The Snatch - [Nameless Detective 01]

by Bill Pronzini

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  The Snatch

  [Nameless Detective 01]

  By Bill Pronzini

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  1

  Tamarack Drive was one of these oak- and elm-and eucalyptus-shaded affairs that are supposed to make you think of rustic country lanes. There were no sidewalks on either side; instead, there were narrow creeks with mica rock beds and a trickle of water and root-tangled red-earth banks.

  It was just past four in the afternoon when I parked my car behind a green panel truck that had the words Burlingame Landscaping and Gardening Servicestenciled across its rear doors—and next to a post-supported mailbox crafted to represent a Lincolnesque log cabin, the numerals 416 in black iron extending like a billboard from its roof. Just beyond that, a narrow wooden footbridge spanned the creek to the front gate, and a larger wooden structure a little further on did the same to an interior drive; they were made out of redwood, with thick bark-covered railings and arched supports beneath to give the impression of tunneling. The gate was of redwood, too, set into a black wrought-iron frame, and so was the six-foot fence that stretched out on both sides. I could see the upper story of the house—a big modern Tudor with a gabled roof, set well back inside the grounds.

  It was one of those warm, balmy autumn days, with just enough breeze to stir the fallen reddish-gold oak and elm leaves—the kind of day that makes you think of football games and long, leisurely strolls and pretty girls in short dresses with their hair blowing silken and free. I had the window rolled down, and the breeze was cool and soft against the side of my face; the aromatic scent of the eucalyptus was strong and pungent in the air.

  I sat there for a time, watching the leaves flutter across asphalt patchworked with sunlight and shade. It was very quiet. This was Hillsborough, a sanctuary for the affluent and the snobbish on the Peninsula fifteen miles south of San Francisco, and when you entered its boundaries you stepped into a kind of Elysium where silence reigned supreme and noise of any kind constituted an unpardonable sin. I felt vaguely uncomfortable. 1 seemed always to feel that way in places like Hillsborough, the same feeling you might have if you found yourself at a formal party wearing slacks and a sport shirt.

  I lit a cigarette, and that started the coughing again. 1 got out my handkerchief and covered my mouth with it. After a while the coughing stopped and I took-the linen away and looked at it. There was a grayishness to the phlegm that made me shudder a little. I put the handkerchief in my pocket again and stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray and got out of the car.

  I crossed the footbridge, and there was a small plaque fastened to the center of the redwood gate that said simply: Martinetti. On my right as I entered the grounds was a thick, green, well-trimmed lawn stretching away to a landscaped rock garden with a stone pond and a lot of evergreen shrubs and myrtle and spidery California wood ferns. The redwood fence extended in a right angle to form the boundary line along that side of the property, ending at another creek wider and deeper than the one bordering the street in front. The creek formed a natural rear boundary, and tall, slender eucalyptus trees grew along it in thick profusion. A young guy in a striped T-shirt and dungarees was kneeling on a spread piece of canvas nearby, weeding the lawn with a small trowel. He didn’t look up as I entered.

  There was more of the verdant lawn to the left, and beyond it a crushed gravel drive and a wide portico with room for three cars parked side by side. At the moment there were two: a new beige-colored Lincoln Continental and a ten-year-old immaculate MG roadster painted a gleaming silver. The lawn sloped into a raised terrace made of fieldstone, to the side of the house, and I could see the blue tile of an L-shaped swimming pool and a lot of heavy white wrought-iron patio furniture and an outdoor bar.

  A white gravel path, inside very low stone retaining walls, curved up to the front door. I followed it, looking up at the house. I still had that vague feeling of discomfort I had known in the car.

  A considerable amount of money had gone into the construction of the Martinetti home. It was huge and two-storied, fashioned of a mixture of brick and patterned stone and lavish half-timber work, with a big bay window along the one side overlooking terrace and pool. Rectangular mullioned windows were set on either side of the front door and on the facing second-story wall. Two high molded chimneys jutted upward on either side, advertising the presence of two sizable fireplaces within.

  On the door was a heavy brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head; to lift it, you had to put your fingers inside the widespread jaws. I decided it was more decorative than functional. I found a small pearl button inlaid in the wood on one side and pressed that and listened to chimes, muted and rolling, echoing inside. I stood waiting, holding my hat in my hands.

  Five seconds passed, and then the door opened and a thin girl with bright green, thick-lashed eyes looked out. She was in her early twenties, pretty in a gaunt sort of way. Her hair was cut short in what we used to call an Italian bob, and there was a white maid’s cap perched precariously on the back of her head. A white peasant blouse and a dark skirt and flat-heeled shoes comprised her dress, and I supposed the silly little cap was to let you know that she was a servant and not a member of the household.

  “Yes, sir?” she asked.

  Before I could tell her who I was, and that I was expected, a tall dark-featured guy came up behind her and took the door gently out of her hands. He said, “It’s all right, Cassy, I’ll take care of it,” and she nodded and disappeared obediently around him.

  The guy took a step forward and looked me over noncommittally. He was about thirty, slender, gray-eyed, wearing a Roos/Atkins suit and a white shirt and a tasteful silver-and-blue tie. Black and cut short, his hair was carefully brushed in a way that was designed to minimize the size of his somewhat large ears. He seemed nervous and harried, and there were deep hollows in his cheeks that might have gotten there from perpetual anxiety. He looked the ulcerous type.

  He said, “Are you the detective Mr. Martinetti called?”

  I said that I was.

  “Well, please come in.” He stood aside. “My name is Dean Proxmire. I’m Mr. Martinetti’s secretary.”

  We shook hands, briefly. “How do you do?” I said, and felt foolish saying it. I wished I knew just how to handle myself in this kind of surroundings.

  We were in a good-sized entrance hall, and there were a couple of pieces of decorative furniture on a muted broadloom carpet; several paintings in silver frames and a silver-framed antique mirror adorned the walls. Directly across from the door was a set of stairs leading up to a wrought-iron-railed balcony at the second floor. A wide doorway opened into a darkened living room, drapes drawn over the bay window, to the left of the stairs; to the right, an extension of the hall ran toward the rear of the house.

  Proxmire took my hat and laid it carefully on the table under the mirror. He gestured toward the hall. “Mr. Martinetti and Mr. Channing are waiting in the study,” he said.

  I nodded, and we went down the hall and stopped before a set of carved double doors that looked as if they belonged in some baronial English manor. Proxmire tapped discreetly on the wood, and then opened one of the doors and stepped back so I could precede him inside.

  The study was considerably longer than it was wide, redwood-paneled, with a beamed ceiling in a kind of diamond design. A large patterned-stone fireplace was set against the far wall, with staggered bookshelves flanking it and filling the near end wall; the mantelpiece and some of the shelves contained heavy hammered copper ewers and demijohns and the like. Next to the entrance doors on the left was a built-in stereo unit, and beyond that a recessed alcove that co
ntained an impressive redwood-and-leather bar. The furnishings themselves were of the same style and materials: three thickly padded chairs, two long, low couches—one facing the fireplace; the other set before a massive oblong desk with a black leather executive’s chair behind it—some heavy tables and a couple of mohair-shaded reading lamps. The desk was placed diagonally before the far left-hand corner, and dark brown damask drapes were drawn over windows extending the same distance on either side, forming a background V for the desk. It was very dark in there, and in spite of the appointments, I had the impression of austerity rather than solid masculine comfort, as if no one ever used this study simply to relax.

  There were two men in the room, and both of them stood up as we came in. The man behind the desk was Louis Martinetti: tall, granite-hewn, hair and eyes the color of steel, nose strong and wide, the nostrils in a perpetual flare. He was forty-five, if you believed the newspapers, and from a distance he looked maybe ten years younger; you could almost feel the magnetism of the man reaching out at you across the room, and I was oddly reminded of an old pulp-magazine hero of the thirties and forties named Doc Savage. If Martinetti’s face and hands had been bronzed instead of merely lightly tanned, his hair a metallic silver instead of dark gray, the resemblance might have been startling. He wore an old alpaca golfing sweater over a salmon-colored polo shirt, and beige doeskin slacks.

  The other man, Allan Channing, was similarly dressed, but perhaps as sharp a physical contrast to Martinetti as you could imagine. He was big but not fat, with fine thinning hair the color, or non-color, of dust. He had pink cheeks and a soft mouth, and no particular magnetism at all. His eyes were wide and blue and innocent, containing the earnest guilelessness of an inquisitive child. Those eyes had fooled a lot of people over the years, and that was one of the reasons Channing was worth something like five or six million dollars at the last conservative press estimate.

  They made a pretty awesome pair, Channing and Martinetti. They were speculators, angle boys, long-shot and sure-shot gamblers, wheelers-and-dealers. If you live in California, you know the type; it’s a breeding ground for them. Real estate, industry, commerce—you name it, and if there’s a dollar to be made from its exploitation, they’ll find a way to make it. They were independents, self-made types, and if they had not been as adept, as cunning, as ruthless as they undoubtedly were, the large speculative concerns would have swallowed them up or destroyed them a long time ago.

  Martinetti had made and lost a million dollars three or four times over the past twenty-odd years, and he had the reputation of being a hunch player who would take a flyer on almost anything if his judgment told him there was a chance it would pay off. Channing, on the other hand, was pretty much of a conservative; he liked to play it close to the vest, to leave the wildcatting to men like Martinetti. He had not come out on the short end in the past twenty years, and it was not likely that he ever would. That, in effect, was the difference between the two of them—and very possibly the reason that they had been able to remain friends over the years.

  Proxmire and I approached the desk, and Martinetti’s eyes appraised me with each step, running me through the snap-computer that was his mind, with no outward showing of conclusions. And as I neared him, I could see that something was bothering him, weighing heavily on his mind—and that whatever it was had cracked the granite of his physical being with a network of hairline fractures, like a solid substance about to fragment itself from some inner pressure. There was a gauntness to his face, a shadowed hollowness to the gray eyes. A tic had gotten up on the left side of his face, high on the cheekbone, and his full, expressive mouth was quirked oddly because of it.

  Proxmire made the introductions, and I shook hands with Martinetti and then with Channing. There was a chair to one side of the desk, between it and the couch where Channing was, and I sat down there at Martinetti’s indication and put my hands on my knees. He continued to stand behind his desk for a time, watching Proxmire retreat to the far end of the room but not out of it. Then, abruptly, he turned and walked across to the alcove where the bar was. He paused there, turning slightly, and said to me, “Would you care for a drink?”

  “No, thank you,” I answered.

  “Allan?”

  Channing shook his head. “Not just now, Lou.” He seemed agitated, as if he found himself in a situation that he did not quite know how to cope with.

  Martinetti poured four fingers of amber liquid from a decanter into a cut-crystal glass and returned to the desk. He sat down, and made a pyramid of his hands and rested his forehead on it for a long moment. Then he raised his head, looking directly at me.

  “At ten o’clock this morning,” he said, without preamble, “a man dressed in a dark-blue business suit and carrying a briefcase entered the headmaster’s office at Sandhurst Military Academy in Burlingame. He introduced himself as a Mr. Edmonds, a member of the legal firm I employ, and showed a note written on my personal stationery to Mr. Young, the headmaster. The note said that Young was to release my son, Gary, to this Edmonds on a matter of the gravest personal importance. The note was ostensibly signed by me. Mr. Young summoned Gary from his class, and he and the man then left Sandhurst in a late-model station wagon.”

  Martinetti picked up his glass and drank from it. It was very quiet in the dark room—and suddenly very cold. “At two this afternoon, when Allan and I returned from a round of golf at the Burlingame Country Club, there was a telephone call for me,” he went on. “A man’s voice said that unless I paid him a specified amount of money, at a time and place of which I would later be notified, I could look for the body of my son in the Bay.”

  He was watching me intently now, waiting for my reaction. I avoided his eyes. I got out a cigarette and lit it and looked around for an ashtray. There were none. I put the match in my coat pocket. I could feel my lungs rebelling against the sharpness of the smoke, but the coughing did not start up again.

  Martinetti said, “Do you understand what I’ve just told you? My son has been kidnapped.”

  “I understand it,” I said. “Have you called the police yet?”

  “No, and I don’t intend to.”

  “Because of the threat?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They’re still the people you want to talk to.”

  “No,” Martinetti said. “I want my son back safely, and to get him back I’ll follow any orders I’m given. No police.”

  “Just why did you call me, Mr. Martinetti?” I asked him. “I have neither the facilities nor the inclination to investigate a kidnapping.”

  “I don’t want you to investigate anything,” Martinetti said. There was an edge to his voice now, born of impatience and frustration and perhaps of fear.

  “Then why?”

  “The kidnapper wants a third party to make the money drop,” he said slowly. “I don’t know why. Maybe he’s afraid if I do it myself, I’ll panic or try something foolish. I don’t know.”

  “How much do they want?”

  He took a deep breath, held it, released it audibly. “Three hundred thousand dollars,” he said.

  I tapped some cigarette ash into the palm of my hand. The silence seemed to build in the room. I said finally, “What kind of arrangements were you given?”

  “The bills are to be in small denominations, nothing larger than a hundred. I suppose that’s standard procedure.”

  “It’s the way this kind of thing is usually worked.”

  “I’m to put the money into a plain suitcase. Then I’m to wait for further instructions.”

  “Were you told when?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “But no particular time?”

  “No.”

  I stared at a veined black marble pen set next to the telephone on his desk. I still could not meet his eyes. “Haven’t you got someone here who can make the delivery for you? Mr. Channing, maybe, or—”

  “I’m sorry,” Channing said quickly from the couch. He had the kind of sof
t, sepulchral voice you come to expect from morticians. “Louis and I talked over that possibility, but I simply couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take that kind of responsibility.”

  No, I thought, but it’s all right if I take it.

  I said to Martinetti, “What about your secretary?”

  He looked to where Proxmire was sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace. An odd, bitter little smile touched the corners of his mouth, and then disappeared as quickly as it had come. “I’m afraid not,” he said.

  “One of your other friends or business associates?”

  “To be perfectly frank, there is no one I would care to trust with that kind of money.”

  “You’re apparently prepared to trust me with it.”

  “You have a reputation for honesty, integrity and discretion in your profession. I made several reference calls before I telephoned you personally.”

  I did not say anything.

  Martinetti said, “Will you do it?”