The Vanished - [Nameless Detective 02]

by Bill Pronzini

  ‘Well,’ the old guy said, ‘I guess he did.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Sands, you said his name is?’

  ‘Roy Sands, right.’

  ‘That description don’t tell me much, but I recollect the name. My eyesight’s bad but my memory ain’t, for a fact.’ He shuffled over a couple of steps and opened a leatherbound register lying on the counter and riffled through some pages. He found what he wanted, bent closer, peering, and then nodded. ‘Uh-huh, Roy Sands. Night of December twenty-one. Took a room for a week, one of the singles at fourteen per.’

  The gods are beginning to smile a little, I thought. I said, ‘Did you check him in personally?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Was he alone?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Did he seem worried, nervous, preoccupied? Like that?’

  ‘All he seemed was cold,’ the old guy said. ‘It was snowing that night, too, and he was all bundled up in a hat and a topcoat and a muffler. He kept hugging himself like he had a chill.’

  ‘Did he stay the full week here?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘How long, then?’

  ‘Only the one night.’

  ‘He checked out the next day?’

  ‘Didn’t check out at all. He just sort of— disappeared, I guess you could say. But he’d paid in advance, and the key was here at the desk, so it wasn’t any of our worry. Except for his suitcase.’

  ‘Suitcase?’

  ‘Left it in the room. Maid found it when she went in to clean the next day.’

  Well, I thought. Well, now. ‘He didn’t come back to claim the case, or call about it?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Then—do you still have it?’

  He nodded. ‘Down in the basement.’

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

  ‘Through it, you mean?’ he asked shrewdly.

  ‘Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know as I can allow that, since the case don’t belong to you ...’

  ‘I’m working for Sands’ fiancée,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t heard from him since before he came up here, and she’s damned worried. They were supposed to be married sometime this month.’

  The old guy studied me for a time. ‘Fact?’ he asked.

  ‘Fact.’

  ‘Can I see that license of yours again?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I showed it to him, and I could see his lips moving, memorizing my name and address. While he was doing that, I got a card out of another part of the wallet—one of those with my office and home address on it—and handed it to him. He read it over, looked at me out of one eye, and then shrugged. He opened the cash register and put the card in there, under the money drawer, and took out a thick ring of keys. Walking slowly, as if his feet pained him, he came out from behind the desk.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you down to the basement. I’ve got to be around while you look through that case, but I can’t leave the desk for but a couple of minutes. We’ll have to take it up here.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said.

  We went through a door and down some dark, narrow steps. The basement was at their bottom, through another door, and it was cold and damp and filled with the kinds of things you would expect to find in a hotel basement: boxes and crates and trunks and some discarded furniture and cartons of accounting stuff and piles of miscellany. The suitcase was off in one corner.

  I said as I bent to it, ‘Is this all he had in the way of luggage?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘He went away with the clothes on his back, then?’

  ‘Far as I know, he must have.’

  The case was not heavy. I picked it up and we walked back to the stairs. The old guy clicked off the lights and locked the door again, and we started back up.

  I said, ‘Did Sands have any visitors the one night he was here?’

  ‘None that I know about.’

  ‘Make or receive any calls?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Did he say anything to indicate where he was going from here, what he planned to do?’

  ‘Not as I can recall. He didn’t say much of anything, except to ask for a room.’

  We came into the lobby again. I said, ‘Anywhere?’

  ‘Guess so. By the desk there’s okay.’

  I put the case down and opened it, kneeling on the worn carpeting. I emptied it slowly, carefully, putting the contents in neat piles where the old guy could see them. Then I began to sift through the items, methodically.

  There was not much. One pair of slacks and one sports shirt, freshly laundered and conservatively cut and colored; a change of underwear and socks; a rumpled gray gabardine suit, a couple of years old and fairly expensive; a necktie of dubious taste, in the current wide fashion; a packet of air-mail letters, tied with a rubber band, that were from Elaine Kavanaugh and addressed to Sands at an APO number; and a small leather kit bag containing a band-type razor, an aerosol can of shaving cream, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of aspirin, a tube of gel hair lotion, and a small can of body talc, a spare comb, and a spring case filled with men’s jewelry.

  I went over the bottom of the case, but there was nothing except some lint and a German pfennig. The kit bag had nothing but the personal hygiene items, and all the clothing pockets were empty. Or I thought they were until I poked an index finger into the slit handkerchief pocket on the suit jacket and came up with a piece of white notepaper folded in a small square. I opened it, and in a neat masculine printing I read:

  Galerie der Expressionisten

  Blumenstrasse 15

  The old guy was watching me from behind the desk. ‘What you got there?’ he asked.

  I showed it to him.

  ‘Looks like German,’ he said.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Mean something, does it?’

  That was a good question. I was thinking about the stolen sketch of Roy Sands, and wondering if Galerie der Expressionisten was an art gallery, and if it was, whether or not there was a connection between the two. ‘Do you mind if I keep it?’ I asked the old guy.

  ‘Well, it rightly belongs to this Sands fella.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But I don’t see no harm in you copying down what it says there, long as you put the original paper back where you got it.’

  So I copied the words onto a piece of hotel stationery and put that in my wallet, and then I packed everything back into the case and the old guy and I made another trip down to the basement. When we came back up I put a five-dollar bill on the counter. ‘For your time and help,’ I told him.

  ‘I’d rather not, you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘If I take money from you, it’d put a bad taste in my mouth—kind of like I was accepting bribes or doing something unethical.’

  I said I understood, and we looked at each other the way a couple of guys will once they’ve decided they comprehend and approve of one another. We shook hands, and he went back to his ledger and I went back to the cold, wet snow falling across the night.

  * * * *

  I picked up my car at the county lot and drove out toward the University of Oregon campus and found a nice-looking motel. I checked in there and called the Eugene police department and told Sergeant Downey what I had found at the Leavitt Hotel; he said he would look into it a little further and that he would contact me if he learned anything more.

  I put in a call to the Royal Gate Hotel in San Francisco, and Elaine Kavanaugh was in her room. ‘I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to call,’ she said when I identified myself. Her voice was very tense, and I had the impression she was holding her breath. ‘Did you find out anything?’

  ‘A little,’ I said. I told her all the places I had covered, and I told her about the hotel and the suitcase. She was silent for a long moment; then, in a small voice, she said, ‘It doesn’t look very good, does it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘We don’t
have enough information to do any speculating.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have left his things in that hotel room unless something had happened to—’ She broke off, and I could hear her take a tremulous breath that was almost a sob. ‘I’m afraid,’ she whispered. ‘I’m very afraid.’

  There was nothing for me to say to that; any words I could have come up with would have sounded forced and tenuous. I let several seconds pass, a coldness on my shoulders, and then I said, ‘I don’t know what this means, if anything, but I found a piece of paper in the pocket of your fiancé’s suit—the one in his suitcase at the hotel here. It had the name of a gallery printed on it, and an address that was obviously German—fifteen Blumenstrasse.’

  ‘Gallery? You mean an art gallery?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well, what was the name?’

  ‘Galerie der Expressionisten,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve never heard of it. What city is it in?’

  ‘There was none listed on the paper.’

  ‘Do you think this gallery has something to do with the portrait of Roy? Do you think it means anything?’

  ‘It might. I don’t know.’

  ‘Roy disappeared for some reason. Maybe ... well, maybe the gallery and the portrait are mixed in somehow. Mightn’t that be possible?’

  ‘At this point anything might be possible, Miss Kavanaugh,’ I said, and sighed inaudibly. I wanted to tell her that rhetorical questions, even though we all indulge in them from time to time, served no real purpose; but I thought that if I did, it would sound cruel. ‘Do you want me to check around up here another day?’

  ‘Is there any more you can do?’

  ‘Not really. I’ve covered everything I can think of.’

  ‘Then I suppose you’d best come back to San Francisco.’

  ‘Do you want me to come by your hotel when I get in?’

  ‘Yes, I think that would be a good idea.’

  We said good-bye, and I went over to the motel coffee shop and ate a hot dinner and drank some hot coffee to go with it. A long soak in the bathtub and I was ready for bed. I buried myself between the warmth of fresh sheets and a quilted comforter, but for the second night in a row sleep came slowly, reluctantly. A nonsense thing kept running around inside my head:

  The time of Sands is running out, the shifting, whispering, vanishing Sands...

  * * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The shuttle bus from San Francisco International Airport pulled in to the Downtown Terminal just before twelve the next day. I picked up my overnight bag, went across the street to the parking garage where I had left my car, and locked the bag in the trunk. Then I walked over and down to Powell Street, past the skin-flick houses and the porno bookstores—the new San Francisco, the decadent one, the ugly one. On Powell, I cut across the narrow street in front of one of the few remaining cable cars and entered the Royal Gate Hotel.

  This was old San Francisco, vanished San Francisco, a part of the glorious and spirited city that had risen from the ashes of one of the world’s greatest tragedies. It was an unostentatious twelve-story building which had once numbered the likes of J. P. Morgan, Louis Bromfield, and Lillian Russell among its many distinguished guests—and had never forgotten them. The quiet, spacious lobby had been modernized just enough to keep it fashionable, but without losing any of its gentility. If you were a native of The City, coming into the Royal Hotel, you felt a little sad, a little wistful, for the things that once were, the traditions—such as the chattering, lurching, magnificent cable cars—that were one by one being returned to those ashes which they had survived or from which they had been reborn. It was that way for me.

  I asked an elderly desk clerk, who might very possibly have carried the bags of Thomas Edison or Florenz Ziegfeld in his youth, for Miss Kavanaugh’s room; he told me politely that he would have to ring to find out if she would see me, and I gave him my name and waited while he had the switchboard call her. When he had her confirmation, he directed me to the elevators and told me Miss Kavanaugh was in 1012.

  I rode up with a uniformed operator, another vanishing breed, and got off and walked through velvet plush past gold inlaid mirrors and rococo furnishings to 1012. Elaine opened the door immediately to my knock, and I went into a large room done in soft blues and dark wood, with a double bed and a writing desk and three chairs and a low, comfortable-looking divan. There was no television set, and that told you something right there.

  Elaine wore a beige wool dress, simply cut, and a single stand of cultured pearls at her throat. She was not wearing the silver-rimmed glasses she had had on in my office, and her brown eyes were tired and faintly blood-shot— very probably from a lack of sleep. A vague smokiness seemed to be clouding the textured translucence of her skin, as if some inexplicable form of pollution had begun to consume her from within.

  We said perfunctory amenities, and she motioned to one of the chairs and took one for herself and we sat facing each other with a glass-topped table between us. She had her hands folded on her knees and her knees drawn tightly together, the way she had sat in my office. Her head was erect, chin up, and I could see the cords in her slender throat, the faint pulse beating in its soft white hollow.

  ‘Well,’ she said with a certain firmness, ‘I’ve been thinking about things, and there doesn’t seem to be anything more you can do over here.’

  ‘Over here?’

  ‘I’d like you to go to Germany,’ she said.

  I blinked at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Germany. To Kitzingen.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘To find out about that gallery and that portrait of Roy. To find out if they have anything to do with his disappearance.’

  ‘We don’t know that the gallery is in Kitzingen,’ I said. ‘It could be anywhere in Germany. And we don’t even know that it’s an art gallery. I had planned to check on that today by phone—’

  ‘You don’t need to,’ she said. ‘The Galerie der Expressionisten is an art gallery, and it is in Kitzingen. I called overseas information early this morning, and there was a listing for it.’

  ‘Then we can contact the gallery by telephone.’

  ‘I did that, too. I had to have something to do with myself, and so I placed a call to Germany and talked with a man named Ackermann; he owns the Galerie der Expressionisten. He spoke English—very good English.’

  ‘What did he have to say?’

  ‘He’d never heard of Roy,’ she answered thinly. ‘And he’d never heard of the portrait, at least he said he hadn’t from my description.’

  I rubbed the back of my neck. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, why do you want me to go to Germany, if that’s the case?’

  Her eyes were steady on my face. ‘I think it’s very strange that anyone would want to steal that portrait, and because it was stolen, it must mean something to somebody. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted.

  ‘Well, Roy had the sketch and he had the address of the gallery, too, and now he’s missing—that all could be important, somehow, we don’t know that it isn’t. You can’t tell much by talking to someone on the telephone, and anyway, there are other places you might be able to go if you were over there. If that sketch means something in terms of Roy’s disappearance, maybe you can find out what it is in Germany.’

  ‘Your fiancé vanished on this side of the Atlantic, Miss Kavanaugh.’

  ‘I know that, for God’s sake, but the portrait must mean something, and we don’t have any other clue, do we?’

  ‘No, we don’t.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘Do you realize how much it would cost you to get me over to Germany and back again?’

  ‘I told you before, I don’t care how much anything costs. Don’t you understand, finding Roy is the only important thing—nothing else is important, not money, not anything!’

  ‘All right, Miss Kavanaugh, take it easy.’

  ‘Will you go to Germany for me?�
�

  ‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure, I’m very sure.’

  I thought: It may be a waste of time and money, but her arguments are valid enough: a connection between that portrait—the theft of it—and Sands’ disappearance might very well exist, and the connection could conceivably be found in Germany. One thing is sure: both are damned odd, and both need explanation. You can’t just walk out on her now, she’s half frantic and she’s got nobody and it’s her money after all; you owe it to her for her faith and her investment, you owe it to yourself for what happened the other night.