The Snatch nd-1

by Bill Pronzini

  “No.”

  “Oh Christ,” I said softly.

  “Yeah,” Donleavy said. “You want to tell me what happened at the drop last night?”

  “Do you know the location?”

  “Martinetti told us.”

  “You found the dead man, then.”

  “Uh-huh. Stabbed in the back, below the right kidney, and cut up deep under the breastbone.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A guy named Paul Lockridge,” Donleavy said. “You want to answer some of my questions now?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sure.”

  I told him what had happened, exactly as I remembered it, going over it again to make sure I had left nothing out.

  Donleavy said, “And you never saw the guy’s face?”

  “No. It all happened too fast.”

  “Did he say anything at any time?”

  “No.”

  “Can you remember anything about him?”

  “He wore some kind of long coat.”

  “What kind?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  He sighed. “How do you figure it?”

  “I hadn’t thought that far.”

  “Well, think that far now.”

  I pushed it around for several seconds, but my head ached, and I let it go finally and said, “It looks like a double-cross. Two in on the snatch instead of one, and as soon as the money was dropped the killer pulled a knife on this Lockridge. But he wasn’t accurate in the dark and the fog, and he just wounded him with the first thrust, in the back. Lockridge screamed and turned and the killer stabbed him under the breastbone, and then I came down in time to get myself cut.”

  “That’s the way it looks, all right,” Donleavy said.

  “I hope that’s not exactly the way it is.”

  “Why?”

  “The boy should have been released by now,” I said. “If he was going to be released at all.”

  Donleavy’s forehead wrinkled like the brow of a hound. “A guy uses a knife like that, he hasn’t got much conscience or regard for human life, has he?”

  “No,” I said grimly, “he hasn’t.”

  I lay there and stared down at the top of the tight white bandages ringing my lower stomach, visible through the open front of the cotton hospital gown they had dressed me in. I could feel Donleavy’s eyes on me. After a time I said, “How’s Martinetti?”

  “How would you expect?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He didn’t want to talk to us when we went out to his place,” Donleavy said. “But he couldn’t deny something was wrong, not the way he looked and the way his wife and the others there looked. It was past midnight, and he’d figured things went wrong because you weren’t back. We told him what had happened to you as far as we knew it, and he gave us the whole story then. He was a damned fool for not coming to us in the first place with it; if he had, none of this would have happened.”

  Donleavy’s voice had hardened somewhat, but his eyes and his mouth were still sleepy. I said, “You won’t get any argument on that.”

  “Why weren’t we notified?”

  “Martinetti must have told you that.”

  “I want you to tell me.”

  “He didn’t want the law. He only wanted to pay the ransom to get his son back, to follow the instructions the kidnapper gave him.”

  “And you went along with that?”

  “He didn’t ask me for my opinion.”

  “Maybe you should have offered it.”

  “It wasn’t my place-or my son.”

  “What was your place?”

  “To make the drop for him, that’s all.”

  “No investigating, or anything like that?”

  “No, just make the drop.”

  “How much were you getting for that?”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars.”

  “That’s nice money for a little drive into the hills.”

  “And a knife in the belly?”

  “You couldn’t have foreseen that, could you?”

  “Listen, what are you trying to say, Donleavy? That I should have turned down a sour but legitimate job when I could use the money? That I should have violated a client’s trust and phoned you people about the kidnapping? That I didn’t try to talk Martinetti out of paying the ransom money because that would have meant I’d lose a fifteen-hundred-dollar fee?”

  “All of those things crossed my mind.”

  “And all of them are so much horseshit.”

  “I’ve heard of you a little,” Donleavy said. “You used to be with the Frisco cops, didn’t you?”

  “For fifteen years.”

  “You don’t work much, but you’ve got a decent name.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m not leaning on you,” Donleavy said mildly. He shifted his weight on the chair. “You’ve been through enough for one night.”

  I met his eyes. “Look, Donleavy, nobody feels any worse about this whole thing than I do-and I don’t mean getting cut. I’m not trying to excuse myself or my actions, right or wrong; I just want you to understand what motivated them, and what didn’t motivate them.”

  “Sure,” Donleavy said, and got ponderously to his feet. He sucked in his round cheeks, and puffed them out again, like a blowfish. “We’ve talked enough for now. I think they want to give you something to make you sleep.”

  “Will you tell Martinetti what happened?”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell him.”

  “All right.”

  He did that thing with his cheeks again. “I got cut once, in the side, not half as big a gash as you got,” he said slowly. “It happened in a bar in Tucson, just after the Korean War; I was new on the cops there and I went up against a guy waving a straight razor. I was never more scared in my life after he slashed me, and I never forgot what happened. I’ve still got the scar, and every now and then I still get nightmares about it.”

  He turned, fat but never soft, and shuffled over to the door and opened it and went out without looking at me again. I stared at the ceiling for a while, and then I closed my eyes to rest them. But when I did that, I could see the blood running out between my fingers in the dome light of the car, and I snapped them open again and watched my hands trembling on the bedclothes.

  I thought: I’m never going to forget it, either. The scar will see to that. And maybe some nightmares, too, just like the ones Donleavy has every now and then.

  * * * *

  9

  The doctor and the auburn-haired nurse returned to ask me if there was anybody I wanted notified of my whereabouts. I thought about having them get in touch with Erika, or perhaps Eberhardt, but there was no use in alarming either of them. I said no. They gave me a shot of something then, and I went to sleep almost immediately. I slept deep and hard, and I did not dream. It was one o’clock in the afternoon when I woke up again.

  There was no fuzziness to my thinking, and the pain in my head had completely gone; the pain in my belly was no worse than I remembered it being when I had awakened before. But the ingrained fear of hospitals was strong inside me, and I felt claustrophobic. I had to urinate, and I considered throwing back the covers and trying to get up to find the john-but I was afraid to do that on my own because of the stitches. There was a push button attached to the tubular headrest of the bed, and I rang that a couple of times for assistance.

  A nurse came in-thin, sad-eyed, flat-chested- and I told her I had to use the toilet but that I wanted to get up and walk there if it was all right. She said it was all right if I was very careful. I got out of bed, leaning on her, and my legs were somewhat weak and the pain grew warm across my lower belly, but I did not fall or stumble when I took my first couple of steps. The nurse went with me out of the room and down the hall one door and waited for me until I came out. Then she walked me back to bed again and wiped the sweat off my forehead with a cloth and
patted me as if I had been a very good little boy. She left me alone again.

  The claustrophobia had vanished and I lay quiet now. A youngish doctor with an air of nervous energy about him put in an appearance shortly and wanted to know how I felt. I told him. He took the bandages off and examined the wound in my stomach; I did not look at it myself. He put a new dressing on that burned a little, and some more outer wrappings.

  I said, “How soon can I get out of here?”

  “Perhaps this evening,” he answered. “I’ll want to look at the wound again before I make it definite.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  After he had gone, the flat-chested nurse brought a tray containing some soft-boiled eggs and a cup of lukewarm broth and a dish of liquidy lime jello. I managed to eat some of it.

  Oddly, I did not want a cigarette afterward. Oddly, because following any kind of meal, no matter how light, the craving for one was always the strongest. It was the shock of being cut, I supposed, which was responsible for that; my system would be rebelling against such stimulants.

  I wondered briefly if my lungs had been examined when they brought me in the night before, as a matter of course, and then decided that it was not likely. I thought: I ought to have them do it while I’m here. I ought to tell them about the cough, and the rasping in my chest, and have them do some X-rays. That’s what I ought to do. Well, maybe when the doctor comes again tonight- maybe then I’ll tell him.

  The door opened and the nurse said, “You have some visitors.”

  “Who are they?”

  “A Mr. Donleavy and a Mr. Reese.”

  “All right.”

  Donleavy was still wearing the dark brown worsted; he nodded to me, his expression just as deceptively sleepy as it had been earlier. The other one, Reese, was about thirty, with cool gray-green eyes and flatly stoic features. Sparse, kinky black hair covered his scalp like moss on a round rock. He wore a semi-mod gray suit and a pale gold shirt with a silver-and-black tie, and you got the impression that he thought he was a pretty sharp and urbane guy.

  The two of them came over to the side of the bed and pulled up the only two chairs in the room. Donleavy said, “How you feeling?”

  “Better.”

  “This is Ted Reese, my partner.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  Reese nodded curtly.

  I asked, “Anything new about the boy?”

  “No,” Donleavy answered. “No calls, no word at all.”

  Reese said, “We thought you might have remembered something since you talked to Harry last night.” His voice was crisp and well-modulated, and had that ring of authority that the younger ones like to affect. I remembered when my own voice had sounded that way, after I had come out of the Police Academy.

  I said, “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “We’re not getting anywhere at all,” Donleavy said. “We’ve got to go back and double over everything again.”

  “What did you find out about the dead guy?”

  “His name is Lockridge, like I told you this morning. Home address in Cleveland, wallet with a hundred and twenty-three dollars in it, no credit cards, not much of anything, really, except an Ohio driver’s license. No known residence in California, no known next of kin. There was a suitcase in the car we found at the bottom of the slope, but the contents were no help at all; off-the-rack stuff, medium-priced.”

  “Was he the one who went to Sandhurst and took the boy?”

  “Yeah. The headmaster identified a photo of him.”

  “Did Lockridge have any kind of record?”

  “We haven’t gotten a report on him yet from the Cleveland police, or from the FBI.”

  “What about the car?”

  “Rental job. The agency couldn’t tell us anything about him.”

  “Prints?”

  “Some of Lockridge’s, a few others that could belong to anybody, from one of the firm’s mechanics to the last renter. We’re checking.”

  “Nothing that could help where it all happened? Footprints, something dropped, like that?”

  Donleavy shook his head. “Too many leaves and twigs for footprints. We sifted through the area, but there wasn’t anything we could work with.”

  “Are you going on the assumption that it was somebody in the kidnapping with Lockridge who killed him?”

  “We’re going on a lot of assumptions right now,” he said carefully.

  “Okay,” I said. “How did Martinetti take the news of what happened?”

  “He doesn’t blame you for anything, if that was worrying you,” Reese said.

  “No, it wasn’t worrying me.” I gave my attention to Donleavy. “Have you let the story out to the papers?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Martinetti okayed it this morning. They’re going to run a school photo of the boy, and one of Lockridge under a ‘Have You Seen This Man?’ banner. It’ll come out in today’s afternoon editions.”

  “Can you keep the reporters away from me?”

  “We’ve taken care of that. We’re not letting them get at the Martinettis either.”

  “I should think you’d welcome the publicity,” Reese said to me, “in your line of work.”

  “I don’t like talking to reporters.”

  “Let him alone, Reese,” Donleavy said mildly. He sighed and got up on his feet. To me: “The doctor tells us you can probably go home tonight, if you take it easy.”

  “The sooner, the better.”

  “You’ll have to figure out some kind of transportation. We had your car towed into the Harwick Garage in San Bruno, and it’ll be there a couple of days at least.”

  “How bad was the damage?”

  “Most of the left side bunged in,” Donleavy said. “And you’ve got a bent A-frame.”

  I stared down at the foot of the bed. “I guess I’m pretty lucky, all right.”

  “Yeah, I guess you are.”

  Reese said pettishly, “You’ll be home after you leave here, won’t you? In case we want to talk to you again.”

  “I’ll be home.”

  “And you’ll be sure to let us know if you remember something.”

  “Of course.”

  Donleavy nodded, and Reese pursed his lips, and they went out.

  I lay back and tried to sleep, to keep from thinking about where I was and to make the time pass that much more quickly. But my mind was alert now, and I could not seem to turn it off.

  I thought about what had happened at the drop site, and the theory of the double-cross. I could see a flaw in it. Why would Lockridge’s partner have chosen to kill him at that particular spot? Why wouldn’t he have waited until some later time, when they had the money and were safely away from there? Still, itwas an isolated location and a body might not be found for some time; it would not be such a bad place to dispose of someone.

  Another flaw: why wouldn’t he have waited until I was safely gone before using his knife? I had an answer for that one, too, such as it was: he could have gotten excited, thinking about all the money in the suitcase, and decided I was far enough away not to hear anything. He would not have expected to miss a vital spot with that first thrust, and if he had done it right, Lockridge would not have made any sound for me to hear.

  But then there was the fact that everything previously had pointed to a single man having engineered the kidnapping of Gary Martinetti. Lockridge was the one who had pulled off the actual abduction of the boy from the Sandhurst Military Academy, and from the voice mannerisms Martinetti had told me about, it seemed as if Lockridge had been the one to make the calls too. The only possible evidence of another party involved in the thing was the warning to Martinetti with the drop instructions: if he, the kidnapper, did not return to a certain place at a certain time, there was someone with the boy who had instructions to get rid of him. But that could have merely been bluff, to insure Martinetti’s keeping his end of the bargain.

  I could
think of one other explanation for last night.

  A hijacking.

  I touched my tongue to my lips. Well, all right. Somebody who was perhaps not connected with the kidnapping at all, who had found out where the money was to be dropped. Somebody who had waited in the fog and darkness near that flat sandstone rock, watched me deliver the suitcase, seen Lockridge come for it after I had gone, and then gone after him with the knife.

  The question there was: how could that somebody have known the exact location of the money exchange? There were two possibilities, one on either end of the spectrum-victim or perpetrator. From Lockridge’s side, there existed the chance that he had let the information slip to a girl friend, a relative, a close acquaintance, and that person had taken full advantage of the knowledge. But that did not seem likely; if you’re pulling off a capital-offense crime like a kidnapping, you do not talk about it to anyone-and you especially do not reveal the location of the spot where you’re getting the ransom money. Lockridge had proven himself very shrewd, very cool in handling the rest of things; a lapse of this kind appeared to be out of character.

  From Martinetti’s side, only he and I and Proxmire seemingly knew the location of the drop site-but it was likely, even probable, that Karyn Martinetti and Allan Channing and perhaps even the maid, Cassy, could have been told or overheard it. Could one of them have left after I did, taken a shortcut of some kind to get to the hills before I arrived, hidden out by the sandstone rock …?

  I did not care for that presumption at all. If one of them had left Hillsborough, the police would have that information by now; that person would be immediately suspect, and would have surely known he would be almost from the beginning; it would be a safe supposition, then, that all of them had been waiting with Martinetti for my return, for the hoped-for telephone call from the kidnapper telling them where the boy could be found.

  The only other possibility I could envision along those lines was that one of them had somehow gotten word out of the house to a confederate, relaying to him the drop location. Three hundred thousand dollars was more than sufficient motivation-but were any of them cold enough, corrupt enough, to have jeopardized the life of a nine-year-old boy who was personally close to them to get it? And even if so, that person would obviously have known my mission and the route I would take to reach the drop site; why hadn’t his confederate hijacked mesomewhere along the way instead of waiting for me to deliver the money and leave?