Bill Pronzini - Hoodwink

She frowned down at her cup. “I suppose I got the same feeling tonight. Only I just don’t see how my folks could be involved.”

I hesitated. Then I said slowly, “Kerry, look, there’s something else you’d better know. When Dancer knocked Cybil’s purse off the table at the party I got a look at what fell out of it. One of the things was a gun.”

“A what?”

“A gun. A.38 caliber snub-nosed revolver.”

Strong rushes of emotion seemed to make her eyes change color; they got dark again, almost smoky green, and in them you could see her struggling with what I’d just told her. “A gun,” she said. “My God.”

“It isn’t something she’s prone to doing, then.”

“Of course not. You think she goes around packing a gun?”

“Some people do.”

“She’s not one of those paranoids.”

“Easy. I wasn’t suggesting she was. Do you have any idea why she’d come to the convention armed?”

“No. God, I didn’t even know she owned a gun.” For half a dozen seconds Kerry stared at a spot just beyond my right shoulder; then she shook herself, and her eyes lightened again, glistening. “I don’t like this,” she said. “I don’t like any of this one damn bit.”

“It might be a good idea if you had a talk with her in the morning,” I said. “Maybe she’ll confide in you.”

“You bet I’ll have a talk with her in the morning. I’d go back up there right now if it wasn’t so late.”

And that just about finished the conversation. She was too busy worrying questions around inside her head for any more banter or discussion. I called for the check, and we went out through the lobby and into a warm soft breeze off the Bay.

“Your car close by?” I asked her.

“In the garage just down the street.”

“Mine’s the other way. But I’ll walk over with you.”

“No need. Thanks for the coffee.”

“Sure. About that raincheck for supper-you could use it tomorrow night if you’re not doing anything else.”

“Let’s see what Cybil has to say.” The collar of my standard rumpled private eye trenchcoat seemed to be tucked under, all cockeyed in my standard sloppy fashion, and she reached up and straightened it. She had to stand close to me to do that, and I could smell the faintly spicy scent of her breath. “And what kind of day tomorrow turns out to be.”

“Fair enough.”

She let me have one of her smiles, patted the trenchcoat collar, and went off toward the lighted front of the parking garage. I watched her for a time, with that spicy scent lingering in my mind, and a kind of afterimage, too, of her coppery hair and the way her mouth looked when she smiled. Then I lifted my head and looked up at the glossy moon hanging overhead-one of those spring moons that bathes everything in silvery light and stirs the blood and makes coyotes stand up all hot and bothered and start baying.

I felt like doing a little baying myself just then. Damned if I didn’t.

The convention was already in full swing when I got back to the hotel at ten the next morning. One of the wide central corridors off the reception lobby was crowded with people and lined with tables of various sizes, some of them draped in cloths that read Registration and Banquet Tickets and Seating and Tours of Sam Spade’s San Francisco. The people were of various sizes, too, and various ages that seemed to start at about fifteen and extend up to semiold duffers like me. Almost everybody was dressed casually-one young guy in a Shadow cape and slouch hat, no less, and one chubby girl in a short skirt and one of those metal brassieres you used to see on the covers of science fiction pulps. As soon as I quit gawking at the girl, I began to feel overdressed in my suit and tie. But then I spotted Bert Praxas talking to a couple of eager-looking kids, and he was also wearing a suit and tie and looked every bit as stuffy as I probably did.

I didn’t see anybody else I knew in the crowd, 78 *

so I went over to where Praxas was. He saw me, raised a hand in a “just a second” gesture, and finished telling an anecdote about having to make a last-minute change in one of his Spectre novels because of an unintentional double entendre. Then he excused himself from the kids and joined me.

Another teenager trotted by just then, this one wearing a Viking helmet and what looked like a motheaten bearskin, and waving a sword made out of wood and tinfoil. I followed him with my eyes, trying to figure out who or what he was supposed to be.

Praxas said, “Conan the Barbarian.” He was smiling.

“Pardon?”

“The Robert E. Howard character from Weird Tales. That’s who the boy is dressed up as.” His smile widened. “This has to be your first convention. You’ve got the usual nonplussed look.”

“Are there always kids who wear costumes like that?”

“Oh yes. If you think you’re seeing strange sights here, though, you should go to a science fiction con. It’s an experience.”

“I’ll bet it is. Why do they do it?”

“Self-expression,” he said. “A lot of them are lonely, social misfits in one way or another; they crave companionship and attention, and it’s only natural that they gravitate to others with similar interests. But you won’t see many of them here.

This is more a convention for dealers, collectors, and serious pulp fans.”

“Like me, huh?”

“Like you. The huckster room is open, by the way. If you plan to do any buying for your collection, you should go in as soon as possible. The turnover will likely be fast and furious.”

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

But the first place I went when I left him was to the house phones, to call Dancer’s room. There was no answer. I went to the hotel bar next, but it wasn’t open for business yet. He still hadn’t joined the convention crowd, either, nor had anyone else I knew. Which gave me a good excuse to take Praxas’s advice and visit the huckster room.

The woman sitting at the registration table told me it was nearby on the main floor, just turn right at the end of this corridor. So I did that, and it turned out to be a big rectangular room with wide-open entrance doors and a couple of guys checking name tags. A three-foot-square sign to one side said, Convention Members Only - Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted. It took me thirty seconds to remember what I’d done with the name tag Underwood had given me last night, and then to consider myself lucky I hadn’t changed suits this morning. When I got inside I was confronted with sales tables lining the walls and arranged in a middle square as well, so that pulp magazines-and some hardcover and paperback books-would loom on both sides of you all the way around. The room was almost as crowded as the registration area, but most of the people seemed to be upwards of twenty-five and to have a much more serious mien as they wandered around or bent over the stacks and boxes and trays of plastic-bagged pulps.

The whole place made me feel like a proverbial kid in a candy store. This was something I understood; this was my kind of world. I could feel myself grinning, no doubt in a fatuous way, as I started to do some browsing of my own.

It didn’t take long for the browsing to turn into a shopping trip. I found several issues of Detective Tales, Double Detective, Private Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly that I didn’t have, plus a coverless Black Mask from 1931 with stories by Horace McCoy and Frederick Nebel. At the end of half an hour I was fourteen pulps richer and fifty-two dollars poorer.

Then I stopped to admire the display of a Southern California dealer-three 1920s Black Masks with Hammett stories, priced at $125 each, the first issue of Wu Fang at $650, the first issue of the rare hero pulp The Octopus at $800-and to wonder about the incredible inflationary rate of magazines that had sold new forty to fifty years ago for a nickel and a dime. Somebody caught hold of my arm while I was doing that, and when I turned I saw Lloyd Underwood standing there, showing me his stained dentures.