The Snatch - [Nameless Detective 01]

by Bill Pronzini

  But then the film began again, without warning, and half comatose and half rational, I relived it all and saw the blood, and I was terrified. A voice cried out in rising decibels, and it was my voice, and my hands beat at the air with the frantic flutterings of a wounded bird. Fingers soft and gentle took my arms and stilled them and laid me down again, and something cool and moist brushed with careful strokes across my forehead.

  I heard myself whimpering, a child’s whimpering, and somehow I managed to stop that. Then the voice that was not my voice, that was too high-pitched and too filled with terror to have been my voice, began crying, “He stabbed me and took the money, I’m dying oh please you have to call Martinetti, Martinetti has to be told about the money!”

  The cool, moist strokes continued, and it was a woman’s caressing, a woman wearing apple-scented perfume and talking to me in words soft and gentle like her fingers. Some of the panic left me, and I could feel calm returning, and I was aware that I was coming out of it, that I was waking up. I did not want to wake up, because I was afraid of what I would learn, but the panic was no more and with the calm came the need to know. I could not stay under much longer.

  My brain began to clear, and it was full dawn soon and the blackness was gone. I lay there, awake now, with only a fuzziness disturbing the clarity of my thoughts, my eyes squeezed tightly shut and my hands pulled into fists at my sides. I knew I was in bed, in a hospital; there were the faint odors of ether and disinfectant and floor wax—institutional smells—pushing away the quiet apple scent of the woman, and knowing this, my body took on a stiffness, a rigidity, and images tried to push their way into my mind. I fought them, I fought them desperately, because they were carefully buried images of things I had seen in field hospitals in the South Pacific, and I knew that if I allowed them to return they would bring the panic and the terrible fear with them. I fought them, and I won, and they retreated. The confrontation left me gasping for breath. I closed my mouth and willed normalcy to my lungs.

  I listened. There was a faint, faraway ticking that would be a wall clock, perhaps, and the sounds of hospital activity muted by thick walls, and now the scraping of a chair, and now a muffled cough, and now nothing.

  I opened my eyes.

  My vision was clear, except for lingering, shimmering pulses of light at the periphery of it. I was looking at a big man in a white hospital smock, with big capable hands and gold-rimmed spectacles and a neat salt-and-pepper mustache. He was smiling, a tired and wan smile, standing just beyond the tubular gray rail at the foot of the bed on which I lay. The walls of the room behind him were a pale green, with an off-white ceiling, and there was a white table with a stainless-steel water carafe and some plastic cups on it.

  I looked at the doctor, blinking a little. I said in a calm, clear voice—my voice, “Am I dying?”

  “No,” he answered gravely, “you’re not dying.”

  I grasped that with my mind, and clung to it, and I saw in his eyes that it was the truth. The quiescence, so tenuous before, now became firm and complete; there would be no more panic. I said, “My belly . . .”

  “A nasty cut, but not deep enough to have done much damage. You lost a lot of blood, and it took twenty-seven stitches to close you up, but you’ll be all right.”

  “I thought ... I thought my entrails were . . .”

  “Shock,” the doctor said, with a small, understanding nod. “It magnifies things out of proportion. You’re not badly hurt, you can believe that.”

  I let my mind focus on the pain in my stomach now, and it was still dull and vaguely pulsing. They would have used Novocaine as a local anaesthetic, and given me some kind of pain-killer, too, which would account for the fuzziness at the fringes of my thinking; the pain perhaps would be stronger later, but I would be able to tolerate it, knowing that I was not dying.

  I swallowed into a parched throat, and raised one of my hands off the bedclothes to touch my forehead just over my right eye, where the pain in my head seemed to be centered. I encountered a bandage, with a sensitive lump beneath it. I said, “How did I get this?”

  The doctor moistened his lips, and his eyes shifted to my right. For the first time since I had come completely awake, I realized that there were other people in the room. I turned my head on the pillow.

  A slender, doe-eyed young nurse stood near the window, auburn hair tucked under one of those little newspaper-sailboat white hats. Her face was solemn and very dedicated, and she would have soft hands and an apple scent about her. In a hard metal chair pulled back from the bed, a very fat man in a dark brown worsted suit sat with his hands flat on his knees. He had shiny black eyes, like smooth Greek olives, and they were watching me with no expression other than a kind of resigned weariness. His mouth was thick and sleepy-looking, and there was a ponderousness to the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head; but I had worked with cops of one kind and another for a long time, and I knew that that was what he was, and I knew as well that he was not half as soft and sleepy as he appeared or pretended to be.

  He shifted a little on his chair and looked at the doctor and the nurse. They left the room immediately, wordlessly. The fat man said to me, “You got the lump when your car went off the road. Steering wheel or windshield. It could have been worse, but you only sideswiped a couple of eucalyptus and nosed into a ditch.” He spoke softly and carefully, as if weighing each sentence before putting voice to it.

  I said, “Who are you?”

  “My name is Donleavy. I’m with the District Attorney’s Office of San Mateo County.”

  I looked at the identification he produced, and moved my head on the pillow in careful acknowledgment. Special investigator. Well, he wouldn’t be here if it was just the knife wound in my stomach, I thought—or even if they had only found the dead man by the sandstone rock. But he would have come out, all right, if the authorities had wind of the kidnapping.

  Donleavy was watching me think. After a time he said, “Mr. Martinetti is waiting at his home just now, with my partner. If you were wondering whether you should say anything.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “You told us,” Donleavy said. “Indirectly.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Man who lives in the house near where you went off the road heard the crash and went out to investigate. He called the hospital here—Peninsula Emergency, if you’re interested—and they sent an ambulance. You were delirious when it arrived, kept repeating the name Martinetti and something about a kidnapping and murder and the money being gone. The attendants passed it on to the staff here when they brought you in, and they relayed it to us.

  I took a long, slow breath, remembering the shouting I had done in the half-world of returning consciousness. “What time is it now?” I asked Donleavy.

  “Just past five a.m.”

  “Has the boy been released yet?”

  “No.”

  “Any word?”

  “No.”

  “Oh Christ,” I said softly.

  “Yeah,” Donleavy said. “You want to tell me what happened at the drop last night?”

  “Do you know the location?”

  “Martinetti told us.”

  “You found the dead man, then.”

  “Uh-huh. Stabbed in the back, below the right kidney, and cut up deep under the breastbone.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A guy named Paul Lockridge,” Donleavy said. “You want to answer some of my questions now?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sure.”

  I told him what had happened, exactly as I remembered it, going over it again to make sure I had left nothing out.

  Donleavy said, “And you never saw the guy’s face?”

  “No. It all happened too fast.”

  “Did he say anything at any time?”

  “No.”

  “Can you remember anything about him?”

  “He wore some kind of long coat.”

  “W
hat kind?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  He sighed. “How do you figure it?”

  “I hadn’t thought that far.”

  “Well, think that far now.”

  I pushed it around for several seconds, but my head ached, and I let it go finally and said, “It looks like a double-cross. Two in on the snatch instead of one, and as soon as the money was dropped the killer pulled a knife on this Lockridge. But he wasn’t accurate in the dark and the fog, and he just wounded him with the first thrust, in the back. Lockridge screamed and turned and the killer stabbed him under the breastbone, and then I came down in time to get myself cut.”

  “That’s the way it looks, all right,” Donleavy said.

  “I hope that’s not exactly the way it is.”

  “Why?”

  “The boy should have been released by now,” I said. “If he was going to be released at all.”

  Donleavy’s forehead wrinkled like the brow of a hound. “A guy uses a knife like that, he hasn’t got much conscience or regard for human life, has he?”

  “No,” I said grimly, “he hasn’t.”

  I lay there and stared down at the top of the tight white bandages ringing my lower stomach, visible through the open front of the cotton hospital gown they had dressed me in. I could feel Donleavy’s eyes on me. After a time I said, “How’s Martinetti?”

  “How would you expect?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He didn’t want to talk to us when we went out to his place,” Donleavy said. “But he couldn’t deny something was wrong, not the way he looked and the way his wife and the others there looked. It was past midnight, and he’d figured things went wrong because you weren’t back. We told him what had happened to you as far as we knew it, and he gave us the whole story then. He was a damned fool for not coming to us in the first place with it; if he had, none of this would have happened.”

  Donleavy’s voice had hardened somewhat, but his eyes and his mouth were still sleepy. I said, “You won’t get any argument on that.”

  “Why weren’t we notified?”

  “Martinetti must have told you that.”

  “I want you to tell me.”

  “He didn’t want the law. He only wanted to pay the ransom to get his son back, to follow the instructions the kidnapper gave him.”

  “And you went along with that?”

  “He didn’t ask me for my opinion.”

  “Maybe you should have offered it.”

  “It wasn’t my place—or my son.”

  “What was your place?”

  “To make the drop for him, that’s all.”

  “No investigating, or anything like that?”

  “No, just make the drop.”

  “How much were you getting for that?”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars.”

  “That’s nice money for a little drive into the hills.”

  “And a knife in the belly?”

  “You couldn’t have foreseen that, could you?”

  “Listen, what are you trying to say, Donleavy? That I should have turned down a sour but legitimate job when I could use the money? That I should have violated a client’s trust and phoned you people about the kidnapping? That I didn’t try to talk Martinetti out of paying the ransom money because that would have meant I’d lose a fifteen-hundred-dollar fee?”

  “All of those things crossed my mind.”

  “And all of them are so much horseshit.”

  “I’ve heard of you a little,” Donleavy said. “You used to be with the Frisco cops, didn’t you?”

  “For fifteen years.”

  “You don’t work much, but you’ve got a decent name.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m not leaning on you,” Donleavy said mildly. He shifted his weight on the chair. “You’ve been through enough for one night.”

  I met his eyes. “Look, Donleavy, nobody feels any worse about this whole thing than I do—and I don’t mean getting cut. I’m not trying to excuse myself or my actions, right or wrong; I just want you to understand what motivated them, and what didn’t motivate them.”

  “Sure,” Donleavy said, and got ponderously to his feet. He sucked in his round cheeks, and puffed them out again, like a blowfish. “We’ve talked enough for now. I think they want to give you something to make you sleep.”

  “Will you tell Martinetti what happened?”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell him.”

  “All right.”

  He did that thing with his cheeks again. “I got cut once, in the side, not half as big a gash as you got,” he said slowly. “It happened in a bar in Tucson, just after the Korean War; I was new on the cops there and I went up against a guy waving a straight razor. I was never more scared in my life after he slashed me, and I never forgot what happened. I’ve still got the scar, and every now and then I still get nightmares about it.”

  He turned, fat but never soft, and shuffled over to the door and opened it and went out without looking at me again. I stared at the ceiling for a while, and then I closed my eyes to rest them. But when I did that, I could see the blood running out between my fingers in the dome light of the car, and I snapped them open again and watched my hands trembling on the bedclothes.

  I thought: I’m never going to forget it, either. The scar will see to that. And maybe some nightmares, too, just like the ones Donleavy has every now and then.

  * * * *

  9

  The doctor and the auburn-haired nurse returned to ask me if there was anybody I wanted notified of my whereabouts. I thought about having them get in touch with Erika, or perhaps Eberhardt, but there was no use in alarming either of them. I said no. They gave me a shot of something then, and I went to sleep almost immediately. I slept deep and hard, and I did not dream. It was one o’clock in the afternoon when I woke up again.

  There was no fuzziness to my thinking, and the pain in my head had completely gone; the pain in my belly was no worse than I remembered it being when I had awakened before. But the ingrained fear of hospitals was strong inside me, and I felt claustrophobic. I had to urinate, and I considered throwing back the covers and trying to get up to find the john—but I was afraid to do that on my own because of the stitches. There was a push button attached to the tubular headrest of the bed, and I rang that a couple of times for assistance.

  A nurse came in—thin, sad-eyed, flat-chested— and I told her I had to use the toilet but that I wanted to get up and walk there if it was all right. She said it was all right if I was very careful. I got out of bed, leaning on her, and my legs were somewhat weak and the pain grew warm across my lower belly, but I did not fall or stumble when I took my first couple of steps. The nurse went with me out of the room and down the hall one door and waited for me until I came out. Then she walked me back to bed again and wiped the sweat off my forehead with a cloth and patted me as if I had been a very good little boy. She left me alone again.

  The claustrophobia had vanished and I lay quiet now. A youngish doctor with an air of nervous energy about him put in an appearance shortly and wanted to know how I felt. I told him. He took the bandages off and examined the wound in my stomach; I did not look at it myself. He put a new dressing on that burned a little, and some more outer wrappings.

  I said, “How soon can I get out of here?”

  “Perhaps this evening,” he answered. “I’ll want to look at the wound again before I make it definite.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  After he had gone, the flat-chested nurse brought a tray containing some soft-boiled eggs and a cup of lukewarm broth and a dish of liquidy lime jello. I managed to eat some of it.

  Oddly, I did not want a cigarette afterward. Oddly, because following any kind of meal, no matter how light, the craving for one was always the strongest. It was the shock of being cut, I supposed, which was responsible for that; my system would be rebelling against such stimu
lants.

  I wondered briefly if my lungs had been examined when they brought me in the night before, as a matter of course, and then decided that it was not likely. I thought: I ought to have them do it while I’m here. I ought to tell them about the cough, and the rasping in my chest, and have them do some X-rays. That’s what I ought to do. Well, maybe when the doctor comes again tonight— maybe then I’ll tell him.