The Snatch - [Nameless Detective 01]

by Bill Pronzini

  The door opened and the nurse said, “You have some visitors.”

  “Who are they?”

  “A Mr. Donleavy and a Mr. Reese.”

  “All right.”

  Donleavy was still wearing the dark brown worsted; he nodded to me, his expression just as deceptively sleepy as it had been earlier. The other one, Reese, was about thirty, with cool gray-green eyes and flatly stoic features. Sparse, kinky black hair covered his scalp like moss on a round rock. He wore a semi-mod gray suit and a pale gold shirt with a silver-and-black tie, and you got the impression that he thought he was a pretty sharp and urbane guy.

  The two of them came over to the side of the bed and pulled up the only two chairs in the room. Donleavy said, “How you feeling?”

  “Better.”

  “This is Ted Reese, my partner.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  Reese nodded curtly.

  I asked, “Anything new about the boy?”

  “No,” Donleavy answered. “No calls, no word at all.”

  Reese said, “We thought you might have remembered something since you talked to Harry last night.” His voice was crisp and well-modulated, and had that ring of authority that the younger ones like to affect. I remembered when my own voice had sounded that way, after I had come out of the Police Academy.

  I said, “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “We’re not getting anywhere at all,” Donleavy said. “We’ve got to go back and double over everything again.”

  “What did you find out about the dead guy?”

  “His name is Lockridge, like I told you this morning. Home address in Cleveland, wallet with a hundred and twenty-three dollars in it, no credit cards, not much of anything, really, except an Ohio driver’s license. No known residence in California, no known next of kin. There was a suitcase in the car we found at the bottom of the slope, but the contents were no help at all; off-the-rack stuff, medium-priced.”

  “Was he the one who went to Sandhurst and took the boy?”

  “Yeah. The headmaster identified a photo of him.”

  “Did Lockridge have any kind of record?”

  “We haven’t gotten a report on him yet from the Cleveland police, or from the FBI.”

  “What about the car?”

  “Rental job. The agency couldn’t tell us anything about him.”

  “Prints?”

  “Some of Lockridge’s, a few others that could belong to anybody, from one of the firm’s mechanics to the last renter. We’re checking.”

  “Nothing that could help where it all happened? Footprints, something dropped, like that?”

  Donleavy shook his head. “Too many leaves and twigs for footprints. We sifted through the area, but there wasn’t anything we could work with.”

  “Are you going on the assumption that it was somebody in the kidnapping with Lockridge who killed him?”

  “We’re going on a lot of assumptions right now,” he said carefully.

  “Okay,” I said. “How did Martinetti take the news of what happened?”

  “He doesn’t blame you for anything, if that was worrying you,” Reese said.

  “No, it wasn’t worrying me.” I gave my attention to Donleavy. “Have you let the story out to the papers?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Martinetti okayed it this morning. They’re going to run a school photo of the boy, and one of Lockridge under a ‘Have You Seen This Man?’ banner. It’ll come out in today’s afternoon editions.”

  “Can you keep the reporters away from me?”

  “We’ve taken care of that. We’re not letting them get at the Martinettis either.”

  “I should think you’d welcome the publicity,” Reese said to me, “in your line of work.”

  “I don’t like talking to reporters.”

  “Let him alone, Reese,” Donleavy said mildly. He sighed and got up on his feet. To me: “The doctor tells us you can probably go home tonight, if you take it easy.”

  “The sooner, the better.”

  “You’ll have to figure out some kind of transportation. We had your car towed into the Harwick Garage in San Bruno, and it’ll be there a couple of days at least.”

  “How bad was the damage?”

  “Most of the left side bunged in,” Donleavy said. “And you’ve got a bent A-frame.”

  I stared down at the foot of the bed. “I guess I’m pretty lucky, all right.”

  “Yeah, I guess you are.”

  Reese said pettishly, “You’ll be home after you leave here, won’t you? In case we want to talk to you again.”

  “I’ll be home.”

  “And you’ll be sure to let us know if you remember something.”

  “Of course.”

  Donleavy nodded, and Reese pursed his lips, and they went out.

  I lay back and tried to sleep, to keep from thinking about where I was and to make the time pass that much more quickly. But my mind was alert now, and I could not seem to turn it off.

  I thought about what had happened at the drop site, and the theory of the double-cross. I could see a flaw in it. Why would Lockridge’s partner have chosen to kill him at that particular spot? Why wouldn’t he have waited until some later time, when they had the money and were safely away from there? Still, itwas an isolated location and a body might not be found for some time; it would not be such a bad place to dispose of someone.

  Another flaw: why wouldn’t he have waited until I was safely gone before using his knife? I had an answer for that one, too, such as it was: he could have gotten excited, thinking about all the money in the suitcase, and decided I was far enough away not to hear anything. He would not have expected to miss a vital spot with that first thrust, and if he had done it right, Lockridge would not have made any sound for me to hear.

  But then there was the fact that everything previously had pointed to a single man having engineered the kidnapping of Gary Martinetti. Lockridge was the one who had pulled off the actual abduction of the boy from the Sandhurst Military Academy, and from the voice mannerisms Martinetti had told me about, it seemed as if Lockridge had been the one to make the calls too. The only possible evidence of another party involved in the thing was the warning to Martinetti with the drop instructions: if he, the kidnapper, did not return to a certain place at a certain time, there was someone with the boy who had instructions to get rid of him. But that could have merely been bluff, to insure Martinetti’s keeping his end of the bargain.

  I could think of one other explanation for last night.

  A hijacking.

  I touched my tongue to my lips. Well, all right. Somebody who was perhaps not connected with the kidnapping at all, who had found out where the money was to be dropped. Somebody who had waited in the fog and darkness near that flat sandstone rock, watched me deliver the suitcase, seen Lockridge come for it after I had gone, and then gone after him with the knife.

  The question there was: how could that somebody have known the exact location of the money exchange? There were two possibilities, one on either end of the spectrum—victim or perpetrator. From Lockridge’s side, there existed the chance that he had let the information slip to a girl friend, a relative, a close acquaintance, and that person had taken full advantage of the knowledge. But that did not seem likely; if you’re pulling off a capital-offense crime like a kidnapping, you do not talk about it to anyone—and you especially do not reveal the location of the spot where you’re getting the ransom money. Lockridge had proven himself very shrewd, very cool in handling the rest of things; a lapse of this kind appeared to be out of character.

  From Martinetti’s side, only he and I and Proxmire seemingly knew the location of the drop site—but it was likely, even probable, that Karyn Martinetti and Allan Channing and perhaps even the maid, Cassy, could have been told or overheard it. Could one of them have left after I did, taken a shortcut of some kind to get to the hills before I arrived, hidden
out by the sandstone rock . . . ?

  I did not care for that presumption at all. If one of them had left Hillsborough, the police would have that information by now; that person would be immediately suspect, and would have surely known he would be almost from the beginning; it would be a safe supposition, then, that all of them had been waiting with Martinetti for my return, for the hoped-for telephone call from the kidnapper telling them where the boy could be found.

  The only other possibility I could envision along those lines was that one of them had somehow gotten word out of the house to a confederate, relaying to him the drop location. Three hundred thousand dollars was more than sufficient motivation—but were any of them cold enough, corrupt enough, to have jeopardized the life of a nine-year-old boy who was personally close to them to get it? And even if so, that person would obviously have known my mission and the route I would take to reach the drop site; why hadn’t his confederate hijacked mesomewhere along the way instead of waiting for me to deliver the money and leave?

  The whole damned thing was a merry-go-round; you could ride it for a long, long time and never even come close to the brass ring. It was no longer any of my concern anyway; I was out of it, legally and morally. This was a business for cops like Donleavy and Reese. They were good men, even Reese; all he needed was a few years in which to learn the subtleties of his profession. And Donleavy was as good as they make them. Whatever there was to be done, to be learned, they would do it and they would learn it.

  But I could not seem to get what had happened out of my head. I was too personally involved in it, too close to the core of it; I would carry a scar on my belly and some nightmare memories because of it. There was inside me this kind of frustrated ambivalence of wanting nothing more to do with the affair—and of wanting to see it through personally to its conclusion.

  I poured myself a small cup of water from the carafe on the bedside table. I drank a little of it and put the cup down again, and a soft knocking sounded on the door.

  A moment later Louis Martinetti came into the room.

  I could tell by looking at him that there had been no further word. He appeared skeletal, ghastly, as if all the supporting bones in his body had begun to calcify, so that the features of his face gave the impression of collapsing in on themselves. His eyes were sunken in great purple-shadowed pits, and there were deep excavations beneath his cheekbones. The skin on his lips seemed cracked, perhaps from too much wetting, perhaps from none at all. The iron-gray hair, which had seemed so vital that first time I met him, now looked only brittle and lifeless. He no longer reminded me of the dynamic pulp hero Doc Savage; he reminded me of a man dying as my uncle had died, with something alien and horrible sucking at his flesh from within.

  He wore a black suit, black tie knotted loosely over a soiled white shirt. His shoulders drooped, and he walked with a kind of shuffling step, as if his legs were too heavy to lift off the floor. I wondered how long it had been since he had slept—and how long it would be until he slept again.

  He sank into one of the chairs beside my bed and rubbed at his face with gray-fingered hands. “They told me it would be all right if I just came in,” he said. His voice was that of a hollow man. “They said you weren’t hurt as badly as we first thought and that you’d probably be going home tonight.”

  “Yes.”

  He made a vague, self-deprecating gesture with his right hand. “I wanted to come earlier, but I thought that I should stay by the phone . . .”

  “I understand, Mr. Martinetti.”

  “My wife and one of the District Attorney’s people are waiting now, in case there should be a call.” He did not sound as if he believed there would be. “They’ll notify me here if they have any news.”

  There was nothing for me to say.

  Martinetti said, “I wanted to talk to you before you went home. I wanted to tell you that I know what happened last night wasn’t your fault. You did everything you were humanly able to do, and I appreciate that. More than I can tell you.”

  His words instilled in me a vague sense of uneasiness. I felt big and awkward and helpless, lying there.

  “I know this is a hell of a thing to ask, after what happened to you,” he said, “and if you say no, I won’t blame you in the least. I spoke to the doctor just before I came in here, and he seems to feel that you’ll be able to get around reasonably well after you leave here. That being the case, I’d like you to continue working for me.”

  I frowned a little at that; I had not anticipated it. “In what capacity, Mr. Martinetti?”

  “As an investigator. To help locate my son, and the person who killed this Lockridge.”

  I released a breath soundlessly through my nostrils. “You already have the facilities of an entire county working toward that same end,” I said.

  “I realize that,” Martinetti said. “But I want every available and competent man possible.”

  “There isn’t anything I can do that the District Attorney’s Office isn’t already doing.”

  “You were in on this thing almost from the beginning,” Martinetti said. “You have a personal stake in it, after what happened to you.”

  Those were the same thoughts I had been thinking just before he came in. I said slowly, “Where would I start investigating, Mr. Martinetti? I would only be following in the footsteps of men like Donleavy and Reese by the time I could get on it. And I don’t think they’d like that.”

  “You’re allowed to investigate as long as you don’t interfere with police actions, aren’t you? As long as you report any findings immediately and directly to them?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  “Will you do it, then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He sighed. “Are you aware of the theory the District Attorney’s people are pursuing at the moment?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “They seem to think two men were in on the kidnapping of my son, and that one of them killed the other for the money.”

  “That’s a workable theory.”

  “Yes, but there’s another one too. One that they know about, of course, but don’t seem to be following at all. One that sickens me, but which nonetheless exists.”

  “And that is?”

  “That someone in my household is responsible for what happened last night,” he said.

  “Directly, or by collusion?”

  “By collusion, of course. They were all present there after you left to deliver the money. But all of them knew, I’m certain, about the location of the money exchange, and any of them could have gotten word to someone on the outside.”

  “Do you believe that’s the case, Mr. Martinetti?”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s possible.”

  “Then I’d like you to investigate the theory.”

  I thought: What am I going to tell him? No, I can’t do it—and watch his face crumble even more than it already has, or perhaps pale with frustrated anger? After what happened, did I have the right to turn him down? On the other hand, did I have the right to take his money under what almost amounted to false pretenses—value received for no real value given—and at the same time run the risk of alienation from the local authorities? I did not know what to say; and yet, I had to say something . . .

  Martinetti seemed to sense my irresolution. He got slowly to his feet and looked down at me. “Don’t give me your answer now. If . . . there’s no word on Gary by tonight, I’ll call you in San Francisco and you can tell me your decision then. Will that be all right?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I felt a certain sense of relief. But it was guilt-tinged, because I had taken the easy way out for the moment.

  He said, “You’ll think about it?”

  “I won’t be thinking about much else.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and it was a shadow, a pathetic burlesque, of the galvanic Louis Martinetti that I watched shuffle across the room and silently disappear into the corr
idor outside.

  * * * *

  10

  Shortly before five a prim little nurse with eyes like two watermelon seeds imbedded in cotton came in and said that there was a telephone call for me, did I feel well enough to walk down the corridor and take it?

  I said I felt well enough. She helped me on with a hospital robe, and we walked down to the floor reception desk. There were a lot of patients abroad—old women and old men with death in their eyes, leaning on canes or sitting in wheelchairs or on window benches like fragile and antediluvian artifacts; a tearful young girl immense with child walking on swollen ankles; a portly guy with his face swathed in bandages, making pitiable whimpering sounds as he walked. The scent of fear was strong in that corridor. It was not the consuming fear which had permeated the air inside the war-zone hospitals, but it was potent enough to initiate nausea swirling through my stomach and a kind of weakness at the back of my knees. I had to hold on to the edge of the reception desk for a moment, breathing through my mouth and exerting a conscious effort of will to keep from being violently sick.