Adjusting his thick, wire-rimmed spectacles with both hands, Herb peered into a glass case containing several shelves of old comic books. "How much is that?" he asked, pointing to one whose cover featured a man with green skin, red boots and gloves, and what appeared to be writhing tentacles sprouting from his neck like a living scarf. Squatting on a rooftop behind him was a being who resembled a sinister version of Spiderman.
"Beware the Creeper!" Pete Brennan read as he unlocked the case and with two burly, hairy forearms covered with tattoos removed the comic book, flipping it over on the counter. Taking off his own spectacles he lifted the back cover to about 10 inches from his face. "Fifty bucks," he said, reading from the tiny price sticker.
Something about Brennan made Herb uncomfortable; probably the fact that he had killed someone less than a week ago and didn't seem a bit on edge. The victim had tried to rob him at gunpoint, and Brennan, an ex-Marine who had served in the first Gulf War, had acted in self-defense. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the DA was not expected to file charges.
"Fifty bucks," echoed a shrill voice. A short whistle followed. Startled, Herb looked around the store and spotted a caged parrot suspended above and slightly behind the counter.
"Shut up, Ruby," Brennan growled.
"Shut up, Ruby," the bird repeated.
"Fifty bucks is pretty steep for a comic book," Herb ventured.
"Not just any comic book," Brennan assured him. "The Creeper Number One. I was at a convention in New York last year where one of these sold for $300. Of course, it was graded near mint."
Again came the parrot's impromptu commentary. "In one mighty magazine."
Brennan ignored the interruption this time. "You a collector?"
Herb laughed nervously. "Me? No, just curious." Then he ventured a delicate question. "So, things back to normal around here?"
Brennan shrugged. "Yeah, it was no big deal. Guy was here the day before for about five minutes, casing the place, I guess. Then he shows up at closing time the next day, pulls a gun, tells me to empty the register. I guess you know the rest."
Herb did. Brennan, who was licensed to carry, had whipped out a .38 and fired once, striking the gunman in the chest. Hector Ruiz, 32, had died instantly. In his right hand police had discovered a loaded, unregistered .22 Beretta. Ruiz, a native of Colombia, had worked as a cook in a nearby Mexican Restaurant, and had never been in trouble with the law.
Herb returned to a less threatening topic. "Do you have any old Batman comics? He was always my favorite superhero."
Brennan nodded, then directed Herb to one of several large cardboard boxes in the back of the store. Herb casually thumbed through about fifty comic books, all carefully encased in plastic holders. He finally settled on Detective Comics Number 456, which in 1976 had retailed for a quarter. Without bothering to look at the price tag, Herb brought the issue to the register.
"Twenty-five dollars," Brennan told him.
Telling himself it was an "investment," Herb paid without flinching. "Thanks," he said to Brennan, who replied in kind.
As he exited, Ruby the parrot taunted him once more. "In one mighty magazine."
Without bothering to close the pages, Herb stuffed the comic book under a pile of papers as soon as he noticed Della Devore, the receptionist at Sylvester Threaded Screw Products, standing by his desk. Della, a statuesque twenty-five year-old brunette who contained her elegant coiffure with a single brown barrette, was wearing a long purple dress with spaghetti straps, and black stiletto heels.
"Am I interrupting something?" she asked, a little provocatively.
"Uh, no," Herb stammered. "I was just going over some papers."
"Jim wants to see you in his office," she said. "Something about last month's invoices being fifty cents off."
Herb's job to him was just that. He derived no enjoyment from it whatsoever. But that was precisely his rationale for taking and keeping a boring position. As soon as he walked out the door at five, he left work behind. He was forty-five, unmarried with no prospects in sight, and earned a mediocre $33,000 annually. Really not much of a life, he supposed. But in eleven years as company bookkeeper, his record had been exemplary, and even a four-bit discrepancy was unacceptable.
"Thanks, Della," he replied. "I'll be right there."
"What comic book are you reading?" she asked, blindsiding him.
Fumbling for an appropriate response at first, Herb decided to simply come clean. "Batman's Detective Comics Number 456," he confessed.
"Batman?" she replied. "You should get together with Kyle in shipping," she said. "He must have a thousand Batman comics. Is that one valuable?"
"Paid twenty-five dollars for it," Herb admitted sheepishly.
Della flashed a wisp of a smile. "I guess we all have to do something in our spare time." With that she turned and walked away. Herb found his eyes involuntarily glued to Della's backside as she gradually receded into the distance. A moment later he flushed a light crimson, recalling Della's penchant for polite put-downs.
Solving the fifty-cent conundrum proved easy for Herb; somehow money meant for postage had been entered into the merchandise column by one of the temps. Another issue had as quickly arisen to torment Herb, however: the fact that he put out twenty-five dollars for a comic book that Kyle claimed was worth maybe ten. On the way home Herb decided to pay another visit to Chromatic Comics.
Brennan's tone was thoroughly diplomatic. "Sir, I assure you that Batman Number 456 is worth at least twenty-five dollars. If I had that one graded, it would probably get a VG and fetch almost twice as much."
"In one mighty magazine," Ruby inexplicably chortled. This drew an irritated glance from her owner.
Herb's attention was fixed momentarily on the prolix parrot. Then he asked Brennan "What’s a VG?"
Brennan quickly and efficiently explained the system of rating comics. Poor, which reflected a numeric value of .05, was the lowest denomination, while Mint merited a 10. In between were twelve other variables.
"So this might be a Very Good?" Herb inquired hopefully.
"Could be," Brennan acknowledged.
"In one mighty magazine," Ruby remarked. Herb looked at the chatty bird once more, then noticed for the first time a wall-mounted security camera. Tracing Herb's gaze, Brennan explained "It's phony. Makes 'em think twice, though."
Apparently it hadn't made Hector Ruiz think twice, Herb almost said. Then making his way back to the familiar Batman box, he picked out two more "collector's" issues, which set him back forty bucks this time, and headed home. As he was exiting, the electric door chime was accompanied by Ruby's now-familiar expression.
Herb was standing in the parking lot, his purchase in a plain plastic bag in one hand, and the keys to his 1999 Ford Escort in the other. Naturally his attention was drawn to the sight of a nubile young woman in shorts bending over something on the ground. When he noticed a funeral wreath he suddenly felt guilty for his irreverent libido. As she stood up Herb saw a pretty Hispanic woman in her early twenties, with a braided black ponytail and sad features. Her lime green t-shirt bore the name "La Cocina," which Herb recognized as that of a nearby Mexican restaurant, the one where Hector Ruiz had worked. She noticed Herb, too, but said nothing.
Brennan, however, was disinclined to remain silent. Barging out the front door, he confronted the girl, his arms waving furiously.
"You get that crap off my lot!" he demanded. "If you wanna mourn that two-bit thug, do it somewhere else."
With a reproachful glare, she scooped up the wreath and walked briskly alongside busy Roosevelt Boulevard, away from the store. Dumfounded, Herb looked at her as she departed and then at Brennan, as if waiting for an explanation. None was forthcoming, however, as Brennan shook his head disgustedly and went back inside.
Herb stood there for a few more minutes, watching the three lanes of northbound traffic speed by him. He had worked through lunch, and his appetite suddenly surfaced like the shark in Jaws. A beef and bean burrito with a margarita would taste good, he thought, heading towards La Cocina.
Despite the awkwardness, Herb was glad that the same young lady he had seen a short while earlier waited on him. The waitress, whose name was Ana, didn't seem at all embarrassed about the recent incident, taking and serving his order with perfect aplomb. Herb risked a question.
"Was Hector a friend of yours?"
She looked at him distrustfully. Then her features softened a little, and she replied, "I work with him for a year. He did not deserve to die like that." She set Herb's second margarita in front of him.
Herb cleared his throat, as if indicating that he was proceeding with caution in his line of questioning.
"They say he had a gun."
Ana remained imperturbable. "He did not have no gun."
"It was found in his right hand," Herb said.
This seemed to irk her. "In his right hand? He was left-handed. When he was a boy in Catholic school in Bogota, the nuns, they make him write with his right hand, but he do everything else with his left hand."
Ana then volunteered that Hector stopped by the comic book store on his lunch break the day before he died. What transpired there Ana didn't know, but Hector was fifteen minutes late returning to work, which got him yelled at by Marco, the owner. Hector didn't seem to mind, Ana said, and was in a good mood the rest of the day. He did make some cryptic remark, she added, something like "I want gold."
"Then he go back the next day, and that man kill him," she concluded, breaking into a sob.
"Something just doesn't add up," Herb told Kyle during their first of two fifteen-minute daily coffee breaks. "I have to admit that I'm bothered by it."
Kyle, one hand braced against a table in the lunchroom, sipped his coffee nonchalantly before replying "What doesn't add up is you paying forty bucks for Batman number 294 and 442, when they look to me to be about an FG. You got ripped, pal."
It was Herb's turn to sip his coffee and try to look suave. Swayed momentarily from the more important issue on his mind, he asked Kyle, "Why would he cheat me?"
Kyle thumped himself on the forehead with his right palm, like someone in an old V-8 commercial. "Because, dude, you don't know jack about comics, and it's obvious." Another sip of java followed this unpleasant revelation. "Besides, his business doesn't seem to be doing that well. Almost every time I go there, I'm the only customer."
Now Herb thumped himself on the forehead. "Me, too," he said. "Maybe he should sell that parrot," he joked.
"I remember when he got that bird last year," Kyle said. "She was just a chick."
As if on cue, Della sauntered by the pair. "Kyle," she said. "Commissioner Gorman is on line one for you."
Kyle seethed for a moment before retorting, "It's Commissioner Gordon!"
"You sure told her," Herb said.
Herb would hardly have admitted that he had spent two hours in front of his computer that night looking up titles of Bronze Age Batman Comics and their respective values. He repeated aloud to himself “Golden Age, 1938 to 1955. Silver Age, 1956 to 1969. Bronze Age, 1970 to 1983. Copper Age, 1984 to 1991. Modern Age, 1992 to present.” Herb paused to scratch his head. “Modern Age?” he mused. “What’s wrong with ‘Nickel Age’ or ‘Steel Age?’”
Herb shook his head briskly in an attempt to focus on a more important matter, one that was only marginally related to comics. What had Hector meant by that odd remark that he wanted gold? Was "gold" his way of saying "money," and therefore an indication of his intention to rob Brennan? He thought long and hard for several minutes before searching the Internet for a specific phrase in Spanish. What he found just might explain a lot, he concluded, and wondered if his recent interest in "Detective" Comics was purely coincidental. He spent an additional hour at his computer, searching Ebay before going to bed.
The following day at work, he caught up with Kyle, who was unenthusiastically sealing a large box with brown packaging tape. Herb thought that his approach to Kyle was flawless.
"Hey, Kyle," he said. "You wanna be a superhero?"
After work, an eager Kyle and an anxious Herb stopped at Chromatic Comics. The door chime announced their entrance, but the proprietor was nowhere in sight. Herb noticed to his dismay that Ruby's cage was empty.
The sound of thumping footsteps preceded the opening of a painted green steel door behind the counter. Brennan appeared, brushing the dust off a dirty white apron, which he subsequently took off and hung on a wall hook. He nodded to the pair as he pulled the door shut behind him.
"Gentlemen," he said.
"Where's the bird?" Kyle asked.
"Found her dead in her cage this morning," Brennan replied.
Herb looked shocked. "I'm sorry to hear that," he told Brennan.
"Yeah, well, it happens," Brennan said.
"She wasn't that old," Kyle remarked. "An African Grey parrot can live 40 years."
Brennan turned cold instantly. "What's your point?"
Kyle instinctively took a step back. "Maybe it was . . . 'fowl' play?" He snickered.
Brennan groaned. Then the telephone rang. "Chromatic Comics . . . Yeah, we have a couple left . . . It's by Alan Moore."
While Brennan fielded the phone call, Herb and Kyle edged slowly away from the counter. "The bird sang," Kyle whispered, a little too loudly, Herb thought. "so he killed her."
"Yeah, they made a movie out of that one, with Jackie Earle Hailey as Rorschach," Brennan told the caller. He glanced warily at Herb and Kyle. "No, we don't have any DVD's, but we carry the graphic novel . . . Six o'clock."
"Pick out something from the Batman box," Kyle said, nudging Herb and forgetting to whisper. "We'll see if he tries to cheat you this time."
"I have to go," Brennan concluded, hanging up the receiver. He stared at Kyle. "Who is trying to cheat who?" he asked.
With a surprising burst of bravado, Kyle pointed at Brennan accusingly. "You are trying to cheat my friend here, like you cheated Hector Ruiz."
Herb thought that he would die. And may not have been that far off base. "He's really not my friend," he tried explaining to Brennan, who by this time had walked around the counter and towards the front door. Locking it, he took off the OPEN sign and hung a BACK IN 30 MINUTES sign in its place. He approached the two men menacingly, his right hand hovering dangerously close to his hip pocket.
"What else do you know?" he calmly asked Kyle.
"Look, we really have to get going," Herb tried unsuccessfully to intervene. "You know the traffic on the Boulevard."
"We took the 14 Bus, Herb," Kyle answered, apparently oblivious to the jeopardy of their current situation.
"What else do you know?" Brennan repeated.
"Well," Kyle continued defiantly. "My friend Herb says-"
"I'm really not his friend."
But Kyle kept digging. ". . .that you cheated Hector Ruiz by paying him far less than what that comic was worth. That was why he came back, to demand justice. And instead you gave him," here Kyle paused for effect. "The business end of a .38." He began pacing back and forth dramatically, gesturing like an attorney making a summation. "But you made some big mistakes, Brennan," Kyle ranted, waving his finger. "You put a gun in his right hand, not realizing that he was left-handed."
Brennan interrupted him. "I saw him write something in a little pocket notebook with his right hand."
"So you did," Kyle went on. "But even though he wrote with his right hand, he did everything else with his left." Kyle concluded by revealing the name of the fatal comic book, which, according to his "good friend" Herb Heavener, was worth $30,000: The Fantastic Four Number One, from November, 1961.
"That's why the bird kept repeating 'in one mighty magazine," Kyle said. "Because he heard you and Hector discussing the cover blurb "Together for the first time. . . in one mighty magazine!"
Kyle didn't see Brennan produce the pistol from his hip pocket, which was pointed towards the floor . . . for the moment. But Herb saw.
Kyle enjoyed being a "superhero" too much to shut up. "That waitress from the Mexican restaurant thought that Hector said that he wanted gold. But what he actually said was Quiero un loro - I want a parrot- not Quiero oro- I want gold. So you killed him, and then you offed the parrot!" he said proudly.
Kyle turned to Herb. "Sorry I got a little carried away," he said. "I know that this wasn't exactly the way we planned it." To Brennan he said "One man and one bird, dead because of a comic book."
Brennan smirked maliciously. "Or to be more precise, one man, one parrot and two stool pigeons," he replied.
Herb was ashen. Finally the gravity of the situation hit Kyle, too.
"Y-you can't kill us here," he told Brennan.
"You're right," Brennan replied, waving them towards the counter with his .38. "Get over there." The pair obeyed. "Open it," he ordered Herb. Grasping the door knob with one hand, Herb squeezed with all his might, accompanied by a loud grunt.
"It won't open!" he said.
"What? Get out of the way!" Brennan swooped in between the pair, and in one fluid move, seized the knob with his free hand a pushed the door open. Lunging forward, Herb slammed into Brennan's hips with both hands, sending him tumbling loudly to the bottom of the wooden steps. Barely catching himself, Herb yanked the door shut and tried to catch his breath.
Kyle looked at him in amazement. "Dude," he exclaimed. "You are the superhero!"
Herb watched the evening news the following night with less enthusiasm than he would have expected, although he was pleased with the DA’s decision to file murder charges against Pete Brennan. Herb would have liked a charge of animal cruelty tacked on as well, but there was no feathered corpse to be found, and subsequently, no avian autopsy. Brennan, recuperating from a concussion and three broken ribs, admitted that Hector was unarmed when he shot him, but claimed that he “reached real quick behind his back,” leading Brennan to think otherwise. Brennan confessed to planting the .22 only because he didn’t think that the police would believe his story. Furthermore, he accused Herb and Kyle of pushing him down the basement stairs in an attempt to murder and rob him. The cops weren’t buying any of it. Herb, far from feeling like a superhero, was just happy that the DA didn’t charge him and Kyle with obstruction of justice.
“You and your friend should have gone to the police if you had new information,” a Sergeant Lucretia Samuels admonished him.
“He’s really not my friend,” Herb replied.
Aware that the telephone had been ringing loudly, Herb picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Herb, how are you doing?”
Herb sighed. “Not bad, Kyle, considering you almost got us killed yesterday.”
“What are you talking about?” Kyle said. “I was ready to push him down the steps if you hadn’t.”
“Glad to know that you had my back,” Herb replied.
Kyle’s sarcasm detector was obviously not working. “No problem. What are friends for?” Then he asked “Did you hear that the Citizens’ Crime Commission wants to give us a $10,000 reward?”
Herb hadn’t. “Really? No, Kyle, I didn’t. That’s good, I suppose.”
“The way that I look at it, $5,000 apiece isn’t really enough to start a business, but if we pool our resources, and maybe get a small business loan, we can take over Brennan’s place when he goes to jail! We’ll rename it ‘Kyle’s Komics,’ with two K’s. I’ll handle the customers, you’ll handle the bookkeeping.”
“I don’t think so,” Herb replied.
“Okay, the name’s negotiable. How about Kyle and Herb’s Comics?”
Herb managed a chuckle. “I’m still gonna have to pass,” he said.
“Oh, all right,” Kyle conceded. “But if you ever come across another crime case, let me in on it again. I think I’ve got a knack for solving mysteries. Admit it: things wouldn’t have been the same without me.”
“That’s for sure,” Herb said.
“Goodnight, Herb.”
“Goodnight, Lestrade,” Herb said, leaving Kyle to figure that one out by himself.
- Allan M. Heller
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