Bill Pronzini - Hoodwink

You might as well have your name tag now, though.”

“Name tag?”

“Have to wear one so you can attend all the events. This must be your first con.” He wrote my name on a gummed label and handed it to me. “There you go. Bar’s to your left as you go in. But if you like beer, there isn’t any. I asked room service to send some up, but they haven’t got here yet.”

I nodded without saying anything, because antic types like him tend to make me inarticulate, and entered the suite through the half-open doors. It was one big room about the size of a cocktail lounge, divided into three sections by two pairs of circular pillars. Rococo chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and there were two Queen Anne fireplaces, one at each side wall; the whole of the end wall facing the entrance was windows, some of them open to let in the mellow summery air San Francisco gets in late May. Heavy Victorian furniture was placed at strategic locations so you could sit and admire the view. And it was some view, too, particularly on a night like this: Twin Peaks to the west, the glistening black of the Bay, and the mosaic of city lights in between.

There were about twenty people standing or sitting together in small groups, making party noises and bending party elbows. None of them paid much attention to me as I wandered through, although I did get a somewhat lengthy glance from a tall, good-looking woman with coppery hair. But that was probably because I almost bumped into her and knocked her down, which is what happens to clumsy people who try to walk, peel the paper backing off a name tag, and look for a familiar face all at the same time.

I found Dancer holding up one of the pillars, talking to a scrawny guy about sixty with turkey wattles and the kind of suntan you don’t get on a three-week vacation. Dancer was saying something about Norbert Davis being the only pulp writer who could be funny and hard-boiled at once, but the scrawny guy did not seem to be listening. He wore a worried and preoccupied expression, and he kept patting the half-dozen hairs combed grid-fashion over the top of his skull-as if what he worried about was that they would fall off or disappear.

When Dancer saw me he said, “Hey, there he is, the shamus,” and reached out to smack me on the shoulder. The scrawny guy swiveled his head like a startled bird and peered at me. Then he patted the six hairs again. The ice in the glass clamped in his other hand made nervous tinkling sounds.

“This is the pulp-collecting dick I told you about, Frank,” Dancer said to the scrawny guy. Then to me: “Meet Frank Colodny. Meanest damn editor the pulps ever saw. Twice as mean as Leo Margulies in his heyday, and not half as decent underneath. Right, Frank baby?”

Colodny had nothing to say to that. I gave him my hand and told him it was an honor to meet him. He had been something of a scourge in his time, all right-a tough-minded, hell-raising boy wonder who had taken over a floundering Midnight Detective in 1942, when he was twenty-three years old and a 4-F asthmatic, and kept it- and more than a dozen other detective, Western, love, and air-war pulps-alive during the war and for nearly a decade afterward. You wouldn’t guess it to look at him, but he had also had a reputation as a high-living, hard-drinking roue. Well, maybe this was what happened to high-living, hard-drinking roues: they turned into scrawny guys with turkey wattles and suntans and six hairs on their scalps. Low-living, light-drinking, near-celibate types like me might like to think so, anyway.

Colodny did not think it was an honor to meet me; he grunted something, let go of my hand the way you let go of things you don’t like the feel of, and knocked back half of his drink. He still looked worried, and he still looked preoccupied.

Dancer said to me, “You know what he did when Action House collapsed in ‘50? Goddamnedest thing you ever heard. I still can’t get over it. Tell him, Frank.”

“You talk too much,” Colodny said, and pushed past me and headed for the bar.

“Friendly sort, isn’t he?” I said.

Dancer’s mood seemed to shift from good humor to sudden anger, the way a drunk’s will. And he was drunk, all right, or close to it; his eyes told you that. “He’s a lousy son of a bitch.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Screwed me out of a thousand bucks in the late forties, that’s why. Screwed a lot of other writers, too.”

“How did he do that?”

“He had ways.” Dancer’s hands clenched and he glared over at where Colodny was at the bar. “Lousy son of a bitch.”

“Take it easy,” I said. “The time to start trouble was thirty years ago, when it happened.” If it happened, I thought. “What did Colodny do when the pulps collapsed in 1950? You started to tell me but you didn’t finish it?”

Mercurially, Dancer’s mood shifted back to the previous good humor; the sardonic smile quirked his mouth. “Bought himself a town.”

“How was that again?”

“Bought himself a town. Moved out to Arizona and bought a run-down old ghost town up in the hills somewhere. Can you beat that? Isn’t that the goddamnedest thing you ever heard?”

“What did he do with this ghost town?”

“Didn’t do anything with it. Said he always wanted to own a town, and now he does. Named it after himself too, by God. Colodnyville. Isn’t that the goddamnedest thing you ever heard?”

“He’s been living in a ghost town all these years?”

“Off and on, he says. Most people have a cabin in the woods; Colodny’s got a frigging ghost town in the hills. Isn’t that the-”

“Yeah,” I said. I was still fiddling with the name tag; the paper didn’t want to come off the gummed backing. The hell with it, I thought. I did not like name tags in the first place, and besides, Dancer wasn’t wearing one. I put the thing into the handkerchief pocket of my jacket, where I would be sure to forget about it.

Dancer said, “Aren’t you drinking?”

“No. Lloyd Underwoood told me there’s no beer.”

“Beer? Booze is free tonight, you now.”

“I only drink beer.”

“No kidding, huh? How come?”

A big elderly guy in a Western shirt and a string tie saved me from having to explain my drinking habits. He wandered through the crowd and between Dancer and me, presumably on his way to the bathroom; but Dancer reached out and caught hold of his forearm and stopped him.

“Jimbo,” he said, “rein up a second. Want you to meet the shamus I was telling you about.”

“Well,” the big guy said, and a smile creased his leathery features. He was about seventy, but he stood tall and straight, with his shoulders back and his head high; you got the impression that he was a proud man. And an active one, too, who hadn’t been slowed down much by age. He gave me his hand, saying, “I’m Jim Bohannon. Glad to know you.”

“Same here.”

“Jimbo was heir to Heinle Faust back in the forties,” Dancer said. “The new Max Brand-king of the oaters.”

“Horse manure,” Bohannon said.

“Sure you were. Wrote a lead novel just about every month for Leo Margulies at Thrilling or Rog Terrill at Popular. How many pulp pieces you do altogether, Jimbo?”

“Oh, maybe a thousand.”

“Prolific as hell. Still does a novel once in a while. Must have ground out a hundred books by now, huh, Jimbo?”

Bohannon frowned at him-but tolerantly, the way a father might at a noisy, abrasive, but still likable son. Then he looked at me again, and the easygoing grin came back. “Hell,” he said, “you’re not much interested in the Bohannon statistics. I understand your pulp collection is mostly mystery and detective; you’ve probably never read a word of mine.”