Kill Your Darlings by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

will be around this afternoon, when the ’con officially opens, to do a live minicam thing on the six o’clock news.”
    The waitress came over at that point, and I had thought I wanted breakfast, but suddenly coffee seemed all my stomach could face.
    “Has Mae been down?” I said.
    Sardini shook his head no. “She talked to the reporters in her room. Just for a little while.”
    I was surprised she hadn’t called me for some support; she was a strong woman, though, and had plenty of media experience. She could handle herself.
    “Tom,” I said, “I’m assuming you’d like me to ask her to stick around until the awards ceremony Saturday.”
    Tom shrugged elaborately, shook his head no, then broke out into a chagrined smile and admitted, “Yes. I don’t want to sound like as much of a media ghoul as those reporters, but we were depending on Roscoe—to get us a little ink.”
    Well, he’d done that much for them already.
    “It’d be good if we could get Mrs. Kane to accept the award for her husband,” Tom was saying as the waitress refilled our coffee cups. “I feel like a creep saying so, but we can use the publicity that’d bring.”
    “I don’t think you’re out of line, Tom,” I said. “I want now more than ever to see Roscoe Kane given some public recognition.”
    “Then you’ll talk to Mae Kane?”
    “I’ll talk to her. Give it my best shot.”
    “Thanks, Mal. Sorry to even mention it, really....”
    “It’s okay. I brought it up.”
    “Uh, would you mind,” Murtz ventured, “telling us what really happened last night?”
    I told them; I took it easy on my suspicions, but I didn’t leave my suspicions out.
    And Murtz said, “D’you really think he was murdered, Mal? Or have you just read too many mysteries?”
    I tried to smile but it went sour. “I don’t know. Maybe I wrote too many. I found a body one other time, and it was murder—clearly murder. Remember? Maybe I’ve got delusions of being an amateur detective now.”
    “Maybe you’re just researching your next book,” Tom offered, then realized that sounded uglier than he’d meant it to, and added, “I didn’t mean that exactly that way, Mal....”
    “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not sure myself, what to do or what to think. All I know is I’m depressed at losing a friend.”
    Tom smiled tightly. “He was more than a friend. He was your damn idol. Your hero.”
    I nodded. “You’re right. He was my hero. I’ve always been something of a hero worshipper. When I was a little kid my hero was Peter Pan; I even had a little green outfit I wore around—quote me, Sardini, and your ass is history! Then it was Batman, and I wore a mask and swung around on a rope for a couple of years. And then around junior high, the Saint was my main man... first the TV version, then the books. And then I discovered Gat Garson, and you know those pictures of Kane, in muscleman T-shirts, posing with guns and dogs and such on the backs of his books?”
    “Yeah,” Murtz said. “He was spoofing Spillane doing the same thing.”
    “I didn’t know that at the time,” I said. “I discovered Kane and Gat Garson first—Spillane and Mike Hammer came later, for me. My uncle Richard had some Gat Garson paperbacks in his attic, and I found ’em, and my uncle found
me
, looking at them. He only grinned and said, ‘Take ’em home with you if you want,’ and I did... under my coat. The pictures of Kane on theback of the books made me transfer my hero worship from Gat Garson to the guy who
thought up
Gat Garson. It was exciting to me, seeing these pictures of a tough-looking writer, who was a
real person;
I could never hope to be Gat Garson—by twelve, I was hip enough to know that—but I could be Roscoe Kane when I grew up, if I worked at it hard enough. And in high school I started trying to write my little stories. Sending ’em out in the mail. Piling up rejections. My detective was called Matt Savage. You probably had a Matt Savage,