The Snatch nd-1

by Bill Pronzini

  He had put me in a very uncomfortable position. If he had asked me to investigate the snatch of his son, I could have backed out without any qualms at all. And yet, all he had asked me to do was make the drop for him-just that, nothing else. With his mind made up to pay the three hundred thousand, somebody had to carry out the delivery; and the fewer people who knew about it, the better the boy’s chances.

  Fifteen hundred dollars. I had not had a client in five weeks, and fifteen hundred dollars was a considerable amount of money in my present state of affairs. But suppose I made a mistake? Suppose I fouled things up in some nebulous, unpredictable way, and something happened to Gary Martinetti? Suppose-?

  Well, Jesus, suppose a hundred things, a thousand things. I got another cigarette out and lighted it, and then behind me Martinetti said in a voice stripped of all its normal power and magnetism, words that must have come very hard for a man like him, “Please. For God’s sake- please.”

  I turned slowly. “All right,” I said. “All right, Mr. Martinetti, I’ll deliver the money for you.”

  * * * *

  2

  Martinetti looked at me for perhaps five seconds, his face expressionless, and then he said, “Thank you, I- thank you,” in a low voice and went over to the drapes and parted them and stood staring out broodingly.

  I returned to my chair and sat down, conscious of the gazes of both Proxmire and Channing. I took a long drag on my cigarette, and one of the damned coughing attacks came on with no warning, violent and racking. By the time I got it under control, with the handkerchief to catch the phlegm, Martinetti was back at his desk. He was looking at me oddly.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Just a little chest cold,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t. I did not want to talk about it. I went to the fireplace again and got rid of the butt and came back. Briefly, I wondered what the three of them in there were thinking about me; but it really was not important, and I put it out of my mind.

  I said to Martinetti, “I’d like to know a few of the particulars of what happened today. I don’t want to go into this completely cold.”

  He nodded. “What do you want to know?”

  “To begin with, how many people know about the abduction?”

  “The four of us in this room. My wife, Karyn, of course. I would imagine the maid, since she was about when the call came. And Young, the headmaster at Sandhurst.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” I said. “How old is your son?”

  “Nine.”

  “Bright?”

  “Yes, very.”

  That wasn’t necessarily a good thing, in circumstances such as these. Bright kids are generally perceptive of details, and a kidnapper would not want details related that might perhaps lead the authorities to him at some future time. I did not tell Martinetti that.

  I said, “Are you in the habit of summoning him from school with a note, or by your lawyer?”

  “No, certainly not.”

  “Didn’t this Young try to confirm the note with you?”

  “He didn’t feel it was necessary,” Martinetti said. “It was written on my personal stationery, as I said before, and the signature seemed all right to him.”

  “Did you get the note?”

  “Yes. Do you want to see it?”

  “If I could.”

  He took a sheet of bond stationery, folded twice, business-fashion, from the center drawer of the desk and slid it across to me. I unfolded it, read the text-three sentences neatly typed, with no typographical or grammatical errors-and then looked at the signature. It was bold and flowing, with loops instead of dots above the I’S.

  “How good a forgery is the signature?” I asked Martinetti.

  “Good enough to have been taken as mine.”

  “Do many people have access to papers you’ve signed? To your personal stationery?”

  His lips pulled into a tight, bloodless line, and the irises of his eyes had a peculiar light in them. “Are you intimating that someone I’m acquainted with is responsible?”

  “I’m not intimating anything,” I said. “I’m only asking some questions. If you’d rather not answer them, that’s your prerogative.”

  The muscles circling his mouth relaxed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m on edge; my nerves are rubbed raw.”

  “You don’t have to apologize, Mr. Martinetti.”

  “Oh Christ,” he said wearily, and ran a heavy hand through his hair. “That same damned possibility has occurred to me more than once in the past couple of hours. That someone I know or once knew is connected with this … this theft of my son. But I can’t conceive of even one person who would do a thing like this.”

  “How many people now have or have had access to your papers?”

  “Quite a few, I suppose. I only keep one girl at my office in Redwood City, for instance, and almost anyone could simply walk in when she’s in the rest room or getting coffee from the machine downstairs.”

  I nodded. There was no purpose in pressing this subject; I could see that it was painful for Martinetti, and I was not supposed to be conducting an investigation or an interrogation anyway. I had to keep reminding myself of my limitations every now and then, because I had been a cop for fifteen years before I went out on my own, and when you’ve been conditioned to certain methods for that length of time, you find them difficult to break.

  I asked, “What did Young tell you about theman?”

  “That he was a smooth character, authoritative and well-mannered.”

  “When you received this call earlier in the afternoon, did he threaten or intimidate you in any way beyond the warning to meet his demands or suffer the consequences?”

  “No. He was very amiable, in fact.”

  “You were unfamiliar with his voice, I take it?”

  “Completely.”

  “Was there anything distinctive about it?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Did he have an impediment, an accent, like that?”

  “No, it was just an average voice.”

  “Would you say the caller was educated?”

  “I suppose so. His grammar seemed correct.”

  “Did he let you talk to your son?”

  “Just for a moment, yes.”

  “Was the boy all right?”

  “Yes, considering. He was frightened, of course.”

  I sat back a little, pulling at the lobe of my ear. All of this could have meant something favorable, or it could have meant nothing at all. There are a lot of psychopathic personalities who are adequately educated, and who can be polite and imperative when it behooves them. But I liked it better with that kind of guy than I would have if he had been abusive or obscene, if he had twisted the boy’s arm, say, while he was talking on the phone, to let Martinetti know he meant business-that kind of thing.

  I got slowly to my feet. “I don’t think there’s anything else I’ll need to know, Mr. Martinetti. If it’s all right with you, I’ll be down in the morning sometime to wait for the call with you.”

  “I’d appreciate that, thank you.”

  I got my wallet from my coat pocket and took out one of the plain white business cards with my home and office telephone numbers embossed on it. I put the card on the desk in front of him, next to the refolded kidnap note. “If anything happens,” I said, “or if you want to get in touch with me for any reason, call one of those two numbers. If I go anywhere else, I’ll leave word with the answering service that takes care of my office while I’m away.”

  He nodded, touched the card with one squarely manicured forefinger, and quickly opened the center desk drawer again. He swept the card and the note into it, and extracted a large leather-bound checkbook. “Let me give you a retainer before you go,” he said. “Would five hundred dollars be all right for now?”

  “Whatever you like,” I said.

  He wrote quickly with a pen from the marble set, tore the che
ck out, looked at it, and handed it across to me.

  I put it in my wallet. We shook hands. Channing was on his feet, too, and I shook hands with him again. He hadn’t said a word since his firm disinclination to have anything to do with the ransom drop, and I wondered what kind of things were going around inside that large and ingenious head of his. I did not think I would care for them, whatever they were.

  Martinetti motioned to Proxmire, looked at me, and said, “Dean will show you out.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll expect you in the morning, then.”

  I nodded, watched him sit heavily in the executive’s chair and stare with brooding intensity at the glass of liquor on his desk, and then I turned and went over to where Proxmire was waiting by the double-doored entrance.

  We went out, and he closed the door. I took a couple of steps along the hall, and he caught my arm lightly and looked at me with eyes that were filled with a liquid fervency. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t quite know how to go about it. He bulged his lower lip with his tongue, getting the words arranged. Finally he said, “You’ll be very careful, won’t you? When you deliver the money? You’ll do exactly what you’re supposed to do?”

  “Did you expect me to start a running gun battle with whoever comes after it?” I said mildly.

  He looked a little shocked. “I didn’t mean … Well, you have a very fine reputation, of course. I just thought that … oh God, I don’t know what I thought. I’m sorry. Listen, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’m upset, that’s all,” Proxmire said. “The boy and I are very close, you see. He’s almost like-well, we’re very close.”

  “I understand.”

  “I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

  “He’ll come home okay,” I said, putting more assurance in my voice than I felt. “You have to count on that.”

  “I don’t like the idea of paying a ransom,” Proxmire said. “We’re placing our complete trust in a kidnapper, somebody who preys onchildren, for God’s sake! I told Martinetti that the police should be notified. I still think they should.”

  “It’s his son,” I said quietly. “And his decision.”

  “Yes. Yes, I … I know.”

  We went along the hallway and I took my hat off the table, turning toward the door. In that moment I saw the woman standing in the doorway leading to the living room. There were lights on in there now, diffused and amber, and she had a glass in her hand that was half filled with some colorless liquid that might have been water or something considerably stronger. She was leaning against the jamb, as if her legs were too weak to support the full weight of her.

  She was maybe thirty, with good breasts and strong hips and the kind of hourglass waist that a big man would have taken pride in spanning with both his hands. Her hair was blond, worn shoulder-length and flipped under at the bottom the way Doris Day used to have hers in those movies with Rock Hudson. Sensuous would be the proper descriptive adjective for her mouth, even void of lipstick as it was at the moment, and tiny dimples attractively centered each of her cheeks. At some other time she might have been almost beautiful, but there was an unhealthy gray pallor to her face now, a glazed, little-girl-lost quality to the azure-blue eyes. She wore a thin paisley-print dress, and her legs and feet were bare.

  Proxmire said, “Karyn!” and went to her and touched her shoulder timorously, solicitously. He took the glass out of her hand, looked at it, wet his lips, and carried it a few steps into the living room and put it down on an end table next to a long couch. She made no protest. Her eyes were on me, with a kind of dull comprehension in them.

  Proxmire came back and said, “You ought to be in bed, Karyn. The sedative-”

  “Oh, damn the sedative,” she said dully, and left the doorway and walked unsteadily over to where I stood. She was not drunk; it was pain and fear that caused her shakiness, and the two emotions were alive and volatile inside her.

  She stopped a foot away from me, and her tormented eyes roamed my face. “You’re the detective Louis called, aren’t you?” she asked in a flat, toneless voice.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m Karyn Martinetti, Gary’s mother.”

  I did not know what to say to her. I shifted my feet awkwardly, nervously. I had never been any good in a situation like this, facing misery and grief, and that was just one of the dozen or so reasons which had made up my long-range decision to leave the cops. If I could have done it in the least charitably, I would have pushed past her to the door and gotten out of there. I thought: If she starts to cry, I’ll do it anyway.

  She said, “Will you help us get my son back?”

  Proxmire came to my aid then, and I felt better toward him than I had a few moments earlier. He put his arm tenderly around Karyn Martinetti’s shoulders, and she seemed to lean against him as she had leaned against the doorjamb.

  Proxmire said, “He’s agreed to deliver the ransom money for us, Karyn. He’ll come again tomorrow to wait with Louis for the call.”

  She nodded numbly. “Thank you,” she said, and her eyes were still restless on my face.

  I had the disquieting, ridiculous feeling that she wanted to kiss my cheek or my hand. I edged toward the door. “I’d better be going now,” I said.

  “Of course, goodbye,” Proxmire said, and his expression added that he knew how I felt. I wondered if he really did. He turned the woman gently away and led her toward the stairs, his head dipped toward her, whispering against her ear. I watched him start her up the stairs, with her moving like an automaton, and then I got the door open and stepped quickly outside.

  The air was still warm and sweet and fresh, but it did not make me feel any better.

  * * * *

  3

  I live in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco, in what I think is called a Queen Anne Victorian. Old and tired and a bit frowzy, it stands with its turrets and gables proudly erect-like a tycoon’s aging mistress with no future and a million glittering memories. It had once been somebody’s fine home in the pre-earthquake days of the Barbary Coast and the Chinese tong wars, but time and the scavengers had gotten to it in the thirties and it was subdivided into three fairly large flats. In spite of its age, the location commands a high rent, and if I had not been living there for the past seventeen years under the same owner, I could not have afforded it.

  It was almost six-thirty when I turned off Van Ness Avenue onto Clay Street; I had been entangled in the usual rush-hour traffic snarl on the Bayshore, immediately after leaving Hillsborough. There were no parking spaces in the vicinity of my place, not a particularly surprising occurrence, and I had to leave my car a block and a half away. It was considerably cooler in San Francisco than it had been on the Peninsula, and there was a thin, cold wind coming in off the Bay. Fog, in thick gray billows like the smoke from a rubber fire, unfolded across the darkening sky.

  I walked quickly, and when I reached the foyer of my building I was winded and conscious of a muted ache in my chest. I tried not to think about that, breathing through my mouth. My mailbox contained two letters, and I put them in my pocket and climbed the dark stairs to the second floor.

  The old, faded rose-colored carpet in my apartment was strewn with newspapers and package wrappings and the ashes and butts from an overturned ashtray; the remains of last night’s delicatessen supper littered the copper-topped coffee table in front of the sofa. Living alone for a long time does that to you; you get so you don’t much care if you come home to neatness or disarray, because mostly you come home alone. I had stopped picking up after myself years ago.

  I went over to the thermostat and fussed with it and got some heat coming through the floor furnace. Then I crossed to the curving bay windows and pulled the curtains closed. The fog was heavy now, and I could make out only substanceless shapes in the distance; but on a clear day you could see the sailboats like idyllic toys dotting the silver-blue surface of the Bay, the long and symm
etrical contours of the Yacht Harbor, the rising spans of the Golden Gate Bridge and the vast, gentle Pacific beyond.

  I took a beer out of the refrigerator in the kitchen and carried it into the living room and sat down to read my mail at the tall mahogany secretary in one corner. One of the letters was a bill from a garage on Mission Street that had done some minor repairs on my car; the other was from a guy in North Carolina, with a new list of pulp magazines he had for sale.

  I put the garage bill with some others in one of the pigeonholes. From a lower drawer, I got out the list I had painstakingly typed over a period of several weeks, and compared it with the items outlined in the letter from North Carolina. There were eight issues of Detective Tales, Star Detective and Clues from the 1930’s that I did not have. I sat down and wrote the guy a check and a little note to go with it. When I finished with that, I endorsed Martinetti’s check and tucked that into a bank envelope with a deposit slip, and put both envelopes into my coat pocket.

  I was not particularly hungry, but I thought I ought to eat something. The refrigerator yielded a package of mortadella and some brick Cheddar cheese, and I made myself two sandwiches on sourdough French bread and ate them standing up at the sideboard. I drank the last of the beer, and then returned to the living room and kicked off my shoes and jacket and pulled down my tie and went to the bookshelves covering the side wall beyond the windows.

  The shelves, which I had constructed of metal wall brackets and varying lengths of darkly laminated wood, were the only things in the apartment I made a special effort to keep in order. They contained something more than five thousand copies of detective and adventure pulp magazines dating from the late twenties through the early fifties, when the pulp market collapsed and died.

  I had them segregated by title, chronologically, with the quality items like Black Maskand Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly on the upper shelves, and the lesser ones-seventy-five different titles, twenty-two separate Volume One, Number 1-filling the remainder. I had turned some of them around at various points so that their covers faced into the room; they were pretty lurid, most of those covers-salivating fiends in black cloaks or scarlet robes or slouch hats, clutching huge automatics or gleaming daggers; half-nude girls with too-red lips screaming in agony or fear or perhaps even ecstasy-but I liked the effect they gave that staid rose-papered high-ceilinged room. It made the whole setting seem impressionistic, somehow, like a pop-art display.