Bill Pronzini: Hoodwink

She bent down to it, saying, “Damn you, Russ.” I started to help her, but she shook her head and did the scooping up herself.

“Sorry about that,” Dancer said. “Another slight accident.”

Cybil straightened up, ignoring him, and tucked the purse under her arm. “I’m going to the powder room,” she said to Kerry, nodded to me, and headed toward the entrance doors.

Kerry gave me a faint smile that might have meant anything or nothing at all; then she moved to the bar. I watched the way she walked-smooth and flowing, almost catlike-but only part of my mind noted and registered it. The other part was working on something else: one of the things that had fallen out of Cybil Wade’s purse, that I had glimpsed before she could shove it back inside.

What was a nice, sweet-faced lady like her doing at a party with a.38 snub-nosed revolver?

I was still puzzling about Cybil Wade’s gun when Dancer called my name. But not from close by; from across the room, where he had wandered and joined a group of three other men. He was making beckoning gestures, so I went over there before he could shout again or do something else to make a horse’s ass out of himself.

“Want you to meet the last three Pulpeteers,” he said when I got to him. Then he blinked a couple of times, with alcoholic surprise at what he took to be his own cleverness. “Hah! The Three Pulpeteers, by God. How about that?”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did any of the three men. They were all around sixty-five, but physically, at least, age was about all they had in common. The guy on Dancer’s left was tall, graymaned, and vaguely cadaverous-looking, dressed in a dark suit and a blue tie with yellow ovals on it that looked like eyes. The guy in the middle was a head shorter, pudgy, with a Friar Tuck fringe of reddish hair, wearing a loose green turtleneck sweater and a pair of Levi’s. And the guy on my right was of average height, handsome in an athletic sort of way, brown-haired and sporting a neat black mustache; he wore casual but expensive sports clothes.

Dancer performed the introductions in his mildly insulting way and managed not to spill the rest of his drink on anybody while he was doing it. If I had had to guess which was which beforehand, based on their pulp writing and on subsequent endeavors, I would have said the tall one was Ivan Wade, the pudgy one Bert Praxas, and the well-dressed one Waldo Ramsey. And I would have been wrong three out of three.

The somewhat cadaverous guy turned out to be Praxas-an even more prolific writer than Jim Bohannon in his day, although he had been retired for close to twenty years. In addition to his novels about The Spectre, written under the house pseudonym of Robert M. Barclay, he’d done several hundred mystery and detective stories and half as many airwar adventures for Sky Fighters and the other aviation magazines. But The Spectre novels were far and away what he was best known and most remembered for; the brochure Dancer had given me said he’d become something of a cult figure among collectors and aficionados and often appeared at conventions of this type.

The pudgy, red-haired guy, it developed, was Waldo Ramsey. He had been something of a minor pulp writer, in the same sense that Dancer had been minor-a competent storyteller whose work for Midnight Detective and others was sometimes dazzling but more often careless and indifferent. But where Dancer had slid steadily downhill into hackdom, Ramsey had found himself, nurtured his talent over the years, and climbed upward into respectability and success. He had been writing suspense novels since the mid-fifties, and in the past few years had hit it semibig with a pair of ambitious espionage books that he had sold and adapted to film. Which probably explained why he was dressed as sloppily as he was: it’s the people with money who can afford to dress at public functions as if they haven’t got money.

And the athletic, mustachioed man was Ivan Wade, Cybil’s husband and Kerry’s father. He had a quiet, reserved sort of face, with all the features grouped in close to the center, and gentle eyes. According to the convention brochure, he had started out writing for Weird Tales, Dime Mystery, and other fantasy/horror pulps, and gone on from there to radio scripting, the slick magazines, some TV work, and finally to novels and nonfiction books on occult and magic themes. The things he wrote about, and the things Cybil had written about, made we wonder what it had been like for Kerry growing up. It was an irrelevant thought, but I wondered just the same.

When the introductions were over and I had finished shaking hands with the three of them, Ramsey said good-naturedly, “A pulp-collecting private eye. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

“I guess it is a little unusual,” I said.

“You can say that again.”

Praxas asked me, “What do you think of our little mystery? I assume Russ has filled you in on the details by now.”

“Damn right I have,” Dancer said.

I said, “I don’t know what to think. Not yet.”

“If whoever it is is serious,” Ramsey said, “he’s also crazy. He’d have to be to think any or all of us are plagiarists.”

“Well, I suppose we’ll be contacted in any case,” Praxas said. He had a sepulchral voice, like John Carradine or Karloff without the lisp, that sharpened his cadaverous image; the more you looked at and listened to him, the more it seemed he ought to be the one who wrote horror fiction. He would have made a beautiful stereotype. “Should we tell you when that happens?”

“If you like,” I said. “I don’t know what Dancer told you, but there’s really not much I can do except keep my eyes and ears open and offer advice if the need arises.”

“Told them you were the best damn private eye in the business,” Dancer said. “Told them you’d get to the bottom of it whether you were getting paid or not.”

He was beginning to irk me. The drunker he got, the harder it was to keep on liking him. “Yeah, well, I’m not the best, and I’m not likely to get to the bottom of anything. The fact is, I’m here mostly as just another pulp fan.”

“Sure you are. Best damn private eye in the business.”

Ramsey said, “You’re a pain in the ass, Russ, you know that?”

“Damn right I am. Best damn ass pain in the business.”

Ramsey shook his head and watched Dancer knock back what was left in his glass. Then he asked me, “You been a detective long?”

“About thirty years, public and private.”

“How long collecting pulps?”

“Same.”

“You go to conventions regularly?”

“No. This is my first.”

“Mine too. Bert here thrives on them, you know.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Praxas said. “I go to conventions for the same reason I give talks at colleges and universities: I enjoy meeting fans and it helps keep my work alive. But I hardly thrive on them.”

Dancer said, “Good for the old ego, huh, Bertie?”

“Yes. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. How about the money?”

“Money?”

“Sure. The old honorarium.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“How many cons you go to in a year?”

“A half-dozen or so. Why?”

“All of them on the pulps?”

“No. Most are science fiction-or comic-oriented.”

“Pay better or worse than this one?”

“About the same.”

“What about the college lectures? They pay good?”

“I suppose so.”

“How much per? Five hundred?”

“In most cases, yes …”

“Plus expenses,“Dancer said. “A half-dozen cons, a half-dozen lectures, that’s six grand a year. Plus expenses. By God, Bertie, it’s not a bad scam. Beats hell out of beating a typewriter. Maybe I’ll try it myself.”