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get to New York?”
    “Once in a while.”
    “Call next time.”
    “I will.”
    Culver searched for words. “This must be a rough morning for you,” he said. “I know Roscoe Kane meant a lot to you.”
    “Yes, he did. We sort of had the final audience with him, I guess, last night in the bar.”
    Culver sipped some coffee, sighed heavily. “At least I got to tell the man how much I admired his writing. For all the money he made, he had precious little recognition.”
    “I would have thought money was his primary goal,” Cynthia said, with a little shrug. She turned to me, still sympathetic. “I don’t mean to be unkind, Mal. I know Kane was your mentor, of sorts. I just mean, I don’t think we should feel too sorry for him, in terms of his writing career. Beyond the publishing problems of his later years, I mean. Because I don’t think Roscoe Kane had any literary pretentions; he was a craftsman, if you will, and he made his fortune, and I’d imagine he felt quite content having done so.”
    Culver shook his head no. “I disagree. Kane wasn’t a hack by any means”—he glanced at me—“you must remember that ‘craftsman’ is Cynthia’s euphemism for hack.” He looked back at her sharply. “You seem to have forgotten he was a peer of Hammett and Chandler’s, the last ‘star performer’ of the original
Black Mask
crowd....”
    Cynthia half-smiled. “Don’t you think I know that?” she said, with the gentlest condescension.
    Something was going on beneath the surface of this literary discussion that I couldn’t quite pick up on; and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
    Culver looked at me again. “Anyway, I’m very sorry, Mallory. Just wanted you to know.”
    “I appreciate that. And I’m sure Roscoe appreciated hearing your words of praise, too. You’re one of the few modern mystery writers he had any respect for.”
    Culver smiled a little. “That’s nice to hear.”
    “I’m glad to meet you, too,” I said. “I’ve always admired your McClain series. And I’m also a big fan of your brother’s. Is he attending the convention?”
    Culver’s face froze.
    “No,” he said. He plucked the check from the table and stood. “Excuse me while I take care of this,” he said, and rose and strode off toward the mini-gazebo housing the cashier.
    “What was that all about?” I asked Cynthia.
    “He and his brother don’t speak,” she said. “It’s simple envy on both their parts.... Tim gets the good reviews, and Curt gets the Hollywood sales.”
    Culver’s twin brother, Curt—who wrote under the name Curt Clark—was the author of numerous comedy caper novels, a good half dozen of which had been snapped up by the movies. But it was Culver’s Hammett-like novels about professional thief McClain that had earned the critical raves, as well as a couple of Edgars and several overseas awards.
    “Didn’t mean to step on any toes,” I said.
    “Oh, he’s just in a gloomy mood today,” she said. “I think being with Roscoe Kane so shortly before his death made Tima little dour, shall we say. Contemplating his own mortality—which of course is the male equivalent of the navel.”
    She said this with the tiniest cocktail-party smile, and got a genuine smile out of me, despite my own mood. She was able to get away with saying the nastiest things by saying them in the most good-natured, offhand way.
    “I liked your Hammett biography,” I said. “How’d you swing the cooperation of the estate?”
    “Tact and patience,” she said. “Something the men who’d approached the estate hadn’t bothered trying.”
    “I have to admit I was surprised you wrote a book about a tough-guy writer, what with your leaning toward the more genteel sort of mystery.”
    Cynthia had made her reputation writing drawing-room mysteries, intelligent, urbane American versions of the Agatha Christie formula. Lately she’d begun doing occasional “big” books, suspense novels in the vein of Mary Higgins Clark; at