Hoodwink nd-7

by Bill Pronzini

  The car stopped and the doors whispered open. Underwood stayed where he was, looking horrified, so I had to take his arm and steer him out. He said then, “What am I going to tell everybody?

  “They’re all waiting; I have to tell them something…”

  “That’s up to you. But don’t use the word murder, and don’t imply anything against Dancer. Keep it as low-key as you can.”

  “Low-key,” he said. He still looked horrified, but he sounded flustered and aggrieved. “The convention is ruined. You know that, don’t you?” As if it were my fault. “All the work we put into it, all the time and money… God.” “Yeah,“I said.

  “And not just for this year-ruined for good. How can we put on a con again after a thing like this? Who would want to come?”

  I said sourly, “Not Frank Colodny, that’s for sure.”

  There were maybe a dozen people standing around in the hallway outside the auditorium, smoking, talking in low voices. Through the open doors I could see the rest inside, most of them on their feet too; Kerry was one of the few sitting down. The general atmosphere seemed to be one of agitation and annoyance: the most popular object in the room was the clock on the wall.

  As soon as we stepped inside, Underwood broke away and made straight for the dais. I moved over to hold up the side wall. Kerry had got up as soon as I appeared and she came over to join me. So did Bert Praxas and Waldo Ramsey, both of whom had been standing nearby.

  Kerry put her hand on my arm. “What’s going on?” she said. “Is Dancer drunk again?”

  “He’s drunk, all right. But it’s worse than that.”

  Underwood was up on the dais now, calling for attention through one of the table microphones. The rumble of conversation in the room died away into an expectant hush; you could almost see necks craning forward. I picked out the ones belonging to Cybil Wade and Ozzie Meeker and kept my eye on them. Ivan Wade was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Jim Bohannon.

  “I’m sorry to say I have some tragic news,“Underwood said into the microphone. “Frank Colodny has been … killed in an accident here in the hotel.”

  It rocked them pretty good, as that kind of news always does. Voices rose, people looked at each other in disbelief, a couple of those sitting down popped up like jack-in-the-boxes. I was still watching Cybil Wade and Ozzie Meeker. Beyond a slight head jerk Meeker didn’t show any reaction at all, but Cybil seemed to go through a whole series of them. First she stiffened and her eyes got wide and her mouth came open; then her mouth closed, and she raised one hand to touch the makeup-faded bruise on her cheek; then the hand dropped and the rigidity left her; then the near corner of her mouth lifted slightly in what might have been a grim smile; then her whole body appeared to sag and she slumped lower on the chair, the way a person does at a release of tension. All of this in no more than six or seven seconds.

  Kerry’s hand was tight on my arm. When I heard her say, “My God!” in a low voice I transferred my gaze from her mother to her. She wore a shocked and frightened expression, and her eyes were full of questions. Ramsey and Praxas looked shocked too; neither of them could seem to decide whether to give his attention to Underwood or to me.

  People were clamoring at Underwood for more information. He kept saying, “I don’t know any of the details. It has something to do with Russ Dancer, and the police have been called in. They’re upstairs now. That’s all I know.”

  “But that’s not all you know, is it?” Kerry said to me. “What happened to Colodny?”

  “He was shot. In Dancer’s room.”

  “Shot? You mean murdered.”

  “The police think so.” I was not going to tell her he’d been shot with Cybil’s stolen gun, not here in front of Praxas and Ramsey and the others milling around.

  Ramsey said, “Did Dancer do it?”

  “Maybe. He says no, but I found him alone with the body a few seconds after it happened. I heard the shot as I was coming down the hallway.”

  “But why?” Praxas asked. “Why would Russ do such a thing?”

  “He didn’t like Colodny much. And he thought Colodny was behind the ‘Hoodwink’ extortion.”

  “That’s not much of a motive for murder.”

  “It might be if a man was drunk enough and had violent tendencies to begin with.”

  “I guess so. But my God, a cold-blooded murder…”

  Underwood made another announcement, this one to the effect that the rest of today’s program would have to be cancelled; he looked pained as he did it. Then the buzzing crowd began to file out of the auditorium. But Ozzie Meeker kept on sitting in his chair, the only person in the room who was. Behind his horn-rimmed glasses his bird-like eyes seemed fixed on a spot somewhere to the left of the dais. He looked about as unconcerned as a man can look in the middle of general upheaval. I wondered if maybe he was drunk again, or if maybe he was savoring Colodny’s demise for reasons of his own. I had not forgotten the angry words the two of them had had on Thursday night.

  I said to Ramsey and Praxas, “You’d better keep yourselves available. The police will want to talk to you and the others.”

  “I wasn’t planning to go anywhere,” Praxas said.

  “Neither was I,” Ramsey said. “Except maybe to the bar.”

  Kerry had gone over to talk to Cybil. I gestured to her to wait for me, and when she nodded I made my way through the rows of empty chairs to where Meeker was sitting. He looked up when I stopped in front of him and blinked at me a couple of times. Up close his eyes had a faint hangover glaze, but he smelled of breath mints, not whiskey.

  “Well,” he said, “the detective.”

  “Hell of a thing about Colodny, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I’d be a liar if I said I did. I hated his guts.”

  “Why?”

  “He was a man people hated,” Meeker said, and shrugged. “All the Pulpeteers hated him, you know. Did Dancer kill him?”

  “What makes you think he was murdered?”

  “Wasn’t he?”

  “Maybe. What did you and Colodny argue about on Thursday night?”

  The question got me what passed for a sly look. “Thursday night?”

  “At the cocktail party. You had words.”

  “Did we? I don’t remember.”

  “Sure you do. He warned you to stay away from him.”

  “Did he?”

  “Was that because you’d threatened him?”

  “Not me. Why would I threaten him?”

  Yeah, I thought. Why?

  I said, “The police’ll be around to talk to you pretty soon, Meeker. Maybe you’ll be a little more cooperative with them.”

  “Maybe I will.” He grinned at me. “And maybe I won’t.”

  I went back and collected Kerry-Cybil had disappeared-and we went out into the hallway. She said, “Why-did you want to talk to Meeker?”

  “Because I think he’s got secrets.”, “What kind of secrets?”

  “I don’t know yet. What did Cybil have to say about Colodny’s death?”

  “Not very much. She seemed kind of wilted.”

  Relieved was the proper word, but I didn’t correct her.

  The area in front of the elevators was crowded with people waiting for cars to take them up or down; we opted for the stairs. In the lobby I went over to the front desk and found the prim manager, whose name I’d forgotten, deep in conversation with the security officer, Harris. I told them I would be in the Garden Bistro if Lieutenant Eberhardt wanted to see me, and Harris said, “Fine,” and the prim guy favored me with a prim nod. But he looked at me as if I was one of those he held responsible for scandalizing his hotel.

  The lobby did not look scandalized so far. The police had evidently been ushered in through the service entrance and taken upstairs in one of the service elevators, and word of the homicide had not yet spread among the guests and general staff. A few of the convention people were hanging around i
n knots, looking nervous and furtive, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention to them. Kerry and I made our way across to the coffee shop and found a table in the rear. Neither of us said anything until we’d ordered coffee.

  “Are you going to tell me the details?” she asked then. “Or do I have to read them in the papers?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” I said, and did that. I still did not mention the fact that the murder weapon was her mother’s missing.38, but I might as well have; she seemed to intuit it and asked me flat out if it was. So I admitted it.

  She said, “Then it was Dancer who stole the gun.”

  “It he killed Colodny, it must have been.”

  “Why do you say ‘if’? Didn’t you just tell me that all the doors and windows in his room were locked from the inside and you got there only a few seconds after the shot was fired? He must be the killer.”

  “So it would seem. But I keep having doubts.”

  “Why?”

  “The way he looked, the things he said. He was drunk and it’s hard for a drunk to lie convincingly.”

  “That’s pretty flimsy against all the evidence. How could Colodny have been killed in his room if Dancer’s not guilty?”

  I shook my head.

  “Who else could possibly have done it?”

  “Just about anybody, I suppose.”

  “You mean one of the other Pulpeteers.”

  “Well, that’s how it would add up.”

  Ridges formed on her forehead. “You’re not thinking of Cybil?”

  “No,” I said, but it could have been Cybil, all right. She might have lied about the.38 being stolen. The sneak thief could have been after something else and she could have hidden the gun somewhere, with the intention of using it on Colodny. The question then was, why? What would her motive be? But this was a game you could play with Ivan Wade and the other Pulpeteers as well. Any of them could be guilty, and if you dug deep enough, you’d probably find more than one suitable motive. To make that reasonable, though, you had to eliminate Dancer as the primary suspect, which meant providing an answer to the one big question Kerry had just posed.

  How could Colodny have been shot in that locked room if Dancer wasn’t the killer?

  Our coffee came and Kerry toyed with hers for a time, mostly in a kind of brooding silence. Pretty soon she said, “I think I’ll go find Cybil and have another talk with her. My father, too.”

  I nodded. “Are we having dinner tonight?”

  “If I say no, you won’t take it as a rejection, will you?”

  “Not unless you mean it that way.”

  “I’m just not in the mood, after all this. Tomorrow or Monday, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “But call me tonight if you want. I’ll be home.”

  I said I would. And after she was gone, I sat there and drank coffee and did some meditating, none of which got me anywhere. At the end of fifteen minutes, I decided I had had enough of sitting around; I paid the check and went out and prowled around for a time, down by the huckster room-it was closed now-and back again.

  When I returned to the reception area, Eberhardt was over at the desk, scowling at the prim-faced manager. As soon as I came up, the scowl switched in my direction and hung on me like a dark cloud. It made me think, irrelevantly, of one of the worst lines I had ever read in a pulp: “Mister, I’m gonna cloud up and rain all over you.”

  “Where the hell have you been?” he growled.

  “Wandering around the lobby. Why?”

  “You left word you’d be in the goddamn coffee shop. You think I got nothing better to do than play hide and seek?”

  “Lighten up, Eb, will you?”

  “Yeah, lighten up. The hell with that. Listen, I’m finished here, and as far as I’m concerned, so are you. Come down to the Hall tomorrow or the next day and sign a statement.”

  “Sure. What about Dancer?”

  “What about him?”

  “Is he going to be charged?”

  “What the hell do you think? Of course he’s going to be charged. He’s guilty as sin, and you know it.”

  “Has he confessed?”

  “Do most of them confess? He did it and that’s that; don’t go making a big mystery out of this.

  Just go home and try to keep your fat ass out of trouble.”

  “I don’t go looking for it, Eb.”

  He made a snorting sound and took his scowl away to the elevators.

  There was no reason for me to hang around the hotel. Besides, its somber Victorian good taste was beginning to depress me. I got out of there, claimed my car from the garage down the block, and pointed it across town to Pacific Heights. Eberhardt’s odd behavior nagged at my thoughts part of the way. He was always irascible, but today there had been none of the affection that underlay his gruffness. Something was weighing heavy on him, and I was not going to be satisfied until I found out what it was.

  The day was getting on toward dinnertime, so I stopped at a place on Union that makes pretty good pizza and ordered a pepperoni-and-extra-cheese to go. In my flat I opened a bottle of Schlitz and sat eating in front of the bay window, where I could look out over the Bay and watch the sunset bathe the hills of Marin in a soft reddish glow. It made me feel kind of pensive. And aware of how quiet and empty the flat was.

  I went into the bedroom. Kerry had insisted on making the bed this morning, and it had never looked so neat. The whole damned room looked neat for a change; it wasn’t half bad that way, either. A different perspective. I sat down on the bed, hauled up the phone receiver, and dialed Kerry’s number. The thing buzzed ten times, emptily, before I put the handset down again.

  To pass the time, I decided on some reading. But instead of taking a pulp off one of the shelves, I dragged out the “Hoodwink” manuscript, which I had carted home from the office, and had another go at that. I went all the way through it without feeling any more enlightened than the first time I’d read it-but when I put it down there was a funny scratching sensation at the back of my mind. Over the years I had had enough similar itches to recognize them as insights trying to be born: there was something about the novelette- plot, style, something-that I was overlooking.

  I read it a third time. But the insight, whatever it might be, stayed in labor. There was no use in trying to force it through; it would get itself born eventually.

  Damn, but it was quiet in there. I turned on the little portable television, something I seldom do, just to have some noise. A little while later, I went into the bedroom and dialed Kerry’s number again. Still no answer. The nightstand clock said that it was after ten. She told me she’d be home tonight, I thought. So where is she?

  So she’s out somewhere. She’s a big girl; she doesn’t have to answer to you if she decides to stay out on a Saturday night. What’s the matter with you? Mooning around here like a lovesick jerk. You’re fifty-three years old, for Christ’s sake. Go to bed, why don’t you? You old fart, you.

  I went to bed.

  But I didn’t sleep right away. The damn bed felt empty, too, and I could still smell the sweet musk of her perfume on the other pillow.

  I dreamed I was in a room where half a dozen guys were playing poker. They were all private eyes from the pulps: Carmady, Max Latin, Race Williams, Jim Bennett-some of the best of the bunch. Latin wanted to know what kind of detective I thought I was; his voice sounded like Kerry’s. I said I was a pulp detective. Carmady said, “No you’re not, you can’t play with us because you’re not one of us,” and I said, “But I am, I’m the same kind of private eye you are,” and Bennett said, “Private eyes can’t fall in love with younger women because they can’t be dirty old men,” and I said, “But I’m not in love with her,” and Williams said, “You old fart, you,” and the phone went off six inches from my ear and put an end to all this nonsense.

  I sat up in bed, rubbed at my eyes until I could focus on the dial of the clock. It was 8:40. Welcome to a new day, I thought, and fumbled the handset
up to my ear.

  A male voice I didn’t recognize made a question out of my name. I confirmed it, and the voice said, “My name is Arthur Pitchfield. I’m the public defender assigned to represent Russell Dancer.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Pitchfield?”

  “You can’t do anything for me, I’m afraid. I’m calling for Mr. Dancer. He’d like to see you as soon as possible.”

  “He would, huh?”

  “Yes,” Pitchfield said. “I told him there’s very little a private investigator can do for him-no offense-but he insists you’re a friend of his.”

  Sure I am, I thought. “He’s still at the Hall of Justice?”

  “Of course. Even if bail had been set, he couldn’t meet it.” A pause. “I’m advising him to plead guilty, you know.”

  “What does Dancer say?”

  “He says no,” Pitchfield said. “He claims he’s innocent.”

  “Tell him I’ll be down around ten,” I said, and hung up on him.

  I sat there for a little while, waking up. Well, I told myself, you might have known it was coming. Maybe you did know, huh? You agreed fast enough. But it could be the poor bastard is innocent, despite all the circumstantial evidence. What can it hurt to talk to him? Nothing much you can do for him, Pitchfield may have been right about that, but at least you can listen to what he has to say.

  Then I thought, wryly: An old fart, a lovesick jerk, a brother-figure to an alcoholic ex-pulp writer. Some private eye. Is it any wonder Carmady and Latin and the rest of the boys want to kick you out of the fraternity?

  TWELVE

  The Hall of Justice was a massive gray stone building on Bryant Street, south of Market, not all that far from Skid Row and the Tenderloin. It looked just like what it was; you could take away all the signs and bring somebody in from Iowa or rural New Hampshire and ask him what the building was, and he’d tell you in two seconds flat. On gray days it looked even more austere, and this was a gray day. The fog had come in sometime during the night, along with a chill wind, and built a high overcast that wiped out the nice summery weather we’d been having.

  It being Sunday, there was available street parking on Bryant. I put my car into a slot a half-block away, went down and inside, and rode one of the elevators up to where they had the holding cells on the top floor. I filled out a form, and one of the cops on duty took it and went away somewhere. It took him ten minutes to find his way back. Five minutes after that, I was ushered through a metal detector and then into the visitors’ room, where I sat myself down in one of the screened-off cubicles. And another three minutes after that, Dancer was brought in.