Paperback Jack, page 19
Her eyes flicked over the tops of her glasses, toward the door communicating to the waiting room. He knew now the pawnbroker would not be interviewed.
For the better part of a minute, Margery St. John paged through the sheets in a folder spread open before her. She drummed them together, removed her reading glasses, and looked at the witness.
“Mr. Heppleman, are you familiar with a man named Rodney Tharp?”
The name meant nothing at first. Seeing his blank expression, she looked down at the top sheet. “He taught an adult creative writing course in Public School 187 in New York City. You took the course in the fall of 1946.”
“I remember. I don’t think I knew his first name was Rodney.”
For some reason someone tittered.
“Do you remember the circumstances of your last meeting?”
He felt the blood slide from his face.
Ter Horst covered the microphone. “What?”
He shook his head. It was too late. The lawyer sat back, expressionless.
“He accused me of plagiarism and I slugged him.”
St. John gaveled down the spectators.
“Were you guilty of plagiarism?”
“No. The only theft I’ve ever been guilty of is that damn typewriter.”
Orville Stahl, the representative from Delaware, spoke for the first time. His salt-and-pepper beard encircled his face like an Amish farmer’s. “That’s your second profanity. I caution you to watch your language, sir. Children are watching at home.”
Jacob made no response. His eyes remained on St. John.
“You’ve established a history of violent behavior,” she said at last.
“Two incidents don’t make a pattern, Congresswoman. I’d just come back from a war. Adjusting to peacetime—”
“I’ve read some of your work, don’t forget.” She emphasized the last two words. “My aides have read all of it, and chronicled each violent act that takes place. In The Fence alone there are—”
“Excuse me for interrupting; I don’t mean to be rude. But isn’t your committee’s area of interest pornography?”
“In entertainment, yes.”
“I don’t see what violence has to do with sex.”
A chuckling issued from the gallery.
St. John glared. “Are you ridiculing the purpose of this hearing?”
“Not at all. I’m just trying to find out what it is.”
“I could go deeper into the report before me and enumerate the acts of a prurient nature that occur in your work; but that would take time, and we have many other people to talk to. Instead, I’ll remind you that our interest is also in juvenile delinquency. You are a father, are you not?”
“I am.”
“Would you allow your daughter to read your books?”
“Not until she’s of age.”
“And what age would that be?”
“Thirty.”
She banged down the roar of laughter hard. “One more attempt at levity and this committee will find you in contempt.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny. I think it’s a parent’s responsibility to shield his children from material meant for adults. I wouldn’t let Millie read William Faulkner at her age. I’m answering your questions, Congresswoman.”
“How well do you know Philip Scarpetti?”
He looked at Ter Horst, who again gave him nothing.
“I’ve known him for approximately five years. He used to paint covers for Blue Devil Books.”
“I’m aware of that. He’s sat where you’re sitting, and is serving a sentence for contempt. Do you see each other socially?”
“Not lately.”
“And what did you do when you met?”
“We talked.”
“Is that all you do?”
“Sometimes we drank alcohol.”
Ter Horst covered the microphone. “She’s about to ask if you smoke marijuana. Plead the Fifth.”
But she did not.
“Mr. Heppleman, have you and Philip Scarpetti ever engaged in unnatural sexual relations?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Jacob shook his head. “Who’d have thought being a fairy is worse than being a thief?”
“Cheer up.” Gilbert Ter Horst was a poster boy for chronic optimism. They sat with Ellen in a red vinyl-upholstered booth in a bar called the Veto Lounge in Chevy Chase. The waitresses wore net stockings and heels, and Tony Bennett sang from invisible speakers. The place was nearly full as dusk piled up outside and everyone seemed to be starting to have a good time. The attorney drank a vodka martini with a twist, Jacob Scotch on the rocks. A glass of Chablis stood virtually untouched in front of Ellen.
“They’re done with you,” the lawyer went on. “You didn’t rise to their bait. You said a simple ‘No’ to the question St. John had been sitting on like a hen, and she couldn’t get rid of you fast enough. She made a common mistake, thinking homosexuals only know other homosexuals.”
“How come she believed me?”
“She expected you to blow your top; it’s the oldest courtroom trick in the book. Indignation is a smoke screen for the guilty. But you couldn’t be shaken. In TV parlance, you skewed honest. Don’t think those camera hogs aren’t wise to that.”
“You thought she was going to ask if we smoked marijuana.”
“That was a miscalculation, I admit. After what that prig from Delaware said about profanity, I thought they’d steer clear of calling you a fag. Well, it all came out better than I expected, and after your little confession I wouldn’t be surprised if your sales figures double. Readers will think you write from experience.”
“Who gives a shit? I helped Uncle Sam heap dirt on Phil’s grave.”
Ellen said, “Stop beating yourself up, Jake. All you could do was tell the truth.”
“What’s going to happen to him in Atlanta?”
“He’s in isolation; standard procedure.” The lawyer sipped from his funnel glass. “He’ll do six months tops, and the feds take better care of inmates than anywhere else in the penal system. He’ll probably put on weight.”
“But how will he eat when he gets out?”
“He’ll find work. He isn’t the first queer to make his living with a brush.”
“Jakey! Don’t!” She grabbed his arm.
He let go of Ter Horst’s lapels. His Scotch had dumped over. Lozenges of half-melted ice wallowed in a puddle dripping off the edge of the table. Heads turned their way.
The lawyer straightened his jacket. “I’m glad you saved that for here.”
Jacob slid out of his seat, scooped money from his wallet, and laid it on a dry patch of table. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You know where I am if you want to sue.”
* * *
The House Select Committee on Pornography and Juvenile Delinquency adjourned at the end of its session in September 1953, with a recommendation that the paperback book industry police itself or face pressure from government. Gilbert Ter Horst called it a strategic withdrawal. Those committee members who were up for re-election returned to their home states to campaign, including Margery St. John, who beat her Republican challenger with fifty-three percent of the vote.
Jacob said, “She’s going to be the first woman president.”
“That or a lady wrestler,” said Ellen.
* * *
“So what’s the verdict?” he asked Robin Elk.
“Verdict?” The publisher, sporting a fresh London pallor, sat in the leather-upholstered conversation area in his office playing with a new cane with Queen Elizabeth II’s crowned head on top in silver, a Coronation souvenir.
“The Great Cleanup. Where do we stand?”
“Almost precisely where we stood at the beginning. Congress can’t tamper with the First Amendment, but just to mollify the country preachers and the PTA, the industry is toning down its covers: more clothes on the women, less blood on the floor. That’s all the blighters really cared about, sensational images they could show on the news. The books’ contents remain unchanged.”
“What’s Blue Devil doing?”
“No more paintings. We’re using a pen-and-ink drawing on The Lazy Profession. Splendid title, by the way.”
“Thanks. I was sure you’d shoot it down.” He was coldly professional with Elk. Had the hearings gone a different direction, the publisher would have dropped him as fast as he had his star artist.
Elk was unmoved by his demeanor. “Who but Jack Holly would suggest that most criminals choose their path simply because they’re indolent?”
“Phil Scarpetti, that’s who. He was my tutor.” He’d sent Scarpetti a letter in care of the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. It hadn’t been returned, but there had been no reply. He’d be released soon. “So the Philistines won after all.”
“It’s a concession, but hardly dishonorable. The comic-book publishers have agreed to censor themselves. Television will follow suit. Lash Logan, Private Eye wouldn’t get past the front door today, much less onto the air.”
“What’s Stratton up to?”
“Vanished without a trace. I’ve heard rumors about Korea and Tijuana. I regard Tijuana as more likely.”
“The worse his luck gets, the better I like him.” Jacob drank coffee. He hadn’t had a drop of liquor since that day in the Veto Lounge. “Won’t pen-and-ink look cheap?”
“Nothing like. We snatched this young man away from the Saturday Evening Post. Early sketches promise a dramatic effect, without a suggestion of sadism. Technically it’s perfect.” He sighed.
“What’s wrong with perfect?”
“One misses the exaggerated proportions, the bright colors, the suggestion of life in the raw; the crudity, I suppose. It spoke to the belly, not the brain. The cover for The Lazy Profession could hang in a gallery, where anyone with the price of admission can look at it.”
“Anyone always could. It cost two bits.”
“As a customer, I wouldn’t pay a dime a dozen for this lot. Instead I’m paying twice what I paid Scarpetti at his height. The artists have formed a union.”
“I heard they’re going to photographic covers at Belvedere, to get around it.”
“A mistake. It will confuse readers into thinking they’re buying a work of nonfiction.” He leaned the cane against his chair. “I forgot to congratulate you. Winderspear informs me Edvard Kaspar’s going ahead with The Fence.”
“Filming’s started. The Breen Office made him change the title, to separate it from all the controversy. He’s shooting it under Stolen Goods. But it may change again.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“It stinks, but I don’t care. I just put twenty thousand in the bank.”
Elk’s chipmunk eyes brightened. “Now that you’re in the black I don’t suppose I can interest you in a new contract.”
“I’m not touching the Hollywood money. It’s going into Millie’s college fund.”
“We can talk, then.”
“No dice, Robin. I’ve had an offer from Dunlap for two books, sight unseen. They saw my manly profile on TV and think it’ll look good on the jacket flap. There was never any room for it on the back of a Blue Devil book, among all those exclamation points.”
“Hardcover’s a step down, not up. You get a hundred percent of the royalties now. Dunlap will sell subsidiary rights to a paperback house—mine, possibly—and take half.”
The man was all greed; worse than Irish Mickey Shannon in his way. Mickey at least had the virtue of personal pride. His old push for a piece of the action was symbolic; a balm for his hard-won criminal wisdom suddenly offered cheap for the masses. It would continue to fester no matter how many years he spent in an eight-by-ten cell. There was nothing symbolic about Robin Elk’s avarice.
“It will be a nice change to see a customer laying my book faceup on the counter of a real bookstore.”
“That will happen regardless. Someday the world will catch up with you jaded fellows and realize you were the ones telling the truth all along. You’ll get the respect you deserve without compromising your principles.”
Jacob laughed. “Elk, you wouldn’t recognize a principle if it walked up and kicked that cane out from under you.”
PART FIVE
1978
HUNDRED BUCKS A PLATE
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The room was cavernous, dwarfing the crowd, packed so tightly the people could only shuffle forward as they entered. Signs and banners identified the booths, and barn door–size blowups of movie posters and book covers made startling splashes of color: The scarlet lips of the slinky temptress on Chinese Checkers were as big as a sofa.
“Mr. Holly?”
“Heppleman.” He shook the young man’s hand.
“I’m Earl Frame. We spoke on the phone.”
Frame wore a sportcoat over a T-shirt and blue jeans.
“My daughter, Mildred.”
He colored before the tall redhead at Jacob’s side. She took his hand, smiling. “Hello.”
“Hello. Um, has anyone ever told you that you look like the woman on the original cover of The Fence?”
“No, but I’m told I resemble my mother.”
He cleared his throat. “Mr. Heppleman, you’re scheduled to sign at two, after you deliver the keynote. That’s when the interest is highest. Is that all right?”
Jacob had leaned in to hear him. “I don’t guess it matters. I’m not Erica Jong. In the old days, we didn’t bother with signings. Back then people read paperbacks and threw them away or passed them on. No one collected them.”
“Times have changed. I’ll show you where you’re speaking.”
The banquet hall was nearly as large as the exhibition room. Waiters were setting out dishes and flatware on round linen-covered tables, with numbers clipped to stands in the centers and eight chairs to each. A wooden lectern stood on a riser at the far end. On the wall behind it hung a swallowtail-shaped banner with a dozen of Jack Holly’s covers reproduced on it in full color.
“Amazing,” he said. “And in broad daylight. But I’ll never fill the joint.”
“We’re sold out, at a hundred dollars a plate.”
He touched the gizmo in his ear. There must have been some distortion.
Millie patted his arm. “You’re too modest, Dad. Mom would’ve been so proud.”
“She was proud of me regardless. Her one blind spot.”
She’d had two, actually, counting cigarettes. Don’t be sad, Jakey. I had the time of my life.
Frame interrupted his thoughts. “The fund’s intended to provide aid to struggling writers and graphic artists.”
“Where was it when I needed it?”
“We’re really delighted you could make it, sir. There aren’t many of your colleagues in condition to attend. Phoebe Sternwalter died while we were in correspondence. Burt Woods and Paul Arthur won’t share the same building; they write on opposite coasts and mail pages to each other. We offered to fly Robin Elk from the U.K. at our expense, but he declined through a secretary.”
“I heard he became a recluse after he sold his father’s firm.”
“The artists are a special challenge. Phil Scarpetti’s old address is no good. He did all your covers, didn’t he?”
“Most of them, yes.”
He’d spotted Phil five years ago on the subway, or thought he had. He’d aged badly; but who’d ever had practice at that? He was in the company of a young man. He met Jacob’s gaze, briefly and without sign of recognition. The pair got off at the next stop. For Jacob it was like reading the obituary of someone he’d once been close to.
Back in the exhibition room, a woman passed wearing a skin-tight gold lamé jumpsuit with brass-embossed breasts. He remembered the series. Glamazons, by Hugh Brock.
Brock’s wife woke up one morning while he was pouring gasoline on a pile of her clothes in the bedroom. He’d died in Bellevue.
Someone spoke. He started. “What?”
“You’ll have to speak up,” Millie said. “My father’s a little hard of hearing.”
Earl Frame raised his voice. “You knew Cliff Cutter, didn’t you?”
“Not well; but I admired him.”
“I think you’ll appreciate this.” The young man walked away briskly.
Millie said, “I guess we’re supposed to follow him.”
“I should’ve brought a bicycle.”
They stopped at a booth at the end of a long aisle, where a crowd was dispersing. A stout old woman busied herself arranging items in a sort of museum display. Panels of weathered barnwood had been erected to form a room within the room. A Winchester carbine, an ivory-handled Colt in a worn holster, lariats, coppertone photos of Indian braves shared the space with a rolltop desk and a battered old Underwood typewriter. Cutter might have just stepped out of the rustic study for a breath of desert air.
“We trucked it all in directly from his place in Denver,” Frame said. “Everything’s just as he left it. He wrote most of his westerns in that room. It’s the most popular booth in the exhibition.”
“Jack?”
He stared at the old woman. “Nayoka?” It was Cliff Cutter’s Navajo wife. He recognized the bright black eyes, sunk deep in folds of fat. He took her hand gently.
She beamed first at him, then at Millie. “How old are you, child?”
The question surprised her into laughter. “I’ll be thirty next March.”
Nayoka turned back to Jacob. “I told you. Indian medicine is still strong.”
“We put that carving in a safe-deposit box when Millie was teething.” He changed the subject. “This is an impressive display. I can feel his presence.”
“He’d be furious. They put everything in wrong. He wouldn’t let me in even to clean. You know how he died.”
“I heard it was a stroke.”
“That happened in the hospital after they set his hip. He fell off his horse galloping down a ravine: showing off for his young ranch hands. He was ninety-two.”
