Hoodwink

by Bill Pronzini

  “He’s been gone all day, has he?”

  “Yes. Since seven this morning. Magic is his great passion these days. May I use your phone to call a taxi?”

  “That’s not necessary,” I said. “I’ll drive you back to the hotel.”

  I got her coat for her and helped her into it. She let me have another smile, a little brighter than before, and said, “I’m glad I came here tonight. I wasn’t sure about you before I did, but now I am. You’re a decent man and I think you’re good for Kerry.”

  “I hope so, Mrs. Wade.”

  “Please call me Cybil. And I wouldn’t worry about Ivan’s disapproval. He’s terribly stuffy sometimes, and overprotective, but he’ll come around.”

  I said I hoped that too, but I was not worried about Ivan’s disapproval. What I was worried about was that he was the one who had killed Frank Colodny and maybe Ozzie Meeker too, which was a hell of a lot more dismaying prospect. Because the way things looked to me now, no one fitted the murderer’s role half so well as stuffy Ivan Wade.

  EIGHTEEN

  Somebody kept ringing the damned door buzzer.

  At first the sound got mixed up with a jumbled dream I was having; then it broke all the way through and woke me up, brought me jerkily upright. Disoriented and grumbling, I pawed at my eyes until I got them unstuck. There was morning light coming through the window, but it was pale and gray and gave the room a dingy look, like something out of an old B movie. I squinted at the nightstand clock. And the time, for Christ’s sake, was 6:46.

  Who the hell would come calling at 6:46 in the morning?

  The buzzer kept blaring away, long and short, long and short, until the noise began to rattle around inside my head like a marble in a box. I said a few things under my breath, most of them obscene, and fumbled my way out of bed and into an old robe from the closet. Then I lumbered into the front room and jammed down the talk lever on the intercom unit.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me—Eberhardt.”

  Eberhardt? “You know what time it is?”

  “Yeah, I know. Buzz me in, will you?”

  So I buzzed him in, scowling about it. Then I unlocked the door, opened it, and went back into the bedroom to put my pants on. I heard him come in—he made some noise with the door— and pretty soon he yelled my name.

  I yelled back at him to keep his pants on, finished putting mine on, and went out there. I don’t know what I expected to see—Eberhardt as he usually was, I suppose, wearing a business suit, with his hair combed and a pipe poking out of his face—but what I did see brought me up short and made me gawp a little. He was standing over by the couch, none too steady on his feet, and you could smell the liquor on him from across the room. He wore sports clothes instead of a suit, but the shirt was rumpled and one of the buttons was missing, and the fly on his trousers was at half-mast. His cheeks were stubbled, his hair stuck up at sharp angles like the stubby spokes on a mace; his face was red and glazed-looking, and his eyes were a couple of wounds with streaks of blood in them. I had known him more than thirty years, and I’d never seen him like this. Never.

  “What the hell, Eb?”

  “What the hell, yourself. You got any coffee?”

  “I’ll put some on. What’re you doing here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he said. “Just thought I’d drop in.”

  “Yeah.”

  I went into the kitchen and ran some tap water into a kettle. He followed me, propped himself up against the wall next to the door, fumbled around in his jacket until he found one of his old briars. He put the thing in one corner of his mouth and left it hanging there.

  “You went out and tied one on, huh?” I said as I plopped the kettle down on the stove and turned on the gas flame.

  “Better believe it,” he said.

  “You feel any better?”

  “No. I feel lousy.”

  “You look lousy. Why aren’t you home?”

  “Told you, I was in the neighborhood.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I spent the night down on Greenwich.”

  “Who do you know on Greenwich?”

  “Lady, that’s who. Lady I met last night.”

  “Uh-huh. Like that.”

  “Like that. You think I’m too old to pick up broads in bars? Not me, hot shot. You, maybe, with that flabby gut of yours. Not me.”

  I spooned instant coffee into two cups. “Congratulations. So you got laid. How’re you going to make it to work today, the shape you’re in?”

  “No,“he said.

  “No? No what?”

  “No, I didn’t get laid.”

  “That’s too bad. Wasn’t she willing?”

  “Oh, she was willing. So was I.”

  “Well, then?”

  He pushed away from the wall, moved to one of the chairs at the dining table. When he sat down he did it heavily, and the pipe fell out of his mouth and clattered on the table, spilling a trail of ash and dottle. He sat there looking at it, frowning.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “If you didn’t come here to brag about your conquest,” I said, “why did you come?”

  “Coffee. And I was in the neighborhood.”

  “Come on, Eb. I know you better than that. You’ve got a reason or you wouldn’t be here looking like you do.”

  “You think you know me? Nobody knows me. Dana least of all. You want to hear something funny? She called last night. I’m home two minutes and she calls, first I’ve heard from her since she moved out. Reason is, she thought I might be worrying about her and she wanted to let me know she’s all right. Didn’t ask me how I was, how anything was, just wanted to let me know she’s all right and staying with a friend. That’s what she said, ‘I’m staying with a friend.’ Asshole lover of hers, that’s who she’s staying with.”

  “So you went right out and got drunk and got laid.”

  “No. Don’t you listen? I didn’t get laid.”

  “Okay, you didn’t. Go back and see the lady tonight. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  “Get lucky. Yeah. She threw me out.”

  “What?”

  “She threw me out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she didn’t get laid.”

  “Eb …”

  “Called me a sorry excuse for a man and threw me out.”

  The kettle commenced a whistling shriek. I reached over and shut off the gas.

  “Figured it was the booze last night,“Eberhardt said. “Nothing to worry about. But this morning …” His face screwed up and for an awkward moment I thought he might start to bawl. But then he passed a hand over his eyes and his expression cleared; he looked up at me with the same sort of appeal as on Sunday. “You understand me? You’re the same age I am, you been around… you understand?”

  I understood, all right. Why he had come, what it was he really wanted to talk about. And the whole thing—the way he looked, what he was saying, what he was about to say—would have been comical if it had not been so tragic.

  “I couldn’t get it up,” he said. “I couldn’t get the son of a bitch to stand up and salute.”

  I spent an hour filling him full of coffee and talking to him like a Dutch uncle, reassuring him, telling him it was a temporary thing—stress, the psychological blow of Dana leaving him, maybe the woman and circumstances of last night as well. He knew all that, of course, but he was beaten down and lonely—about as beaten down and lonely as a man like Eberhardt could get— and he needed to have it all said to him by a sympathetic friend. He seemed to feel a little better afterward, which made one of us; it was the wrong kind of start for my day, and coming on the heels of last night’s dirty-laundry session with Cybil Wade, it left me feeling as morose as I had on Sunday.

  Eberhardt was in no shape to go traipsing down to the Hall of Justice or even to drive to his house in Noe Valley. I convinced him of that, and got him to take a cold shower and crawl into my bed to sleep it off. Then I
rang up the Homicide Squad for him and told one of the inspectors that Eb wouldn’t be in until later today, maybe not at all. When I got out of there at 8:40 he was snoring away in bed, with one of the pillows clasped against him as if it were Dana in the days before the walls came tumbling down.

  I took my depression downtown through wispy fog that had put a sheen of wetness on the streets. I was on Taylor Street, just crossing Eddy and about to swing into the lot on the corner, when I remembered that I no longer had an office here. My new offices, as of today, were located on Drumm Street. For Christ’s sake, I thought, and wondered if I was becoming senile. The memory lapse, and the fact that I wouldn’t be working in this lousy neighborhood anymore after two decades of calling it a second home, made me even more morose. It was one of those days when you should never get out of bed. When you should crawl under the sheets and huddle there like a rabbit under a newspaper until it goes away.

  I drove all the way up the hill to California, turned right, and drove all the way down the hill to Drumm. Amazingly, there was a parking space near Sacramento; I put my car into it and walked back to the nice, shiny, renovated building where I had my new offices.

  The offices were nice and shiny too: two rooms, one waiting area and one private office; pastel walls and a beige carpet on the floor; some chrome chairs with corduroy cushions; and Venetian blinds over the windows in case you didn’t want to look out at the Embarcadero Freeway monstrosity looming nearby. The only things out of place were crap that belonged to me—the piles of boxes in the middle of the anteroom, the desk in the private office, that the moving company had delivered yesterday.

  It was a fine new set of offices, all right. And it tied a nice black ribbon on my depression: I was going to hate working here, image or no image, changing times or no changing times.

  The telephone company had come in and installed a phone—as promised, for a change—and it was sitting in the middle of my desk. It was a yellow phone, with a pushbutton dial system. Private eyes aren’t supposed to have yellow phones, I thought sourly; pimps have yellow phones. But I went over and used it anyway, to put in a long-distance call to Ben Chadwick’s office in Hollywood.

  He was in, which was surprising because the time was only 9:30. “I had to come in early today,” he said by way of explanation. “Heavy workload. I hate these early-bird hours, though.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Listen,” he said, “I tried to call you yesterday, but the operator said your phone had been disconnected. I thought maybe you’d gone out of business. Either that, or somebody blew you away.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What have you got, Ben?”

  “Evil by Gaslight. You wanted poop, here’s poop: Magnum bought the rights in 1950 from a guy named Frank Colodny. Nobody remembers anything about him; came in off the street to see Magnum’s story editor, with an intro from some local flack he knew. Story editor liked what he saw, the moguls liked what they saw, and they paid him fifty grand for the property. Plus sweeteners. Pretty heavy sugar for those days.”

  “What did they buy? Story treatment?”

  “Nope. Complete screenplay. Damn good screenplay too, from what I’ve been told. Only a few changes from original to shooting script.”

  “Did Colodny claim to have written it?”

  “Yep. Under the Rose Tyler Crawford name.” “Was anyone else involved in the deal?” “Not as far as Magnum knew.” “Who made the changes in the script?” “Colodny did. They gave him an office and a typewriter on the lot. They also hauled him onto the set during shooting when they needed a few last minute changes.”

  “Those sweeteners you mentioned—what were they?”

  “Two percent of the gross profit. Also not common in those days; Magnum must have really wanted that property. Doesn’t sound like much, but Evil grossed a bundle. Magnum paid Colodny another eighty grand or so over the years for that two percent.”

  “Were you able to dig up any local angles on Colodny?”

  “Nope. He lived in Arizona, not down here; royalty checks were mailed to a P.O. box in a place called Wickstaff. But I don’t know if the address is current. Last check went out some years back.” “Thanks, Ben. Let me know if I can do something for you up here.” “I will,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.” We hung up. And I sat down in my chair and put my feet up on the desk the way private eyes are supposed to do, new offices or not, and brooded out through the slats in the Venetian blinds. Things were beginning to come together.

  What I needed to do now was to shuffle all the pieces around and see if the full pattern emerged.

  Okay. Meeker and Colodny are friends in New York in the forties; Meeker is a pulp artist and works for Action House, where Colodny is ‘editor-in-chief. But Meeker has secret writing aspirations—secret because maybe he’s not sure his work is any good, and he doesn’t want to embarrass himself in front of the other Pulpeteers—and he writes … what? the short story or the screenplay? Come back to that later. He writes something called “Hoodwink” and decides to show it to Colodny. Colodny the editor recognizes its merit; and Colodny the bastard smells big money and plans to steal it for himself. He puts Meeker off, maybe tells him it’s not very good but he’ll see what he can do with it, and then a little while later he disappears. And where he goes is out to Hollywood, where he sells the property to Magnum Pictures for fifty thousand dollars and a percentage of the profits. After which he buys a ghost town in Arizona, calls it Colodnyville, and settles in for the next thirty years.

  Meeker, of course, doesn’t know right away that he’s been cheated. He only knows that Colodny has disappeared. He doesn’t find out until the film is released—or maybe years afterward—and by then it’s too late. He has no legal proof that Colodny stole or plagiarized his work since he obviously never copyrighted it; and Colodny’s trail is long cold, so that even if Meeker tries to find him, he turns up empty-handed. So Meeker stays in New York drawing for the last of the pulps and the burgeoning paperback market, then later moves out to California to freelance. And all the while he grows more bitter and resentful toward Colodny.

  Comes this year, the past several weeks. Lloyd Underwood and some others decide to put on a pulp convention, and somehow they manage to locate Colodny. Maybe the idea of a reunion with his Pulpeteer cronies amuses him after all the elapsed time, or maybe it’s the prospect of seeing and bedding Cybil Wade again that amuses him. At any rate he agrees to come to the convention. The only thing that would have kept him away is the fact that Meeker would be present; but as far as Colodny knows, Meeker is among the missing—Underwood, ironically, has had difficulty finding a man who all but lives in his own backyard. It isn’t until after Colodny arrives at the hotel that he comes face to face with Meeker and his past crimes.

  Meanwhile, Meeker is finally located by Underwood, who tells him that Colodny will be one of the guest panelists at the convention. This news has to have had a profound effect on Meeker. After thirty years he is at last going to confront the man who stole “Hoodwink” from him. So then—

  So then what}

  My speculations had been pretty solid so far, but now they came to a skidding halt. If Meeker knew Colodny had stolen “Hoodwink,” why had he sent copies of the short story to all the other Pulpeteers, along with the extortion letters? Unless it was some sort of mad purposeless game… but even at that, it didn’t make sense. I had asked Cybil Wade a few more questions about Meeker during the ride back to the hotel last night, and she’d confirmed my impression of him as a flake, somebody who had always marched to the tune of a different drummer. It was likely that Colodny’s betrayal had pushed him a little deeper into lunacy—anybody who would conceive that extortion gambit in the first place had to be at least half cracked—and yet he hadn’t struck me as irrational. There had to have been some sort of method in it.

  But there were other things, too, that wouldn’t fit together: If Meeker had killed Colodny, if revenge in the form of a bullet was his primary inten
tion, why bother to send the manuscripts and extortion letters? And if he hadn’t killed Colodny, if murder wasn’t his intention but someone else’s, why had he been killed? And why had Colodny—apparently Colodny—stolen Cybil’s gun? To threaten Meeker, as Cybil had threatened him, to lay off? But then why had Colodny turned up dead in the hotel and not Meeker?

  Too many questions at once; they kept running around and bumping into each other, and they were giving me a headache. All right, then. Backtrack a little, take it from the original “Hood wink” material. Was it the novelette or the screenplay? The short story seemed much more probable. Meeker was a Pulpeteer, he worked for a pulp magazine publisher, he was immersed in fiction as prose, not fiction as cinematic drama. Besides, if he’d written the screenplay, why would he bother to do a novelette version?

  Next question: Then who wrote the screenplay? Not Colodny, in spite of what Ben Chadwick had told me. According to what I’d learned Colodny was not, and never had been, a writer. What he was was an editor, which explained how he was able to rewrite the script to Magnum’s specifications and make last-minute changes on the film set; any good editor could do that much creative work without being a writer. But somebody else had to have written the initial screenplay, using Meeker’s story as the basis.

  Next question: Who did the actual plagiarism? One of the Pulpeteers? Could Colodny have taken one of the others in on the scam and then cheated him out of his share, just as he had cheated Meeker? And could Meeker, realizing that someone else was involved, suspecting it was a Pulpeteer—Cybil Wade, maybe, because of her affair with Colodny; that would explain the markings on the Arizona map—could he have sent the novelette and the extortion letters to each of them as part of his own screwball plan to find out which one was guilty?

  I took my feet off the desk and got up and paced around a little. Now I was getting somewhere again. Colodny had had an accomplice, and the accomplice had killed him out of the same motive as Meeker had: revenge. And why murder Meeker later on? How about because Meeker had succeeded in his plan, had found out who the accomplice was—not Cybil after all, someone else—and threatened to go to the police; or maybe even because he tried a little blackmail of his own. The killer couldn’t take the risk of being found out: exit Meeker. It made sense. There were still some small loose pieces, like who had really stolen Cybil Wade’s gun and why, and still some big loose pieces, like how had the killer managed to pull off not one but two locked-room murders— but the skeleton of it was there, all the structural bones gleaming inside the dusty museum of my head. Figure out who, I told myself, and the rest of it, the “impossible” stuff, will follow. The solutions are there; you just haven’t put them together yet.