“Oh, sure. At least she used to when I was living at home. I don’t think she’s ever been as happy as she was in the forties.”
“Why is that?”
The waitress brought our coffee. Kerry stirred cream into hers before she said, “I guess she was happiest back then for several reasons. She was young. She’d just made it through a war and dozens of short separations-my dad was an army liaison officer and did a lot of shuttling back and forth between New York and Washington. And she was writing for the pulps, doing what she’d always wanted to do. She even wrote some pulp stories with Ivan, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Under a pseudonym. Gruesome stuff about ax murderers and people being buried alive. I loved it when I was a kid.”
“They let you read horror fiction as a kid?”
“They didn’t know about it. I used to get into their magazine file copies.”
“Did Cybil like being one of the Pulpeteers?”
“Sure. Apparently they were a pretty wild group.”
“Wild in what way?”
“The forties kind of way,” Kerry said. “All-night parties, crazy practical jokes, a fistfight or two once in a while.”
“Fistfight? You mean among themselves?”
“Cybil never went into detail. Neither did my dad.”
“She never mentioned who was involved?”
“If she did, I don’t remember. Maybe Frank Colodny, though.”
“Why Colodny?”
“Some of the writers accused him of cheating on what he paid for their stories. He’d promise them one amount, pay them another when they delivered, and claim economic pressures as the reason for the cutback. But the writers suspected he was putting through vouchers for the full amount and then pocketing the difference himself.”
I remembered Dancer alluding to the same thing at the party. “Why was Colodny allowed in the Pulpeteers,” I asked, “if he was suspected of crooked dealings?”
“Well, the cheating only started at the end of the decade, when Action House was losing money like all the other pulp publishers, because of television and paperbacks. Colodny owned a piece of the company, and Cybil says that he liked money. When he couldn’t find anybody else to screw he started doing it to his friends.”
“Nice guy.”
“But they could never prove it, and it took them a while to even accept that it was going on. One by one they stopped writing for him, and finally they threw him out of the group.”
“When was that?”
“In ‘49, I think. The year before Action House went bankrupt and Colodny disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Well, one day he was in New York, and the next day Action House’s offices were closed and he was gone. Nobody knew where.”
“There wasn’t anything shady involved, was there?”
“You mean like embezzlement? No. The company didn’t have any money left to embezzle. He just vanished, that’s all.”
And turned up in Arizona, I thought, with enough money to buy an entire town. A ghost town, sure, but even ghost towns and the land they’re on didn’t come cheap in 1950. Where did he get the money, if Action House was bankrupt?
“What did your folks think about Colodny buying a ghost town?” I asked her.
“They didn’t know about it until today. But I don’t think they were all that surprised.”
“Why not? It’s not something a person would normally do.”
“Not most people, but Colodny was always a flake. Back in New York, Cybil says, his big fantasy was to move out West and prospect for gold. No kidding.”
“Some fantasy,” I said.
“He’d always been a fan of Western pulp stories; that’s probably where he got the idea. He came from a small town in New Mexico and never really liked New York. He went there because an uncle of his got him the job with Action House. But he was always talking about moving back someday. He had asthma too, that was another reason he wanted to move West-the dry air.”
“Then what kept him in New York so long?”
“Money, I guess. He wanted that more than any thing else.”
“Uh-huh. So where’d he get enough to buy the ghost town?”
“Nobody knows. None of the others had seen him or heard anything about him since his disappearance thirty years ago.”
“How did your folks react to the prospect of spending a weekend with him after all that time?”
“They weren’t exactly overjoyed. But then, thirty years is a long time to hold a grudge.”
“Yeah,” I said, “a long time.”
There was a silence, during which Kerry gave me another of her long, probing looks. “Are you thinking it might be one of the Pulpeteers who broke into their room tonight?”
“It’s possible.”
“Frank Colodny?”
“Also possible.”
“Buy why? For what reason?”
I shook my head. “Unless it had something to do with ‘Hoodwink’ and the extortion letters.”
“You mean one of the Pulpeteers behind that too? Why?”“I can’t even guess,“I said. “But there are all sorts of things going on here, and I don’t just mean attempted extortion and breaking-and-entering. Tensions that go back much longer than that.”
She frowned down at her cup. “I suppose I got the same feeling tonight. Only I just don’t see how my folks could be involved.”
I hesitated. Then I said slowly, “Kerry, look, there’s something else you’d better know. When Dancer knocked Cybil’s purse off the table at the party I got a look at what fell out of it. One of the things was a gun.”
“A what?”
“A gun. A.38 caliber snub-nosed revolver.”
Strong rushes of emotion seemed to make her eyes change color; they got dark again, almost smoky green, and in them you could see her struggling with what I’d just told her. “A gun,” she said. “My God.”
“It isn’t something she’s prone to doing, then.”
“Of course not. You think she goes around packing a gun?”
“Some people do.”
“She’s not one of those paranoids.”
“Easy. I wasn’t suggesting she was. Do you have any idea why she’d come to the convention armed?”
“No. God, I didn’t even know she owned a gun.” For half a dozen seconds Kerry stared at a spot just beyond my right shoulder; then she shook herself, and her eyes lightened again, glistening. “I don’t like this,” she said. “I don’t like any of this one damn bit.”
“It might be a good idea if you had a talk with her in the morning,” I said. “Maybe she’ll confide in you.”
“You bet I’ll have a talk with her in the morning. I’d go back up there right now if it wasn’t so late.”
And that just about finished the conversation. She was too busy worrying questions around inside her head for any more banter or discussion. I called for the check, and we went out through the lobby and into a warm soft breeze off the Bay.
“Your car close by?” I asked her.
“In the garage just down the street.”
“Mine’s the other way. But I’ll walk over with you.”
“No need. Thanks for the coffee.”
“Sure. About that raincheck for supper-you could use it tomorrow night if you’re not doing anything else.”
“Let’s see what Cybil has to say.” The collar of my standard rumpled private eye trenchcoat seemed to be tucked under, all cockeyed in my standard sloppy fashion, and she reached up and straightened it. She had to stand close to me to do that, and I could smell the faintly spicy scent of her breath. “And what kind of day tomorrow turns out to be.”
“Fair enough.”
She let me have one of her smiles, patted the trenchcoat collar, and went off toward the lighted front of the parking garage. I watched her for a time, with that spicy scent lingering in my mind, and a kind of afterimage, too, of her coppery hair and the way her mouth looked when she smiled. Then I lifted my head and looked up at the glossy moon hanging overhead-one of those spring moons that bathes everything in silvery light and stirs the blood and makes coyotes stand up all hot and bothered and start baying.