Bill Pronzini: Hoodwink

“Did the police go out to Colodnyville too?”

“I suppose. They didn’t tell me.”

“How do I get there?”

“Straight out of town to the east until you come to Ocotillo Road, winds up into the foothills. Old dirt track off there about a mile in. You’ll see a sign. Crazy old fool put up a sign.”

“One more question. Has anyone else been around asking about Colodny in the past few days?”

“Just you. Hyped-up dude named Lloyd Underwood called him three-four weeks ago, said he was a pulp magazine collector. Said he’d heard about Frank from some other collector passed through these parts on a book-buying trip. That’s why Frank went off to San Francisco. Pulp magazines,” she said, and curled her lip again. They were right up there with half-breeds and interracial marriages in her esteem.

“But nobody’s called since?”

“No. Who’d call? He didn’t have any friends.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Mean and tetched, that’s why. Married a half-breed, kept to himself like he had secrets, bit your head off when you spoke to him, lived out in that godforsaken place claiming he was a prospector.” She made a piglike snorting sound. “Prospector. No gold out there anymore, not in fifty years; he didn’t take a hundred dollars out of those hills in all the time he was there. But he always had plenty of money just the same.”

“If you disliked him so much, why did you give him a room in your house?”

She looked at me as if I might be a little tetched myself. “He paid me one-fifty a week,” she said. “Why do you think?”

I left her sitting there, not bothering to thank her or to say goodbye, and pushed back through the sweltering air to the street. The back of my shirt and most of the underarm areas were sopping wet, but not one drop of sweat had appeared anywhere on her face or arms and her dress was desert-dry. I disliked her for that as much as for anything else.

Back in the car, I let the dusty air conditioner dry me off as I drove to Main Street again, then turned east on the country road that cut through it in that direction. There was not much traffic and nothing much to look at except lava formations and tall saguaro cactus. The sky was so milky now that the sun looked like a cataracted eye. That and the heat glaze and the absence of movement anywhere beyond the road itself gave me an eerie feeling, as if I were driving in a place not of this world. My turn in the Twilight Zone.

I added what Mrs. Duncan had told me to what I already knew about Colodny, and it fit together nicely in the pattern I had evolved. He had come here thirty years ago with his boodle from Magnum Pictures, bought the ghost town, married, settled down to act out his fantasy of life as a gold prospector, and thumbed his nose at the world for a quarter of a century. The death of his wife, maybe coupled with creeping old age, had left him lonely; that had to be why he’d spent more time in Wickstaff over the past six years. It might also explain why he had consented to attend the pulp con and the Pulpeteer reunion. And why he had tried to force Cybil Wade to share a bed with him again after all those years.

The fact that he kept most of his possessions in Colodnyville might also be significant. If he had retained anything incriminating from his New York days, such as evidence of his partner’s identity in the “Hoodwink” plagiarism-and that embarrassing photograph Cybil had told me about- it was likely to be there. Unless the local law had found it and confiscated it, of course. If I had no luck myself I would have to check with them right away. But I hoped that if they had found something, it was not the photograph; that was not for anybody to look at, including me. The first thing I’d do if I came across it myself would be to shut my eyes and burn it.

The road took me in a more or less straight line for better than five miles before an intersection loomed up. On the near side was a sign that indicated the narrow two-lane cutting off to the southeast was Ocotillo Road. The foothills loomed up here, too-more lava formations, huge rocks balanced on top of each other and strewn along slopes that also bore catclaw, cholla, organ-pipe cactus abloom with pink and white and lavender flowers. Higher up, crags and limestone walls stood dark red against the starchy sky.

Ocotillo Road zigzagged through this rough terrain, sometimes climbing, sometimes dropping into shallow vales-past a lonesome and not very prosperous-looking ranchhouse tucked behind one of the hills, past stretches of the thorny brush that had given the road its name. A little more than a mile along, by the Duster’s odometer, an unpaved and badly rutted track appeared on my right, leading off onto higher ground. Tacked to the trunk of a paloverde growing alongside it was the sign, made out of weathered shingles and painted in faded black letters, that Mrs. Duncan had told me about. It said: Colodnyville — Population 2 — No Trespassing. When I made the turn there I had to slow down to a crawl. A jeep was what you needed to navigate a trail like this, and the Duster was a long way from being jeeplike. It jounced and banged and kept scraping its undercarriage on jutting rocks; I thought that one would tear the pan or at least flatten one or two tires, and I had visions of being stranded out here in the middle of nowhere with snakes and gila monsters and Christ knew what else that inhabited these rocks. But none of that happened. All that happened was that I cracked my head against the door frame a couple of times and wound up with a headache.

The trail twisted upward for a time, slid sideways, and then hooked around and along the wall of a limestone cliff. There was a pretty steep dropoff on one side; I tried not to look down in that direction because I’m a coward when it comes to high places. Then the track began to descend in a series of sharp curves that were almost switchbacks. And pretty soon it straightened out again, and I was in another hollow, not large enough to be called a valley but large enough nonetheless to contain Colodnyville.

It was not what I had expected. When you think of ghost towns you think of open spaces, two or three blocks of crumbling false-front buildings, tumbleweeds everywhere, a saloon with one of its batwings canted at a rakish angle, hitchracks and horse troughs and broken signs flapping in the wind. But that was Hollywood stereotype, not Colodnyville. Now I knew why Mrs. Duncan had said, “Ghost town. That’s a laugh.” Because it wasn’t even a town-not unless you can call four buildings huddled more or less together in a small sea of cactus and rocks a town.

All the buildings were plaster-faced adobe ruins, three of them with glassless windows, the other one with rusted iron bars like a jail and a crisscross of boards tacked up inside. The one with the window bars was the largest, maybe forty feet square, with a roof that had a little peak in front and slanted downward to the rear. There was nothing else to see except for a well dug off to one side, sporting a crooked windlass that looked about ready to collapse, and the remains of a crude wooden sluice box set up alongside it. In the crags above and beyond, there was evidence that mining had once been done here-tailings, the boarded-up entrances to at least two pocket mines. But it had never been a rich lode, judging from the ruins, nor had the miners who’d worked it stayed on for more than a few years.

I eased the Duster forward until the road began to peter out among the rocks and cacti, twenty yards or so from the nearest building and sixty yards from the nearest crag. When I got out it was like stepping into a vacuum: dead silence everywhere. Not a breathless hush, but a complete absence of sound, the way it was supposed to be on the moon. And the heat was thick, smothering, under that murky sky, acrid with the smell of dust. Sweat came popping out again and made me feel soiled and gritty.