It's Superman! A Novel Read online

“Is that Stick? Is that Herman Stickowski? Let me see it again.”

  “Willi …”

  “I didn’t get a good look at the guy’s face, I seen his legs!”

  “But on the other hand, you saw Lex Luthor’s face clear enough.”

  “I did! And if they hadn’t stolen my film, the other two guys would’ve been in the picture. You woulda seen!”

  “ ‘Woulda.’ ”

  “I’m telling the truth!”

  “Sure, Willi …”

  Early that afternoon, a lawyer from the Legal Aid Society who stopped by on two previous occasions informs Willi that he’s been unable to convince a judge to set any bond, then suggests that he hire a criminal attorney for his trial defense. “Sooner,” he says, “rather than later.”

  According to hospital admitting records, at three-thirty P.M., a male Caucasian, weight 240, height 6′3″, date of birth 5/12/95, occupation left blank, is assigned a private room two doors down from Willi’s. His chart gives his name as Sidney n.m.i. Marsden and claims he is suffering from diverticulosis. He is not. He is in perfect health, although he does remember to groan occasionally, as he’s been instructed, and to complain, but not too much, about his discomfort. In between his groaning and his complaining, he entertains himself by reading stories in a year-and-a-half-old issue of Argosy. It’s a tribute to his professionalism that he resists ogling and mashing Betty Simon, one of the nurses on duty. Madone, the lungs on that broad! His name is not Sidney Marsden.

  At a quarter to seven Lois Lane arrives at the hospital. Because her pocketbook holds a little zippered manicure kit containing a metal nail file and cuticle scissors, she has to leave it with the posted guard, this evening a young blond-haired policeman-in-tunic named Ben Jaeger. He apologizes when he divests Lois of her bag. She thinks he’s cute.

  Eighteen months ago, Officer Jaeger, still a rookie on traffic detail, arrested Spider Sandglass outside of McSorley’s Old Ale House, 15 East Seventh Street, for assaulting an acquaintance Spider claimed owed him a small amount of money.

  Clearly, Spider’s father doesn’t hold that against Officer Jaeger. On the contrary.

  When Lois comes into Willi’s room, she discovers him standing at the window, looking down nine stories to the street. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

  “They’re sending me to Riker’s tomorrow!.”

  “Get under the covers—please?”

  “I can’t go to jail! I’ll go nuts!”

  “What about Detective Sandglass,” she says in a measured, patient tone, “can’t he—?”

  “Feh! He still thinks I’m lying. Everybody does!” Willi hammers the crown of his head against the window frame. “You don’t think I’m lying, do you? Lois?”

  “Willi, I don’t think you cut anyone’s throat, of course not.”

  “But?”

  “I think maybe you saw somebody who just looked like the alderman.”

  “I should just stick my tongue in a light socket and be done with it.” He looks around for a lamp, follows the cord to a wall, the plug—there! He might as well do it now! Save everybody a lot of trouble.

  “Willi, you need to calm down. Now listen. I did some calling around today and I think I may’ve found you a lawyer. His name—”

  “I can’t afford a lawyer.”

  “I can help.”

  “Oh sure, now you can. Now you can loan me some money! Thanks a whole heap.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “If you’d loaned me thirty bucks when I asked you for it …”

  “So this is my fault?”

  She expects another explosion of Willi’s pique and a fresh fusillade of blame-laying, name-calling. Instead, his shoulders sag. “I’m scared, Lois.”

  “I know,” she says, “I know.” She’s eager to hug him, but also reluctant: she doesn’t want him to cry out in physical pain. But suddenly Willi hugs her. “It’s going to be okay,” she murmurs. “It’s all going to be just fine.”

  But with the situation the way it looks, Lois has no idea how.

  At ten minutes to eleven, a tall and buxom middle-aged nurse that Skinny Simon has never seen before briskly passes her by, absorbed, it seems, in making chart notations on the run. For a moment Skinny considers chasing after the woman to remind her it’s against hospital regulations for nurses to wear perfume on the job. She is going off duty, however, and besides, she’s not the shift supervisor. So instead she goes to check on Willi, not knowing what she could say to him; do you wish someone well when they’re heading off to jail?

  But she needn’t have worried: when she peeks in, he’s pretending to sleep (an R.N. can always tell). Skinny shuts the door, bids good night to Officer Jaeger (he’s adorable), clocks out, rides an elevator down to the lobby, and leaves the building.

  Out in the muggy summer night, she feels blue all of a sudden. Her live-in boyfriend, Charlie Brunner, is in California and won’t return till God knows when. Maybe September, but maybe not. He’s a trumpeter with Benny Goodman’s orchestra, which was on the verge of disbanding as recently as two months ago when the boys and their canary, Helen Ward, left New York on a last-ditch cross-country tour. Now they’re packing in audiences night after night at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. Lucky Charlie! Poor Willi. Poor guy, she thinks, recalling the two or three, three or four, certainly less than ten, times they made love, just for the pure fun of it and nothing more. How could he have killed someone? She doesn’t believe it. She believes it. No, she doesn’t. Then she thinks, Imagine that nurse coming on the floor drenched in perfume! And cheap, awful stuff at that! Skinny stops, inexplicably bothered by something that has nothing to do with perfume. But what? She gives a tiny shrug and runs to catch her bus.

  Meanwhile, the atrociously perfumed nurse is removing a vacuum thermos filled with strong coffee from a leather bag she stowed in one of the linen closets when she arrived at the hospital. She glances at her wristwatch, which has no second hand. She is anxious to get started, but it’s still too early. Another forty-five minutes to an hour, at least.

  Replacing the thermos in the bag and the bag at the back of a lower shelf, she closes the closet, looks up the hall at the policeman sitting in his tipped-back chair (she hates pretty boys), and then, to make herself scarce, goes and has a smoke on the concrete fire stairs between the ninth floor and the eighth.

  The narrow square bar pinned to her uniform reads: TIBBELL. If anyone happens to ask her, she’ll tell them her first name is Rosemary, and that it’s Mrs. Rosemary Tibbell. But she hopes no one asks her.

  Her name isn’t Rosemary Tibbell, and she isn’t married.

  At a few minutes past midnight, now the second of August, Ben Jaeger is stifling a yawn and feeling the first cricks move through his shoulders and lower back when a nurse appears and offers him coffee. “You’re an angel!” he tells her. He peers above the square yardage of her bosom to her name bar and adds, “Miss Tibbell.”

  “Mrs.,” she says.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Tibbell.”

  As she unscrews the deep cap from her thermos, he has to turn away his head slightly and squint his eyes. Perfume has that effect on Officer Jaeger, causes his eyes to sting and water. Soon, if Nurse Tibbell sticks around, he’ll be sneezing his head off. But she doesn’t. She fills the cap with hot coffee, watches him take an appreciative gulp, and says, “Why don’t you just hold on to the thermos? You need it more than I do.” She gives him a motherly pat on his wrist and pads away on her rubber-soled shoes, past the room where a new patient called Sidney Marsden is getting dressed in the dark. She doesn’t notice that his door is closed.

  It’s locked, too.

  Marsden finishes tying his shoelaces, then goes back to the closet and removes his overnight bag. It requires a key and he uses it. The bag contains a full set of men’s clothes: underwear, trousers, shirt, and shoes, everything purchased only yesterday, the sizes estimated from newspaper photographs. Jeez, they forgot socks! Well, too bad. He rummages past
the clothing, feels around and finds a small bundle, the newspaper wrapping spotted with gun oil. He takes it out and sets it down on a chair.

  It’s half past twelve by the radium glow of the bedside clock.

  He was told “not before one.”

  Damn, though, he’s been twiddling his thumbs for going on ten hours already!

  But if he rushes and does this thing too soon, he’ll get outside and there won’t be a car waiting. Exhaling a long sigh of disgust, he sits down on the side of the bed.

  By ten of one, Rosemary Tibbell is beginning to feel anxious. Even though she has been ducking into different rooms and utility closets up and down the ninth floor, hiding briefly, emerging, then hiding again, she has, she knows, been noticed by some of the other nurses working the shift. She caught three of them whispering together and looking queerly at her. Even worse, a freckle-faced Irish nurse has gone over and started flirting with the baby-faced copper—who hasn’t, so far as Rosemary can see, taken even a sip of coffee in the last twenty minutes.

  This better happen soon, she thinks.

  She pats the slit pocket in her uniform skirt and feels the short loaded syringe there.

  More than fifty blocks to the north, Lex Luthor’s mother, “Mrs. Wesley Dunn,” a widow, puts the last two pills from her candy dish into her mouth, below her tongue, and despite being logy by then, and nauseous, she rinses them down with the end of her bourbon. Vaguely, so vaguely, she hears the bells at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine ring the hour. One o’clock.

  At the same moment downtown, on West Twenty-third Street, not far from the Hotel Chelsea, an explosion rips through a nineteenth-century brownstone residence that was converted five years ago into a workingman’s brothel. Windows blow out, followed by flames.

  From the steps of the nearby YMCA, Herman Stickowski, called Stick, watches the fire with a satisfied grin on his face.

  Under the wheel of a Packard 8 parked just across the street, Dick Sandglass watches Herman Stickowski for a few moments longer, then jumps from his car and runs toward the burning brownstone. It is two minutes past one.

  At three minutes past, on the ninth floor of Roosevelt Hospital, Officer Ben Jaeger slumps to one side, lets out a fluttering breath, and immediately begins dreaming.

  At five minutes past the hour, Rosemary Tibbell, having consulted a piece of notebook paper scribbled with instructions, flips several toggles on a little wall dingus that looks much like a fuse box. Immediately, up and down the ninth floor, paired blue and red bulbs start flashing an emergency sequence. She watches all of the other nurses respond: they drop everything and rush in a pack toward swinging doors at the opposite end of the hall.

  At six minutes past one, Mrs. Tibbell enters Willi Berg’s room.

  Stopping suddenly, she draws a sharp breath, then leans over Willi, who is fast asleep but whose legs are kicking under the covers. Carefully she pushes back the left sleeve of his pajama top and pulls out the plunger from her syringe.

  She feels something cold touch her neck.

  “Put it down, sweetheart.”

  Maybe she would have and maybe she wouldn’t have, but Sidney Marsden, impatient beyond any further endurance, simply chops her across the windpipe with the edge of his hand, then punches down hard on the back of her neck. If he didn’t think Mrs. Tibbell was a real nurse, thus a good egg and deserving of continued life, he surely would have struck her with blows guaranteed to kill.

  She crumples, he catches her and eases her down to the floor.

  Willi Berg flinches awake.

  “Get dressed,” says Marsden, tossing him the overnight bag.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “You want to get out of here?”

  “Yeah, but who—?”

  “Then get dressed.”

  Taking the stairs, they leave the hospital together about a quarter past one and by twenty past are riding downtown in a Dodge touring sedan. By one-thirty they are crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.

  VIII

  National mourning. Further reports of arson.

  Lex Luthor’s shocking new appearance.

  Clark Kent, reporter. Willi becomes a chain-smoker.

  His shocking new appearance.

  ●

  1

  The major story in newspapers published on Friday, August 16, 1935, is the plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, that ended the lives of Will Rogers and Wiley Post. After Charles Lindbergh, Post was the country’s most touted aviation pioneer, and Rogers, of course, the universally beloved comedian, radio broadcaster, syndicated columnist, and movie personality, the Cherokee cowboy with a ready wink. He never met a man he didn’t like. The two friends were on a flight to Russia. It’s unbelievable. It’s horrible. It’s a national tragedy.

  That same day readers also learn President Roosevelt has signed into law the Social Security Act, and Italy’s Primo Camera, who recently lost the world’s heavyweight boxing match to American Negro Joe Louis, has had his passport canceled by Achille Starace, Secretary General of the Fascist Party. “Camera’s showing,” he says, “is a dishonor to Fascist sport.”

  And in New York City news, for the fifth time in two weeks a house of ill-repute allegedly operated by associates of indicted racketeer Lucky Luciano was destroyed last night in a blaze that fire marshals are calling a clear case of arson. Three lives were lost, but, according to an officer from the Eighteenth Precinct, they were just prostitutes.

  Two weeks after his brazen escape from a guarded room at Roosevelt Hospital, Ninth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, William Jacob Berg, twenty, the so-called Foto-Fugitive, still remains at large.

  Meanwhile, (Miss) Catherine Barton, a woman of a certain age, was released yesterday from police custody. A cafeteria hostess from Woodside, Queens, who had originally given her name as Rosemary Tibbell, Miss Barton was discovered on the morning of August second lying bruised and unconscious in Mr. Berg’s hospital room. She was dressed in a nurse’s uniform rented from a costume store on West Forty-eighth Street. Although initially dubious of her claims to being romantically infatuated by the young murderer after seeing his photographs in the tabloid press, police finally charged the woman with simple trespass, allowed her to pay a small fine, and set her free.

  In all the New York papers that day it is also reported that while Fred S. Gropper, vice-president of Amalgamated Gas & Electric, was being paid an annual salary of $60,000, AG&E President Howard H. Sloan had been charging the system’s many holding companies an aggregate of $150,000 per annum for their respective shares of Mr. Gropper’s services. Apparently, Mr. Sloan, whose whereabouts remain currently unknown, has been pocketing the $90,000-a-year difference.

  Upon hearing of these revelations, Alderman Alexander Luthor, a personal friend of Sloan’s who benefited from the financier’s advice and monetary contributions during his recent election campaign, expressed shock and dismay but gently reminded members of the fourth estate that, in America at least, a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

  During his press conference at City Hall, Alderman Luthor was asked by reporters to comment upon his startling new appearance. Running a hand over his recently shaved and polished skull, he laughed and said, “It kind of resembles the world, doesn’t it?”

  Leaving the rostrum, the alderman was overheard to hum a few sprightly bars of “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.”

  In the funnies today, Winnie Winkle finds a handbag full of jewelry, Dagwood runs smack into the postman, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are ambushed in a gulch, Pat Ryan kisses the Dragon Lady, and Daddy Warbucks is still being held prisoner in a lunatic asylum by a quack doctor in the employ of a rival tycoon.

  “You know something, boss,” says Paulie Scaffa after he’s finished reading Little Orphan Annie, “you kind of look like Daddy Warbucks now. Especially since you both wear tuxedos.”

  Whereupon Lex boxes Paulie’s ears. “Mind telling me why you’re sitting here reading the comics, is that what I pay you for?�
��

  “Just give me something to do, boss, I’ll do it.”

  “Find Willi Berg.”

  “Boss, we’ve looked. He just vanished.”

  “But how? Who helped him?”

  Paulie shakes his head.

  “I’m late for a meeting with Fatty Arbuckle,” says Lex, referring to Mayor La Guardia, a public friend he privately loathes. “We’ll talk more about this tonight. And bring Stick with you when you come back.”

  “Sure, boss, and in the meantime, I’ll keep looking for the kid.”

  “You do that.”

  As soon as Lex has gone, Paulie raises the windows in his boss’s large, bright kitchen and lights a cigarette. Retaking his seat at the table, he continues to page through the Daily News. In The Gumps cartoon strip, Andy is griping to his wife, but there are too many words crowded into the talk balloons, so Paulie reads Dick Tracy instead. He knows he shouldn’t like Dick Tracy, but he does.

  He likes how whenever somebody gets shot, you can see the bullet go in one side of the guy’s head and exit the other in a sinuous dotted line.

  2

  There is no paper published in Smallville, Kansas, on August 16. The Herald-Progress, eight broadsheet pages in a tombstone format, comes out just once a week. There will be a new edition next Tuesday. In the meantime, most town and farm residents still keep this past Tuesday’s edition on hand. They’ll wait until the next one is delivered before putting it in the outhouse or using it for peelings. That’s because Newel Timmins, at considerable expense, includes on the next-to-last page of his newspaper a complete seven-day program listing for all of the radio stations you can pick up in southeastern Osage County.

  In Smallville, Newel Timmins is considered a cracker-jack businessman and a genuine public servant, although Jonathan Kent thinks he was a real boob to support Herbert Hoover in the last election. Otherwise he’s a decent enough fellow, for a Republican, and he certainly has been good to Clark. Even gives the boy his own byline if something he’s written—the story about the seven Amish families, for example, that just pulled up stakes and moved to Pennsylvania—runs in excess of two columns.