San Diego Noir

all—a goddamn baseball stadium, PETCO Park, sitting smack dab in the middle of the Gaslamp Quarter like something a tornado had uprooted from the suburbs and dropped from the sky.

Fenderson couldn’t have felt more disoriented were he hanging upside down on a float at the Doo Dah Parade.

But business was business, and business today was here at Comic-Con in San Diego. Distractions aside, Fenderson had to focus and look for what he’d paid a ticket scalper the preposterous fee of $100 to find among all these funny book-obsessed weirdos: a great illustrator willing to work on the cheap.

For all his talent and ingenuity, after fifteen years of trying, Fenderson had yet to make it big as a writer, either of crime novels or screenplays, and he was at his wits end, attempting to figure out why. It surely had nothing to do with the work itself; compared to the crap some name authors were getting paid six figures or more a book to churn out, Fenderson knew his stuff was as good or better than anyone’s. His premises were startlingly original, his characters were unforgettable, and his dialogue crackled with realism.

He knew all this because some of his best drinking buddies in the business—who had no reason to lie to him, right?—had often told him so, and the host of the public television show Bebe’s Bookshelf gave his last book, Murderer, a rave review. So his problem, as near as Fenderson could tell, could only be chalked up to one thing: timing. He was simply in the habit of missing the crest of the wave.

It was an error he was determined to correct immediately. This time, he was going to be ahead of the curve, and the curve at present led directly to the graphic novel. Glorified, oversized comic books with hardback covers— that was what everyone was buying, especially the suits in Hollywood. You wrote the right graphic novel, big-dollar option deals were almost certain to follow. The fan boys in the movie business couldn’t get enough, and there seemed to be no end in sight to all the money they were willing to throw around in search of the next Hellboy franchise or Watchmen blockbuster.

Fenderson didn’t know Hellboy from Superboy, but he knew a gravy train when he saw one, and he’d driven down to San Diego for the express purpose of hitching a ride on this one. He had the “novel” part of his graphic novel already in hand—typical of his ability to produce amazing work in a short period of time, he’d written the 400 -page manuscript in less than a month—and now all he needed was an artist to illustrate the ten-page proposal he’d put together. He’d done enough research to know that no editor would glance at five pages of his book without illustrations, so an artist was a must. Preferably, someone extremely talented, desperate for a break, and dumb enough to do the job for free, based on Fenderson’s bullshit promises of a big payday on the back end. Gullible, that was the word. He needed a brilliant artist who was also gullible.

He couldn’t imagine he’d have much trouble finding such a geek in this room; pimple-faced kids dragging portfolio cases bursting with artwork from one booth to the next were everywhere. Some were in costume, more just wore geeky T-shirts, but they all looked ripe for the picking. All Fenderson had to do was find one who could actually do professional-grade work, then give him the big pitch: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to collaborate with one of the most critically acclaimed authors in crime fiction on a graphic novel project that editors and movie producers were already lining up to see. Who the hell could say no to that?

Fenderson roamed the halls for two hours, peeking over shoulders, eavesdropping on conversations, taking his sweet time. He wanted to get this right, and it would be all too easy to make a mistake in light of his inexperience in such matters. Having as little interest in comic books as he did, all the artwork on display at the Con pretty much looked the same to him. The godawful stuff was fairly obvious, but everything else struck him as equally juvenile and absurd. His contempt for the entire medium made it difficult for him to view the work of the artists in attendance with anything approaching a critical eye.

But then he saw the fattest Luke Skywalker he’d ever laid eyes on showing a stack of large black-and-white pages to a mildly attentive fanzine publisher, and he thought he had his man. Chubby wore a five o’clock shadow and was dressed as if for a blind date on Tatooine, but the artwork he was flashing with obvious pride had a noirish power to it that even Fenderson couldn’t miss. Fenderson waited for his conversation with the publisher to peter out, being jostled on all sides as he did so by cardboard-clad Stormtroopers and video game characters swathed in felt and Velcro, then moved in on him as he started to walk away, a shark chasing fresh blood in the water.

“Ken Fenderson?”

Fenderson spun around at the sound of his name, startled. Fat Luke slipped off the hook and disappeared, swallowed up by the crowd.

The young woman who had called out to him did not look familiar. He made a point of forgetting homely girls as soon as he met them, and this one, at first glance, was as homely as they got: lifeless, shoulder-length black hair, zero makeup, and the posture of a plow horse, all wrapped up in the standard uniform of a violin teacher.

“Yes?” Fenderson said warily.

She showed him a small smile he could not quite read. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

Had she been a looker, a lie would have been called for. But for this sad sister, the truth was good enough. “No, frankly, I don’t.”

She offered the odd smile again. “Jennifer Alcott. I was a student of yours once. ‘Writing the Can’t-Miss Screenplay,’ class of winter ’96.”

Oh shit, Fenderson thought. One of those.

For two years, back in the mid-’90s, he had taught a beginner’s screenwriting class at the Learning Bridge, a low-rent extension-course outfit in the San Fernando Valley that no longer existed. The pay had been shit and the students had been worse, retirees and wannabes from all walks of life who laughingly thought they had the chops to become the next big A-list Hollywood scribe. None of them could write their way out of a paper bag, and it was all Fenderson could do to read their stuff week after week without retching all over the page.

“Oh. Hey,” Fenderson said. The name Jennifer Alcott rang a very dim bell, but the face meant nothing to him.

“It’s such a surprise to see you. What are you doing here?” Alcott asked, not appearing to be pleasantly surprised at all.

“Actually, I’m looking for an artist. For a graphic novel I’m doing for Dark Horse.” He’d read somewhere that Dark Horse was one of the top publishers in the graphic novel arena, and implying he already had a deal in place there was a lie he was prepared to tell at the Con all weekend long.

“An artist? Really.” Fenderson thought she would flash that bizarre smile of hers again, but this time all she did was nod. “Well, what a coincidence.”