“But then the pulp markets began to collapse in the late forties. Action House started to lose money on Midnight Detective and their other titles and had to fold all but Midnight by the end of 1949. That was when Frank got desperate and turned into a thief-and worse. When Midnight folded in 1950, that was the end of Action House;
Frank was broke and out of a job. So he came to me and asked me for five hundred dollars.
“I had the money. My own writing had slacked off, but Ivan was doing well with his pulp work and with books and radio scripting. But the money was in savings for Kerry’s education, and I turned Frank down. We’d become much less friendly anyway by then, because of the way he’d been cheating writers. Only he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He said he had proof we’d been intimate during the war-that damned photograph. He said that unless I gave him the five hundred dollars he’d tell Ivan about us, show him the photo, make it all seem more intense and sordid than it had really been. I had no choice. Ivan is insanely jealous and there’s no telling what he might have done. I gave Frank the money.
“That wasn’t the end of it, of course. He came back three months later and demanded another five hundred. There was that much and more still in the savings, but if I took it out I knew Ivan would become suspicious; he’d asked me about the first five hundred and I’d had to invent a story about one of my relatives being ill and needing a loan. So I went out alone to my mother’s for a three-day weekend, on a pretext, and wrote fifty thousand words of detective pulp and managed to sell all of it to the surviving magazines under pseudonyms. I kept on writing on the sly like that because I knew Frank would be back for more. I did it for four months, half frantic all the time-
well over three hundred thousand words-and I think that, more than anything else, was what burned me out as a writer.
“Frank did come around again, twice more. And then, all of a sudden, he disappeared: one day he was there, hanging around publishing, looking for work that nobody would give him, and the next he was gone. I couldn’t believe it at first. I kept waiting for him to get in touch with me, to make more blackmail demands. But he didn’t, not for almost thirty years.”
She stopped talking and sat statuelike for a time, still peering down that long, dark tunnel. Then she came out of it, blinked several times, and finally focused on me. She ran her tongue over dry-looking lips, fumbled at the blouse button again.
“You see?” she said wryly. “Not a pretty story.” I hauled up my beer and had a long pull from it. When I put the bottle down I said, “Do you have any idea why Colodny disappeared as he did?”
“No. And I didn’t care enough to try finding out. All that mattered was that he was out of my life.”
“Did any of the other Pulpeteers know?” “None of them indicated it if they did.” “What about this ghost town Colodny is supposed to have bought in Arizona? Was any mention made of that in New York?”
“Well, he was always talking about moving back to the West-he came from New Mexico-and prospecting for gold. But none of us took him seriously; we all treated it as a joke.”
“Did he say anything along those lines before he disappeared?”
“Not that I remember. Russ told me the other day Frank bought the town right after he left New York-that was what Frank had told him-but if he did, I can’t imagine where he got the money.”
I could, but I did not want to go into it with her. I didn’t much want to ask the next question, either, but I had to know the answer. “You said something about a photograph, Mrs. Wade. What sort of photograph?”
Her eyes flicked away from me again. Two small spots of color, like the marks a pair of pressed-in dimes would leave, appeared on her cheeks. “Frank took it that first night we were together, after we … afterward. I refused to let him at first, but I’d had a lot to drink, and he promised he’d never show it to anybody, and the idea of it was … exciting, wicked.” Her gaze came back to my face. “Do I have to tell you what pose I was in when he snapped it?”
“No,” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Thank you. I think you can understand why I couldn’t let Ivan see it. I’d have done anything to prevent that.”
“Including murder?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “If it had come to that; if I’d had no other alternative. But I didn’t kill him. I’m glad he’s dead-I felt a tre mendous relief when I heard about it. But I did not kill him.”
It seemed stuffy in there; I got up and went over to the thermostat and turned it down. Cybil was looking at her beer glass with distaste when I sat down again, as if remembering the analogy she had drawn earlier and equating beer with her ill-advised affair.
I said, “The first time you saw Colodny since 1950 was at the convention?”
“No. Not quite.”
“Oh?”
“He called me in Los Angeles one night about three weeks ago, out of nowhere. God, I nearly had a heart attack. He said he’d been approached about attending the convention, and when he learned that Ivan and I were on the program he’d accepted. He said Lloyd Underwood had given him our address and telephone number, and he was in Los Angeles and thought it would be nice if he and I got together for a little preconvention reunion. I tried to put him off but he insisted; there was nothing I could do except agree to meet him. I thought he might try to.blackmail me again, and I was right. But it wasn’t money he wanted this time. It was me.”
“He made a pass at you?”
“Yes. A vulgar pass. If I didn’t go to bed with him, he said, he’d have a talk with Ivan and he’d show him the photograph; he’d kept it all these years, and he was sure Ivan would still be inter ested. I almost gave in to him-I don’t have much shame left-but you saw the way he looked: the years hadn’t been good to him. He was repulsive. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I put him off with promises, all sorts of promises and told him I’d make arrangements to be with him at the convention.”
“Did you mean that, or were you just buying time?”
“Just buying time. But I also had an idea I could drive him away, force him to leave me alone.”
“How?”
“By threatening him,” she said. “With a gun.”
“The.38 you brought with you, the one that eventually killed him.”
“Yes. I bought it from a friend who has a gun collection.”
“Did you go ahead with the threat?”
“Yes, I went ahead with it.”
“And?”
“He laughed at me. He said I didn’t have the courage to shoot anybody. I told him I did and I meant it; I think I could have killed that man. But I swear to you again that I didn’t.”
“Did your husband know you’d brought the gun with you?”
“No. Not until after it was stolen. Then I had to make up that story about bringing it with me for demonstration purposes.”
“Did anybody else know you had it?”
“Not unless someone saw it when Russ knocked over my purse at the party on Thursday night. You saw it then, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But if nobody else did, then it had to be Frank who broke into our room later and took it.”
“Assuming the thief wasn’t after something else,” I said, “and stealing the gun was incidental.”
“Nothing else was missing.”
Not unless Ivan had played the same game as she and brought along something he hadn’t told her about. “Did Colodny say anything to indicate that he might want your gun?”