Hoodwink

by Bill Pronzini

  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.

  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.”<
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  “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.”