to censor the literature?”
He paused, then: “The times were different. The Coast Guard confiscated French novels at the docks. Comic books were burned publicly in church parking lots. Juvenile delinquency was a crisis, and some well-meaning people thought they could eradicate it at the source—if they could just identify the source.
“It was nothing new. When I was a boy, it was radio: Gangbusters and Jack Benny were raising a generation of illiterates. Later it was television. Now it’s video arcades. The difference is more people are paying lip service to the First Amendment. Not that it amounts to any more than that, but back then such talk branded you a Communist.”
He finished to a standing ovation.
On his way to the booth where he was to sign, a middle-aged man in a denim jacket and jeans approached him. “Mr. Heppleman, I’m Kurt Krohner. I’m with the Post.” He showed a press card. “Can I ask you some things?”
“If you don’t mind walking with me.”
Krohner trotted alongside. “Your kind of book is getting a great deal more respect these days.”
“Any amount would be more than we got.”
“Why the change?”
“The world caught up.”
“I’m sorry?”
He stopped walking and faced the reporter.
“Many of us were just back from the war. You can’t see cities being bombed, corpses piled in concentration camps, and dish out happy endings. We wrote about a world that had changed, and we pointed out where it took a wrong turn. For that we were called smut peddlers. Then along came political scandals, pointless wars, and men’s peckers on movie screens where Shirley Temple used to sing and dance. It took all that for everyone else to see what we saw. So now we’re serious artists who weren’t afraid to tell it like it was.”
He was paraphrasing Robin Elk, he knew. It didn’t change his opinion of the man. He resumed walking.
“Is that how you saw yourselves?” Krohner scrambled to catch up.
“Hell, no. We wanted to put away enough dough so we could get out of the paperback jungle and write respectable.”
Krohner scribbled as they walked. They detoured around a line that snaked around several booths in the dealers’ room. The customers obscured whoever it was signing behind the table. Jacob said, “Who’s that, do you know?”
The reporter traded his notebook for a folded program. “That private-eye guy, Stratton. I’d say he’s in demand.”
Officially Jacob was there to sign The Valley Forge Murders, his latest revolutionary historical mystery, and Dunlap had provided two hundred copies. But the old Blue Devil titles had been reissued in paper by Lighthouse Books, and they outsold the hardcover ten to one. Earl Frame stood beside the table, opening the books for him to inscribe, with Millie present to hand them to each person in line; a factory operation that rarely obliged Jacob to look up into the faces.
“You write all these books yourself?”
He looked up then.
Hank Stratton’s grin was stuck to a slack face, his formerly steely eyes bloodshot now and settled deep in their sockets. He’d exchanged his trademark fedora and trench coat for a Yankees cap and powder-blue leisure suit.
They shook hands. The P. I. writer’s grip was as firm as always. He snatched the Lighthouse edition of The Fence off the top of the stack and handed it to Jacob. “I never did get past the first couple of chapters; lost my copy during a move.”
He inscribed it to Stratton—that made it an association copy, one author to another—and gave it back. A tall blonde in a tight red dress had appeared at Stratton’s side. “You promised me a drink,” she said.
He leered at Jacob. “Meet my nurse.”
After the pair left, Millie said, “I remember you telling me about him. He sure landed on his feet.”
“And to think I almost liked him once.”
Jacob sold out. When the last purchaser drifted off, he stood and stretched. His right leg had gone to sleep.
“Ready to go, Dad?” Millie twined her arm inside his.
“While I still have stars in my eyes.”
An elevator took them down to an underground parking garage. It was lit by bulbs in cages and smelled of oil and engine exhaust and damp; a scene from a Holly novel.
“Wait here, Dad. I’ll bring the car around.”
He watched her walk away down the aisle. His eyes lost focus. Through them he saw her mother’s careless stride.
“Jack Holly!”
He swung toward the deep coarse voice.
A stunted dark figure was coming his way from the shadowy end of the garage, a broad-tailed coat spreading behind it, a hat with a dimpled crown on its head. Steel taps clicked on concrete.
The figure came into focus. Time had closed its fist on that face, crumpling it into thousands of creases.
“Mickey?”
“Irish Mickey died in the joint,” said the dwarf. “Nobody’s called me that since I got out. I’m Izzy Muntz again. This is for you.” He stuck a hand inside his shabby coat. The Luger was gone, probably in police custody long since; the short stubby revolver was more to his scale.
Jacob threw out his hands, as if he could catch the bullet between them, like a moth.
Sudden bright light threw his shadow across the little man’s face. Jacob was already moving, out of the line of fire. The car sped past him, close enough to lift his coat, its headlamps drenching the gunman in blinding white. Shannon’s face was a rictus of shock.
Steel slammed into flesh, a ghastly noise. His feet left the floor, his body flying up and over the hood. He might have been diving to meet the threat. Brakes shrieked. Then he was airborne. His body hung at the top of the arc, just under the low ceiling, for an impossible length of time, then came down on its back with a sickening wet smack.
“Dad!” Millie was out of the car, the door hanging open. The hood was crumpled up against the windshield. She caught her father in her arms as he lost his balance. She shivered in his embrace.
“Are you all right?” He was shouting.
“That man! He—”
“He’s sick!” He shook her by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”
She bobbed her head up and down. Her teeth were chattering.
More footsteps clattered. A security guard in a gray uniform was running their way, unbuttoning his holster as he came. He stopped before the tiny figure lying broken at his feet, spreading his arms to hold back a crowd appearing as from empty air.
Jacob squeezed Millie’s arms, patted them; a lame attempt at reassurance. He disengaged himself with effort—she was holding him in a death grip—made sure she could stand on her own, then stepped forward to kneel beside Irish Mickey Shannon.
The dwarf was a sack of shattered bone. A gray mist came through his prison pallor. He was wheezing. Blood spilled from his nostrils and over his chin. On an impulse, Jacob took off his coat, lifted the dying man’s head gently, and doubled the coat over to make a pillow.
“You should’ve gone straight, Mickey,” he heard himself saying. “We might have collaborated on your memoirs. You’d have been upstairs, signing autographs next to me. Getting respect.”
Shannon’s eyes had lost their gloss, but teeth gleamed through the blood in a grotesque grin. Jacob had to lean close, turning his better ear to hear what the little man was saying before it ended in a rattle.
“Respect,” he said. “Where’s the fun in that?”