The Snatch nd-1

by Bill Pronzini

  I had been collecting pulp magazines for twenty-five years, and it was the one consuming passion I had in life. I had grown up on the fringe of the Mission District during the Depression, in a neighborhood not good but not bad, not poor but not well-to-do, and every spare nickel and dime I could cadge or earn went for pulps from the time I was twelve years old. I had stacks of them in the basement storage room of our building, which my mother later gave to the Goodwill without my permission, and I would spend hours in my room or in the basement reading Black Mask and the other detective magazines instead of studying.

  The pulps fascinated, captivated, me. I couldn’t get enough of them. I went to the City College of San Francisco after I graduated high school, and quit after three semesters because the pulps got in the way of my studying and I wouldn’t give them up. I went into the Army shortly after that, and until the war broke out I had this soft assignment in Texas as the private chauffeur to a major who was sleeping with half the girls in the nearby town and trying to get next to the other half. I had plenty of time to read, and to plan what I was going to do when I got out of the service; there was a natural fusion of the two after a while, and I knew I was going to go into police work. I had admired the champions of justice that Chandler and Hammett and the other pulp authors wrote about for a long time, and the kind of job they were doing was the kind of job I wanted to do myself.

  After Pearl Harbor, I was sent to the South Pacific, and while I was in Hawaii I applied for a position with Military Intelligence. Eventually I passed enough tests to get me into a security unit. I saw no real action, but I learned police work the way the Army teaches it.

  I came out late in 1945, after Hiroshima, and when I returned to San Francisco I took the Civil Service exams. In 1946 I went into the Police Academy; I thought I was pretty hot-shot in those days, and I made no secret of the fact that I was both a voracious pulp reader and a self-proclaimed world-beater who was going to set the department on its ear once I got into uniform.

  Most of the guys I went through the Academy with thought I was some great fun. They kept pulling gags on me, and calling me “Philip” and “Sam” and “Nick” and “Nero.” There was this one in particular, a sort of dour-faced type named Eberhardt, who used to ride me mercilessly, until one day after a drill I took all I was going to take and hit him flush in the mouth. We became good friends after that, the way guys will sometimes after such incidents.

  It did not take me long, after I was on the force, to learn that real police work is little more than routine and hard work, pain and suffering, long hours and damned little money, so that you had to fight a constant internal battle to maintain your honesty and your integrity. It was all of those things, and a lot more, but even after I matured and realized and accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to set the world on fire, I stuck it out; I stuck it out for fifteen years, because I believed then-and I still believe now- that the prevention of crime and the interests of justice and the law are of vital and immediate concern.

  Fifteen years. The last four on the General Works Detail attached to the investigation of homicides. And then one afternoon you answer a squeal to a nice house in the Sunset District, and you walk into a living room that is literally painted with blood-the ceiling, the floors, the walls, the furniture-and sitting there in the middle is a guy with empty eyes cradling a double-edged woodsman’s axe, crying, and all around him are what’s left of his wife and their two preschool children. You stand there and you look at that, and then you go outside and you puke until there’s nothing left, and then you either erect mental defenses to the carnage and step back inside and do the things you have to do as a cop, or you admit that you’ve had it, you can’t take any more, and you get so drunk later that night that you cannot stand without assistance. I was no longer able to erect those mental defenses.

  Six months later the State Board of Licenses, after a series of examinations and the posting of a bond, granted me a private investigator’s license and I resigned from the force the same day I received the news.

  Eberhardt, who is now a Lieutenant of Detectives and who has grown even more dour and cynical over the years, thought I was crazy to have given up fifteen years’ seniority toward a pension to open a private agency; he still thinks that, because the agency has been anything but a major success, and he still thinks I’m crazy to keep on reading and collecting pulp magazines. We’re good friends in spite of that.

  I got down one of the copies of Black Mask that I had recently acquired, and hadn’t finished reading as yet, and took it over to the sofa. I lit a cigarette, and waited, and when I knew my lungs were going to be all right I opened the magazine and tried to read.

  But I could not keep my mind on it. I kept thinking about the Martinetti kidnapping, and the way Karyn Martinetti had looked at me with her eyes full of pain and terror, and the job I had agreed to do. I wished there was some way I could get out of it, now, but I knew that there wasn’t; I had committed myself, and unless something radical happened to alter the present status of things, I had to follow through.

  I put the magazine down and looked at my watch. Eight o’clock. I wondered if Erika was home, and if she was, what kind of mood she was in. I did not feel much like being alone tonight, but I did not want to have to put up with an argument either.

  I kept my telephone in the bedroom, and I walked in there and called her and she answered on the third ring. “Hi, old bear,” she said. She sounded pretty chipper. “I suppose you’re horny. You never call me otherwise.”

  I grinned some at that. “I’m more lonely than anything else,” I said. “Can I come over and hold your hand?”

  “That would be something different, at least.”

  “Have you got any brandy?”

  “Half a bottle.”

  “Make me a drink,” I said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  * * * *

  Erika was Erika Coates, and she lived in one of those tasteless stucco-facaded flats on the Marina, near the Presidio. She was a legal secretary with a very proper probate law firm in the financial district; she was thirty-seven years old and twice divorced; she was opinionated and outspoken and somewhat censorious and better in bed than any woman I have ever known.

  I met her during the course of a minor investigation I had been conducting for an insurance company two years ago, and asked her out eleven times-four of those in person-before she consented to have so much as an after-work cocktail in Paoli’s or the Iron Duke. I had since that time asked her on three separate occasions to marry me, a question I had long past decided I would never be asking any woman, and she had turned me down with gentle regrets each time; she did not want to have to worry about going through a third divorce, she said, but I did not think that was the real reason. The real reason was that she did not like the kind of job I had; it was too unstable for her, I suppose, and the one thing she needed now was stability.

  I believe she was in love with me just the same.

  I know I was in love with her.

  I parked my car in her driveway, as I always did, and went up and rang her bell twice long and twice short in the code we had worked out so that she wouldn’t have to come downstairs to see who it was before working the door buzzer. After a couple of seconds the release sounded and I entered and climbed the stairs, and she was waiting for me with her door open and a nice dutiful-wife smile that her eyes said was a fat put-on.

  I kissed her, and she was warm and soft in my arms, nuzzling. I stood her away after a time, wondering if the way I felt was mirrored on my face for her to see. Her own face was heart-shaped and puckish, and I thought: Jesus, but she must have been lovely when she was a very young girl. She was still lovely, with this raven-black hair sweeping down like a silken midnight waterfall, glinting metallic-blue highlights in the proper lighting, and wide dancing eyes like fine gray pearls, and a soft quizzical mouth and little gnomelike ears with huge gold gypsy hoops hanging from them. If you looked for them, you could se
e the tiny age wrinkles that she covered so carefully with skin-toned make-up, the faint cross-hatching effect on the slender column of her throat-but I never looked. She had kept her figure by dieting and exercise, and her breasts were firm and small and her hips lean and her legs ripplingly muscled and sun-lamp brown; tonight she had the package wrapped in a pair of quilted culottes that did nothing for it at all.

  She saw me looking at the outfit, and said, “So what did you expect? Something sheer and slinky?”

  “Why not?” I said, and patted her, and took her arm and prompted her into the flat.

  She had the gas logs burning in the small false fireplace at one end of the room, and it was warm and comfortable in there. The apartment itself was neat and feminine, furnished in Danish Modern, with a lot of frilly throw pillows and some cute white-and-black fluff rugs and a big panda bear sitting in one corner like a naughty child. The walls were filled with wood and glass figurines on dainty shelves, and impressionistic and experimental prints such as Matisse’s “Red Studio” and Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” and a couple of things by Picasso. Over the door leading to the kitchen was a funny little scroll plaque that said: Evil Is a Very Bad Thing.

  She had the loveseat arranged in front of the fire, with the bottle of brandy and a silver ice bucket and a couple of glasses on a table beside it. We went over there and sat down, and I mixed a couple of drinks. We sat in silence, our thighs touching. I sipped at my drink, staring at the red-orange glow of the gas fire.

  After a time Erika said softly, “What’s the matter, old bear?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re very contemplative tonight.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I guess I am.”

  “What is it?”

  “A job, a not very nice job.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Professional ethics forbid?”

  “In this instance, yes.”

  “Phooey,” she said, and there was that faint note of sarcasm and censure in her voice that I did not like to hear, because I knew where it would lead if we allowed it to get out of hand.

  I let the remark pass. I got out a cigarette and lit it, and a spell of coughing came on so suddenly that it almost doubled me over on the seat. It seemed loud and consumptive in the quiet apartment. I sat there with the fresh handkerchief over my mouth, listening to the wheezing sounds coming out of my open mouth, not looking at Erika.

  And she said very quietly, “When are you going to give up those damned cigarettes, old bear? You smoke three packs every day, or is it four? Your lungs must look like a coal miner’s.”

  “It’s not that easy to break the habit-how many times do I have to tell you that?”

  “Other people do it every day.”

  “Well, I’m not other people.”

  “If you wanted to quit badly enough, you’d find a way.”

  “Look,” I said, “we’ve been through all this crap before.”

  “Oh yes, of course we have,” she said sardonically. “And that cough keeps getting worse every time I see you. You can’t be naive enough to think there’s no connection.”

  “It’s a bronchial thing, that’s all.”

  “Yes? Then why don’t you go the doctor for something to clear it up?”

  “I don’t need to go to a doctor.”

  “Yes you do, but you won’t go anyway. You’re afraid of what an examination might reveal. You’re afraid a doctor might find cancer or tuberculosis or-”

  “Shut up, Erika!” I snapped at her. “Goddamn it, shut up!”

  She got to her feet and looked down at me with a pitying expression, and I could feel anger building hot inside me, making the blood pound in my temples. We were coming on another fight, I could sense it; I didn’t want it, and yet I knew it was coming and I couldn’t find a way to stop it.

  “When are you going to grow up?” Erika asked me. “For God’s sake, you’re forty-seven years old. Do you think you’ve got the body of a teenager? You’re susceptible to diseases at your age-”

  “Listen,” I said, “I don’t need any frigging lectures from you!”

  I was sorry as soon as I said the words, but it was too late to take them back. Her mouth went small and tight at the corners, and a veil came down like shutters closing over her eyes. “My, haven’t we got the pleasant mouth this evening,” she said, but all the vitriol was gone from her voice now and there was a kind of controlled and righteous fury in its place.

  I said, “Erika …”

  “Good night,” she said. “Please close the door on your way out.” And she turned and walked with quick angry strides across the room and through the doorway into the bedroom. The door closed a moment later, loud enough for me to hear, and there was the empty and unmistakably final clicking sound of the key turning in the lock.

  I got to my feet and stood there in the now still, suddenly cheerless room for a long time; and then I went over to the front door and slammed out of there, making as much noise as I could.

  I drove home in a dark blue funk and made myself a stiff drink that I barely touched and sat listening to the wind tugging at the stripping around the bay windows. After a while the anger drained out of me and left in its wake a deep feeling of depression, of brooding introspection. I went in and got undressed and slipped into the iron-posted bed-but I couldn’t sleep. I lay there in the dark, wanting a cigarette, not having one.

  I kept thinking: She’s right. Damn her, she’s right.

  * * * *

  4

  At a few minutes past eight the next morning, tired and stiff-jointed from lack of sleep, I sat staring moodily into a mug of black coffee in the kitchen.

  There was a package of Pall Malls beside the mug, and I turned it over and over with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, not looking at it, trying to make up my mind about them and about the coughing. Cigarettes were a crutch, the satisfaction of a small, obdurate craving, and I was good at telling myself that I could no more give them up than I could give up eating. And yet the thought, strong and vivid now, of what might be growing, festering, in my chest made sweat cold and viscid flow along my body.

  I had been putting it out of my mind, effectively blocking it out each time it demanded attention, for better than two months. That’s one of the fine things about the human animal: if something bothers you, if something frightens you, you simply put it out of your mind and tell yourself that after a while it will go away of its own accord-and that makes everything okay again. But I could no longer indulge in that kind of speciousness, because the cough was getting worse and because Erika’s harsh and acerbic words had brought it all out into the open, into a light I could not flick off.

  Well, all right. I had to give up the damned cigarettes, what was the use in kidding myself? I had to quit them cold, none of this tapering-off crap. I could chew toothpicks or gum until the gnawing went away, and after that it would not be so bad at all. Then I would have to go to a doctor and have a chest X-ray, and maybe a thorough physical, to find out about the cough. Maybe what I had told Erika was correct: maybe it was nothing more than a bronchial disorder.

  Yeah, and maybe it was cancer.

  Jesus, Jesus! I could feel my hands starting to shake, and I swept the package of cigarettes off onto the floor and got up and kicked them behind the stove. I was scared. I had been scared all along.

  I thought: What would I do if they told me I had six months to live? What would I say, what would I feel? Or suppose I had to have surgery, to have a lung removed? How would I bear up under that? Because I was petrified of hospitals, of surgical steel, after having been in war-zone hospitals in the South Pacific and having seen things in them no man should ever see. God, maybe it wasjust better to let whatever it was alone, until it either cleared itself up or I just kicked over, but that was not the way it happened, no, an uncle of mine had died of cancer and he had been a hale and hearty man weighing two hundred
and fifty pounds all his life and yet he had died at half that weight with his body yellowed and withered and the cancer eating at him, consuming him from within and making him scream with the pain of-

  The sudden, strident sound of the telephone bell brought me whirling about. I had taken the phone on its long cord into the kitchen and put it down on the sideboard earlier, with the idea of calling Erika, but I hadn’t been able to do it; I had forgotten the thing was there.

  I took a couple of deep breaths, getting the dark thoughts out of my mind, getting calm, and then I went over and answered it on the third ring. It was a secretary to Allan Channing, crisp and efficient and precise. She wanted to know if it would be possible for me to come by his office in San Mateo before I attended to my other commitment on the Peninsula. I said it would, and wondered what Channing wanted of me; but I did not ask. The secretary would not have known anyway.

  I hung up and went back and stared at the coffee some more. I was not looking forward to what lay ahead on this day, or at any time in the near future, and suddenly I wished I were on a boat somewhere-an old bugeye sloop, perhaps, clean and sleek and well-provisioned- alone on that boat with the song of the sea wind in my ears and the feel of salt spray on my face. But that was a never-never land, a peace and a serenity I could never aspire to because I was too practical, too tightly bound to the city and her chaotic ways. I knew that, and the knowledge saddened me. I had today, and maybe tomorrow, and maybe a lot of tomorrows-but I had cold stark reality, too, and I could never escape from it …