Hoodwink

by Bill Pronzini

  Mercurially, Dancer’s mood shifted back to the previous good humor; the sardonic smile quirked his mouth. “Bought himself a town.”

  “How was that again?”

  “Bought himself a town. Moved out to Arizona and bought a run-down old ghost town up in the hills somewhere. Can you beat that? Isn’t that the goddamnedest thing you ever heard?”

  “What did he do with this ghost town?”

  “Didn’t do anything with it. Said he always wanted to own a town, and now he does. Named it after himself too, by God. Colodnyville. Isn’t that the goddamnedest thing you ever heard?”

  “He’s been living in a ghost town all these years?”

  “Off and on, he says. Most people have a cabin in the woods; Colodny’s got a frigging ghost town in the hills. Isn’t that the—”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was still fiddling with the name tag; the paper didn’t want to come off the gummed backing. The hell with it, I thought. I did not like name tags in the first place, and besides, Dancer wasn’t wearing one. I put the thing into the handkerchief pocket of my jacket, where I would be sure to forget about it.

  Dancer said, “Aren’t you drinking?”

  “No. Lloyd Underwoood told me there’s no beer.”

  “Beer? Booze is free tonight, you now.”

  “I only drink beer.”

  “No kidding, huh? How come?”

  A big elderly guy in a Western shirt and a string tie saved me from having to explain my drinking habits. He wandered through the crowd and between Dancer and me, presumably on his way to the bathroom; but Dancer reached out and caught hold of his forearm and stopped him.

  “Jimbo,” he said, “rein up a second. Want you to meet the shamus I was telling you about.”

  “Well,” the big guy said, and a smile creased his leathery features. He was about seventy, but he stood tall and straight, with his shoulders back and his head high; you got the impression that he was a proud man. And an active one, too, who hadn’t been slowed down much by age. He gave me his hand, saying, “I’m Jim Bohannon. Glad to know you.”

  “Same here.”

  “Jimbo was heir to Heinle Faust back in the forties,” Dancer said. “The new Max Brand—king of the oaters.”

  “Horse manure,” Bohannon said.

  “Sure you were. Wrote a lead novel just about every month for Leo Margulies at Thrilling or Rog Terrill at Popular. How many pulp pieces you do altogether, Jimbo?”

  “Oh, maybe a thousand.”

  “Prolific as hell. Still does a novel once in a while. Must have ground out a hundred books by now, huh, Jimbo?”

  Bohannon frowned at him—but tolerantly, the way a father might at a noisy, abrasive, but still likable son. Then he looked at me again, and the easygoing grin came back. “Hell,” he said, “you’re not much interested in the Bohannon statistics. I understand your pulp collection is mostly mystery and detective; you’ve probably never read a word of mine.”

  “I’m interested, all right,” I said, and meant it. “And I have read some of your work.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sure. The series you used to do for Adventure, about the Alaskan peace officer in the twenties. And the series about the railroad detectives, Kincaid and Buckmaster, in Short Stories. Pure detective fiction, and some terrific writing.”

  Bohannon’s grin widened. “I don’t know if that’s grease or not,” he said, “but I like it anyhow.”

  “It’s not grease.”

  “Well, thanks. It’s nice to have your work remembered.”

  “Maybe you think so, Jimbo,” Dancer said, “but not me. Who the hell really cares if you’ve published twenty million words and I’ve published maybe ten? Who cares about all the lousy stories and books we’ve written? They’re all just so much garbage rotting away in basements and secondhand stores.”

  Bohannon sighed. It was obvious he’d heard that particular line, or a variation of it, before and that he’d learned the only way to deal with it was to ignore it. So it seemed like a good idea for me to help him out by changing the subject.

  “About the manuscript and letter you and the others received, Mr. Bohannon,” I said. “Do you think it’s a serious extortion plot of some kind?”

  “Oh, I doubt it. Somebody’s idea of a joke, probably.”

  “Did the novelette ring any bells?”

  “None, I’m afraid.”

  “Was the style at all familiar?”

  “Nope,” Bohannon said. He grinned. “I don’t know much about Victorian melodramas,- horse operas are what I like.”

  “Another twenty years,” Dancer said, “there won’t be any more horse operas for anybody to like. Not even any of the adult porno crap that’s all over the place right now. Nothing. Nada.” “Maybe not, Russ. But I’ll tell you one thing there’ll still be plenty of twenty years from now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Horses’ asses,“Bohannon said.

  It was a pretty good exit line, and Bohannon knew it; he nodded to me, showed me his grin one more time, and moved off. Dancer stared after him, but there was no anger in his expression; maybe it was only Frank Colodny who made him feel belligerent when he was tight. Then he shrugged, lifted his glass, saw it was empty, and scowled at it.

  “I need another drink,” he said, as if he were surprised at himself for overlooking the fact until just now.

  “It’s early yet, Russ.”

  “Damn right it is,” he said, misinterpreting my meaning. “Come on, we’ll get a couple of belts, and I’ll introduce you to the rest of the Pulpeteers.”

  He turned toward the bar, walking steadily enough, and I followed and watched him tell the young guy who was tending it to pour a double Wild Turkey on the rocks. There was still no beer, it turned out. Dancer started to make a fuss about that, but I told him it didn’t matter. I wasn’t thirsty anyway. And prodded him aside.

  But I did the prodding a little too forcefully, because he turned straight into a heavy mahogany coffee table and stumbled against its leg. Some of the liquor spilled out of his glass onto the table. The two women sitting behind it on the plush Victorian settee hopped up to keep from getting splashed; then the older of the two reached down just in time to prevent her purse, which was perched on one corner of the table, from toppling off.

  Dancer recovered his balance, smiled in a wolfish way, and said, “Sorry, ladies. A slight accident.”

  “There’s always a slight accident when you’re around, Russ,” the older woman said.

  “Now, Sweeteyes, don’t be nasty.”

  The woman said something to that in an undertone, but I was looking at the younger one and I didn’t hear it. She was the tall, good-looking redhead I had almost run down earlier, and she was even nicer to look at up close. Not pretty in any classic sense, but still striking: animated face etched with humor lines; generous mouth, sleek jawline, dark eyes that had no makeup to accentuate them and didn’t need any; slim long-fingered hands; stylish shoulder-length hairdo; willowy figure in a dark green suit. She might have been thirty-five or forty, not that it mattered.

  She gazed back at me without conceit, offense, or false modesty—just a frank steady look that said she liked to be appreciated. Not eye-raped, but appreciated. “Let me guess,” she said. Sexy voice too, like Lauren Bacall. “You’re the private eye.”

  “That’s me. And you’re—?”

  “Kerry Wade,” Dancer said. “And this is Cybil Wade. Two-thirds of the Wade family. Old Ivan’s around somewhere.” He leered at the older woman. “Old Ivan’s always been around somewhere, hasn’t he, Sweeteyes?”

  “Don’t call me that, Russ,” Cybil Wade said.

  “Why not? Fits you.”

  He was right about that. Her eyes were huge, tawny-colored, guileless—sweet. Combined with dimples, the same coppery hair and willowy figure as her daughter, and a radiant smile, they gave her a kind of ingenuousness that even six decades or so of living had failed to erase. Kerry Wade was attractive
, yes, but Cybil Wade was beautiful. Had been beautiful when she was young and was still beautiful right now—a sixty-year-old knockout in a white satin dress.

  I touched hands with her and with her daughter, and we all said how pleased we were to meet each other. It seemed to me that Kerry’s hand lingered in mine, but maybe that was just wishful thinking. And the one thing about Cybil that did not fit the sweet, wholesome image she presented was her voice: it was even sexier than Kerry’s.

  “Hard to believe this little doll wrote the Max Ruffe private eye stuff, isn’t it?” Dancer said. “Never could get over it. Wrote just like a man— all hard-edged blood, guts, and sex.”

  “Not only like a man,” I said. “Better than just about all of them.”

  Kerry’s gaze was still on me, and it seemed to have some speculative interest in it. “Have you read a lot of Cybil’s pulp stories?”

  “Enough to put her in the same league with Chandler and Hammett. I can even quote a line from one.”

  “Really?“Cybil asked.

  “Really. I read it five or six years ago and I’ve never forgotten it. ‘He had a face like a graveyard at night—cold, empty, a little frightening—and when he opened his mouth, you could see stumps of teeth sticking up here and there like headstones.’ “

  She rolled her eyes. “My God,” she said, “are you sure I wrote that?” But she sounded pleased just the same.

  “Positive. I forget the title of the story, but the author was Samuel Leatherman.”

  Dancer said, “You always were good with the brooding metaphor, Sweeteyes. Wrote just like a man, all right. One thing, though, that you never wrote as well as a hack like me.”

  “What would that be, Russ?”

  “A kick in the balls,” Dancer said. “Only a man can do justice to a kick in the balls.”

  He seemed to expect some kind of reaction to that but not the one he got. Kerry and I just looked at him the way you do at somebody who makes a boorish remark at a party; but an expression of ironic amusement crossed Cybil’s face, and she reached out and patted Dancer’s arm like somebody patting a dog on the head.

  “I’m not so sure about that, Russ,” she said. “Would you like me to kick you in the balls so we can find out?”

  Dancer didn’t much like that; he glared at her for a long moment. I took a step toward him in case he got nasty. But then his facial muscles relaxed, and he shook his head and began to laugh.

  “Any time, Sweeteyes,” he said. “It might even be fun.” And he laughed so hard that he banged into the coffee table again and spilled a little more of his drink. He also dislodged Cybil’s purse this time, sent it off onto the floor before she could grab it. It popped open when it hit, and some things spilled out.

  She bent down to it, saying, “Damn you, Russ.” I started to help her, but she shook her head and did the scooping up herself.

  “Sorry about that,” Dancer said. “Another slight accident.”

  Cybil straightened up, ignoring him, and tucked the purse under her arm. “I’m going to the powder room,” she said to Kerry, nodded to me, and headed toward the entrance doors.

  Kerry gave me a faint smile that might have meant anything or nothing at all; then she moved to the bar. I watched the way she walked—smooth and flowing, almost catlike—but only part of my mind noted and registered it. The other part was working on something else: one of the things that had fallen out of Cybil Wade’s purse, that I had glimpsed before she could shove it back inside.

  What was a nice, sweet-faced lady like her doing at a party with a .38 snub-nosed revolver?

  FOUR

  I was still puzzling about Cybil Wade’s gun when Dancer called my name. But not from close by; from across the room, where he had wandered and joined a group of three other men. He was making beckoning gestures, so I went over there before he could shout again or do something else to make a horse’s ass out of himself.

  “Want you to meet the last three Pulpeteers,” he said when I got to him. Then he blinked a couple of times, with alcoholic surprise at what he took to be his own cleverness. “Hah! The Three Pulpeteers, by God. How about that?”

  I didn’t say anything. Neither did any of the three men. They were all around sixty-five, but physically, at least, age was about all they had in common. The guy on Dancer’s left was tall, graymaned, and vaguely cadaverous-looking, dressed in a dark suit and a blue tie with yellow ovals on it that looked like eyes. The guy in the middle was a head shorter, pudgy, with a Friar Tuck fringe of reddish hair, wearing a loose green turtleneck sweater and a pair of Levi’s. And the guy on my right was of average height, handsome in an athletic sort of way, brown-haired and sporting a neat black mustache; he wore casual but expensive sports clothes.

  Dancer performed the introductions in his mildly insulting way and managed not to spill the rest of his drink on anybody while he was doing it. If I had had to guess which was which beforehand, based on their pulp writing and on subsequent endeavors, I would have said the tall one was Ivan Wade, the pudgy one Bert Praxas, and the well-dressed one Waldo Ramsey. And I would have been wrong three out of three.

  The somewhat cadaverous guy turned out to be Praxas—an even more prolific writer than Jim Bohannon in his day, although he had been retired for close to twenty years. In addition to his novels about The Spectre, written under the house pseudonym of Robert M. Barclay, he’d done several hundred mystery and detective stories and half as many airwar adventures for Sky Fighters and the other aviation magazines. But The Spectre novels were far and away what he was best known and most remembered for; the brochure Dancer had given me said he’d become something of a cult figure among collectors and aficionados and often appeared at conventions of this type.

  The pudgy, red-haired guy, it developed, was Waldo Ramsey. He had been something of a minor pulp writer, in the same sense that Dancer had been minor—a competent storyteller whose work for Midnight Detective and others was sometimes dazzling but more often careless and indifferent. But where Dancer had slid steadily downhill into hackdom, Ramsey had found himself, nurtured his talent over the years, and climbed upward into respectability and success. He had been writing suspense novels since the mid-fifties, and in the past few years had hit it semibig with a pair of ambitious espionage books that he had sold and adapted to film. Which probably explained why he was dressed as sloppily as he was: it’s the people with money who can afford to dress at public functions as if they haven’t got money.

  And the athletic, mustachioed man was Ivan Wade, Cybil’s husband and Kerry’s father. He had a quiet, reserved sort of face, with all the features grouped in close to the center, and gentle eyes. According to the convention brochure, he had started out writing for Weird Tales, Dime Mystery, and other fantasy/horror pulps, and gone on from there to radio scripting, the slick magazines, some TV work, and finally to novels and nonfiction books on occult and magic themes. The things he wrote about, and the things Cybil had written about, made we wonder what it had been like for Kerry growing up. It was an irrelevant thought, but I wondered just the same.

  When the introductions were over and I had finished shaking hands with the three of them, Ramsey said good-naturedly, “A pulp-collecting private eye. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

  “I guess it is a little unusual,” I said.

  “You can say that again.”

  Praxas asked me, “What do you think of our little mystery? I assume Russ has filled you in on the details by now.”

  “Damn right I have,” Dancer said.

  I said, “I don’t know what to think. Not yet.”

  “If whoever it is is serious,” Ramsey said, “he’s also crazy. He’d have to be to think any or all of us are plagiarists.”

  “Well, I suppose we’ll be contacted in any case,” Praxas said. He had a sepulchral voice, like John Carradine or Karloff without the lisp, that sharpened his cadaverous image; the more you looked at and listened to him, the more it seemed he ought to be the one w
ho wrote horror fiction. He would have made a beautiful stereotype. “Should we tell you when that happens?”

  “If you like,” I said. “I don’t know what Dancer told you, but there’s really not much I can do except keep my eyes and ears open and offer advice if the need arises.”

  “Told them you were the best damn private eye in the business,” Dancer said. “Told them you’d get to the bottom of it whether you were getting paid or not.”

  He was beginning to irk me. The drunker he got, the harder it was to keep on liking him. “Yeah, well, I’m not the best, and I’m not likely to get to the bottom of anything. The fact is, I’m here mostly as just another pulp fan.”

  “Sure you are. Best damn private eye in the business.”

  Ramsey said, “You’re a pain in the ass, Russ, you know that?”

  “Damn right I am. Best damn ass pain in the business.”

  Ramsey shook his head and watched Dancer knock back what was left in his glass. Then he asked me, “You been a detective long?”

  “About thirty years, public and private.”

  “How long collecting pulps?”

  “Same.”

  “You go to conventions regularly?”

  “No. This is my first.”

  “Mine too. Bert here thrives on them, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Praxas said. “I go to conventions for the same reason I give talks at colleges and universities: I enjoy meeting fans and it helps keep my work alive. But I hardly thrive on them.”

  Dancer said, “Good for the old ego, huh, Bertie?”

  “Yes. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. How about the money?”

  “Money?”

  “Sure. The old honorarium.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “How many cons you go to in a year?”

  “A half-dozen or so. Why?”

  “All of them on the pulps?”

  “No. Most are science fiction-or comic-oriented.”

  “Pay better or worse than this one?”