Bill Pronzini - Hoodwink

“Well, I’d rather not make a fuss about it,” she said finally.

“There won’t be a fuss,” Wade said. “We’ll ask the manager to be discreet.”

“Can’t we at least wait until morning?”

Wade glanced at me and I shrugged. He said to Cybil, “All right, in the morning. It’s getting late and we’re all tired.”

Kerry took that as a cue for us to leave. And a couple of minutes later, after the goodnights, we were alone together in the hallway. She said, “I seem to have lost my appetite. Raincheck on Rosebud’s, okay?”

“Sure. But how about a cup of coffee downstairs? It’s still early yet.”

“Well… just one, maybe.”

The lobby coffee shop was still open, and we took one of several fancy white wrought-iron tables surrounded by potted plants; the place was called, rather snootily for a hotel coffee shop, the Garden Bistro. Kerry sat studying me as I gave our order to the waitress, and she kept on studying me for some seconds afterward.

“What aren’t you telling me?” she said.

“Why do you think I’m not telling you something.”

“Intuition. You don’t exactly have a poker face, you know.”

“I always thought I did.”

“Well, you don’t. What did you do on that errand of yours?”

I hesitated. I could be frank with her, but that would mean mentioning the.38 revolver in her mother’s purse. If she didn’t already know about it, and the odds were she didn’t, it might upset her. Still, if Cybil was courting some kind of trouble, she had a right to know about it. And maybe she could help me find out just what it was that was going on here.

“Well?” she said.

“Okay. I went to see if I could find Russ Dancer.”

“Why? You don’t suspect him, do you?”

“Not actively. But the intruder had alcohol on his breath, and not just the kind from one or two social drinks. That made me think of Dancer.”

“You mean because of the way he feels about Cybil? My God, you weren’t thinking rape or anything like that?”

“The thought did cross my mind.”

“Well, you — can forget it, believe me. Dancer would never hurt Cybil; never. He worships her.”

“Worship can turn into hatred sometimes.”

“Yes, but not in Dancer’s case. I can see it in his eyes-how he feels about her.”

“Did you know Dancer before you met him here?”

“No. But Cybil told me enough about him to give me a good idea of what to expect. Men like Russ Dancer are easy to read.”

Not for me, they weren’t. But I said, “Does Cybil do a lot of reminiscing about the old days?”

“Oh, sure. At least she used to when I was living at home. I don’t think she’s ever been as happy as she was in the forties.”

“Why is that?”

The waitress brought our coffee. Kerry stirred cream into hers before she said, “I guess she was happiest back then for several reasons. She was young. She’d just made it through a war and dozens of short separations-my dad was an army liaison officer and did a lot of shuttling back and forth between New York and Washington. And she was writing for the pulps, doing what she’d always wanted to do. She even wrote some pulp stories with Ivan, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Under a pseudonym. Gruesome stuff about ax murderers and people being buried alive. I loved it when I was a kid.”

“They let you read horror fiction as a kid?”

“They didn’t know about it. I used to get into their magazine file copies.”

“Did Cybil like being one of the Pulpeteers?”

“Sure. Apparently they were a pretty wild group.”

“Wild in what way?”

“The forties kind of way,” Kerry said. “All-night parties, crazy practical jokes, a fistfight or two once in a while.”

“Fistfight? You mean among themselves?”

“Cybil never went into detail. Neither did my dad.”

“She never mentioned who was involved?”

“If she did, I don’t remember. Maybe Frank Colodny, though.”

“Why Colodny?”

“Some of the writers accused him of cheating on what he paid for their stories. He’d promise them one amount, pay them another when they delivered, and claim economic pressures as the reason for the cutback. But the writers suspected he was putting through vouchers for the full amount and then pocketing the difference himself.”

I remembered Dancer alluding to the same thing at the party. “Why was Colodny allowed in the Pulpeteers,” I asked, “if he was suspected of crooked dealings?”

“Well, the cheating only started at the end of the decade, when Action House was losing money like all the other pulp publishers, because of television and paperbacks. Colodny owned a piece of the company, and Cybil says that he liked money. When he couldn’t find anybody else to screw he started doing it to his friends.”

“Nice guy.”

“But they could never prove it, and it took them a while to even accept that it was going on. One by one they stopped writing for him, and finally they threw him out of the group.”

“When was that?”

“In ‘49, I think. The year before Action House went bankrupt and Colodny disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Well, one day he was in New York, and the next day Action House’s offices were closed and he was gone. Nobody knew where.”

“There wasn’t anything shady involved, was there?”

“You mean like embezzlement? No. The company didn’t have any money left to embezzle. He just vanished, that’s all.”

And turned up in Arizona, I thought, with enough money to buy an entire town. A ghost town, sure, but even ghost towns and the land they’re on didn’t come cheap in 1950. Where did he get the money, if Action House was bankrupt?

“What did your folks think about Colodny buying a ghost town?” I asked her.

“They didn’t know about it until today. But I don’t think they were all that surprised.”

“Why not? It’s not something a person would normally do.”

“Not most people, but Colodny was always a flake. Back in New York, Cybil says, his big fantasy was to move out West and prospect for gold. No kidding.”

“Some fantasy,” I said.

“He’d always been a fan of Western pulp stories; that’s probably where he got the idea. He came from a small town in New Mexico and never really liked New York. He went there because an uncle of his got him the job with Action House. But he was always talking about moving back someday. He had asthma too, that was another reason he wanted to move West-the dry air.”

“Then what kept him in New York so long?”

“Money, I guess. He wanted that more than any thing else.”

“Uh-huh. So where’d he get enough to buy the ghost town?”

“Nobody knows. None of the others had seen him or heard anything about him since his disappearance thirty years ago.”

“How did your folks react to the prospect of spending a weekend with him after all that time?”

“They weren’t exactly overjoyed. But then, thirty years is a long time to hold a grudge.”

“Yeah,” I said, “a long time.”

There was a silence, during which Kerry gave me another of her long, probing looks. “Are you thinking it might be one of the Pulpeteers who broke into their room tonight?”

“It’s possible.”

“Frank Colodny?”

“Also possible.”

“Buy why? For what reason?”

I shook my head. “Unless it had something to do with ‘Hoodwink’ and the extortion letters.”

“You mean one of the Pulpeteers behind that too? Why?”“ I can’t even guess,“I said. “But there are all sorts of things going on here, and I don’t just mean attempted extortion and breaking-and-entering. Tensions that go back much longer than that.”