“We don't intend to cash in on any notoriety, Mag.”
She gave me a fat wink. “Come, come, Norm, you talk your way and I'll talk mine.” Mag held up a slim book with a mild pink dust jacket. The cover was a kind of surrealistic picture of a big-eyed, solemn-faced young girl leaning against a yellow mud adobe hut. She was gazing at a desert sun, very red and hot. A lean girl in smartly styled jeans and a chic blouse, she looked like a fashion model—except for a small gun in a jeweled hip holster. The girl and the clothes were in sharp contrast to the deadly gun, the plain hut. The title, The Last Supper, was printed in small, old fashioned type. “This is one of his better books, Norm, in fact the best he ever did for us. Unfortunately it came out a few days before the Korean war and was lost in the shuffle. I like the jacket and the plot has a beautiful gimmick.”
I thumbed through the novel. “This was before my time here. What's it about? Not wife killing, I hope.”
“Naw. A gal who is a religious fanatic kills a young professor who is about to prove one of the Disciples intended to poison Christ during the Last Supper. Wonderful snapper: she kills the guy with a diamond bullet.”
Mag looked up at me as if expecting a shout of joy. “She killed him with... a what?” I asked.
“A diamond slug. Being harder than the steel of the gun, the diamond completely changed the ballistics of the murder weapon, throwing the cops into a tizzy. Far-fetched, but it reads fast and well. Do you know Matt made a thorough study of the Bible for this book?”
“Can you spare this copy?”
“Along with 3489 unbound copies in the warehouse. Is all this definite, Norm?”
“No. Far from it. It's an advertising thing. Of course I'll let you know the moment it is decided.”
As I reached the door, Maggie said, “Knew I had something to see you about. I have a French suspense novel that didn't do well on the other side, but my scouts swear it's a damn good yarn. Would Michele have time to read it for me?”
“Too bad you didn't tell me yesterday, she's in Paris now —or will be in a few hours. Her parents aren't feeling too well. I had to take her to Idlewild at five this morning.” And my God, how the words dragged in my mouth like rotten cotton!
“Lazy-me, the lousy book has been on my desk for a week. Well, it can wait until she returns. Wish I could pick up my fat-self and put it down in Paris. Or Rome. I like Rome even better.”
“Michele may be gone the balance of the summer,” I said, leaving her office. The balance of the summer or the rest of my damn life?
I stopped at the promotion office to pick up a background file on Matt and when I returned to my office, Marty Kelly was waiting on the phone. He said, “I hear we're going to do pages of advertising around Matt Anthony. When do we start? Like to talk it over at lunch?”
“The goddamn office grapevine,” I said, making with a mock groan. “Not true, Marty. We may do something. Right now everything is up in the air. And keep it quiet. I mean that.”
“I get the message. How about having chow with your old boss anyway?”
“Remember that another day, I'm tied up for lunch,” I said, wondering if I should tell him I was eating with Frank.
“I'll drop in to see you in a few days. I have some layouts on that prize book campaign I want you to okay. And listen, we can really go to town on Anthony, he's made to order for publicity.
“I'll let you know, Marty.”
I got a pipe working, opened my shoe laces, leaned back in my leather chair... and started reading the Matt Anthony file.
The son of a rural mailman and farmer, Matt had been born in a small upstate town near the Canadian border 51 years ago. He studied at Cornell on a state agriculture scholarship but dropped out after two years to go to sea. He entered NYU fifteen months later, working as a longshoreman to pay his tuition. He married a waitress for six months. When he was 27 he became an English instructor at Brooks University, a small but heavily endowed Midwestern school. It was about this time that Matt started publishing in several literary quarterlies and soon gave up teaching to become a full-time writer. Anthony was very prolific, selling over a million words to the pulps within two years, along with a sale to Collier's. (I stopped to figure a million words at about a cent a word was... ten thousand, or about five thousand a year. Not bad for those days—or these days, I guess.)
He worked on WPA for a few months (with that income?) and went to sea again during the tail end of the depression. His first mystery novel had for its background the teenage-hobos criss-crossing America in search of jobs. The book received only two reviews—mysteries were rarely reviewed then—both of them excellent. In 1937 he started making 'headlines.' He married a minor starlet in Mexico and was deported several days later for sending three policemen to the hospital during a drunken brawl. Matt himself spent several weeks in an El Paso hospital suffering from a concussion. That same year he placed in the Albany-New York outboard race, sold two books to Hollywood, and authored a radio serial called 'Private Gun.'
By an odd coincidence, he next made headlines the same week one of his books was published by punching a British police official in Africa, who was supposed to have been flogging a native. There was a one-day fuss until the State Department secured Matt's release. Some months later, he made the papers again when a bank was looted in a small California town. Matt Anthony the detective story writer was passing through and was 'asked' to give the local police a hand. There wasn't any mention in the file as to whether the bank robbers were ever captured.
Francine had been married to a little known and alcoholic novelist. Mart's name was in the columns now and then, squiring some pretty actress around, so it was a mild shock (to whomever was interested) when he married the not-so-glamorous Francine three weeks before Pearl Harbor. Months later they were both in England, Matt an accredited war correspondent for a small feature syndicate. He went to Africa, to Italy—where he was hospitalized after too much drinking hardened his liver. He made headlines again when he was attached to the famed 442nd Combat Team in Northern Italy. He had been-in a machine gun nest when a direct mortar hit had killed the soldiers and slightly wounded Matt. According to one news dispatch, Matt had gone 'fighting mad' and like a movie hero had picked up a tommy gun and charged. There was some doubt as to whether he had killed two Nazi soldiers, but he had wounded and captured a German officer and had to be restrained from killing him with his bare hands.
Since correspondents are not supposed to be shooting, Matt was returned to the States and for a time lectured on the war bond circuit. His books sold well, sales being limited only by the paper shortage. He was supposed to be writing a war book, but never finished (or started) it. After the war, except for sailing the Atlantic alone and a brawl in a Boston bar, Matt kept out of the papers. Two years ago he had packaged the television rights to five of his books for 'an undisclosed sum.'
So that was Matt Anthony. I put the file down. He must have been married to Francine the time I saw him, just before he sailed the ocean.
I glanced at the two afternoon editions of the newspapers Miss Park had left on my desk. The killing was front page with a picture of a grinning Matt being escorted out of a bar by two cops (taken in 1948) and a studio photo of him in his correspondent's uniform which seemed to be strained by the broad shoulders and heavy neck. On the inside pages there was a snap of a gray, bushy-haired little man shielding his face from the cameras: Prof. Brown leaving a subversive investigation. There was another picture of a rowboat with a new outboard and a large arrow bluntly pointing to a slight dent next to an oar lock.