Коллинз Макс Аллан (Max Allan Collins)THURSDAY
1
Heroes aren’t supposed to die.
But heroes, at least real-life “role model” type heroes (as opposed to such mythic figures as Hercules and Davy Crockett), are human beings; and human beings, even the best of ’em, sooner or later, each and every one, wind up dead.
My hero was dead in a bathtub; drowned, apparently. He’d been drinking heavily, earlier that night. He’d been dead drunk when I walked him up to his hotel room. And now he was just dead.
A few hours before, he’d been vocal-embarrassingly vocal-sitting in the cocktail lounge downstairs. We were in Chicago, in the Americana-Congress Hotel, and it was October.
“There hasn’t been a goddamn mystery writer worth reading since Dashiell Hammett died,” he slurred, at a table of mystery writers. Tomorrow was day one of the Bouchercon, the annual mystery fan convention.
“You’re worth reading,” I ventured, smiling, trying to keep it light.
Roscoe Kane, the shoulders of his plaid shirt flecked with dandruff, his patched brown sports jacket slung sloppily over the back of his chair, looked at me with disgust lining every wrinkle of his basset-hound face, his rheumy china-blue eyes like nasty lasers. The hoarse voice wanted to be contemptuous, but sad self-pity got in the way: “I used to be.”
Across the table from us, Brett Murtz, in faded blue workshirt and jeans, leaned over and gestured, his long curly hair and free-flowing mustache making him look like a hippie Gene Shalit; he had the kind of enthusiasm it took to have driven here from Colorado in a Datsun.
“I’ll bet you could still write a hell of a yarn,” he said. “You ought to come out with a new Gat Garson!”
A bigger chill couldn’t have fallen across the small party of five if somebody had turned on the air conditioning; the rest of us-me, Peter Christian, Tim Culver-were well aware of Roscoe Kane’s unfortunate situation, where publishing was concerned.
But Murtz rushed in where angels fear to tread.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got writer’s block!” Murtz said, good-naturedly. “I wrote you a fan letter back when I was in high school, and told you I was trying to be a writer, and said I had a book half-written but was stuck-and that I was afraid I had writer’s block-remember? And you wrote me back and said…”