Hoodwink

FOUR

I was still puzzling about Cybil Wade’s gun when Dancer called my name. But not from close by; from across the room, where he had wandered and joined a group of three other men. He was making beckoning gestures, so I went over there before he could shout again or do something else to make a horse’s ass out of himself.

“Want you to meet the last three Pulpeteers,” he said when I got to him. Then he blinked a couple of times, with alcoholic surprise at what he took to be his own cleverness. “Hah! The Three Pulpeteers, by God. How about that?”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did any of the three men. They were all around sixty-five, but physically, at least, age was about all they had in common. The guy on Dancer’s left was tall, graymaned, and vaguely cadaverous-looking, dressed in a dark suit and a blue tie with yellow ovals on it that looked like eyes. The guy in the middle was a head shorter, pudgy, with a Friar Tuck fringe of reddish hair, wearing a loose green turtleneck sweater and a pair of Levi’s. And the guy on my right was of average height, handsome in an athletic sort of way, brown-haired and sporting a neat black mustache; he wore casual but expensive sports clothes.

Dancer performed the introductions in his mildly insulting way and managed not to spill the rest of his drink on anybody while he was doing it. If I had had to guess which was which beforehand, based on their pulp writing and on subsequent endeavors, I would have said the tall one was Ivan Wade, the pudgy one Bert Praxas, and the well-dressed one Waldo Ramsey. And I would have been wrong three out of three.

The somewhat cadaverous guy turned out to be Praxas-an even more prolific writer than Jim Bohannon in his day, although he had been retired for close to twenty years. In addition to his novels about The Spectre, written under the house pseudonym of Robert M. Barclay, he’d done several hundred mystery and detective stories and half as many airwar adventures for Sky Fighters and the other aviation magazines. But The Spectre novels were far and away what he was best known and most remembered for; the brochure Dancer had given me said he’d become something of a cult figure among collectors and aficionados and often appeared at conventions of this type.

The pudgy, red-haired guy, it developed, was Waldo Ramsey. He had been something of a minor pulp writer, in the same sense that Dancer had been minor-a competent storyteller whose work for Midnight Detective and others was sometimes dazzling but more often careless and indifferent. But where Dancer had slid steadily downhill into hackdom, Ramsey had found himself, nurtured his talent over the years, and climbed upward into respectability and success. He had been writing suspense novels since the mid-fifties, and in the past few years had hit it semibig with a pair of ambitious espionage books that he had sold and adapted to film. Which probably explained why he was dressed as sloppily as he was: it’s the people with money who can afford to dress at public functions as if they haven’t got money.

And the athletic, mustachioed man was Ivan Wade, Cybil’s husband and Kerry’s father. He had a quiet, reserved sort of face, with all the features grouped in close to the center, and gentle eyes. According to the convention brochure, he had started out writing for Weird Tales, Dime Mystery, and other fantasy/horror pulps, and gone on from there to radio scripting, the slick magazines, some TV work, and finally to novels and nonfiction books on occult and magic themes. The things he wrote about, and the things Cybil had written about, made we wonder what it had been like for Kerry growing up. It was an irrelevant thought, but I wondered just the same.

When the introductions were over and I had finished shaking hands with the three of them, Ramsey said good-naturedly, “A pulp-collecting private eye. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

“I guess it is a little unusual,” I said.

“You can say that again.”

Praxas asked me, “What do you think of our little mystery? I assume Russ has filled you in on the details by now.”

“Damn right I have,” Dancer said.

I said, “I don’t know what to think. Not yet.”

“If whoever it is is serious,” Ramsey said, “he’s also crazy. He’d have to be to think any or all of us are plagiarists.”

“Well, I suppose we’ll be contacted in any case,” Praxas said. He had a sepulchral voice, like John Carradine or Karloff without the lisp, that sharpened his cadaverous image; the more you looked at and listened to him, the more it seemed he ought to be the one who wrote horror fiction. He would have made a beautiful stereotype. “Should we tell you when that happens?”

“If you like,” I said. “I don’t know what Dancer told you, but there’s really not much I can do except keep my eyes and ears open and offer advice if the need arises.”

“Told them you were the best damn private eye in the business,” Dancer said. “Told them you’d get to the bottom of it whether you were getting paid or not.”

He was beginning to irk me. The drunker he got, the harder it was to keep on liking him. “Yeah, well, I’m not the best, and I’m not likely to get to the bottom of anything. The fact is, I’m here mostly as just another pulp fan.”

“Sure you are. Best damn private eye in the business.”

Ramsey said, “You’re a pain in the ass, Russ, you know that?”

“Damn right I am. Best damn ass pain in the business.”

Ramsey shook his head and watched Dancer knock back what was left in his glass. Then he asked me, “You been a detective long?”

“About thirty years, public and private.”

“How long collecting pulps?”

“Same.”

“You go to conventions regularly?”

“No. This is my first.”

“Mine too. Bert here thrives on them, you know.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Praxas said. “I go to conventions for the same reason I give talks at colleges and universities: I enjoy meeting fans and it helps keep my work alive. But I hardly thrive on them.”

Dancer said, “Good for the old ego, huh, Bertie?”

“Yes. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. How about the money?”

“Money?”

“Sure. The old honorarium.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“How many cons you go to in a year?”

“A half-dozen or so. Why?”

“All of them on the pulps?”

“No. Most are science fiction-or comic-oriented.”

“Pay better or worse than this one?”

“About the same.”

“What about the college lectures? They pay good?”

“I suppose so.”

“How much per? Five hundred?”

“In most cases, yes …”

“Plus expenses,“Dancer said. “A half-dozen cons, a half-dozen lectures, that’s six grand a year. Plus expenses. By God, Bertie, it’s not a bad scam. Beats hell out of beating a typewriter. Maybe I’ll try it myself.”

“I doubt if you could, Russ,” Ivan Wade said.

“Oh, is that so? Why not?”

“Because you’re an obnoxious drunk.”

“Hah?”

“Convention organizers aren’t interested in drunks. Neither are college faculties. And neither are the fans; they don’t care to watch sodden hacks stumbling around making fools of themselves.”

It got quiet among the five of us. Wade had spoken softly, evenly, but each of the words was like an arrow coated with venom. Dancer opened his mouth, closed it again as if he were still casting around inside his head for a suitable comeback. He had absorbed abusive remarks from Bo hannon and Cybil Wade and Ramsey, but they had each had a bantering quality; he could deal with a few harmless insults among old cronies. But he didn’t seem to know how to handle the real thing-a combination of dislike and disgust.

Ten seconds went away. And finally Dancer found words, so inadequate after all that silence that they were an anticlimax: “So I’m a drunk and a hack, Ivan, so what?”

“So nothing,” Wade said. “So you’re a drunk and a hack, that’s all.”

Dancer did not get angry, or laugh, or shrug it off. Wade’s words seemed to have cut deep inside him, sliced into a nerve somewhere. Pain showed on his face, but it was not self-pity this time-it was hurt just as genuine as Wade’s disgust, a reflection of the festering spiritual anguish that had made him a drunk in the first place.

His eyes shifted away from Wade, flicked over Ramsey and Praxas to me, and then focused downward on the empty glass in his hand. Without saying anything, he turned from us and went to the bar.

Ramsey said, “You put it into him kind of deep, didn’t you, Ivan?”

“Did I?” Wade said. He shrugged, his face impassive. “If you’ll all excuse me …” And he went away too, over toward the windows.

“What was that all about?” I asked Ramsey and Praxas. “Something between the two of them?”

“You could say that,” Ramsey answered.

“Mind if I ask what it is?”

“It’s a long story,” Praxas said. “And ancient history.”

Which meant that he didn’t want to discuss it. Neither did Ramsey, judging from his expression. So I let it drop; it was none of my business, really. Unless it had a bearing on the extortion business, and that seemed doubtful.

Dancer came back from the bar with a fresh drink. But he didn’t rejoin the three of us; he plopped himself down in a chair not far away and stared out at the mosaic of city lights. Then, almost at once, he began to sing. Not in the loud boisterous way of most drunks at a party; in a subdued and dolorous voice that barely carried to where we were standing. I could just make out the words-the same four-line, mostly Spanish verse over and over, not so much a song as a chant. Or a lament.

“No tengo tabaco, “No tengo papel, “No tengo dinero- “Goddammit to hell. While the three of us were listening to that, not saying anything, Jim Bohannon came wandering over. He stopped beside me, cocked his head in Dancer’s direction, and said to Praxas, “Some things don’t change much in thirty years, I reckon.”

“Apparently not.”

Ramsey saw me looking puzzled. “Russ used to recite that verse at Pulpeteer meetings,” he said, “every time he dived into the sauce. Drunker he got, the more he’d feel sorry for himself; and the sorrier he felt, the more he’d recite. Used to drive us crazy.”

“Well, at least he’s learned to be quiet about it,“Bohannon said.

I asked, “Did he make it up himself?”

“No. It’s an old cowboy lament, from down along the Mexican border-”

There was a sudden commotion behind us, in the center of the room: loud voices and the sound of glass shattering. Bohannon and I both spun around; all the party noises seemed to stop at once, including Dancer’s singing. Twenty feet away two men stood facing each other, a broken highball glass and a streak of wetness and melting ice cubes like a dividing line on the carpet between them. One of the men was the scrawny ex-editor, Frank Colodny. The other one I didn’t know; he was a dusty, sixtyish guy wearing hornrimmed glasses and an ancient sports jacket with elbow patches.

Colodny had his right hand up, forefinger extended and shaking within an inch of the other guy’s chin. His face was congested and his eyes had bright, hot little lights in them. “Stay the hell away from me, Meeker, I’m warning you.”

“Say that a little louder,” the man named Meeker said. He looked just the opposite of Colodny-calm and coldly deliberate. “Let everybody hear it.”

“You crazy bastard-”

“Louder, Frank. Louder.”

Colodny seemed to have a belated awareness of his audience; he lowered his arm, licked his lips, and backed off a step. Then he clamped his lips together, made them disappear into a thin white slash. And swung around and stalked out of the suite, brushing past a startled-looking Lloyd Underwood who had hurried in and was half blocking the entrance.

The other man, Meeker, watched him go with a faint, humorless smile plucking at the corners of his mouth. When Colodny had disappeared, Meeker sat on his heels and began to pick up the broken shards of glass. And as if that was a cue for the rest of us, the frozen tableau dissolved and people began moving around and talking again, letting the mood of the party regenerate like new skin over a minor wound.

“No tengo tabaco, “No tengo papel…”

Bohannon said, “Now what the devil is Frank so heated up about?”

“That’s a good question,” Praxas said. “He seemed jittery and upset when he got here.”

I asked, “Who’s the fellow named Meeker?”

“Ozzie Meeker. An oldtimer like us.” ‘“A writer? I don’t recognize the name.”

“No. An artist,”

“He worked with Frank at Action House in the forties,” Ramsey said. “Did most of the detective and Western covers, and some of the interior black-and-whites.”

“His name wasn’t in the convention brochure, was it?”

Praxas shook his head. “I understand Lloyd Underwood wasn’t able to locate him until after the brochures were printed. But he’s exhibiting some of his work in the Art Room.”

“Nostalgia got to him, same as it got to us,” Bohannon said. “He was one of us for a while, you know.”

“The Pulpeteers, you mean?” I asked.

“Right. He started coming to meetings in the late forties, after he went to work for Action House. He and Colodny were always friendly back then. Wonder what set them off now, after all these years?”

Nobody seemed to know.

“No tengo dinero- “Goddammit to hell…”

The little group we made began to break up one by one. Ramsey drifted off to the bar for another drink; Bohannon’s wife, a pleasant gray-haired lady, came over and got him and took him away to meet someone; and one of the convention organizers, or maybe just a fan, collared Praxas and began asking him questions about The Spectre’s sex life. Which left me standing by myself, listening to Dancer sing his monotonous little lament. And wondering about things like the.38 in Cybil Wade’s purse, Dancer’s dislike for Colodny, the sudden tension between Colodny and Meeker, the deeper-seated tension between Dancer and Ivan Wade.

Not that there was much point in my worrying about any of it. I had no particular desire to involve myself in a lot of private, thirty-year-old interrelationships among ex-pulp writers. Despite what Dancer had gone around telling people, the old lone wolf was here to enjoy himself more than he was here to work at detection.

And one of the ways I might like to enjoy myself started toward me just then, smiling in her frank, attractive way.

Kerry Wade.