Bill Pronzini: Hoodwink

I swallowed my fear and jumped straight down at him.

He tried to dodge clear, but surprise made him slow and awkward; one of my bent knees hit him in the chest, the whole weight of my body drove him over backwards and flattened him into the ground. We broke apart when we hit, like something splitting in half, and he lost the rifle and I lost the hatchet. But I didn’t need the hatchet. I dragged myself onto all fours, hurting and shaky; he didn’t move at all.

I could have broken both legs, I thought fuzzily. If I hadn’t hit him just right, coming off that damn roof, I could have broken a dozen bones.

Yeah, another part of me said. And he’d have shot you dead if you hadn’t jumped off the damn roof.

It took me a minute or so to get up onto my feet again. After which I went over, checked to see if he was still alive-he was-and then stood looking down at him, gawping a little the way I had on the roof. Because he wasn’t anyone I had expected to see. Because there were some holes in the deductive reasoning I had done back in San Francisco, Not only wasn’t he Ivan Wade, he was not even one of the Pulpeteers.

The guy lying there on the ground was Lloyd Underwood.

At two o’clock on Thursday afternoon I was back in San Francisco, sitting in Eberhardt’s office at the Hall of Justice, getting ready for story time. Eberhardt was there too, of course, and so was a police stenographer. And so was Russ Dancer: Eb had had him brought down from the detention cells at my request. Nobody else had been invited.

The one other person I’d have wanted there was Underwood, but he was being held in Arizona, in the Cochise County jail where I had delivered him late yesterday afternoon, on an attempted murder charge. There had been no way to have him brought back to California, not without going through extradition proceedings. But then, Under wood had been sullen and uncommunicative anyway; he hadn’t said anything to me when he regained consciousness, all trussed up like a turkey, as I was changing the Duster’s flat tires-one spare from the rental’s trunk, one from Underwood’s Dodge hidden in the rocks nearby-and he hadn’t said anything during the long ride out of there. He’d opened his mouth pretty good after I hauled him into the county police offices in Bis-bee, but only to yell for an attorney. He had not admitted anything.

Not that his presence was all that necessary at this little gathering. Its purpose was for me to explain the entire chain of events to Eberhardt and convince him I knew what I was talking about. Which would then bring about a dropping of charges against Dancer, his release, a reopening of the Colodny case, and a revaluation of the Meeker homicide by the Sacramento authorities. The subsequent investigation would slap Underwood with a murder charge, or so I hoped. I had nothing conclusive against him except the attempted homicide in Arizona, but if the police were convinced of his guilt, they were bound to turn up some sort of substantive evidence. Either that, or the pressure would get to Underwood and he would crack wide open. He was an amateur at crime, and amateurs convict themselves a good percentage of the time.

I had had plenty of time to reshape my theories so that Underwood, not Ivan Wade or one of the other Pulpeteers, fit the role of murderer. It had been eight P.M. before the Arizona law and I were finished with each other-too late to drive back to Tucson, much less catch a flight to San Francisco. So I had made two telephone calls, one to Eberhardt and one to Kerry, and then spent the night in Bisbee. Early this morning I’d driven to Tucson, just as an eleven o’clock flight out was boarding. By the time we touched down at San Francisco, I had a complete progression worked out. It hadn’t been all that difficult, really. Once I realized what my mistakes were, as I had pieced it together initially, Underwood fit in with no trouble at all.

The office was as blue with smoke as it had been the last time I was there: Eberhardt puffing away on a billiard briar, Dancer chain-smoking cigarettes. But at least the electric heater wasn’t on, and the temperature was at a tolerable level. Dancer, who still appeared ludicrous in his orange jumpsuit, kept looking at me with big dog eyes full of gratitude, as if he wanted to come over and lick my hand. He made me a little uncomfortable. I liked him much better in his role as the cynical and seedy hack writer, because I could deal with that. Fawning admiration was something else again.

Eberhardt took the pipe out of his mouth and said gruffly, “All right, let’s get this show on the road.” He did not look at me as he said it. He hadn’t given me a direct look since my arrival. That was easy enough to figure, too: he was embarrassed at having shown up at my place drunk on Tuesday morning to discuss his sexual problems. So he was dealing with it by not dealing with it, by reverting behind the mask of hard-edged authority. He seemed to be bearing up all right, though. His eyes were bloodshot, which may have meant another drinking bout or just that he wasn’t sleeping much, and his face still had that blurred, grayish look. But he was tough, one of the, boys from the old school; he was not going to fall apart.

“I’d better lay everything out chronologically,” I said. “It’s complicated, and it’ll be easier to follow that way.”

“Tell it whichever way you want. It’s your party.”

“The central factor is the ‘Hoodwink’ manuscript, so what happened to both Colodny and Meeker had origins more than thirty years ago.” I went on to explain my theory about Colodny’s theft of the novelette Meeker had written and entrusted to him, the bringing in of someone to plagiarize it into a screenplay, the eventual sale to Hollywood. And also how I had come to the fact that Meeker was the “Hoodwink” author.

Eberhardt said, “Who was this someone Colodny brought in? You’re not going to tell me it was Underwood, are you?”

“No, not Underwood. He’s not a writer, and he didn’t know Colodny in those days.”

“Ivan Wade?” Dancer asked, as if he were hopeful the answer would be yes.

“It wasn’t Wade either,” I said. “It was Waldo Ramsey.”

“Waldo?”

“There was a strongbox inside Colodny’s place in the ghost town. He’d kept a letter in it from Ramsey, written in 1950; it mentions the screenplay.”

“Why would Frank keep an incriminating letter all these years?”

“I guess he was something of a packrat,” I said, but that wasn’t the truth. Colodny had kept the letter because it was the stuff of potential blackmail-the same reason he’d kept the photograph of Cybil Wade and a couple of other items I had found in the strongbox. Whether or not he had used it against Ramsey was a moot point; but I doubted it. The Hollywood score had ended Colodny’s blackmailing pursuits, at least for the intervening three decades. I did not mention any of this because I didn’t want to go into the blackmail angle. It was more or less irrelevant to the two homicides, and I wanted to protect Cybil’s reputation. I had burned the photograph, sight unseen, back in Arizona.

Dancer was shaking his head. “I wouldn’t have figured Waldo for a plagiarist,” he said. “He was on his uppers in those days, sure, but we all were. He always seemed honest enough. And he never mentioned anything about writing screenplays.”

“Well, he had the talent-he’s adapted a couple of his own books for the screen, remember? But I’m not so sure he even knew he was a plagiarist. The wording of his letter indicates he believed Colodny had received permission from some anonymous author to have the novelette turned into a screenplay. He may have suspected there was funny business going on, but as you said, Russ, he was on his uppers back then. Colodny paid him pretty well for the job.” With money he got from blackmailing Cybil Wade, I thought.