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 corridor 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 e
ffort of will to keep from being violently sick.
“Are you all right, sir?” the nurse asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a minute.”
She watched me uncertainly as I fought down the nausea and the laboredness of my breathing. When I took a couple of steps to where a pay phone with the receiver placed carefully on its lower shelf sat on the adjacent wall, she seemed satisfied that I was not going to keel over on her and moved away.
I caught up the receiver and said hello.
A familiar voice said, very sourly, “Well, you must be in pretty good shape if they let you come to the phone. You goddamn dagos have hide six inches thick.”
Eberhardt. I smiled a little. “Thanks for your touching concern, jewboy,” I said. The racial jibes were an old thing between us, but they were nothing more than an expression of warmth, of understanding, of comradeship; we had known each other when it was fashionable for the masses to hate and deride the Jews and the Italians along with the other minorities, and we had taken plenty of abuse in our time. We had lived with it, and weathered it, and we had earned the right to make a small joke of it between us. We could relax with our heritage at long last, and God, how nice that was! Maybe there would be a day when this same ease would supplant the bristling hatred extant in some of the other minorities today, and an understanding shrug would replace the stiffened back and the defiantly jutting chin. It would be a fine day if it came.
I said, “How did you hear about it, Eb?”
“I came on at four today,” he said, “and there it was on my desk. I thought somebody was pulling a gag at first.”
“It’s no gag, brother.”
“Yeah. How you feeling?”
“Not too bad.”
“When they letting you out?”
“Tonight, maybe.”
“Jesus,” he said, “twenty-seven stitches in the belly,” and his voice had gotten softer. He was not nearly as hard or as confirmed a cynic as he liked you to believe; it was a facade, the same way Donleavy’s sleepy appearance was a facade. Eberhardt was a good man, a good cop, a good friend; I had been the best man at his wedding twenty-one years ago, and I was his oldest daughter’s godfather. I knew that the report on what had happened to me had affected him considerably more than he was letting on.
He said, “Look, as soon as I heard about it and checked with the hospital, I called up Erika and told her. I knew damned well you wouldn’t have, and I figured it was better coming from me than from the newspapers.”
“I hope you didn’t alarm her, Eb.”
“How do you sugar-coat a knife in the guts?”
I took a breath. “What did she say?”
“She said she was leaving right away to come down there,” Eberhardt said. “She was scared and she was worried, what did you expect?”
“Just that, I guess.”
“I’d come down myself if I wasn’t on duty.”
“I can get along without it.”
“Yeah.” He was silent for a moment; then: “Listen, take it easy, will you?”
“Don’t worry.”
He said, “Some chance, a big tough private-eye guy like you,” and hung up very gently in my ear.
When I returned to my room, the nervously energetic doctor was waiting for me. He examined my wound, supervised the changing of the dressing, and pronounced me fit to go home-after delivering a list of instructions as to what I could or could not do, eat, and subject myself to.
I asked one of the nurses for the afternoon newspapers, and she brought me copies of the San Francisco Examiner and the San Mateo Times. The pictures of Lockridge, and the boy in his military uniform, were spread across the front page of both, and the accompanying stories under seventeen-point heads were sketchy and suffered from a lack of salient facts. My name was mentioned twice in the Examiner, three times in the Times, misspelled once in the latter; I was purported to have been wounded, though not seriously, during the delivery of the ransom money, but my whereabouts were not divulged. I could imagine the number of reporter-placed calls my answering service had gotten in San Francisco, and I wished that the District Attorney’s Office had not given out my name at all.
I got out of bed, carefully, because I had developed a restlessness, and went over to the window. I was standing there, watching vacillating threads of gold and burnished brass and coralline interweave on the clear western horizon to fashion the intricate symmetry of an autumn sunset, when Erika arrived at a quarter to six.
She was all in pink-pink scoop-necked shift, pink square-heeled shoes, pink coat with big leather buttons, pink handbag, her hair done up with a pink velvet ribbon in it. She looked twenty-seven instead of thirty-seven. She looked very good.
She came over to me and I kissed her and held her shoulders. Her eyes were deep pools of translucent water, and in them I could read a curious mixture of emotions, some I wanted, some I did not.
“Eberhardt called me,” she said. “I had to hear it from him.”
“I didn’t want to worry you, Erika.”
“That’s very considerate of you.”
“Honey, please, it’s not that serious …”
“You were almost killed, that’s not serious?”
“But I wasn’t killed,” I said. “I’m alive, I’m going to be all right. Isn’t that the important thing?”
Her eyes probed mine for a long moment, and then her face softened and she lifted her arms and cupped my face between her palms. “Yes, yes, that’s the important thing. Oh God, old bear, it makes me sick inside just to think about you being cut that way, with a knife!” I could feel her shoulders trembling beneath my hands, but she did not cry; Erika had ceased shedding tears in response to a crisis a long time ago.
I drew a long breath, holding her, and then I noticed that in her left hand was a large paper bag with the name of some clothing store on it. I said lightly, “Hey, what’d you bring me?”
“I stopped to buy you some clothes. Eberhardt said yours were … ruined and you needed something to get home in …”
“Lord, you’re a wonder.”
“Sure.”
I took the bag gently out of her hand and kissed her again and said, “It’s time I got out of here, honey. Let’s go home.”
Twenty minutes later I was dressed in a white shirt and a pair of flannel slacks and a poplin jacket, checking out at the reception desk. They gave me a statement there, and the amount on it seemed exorbitant at first-but I did not say anything about it; perhaps it wasn’t really so much, after all, for my life. The doctor was there with more instructions, and I promised him that I would see a local physician in San Francisco within the next couple of days to have the dressing changed and healing progress on the wound checked. We shook hands, solemnly, like two church deacons at a Sunday social, and then Erika and I went out into the cool night air.
She had a three-year-old beige Valiant, and she drove it like an old lady in an Essex: body rigidly erect, both hands locked on the wheel, the speedometer needle frozen at fifty-five once we got onto Bayshore North at San Bruno Avenue. She made me nervous watching her, and I stared out through the windshield instead, sitting low on the seat with my legs splayed out to ease the constriction in my stomach.
I made a couple of attempts at conversation, but Erika wasn’t having any. She had her mouth pulled tight at the corners, and I knew that she was brooding and why she was brooding, and I thought that it was a good thing she wanted silence. I kept on staring out the windshield, trying to decide what I was going to do about Martinetti’s offer.
I went over the pros and cons of it a half dozen times, and resolved nothing at all. I knew what I ought to do, and that was to tell Martinetti no when he called, to just wash my hands of the whole thing. And yet, the prospect of doing that made me feel edgy and impotent. I was not a quitter, and to step out of the affair now made me just that; as long as I did not violate any laws, or get in anybody’s hair, I had something of an obligation to myself to stay with it u
ntil it was concluded, one way or another.
I thought: Well, maybe it will all break by tonight and I won’t have to make any decision. I hope that’s the way it is; Christ, I hope that’s the way it is.
San Francisco was blanketed in fog, and as we left the freeway I could feel a coldness settling on my spine despite the warmth of the car’s heater. The shredded gray tendrils of mist recalled last night and its violent chain of events vividly to my mind; I shivered a little, and the pain grew gnawing across my lower belly.
There was a parking space almost directly in front of my building, for a change, and Erika spent three minutes putting the Valiant into it. She came around and took my arm as I got out of the car, holding on to it tightly, and we went up onto the porch. The police and the hospital staff had gathered my personal effects from the blood-soaked ruin of my own clothing. When I used my key on the front door and my apartment door, I was breathing only just a little heavily from the climbing of the single flight of stairs.
Erika let her eyes wander with distaste over the living room as we stepped inside. She said, “My God, how can you stand to live like this?” But there was a lightness to her words, the first she had spoken since we’d left the hospital, that gave the impression of relaxation inside her now. She had finished her brooding, having apparently come to some conclusion or resignation; the tightness was gone from the corners of her mouth, and she was beautiful and soft for me again.
I said, “You say the same thing every time you come here.”
“It doesn’t seem to do any good.”
“Can I help it if I’m a slob at heart?”
“Oh, go lie down, will you?” she said. “I’ll fix you something to eat. Are you hungry?”
“Sure.”
“Well, that’s a good sign anyway.”
Erika took off her coat and went over and hung it up in the coat closet. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and clicked on the lights and made an exasperated sound and began banging pots and things around. I walked to the couch and swept some newspapers onto the floor and lay down.
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