Bill Pronzini: Hoodwink

Most of the Pulpeteers were inclined to shrug the whole thing off as the work of a crank, but at the same time they were curious and maybe just a little uneasy. Unusual or abnormal behavior, particularly by a party or parties unknown, always tends to make people nervous. So when Dancer had mentioned my name to them, the consensus was that it might not be a bad idea to have somebody around who was both a detective by profession and a knowledgeable pulp collector by avocation.

“Whoever’s behind this might not even be at the convention, you know,” I said. “Chances are it’s all some sort of hoax and you’ll never hear from ‘Hoodwink’ again.”

Dancer said, “But suppose one of us does hear from him?”

“Well, that’s a bridge to cross if we come to it.”

“Then you’ll snoop for us?”

“Sure, I’ll do what I can. You’ve got me curious too, now. Just don’t expect too much of me wandering around the convention. If I can do anything at all, it’ll probably be through channels.”

“What channels?”

“I know a guy down in Hollywood,” I said, “who knows some people in the movie industry. He might be able to dig up something on the background of Evil by Gaslight -something on Rose Tyler Crawford-that’ll tie in with this extortion business.”

Dancer liked that approach and said so. Then he looked at his watch, wetting his lips the way a man does when he’s thirsty. “Hey, almost five o’clock,” he said. “I’ve got to be moving.”

I nodded. “Okay if I hang onto the manuscript? I’d like to read it so I know what I’m dealing with.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

I asked him about the party tonight, and he told me it started at eight o’clock in Suite M on the fifteenth floor of the Continental. Another handshake, and off he went to do something about his thirst. When he was gone I went and did something about mine too: poured myself a fresh cup of coffee from the hotplate I keep on the file cabinet.

The hotplate was brand new; the old one, the one I’d bought when I first rented this office twenty years ago, had been badly damaged during that Carding/Nichols case a few months back. The whole office had been badly damaged-torn apart, raped, by a paranoid psychotic who thought my investigative efforts were part of a complex and nonexistent persecution plot. So to go along with the new hotplate, I also had a new desk and chair from a secondhand office-supply company, my old desk and armchair having been scarred and slashed beyond repair. I even had a new poster of my favorite Black Mask cover to replace the one that had been ripped off the wall and shredded out of its frame.

It was the same office I had worked in for two decades and yet it wasn’t.

The new furniture did not look or feel right. The walls and floors still bore the stains of splashed coffee and spilled white glue-the stains Dancer had mentioned earlier. They were a reminder of the rape, and a reminder, too, of Taylor Street and the deteriorating Tenderloin that lay outside. No, it wasn’t the same anymore and hadn’t been for months. Hadn’t been, maybe, for some time before the violation.

And that was why I had finally decided it was time for a change. Time to find a new office in a safer building in a neighborhood that would inspire rather than diminish confidence in potential clients. Time to take a step up in the world, or at least a step sideways into a better environment. Time to put on the front of a higher class private detective, as befitted what some local yellow jour nalist had called “the last of the lone-wolf private eyes.”

My new offices were on Drumm Street not far from the waterfront. The building had been renovated a couple of years ago, and I would have two large, cheery rooms instead of this dreary one-and-an-alcove. The location, in an area more or less surrounded by the financial district, the waterfront docks and warehouses, Embarcadero Center, and the Ferry Building, was attractive and easy to get to. And the best part was, the rent amounted to only forty dollars a month more than I was paying here after the latest increase.

I was all set to move in any time after next Monday, which was the last day of the month. A two-year lease had been signed, and I had given notice to the landlord here; all I had to do was pack up everything that belonged to me and then make arrangements with one of the smaller moving companies to transfer boxes and furniture.

And yet I kept putting off the packing job. I had brought the boxes in three days ago, and I’d had plenty of free time since then, most of which I had spent, as usual, reading pulp stories by Russ Dancer and his peers. Maybe I was just lazy. But more likely it was psychological: giving up a place where you’ve spent a substantial part of your life, a place full of memories more pleasant than unpleasant, is something that does not come easy to somebody with my temperament.

I would have to do it before next Tuesday, but now I had an excuse not to do it at all this week. For the next three days, I would be rubbing elbows with pulp writers at the Hotel Continental. I would not really be working, because I wasn’t getting paid, but that was all right. Next week I could pack boxes and finally get out of here and into my new offices; next week I could worry about building an image as a better-class private eye and also start making lots of money-enough, maybe, to get myself some fancy electronic surveillance equipment, not to mention a sexy secretary.

Right, Mr. Marlowe?

You bet, Mr. Spade.

I carried the coffee back to my desk and sat down with it and the copy of “Hoodwink.” The style in which the manuscript was written was not my cup of tea: florid descriptive passages, some of them a little stilted; arch dialogue and not much in the way of action. But for all that, there was power in the words-a kind of brooding and atmospheric sense of evil that hooked you and kept you hooked from the opening paragraph-

The hansom cab drifted spectrally out of the fog-enwrapped London night, its horse’s hooves clattering upon the cobblestones, the crack of its driver’s whip not unlike the snapping of a condemned man’s neck on the gallows at Newgate Prison. When it drew to a halt before the entrance to No. 7 Kingswood Crescent, the silence which settled around it seemed to possess a sudden sinister breathlessness. The tall man who alighted drew his cloak about him, stood peering up at the great house through its garlands of clinging mist. In that moment of silent motionlessness, man and hansom had the aspect of two-dimensional shadows newly sketched on night’s dark canvas, with ink still wet and glistening.

to the final paragraph-

The identity of that caped figure sent her reeling away toward the open window and the darkness beyond. The stationary objects in the room seemed to swirl past her, shading into distorted and colorless images much like those in a surrealist composition. The darkness reached out for her, yet she was no longer afraid of it. Fearful darkness? No! Merciful darkness. Darkness, her last lover. And when it embraced her in that first instant of weightless descent toward the black waters far below, she cried out not in terror but in ecstasy at the fulfillment of the dark promise which now, at long last, would be hers.

The plot was solid and cleverly worked out: a psychological study of two women and a man, one of whom was a murderer, living in the London of 1895, and of a mysterious fourth person-a caped figure-who wasn’t identified until the last page. That final revelation was surprising in print, but cinematically it had been stunning-the main reason why Evil by Gaslight had been such a box-office success in its time.

I hadn’t seen the movie for a while, and then in an edited version for TV, but its plot and that of “Hoodwink” struck me, as they had Dancer and the other Pulpeteers, as being identical. So did some of the more memorable passages of dialogue. Which started me wondering if maybe the novelette had been written after the film instead of before it-if “Hoodwink” was the plagiarism, copied as a prose work for the purpose of extortion. But even if that were the case, the mechanics of the scheme still escaped me. How could you collect extortion money by accusing six different writers of a thirty-year-old act of plagiarism none of them could have committed?