I sat forward. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you.” She bit her lip. “But not right now. I gotta think it through, first.”
“If you know something that will help convince the authorities that this is-or at least might be-a murder, then don’t hold back, Evelyn. Tell me what you know.”
She smiled, but the smile was oddly private. “Don’t give me that. I read your books, pal.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that. I read ’em. Roscoe loaned ’em to me. He was proud of you. You were his prize pupil. And only.”
A wave of emotion ran through me; I swallowed and tried to keep my own beer from getting salty.
I said, “I still don’t see what that has to do…”
“Those stories of yours, those books, were true, weren’t they?”
“More or less.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said smugly.
“Make your point, Evelyn.”
“I didn’t like the books.”
“So?”
“The writing seemed okay; I’m no writer, but I lived with one long enough to know writing when I see it. I just didn’t like what you did with it. I didn’t like you taking those two real murders you happened to fall into and turnin’ ’em into mystery stories. It’s like I said, writers are always trying to turn real life into stories, nice ’n’ tidy with beginnings and middles and ends, and real life isn’t like that. And, frankly, pal, I think you were kind of a leech, turnin’ those real-life tragedies into something you could make a buck off of.”
“Your disapproval is noted, Evelyn. But what’s that got to do with what happened to Roscoe?”
She gave me a nasty smile over the lip of her beer glass. “My point is your amateur detective crap won’t cut it here. You’re in Chicago; and you’re in over your head. This should be left to the police, kiddo.”
“I’d love to leave it to the police. Unfortunately nobody but me is convinced Roscoe’s death was murder.”
“I’m convinced. And I’ll talk to the police about it, soon enough. But this is my business, Mallory. I’ll handle this my way, ’cause I’m involved, and you’re not; ’cause I know what’s going on, and you don’t have a clue. So take my motherly advice and keep out.”
“Oh, really?”
“Find some other murder to write your next book about.”
Liking Evelyn had been a short-term event.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” I snapped at her. “Did you come down from Milwaukee this morning when you heard the news of Roscoe’s death, or what?”
She drank some beer. “I was already coming down. I heard about it on the radio coming down, in fact.”
“Why were you coming down?”
“To meet Roscoe, of course.”
“Evelyn-you and Roscoe were divorced a long, long time ago. With little love lost.”
She jerked upright in the booth; the beer in her hand splashed. “You don’t know my life. You didn’t write my life, I’m not a character in one of your goddamn books. So don’t go making… pronouncements… about me or my life!”
“Okay, okay. Maybe that was out of line. But what… business did you have here with Roscoe?”
She smiled enigmatically. “It was partly business. But it was mostly love.”
The jukebox started in on “Blue Skies” again.
“Love?”
“Roscoe and I were getting back together. He was planning to divorce Mae.”
“Oh, come on, Evelyn…”
She looked hurt; defensive. Suddenly the pretty woman she had once been became more apparent; the fat old woman faded for an instant, and the ghost of the zaftig blonde asserted itself.
“You think you know so much about Roscoe Kane,” she said. “Well, here’s something you didn’t know: we’d been having an affair the past six months. The bitch thought ol’ Gat Garson couldn’t get it up anymore, but he got it up for me just fine. Pick up the check, would you, honey?”
And she was up and out of there, moving faster than a big woman like her had any right to, and by the time I paid the check and went out after her, she was gone.
8
I rode the escalator up to the hotel’s second floor, where the dealers’ room was, feeling dazed, even a little battered, from my confrontation with Evelyn Kane. I didn’t know what to make of much of what she’d said; her revelation about having an affair with her ex-husband seemed like lunacy. That didn’t mean it might not be true, of course. I had just checked at the front desk and Evelyn Kane had not-at least not yet-checked in at the Americana-Congress. She’d disappeared in a cloud of hot air-which was what her story about getting back together with Roscoe had to be. Didn’t it?
The ’con registration desk was a long banquet table against the wall at the top of the escalator. The two young women and the young man behind the table were mystery fans enlisted for this dirty work, and they were eagerly chattering about the mystery writers they’d been meeting. They put me in my place by having obviously never heard of me. I had prepaid, so all I had to do was check in, pick up my plastic name badge, pin it to my sweater and be humiliated by the lack of recognition. Bouchercon was under way for me.
The dealers’ room (which actually sprawled over several rooms adjacent to the large Gold Room, site of most of the ’con’s major activities) hadn’t been open long and some of the dealers were still in the process of setting up. The Mystery House table was one of the latter, and one of Gorman’s flunkys was doing the setting up, a thin, acned kid in a plaid shirt; the enormous pleasure of seeing Gregg Gorman himself would have to wait.
Friday was never a terribly active day at a Bouchercon-only the professional writers and diehard fans who’d flown or driven in from here/there/everywhere would be around; Saturday would find Chicago-area fans flocking to a complete card of activities-speakers, panel discussions, movies-and Bouchercon, Chicago-Style, would be in full swing.
Still, there were probably twenty-five or thirty people wandering about the room, and the number of dealer tables was probably nearly the same. I bumped into Sardini and Murtz, both of whom carried ever-growing stacks of books they’d just bought, each commenting about having to go home after the ’con and immediately write and sell something to make up for what they’d been spending. Some of the dealers were hawking new books by the likes of Donald E. Westlake, Joe Gores and Lawrence Block-as well as studies and biographies on writers like Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers and John D. MacDonald. And of course there were books by the writers who’d be appearing at the ’con, which gave fans a chance to pick up copies to get autographed. Cynthia Crystal was sitting at a table doing just that with her Hammett bio, for a cluster of fans of various ages and sexes (all wearing glasses-see what reading gets you?). Several dealers were carrying my books, and I thanked them for their support; most dealers are mystery fans as well, and a couple had copies of my two novels tucked away for an autograph, which I gladly gave them. If only the guy at the Port City 7-Eleven who always insisted on seeing my ID before cashing my checks could see me now…
The major attraction of the room, however, was old books: hardcover editions in dustjacket, with prices routinely in the forty to one hundred dollar area-The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, a surrealistic cover depicting a little idol with blood on it; Galatea by James M. Cain, a purple cover with a picture of a water tower. The appeal of all this was a bit beyond me. I’ve never been a collector, anyway not the type who has to have first editions and the like (a novel’s a novel-it doesn’t matter to me what’s on the cover or what edition it is, so long as it’s in English). But I did get a kick out of seeing the rare old paperbacks from the ’40s and ’50s, with their garish covers.