A Killing in Comics Read Online Free PDF Page B

last night.
    This morning, she’d clearly been giving Donny’s demise some thought. At least, she was plainly troubled by something other than her excess seventeen pounds. She was leaning back in the chair, rocking gently, her long tapering fingertips (no nail polish but well-groomed long nails) tented, her face taut with thought.
    Even sitting down, Maggie Starr looked tall—she was five-nine, after all—but the point was made by the huge, elaborately framed full-length portrait of her (in a form-fitting outfit of pink feathers) that hung right behind her. It dated to her 1941 Broadway revue, Starr in Garter , a gigantic pastel by Rolf Armstrong. Whether commissioned by the show’s producer or Maggie herself, I never asked.
    If you’re thinking Maggie had a hell of an ego, you’re right; but she mostly seemed to view the looming portrait as a reminder of what she was supposed to look like—like a woman hanging a new dress a size smaller than she is on a hanger on the refrigerator. I would see her steal glances up at the thing, and her expression would be as sour as a bitter-lemon cough drop.
    Something else we should get out of the way: she was in fact my stepmother. She didn’t give birth to me but she did use to sleep with the major, and that disquieting but undeniable reality cancelled out for me the fact that she was a stunning beauty. Anyway, she was older than me. She’d be forty before I was thirty.
    Now you might be so tactless as to point out that just the afternoon before I’d had no trouble at all falling half in love with Honey Daily, who was thirty-five easy. But Honey Daily, to my knowledge anyway, never slept with my father. That I could get past her sleeping with a fat loathsome creature like Donny Harrison (RIP) will just have to remain one of the great enigmas of western civilization that we’ll never solve.
    Still, Maggie was, as I’ve said, stunning—even in her recluse-state wardrobe—pale-green scarf over her Lucille Ball hair, the faintest dab of lipstick on her trademark bee-stung lips, her big green eyes unaided by mascara, her pale, faintly freckled oval face as perfect as a carved cameo, her slender if bosomy figure hiding out under a green-plaid lumberjack shirt, sleeves rolled to her elbow. She’d been seated when I got there, but I would’ve bet a month’s pay those long legs were on the lam under baggy blue denims.
    Displaying that other trademark of hers—the deep, almost mannish voice coming out of a little-girl puss—she interrupted her troubled reverie to ask, “Too early for a Coke?”
    She knew I despised coffee.
    “Never,” I said.
    She pressed a small red button on her desk and shook her head. “Your poor teeth.”
    “My teeth are fine. All mine and nary a filling.”
    “The major lost his teeth before he was your age.”
    “Well, maybe my mother had nice teeth.”
    A little smile twitched. “Maybe she did. Before my time.”
    Her assistant Bryce (Maggie did not care for the term “secretary”—nor did Bryce) came briskly in behind me from his reception area-cum-office with tucked-away kitchenette. I liked Bryce, who was funny and smart and (to use the most current term) “gay.” An alarmingly handsome, trimly bearded brown-eyed boy about twenty-five, he wore a black turtleneck sweater and black slacks but white rubber-sole shoes—I never asked.
    He had been a dancer in Maggie’s Broadway show during the run of which he’d broken an ankle, ending one career and picking up on another, which was to be chauffeur, secretary and whatever else Maggie might need on a whim. Sort of like that African giant in the leopard skin who follows Mandrake the Magician around.
    Bryce had an apartment in the basement, below the restaurant, a rather dank little chamber for such a neat little character to live in. I wasn’t sure I knew what went on down there but was positive I didn’t want to.
    Using a tray, Bryce delivered Maggie’s coffee, so cream-laden it was damn