Bill Pronzini: Hoodwink

“I’ll buy it so far,” Eberhardt said. Dancer didn’t have anything to say; he just sat there looking relieved. “But now where does Underwood fit in?”

“He must have showed up at Meeker’s room, for one reason or another-he was the convention chairman, remember-some time during the scuffle, probably just seconds before I got off the elevator. The hallway door must have been open or at least unlatched; he heard scuffling sounds, he went in just in time to see Colodny get shot and what happened afterward.”

“And then what? Blackmail?”

“Either that, or Meeker offered him money to keep him quiet. Underwood needed money, evidently; he told me he was selling off part of his pulp collection, and no big-time collector like him would do that unless he was having financial problems. In any case Underwood became an accessory and the two of them beat it out of there the first chance they had-maybe right away, maybe later, while I was in talking to Dancer or after the security guy and the manager showed up. Meeker also figures to be the one who planted the typewriter-his own portable-in Colodny’s room to make everyone think Colodny was the one behind the extortion.”

Eberhardt nodded. “Now we come to why Underwood killed Meeker. And how.” “Well, I’m not sure on the why part,” I said, “but I can make some guesses. Maybe he wanted more of a payoff than Meeker was willing to give. Or maybe Meeker had second thoughts about the killing and was making noises about confessing all, which would have put Underwood in the soup as an accessory. Or maybe it was another kind of greed: Meeker must have told him about ‘Hoodwink’ and the rest of it, including Colodny’s big Hollywood score and the fact of an accomplice in the plagiarism, and it could be that Underwood had visions of a horde of money stashed down in Arizona, or maybe of running his own blackmail scam against the surviving plagiarist.”

“The locked-room business with the shed,” Eberhardt said. “Was that just a freak accident too?”

“No, that was planned so that it would look like Meeker died accidentally. I think it must have been the way Colodny died that gave him the idea.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s the same solution in both cases, Eb,” I said. “I realized that in the ghost town. When Underwood took his first shot at me I dove back inside the building, slammed the door, and barred it. See the parallel? It was the same sort of thing that happened when Colodny was shot.”

“I don’t see any parallel in the Meeker case.”

“It’s there. Colodny was mortally wounded when he locked the connecting door; in effect he was a dead man. And it was a dead man- Meeker-who locked the door of that shed.”

“Oh, it was? Listen, I talked to the cops up there. Meeker’s head was split open like a melon; the coroner says he died instantly. He didn’t have time to run into the shed and lock the door after him.”

“I don’t mean it that way,” I said. “I mean it literally: he was dead when he locked the door.”

Dancer was sitting forward on the edge of his chair, squinting at me with rapt eyes through his cigarette smoke. Even the stenographer looked expectant. Eberhardt, though, just sat glaring at the front of my shirt-still avoiding my eyes. “Make some sense, will you? Spell it out.”

“There was a length of fishing twine in the grass outside the shed,” I said. “Underwood must have dropped it before he beat it out of there. I thought at first he’d used it to gimmick the key in the inside lock. You know, the old bit about running pieces of cord under the door and turning the key with slip knots. But one of the investigators up there, a guy named Loomis, told me that the shed key couldn’t have been turned that way; it had to have been turned by hand. He was right on both counts: the fishing twine was used for something else and the key was turned by hand.”

“Meeker’s hand, I suppose?”

“Yes. Well, more precisely, Meeker’s finger.”

“His finger.”

“Index finger, right hand. Loomis told me it was lacerated; that was what finally tipped me.”

“Come on, don’t keep drawing it out. What happened?”

“Meeker was lying in that shed with his head near the ax and the stepladder overturned. The assumption was supposed to be that he’d been standing on the ladder, lost his balance, and fallen down onto the ax. But he was killed somewhere else, with the ax, and then put into the shed. All right. What Underwood did was this: he set the stepladder close to the door, leaving just enough room to open the door so he could get out, and balanced Meeker’s body over the ladder. Then he turned the key as far as he could without shooting the bolt-and wedged Meeker’s finger through the hole in the key’s top. All he had to do then was position the ax, loop the piece of cord around the leg of the ladder, run the cord ends out under the door, slip outside himself, shut the door, and then jerk the cord to jerk the ladder and make the body fall. Meeker’s finger turned the key in the lock and slipped out of the hole as the body toppled; that’s how the finger got lacerated. It might have been tricky to get all the elements-ladder, body, finger, key-balanced right in order to make it work; he might have had to do it more than once. But he had time. And he did do it.”

Eberhardt gave it some thought. Then he shrugged and said, “It makes a screwy kind of sense, I suppose. Why did Underwood search Meeker’s studio after he killed him?”

“Looking for money, probably. More or less the same reason he went down to Arizona to search Colodny’s place. There are three reasons I should have tumbled to Underwood’s involvement long before I saw him in Arizona with his rifle, and one of them has to do with those two searches. But I didn’t tumble to any of them, not even the most obvious, until I went back over everything trying to fit Underwood in as the murderer.”

“What was the thing about the searches?”

“In both Meeker’s house and Colodny’s place there were stacks of pulp magazines,” I said. “And in both places the pulps were the only items that hadn’t been scattered around or torn up. Who else but a pulp collector, somebody who understands what they’re worth and reveres them, would spare a bunch of pulps when he’s ransacking a room?”

“And the other two reasons?”

“One is a small slip he made when I talked to him on the phone on Tuesday. He must have just got back from Meeker’s, and here I was, calling for Meeker’s address so I could go up and see him; it had to have shaken Underwood a little and put him off his guard. He asked me if the reason I was going to see Meeker had anything to do with poor Colodny being shot through the heart. But how did he know Colodny had been shot through the heart? The newspapers didn’t carry that information; all they said was that he’d died of a gunshot wound. And you or your men weren’t likely to have mentioned a fact like that when you questioned him. The only other way he could have known was if he’d been there at the time of the shooting and seen where Colodny was shot.

“The third reason is the most obvious one. Meeker’s alibi for the time of Colodny’s death was that he was with Underwood, attending to his pulp art display. And Underwood must have corroborated that when you talked to him. But if Meeker was involved in the death of Colodny, as he obviously was, then Underwood had to be involved too; otherwise why would he lie on Meeker’s behalf? I should have worked that out a hell of a lot sooner than I did. If I had, I might have saved myself some grief.”

Eberhardt relit his pipe. “Is that it? Or have you got any other loose ends to tie off?”

“I think that’s about it,” I said. “After Underwood talked to me on Tuesday, he must have driven that Dodge of his straight down to Arizona.