Bill Pronzini: Hoodwink

Eberhardt said, “Enough with the history lesson. Bring it forward thirty years, will you?”

“Sure.” And I told them my speculations on Meeker: his discovery that he’d been cheated, the festering grudge, the invitation to the pulp convention and the chance to confront Colodny after all those years, and his half-cracked scheme to send out copies of the novelette, along with bogus extortion letters, in an effort to find out which of the Pulpeteers had been Colodny’s accomplice in the plagiarism.

“Did he find out?” Dancer asked.

“I don’t think so. Ramsey had to have realized right away what ‘Hoodwink’ was all about, and it must have scared him pretty good; his career is going great guns and something like this could hurt him if it went public.”

“Which gave him a sweet motive for murder, no?”

“If he’d been inclined that way. That’s how I figured it at first: whoever the plagiarist was was the murderer. It seemed to add up; I didn’t consider that somebody else-Underwood-had got tossed by accident into the pot that was brewing. I doubt if Ramsey knows to this minute that Meeker was the true author of ‘Hoodwink.’ Or if Meeker learned that Ramsey was the unwitting plagiarist. The circumstances forced Ramsey to keep his mouth shut and bluff it out; there was no confrontation between them.”

“How did Underwood get tossed into the pot?” Eberhardt asked.

“I’m coming to that. There are a couple of other things that need explaining first. The thirty-eight that killed Colodny, for one. Cybil Wade’s gun. But it was stolen from her last Thursday night, while she was at the cocktail party.”

“By whom?”

“By Colodny. He was the man I surprised in the Wades’ room. He wanted the gun to threaten Meeker with; it was the only weapon he could have gotten on short notice. Maybe he even intended to kill Meeker with it-we’ll never know.”

Dancer said, “How did he know Cybil had the gun?”

“He knew because she’d threatened him with it. He made a pass at her, swatted her around when she refused, and she pulled the gun.”

Dancer smiled sardonically. “I didn’t think the old son of a bitch still had it in him. Even for Sweeteyes.”

“He had it in him, all right. But he was running scared at the same time. He hadn’t expected to find Meeker at the convention-that was the only reason he’d consented to come in the first place, because Meeker wasn’t supposed to be there-and meeting him face to face had to have been a shock. Particularly when Meeker confronted him about the plagiarism, which is what must have happened; Meeker was having a high old time playing catalyst, shaking up the entire group-taking his own warped kind of revenge-and Colodny was his primary target. That had to be what caused the flare-up between the two of them at the cocktail party: Meeker goading Colodny, maybe trying to force a public confession.”

“Is that what Meeker was after?” Eberhardt asked. “A public confession?”

“I’d say so. Maybe he wanted money, too, reparation, but after thirty years he wasn’t likely to get it. He had to know that, screw loose or not. I doubt if he was really a blackmailer or an extortionist. The poor bastard’s primary motive all along had to be revenge.”

“Okay, go on.”

“So Colodny got desperate after the cocktail-party incident; he went to Wades’ room, jimmied the lock, and swiped the gun. The fact that I caught him at it, almost ran him down, must have shaken him up even more: he couldn’t be sure whether or not I’d seen him and could identify him. He decided to lay low, not go after Meeker right away-wait until he saw how things went down. He probably hid the gun somewhere, to be on the safe side. That way, if I had seen him and did identify him, he could bluff it out.”

“So did he go after Meeker?”

“Yes, but not until Saturday. He found out on Friday that I hadn’t got a clear look at him in the Wades’ room, but there were other things going on then. You throwing your weight around in the bar, Russ, that was one.”

“I was sure he’d put that second extortion note in my pocket,” Dancer said. “Who did if he didn’t? Meeker?”

“Meeker. He could have done it any time that morning; the shape you were in, you wouldn’t have noticed. I think you were one of his top suspects for the plagiarist.”

“Me?”

“That’s why he kept palling around with you, feeding you drinks. He was setting you up, trying to get you to incriminate yourself.”

“Jesus.”

“He spent most of Friday with you, working on you, so he must have left Colodny pretty much alone. And Colodny left him alone. But on Saturday it started again-Meeker goading him. That’s what led to the shooting.”

“Yeah, the locked-room trick. I’ve been going nuts trying to figure that out.”

“It wasn’t a locked-room trick,” I said. “Which is why neither of us could figure it out. No gimmick, no illusion, nothing like that at all. Just a sort of freak accident, with you getting caught in the middle.”

“Accident?”

“That’s right-a juxtaposition of circumstances that combined to create a false impression.”

“I don’t get it. What juxtaposition?”

“Let me tell it chronologically,” I said. “The first thing is that you came in drunk a few minutes before noon. You remember you told me you knocked on Meeker’s door to see if he wanted to buy you a drink?”

“I remember.”

“But there was no answer: he wasn’t in. So you went down to your room, and after that everything is a blank in your memory. What you figure you did was to go straight in and collapse on the bed, but that isn’t what you did at all.”

“What did I do?”

“You bought yourself another drink.”

“The bottle of rye that was on the couch? But I don’t even remember it being in the room-”

“It wasn’t in the room. You went and got it.”

“Where?”

“Out of Meeker’s room,” I said. “He had plenty of liquor in there; you told me that yourself. You also told me that on Friday when I rang up your room, while you were in with Meeker having a drink, you’d heard the phone ring but you couldn’t get through the door in time. You didn’t mean the hall door, did you? You meant the connecting door.”

“Ah Christ, that’s right. The connecting door was unlocked; I remember Ozzie doing it.”

“And he didn’t relock it again. It was open on his side when you came into your room on Saturday. So you opened the connecting door, went into Meeker’s room, got the bottle, took a drink or two when you came back, tossed the bottle on the couch, and then went in and passed out. You also did one other thing-the most important thing of all.”

“What was that?”

“You left the connecting door open,” I said. “Maybe not all the way open, but not latched either.”

Eberhardt’s expression altered slightly. He took the pipe out of his mouth and said, “I think I’m beginning to see it.”

“Sure. After Dancer was back in his room, passed out, Meeker came into his room. He didn’t notice that the connecting door was open, or maybe he did and didn’t care. A little while after that Colodny showed up with the gun, either to threaten Meeker or to shoot him. They had an argument, they scuffled, and in the scuffle they bumped into the connecting door and went through it. They were actually struggling inside Dancer’s room when the gun went off and Colodny, not Meeker, was shot.”

“What happened with the gun?” Eberhardt said. “Did Meeker throw it down afterward?”

“Maybe. Or more likely it popped loose from his hand when it went off. Or from Colodny’s hand-whoever had hold of it. It’s easy enough to figure what happened next: Meeker, in surprise or fear or both, jumped back inside his own room. Colodny, on the other hand, was mortally wounded; but even somebody shot through the heart can live five or ten seconds afterward, that’s a medical fact. So either he or Meeker threw the door shut-an instinctive reaction, born of fear. For that same reason, fear, Colodny managed to turn the bolt on Dancer’s side, and Meeker did the same on his side of the door, double-locking it. The sound of the shot woke up Dancer; the other sounds he heard were the door shutting, the bolts being thrown, and Colodny falling to the floor. When Dancer staggered in from the bedroom, Colodny was already dead. He saw the body, picked up the gun. And that completed the false impression that confronted me when I let myself in a minute or so later.”