Hoodwink

SEVEN

The convention was already in full swing when I got back to the hotel at ten the next morning. One of the wide central corridors off the reception lobby was crowded with people and lined with tables of various sizes, some of them draped in cloths that read Registration and Banquet Tickets and Seating and Tours of Sam Spade’s San Francisco. The people were of various sizes, too, and various ages that seemed to start at about fifteen and extend up to semiold duffers like me. Almost everybody was dressed casually-one young guy in a Shadow cape and slouch hat, no less, and one chubby girl in a short skirt and one of those metal brassieres you used to see on the covers of science fiction pulps. As soon as I quit gawking at the girl, I began to feel overdressed in my suit and tie. But then I spotted Bert Praxas talking to a couple of eager-looking kids, and he was also wearing a suit and tie and looked every bit as stuffy as I probably did.

I didn’t see anybody else I knew in the crowd, 78 *

so I went over to where Praxas was. He saw me, raised a hand in a “just a second” gesture, and finished telling an anecdote about having to make a last-minute change in one of his Spectre novels because of an unintentional double entendre. Then he excused himself from the kids and joined me.

Another teenager trotted by just then, this one wearing a Viking helmet and what looked like a motheaten bearskin, and waving a sword made out of wood and tinfoil. I followed him with my eyes, trying to figure out who or what he was supposed to be.

Praxas said, “Conan the Barbarian.” He was smiling.

“Pardon?”

“The Robert E. Howard character from Weird Tales. That’s who the boy is dressed up as.” His smile widened. “This has to be your first convention. You’ve got the usual nonplussed look.”

“Are there always kids who wear costumes like that?”

“Oh yes. If you think you’re seeing strange sights here, though, you should go to a science fiction con. It’s an experience.”

“I’ll bet it is. Why do they do it?”

“Self-expression,” he said. “A lot of them are lonely, social misfits in one way or another; they crave companionship and attention, and it’s only natural that they gravitate to others with similar interests. But you won’t see many of them here.

This is more a convention for dealers, collectors, and serious pulp fans.”

“Like me, huh?”

“Like you. The huckster room is open, by the way. If you plan to do any buying for your collection, you should go in as soon as possible. The turnover will likely be fast and furious.”

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

But the first place I went when I left him was to the house phones, to call Dancer’s room. There was no answer. I went to the hotel bar next, but it wasn’t open for business yet. He still hadn’t joined the convention crowd, either, nor had anyone else I knew. Which gave me a good excuse to take Praxas’s advice and visit the huckster room.

The woman sitting at the registration table told me it was nearby on the main floor, just turn right at the end of this corridor. So I did that, and it turned out to be a big rectangular room with wide-open entrance doors and a couple of guys checking name tags. A three-foot-square sign to one side said, Convention Members Only-Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted. It took me thirty seconds to remember what I’d done with the name tag Underwood had given me last night, and then to consider myself lucky I hadn’t changed suits this morning. When I got inside I was confronted with sales tables lining the walls and arranged in a middle square as well, so that pulp magazines-and some hardcover and paperback books-would loom on both sides of you all the way around. The room was almost as crowded as the registration area, but most of the people seemed to be upwards of twenty-five and to have a much more serious mien as they wandered around or bent over the stacks and boxes and trays of plastic-bagged pulps.

The whole place made me feel like a proverbial kid in a candy store. This was something I understood; this was my kind of world. I could feel myself grinning, no doubt in a fatuous way, as I started to do some browsing of my own.

It didn’t take long for the browsing to turn into a shopping trip. I found several issues of Detective Tales, Double Detective, Private Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly that I didn’t have, plus a coverless Black Mask from 1931 with stories by Horace McCoy and Frederick Nebel. At the end of half an hour I was fourteen pulps richer and fifty-two dollars poorer.

Then I stopped to admire the display of a Southern California dealer-three 1920s Black Masks with Hammett stories, priced at $125 each, the first issue of Wu Fang at $650, the first issue of the rare hero pulp The Octopus at $800-and to wonder about the incredible inflationary rate of magazines that had sold new forty to fifty years ago for a nickel and a dime. Somebody caught hold of my arm while I was doing that, and when I turned I saw Lloyd Underwood standing there, showing me his stained dentures.

“Finding a lot of your wants, I see,” he said.

“Good. I picked up a ‘35 Shadow myself a little while ago, got it in trade for an Operator Five and a Spider. What do you think of it so far?”

I spent a couple of seconds sorting that out. “The huckster room?” I said finally. “I think it’s fine-”

“No, I meant the con. Of course we haven’t really gotten under way yet. First panel is at one. Have you seen the auction books yet?”

“Auction books?”

“The pulps we’re auctioning on Sunday,” he said. “To help pay for the con. Some very rare items. Our prize is the first issue of Weird Tales- March 23, 1923. You don’t own that one, do you? Not many people do. A beautiful copy.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“Opening bid is twenty-five hundred, but we expect to get three thousand at least.”

Three thousand dollars for a pulp, I thought. Suppose I had plenty of money-would I spend that much on just one magazine? Well, maybe. But then, what the hell would I do with it? I’d be afraid to open it, much less read it, and what good was having a pulp or any other reading material if you couldn’t enjoy what was in it?

“Come on,” Underwood said, “I’ll show you the display. Do you know many local collectors and dealers?”

“Not too many, no. I buy mostly through the mail…”

I didn’t finish what I had intended to say be cause he had hold of my arm and was maneuvering me through the jumble of people. The auction pulps turned out to be every bit as impressive as I’d expected; in addition to the first issue of Weird Tales, there were the first five of Doc Savage, the first G-8 and His Battle Aces, and several 1930s Spicy Mystery and Spicy Detective whose stories used to turn on the kids of my generation with descriptions of nubile breasts, alabaster thighs, and lush hips, and with lots of innuendo and three-dot chapter endings. From there Underwood steered me around to meet a bunch of local people, including the head of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art and the owner of the San Francisco Mystery Bookstore-so many names and faces that they all blended together and flowed right out of my head. One that stayed with me was a big Italian guy who had a name similar to mine. He also had a large collection of pulps, he said, and claimed to be a writer of mystery and detective fiction. Maybe he was, but I had never heard of him.

I’d been in there for an hour by then, and Underwood’s antic monologues were beginning to wear on me. Besides which, I was tired of jostling and being jostled and of shaking hands while I tried not to drop or damage the pulps I had bought. It was time I went looking for Dancer and for Kerry. Particularly Kerry.

When I managed to extricate myself from Underwood and the rest of the crowd I went back to the registration area. There were even more people milling around now, among them one kid wearing a futuristic jumpsuit and a holstered plastic ray-gun, with spaced-out eyes to go with the costume. But I didn’t see any familiar faces until I got to the main reception lobby and glanced over at the elevators, — both Dancer and the dusty pulp artist, Ozzie Meeker, were standing there, each of them loaded down with armfuls of small, framed oil paintings.

I veered over there and reached them just as one of the elevators opened up and disgorged a bunch of people. Dancer saw me and grinned all over his face-a wet, loose kind of grin. The whites of his eyes had a wounded look, and his breath would have knocked over a horse.

“Hey, shamus,” he said, “what’s happening?”

“Not much. Where you headed?”

“Art Room up on the mezzanine. Got to help Ozzie here set up his display.”

“Mind if I tag along? I want to talk to you for a minute.”

“Sure. More the merrier, what the hell.”

Meeker was holding the elevator, and he watched me from behind his horn-rims with bright, birdlike eyes as Dancer and I moved inside. Up close, the skin of his face had a brown, sun-cracked look, webbed with tiny crosshatches of wrinkles-the skin of a man who spent a good part of his time outdoors, as Colodny obviously did. There was a whiskey smell on him too, but not half as strong, and his gaze was steady and free of the glassiness that showed behind Dancer’s squint.

He said, “I don’t think we met at the party last night. I’m Ozzie Meeker. You’re the detective, right?”

“Right.”

“Best damn detective in the business,” Dancer said in his annoying way. “Solved a couple of murders in Cypress Bay a few years back, you know that, Ozzie? Some shamus, bet your ass.”

“Interesting,” Meeker said, as if he meant it.

The elevator stopped at the mezzanine and we got out and turned into the westside corridor. I said to Meeker, “Couldn’t help noticing that you and Frank Colodny had a little altercation last night. Nothing serious, I hope.”

He shrugged. “Frank and I don’t get along too well anymore.”

“How could anybody get along with that bastard?” Dancer said. “Screwed Ozzie out of money back in the pulp days too, just like he screwed his writers. Ozzie was the best damn cover artist the pulps ever had. Drew beautiful stuff. You remember his stuff?”

“Yes, “I said.

“Got some of it right here. Originals. Never got the recognition he deserved. Did you, Ozzie?”

Meeker shrugged again. “Do any of us?”

“Not me,” Dancer said. “But hell, I never deserved any.”

The Art Room hadn’t officially opened yet, and the doors to it were closed; another guard-type was posted out front. He let us go inside when Meeker showed his name tag. A dozen or so men and women occupied the room, setting up displays of original oils, reproductions, laminated and framed covers, pen-and-ink interior illustrations, old editorial layout sheets, storyboards, and other pulp artwork and ephemera. According to the convention brochure, the material was all owned by private collectors and was being shown by them; the only ex-pulp artist in attendance was Meeker.

He had been given a place of honor as a result, near the door so his display would be the first you’d see when you came in, and he and Dancer unloaded themselves there. His art, most of which depicted Western gunslingers in various action scenes, was striking; not as good as that done by Eggenhofer, the king of Western pulp artists, but still pretty good. His distinctive signature-his last name inside the loop of a lariat-was prominent on each painting.

Dancer said, “What time’s the exhibit open, Ozzie?”

“One o’clock. Same time as Wade’s panel.”

“Should have time for a couple more belts, hah?”

“I don’t see why not,” Meeker said.

I did, but I didn’t say so. Delivering temperance lectures was out of my line.

go ahead and get started, Ozzie,” Dancer said. “Soon as I talk to my buddy the shamus, I’ll give you a hand.”

I told Meeker it was nice meeting him and prodded Dancer over into a corner. “That Ozzie’s a hell of a nice guy, you know that?” he said. He gave me one of his sardonic grins, loose and moist at the edges. “Generous with his booze, too. Real generous.”

“That where you’ve been this morning? With him?”

“Yup. Since I ran into him in the hall at eight-thirty. We got adjoining rooms. Damn convenient.” He squinted at me. “How long you been here?”

“I came in at ten.”

“You ring up my room around that time?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Thought it was probably you. I heard the phone but by the time I got through the door it was too late.”

“I tried to find you last night, too,” I said, “after you disappeared from the party. But you weren’t in then, either.”

He frowned with a bewildered sort of intensity, the way a drunk does when he’s trying to remember something. “What time was that?”

“Around ten-thirty.”

“I must’ve been in,” he said. “I went straight there from the party. Maybe I was already asleep.”

“Maybe you were. How come you left the party without saying anything?”

“I had to puke. Something I ate; my gut was boiling.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, so I was a little drunkie too. What the hell.”

“You didn’t happen to see Cybil Wade on the way back to your room, did you?”

That got me nothing at all. Dancer’s reaction was one of dull puzzlement, with flickers of something under it that was probably pain. “No, I didn’t see her,” he said. “Why?”

“Just wondering.” I couldn’t see any purpose in mentioning the intruder in the Wades’ room; it was liable to stir him up, and he was unpredictable enough as it was. “Are you going to Ivan Wade’s panel?”

“Not me. The hell with old Ivan; he’s full of bullshit anyway.” He squinted at me again. “Speaking of bullshit, you find out anything yet about the big extortion scam?”

“No, not yet. But I’m in there pitching.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Best damn private eye in the business.”

He gave me a broad wink, banged me on the shoulder, and moved back to where Meeker was working with his art display. He was pretty steady on his feet, but the habitual drinker learns how to control his motor responses. I wondered if he’d learned how to control his facial expressions and his tongue too-if he was hiding something, if there were motives or designed perking away inside that shaggy head of his. It didn’t seem likely. Still, I had an uneasy feeling about him. He may have been guiltless so far, but if there was any more trouble, I thought, it would be Russ Dancer who was smack in the middle of it.

I had had enough of elevators for a while; I took the stairs back down to the lobby. And the first person I saw when I walked through the door was Kerry.

She was just coming out of the newsstand and tobacco shop across the lobby, alone and wearing a white satiny-looking blouse, a pair of dark blue slacks, and an introspective and faintly agitated look. When she saw me, three or four seconds later, one eyebrow went up and she made a beckoning gesture; then she sidestepped to one of the pillars and stood plucking at her coppery hair- not fluffing it the way women do, just plucking, as if she was restless and her hand did not want to be still.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said when I got to her. “Did you just get here?”

“No, at ten o’clock. But I’ve been moving around. Did you talk to your mother?”

She nodded. “After breakfast.”

“What about the gun?”

“She claims she brought it with her as a joke, to I illustrate her panel comments about private eyes. [She says it wasn’t loaded.”

“Do you believe her?”

“I don’t know. I got the feeling she might be lying, but I couldn’t be sure. Cybil can be inscrutable when she wants to be.”

“No reaction when you first mentioned the gun?”

“Hardly any. She’s not easily startled, either.”

“Did you tell her I’d seen it at the party?”

“Yes. But she was sure you had at the time, she said, and she realized then it was a mistake to bring it with her. She was afraid you might say something to somebody and there’d be a fuss. That’s why she left just afterward-to take the gun back to her room and put it away in her suitcase.”

“Her suitcase?”

“That’s right,” Kerry said. “Whoever broke in last night did steal something after all, even though Cybil didn’t want to admit it. He stole that damned gun.”