Free A Killing in Comics by Max Allan Collins Page A

interestingly and well at Donny’s birthday party, up to where he dropped dead onto that knife, anyway. And I hoped we could pick up where we left off, now that she was unattached and might need a sympathetic shoulder, said shoulder being attached to the rest of me, should she need any other sympathetic body part.
    Soon I’d gone up the elevator and down the hall and up to the door of her suite, and knocked. The door had a small peephole above its gold numerals, and I must have been approved for entry, because as I raised my knuckles to try again, the door swung inward halfway and she filled the available space with herself, decked out in a black dressing gown, her fetchingly mussed-up blonde hair brushing shoulders whose pinkness could not be disguised by filmy black.
    “I remember you,” she said, martini in hand, smirky smile on full lips.
    Was she just a little drunk? I couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t as though she’d answered my knock in a negligee—the dressing gown was layers of sheer stuff that didn’t obscure her shape but also didn’t put it on display. Still, these were not the usual widow’s weeds; of course, she wasn’t a widow—kept woman’s weeds?
    “I was in the neighborhood,” I said. I nodded down the hall. “Returning a lost puppy to a little old lady who lives down next to the ice machine.”
    “I like you,” she said. “You’re silly.”
    Where had I heard that before? As she bid me enter with a slightly unsteady sweeping gesture, making room for me, I remembered: Tweety Bird to Sylvester the Cat in a cartoon that did not turn out well for the cat.
    She shut the door behind us and I was moving into the entry way, footsteps echoing on green marble. I wheeled to look at her; she was slumped against the white door in her black dressing gown, red-nailed hand leaning on the gold doorknob, other hand regally if precipitously holding the martini, making a somber pinup. On either side of her was a white slab of something with a Grecian bust on top. The walls were coral with white wood trim, and at my left was a bronze-framed mirror and a white table with fresh flowers on it, also white. At right was another white door, presumably to a closet.
    Her baby blues, bearing a red filigree, found their way to my face. “Are you here to take advantage of me? Or to try and cheer me up?”
    I shrugged. “Maybe it’ll cheer you up if I took advantage of you.”
    She laughed, a little more than that rated, and it echoed in the space, giving the laughter bottom but not disguising the ragged edge of hysteria up top.
    I went over to her and took an elbow and walked her into the living room, almost dragging her over the fluffy white carpet.
    The big high-ceilinged area looked strikingly different than it had during Donny’s party, and not just because sixty-some people were no longer wandering around in it. Hotel elves had come in after the cops left to put the world of the suite right again, some furniture having been added back in, and all of it rearranged. The white baby grand was gone, rolled out with the Negro pianist.
    Down toward the end of the living room, through open French doors at left, extended a large dining room, and where its long table had been covered with a linen cloth and arrayed with hors d’oeuvres at the party was now bare, sleek dark wood adorned only with a centerpiece of white and pink flowers.
    Meanwhile, back in the living room, the two emerald leather chairs that had been here and there at the periphery, and a couch that had lined a wall, were back in what I presumed was their usual arrangement: the pair of chairs side by side and facing the couch across a glass coffee table, next to the marble fireplace and its mirror over the mantel.
    I escorted her to that couch, near where a martini glass rested on the glass table, making a wet circle. The air-conditioning was on high, almost uncomfortably so, and my mind automatically and ridiculously looked at the fireplace and wished it