The Snatch - [Nameless Detective 01]

by Bill Pronzini

  Abruptly she stopped, face flushed with the passion of her words, her gray eyes flashing and silvery with what may have been tears. Then she turned and ran over to the closet and got her coat out. I struggled up onto my feet, but before I could reach her she had the door open and I could hear her shoes clicking on the stairs going down. A moment later the front door slammed and there was only silence.

  I stood listening to the echo of her words in my ears, the cutting sting of them. No, I thought, no, she’s wrong, she’s all the way wrong, that’s not the way it is, Jesus, that’s just not the way it is!

  I went back to the couch and sat there with the pain hot and sharp now in my stomach, staring over at the door. I said aloud, to break the deepening silence, “She’ll be back. She didn’t mean any of it, not that way.”

  The words sounded uncertain, supplicating, in the suddenly cold and shabby room.

  * * * *

  11

  The next morning I awoke feeling stiff and sore. There was a dull throbbing in my temples, and a sharp ache at the center of the lump on my forehead. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror; the face that stared back at me was an unhealthy gray and etched with too many lines and crags, like a contour map of an arid and desolate terrain. The whites of my eyes had a rheumy look to them—dull green agates floating in partially curdled milk—and my lips were puffed and dry. The beard stubble on my chin and patterned thickly across my cheeks was the color of old pewter.

  I took four aspirins out of the bottle in the medicine cabinet and swallowed a little water with them, and shaved, and passed the toothbrush over the smoke stains on my teeth, and combed my gray-streaked hair, and studied myself again, critically, in the mirror. I did not look or feel much better. I walked back into the bedroom and sat on the bed and stared at the backs of my hands. They were deeply veined and faintly gray. You and Martinetti, I thought. A couple of sick, tired old men—but he would recover after a while, because that was the kind of man he was; nothing would ever completely destroy his vitality, his vigor, his youth. But what about you, tiger? Yeah, what about you?

  I stripped off my pajamas and looked at the bandages to see if there was any trouble with the wound. They were clean and dry. I began to dress, slowly and carefully, in one of my two remaining suits—a charcoal worsted that was four years old and had a faint shine along the seat of the trousers. I put on the white shirt Erika had bought, and tied a knitted green tie and fastened it to the shirt with a gold bar clasp. I had just gotten that accomplished when the telephone rang.

  I thought it might be Martinetti, but it was, instead, Allan Channing. I frowned a little as he identified himself; his voice was cold and angry and precise.

  He said, “I’m calling to let you know that I think Lou Martinetti made a very grave error in judgment in hiring you as an investigator after what happened the other night. You’ve caused enough trouble as it is.”

  You supercilious son of a bitch, I thought. I said, “Is that supposed to be some kind of warning, Mr. Channing?”

  “Call it what you like,” he said. “I hold you personally responsible for what happened to my money, and if it isn’t recovered, I fully intend to take steps to see that you don’t have the opportunity to inflict similar damages on other individuals. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly,” I said between clenched teeth.

  “Lou Martinetti is a very good friend of mine, even if he is prone to irrational ideas and decisions at times, and I don’t want any further fumblings in his behalf. I suggest you call him immediately and resign from his employ.”

  “It must be hell to be a man like you, Channing,” I said. “It must be pure hell to value a sum of money more than the life of a nine-year-old boy.”

  “Listen here—” Channing began.

  “Nuts to you, brother,” I said, and I slammed the phone down in his ear.

  I stood there shaking a little. The bastard, the soulless bastard. I went over and sat down on the bed again and after a while the trembling subsided and I was all right. I got up, and the telephone bell sounded again.

  It was Dana Eberhardt this time, wanting to know how I felt and if I needed anything. She was one of the most maternal women I had ever known, and she had been fussing over me for twenty years. She had tried to marry me off to half of her eligible female relatives at one time or another, and it was a great source of frustration for her that she had never even come close to succeeding. A running joke between Eberhardt and me was that if she ever found out I had spent a weekend with her cousin Jeannie in Carmel six years ago, she would bring out a shotgun and march Jeannie and me to the nearest altar.

  I assured Dana that I was all right, and that I would take care of myself and that I would come up to see them the first chance I got. I wished she had not found out what had happened, because the chances were that I would never hear the end of it. She and Eberhardt were as bad as Erika, in their own way, when it came to my profession.

  Erika. I looked at the phone, thinking that I wanted to talk to her—and yet I did not want to talk to her. I could still feel the unfair bite of her words last night. But I would be needing the use of a car today, and she kept hers in a lot on Mission Street, not far from my office.

  I dialed the number of her firm in the financial district, and the switchboard there put me through to her. “Well,” she said, “how nice.” Her voice was cool. “You sound very fit this morning. Did you sleep well?”

  “I slept fine,” I lied. “Listen, Erika, I called to ask if I could borrow your car today.”

  Silence. I counted mutely to eleven, and then she said, “Is that all you wanted?”

  “For now, yes.”

  “I’ll call the garage for you, then,” she said flatly. “You won’t get any blood on the upholstery, will you? If you’re stabbed again, or shot, I mean.”

  “That’s not funny, Erika.”

  “It wasn’t intended to be,” she said, and she broke the connection with a soft click.

  * * * *

  I took a taxi down to the parking garage on Mission and picked up the Valiant and drove it over to Taylor Street. My office was in the Kores Building, a couple of blocks off Market, and I parked perversely in a yellow loading zone a half-block away. The sun was out by then —it was after ten—but there was a chill autumn wind blowing through the concrete-and-steel canyons of the city. I walked as quickly as I thought it wise to be walking, my hands shoved down in the pockets of the heavy tweed topcoat I had put on before leaving my apartment.

  The entrance to the Kores Building was nothing more than a narrow doorway wedged between a dealer in old coins and a luncheonette. I went inside, and the lobby was as it always was: cold and dark and still. I checked the row of tenants’ mailboxes, found mine empty, and then took the elevator up to the third floor.

  My office smelled of dust and stale cigarette smoke. I went over and opened the window behind my desk a little, letting in the traffic noise from Taylor Street below. Then I knelt down gingerly by the steam radiator and fiddled with the controls and listened to the pipes banging somewhere in the bowels of the building.

  A hot plate rested on the top of the single metal file cabinet, and I went there and lifted the lid on the coffee pot sitting on it and looked inside. A faint greenish substance had gathered around the edges of the coffee I had made three mornings ago. I carried the pot into the alcove on the right-hand side of the single room, washed it out in the sink, and made some fresh. After I had plugged in the hot plate, I sat behind the desk in my overcoat, listening to the ringing knock of the radiator, waiting for it to warm up and for the coffee to boil. The clock on the wall above the file cabinet read 10:37.

  I picked up the phone and called my answering service. There were no messages from anyone I cared to call back. I thanked the girl and told her I would be in for a while.

  The coffee began bubbling. I got up again and poured some into a clean cup and carried it back to the desk. I stared at the st
eam rising in faint curling wisps and wondered where I was going to start today.

  Martinetti had not called, and that meant there were still no further developments. I did not particularly care for the idea of driving down to Hillsborough and facing the pall of gloom that would be the Martinetti household, but that seemed to be the only logical way of approaching an investigation. I could talk to each of the people there, do a little circumspect probing . . .

  The sound of the knob turning and the door being pushed open caught and held my attention, and I watched with some surprise the harried form of Dean Proxmire step into the office.

  He wore a belted tan trenchcoat, stylish and nicely cut, and there was some color in his hollowed cheeks from the stinging wind. His lips were pursed into a thin horizontal line, and his deeply hooded eyes told me that he was nervous and very tired, and perhaps just a little unsure of himself. He shut the door, looked at me, looked away, and let his gaze flicker over the office: the pale papered walls and the pebbled-brown asphalt tile floor; the old leather couch outside the low rail divider, set beneath a framed photograph of my license and a photograph of my graduating class at the Police Academy; three chairs and a small table with a dusty glass ashtray on it and some magazines that nobody had ever read; the file cabinet, of a somber gray metal, sharing the wall beyond the alcove with the steam radiator and a four-color calendar featuring a sunset on bucolic meadows; the second-hand oak desk with its cluttered surface and the coffee cup sitting in the middle of the memo blotter and me behind it watching him steadily.

  Proxmire took it all in very slowly, and what he saw seemed to give him some assurance. He put his eyes on my face and left them there and walked purposefully through the gate in the divider and over in front of the desk. I got up on my feet because I did not want him talking down to me in any way. I said, “Good morning, Mr. Proxmire.”

  “Is it?” he said stiffly.

  I let that pass. “What can I do for you?”

  “I understand you’ve consented to do some investigating for Mr. Martinetti.”

  I shrugged noncommittally.

  “Well, I should think after what happened to you, you’d want no more part in this business,” he said. “I should think you’d be damned glad to have gotten out of it with your life.”

  “Which means what, Mr. Proxmire?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “I take it you don’t like the idea of my continuing on the case in an investigative capacity.”

  “Frankly, I don’t like it at all.”

  “Why?”

  “Would you like the flat truth?”

  “Of course.”

  “I have my doubts as to your competency,” Proxmire said. The belligerence in his voice seemed a little forced.

  “Is that right? Would you mind telling me the reason?”

  “That should be obvious.”

  “Martinetti doesn’t blame me for what happened two nights ago.”

  “Listen,” Proxmire said, “I don’t like the idea of someone like you snooping around. God knows, we’ve got enough problems just now, what with no word on Gary . . .”

  “We, Mr. Proxmire?”

  His cheeks seemed to gain more color. “The Martinettis, I meant.”

  I said, “And just what did you mean by ‘snooping around’?”

  “You know perfectly well what I meant,” Proxmire said. “Martinetti has some damn-fool notion that someone who was in his house the day of the ransom delivery is responsible for what happened to you, for murdering the kidnapper, Lockridge. And he wants you to check up on us.”

  “You don’t care for that theory, I take it?”

  “No, I don’t!” Proxmire said emphatically. “It’s plainly ridiculous. The District Attorney’s people seem to feel it was a partner of this Lockridge, and that’s what I think too.”

  “What harm can it do to check all the possibilities?”

  “It’s a waste of time and money.”

  “My time and Mr. Martinetti’s money,” I said. “Why should that bother you so much?”

  “Damn it—”

  “Or are you worried about what an investigation might turn up? Do you have something to hide, Mr. Proxmire?”

  A tic had gotten up under his left eye, and it made the lower lid jump spasmodically. He said, too quickly, “Of course not! What would I have to hide?”

  I shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”

  “Are you insinuating I had something to do with what happened?”

  “I’m not insinuating anything at all,” I said. “You came to me, Mr. Proxmire, remember that.”

  “Listen here, I won’t have you asking a lot of personal questions and upsetting everyone at a time like this! Mrs. Martinetti is on the brink of total collapse . . .” He broke off, as if he had realized that he might be telling me just a little too much in an indirect way. I could hear the click of his teeth as he clamped his mouth tightly shut.

  I said quietly, “I don’t have any intention of upsetting anyone. And the only things I’m interested in are those that might pertain to the chain of events involving the kidnapping. Whatever else I might know or happen to find out is irrelevent to the job I was hired for; I don’t intend to make use of it in any way at all.”

  We stood there staring at one another. The tic under Proxmire’s eye caused him to avert his head finally, and as soon as he did that he turned around and went over to the door. He looked back at me just before he went out, and there were a plethora of emotions mirrored on the gaunt planes of his face. He was a man under a severe strain—not the kind of strain Martinetti was under, perhaps, but one which could be just as damaging internally. I listened to his footsteps retreating along the hallway outside.

  I sat down again. It was a nice morning so far: first Channing, and now Proxmire, who did not want me doing any specific investigating for Martinetti. One because he stood to lose three hundred thousand dollars of his money and needed someone to blame for it, and the other because he was having an affair with, and was apparently in love with, Louis Martinetti’s wife. Or were the motivations even deeper than that? Was Proxmire, or maybe Channing, afraid I would discover something else . . . ?

  Well, that kind of speculation was useless at this point. I drank some more coffee and thought that I wanted a cigarette; but there were none in the office, and I would have to go downstairs and over to the luncheonette to get a package. I did not feel like doing that. It was probably just as well, because I had the habit licked by two days now, and the first couple were always the hardest, wasn’t that what they always told you?

  The telephone rang.

  I looked at it and wondered if it was a reporter, and thought that if it was I would hang up on him. I caught up the receiver and gave my name, and a very small, very timorous, almost inaudible feminine voice said haltingly, “Are . . . are you the detective who is involved with the Martinetti kidnapping?”

  I took the receiver away from my ear and frowned at it and put it back and said, “Yes, that’s right. Who’s calling, please?”

  “I . . . I’d rather not give my name. You wouldn’t know me anyway.”

  “Well, what was it then?”

  “I called you because I ... I think I might know something about that . . . that man.”

  “Lockridge? The dead kidnapper?”

  “Yes, him.”

  “The people you want are the police, lady—”

  “No!” She said it very fast, raising her voice above the whisper, and then quickly dropped it down again: “No, I ... I don’t want the police. I . . . won’t talk to them. Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “But you’ll talk to me.”

  “I . . . yes.”

  “If you’ll give me your address . . .”

  “Oh no,” she said, “no, I won’t do that. You’ll have to meet me. Alone.”

  Christ, I thought. You could suffocate under all this heavy melodrama. “All right. Wh
ere?”

  “Do you know the section of Golden Gate Park where they have the Portals of the Past?”

  “I know it, yes.”

  “I’ll meet you at the first portal near the drive, at twelve. I ... I won’t come near you if you’re not alone.”

  “I’ll be alone.”

  “I hope you are,” she said, and that was all.