The Snatch nd-1

by Bill Pronzini

  There was a package of cigarettes on the coffee table, and I looked at it and thought about having one. But the craving was not at all strong, and I did not want to provoke Erika into any kind of argument. Besides that, I had a running start on quitting them now, the kind of start I would not have again; if I was going to do it at all, this was the right time.

  I picked up the copy of Black Mask that I had been reading two nights ago, and began to thumb idly through it. I started to glance over the story I had begun then, without any real hope of being able to concentrate, but the opening gripped me this time and I was ten pages involved in it when Erika came in with a tray a few minutes later.

  She put the tray down on the coffee table, clearing away some of the dishes and things. She said, “Don’t you ever tire of reading those silly magazines?”

  “No,” I said. “Don’t you ever tire of cleaning up?

  “What do you think?”

  “You’ll make some guy a good wife anyway.”

  “I can give you the names of two guys who wouldn’t agree with that,” she said.

  “A hell of a lot they know.”

  “Maybe they know best of all.”

  “Nuts,” I said. I looked at the tray. There was some beef broth and a fluffy omelette and a dish of applesauce. It wasn’t the kind of stuff I liked to eat as a rule, but I sat up dutifully and put the pulp aside and went to work on the food.

  I was halfway through the meal when the telephone rang. I looked up at the sunburst clock over the false fireplace; it was eight-thirty. I said to Erika, “Answer that, will you, honey? If it’s Louis Martinetti, I’ll talk to him. Nobody else.”

  She looked at me sharply, and then went into the bedroom and cut off the phone in mid-ring. I heard her tell somebody that I wasn’t available for comment just now, she was sorry, and a moment later she came back into the front room. “Somebody from the Chronicle” she said.

  I finished the meal she had prepared, and Erika took the tray away and came back and began to clean up. I lay down again and tried to read some more of the Black Mask story, but it was no good now. I was tense and waiting for Martinetti’s call, because I knew what I was going to tell him; I had known it the instant the telephone rang before and I had thought it might be him.

  He called at five to nine.

  Erika went in to answer it, and returned with the phone on its long cord. She gave it to me, mouthing Martinetti’s name silently, and went away into the kitchen. I said, “Yes, Mr. Martinetti?”

  “There’s nothing yet,” he said, “nothing at all.” Even over the wire, his exhaustion was plainly evident. “I’ve just heard from the District Attorney’s people.”

  “Then you still want me to keep working for you?”

  “Yes. Will you do it?”

  I blew a soft breath away from the mouthpiece. “All right, Mr. Martinetti. I’ll do what I can. But I want you to understand that it probably won’t be much, and that I don’t want any money unless I make some kind of contribution.”

  “Whatever you wish,” he said.

  “Call me at any time if you have some news. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll know there aren’t any further developments.”

  “Yes.” He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I … I appreciate this. More than I can tell you.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I hope I can help, Mr. Martinetti.”

  We said goodbye and I replaced the handset in its cradle. I sat there and looked at the phone and I felt better about it all now, having reached a decision. I turned away to lie down again and Erika was standing just behind the couch with the tightness back at the corners of her mouth and her eyes very dark.

  I said, “You were listening.”

  “Yes, I was listening,” softly, flatly.

  “Erika …”

  “You damned fool,” she said in sibilant tones, “oh, you poor damned fool. You can’t let it alone, can you? You’ve got to stay right in there until the bitter end.”

  “Look,” I said, “you don’t understand …”

  “Don’t I? I understand very well, you’d be surprised what I understand. I understand that you’ve got a knife wound in your stomach from this business, this skulking around in the night, and now you want to keep right on with the case. Can’t walk out on a client, isn’t that the way it goes? Well, maybe next time the man with the knife won’t miss. Maybe next time he’ll kill you and you’ll die gloriously in the name of truth and right and justice.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Erika …”

  “No, you hear me out,” she said. “I’m going to say what’s on my mind, what’s been on my mind for a long time now. I’m fed up, old bear. I’m fed up with waiting around for you to change, for you to grow up. I’m fed up with this private-detective business of yours, this cloak-and-dagger crap, this pointless losing proposition that you cling to so damned tenaciously. You haven’t had ten clients this year, and yet you go down to that musty-dusty office of yours every morning and you sit there and wait for the telephone to ring like some character in one of those pulp magazines you collect.”

  I could feel the anger beginning inside me, and my stomach throbbed painfully now. But it was impotent anger, because there was nothing for me to say to her, no way to make her understand.

  She kept on with it. She said, “You want to know the real reason you quit the police force to open up that agency of yours, the real deep-down reason? I’ll tell you: it was and is an obsession to be just like those pulp-magazine detectives and you never would have been satisfied until you’d tried it. Well, now you’ve tried it, for ten years you’ve tried it, and you just don’t want to let go, you can’t let go. You’re living in a world that doesn’t exist and never did, in an era that’s twenty-five-years dead. You’re a kid dreaming about being a hero, and yet you haven’t got the guts or the flair to go out and be one; you’re too honest and too sensitive and too ethical, too affected by real corruption and real human misery to be the kind of lone wolf private eye you’d like to be. You’re no damned hero, and it hurts you that you’re not, and that’s why you won’t let go of it. And the whole while you’re eating and sleeping and living yesteryear’s dream world, to salve your wounded pride you’re deluding yourself that you’re an anachronism in a real-life world that couldn’t care less one way or the other. You’re nothing but a little boy, and I’m damned if I’ll have a little boy in my bed every night of the year. That’s the reason I wouldn’t and I won’t marry you; I can’t compete with an obsession, I won’t compete with it-”

  Abruptly she stopped, face flushed with the passion of her words, her gray eyes flashing and silvery with what may have been tears. Then she turned and ran over to the closet and got her coat out. I struggled up onto my feet, but before I could reach her she had the door open and I could hear her shoes clicking on the stairs going down. A moment later the front door slammed and there was only silence.

  I stood listening to the echo of her words in my ears, the cutting sting of them. No, I thought, no, she’s wrong, she’s all the way wrong, that’s not the way it is, Jesus, that’s just not the way it is!

  I went back to the couch and sat there with the pain hot and sharp now in my stomach, staring over at the door. I said aloud, to break the deepening silence, “She’ll be back. She didn’t mean any of it, not that way.”

  The words sounded uncertain, supplicating, in the suddenly cold and shabby room.

  * * * *

  11

  The next morning I awoke feeling stiff and sore. There was a dull throbbing in my temples, and a sharp ache at the center of the lump on my forehead. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror; the face that stared back at me was an unhealthy gray and etched with too many lines and crags, like a contour map of an arid and desolate terrain. The whites of my eyes had a rheumy look to them-dull green agates floating in partially curdled milk-and my lips were puffed and dry. The beard stubble on my chin and patterned thickly across my cheeks was the
color of old pewter.

  I took four aspirins out of the bottle in the medicine cabinet and swallowed a little water with them, and shaved, and passed the toothbrush over the smoke stains on my teeth, and combed my gray-streaked hair, and studied myself again, critically, in the mirror. I did not look or feel much better. I walked back into the bedroom and sat on the bed and stared at the backs of my hands. They were deeply veined and faintly gray. You and Martinetti, I thought. A couple of sick, tired old men-but he would recover after a while, because that was the kind of man he was; nothing would ever completely destroy his vitality, his vigor, his youth. But what about you, tiger? Yeah, what about you?

  I stripped off my pajamas and looked at the bandages to see if there was any trouble with the wound. They were clean and dry. I began to dress, slowly and carefully, in one of my two remaining suits-a charcoal worsted that was four years old and had a faint shine along the seat of the trousers. I put on the white shirt Erika had bought, and tied a knitted green tie and fastened it to the shirt with a gold bar clasp. I had just gotten that accomplished when the telephone rang.

  I thought it might be Martinetti, but it was, instead, Allan Channing. I frowned a little as he identified himself; his voice was cold and angry and precise.

  He said, “I’m calling to let you know that I think Lou Martinetti made a very grave error in judgment in hiring you as an investigator after what happened the other night. You’ve caused enough trouble as it is.”

  You supercilious son of a bitch, I thought. I said, “Is that supposed to be some kind of warning, Mr. Channing?”

  “Call it what you like,” he said. “I hold you personally responsible for what happened to my money, and if it isn’t recovered, I fully intend to take steps to see that you don’t have the opportunity to inflict similar damages on other individuals. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly,” I said between clenched teeth.

  “Lou Martinetti is a very good friend of mine, even if he is prone to irrational ideas and decisions at times, and I don’t want any further fumblings in his behalf. I suggest you call him immediately and resign from his employ.”

  “It must be hell to be a man like you, Channing,” I said. “It must be pure hell to value a sum of money more than the life of a nine-year-old boy.”

  “Listen here-” Channing began.

  “Nuts to you, brother,” I said, and I slammed the phone down in his ear.

  I stood there shaking a little. The bastard, the soulless bastard. I went over and sat down on the bed again and after a while the trembling subsided and I was all right. I got up, and the telephone bell sounded again.

  It was Dana Eberhardt this time, wanting to know how I felt and if I needed anything. She was one of the most maternal women I had ever known, and she had been fussing over me for twenty years. She had tried to marry me off to half of her eligible female relatives at one time or another, and it was a great source of frustration for her that she had never even come close to succeeding. A running joke between Eberhardt and me was that if she ever found out I had spent a weekend with her cousin Jeannie in Carmel six years ago, she would bring out a shotgun and march Jeannie and me to the nearest altar.

  I assured Dana that I was all right, and that I would take care of myself and that I would come up to see them the first chance I got. I wished she had not found out what had happened, because the chances were that I would never hear the end of it. She and Eberhardt were as bad as Erika, in their own way, when it came to my profession.

  Erika. I looked at the phone, thinking that I wanted to talk to her-and yet I did not want to talk to her. I could still feel the unfair bite of her words last night. But I would be needing the use of a car today, and she kept hers in a lot on Mission Street, not far from my office.

  I dialed the number of her firm in the financial district, and the switchboard there put me through to her. “Well,” she said, “how nice.” Her voice was cool. “You sound very fit this morning. Did you sleep well?”

  “I slept fine,” I lied. “Listen, Erika, I called to ask if I could borrow your car today.”

  Silence. I counted mutely to eleven, and then she said, “Is that all you wanted?”

  “For now, yes.”

  “I’ll call the garage for you, then,” she said flatly. “You won’t get any blood on the upholstery, will you? If you’re stabbed again, or shot, I mean.”

  “That’s not funny, Erika.”

  “It wasn’t intended to be,” she said, and she broke the connection with a soft click.

  * * * *

  I took a taxi down to the parking garage on Mission and picked up the Valiant and drove it over to Taylor Street. My office was in the Kores Building, a couple of blocks off Market, and I parked perversely in a yellow loading zone a half-block away. The sun was out by then — it was after ten-but there was a chill autumn wind blowing through the concrete-and-steel canyons of the city. I walked as quickly as I thought it wise to be walking, my hands shoved down in the pockets of the heavy tweed topcoat I had put on before leaving my apartment.

  The entrance to the Kores Building was nothing more than a narrow doorway wedged between a dealer in old coins and a luncheonette. I went inside, and the lobby was as it always was: cold and dark and still. I checked the row of tenants’ mailboxes, found mine empty, and then took the elevator up to the third floor.

  My office smelled of dust and stale cigarette smoke. I went over and opened the window behind my desk a little, letting in the traffic noise from Taylor Street below. Then I knelt down gingerly by the steam radiator and fiddled with the controls and listened to the pipes banging somewhere in the bowels of the building.

  A hot plate rested on the top of the single metal file cabinet, and I went there and lifted the lid on the coffee pot sitting on it and looked inside. A faint greenish substance had gathered around the edges of the coffee I had made three mornings ago. I carried the pot into the alcove on the right-hand side of the single room, washed it out in the sink, and made some fresh. After I had plugged in the hot plate, I sat behind the desk in my overcoat, listening to the ringing knock of the radiator, waiting for it to warm up and for the coffee to boil. The clock on the wall above the file cabinet read 10:37.

  I picked up the phone and called my answering service. There were no messages from anyone I cared to call back. I thanked the girl and told her I would be in for a while.

  The coffee began bubbling. I got up again and poured some into a clean cup and carried it back to the desk. I stared at the steam rising in faint curling wisps and wondered where I was going to start today.

  Martinetti had not called, and that meant there were still no further developments. I did not particularly care for the idea of driving down to Hillsborough and facing the pall of gloom that would be the Martinetti household, but that seemed to be the only logical way of approaching an investigation. I could talk to each of the people there, do a little circumspect probing …

  The sound of the knob turning and the door being pushed open caught and held my attention, and I watched with some surprise the harried form of Dean Proxmire step into the office.

  He wore a belted tan trenchcoat, stylish and nicely cut, and there was some color in his hollowed cheeks from the stinging wind. His lips were pursed into a thin horizontal line, and his deeply hooded eyes told me that he was nervous and very tired, and perhaps just a little unsure of himself. He shut the door, looked at me, looked away, and let his gaze flicker over the office: the pale papered walls and the pebbled-brown asphalt tile floor; the old leather couch outside the low rail divider, set beneath a framed photograph of my license and a photograph of my graduating class at the Police Academy; three chairs and a small table with a dusty glass ashtray on it and some magazines that nobody had ever read; the file cabinet, of a somber gray metal, sharing the wall beyond the alcove with the steam radiator and a four-color calendar featuring a sunset on bucolic meadows; the second-hand oak desk with its cluttered surface and the coffee
cup sitting in the middle of the memo blotter and me behind it watching him steadily.

  Proxmire took it all in very slowly, and what he saw seemed to give him some assurance. He put his eyes on my face and left them there and walked purposefully through the gate in the divider and over in front of the desk. I got up on my feet because I did not want him talking down to me in any way. I said, “Good morning, Mr. Proxmire.”

  “Is it?” he said stiffly.

  I let that pass. “What can I do for you?”

  “I understand you’ve consented to do some investigating for Mr. Martinetti.”

  I shrugged noncommittally.

  “Well, I should think after what happened to you, you’d want no more part in this business,” he said. “I should think you’d be damned glad to have gotten out of it with your life.”

  “Which means what, Mr. Proxmire?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “I take it you don’t like the idea of my continuing on the case in an investigative capacity.”

  “Frankly, I don’t like it at all.”

  “Why?”

  “Would you like the flat truth?”

  “Of course.”

  “I have my doubts as to your competency,” Proxmire said. The belligerence in his voice seemed a little forced.

  “Is that right? Would you mind telling me the reason?”

  “That should be obvious.”

  “Martinetti doesn’t blame me for what happened two nights ago.”

  “Listen,” Proxmire said, “I don’t like the idea of someone like you snooping around. God knows, we’ve got enough problems just now, what with no word on Gary …”

  “We, Mr. Proxmire?”

  His cheeks seemed to gain more color. “The Martinettis, I meant.”

  I said, “And just what did you mean by ‘snooping around’?”

  “You know perfectly well what I meant,” Proxmire said. “Martinetti has some damn-fool notion that someone who was in his house the day of the ransom delivery is responsible for what happened to you, for murdering the kidnapper, Lockridge. And he wants you to check up on us.”