Hoodwink

by Bill Pronzini

  She put the magazine down again. ” ‘My Body Lies Over the Ocean,’” she said. “Frank had a positive genius for concocting the worst titles. But he was a good editor. He knew when a story didn’t work and why it didn’t work, and he never fiddled with copy. Some editors fancied themselves writers and were forever changing sentence structure and tampering with style, but not Frank.”

  “But he was also dishonest, wasn’t he?”

  “Oh, he was a bastard there’s no question of that.” Nothing changed in her face, but the words were bitter. “Not at first, when the pulps were flourishing and he didn’t have to worry about money. But later—yes.”

  I sat down on the couch. “How well did you know him in those days?”

  “As well as any of the other Pulpeteers, I imagine.”

  “But not intimately?”

  Her gaze flicked away from me, down to the beer on the table. Then she leaned forward and began to pour from the bottle into the glass. I couldn’t see her eyes when she said, “What do you mean by intimately?”

  “Just that, Mrs. Wade.”

  She poured the glass half full, lifted it, and drank until there was nothing but foam left. Foam made a thin white mustache on her upper lip as well; she licked it off. “I never used to like beer,” she said. “I still don’t very much. But once in a great while it tastes good. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are other things like that,” she said. “Things that aren’t good for you, things that you don’t like or care to do except once in a great while. Then something inside you, some sort of craving, makes you want it. Just once, or maybe twice, and then you don’t want it any more. But that once or twice, you have to have it, no matter what.”

  This time I did not say anything.

  She crossed her legs, put one hand on her knee. The other hand began toying with the blouse button between her breasts. She said, “You know about Frank and me, don’t you?”

  “Yes,“I lied.

  “The whole story?”

  “Not all of it, but enough.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “There were some things at Ozzie Meeker’s place,” I said. “Notations he’d made linking you and Colodny.”

  “Yes, Ozzie would know if anybody did. I tried to keep it a secret, God knows, and Frank was bound to do the same. But Ozzie was the closest thing to a friend he had during the war; he was always hanging around Frank’s apartment, and he must have seen us together.”

  “And now he’s dead.”

  “Dead,” she repeated. “How did it happen? Where?”

  “At his place up in the Delta. I found him this afternoon, inside a tool shed. His head was split open with an ax.”

  She seemed to shiver. And poured more beer and drank it off the way she had before, in one long swallow.

  “The police think it was an accident,” I said, “because the shed door was locked from the inside. But I think it was murder.”

  “But why? Why would anybody want to kill Ozzie?”

  “Maybe because he wrote ‘Hoodwink’ and sent those extortion letters.”

  “Ozzie did? But I thought Frank—”

  “No, it wasn’t Colodny.”

  Pause. “You don’t think I had anything to do with Ozzie’s death?”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course not. I was out shopping part of the day and at the hotel the rest of it; I certainly didn’t go up to the Delta.”

  Which was probably true enough. Meeker had died early this morning, according to the coroner’s estimate, and I had talked to Cybil myself around ten-thirty. I said, “Does your husband know about your affair with Colodny?”

  “Ivan? God, no!”

  “Are you positive of that?”

  “Yes. He’d have confronted me if he knew. He’d have … I don’t know what he’d have done. But he’d never keep it to himself.” Her fingers had opened the blouse button and were trying to get it closed again. You could see her Adam’s apple working in the slender column of her throat. “I was terrified back then that he’d find out. That’s why I paid Frank his filthy blackmail money. He’d have told Ivan if I hadn’t, just as he threatened to do.”

  “Blackmail?”

  It got quiet for a few seconds. Then her mouth opened and made a little O. “You didn’t know about that? I thought you’d found that out, too.”

  “No. You’d better tell me about it.”

  “Why? My God, Frank is dead—it’s all ancient history.”

  “Is it? Meeker’s dead, too, and Russ Dancer is in jail charged with a crime he didn’t commit, and the real murderer is running around loose. Suppose he decides to go after somebody else?”

  “I don’t see how my relationship with Frank could have anything to do with murder …”

  I could, if her husband was the person who had killed Colodny. But I didn’t say that to her; I said only, “Maybe it doesn’t. You tell me the truth, all of it, and I’ll take it from there.”

  The blouse button opened again, closed again. “You won’t let it go any further than this room, will you? You won’t tell anyone—especially not Kerry?”

  “Not if you haven’t done anything criminal.” “No, nothing criminal.” Her mouth turned wry. “Just foolish, that’s all. Very, very foolish.” “Everybody’s foolish once in a while,” I said. “Yes. It’s not a very pretty story, you know.” “I’m not in a very pretty line of work.” “I suppose not. But I feel … cheap. You seem to care for Kerry, and I know she cares for you. And here I am, waving a lot of dirty family linen in front of you.”

  “That isn’t going to change how I feel about Kerry,” I said. “Or about you, for that matter. I’m not here to sit in moral judgment, Mrs. Wade. All I’m interested in is finding who killed Colodny and Meeker, and getting Russ Dancer out of jail.” “All right,” she said, and took a breath and let it out with her lips pursed, as if she were blowing out a match. “It happened during the war—World War II, I mean. Ivan was in the Army and stationed in Washington, but there was a housing shortage there, and we decided it would be best if I stayed in New York. My pulp writing career was going well, and all our friends were in Manhattan, and it was just easier all the way around. Ivan used to come home once or twice a month, which was fine; but sometimes his military duties kept him away for months at a time. I was young in those days and … well, warm-blooded. I could stand the short separations but the longer ones were … difficult.”

  She was looking past me now, at a spot somewhere beyond my right shoulder. Or maybe she was not looking at anything in this room. Her eyes had taken on a remoteness, as if she might be peering down a long, dark tunnel into the past. I wanted some of my beer, but I was afraid that if I moved I would disturb the confessionary mood she was in. I just sat still and listened.

  “I had plenty of opportunities, God knows,” she said. “But I wasn’t promiscuous; I loved Ivan—I’ve never stopped loving him. I turned down all sorts of offers, from all sorts of men. Including Russ Dancer. I had my writing and I had Kerry to take care of, she was just a baby then. I might have stayed faithful except that Ivan was sent out to California for six months, some sort of secret work that didn’t allow me to join him or even to talk to him on the telephone. It got terribly lonely after a while. And I had this craving inside me. I needed someone. I just… needed someone.

  “And Frank was there, always there. I found him attractive and he knew that; he’d made passes at me before, and I’d turned him down before, but it was always in a bantering way. Then one night after an editorial meeting, he offered to take me to dinner and I accepted. We had several drinks, we went to his apartment for another one, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have to go home that night because my mother was looking after Kerry, out in Brooklyn—she did that sometimes to give me a little freedom … I didn’t have to go home. So when Frank made his pass, as I knew he would, I didn’t turn him down; it wasn’t bantering any more. And I slept with
him.

  “It happened one more time after that, about a month later. Just those two times, never again. If Frank had had his way, it would have become an all-out clandestine affair—he was after me about it all the time. But there was never anything serious between us. He wanted my body and those two times I wanted his. That was all.

  “Then Ivan came back to Washington and began to make regular trips home to New York, and Frank stopped pestering me. He had other women, droves of them, so he didn’t need me to bolster his ego. The war ended not long after that and we were all excited and busy with the adjustment to peacetime living. I saw Frank fairly often at Pulpeteer meetings, we stayed friends; there were no recriminations. It had been just one of those brief war romances that didn’t mean anything, that after a while you could pretend never happened at all.

  “But then the pulp markets began to collapse in the late forties. Action House started to lose money on Midnight Detective and their other titles and had to fold all but Midnight by the end of 1949. That was when Frank got desperate and turned into a thief—and worse. When Midnight folded in 1950, that was the end of Action House;

  Frank was broke and out of a job. So he came to me and asked me for five hundred dollars.

  “I had the money. My own writing had slacked off, but Ivan was doing well with his pulp work and with books and radio scripting. But the money was in savings for Kerry’s education, and I turned Frank down. We’d become much less friendly anyway by then, because of the way he’d been cheating writers. Only he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He said he had proof we’d been intimate during the war—that damned photograph. He said that unless I gave him the five hundred dollars he’d tell Ivan about us, show him the photo, make it all seem more intense and sordid than it had really been. I had no choice. Ivan is insanely jealous and there’s no telling what he might have done. I gave Frank the money.

  “That wasn’t the end of it, of course. He came back three months later and demanded another five hundred. There was that much and more still in the savings, but if I took it out I knew Ivan would become suspicious; he’d asked me about the first five hundred and I’d had to invent a story about one of my relatives being ill and needing a loan. So I went out alone to my mother’s for a three-day weekend, on a pretext, and wrote fifty thousand words of detective pulp and managed to sell all of it to the surviving magazines under pseudonyms. I kept on writing on the sly like that because I knew Frank would be back for more. I did it for four months, half frantic all the time—

  well over three hundred thousand words—and I think that, more than anything else, was what burned me out as a writer.

  “Frank did come around again, twice more. And then, all of a sudden, he disappeared: one day he was there, hanging around publishing, looking for work that nobody would give him, and the next he was gone. I couldn’t believe it at first. I kept waiting for him to get in touch with me, to make more blackmail demands. But he didn’t, not for almost thirty years.”

  She stopped talking and sat statuelike for a time, still peering down that long, dark tunnel. Then she came out of it, blinked several times, and finally focused on me. She ran her tongue over dry-looking lips, fumbled at the blouse button again.

  “You see?” she said wryly. “Not a pretty story.” I hauled up my beer and had a long pull from it. When I put the bottle down I said, “Do you have any idea why Colodny disappeared as he did?”

  “No. And I didn’t care enough to try finding out. All that mattered was that he was out of my life.”

  “Did any of the other Pulpeteers know?” “None of them indicated it if they did.” “What about this ghost town Colodny is supposed to have bought in Arizona? Was any mention made of that in New York?”

  “Well, he was always talking about moving back to the West—he came from New Mexico—and prospecting for gold. But none of us took him seriously; we all treated it as a joke.”

  “Did he say anything along those lines before he disappeared?”

  “Not that I remember. Russ told me the other day Frank bought the town right after he left New York—that was what Frank had told him—but if he did, I can’t imagine where he got the money.”

  I could, but I did not want to go into it with her. I didn’t much want to ask the next question, either, but I had to know the answer. “You said something about a photograph, Mrs. Wade. What sort of photograph?”

  Her eyes flicked away from me again. Two small spots of color, like the marks a pair of pressed-in dimes would leave, appeared on her cheeks. “Frank took it that first night we were together, after we … afterward. I refused to let him at first, but I’d had a lot to drink, and he promised he’d never show it to anybody, and the idea of it was … exciting, wicked.” Her gaze came back to my face. “Do I have to tell you what pose I was in when he snapped it?”

  “No,” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Thank you. I think you can understand why I couldn’t let Ivan see it. I’d have done anything to prevent that.”

  “Including murder?”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation. “If it had come to that; if I’d had no other alternative. But I didn’t kill him. I’m glad he’s dead—I felt a tre mendous relief when I heard about it. But I did not kill him.”

  It seemed stuffy in there; I got up and went over to the thermostat and turned it down. Cybil was looking at her beer glass with distaste when I sat down again, as if remembering the analogy she had drawn earlier and equating beer with her ill-advised affair.

  I said, “The first time you saw Colodny since 1950 was at the convention?”

  “No. Not quite.”

  “Oh?”

  “He called me in Los Angeles one night about three weeks ago, out of nowhere. God, I nearly had a heart attack. He said he’d been approached about attending the convention, and when he learned that Ivan and I were on the program he’d accepted. He said Lloyd Underwood had given him our address and telephone number, and he was in Los Angeles and thought it would be nice if he and I got together for a little preconvention reunion. I tried to put him off but he insisted; there was nothing I could do except agree to meet him. I thought he might try to.blackmail me again, and I was right. But it wasn’t money he wanted this time. It was me.”

  “He made a pass at you?”

  “Yes. A vulgar pass. If I didn’t go to bed with him, he said, he’d have a talk with Ivan and he’d show him the photograph; he’d kept it all these years, and he was sure Ivan would still be inter ested. I almost gave in to him—I don’t have much shame left—but you saw the way he looked: the years hadn’t been good to him. He was repulsive. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I put him off with promises, all sorts of promises and told him I’d make arrangements to be with him at the convention.”

  “Did you mean that, or were you just buying time?”

  “Just buying time. But I also had an idea I could drive him away, force him to leave me alone.”

  “How?”

  “By threatening him,” she said. “With a gun.”

  “The .38 you brought with you, the one that eventually killed him.”

  “Yes. I bought it from a friend who has a gun collection.”

  “Did you go ahead with the threat?”

  “Yes, I went ahead with it.”

  “And?”

  “He laughed at me. He said I didn’t have the courage to shoot anybody. I told him I did and I meant it; I think I could have killed that man. But I swear to you again that I didn’t.”

  “Did your husband know you’d brought the gun with you?”

  “No. Not until after it was stolen. Then I had to make up that story about bringing it with me for demonstration purposes.”

  “Did anybody else know you had it?”

  “Not unless someone saw it when Russ knocked over my purse at the party on Thursday night. You saw it then, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But if nobody else did, then it had to be Frank who broke
into our room later and took it.”

  “Assuming the thief wasn’t after something else,” I said, “and stealing the gun was incidental.”

  “Nothing else was missing.”

  Not unless Ivan had played the same game as she and brought along something he hadn’t told her about. “Did Colodny say anything to indicate that he might want your gun?”

  “No. But he did seem nervous about something, almost frightened.”

  “Could it have been the ‘Hoodwink’ extortion business?”

  “Well, it could have been. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

  “Did he approach you again after the theft?”

  “About sleeping with him? Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said no. He called me names and I slapped him.”

  “And that was when he hit you and gave you that bruise?”

  “How did you know it was Frank who hit me?”

  “I didn’t, but it’s not much of a deduction after what you’ve told me.”

  “Well he did it, yes. With his fist. He said I’d better not lay a hand on him again, or try to threaten him again, or he’d fix me. He said I’d better come across for him, too. Not that weekend—he had too many things on his mind—but as soon as I got back to Los Angeles. Then he shoved me out of the room and slammed the door.”

  “Were there any more run-ins with him?”

  “No. I saw him Saturday morning, but we never said another word to each other.”

  “All right. Is there anything else you can tell me that might be pertinent?”

  “I don’t think so, no. I’ve told you everything— much more than I could ever tell anyone else.” A faint smile. “But I feel better for it. It’s been festering inside me much too long.”

  “Sure,” I said, “I understand.”

  “I can trust you not to say anything, can’t I? If any of this gets back to Ivan or Kerry …”

  “It won’t. I just hope you’ve been honest with me.”

  “I have. Painfully honest.” Cybil uncrossed her legs and got to her feet. “I’d better go. I left a note for Ivan that I was having dinner with a friend, but he starts to worry if I’m out late.”