Hoodwink

by Bill Pronzini

  The hotplate was brand new; the old one, the one I’d bought when I first rented this office twenty years ago, had been badly damaged during that Carding/Nichols case a few months back. The whole office had been badly damaged—torn apart, raped, by a paranoid psychotic who thought my investigative efforts were part of a complex and nonexistent persecution plot. So to go along with the new hotplate, I also had a new desk and chair from a secondhand office-supply company, my old desk and armchair having been scarred and slashed beyond repair. I even had a new poster of my favorite Black Mask cover to replace the one that had been ripped off the wall and shredded out of its frame.

  It was the same office I had worked in for two decades and yet it wasn’t.

  The new furniture did not look or feel right. The walls and floors still bore the stains of splashed coffee and spilled white glue—the stains Dancer had mentioned earlier. They were a reminder of the rape, and a reminder, too, of Taylor Street and the deteriorating Tenderloin that lay outside. No, it wasn’t the same anymore and hadn’t been for months. Hadn’t been, maybe, for some time before the violation.

  And that was why I had finally decided it was time for a change. Time to find a new office in a safer building in a neighborhood that would inspire rather than diminish confidence in potential clients. Time to take a step up in the world, or at least a step sideways into a better environment. Time to put on the front of a higher class private detective, as befitted what some local yellow jour nalist had called “the last of the lone-wolf private eyes.”

  My new offices were on Drumm Street not far from the waterfront. The building had been renovated a couple of years ago, and I would have two large, cheery rooms instead of this dreary one-and-an-alcove. The location, in an area more or less surrounded by the financial district, the waterfront docks and warehouses, Embarcadero Center, and the Ferry Building, was attractive and easy to get to. And the best part was, the rent amounted to only forty dollars a month more than I was paying here after the latest increase.

  I was all set to move in any time after next Monday, which was the last day of the month. A two-year lease had been signed, and I had given notice to the landlord here; all I had to do was pack up everything that belonged to me and then make arrangements with one of the smaller moving companies to transfer boxes and furniture.

  And yet I kept putting off the packing job. I had brought the boxes in three days ago, and I’d had plenty of free time since then, most of which I had spent, as usual, reading pulp stories by Russ Dancer and his peers. Maybe I was just lazy. But more likely it was psychological: giving up a place where you’ve spent a substantial part of your life, a place full of memories more pleasant than unpleasant, is something that does not come easy to somebody with my temperament.

  I would have to do it before next Tuesday, but now I had an excuse not to do it at all this week. For the next three days, I would be rubbing elbows with pulp writers at the Hotel Continental. I would not really be working, because I wasn’t getting paid, but that was all right. Next week I could pack boxes and finally get out of here and into my new offices; next week I could worry about building an image as a better-class private eye and also start making lots of money—enough, maybe, to get myself some fancy electronic surveillance equipment, not to mention a sexy secretary.

  Right, Mr. Marlowe?

  You bet, Mr. Spade.

  I carried the coffee back to my desk and sat down with it and the copy of “Hoodwink.” The style in which the manuscript was written was not my cup of tea: florid descriptive passages, some of them a little stilted; arch dialogue and not much in the way of action. But for all that, there was power in the words—a kind of brooding and atmospheric sense of evil that hooked you and kept you hooked from the opening paragraph—

  The hansom cab drifted spectrally out of the fog-enwrapped London night, its horse’s hooves clattering upon the cobblestones, the crack of its driver’s whip not unlike the snapping of a condemned man’s neck on the gallows at Newgate Prison. When it drew to a halt before the entrance to No. 7 Kingswood Crescent, the silence which settled around it seemed to possess a sudden sinister breathlessness. The tall man who alighted drew his cloak about him, stood peering up at the great house through its garlands of clinging mist. In that moment of silent motionlessness, man and hansom had the aspect of two-dimensional shadows newly sketched on night’s dark canvas, with ink still wet and glistening.

  to the final paragraph—

  The identity of that caped figure sent her reeling away toward the open window and the darkness beyond. The stationary objects in the room seemed to swirl past her, shading into distorted and colorless images much like those in a surrealist composition. The darkness reached out for her, yet she was no longer afraid of it. Fearful darkness? No! Merciful darkness. Darkness, her last lover. And when it embraced her in that first instant of weightless descent toward the black waters far below, she cried out not in terror but in ecstasy at the fulfillment of the dark promise which now, at long last, would be hers.

  The plot was solid and cleverly worked out: a psychological study of two women and a man, one of whom was a murderer, living in the London of 1895, and of a mysterious fourth person—a caped figure—who wasn’t identified until the last page. That final revelation was surprising in print, but cinematically it had been stunning—the main reason why Evil by Gaslight had been such a box-office success in its time.

  I hadn’t seen the movie for a while, and then in an edited version for TV, but its plot and that of “Hoodwink” struck me, as they had Dancer and the other Pulpeteers, as being identical. So did some of the more memorable passages of dialogue. Which started me wondering if maybe the novelette had been written after the film instead of before it—if “Hoodwink” was the plagiarism, copied as a prose work for the purpose of extortion. But even if that were the case, the mechanics of the scheme still escaped me. How could you collect extortion money by accusing six different writers of a thirty-year-old act of plagiarism none of them could have committed?

  I studied the extortion letter again, but it didn’t tell me anything more than it had the first time. So much for research. I put the letter and manuscript back into the envelope, pulled the phone and my address file over in front of me, and called Ben Chadwick down in Hollywood.

  Chadwick, like me, was a private investigator. Unlike me, he specialized in work for the major film companies—investigating property-room and backlot thefts, insurance claims against the studios, missing actors or actors’ relatives, things like that. I had met him a few years ago on a routine case, and he had looked me up once when he was in San Francisco; we were friendly enough for me to ask a favor and him to do it if he was free.

  He was in, free, and willing. When I explained the situation, he said that offhand he couldn’t remember any sort of scandal connected with Evil by Gaslight or even anything memorable from behind-the-scenes. Sounded like a nut thing to him, he said, but he’d see what he could come up with by the first of next week.

  After we’d rung off, I picked up the convention brochure Dancer had given me. They had quite a program mapped out for the three-day con. There were two panel discussions on Friday, two on Saturday, and one on Sunday morning; there were cocktail parties on Friday evening and Saturday evening, a banquet Saturday night, and a Sunday luncheon; and there was a pulp art show, a screening of the old Shadow film serial with Victor Jory and another of The Maltese Falcon, and a special auction of more than fifty rare and valuable pulps.

  The first of Friday’s panels was called “Weird Tales and the Shudder Pulps” and would be chaired by Ivan Wade, whose specialty during the late thirties and throughout the forties had been some of the grisliest horror fiction ever set down on paper. He was also something of an authority on occult themes and stage magic, the brochure said. Bert Praxas would head the second panel that day, about “The Super Heroes,” a topic on which he was well qualified. He had written some 130 full-length novels between 1939 and 1951 about a crimefight
er called The Spectre, one of the era’s rivals to The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Operator #5.

  Saturday’s panels were “The Western and Adventure Pulps,” chaired by Jim Bohannon, one of the most prolific writers in each of those categories; and “The Pulp Editor Versus the Pulp Writer,” headed by Frank Colodny. The final, Sunday morning, panel was the one that most interested me: “The Hard-boiled Private Eyes,” with co-chairpersons Russ Dancer, Waldo Ramsey, and Cybil Wade, Ivan’s wife. Dancer’s qualifications were obvious, as were Ramsey’s—I recognized his name as a semiregular contributor to Midnight Detective, one of Colodny’s Action House pulps, and others such as Black Mask and New Detective, he had also become a successful suspense novelist in recent years. But I didn’t know what Cybil Wade was doing there until I read her list of credits and discovered, with some amazement, that she was Samuel Leatherman.

  If I had been asked to name the best writer of pulp private-eye fiction after Hammett and Chandler, I would have said Samuel Leatherman without having to think twice. The Leatherman stories, all of which featured a tough, uncompromising detective named Max Ruffe, had run in Black Mask, Dime Detective, and occasionally Midnight Detective throughout the forties. They were lyrical studies in violence, poetic in the same way Hammett and Chandler were poetic, with more characterization and insight than any five average pulp stories. But they were male stories from beginning to end; the style was masculine, the appeal was masculine, even the insights were masculine. The fact that they had been written by a woman was more than a little remarkable. And it made me want to meet Cybil Wade even more than any of the others—to find out what sort of woman she was and also to find out why she had never taken Max Ruffe into book-length novels, why she had let him die along with Dancer’s Rex Hannigan and so many others.

  I could feel myself getting excited about the next three days, the prospect of talking with half a dozen old pulp writers—a feeling that may or may not have been childish for somebody my age, but what the hell. As Dancer had said, I was into pulps and had been for more than thirty years. I had more than six thousand of them, nearly all mystery and detective issues, in my Pacific Heights flat, and I read them with a great deal of pleasure. Psychologically, in fact, they were the reason why I had become, first, a cop and later, a private detective. Emulation: you grow up worshipping a certain kind of hero and if you can, you want to become the same sort of hero yourself. Life-imitating-art in its purest form. So here I was, living out some, if not all, of my youthful fantasies. Erika Coates, a woman I had almost married nine years ago, had been the first to point out to me that I was trying to be a pulp private eye—in an age when the hero was no longer fashionable, in a city that already had Sam Spade. She thought it was unhealthy and counterproductive, and maybe she was right.

  But trying to be a pulp private eye made me happy,- reading pulps and talking to old pulp writers made me happy. And wasn’t being happy what life was all about?

  Damn right it is, Mr. Marlowe.

  Let’s go meet some pulp writers, Mr. Spade.

  THREE

  The Continental was an old Victorian hotel not far from Union Square, in the heart of the city. It had been built around 1890, at no small expense, which meant that it had a pillared and frescoed and English tile-floored lobby, and ornamental Queen Anne fireplaces in every room. Although it was too small to compete with the St. Francis, the Fairmont, and the other fancy hotels, it catered to the same type of well-to-do clientele. More or less, anyway. In recent years the management had been forced to relax its standards somewhat, as a result of increased operating costs, and to allow people and events in its hallowed halls which might not otherwise have measured up. If you had suggested twenty years ago that a pulp magazine convention be held there, they would have thrown you out on your ear.

  I got there a few minutes before eight, all spruced up and chewing a Clorets mint to conceal the pepperoni pizza I had had for supper, and took one of the mirror-walled elevators up to the fif teenth floor. Suite M was at the southern end; there was a table to one side of the entrance with a banner hanging from it that read: Western Pulp Con—Private Reception. A balding, fortyish guy in a turtleneck sweater and sports jacket was sitting behind the table, making notations on a mimeographed list. When I told him my name, he smiled broadly, letting me see an uneven set of dentures, and pumped my hand as if the two words were a hot tip on an Italian horse.

  “Pleasure,” he said. “Pleasure. I’m Lloyd Underwood, convention chairman. From Hayward.”

  “How are you, Mr. Underwood?”

  “Call me Lloyd. Glad you could come. I’ve heard about you—before Russ Dancer mentioned you’d be coming, I mean. Spotted your name in the papers a few times. Like to see your collection one of these days. Got any good duplicates for trade?”

  “Well…”

  “Let me know if you need any pre - I930 Black Masks. I’m selling off part of my collection. I’ve got two from ‘27 and one from ‘24 with a Hammett story,- all three near mint, white pages, no cover defects. I’ll give you a complete list later.”

  “Uh, sure …”

  “We’ll have plenty of time to talk,” Underwood said. “Come early tomorrow if you can. Registration starts at noon, but I’ll be setting up at ten-thirty and the huckster room will be open then.

  You might as well have your name tag now, though.”

  “Name tag?”

  “Have to wear one so you can attend all the events. This must be your first con.” He wrote my name on a gummed label and handed it to me. “There you go. Bar’s to your left as you go in. But if you like beer, there isn’t any. I asked room service to send some up, but they haven’t got here yet.”

  I nodded without saying anything, because antic types like him tend to make me inarticulate, and entered the suite through the half-open doors. It was one big room about the size of a cocktail lounge, divided into three sections by two pairs of circular pillars. Rococo chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and there were two Queen Anne fireplaces, one at each side wall; the whole of the end wall facing the entrance was windows, some of them open to let in the mellow summery air San Francisco gets in late May. Heavy Victorian furniture was placed at strategic locations so you could sit and admire the view. And it was some view, too, particularly on a night like this: Twin Peaks to the west, the glistening black of the Bay, and the mosaic of city lights in between.

  There were about twenty people standing or sitting together in small groups, making party noises and bending party elbows. None of them paid much attention to me as I wandered through, although I did get a somewhat lengthy glance from a tall, good-looking woman with coppery hair. But that was probably because I almost bumped into her and knocked her down, which is what happens to clumsy people who try to walk, peel the paper backing off a name tag, and look for a familiar face all at the same time.

  I found Dancer holding up one of the pillars, talking to a scrawny guy about sixty with turkey wattles and the kind of suntan you don’t get on a three-week vacation. Dancer was saying something about Norbert Davis being the only pulp writer who could be funny and hard-boiled at once, but the scrawny guy did not seem to be listening. He wore a worried and preoccupied expression, and he kept patting the half-dozen hairs combed grid-fashion over the top of his skull—as if what he worried about was that they would fall off or disappear.

  When Dancer saw me he said, “Hey, there he is, the shamus,” and reached out to smack me on the shoulder. The scrawny guy swiveled his head like a startled bird and peered at me. Then he patted the six hairs again. The ice in the glass clamped in his other hand made nervous tinkling sounds.

  “This is the pulp-collecting dick I told you about, Frank,” Dancer said to the scrawny guy. Then to me: “Meet Frank Colodny. Meanest damn editor the pulps ever saw. Twice as mean as Leo Margulies in his heyday, and not half as decent underneath. Right, Frank baby?”

  Colodny had nothing to say to that. I gave him my hand and told him it was an honor to meet him. He ha
d been something of a scourge in his time, all right—a tough-minded, hell-raising boy wonder who had taken over a floundering Midnight Detective in 1942, when he was twenty-three years old and a 4-F asthmatic, and kept it— and more than a dozen other detective, Western, love, and air-war pulps—alive during the war and for nearly a decade afterward. You wouldn’t guess it to look at him, but he had also had a reputation as a high-living, hard-drinking roue. Well, maybe this was what happened to high-living, hard-drinking roues: they turned into scrawny guys with turkey wattles and suntans and six hairs on their scalps. Low-living, light-drinking, near-celibate types like me might like to think so, anyway.

  Colodny did not think it was an honor to meet me; he grunted something, let go of my hand the way you let go of things you don’t like the feel of, and knocked back half of his drink. He still looked worried, and he still looked preoccupied.

  Dancer said to me, “You know what he did when Action House collapsed in ‘50? Goddamnedest thing you ever heard. I still can’t get over it. Tell him, Frank.”

  “You talk too much,” Colodny said, and pushed past me and headed for the bar.

  “Friendly sort, isn’t he?” I said.

  Dancer’s mood seemed to shift from good humor to sudden anger, the way a drunk’s will. And he was drunk, all right, or close to it; his eyes told you that. “He’s a lousy son of a bitch.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Screwed me out of a thousand bucks in the late forties, that’s why. Screwed a lot of other writers, too.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “He had ways.” Dancer’s hands clenched and he glared over at where Colodny was at the bar. “Lousy son of a bitch.”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “The time to start trouble was thirty years ago, when it happened.” If it happened, I thought. “What did Colodny do when the pulps collapsed in 1950? You started to tell me but you didn’t finish it?”