The Snatch nd-1

by Bill Pronzini

  I turned away and let my eyes sweep the room, and there was a telephone on a black metal stand next to the bright-cushioned Danish couch. I went over and reached out for the receiver, and then I heard shuffling sounds from the darkness beyond the archway, strangely discernible above the deafening sea, and I realized that I had been a fool to come inside, a fool not to have considered the possibility that the killer was still on the premises, but it was too late now, too damned late, and when I pivoted he was there in the gloom beyond, with a gun held laxly in his right hand, a specter gaining substance as it moved into the light, stopping full-born and staring at me with the most terrible eyes I had ever seen-eyes that reflected all of man’s most hellish nightmares.

  I stood facing a swindler, a murderer-and worse, perhaps much worse: a man so merciless, so cruel, that he had arranged the kidnapping of his own son.

  I stood facing what was left of Louis Martinetti.

  * * * *

  20

  The gun was a.32-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, walnut-butted, with an almost nonexistent barrel- a belly gun that looked almost toylike in the largeness of Martinetti’s hand. He held it half-turned, palm up at a forty-five-degree angle, and the bore of it pointed loosely at my lower body.

  His face had the look of food mold in the dim light from the floor lamp, and his lips twitched and danced in a kind of macabre rhythm, like the muscle spasm of a dead man. The deep excavations were back beneath his cheekbones. But the eyes-oh Jesus, those eyes! — caught and held your own gaze, and even though you wanted to look away, look anywhere but into those diseased and frightening depths, you could not seem to do it. They were hypnotic, holding you mesmerized with all the horror they contained.

  I stood rigidly, my arms pressed tight against my sides, and I looked into those eyes and, curiously, I was not afraid. I should have known fear, because there was fear all around me in that room and because I was facing a gun that had already killed one man tonight-and yet, it was absent from my mind. I felt only a great despondency at the knowledge of what man can become, and an anger, too, and a nauseous disgust. I felt very tired, and very cold. But that was all-truly, that was all.

  Neither Martinetti nor I spoke for a long time, and the thundering roar of the vast ocean swirled around us, reverberating, swelling the air in that room and swelling it until it seemed as if the pressure of the noise would burst the walls. And then it became no louder, as if waiting, as if maintaining that pitch like a great clarinetist would maintain the screaming high notes of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Iceburg Blues,” the power of it awesome and frightening but not as frightening as Martinetti’s eyes.

  I said the words that were thick on my tongue, “You son of a bitch.”

  He released a prolonged, sighing, shuddering breath and raised his left hand and passed it over the loose wetness of his mouth. “Yes,” he said, and that single word was no more than a death rattle, all inflection abrogated by the consuming sound of the Pacific.

  “What motivates you, Martinetti? What do you use for a conscience, for a soul? What are you, for God’s sake?”

  Something, a ghastly presence, came and went on his face. “I don’t know,” he said with a kind of sick wonder. “I don’t know!”

  “Your own son,” I said. “Your own flesh.”

  “So simple in the beginning,” he said, “not so terrible … intelligent boy, Gary, no emotional scars …too stable, but it went wrong, there was no way it could go wrong, but it went wrong …”

  I thought: Is this the actor worthy of an award, the coldly methodical mercenary, the bitterly vengeful cuckold? Is this the Louis Martinetti of chicanery and deceit and extra-legalities, of the forceful and magnetic personality-this shell, this decaying creature with the zombie eyes?

  But I said, “It was the money, wasn’t it, Martinetti? The three hundred thousand dollars of Channing’s money. That’s why you did it.”

  “The money,” he said, “oh yes, I had to have the money … the real estate investment closing up and no more assets, no place to turn-Jesus God, it meant millions and Channing was the only one with the kind of cash I needed … Channing, that bastard, that cold bastard, never loaned a cent in his life, never bet on a long shot and so proud of it-well, I gave him something to shake his pride, didn’t I? I gave him a kidnapping, I gave him a goddamn ultimatum-how would the newspapers like to know you refused to save a little boy’s life, Allan? You think about that, you bastard …”

  He stopped talking and stood there motionless. I could feel the sweat on my own body, as motionless as his. It was as if we had been frozen, solidified, in the tableau of the room-a scene of horror cast in wax at Madame Tussaud’s. A half-minute passed and I got some saliva through the dry crust inside my mouth and I said, “Lockridge, Martinetti. What was your connection with Lockridge?”

  “Lockridge,” he repeated, and he kept standing there, rigid, the gun not moving in his hand. I counted to six before he spoke again, the words like those on a recording tape being played for the millionth time, words which had lost all their human qualities and become the expressions of a machine. “He didn’t have a choice either, I told him that, I said not with your underworld connections there in Ohio-one word from me would have sent him to prison for a long time … oh no, I didn’t have to give him fifty thousand, but it was my safety margin, all planned so carefully …”

  Yeah, I thought, you planned it all so carefully. You must have met Lockridge in Ohio, your wife is from there, and maybe you used him in some capacity on your schemes and deals over the years; it figures that way. So when you came up with the kidnapping idea, you brought him out here and briefed him on the situation and told him about the area in the San Bruno hills to be used as a drop point. You told him to treat Gary with kid gloves, to buy some of his favorite books and models so that the boy would be comfortable, and you gave him Gary’s exact clothing sizes, too, so that he wouldn’t have to keep wearing his school uniform. Then you wrote out that kidnap note yourself, on your personal stationery, and signed your name to it; that’s why the headmaster at Sandhurst never questioned the signature: it was authentic.

  But you didn’t know where Lockridge was holding Gary. You weren’t acting after Lockridge was killed and I had been stabbed and the money hijacked. Maybe you were supposed to know where the boy was, maybe you thought youdid know. You had to keep up the masquerade of waiting by the phone and so you couldn’t get away to check on the boy until the following afternoon, probably just before you came to see me in the hospital; sure, and maybe you planned to keep Gary from seeing you somehow and then drop some clue to Donleavy or me later on. But then, if I’m guessing right, you discovered that the boy was not where he was supposed to be and you panicked; you weren’t aware of the Hanlon girl-Lockridge had brought her in on his own, for his own reasons- and you thought Gary was alone, locked up somewhere, that he might starve to death if he wasn’t found. Lockridge had pulled a fast one on you, an irony you never expected, either because he wanted some insurance that you kept your part of the bargain you’d made with him, or because he intended to hold you up for a larger percentage of the money. It doesn’t matter now; it just doesn’t matter at all.

  The rest of it is simple enough to figure. You brought me into the kidnapping in the beginning because you needed a witness to the money exchange, a corroborator that a kidnapping had taken place, when you went to the police after you had the money and Lockridge was on his way back to Cleveland; Channing would have expected, demanded, that the affair be reported as soon as Gary was returned home. You asked me to keep working for you when the boy was still missing for just the reason you gave me in the hospital: you wanted all the men available looking for Gary. And you asked me to stay on tonight because it would not have seemed proper to dispense with my services after I had been the one to find your son; and perhaps because you wanted to punish your wife-and Proxmire-by having me question them about a possible complicity. That would be the reason, too, why you told me toni
ght about the affair between them.

  All that remains, Martinetti, is the question of Art Shanley. When I talked to you that first afternoon in your study, you went to the drapes and looked out at the rear grounds; you must have seen the gardener-Glen Shanley-out there, and later assumed that he might have overheard something between you and me, or between you and Channing earlier. It’s likely that you didn’t make any connection at all at first, because you were too upset by the hijacking and then too concerned, in spite of it all, for Gary’s safety. But once the District Attorney’s man, Reese, found the phone bug-and once I reported locating Gary-you had time to think and remember seeing the gardener.

  But how did you know about Glen Shanley’s brother, Art, here in Half Moon Bay? Glen’s wife would have told me if you had talked to her. Well, maybe Glen mentioned his brother at one time or another, also mentioned that Art dabbled in electronics, and you recalled that, extrapolated it. You couldn’t have known for certain that Art Shanley was the hijacker, but you had a strong suspicion, and that was enough for you to come out here tonight …

  I stopped talking mentally to Martinetti, watching him closely now. He seemed to be swaying slightly, like a frail and withered tree in a strong wind. He was no longer looking at me or even through me. He was lookingaround me to where the body of Art Shanley lay in its coagulating blood on the floor.

  A sound that was something between a cough and a sob came from deep within him, perhaps from the very core of him. And he began talking again, in that same dead, unhuman voice. “I didn’t want to do this, I didn’t want to do this … I told him I’d give him fifty thousand and forget about what he’d done if he turned the rest of the money over to me, but he laughed, he laughed, he said that if he wasguilty, and he was, I knew it then, oh, I could see it in his eyes, he said he would be a fool to accept that kind of offer. He tried to throw me out, he put his hands on me and we struggled and then I I I I just took the gun out of my pocket and I shot him, I shot him …”

  Again he stopped talking. I said softly, “Do you remember what you said to me tonight, at your home, Martinetti? About how any man is capable of murder- and a lot of other things, too-if he’s pushed hard enough, if he’s tempted strongly enough? Well, maybe you were pushed and tempted that hard, just as this real estate thing tempted you into having your own son kidnapped. Maybe you wanted Shanley dead, even though you wouldn’t admit it to yourself, because with him out of the way you were completely safe and you would have eliminated the man who caused you so much anguish, who almost killed your son and your chance to regain a lost fortune. Maybe you did intend to kill him all along. Why else the gun? Why else would you park your car in the trees by the road fork-that’s where it is, isn’t it? — instead of driving directly up to the cottage here? Why else did you shoot him?”

  “Oh God,” Martinetti whispered. “Oh God!”

  “The money,” I said. “Where’s the money?”

  The quivering of his lips had worsened now, and saliva glistened on them, welling at the corners like fat and obscene tears. “The suitcase, it was in the closet, I opened it and I looked at the money, all that money, and suddenly I didn’t want it any more I didn’t want it I didn’t care about it I didn’t want to see it, all I could see was him lying there in the dark, but the image of him wouldn’t go away, I killed him … I murdered him …”

  “Three hundred thousand dollars,” I said half audibly. “The price of a soul.”

  “I’m a murderer,” he said, “yes, I’m a murderer, I killed him don’t you know that? I murdered him murdered him murdered him …”

  He kept on that way, softer and softer, the words becoming unintelligible to me, and he was speaking only to himself now, to the very essence of his being. He no longer knew I was there. He was a callous man, a hard man, a man who had been very close to crime, even to criminals, over the years, skirting the periphery of illegality and immorality, never really affected by it-and yet, he had never himself had to deal with the cold, terrifying fact of death, of murder, of the awesomeness of snuffing out a human life. Faced with the thing he had done, the circumstances which had led to the act-examining it within himself-he was unable to cope with it; it was destroying him, so quickly and so completely that the effects of that destruction were outwardly visible.

  As I listened to him babbling, I realized that he was totally incapable of pulling that trigger another time, of taking a second human life-and I realized, too, that I had known all along that this was true, that I had stood facing his gun not as a brave man facing death, but as a man who knows irrevocably the outcome of a situation, knows that he will not be harmed in any way. I looked deep into Martinetti’s eyes and saw the terrible guilt, the cancerous insanity burning in their depths, and then I forced my gaze again to the gun in his hand. It was no longer pointing at me; the muzzle was angled toward the floor at my feet.

  There were perhaps three steps between us, three long quick strides, and his shoulders were slumped now, muscles lax, mouth open to release his murmurings-three long quick strides. I took them without thinking any more about it and hit him the same way, a long hard right-hand flush on the point of his jaw, the shock of the impact exploding the length of my arm and into my armpit, pain through my knuckles, and he went down clean and silent, with his eyes rolling up in their sockets, sprawling out on top of the gun, covering it with his body, unmoving.

  I stood looking down at him, breathing heavily. I felt nothing at all. The anger and the hatred and the disgust were gone now, and they had left nothing in their place but a hollow vacuum, a weariness that transcended the physical.

  My hands were trembling and I thrust them into the pockets of my overcoat to still them, and the fingers of my right hand encountered the package of cigarettes I had bought earlier in the evening. I took it out and looked at it, and then I closed my eyes and tore open the pack and lit one and dragged smoke deep into my lungs. It was harsh and raw and hot and brought a vague weakness to my knees-it was fine.

  I went over to the telephone and picked up the receiver and stood holding it, looking over at Martinetti lying very still, very old, like some crumbling sarcophagus. And, strangely, I thought then of Erika.

  You were right, Erika, I thought. You were right that I’m honest and ethical and sensitive, that I don’t have a lot of flair or even a lot of guts. You were right that I’m not a hero, and that I never will be.

  But you were wrong, too. You said that I’m nothing more than a little boy playing at being a detective, that I’m living in the past, in a world that never existed. But the world I live in, you live in, is a world sicker and harsher and crueler than anything in man’s imagination, a lousy world that requires men like Donleavy and Reese and Eberhardt to keep it from becoming sicker and harsher and cruder than it already is, dedicated men, Erika, men who care. I’m one of those men-how or why I got to be that way is of no real consequence-and because I am, I’m not living the lie you think I am.

  You can’t change me, Erika, you can’t hope to make me into something that I’m not and never will be. And that’s why, if I must choose, I won’t choose you, even though I love you; I am what I am, and how can you cease being-how can you alter in any way-what you are?

  I’m no hero.

  I’m just a cop.

  I’m just a man.

  I sucked deeply, hungrily, on my cigarette and dialed the operator, and when she came on I asked her for the police above the tintinnabulation of the restless and.eternal sea….

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: fbd-a7c094-0f49-aa45-b5b4-5693-1ead-518474

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 17.08.2013

  Created using: calibre 0.9.43, Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software

  Document authors :

  Bill Pronzini

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