Hoodwink

NINE

I woke up a little past seven in the morning, and there she was beside me, lying on her back with her hip thrust over against mine-all smooth and soft-looking with that coppery hair sleep-touseled around her face. I lay looking at her for a time. There was a good warm feeling inside me, and a kind of tenderness, and a kind of wonder, too, that my bed should be full of so much woman.

Pretty soon I rolled toward her and kissed her and did a couple of other things. She opened one eye and said sleepily, “Mm.”

“Morning,” I said.

“Morning yourself.”

“You feel good, you know that?”

“Mm.”

“I’m not used to waking up with a lady in my bed.”

She yawned and opened the other eye. “So I gathered.”

“I guess I was pretty eager, huh?”

“Pretty eager.”

“Well, it’s been a while, I admit it.”

“For me, too,” she said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“How long?”

“A while. Months.”

“So why me, then?”

“Why not you?”

“Any old port in a storm, right?”

“No, not right,” she said seriously.

“Then why me?”

“What’s wrong with you!” “Plenty. I’ve got a beer belly-”

“I don’t mind that.”

“-and the general appearance of a bear-”

“I like bears.”

“-and I’m an old man. Getting there, anyway.”

“Sure you are. Hah.”

“So what do you see in me?”

“God, you’re persistent. All right-a nice man, that’s what I see in you. A nice, gentle, pussycat private eye. Okay?”

“Pussycat,” I said and laughed.

“Pussycat. You attract me; I can’t tell you exactly why, but you do. Every time I looked at you the past two days, I found myself wondering what it would be like to go to bed with you. Haven’t you ever looked at somebody and just wanted to go straight to bed?”

“Lots of times. You, for instance.”

“Mm-hmm. And you know something?”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t mind doing it again right now.”

“Mutual,” I said. “But I guess we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think I’m up to it.”

“You will be,” she said. “Oh, you will be.”

She was right: I was.

What with one thing and another, it was almost noon before we got down to the Hotel Continental.

One of the things was stopping off at her apartment in Diamond Heights Village, at the crest of Twin Peaks, so she could change into fresh clothing. It was a nice apartment, with one of those 180-degree views from a rear balcony or through a combination picture window and sliding glass door; she had it decorated with modernistic furniture, accent on chrome and sharp angles, and huge paintings done in blacks, whites, and oranges. A warm, comfortable place, the kind you want to come back to. And I wanted to come back there, all right, just as I wanted her to come back to my flat-time and again. I wanted it more than I was willing to admit to myself just yet.

As we entered through the main lobby doors of the hotel I said, “How about something to eat?” All we’d had for breakfast was coffee and some toast made out of two-day-old bread, and my stomach was making ominous rumbling noises.

“Lord, yes. I’m famished,“Kerry said. “But I should say hello to my folks first.”

The bank of house phones was nearby, so we went over there and she rang up 1017. Somebody came on the line; she talked for maybe fifteen seconds before she replaced the receiver. When she turned to me her forehead was ridged and those chameleon eyes of hers were starting to change color again.

“I think I’d better go up and talk to Cybil,” she said.

“Something wrong?”

“I don’t know. She sounded… odd.”

“In what way?”

“Just odd. Subdued, worried. Maybe I can find out what it is if I see her in person. Meet you in the coffee shop?”

“Okay. I want to check on Dancer anyway.”

She went away to the elevators. And I went across and into the corridor toward the convention tables, wondering if something else had happened last night after we’d left-something to do with the missing.38 revolver, for example, or with Russ Dancer. Or both.

But if that were the case, it couldn’t have amounted to much, judging from the crowd and the general atmosphere of cheerful camaraderie. There were even more people than yesterday, and a proportionately greater number of kids dressed in unconventional costume. The chubby girl in the brass brassiere had brought a boyfriend dressed up as a bug-eyed monster: green scaly papier-mache Head and eyeballs dangling and bobbing at the end of six-inch springs. But I was used to it by now. It was only three or four seconds before I quit staring this time.

The first Pulpeteer I saw was Jim Bohannon, making his way in my direction through the crowd. When we neared each other I motioned him off to one side, out of the traffic stream.

“Mob scene this morning,” he said. “I didn’t know this many people even remembered the pulps.”

“There are plenty of us. Maybe they’ll make a comeback someday.”

“No chance of that, I’m afraid. Damn country’s too sophisticated these days.” He made a wry mouth. “We were sort of virginal back in the thirties and forties, if you know what I mean. But we’ve been screwed a whole hell of a lot since.”

“That’s the truth,” I said. “Anything exciting happen last night? I left the party a little before seven.”

“Not much. Bunch of us got together for a poker game in Bert Praxas’s room after dinner. I dropped thirty bucks, and Ivan Wade won fifty. He always was lucky at cards.”

“Did Dancer play too?”

Bohannon’s mouth got even more wry. “He wasn’t in any shape to do more than puke on himself. He and Ozzie Meeker were both loaded.”

He shook his head. “Picked up again this morning right where he left off, too, the damn fool.”

“How early this morning?”

“Pretty early.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“For a minute or so. He said he’d just telephoned his ladyfriend, the one he lives with down the coast, and a letter came for him yesterday from his agent. He had a deal pending to do some Adult porno Westerns, but it fell through. So he was celebrating another defeat, as he put it.” Bohannon shook his head. “Adult porno Westerns, of all the abominations.”

“You have any idea where he is right now?”

“Not right this minute, no. He came stumbling in through the lobby about twenty minutes ago, with one of the convention people. Pretty obvious he’d latched on to the fellow, and they’d been out drinking their breakfast. But I didn’t notice where he went. Off to freeload some more drinks, maybe.”

I nodded. “I think I’d better have a little talk with him.”

“Trying to talk common sense to a drunk,” Bohannon said, “is like trying to talk Shakespeare to the back end of a horse.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I guess I’ll try it anyway.”

I went back into the lobby to the house phones. There was no answer in Dancer’s room. With Meeker, maybe? I thought. But when I got Meek er’s room number from the switchboard and dialed it, that line buzzed in the same empty way.

Just as I was replacing the receiver, somebody said “Good morning” a little stiffly to one side of me. I turned, and it was Ivan Wade-dressed in a pair of doeskin slacks and a dark blue blazer, mustache twitching and eyes full of ice. He was not smiling.

“Morning, Mr. Wade.”

“Did you and Kerry have a nice time last night?”

Uh-oh, I thought. “Yes, very nice.”

“The two of you seem to be quite friendly.”

“Well…” I stopped and cleared my throat. “We get along pretty well, yes.”

“Evidently,” Wade said, and the ice was in his voice now. Along with something that might have been distaste.

I stood there trying to think of something intelligent to say while he watched me in his cold way. He was not keen on the idea of Kerry and me having a relationship, that was plain enough; but for what reason? The fact that I was fifteen years older than she? The fact that I was a private detective? My passion for pulp magazines? The way I parted my hair or the way my belly drooped over my belt? Maybe he just didn’t like anybody messing around with his daughter after the way her schmuck of a former husband had treated her.

I said, “Look, Mr. Wade,” and then stopped again, blank-headed, and I probably would have found something stupid to say if one of the eleva tor cars hadn’t reached the lobby just then and discharged Kerry. She saw Wade and me and came straight over. Whatever her mother had had to say to her, it couldn’t have been very pleasant; her eyes had a dark, angry look and the set of her face was a little grim.

She said to Wade, “What happened to Cybil last night?”

He glanced at me, then back at her with sharp meaning.

Kerry ignored it. “My mother,” she said to me in a deliberate way, “has a big fat bruise on one cheekbone. She says she fell down, but I don’t believe her. I think someone hit her.” And she looked hard at Wade.

His mouth was tight and you could tell he was building up a pretty good anger of his own. “I’ve never laid a hand on Cybil in forty years.”

“Then who did it?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me.”

“Well, when did it happen?”

“Sometime last night. She was all right when I went to play poker with Bert Praxas and some of the others; she had those marks when I came back a few hours later.” He glanced at me again, with something close to open hostility. “Do we have to discuss private matters in front of a stranger?”

Kerry linked her arm through mine. “He’s not exactly a stranger, Dad.”

“So I gathered,“Wade said. “I’d like to see you later, if you don’t mind. Alone.”

Kerry and I watched him stalk away. She said, “I love him, but God, he can be stuffy sometimes.”

“He doesn’t seem to like me very much,” I said.

“Well, he’s always been overprotective. But I can handle him, that’s no problem. It’s my mother I’m worried about.”

“What did she say to you just now?”

“Not much. She’s hiding something and she wants to confide in somebody. But she can’t seem to let it come out.”

“You think your father was the one who hit her?”

“No. But I almost wanted it to be him. I could cope with that; it’s not so … I don’t know, ominous.”

“Did she tell you anything at all about last night?”

“Nothing that wasn’t a lie. It must have something to do with that gun-with why she brought it with her. Don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” I said, but that was what I thought, all right. Something to do with the gun, and possibly with its theft from her room. Something to do with Russ Dancer, too? I wondered. Suppose he got Cybil alone somewhere last night, made a pass at her, and swatted her one when she rejected him?

Kerry seemed to be reading my mind. She said, “It could be Russ Dancer who beat up on her. He was drunk again at the party.”

“Yeah.”

“If it was him, I want to know it.”

“So do I. I’ve been looking for him since you left.”

“I’ll help you find him.”

“No. Better let me handle him alone.”

“Tough-guy stuff?”

“I hope not. Why don’t you go ahead and have lunch? I’ll join you as soon as I can-or meet you in the auditorium for Colodny’s panel at one if I run late.”

She said all right, not without reluctance, and I went off to check the Continental Bar. No sign of Dancer there. And no sign of him in the registration area or the huckster room. I went up to the mezzanine and looked into the auditorium and the Pulp Art room. He was not in either of those places. Which meant he’d left the hotel again, maybe to do some more drinking, or he was up in his room after all, passed out or partying.

I got back into the elevator and rode up to the sixth floor. When I turned along the east corridor, a middle-aged maid with loose piles of butterscotch hair was just coming past the little cul-de-sac that contained the entrance to Dancer’s room, pushing one of those big all-purpose hotel carts loaded with fresh linen, detergents, trash receptacles, and the like. She looked harried, the way most hotel maids always seem to, and as I moved toward her she lifted one hand and rubbed the back of it across her forehead.

That was when the gun went off.

The flat, banging sound seemed to erupt ahead of me and to my right, behind where the maid was-Dancer’s room. The maid had stopped dead and so had I, and for an instant we were staring at each other across twenty yards of empty carpeting. Then there was a low cry and a series of other sounds muffled by the walls that I couldn’t identify.

The hackles went up on my neck, and there was a prickling sensation along my scalp like something scurrying through dry grass. I uprooted myself, went charging ahead along the hall. The gunshot had come from Dancer’s room, all right; I was sure of it. Ahead of me the maid had backed off and was peering into the cul-de-sac with a seriocomic expression of confusion and fright. I pounded past another of the cul-de-sacs, past her cart. More noises came from behind the thick corridor wall, still deadened and unidentifiable. When I neared the maid she scrambled aside, but she was slow doing it and I almost collided with her. We veered off from each other, her squeaking a little, stumbling, and I caught hold of the wall at the corner and pulled myself around it into the cul-de-sac.

Nobody was in the passageway. All three doors-the entrances to 617 and 619 and the one to the storage closet at the end-were shut. I ran

to Dancer’s door and grabbed the knob and twisted hard; it bound up halfway through the rotation. I hung onto it, rattled the door in its frame. Then I quit rattling and held a breath to listen.

Silence inside there now.

“Dancer?” I shouted. “Open the door!”

Nothing.

I looked back toward the corridor. The maid was still poised there, watching me huge-eyed, like one of the children in a painting by Keane. “I’m a detective!” I yelled at her. “I need your passkey!”

I had to yell it a second time, moving back toward her, before it got through and she responded. She held the key out at arm’s length, timidly, as if she were afraid I might want to take her arm along with it. I jerked it out of her hand, ran back to 617, and slotted it into the lock. The latch clicked; the knob rotated all the way in my hand this time and the door popped inward. I shoved it all the way, tensing, and took two quick steps into the room.

Dancer was ten feet away, in the middle of the carpet near the couch, swaying a little. His face was gray, blotchy, and his eyes were only half focused and so red-rimmed and red-lined they looked bloody. The smell of raw whiskey coming off him and from the open quart bottle of rye overturned on the couch, mingled with the stench of cordite, was nauseating.

And lying back-sprawled at his feet, one leg drawn up and both arms wrapped across his chest, was Frank Colodny. You only had to look at him once-the position he was in, the facial rictus and the blank staring eyes, the blood showing beneath the crossed arms-to know that he was dead.

Dancer turned his head toward me, blinked, blinked again, and seemed to recognize me. “I didn’t do it,” he said in a sick, slurred voice. “Christ Almighty, I didn’t kill him.”

But the gun he held pointed downward in his right hand said otherwise.

Cybil Wade’s gun, I thought-the missing.38 revolver.