Hoodwink

by Bill Pronzini

  But I was making progress with the hole, widening it out to better than two feet. I came across a layer of chicken wire, but it was so old and brittle that I had no trouble whacking through it with the hatchet. At the center of the hole, where I had penetrated farthest, it felt four or five inches deep. I told myself the roof couldn’t be any more than six inches thick and kept on methodically slugging away at the adobe.

  A long time later—what seemed like a long time—I made another weakening swing … and broke through.

  Along with adobe chips and powder, a shaft of daylight came slanting down into my face this time. I blinked at it, coughing, for two or three seconds. Then fresh determination and a sense of rage buoyed up my strength, and I hammered and scraped at the edges of the hole until I could feel the sun hot against the upper part of my body, see a good foot-and-a-half’s worth of the hazy sky. But I was careful not to send any pieces of adobe up onto the roof, where they might be seen in the air or heard clattering. All of it fell down around me:

  the bed and the floor near it were half buried under shallow layers.

  When I had the hole widened out to two feet I dropped the hatchet, came down off the bed, and leaned against one of the posts, dripping. I had known a guy once, in the Army, who had worked as a cowboy on a ranch in Wyoming, and his favorite expression was, “I feel like I been rode hard and turned loose wet.” That was how I felt right now. My right arm tingled with fatigue, my neck and back were stiff, my head throbbed, my throat burned from the dust and heat. Even if I were ready to drag myself up through that hole, which I wasn’t, my body was not yet ready to respond.

  The room was full of light now, spilling in through the hole; I no longer needed matches to see where I was going. I dragged myself over to the right front window and squinted out through the boards. Absolute stillness, like looking at a slide picture on a screen. I went to each of the side windows in turn, and it was the same in those directions, too. If he had come down while I was working on the hole, he was somewhere around to the rear or behind one of the other buildings. But I did not think he’d come down; I couldn’t think it, because if he had, I was finished. No, he was still up there under the leaning rocks, still waiting.

  So all right. Maybe he had heard me banging through the roof and wondered what I was doing, but now he was going to hear and wonder plenty. Now I wanted him to get suspicious and come investigate.

  I went back to where the hatchet lay on the bed. My right arm was on the mend; I picked up the hatchet and started to beat on the nearest window boards with as much strength as I could muster. Then I moved to the front and beat on those boards for a while. Then I got some tin plates from the mess on the floor and pounded on them, yelling and screaming all the while like a lunatic. Then I used the hatchet to pry loose some of the boards on a side window and hurled them out through the bars. Every minute or so while I was doing all of this, I looked out toward the leaning rocks. But the son of a bitch didn’t bite. Maybe he suspected it was a trick. Maybe he had steel nerves. Maybe he was as crazy as I was pretending to be.

  Maybe it was just a matter of time before he did bite.

  I tore off more side-window boards, flung them outside. I found several unbroken glasses, cups, plates, and hurled them against the walls and the window bars. I screamed like Tarzan on a jungle vine and imitated a cackling laugh at the top of my voice. I used the hatchet to beat some more on the remaining window boards. I looked out toward the rocks for the fiftieth or hundredth time—

  Movement.

  Just a shadow at first, moving among other shadows. But after a few seconds he came out into the open, a man-shape in dark clothes—too far away for me to see who he was. Not that I was particularly interested in his identity right now. I kept watching him, yelling and banging things with the hatchet, as he started down out of the rocks. He was coming, all right. He was coming.

  I hurried across to the bed, shoved it out of the way, and dragged one of the tables over under the hole. Then I went back, breaking more crockery on the way, hooting and cackling, and looked out again. Still coming. I might have been able to recognize him if I’d stayed there a little longer, but all I wanted was to make sure he was going to come all the way to this building. And it looked like he was—warily, slowly, but on his way just the same.

  I picked up two of the tin plates and hammered on them as I went back to where I’d positioned the table. I found two more glasses, another cup, and laid them and the plates on the table. When I climbed up and poked my head out, the roof slant and front lip blocked my view in that direction; I could see part of the distant rocks but not the two where he had been hiding. I picked up the glasses and cup and plates and set them on the roof to one side, anchoring them in little potholes so they wouldn’t slide off; laid the hatchet beside them. Standing on tiptoe, I got my arms through the hole and wedged down on the roof. And then heaved and squirmed upward, head down, angling toward the rear wall so I wouldn’t reveal myself above the roof’s peak.

  Doing it silently was my main concern, and I seemed to manage that well enough. But a sharp edge of adobe or chicken wire put a gash in my leg as I came through. I tried not to pay any attention to it, except that it stung and burned like fire. The roof’s surface was irregular, pocked with little holes, studded with bumps; I got my feet and hands braced and turned back to face the hole. Leaned down into it with the glasses and the cup and shattered them back under against the walls. Then I beat on the tin plates, down inside so the noise would come from in there. After ten seconds or so, I tossed the plates back against the wall, pushed out of and away from the hole, and began to crawl up the roof slant to the front, the hatchet in one hand, like an Indian in an old cavalry movie.

  When I got to within a foot of the edge I lay still and listened. Silence. Have to chance a look, I thought; I’ve got to know where he is. I eased my head up, an inch at a time. And there he was, forty feet or so from the building, moving at an angle toward the left-hand corner—eyes fixed straight ahead, the rifle jutting out in front of him at belt level. I gawped at him a little as he cut past the corner and started around on that side.

  It was clear enough what he had in mind. He could not see inside from the front, because I hadn’t broken any of the boarding off those windows. But he could look in through one of the unboarded side windows. Which was just what I wanted him to do—come right up close and peer through the bars.

  I eased my body around to the left, teeth clamped against the pain in my leg, and crawled toward where I judged the near window to be. I had to do it even more slowly than before, because of his nearness and the risk of making noise. He was not trying to be quiet, though; I could hear the faint shuffle of his steps on the rocky ground.

  Close to the side edge, I stopped again and lifted my head for another look. Twenty feet away now, still angling toward the window. A few more steps and he would be near enough for me to make my move, even if he didn’t go all the way up to the window.

  I drew back onto my knees, got one foot down— the leg that wasn’t gashed—and unfolded myself in sections until I was standing up. My shoe scraped a little on one of the pebbly bumps; I froze in place. I could see him, his head and shoulders, and I thought that if he looked up, I would have to take an immediate running jump. But he did not look up. He moved forward one more pace, until only his head was visible.

  I took a limping step myself, closer to the edge. The building was built low to the ground, but anything above three feet was too high for me; standing up there, looking down, made my stom ach queasy and more sweat roll out of my pores. I took a firmer grip on the hatchet. I was not breathing at all now.

  He had stopped and I could see him crane his head forward as if startled: he was staring through the bars and I knew he had seen the hole in the ceiling. I took one more step—and as soon as I did, he jerked his body and his head back, looked up, started to bring the rifle up.

  I swallowed my fear and jumped straight down at him.

&nbs
p; He tried to dodge clear, but surprise made him slow and awkward; one of my bent knees hit him in the chest, the whole weight of my body drove him over backwards and flattened him into the ground. We broke apart when we hit, like something splitting in half, and he lost the rifle and I lost the hatchet. But I didn’t need the hatchet. I dragged myself onto all fours, hurting and shaky; he didn’t move at all.

  I could have broken both legs, I thought fuzzily. If I hadn’t hit him just right, coming off that damn roof, I could have broken a dozen bones.

  Yeah, another part of me said. And he’d have shot you dead if you hadn’t jumped off the damn roof.

  It took me a minute or so to get up onto my feet again. After which I went over, checked to see if he was still alive—he was—and then stood looking down at him, gawping a little the way I had on the roof. Because he wasn’t anyone I had expected to see. Because there were some holes in the deductive reasoning I had done back in San Francisco, Not only wasn’t he Ivan Wade, he was not even one of the Pulpeteers.

  The guy lying there on the ground was Lloyd Underwood.

  TWENTY-ONE

  At two o’clock on Thursday afternoon I was back in San Francisco, sitting in Eberhardt’s office at the Hall of Justice, getting ready for story time. Eberhardt was there too, of course, and so was a police stenographer. And so was Russ Dancer: Eb had had him brought down from the detention cells at my request. Nobody else had been invited.

  The one other person I’d have wanted there was Underwood, but he was being held in Arizona, in the Cochise County jail where I had delivered him late yesterday afternoon, on an attempted murder charge. There had been no way to have him brought back to California, not without going through extradition proceedings. But then, Under wood had been sullen and uncommunicative anyway ; he hadn’t said anything to me when he regained consciousness, all trussed up like a turkey, as I was changing the Duster’s flat tires—one spare from the rental’s trunk, one from Underwood’s Dodge hidden in the rocks nearby—and he hadn’t said anything during the long ride out of there. He’d opened his mouth pretty good after I hauled him into the county police offices in Bis-bee, but only to yell for an attorney. He had not admitted anything.

  Not that his presence was all that necessary at this little gathering. Its purpose was for me to explain the entire chain of events to Eberhardt and convince him I knew what I was talking about. Which would then bring about a dropping of charges against Dancer, his release, a reopening of the Colodny case, and a revaluation of the Meeker homicide by the Sacramento authorities. The subsequent investigation would slap Underwood with a murder charge, or so I hoped. I had nothing conclusive against him except the attempted homicide in Arizona, but if the police were convinced of his guilt, they were bound to turn up some sort of substantive evidence. Either that, or the pressure would get to Underwood and he would crack wide open. He was an amateur at crime, and amateurs convict themselves a good percentage of the time.

  I had had plenty of time to reshape my theories so that Underwood, not Ivan Wade or one of the other Pulpeteers, fit the role of murderer. It had been eight P.M. before the Arizona law and I were finished with each other—too late to drive back to Tucson, much less catch a flight to San Francisco. So I had made two telephone calls, one to Eberhardt and one to Kerry, and then spent the night in Bisbee. Early this morning I’d driven to Tucson, just as an eleven o’clock flight out was boarding. By the time we touched down at San Francisco, I had a complete progression worked out. It hadn’t been all that difficult, really. Once I realized what my mistakes were, as I had pieced it together initially, Underwood fit in with no trouble at all.

  The office was as blue with smoke as it had been the last time I was there: Eberhardt puffing away on a billiard briar, Dancer chain-smoking cigarettes. But at least the electric heater wasn’t on, and the temperature was at a tolerable level. Dancer, who still appeared ludicrous in his orange jumpsuit, kept looking at me with big dog eyes full of gratitude, as if he wanted to come over and lick my hand. He made me a little uncomfortable. I liked him much better in his role as the cynical and seedy hack writer, because I could deal with that. Fawning admiration was something else again.

  Eberhardt took the pipe out of his mouth and said gruffly, “All right, let’s get this show on the road.” He did not look at me as he said it. He hadn’t given me a direct look since my arrival. That was easy enough to figure, too: he was embarrassed at having shown up at my place drunk on Tuesday morning to discuss his sexual problems. So he was dealing with it by not dealing with it, by reverting behind the mask of hard-edged authority. He seemed to be bearing up all right, though. His eyes were bloodshot, which may have meant another drinking bout or just that he wasn’t sleeping much, and his face still had that blurred, grayish look. But he was tough, one of the, boys from the old school; he was not going to fall apart.

  “I’d better lay everything out chronologically,” I said. “It’s complicated, and it’ll be easier to follow that way.”

  “Tell it whichever way you want. It’s your party.”

  “The central factor is the ‘Hoodwink’ manuscript, so what happened to both Colodny and Meeker had origins more than thirty years ago.” I went on to explain my theory about Colodny’s theft of the novelette Meeker had written and entrusted to him, the bringing in of someone to plagiarize it into a screenplay, the eventual sale to Hollywood. And also how I had come to the fact that Meeker was the “Hoodwink” author.

  Eberhardt said, “Who was this someone Colodny brought in? You’re not going to tell me it was Underwood, are you?”

  “No, not Underwood. He’s not a writer, and he didn’t know Colodny in those days.”

  “Ivan Wade?” Dancer asked, as if he were hopeful the answer would be yes.

  “It wasn’t Wade either,” I said. “It was Waldo Ramsey.”

  “Waldo?”

  “There was a strongbox inside Colodny’s place in the ghost town. He’d kept a letter in it from Ramsey, written in 1950; it mentions the screenplay.”

  “Why would Frank keep an incriminating letter all these years?”

  “I guess he was something of a packrat,” I said, but that wasn’t the truth. Colodny had kept the letter because it was the stuff of potential blackmail—the same reason he’d kept the photograph of Cybil Wade and a couple of other items I had found in the strongbox. Whether or not he had used it against Ramsey was a moot point; but I doubted it. The Hollywood score had ended Colodny’s blackmailing pursuits, at least for the intervening three decades. I did not mention any of this because I didn’t want to go into the blackmail angle. It was more or less irrelevant to the two homicides, and I wanted to protect Cybil’s reputation. I had burned the photograph, sight unseen, back in Arizona.

  Dancer was shaking his head. “I wouldn’t have figured Waldo for a plagiarist,” he said. “He was on his uppers in those days, sure, but we all were. He always seemed honest enough. And he never mentioned anything about writing screenplays.”

  “Well, he had the talent—he’s adapted a couple of his own books for the screen, remember? But I’m not so sure he even knew he was a plagiarist. The wording of his letter indicates he believed Colodny had received permission from some anonymous author to have the novelette turned into a screenplay. He may have suspected there was funny business going on, but as you said, Russ, he was on his uppers back then. Colodny paid him pretty well for the job.” With money he got from blackmailing Cybil Wade, I thought.

  Eberhardt said, “Enough with the history lesson. Bring it forward thirty years, will you?”

  “Sure.” And I told them my speculations on Meeker: his discovery that he’d been cheated, the festering grudge, the invitation to the pulp convention and the chance to confront Colodny after all those years, and his half-cracked scheme to send out copies of the novelette, along with bogus extortion letters, in an effort to find out which of the Pulpeteers had been Colodny’s accomplice in the plagiarism.

  “Did he find out?”
Dancer asked.

  “I don’t think so. Ramsey had to have realized right away what ‘Hoodwink’ was all about, and it must have scared him pretty good; his career is going great guns and something like this could hurt him if it went public.”

  “Which gave him a sweet motive for murder, no?”

  “If he’d been inclined that way. That’s how I figured it at first: whoever the plagiarist was was the murderer. It seemed to add up; I didn’t consider that somebody else—Underwood—had got tossed by accident into the pot that was brewing. I doubt if Ramsey knows to this minute that Meeker was the true author of ‘Hoodwink.’ Or if Meeker learned that Ramsey was the unwitting plagiarist. The circumstances forced Ramsey to keep his mouth shut and bluff it out; there was no confrontation between them.”

  “How did Underwood get tossed into the pot?” Eberhardt asked.

  “I’m coming to that. There are a couple of other things that need explaining first. The thirty-eight that killed Colodny, for one. Cybil Wade’s gun. But it was stolen from her last Thursday night, while she was at the cocktail party.”

  “By whom?”

  “By Colodny. He was the man I surprised in the Wades’ room. He wanted the gun to threaten Meeker with; it was the only weapon he could have gotten on short notice. Maybe he even intended to kill Meeker with it—we’ll never know.”

  Dancer said, “How did he know Cybil had the gun?”

  “He knew because she’d threatened him with it. He made a pass at her, swatted her around when she refused, and she pulled the gun.”