“I don’t know. I got the feeling she might be lying, but I couldn’t be sure. Cybil can be inscrutable when she wants to be.”
“No reaction when you first mentioned the gun?”
“Hardly any. She’s not easily startled, either.”
“Did you tell her I’d seen it at the party?”
“Yes. But she was sure you had at the time, she said, and she realized then it was a mistake to bring it with her. She was afraid you might say something to somebody and there’d be a fuss. That’s why she left just afterward-to take the gun back to her room and put it away in her suitcase.”
“Her suitcase?”
“That’s right,” Kerry said. “Whoever broke in last night did steal something after all, even though Cybil didn’t want to admit it. He stole that damned gun.”
EIGHT
Ivan Wade’s panel started promptly at one o’clock in a small auditorium on the mezzanine. Two other guys flanked Wade at the long dais table-collectors who were authorities on both Weird Tales and the Shudder Pulps-and well over 150 people were in the audience. Jim Bohannon, Bert Praxas, and Waldo Ramsey were grouped together with Lloyd Underwood near the back; Frank Colodny sat by himself off to one side, worrying the stem of a corncob pipe and looking just as preoccupied as he had last night; and Cybil Wade was in the front row left, across the center aisle from where Kerry and I had taken seats, wearing an air about as preoccupied as Colodny’s.
I had done some more talking with Kerry, over a sandwich in the coffee shop, but to no conclusions. If her mother had another reason for bringing the.38 revolver to the convention, other than using it for demonstration purposes, Kerry had no ideas or guesses as to what that reason might be. And if Cybil was telling the truth about the gun being stolen last night, neither of us had answers to the string of questions that went along with the burglary. Was anything else taken that Cybil refused to mention? Had the intruder been after the gun specifically? If the gun had been the objective, how did he know she had it? And what did he want it for?
Then there was the central question: Was he an outsider or someone connected with the convention?
I’d tried to tell Kerry not to worry, but it had come out sounding hollow. I had a nagging feeling that things were bubbling away under the surface, gathering pressure and maybe getting volatile enough to explode. You can’t explain intimations like that, but I’d had them often enough over the years to pay attention when one came along.
Once the panel started, however, I quit mulling over the missing gun and tranquilized myself on pulp lore. Wade was a pretty good public speaker and revealed a dry, clever sense of humor that got him rapt attention as well as laughter and applause. He also revealed another talent I hadn’t known he possessed: the performance of sleight-of-hand magic. The first illusion he did was to produce a copy of Terror Tales out of the air while he was talking, as if to illustrate a point he was trying to make, and it was so casual and so deft that there was a moment of silence and then what amounted to an ovation.
I leaned over to ask Kerry, “How long has your father been an amateur magician?”
“Oh, as long as I can remember. Stage magic is a passion of his; he’s written a half-dozen books on the subject. Good, isn’t he?”
“Very.”
The pulp lore itself-historical facts, anecdotes about writers and editors, bits of inside information-was fascinating. I learned a good deal about Weird Tales, and about such sex-and-sadism Shudder Pulps of the thirties as Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, and Thrilling Mystery, whose lurid covers depicted half-naked young women being whipped, clubbed, dipped in vats of acid and molten metal, and otherwise tortured on and with all sorts of devices by a variety of leering fiends.
The panel lasted an hour and a half. Everyone except Frank Colodny seemed to find it as engrossing as I did; he had gotten up about two-thirds of the way through, looking fidgety and with his wattles quivering, and disappeared. Wade ended the session by performing another magic trick-the apparent transformation of another pulp magazine into one of his own books. It was a neat finish and flawlessly done, and it earned him another ovation.
Out in the hall afterward Kerry said, “I’ve got to call my office. They gave me the day off but they expect me to check in.”
“See you back here for Jim Bohannon’s panel?”
“When is it, three-fifteen? I should be back by then.” She gave me a critical frown. “Why don’t you do something about your tie?”
I looked down. “What’s the matter with it?”
“Nothing a dry cleaner can’t fix. It looks like something blue died on the front of your shirt.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said, and grinned at me and went away.
I found a restroom and examined my tie in the mirror. It was a little wrinkled and a little stained, but you couldn’t see the stains very clearly against the dark blue background. Or maybe you could, at that. I took the thing off and opened my shirt collar and stuffed the tie out of sight in my coat pocket.
Damn, but she had a knack for making me feel self-conscious.
I took the stairs down to the lobby, went from there out into the balmy afternoon to where I had parked my car. The pulps I had bought in the huckster room went into the trunk; so did the tie. On my way back, with the sun beating down on me, I decided I was thirsty and that a cold beer would taste good. There were still twenty minutes left before Bohannon’s panel.
You got into the Continental Bar by way of a longish corridor, both sides of which were lined with glass-enclosed relics of the Victorian period; it opened off one corner of the lobby. I was just entering the corridor when the commotion started: the banging sound of a chair being over turned, several voices raised and chattering at once. The loudest of the voices, thick with a boozy rage, belonged to Russ Dancer.
Christ, now what? I thought, and half ran the rest of the way into the bar. It was dark in there- dark wood paneling and furnishings, high shadowy ceiling, lighting so sedate it was almost nonexistent-and it took a second for my eyes to adjust. Then I saw Dancer. He had Frank Colodny back up against one of the walls, fist bunched hard in Colodny’s shirtfront, standing nose to nose with him and yelling something incoherent. Waldo Ramsey was there, too, dragging at Dancer’s arm without accomplishing much and telling him to lay off. The rest of the half-dozen people in the room, including the bartender, weren’t doing anything except gawking.
I hustled over and caught hold of Dancer’s other arm, and together Ramsey and I managed to make him turn loose. Colodny put a hand up and rubbed his throat and made a gurgling sound; his whole body seemed to be quivering, but with a rage equal to Dancer’s, not with fear.
“Let me go, goddammit!” Dancer yelled. “I’ll fix this son of a bitch, I’ll fix him!”
I said, “You’re not going to fix anybody,” and he swiveled his head and seemed to see me for the first time. Some of the combativeness faded out of his expression; he ran his tongue loosely over his lips, muttered something under his breath, and glowered at Colodny.
“What’s this all about?” I asked Ramsey. “Hell, I don’t know. He came charging in here a minute ago, hoisted Frank up out of his chair, and started accusing him of being a crook and a swindler.”
“That’s what he is,” Dancer said, “damn right.”
Colodny was making a visible effort to keep himself under control. He glared back at Dancer and said, “You’re a crazy drunk, you know that?
You ought to be in an institution.”
“So should you, bastard. San fucking Quentin.” “Cut it out, Russ,” I told him. “If you want to stay out of trouble, watch your temper and your mouth. This is a public place.”