The Snatch nd-1

by Bill Pronzini

  When I got to the corner, I turned into the small grocery store there. A clock on the rear wall, above a refrigerated case, said that it was almost three. Eberhardt had told me yesterday that he was working the four-to-midnight swing, and it was a safe assumption that he would have that tour all week; chances were good that he would still be home now.

  I stepped up to a small check-out counter in front of a window looking out on Alaska Street. An old guy in a pair of red-and-gray suspenders was sitting on a stool, reading a pocketbook western. He looked up at me with tired eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. “Help you?”

  “Have you got a phone here?”

  “Pay phone?”

  “Any kind of phone.”

  “Local call?”

  “Police business,” I said.

  “Hell,” the old guy said, “whyn’t you say so?” He reached under the counter and brought out a telephone and put it down on the scarred surface. His eyes were not quite so tired now, watching me.

  I moved around to where I could look through the window. The Corvair was visible from there, and the gate in the gray-white picket fence. I dialed Eberhardt’s home number, and he answered on the third ring with typical cordiality: “Yeah, what is it?”

  “Plenty, Eb,” I said, and I gave it to him fast and sketched out. He did not interrupt. When I was finished, he said, “You think this Hanlon girl is in there alone with the kid?”

  “It looks that way, but I can’t be certain.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “A little grocery store at the bottom of the hill.”

  “Can you see the house from there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure she can’t get out through the rear?”

  “Not down that slope, she can’t.”

  “And you disabled her car?”

  “Two flat rear tires.”

  “Okay,” Eberhardt said. “I’ll have a couple of plainclothesmen there in fifteen minutes, and squad cars on stand-by in the area.”

  “Are you coming yourself?”

  “Twenty minutes from here.”

  “No sirens, Eb.”

  “Hell no,” he said, and rang off.

  I gave the phone back to the old guy. He was sitting there with his mouth hinged open. “Goddamn,” he said. “God-damn!”

  I stood at the window and stared up the hill and nothing happened. The old guy kept looking at me with his eyes bright and excited behind the spectacles, and it began to make me nervous. I went outside and leaned against the building, head bowed against the sting of the wind.

  Sixteen minutes had passed when the unmarked black Ford sedan came hurtling up Wisconsin, slowed midway in the block, and pulled smoothly and silently to the curb behind Erika’s Valiant. Four men in dark suits got out and came over in front of the grocery. I knew one of them slightly-an inspector named Gilette.

  He touched my shoulder in greeting and said, “Anything happen since you called the lieutenant?”

  “Nothing, Ray.”

  He moved to where he could look up the hill. “Which house is it?” he asked me.

  “The big white one at the end.”

  “Okay.”

  “What now?” one of the other inspectors said. He was young and sandy-haired and grim-jawed.

  “We wait for the lieutenant,” Gilette told him.

  Eberhardt arrived three minutes later. I was staring down Wisconsin, and I saw his four-year-old Dodge make the turn off 23 rd Street and pass a patrol car that had pulled up there in the event it was needed. He took the Dodge in behind the unmarked sedan and got out and walked over to us with his long legs moving in wide, hard strides.

  Eberhardt seemed to have been fashioned of an odd contrast of sharp angles and smooth blunt planes. He had a high, squarely intelligent forehead, a slender bifurcated nose, a perfectly even mouth, a sharply V-pointed chin. His upper torso was thick and blocky, but he had those long legs and the long-fingered angular hands of a musician. His hair, a light brown color made to seem dusty by a salting of gray, was wavy on the sides and straight on top. He was wearing a loose topcoat over a perennial off-the-rack blue suit that was too tight in the shoulders and too baggy in the legs. In a corner of his mouth was another perennial fixture: a short-stemmed, flame-scarred black briar pipe, cold and empty now.

  He nodded to me and said grimly, “She still up there?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  Gilette took him to the corner and pointed out the house. “Sheffield and I will go up on either side if you want it that way, Lieutenant.”

  “Yeah,” Eberhardt said. He looked at the sandy-haired cop. “Go ahead, Sheff, but take it nice and slow.”

  “Right.”

  I watched Sheffield cross the street and start up the hill on the other side. Eberhardt let him get forty yards along, and then said to Gilette, “Go, Ray.”

  Gilette moved out on this side like a guy looking for a particular house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Eberhardt said to the other two inspectors, “When they get up there and in position, the three of us will move. Dan, around to the back door. Jack, you and I right up the stairs in front.”

  They nodded in wordless understanding, and the four of us stood there and watched Gilette and Sheffield climbing the hill. There should have been some tension in the cold air, but I could not feel it; maybe it was because the whole thing was out of my hands now, and there was no more pressure.

  Sheffield had reached the circle and was starting around the Corvair, and Gilette was nearing the point where the street leveled off, when the blonde suddenly came out of the house holding tightly onto the arm of a small boy.

  I stiffened, leaning across Eberhardt’s shoulder, and I could see that the boy was wearing dungarees and a lightweight jacket. He appeared to be unafraid. And then he and Lorraine Hanlon came through the gate in the picket fence and she saw Gilette and Sheffield hurriedly converging on her with their coats thrown back now and their hands resting on the butts of the service revolvers holstered at their belts.

  She came to a complete standstill there on the sidewalk. She did not try to run; she made no move at all.

  She just stood there like a piece of sculpture, holding on to Gary Martinetti’s arm, until Sheffield reached her and took her hand away.

  Eberhardt and the other two inspectors ran up to the top of the hill and through the gate and scattered across the yard. Gilette and Sheffield pulled the blonde and the boy out of the way. Eberhardt kicked open the front door, and he and the cop called Jack went into the house with drawn guns. But by the time I made it up to the circle they had reappeared again, revolvers holstered, to announce that the premises were otherwise empty.

  That’s all there was to it.

  * * * *

  14

  Eberhardt said, “We’ll talk to the boy first.”

  We were in the house now, in a narrow and musty-smelling hallway just off the kitchen. In the living room, Sheffield and the inspector named Dan were standing watch over Lorraine Hanlon; the third inspector, Jack, was with Gary Martinetti in a rear bedroom, and Ray Gilette was making a systematic search of the house.

  I said, “Whatever you think, Eb.”

  We went down the hallway and into the bedroom. The boy was sitting on the edge of a rumpled iron-frame double bed, his hands folded quietly in his lap. He was a nice-looking kid: lean, agile, in the well-fitting dungarees and jacket, with big soft colt-brown eyes and tousled black hair. He looked up as we came in and smiled at us; we had introduced ourselves to him when we’d first brought him inside.

  I looked around the bedroom. The only furniture in there, in addition to the bed, was an unvarnished wooden dresser and a straight-backed chair pushed under a small table at one wall. The table held a couple of empty plates and a tumbler that looked as if it had contained milk at one time, a toy battleship that had been neatly put together from a model set, the plastic components of a second battleship only just begun, and some hardbound children’s adv
enture books stacked in a neat pile on one end. The room’s single window was fastened down on this side and shuttered across the outside, with an outside latch. A door on the left side of the room opened into a small blue-tile bathroom; there was no window in there that I could see.

  Eberhardt said to Gary, “How you feeling, son? All right?”

  “Oh, sure. I’m fine, sir.”

  That kind of politeness went a long way with Eberhardt. He sat down on the bed and put his arm around the boy’s narrow shoulders. “We’ll be taking you home pretty soon. I guess you’re kind of anxious to see your mom and dad.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “But you won’t mind answering a couple of questions for us first, will you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s fine,” Eberhardt said. “Now the first thing-I want to know if you were hurt in any way. Slapped, shoved, anything like that.”

  “No, Miss Frye was pretty nice to me,” Gary said.

  “Miss Frye, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The blond girl out front?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What about the man? What was his name?”

  “You mean the man who came for me at Sandhurst?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “He said for me to call him Kenneth.”

  Lockridge’s first name had been Paul. Eberhardt apparently knew that as well, because he nodded to himself in his dour way. I had the idea that he had briefed himself thoroughly on the details of the kidnapping and murder of Lockridge-not so much because I was involved in it, but more because he was a good cop who liked to keep fully informed on matters which fell, no matter how peripherally, under his jurisdiction.

  He said, “And this Kenneth was nice to you too, was he?”

  “Yes, sir, I guess he was,” Gary answered.

  “Did he tell you why you were being taken out of school?”

  “He said my dad wanted him to.”

  “Where did you go after you left Sandhurst?”

  “We stopped at a service station and Kenneth gave me a bag with these clothes I’m wearing now inside, and said I was to change out of my uniform.”

  “And then what?”

  “We drove up here in Kenneth’s car.”

  “You mean here to this house?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Was Miss Frye here when you arrived?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gary said. “Kenneth introduced me to her, and then he brought me into this room and showed me the Tom Swift books there-some that I haven’t read before-and the models and said I was going to be staying here for a couple of days.”

  “Did you ask him why?”

  “Sure,” the boy said. “He just laughed and told me it was a big secret.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “Well, that I thought something pretty funny was going on. And he said oh, you do? and I said yes, maybe you better take me home now. He just laughed again and locked me up in here so I couldn’t get out at all.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “Well, a little, I guess.”

  “Did you know what was happening?”

  “Sure,” the boy said matter-of-factly. “I was being kidnapped. I knew for sure when he took me out a little while later to talk to my dad on the phone, after Miss Frye had gone out shopping.”

  Eberhardt said, “Did you see Kenneth again after that first day?”

  “Uh-huh. He came the next morning, and I could hear him and Miss Frye yelling at each other out in the living room.”

  “What were they yelling about?”

  “Miss Frye said she didn’t want anything to do with a kidnapping and Kenneth said it was too late now, she already had something to do with it, and Miss Frye started to cry and Kenneth said for her not to worry because it would all be over tonight-that night, I mean- and they could go back East and live it up.”

  “Did Kenneth come and talk to you personally?”

  “For a little while, he did.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me to be good and stay quiet, and I could go home that night.”

  “Did you do what he said?”

  “Yes, sir. I wanted to go home.”

  “But Kenneth didn’t come back, did he?”

  “No, sir, he didn’t. Did you catch him?”

  “Not exactly,” Eberhardt said. He chewed noiselessly on the stem of his pipe. “Did Miss Frye feed you regularly?”

  “Nothing but a lot of sandwiches,” Gary said. “I’m awful tired of sandwiches.”

  “And did she come talk to you?” Eberhardt asked. “Did she let you out of here at all?”

  “She didn’t let me out,” Gary said. “I guess ‘cause she was afraid I’d try to run or something if she did. There’s two doors into the bathroom, and she’d lock this one and put some milk and sandwiches in there and then unlock it again so I could get the stuff.”

  “Tell me what happened yesterday, Gary.”

  “Nothing much. Miss Frye went around slamming things and I could hear her walking up and down. Then she went out and came back and after that she was pretty quiet. But I could hear her bawling once when I went over to the door to listen.”

  “Did she leave you alone last night?”

  “No,” Gary said, “but she left awful early this morning. I heard the front door slam, and then it got quiet the way it does when nobody’s around, so I knew she’d gone away. I tried yelling for a while, but I didn’t think anybody could hear me, so I quit that. Then I thought about breaking the window, but those shutters are latched on the outside; you can see it if you look hard-the latch, I mean. I just sat here and waited.” He looked down at the sterile whiteness of the cheap new tennis shoes on his small feet, and as if ashamed he said, “I cried once, too-but only for a little while.”

  “What did Miss Frye say to you when she came this afternoon?” Eberhardt asked gently.

  “She didn’t say anything right away. I heard her come into the house and pace around for a while and rattle some glasses and stuff in the kitchen. Then she came and told me she was going to see that I got home because it was the only thing for her to do. Then she unlocked the door and got hold of my arm and took me outside, and that’s when you and the other officers came and rescued me.”

  Eberhardt patted the boy’s head and got up on his feet. “You’re a brave boy, Gary,” he said. “You stay with Inspector Nelson over there for a few minutes while I talk to Miss Frye, and then we’ll see that you get right home. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said, and smiled up at us. It was an infectious smile, and we were both grinning as we went out.

  In the hallway, I said, “Some kid, huh, Eb?”

  “Yeah,” Eberhardt said. “That’s a fact, all right.”

  We went down the hall to the living room.

  * * * *

  15

  It was dark in there, with only a single tassel-shaded floor lamp on one side of the room casting pale light over the drab interior. The furniture was old and tired and dusty; a faded crocheted afghan covered the backrest of an overstuffed velveteen couch, and there were yellow-tinged antimacassars on the arms of two matching chairs.

  In the exact center of the couch, Lorraine Hanlon sat with her knees pressed tightly together, her hands twisted in a large handkerchief. The long blond hair seemed damp and lifeless and painfully artificial in the dimness, and her coral-colored lips were starkly contrasted to the pinched whiteness of a softly round face. She would have been, in other circumstances, attractive in a faintly brassy, too-voluptuous way; hers was the kind of prettiness that would fade rapidly after thirty-five and the inevitable advent of poundage in all the wrong places.

  Sheffield and the inspector named Dan were sitting quietly in the two overstuffed chairs, angled to face the couch. I stayed behind them, out of the way, and Eberhardt walked over and stood in front of the girl. She lifted her head to look at him, and there was a kind of dull fear in her
violet-shadowed eyes. She had said nothing at all that I knew of since she had been taken into custody, but I had the feeling that she would not be uncooperative. The fear was too obviously strong in her.

  Eberhardt said, “You’ve been put under arrest, Miss Hanlon, and it’s my duty to advise you of your personal rights.” He went on to do that, and concluded with, “Do you understand all of your rights as I’ve outlined them?”

  In a small voice that was reminiscent of the librarian’s, she said, “Yes, I understand.”

  “Are you willing, then, to answer questions without the presence of counsel?”

  She sighed softly and nodded.

  “All right, Miss Hanlon,” Eberhardt said. He rested one hip against the curved arm of the couch, and looked over at Sheffield; Sheffield had a note pad and a pencil poised on his right knee. “Suppose you tell us your story.”

  “Where should I start?” dully, resignedly.

  “Start with Kenneth,” Eberhardt said. “Or maybe you knew him as Paul Lockridge.”

  “Yes,” Lorraine said, “Paul Lockridge.” There was bitterness mingled with the wooden resignation now — bitterness and something else, too, an emotion perhaps far more basic.

  “How long did you know him?”

  “About three weeks,” she said. “I met him one night in the Copper Penny, on Union Street. We had some drinks and he asked me out and I accepted. He was a very … very smooth guy. Do you know?”

  “Yeah. What did he tell you about himself?”

  “Not very much. He said he was from Cleveland or someplace like that in the Midwest, and that he was in San Francisco on business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “He never told me.”

  “Didn’t you ask him?”

  “Sure, but he just made some joke about it being one of those things the world wasn’t quite ready for, and he’d got in on the ground floor. Or something like that.”

  “And that’s all he confided in you?”

  “About himself, yes,” Lorraine said. “I thought it was a little funny, you know? because he seemed like the kind of guy who would talk about himself a lot, but he always changed the subject when I asked him. He was … sort of mysterious and exciting. Do you know?”