by Robert Upton
Suddenly, it was all grotesquely clear. Kruger’s madness had festered in the hospital. For eighteen years, he lived only to take vengeance on the man who had sent him there. He had researched McGuffin’s life throughout that time, just as McGuffin was now researching his. By consulting the San Francisco phone book, he knew when McGuffin had moved his office from Post to Sansome Street. By reading the papers and watching the local news on television, he had remained abreast of the detective’s more notable cases. He had probably read of his marriage to Marilyn and the birth of their daughter, Hillary, a few years later. It was unlikely, however, that he had read of their divorce, as that had appeared only in the Law Journal. When Kruger was released, he assumed that McGuffin was still living with his wife and child in North Beach. And when he arrived there and saw the name McGuffin under the bell, he was sure that vengeance was finally about to be his.
Kruger must have talked his way past Marilyn, expecting to find me in the apartment. Then when he found out we were divorced, and I was no longer living there, he came unglued. He knew he couldn’t let them go because they’d tell me he was out to kill me, so he did the only thing his deranged little mind would allow. He snatched my ex-wife and my daughter. Things were happening so fast he couldn’t even compose a ransom note, so he left the yellowed clipping he’d been carrying around for eighteen years, knowing I’d know who had taken them. And the fact that he had allowed them to pack a bag offered at least some hope that he didn’t intend to kill them.
It’s possible that he hasn’t yet figured out what to do with them, McGuffin told himself. I’m the one he wants, not them. He’ll have to come to me to make a trade, and that’s when he has to slip. I may be an accidental detective, but I’ve had eighteen years at it, while he’s spent the last eighteen years being told what to wear and when to eat. It’ll be no contest.
There was, of course, an additional scenario, which McGuffin was aware of but chose not to dwell on. Unstable as Otto Kruger was, and frustrated in his carefully laid plan, he might have already panicked and killed them. No, McGuffin said to himself as he reached for the phone. He couldn’t think like that. He must assume that they were alive and focus more fully on the task of rescuing them than on anything he had ever done before.
“Operator, this is an emergency,” McGuffin said. “I must have the number and the address of Klaus Vandenhof. He last lived on Marin Hill Drive somewhere near San Rafael.”
“I’m sorry,” the operator said after a moment. “That number is unlisted.”
“But you do have a Klaus Vandenhof?”
“Yes, sir, we do.”
“Then listen carefully,” McGuffin instructed. “I’m calling from San Francisco Suicide Watch. I just got off the phone with Mr. Vandenhof. He’s taken some pills. He was trying to give me his address when he passed out. Please give me that address so I can send an ambulance.”
“I don’t have a San Francisco Suicide Watch listed among approved emergency services, sir,” the operator informed him in a singsong voice.
“We’re a brand-new voluntary organization, fully endorsed by the AMA and the mayor’s office. Give me that address before it’s too late.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not allowed -”
“Do you want his death on your conscience?” McGuffin interrupted.
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Then give me the address!”
“I’m sorry, sir, I cannot give out that information. However, I can send an ambulance to that address if you’d like.”
“I don’t want -!” McGuffin shouted, halting abruptly. “Which ambulance?”
“Marin General,” she replied.
“Go ahead, send the ambulance,” McGuffin said.
He dropped the phone in the cradle and sprang for the door. He was running full tilt down the main deck, between the lighted offices, when Elmo Bellini appeared at the end of the corridor, hands outstretched.
“McGuffin, stop!” he shouted.
“Not now!” McGuffin shouted back.
When Elmo lunged, McGuffin caught him with a stiff-arm to the chest, sprawling him backwards, head over heels.
“You’re fired!” Elmo shouted, as McGuffin disappeared out the door and down the gangplank.
McGuffin ran along the Embarcadero, then wove across the street between flashing headlights, halting finally at the service station on the corner where he always parked.
“Quick, my car!” he gasped to the young man behind the desk reading a comic book.
Alarmed by his customer’s urgency, the kid moved quickly. He had to move two cars out of the way before he was able to bring McGuffin’s to the front door. With orchestrated efficiency, the kid slipped out of the front seat, and McGuffin slipped in, passing the kid a $5 bill in the transaction. He leaned on the horn and pulled his battered car out into the Embarcadero traffic ahead of a trail of blue smoke, scattering cars right and left. He sped along the edge of San Francisco Bay, then turned onto Marina Boulevard and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge.
At the bridge, McGuffin plunged the car into a wall of dense fog, then proceeded slowly across the bay to Marin County. The outgoing lanes were crowded with revelers returning to the suburbs after a night on the town, while the fog-shrouded headlights in the incoming lanes were few and far between. He switched the windshield wipers on and glimpsed the moon glowing wet and dim through the fog billowing from under the bridge like steam from a boiling bay. When he left the bridge, the fog disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving a dry moon hanging from the sky above Sausalito. McGuffin glanced at his watch and decided it was time to make the phone call.
“Sausalito,” McGuffin whispered sibilantly as he turned at that exit. He was thinking of Jack Kerouac’s line at first hearing of the place - “There must be a lot of Italians living there.” McGuffin didn’t know about the Italians, but he knew that an Irish detective and his beautiful bride had once lived there. On a houseboat, of all places. She had insisted that McGuffin give up his apartment on Russian Hill after their marriage and move onto her “Art Barge,” as McGuffin called it. It was ironic, McGuffin often thought, that a man who didn’t like boats should have spent so much of his life living first on a Sausalito houseboat and now on a San Francisco ferry boat. But the Oakland Queen, McGuffin thought, remembering Elmo’s parting words, may be my last boat.
He put the car into a shallow dive, spilled out onto Bridgeway, and raced along the edge of the bay until he spied a phone near the Trident Restaurant. He skidded to a stop and jumped quickly out of the car. He dropped a coin into the box, dialed Information for the number of Marin General Emergency Room, then quickly dialed the number he was given.
“Emergency,” a woman’s harried voice announced over the background din.
“This is Dr. Anderson,” McGuffin said. “You dispatched an ambulance for my patient Klaus Vandenhof?”
“Yeah, a few minutes ago. We’re a little backed up here, Doctor,” she said quickly.
“I just want to be sure you have the correct address. Could you repeat it for me, please?”
“Just a minute,” she said in an annoyed tone. Then, a moment later, “Here it is - 1300 Marin Hill Drive?”
“That’s it, thanks,” McGuffin said, dropping the receiver on the hook and lunging for the car.
He drove through the center of Sausalito, past the No-Name Bar where he had first met his wife, then back out onto 101 and toward San Rafael. Even though it had been more than a dozen years (he had forgotten the exact date of their marriage), he remembered that first meeting as if it had happened only the night before. And he always would. For despite the grief she had caused him over the years, Marilyn was an unforgettable woman.
She had been standing at the bar dressed all in black, with fiery blond hair down to her waist, surrounded by a group of admiring men. McGuffin had just returned from a weekend of skiing with his then girlfriend, a Sausalito schoolteacher, with whom he thought he might be in love. Until he saw Marilyn. And s
he saw him. She watched, with eyes that reminded him now of the moon behind the fog, glistening and elusive, as he steered the schoolteacher through the crowd to a table. He sat the teacher with her back to the blonde, then took the opposite chair. She stared at him with a bemused smile, and McGuffin stared back, remembering, with ever-diminishing frequency, to shift his attention to the teacher from time to time.
McGuffin wasn’t pretty, and he knew it - his detective face had already been mauled a bit - but women were attracted to him, and he knew that, too. Nevertheless, he usually found it difficult to approach strange women - unless, of course, he had had a few drinks. Then he moved through the singles saloons with the aplomb of a bad nightclub comic and bombed just as often. But some women, and this blonde was certainly one of them, released something in McGuffin, a chemical perhaps, that made him feel invincible, even without the aid of alcohol. Even if it meant wading through all the guys at the bar, McGuffin decided then and there that he would either have her or make a tremendous fool of himself. He didn’t realize at the time that it was possible to do both.
His chance came a few minutes later when the blonde pushed away from her admirers and walked across the room to the jukebox, sinuous as a black panther. Mumbling an inane excuse, McGuffin got to his feet and followed the blonde to the glowing, pulsing jukebox where she stood studying the selections. She trailed her finger over the glass and didn’t look up when the man in the ski sweater stepped beside her, brushing his hip lightly against hers.
“I’m going to take her home, and I’ll be back here in half an hour,” McGuffin said. “Where will you be?”
“Right here,” the blonde answered, without looking up from the musical selections.
McGuffin returned, and one month later, they were married. Those first couple of years with Marilyn were, McGuffin realized sadly, the best of his life. After she had decided to give up painting, they moved back to San Francisco, where Marilyn bounced between the arts like a falling pinball. One year she was a poet, the next a singer, but never without some minor successes. Between careers, Hillary was born and suddenly their marriage was good again. They would lie in bed for hours on Sunday morning playing with the baby and know that it was as much as life had to offer. Until Marilyn began to have her doubts. She went back to singing with a lousy rock group called Stump, then took up with cocaine and the lead singer, although McGuffin could never be sure of the order.
He was uncertain about a lot of things during that time. He decided to beat up his wife’s lover, then decided that would be foolish, but at the last minute changed his mind again. He managed to avoid a criminal charge, thanks to a good albeit expensive lawyer, but was not so successful in the civil matter. It took most of what little cash McGuffin had left after the divorce to settle the matter out of court. She had shown him more misery and happiness than he had ever dreamed one woman capable, but she had also given him Hillary, and that made it all worthwhile.
McGuffin reached into the glove compartment for his gun and placed it on the seat beside him. If anything happened to his daughter, he would surely kill somebody, he knew, but he didn’t know if it would be Kruger or himself.
Just past the San Rafael exit, McGuffin pulled into a clean, well-lighted service station for directions to Marin Hill Drive. The attendant had never heard of it, but McGuffin found it on the map tacked to the wall, a twisting road on the ocean side of the San Rafael hills. He got back into the car and continued west, drove through the town and then slanted north in the direction of Marin Hill Drive. He found it exactly where the map indicated it would be, a thin strip of potted blacktop that snaked up the side of a steep hill beneath a column of large eucalyptus trees. McGuffin dropped the car into second gear and began the slow, winding ascent. There were small groups of mailboxes posted at intervals along the steep road, and driveways leading either up or down to faintly lighted houses deep in the trees. He was sure he had never been here, yet he experienced a quick déjà vu sensation of having driven this road once before. This was followed, without any apparent connection, by a sudden image of Miles Dwindling sitting with his black-leather doctor’s bag, the magical mystery bag, clutched tightly in his lap.
McGuffin had been curious when he first saw the bag in the corner of the office, but Miles had been unwilling to satisfy his curiosity. “After you’ve been around awhile longer,” the old detective had promised. It was only after Miles’ death, when McGuffin, as the court-appointed executor of his estate, went through his things, that he was able to understand the old man’s unwillingness to share fully with him the sordid realities of the detection business. The black bag contained electronic listening devices, infrared lenses, falsified credentials, a disguise kit, a stethoscope, a glass cutter and other, cruder burglary tools. It was only then that McGuffin fully understood Miles’ frequent assertion that he was a “licensed pragmatist.” And it was only then that he realized why Miles had chosen a recent college graduate over several more experienced applicants for the job. Miles wasn’t looking for police experience; he was looking for a fellow pragmatist.
After eighteen years in the business, McGuffin could understand this. He was often tempted to break the law in order to ensure justice for a client, and often did. But it was not a responsibility to be delegated to just anyone. Until now McGuffin, the intended lawyer, had assumed that his accidental profession was solely the result of Miles Dwindling’s untimely death. Faced with a file of open cases, he had consented to the probate court’s request that he wind up Miles’ business, a task, he estimated, that should take no more than a few weeks. But when a particularly interesting case showed up, McGuffin couldn’t resist adding a new file to the drawer. Then another and another, until here he was eighteen years later, chasing after the man who had murdered his boss and started it all. Now, however, he wondered if pride might have had something to do with his decision to remain in the business. Being appointed heir to the pragmatist was a heady experience for a man so young.
McGuffin had no trouble finding Klaus Vandenhof’s old Victorian house at the top of the hill. There was an ambulance parked in the front yard with a revolving red light on its roof. He lurched to a halt on the lawn beside the ambulance, slipped the gun into his jacket pocket, and stepped out of the car. Seeing no garage or outbuildings where Marilyn and Hillary might be, he walked directly to the open front door, through which two sheepish ambulance attendants were beating a hasty retreat. A fat bald man in a red silk robe followed as far as the porch stairs.
“I want to know who made this report, do you hear me?” he shouted in lightly accented English. “And when I know, I am going to sue everybody!” When the ambulance attendants boarded their vehicle, he turned angrily on the remaining stranger at the foot of the stairs. “Who are you?” he demanded.
McGuffin looked up at the old man glaring at him from the porch. He could easily imagine him forty years before, in jackboots and riding breeches, with short cropped hair, shouting angrily at French civilians. Now the thick muscles had given way to rolls of fat, beginning just below his shiny skull and continuing all the way to his ankles. He had added a lot of pounds, a lot of years and suffered a humiliating defeat, but the arrogance of the conquering soldier was still intact.
“My name is Amos McGuffin,” he answered, staring intently at the fat man’s eyes for a sign of recognition.
“So? What have you to do with this suicide business?” he demanded.
Seeing that his name meant nothing, McGuffin shifted roles. “I’m here to straighten things out, Mr. Vandenhof.”
“Straighten things out! You think you can straighten things out, just like that?” he asked, snapping his fat pink fingers. “Your men pound on our door in the middle of the night and when I open it, they grab me by the throat and shout, ‘What did you take, what did you take?’ I thought they were accusing me of shoplifting!”
“I’m sorry if you and your wife were frightened -”
“Wife! What wife? I have no wife!” the fat m
an spluttered.
“I thought you said our door.”
“I was speaking of my friend Toby, not my wife.”
“I see,” McGuffin said. “Is there anyone else in the house besides you and Toby?”
“No, there is no one else in the house. And what difference would that make anyway?” he demanded. “Toby is very emotional. He is quite upset by this whole thing.”
“That’s too bad for Toby,” McGuffin said, climbing the stairs to the porch.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Vandenhof demanded, stepping in front of the detective.
“I’m looking for a woman and a young girl,” McGuffin said, sliding his hand into his jacket pocket.
“A woman and a - are you crazy?” Vandenhof said, placing a hand on McGuffin’s chest.
McGuffin pushed the hand aside. “And a man named Otto Kruger.”
“Otto?” he asked, eyes opening wide. “Who are you?”
“I’m a private investigator. Your old friend has abducted my ex-wife and daughter, and I’m going to find them, even if it means tearing your house apart,” McGuffin said, sliding the gun from his pocket.
The fat man’s wide eyes tracked slowly to the gun, then back to McGuffin’s face. “You - you are the young man who apprehended Otto - the partner of the man he killed.”
McGuffin nodded. “I was young then. Now I’m older and a bit more irritable. Especially when somebody runs off with my daughter. But I’m sure you understand that, and I’m sure you won’t do anything to make me angrier.”
“I understand perfectly, sir. You have the gun, after all,” he said.
“That’s right, I’ve got the gun and I’m going to search your house,” McGuffin said, motioning toward the door with the automatic. “So let’s go inside.”
“You know, of course, that armed burglary is a serious crime,” the fat man warned, puffing himself up and out even further.