The Vanished - [Nameless Detective 02]

by Bill Pronzini

‘If I do locate him, my liability terminates with that location. I would simply tell you where he is, and after that it’s up to you.’

  She caressed her ring in that secret way again. ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ she said softly.

  I told her what I charged, plus expenses, and she said that was perfectly acceptable. I got one of the standard business contract forms from my desk and filled it in and had her sign it; then I gave her a copy and she gave me a check for one hundred dollars as a retainer.

  I said, ‘Will you authorize my going up to Oregon? It would seem necessary, and I’ll have to fly.’

  ‘Yes, certainly.’

  ‘Do you have a picture of your fiancé, by any chance?’

  ‘I gave the only good one I had to the Missing Persons—but I do have a sketch of him.’

  ‘Sketch?’

  ‘Yes, he must have had it done by one of those sidewalk artists in Europe somewhere. He had all his belongings sent to me in Fresno just before he came home. Naturally, I didn’t look through them right away, I don’t believe in prying—but when he disappeared as he did, I ... well, I went over everything very carefully. There was no clue to where he might have gone, but I did find the sketch. I think he must have intended to surprise me with it later on.’

  ‘Did you happen to bring it with you?’

  Elaine moved her head affirmatively. ‘I knew you’d need a picture,’ she said. She took from her coat pocket a rolled sheet of that type of heavy rag paper which comes as part of an artist’s sketch pad. She handed it across to me. I took it and slipped off a blue rubber band and unrolled the paper, smoothing it out flat on my desk.

  It was fourteen-by-eighteen in size, a head-and-shoulders sketch without background, done in pastel chalk over which a lacquer-type fixative had been applied. I know very little about art, but it seemed to me that the artist who had drawn the portrait was gifted with real talent; it was faintly expressionistic, with bold lines and heavy shadows and somewhat enlarged features, rather than an example of classic portraiture. The man it depicted was about my own age, middle-to-late forties; he had dark-brown hair with a little wave in it and gray eyes and the kind of nose that is often described as aquiline. His mouth was curved in a faint, boyish grin, and he possessed a kind of rugged, craggy, masculine virility.

  I looked up at Elaine. ‘How good a likeness is this?’

  ‘Really quite good,’ she answered. Her eyes shone, and I knew Roy Sands was in her mind, vivid and smiling just for her. ‘It captures the ... oh, I don’t know, the essence of Roy. I don’t know how else to put it.’

  I looked at the sketch a little more, and then rolled it up again and slid the rubber band around it. I set it to one side of my blotter. ‘All right, Miss Kavanaugh,’ I said gently. ‘Could you tell me where you’re staying?’

  ‘The Royal Gate Hotel, on Powell Street.’

  I made a note of that, and then we got on our feet and touched hands and said some things to one another—mild entreaties and milder reassurances. I showed her to the door and watched her walk down the hall to the elevator. She walked very stiffly, her head pulled back, resignation in her step, and it was like watching a prisoner walking a cellblock, a prisoner with nothing waiting for her except a barred cell and an endless succession of solitary nights and hopelessly shattered dreams.

  It was a painful image, fraught with symbolic meaning. I shook myself a little and closed the door and went back to my desk for a cigarette.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pinewood Lane was a narrow blacktopped road that wound and curled and doubled back on itself through the thickly wooded foothills behind Fairfax—a half-hour drive north across the Golden Gate Bridge. The homes were spaced well apart, and you had occasional glimpses of shingled alpine roofs or railed verandas or huge rectangles of glass hidden among the towering conifers and eucalyptus. It took some money, and a taste for nature and the sequestered life, to live up there; I wondered if those who had them knew how potentially blessed they were in a time of increasing universal hunger, overpopulation, and ecological apathy.

  I found number forty-eight without difficulty. There was a gateless stone arch at the foot of the entrance drive, with the numerals 48 carved out of pinewood at the center of the curvature. I drove beneath that and followed the drive through thick, velvety green firs, climbing slightly and somewhat circuitously.

  I glanced down at the temperature gauge as I drove, and it registered hot, as it had begun to do several miles back. The car had not run properly since it had been severely damaged during the course of a kidnapping case I had been involved in a couple of months previously—a sordid and lamentable business because it had directly precipitated the split between Erika and me, and for several other reasons as well. I had had the car in to the garage three times in the past six weeks, and it looked as if I would have to take it in again, with the engine overheating the way it was.

  The drive came out of the evergreens finally and hooked sharply to the left, ending in a small clearing at the rear of which sat a large, rustic home raised off the earth on heavy wood pillars. It was constructed of bleached-pine boarding, with a wide veranda running the width of it and extending back on both sides. The wall of the house was solid glass, except for a wooden area beneath the roof peak. On my right, a steep set of stairs rose up to the veranda and what I assumed would be the main entrance.

  I parked near the stairs and got out of the car into a whistling, ice-tinged wind; it was as cold over here as it had been in San Francisco, in spite of a pale winter sun setting up a shimmering glare overhead. I started up the stairs, and a door opened above and a man came out onto the veranda carrying a tumbler filled with ice and a liquid that appeared by its color to be either Scotch or bourbon. Like Sands, he was about my age, and he wore slacks and a hand-tooled leather vest open over a white turtleneck. He was about my size and height, too, starting to paunch in the same way I had but consciously sucking in on it in a kind of grimly determined struggle to maintain a youthful physique.

  I reached the top of the stairs and he said, ‘Hi, I’m Chuck Hendryx. You must be the guy who called.’

  I said that I was. Before driving all the way up here, I had gotten him on the phone and told him my name and why I wanted to see him, and he had said he would be home all day and to drop by at my convenience. I had intended to talk to Doug Rosmond first, since he was considerably closer, but there had been no answer when I tried his sister’s number. I had also telephoned the Missing Persons Bureau at the Hall of Justice before leaving my office; they had nothing for me on the disappearance of Roy Sands.

  Hendryx and I shook hands and sized one another up the way two men will do, meeting for the first time. He was thick-shouldered, with a wedge-shaped face and bright, alert brown eyes set deeply above his wide cheekbones. He was losing his hair—a dark sandy color—and making a desperate attempt to conceal it by intricate machinations with a comb; when it really started to go, in another couple of years, I had the thought that he would probably buy one of those permanent toupees that you can wear underwater or while sky-diving out of airplanes. There were two small moles on either side of the mouth, like two boulders marking the entrance to a cave; but the smile which quirked his lips assured you that there was nothing ominous or unfriendly lurking within.

  Hendryx apparently decided I was all right. He said, ‘Come on inside, it’s colder than the proverbial witch’s tit out here. My wife and kids are home, but they won’t bother us.’

  We went through the door and into a beam-ceilinged living room done in light hues that complemented the bleached-pine walls. The floor was parqueted pine, bare except for a couple of circular braided rugs. The far wall was fashioned of buff-colored brick, and a three-foot square opening cut off-center served as a fireplace; there were several logs burning in there—green pitch pine that hissed and crackled and sent up rainbow sparks in a miniature fireworks display. The place was clean and neat enough, but it held a vague air of stiffnes
s, as if its natural state were one of perpetual chaos.

  Hendryx shut the door and gestured toward one of the upholstered chairs. ‘Sit down, make yourself comfortable. Drink?’

  ‘Thanks, no.’

  He looked a little ruefully at the tumbler in his hand. ‘Too damned early for it, really, but I need something to bolster my courage. You got any kids?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not married.’

  ‘Christ, I wish I wasn’t sometimes. Not that I don’t love my old lady, or the three boys, but you live away from ‘em most of the year and you can’t get used to ‘em again. It’s like being in a kind of limbo: half-bachelor, half-married, you know?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, and shrugged.

  ‘Sure,’ Hendryx said. ‘That kind of life does have its advantages, though.’ He gave me a broad wink.

  I smiled, because it was the only thing for me to do, and thought: The old double standard. Well, he looks like the sybaritic type, all right—Don Juan at the cross-roads. I wonder if his family doesn’t like traveling because he doesn’t want them to like traveling? Oh, the hell with that; you’re becoming a righteous fart in your old age.

  I watched Hendryx sit down on the divan across from me and put his tumbler on the heavy glass top of a wrought-iron coffee table. He got a cigarette from a pocket in his vest and lighted it and threw the match on the floor without any compunction at all. And I thought now: The world is full of slobs, too. Brother, meet a brother. But this place could never hold a candle to my apartment, even in its natural state.

  I said, ‘As I told you on the phone, Mr. Hendryx, I’ve been asked to investigate the disappearance of Roy Sands.’

  ‘By Elaine Kavanaugh, uh-huh. Well, I don’t blame her for calling a guy like you into it; the cops haven’t given her any satisfaction, and she’s shook up and has the right to be. It’s a damned peculiar thing, Roy vanishing like that.’

  ‘You don’t think he may have changed his mind about marrying the girl? Or had second thoughts, anyway, and went off somewhere to think it over?’

  ‘Hell no,’ Hendryx said emphatically. ‘He wanted to marry her, all right. He was kind of a close-mouthed guy, but when he did talk personal things, it was mostly this Elaine. He’d fallen for her, no doubt about that, and marriage was what he wanted.’

  ‘Then he felt strongly toward her when he came back to the States last month?’

  ‘Sure. He mentioned her name a couple of times on the plane, and you could see it in his eyes. He asked me and Doug Rosmond and Rich Gilmartin if we’d come to the wedding— sometime this month, I think he said. He had one of us picked out as best man, but he wouldn’t say who. We all agreed to go; hell, he’s a buddy and we’re kind of a team, you know? He was supposed to contact us after Christmas sometime and let us know the arrangements.’

  ‘Did you talk with Sands after your arrival in San Francisco?’

  ‘For a couple of minutes the day after— Sunday,’ Hendryx answered. ‘He’d gone through processing, and he was on his way out of the Presidio wearing civvies and carrying a small suitcase.’

  ‘Did he mention where he was going?’

  ‘Well, I kidded him about Elaine, you know, but he was in this sober mood—the way he’d get sometimes when a thing was on his mind. He said he was planning to see her pretty soon, but that he had something to take care of first, up north.’

  ‘Up north?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘Just that, no specific place?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘And he didn’t elaborate on the business he had to take care of?’

  Hendryx shook his head. ‘At the time I figured if he wanted to tell me about it, he would have.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what it was?’

  ‘Not a one.’

  ‘Did he have any friends that you know about in the Pacific Northwest? Oregon, for example?’

  ‘The only friends Roy had were his service buddies,’ Hendryx said. ‘I told him more than once that he ought to re-up, marry Elaine and bring her with him, but she wanted a house and kids, that kind of crap, and she’d talked him into it too. He would be lost at first, you know? He doesn’t make friends that easy.’

  ‘He say anything to you before he left the Presidio?’

  ‘The usual: so long, keep it limp—like that.’

  ‘That was the last time you talked to him, then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I started to ask him about the wires from Oregon, but before I could, there was the sound of a car coming into the clearing out front. A horn blared several times, shrilly, and Hendryx got to his feet. ‘Company,’ he said. ‘Hang on, will you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He went to the door and through it. I sat watching the dying curls of smoke from his cigarette, moistening my lips a little and rubbing the palms of my hands across my trouser legs. I had had seven cigarettes already today, and if I wanted to keep my consumption under a pack every twenty-four hours I was going to have to start rationing.

  To have something to do with my hands, I took the rolled sketch of Roy Sands from my inside jacket pocket; I had put it there, along with the notes I had taken during the interview with Elaine Kavanaugh, just prior to leaving the office. I unrolled the sketch and looked again at Sands’ likable face and wondered what sort of trouble he could have gotten himself into. People don’t disappear without good cause; and if a change of heart about marriage had not prompted Sands into momentary hermitage—and I was inclined to believe Elaine that it hadn’t—then the set of circumstances she had outlined meant that he was very definitely in some kind of tight.

  The sound of male voices on the veranda preceded the opening of the door by a couple of seconds, and then Hendryx came back inside. With him was a second man a couple of years younger. This guy was lean and wiry and eight inches under six feet, and you knew immediately that he had taken a lot of abuse concerning his height over the years, and that he would be constantly on the defensive about it. He owned a wealth of graying-brown hair, worn long and shaggy and combed into drifts on a narrow skull to give him added stature; in addition, he sported a thick, silky-looking mustache—one of these fashionable Continental jobs that slant down to the chin on both sides of the mouth—and there was some gray in that too. Intelligent brown eyes peered out from under question-mark brows, and he carried himself with an air of confident, no-bullshit masculinity; he would do a lot of talking, and command a lot of attention, and be hell-on-wheels in a back-to-back barroom brawl.

  Hendryx led the guy over to where I was, and I got on my feet for the introductions. The bantamweight was Rich Gilmartin, which made things a little easier for me since I had planned on looking up Sands’ third Army buddy later on; he had just dropped by, he said, for a quick one and to see if Chucko wanted to sit in on a stud game some cats were setting up in San Rafael tomorrow night. Hendryx explained who I was and why I was there, and then went to a portable bar against the side wall to fix drinks.

  Gilmartin started away toward one of the chairs, hesitated, and turned back to me. He looked down at the partially unrolled sketch in my left hand—I hadn’t had time to put it away—and said, ‘Isn’t that Roy?’

  I admitted that it was.

  ‘You mind?’

  ‘No, go ahead.’

  He took the sketch and held it up and looked at it, cocking his head to one side. ‘Damn fine likeness,’ he said at length. ‘Where’d you get it?’

  ‘From his fiancée.’

  ‘He send it to her from Germany?’

  ‘In a way,’ I said. ‘It was among the things he forwarded to Fresno. She didn’t have an extra photo, and this serves the purpose just as well.’

  ‘Who would have figured old Roy for an artist’s model?’ Gilmartin said. He took the sketch over to Hendryx. ‘What do you think, Chucko?’

  ‘Pretty good, all right.’

  ‘Damn fine likeness,’ Gilmartin said again. He took the drink Hendryx gave him and came back and
returned the sketch to me. ‘So you’ve joined the hunt for Roy?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I hope to Christ you can do more than the cops have been able to. He’s just another name on the Missing Persons blotter as far as they’re concerned.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Sure, that’s all anybody can expect.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where Sands could be, Mr. Gilmartin?’

  ‘Rich—that’s why we got Christian names, right? No, I don’t know where Roy could be. I’ve kicked this disappearance around with Dougie and Chucko, but it just doesn’t make any sense. No sense at all.’

  Hendryx brought over a fresh drink for himself. ‘Sure you won’t have one?’ he asked me.

  ‘A little early, thanks.’

  ‘It’s never a little early for good Scotch,’ Gilmartin said. He drank deeply from his glass. ‘I needed this, Chucko. Hell of a night last night.’