The Vanished - [Nameless Detective 02]

by Bill Pronzini

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You remember that redhead works at the Mill?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you finally scored with that?’

  ‘Oh baby! And she was just like I said she’d be: a French postcard. A real French postcard, Chucko.’

  ‘No lie, huh?’

  ‘Oh baby!’

  The three of us sat down. I rolled up the sketch of Roy Sands and put it away inside my jacket, and then listened to Gilmartin explain in detail what had taken place with the redhead the night before. Hendryx absorbed every word in rapt attention. From somewhere at the rear of the house, I could hear the faint rumble of an automatic dryer and the half-muffled voice of a woman reprimanding a child; I shifted uncomfortably in my chair.

  I said, ‘Do you mind if we talk about Roy Sands?’

  They both looked at me, and Hendryx said, ‘Well, sure, go ahead.’

  ‘What can you tell me about these wires from Oregon?’

  ‘Not much. He sent them to me and Doug and Rich a couple of days before Christmas.’

  ‘It was to pay off some money he’d lost in a poker game, is that right?’

  ‘Right,’ Gilmartin said. ‘We’d played a little stud the night before we left Larson, and he had lousy cards all night. He was a little strapped then, Christmas and mustering out, the whole bag, and so he wrote out some IOU’s and said he’d get the money to us as soon as he could.’

  ‘Did it seem odd that he would pay off minor gambling debts by wire?’

  ‘Why should it? Roy likes to keep his debts current. We used to play stud and gin rummy, a bunch of us, a couple-three times a week over there, and if Roy lost and couldn’t settle then and there, he’d always have the money first thing on payday.’

  ‘Well, he could have paid all of you when he saw you before his wedding, couldn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, right, but like I told you, Roy is funny that way. He likes everything even up, him into nobody and nobody into him.’

  I looked at Hendryx. ‘Did he mention the debts when you saw him at the Presidio?’

  ‘Not that I remember.’

  ‘If he’d had the money then, he’d have paid you, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Sure, if he’d had it.’

  ‘He had it two days later,’ I said.

  Hendryx frowned. ‘Say, that’s right.’

  ‘Would he have gotten his mustering-out pay by that time?’

  ‘No chance,’ Gilmartin said. ‘Besides, he was having everything sent to his chick in Fresno.’

  I thought that over a little. ‘He didn’t get any money from her,’ I said, ‘and he didn’t go near his savings or checking account. But he had to have gotten the money he paid you with from somewhere.’

  ‘Yeah, he did.’

  ‘Would you know if he had a private account here in the States, something he might not have told Elaine Kavanaugh about?’

  ‘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 alre
ady 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.’