A Killing in Comics Read Free Page A

piano, when I swung my attention back to Honey because she had asked, “Major?”
    “Pardon?”
    “You refer to your father as ‘the major’?”
    I laughed, once. “Yeah, well . . . we weren’t real close. Everybody called Simon Starr the major. He was a major in the first war, and a major character in life—made Donny look like a wall-flower.”
    She laughed, once. “Well . . . he must have been a good-looking man. Or did you get your looks from your mother?”
    “He was short and fat. Mom was a showgirl. You can work that out yourself.”
    Her smile had a warmth, now. “Do you mind another personal question?”
    I shrugged. “Sure. I was first to get cheeky, wasn’t I? Fire away.”
    “How many times was your father married?”
    I held my fingers up in the Boy Scout salute. “Three. My mother died bringing me into the world. It’s up to the world whether that was a fair trade.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry . . . .”
    “It was twenty-eight years ago. I’m pretty well over it. I remember his second wife, vaguely. She was a star in George White’s Broadway Scandals of ’37 . Then there was a Hollywood scandal in ’39, when she and a married cowboy actor got roped in a motel by a divorce dick with a flash camera.”
    She said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” again, but was laughing a little this time. “Was your . . . your mother a star?”
    “No. She was in the Follies of ’28 or ’29 or something. Chorus gal—second from the end. Very pretty, though. I met her sister, my aunt—a housewife in Ohio. If my mother was like her, my dad did all right.”
    Honey had been building up to something. “Your father . . . the major . . . he married only showgirls, then.”
    “That’s right. Same kind of talent he and Donny and Louie were putting in their Spicy Models magazine. Just seemed to be the circle he was moving in. Of course marrying Maggie Starr was moving up in the world.”
    Honey nodded. “She was a real star . . . even in the movies, wasn’t she?”
    “Maggie made a few flicks.”
    She cocked her head, RCA Victor doggie-style. “But I’m confused about something.”
    “I am here but to clarify.”
    “Wasn’t her name already Starr when she married your father?”
    “It was indeed. Her stage name, anyway. Her real last name is Spillman. But already having Starr on all her luggage and so on was a plus in the deal, I suppose.”
    She had finally gotten around to eating the olive off the toothpick in her latest martini. It was fun to watch.
    Then she said, with a delicacy that was almost too much, “What’s it like, having Maggie Starr for a stepmother?”
    “I don’t think of her that way,” I said, truthfully.
    “But she’s . . . beautiful. Probably, next to Gypsy Rose Lee, the most famous . . . famous . . .”
    “If you’re trying to remember the polite word, it’s ecdysiast. But regular joes like me just say stripper.”
    She shook her head and the blonde locks shimmered under the suite’s subdued lighting. “That doesn’t do her justice, does it? She spoofed striptease. Made a joke out of it.”
    “Yeah, but she still took her clothes off. Otherwise Minksy wouldn’t’ve paid her.”
    The big blue eyes narrowed; the long lashes quivered as she thought about that. Then she asked, “She’s stopped, hasn’t she?”
    “Yes. When she inherited the family business, that was the end of one kind of stripping . . . and the beginning of another.”
    Her laughter tinkled, counterpointing the piano player’s tinkling of “I Get a Kick Out of You.” “You mean, she syndicates comic strips.”
    “That’s right. She still considers herself a stripper of sorts.”
    “She sounds wonderful.”
    “She can be.”
    “That sounds . . . guarded.”
    “Well . . . she is my boss.”
    The eyes narrowed again. “Why didn’t your father put you in charge of the business?”
    “Yeah, why didn’t he? . . . I need to freshen my drink. Care to come along?”
    She took my arm and accompanied me. We