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Authors: Max Allan Collins
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typewriter keys, he said, “Just a second. Just a second.”
I dragged him out of his office and into the waiting arms of the unshaven Feldman, who had gotten his partner in front of a mirror with an electric razor, and helped him into a clean suit. Price was like a prospective groom who’d tied one on the night before, and had to be pieced and patched together for the big ceremony.
Which made me the ring bearer, I guess.
At least we weren’t late. In fact, we were fifteen minutes early, and we had to move through a group of reporters, their cameras and notepads at the ready, before we could get past the Grecian columns that flanked the entry. Somehow Harry Barray had wrangled a press pass, though if the big blond disc jockey with the puffy features was a reporter, I was J. Edgar Hoover.
But Barray was the only member of the press contingent who recognized the comic book publisher, or at least the only one who accosted Price with any pre-hearing questions, shoving a microphone in his face and saying, “Good morning, Bob. Are you anticipating any trouble inside?”
In Barray’s defense, this was hardly a hostile question, but Price snapped at him like a bulldog on a short leash.
“Any trouble I get is the fault of people like you,” Price said, eyes bulging, spittle flying, “who trample the rights of good Americans to read and write what they please! Comic book readers are citizens, too, you know!”
Barray backed away, looking damn near scared. I could hardly blame him.
Inside the courthouse, where footsteps echoed like one gunshot after another, Price grinned at me, his eyes glittering behind his round-lensed dark-framed glasses.
“See, Jack? I set that character straight, didn’t I? Show guys like that the error of their ways, and they’ll come around. They will come around.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “You scared the shit out of Barray. He’ll tell his listeners you behaved like a maniac.”
He blinked, eyes owlish behind the lenses. “Why would he do that?”
I ignored that absurdity and instead said, “You still have time to head out a side door. I’ll go in and say you were too sick to testify.”
His cheeks reddened—he might have been blushing, but he wasn’t. “Goddamnit, Jack, I want to testify! This is my big chance!”
“Well, ease off. Stay calm and don’t look and act like a monster that jumped out of one of your funny books.”
That threw him, even hurt him a little, but he said nothing, and I escorted him by the arm into Room 110, where the Kefauver crime hearings had first been held, till the public interest sent them into larger quarters upstairs.
We found our way into the good-sized chamber where burnished oak rode the walls and floors and even the furniture. Reserved seats awaited us at the front of the ten-row spectator section at left. At a long central bench four congressmen (including Senator Estes Kefauver himself) were taking their seats. The room was cool and they left their suit coats on as they settled in.
Near their bench was an astonishing display that disrupted the courtroom’s austerity in an explosion of garish colors and grotesque images. On easels were two dozen blow-ups of full-color comic-book covers: Tales from the Vault, Fighting Crime, Weird Fantastic Science, Suspense Crime Stories, Weird Terror, True Criminals, Beware!, and more. Starring in these poster-size exhibits were walking corpses, machine-gunning gangsters, rampaging werewolves, drooling space creatures, and leggy gun molls showing off their .38 revolvers and heaving “headlights.”
Possibly also 38s, come to think of it.
I pointed out this display to Price.
“You’re screwed,” I whispered.
He glanced at the array of covers—potentially the most damaging witnesses of all, and most of them EF publications—and shrugged as if to say, “So what?”
The witness table sat before the bench but at a forty-five degree angle, so that the spectators could also view the
I dragged him out of his office and into the waiting arms of the unshaven Feldman, who had gotten his partner in front of a mirror with an electric razor, and helped him into a clean suit. Price was like a prospective groom who’d tied one on the night before, and had to be pieced and patched together for the big ceremony.
Which made me the ring bearer, I guess.
At least we weren’t late. In fact, we were fifteen minutes early, and we had to move through a group of reporters, their cameras and notepads at the ready, before we could get past the Grecian columns that flanked the entry. Somehow Harry Barray had wrangled a press pass, though if the big blond disc jockey with the puffy features was a reporter, I was J. Edgar Hoover.
But Barray was the only member of the press contingent who recognized the comic book publisher, or at least the only one who accosted Price with any pre-hearing questions, shoving a microphone in his face and saying, “Good morning, Bob. Are you anticipating any trouble inside?”
In Barray’s defense, this was hardly a hostile question, but Price snapped at him like a bulldog on a short leash.
“Any trouble I get is the fault of people like you,” Price said, eyes bulging, spittle flying, “who trample the rights of good Americans to read and write what they please! Comic book readers are citizens, too, you know!”
Barray backed away, looking damn near scared. I could hardly blame him.
Inside the courthouse, where footsteps echoed like one gunshot after another, Price grinned at me, his eyes glittering behind his round-lensed dark-framed glasses.
“See, Jack? I set that character straight, didn’t I? Show guys like that the error of their ways, and they’ll come around. They will come around.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “You scared the shit out of Barray. He’ll tell his listeners you behaved like a maniac.”
He blinked, eyes owlish behind the lenses. “Why would he do that?”
I ignored that absurdity and instead said, “You still have time to head out a side door. I’ll go in and say you were too sick to testify.”
His cheeks reddened—he might have been blushing, but he wasn’t. “Goddamnit, Jack, I want to testify! This is my big chance!”
“Well, ease off. Stay calm and don’t look and act like a monster that jumped out of one of your funny books.”
That threw him, even hurt him a little, but he said nothing, and I escorted him by the arm into Room 110, where the Kefauver crime hearings had first been held, till the public interest sent them into larger quarters upstairs.
We found our way into the good-sized chamber where burnished oak rode the walls and floors and even the furniture. Reserved seats awaited us at the front of the ten-row spectator section at left. At a long central bench four congressmen (including Senator Estes Kefauver himself) were taking their seats. The room was cool and they left their suit coats on as they settled in.
Near their bench was an astonishing display that disrupted the courtroom’s austerity in an explosion of garish colors and grotesque images. On easels were two dozen blow-ups of full-color comic-book covers: Tales from the Vault, Fighting Crime, Weird Fantastic Science, Suspense Crime Stories, Weird Terror, True Criminals, Beware!, and more. Starring in these poster-size exhibits were walking corpses, machine-gunning gangsters, rampaging werewolves, drooling space creatures, and leggy gun molls showing off their .38 revolvers and heaving “headlights.”
Possibly also 38s, come to think of it.
I pointed out this display to Price.
“You’re screwed,” I whispered.
He glanced at the array of covers—potentially the most damaging witnesses of all, and most of them EF publications—and shrugged as if to say, “So what?”
The witness table sat before the bench but at a forty-five degree angle, so that the spectators could also view the
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