2
There was a lot of jostling around and coming and going at the bar. I knew less than a third of the people there, and was feeling lonely when Fred Dannay came up end shook hands and asked me when I was going to submit another short story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s annual contest.
I grinned and reminded him that he and Manny Lee turned down my last effort, and asked if the other half of Ellery Queen was there.
He said three of Manny’s seven children were sick and he hadn’t been able to make it. Neither had George Harmon Coxe who was in Panama for a few days. “And I don’t know what happened to John Dickson Carr,” he added.
“That’s easy,” a voice snickered behind me. “He couldn’t decide whether to come as Harper’s guest as John Dickson Carr; or as Morrow’s guest in the person of Carter Dickson.”
I turned and saw it was Avery Birk speaking. He’s one of my less favorite competitors, bald and pudgy, with a porcine face and small eyes set too close together. He’s the sort who’s always patting the girls on their fannies and making snickeringly suggestive remarks, and his writing is atrocious. You probably know his character, Johnny Danger, the private eye who beds every blonde he meets within five minutes of being introduced. A compensation, I’ve always believed, for the author’s manifest inability to bed any dame, blonde, brunette or bald-headed.
Avery insisted on pumping my hand and buying me a drink, and Fred Dannay eased away and I was lonely again. Avery asked me how my books were selling in hard covers and I told him, “Lousy,” and he nodded wisely and said I’d never learned to put enough sex in my books. His were selling over ten thousand copies in the first editions, he went on, and he had an offer from one of the houses doing original soft-cover books of a $15,000 advance for a book if he would guarantee them at least five hot sex scenes.
I knew he was probably selling about three thousand copies in hard covers, and might possibly have been offered $2,500 for a soft-cover original, so I shrugged and drank his drink and turned back to the bar away from him to be lonely some more.
I was pouring my third drink of cognac from the bottle I’d had the bartender leave in front of me when I heard a low voice on my left saying, “I’ll bet you it’s the guy that writes Mike Shayne. Uh… can’t think of his name just now, but that’s him all right.”
The speaker was jammed up close beside me on my left side. My patch is on that eye and I couldn’t see who it was. I kept looking straight ahead and pretended not to hear, but there’s no author in the world who wouldn’t have listened.
A second voice, beyond the first speaker, replied scornfully, making no effort to keep his voice low: “You mean Brett Halliday? Maybe it is. Who could care less?”
“Sh-h-h, Lew. Maybe you don’t like his stuff, but he’s one of the real old-timers.”
“That’s just it. His stuff is old hat. My God, I bet I outsell him four to one and I’ve only been writing three years!”
I poured my drink down and then turned deliberately to look at the pair who were discussing me.
The lad next to me had a fresh, round face and ingenuous blue eyes. His corn-colored hair was cut short. He caught my eye as I turned, and a flush spread over his face. He said eagerly, “You are Brett Halliday, aren’t you? I’m Jimmie Mason, a new member. I’ve only had a couple of shorts published, but I’m working on a novel now.”
I shook hands with him. He had pudgy fingers but they pressed hard on mine. I said, “Good luck, Jimmie, but it’s a tough racket.”
“I don’t see anything tough about it,” a voice sneered from beyond him. “What with reprints and all, any hack writer who’s got brains enough to know what the public wants can pick up ten or fifteen grand a year without half trying. Know what Matthew Blood got for his last twenty-five cent original?”
I looked past Jimmie Mason at a dark, thin, angry face. He had a mustache that reminded me of Peter Painter’s in Miami Beach. Wavy black hair was parted carefully in the middle, and he wore a little red and white polka dot bow tie. I never saw a person I instinctively disliked more, and more easily at first sight.
Of course, I should be honest enough to admit his attitude toward my writing wasn’t exactly calculated to make me love him. In eighteen years I’ve learned pretty well to laugh off criticism of my books, but it had taken me a good many years of hard work to reach the point where my income was over ten thousand a year, and it didn’t sit too well to be told by a young punk that any hack writer could do it without half trying.
I said, “No. And I’m not particularly interested what Blood got for a slop-bucketful of sex and sadism.”
“Cut it out, Lew,” begged Mason. “You’ve had one too many drinks. This is Lew Recker, Mr. Halliday,” he went on hastily. “He writes suspense novels. You know… THE WRITHING WORM. It got swell reviews.”
“I doubt if he ever reads anything except his own stuff,” Recker put in. “And, God! What a bore that must be.”
I set my glass down slowly on the bar. I know my face was stony, and I’ve been told my one eye gets a peculiar fixed glare when I’m really angry. At that moment I was really angry. I work damned hard on my books. I try to make each one individual and, with the varied material Mike Shayne’s cases provide, I think I succeed. If I wasn’t so particular, I could do four books a year and double my income. So now I was in a mood to start something.
Jimmie Mason looked frightened and tried to push in front of me. I put my left hand on his shoulder and shoved him back from the bar. Then I felt a hand gripping my right shoulder hard, and heard a cool voice saying urgently, “Brett! I want you to meet someone.”
I recognized Millicent Jane’s voice. Millicent has always been one of my favorite people. She not only writes extremely well, but she is poised and lovely and clever.
How much Millicent had seen or sensed of what was going on between Lew Recker and me, I don’t know. But the interruption was opportune enough, and I set my teeth together hard and turned to see Millicent smiling coolly and holding the arm of a girl wearing a simple, black crepe dress. And she had pleasant, intelligent features, dark brown ringlets on her head and one of the most kissable mouths I’ve ever looked at.
I said, “Hi, Millicent. I’ll buy a drink,” but she shook her head and stepped back a little and said in her rich voice, “I’ll take a rain-check on it, Brett. This is Elsie Murray, who’s here as a guest tonight and she’s been dying to meet you all evening. Why don’t you buy her a drink?”
I said, “I will,” and “Hello, Elsie. Why should you be dying to meet a has-been like me? I’m not Matthew Blood, you know.”
She said, “I know.” She was tall for a girl. Five-eight, I’d guess, and she held herself erect as though she were proud of her height. “I know all about you, Mr. Halliday. I’ve read every book you ever wrote. Not
only that, but I actually went to the trouble of getting them all together and reading them in the order in which they were written, from DIVIDEND ON DEATH right through to ONE NIGHT WITH NORA.”
She didn’t say it gushingly, but with a quiet sincerity that made it sound real. She moved up to the bar beside me and I looked down at the clean neck-line beneath the upswept brown curls, at the pleasant fullness of her body that was just right for her height. I took in a deep breath and she smelled good. No perfume that I could discern. Just a clean female fragrance that made me want to press my face against her hair and inhale it. Or against the back of her neck. Or her lips.
Sure, that’s what I thought of the first moment as I looked down at her-fleetingly and without forming conscious thoughts on the subject. At the same time, I was saying jokingly, “That must have been quite a job… with Dell bringing out the old reprints right along with the new ones.” I nodded to a hovering waiter and as he stepped closer she said, “Can I have a drink of cognac? It would be silly to drink anything else with Brett Halliday, wouldn’t it?”