The Vanished - [Nameless Detective 02]

by Bill Pronzini

  And then?

  Well, he had apparently left Roxbury, by one means of transportation or another, and gone directly to Eugene, Oregon, for some as yet unexplained reason. Had he done that the same day he visited the Emerys—Monday? It would not appear so, since he had checked into the Eugene hotel late on the twenty-first, Tuesday, and had sent the wires to Hendryx, Rosmond, and Gilmartin on that same evening.

  After that—blank.

  If Sands had spent the night of the twentieth here, he would not have had much choice of location; aside from the Redwood Lodge, where I was now staying, I had noticed a small hotel on Main Street and nothing else— although there may have been some kind of accommodations on one of the side streets. I ought to be able, then, to determine, with no problem, whether or not he had spent that particular evening in Roxbury. After that, I would just have to see what developed, what my instincts told me. I had this feeling, a prescience of sorts, that said the answer to the disappearance of Roy Sands was in this village—that the final solution to the whole affair could be had right here, with just a little digging, a little perseverance. There was no foundation for that feeling, and yet it was there and it was demanding.

  I drove back to the Redwood Lodge and stopped at the office and talked again to the guy who looked like Frank Lovejoy. His name was Jardine, I discovered, and he was the owner of the motel; when I told him what my job was and asked him about Roy Sands, he was agreeably co-operative.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I remember him clear enough—Roy Sands. He came in on foot, with just a single suitcase. It was raining a little that day, and he came shuffling down the road looking kind of wet and forlorn. Must have just got off the one o’clock bus from Eureka, I remember thinking at the time. Let’s see, I rented him cabin number three, I think it was. Only stayed the one night.’

  ‘He was alone?’

  ‘Oh sure, alone.’

  ‘Did he say much to you?’

  ‘Come to think of it, he asked me for Coachman Road. Same as you did a while ago.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Not as I can remember.’

  ‘What time did he leave the next morning?’

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ Jardine answered. ‘He was gone, key in the cabin door, when Frances— that’s my old lady—went in at ten.’

  ‘Then you didn’t see him leave?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Isn’t it a little unusual for somebody to check out that way, without turning the key in to you here?’

  ‘Not if they’ve paid in advance, like he did.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me where the bus station is?’

  ‘Don’t have one, exactly. Greyhounds stop at Vanner’s Emporium, two blocks back on Main.’

  ‘Is there a police station in Roxbury?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘Where would I find it?’

  ‘In the City Hall. Same block as Vanner’s Emporium, one street north. State Street.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Sure,’ Jardine said. ‘Glad to oblige.’

  I went to Vanner’s Emporium first, and a very old man with the look and actions of a centenarian told me that he didn’t remember selling a ticket to anybody who looked like Roy Sands, but maybe he had, since his memory wasn’t so good here the past couple of years. He also told me that there were buses to Eureka every other day—Monday, Wednesday, Friday, at 2:00 p.m. You could make connections there for Eugene. Buses south or east? Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays to Redding, departing 1:00 p.m.

  I walked down the block a couple of doors to a café and had some coffee and watched nightfall enfolding the ancient, monolithic redwoods. Apparently Sands had not gone to Eugene by bus; he had spent the night of Monday, the twentieth, in Roxbury, and there were no Grey-hounds out to Eureka and eventually Eugene on Tuesday. He could not have gone to Redding on the 1:00 p.m. Monday bus; that was the one he had come in on, according to what Jardine at the Redwood Lodge had told me. So even if there were some explanation for his heading south to Redding instead of west to Eureka for the transfer to Eugene, he could not have gotten by bus to Redding to do it. Still, he had been in Eugene on Tuesday night, the twenty-first, to send wires and to check into the Leavitt Hotel; he had to have gotten there somehow.

  Had he left Roxbury by train, then? I had not seen anything remotely resembling a railroad depot, and I doubted seriously that a town as small as this one would have passenger service. Sands had not had a car, that had been confirmed by Jardine. Taxi? Possible. But even if Roxbury had some type of cab service, and I suspected that they did not, the cost seemed prohibitive. That left hitchhiking and/or a private vehicle of some kind.

  I thought again of Nick Jackson. Was it possible that Jackson, who had been touring the Northwest with this WAC nurse, had drifted into California as far south as Roxbury—and that Sands had met him here, gone with him to Eugene for some reason? Possible, yes, but not probable; the coincidence of a chance meeting like that was a little too much to swallow. The more I thought about things, the more I was inclined to eliminate Jackson—he seemed too far removed from the core of the whole affair; but until I located Sands, I could not afford to cross him completely off the list.

  I paid for my coffee and walked through the cold, lengthening shadows to State Street. I found the City Hall, a white clapboard building which had been freshly painted and had a set of wide wooden schoolhouse steps up to the double entrance doors. Inside, there was a short hallway with low counters on both sides. Behind the one on the left were a couple of desks and a large switchboard and two young guys in uniform listening to police calls; the counter on the right belonged to the City Water Department and had a sign midway along reading Pay Here. At the end of the hallway was a closed redwood door with Mayor’s Office etched on it in gold leaf.

  One of the uniformed cops—the owner of a blond crew-cut and an officious manner— came over to the counter and asked if he could help me. I spread my wallet open so that he could read my identification, and he looked at it as if he could not quite believe what he saw. He read it again, looked at me, read it a third time. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘a private detective,’ with no inflection at all.

  ‘No kidding,’ the other cop said. He wore his black hair parted in the middle, like the kid in the old Our Gang comedies. He came over and read the identification, and then the two of them stood there staring at me. I thought: Oh Christ, we’re not going to play one of those seriocomic sketches now, are we? I had dealt with small-town law enforcement a couple of times before, and they were a breed unto their own: you never quite knew how things were going to go.

  But it was all right this time. The blond cop said finally, ‘Well, hell, you kind of took us by surprise. The closest we get to private eyes up here is on the television.’

  ‘Sure, I understand.’

  ‘What can we do for you?’

  I told him why I was in Roxbury, leaving out some of the non-relevant details. They were willing and talkative, but there was not much either of them could tell me. There had been no incidents of any kind involving a transient just prior to Christmas, and neither had ever heard of a man named Roy Sands. There were no trains that stopped in or about Roxbury, passenger or freight. There were no taxis operating in the village, and no one had sanction to hire out a private vehicle for the transportation of passengers. Hitchhiking was of course illegal, and the law was strictly enforced, especially within the city limits. There were no automobile-rental agencies or dealerships; you had to go to Eureka or Redding or Weaverville.

  I had no other angles to ask them about; we had covered the spectrum of immediate possibilities. I thanked them for their time, asked them to make a note of Sands’ name and to contact me in San Francisco if anything developed that might shed some light on his disappearance; I gave the blond guy one of my business cards. Then we said good night and I left City Hall and wandered back to Main Street.

  Now what? I asked myself. Canvass the town—c
afés, bars, cigar stores, and the like? That seemed the only thing to do, eighty percent of investigative accomplishment being legwork; any cop, past or present, could tell you that. So I wasted an hour and a half patrolling both sides of Main, a little of State, a little of Portland Street on the opposite side. Fat zero.

  It was after seven now, full dark, and I was hungry. There was a chuck-wagon grill near where I had parked my car, and I went in there and pondered over a rib steak, and a cold draft beer. The nagging prescience was still with me, and it was an irritating, frustrating thing because there was no reason for it, no way to explain it or dispel it. Was there something I had overlooked somewhere along the line? Was there something I had failed to consider? More rhetorical questions for which I had no immediate answers.

  Another beer and a couple of cigarettes, and it was eight-thirty. I was very tired from too much driving, too much walking, too much thinking. I decided I would return to the Redwood Lodge and get some sleep; I did not want to have to drive back to San Francisco just yet—but in order to justify my remaining here, I had to have something to work on, a direction. Maybe a decent night’s rest and the cold light of morning would open up some potentiality of which I was unable to think tonight.

  I took the car back to the motel. They had floodlights set up along the side of the road, illuminating the jungle of ferns fronting the office with soft yellow light; a large redwood sign above the office entrance told you the name of the place and that there wasVacancy. I drove past there, and along the graveled half-moon to where number five sat darkly among the gray-black shapes of the trees.

  A chill wind blew through the densely grown vegetation, ruffling leaves, bending branches, making soft and lamenting sounds in the night. It was very dark back there, and I had the vague thought that they ought to have put some kind of floodlighting on the cabins, too, to circumvent accidents and customer complaints. I took the key out of my pocket and started up onto the small porch in front.

  And he came out of the ebon shadows on the right, a huge man-form with one arm drawn back, footfalls sliding harshly on the foliated gravel, and hit me across the side of the head with a fist like a stone pestle.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Bright white light fragmented behind my eyes, and I staggered backward, going down on my left side. I thought: Jesus—who? and tried to roll over, but he was there and swinging and the pestle slammed into me again, high on the cheekbone. I felt blood flowing warm down the side of my face.

  He straddled me, spewing hot sour breath and flecks of spittle, beating at my face, scraping my scalp into the gravel again and again, bringing hot flaring pain and rage, wild rage, you son of a bitch, you son of a bitch, and I levered up at him with my hips, twisting, rolling, pulling free. I got up on my knees and he had his balance back and he hit me again, oh goddamn it, and there was more swimming pain, I could barely see him through a red haze of blood and fury.

  I crawled away like a crab, gasping, spitting blood, choking on blood, and stumbled up, and he was rushing me, then, low in a crouch with his arms curled wide like a frigging Hollywood ape. I knew who it was in that moment, recognized the rubber mask even more grotesque and unreal now—it was Holly, Holly, and I tried to turn away but it was too late, he slammed into me and we went down, rolling, one of his hands trying to crush my genitals and the other clubbing at my face.

  The night was alive in humming, buzzing, pounding noise, but it was all inside my head. I lifted an elbow in reflex and hit him in the face with it, heard him grunt, felt him stiffen, and hit him again, the bastard, hit him again, broke his nose, and the blood spurted down on me like warm, foul rain and I kept on hitting him, pitching him backward, pitching him off of me. He rolled to one side and shook his head bulllike, wanting to get up, and I went after him with the fury still flaming inside me, clasping both hands together and swinging them at his head like a baseball bat. But it was a glancing blow and he kicked at my ankle, falling away, and I was down flat again with him crying and grunting, scrabbling toward me.

  I tried to gain my feet, but I had very little strength left, I was hurt all right, I was confused and the fear was there to feed the rage, and that wild anger was all I had left— that and self-preservation and some instinctive things you never forget if you’ve ever been trained by the military. He slashed at me again, turning my face into the gravel, and more pain flared and I tasted my own blood, hot and thick and salt-sweet. I was half crazy with all of it.

  I kicked at him blindly, missed, kicked again, felt the side of my shoe scrape along his rib cage. He shouted in agony, maybe I broke some of his ribs, and then his weight was gone and I was able to roll over and come up. I saw him and threw myself at the dark panting shape and hit him in the same ribs again with my shoulder while he was trying to recover. He screamed a second time, twisting his body, and I went after him on my knees, flailing at him with wild, ineffectual blows at first, until I got to him, and then connecting, hitting him now, hurting him now.

  I stopped swinging at him after a time, and he knelt there on all fours with his head hanging down, bull-like again, a fighting bull after the picadors and banderilleros and matadors have finished wounding him and sapping his strength and preparing him for the kill. I raised over him, matador readying the final thrust with the muleta, this crazily disjointed thought there in my mind amid the agony and the heat, and I caught my hands together again and brought them down on the back of Holly’s neck. He grunted, not falling, and I brought the hands down again, and again, beating him to the ground, beating him flat, kept on hitting him until I could not raise my arms any longer and he was lying there very still. All of it drained out of me at once, and I thought: I killed him—but I had no reaction to that. I fell away from him, stretching out on my belly on the hard, rough gravel, leaking blood, trying to breathe, trying to regain control.

  A long time passed, and no one came, and I thought: We made enough noise to raise half the town, why isn’t someone here? But even as I thought that, I knew it wasn’t true; the accelerated speed at which things had happened, the heightening of all my senses, the pain and the fury, had magnified things out of proportion. We had not made as much noise as all that, the office was too far away, the fight had not lasted nearly as long as it seemed. We were alone back there in the darkness.

  I felt my thoughts clearing finally, in spite of a raging inferno of agony in my head, and I got my weak arms under me and pushed myself up, struggling to a sitting position. I was still gasping. I looked over at Holly, and he had not moved. Droplets of blood fell from somewhere on my face to spatter on the gravel between my knees as I sat there. Get up, I thought. I made it onto my feet, shakily, and stood there hurting until I was sure I could walk all right without falling down. Then I went to Holly and leaned over him, and I could hear the stertorous wheezing of his breath into the gravel. I got a grip on the collar of his torn poplin jacket and dragged him to the cabin porch.

  It took some doing to get him up the five steps and across the porch and into the cabin, but I managed it. I left him lying on the floor just inside, and closed the door and locked it and put the key in my pocket. I walked across to the bathroom and flicked on the light, leaving the door open so I could watch him out there, and looked at myself in the mirror over the sink.

  Sweet Christ!

  I caught onto the sides of the basin with shaking hands, fighting down nausea. I was drenched in blood. The left side of my face was like raw ground beef, pebbled with bits of gravel, dirt commingled with the fluid there. A three-cornered flap of loose skin hung open high on my right cheek, and the eye above it was swollen half shut; bruises on both temples, my upper lip split in two places. There was pain all across the back of my skull where he had rolled it in the gravel, and inside my head a near-unbearable pressure had gathered, like volatile gases coming to an explosion point.

  He had done a job on me, all right.

  I stripped off my shirt and jacket and ran warm water int
o the basin, glancing into the other room with my good eye from time to time; Holly had not moved. I washed my face, gently, trying not to cry out. I used a soft towel, and looked in the mirror again, and it was not quite so bad now; but I had to do something about that flap of skin hanging loose under my eye. It was still bleeding, trailing crimson down my cheek in a hellish tear stream.

  I went into the other room, moving on enervated legs, and unlocked the front door and stumbled down to my car. There was a first-aid kit in the glove compartment, and I took that back inside, relocking the door. I poured Mercurochrome onto a gauze square and tore off two strips of adhesive tape and stuck them across the top of the pad; then I set my teeth and shut my eyes and placed the bandage gently over the cut, pressing the loose skin back into place.

  I could feel the pain down through my groin, and a kind of whimper came out of my throat. After a moment the pain went away and I could breathe again. I poured more Mercurochrome onto some cotton swabbing and worked that over the left side of my face, and then I sat down on the edge of the bed and ate four aspirin dry from the kit.