The Snatch - [Nameless Detective 01]

by Bill Pronzini

  I had been putting it out of my mind, effectively blocking it out each time it demanded attention, for better than two months. That’s one of the fine things about the human animal: if something bothers you, if something frightens you, you simply put it out of your mind and tell yourself that after a while it will go away of its own accord—and that makes everything okay again. But I could no longer indulge in that kind of speciousness, because the cough was getting worse and because Erika’s harsh and acerbic words had brought it all out into the open, into a light I could not flick off.

  Well, all right. I had to give up the damned cigarettes, what was the use in kidding myself? I had to quit them cold, none of this tapering-off crap. I could chew toothpicks or gum until the gnawing went away, and after that it would not be so bad at all. Then I would have to go to a doctor and have a chest X-ray, and maybe a thorough physical, to find out about the cough. Maybe what I had told Erika was correct: maybe it was nothing more than a bronchial disorder.

  Yeah, and maybe it was cancer.

  Jesus, Jesus! I could feel my hands starting to shake, and I swept the package of cigarettes off onto the floor and got up and kicked them behind the stove. I was scared. I had been scared all along.

  I thought: What would I do if they told me I had six months to live? What would I say, what would I feel? Or suppose I had to have surgery, to have a lung removed? How would I bear up under that? Because I was petrified of hospitals, of surgical steel, after having been in war-zone hospitals in the South Pacific and having seen things in them no man should ever see. God, maybe it wasjust better to let whatever it was alone, until it either cleared itself up or I just kicked over, but that was not the way it happened, no, an uncle of mine had died of cancer and he had been a hale and hearty man weighing two hundred and fifty pounds all his life and yet he had died at half that weight with his body yellowed and withered and the cancer eating at him, consuming him from within and making him scream with the pain of—

  The sudden, strident sound of the telephone bell brought me whirling about. I had taken the phone on its long cord into the kitchen and put it down on the sideboard earlier, with the idea of calling Erika, but I hadn’t been able to do it; I had forgotten the thing was there.

  I took a couple of deep breaths, getting the dark thoughts out of my mind, getting calm, and then I went over and answered it on the third ring. It was a secretary to Allan Channing, crisp and efficient and precise. She wanted to know if it would be possible for me to come by his office in San Mateo before I attended to my other commitment on the Peninsula. I said it would, and wondered what Channing wanted of me; but I did not ask. The secretary would not have known anyway.

  I hung up and went back and stared at the coffee some more. I was not looking forward to what lay ahead on this day, or at any time in the near future, and suddenly I wished I were on a boat somewhere—an old bugeye sloop, perhaps, clean and sleek and well-provisioned— alone on that boat with the song of the sea wind in my ears and the feel of salt spray on my face. But that was a never-never land, a peace and a serenity I could never aspire to because I was too practical, too tightly bound to the city and her chaotic ways. I knew that, and the knowledge saddened me. I had today, and maybe tomorrow, and maybe a lot of tomorrows—but I had cold stark reality, too, and I could never escape from it . . .

  I shook myself and thought: Come down a little, will you? Christ! I got a box of wooden toothpicks out of one of the cupboards and took that and the telephone into the bedroom. I slipped the toothpicks into the pocket of my suitcoat, and put the coat on, and found a tie that looked all right against the pale yellow of the only clean shirt I had in from the laundry. I stared at the telephone for a few seconds, but I still could not bring myself to call Erika; later, tomorrow, after I was finished with this Martinetti business, after I had made an appointment with a doctor. Tomorrow.

  The same commuter traffic I had gotten caught in the night before, in reverse, tangled the Bayshore, and it took me forty minutes to travel the twenty miles to San Mateo. The fog was thick and gray and cold as far south as Millbrae, and then the sky cleared and it was warm and balmy again, a nice autumn morning that I could not enjoy at all.

  I stopped at a Standard station for gas, and asked directions to the address Allan Channing’s secretary had given me on the phone. The attendant told me how to get to it.

  The building turned out to be a sprawling, ranch-style complex with a covered gallery bisecting it into two wings, and a solid rear section. There was a big lacquered redwood sign hung between two gnarled posts next to the entrance drive; the words San Mateo Professional Center were neatly wood-burned across the top, and below them were wide strips of brass lettered in white in two rows of six each. I saw that the building’s offices were occupied by several doctors and dentists, a certified public accountant, a lawyer; Channing’s name, with the wordsFinancial Consultantbelow it, was next to the bottom on the right-hand row—Number 9.

  I parked my car in the diagonally striped lot to one side and walked around to the gallery. The various offices opened off of that, and it was cool and aromatic in there; multishaped wooden planters set into the stone floor were filled with trimmed cypress and laurel and red-and-white fuchsia and a half-dozen other plants and flowers. The center portion of the rear wall was comprised of a rough-stone waterfall-and-fountain, with pieces of colored tile forming a square mosaic pond for the water trickling down from a mossy, cavelike opening in the rock. Channing’s office was next to that, on the right; a plaque identical to the one on the sign by the drive—a little larger—was fitted to the door at eye level. I turned the knob and went inside.

  I stood in a reception room like a hundred other reception rooms: thick saffron-colored rug on the floor, inoffensive outdoor prints on the walls, a settee and three chairs made of walnut and fitted with tweed cushions, three end tables and a low glass-topped table in front of the settee, with copies of Timeand Newsweek and Fortune and the Wall Street Journal neatly arranged on it, and a small functional metal desk occupying one corner.

  Behind the desk, fingers flying over the keys of a small typewriter, was a thin, angular henna-haired woman in her mid-forties, wearing a mannish gray suit and a couple of ounces of lavender perfume. She had pinched cheeks and hazel eyes that looked as if they had seldom, if ever, shone with the heat of passion. Channing was apparently a no-nonsense boy when it came to business.

  The woman finished what she was typing, let the automatic return flip the carriage back, and looked up at me with professional aloofness. Her smile was as manufactured as the color of her hair. “Yes, may I help you?”

  I gave her my name, and said that Mr. Channing was expecting me. She nodded crisply and went primly through one of the two doors to the right of her desk, both of which were marked Private. I stood on the thick carpet with my hat in my hands, waiting. I tried not to think how badly I wanted a cigarette. A minute or so passed, and then the secretary came out and held the door and told me I could go in.

  It was by no means a sumptuous office; it was a place where the sober task of making money was performed, and that told me a little more about what kind of man Allan Channing was.

  He was standing by the windows that comprised the upper half of the wall behind his desk, wearing an olive-green tailor-made suit and a white shirt with French cuffs and gold links with a black onyx “C” on each of them. Sunlight slanted in through Venetian blinds partially closed over the windows, casting thinly pale bars across his face, and I could see deep purplish circles beneath the innocent eyes. He looked as if he had not slept very much the night before.

  He came away from the windows as I entered, and we shook hands. He asked gravely how I was, indicated one of the two visitors’ chairs, and then went behind the desk and sank wearily into his swivel chair. He pressed the balls of his thumbs against his closed eyelids, held them there for a time, sighed, and looked up and across at me.

  “The reason I asked you to stop by,” he said, “
is a more or less confidential one. I’d appreciate it if whatever is said here this morning goes no further.”

  “All right.”

  “Thank you.” He got his lower lip between his teeth and worried it, as if he was not quite sure how to begin. Then, abruptly, he said, “I’d like your opinion.”

  “On what, Mr. Channing?”

  “This thing with Lou’s son. You seem to know about these matters.”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Well,” Channing said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “What I’d like to know—what usually happens? I mean, after the ransom money is paid, is the victim usually allowed to go free?”

  I frowned slightly. “There’s no way of predicting that,” I told him. “It takes a certain kind of person to carry off a kidnapping, and you never know in advance what he’s going to do.”

  “Would you say the chances were likely?”

  “I wouldn’t say.”

  “Yes, but there must be statistics . . .”

  “Statistics don’t mean anything at all in an individual kidnapping,” I said. “Any police officer would tell you that.”

  “You think Lou should have called the police, don’t you? Instead of flatly agreeing to pay the ransom.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But you didn’t try to convince him of that yesterday.”

  “No, and not because it would have negated my fee if I’d been successful, either.”

  “I didn’t mean to intimate that,” Channing said quickly.

  “Martinetti’s mind was made up, and no amount of talking I could have done would have convinced him otherwise. Besides, it wasn’t and isn’t my place. This involves his son, not mine or anyone else’s, and he’s got the right to make whatever decision he thinks is best.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  I watched him take a cellophane-wrapped Havana Partagas cigar from a walnut-and-bronze humidor on his desk; he had some connections, all right, to have gotten a brand like that into this country. He unwrapped it slowly, and used a silver trimmer from his desk to snip off the end. He rolled the cigar around in his fingers, and looked at me again. “What are the odds on the police catching the kidnapper?” he asked. “After the ransom is paid?”

  Christ, what was the point of all this? My nerves were frayed this morning, and his bandying about was not helping matters any. He had something on his mind, but he was taking a hell of a long time putting voice to it.

  I said, “Sometimes they catch them, and sometimes they don’t. It depends to a large degree on circumstance. Again, it’s not something you can predict.”

  “I see,” Channing said. He used a bronze lighter on the cigar, rolling it in studied half-turns through the flame. The smoke was fragrant and whitish-gray, and I watched it with a kind of hunger. My hands were tight on my knees.

  Channing leaned back in the chair and looked at the cigar, and his guileless eyes were troubled. He said, “I . . . suppose I should be frank with you.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “I’m in an uncomfortable position,” he said slowly. “I have always been a very cautious man when it came to money, you see. That is how I managed to attain the position of wealth and stability which I command today.”

  I waited, not speaking.

  “Lou Martinetti isn’t like that. He takes gambles, foolish gambles. In the past few months he has made some extremely ill-advised investments, and consequently has lost a considerable amount of money.”

  I kept on waiting.

  “Last night he and I made a careful check of his negotiable assets,” Channing said. “He doesn’t have three hundred thousand dollars. He couldn’t begin to raise even half that much, not in one week or one month. To put it simply, Lou Martinetti is not too far removed from bankruptcy.”

  I had not expected that, but I was not as surprised as I might have been; the kind of businessman Martinetti had a reputation of being, the state of his finances at various times in the past, made such a revelation something less than startling. But I thought I saw the motivation for Channing’s earlier questions; the point of all this was becoming very clear.

  I said, “He’s asked you for the ransom money, is that it?”

  Channing was silent for a long moment, a faintly pained expression at the corners of his mouth. Then, slowly, he nodded. “Yes. A loan. I’m not in the habit of loaning money, not even to personal friends, not for any reason. And three hundred thousand dollars is quite a lot of money.”

  I agreed that it was.

  “But on the other hand, if the ransom isn’t paid and Gary is . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words. “If that were to happen, it would be on my conscience, do you see? I couldn’t bear a cross like that.”

  “Are you going to give him the money?”

  “I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “I suppose, when I asked you here today, I just wanted some reassurance that everything was going to work out—that Gary would be returned safely after the ransom payment, and that I would get my money back. Not that Martinetti wouldn’t repay it; he would, certainly, as soon as he was able. But that might possibly be a period of years.”

  I said, without thinking, “And you wouldn’t like to have three hundred thousand dollars of your money not producing any returns.”

  Channing looked at me sharply for a brief instant, and then he sighed audibly and carefully tapped the ash off the end of his cigar into a bronze ashtray. “I’m not a hard man,” he said, and there was a note of defensiveness in his voice. “Oh, I’ve stepped on a few people in my life; what successful man hasn’t? But I’m not a driving force, the way Martinetti is.”

  “That’s your concern, Mr. Channing,” I said. I did not want to listen to any rationalizations this morning.

  “Yes,” he said, “I suppose it is.”

  I got on my feet. “If there’s nothing more, I’ve got to be on my way.”

  “No, nothing more,” he said. He stood, too, and extended his hand. I took it. “Are you going to Lou’s now?

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be there later this afternoon. It will take some time to gather the money together from various banks.”

  I said I would see him later, and let myself out. I went quickly to where I had left my car, and got a toothpick from my coat pocket and chewed on it. I thought:

  Jesus, it must be hell to live with yourself if you’re a like that.

  I started the car and swung down onto El Cai Real and turned north there, toward Hillsborough.

  * * * *

  5

  Martinetti was sitting alone on the terrace, at a wrought-iron table under a huge fringed umbrella. I could see him as I came up the path from the front gate, but instead of cutting across the lawn on the circular stepping stones leading to the terrace from an opening in the low retaining wall, I went peremptorily to the front door and rang the bell.

  The thin dark-haired maid—Cassy—let me in and put my hat on the same hall table and escorted me wordlessly through the huge living room and through a sliding glass door at the left of the bay window. I did not see any sign of Karyn Martinetti or Proxmire, the secretary. The living room was dark and silent.

  There was a white cloth spread over the table at which Martinetti sat, and on it was a silver coffee service and a crystal decanter of what looked like brandy. The cup in front of him was half full, and his face was flushed lightly. The gray eyes were sunken in discolored pouches, and had a haunted look to them; no magnetism on this day.

  He turned the haunted eyes on me as I came out onto the terrace and put his chin down a half-point in greeting. I sat in the chair on his right. He said, hollowly, to the maid, “Bring another cup, would you please, Cassy?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and went away.

  We sat there in silence for a time, looking out over the rippling blue-green water in the pool, to the drive and a high green bordering hedge beyond i
t. It was warm and quiet, and you could hear sparrows and fat-breasted robins chattering in the trees. I wanted a cigarette so badly that the thought of one made saliva flow hotly in my mouth.

  I said finally, “No word yet, Mr. Martinetti?” but it was a rhetorical question. I could tell just by looking at him that there had been none.

  He shook his head and put the coffee cup to his mouth and drank deeply from it with his eyes closed. A shudder passed through him, brief and violent, and then he put the cup down very carefully with hands that were steady only by an effort of will.