Hoodwink Page 15

  But if it had been searched, why? What did Meeker have that somebody wanted?

  The pulps didn’t tell me anything; they were all late forties issues, except for a couple of coverless Wests from the thirties, and all Westerns. The artist’s supplies and fishing equipment didn’t tell me anything either. I gave my attention to the scattered papers. Most of them were leaves from various-sized sketch pads, containing partially finished drawings of one kind or another, and letter carbons dating back several years. All of the face-up correspondence related to Meeker’s commercial artwork. None of it was addressed to anyone I knew or mentioned the names of any of the Pulpeteers.

  Spread out over one of the tables were two maps, one half open and the other open all the way. The half-open one was a city map of San Francisco and on it was a circled X, made with a black felt-tip pen, at the approximate location of the Hotel Continental downtown. The open map was a comprehensive of the state of Arizona. That one had a circled X on it too, some distance southeast of Tucson, in Cochise County. I bent over for a closer look. The area beneath the X showed blank—no town, no road or railway or body of water—which meant that it was open land of some kind: desert, maybe, or foothills. The nearest town was a place called Wickstaff, and that was at least ten miles from the X.

  Why would Meeker have marked a piece of barren land on a map of Arizona? Well, there was one answer: Frank Colodny, according to testimony, owned a ghost town in Arizona called Col’ odnyville. So maybe the land wasn’t barren after all; ghost towns were seldom included on even the most comprehensive of state maps.

  I started to straighten up from the table, and as I did that I noticed another mark on the map, down in the lower right-hand margin, half-hidden by a crease in the paper. What it was, I saw when I got one eye down close to it, was a pair of names written in a small crabbed hand, one above the other and both circled, like the names of lovers inside a heart. The bottom name was also underlined several times and had a string of question marks after it.

  The upper name was Frank Colodny.

  And the lower one, with all the question marks, was Cybil Wade.

  The county sheriff’s men showed up in just about twenty minutes, as advertised. I was outside by then, sitting in my car with the engine running and the heater up full blast to take the chill out of my bones. The first car contained a pair of patrol deputies, and the second, on the tail of the first, contained a deputy sheriff named Jeronczyk, who was the acting officer in charge until the arrival of the sheriff’s investigators from Rio Vista.

  I took them around to the shed and showed them the body through the window. Jeronczyk asked me questions and I answered them; I also gave him some references, including Eberhardt. He was not particularly impressed. But neither was he hostile or suspicious. Just a wary cop investigating an evident case of homicide.

  So I got sent back to my car, which was fine with me, while he and the others set about jimmying one of the shed’s windows. A lot of empty time passed. I keep an overnight bag in the trunk, in the event I get caught out of town unexpectedly, and inside the bag I keep a couple of pulp magazines. I got one of them out and tried to read a story by John K. Butler, but my mind was elsewhere. I kept having mental flashes of Meeker’s body inside that shed, twisted into a stiffened posture with his head opened up and bloody. And I kept thinking about the two names, Colodny’s and Cybil Wade’s, presumably written by Meeker on the map of Arizona.

  A second sheriff’s car showed up after a while, this one containing a couple of plainclothesmen and a guy carrying a doctor’s satchel. The younger of the cops was outfitted with a field lab kit and a camera. All three of them went to where one of the deputies had been stationed by the house, and were shown around to the rear. Ten minutes later the older plainclothesman came back alone and made straight for my car and me inside it.

  He was about my age and had a notch out of his right ear, as if somebody had taken a bite from it; his name was Loomis. And he was so polite it made me wonder if he was putting on an act: he called me sir every second sentence, and apologized twice for the inconvenience of having to detain me. But he also copied down all the information from my investigator’s license as well as the names and addresses and telephone numbers of my references, and made me tell twice how and why I happened to come here today and find Meeker’s body.

  We were just finishing up round two when a country ambulance pulled into the drive. Loomis thanked me again for my cooperation, touched his hat like John Wayne in a Three Mesquiteers movie from the thirties—you had to see it to believe it—and went over to conduct the two attendants around to the shed. That left me alone again. I got out of the car and walked around it a couple of times, dog-fashion, and then got back in and looked at the truss and the you-too-can-be-a-detective ads in the back of the pulp.

  Another twenty minutes crept off into history. At the end of which Loomis and Jeronczyk reappeared and headed my way again. Behind them the ambulance attendants, with the doctor or coroner’s assistant alongside, came slogging into view carrying Meeker’s sheet-covered body on a stretcher. I got out of the car one more time and stood with Loomis and Jeronczyk, watching the attendants load the body inside the ambulance.

  Jeronczyk said, “Well, that’s that.”

  Loomis nodded and looked at me. “You’re free to leave now, sir. We’d appreciate it, though, if you’d stop by the office in Rio Vista and sign a statement. It’s necessary in cases of accidental death.”

  “Accidental death?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you sure it was an accident?”

  “Reasonably sure,” Jeronczyk said. “He was up on that stepladder, fussing with one of the wall hooks, and he either slipped or the ladder gave way under him. He had the ax in his hand, or maybe it was lying on the floor; either way, he fell on it, and it split his head wide open. Happens once in a while, that kind of thing. Just a freak accident.”

  “Then how come he had the door locked?”

  Loomis said, “Sir?”

  “Why would a man go into a small shed like that, on his own property, and lock the door before he climbs up on a stepladder? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Jeronczyk shrugged. “People do strange things sometimes. Have strange quirks. Maybe he was paranoid about security.”

  “The door to his studio was unlocked,” I said. “That’s how I was able to get in to use the telephone.”

  “You seem to think he met with foul play,” Loomis said mildly. “Why is that?”

  “I told you before, he was mixed up in a killing in San Francisco over the weekend. It’s a funny coincidence he should get himself killed in a freak accident two days later.”

  “You say he was ‘mixed up’ in this San Francisco murder. If that’s so, why didn’t the police detain him?”

  “I explained that, too: they’ve arrested somebody else.”

  “But you don’t believe this other person is guilty.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And yet you have no evidence of any wrongdoing against Mr. Meeker. Speculations only. Isn’t that true, sir?”

  “It is unless you found something among Meeker’s papers to connect him to the extortion matter.”

  “We didn’t,” Loomis said. “We found nothing at all incriminating among his papers.”

  “Besides,” Jeronczyk said, “there’s no way he could have been murdered inside that shed. The door was locked from the inside and both windows were stuck fast. It took us five minutes to jimmy one of them open so we could get in ourselves.”

  “There are all sorts of locked-room gimmicks,” I said.

  He gave me a skeptical look. “Such as?”

  “I don’t know offhand. I’m not John Dickson Carr.”

  “Who’s John Dickson Carr?”

  “All right, look, here’s one way. That shed is pretty small; suppose the walls aren’t fully anchored to the ground or the floor; suppose there’s a way you can tilt the whole thing off its foundation—aga
inst a couple of heavy braces, say, to keep it from toppling over. One man could kill another inside, walk out through the door, tilt the shed, crawl back inside under the tilted end, lock the door, crawl out again, and then push the shed back into an upright position around the body.”

  Neither Loomis nor Jeronczyk said anything. They were looking at me now as if they suspected I might not be playing with a full deck.

  “Sure it’s farfetched,” I said, “and I don’t believe it happened that way. But it’s the kind of thing I mean by a locked-room gimmick—something that could be done to make murder seem impossible.”

  “Nothing like that happened here,” Loomis said. His voice was patient and his eyes said that he really didn’t mind standing around and humoring a half-wit private detective from San Francisco. “That shed is solid all the way around and top to bottom. Nobody could tilt one end of it except maybe with a crane.”

  “I never doubted that. Look, it was only an example—”

  “There wasn’t any gimmicking done,” Jeronczyk said. “The door was locked from the inside and the key was in the lock. You saw that yourself through the window, right? And there were two clear latent prints on the key, both of which be longed to the deceased. Now what does that tell you?”

  “That he handled the key at one time or another,” I said, “but not necessarily that he was the one who locked the shed door. The killer could have worn gloves, couldn’t he?”

  Loomis sighed. Patiently. “How would this killer of yours have gotten out of the shed?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t in the shed when he locked the door.”

  “You mean he was already outside?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did he lock the door on the inside?”

  “Maybe he used a couple of pieces of twine. It’s an old trick: You tie the cord around the key, using slip knots, and run the two lengths under the bottom of the door; then you close the door and manipulate the twine to turn the key in the lock. When you’re through all you have to do is jerk hard to loosen the slip knots and then pull the cord out under the door.”

  “Interesting idea,” Jeronczyk said, as if he thought it wasn’t.

  “There’s a broken piece of fishing twine near the shed door, in the grass. I noticed it; you must have too.”

  “We noticed it, yes, sir,” Loomis said.

  “The killer could have used it the way I described and dropped it there afterward.”

  “No, I’m afraid not. It would have been impos sible for anyone to lock the shed door using pieces of twine.”

  “Why would it?”

  “Because the key turns hard in the lock,” Loomis said. “I know that because I turned it myself, several times. No one could possibly turn it with twine. Or even with clothesline or rope, using slip knots and manipulating from under the door. No, sir—the only way that key could have been turned was by hand.”

  So much for that theory; he’d shot it down pretty good. But I said, “I don’t suppose there was anything inside the shed that might point to foul play?”

  He shook his head. “No signs of a struggle, no foreign objects to indicate another’s presence— nothing whatsoever.”

  “How long has Meeker been dead?”

  “Several hours. Rigor mortis had already set in.”

  “Sometime this morning?”

  “Early this morning, yes.”

  “What about other marks on the body?”

  “A bruise on the jaw and lacerations of the right forefinger and the left elbow, all of which the coroner’s assistant says were the result of the fall.”

  “Couldn’t that jaw bruise have been caused by a blow of some kind? With a fist or some type of weapon?”

  “It could have but it wasn’t,” Jeronczyk said. He did not have as much patience as Loomis; he was beginning to sound annoyed. “Now why don’t you just drop the matter, all right? Mr. Meeker died in a freak accident and that’s all there is to it.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Loomis said. “You can’t make malice where none exists. Suppose you just follow me to Rio Vista, sign your statement, and go on home and forget the whole thing.”

  What could I do? I followed him to Rio Vista, signed my statement, and went on home. But I was damned if I would forget the whole thing. No matter what Loomis and Jeronczyk said, no matter what the evidence seemed to indicate, I was convinced that somehow Ozzie Meeker had been murdered.

  When I entered my flat, it was a few minutes past seven o’clock and San Francisco was full of pea-soup fog. I opened a bottle of beer, took it into the bedroom, and dialed Eberhardt’s home number. No answer. So I called the Hall of Justice, but he wasn’t there either,- one of the Homicide inspectors told me Eb had taken the day off. I left a message for him to call me when he came in in the morning—and wondered if he was out somewhere tying one on. Well, what if he was? He was entitled, wasn’t he?

  I sat there working on my beer and staring at the phone. I had already called Kerry from a pay phone in Rio Vista to tell her the news about Meeker and to cancel our dinner date for tonight. She’d taken it well enough, but underneath the calmness in her voice I could tell she was frightened. Two deaths already—would there be more? Were her folks in any danger? Maybe she was even worried about me; I wanted to think so, anyway. And I wanted to see her tonight, except it was more important that I see her mother instead. I had not told her that; I had said only that I didn’t expect to make it back to.the city until late. I also hadn’t said anything about the map of Arizona in Meeker’s studio, or what was written on it in felt-tip pen.

  After a time I caught up the handset again and called the Hotel Continental and asked for the Wades’ room. I had called there, too, from Rio Vista, but Cybil and Ivan had both been out. I’d left a message for her, saying that it was urgent I talk to her and that I would call again around seven-thirty.

  The line buzzed five times before she picked up. “Yes?”

  I told her who was calling. “Are you alone, Mrs. Wade? Can you speak freely?”

  “Why, yes. Ivan’s been out all day, at a meeting with some local amateur magician’s group. What is it you want to talk about?”

  “I don’t think we should discuss it over the phone,” I said. “Can I see you tonight?”

  “Is it about Frank Colodny’s murder?”

  “Yes. And there’s been a second homicide; Ozzie Meeker was killed today.”

  An intake of breath. Then silence for six or seven beats. Then “Oh my God” in a voice not much louder than a whisper.

  “I can meet you in the hotel bar in thirty minutes,” I said.

  “No, not here. You don’t live far away, do you? Kerry said something about Pacific Heights …”

  “Would you rather come here?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.” I gave her the address. “When can I expect you?”

  “Right away. As soon as I can get a taxi.”

  We rang off, and I got up and took my beer into the living room. I felt more apprehensive than anything else. Cybil Wade seemed to be a key factor in this tangled business, and there was no sense in denying it any longer. Or in not sitting her down and asking her some fairly blunt questions. I had backed off from her before because she was Kerry’s mother; but now Meeker was dead, and there was that notation he’d made on the Arizona map, and Dancer was still locked up with a murder charge hanging over him. It was time to bite the bullet.

  I rummaged around in my file of Midnight Detectives until I found one with a Samuel Leatherman story. Then I sat down on the couch, communed a little with Max Ruffe, and waited for his maker to come by and tell me a tale that was fact, not fiction.

  SEVENTEEN

  She got there at 8:05. She was wearing a gray coat and a gray pantsuit made out of some kind of shiny material, and her coppery hair was pulled back into a chignon. On most women that kind of hairdo is severe; on Cybil Wade it highlighted the shape of her face and the still-smooth texture of her ski
n. The face, with the bruise almost gone under light makeup, and the sweet tawny eyes were composed, but below the surface, like a rippling undercurrent, you could see anxiety. She was a woman with secrets, and she was afraid that I had gone poking around and found out what some of them were. She was wrong about that, but if I had my way, she wouldn’t be wrong much longer.

  I showed her inside and took her coat and hung it up in the closet. Like Kerry, she did not feel ill at ease in strange surroundings. She had herself a look around, her eyes lingering longest on the shelves of pulp magazines; if she felt any distaste at the room’s untidiness, she didn’t show it. Then she went over and took a closer look at the plastic-bagged rows of pulps.

  “You really do have an impressive collection, don’t you?” she said when I came over to the couch behind her.

  “Substantial, anyway.”

  She turned. “Kerry said it was impressive and it is.” Pause. “She also seems impressed with you.”

  “Does she? Well, it’s mutual.”

  “I thought it was. That’s part of the reason I wanted to come here tonight, you know, instead of meeting at the hotel. To see where you live, find out a little more about you. Motherly interest, I guess you could call it.”

  Uh-huh, I thought. Maybe she was sincere, but maybe she was trying to con me a little, too, so I would go easier on her. But it was not going to work. If she was mixed up in murder, I wasn’t about to let her off the hook just because she was Kerry’s mother. I could be as hard-boiled as Max Ruffe if it came down to that.

  I said, “Why don’t you take a seat, Mrs. Wade. I’ll get us something to drink. Brandy, beer, coffee?”

  “A beer would be fine.”

  I went into the kitchen, opened up two bottles of Schlitz, got a glass for her out of the cupboard, and carried them back to the living room. She had gone to sit in one of the chairs and picked up the issue of Midnight Detective with her Samuel Leatherman story; she was looking at the interior illustration. There seemed to be a kind of sadness in her expression, but it went away as I crossed over and set one bottle and the glass on the table in front of her.