I said to Ramsey and Praxas, “You’d better keep yourselves available. The police will want to talk to you and the others.”
“I wasn’t planning to go anywhere,” Praxas said.
“Neither was I,” Ramsey said. “Except maybe to the bar.”
Kerry had gone over to talk to Cybil. I gestured to her to wait for me, and when she nodded I made my way through the rows of empty chairs to where Meeker was sitting. He looked up when I stopped in front of him and blinked at me a couple of times. Up close his eyes had a faint hangover glaze, but he smelled of breath mints, not whiskey.
“Well,” he said, “the detective.”
“Hell of a thing about Colodny, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“You don’t think so?”
“I’d be a liar if I said I did. I hated his guts.”
“Why?”
“He was a man people hated,” Meeker said, and shrugged. “All the Pulpeteers hated him, you know. Did Dancer kill him?”
“What makes you think he was murdered?”
“Wasn’t he?”
“Maybe. What did you and Colodny argue about on Thursday night?”
The question got me what passed for a sly look. “Thursday night?”
“At the cocktail party. You had words.”
“Did we? I don’t remember.”
“Sure you do. He warned you to stay away from him.”
“Did he?”
“Was that because you’d threatened him?”
“Not me. Why would I threaten him?”
Yeah, I thought. Why?
I said, “The police’ll be around to talk to you pretty soon, Meeker. Maybe you’ll be a little more cooperative with them.”
“Maybe I will.” He grinned at me. “And maybe I won’t.”
I went back and collected Kerry-Cybil had disappeared-and we went out into the hallway. She said, “Why-did you want to talk to Meeker?”
“Because I think he’s got secrets.”, “What kind of secrets?”
“I don’t know yet. What did Cybil have to say about Colodny’s death?”
“Not very much. She seemed kind of wilted.”
Relieved was the proper word, but I didn’t correct her.
The area in front of the elevators was crowded with people waiting for cars to take them up or down; we opted for the stairs. In the lobby I went over to the front desk and found the prim manager, whose name I’d forgotten, deep in conversation with the security officer, Harris. I told them I would be in the Garden Bistro if Lieutenant Eberhardt wanted to see me, and Harris said, “Fine,” and the prim guy favored me with a prim nod. But he looked at me as if I was one of those he held responsible for scandalizing his hotel.
The lobby did not look scandalized so far. The police had evidently been ushered in through the service entrance and taken upstairs in one of the service elevators, and word of the homicide had not yet spread among the guests and general staff. A few of the convention people were hanging around in knots, looking nervous and furtive, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention to them. Kerry and I made our way across to the coffee shop and found a table in the rear. Neither of us said anything until we’d ordered coffee.
“Are you going to tell me the details?” she asked then. “Or do I have to read them in the papers?”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” I said, and did that. I still did not mention the fact that the murder weapon was her mother’s missing.38, but I might as well have; she seemed to intuit it and asked me flat out if it was. So I admitted it.
She said, “Then it was Dancer who stole the gun.”
“It he killed Colodny, it must have been.”
“Why do you say ‘if’? Didn’t you just tell me that all the doors and windows in his room were locked from the inside and you got there only a few seconds after the shot was fired? He must be the killer.”
“So it would seem. But I keep having doubts.”
“Why?”
“The way he looked, the things he said. He was drunk and it’s hard for a drunk to lie convincingly.”
“That’s pretty flimsy against all the evidence. How could Colodny have been killed in his room if Dancer’s not guilty?”
I shook my head.
“Who else could possibly have done it?”
“Just about anybody, I suppose.”
“You mean one of the other Pulpeteers.”
“Well, that’s how it would add up.”
Ridges formed on her forehead. “You’re not thinking of Cybil?”
“No,” I said, but it could have been Cybil, all right. She might have lied about the.38 being stolen. The sneak thief could have been after something else and she could have hidden the gun somewhere, with the intention of using it on Colodny. The question then was, why? What would her motive be? But this was a game you could play with Ivan Wade and the other Pulpeteers as well. Any of them could be guilty, and if you dug deep enough, you’d probably find more than one suitable motive. To make that reasonable, though, you had to eliminate Dancer as the primary suspect, which meant providing an answer to the one big question Kerry had just posed.
How could Colodny have been shot in that locked room if Dancer wasn’t the killer?
Our coffee came and Kerry toyed with hers for a time, mostly in a kind of brooding silence. Pretty soon she said, “I think I’ll go find Cybil and have another talk with her. My father, too.”
I nodded. “Are we having dinner tonight?”
“If I say no, you won’t take it as a rejection, will you?”
“Not unless you mean it that way.”
“I’m just not in the mood, after all this. Tomorrow or Monday, okay?”
“Okay.”
“But call me tonight if you want. I’ll be home.”
I said I would. And after she was gone, I sat there and drank coffee and did some meditating, none of which got me anywhere. At the end of fifteen minutes, I decided I had had enough of sitting around; I paid the check and went out and prowled around for a time, down by the huckster room-it was closed now-and back again.
When I returned to the reception area, Eberhardt was over at the desk, scowling at the prim-faced manager. As soon as I came up, the scowl switched in my direction and hung on me like a dark cloud. It made me think, irrelevantly, of one of the worst lines I had ever read in a pulp: “Mister, I’m gonna cloud up and rain all over you.”
“Where the hell have you been?” he growled.
“Wandering around the lobby. Why?”
“You left word you’d be in the goddamn coffee shop. You think I got nothing better to do than play hide and seek?”
“Lighten up, Eb, will you?”
“Yeah, lighten up. The hell with that. Listen, I’m finished here, and as far as I’m concerned, so are you. Come down to the Hall tomorrow or the next day and sign a statement.”
“Sure. What about Dancer?”
“What about him?”
“Is he going to be charged?”
“What the hell do you think? Of course he’s going to be charged. He’s guilty as sin, and you know it.”
“Has he confessed?”
“Do most of them confess? He did it and that’s that; don’t go making a big mystery out of this.
Just go home and try to keep your fat ass out of trouble.”
“I don’t go looking for it, Eb.”
He made a snorting sound and took his scowl away to the elevators.
There was no reason for me to hang around the hotel. Besides, its somber Victorian good taste was beginning to depress me. I got out of there, claimed my car from the garage down the block, and pointed it across town to Pacific Heights. Eberhardt’s odd behavior nagged at my thoughts part of the way. He was always irascible, but today there had been none of the affection that underlay his gruffness. Something was weighing heavy on him, and I was not going to be satisfied until I found out what it was.