Bill Pronzini - Hoodwink

Eberhardt was in no shape to go traipsing down to the Hall of Justice or even to drive to his house in Noe Valley. I convinced him of that, and got him to take a cold shower and crawl into my bed to sleep it off. Then I rang up the Homicide Squad for him and told one of the inspectors that Eb wouldn’t be in until later today, maybe not at all. When I got out of there at 8:40 he was snoring away in bed, with one of the pillows clasped against him as if it were Dana in the days before the walls came tumbling down.

I took my depression downtown through wispy fog that had put a sheen of wetness on the streets. I was on Taylor Street, just crossing Eddy and about to swing into the lot on the corner, when I remembered that I no longer had an office here. My new offices, as of today, were located on Drumm Street. For Christ’s sake, I thought, and wondered if I was becoming senile. The memory lapse, and the fact that I wouldn’t be working in this lousy neighborhood anymore after two decades of calling it a second home, made me even more morose. It was one of those days when you should never get out of bed. When you should crawl under the sheets and huddle there like a rabbit under a newspaper until it goes away.

I drove all the way up the hill to California, turned right, and drove all the way down the hill to Drumm. Amazingly, there was a parking space near Sacramento; I put my car into it and walked back to the nice, shiny, renovated building where I had my new offices.

The offices were nice and shiny too: two rooms, one waiting area and one private office; pastel walls and a beige carpet on the floor; some chrome chairs with corduroy cushions; and Venetian blinds over the windows in case you didn’t want to look out at the Embarcadero Freeway monstrosity looming nearby. The only things out of place were crap that belonged to me-the piles of boxes in the middle of the anteroom, the desk in the private office, that the moving company had delivered yesterday.

It was a fine new set of offices, all right. And it tied a nice black ribbon on my depression: I was going to hate working here, image or no image, changing times or no changing times.

The telephone company had come in and installed a phone-as promised, for a change-and it was sitting in the middle of my desk. It was a yellow phone, with a pushbutton dial system. Private eyes aren’t supposed to have yellow phones, I thought sourly; pimps have yellow phones. But I went over and used it anyway, to put in a long-distance call to Ben Chadwick’s office in Hollywood.

He was in, which was surprising because the time was only 9:30. “I had to come in early today,” he said by way of explanation. “Heavy workload. I hate these early-bird hours, though.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Listen,” he said, “I tried to call you yesterday, but the operator said your phone had been disconnected. I thought maybe you’d gone out of business. Either that, or somebody blew you away.”

“Yeah,” I said. “What have you got, Ben?”

“Evil by Gaslight. You wanted poop, here’s poop: Magnum bought the rights in 1950 from a guy named Frank Colodny. Nobody remembers anything about him; came in off the street to see Magnum’s story editor, with an intro from some local flack he knew. Story editor liked what he saw, the moguls liked what they saw, and they paid him fifty grand for the property. Plus sweeteners. Pretty heavy sugar for those days.”

“What did they buy? Story treatment?”

“Nope. Complete screenplay. Damn good screenplay too, from what I’ve been told. Only a few changes from original to shooting script.”

“Did Colodny claim to have written it?”

“Yep. Under the Rose Tyler Crawford name.” “Was anyone else involved in the deal?” “Not as far as Magnum knew.” “Who made the changes in the script?” “Colodny did. They gave him an office and a typewriter on the lot. They also hauled him onto the set during shooting when they needed a few last minute changes.”

“Those sweeteners you mentioned-what were they?”

“Two percent of the gross profit. Also not common in those days; Magnum must have really wanted that property. Doesn’t sound like much, but Evil grossed a bundle. Magnum paid Colodny another eighty grand or so over the years for that two percent.”

“Were you able to dig up any local angles on Colodny?”

“Nope. He lived in Arizona, not down here; royalty checks were mailed to a P.O. box in a place called Wickstaff. But I don’t know if the address is current. Last check went out some years back.” “Thanks, Ben. Let me know if I can do something for you up here.” “I will,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.” We hung up. And I sat down in my chair and put my feet up on the desk the way private eyes are supposed to do, new offices or not, and brooded out through the slats in the Venetian blinds. Things were beginning to come together.

What I needed to do now was to shuffle all the pieces around and see if the full pattern emerged.

Okay. Meeker and Colodny are friends in New York in the forties; Meeker is a pulp artist and works for Action House, where Colodny is ‘editor-in-chief. But Meeker has secret writing aspirations-secret because maybe he’s not sure his work is any good, and he doesn’t want to embarrass himself in front of the other Pulpeteers-and he writes … what? the short story or the screenplay? Come back to that later. He writes something called “Hoodwink” and decides to show it to Colodny. Colodny the editor recognizes its merit; and Colodny the bastard smells big money and plans to steal it for himself. He puts Meeker off, maybe tells him it’s not very good but he’ll see what he can do with it, and then a little while later he disappears. And where he goes is out to Hollywood, where he sells the property to Magnum Pictures for fifty thousand dollars and a percentage of the profits. After which he buys a ghost town in Arizona, calls it Colodnyville, and settles in for the next thirty years.

Meeker, of course, doesn’t know right away that he’s been cheated. He only knows that Colodny has disappeared. He doesn’t find out until the film is released-or maybe years afterward-and by then it’s too late. He has no legal proof that Colodny stole or plagiarized his work since he obviously never copyrighted it; and Colodny’s trail is long cold, so that even if Meeker tries to find him, he turns up empty-handed. So Meeker stays in New York drawing for the last of the pulps and the burgeoning paperback market, then later moves out to California to freelance. And all the while he grows more bitter and resentful toward Colodny.

Comes this year, the past several weeks. Lloyd Underwood and some others decide to put on a pulp convention, and somehow they manage to locate Colodny. Maybe the idea of a reunion with his Pulpeteer cronies amuses him after all the elapsed time, or maybe it’s the prospect of seeing and bedding Cybil Wade again that amuses him. At any rate he agrees to come to the convention. The only thing that would have kept him away is the fact that Meeker would be present; but as far as Colodny knows, Meeker is among the missing-Underwood, ironically, has had difficulty finding a man who all but lives in his own backyard. It isn’t until after Colodny arrives at the hotel that he comes face to face with Meeker and his past crimes.

Meanwhile, Meeker is finally located by Underwood, who tells him that Colodny will be one of the guest panelists at the convention. This news has to have had a profound effect on Meeker. After thirty years he is at last going to confront the man who stole “Hoodwink” from him. So then-

So then what }

My speculations had been pretty solid so far, but now they came to a skidding halt. If Meeker knew Colodny had stolen “Hoodwink,” why had he sent copies of the short story to all the other Pulpeteers, along with the extortion letters? Unless it was some sort of mad purposeless game… but even at that, it didn’t make sense. I had asked Cybil Wade a few more questions about Meeker during the ride back to the hotel last night, and she’d confirmed my impression of him as a flake, somebody who had always marched to the tune of a different drummer. It was likely that Colodny’s betrayal had pushed him a little deeper into lunacy-anybody who would conceive that extortion gambit in the first place had to be at least half cracked-and yet he hadn’t struck me as irrational. There had to have been some sort of method in it.