The Vanished

by Bill Pronzini

  ‘I just thought-’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  I had the feeling that she was about to hang up. I said quickly, ‘I’d like to see you tonight anyway. For dinner and a show, or just for a drink. Whatever you say.’

  Ten seconds crawled away. And she said, ‘I… don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just… don’t think so.’

  ‘Miss Rosmond-Cheryl-I’d like to see you.’

  No response.

  ‘I could meet you for a drink,’ I said. ‘Just for an hour or so. Anywhere you like.’

  I did some more waiting, and the palms of my hands were still moist. She said finally, in a low voice, ‘I suppose… I guess we could have a drink.’

  ‘Shall I meet you somewhere?’

  ‘Do you know the Golden Door, on Irving off Nineteenth?’

  ‘Yes, I know it.’

  ‘I’ll be there at nine.’

  ‘At nine, Cheryl.’

  ‘Good-bye,’ she said, and she was gone.

  I put the receiver down, thinking: She’s been hurt in some way, badly hurt, and that’s why she’s got this defensive barrier up, why she’s so hesitant. But she’s lonely, too, even lonelier than I am, and she’s willing to take the chance, willing to find out if there’s anything to this attraction we both felt.

  I began to feel considerably better. This meeting tonight could be the beginning of something good for both of us, given enough time and patience and understanding. Something very good.

  An end to loneliness.

  * * * *

  They were digging up the pavement a half-block from my apartment in Pacific Heights, and I had to park four streets away and walk back. The staccato chattering of jackhammers and the diesel roar of trucks were deafening. As if parking in Pacific Heights wasn’t impossible enough, the goddamn city.

  I turned into the foyer of my building, a tired old Victorian lady clinging to the time-tattered remnants of elegance, looking backward to the era when she had been a fine private home and no one had anticipated a global war. She still commanded a high price because of her location, and I could not have afforded her if it were not for the fact that I had lived with her for almost eighteen years under the singular supervision of a benevolent landlord.

  There was no mail in my box, and no respite from the noise inside my second-floor flat; even with all the windows closed and locked, you could hear the volume of sound in the street outside. I went through the cluttered living room, stepping over this and kicking that aside. I was at an age, and had a temperament, that no longer required care and neatness. As I had suspected Hendryx of being, I was a slob-not proud of it, just accepting it.

  I got a beer out of the refrigerator, reentered the living room, and sat down on the couch. From there I could see the laminated-wood shelving which covered the side wall beyond the bay windows, and which contained better than five thousand copies of detective and adventure pulp magazines I had collected over the years. That was my one hobby, the accumulation of pulps, and when I was feeling low I could usually immerse myself in an issue of Black Mask or Dime Detective, or one of the other seventy-five titles I possessed, thoroughly enough to circumvent the mood.

  The lurid covers, some of which I had placed so that they faced into the room, made a nice contrast to the heavy, ponderous pseudo-Hepplewhite furniture, the faded rose-design rug and wallpaper. The magazines were segregated by title and date, and I had an index made up so that when I received a quote from one of the suppliers I dealt with, I could easily check what I had against the for-sale listing.

  I sipped some of my beer, and Cheryl was on my mind, and the missing Roy Sands-and Erika, too, as she always seemed to be when I was conscious of my pulp magazines. Every time I looked at them, I could hear the words Erika had said to me in this very room some two and a half months ago, harsh and stinging words: ‘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’s 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…’

  The thing of it was, the thing I could never make her understand, was that even if she was right, it did not matter-it was not important. How I became what I am, or why, is irrelevant to the simple fact that I am what I am. I could not change, for her or for anyone. But that had not been enough for Erika, and it had ended between us for primarily that reason.

  And now, maybe, after two and a half empty months, there was Cheryl.

  I finished my beer and went into the cluttered bedroom and dragged my battered suitcase out of the closet. I had called United Airlines from my office and made a reservation on the 9:00 a.m. flight to Eugene the following morning; as I had told Doug Rosmond, that was my next logical step on behalf of Elaine Kavanaugh. I had also called Elaine at her hotel to ask about this Jackson, the one Rosmond had mentioned as once having had trouble with Roy Sands. She did not know who Jackson was, and could not recall Sands’ ever using the name in any context whatsoever. I had also rung up Chuck Hendryx, and that call had netted me a little more information.

  Hendryx had said, ‘Sure, I remember the trouble Roy had with that prick Jackson. I didn’t know he was from the Northwest, though, and that’s why I didn’t say anything about it.’

  ‘Do you know where Jackson is now?’

  ‘Well, the last I heard he was on Okie.’

  ‘Okinawa?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Last year sometime. One of the boys at Larson happened to mention his name.’

  My final call before leaving the office had been to a guy named Salzberg, who was an Army lieutenant stationed at the Presidio and whom I had known for thirty years, since the Second War. We had talked a little, and then I had asked him if he’d bend regulations a bit and find out about this Nick Jackson for me; since Jackson had been stationed at the Presidio three years ago, there would be a file on him that would have a civilian address, or at least the address of civilian relatives-and from there I could determine his current whereabouts. Salzberg likes the sauce pretty good, and on the promise that I would drop a bottle around one of these nights, he agreed to do what he could, adding that it would probably take a day or two. I had hoped to have the information in time for the Eugene trip, but he’d said that there was no way he could get to the files before midday tomorrow; I had had to be content with that.

  I finished packing my bag, and then went in and soaked in a tubful of hot water for a while. I put on a fresh suit, and some whorish cologne just for the hell of it, and decided I presented a respectable enough image when I looked the package over in the bathroom mirror.

  There was a delicatessen over on Union which I frequented regularly, and I stopped in there for some supper. Then I drove out toward the beach, chewing chlorophyll tablets to get rid of the taste and odor of garlic sausage. I felt like a shy kid on his first big date, apprehensive and yet filled with a tingling sort of excitement; it was somehow kind of nice to feel that way again…

  CHAPTER FIVEr />
  The Golden Door was a neighborhood cocktail lounge, but it was that kind of quiet, sedate, well-mannered place where you would take a wife or a mistress with equal freedom. Beyond the gold-painted door which gave it its name, there was a long narrow room with a bar on the right and some low tables on a raised section to the left. At the far end, the room widened like the bulb on the end of a thermometer into a sunken circular area; in there were a couple of kiln-type fireplaces made out of white brick, extending to the ceiling, and some wall nooks and booths where you could have plenty of privacy. The decor was gold and brown, and they kept it relatively dark with diffused amber lights in the walls and ceiling.

  I arrived a few minutes before nine, and Cheryl was not there as yet. I sat at the bar and drank a beer and watched the door. I kept going over in my mind what I was going to say to her; I wanted it to be just right, completely open, completely honest.

  A beer-company clock over the backbar said that it was 9:02 when she came in through the door.

  She stopped when she saw me, holding a small black purse in front of her at the waist. She was wearing a suede coat and she had a dark scarf tied over her hair. I stood up and went to her, and we looked at each other like two timid children in a dark playground. I said, ‘Do you want to take one of the booths in the back?’

  She nodded, and we went along parallel to the bar and down the cement steps into the circular area. There was not much of a crowd this early on a week night, and we found a place at the far end, before one of the fireplaces.

  A waitress came around and I asked Cheryl what she wanted; it was a gimlet. I ordered another beer, and the waitress went away. Cheryl took off her coat and unknotted the scarf, tossing her head slightly; the right side of her face was to the wood fire in the brick kiln, and the flickering light gave her hair the impression of burning, like the streak of red-gold fire a setting sun puts across the surface of a clear-day ocean. She wore the same white-and-lavender sweater she had had on that afternoon.

  Our drinks came quickly. Cheryl raised her glass and looked at me directly for the first time, over the rim of it. I stared into her eyes, but it was too dark, even with the fire, to see all or any of the things I had seen there earlier. I wanted to tell her she was very lovely, but I did not know how she would interpret it; it was the right thing to say, and it wasn’t. You said those same words to a girl you were interested only in seducing, without strings, to a girl you thought no more of than a quick lay, a quick coming, a quick good-bye.

  ‘Well,’ she asked at length, ‘do you want to talk about Roy Sands?’

  ‘No,’ I said honestly, ‘I want to talk about you.’

  ‘You told me you wanted some help in your investigation.’

  ‘And you told me you didn’t know anything.’

  ‘I don’t. Roy and I went out together a couple of times, and he came to the house now and then before he and Doug went to Germany. I really don’t know him that well.’

  ‘All right, then. Now we can talk about you.’

  ‘Why do you want to talk about me?’

  ‘I want to know you.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I hope you do, Cheryl.’

  She raised her glass again and drank from it, looking away. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you fell in love with me this afternoon. You looked into my eyes there at the door, and you fell in love with me just like that.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Love at first sight is a lot of hooey. But there’s attraction at first sight, a kind of immediate fascination. That’s the way I feel about you-and maybe, a little, it’s the way you feel about me.’

  Cheryl was silent for a time. Then, slowly, she said, ‘We’re two strangers-two adults. It’s silly, this kind of thing.’

  She was starting to admit it now, to me as well as to herself. ‘It’s not silly,’ I told her. ‘It happens-it happened today. And we don’t have to be strangers very long. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it-why I asked you out and why you accepted? The real reason? To become something more than strangers?’

  ‘I… don’t know. Maybe it is.’

  ‘It is, Cheryl. Listen, the simplest way to start it off is by being open and frank with one another. So I’ll tell you some things about me. All right?’

  She did not answer, and so I went on with it before I could change my mind. I said, ‘There was this woman, and I was in love with her, the first time I was ever really in love, an old bachelor like me. I asked her to marry me three or four times, but she always said no, with regrets. She’d been divorced a couple of times, and she said she was afraid of trying again, afraid of having to go through another divorce because the first two had been pretty rough on her. But she wanted security, her own kind of security, and I know she would have married me if it hadn’t been for my job. She didn’t like that, anything about it. She said it was foolish, a losing proposition, a childish fantasy-world of cops and robbers, and she kept after me to give it up. We argued about that, and about some other things, and finally she gave me an ultimatum: the job or her, take your choice. One or the other, but not both- never both.’

  I got a cigarette out and put fire on it, and I could feel Cheryl’s eyes on my face. She would be trying to determine if what I was telling her was straight goods or just a fine old polished line, and that was all right; the answer was the right one.

  She said softly, ‘And you chose your job.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I answered, ‘I chose my job. I had to do it that way, because even though I loved her, I couldn’t quit doing the thing I’ve done all my life, the only thing I care about doing, the thing that motivates me and keeps me alive.’

  ‘This all happened recently, didn’t it?’

  ‘Almost three months ago.’

  ‘Have you seen her since you… made your decision?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be any good any more, for her or for me. It’s over and it’s dead and I keep telling myself that’s the best for both of us; but I keep thinking about her and wondering why she couldn’t have understood the way it had to be for me. That’s all it would have taken, just for her to understand.’

  Silence formed and built between us. I had a grittiness far down in the back of my throat, but I was not sorry I had told Cheryl about Erika; except for Eberhardt-a close friend on the San Francisco cops-and his wife, she was the only person I had talked to about it. It had been festering inside me like pus gathering in a deep sore.

  Cheryl drank what was left of her gimlet, set the glass down, and then turned slightly in her chair to look into the dancing flames inside the kiln fireplace. I smoked, watching her face, the set of her small jaw, the wisp of hair that curled like something spun by Rapunzel on the shoulder of her sweater.

  She said, ‘You must be a very lonely man.’

  Coming from someone else, those words might have been sharply painful; but from her, they served only in filling me with a sense of warmth and relief. We were all right, I knew that suddenly. It really was going to be fine between us.

  I said, ‘Sometimes. Sometimes I am.’

  ‘It’s a terrible thing, to be lonely.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it’s worse to be hurt. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘I’ve been hurt a lot of times, in a lot of ways,’ she said in a faraway kind of voice. She was still staring into the fire, and the fluctuating shadows were deep on her face, hiding her eyes. ‘I’ve been deceived and used and slapped around, always giving and never receiving. If you’ve been hurt that way, enough that way, you reach a point where you can’t take any more hurt, and you’d rather be completely and forever alone than to be hurt even the littlest bit again. Can you understand how that is?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It was Tom, my ex-husband, that did it for me. I loved him, I thought he was everything good and sweet in the world, the one really wonderful thing to happen in my life. I gave him everything I had to give or knew how to gi
ve-emotionally, physically. I gave him everything and he…’

  She stopped, abruptly, and held her hands extended, palms outward toward the fire, as if warming them, as if warding off something cold and dark manifesting itself in the canyons of her memory. For a moment I thought she would not go on, and then she began talking again, so softly I had to lean forward to hear her.

  ‘One night, a Saturday, I was sleeping and there were some noises, laughter and some other sounds, and I woke up. It was four a.m. Tom had gone out that night without telling me where and he hadn’t come home when I went to bed at midnight. I got out of bed and put a robe on and went to the living room, and he was there-Tom-he was there on the couch with this woman and they were naked and just… doing it, there on the couch, very drunk, both of them, and the woman was on top, she… she was fat and she was old and she had lipstick and rouge smeared all over her face like a clown. It was… it was…’

  She stopped again, and shuddered, and I wanted to get up and go to her and put my arms around her. But it was not the thing to do, not in this kind of situation, not at this time.

  ‘I moved out that night and went to a lawyer the next morning and filed for a divorce. A friend of mine got me the house on Vicente and I stayed there, and it was very bad for a while. I came close to a breakdown and-other things; but then I got over it, with Doug’s help, he was home then, and I was all right. Six weeks afterward Tom and some woman-a different one, I think-were drinking at a place up in Sonoma County and they went off the road coming back and ran into a culvert and killed themselves, both of them. That’s why I’m a widow now, instead of just another divorcee.’

  And that’s why you took your maiden name again, I thought. I said nothing, waiting for her to go on.

  ‘I didn’t feel anything for him then, when I found out he was dead,’ she said. ‘He was… just nothing to me any more. I didn’t even go to his funeral.’

  I asked quietly, ‘How long ago did this happen, Cheryl?’