Hoodwink

EIGHT

Ivan Wade’s panel started promptly at one o’clock in a small auditorium on the mezzanine. Two other guys flanked Wade at the long dais table-collectors who were authorities on both Weird Tales and the Shudder Pulps-and well over 150 people were in the audience. Jim Bohannon, Bert Praxas, and Waldo Ramsey were grouped together with Lloyd Underwood near the back; Frank Colodny sat by himself off to one side, worrying the stem of a corncob pipe and looking just as preoccupied as he had last night; and Cybil Wade was in the front row left, across the center aisle from where Kerry and I had taken seats, wearing an air about as preoccupied as Colodny’s.

I had done some more talking with Kerry, over a sandwich in the coffee shop, but to no conclusions. If her mother had another reason for bringing the.38 revolver to the convention, other than using it for demonstration purposes, Kerry had no ideas or guesses as to what that reason might be. And if Cybil was telling the truth about the gun being stolen last night, neither of us had answers to the string of questions that went along with the burglary. Was anything else taken that Cybil refused to mention? Had the intruder been after the gun specifically? If the gun had been the objective, how did he know she had it? And what did he want it for?

Then there was the central question: Was he an outsider or someone connected with the convention?

I’d tried to tell Kerry not to worry, but it had come out sounding hollow. I had a nagging feeling that things were bubbling away under the surface, gathering pressure and maybe getting volatile enough to explode. You can’t explain intimations like that, but I’d had them often enough over the years to pay attention when one came along.

Once the panel started, however, I quit mulling over the missing gun and tranquilized myself on pulp lore. Wade was a pretty good public speaker and revealed a dry, clever sense of humor that got him rapt attention as well as laughter and applause. He also revealed another talent I hadn’t known he possessed: the performance of sleight-of-hand magic. The first illusion he did was to produce a copy of Terror Tales out of the air while he was talking, as if to illustrate a point he was trying to make, and it was so casual and so deft that there was a moment of silence and then what amounted to an ovation.

I leaned over to ask Kerry, “How long has your father been an amateur magician?”

“Oh, as long as I can remember. Stage magic is a passion of his; he’s written a half-dozen books on the subject. Good, isn’t he?”

“Very.”

The pulp lore itself-historical facts, anecdotes about writers and editors, bits of inside information-was fascinating. I learned a good deal about Weird Tales, and about such sex-and-sadism Shudder Pulps of the thirties as Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, and Thrilling Mystery, whose lurid covers depicted half-naked young women being whipped, clubbed, dipped in vats of acid and molten metal, and otherwise tortured on and with all sorts of devices by a variety of leering fiends.

The panel lasted an hour and a half. Everyone except Frank Colodny seemed to find it as engrossing as I did; he had gotten up about two-thirds of the way through, looking fidgety and with his wattles quivering, and disappeared. Wade ended the session by performing another magic trick-the apparent transformation of another pulp magazine into one of his own books. It was a neat finish and flawlessly done, and it earned him another ovation.

Out in the hall afterward Kerry said, “I’ve got to call my office. They gave me the day off but they expect me to check in.”

“See you back here for Jim Bohannon’s panel?”

“When is it, three-fifteen? I should be back by then.” She gave me a critical frown. “Why don’t you do something about your tie?”

I looked down. “What’s the matter with it?”

“Nothing a dry cleaner can’t fix. It looks like something blue died on the front of your shirt.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t mention it,” she said, and grinned at me and went away.

I found a restroom and examined my tie in the mirror. It was a little wrinkled and a little stained, but you couldn’t see the stains very clearly against the dark blue background. Or maybe you could, at that. I took the thing off and opened my shirt collar and stuffed the tie out of sight in my coat pocket.

Damn, but she had a knack for making me feel self-conscious.

I took the stairs down to the lobby, went from there out into the balmy afternoon to where I had parked my car. The pulps I had bought in the huckster room went into the trunk; so did the tie. On my way back, with the sun beating down on me, I decided I was thirsty and that a cold beer would taste good. There were still twenty minutes left before Bohannon’s panel.

You got into the Continental Bar by way of a longish corridor, both sides of which were lined with glass-enclosed relics of the Victorian period; it opened off one corner of the lobby. I was just entering the corridor when the commotion started: the banging sound of a chair being over turned, several voices raised and chattering at once. The loudest of the voices, thick with a boozy rage, belonged to Russ Dancer.

Christ, now what? I thought, and half ran the rest of the way into the bar. It was dark in there- dark wood paneling and furnishings, high shadowy ceiling, lighting so sedate it was almost nonexistent-and it took a second for my eyes to adjust. Then I saw Dancer. He had Frank Colodny back up against one of the walls, fist bunched hard in Colodny’s shirtfront, standing nose to nose with him and yelling something incoherent. Waldo Ramsey was there, too, dragging at Dancer’s arm without accomplishing much and telling him to lay off. The rest of the half-dozen people in the room, including the bartender, weren’t doing anything except gawking.

I hustled over and caught hold of Dancer’s other arm, and together Ramsey and I managed to make him turn loose. Colodny put a hand up and rubbed his throat and made a gurgling sound; his whole body seemed to be quivering, but with a rage equal to Dancer’s, not with fear.

“Let me go, goddammit!” Dancer yelled. “I’ll fix this son of a bitch, I’ll fix him!”

I said, “You’re not going to fix anybody,” and he swiveled his head and seemed to see me for the first time. Some of the combativeness faded out of his expression; he ran his tongue loosely over his lips, muttered something under his breath, and glowered at Colodny.

“What’s this all about?” I asked Ramsey. “Hell, I don’t know. He came charging in here a minute ago, hoisted Frank up out of his chair, and started accusing him of being a crook and a swindler.”

“That’s what he is,” Dancer said, “damn right.”

Colodny was making a visible effort to keep himself under control. He glared back at Dancer and said, “You’re a crazy drunk, you know that?

You ought to be in an institution.”

“So should you, bastard. San fucking Quentin.” “Cut it out, Russ,” I told him. “If you want to stay out of trouble, watch your temper and your mouth. This is a public place.”

“He’s the one who’s gonna have trouble, not me.”

“Why? What are you so stirred up about?” “He’s behind the extortion scam, that’s what.” Ramsey blinked at him. Colodny said, “You’re a liar.”

“The hell I am. You slipped the note in my pocket, all right. Upstairs, when you ran into me in the hall a few minutes ago.” I said, “What note?” “Let go my arm and I’ll show you.” I eased my grip a little first, to see if he had any more rough ideas, then released him when I decided he didn’t. He dug out a folded square of paper from his jacket pocket, handed it over without taking his eyes off Colodny. There were three sentences typed on the paper, in a different type face from either the previous letter or the “Hoodwink” manuscript; no salutation or signature.

“What does it say?” Ramsey asked me.

” There’s no mistake now. I know you’re the one. My price has gone up-ten thousand dollars, to be paid by midnight Sunday. Otherwise your plagiarism will be made public on Monday morning.’”

“I didn’t write that,“Colodny said. “It’s non sense.”

I looked at Dancer. “Are you sure he put this in your pocket?”

“Sure I’m sure. It wasn’t there a little while ago, and I haven’t been close to anybody except him. Damn straight he’s the one.”

“Delirium tiemens,” Colodny said. “The man’s hallucinating.”

“Do you know anything about this extortion ploy, Mr. Colodny?” I asked him.

“No.” The anger seemed to have drained out of him; he looked fidgety again. “I don’t have to answer questions or take any more abuse, not from any of you.” And he pushed away from the wall, did a wary sidestep around Dancer, and headed over to the bar. He had it all to himself when he got there; the other patrons had disappeared.

Dancer said to me, “You just going to let him go?”

“What else can I do? There’s no evidence against him. It’s your word against his.”

His mood shifted and turned sullen; you could see it happen in his face, even in the semidarkness of the bar. “He won’t get away with it, I’ll tell you that. Not this time.”

I started to tell him to take it easy, not to go off half-cocked, but he was already moving away. It looked for a second as if he would try bracing Colodny again. Then he veered off, walking in hard, bullish strides, and vanished down the corridor.

Ramsey said, “Christ, but he’s a lush,” and shook his head.

“You don’t think he’s right about Colodny?”

“I doubt it. I don’t see Frank pulling a stunt like ‘Hoodwink.’ It’s got warped overtones-the work of somebody who’s at least half a whack. Colodny may be a lot of things, but a whack isn’t one of them.”

“It’s been a long time since you knew him, hasn’t it?”

“Yes. But he hasn’t changed much; I’d bet on that. This sort of gambit just isn’t his style.”

“Then where do you suppose Dancer got the note?”

“Beats me,” Ramsey said. “Lushes aren’t particularly attentive, and you can’t trust their memories or their time perception. Seems to me anybody could have slipped him the note at any time.”

“You’re probably right.”

There was an antique chiming clock above the lounge’s Queen Anne fireplace, and it started to bong just then. Three times: three o’clock. I decided I didn’t want a beer after all and left Ramsey and started out. Colodny watched me in the back-bar mirror, holding a glass in one hand and stroking the six strands of hair on his scalp with the other. Maybe it was a trick of the faint lighting, but he looked frightened sitting there, almost cowering, like somebody trying to hide in a roomful of shadows.

When I got out into the lobby I spotted Dancer again, standing together with Cybil Wade near the reception desk. He had his head bent forward, saying something to her in an intense sort of way; I could not see his face from where I was, but hers was visible in three-quarters profile. And it was blank, void of expression-one of those plastic, dimpled doll’s faces.

I started toward them. The shape Dancer was in, he was capable of saying or doing anything, and I was afraid of another scene. But I had only taken a couple of steps when he raised his head and clumped past her to the elevators. I caught a glimpse of his face then: he was laughing. There was not much mirth in it, though. Part of it was sexual leering and part of it seemed to be a kind of painful release. The way a man laughs when something is tearing him up inside.

Cybil stayed where she was, looking after him. She didn’t notice me until I came up beside her and said, “Anything wrong, Mrs. Wade?” Then the tawny eyes blinked and looked at me, and animation came back into her face.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

“Everything all right?”

“Yes, fine. Will you excuse me?”

“Sure, of course.”

She hurried across the lobby, vanished into one of the elevator cars. And it was my turn to stand looking at nothing, thinking about her and Dancer and Colodny and the second extortion note-and all the things that had happened in the past twenty-four hours.

And this is-only Friday afternoon, I thought gloomily. The convention still has two full days to run.

Where does it all go from here?

Kerry and I went out for dinner at seven o’clock.

Nothing much happened in the four hours before then. When I met her at the auditorium for Jim Bohannon’s panel I didn’t show her the new note or tell her what had happened in the Continental Bar. She was worried enough as it was, without me adding fuel. Besides, she had a nice smile for me and I did not want to make it go away.

Frank Colodny was a no-show; so were Dancer and Ozzie Meeker. But Cybil was there, sitting with her husband and looking less remote and more composed than she had downstairs. Most of the 150 or so people in the audience seemed to have a grand old time once the panel got rolling. I should have and didn’t, really, but that was no fault of Bohannon or the two collectors of adventure and Western pulps who shared the dais with him. Bohannon was a quiet, amusing speaker, without Ivan Wade’s theatrical flair, but with just as much expertise. And the pulp lore, as always for me, was stimulating: historical perspectives on Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, Wild West Weekly, Western Story; anecdotes about Leo Margulies, Rogers Terrill, and other pulp editors. But I just could not seem to keep myself mentally involved. My mind kept wandering, shuffling through the events of last night and today as if they were a deck of cards-strange mismatched cards that didn’t seem to add up to much yet.

After the panel was over, Kerry and I spent a little time browsing through the huckster room again. I bought two more issues of Dime Detective and an autographed copy of one of her father’s books on stage magic. Then Lloyd Underwood appeared and reminded us that there was another cocktail party in Suite M, beginning at six.

The party started out all right. I got myself a beer, and Kerry had a vodka gimlet, and we mingled. After a while Dancer showed up with Ozzie Meeker, looking twice as squiffed as he had in the bar earlier, and I quit mingling to keep an eye on him. But he was in pretty good spirits and seemed to have forgotten the incident with Colodny, who was the only one of the Pulpeteers not present.

He was as obstreperous as ever, but he left Cybil alone, and he didn’t make trouble for anybody else.

More and more people began to file in, until finally the room was jammed to overflowing. That was when I decided I didn’t need to be a watchdog any more today and reminded Kerry of her dinner raincheck. She said, “Okay, good idea; I’m starved,” and we found her folks so she could tell them we were leaving. Ivan Wade gave me a speculative look, as if he were wondering what sort of intentions I had toward his daughter. But he had nothing to say to me.

We opted for an English-style pub called The Coachman because it wasn’t far away-over on the far side of Nob Hill-and because Kerry said it was one of her favorite restaurants. A two-block walk past Union Square and then the Powell-Mason cable car got us there in twenty minutes. And another twenty minutes after that we had a table, pints of Bass ale, and orders in for steak-and-kidney pie.

We talked over the drinks, over dinner, over the coffee afterward-nice, easy, relaxed talking, as if we were two people who had known each other for two years instead of two days. Yet at this point or that one, there were small silences, and each time she seemed to study me with those frank green eyes, and each time it made me aware of the way I looked, my posture, the difference in our ages. There had only been a few women in my life I had felt quite as comfortable with-and none who made me feel so damned awkward and self-conscious. And she knew it, too. It seemed to amuse her, but not in a perverse or unkind way; as if it was part of whatever appeal I held for her.

She was thirty-eight, she told me, and she had been divorced for four years and married for eleven before that to a schmuck named Ray Dunston, who was a Los Angeles criminal lawyer. Those were her words: “a schmuck named Ray Dunston.” She was candid about the marriage; it had started out good, begun to slide gradually year by year, and finally become a thing of cold convenience. She suspected that he had been seeing other women almost from the first, which made him a schmuck in my book, all right. As soon as she found out for sure, she left him, filed for divorce, applied to Bates and Carpenter for a job- she had worked for a Los Angeles ad agency for five years-and here she was. No children, although she would have had kids if the schmuck had been willing; no involvements and no obligations. Enjoying San Francisco, enjoying her freedom, enjoying life again. And what about me? What was my life story?

So I told her about growing up with the pulps, wanting to emulate the detectives I spent so many vicarious hours with. About my tour of duty as a military policeman in the South Pacific and how I had taken my civil service exam and gone through the Police Academy after the war. About all the years on the San Francisco cops and the brutal ax murder in the Sunset District that had given me the excuse I needed to quit the force and open up my own agency. I told her about Erika Coates, and about another woman named Cheryl Rosmond that I had loved-or thought I’d loved-for a while. I told her about the lesion on my lung, the struggle I had gone through to come to terms with the spectre of cancer.

Things seemed to be getting a little grim at that point, and I switched the subject to the convention. But that wasn’t much better. So then, by tacit agreement, we did the rest of our talking about neutral topics-books, movies, sports-until the time came to pay the check.

Outside I said, “It’s a nice night. Why don’t we walk back?”

“Fine.”

“We can stop somewhere for a nightcap if you like.”

“How about your place?”

I did a small double take. “Are you serious?”

“Sure. I’m curious about your pulps.”

“Not my etchings, huh?”

She laughed. “I’ll bet you don’t have sixty-five hundred of those.”

“Nope. Uh, what I do have, though, is a pretty messy flat. I’d better tell you that now, in case you’re easily shocked.”

“I’m not. Besides, I expected you to have a messy flat.”

“How come?”

“The way you dress,“she said, and gave me one of her smiles. “Okay, come on-take me to your pulps.”

We walked back to the hotel, picked up my car, and I took her to my pulps. Her eyes widened a little when I opened the door and put on the lights and the dustballs winked at her from under the furniture; but she took it pretty well. She said, “You could apply for disaster relief, you know?” and made straight for the bookshelves flanking the bay window, where I keep the pulps in chronological order by title.

While she was making impressed noises, I opened the curtains over the window. Pacific Heights is an expensive neighborhood primarily because of the view, and on a night like this, you had it all: the Golden Gate Bridge, the lights of Marin, the revolving beacon on Alcatraz, the luminous pinpoints strung across the East Bay. Romantic stuff-but maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about romance. Except that I was. Ivan Wade could have popped me on the nose for what I was thinking right then, and I wouldn’t have blamed him much.

I found some brandy in the kitchen, poured a snifter for her and a companionable dollop for me, and we sat on the couch and talked about pulps and looked at the view. Then we stopped talking and finished the brandy. Then we just sat there and looked at each other.

“Well? “she said.

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to tear my clothes off?”

“Do what?”

“Tear my clothes off. Isn’t that what private eyes do when they get a woman alone in their flat?”

“Not this private eye.”

“No? What do you do, then?”

“Conventional things, that’s all.”

“Not too conventional, I hope.”

“Well…”

“Well,” she said. “Do something conventional.”

So I kissed her. “Mmm, you taste good,” she said, and I said, — “You too” and kissed her again-a good long hot kiss this time. It was starting to get even hotter when she ended it and leaned back to look at me.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?”

“Oh for God’s sake. Ask me if I want to go to bed.”

“Do you want to go to bed?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said, and took the hand of the tough private dick, the last lone wolf, the suave seducer of beautiful women, and led him like a kid into his own bedroom.