Hoodwink

by Bill Pronzini

  When she was gone I telephoned East Bay information, asked for a Hayward listing on Lloyd Underwood, and then dialed the number I was given. Underwood was home and surprised to hear from me. He was also as antic as ever, nattering away at top speed.

  “Ozzie Meeker?” he said. “Yes, he lives on Yoloy Island up in the Delta. Is there any special reason you want to talk to him? Does it have anything to do with poor Frank Colodny being shot through the heart at the convention?”

  “It’s a private matter, Mr. Underwood. Where would Yoloy Island be, do you know?”

  “Near Grand Island, I think, east of Rio Vista. I’ve never been there myself. It’s an Indian word meaning a place thick with rushes. Yoloy, I mean. Did you know that?”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes. I still can’t believe Russ Dancer is a murderer. Do you really think he did it?”

  “I have my doubts.”

  “You do? Who do you think it was, then?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m trying to find out.”

  “Well, if it wasn’t Russ Dancer I hope you do.” He made a clucking sound. “What a tragic end to the first Western Pulp Con. Don’t you think so? Of course, the publicity might work in favor of a second Western Pulp Con and bring the dealers and fans out in droves next year. You just never know about people—”

  “Thanks for your help, Mr. Underwood,” I said. And hung up on him.

  It took me another ten minutes with the telephone to locate a small trucking outfit that charged reasonable prices and was willing to pick up this afternoon and deliver right away to the new address on Drumm Street. Then I finished cleaning out the alcove, emptied my desk, and pushed all the packing cases together in the middle of the floor. Then I went down the hall to the office of a CPA named Hadley, told him I’d given the moving company his name, asked him if he’d let them into my office when they came, and turned my key over to him. Then, not without reluctance, I got out of there for the last time.

  I had my car on the Bay Bridge, headed east, before the noon hour was half gone.

  FIFTEEN

  The weather was better on the east side of the Bay: mostly clear with scattered banks of wind-driven clouds. Traffic bunched a little heavy on Highway 24 coming out of Oakland, but when I picked up 680 outside Walnut Creek, it thinned down quite a bit. I turned the radio on, just to have some noise, and let my thoughts wander the way you do on an easy freeway drive.

  Where they wandered to first off, and lingered on, was Kerry. Our relationship. We were pretty fine together in the sack, but there was more to it than that. How much more I wasn’t sure yet. Ego was part of it; ego always is when an old fart gets himself an attractive woman a dozen or more years younger than he is. The depth of her personality was part of it too; and her sense of humor; and that knack she had of making me feel like a dumb little boy one minute and a hell of a man the next. All those things, yes—but still something more?

  I remembered what she’d said to me on Saturday morning, after the night we’d spent together: “You’re a nice man, a nice gentle pussycat private eye.” More than that for her too, though—and more than the sex and my great wit and charm. Hell, she’d confessed it herself this morning—she had been fascinated by the mystique of the fictional private investigator ever since she was a kid. Rock stars and athletes have groupies; why shouldn’t a private eye have one?

  Hey, come on, I told myself, that’s not fair. So she’s attracted to private detectives, so what? Are you any better? Maybe the bottom-line attraction for you is that she’s the daughter of a pair of pulp writers, one of whom wrote your favorite detective series. Maybe you’re a pulp groupie. Think about that one, wise guy.

  I thought about it, and it began to make me feel uneasy. There seemed to be a certain element of truth in it—maybe more truth than I cared to accept—and it opened up disturbing possibilities. The pulps had been a central part of my life for three and a half decades; I had already admitted to myself that from my own youth I had tried to emulate the pulp detectives I admired. Suppose those pulps had become so central that I had subconsciously allowed them to govern my emotional and sexual responses? Suppose the only woman I was capable of loving now was one with a connection to those yellowing old magazines and the people who had written for them?

  Suppose it was the pulps, not Kerry, that I had gotten off on Friday night and Saturday morning and yesterday-afternoon?

  No, I thought, no. No. I’m a lot of things but that kind of abnormal isn’t one of them. Is Kerry abnormal because she likes private cops? Was it Sam Spade or Phil Marlowe she had her orgasms with instead of me? Bullshit. We had pulps and private detectives in common—they were what had drawn us together in the first place—but that was all there was to it. It was me, the man, she cared for; it was her, the woman, I cared for, and wanted, and was touched by inside.

  With an effort I herded all the psychological nonsense into the back of my mind and walled it off there, the hell with it. Think about something else—Eberhardt’s marital crisis, what I would say to Ozzie Meeker when I got to Yoloy Island, theories on the murder of Frank Colodny and the solution to the “Hoodwink” enigma. Too much self-analysis only led you into ugly little byways you had no business exploring. And ended up driving you half crazy.

  I picked up Highway 4 above Concord, and when I got past Antioch I stopped at a service station and bought a tankful of gas and a map of the Delta area. A couple of minutes with the map was all I needed; Yoloy Island didn’t look to be too hard to get to. And it was small enough so that I probably would not have to chase around checking streets and asking a lot of directions to Meeker’s place.

  It was getting on toward two o’clock when I crossed the San Joaquin River at the westernmost edge of the Delta, near where it merges with the Sacramento River on a course to San Francisco Bay. Highway 160 began there and wound up through the network of islands, villages, marinas, picnic spots, levee roads, seventy bridges and drawbridges, and more than a thousand miles of waterways that make up the Delta. It was pretty nice country, full of willow trees and mistletoe-draped cottonwoods, cultivated farmland and jungly backwater sloughs where you could pick wild blackberries and catch catfish and Delta crayfish, shanty-towns occupied by elderly Chinese who looked as though they’d stepped out of the nineteenth century, places with colorful names like Dead Man’s Slough, Poker Bend, Jackass Flat, some of the best restaurants in California, and any number of houseboats, speedboats, sailboats, rowboats, skiffs, rafts, and old freighters. About the only inland water craft you wouldn’t find, in fact—and ironically enough—were the steamboats that had opened up the Delta in the days following the Gold Rush, carrying passengers and freight to and from Sacramento, Stockton, San Francisco, and new settlements in between.

  The area was steeped in history and legend. Ghosts were said to walk on foggy nights in Dead Man’s Slough; there was supposed to be a treasure of gold specie buried on Coarsegold Island; old-timers would tell you straightfaced that there had been so many corpses consigned to watery graves in the Deltas-miners murdered for their pokes, cheating gamblers, claim-jumpers, outlaws and outlaw victims, Chinese slaughtered by whites and by their own in tong battles, passengers and crewmen killed when steamboat boilers exploded—that if you drained all the rivers and sloughs, you could walk from Sacramento to San Francisco on the layers of muddy bones.

  During the summer the Delta was one of the most popular recreation and resort areas in North-em California. In the spring, though, cold winds still blow steadily across the flat alluvial plain and keep most people away. And this year, because of serious flooding and land erosion during heavy winter rains, even foul-weather fishermen were said to be looking elsewhere.

  With the light traffic conditions, I made the twenty-odd miles to Grand Island in just under forty-five minutes. The turnoff I wanted, according to the map, was Poverty Road. I found it easily enough, went along there for another three miles, made another turn on Yoloy Road,
and followed that to where an old-fashioned latticed-metal bridge spanned the gunmetal-gray waters of a channel. When I came off the bridge I was on Yoloy Island.

  If yoloy meant “a place thick with rushes,” as Lloyd Underwood had told me, the island was well named: Tules grew all along the shoreline, below the levee road that looped along its perimeter. The other side of the road was lined with willow and pepper trees. Toward the center of the island, well apart from each other on higher ground partially hidden by brush and trees, I could see a couple of frame houses, one of them in tumbledown condition; unpaved access roads led up to each property, and at the foot of each drive was a mailbox with a name lettered on it. I slowed at both of them and pulled over close enough so that I could read the names. Neither one was Meeker.

  The whole island could not have been more than three-quarters of a mile in circumference. Halfway around it the levee road veered inland past a rocky point on one side and a stretch of windswept grassland on the other. Beyond the point was a stand of cottonwoods, and beyond the cottonwoods was another house, this one built between the road and the slough and shaded by more cottonwoods and a couple of droopy willows. I came up near the drive and squinted through the windshield at the mailbox standing there. The lettering on this one was artistically done in three colors: Oswald J. Meeker.

  I turned up the drive. The house was an old two-story frame with galleried porches and looked even more tumbledown than the one back near the bridge: white paint chipped and faded, upper gallery sagging in the middle, railings and Victorian latticework broken in places. The remains of a covered pioneer wagon, maybe authentic and maybe not, sat off to one side; the high grass growing up around it made it look as if it were sinking into the earth. Parked between the wagon and the house was a Plymouth station wagon, Korean War vintage, that had part of its right rear panel caved in and rust spots all over its chrome.

  Meeker may have been a pretty successful artist for the pulps, I thought, but he didn’t seem to be doing too well these days. Unless the ramshackle appearance of everything was an eccentricity or some sort of calculation. For all I knew, the inside of the house was as opulent as any in the wealthy neighborhoods of San Francisco.

  I parked my car behind the Plymouth and got out. The wind here was raw and blustery, swaying the grass and the willow trees, building little choppy waves in the slough behind and below the house. It had scraped the sky clean of clouds, leaving it a slatey blue with the sun off-center in it like a frozen yellow eye. I pulled up the collar on my coat, stuffed my hands inside the pockets. Then I went up onto the porch, stepping gingerly because the old boards creaked and gave under my feet, and pushed the doorbell button.

  Nothing happened. The door stayed closed and there weren’t any sounds except for the echoes of the bell and the low whistling cry of the wind.

  Maybe he’s not home, I thought. Maybe I should have called first instead of driving all the way up here on faith. But unless he owned two cars, how about the Plymouth wagon sitting there?

  I came down off the porch and made my way around to the rear; it could be he had a studio back there and hadn’t heard the bell. Past the house, I saw more grassy earth that sloped down to a tiny natural cove flanked on both sides by thick tule patches. Two beaten-down paths led through the grass. One went to a rickety pier that bisected the cove, extending twenty feet or so into the channel; the other went to some kind of shed with a window on the near side, built triangularly between the house and the pier.

  A screened-in porch with a glass roof had been tacked onto the back of the house. I thought that the glass roof probably made it a studio, all right, and climbed three steps to the screen door. It was unlatched and standing open a couple of inches. I - caught hold of it and poked my head through and called Meeker’s name.

  No answer.

  It seemed a little funny that Meeker would leave the door open like this if he wasn’t around. Maybe he was eccentric enough not to care about things like locking doors—but it still made me wonder. You’d think he would want to protect his personal belongings, particularly the original oils and charcoal and ink sketches that were hung all over the inner wall of the studio. They had to be worth quite a bit of money to collectors.

  I debated going inside. But I did not want to do that; trespassing was one trait of the fictional private eye I had always considered dumb as well as illegal, and I cared for it less than ever since I’d broken into a fish processing company in Bodega Bay on that Carding/Nichols case a few months back, against my better judgment, and nearly got myself killed for it. Instead I settled for a look around the studio from where I stood outside. Which told me nothing. The place was even sloppier than my flat, cluttered with easels, jars of paint, brushes, blank canvases, and other artist’s supplies, and a farrago of papers, maps, books, tattered Western pulps, fishing equipment. It was also empty of human habitation.

  I pushed the door shut and stood for a couple of seconds looking out at the empty slough. Then I went down along the path to the pier. Tied up on the lee side was a fourteen-foot skiff with an outboard engine tilted up at the rear and a tarpaulin roped over most of its length. I took a couple of steps out on the pier, to where I could look both upstream and downstream along the slough. There wasn’t anything to see in either direction, or across the channel at the opposite bank.

  The wind gusted and made the skiff bob in the choppy water, bang against the side of the pier. I could feel my cheeks and ears getting numb. It could be Meeker had a second skiff and had gone fishing in one of the other sloughs; he was a fisherman, judging from the gear I’d seen inside the studio. But it was a damned cold day—too cold and too rough for the fishing to be good at any hour, much less the middle of the afternoon.

  And why would he leave the studio door unlocked?

  When I stepped off the pier the shed caught my eye. It was about twelve feet square, made out of weathered gray boards, with an asymmetrical roof covered in tarpaper. There was a window on this side too, facing the channel. On impulse I headed over that way through the marshy grass. At the door I stopped and reached out to try the knob. Locked.

  I started to turn away—and stopped again, for no reason except that a length of fishing twine lay curled in the grass like a scrawny snake. A hollow jumpy feeling started up in my stomach; then the back of my scalp began to crawl, and not from the wind or the cold. Ah no, I thought, not again, not another one. But that kind of feeling had come over me too many times before. It had got so I could almost feel the psychic after-tremors of violence, the presence of death, when I got near enough to them.

  I put my teeth together and moved around to the window on the side nearest the house. The glass was streaked with dirt; I had to lower my face close to it to get a clear look inside. The interior was shadowed and cobwebby, but enough daylight penetrated through the windows to make the shapes within discernible.

  Ozzie Meeker was lying crumpled on the wooden floor near the door, next to an overturned stepladder and a double-bitted ax. There was blood and gray matter on him and on the blades of the ax: the back of his head had been split open.

  Bile kicked up into my throat; I turned away and took three or four deep breaths. When my stomach settled down again I had another look through the glass—not at the body this time but at the door. There was a key in the old-fashioned latch, one of those big, round-headed ones; I could see it plainly. I caught hold of the window sash and tried to force it upward. It wouldn’t budge. I hurried around to the other side, made the same effort with that window, and got the same nonresults. Both windows were either stuck fast or locked from inside like the door. And as far as I could tell, there was no other way in or out of the shed.

  Another damned sealed-room killing.

  SIXTEEN

  I called the county sheriff’s office from Meeker’s studio, using my handkerchief to hold the phone receiver and not touching anything else. A guy with a voice like a file on metal took my name and Meeker’s address, told me to stay where
I was, somebody would be out within twenty minutes, and clicked off before I could offer an acknowledgment. He sounded pretty excited; they probably didn’t get many homicide cases up here, and this one would be the highlight of his week. Some highlight.

  I debated ringing up Eberhardt and filling him in on this latest turn of events, but that would have been premature. Maybe Meeker’s death would get Dancer off the hook and maybe it wouldn’t; it was too soon to tell. If Meeker had committed suicide, and if there was a note somewhere saying he’d done it because he had been responsible for Frank Colodny’s death, then that would tie everything off in a nice little bundle. The problem with that was, Meeker hadn’t com mitted suicide. Suicides don’t lock themselves inside sheds and split their heads open with double-bitted axes. No, it was either an accident— which was more convenient coincidence than I cared to swallow—or it was murder. And if it was murder, it would either uncomplicate things or complicate them even more; it all depended on the mitigating circumstances and on what sort of evidence the local authorities came up with.

  Or that I could come up with myself, I thought.

  Here I was, alone in the studio with nothing to occupy my time until the county sheriff’s men arrived. I could go outside and wait for them, but it was pretty cold outside. I was not supposed to touch anything in here, but I didn’t have to touch anything—not with my hands, anyway. There was nothing to stop me from sniffing around like an old bloodhound, was there? Nothing to stop me from looking! I went over to the screen door and looked out to make sure the rear yard was still empty. Then I turned to look at the disarray of things in the studio. And it struck me that the mess in there might not have been made by Meeker—that maybe the place had been searched. It had that kind of look, the more you studied it. Nothing overt, like slashed upholstery or upended furniture, but a messiness that went beyond sloppy. About the only things that weren’t slung around helter-skelter were the pulp magazines stacked along one wall.