Hoodwink

NINETEEN

The town of Wickstaff, Arizona, was one of those places plunked down in the middle of nowhere that make you wonder about their origins. There was nothing much surrounding it in any direction except rough terrain dominated by cacti, scrub brush, and eroded lava pinnacles-mile after mile of sun-blasted emptiness that stretched away to low, reddish foothills on three sides. Two roads cut through it north-south and east-west, both of them county-maintained and both two-lane blacktop; scattered here and there in its vicinity were a few hardscrabble ranches. And as far as I could tell, that was all there was. So why had it been created and nurtured in the first place? What had kept it alive when hundreds of others in the Southwest, including the fabled Tombstone, which was not all that far away and in a better geographical location, died natural deaths and became ghosts crumbling away into ruin or tourist bait?

On the outskirts was a sign that said, with evident civic pride, that the current population was the same as the date Wickstaff had been founded: 1897. I passed it, driving the cranky Duster I had rented in Tucson, a few minutes past noon on Wednesday. The temperature was in the nineties, but streaky clouds and heat haze gave the sky a whitish cast, made the sun look like a boiled egg, and kept the glare down outside. Inside, the air-conditioner whirred and clanked like an old Hoover vacuum cleaner and tunneled dust along with cool air through the vents.

I felt somewhat relieved to finally get where I’d been going. Twenty hours alone on an airplane, in a motel, driving back-country roads gives you too much time to think about things. Like Eberhardt and how marriages can go sour. And the murders, how they might have been committed. And Cybil Wade’s affair with Colodny. And Ivan Wade’s jealousy. And Kerry-mostly Kerry. I had lots of ideas, some of them good, some of them not so good, some of them unsettling; but on more than one level, it came right down to this: Was Ivan Wade guilty of murder or wasn’t he? Without knowing the answer to that, I could not resolve my situation with Kerry or convince the San Francisco cops that Russ Dancer was innocent.

But now here I was, welcome to Wickstaff, and I could start doing things instead of brooding about them. The first thing I could do was to find out where Colodny had lived when he wasn’t keeping house with a bunch of ghosts. The second thing after that was to find out how to get to Colodnyville.

Neither figured to be difficult, Wickstaff being as small as it was, and they weren’t. The town had a three-block main street, with about a third of the buildings of grandfatherly vintage, made out of adobe brick and sporting Western-style false fronts. One of these in the second block housed something called the Elite Cafe. I parked in front and went in there, on the theory that if anybody knows everybody in a small town, it’s the people who run a local eatery. It was a good theory in this case: a dour middle-aged waitress told me Colodny had boarded with a Mrs. Duncan on Quartz Street, turn right at the next corner, three blocks down, first house on your left. I also learned that word had found its way here from San Francisco about Colodny’s death; the waitress asked me if I was kin or a friend of his, and when I said no she said, “He was a mean old bastard,” and left it at that. Colodny, it seemed, had not been any better liked among the folks of Wickstaff than he had among the Pulpeteers.

I went out and got into the Duster and turned right at the next corner, drove three blocks down, and stopped again in front of the first house on my left. It was a big frame house, somewhat weathered, with a wide front porch that was shaded by paloverde trees. A Conestoga wagon wheel, painted white, had been imbedded in the patchy front lawn, and against it was propped a sign that said: Room for Rent. On the porch, in the shade, a fat woman in a straw hat sat in a wicker chair and peered out at me with kindled interest.

The walk from the car to the porch was maybe thirty yards, but I felt wet when I got there. The Arizona heat was something; so was that starched-looking sky. And so was the fat woman. She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she had an angelic face, a voice that came out of a whiskey keg, a pair of raisinlike eyes that picked my pocket and counted the money in my wallet. The most interesting thing about her, though, was the fact that she didn’t sweat. She sat there in her chair, swaddled in heat, and her face was powder dry; she didn’t even look uncomfortable. It seemed unnatural somehow, particularly when I could feel myself dripping and simmering in front of her, like an ice cube on a hot stove.

“Hot day,” I said.

“Is it? Didn’t notice.”

“Are you Mrs. Duncan?”

“That’s me. It’s one-fifty per week, meals included.”

“What is?”

“The room. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“No, ma’am. Not exactly.”

She lost interest in me. She didn’t move, her expression didn’t change, but the light of avarice went out of her raisin eyes and was replaced by a dull glow of boredom. If it had not required too much effort, she might have yawned in my face. Or told me to go away. As it was she just sat still and watched me sweat.

“I’m here about Frank Colodny,” I said.

That didn’t interest her much either. “Policeman?”

“Private investigator, from San Francisco.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Yes, ma’am. Would you mind answering a few questions?”

“About Frank?”

“Yes, about Frank.”

“Don’t see why I should, if you’re not a cop.”

“It might help save a man’s life, Mrs. Duncan.”

“Whose life?”

“The man in San Francisco charged with killing Colodny,” I said. “I think he’s innocent and I’m trying to prove it.”

“If he’s been charged he must be guilty.”

“Not in this case. If you knew the facts-”

“I’m not interested,” she said.

We looked at each other. She was not going to give an inch, you could see that; she was a sweet old bitch. I rubbed sweat off my forehead with the back of one hand, and that made her mouth twitch in what might have been a smile. Then I dragged out my wallet and opened it and took out a five-dollar bill. That put the smile away, made the avarice reappear in her eyes-not much of it, just about five dollars’ worth.

“Answers,” I said. “Okay?”

She held out one flabby arm. I gave her the five and she made it disappear into the folds of her housedress. The greed-light disappeared with it. She was bored again, now that she had the money.

I asked her, “How long did Colodny board with you?”

“Six years, give or take.”

“Where did he live before that?”

“Place over on Cholla that burned down. Most of the time he lived out in the hills with his wife.”

“Wife? I didn’t know he was married.”

It wasn’t a question, so she didn’t say anything.

I said, “Where can I find her?”

“Graveyard, I reckon. Been dead, those six years.”

“What did she die of?”

“Suffocated in the fire, so they said.”

“Accidental fire?”

“Smoking in bed. Her, not him.”

“What was her name?”

“Lisa Horseman.”

“That’s an Indian name, isn’t it?”

“Navajo. She was a half-breed,” Mrs. Duncan said, and curled her lip to let me know what she thought of half-breeds and interracial marriages.

“Was she from Wickstaff?”

“Folks had a ranch nearby.”

“How long were she and Colodny married?”

“Since he come here, back in the early fifties.”

“Did they have any children?”

“Nope.”

“Are her relatives still living?”

“Nope.”

“Did Colodny still spend time in the ghost town after she died?”

“Ghost town. That’s a laugh.”

“How do you mean?”

“You fixing to go out there, are you?”

“I was, yes.”

“Then you’ll see what I mean when you get there.”

“But he did go there regularly?”

“Sure he did. Two-three days a week.”

Which meant that he maintained some sort of home in Colodnyville, probably the same one he’d shared with his wife when she was alive. I went on to ask her if the local police had stopped by to see her and to check through Colodny’s belongings-a routine undertaking in homicide cases where the victim is killed in another area or state, and has no immediate next of kin.

She said, “They have, but wasn’t much for them to go through.”

“No? Why not?”

“He didn’t keep much here,” she said. A small bitterness had crept into her voice, as if she begrudged that fact. The police were not the only ones who had checked through Colodny’s belongings in this house. “Clothes, some books, not much else.”

“Did the police go out to Colodnyville too?”

“I suppose. They didn’t tell me.”

“How do I get there?”

“Straight out of town to the east until you come to Ocotillo Road, winds up into the foothills. Old dirt track off there about a mile in. You’ll see a sign. Crazy old fool put up a sign.”

“One more question. Has anyone else been around asking about Colodny in the past few days?”

“Just you. Hyped-up dude named Lloyd Underwood called him three-four weeks ago, said he was a pulp magazine collector. Said he’d heard about Frank from some other collector passed through these parts on a book-buying trip. That’s why Frank went off to San Francisco. Pulp magazines,” she said, and curled her lip again. They were right up there with half-breeds and interracial marriages in her esteem.

“But nobody’s called since?”

“No. Who’d call? He didn’t have any friends.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Mean and tetched, that’s why. Married a half-breed, kept to himself like he had secrets, bit your head off when you spoke to him, lived out in that godforsaken place claiming he was a prospector.” She made a piglike snorting sound. “Prospector. No gold out there anymore, not in fifty years; he didn’t take a hundred dollars out of those hills in all the time he was there. But he always had plenty of money just the same.”

“If you disliked him so much, why did you give him a room in your house?”

She looked at me as if I might be a little tetched myself. “He paid me one-fifty a week,” she said. “Why do you think?”

I left her sitting there, not bothering to thank her or to say goodbye, and pushed back through the sweltering air to the street. The back of my shirt and most of the underarm areas were sopping wet, but not one drop of sweat had appeared anywhere on her face or arms and her dress was desert-dry. I disliked her for that as much as for anything else.

Back in the car, I let the dusty air conditioner dry me off as I drove to Main Street again, then turned east on the country road that cut through it in that direction. There was not much traffic and nothing much to look at except lava formations and tall saguaro cactus. The sky was so milky now that the sun looked like a cataracted eye. That and the heat glaze and the absence of movement anywhere beyond the road itself gave me an eerie feeling, as if I were driving in a place not of this world. My turn in the Twilight Zone.

I added what Mrs. Duncan had told me to what I already knew about Colodny, and it fit together nicely in the pattern I had evolved. He had come here thirty years ago with his boodle from Magnum Pictures, bought the ghost town, married, settled down to act out his fantasy of life as a gold prospector, and thumbed his nose at the world for a quarter of a century. The death of his wife, maybe coupled with creeping old age, had left him lonely; that had to be why he’d spent more time in Wickstaff over the past six years. It might also explain why he had consented to attend the pulp con and the Pulpeteer reunion. And why he had tried to force Cybil Wade to share a bed with him again after all those years.

The fact that he kept most of his possessions in Colodnyville might also be significant. If he had retained anything incriminating from his New York days, such as evidence of his partner’s identity in the “Hoodwink” plagiarism-and that embarrassing photograph Cybil had told me about- it was likely to be there. Unless the local law had found it and confiscated it, of course. If I had no luck myself I would have to check with them right away. But I hoped that if they had found something, it was not the photograph; that was not for anybody to look at, including me. The first thing I’d do if I came across it myself would be to shut my eyes and burn it.

The road took me in a more or less straight line for better than five miles before an intersection loomed up. On the near side was a sign that indicated the narrow two-lane cutting off to the southeast was Ocotillo Road. The foothills loomed up here, too-more lava formations, huge rocks balanced on top of each other and strewn along slopes that also bore catclaw, cholla, organ-pipe cactus abloom with pink and white and lavender flowers. Higher up, crags and limestone walls stood dark red against the starchy sky.

Ocotillo Road zigzagged through this rough terrain, sometimes climbing, sometimes dropping into shallow vales-past a lonesome and not very prosperous-looking ranchhouse tucked behind one of the hills, past stretches of the thorny brush that had given the road its name. A little more than a mile along, by the Duster’s odometer, an unpaved and badly rutted track appeared on my right, leading off onto higher ground. Tacked to the trunk of a paloverde growing alongside it was the sign, made out of weathered shingles and painted in faded black letters, that Mrs. Duncan had told me about. It said: Colodnyville — Population 2 — No Trespassing. When I made the turn there I had to slow down to a crawl. A jeep was what you needed to navigate a trail like this, and the Duster was a long way from being jeeplike. It jounced and banged and kept scraping its undercarriage on jutting rocks; I thought that one would tear the pan or at least flatten one or two tires, and I had visions of being stranded out here in the middle of nowhere with snakes and gila monsters and Christ knew what else that inhabited these rocks. But none of that happened. All that happened was that I cracked my head against the door frame a couple of times and wound up with a headache.

The trail twisted upward for a time, slid sideways, and then hooked around and along the wall of a limestone cliff. There was a pretty steep dropoff on one side; I tried not to look down in that direction because I’m a coward when it comes to high places. Then the track began to descend in a series of sharp curves that were almost switchbacks. And pretty soon it straightened out again, and I was in another hollow, not large enough to be called a valley but large enough nonetheless to contain Colodnyville.

It was not what I had expected. When you think of ghost towns you think of open spaces, two or three blocks of crumbling false-front buildings, tumbleweeds everywhere, a saloon with one of its batwings canted at a rakish angle, hitchracks and horse troughs and broken signs flapping in the wind. But that was Hollywood stereotype, not Colodnyville. Now I knew why Mrs. Duncan had said, “Ghost town. That’s a laugh.” Because it wasn’t even a town-not unless you can call four buildings huddled more or less together in a small sea of cactus and rocks a town.

All the buildings were plaster-faced adobe ruins, three of them with glassless windows, the other one with rusted iron bars like a jail and a crisscross of boards tacked up inside. The one with the window bars was the largest, maybe forty feet square, with a roof that had a little peak in front and slanted downward to the rear. There was nothing else to see except for a well dug off to one side, sporting a crooked windlass that looked about ready to collapse, and the remains of a crude wooden sluice box set up alongside it. In the crags above and beyond, there was evidence that mining had once been done here-tailings, the boarded-up entrances to at least two pocket mines. But it had never been a rich lode, judging from the ruins, nor had the miners who’d worked it stayed on for more than a few years.

I eased the Duster forward until the road began to peter out among the rocks and cacti, twenty yards or so from the nearest building and sixty yards from the nearest crag. When I got out it was like stepping into a vacuum: dead silence everywhere. Not a breathless hush, but a complete absence of sound, the way it was supposed to be on the moon. And the heat was thick, smothering, under that murky sky, acrid with the smell of dust. Sweat came popping out again and made me feel soiled and gritty.

Carefully I picked my way across to the largest building. Enough sunlight came through the haze to put a gleam on the cracked plaster facing; it looked like thin icing on a crumbled and petrified cake. There was a door cut off-center in that front wall, and when I got close enough I could see that it was made out of heavy timbers reinforced and bound with rusted iron straps. Above the latch was the hasp for a padlock, and set into the adobe was the ring that it fastened over. But it was not fastened now; the hasp stood out from the door at right angles. And lying in the dust to one side was the remains of a thick Yale lock.

I leaned down to pick up the padlock. It had been sawn through with what might have been a hacksaw, and recently: the cut ends were still shiny. Had the local police done it when they were here? Or had someone else been around?

I dropped the padlock where I’d found it, moved over to try the door. It opened, creaking a little like the door in the old Inner Sanctum radio show. At first I couldn’t see anything except gloom streaked with thin shafts of light that came through gaps in the window boarding. I stepped inside, blinked several times to help my eyes adjust from the outside glare. Then the ulterior began to take shape-a low single room beneath a slanted beam ceiling-and I got my second surprise of the past few-minutes. Or second and third, because this one was double-barreled.

The first thing was the way it was furnished. What I had expected to find was spartan prospector’s digs: bunk beds, and old potbellied stove, a table and a few chairs-that sort of thing. What I found instead was something out of an 1890s whorehouse. The room was jammed with wine-red, velvet-covered settees and chairs, rococo tables, glassed-in cabinets, a four-poster bed with a lace canopy, a fancy nickel-plated, high-closet stove, even a hanging oil lamp with what looked to be a Tiffany shade. The wine-red carpeting on the floor was worn and coated with dust, but you could tell that it had once been expensive. Colodny may have moved out here into the middle of nowhere, but it was not to live in squalor; he had taken esoteric New York tastes with him. And created a kind of decadently elegant private world for himself and his wife.

The second part of the surprise was that the place was in a shambles-it had been turned upside-down by somebody looking for something. The bed and most of the cushions had been ripped open, the canopy was in tatters, the carpet was strewn with hundreds of hardcover and paperback books that had once occupied space inside the glass-fronted cabinets; drawers had been pulled-out and emptied, the stove emptied of ash and charred wood fragments; wall cupboards stood open and their contents lay scattered everywhere. A four-foot stack of pulp magazines in one corner was about all that had been left undisturbed.

The Cochise County law would not have done anything like this. So who, then? The person who had killed Colodny and Meeker, the accomplice in the “Hoodwink” plagiarism? It added up that way. And what he’d been looking for figured to be the same thing I was here to look for: evidence that would ruin him as a plagiarist and establish his motive for murder. The big question was, had he found it?

Either way, I was here now and I was not going to leave without conducting my own search of the premises. Technically I was trespassing, but with Colodny and his wife both dead, and no next of kin, there was nobody to prosecute me. This was one time I could bend the rules a little with a clear conscience.

But even with the door open it was gloomy in there, full of shadows. I didn’t have any matches, or any particular inclination to light the oil lamps, so I would need the flashlight clipped under the Duster’s dash before I started in. I went back to the open door, through it into the hazy afternoon glare. I stood for a moment, squinting, rubbing wetness off my forehead, as my eyes readjusted to daylight. Then I took three steps toward the car.

On the fourth step something went whistling over my right shoulder, just under the ear, and made a chinking sound in the plaster facing behind me. At almost the same time, noise erupted from the rocks across the clearing, a small echoing clap of it like thunder from a long way off.

Gunshot.

Somebody’s shooting at me! And then I moved, on reflex and instinct- turned and dove headfirst back through the open doorway just as a second bullet slashed the air above me, rained chips of plaster down on my back, and another hollow explosion rolled out of the rocks like the Biblical crack of doom.