The Vanished

by Bill Pronzini

  ‘Not old Roy. Hell, I know for a fact most of his pay went to her for banking. He was really hooked, poor bastard.’

  I shifted position on the chair to get rid of a cramp forming in my left hip. ‘Was there a message along with the money Sands wired you?’

  ‘Just a few words on mine.’

  ‘Did you happen to save it?’

  ‘No reason to at the time.’

  ‘What about you?’ I asked Hendryx.

  ‘Same thing. Mine went into the fireplace.’

  ‘Can either of you remember what was said?’

  ‘Here’s the thirty I owe you and have a Merry Christmas-something like that.’

  ‘Ditto,’ Gilmartin said.

  I nodded, and did some more thinking. At length I said, ‘Is there anything at all you can think of that might help me locate Sands? Something in his past, something he may have let slip at one time or another?’

  Hendryx frowned and ran a hand carefully over the thinning hair on the crown of his head. He said, ‘No, nothing.’ Gilmartin rolled the sweating surface of his glass over his forehead; with his other hand he made a negative gesture.

  I could not think of anything else I wanted to ask either of them, and so I said, ‘I guess that’s it,’ and got on my feet. I thanked them for their time, shook hands with them, promised to let them know if I learned anything definite. Hendryx said I could call on Rich and him any time if there was anything further they could do, and then I went out and down the steps to my car.

  I sat there for a moment, listening to the wind sing a sad, humming song through the high green trees. I wondered, oddly, if the topic of conversation behind the glass up there was Roy Sands or a redheaded French postcard; then I got the thing going and went away without looking back.

  CHAPTER THREE

  As I slowed to pay the southbound toll on the Golden Gate Bridge, I thought it might be an idea to drive over to Vicente Street-not far from there-and see if Doug Rosmond had come home. I did not much feel like going back to the dusty emptiness of my office, and the car was running all right since I had stopped to put water in the radiator after leaving Pinewood Lane.

  I took the 19th Avenue exit off the toll plaza and drove through Golden Gate Park and turned westward on Vicente. There was no fog today-not yet anyway-and from the vicinity of Cheryl Rosmond’s home you could see the slate-gray water of the Pacific beyond Ocean Beach. It had the kind of desolate appearance the sea achieves in winter, primitive and unsettling, like looking at something out of the dim past. Like the deserts and the majestic mountain ranges, the oceans were something else that did not change with the passage of time.

  The number Elaine Kavanaugh had given me was a white box-shaped rough-stucco house identical to its neighbors on both sides of the street, crowded together in long rows like beads on a tightly strung necklace. It had a small square of lawn, and a wide set of wooden stairs inside a stucco frame leading up to the front entrance. White filmy curtains covered the rectangular window to one side.

  I parked my car at the curb and got out and climbed the steps. The wind blowing in from the sea was harsh and penetrating, and I hunched my neck in the collar of my topcoat as I pressed the doorbell. I stood waiting, shivering a little, but no one opened the door. I put my thumb against the bell and rang it again, and then there were faint sounds within, someone approaching. I was in luck after all. A night bolt scraped inside and the door parted inward.

  The first thing-the only thing-I saw were her eyes.

  They were huge and very green and very soft, expressive and warm and yet containing a kind of pleading, like a child after a severe punishment saying no more, no more. And there was sensitivity, too, in their depths, and tragedy and gaiety and sensuality, and I thought with a small part of my mind: What’s the matter with you, you can’t be seeing all of those things, and yet I was seeing them, they were all there for me to see and interpret.

  There was something in my eyes for her, too. I became aware of that very suddenly, and I wondered dimly if she was reading the same things I was, if a similar kind of inner reflection was there for her as well.

  Neither of us moved for several long seconds; then, finally, she made a soft meaningless sound deep in her throat and put her hand up at the edge of the door, as if she were thinking of shutting it. I tried to find something to say to her, but I could not seem to think of anything. I looked at the rest of her, and I was in no way disappointed: small, slender hands; long flowing hair the soft reddish-gold of autumn leaves; no makeup, but none needed to accentuate elfin features as symmetrical as expert sculpturing. She could have been twenty-seven or thirty-two-a totally unimportant factor-and she was soft and gently rounded in a pale lavender skirt and a white sweater with lavender bands like narrow epaulets across the shoulders.

  ‘What is it?’ she said then, in a voice that was just a shade too high.

  I felt awkward suddenly, and my hands seemed large and curiously spasmodic. I got them down into the pockets of my overcoat. ‘Is… Are you Cheryl Rosmond?’

  ‘Yes? What is it you want?’

  ‘I’d like to talk to your brother. Doug Rosmond?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and her hand dropped away from the door. There seemed to be a faint flush just under her small ears.

  ‘Is he at home, Miss Rosmond?’

  ‘Yes, he’s here.’

  I told her my name and my profession. I couldn’t take my eyes off her face, but she was not looking at me at all now; her gaze was to the left of me and beyond, counting the cracks in the sidewalk, the blades of grass in the lawn. ‘I’ve been hired to locate a man named Roy Sands, a friend of your brother’s; he’s disappeared.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand it.’

  ‘Do you know Sands?’

  ‘Yes. We… Yes.’

  ‘May I come in, Miss Rosmond?’

  ‘Of course. Doug is on the back porch, fixing the drain on the laundry sink. I’ll get him.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She backed away, and I entered and shut the door. It was pleasant in there, warmly comfortable: curving mahogany sectional and matching chairs upholstered in pink and pastel-yellow, white alabaster lamps giving off warm light through shantung shades, staggered knickknack shelves on one wall with glass and porcelain figurines of owls and elephants and horses. The floor was almost completely covered by a muted-patterned rug.

  Cheryl kept on backing away, looking at me, and then away, and then back. She said, Til get Doug,’ and turned abruptly through a doorway.

  When I was alone, I took my hands out of my pockets and stared at them. They looked faintly gray, the veins bluish and prominent. I put them away again and went around the room, looking at the pictures on the walls without really seeing them.

  A voice said my name, and when I turned, a guy in the same age bracket as Hendryx and Gilmartin was standing in the doorway through which Cheryl had gone moments earlier. She was not with him. I wondered if she had gone to some other part of the house, where she could not hear her brother and me-or whether she was out there in the kitchen, at the stove or at the drain-board, listening and maybe thinking about me in the same way I was thinking about her…

  I shook myself mentally and got my mind focused on Doug Rosmond. He was coming toward me now, a big, quiet-looking man dressed in a gray sweatshirt and old, dusty jeans. He was her brother, all right: the same reddish-gold hair, his thick and unkempt; the same green eyes; the same symmetrical features-though in his case distinctly masculine. He would have had a lot of women in his time, I thought-he was the kind of guy they felt instinctively protective toward, the maternal instinct-but unlike men such as Hendryx and Gilmartin, he would have left each of them with their pride and their self-respect afterward; there was no hint of cruelty or cynical contempt in his face or his steady gaze.

  We got the amenities over with, and I sat on one of the chairs. He went over to lean against an inexpensive television-and-stereo unit nearby; I supposed it
was because he did not want to sit on the furniture with his dusty clothing.

  ‘I’m glad to hear that Elaine Kavanaugh called a detective in to help find Roy,’ he said. ‘She was pretty worried about him when I talked to her.’

  ‘When was that, Mr. Rosmond?’

  ‘A couple of days ago, the last time. She called to find out if I’d heard anything from Roy. Just grabbing at straws, I guess.’

  ‘Do you have any ideas where Sands might be?’

  ‘No-none, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I take it you don’t think he went off of his own accord?’

  ‘Not the way he felt about Elaine, not without telling her he was going,’ Rosmond said. ‘Besides that, Roy isn’t the kind of guy to just disappear unexpectedly-like a boozer will, sometimes, or an outdoors type, or a guy with a lot of independence.’

  The booze angle had occurred to me briefly on the drive back from Marin County. I said, ‘Sands isn’t much of a drinker?’

  ‘Not Roy. Puke and pass out on three shots and sick for two days afterward-that kind of guy. A couple of beers nursed out over an evening is his limit.’

  So much for that possibility. I asked Rosmond some of the same questions I had asked Hendryx and Gilmartin earlier, and got the same general answers: Sands was basically introverted, a gambler and hell-raiser only in the mildest sense, and an all-around nice guy. There was nothing in any of that, or if there was, I couldn’t see it; I was having a difficult time keeping my mind orderly because of Cheryl, and I found my eyes straying toward the open doorway to the kitchen from time to time.

  I lit a cigarette and told Rosmond about Hendryx’s meeting with Sands at the Presidio. I asked, ‘Did Sands ever mention business or acquaintances, anything at all, in the Pacific Northwest?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Well, wait, there’s a guy named Jackson, Nick Jackson, I think, that came from Oregon or Washington originally. Roy had some trouble with him a while back, at the Presidio.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘Well’-he lowered his voice-’Roy was sleeping with Jackson’s woman and Jackson didn’t like it; this was maybe three years back, before he met Elaine. Jackson was a major then, and he tried to railroad Roy into a dishonorable, and maybe some time in the stockade, because of it.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘There was a little black-marketeering going on-cigarettes, booze, stuff like that. Roy didn’t have a damned thing to do with it, but Jackson tried to make out that he did.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing. They caught the guys who were doing it.’

  ‘No repercussions between Sands and Jackson?’

  ‘Bad feelings, maybe, but nothing rough.’

  ‘Anything since?’

  ‘Not that I know about.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where Jackson is now?’

  ‘No. He’s not at the Presidio, though.’

  ‘I’ll check on it.’

  ‘I doubt if Jackson could have had anything to do with Roy’s disappearance. I mean, the trouble was three years ago.’

  ‘You never know,’ I said. I worked on my cigarette a little. ‘There’s no reason you’re aware of for Sands having gone to Oregon from San Francisco?’

  ‘I can’t think of any.’

  ‘This money he wired you just before Christmas, to pay off his poker losses-do you happen to have the message that came with it?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ Rosmond said. ‘I’m one of these guys who never likes to throw anything out, and after it came I put it with some papers in one of my bags.’

  ‘Would you mind if I had a look at it?’

  ‘Not at all. I’ll get it for you.’

  He left the room and there was the sound of a door opening, and closing, and then there was only silence. I sat smoking, listening to the quiet, and I had this foolish impulse to go out into the kitchen, to see if Cheryl was there. I got up and took a couple of steps and stopped and thought: What the hell are you doing? Christ! I sat down again.

  I could not get her out of my mind. It happens that way sometimes, and there’s no explanation for it, no rationality involved. You meet a woman, however briefly, and you can’t stop thinking about her, touching her with your mind, examining some distinctive feature over and over again. With Cheryl it was her eyes, it would always be her eyes; I could see them once more, mentally, and all the things they had contained, and the reflection in them of what she had in turn discovered in my own eyes…

  I heard the opening and closing of a door again, reverse process. Rosmond came back into the room with a folded square of paper in his right hand.

  ‘Here it is,’ he said, and gave me the paper and went over by the television-and-stereo unit again. I unfolded the square and spread it open on my knee. It read:

  eunmx xlt 1960 js nl pd eugene ore 12/21 830p

  douglas rosmond

  2579 vicente st san francisco/calif

  here is the 27 i owe you buddy, merry christmas roy

  It told me nothing that I was not already aware of, except that the wires had been sent around 8:30 p.m. on the twenty-first of last month. I handed the telegram back to Rosmond.

  He said, ‘Not much help, is it?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not much.’

  ‘Roy was forever doing crazy things like that. I had three weeks leave in Italy once, and he sent me twenty bucks in cash that he’d borrowed from me, instead of waiting till I got back to Germany.’ Rosmond worried a hand through his hair. ‘I wish I could give you something that would help, but I just can’t. Roy never talked much about his personal life-except for Elaine Kavanaugh. He didn’t have much choice there, since we all knew about him dating her and planning to marry her when his twenty was up.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s a chance that he could have been dangling another woman here in the States,’ I said. ‘That might explain his trip to Oregon.’

  ‘No chance at all,’ Rosmond said positively. ‘Roy used to cat around as much as the rest of us until he met Elaine, but he was a changed guy after she came on the scene. When he fell, he fell hard.’

  ‘Is there anybody else in this area who might know something about Sands’ disappearance or whereabouts? Another close friend of his? An acquaintance?’

  ‘Just Rich and Chuck and me. Nobody else-except maybe Jock MacVeagh, but he’s still at Larson. The five of us used to buddy around regularly over there.’

  ‘Well, I guess that’s it, then.’

  ‘Are you planning to go up to Oregon to look for Roy?’

  ‘I guess I will. I haven’t learned anything that might help down here, and Eugene is the next logical step.’

  Rosmond rumpled his hair again. ‘I’d hate to… Oh, the hell with that kind of thinking. Roy can take care of himself.’ He came away from the console unit. ‘Luck, huh?’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  I got on my feet and we shook hands and there was nothing I could do then but cross the room to the door with him. I wanted to say something about Cheryl, but what could I say? I wanted to see her again, if only for a moment, before I left-but I could figure no plausible way to work that. All that was left was for me to open the door and exchange good-byes with Rosmond, and then I was outside in the cold wind coming off the ocean, walking down to my car, stopping and turning and looking up at the house for a moment.

  I thought I saw movement at the window, behind the curtains, a flash of trailing reddish-gold, a flash of lavender-and-white, but it may have been only my imagination.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When I got back to my office on Taylor Street, a couple of blocks up from Market, it was a quarter past three. I put the morning coffee on the reheat, and while I waited for it to come to a boil, I rang up my answering service to find out if anyone had called during my absence. No one had.

  I stood back and looked the place over with a critical eye: the old oak desk and a couple of chairs, like a general and two enlisted men of a badly defeated army
, weary and battle-scarred; outside the rail divider a dusty couch and a table with some back-date magazines that had never been opened by me or by anyone else; a narrow alcove with a sink and some shelves for stationery supplies-bathroom facilities down the hall, turn to your right, but somehow the janitor never remembers to refill the paper dispenser, so you had better bring something of your own; and a single metal file cabinet with the hot plate and the coffee pot resting on top of it and nothing much inside. It was always cold in there, even with the valve on the steam radiator opened wide, and the air was always a little musty, a little stale. Some place, I thought. Some occupant, too.

  Knock it off, I thought.

  I rescued the coffee and carried a mug of it back to the desk and sat down and stared out the window for a time. There was nothing much to see except the stone-and-glass buildings outlined against a cold gray winter sky. It seemed that every time I looked, another sky-scraper was going up, taller and taller, like mushrooms or toadstools sprouting with that alarming rapidity after a heavy rain- the fungi of the cities…

  Well, nuts to that too. Come down again, for Christ’s sake. Did she get to you that much?

  Yeah, I thought, she got to me that much.

  All right then.

  I pulled the phone in front of me and took the note pad from my suit jacket. I dialed the number I had looked up earlier, and it rang once, twice, and the palm of my hand was faintly moist around the receiver. Another ring, and a soft click, and she said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Miss Rosmond?’

  I heard the intake of her breath, and then I listened to silence and the hammering of the radiator. Pretty soon she said, ‘Yes, who is this?’ even though I was certain she already knew.

  I said my name for her, just to make it absolute. Then: ‘I was wondering if I could see you tonight? I thought, since you know Roy Sands personally, you might be able to tell me something that would help my investigation-’

  ‘I don’t know anything that would help. What could I possibly know that my brother doesn’t?’