The Book of Lies - Brad Meltzer [71]
. . . and on the worst days, on birthdays, I’ve talked to her out loud, and asked her questions, and cried and laughed and sobbed at her imagined responses, especially the ones where she hints that she forgives me. Jerry Siegel had it right. We all live best in our own imaginations.
“Cal, you wanna sit?” my dad asks. “You look green.”
“I’m great,” I insist, realizing I’m now leaning against the filing cabinet. I go to stand up straight. No. Leaning’s just fine. And I’m not the only one.
Across from me, Naomi looks exhausted as she hooks her armpit over the top of a cubicle like a crutch. I was so lost in my own pity parade, I almost forgot. Her son. Her son the orphan. The moment she sees me watching, she stands up straight. I offer a nod of understanding. She turns away, kicking herself for giving even that tiniest piece of her puzzle.
“So this stuff with Jerry’s dad’s murder—you were saying there was some kinda search?” Naomi asks.
“Yup-yup . . . that’s where the weird gets weirder,” the curator says. “In the weeks after Mitchell Siegel’s shooting, there was no police report filed, no investigation opened, no search for any suspects. Even worse, despite the two bullets in the dad’s chest, the story that’s told throughout the Siegel family is that Mitchell died of a heart attack. Even today, Jerry’s widow and daughter say that Jerry told them his dad had a heart attack from the robbery. And even worse than all that, in the fifty years since that day . . . in the thousands—literally thousands—of interviews where they asked Jerry where he got the idea for his bulletproof Superman, he never—never once—says it was from his dad. Never even mentions his dad in a single interview!”
“Maybe Jerry just wanted his privacy.”
“I agree,” the curator says. “But that doesn’t mean he didn’t need someplace to deal with it. Just look at the original stories: The first character Jerry created after his dad’s death wasn’t Superman. Instead, Jerry was obsessed with the bad guys, focusing his entire tale around a villain. It was the same in Action Comics,” he adds, waving his hand over the pristine comic book. “Have you even read it? Superman doesn’t fight aliens and monsters in here. He goes to Washington, D.C., and fights corruption in government and foreign spies. In fact, when you look at the Cleveland newspaper the day after his dad is killed—if you want to see what Jerry was looking at the day after he lost his father—there’s an op-ed saying that we don’t need vigilantes anymore, and it’s written by a man named Luther, spelled er instead of or.”
“Okay, so wait,” Naomi challenges. “Now we’re supposed to believe all the bad guys in comic books are real?”
“No, you’re missing it,” the curator says, waving the single photocopy of Jerry Siegel’s early Superman endeavor. “All the bad guys aren’t real. But in Jerry’s case, one of them might be.”
49
Okay, let me be as nice as I can about this,” Naomi begins. “Um . . . did you make all this crap up?”
“This isn’t theory. This is history,” the curator insists. “And it’s a search for one of the greatest lost books in the world—a story that eventually gave birth to one of society’s most recognized heroes.”
“And also involves kryptonite as a major plot element,” Naomi chides. “No offense, but I’ve got bigger worries than solving an eighty-year-old murder.”
“I’m not the only one who believes it. Now I don’t know if they hid it in the art or just in the story—but there’s a reason those original Superman pages are still missing. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s what Jerry put in there.”
“He put his dad’s killer?” I ask.
“He had to deal with it somewhere,” the curator repeats.
“So he put his dad’s killer in the pages of a comic book?”
“Y’know where he got the name Lois Lane from? Lola Lane, one of Jerry’s favorite actresses.