Free It's Superman! A Novel by Tom De Haven

to watch Skinny Simon leave, but when Lois glowers at him, he looks back down, abashed, at his bundled-up hand.
    She begins to stride up and down the waiting room, oblivious to everyone who comes limping in or is called out for treatment or just sits there with fretful patience. But then she spots a cop outside speaking with a group of men who are obviously reporters. The pads, the pencils, the cigarettes fitted behind their ears.
    “. . . not too far from one of them university clubs,” the cop is saying when Lois comes through the heavy glass door, “but nobody seen anything, is what I’m told. Nah, I don’t know which club.”
    Scribbling as he speaks, one of the pad-and-pencil men says, “We heard his camera got smashed—that so?”
    “Well, I can set you fellers straight about that. I wouldn’t say it was smashed, more like it just fell and broke when the poor lad got it in the back.”
    Lois feels a cold pain move in her chest, crawling up from her sternum to the lower part of her throat.
    “But you birds might like this. Seems our triggerman helped himself to the film.”
    “Any idea what was on it, Danny?” asks another reporter.
    “Nope,” says the cop. Then “You,” he says to still another reporter.
    “Where was he coming from?”
    “Beats me.”
    That same reporter asks, “What’s this about a set of burglar’s picks?”
    “Where’d you hear that?”
    “So what about it? Willi have ’em or not?”
    “No comment.”
    “Danny, Danny—what do you know about this stiff they just found in a pawnshop with his throat cut? That’s only a couple blocks from where little Willi got shot. Any connection?”
    “No comment,” says the cop, then, “Yes, ma’am, you,” he says, nodding at Lois, who by now has dug out her own pencil and nickel pad from her purse and pushed rudely through the pack of newshounds.
    Putting a sneer on her mouth, adding speed to her voice, and arching an eyebrow—the way Professor Gurney taught her to do it—Lois says, “So what are the doctors saying about his chances? This joe gonna make it?”
    2
    On Tuesday the eighteenth of June, Willi Berg finally opens his eyes again only to be told that a bill of indictment was handed down yesterday in the City and County of New York charging him with first-degree murder in the death of Leon Seymour Chodash.
    Murder during the commission of an armed robbery.
    There is the little matter of a claim ticket from the victim’s place of business discovered in Willi’s billfold.
    Plus that kit of flagrantly illegal jimmies and picks stuffed in his jacket.
    His fingerprints on the cash register, the counter, the telephone.
    And if he wasn’t stitched up and so full of drains, the two homicide detectives that arrest Willi in his hospital bed would show him exactly what they think of his cockamamie story about a bookmakers’ parlor, a bunch of dead bodies—only five? Why not ten, Willi? Or twenty ?—and the secret criminal career of Alderman Lex Luthor, the newest, youngest, and most popular member of the board.
    “So who shot you, Willi? Have a little falling out with your accomplice? Didn’t want to split the take?”
    “What take?”
    “Who shot you, kid?”
    “I told you!”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    “Go to hell.”
    “Not us, you little mockie. You’re the one’s gonna have a hot date with the electric chair.”
    That same day Willi’s picture runs on the front page of all of the two-, three-, and five-cent papers. Both the News and the Mirror refer to him as a “Mad Dog Killer.” But that doesn’t bother him half as much as what the Planet calls him: a “Would-be Fotog.” Now, that hurts.

VI
    Sad day. An infidel in Smallville. Mrs. Kent’s baking skills
are recalled. Eighteen years ago. Clark takes a long walk
in the woods and ruins a good pair of shoes.
●
    1
    Funeral services for Martha Clark Kent are scheduled for ten A.M. this morning at the Tomahawk Methodist Church, corner of Fourth and Union streets,