“Hi,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Well, hello. I’ve been wondering if you’d call.”
“I’ve had kind of a busy morning.”
“You must have. I rang up your apartment at nine-thirty and you were already gone. I thought maybe you were miffed at me.”
I
“Why should I be miffed at you?”
“Because I “wasn’t home last night. Or didn’t you try to call?”
“I tried to call.”
“My folks insisted I go out to dinner with them,” she said, “and it got to be pretty late. I didn’t get home until after eleven.”
“You don’t have to answer to me for your time.”
“Hey, you sound grumpy. What’s the matter?”
“Not too much,” I said. “I just had a nice little session with your father, that’s all. He called me a fat, scruffy private detective and said I didn’t have any right to be sucking around a woman young enough to be my daughter.”
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s impossible sometimes. He think’s I’m still a child who has to be protected from myself.”
“I suppose he gave you the same routine last night.”
“Not in the same words, but yes.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him I was a big girl now and he’d realize what a nice guy you were when he got to know you.”
“What’d he say to that?”
“I don’t think you want to hear it.”
“Terrific,” I said. “This has been some damn day. First I let myself get talked into going to work for Dancer-”
“Dancer?”
“Yeah. I went down to see him at the Hall of Justice this morning, and I’m still inclined to believe his story; so I’ll try to do what I can for him. Then I find out my best friend’s wife just left him after twenty-eight years. Then I come down here to the hotel and get into a verbal battle with your old man.”
“Have you seen the newspapers yet?”
“No, I don’t bother to read them most of the time. Why?”
“You won’t like what they have to say about you either.”
“What do they have to say?”
” ‘Murder-prone private detective gets involved in another slaying. Pulp collector attends pulp convention where ex-pulp editor fatally shot by ex-pulp writer.’ That’s about the gist of it.”
“Bastards. They’re having a field day at my expense.”
“I told you you wouldn’t like it.”
“Miserable damn day.”
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m fresh out of ideas.”
“Why don’t you come over here?”
“I’m not sure I’d be very good company.”
“I’ll take the chance. Maybe we can think of something cheerful to do together.”
So I went over there and we thought of something cheerful to do together. Twice.
* * *
I was feeling better when I got home around eight o’clock. Kerry had had to keep her dinner date with her folks, but that was okay; there was the promise of other nights to be shared. Whether her father liked it or not, we seemed to have a thing going. And nuts to him. She liked it and I liked it and we were the only two who mattered.
But after I had been home an hour or so, while I was swilling down a can of Schlitz and some leftover pizza, I started to brood again. Why should I be so down on Ivan Wade? From what Kerry had told me, he was a decent enough guy who cared about her welfare and her happiness. So maybe he had a legitimate gripe. Maybe I was a fat, scruffy private detective and maybe I was too old for her. And maybe I had gone to her apartment and her bed this afternoon as much to spite him as to be with her-prove I could lay his daughter if I damned well pleased and the hell with him. I did not want to think about what sort of person that would make me, down in the depths of the subconscious.
Then I started to think about Eberhardt and Dana, and what a lousy thing the breakup of their marriage was, and pretty soon I had managed to brood myself right back into a funk. I had another beer and went to bed, which is one good place to take a funk. But then I made the mistake of reading the news story on Colodny’s murder-I had bought a Sunday paper on the way home, against my better judgment-and it enraged and depressed me all over again. They’d had a field day, all right. The facts were at a minimum: Colodny had died from a gunshot wound, Dancer had been arrested and charged with homicide. The rest of the story focused on the convention, on the Pulpeteers, and on me, and was written more or less tongue-in-cheek. Somebody dies by violence and the journalists treat it as a kind of black-humored joke.
So I brooded about that for a while. And some more about Kerry, Ivan Wade, Eberhardt and Dana, Dancer caged up down at the Hall of Justice, sweating out a murder rap. Then I got up and had one more beer. But all it did was give me a headache and put a bad taste in my mouth. I took three aspirin and brushed my teeth, and when I crawled back into bed it was almost midnight.
Tomorrow couldn’t get here soon enough to suit me…
FOURTEEN
The empty packing boxes were waiting for me when I got down to my office a little past nine on Monday morning.
I looked at them without much relish. Last day in the old digs, like it or not. The end of an era; a kind of milestone in the long and illustrious career of Lone Wolf, the last of the red-hot private snoops. From now on it would be business in sedate surroundings. No more dingy office in a dingy building in a dingy neighborhood. No more forties-style atmosphere, — no more Spade and no more Marlowe. Retire the trenchcoat, throw out the slouch hat, get rid of the shiny-bottom suits with the frayed cuffs. The times, son, they are a-changing. Image is everything these days. Nobody pays much attention to anachronisms in the 1980s, especially red-hot private snoop-type anachronisms, except for a bunch of smartass newspaper reporters who ought to know better. And that’s another thing: cut it out with calling yourself private snoop and keyhole peeper and lone-wolf private eye. What you are, you know, is the head of an investigative services firm.
Nuts, I thought.
So the old lone wolf took off his trenchcoat, hung it up along with his slouch hat. Then he shot the frayed cuffs on his shiny-bottom suit and ankled across to his desk, where he winked a cynical private eye at the Black Mask poster on one dingy wall. After which he settled down to the business of a new day.
There weren’t any messages on my answering machine. I disconnected the thing and took it over and plunked it down inside one of the packing cases; that was a start, anyway. While I brewed coffee I wondered if Ben Chadwick had dug up anything yet on Rose Tyler Crawford and the Evil by Gaslight film. But if he had, I decided, he’d have called by now. There was just nothing to do on that angle except to wait it out.
I shuffled some papers around while the coffee water heated. Opened up my portfolio case and shuffled through the “Hoodwink” manuscript again while I drank my first cup. I had brought the manuscript with me from home because that elusive oddity about it kept scratching at my mind, and I thought if I went over it enough times, I could eventually get a handle on it. Not this time, though. All I got was a coffee stain on one of the pages.
It was nine-fifty before I finally convinced myself to quit procrastinating and get the damn pack ing over and done with. I had to be out of here by five o’clock, which meant I had to have everything boxed up and a moving company called in by midafternoon. And the longer I hung around here being nostalgic or maudlin or anachronistic, the less time I would have today to do something constructive in Dancer’s behalf.
I started with the file cabinet and got both drawers empty of files-what was left of them after the office rape-and packed away in short order. After which I took down the poster and the framed photostat of my license and wrapped them in a blanket so the glass would at least stand a chance of survival. Then I went into the alcove, dragging one of the cases after me, and began unloading the miscellaneous crap from the shelves in there.