The Paperback Show Murders Read online

  “Damn and blast!” I said. “It’s just not fair. We spend the entire year getting ready for this event, and it’s being ruined by someone pursuing a private vendetta. I mean, it’s like a bad paperback novel.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said. “Maybe Lissa threatened the writer with exposure, when she couldn’t pay the price she was asking. Somebody like Freddie the Cur could outbid anyone if he saw a buck to be made down the line. You know that.”

  “Yeah, but…like I said, it’s not fair that we’re the ones being made to pay the piper here—all of us. Not right at all.”

  “I’m not disagreeing with you,” she said, “I’m really not. But there’s nothing we can do about it until the cops catch the killer.”

  She rose from her seat and turned to help someone whom I couldn’t see, but then I had a customer too, so we finally sold a few books. We had a long way to go, though, just to break even.

  Then I saw the lanky form of Lieutenant Pfisch approaching, and I whispered, “Here comes da fuzz!”—to which Margie said, “Stop that!”

  He halted in front of our table, and said: “You know, I was thinking about what you said last night, and I thought I’d better take a look at that novel you mentioned. You know, Castle, uh….”

  “Castle Dred,” I said. “I think we’ve got one or two somewhere. Not a prime copy, you understand: ‘spine intact, but some creases,’ as Vanis Victoroff would say.”

  “I just want to read it to see if anything there gives me an idea or two.”

  “Margie! You know where that book went?” I was plowing through the Ace “K” series, looking for the worn copy of K-99 that I knew we had in stock.

  “Here it is!” she said, holding up the item I was seeking.

  “What’s it doing over there?” I asked. “Somebody must have moved it while pawing through our table. Here you go, Lieutenant—it’s on the house!”

  “No, sir, I can’t do that, thank you just the same,” the policeman said. “I’ll pay my way with the legal tender of the land. Let me give me the total, please.”

  I charged him ten bucks, which was a fair price, considering the less-than-ideal condition of the volume. But the pages were intact, so he could read to his heart’s delight.

  Oh, I remembered Castle Dred, all right; I recalled the plot very well indeed, since it was so over-the-top.

  Jezebel Langtree’s father is left penniless in the aftermath of the Civil War, when his massive investment in Confederate War Bonds suddenly turns into worthless paper. Jezzy, the twenty-two-year-old eldest child, whose beau had been killed in the Pickett line at Gettysburg, is forced to take a job as governess to the children of the House of Montragora, located a few miles outside the small county seat of Georgeville, Virginia.

  Col. Phibeas Montragora had maintained his fortune by selling horses, food, and stock to both sides in the War Between the States, and now has become the largest land owner in Rapunzel County, buying estates cheaply as the proprietors default on their loans. He has his greedy eyes firmly fixed on Hilldale, the Langtree farm, which lies astride a major highway into the new state of West Virginia. He wants to build an, uh, special “inn” there for the weary business travelers that he knows are coming.

  Madame Lucrezia Montragora runs her household like a petty tyrant, insisting on having her way in everything; and her two young daughters, Hannabelle and Sarralee, follow their mother’s lead. Jezzy’s life at Montragore House becomes a living hell, a game of bait-and-switch that she can never win. And yet she has no choice but to continue: her regular income, small as it is, is the only thing that is keeping her family solvent.

  But there’s something very strange about the Montragoras, Jezzy discovers, something that they’re hiding from the outside world. Other than the old patriarch, who’s always away on business somewhere, the mansion contains no men—all of the servants, all of the near relations, are female.

  One day she uncovers the family Bible, with its record of births, deaths, and marriages; and finds, much to her surprise, that it does include the names of numerous male offspring, but that none of them ever seem to carry on the line. Indeed, most die soon after reaching the age of fourteen or fifteen. And then comes the greatest shock of all: the marriage record of Lucrezia Montragora with Phibeas Van Damm! He’s not a Montragora by blood!

  When Madame Montragora enters the room and discovers Jezzy holding the book, she yells to the servants for help, and before the governess can do anything to save herself, has her tied and bound in a subterranean room deep beneath the old structure. Then she strips away the young woman’s clothes, and begins a very strange torture session, caressing her with feathered boas. “I’ll make you come to Mama!” she says. “You’ll confess everything before you’re through!”

  All seems lost until the Colonel returns from his latest venture, and frees Jezzy from her bonds, wrapping her in his great-cloak. As she flees from the mansion in the night, she can hear the two adults shouting at each other—and then she sees the flames spitting from the windows, as Montragore House finally meets its ugly fate, taking with it the perverted women who’ve inhabited its walls.

  I could see why there’d never been a sequel.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “HOW’S IT HANGIN’?”

  Saturday, March 26

  “Jackson rode into town on his albino palomino, settin’ high in the saddle and looking for b’ar.

  “He drew his six-shooter and fired a shot straight up at the sky—and then heard it plunk right down again, through the top of the tin water tower, the one with Alab-ster whitewashed across the pale, faded top of the tank. Water began drippin’ out the bottom.

  “Several townsfolk wandered out onto the dusty main street of Alabaster, Kansas (not far from Dodge City), but only one person really welcomed him—Mr. Josiah Murdo, the mortician.

  “‘How’s it hangin’?’ the embalmer asked. Jackson was always good for business.

  “‘Got me a wanted poster for One-Eye Dick,’ the gunman said, whippin’ it out and wavin’ it ’round and ’round in the bright noonday sun. ‘They said he was lurkin’ here somewheres.’

  “‘Seen him down in the saloon jus’ this mornin’,’ Murdo said. ‘Looked to be sailin’ at half-mast.’

  “‘He’ll be all-busted-up by the time I’m through with him,’ Jackson said. Just then the doors of the Lucky Gal slammed open, and Dick himself came wobblin’ out, ramblin’ back and forth while he tried to pull himself together.

  “‘I sees you, Dick,’ Jackson said, hoppin’ down from his paley pony. He wiped his hands on his flannel shirt, and unbuttoned the straps over his guns. ‘Prepare to die, you dog!’ he shouted.

  “But Dick was already pullin’ out his massive weapon, and levelin’ it right at the bounty hunter’s heart. ‘Gotcha!’ he said.

  “Jackson did a tumbly to his left, yankin’ out his one-eyed monster at the same time, and firin’ from a prone position right behind the water trough that his palomino was sippin’ from. One-Eye Dick’s shot plonked a hole in the wood next to his head—but Jackson’s didn’t miss his target.

  “‘Too bad!’ he yelled, as his opponent dropped dead-first into the dust. ‘Ya had a big one, all right, but ya jus’ couldn’t get it in play, could ya?

  “Now, that’s a truth that every gunslinger knows: the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

  —Not Far from Dodge City,

  by Brody Dameen (1959)

  The horror writer Brody Richard Dameen was about fifty-five years of age, but he looked at least eighty, as he staggered over to signing area “D” at three o’clock, a couple of tables down from ours. He’d obviously been sipping the breakfast of champions again—bourbon sans the rocks.

  Dameen had started his career writing westerns for Star Books and porn for Bee-Line, and then had tried spy spoofs in the 1960s, and moved to horror in the ’70s. His one big claim to fame was the bestselling paperback, The O-Man (Pinochle Books), the tale of a demon-fighting a
ction hero infused with not-so-delicate shades of both James Bond and The Exorcist, which had spawned twenty-seven really bad sequels, and an equally popular yet despicable motion picture starring a very young Brucie Campo (plus a dozen slimy straight-to-video offspring).

  Of late, however, “The O-Man,” as he was fond of calling himself, had fallen on hard times, and was now reduced to peddling his memoirs, Five Decades of Pornorror, and endless analyses of how his better-selling competitors had ripped him off.

  The line of fans waiting patiently to receive his precious signature was not nearly as long as that for the next writer, Van Cott, who was hovering above one of his books, trying to remember what his name was.

  I asked Margie to watch our table, and moseyed on over. “How’s it hangin’, Brody?” I asked.

  He grimaced a bit, and then sipped from the pink straw sticking through the top of the plastic cup in front of him. “Man, it’s, uh, tough out there today,” he said, “but things’re, uh, looking up. I’ve got a deal working that should, uh, should, uh….”

  He shook his head to clear out the cobwebs, but it obviously didn’t work this time, so he said again, “It should, uh, really….”

  “Yeah, I understand,” I said. “When you’re done, Brody, could you sign the copies we have of your books?”

  “Sure, man, anything for a friend. Hey, when I’m, uh, back on Park Place again, I’m going to, uh, to—I’ll remember the people who, uh, helped me, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll count on it.”

  I was shaking my head when I sat down again.

  “Still in bad shape?” Margie asked.

  “Worse than ever. Now he says he’s got a deal going.”

  “He’s been saying that for the last decade.”

  I’d just sold a copy of a mint-condition Pony Book from the postwar period when I saw Lieutenant Pfisch and Sergeant Hamm coming our way.

  “They’re baaack!” I hissed at my partner, nodding down the aisle.

  “I wonder what they want,” she said.

  “Ms. Brittleback,” the Lieutenant said, “I wonder if we could have a word with you again. In private, please.”

  “What’s this all about?” I asked.

  “We have some more questions for her,” Hamm said.

  “About what?”

  “I think that’s a matter of police business,” Pfisch said. “Will you come with us, please?” he added, nodding at Margie.

  “What should I do?” she asked, turning to me, fear etched in her eyes.

  The room around us had gotten very quiet all of a sudden.

  “Are you charging her with anything, Lieutenant?” I asked.

  “Not at this time,” he said.

  “And if she refuses?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that,” the policeman said. “You see, sir, we have a witness who can place her outside Ms. Boaz’s room at nine o’clock last night. We want to know what she was doing there!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND”

  Saturday, March 26

  “‘You don’t understand, Jesse, you just don’t,’ Laura gushed, reaching one lovely, lanky hand ‘south of the border.’ ‘A girl has her needs, too!’

  “‘But I promised Father Fritto that I’d keep myself pure,’ her boyfriend said, ‘that I’d drink only distilled water and eat unleavened bread, and abstain from the, uh, baser acts of life, until, until….’

  “‘Until what, my love?’ she asked, panting to keep her rubbed-raw emotions in cheek. She was a sprightly girl raised on goat’s milk and chocolate balls, and she had a Pollyanna’s picture of life in the Big Palooza. Still, she’d kept her goal firmly planted in front of her eyes—and she wanted it now!

  “‘Until I found “urbvana,”’ he said, ‘Father Fritto’s life-freeing, formal “D” hybrid.’ He showed her the elongated bulb of the carefully cultivated plant.

  “‘But I can give you something more!’ Laura exclaimed, smiling her cheery, toothy grin at him.

  “‘What?’ Jesse asked, leaning towards her expectantly.

  “‘Silly boy!’ she said, grasping both her lover’s root—and his prompt attention. ‘Nervana!’

  “‘Ohm, my God!’”

  —Urban Commune Nurse,

  by Kitty Gaylord (1963)

  Margie returned ninety minutes later. She looked shaken and drawn—and more than a little distracted.

  “What did they want to know?” I asked her, when she’d settled in her seat.

  “Uh, what?” she whispered, head cast down.

  “The police,” I said.

  “Well, someone claimed to have seen me in front of Lissa’s door a little after nine o’clock last night.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “They wouldn’t say.” My partner’s head continued to droop, and I could barely hear her mumbles over the conversations behind me.

  “And were you there?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why, Margie? Why?”

  I was really getting concerned now. Maybe she needed an attorney.

  “I…you don’t understand. You…you just don’t.” She was back to whispering again.

  “Try me,” I said.

  “I wanted to save an old friend’s reputation, that’s all. I wanted to talk some sense into Lissa. But when I got to her room, the door was cracked open; I went inside and saw her lying there dead, with the book already gone. I found a small corner of the cover grasped between her fingers, and I took it from her. Whoever killed her had literally snatched it from her dying hand.

  “That’s what I told the cops. I don’t know why they didn’t arrest me—I can’t prove any of it.”

  “What friend?” I asked. “What reputation?”

  “That was my copy of Castle Dred. It was inscribed to me, OK? I knew the writer almost fifty years ago, during my last year of high school, just before I came to New York. We were…well, we were close. I wound up writing some of those gothics too, as well as porn books and other stuff, in the mid-1960s and ’70s. But I didn’t write Dred—my best friend did. We had a kind of contest going, over which of us would get published first—and she won!” A streak of tears furrowed down both sides of her face.

  “But she never came to the Big Apple, like me. I urged her to join me, I really did; I told her that she could find acceptance there, that she had talent to spare, but she was afraid to leave her family. Instead, she married a local banker and had a couple of kids, and…I don’t really know what. She got divorced and moved away from that small town, finally, and I lost track of her decades ago. I don’t know what became of her. I didn’t have any family left myself, so I never went back—didn’t want to go back.”

  “But who was she?”

  “Just a sweet girl whose head was filled with dreams—like mine. We loved literature, we loved the great authors, we wanted to become just like them. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Beats, everything old and new excited us. We were young then: we thought all things were possible. They weren’t! She didn’t have the gumption to take it to the next step. I did, although I never amounted to much as a writer. I was just a hack. Turned out my talent—and hers—didn’t measure up, really. So, maybe she was wiser than me, I don’t know.”

  “Was Lissa right in saying that she’s here at the con?”

  “How would I know?” Margie said. “I haven’t seen or talked to her since 1964. I don’t know if I’d even recognize her now. We were both twenty back then, so she’d be about sixty-six or –seven if she were still alive. And what difference does it make anyway? I lost track of my copy years ago, during one of my frequent moves. I probably traded the book for something else to read, or gave it to a friend.”

  “Well, it obviously made a difference to someone—enough of a difference to kill for,” I said.

  “If she had a position in society, she might have been concerned about having it compromised.”

  “In this day and age?” I said. “Who
cares anymore whether you’re straight or gay?”

  “A lot of people care, particularly in business and professional circles, particularly in small towns,” my partner said. “That’s why I went to see Lissa. I thought I could buy the book back for the business, and just write it off my account. I thought I could take care of the problem once and for all. If my friend wanted her pen name kept secret, I could at least do that much for her. But….”

  I sighed. “What was her name?” I finally asked.

  “That’s my business, OK?”

  “Did you tell the cops all this?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you tell them her name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why not me?”

  She looked up at me then, and after a long pause, said: “I don’t think I really want you to know.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “I DON’T KNOW WHY”

  Saturday, March 26

  “The Sundogger came roaring out of the nebula, zap guns blazing at both ends.

  “‘Bzzzt, bzzzt,’ they went, as they chewed through the hull of the Kymkurdashianan battleship.

  “‘Burka, burka,’ the alien vessel responded, sending a stream of supercharged x-beams back the other direction.

  “‘They’re outgunned! Why don’t they surrender?’ Sergeant Mazeltoff yelled over the steam jetting into the control room. He wiped the sweat from his overheated brow.

  “‘I don’t know why,’ I shouted back at him, adjusting the valve to inject more super-coal into the engine. Trying to predict what a Kymkurdashian might do was almost impossible, since they acted only from irrational premises. They built beautiful hulls, no question, but their control-and-command functions were mostly lacking—and that made them very dangerous foes indeed.

  “‘They’re a-comin’ right at us!’ Scottie the Res-geek said in an even tone of voice. Only an insufficiency of test-tubes ever bothered him.

  “‘Then blast the buggers!’ I ordered. I pressed the big red button on the console.