Hoodwink

by Bill Pronzini

  Ivan Wade, I thought glumly. It’s got to be Ivan Wade.

  He was an amateur magician, and who better than an amateur magician to stage a pair of locked-room illusions? He was the cuckolded husband, and if he’d found that out, despite Cybil’s protestations to the contrary, it doubled his motive for murder. It was Dancer who had been framed, and Wade had a long-standing hostility toward him. The Wades hadn’t exactly been poor in 1950, by Cybil’s testimony, but the prospect of a big Hollywood score was enough to corrupt ‘anybody at any income level. Ivan had had experience in radio scripting at that time, and later did a number of TV scripts, so he understood the dramatic form; it was only a small step to the writing of a complete screenplay. And from what I’d learned about Colodny, he had been the kind of perverse bastard who’d have enjoyed working a scam with the husband of the woman he’d seduced and was then blackmailing.

  Wade fit the bill, all right—and I hoped to God I was wrong about him. If I wasn’t, and if I helped to put him in prison for murder, what would happen between Kerry and me? I had a pretty bad idea. Once before I had got involved with a woman and a murder case at the same time, and the killer turned out to be her brother, and I was the catalyst in his eventual suicide. The relationship had died along with him. It made me ache to think of the same thing happening with Kerry and me.

  But I was in too deep to back out now, even for her sake, even for mine. I owed the truth to Dancer and I owed it to myself. The one hope I had was to turn up evidence that exonerated Wade by pointing conclusively to someone else. Innocent until proven guilty; give him the benefit of that and slog ahead, try to find proof either way.

  And I had an idea where I ought to go slogging, too. If there was one place proof might exist, along with some other missing pieces, it—

  The telephone rang.

  I moved over and caught up the receiver. “Detective Agency.”

  “Hi, it’s me,“Kerry’s voice said. “Are you busy?”

  “Sort of. But not too busy for you.”

  “How are the new offices?”

  “Terrific,” I lied. “Where are you? At work?”

  “Yes. I just spoke to Cybil; she said she saw you last night.”

  “I got back a little earlier than expected and we had a talk.”

  “So she said. She wouldn’t tell me what about, though.”

  “You, for one thing.”

  “I’ll bet. She approves of you, you know.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know.”

  “Well, I wish you’d have come and talked with me too. What you told me on the phone about Ozzie Meeker really had me upset. Are you positive he was murdered?”

  “Pretty positive.”

  “Two murders,” she said. “What if a third Pulpeteer dies?”

  “I don’t think that’ll happen.”

  “Convince me in person. Will I see you tonight?”

  “I wish you could. But no, not tonight.”

  “Are you trying to avoid me for some reason?”

  “Honey,” I said, “the last thing I want to do is avoid you. No, I’m going out of town.”

  “Out of town? Where?”

  “Arizona.” “Why Arizona?”

  “I want to take to some people in Wickstaff, where Colodny lived. I also want to have a look at this ghost town he owned.”

  “But why?”

  “Just a hunch, that’s all. I’ll have more to tell you when I get back.”

  “I hope so,“she said. “And I hope it’s good news.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Me too.”

  I spent the rest of the morning at the Hall of Justice, filling Russ Dancer in on the latest developments, asking him questions about Ivan Wade and Colodny and Meeker. He didn’t have anything new to tell me, except that Wade had begun experimenting with television scripting as early as 1949 and had also written an unsuccessful play. So there was no question that he had had the talent and the know-how to write the Evil by Gaslight screenplay.

  Dancer was in better spirits than he had been on Sunday, even though I was careful not to build up his hopes. His faith in me was almost childlike. “You’ll get me out of here,” he said. “I know it; it’s just a matter of time. “You’re the best there is.”

  Yeah.

  Then I drove out to SFO, parked my car, took the overnight bag out of the trunk, and went in and bought myself a ticket. At 3:45 I was up in the friendly skies on my way to Tucson.

  NINETEEN

  The town of Wickstaff, Arizona, was one of those places plunked down in the middle of nowhere that make you wonder about their origins. There was nothing much surrounding it in any direction except rough terrain dominated by cacti, scrub brush, and eroded lava pinnacles—mile after mile of sun-blasted emptiness that stretched away to low, reddish foothills on three sides. Two roads cut through it north-south and east-west, both of them county-maintained and both two-lane blacktop; scattered here and there in its vicinity were a few hardscrabble ranches. And as far as I could tell, that was all there was. So why had it been created and nurtured in the first place? What had kept it alive when hundreds of others in the Southwest, including the fabled Tombstone, which was not all that far away and in a better geographical location, died natural deaths and became ghosts crumbling away into ruin or tourist bait?

  On the outskirts was a sign that said, with evident civic pride, that the current population was the same as the date Wickstaff had been founded: 1897. I passed it, driving the cranky Duster I had rented in Tucson, a few minutes past noon on Wednesday. The temperature was in the nineties, but streaky clouds and heat haze gave the sky a whitish cast, made the sun look like a boiled egg, and kept the glare down outside. Inside, the air-conditioner whirred and clanked like an old Hoover vacuum cleaner and tunneled dust along with cool air through the vents.

  I felt somewhat relieved to finally get where I’d been going. Twenty hours alone on an airplane, in a motel, driving back-country roads gives you too much time to think about things. Like Eberhardt and how marriages can go sour. And the murders, how they might have been committed. And Cybil Wade’s affair with Colodny. And Ivan Wade’s jealousy. And Kerry—mostly Kerry. I had lots of ideas, some of them good, some of them not so good, some of them unsettling; but on more than one level, it came right down to this: Was Ivan Wade guilty of murder or wasn’t he? Without knowing the answer to that, I could not resolve my situation with Kerry or convince the San Francisco cops that Russ Dancer was innocent.

  But now here I was, welcome to Wickstaff, and I could start doing things instead of brooding about them. The first thing I could do was to find out where Colodny had lived when he wasn’t keeping house with a bunch of ghosts. The second thing after that was to find out how to get to Colodnyville.

  Neither figured to be difficult, Wickstaff being as small as it was, and they weren’t. The town had a three-block main street, with about a third of the buildings of grandfatherly vintage, made out of adobe brick and sporting Western-style false fronts. One of these in the second block housed something called the Elite Cafe. I parked in front and went in there, on the theory that if anybody knows everybody in a small town, it’s the people who run a local eatery. It was a good theory in this case: a dour middle-aged waitress told me Colodny had boarded with a Mrs. Duncan on Quartz Street, turn right at the next corner, three blocks down, first house on your left. I also learned that word had found its way here from San Francisco about Colodny’s death; the waitress asked me if I was kin or a friend of his, and when I said no she said, “He was a mean old bastard,” and left it at that. Colodny, it seemed, had not been any better liked among the folks of Wickstaff than he had among the Pulpeteers.

  I went out and got into the Duster and turned right at the next corner, drove three blocks down, and stopped again in front of the first house on my left. It was a big frame house, somewhat weathered, with a wide front porch that was shaded by paloverde trees. A Conestoga wagon wheel, painted white, had been imbedded in the patchy front
lawn, and against it was propped a sign that said: Room for Rent. On the porch, in the shade, a fat woman in a straw hat sat in a wicker chair and peered out at me with kindled interest.

  The walk from the car to the porch was maybe thirty yards, but I felt wet when I got there. The Arizona heat was something; so was that starched-looking sky. And so was the fat woman. She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she had an angelic face, a voice that came out of a whiskey keg, a pair of raisinlike eyes that picked my pocket and counted the money in my wallet. The most interesting thing about her, though, was the fact that she didn’t sweat. She sat there in her chair, swaddled in heat, and her face was powder dry; she didn’t even look uncomfortable. It seemed unnatural somehow, particularly when I could feel myself dripping and simmering in front of her, like an ice cube on a hot stove.

  “Hot day,” I said.

  “Is it? Didn’t notice.”

  “Are you Mrs. Duncan?”

  “That’s me. It’s one-fifty per week, meals included.”

  “What is?”

  “The room. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  “No, ma’am. Not exactly.”

  She lost interest in me. She didn’t move, her expression didn’t change, but the light of avarice went out of her raisin eyes and was replaced by a dull glow of boredom. If it had not required too much effort, she might have yawned in my face. Or told me to go away. As it was she just sat still and watched me sweat.

  “I’m here about Frank Colodny,” I said.

  That didn’t interest her much either. “Policeman?”

  “Private investigator, from San Francisco.”

  “Is that a fact.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Would you mind answering a few questions?”

  “About Frank?”

  “Yes, about Frank.”

  “Don’t see why I should, if you’re not a cop.”

  “It might help save a man’s life, Mrs. Duncan.”

  “Whose life?”

  “The man in San Francisco charged with killing Colodny,” I said. “I think he’s innocent and I’m trying to prove it.”

  “If he’s been charged he must be guilty.”

  “Not in this case. If you knew the facts—”

  “I’m not interested,” she said.

  We looked at each other. She was not going to give an inch, you could see that; she was a sweet old bitch. I rubbed sweat off my forehead with the back of one hand, and that made her mouth twitch in what might have been a smile. Then I dragged out my wallet and opened it and took out a five-dollar bill. That put the smile away, made the avarice reappear in her eyes—not much of it, just about five dollars’ worth.

  “Answers,” I said. “Okay?”

  ‘ 254

  She held out one flabby arm. I gave her the five and she made it disappear into the folds of her housedress. The greed-light disappeared with it. She was bored again, now that she had the money.

  I asked her, “How long did Colodny board with you?”

  “Six years, give or take.”

  “Where did he live before that?”

  “Place over on Cholla that burned down. Most of the time he lived out in the hills with his wife.”

  “Wife? I didn’t know he was married.”

  It wasn’t a question, so she didn’t say anything.

  I said, “Where can I find her?”

  “Graveyard, I reckon. Been dead, those six years.”

  “What did she die of?”

  “Suffocated in the fire, so they said.”

  “Accidental fire?”

  “Smoking in bed. Her, not him.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Lisa Horseman.”

  “That’s an Indian name, isn’t it?”

  “Navajo. She was a half-breed,” Mrs. Duncan said, and curled her lip to let me know what she thought of half-breeds and interracial marriages.

  “Was she from Wickstaff?”

  “Folks had a ranch nearby.”

  “How long were she and Colodny married?”

  “Since he come here, back in the early fifties.”

  “Did they have any children?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are her relatives still living?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did Colodny still spend time in the ghost town after she died?”

  “Ghost town. That’s a laugh.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You fixing to go out there, are you?”

  “I was, yes.”

  “Then you’ll see what I mean when you get there.”

  “But he did go there regularly?”

  “Sure he did. Two-three days a week.”

  Which meant that he maintained some sort of home in Colodnyville, probably the same one he’d shared with his wife when she was alive. I went on to ask her if the local police had stopped by to see her and to check through Colodny’s belongings—a routine undertaking in homicide cases where the victim is killed in another area or state, and has no immediate next of kin.

  She said, “They have, but wasn’t much for them to go through.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “He didn’t keep much here,” she said. A small bitterness had crept into her voice, as if she begrudged that fact. The police were not the only ones who had checked through Colodny’s belongings in this house. “Clothes, some books, not much else.”

  “Did the police go out to Colodnyville too?”

  “I suppose. They didn’t tell me.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “Straight out of town to the east until you come to Ocotillo Road, winds up into the foothills. Old dirt track off there about a mile in. You’ll see a sign. Crazy old fool put up a sign.”

  “One more question. Has anyone else been around asking about Colodny in the past few days?”

  “Just you. Hyped-up dude named Lloyd Underwood called him three-four weeks ago, said he was a pulp magazine collector. Said he’d heard about Frank from some other collector passed through these parts on a book-buying trip. That’s why Frank went off to San Francisco. Pulp magazines,” she said, and curled her lip again. They were right up there with half-breeds and interracial marriages in her esteem.

  “But nobody’s called since?”

  “No. Who’d call? He didn’t have any friends.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “Mean and tetched, that’s why. Married a half-breed, kept to himself like he had secrets, bit your head off when you spoke to him, lived out in that godforsaken place claiming he was a prospector.” She made a piglike snorting sound. “Prospector. No gold out there anymore, not in fifty years; he didn’t take a hundred dollars out of those hills in all the time he was there. But he always had plenty of money just the same.”

  “If you disliked him so much, why did you give him a room in your house?”

  She looked at me as if I might be a little tetched myself. “He paid me one-fifty a week,” she said. “Why do you think?”

  I left her sitting there, not bothering to thank her or to say goodbye, and pushed back through the sweltering air to the street. The back of my shirt and most of the underarm areas were sopping wet, but not one drop of sweat had appeared anywhere on her face or arms and her dress was desert-dry. I disliked her for that as much as for anything else.

  Back in the car, I let the dusty air conditioner dry me off as I drove to Main Street again, then turned east on the country road that cut through it in that direction. There was not much traffic and nothing much to look at except lava formations and tall saguaro cactus. The sky was so milky now that the sun looked like a cataracted eye. That and the heat glaze and the absence of movement anywhere beyond the road itself gave me an eerie feeling, as if I were driving in a place not of this world. My turn in the Twilight Zone.

  I added what Mrs. Duncan had told me to what I already knew about Colodny, and it fit together nicely in the pattern I had evolved. He had come here thirty years ago with his boodle
from Magnum Pictures, bought the ghost town, married, settled down to act out his fantasy of life as a gold prospector, and thumbed his nose at the world for a quarter of a century. The death of his wife, maybe coupled with creeping old age, had left him lonely; that had to be why he’d spent more time in Wickstaff over the past six years. It might also explain why he had consented to attend the pulp con and the Pulpeteer reunion. And why he had tried to force Cybil Wade to share a bed with him again after all those years.

  The fact that he kept most of his possessions in Colodnyville might also be significant. If he had retained anything incriminating from his New York days, such as evidence of his partner’s identity in the “Hoodwink” plagiarism—and that embarrassing photograph Cybil had told me about— it was likely to be there. Unless the local law had found it and confiscated it, of course. If I had no luck myself I would have to check with them right away. But I hoped that if they had found something, it was not the photograph; that was not for anybody to look at, including me. The first thing I’d do if I came across it myself would be to shut my eyes and burn it.

  The road took me in a more or less straight line for better than five miles before an intersection loomed up. On the near side was a sign that indicated the narrow two-lane cutting off to the southeast was Ocotillo Road. The foothills loomed up here, too—more lava formations, huge rocks balanced on top of each other and strewn along slopes that also bore catclaw, cholla, organ-pipe cactus abloom with pink and white and lavender flowers. Higher up, crags and limestone walls stood dark red against the starchy sky.