Free Kill Your Darlings by Max Allan Collins

page.”
    “The movie star line won’t.”
    “Maybe you’re right. So. You know who I am.”
    She grinned back at me; she had a thousand smiles, this one, all of them terrific, most of them wry. “Don’t be too proud of yourself. It’s my job to know who you are.”
    I snapped my fingers. “Kathy Wickman!”
    She nodded; pointed to her
Noir
sweatshirt, giving me a great excuse to take a look at how the word
Noir
rolled with the flow of her. She had the sort of breasts Gat Garson would no doubt describe as “pert, perfect handfuls, straining for their independence”; I, of course, would find a less sexist way to put it, though I can’t think of one at the moment.
    “It doesn’t take
that
long to read the word
Noir
,” she said, with a one-sided wry smile. Make that 1001 smiles.
    “I flunked Evelyn Wood,” I explained; I extended a hand across the table and we shook hands—hers was slim, cool, smooth. Mine was—who cares?
    “You may remember, I dropped you a note about your first novel,” she said. “I just had to comment, personally, on that chapter about your hero’s rites of adolescence.”
    “That was a nice letter; thanks.”
    “The letter you wrote back was nice, too. That chapter really hit me; kind of unusual to find it plopped down in the middle of mystery novel.”
    “That chapter was all true, every word of it,” I said. “I couldn’t use everything that really happened, actually—some of the things my
real
first love pulled on me outstrip anything the fictionalized one in my book did.”
    “Really? Say—why don’t we get together for dinner, sometime over this Bouchercon weekend? I’d love to hear the stuff that didn’t make it into that chapter.”
    “My outtakes would interest you, huh?” I shook my head. “I don’t know if I could be forced to talk about myself like that; I’m really very modest and shy. How about tonight?”
    “Okay—” She smiled; this one wasn’t wry. Which was just fine with me.
    “Have you had lunch? I’ve got a cheeseburger on the way.”
    “Actually, I haven’t eaten.”
    I called a waitress over and Kathy ordered.
    Kathy, I should finally get around to saying, was the editor of
Noir
; she was the very person who’d been doing those favorable reviews of my books. So naturally I respected her intellectually, being as how she had such high standards and good tastein matters literary (unless she panned my next book, in which case all bets were off). But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was just as attracted to her physically as mentally.
    Frankly, feeling attracted to Kathy, young, pert, pixie-fresh Kathy, helped flush the uncomfortable feeling I had about Mae Kane out of my system.
    “I really like your magazine,” I said, between bites of cheeseburger.
    “You and our thousand or so other readers.”
    “You ought to have a better circulation than that.”
    “I know. It’s that screwed-up publisher of mine.”
    I lifted my eyebrows and put ’em back down. “I’m glad you brought that up, not me.”
    “Oh, really?”
    “Your publisher. Gregg Gorman. He’s an s.o.b., you know.”
    Taking a bite of her own cheeseburger, she rolled her eyes and nodded, swallowed, said, “You’re telling me. But he pays the bills, and stays out of my way.”
    “It’s a nice little magazine.”
    “If Gregg’d just promote it, it could be a bigger nice little magazine. He’s stubborn; he sells it to the mystery fan market, and won’t bother trying for newsstand distribution. We’ve got articles, fiction by some up-and-coming writers—you wouldn’t like to try a short story, would you?”
    “Sure. What’s your word rate?”
    Her mouth and chin crinkled in embarrassment. “Half a cent per.”
    “Ouch. I always wanted to know what it felt like to be an old-time pulp writer.”
    “Now you’ll know. Unless you’re going to back out...”
    “Well, I did say yes, so a deal’s a deal.”
    Wry smile; rerun of the first one. “Anyway,” she