The Snatch nd-1

by Bill Pronzini

  Eberhardt nodded sourly and said, “You dated him regularly the past three weeks, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did he live?”

  “The Jack Tar Hotel.”

  Eberhardt glanced briefly in my direction, and we were both thinking the same thing: the Jack Tar was a huge downtown hotel, catering to visiting businessmen, and the flow through there was heavy and constant. There was nothing particularly memorable about Lockridge, from the photo I had seen in the paper, and he would have blended perfectly, anonymously, into the milieu-just another average face in a thousand average faces a week. That seemed to explain why there had been no response as yet to the news media’s plea for assistance; he had apparently checked out of the Tar immediately prior to driving up into the San Bruno hills to the ransom drop, which also explained the suitcase he had had in the rented car. Registration cards are filed away quickly in a place like the Jack Tar, and if he had not used his name often, there was no reason why any of the clerks or bellboys would have remembered it.

  Eberhardt said, “Where did you go when you went out with Lockridge?”

  “Nightclubs, mostly. North Beach and over to Jack London Square in Oakland. Like that.”

  “He had plenty of money, then.”

  “He seemed to have.”

  “Did you always go alone, just the two of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he have any friends in the Bay Area that you know about?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He never mentioned anyone?”

  “Well,” Lorraine said slowly, “just this cousin he said lived down the Peninsula.”

  “What was this cousin’s name?”

  “He didn’t say, but I think he must have been referring to what he was going to do-the kidnapping, I mean. I don’t think there really was a cousin.” A shudder passed through her, and she twisted the handkerchief into a tight rope between her trembling hands. Her eyes roamed Eberhardt’s face imploringly. “You’ve got to believe one thing: I didn’t know Paul was going to kidnap that little boy until after he’d already done it. I swear to God I didn’t; I wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in it if I had.”

  Eberhardt tapped the stem of his pipe against his front teeth and said nothing for a long moment. Then: “What was his story to you in the beginning?”

  “He … he said that this cousin of his had a little boy, and Paul was going to take care of him for a couple of days while the cousin went somewhere on a trip. But he said the boy was kind of a problem child and had this big imagination, and he was being punished on account of some kid’s trick he’d pulled. He was supposed to be locked up in his room.”

  “And you believed all that?”

  She looked at her quaking hands. “I … I wanted to believe him. He said we’d go away together, back East someplace. He said he was coming into a lot of money very soon.”

  “Uh-huh,” Eberhardt said.

  “It’s the truth, I swear it. He asked me if I would watch over the boy for a couple of days while he attended to some business, and just not to pay attention to what the boy said. He told me to go ahead and quit my job-I worked for this accounting firm as a secretary-and we’d leave as soon as the boy went home to the cousin. It seemed all right, it really did.”

  “Who rented this house? Lockridge?”

  “Yes, by telephone I think he said. But I didn’t even know about this place until Paul told me the night before he brought the boy.”

  “Didn’t you think it was kind of odd? That he had rented a house when he was getting ready to leave the Bay Area? That he was living in a hotel instead of here if he’d had it all along?”

  “Yes, a little. But I … liked Paul. I didn’t want anything to be wrong, don’t you see?”

  “When did you decide something was wrong?”

  “After he brought the boy here,” Lorraine said, “and locked him up in the bedroom so fast.”

  “But you didn’t say anything to him then.”

  “No.” She kept on twisting the handkerchief. “I did a lot of thinking that night, and I decided that maybe … maybe Paul had kidnapped the boy.”

  “Why didn’t you call the authorities right then?”

  “I wasn’t sure, that’s why. I wanted to ask Paul. But when I called the hotel, he wasn’t there. So I … I just waited.”

  “And when he came the next day, what did you do?”

  “I told him what I suspected.”

  “Did he deny it?”

  “At first he did, but then he just shrugged and admitted it. He said there was a lot of money involved, and some other considerations too, but that there were no risks and I shouldn’t worry.” She laughed humorlessly, bitterly. “No risks-and now he’s dead.”

  Eberhardt said, “So you went along with him.”

  “What could I do? I was already involved, wasn’t I? And he kept saying nothing could go wrong. I couldn’t … I couldn’t just sit down and call the police. Besides, I … oh, damn it, I loved him. I loved Paul Lockridge! I wanted to be with him, to live the way he said we would live, to have the things I’ve never had before. Do you see, do you know?”

  It was very quiet. The only sound was Sheffield’s pencil moving across the rough paper of the note pad. I felt a little sorry for Lorraine Hanlon, for all the Lorraine Hanlons of the world. They were early-blossoming flesh — nature’s compensation for insipid intelligence ofttimes- and sensuality in lieu of rationality was their way. They measured happiness in material possessions and hedonistic accomplishments, and they invariably believed their bodies before they listened to their minds. They were ripe prey, standard fodder, for the appetites and manipulations of men like Paul Lockridge. Lorraine Hanlon was a pawn, the same way her little librarian sister was a pawn-on different sides of the board, perhaps, but still a pawn, always a pawn, and life sacrifices its pawns for the same reasons a chess player sacrifices his: to protect and maintain the stronger and more powerful ones, the rooks and the knights, the king and the queen.

  Eberhardt broke the protracted stillness, finally, by asking quietly, “Lockridge was suppose to come for you the night of the ransom delivery, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Lorraine answered dolorously. “He said it would be late, after eleven. Then we would take the boy down the Peninsula and let him off somewhere and just keep on driving. We would go to Las Vegas first …” Her eyes were dry, but there was pain in them that was evident even from where I was; it was the pain of shattered hopes and a future filled with grayness. “But he didn’t come. I waited up until three o’clock, and then I went to bed but I didn’t sleep at all.”

  “What did you think had happened?”

  “I thought … I thought he’d just gone off without me. That he’d gotten the money and left me to handle the boy.”

  “But you weren’t sure, and you did nothing.”

  “That’s right. I waited all through the next day, yesterday, and finally I couldn’t take any more of this house and I went out to buy a newspaper. And I saw … saw Paul’s photo and that he was dead …”

  Eberhardt said, “Why didn’t you let the boy go last night, after you came back?”

  “I was afraid,” she said. “I thought you-the police-might think I had something to do with Paul’s murder. I was confused and … and sick over his death. I told you, I loved him.”

  “What decided you today?”

  “I had to have somebody to talk to, some company; I couldn’t stay in this house another minute. I went to where I’ve been living with my sister. She could tell something was wrong, and she had recognized Paul’s picture from the one time he had come there to pick me up on a date; she went to talk to a detective”-her eyes flicked over to me, quickly, and then fastened again on the handkerchief she was still knotting between her fingers-“and when she came back and told me what she’d done and tried to get me to turn myself in, I just … I panicked. The only thing I could think to do was get back here and take the bo
y someplace and release him, and that way I would be safe.”

  “What were you going to do then?”

  “Run away, I guess, I don’t know where. Just run away. I … oh God, oh God!” She put her face in her hands and the tears came then, swift and silent, and her body oscillated heavily, as if she were caught between two powerful and unresisting magnets.

  Eberhardt stood and looked at me and shook his head in a kind of sadly cynical way. Then he turned and went over to Sheffield and said softly, “Take her down to the Hall, Sheff, you and Dan. It’s time the boy’s parents were notified that he’s all right; after that, we’ll be taking him home.”

  Eberhardt and I went into the cluttered, ancient-applianced kitchen. Just as we did, Ray Gilette came in through the back door. He said, “I went over everything, inside and out, Lieutenant. No weapons and no suitcase filled with money. A flat zero.”

  Eberhardt nodded. He looked over at a wall phone above a plastic-topped dinette littered with coffee cups and empty glasses and an ashtray overflowing with coral-tipped cigarette butts. “You want to make the call?” he asked me. “You’re the fair-haired boy.”

  “I’d like that, Eb,” I said.

  “Go ahead, then.”

  I went over to the phone and dialed Martinetti’s number from memory. He answered personally on the first ring. I told him in clear, fast words that his son had been found, that Gary was fine and safe, that he would be brought home in just a little while. I listened to a giant explosion of breath, to humbly murmured words, “Thank God, thank God.” I told him the rest of it then, touching high points for him, and I had just finished when I heard Karyn Martinetti’s voice demanding shrilly, plaintively, in the background, “What is it, Lou, what is it?”-and Martinetti’s answer, “Gary’s been found, he’s safe, he’s coming home,” and her low cry of relief, joy, and then the sound of weeping.

  There were some confused moments then, and I heard other voices in the background-Proxmire’s, what seemed like Donleavy’s. I could picture the scene in Martinetti’s study or wherever he was talking from: the deep sighs of total relief, the wan and tired smiles, the weakness of limbs that comes with the sudden and complete collapse of tension. I could almost feel the elation, the relief, emanating over the wire; the two emotions were strong inside me as well as I sat there holding the phone and listening.

  Finally Martinetti said, “Are you still there? We’ve got a little bit of a carnival atmosphere here right now.”

  “It’s nice to hear,” I said.

  He laughed softly, a little numbly. “I just don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t need to say anything, Mr. Martinetti,” I told him. “I think I understand how you feel.”

  “Will you be bringing Gary home yourself?”

  “I’ll be coming along, yes.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  “We should be there within the hour.”

  “This girl, this accomplice of Lockridge’s,” he said. “Has she told you anything about his death, or about the money?”

  “A few things, but nothing vital. We’ll tell you about it when we get down there.”

  “All right.” He paused to listen to a voice near him, and then said, “Mr. Donleavy wants to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  Donleavy’s voice came on the line. “Nice work,” he said, and he sounded genuinely complimentary, genuinely pleased. “I was listening over Mr. Martinetti’s shoulder.”

  “Thanks, Donleavy.”

  “Listen, who’s in charge up there?”

  “Lieutenant Eberhardt.”

  “Yeah, I know him a little,” Donleavy said. “He’s a good man. Can you put him on?”

  “Sure.”

  Eberhardt was leaning on the drainboard, tamping tobacco from a cracked leather pouch into his pipe. I motioned to him and he came over and took the phone and talked to Donleavy for a while. Eb gave him a fast rundown of what we had learned in talking to the boy and to Lorraine Hanlon; from his end of the remainder of the conversation I gathered that Donleavy was sending Reese up to San Francisco to talk to Lorraine at the Hall, and that he was staying at Martinetti’s to wait for our arrival.

  Eberhardt rang off eventually and got out a butane pipe lighter and put flame to the black briar bowl. When he had it drawing to his satisfaction, he said, “Come on, hot shot. Let’s go give a little boy back to his family.”

  * * * *

  16

  It was almost five-thirty when I turned Erika’s Valiant onto Tamarack Drive in Hillsborough. There were a couple of cars pulled up outside number 416-a dark brown Ford and a black Plymouth-and I supposed they belonged to Donleavy and maybe some other one of the District Attorney’s people. I parked behind the Plymouth on the cool, quiet street; a thin early-evening breeze sent oak and eucalyptus leaves skipping among the deepening shadows cast by the surrounding trees.

  Gary had the rear door open almost before I had brought the Valiant to a complete stop. He ran up to the wooden footbridge and across it and swung open the gate. Eberhardt and I got out and watched him running up the gravel path with his legs and arms pumping like a well-coached sprinter. The front door opened before he got fifty feet, and Karyn Martinetti-slender and very young-looking in a pale yellow cotton dress-came flying out with her arms stretched wide, shouting, “Gary, Gary, Gary!” and enclosed him in her grasp and swung him around and clung to him with a possessiveness that was almost feral in its intensity. Her face was sheened with tears, free of cosmetics, and she looked radiant now that her son was safe again in her arms.

  “Oh, honey, Gary, are you all right, did they hurt you, how do you feel, honey?” she crooned at him.

  He hugged her, and then patted her brushed blond hair in a kind of manly tolerance for the histrionics of women. “Sure, Mom,” he said, “I’m okay. You don’t have to worry any more.”

  She made half-laughing, half-crying sounds and kept on holding him very close to her breast. I looked beyond them and saw that Martinetti-with Proxmire at his heels-had come outside now; both of them wore rumpled slacks and old sweaters and weary smiles. They hunkered down, one on either side of the woman and the boy, and Martinetti clasped his son’s face between his hands and kissed his forehead. Proxmire looked as if he wanted to do the same thing, but he just squatted there with an odd sadness to the cast of his face and his eyes shining a little as he looked at Gary. I thought: He’s really fond of that boy, you can’t fake a look like that.

  Beside me, Eberhardt said softly, “This is kind of a nice thing to see, but somehow it makes you uncomfortable to watch it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean, Eb.”

  We stood quietly out of the way and let them have their reunion in some privacy. I noticed that Donleavy stood framed in the doorway, in blue dacron today, allowing the Martinettis and Proxmire the same privilege; he looked typically sad and sleepy. Eberhardt shuffled his feet around and began to fill his pipe with quick, nervous gestures. I thought his discomfiture was partially due to the poignancy he was witnessing, and partially because he felt no more at home in a milieu like Hillsborough than I did.

  Martinetti straightened up after a time and walked over to where Eberhardt and I were standing. The change in him, now that his son had been found and returned home, was considerable; but the deep fissures in the hewn granite were still visible, and his eyes remained sunken even though there was life in them again-some of the strength and power of the man. The draining tension, the total lack of sleep, the fear and the worry, had left marks which would not heal in a single day or a single week. It would be some time yet before the haunted, skeletal look of him was completely gone, before the chiseled features were smooth and hard and clear of the corpselike grayness which still faintly tinged them.

  He reached for my hand and shook it warmly and thanked me mutely with his eyes. Then he looked at Eb and said, “Is this Lieutenant Eberhardt?”

  I said, “Yes, it is,” and made simple introd
uctions.

  “I’d like to shake your hand, too, Lieutenant,” Martinetti said, and they did that solemnly. He smiled with infinite weariness. “Come into the house. We’ll have a celebratory drink. God, I could use a drink just now.”

  Eberhardt said he could use one, too, and that was unusual, because he did not like to take anything alcoholic when he was on duty; he was old-fashioned, or perhaps the word is sensible, that way. His agreeableness to the offer told me just how uncomfortable he was.

  We followed Martinetti along the path. His wife was taking Gary into the house now, her arm tight around his shoulders, holding him hard against her side; she was not about to let go of him just yet. Proxmire followed them and then stopped at the door and hovered there nervously; when Martinetti went in and Eberhardt followed him, Proxmire took my arm and drew me aside.

  “Listen,” he said earnestly, “I want to apologize for this morning.”

  There was genuine contrition on the deeply hollowed surface of his face, in the tired and pouched depths of his eyes. I said, “You were under a heavy strain, Proxmire, I can understand that.”

  “Yes, but I had no call to come down on you that way. I … feel like a complete ass.”

  “We all feel like asses now and then,” I said. “Let’s just forget about it, why don’t we?”

  “No hard feelings?”

  “No,” I said, “no hard feelings.”

  “You’re a generous man,” Proxmire said, and gave me his hand. I took it, and he smiled, and we stepped into the house.

  The others were in the living room, and we went in there. Donleavy was standing over by the draped window with Eberhardt, talking softly to him. Karyn Martinetti had been sitting on the couch; she got to her feet when she saw me and threw her arms around my neck without shame and kissed me hard on the cheek. Her hair was very soft and smelled of violets in a pleasantly vague sort of way.

  She whispered, “Thank you,” and stepped back, smiling, her eyes still wet. Then she turned back to the couch and sat down with her arm around Gary’s shoulders.