The Snatch - [Nameless Detective 01]

by Bill Pronzini

  The maid came back with a china cup on a small silver tray and put the cup down in front of me and poured coffee from the silver service. Then she refilled Martinetti’s cup and went away again. I watched him add a couple of fingers from the decanter, and poured milk and stirred sugar into my own coffee.

  I said quietly, “You ought to get some sleep, Mr. Martinetti. I can watch the phone for you.”

  “No, I’m all right,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  He drank from his cup again. I hoped he would not get drunk; in this sort of situation the clearer the thinking the better off everything was going to be. But he looked as if he could handle the liquor well enough, and I thought better of saying anything to him about it. If Gary Martinetti had been my son, maybe I would have felt like getting a little tight, too.

  There was not much we could say to one another, and we sat and listened to the morning sounds. I drank coffee and chewed toothpicks and tried not to think about anything at all. An hour passed, and I knew I was not going to make it. My nerves were like the sparking ends of live wires. I kept telling myself to remember the cough, to remember my uncle who had died wasted of cancer, but I wasn’t coughing now and my lungs felt fine and it just wasn’t any goddamned use, not with the tension building inexorably with each passing second.

  I excused myself and went along the lawn to the path and out to where I had left my car. In the glove compartment I found three packages of cigarettes that I had known were there all along. I got one of them out and tore it open and shook out a cylinder and lit it and breathed in the smoke like it was ambrosia. I closed my eyes and leaned against the side of the car, and there was a weak feeling of completion in the pit of my stomach, the kind of feeling you have after a sexual orgasm. I was not coughing, and the barrier was back up in my mind; I could not even tell myself what a weak damned fool I was.

  I put the opened package and another one in my coat pocket and walked back across the footbridge, through the gate. As I approached the terrace, I saw that Karyn Martinetti had come out and was sitting next to her husband at the table. She still had that little-girl-lost expression in her eyes, but there was some color in her cheeks and she’d put on a touch of coral lipstick. The blond hair was pulled back severely into a ponytail and tied with a black velvet ribbon, and she was dressed in a thin white sweater and a wrap-around skirt and white tennis shoes.

  She tried a smile for me as I sat down, but it was weak and painful for her and she put it away almost immediately.

  I said, “Good morning, Mrs. Martinetti. How are you feeling?”

  “Oh, lovely,” she answered in a dull voice. “I can’t remember when I’ve ever felt as lovely as I do at this very moment.”

  “Karyn, for God’s sake!” Martinetti snapped at her.

  She brought her arms up and hugged herself as if she was suddenly chilled. “I’m sorry,” she said very softly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down?” Martinetti said. “You aren’t helping us or yourself being down here.”

  “I don’t want to be alone, Lou.”

  “Cassy will stay with you.”

  “I want to stay here.”

  He moistened his lips. “All right, then.”

  And the three of us sat, waiting. The sun climbed perpendicular in the pale blue autumn sky, and then started its slow and repetitive descent toward the western horizon. Cassy came out with a plate of sandwiches and some chilled raw vegetables, but none of us seemed to be very hungry. I smoked three more cigarettes, carefully, like a junior high school kid locked in the bathroom, and nothing happened in my chest. The tension was still strong in the air, growing stronger, but I could handle it now; I had my crutch back.

  Shortly past one the silver MG roadster I had seen the day before pulled across the wooden bridge into the drive and Dean Proxmire got out. He came hurrying across the lawn and onto the terrace, harried and pale and somber. His eyes, when they touched Karyn Martinetti’s face, held a deep concern—and something else that I could not quite read.

  Martinetti said, “Did you take care of things at the office?”

  “Yes. Any news yet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Christ, what’s taking him so long?”

  “I wish to God I knew.”

  Proxmire sank into the fourth chair at the table, looked at Karyn Martinetti again, looked at the back of his hands. He said softly, bitterly, “The bastard. The lousy bastard.”

  More silence. Five minutes passed. And then, suddenly, Martinetti scraped his chair back and got to his feet. He lifted the near-empty decanter off the table. “I’m going into the study,” he said. He looked at me. “Are you coming?

  I said, “All right,” and stood up.

  “Dean?”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll stay here with Karyn,” Proxmire said.

  “Why should I mind?” Martinetti said.

  They looked at one another steadily, and something indefinable passed between them. I wondered what kind of relationships lay below the proper surface in this nice Hillsborough house—but it wasn’t any of my business. I had enough to worry about.

  Martinetti turned on his heel and I followed him through the living room and down the side hallway and through the ornate double doors into his study. He went over to the bar and got a glass from behind it and took that and the decanter to his desk. I sat on the couch facing him. He said, “Help yourself if you want a drink,” and poured his glass three-quarters full.

  The silence deepened after a time, seeming to gain volume, so that it was like a screaming cacophony of sound just beyond the range of hearing. I developed a headache from listening to it, from the tension of waiting. I made a couple of attempts at conversation, but Martinetti was not having any. He sat there drinking and staring at a point high on the wall above his stereo components, moving just a little every now and then to ease a cramped muscle. He did not look at me at all.

  I got up a couple of times and prowled the room, looking at the books on the shelves, the hammered-copper curios, the stereo unit. The books were stuffy English classics and modern romances and biographical studies, the records were fugues, Chopin and Bartok and Shostakovich, mood and dinner music—but no jazz; none of it much interested me. I went through a half-dozen more cigarettes, and there was a rasping in my chest now and I knew that the next one would bring on the coughing. I could hear Erika’s voice saying over and over in my mind, When are you going to grow up? Do you think you’ve got the body of a teenager? When are you going to grow up?

  * * * *

  The call came at nine minutes past four.

  The sound of the bell seemed to explode in the strained, deafening hush of the room. Martinetti came half out of his chair in a convulsive movement, freezing there, his eyes bulging toward the phone, his hands gripping the edge of the desk. I got on my feet and swallowed against a dryness in my throat.

  Martinetti gave a kind of shiver, as if to regenerate mobility, and then caught up the receiver with his right hand. He said, “Hello?” in a hoarse whispering voice.

  He did not say anything else for more than a minute. He held the instrument pressed tightly to his ear, the hand white and rigid around it, his face a mask of intense concentration as he listened. Finally he said, “Yes, I understand,” paused, said, “Please, I’m doing just as you want, don’t hurt my—”

  His mouth clamped shut, and the hand holding the receiver dropped slowly to his side. After a moment he reached out and placed the handset in its cradle and sank back down in his chair. He put his head in his hands.

  I went up to the desk and saw that his shoulders were trembling almost imperceptibly, as if he might be silently weeping. I gave him thirty seconds, and then I said softly, “Mr. Martinetti.”

  His head jerked up, and he looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. There was a grayness to the taut skin across his cheekbones, but his eyes were dry
.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked him. “The call—?”

  “No, no,” he said, and took a deep shuddering breath. “I . . . it’s just that I ... I feel drained, purged, after all that waiting. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  There was a sharp rapping on the entrance doors, and one of them swung open and Proxmire came quickly into the study. Karyn Martinetti was behind him, her face the color of dirty snow. Proxmire said, “We heard the telephone. Was that—?”

  Martinetti said, “Yes.”

  “What did he say? Is Gary all right?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Well, what did he say?”

  Martinetti looked at him dully.

  “Damn it, man, did he give you instructions for delivering the ransom money?” Proxmire demanded.

  Martinetti seemed not to notice. “Yes.”

  I said, “When will it be?”

  “Tonight.”

  “What time?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a dirt road leading off Old Southbridge Road, up in the hills back of San Bruno,” Martinetti said woodenly. “You’re to drive in there exactly one mile. You’ll leave your car in a turnaround there and walk down the embankment at the left side of the road until you reach a flat sandstone rock. You’ll put the money on top of the rock and return to your car. Then you’ll turn the car around and go back the way you came.”

  I thought it over. “It sounds kind of isolated. He’d be leaving himself wide open to a trap, if you’d played it the other way and called the police.”

  “Not really,” Proxmire said. “I know that area, and there’s another road at the bottom of the embankment. If he waits down there, there are a dozen streets he can slip into once he has the money.”

  I nodded, and said to Martinetti, “Was there anything else?”

  “A warning,” he answered softly. “No police, and no tricks. If he’s picked up, and doesn’t return to a certain place at a certain time, there is someone with the boy who has instructions to . . .” He broke off, and dry-washed his face savagely with both hands. “When he has the money, we’ll get a call telling us where to find Gary. That’s all.”

  I took a breath. “Have you got a map of the drop area?”

  “I think there’s one in the hall table.”

  “I’ll get it,” Proxmire said. He went to where Karyn Martinetti was standing with both hands hooked onto the couch in front of the fireplace, took her arm, and led her out of the room.

  Martinetti got up and took the decanter over to the alcove. He poured a small one into his glass, drank it off, shuddered, and put the decanter away behind the bar. He said, “I’ve had enough of that.”

  I did not say anything, but I thought that he was probably right.

  Proxmire came back alone, with a map of the San Francisco Peninsula. I spread it open on Martinetti’s desk. He pointed out the area, and the spot of the drop as near as he could tell it by scale. I familiarized myself with it, and with the route I would take to get there, and then folded the map and put it into my coat pocket.

  It was about the kind of thing I had expected: simple enough, well planned, not much margin for error. Except for a few minutes alone in the darkness with three hundred thousand dollars, it would be a cakewalk for me; as long as nothing went wrong, it did not seem to be worth anywhere near the fifteen hundred dollars I was getting for it.

  * * * *

  6

  Time crawled like a fat gray slug.

  Seconds became lifetimes, and minutes became miniature eternities. The waiting before had been bad, but this was something else again. You could feel the pressure building, building, like a tangible entity through the dark and silent house.

  Martinetti had professed a desire to be alone, and Proxmire and I had gone out to sit in the living room with Karyn Martinetti. It was a nice living room—a copper-hooded fireplace similar in styling but somewhat larger than the one in the study, some good stark seascapes of the cypress-dotted coastline between Monterey and Big Sur, a low rock planter wall that right-angled into the room between the bay window and the fireplace and had some green vines twisting down along the stones almost to the floor—but the air in there seemed stagnant, as if it had been closed up for a very long time. I had to breathe through my mouth after a while. My headache gained magnitude to where the dull pain had a lancing rhythm, like the muted throb of a two-cycle engine.

  Cassy came with coffee and more sandwiches. I got two cups of the strong black liquid down, but the ham-on-whole-wheat seemed to stick in a glutinous mass in my throat. Proxmire and Karyn Martinetti neither ate nor drank anything; they were sitting on the couch, at opposite ends, like two sculpted bookends holding up nothing at all.

  The door chimes sounded just past six, and Proxmire was on his feet and moving with long strides into the entrance hall before the echo of them faded into silence. From where I was sitting I could look into the hall, and I saw him open the door and admit Allan Channing.

  Channing, dressed as he had been that morning, was carrying a brown leather suitcase in his right hand. It looked very heavy. He glanced into the living room and saw me, but he made no acknowledgment. He told Proxmire that Martinetti was waiting for him, and the two of them disappeared into the side hall.

  A couple of minutes passed, and Proxmire came back and sat down stoically and watched Karyn Martinetti out of half-lidded eyes. I tried another cigarette, and the coughing started, and I ground it out immediately. My chest felt as if a steel band were being tightened around it, suffocating me. The weight of this whole thing was beginning to settle squarely on my shoulders now; the others were assuming passive roles. If anything went wrong tonight . . .

  Well, all right, I told myself. All you have to do is follow the instructions. No games and no heroics; hell, you’re not even inclined that way. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?

  I decided I needed some fresh air. I went out onto the terrace and walked over to the outdoor bar. It was constructed of stone, with a slant-backed wooden roof; four leather-topped stools were arranged before it. I sat on one of them, facing toward the house and pool.

  It was full dark now, and the night air held the clean, mild bite of autumn frost. The stars seemed cold and synthetic in the ebon sky. There was a yellow-gold half moon, like a canted, halved orange slice, sitting directly overhead; the edges of its curvature were of a slightly darker coloration, rindlike. It shone on the water in the swimming pool in a long, slender, golden streamer.

  I felt better, sitting out there. The drapes were pulled closed over the bay window, and I could not see inside; I thought that was just as well. From the direction of the creek running across the rear of the Martinetti property, there was the commingled sound of crickets and night birds singing full-throated and yet very soft, without worry and without sadness.

  The music they made seemed to have a deep lure for me, like that haunting oboe melody in Hamlin town, and I left the outdoor bar and walked to the creek across the thick dew-scented grass. I reached the bank and the heavy shadows cast by the tall, staid eucalyptus, and began to walk toward the rock garden at the far end of the grounds.

  The creek bed was rocky and littered with branches and leaves and silt. A thin, tired stream meandered across the stones in the exact center, but when the winter rains came, the creek would be swollen and rushing with muddy brown run-off water. The banks were irregular and not at all steep, and I thought to hell with it and climbed down to give the frail and weary stream some company for a short while.

  I walked slowly, listening to the night music, smelling the dampness of the earth and of green things growing fresh and strong. The cold air felt very good in my lungs, and I took long swallows of it and thought about nothing at all.

  I drew parallel with the rock garden, and the stunted shapes of the shrubs and plants were silky black shadows against the lighter color of the sky. I reached the high redwo
od boundary fence and went past it fifteen yards or so, and there was a shelf at the bole of one of the slender eucalyptus covered with dry leaves and dark green Spanish moss. I sat down on that, in the deep shadow of the tree, and looked into the darkness beyond the opposite bank, where thick undergrowth obliterated the rear grounds of another home. The orange-slice moon was visible between the branches of the trees overhead.

  I had been there about five minutes, sitting motionless on the natural bank chair, when I heard the sound of footfalls shuffling through the foliage at the base of the redwood fence, coming around it. There was silence for the space of several heartbeats, and then voices, clear and distinct, came drifting to me on the scented night air.

  “Oh God, Dean, hold me, just hold me!”