Hoodwink

SIX

When I got back to Room 1017, the door was still standing wide open, but there were lamps burning now on a pair of end tables. I did not see Kerry at first and I rapped on the panel and called out her name. She came hurrying out of the bedroom as I entered.

“You didn’t catch him,” she said in disappointed tones. Her eyes were round and dark, angry, but they softened a little as she looked at me. Which made her disappointed in the fact that the intruder had got away, not in me.

“No. Listen, you shouldn’t have left the door open.”

“The door? Why not? You don’t think he’d come back?”

I bent over and peered at the latch. There were fresh scratch marks on its lip and on the metal plate around the opening, the kind amateurs make when they set out to pick a lock. Professionals-sneak thieves, for example-know how to use tools and seldom leave marks of any kind. I straightened again and shut the door, making sure that the lock still held.

Kerry said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t know what to think. Probably not, though.”

She came up closer to me and touched my chin gently with the tips of her fingers; her eyes seemed to soften even more, to change shades-

dark green to a light emerald green-in the lamp light. “Did this happen when you fell?”

“What is it? A bruise?”

“Just a little one. Did you get a look at him?”

“No. Did you?”

“No, it was too dark, and it all happened so fast. Who do you think he was? A burglar?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I glanced around the room. The coffee table was kicked around at an off-angle near the sofa, but nothing else looked to be disturbed. Nor did anything look out of place in what I could see of the bedroom. There was a connecting door in one wall between this suite and the one on the south side; most of the larger rooms in the Continental had them-an old-fashioned custom for the easy creation of “apartments” for the wealthier clientele. But this one was locked on this side and on the other side too, and it did not look to have been tampered with. “Can you tell if anything’s missing?”

Kerry shook her head. “Cybil’s suitcase is open, but she might have left it that way herself; it doesn’t look rummaged through.”

“You’d better call Suite M and tell her and your father what happened. Have them come back here and check things over before they notify the management.”

“What are you going to do?”

“There’s something I want to check on myself. I’ll be back pretty soon.” I retreated to the door. “Lock it after me this time, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “But you’re making me nervous. Do you know something I don’t?”

“No,” I said, truthfully enough. “I’d tell you if I did.”

I went out, waited until I heard the click of the latch, and then hustled to the elevators and took one up to the sixth floor. Dancer had told me his room was 617; I found the door to it tucked inside one of those little cul-de-sacs you find in older hotels-a blind corridor maybe fifteen feet long, with two doors facing each other across it and a third door, probably to some kind of storage or maid’s closet, at the end.

There were no lights showing through the bottom louvers and no sounds from within when I put my ear against the panel. I knocked, waited for fifteen seconds, and knocked again with more emphasis. Nothing. If he was inside he was either passed out or just not opening up for anybody.

For no good reason I went from there back up to the fifteenth floor and poked my head into Suite M. The party was just about over; there were only eight or nine people left, none of them Russ Dancer. I went inside and asked Lloyd Underwood and Bert Praxas if they’d seen him in the past half-hour or knew where he’d gone. They said no.

So what? I asked myself as I hiked back to the elevators. Not being around doesn’t make him guilty of anything; he doesn’t have to be the one. Hell, it could be anybody. How many people in this city are running around tonight with whiskey fumes on their breath?

But I still wished I knew where Dancer was and where he’d been twenty minutes ago.

I could hear voices inside 1017 when I got back down to there, and it was Ivan Wade who opened up in answer to my knock. If he was upset or worried over what had happened, you could not tell it by looking at him. He wore the same aloof expression he had earlier.

He said, “Come inside. How’s your chin?”

“Sore.”

“I’m sorry it had to happen.”

“Me too. Did you find anything missing?”

“I don’t think so. My wife’s still checking.”

Kerry was standing behind him, near the couch, and when I was all the way inside she said, “Find out much on your errand?”

“No. Nothing.”

Wade said, “It was a sneak thief, I suppose.”

“Well, that’s a possibility.”

“Why a possibility? Who else could it have been?”

“Maybe it was your would-be extortionist, Dad,“Kerry said. “The one behind those letters and ‘Hoodwink’ manuscripts.”

Wade’s eyes narrowed. “That whole business is a hoax,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Of course it is. Besides, why would an extortionist break into our room?”

I said, “Did you or your wife bring anything valuable with you from home? I don’t just mean money and jewelry; I mean literary material-rare pulps, manuscripts, anything like that.”

“No,” he said. “Nothing of any special value.”

Cybil came out of the bedroom just then with her arms folded, hands against forearms, under her breasts. Her husband may have been taking this thing pretty calmly, but she wasn’t; there was anxiety in the way she moved and in the set of her face. Her lipstick was flaked and spotty where she’d worried it off with her teeth.

“Everything still there?” Wade asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure I closed my suitcase before we left for the party and the lid is raised now, but nothing inside seems to have been touched. I suppose whoever it was didn’t have time.”

Kerry said, “What could he have been after in your suitcase?”

“God knows.” But there was hesitation before she said it.

“Well, no damage done then,” Wade said. “Or at least not much damage. The best thing to do is notify the hotel manager and then forget it all happened.1’

Cybil gave him a sharp bright look. “Why do we have to notify the hotel manager?”

“It’s standard procedure, Mrs. Wade,” I told her.

She gnawed off a little more paint from her lower lip. She had things preying on her mind, you could see that-and it was not just the breaking-and-entering. Kerry had said she was a tough lady, as tough as Max Ruffe, and I believed it; and tough ladies don’t get themselves all worked up over a minor burglary attempt, not unless they suspect it isn’t so minor after all.

“Well, I’d rather not make a fuss about it,” she said finally.

“There won’t be a fuss,” Wade said. “We’ll ask the manager to be discreet.”

“Can’t we at least wait until morning?”

Wade glanced at me and I shrugged. He said to Cybil, “All right, in the morning. It’s getting late and we’re all tired.”

Kerry took that as a cue for us to leave. And a couple of minutes later, after the goodnights, we were alone together in the hallway. She said, “I seem to have lost my appetite. Raincheck on Rosebud’s, okay?”

“Sure. But how about a cup of coffee downstairs? It’s still early yet.”

“Well… just one, maybe.”

The lobby coffee shop was still open, and we took one of several fancy white wrought-iron tables surrounded by potted plants; the place was called, rather snootily for a hotel coffee shop, the Garden Bistro. Kerry sat studying me as I gave our order to the waitress, and she kept on studying me for some seconds afterward.

“What aren’t you telling me?” she said.

“Why do you think I’m not telling you something.”

“Intuition. You don’t exactly have a poker face, you know.”

“I always thought I did.”

“Well, you don’t. What did you do on that errand of yours?”

I hesitated. I could be frank with her, but that would mean mentioning the.38 revolver in her mother’s purse. If she didn’t already know about it, and the odds were she didn’t, it might upset her. Still, if Cybil was courting some kind of trouble, she had a right to know about it. And maybe she could help me find out just what it was that was going on here.

“Well?” she said.

“Okay. I went to see if I could find Russ Dancer.”

“Why? You don’t suspect him, do you?”

“Not actively. But the intruder had alcohol on his breath, and not just the kind from one or two social drinks. That made me think of Dancer.”

“You mean because of the way he feels about Cybil? My God, you weren’t thinking rape or anything like that?”

“The thought did cross my mind.”

“Well, you — can forget it, believe me. Dancer would never hurt Cybil; never. He worships her.”

“Worship can turn into hatred sometimes.”

“Yes, but not in Dancer’s case. I can see it in his eyes-how he feels about her.”

“Did you know Dancer before you met him here?”

“No. But Cybil told me enough about him to give me a good idea of what to expect. Men like Russ Dancer are easy to read.”

Not for me, they weren’t. But I said, “Does Cybil do a lot of reminiscing about the old days?”

“Oh, sure. At least she used to when I was living at home. I don’t think she’s ever been as happy as she was in the forties.”

“Why is that?”

The waitress brought our coffee. Kerry stirred cream into hers before she said, “I guess she was happiest back then for several reasons. She was young. She’d just made it through a war and dozens of short separations-my dad was an army liaison officer and did a lot of shuttling back and forth between New York and Washington. And she was writing for the pulps, doing what she’d always wanted to do. She even wrote some pulp stories with Ivan, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Under a pseudonym. Gruesome stuff about ax murderers and people being buried alive. I loved it when I was a kid.”

“They let you read horror fiction as a kid?”

“They didn’t know about it. I used to get into their magazine file copies.”

“Did Cybil like being one of the Pulpeteers?”

“Sure. Apparently they were a pretty wild group.”

“Wild in what way?”

“The forties kind of way,” Kerry said. “All-night parties, crazy practical jokes, a fistfight or two once in a while.”

“Fistfight? You mean among themselves?”

“Cybil never went into detail. Neither did my dad.”

“She never mentioned who was involved?”

“If she did, I don’t remember. Maybe Frank Colodny, though.”

“Why Colodny?”

“Some of the writers accused him of cheating on what he paid for their stories. He’d promise them one amount, pay them another when they delivered, and claim economic pressures as the reason for the cutback. But the writers suspected he was putting through vouchers for the full amount and then pocketing the difference himself.”

I remembered Dancer alluding to the same thing at the party. “Why was Colodny allowed in the Pulpeteers,” I asked, “if he was suspected of crooked dealings?”

“Well, the cheating only started at the end of the decade, when Action House was losing money like all the other pulp publishers, because of television and paperbacks. Colodny owned a piece of the company, and Cybil says that he liked money. When he couldn’t find anybody else to screw he started doing it to his friends.”

“Nice guy.”

“But they could never prove it, and it took them a while to even accept that it was going on. One by one they stopped writing for him, and finally they threw him out of the group.”

“When was that?”

“In ‘49, I think. The year before Action House went bankrupt and Colodny disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Well, one day he was in New York, and the next day Action House’s offices were closed and he was gone. Nobody knew where.”

“There wasn’t anything shady involved, was there?”

“You mean like embezzlement? No. The company didn’t have any money left to embezzle. He just vanished, that’s all.”

And turned up in Arizona, I thought, with enough money to buy an entire town. A ghost town, sure, but even ghost towns and the land they’re on didn’t come cheap in 1950. Where did he get the money, if Action House was bankrupt?

“What did your folks think about Colodny buying a ghost town?” I asked her.

“They didn’t know about it until today. But I don’t think they were all that surprised.”

“Why not? It’s not something a person would normally do.”

“Not most people, but Colodny was always a flake. Back in New York, Cybil says, his big fantasy was to move out West and prospect for gold. No kidding.”

“Some fantasy,” I said.

“He’d always been a fan of Western pulp stories; that’s probably where he got the idea. He came from a small town in New Mexico and never really liked New York. He went there because an uncle of his got him the job with Action House. But he was always talking about moving back someday. He had asthma too, that was another reason he wanted to move West-the dry air.”

“Then what kept him in New York so long?”

“Money, I guess. He wanted that more than any thing else.”

“Uh-huh. So where’d he get enough to buy the ghost town?”

“Nobody knows. None of the others had seen him or heard anything about him since his disappearance thirty years ago.”

“How did your folks react to the prospect of spending a weekend with him after all that time?”

“They weren’t exactly overjoyed. But then, thirty years is a long time to hold a grudge.”

“Yeah,” I said, “a long time.”

There was a silence, during which Kerry gave me another of her long, probing looks. “Are you thinking it might be one of the Pulpeteers who broke into their room tonight?”

“It’s possible.”

“Frank Colodny?”

“Also possible.”

“Buy why? For what reason?”

I shook my head. “Unless it had something to do with ‘Hoodwink’ and the extortion letters.”

“You mean one of the Pulpeteers behind that too? Why?”“I can’t even guess,“I said. “But there are all sorts of things going on here, and I don’t just mean attempted extortion and breaking-and-entering. Tensions that go back much longer than that.”

She frowned down at her cup. “I suppose I got the same feeling tonight. Only I just don’t see how my folks could be involved.”

I hesitated. Then I said slowly, “Kerry, look, there’s something else you’d better know. When Dancer knocked Cybil’s purse off the table at the party I got a look at what fell out of it. One of the things was a gun.”

“A what?”

“A gun. A.38 caliber snub-nosed revolver.”

Strong rushes of emotion seemed to make her eyes change color; they got dark again, almost smoky green, and in them you could see her struggling with what I’d just told her. “A gun,” she said. “My God.”

“It isn’t something she’s prone to doing, then.”

“Of course not. You think she goes around packing a gun?”

“Some people do.”

“She’s not one of those paranoids.”

“Easy. I wasn’t suggesting she was. Do you have any idea why she’d come to the convention armed?”

“No. God, I didn’t even know she owned a gun.” For half a dozen seconds Kerry stared at a spot just beyond my right shoulder; then she shook herself, and her eyes lightened again, glistening. “I don’t like this,” she said. “I don’t like any of this one damn bit.”

“It might be a good idea if you had a talk with her in the morning,” I said. “Maybe she’ll confide in you.”

“You bet I’ll have a talk with her in the morning. I’d go back up there right now if it wasn’t so late.”

And that just about finished the conversation. She was too busy worrying questions around inside her head for any more banter or discussion. I called for the check, and we went out through the lobby and into a warm soft breeze off the Bay.

“Your car close by?” I asked her.

“In the garage just down the street.”

“Mine’s the other way. But I’ll walk over with you.”

“No need. Thanks for the coffee.”

“Sure. About that raincheck for supper-you could use it tomorrow night if you’re not doing anything else.”

“Let’s see what Cybil has to say.” The collar of my standard rumpled private eye trenchcoat seemed to be tucked under, all cockeyed in my standard sloppy fashion, and she reached up and straightened it. She had to stand close to me to do that, and I could smell the faintly spicy scent of her breath. “And what kind of day tomorrow turns out to be.”

“Fair enough.”

She let me have one of her smiles, patted the trenchcoat collar, and went off toward the lighted front of the parking garage. I watched her for a time, with that spicy scent lingering in my mind, and a kind of afterimage, too, of her coppery hair and the way her mouth looked when she smiled. Then I lifted my head and looked up at the glossy moon hanging overhead-one of those spring moons that bathes everything in silvery light and stirs the blood and makes coyotes stand up all hot and bothered and start baying.

I felt like doing a little baying myself just then. Damned if I didn’t.