Bill Pronzini: Hoodwink

He got to Colodnyville before I did, but not by much. And that was another juxtaposition of events that almost ended in tragedy.”

“Almost, yeah,” Dancer said. “Christ, if he’d killed you down there, where would I be?”

“How about me?” I said. “Where would I be?”

Eberhardt made a couple of notes on a form sheet he drew over in front of him. Then he shooed the police stenographer out and said to me, “You pull some of the goddamnedest rabbits out of your hat. But okay, you got me convinced. I’ll have the charges against Dancer dropped, and we’ll see what we can do about building a case against Underwood.”

He reached for the phone, punched out an interoffice number, and spoke to someone up in Detention. Dancer came out of his chair and headed straight for me. He got hold of my hand and levered it up and down as if it were a pump handle, breathing the odor of cigarettes and toothpaste into my face. “I’ll never forget you for this,” he said. “I mean that, never. You saved my life. I’ll pay you back, just like I promised. And if I can ever do anything for you, anything at all-”

“How about letting go of my hand?”

“Oh … sure. Sorry. Listen, how soon do you think they’ll let me out of here?”

“I don’t know. Not long, I guess.”

“I hope not. We’ve got some celebrating to do.”

“What do you mean, celebrating?”

“What do you think I mean? Man, I’m going to tie one on tonight like you wouldn’t believe!”

I sighed. He was never going to learn; never. And I was never going to get paid for my time on this rescue mission either, or reimbursed for expenses like gasoline, parking, air fare, car rental, and motel accommodations. Dancer may have been well-intentioned, but he was the kind who would always be living on the edge of poverty. Nobody was paying for my services except me.

No tengo dinero - goddammit to hell…

Kerry and I were sitting on the balcony of her apartment on Twin Peaks, sipping beer and looking out at a pretty spectacular view. The sun had just gone down-there had not been any fog today to blot it out-and the sky was still streaked in gold and red and dusky purple. There was a little wind, but it had not got cool enough yet to drive us inside. A nice night. A very nice night.

We hadn’t said anything for a time, companion-ably. A three-quarter moon was starting to take on definition as night closed down; I had my eye on that, thinking moon thoughts, when she said, “You really believed it was my father? The killer, I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I really did.”

“I ought to swat you one. Don’t you know by now that the Wades are pure of heart and mind?”

“Sure,” I said, and thought about Cybil’s affair with Frank Colodny. “But a lot of circumstantial evidence pointed to him. You’re not offended, are you?”

“Well, I ought to be.”

I looked at tier, but she wasn’t serious. She looked terrific: coppery hair combed out fluffy, no lipstick-I don’t like lipstick much-the last of the daylight highlighting her face, giving it a kind of delicate softness, making the chameleon eyes look black. She was wearing flare slacks, a peach-colored blouse, and a woolly vest that curved around her breasts. I liked that vest a lot; it made her look even more sensual than she was.

“I still can’t get over it,” she said.

“Over what?”

“Lloyd Underwood. Of all people!”

“Greed does funny things to.people’s heads,” I said.

“I know. But I kept thinking it had to be one of the Pulpeteers. Not my father or Cybil, but one of the others.”

“Me, too. That’s the way it looked all along.”

“I guess you were surprised when you saw Underwood in that ghost town.”

“Not as much as I might have been in less tense circumstances.”

Her face clouded abruptly and she was silent for a time.

I said, “What’s the matter?”

“I was just thinking about him shooting at you-about you being locked up in that old building. God, he might have killed you.”

“But he didn’t.”

“But he might have.”

“Would it have bothered you much if he had?”

She gave me a look. “Don’t ask dumb questions.” * “Okay.”

“You’ve almost been killed before, haven’t you.”

“A couple of times. No more than most public cops.”

“I don’t like that part of your job at all.”

“Neither do I. But pulp private eyes get shot at all the time, and bashed on the head all the time too. I’ve only been shot at a couple of times and never bashed on the head.” I paused. “And I’ve only been seduced once.”

“Oh?”

“By you.”

“Phooey,” she said. “I’m going in to use the loo. Do you want another beer?”

“You bet.”

She got up, wrinkled her nose at me, and went inside. I sat there and looked at the dark waters of the Bay, the lights of the city, the lopsided moon. And my mind was full of all sorts of things.

Eberhardt, for one. He was looking a little better, starting to cope with the breakup of his marriage, but I would have preferred it if he were less of an introvert. Like me, he tended to brood too much about things, and brooding never did you any good in the long run. Would Dana come back? It did not seem that way; it seemed she was gone for good. He’d live with it if she was. But he wouldn’t be the same. I knew him well enough to understand that and to feel the sense of loss: he would not be the same man.

I had the Wades on my mind too. Cybil because of the way she had opened up to me, what she had told me about her past; Ivan because in his eyes I was nothing but a fat, scruffy private detective. I’d wanted to talk to both of them again-to tell Cybil I had found and destroyed the photograph without looking at it, and to see if I couldn’t make peace with Ivan-but they had left for Los Angeles last night. Cybil had wanted to stay a while longer, Kerry said, but Ivan had book commitments. So off they went.

And of course I had Kerry on my mind. All over my mind, in fact. All of the thoughts were pleasant, but some of them-the same ones that had been there when I first started running around Arizona-were also unsettling. Very unsettling because they kept intruding and would not be pushed away.

I told myself that you had to take time, lots of time, to weigh the pros and cons. On the one hand there was Eberhardt and Dana, Cybil and Colodny, infidelity and divorce, — you could not overlook things like that, especially now, when they hit so close to home. But on the other hand there were other things like moonlight, perfume, woolly vests, warm hands, soft lips, a spicy sense of humor, compatibility, gentleness-togetherness. Two by two, wasn’t that the way it was supposed to be on this earth? No man is an island, no man should live his life alone.

I’m fifty-three years old, I thought, I’ve been alone most of my life. What the hell do I want to think about togetherness for?

But the answer to that was obvious, even to a slow type like me. It was that which made the world go round, the many-splendored thing, the thing that created babies and dreams and happiness-and lots of heartaches too. Fifty-three years old and in love again, in love for real. Well, if that wasn’t the damnedest thing. If that wasn’t the silliest damn thing for an old lone wolf.

Right, Mr. Marlowe?

You bet, Mr. Spade.

When Kerry came back, I had a funny feeling I was going to ask her to marry me….