“He’s the one who’s gonna have trouble, not me.”
“Why? What are you so stirred up about?” “He’s behind the extortion scam, that’s what.” Ramsey blinked at him. Colodny said, “You’re a liar.”
“The hell I am. You slipped the note in my pocket, all right. Upstairs, when you ran into me in the hall a few minutes ago.” I said, “What note?” “Let go my arm and I’ll show you.” I eased my grip a little first, to see if he had any more rough ideas, then released him when I decided he didn’t. He dug out a folded square of paper from his jacket pocket, handed it over without taking his eyes off Colodny. There were three sentences typed on the paper, in a different type face from either the previous letter or the “Hoodwink” manuscript; no salutation or signature.
“What does it say?” Ramsey asked me.
” There’s no mistake now. I know you’re the one. My price has gone up-ten thousand dollars, to be paid by midnight Sunday. Otherwise your plagiarism will be made public on Monday morning.’”
“I didn’t write that,“Colodny said. “It’s non sense.”
I looked at Dancer. “Are you sure he put this in your pocket?”
“Sure I’m sure. It wasn’t there a little while ago, and I haven’t been close to anybody except him. Damn straight he’s the one.”
“Delirium tiemens,” Colodny said. “The man’s hallucinating.”
“Do you know anything about this extortion ploy, Mr. Colodny?” I asked him.
“No.” The anger seemed to have drained out of him; he looked fidgety again. “I don’t have to answer questions or take any more abuse, not from any of you.” And he pushed away from the wall, did a wary sidestep around Dancer, and headed over to the bar. He had it all to himself when he got there; the other patrons had disappeared.
Dancer said to me, “You just going to let him go?”
“What else can I do? There’s no evidence against him. It’s your word against his.”
His mood shifted and turned sullen; you could see it happen in his face, even in the semidarkness of the bar. “He won’t get away with it, I’ll tell you that. Not this time.”
I started to tell him to take it easy, not to go off half-cocked, but he was already moving away. It looked for a second as if he would try bracing Colodny again. Then he veered off, walking in hard, bullish strides, and vanished down the corridor.
Ramsey said, “Christ, but he’s a lush,” and shook his head.
“You don’t think he’s right about Colodny?”
“I doubt it. I don’t see Frank pulling a stunt like ‘Hoodwink.’ It’s got warped overtones-the work of somebody who’s at least half a whack. Colodny may be a lot of things, but a whack isn’t one of them.”
“It’s been a long time since you knew him, hasn’t it?”
“Yes. But he hasn’t changed much; I’d bet on that. This sort of gambit just isn’t his style.”
“Then where do you suppose Dancer got the note?”
“Beats me,” Ramsey said. “Lushes aren’t particularly attentive, and you can’t trust their memories or their time perception. Seems to me anybody could have slipped him the note at any time.”
“You’re probably right.”
There was an antique chiming clock above the lounge’s Queen Anne fireplace, and it started to bong just then. Three times: three o’clock. I decided I didn’t want a beer after all and left Ramsey and started out. Colodny watched me in the back-bar mirror, holding a glass in one hand and stroking the six strands of hair on his scalp with the other. Maybe it was a trick of the faint lighting, but he looked frightened sitting there, almost cowering, like somebody trying to hide in a roomful of shadows.
When I got out into the lobby I spotted Dancer again, standing together with Cybil Wade near the reception desk. He had his head bent forward, saying something to her in an intense sort of way; I could not see his face from where I was, but hers was visible in three-quarters profile. And it was blank, void of expression-one of those plastic, dimpled doll’s faces.
I started toward them. The shape Dancer was in, he was capable of saying or doing anything, and I was afraid of another scene. But I had only taken a couple of steps when he raised his head and clumped past her to the elevators. I caught a glimpse of his face then: he was laughing. There was not much mirth in it, though. Part of it was sexual leering and part of it seemed to be a kind of painful release. The way a man laughs when something is tearing him up inside.
Cybil stayed where she was, looking after him. She didn’t notice me until I came up beside her and said, “Anything wrong, Mrs. Wade?” Then the tawny eyes blinked and looked at me, and animation came back into her face.
“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”
“Everything all right?”
“Yes, fine. Will you excuse me?”
“Sure, of course.”
She hurried across the lobby, vanished into one of the elevator cars. And it was my turn to stand looking at nothing, thinking about her and Dancer and Colodny and the second extortion note-and all the things that had happened in the past twenty-four hours.
And this is-only Friday afternoon, I thought gloomily. The convention still has two full days to run.
Where does it all go from here?
Kerry and I went out for dinner at seven o’clock.
Nothing much happened in the four hours before then. When I met her at the auditorium for Jim Bohannon’s panel I didn’t show her the new note or tell her what had happened in the Continental Bar. She was worried enough as it was, without me adding fuel. Besides, she had a nice smile for me and I did not want to make it go away.
Frank Colodny was a no-show; so were Dancer and Ozzie Meeker. But Cybil was there, sitting with her husband and looking less remote and more composed than she had downstairs. Most of the 150 or so people in the audience seemed to have a grand old time once the panel got rolling. I should have and didn’t, really, but that was no fault of Bohannon or the two collectors of adventure and Western pulps who shared the dais with him. Bohannon was a quiet, amusing speaker, without Ivan Wade’s theatrical flair, but with just as much expertise. And the pulp lore, as always for me, was stimulating: historical perspectives on Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, Wild West Weekly, Western Story; anecdotes about Leo Margulies, Rogers Terrill, and other pulp editors. But I just could not seem to keep myself mentally involved. My mind kept wandering, shuffling through the events of last night and today as if they were a deck of cards-strange mismatched cards that didn’t seem to add up to much yet.
After the panel was over, Kerry and I spent a little time browsing through the huckster room again. I bought two more issues of Dime Detective and an autographed copy of one of her father’s books on stage magic. Then Lloyd Underwood appeared and reminded us that there was another cocktail party in Suite M, beginning at six.
The party started out all right. I got myself a beer, and Kerry had a vodka gimlet, and we mingled. After a while Dancer showed up with Ozzie Meeker, looking twice as squiffed as he had in the bar earlier, and I quit mingling to keep an eye on him. But he was in pretty good spirits and seemed to have forgotten the incident with Colodny, who was the only one of the Pulpeteers not present.
He was as obstreperous as ever, but he left Cybil alone, and he didn’t make trouble for anybody else.
More and more people began to file in, until finally the room was jammed to overflowing. That was when I decided I didn’t need to be a watchdog any more today and reminded Kerry of her dinner raincheck. She said, “Okay, good idea; I’m starved,” and we found her folks so she could tell them we were leaving. Ivan Wade gave me a speculative look, as if he were wondering what sort of intentions I had toward his daughter. But he had nothing to say to me.
We opted for an English-style pub called The Coachman because it wasn’t far away-over on the far side of Nob Hill-and because Kerry said it was one of her favorite restaurants. A two-block walk past Union Square and then the Powell-Mason cable car got us there in twenty minutes. And another twenty minutes after that we had a table, pints of Bass ale, and orders in for steak-and-kidney pie.