Bill Pronzini - Hoodwink

But there were other things, too, that wouldn’t fit together: If Meeker had killed Colodny, if revenge in the form of a bullet was his primary intention, why bother to send the manuscripts and extortion letters? And if he hadn’t killed Colodny, if murder wasn’t his intention but someone else’s, why had he been killed? And why had Colodny-apparently Colodny-stolen Cybil’s gun? To threaten Meeker, as Cybil had threatened him, to lay off? But then why had Colodny turned up dead in the hotel and not Meeker?

Too many questions at once; they kept running around and bumping into each other, and they were giving me a headache. All right, then. Backtrack a little, take it from the original “Hood wink” material. Was it the novelette or the screenplay? The short story seemed much more probable. Meeker was a Pulpeteer, he worked for a pulp magazine publisher, he was immersed in fiction as prose, not fiction as cinematic drama. Besides, if he’d written the screenplay, why would he bother to do a novelette version?

Next question: Then who wrote the screenplay? Not Colodny, in spite of what Ben Chadwick had told me. According to what I’d learned Colodny was not, and never had been, a writer. What he was was an editor, which explained how he was able to rewrite the script to Magnum’s specifications and make last-minute changes on the film set; any good editor could do that much creative work without being a writer. But somebody else had to have written the initial screenplay, using Meeker’s story as the basis.

Next question: Who did the actual plagiarism? One of the Pulpeteers? Could Colodny have taken one of the others in on the scam and then cheated him out of his share, just as he had cheated Meeker? And could Meeker, realizing that someone else was involved, suspecting it was a Pulpeteer-Cybil Wade, maybe, because of her affair with Colodny; that would explain the markings on the Arizona map-could he have sent the novelette and the extortion letters to each of them as part of his own screwball plan to find out which one was guilty?

I took my feet off the desk and got up and paced around a little. Now I was getting somewhere again. Colodny had had an accomplice, and the accomplice had killed him out of the same motive as Meeker had: revenge. And why murder Meeker later on? How about because Meeker had succeeded in his plan, had found out who the accomplice was-not Cybil after all, someone else-and threatened to go to the police; or maybe even because he tried a little blackmail of his own. The killer couldn’t take the risk of being found out: exit Meeker. It made sense. There were still some small loose pieces, like who had really stolen Cybil Wade’s gun and why, and still some big loose pieces, like how had the killer managed to pull off not one but two locked-room murders- but the skeleton of it was there, all the structural bones gleaming inside the dusty museum of my head. Figure out who, I told myself, and the rest of it, the “impossible” stuff, will follow. The solutions are there; you just haven’t put them together yet.

Ivan Wade, I thought glumly. It’s got to be Ivan Wade.

He was an amateur magician, and who better than an amateur magician to stage a pair of locked-room illusions? He was the cuckolded husband, and if he’d found that out, despite Cybil’s protestations to the contrary, it doubled his motive for murder. It was Dancer who had been framed, and Wade had a long-standing hostility toward him. The Wades hadn’t exactly been poor in 1950, by Cybil’s testimony, but the prospect of a big Hollywood score was enough to corrupt ‘anybody at any income level. Ivan had had experience in radio scripting at that time, and later did a number of TV scripts, so he understood the dramatic form; it was only a small step to the writing of a complete screenplay. And from what I’d learned about Colodny, he had been the kind of perverse bastard who’d have enjoyed working a scam with the husband of the woman he’d seduced and was then blackmailing.

Wade fit the bill, all right-and I hoped to God I was wrong about him. If I wasn’t, and if I helped to put him in prison for murder, what would happen between Kerry and me? I had a pretty bad idea. Once before I had got involved with a woman and a murder case at the same time, and the killer turned out to be her brother, and I was the catalyst in his eventual suicide. The relationship had died along with him. It made me ache to think of the same thing happening with Kerry and me.

But I was in too deep to back out now, even for her sake, even for mine. I owed the truth to Dancer and I owed it to myself. The one hope I had was to turn up evidence that exonerated Wade by pointing conclusively to someone else. Innocent until proven guilty; give him the benefit of that and slog ahead, try to find proof either way.

And I had an idea where I ought to go slogging, too. If there was one place proof might exist, along with some other missing pieces, it-

The telephone rang.

I moved over and caught up the receiver. “Detective Agency.”

“Hi, it’s me,“Kerry’s voice said. “Are you busy?”

“Sort of. But not too busy for you.”

“How are the new offices?”

“Terrific,” I lied. “Where are you? At work?”

“Yes. I just spoke to Cybil; she said she saw you last night.”

“I got back a little earlier than expected and we had a talk.”

“So she said. She wouldn’t tell me what about, though.”

“You, for one thing.”

“I’ll bet. She approves of you, you know.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know.”

“Well, I wish you’d have come and talked with me too. What you told me on the phone about Ozzie Meeker really had me upset. Are you positive he was murdered?”

“Pretty positive.”

“Two murders,” she said. “What if a third Pulpeteer dies?”

“I don’t think that’ll happen.”

“Convince me in person. Will I see you tonight?”

“I wish you could. But no, not tonight.”

“Are you trying to avoid me for some reason?”

“Honey,” I said, “the last thing I want to do is avoid you. No, I’m going out of town.”

“Out of town? Where?”

“Arizona.” “Why Arizona?”

“I want to take to some people in Wickstaff, where Colodny lived. I also want to have a look at this ghost town he owned.”

“But why?”

“Just a hunch, that’s all. I’ll have more to tell you when I get back.”

“I hope so,“she said. “And I hope it’s good news.”

“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”

I spent the rest of the morning at the Hall of Justice, filling Russ Dancer in on the latest developments, asking him questions about Ivan Wade and Colodny and Meeker. He didn’t have anything new to tell me, except that Wade had begun experimenting with television scripting as early as 1949 and had also written an unsuccessful play. So there was no question that he had had the talent and the know-how to write the Evil by Gaslight screenplay.

Dancer was in better spirits than he had been on Sunday, even though I was careful not to build up his hopes. His faith in me was almost childlike. “You’ll get me out of here,” he said. “I know it; it’s just a matter of time. “You’re the best there is.”

Yeah.

Then I drove out to SFO, parked my car, took the overnight bag out of the trunk, and went in and bought myself a ticket. At 3:45 I was up in the friendly skies on my way to Tucson.

The town of Wickstaff, Arizona, was one of those places plunked down in the middle of nowhere that make you wonder about their origins. There was nothing much surrounding it in any direction except rough terrain dominated by cacti, scrub brush, and eroded lava pinnacles-mile after mile of sun-blasted emptiness that stretched away to low, reddish foothills on three sides. Two roads cut through it north-south and east-west, both of them county-maintained and both two-lane blacktop; scattered here and there in its vicinity were a few hardscrabble ranches. And as far as I could tell, that was all there was. So why had it been created and nurtured in the first place? What had kept it alive when hundreds of others in the Southwest, including the fabled Tombstone, which was not all that far away and in a better geographical location, died natural deaths and became ghosts crumbling away into ruin or tourist bait?