Hoodwink

by Bill Pronzini

  Dancer smiled sardonically. “I didn’t think the old son of a bitch still had it in him. Even for Sweeteyes.”

  “He had it in him, all right. But he was running scared at the same time. He hadn’t expected to find Meeker at the convention—that was the only reason he’d consented to come in the first place, because Meeker wasn’t supposed to be there—and meeting him face to face had to have been a shock. Particularly when Meeker confronted him about the plagiarism, which is what must have happened; Meeker was having a high old time playing catalyst, shaking up the entire group—taking his own warped kind of revenge—and Colodny was his primary target. That had to be what caused the flare-up between the two of them at the cocktail party: Meeker goading Colodny, maybe trying to force a public confession.”

  “Is that what Meeker was after?” Eberhardt asked. “A public confession?”

  “I’d say so. Maybe he wanted money, too, reparation, but after thirty years he wasn’t likely to get it. He had to know that, screw loose or not. I doubt if he was really a blackmailer or an extortionist. The poor bastard’s primary motive all along had to be revenge.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “So Colodny got desperate after the cocktail-party incident; he went to Wades’ room, jimmied the lock, and swiped the gun. The fact that I caught him at it, almost ran him down, must have shaken him up even more: he couldn’t be sure whether or not I’d seen him and could identify him. He decided to lay low, not go after Meeker right away—wait until he saw how things went down. He probably hid the gun somewhere, to be on the safe side. That way, if I had seen him and did identify him, he could bluff it out.”

  “So did he go after Meeker?”

  “Yes, but not until Saturday. He found out on Friday that I hadn’t got a clear look at him in the Wades’ room, but there were other things going on then. You throwing your weight around in the bar, Russ, that was one.”

  “I was sure he’d put that second extortion note in my pocket,” Dancer said. “Who did if he didn’t? Meeker?”

  “Meeker. He could have done it any time that morning; the shape you were in, you wouldn’t have noticed. I think you were one of his top suspects for the plagiarist.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s why he kept palling around with you, feeding you drinks. He was setting you up, trying to get you to incriminate yourself.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He spent most of Friday with you, working on you, so he must have left Colodny pretty much alone. And Colodny left him alone. But on Saturday it started again—Meeker goading him. That’s what led to the shooting.”

  “Yeah, the locked-room trick. I’ve been going nuts trying to figure that out.”

  “It wasn’t a locked-room trick,” I said. “Which is why neither of us could figure it out. No gimmick, no illusion, nothing like that at all. Just a sort of freak accident, with you getting caught in the middle.”

  “Accident?”

  “That’s right—a juxtaposition of circumstances that combined to create a false impression.”

  “I don’t get it. What juxtaposition?”

  “Let me tell it chronologically,” I said. “The first thing is that you came in drunk a few minutes before noon. You remember you told me you knocked on Meeker’s door to see if he wanted to buy you a drink?”

  “I remember.”

  “But there was no answer: he wasn’t in. So you went down to your room, and after that everything is a blank in your memory. What you figure you did was to go straight in and collapse on the bed, but that isn’t what you did at all.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You bought yourself another drink.”

  “The bottle of rye that was on the couch? But I don’t even remember it being in the room—”

  “It wasn’t in the room. You went and got it.”

  “Where?”

  “Out of Meeker’s room,” I said. “He had plenty of liquor in there; you told me that yourself. You also told me that on Friday when I rang up your room, while you were in with Meeker having a drink, you’d heard the phone ring but you couldn’t get through the door in time. You didn’t mean the hall door, did you? You meant the connecting door.”

  “Ah Christ, that’s right. The connecting door was unlocked; I remember Ozzie doing it.”

  “And he didn’t relock it again. It was open on his side when you came into your room on Saturday. So you opened the connecting door, went into Meeker’s room, got the bottle, took a drink or two when you came back, tossed the bottle on the couch, and then went in and passed out. You also did one other thing—the most important thing of all.”

  “What was that?”

  “You left the connecting door open,” I said. “Maybe not all the way open, but not latched either.”

  Eberhardt’s expression altered slightly. He took the pipe out of his mouth and said, “I think I’m beginning to see it.”

  “Sure. After Dancer was back in his room, passed out, Meeker came into his room. He didn’t notice that the connecting door was open, or maybe he did and didn’t care. A little while after that Colodny showed up with the gun, either to threaten Meeker or to shoot him. They had an argument, they scuffled, and in the scuffle they bumped into the connecting door and went through it. They were actually struggling inside Dancer’s room when the gun went off and Colodny, not Meeker, was shot.”

  “What happened with the gun?” Eberhardt said. “Did Meeker throw it down afterward?”

  “Maybe. Or more likely it popped loose from his hand when it went off. Or from Colodny’s hand—whoever had hold of it. It’s easy enough to figure what happened next: Meeker, in surprise or fear or both, jumped back inside his own room. Colodny, on the other hand, was mortally wounded; but even somebody shot through the heart can live five or ten seconds afterward, that’s a medical fact. So either he or Meeker threw the door shut—an instinctive reaction, born of fear. For that same reason, fear, Colodny managed to turn the bolt on Dancer’s side, and Meeker did the same on his side of the door, double-locking it. The sound of the shot woke up Dancer; the other sounds he heard were the door shutting, the bolts being thrown, and Colodny falling to the floor. When Dancer staggered in from the bedroom, Colodny was already dead. He saw the body, picked up the gun. And that completed the false impression that confronted me when I let myself in a minute or so later.”

  “I’ll buy it so far,” Eberhardt said. Dancer didn’t have anything to say; he just sat there looking relieved. “But now where does Underwood fit in?”

  “He must have showed up at Meeker’s room, for one reason or another—he was the convention chairman, remember—some time during the scuffle, probably just seconds before I got off the elevator. The hallway door must have been open or at least unlatched; he heard scuffling sounds, he went in just in time to see Colodny get shot and what happened afterward.”

  “And then what? Blackmail?”

  “Either that, or Meeker offered him money to keep him quiet. Underwood needed money, evidently; he told me he was selling off part of his pulp collection, and no big-time collector like him would do that unless he was having financial problems. In any case Underwood became an accessory and the two of them beat it out of there the first chance they had—maybe right away, maybe later, while I was in talking to Dancer or after the security guy and the manager showed up. Meeker also figures to be the one who planted the typewriter—his own portable—in Colodny’s room to make everyone think Colodny was the one behind the extortion.”

  Eberhardt nodded. “Now we come to why Underwood killed Meeker. And how.” “Well, I’m not sure on the why part,” I said, “but I can make some guesses. Maybe he wanted more of a payoff than Meeker was willing to give. Or maybe Meeker had second thoughts about the killing and was making noises about confessing all, which would have put Underwood in the soup as an accessory. Or maybe it was another kind of greed: Meeker must have told him about ‘Hoodwink’ and the rest of it, including Colodny’s big Hollywood score and t
he fact of an accomplice in the plagiarism, and it could be that Underwood had visions of a horde of money stashed down in Arizona, or maybe of running his own blackmail scam against the surviving plagiarist.”

  “The locked-room business with the shed,” Eberhardt said. “Was that just a freak accident too?”

  “No, that was planned so that it would look like Meeker died accidentally. I think it must have been the way Colodny died that gave him the idea.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s the same solution in both cases, Eb,” I said. “I realized that in the ghost town. When Underwood took his first shot at me I dove back inside the building, slammed the door, and barred it. See the parallel? It was the same sort of thing that happened when Colodny was shot.”

  “I don’t see any parallel in the Meeker case.”

  “It’s there. Colodny was mortally wounded when he locked the connecting door; in effect he was a dead man. And it was a dead man— Meeker—who locked the door of that shed.”

  “Oh, it was? Listen, I talked to the cops up there. Meeker’s head was split open like a melon; the coroner says he died instantly. He didn’t have time to run into the shed and lock the door after him.”

  “I don’t mean it that way,” I said. “I mean it literally: he was dead when he locked the door.”

  Dancer was sitting forward on the edge of his chair, squinting at me with rapt eyes through his cigarette smoke. Even the stenographer looked expectant. Eberhardt, though, just sat glaring at the front of my shirt—still avoiding my eyes. “Make some sense, will you? Spell it out.”

  “There was a length of fishing twine in the grass outside the shed,” I said. “Underwood must have dropped it before he beat it out of there. I thought at first he’d used it to gimmick the key in the inside lock. You know, the old bit about running pieces of cord under the door and turning the key with slip knots. But one of the investigators up there, a guy named Loomis, told me that the shed key couldn’t have been turned that way; it had to have been turned by hand. He was right on both counts: the fishing twine was used for something else and the key was turned by hand.”

  “Meeker’s hand, I suppose?”

  “Yes. Well, more precisely, Meeker’s finger.”

  “His finger.”

  “Index finger, right hand. Loomis told me it was lacerated; that was what finally tipped me.”

  “Come on, don’t keep drawing it out. What happened?”

  “Meeker was lying in that shed with his head near the ax and the stepladder overturned. The assumption was supposed to be that he’d been standing on the ladder, lost his balance, and fallen down onto the ax. But he was killed somewhere else, with the ax, and then put into the shed. All right. What Underwood did was this: he set the stepladder close to the door, leaving just enough room to open the door so he could get out, and balanced Meeker’s body over the ladder. Then he turned the key as far as he could without shooting the bolt—and wedged Meeker’s finger through the hole in the key’s top. All he had to do then was position the ax, loop the piece of cord around the leg of the ladder, run the cord ends out under the door, slip outside himself, shut the door, and then jerk the cord to jerk the ladder and make the body fall. Meeker’s finger turned the key in the lock and slipped out of the hole as the body toppled; that’s how the finger got lacerated. It might have been tricky to get all the elements—ladder, body, finger, key—balanced right in order to make it work; he might have had to do it more than once. But he had time. And he did do it.”

  Eberhardt gave it some thought. Then he shrugged and said, “It makes a screwy kind of sense, I suppose. Why did Underwood search Meeker’s studio after he killed him?”

  “Looking for money, probably. More or less the same reason he went down to Arizona to search Colodny’s place. There are three reasons I should have tumbled to Underwood’s involvement long before I saw him in Arizona with his rifle, and one of them has to do with those two searches. But I didn’t tumble to any of them, not even the most obvious, until I went back over everything trying to fit Underwood in as the murderer.”

  “What was the thing about the searches?”

  “In both Meeker’s house and Colodny’s place there were stacks of pulp magazines,” I said. “And in both places the pulps were the only items that hadn’t been scattered around or torn up. Who else but a pulp collector, somebody who understands what they’re worth and reveres them, would spare a bunch of pulps when he’s ransacking a room?”

  “And the other two reasons?”

  “One is a small slip he made when I talked to him on the phone on Tuesday. He must have just got back from Meeker’s, and here I was, calling for Meeker’s address so I could go up and see him; it had to have shaken Underwood a little and put him off his guard. He asked me if the reason I was going to see Meeker had anything to do with poor Colodny being shot through the heart. But how did he know Colodny had been shot through the heart? The newspapers didn’t carry that information; all they said was that he’d died of a gunshot wound. And you or your men weren’t likely to have mentioned a fact like that when you questioned him. The only other way he could have known was if he’d been there at the time of the shooting and seen where Colodny was shot.

  “The third reason is the most obvious one. Meeker’s alibi for the time of Colodny’s death was that he was with Underwood, attending to his pulp art display. And Underwood must have corroborated that when you talked to him. But if Meeker was involved in the death of Colodny, as he obviously was, then Underwood had to be involved too; otherwise why would he lie on Meeker’s behalf? I should have worked that out a hell of a lot sooner than I did. If I had, I might have saved myself some grief.”

  Eberhardt relit his pipe. “Is that it? Or have you got any other loose ends to tie off?”

  “I think that’s about it,” I said. “After Underwood talked to me on Tuesday, he must have driven that Dodge of his straight down to Arizona.

  He got to Colodnyville before I did, but not by much. And that was another juxtaposition of events that almost ended in tragedy.”

  “Almost, yeah,” Dancer said. “Christ, if he’d killed you down there, where would I be?”

  “How about me?” I said. “Where would I be?”

  Eberhardt made a couple of notes on a form sheet he drew over in front of him. Then he shooed the police stenographer out and said to me, “You pull some of the goddamnedest rabbits out of your hat. But okay, you got me convinced. I’ll have the charges against Dancer dropped, and we’ll see what we can do about building a case against Underwood.”

  He reached for the phone, punched out an interoffice number, and spoke to someone up in Detention. Dancer came out of his chair and headed straight for me. He got hold of my hand and levered it up and down as if it were a pump handle, breathing the odor of cigarettes and toothpaste into my face. “I’ll never forget you for this,” he said. “I mean that, never. You saved my life. I’ll pay you back, just like I promised. And if I can ever do anything for you, anything at all—”

  “How about letting go of my hand?”

  “Oh … sure. Sorry. Listen, how soon do you think they’ll let me out of here?”

  “I don’t know. Not long, I guess.”

  “I hope not. We’ve got some celebrating to do.”

  “What do you mean, celebrating?”

  “What do you think I mean? Man, I’m going to tie one on tonight like you wouldn’t believe!”

  I sighed. He was never going to learn; never. And I was never going to get paid for my time on this rescue mission either, or reimbursed for expenses like gasoline, parking, air fare, car rental, and motel accommodations. Dancer may have been well-intentioned, but he was the kind who would always be living on the edge of poverty. Nobody was paying for my services except me.

  No tengo dinero—goddammit to hell…

  TWENTY-TWO

  Kerry and I were sitting on the balcony of her apartment on Twin Peaks, sipping beer and looking out at a pretty spec
tacular view. The sun had just gone down—there had not been any fog today to blot it out—and the sky was still streaked in gold and red and dusky purple. There was a little wind, but it had not got cool enough yet to drive us inside. A nice night. A very nice night.

  We hadn’t said anything for a time, companion-ably. A three-quarter moon was starting to take on definition as night closed down; I had my eye on that, thinking moon thoughts, when she said, “You really believed it was my father? The killer, I mean?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I really did.”

  “I ought to swat you one. Don’t you know by now that the Wades are pure of heart and mind?”

  “Sure,” I said, and thought about Cybil’s affair with Frank Colodny. “But a lot of circumstantial evidence pointed to him. You’re not offended, are you?”

  “Well, I ought to be.”

  I looked at tier, but she wasn’t serious. She looked terrific: coppery hair combed out fluffy, no lipstick—I don’t like lipstick much—the last of the daylight highlighting her face, giving it a kind of delicate softness, making the chameleon eyes look black. She was wearing flare slacks, a peach-colored blouse, and a woolly vest that curved around her breasts. I liked that vest a lot; it made her look even more sensual than she was.

  “I still can’t get over it,” she said.

  “Over what?”

  “Lloyd Underwood. Of all people!”

  “Greed does funny things to .people’s heads,” I said.

  “I know. But I kept thinking it had to be one of the Pulpeteers. Not my father or Cybil, but one of the others.”

  “Me, too. That’s the way it looked all along.”

  “I guess you were surprised when you saw Underwood in that ghost town.”

  “Not as much as I might have been in less tense circumstances.”

  Her face clouded abruptly and she was silent for a time.

  I said, “What’s the matter?”

  “I was just thinking about him shooting at you—about you being locked up in that old building. God, he might have killed you.”