The Snatch - [Nameless Detective 01]

by Bill Pronzini

  I drove up to where I could see the length of 30th and pulled off on the side of the drive and sat there slouched down with the motor running. If she looked back again, she would not see much of anything out of the ordinary; she would have expected any trailing of her to be done on foot.

  I watched the blue shag coat exit the park on Fulton Street. She paused there and looked back quickly, and then crossed the street and continued along 30th Avenue, north. I took the Valiant out of neutral and swung it around and drove up to Fulton and waited between the stone cairns there until the light flashed green. I drove across and pulled over to the curb and watched her span Cabrillo, heading in the direction of George Washington High School.

  I stayed at the curb until she was midway in the second block before pulling out and passing over Cabrillo to the curb again on the other side. She turned left on Balboa, and I went up and made the turn and block-hopped behind her for three blocks. Just after she had crossed 3 3rd Avenue, she stopped in front of one of the stucco-fronted, pastel-colored apartment houses there, and looked both ways up and down the street; I was at the curb then, and she did not appear to notice me. She went into the foyer of the building.

  I drove up to the corner and parked in front of somebody’s driveway on the eastern side of 33rd. I waited two minutes, timing it by my watch, but she did not come back out. I left the car and crossed the street and walked slowly up to the building she had entered.

  It was three stories, a dull green color, with a narrow circumscribed foyer and a thick glass-and-wood door barring admittance. A row of six mailboxes, above which were tiny white card strips enclosed in cellophane-covered brass plates, were on the right-hand wall. Each had a round ivory button just above it. I glanced at the names on each of the card strips, and the one for Apartment 4 read Elaine and Lorraine Hanlon in a neat, precise, feminine printing. I stepped out of the foyer and looked at the number in the rectangular lighted frame set into the stucco wall. Then I walked back to the car and got inside and tried to decide if I should wait around for a while, just in case, or get to the nearest phone as quickly as possible.

  I was reaching for the ignition key, having settled on the phone, when the blonde came out of the entrance-way and ran across the street.

  I sat up a little straighter on the seat. She was a big girl, with long legs flashing bare and smooth under a short cotton coat and heavy breasts stretching the buttoned front of it. Her hair was the artificial color of champagne, worn long, streaming behind her in the wind like the mane of a thoroughbred at full gallop. She jerked open the door on a green Corvair Monza, but before she could get inside, the librarian came running into view with her arms extended outward and upward like a bird about to take flight. She had the shag coat and scarf off now, and I could see that her hair was cut short and close over her ears and that she was wearing a bulky white knit sweater over the gray tweed slacks. She looked almost pathetically thin—no hips, no breasts, a little girl who had never grown up and never would.

  I had the window down now and I could hear her yelling something, but I could not understand the words. She ran over to the champagne blonde and caught her arm, but the blonde shrugged violently and the librarian stumbled backward a couple of steps, into the middle of the street. If there had been a car coming, it would have gotten her. The blonde slid inside the Corvair and slammed the door, and a moment later I could hear the starter grind viciously.

  The librarian went back to the car and clawed at the window, but it was a futile and terrified scratching. Her face was turned toward me for a moment, and I could see that it was twisted with emotion; she might have been crying or she might have been mutely screaming.

  The champagne blonde—almost assuredly Lorraine Hanlon—got the Corvair in gear and came away from the curb with the rear tires howling on the pavement, leaving the little girl standing there on the asphalt, small and desperate and alone. I had the Valiant started and moving along the street by then, and I pulled around Elaine Hanlon and went after her sister.

  It was the same thing, perhaps, that a lot of men had been doing all of the librarian’s life; and like them, I did not once look back.

  * * * *

  13

  Lorraine Hanlon drove with a kind of determined recklessness, leaning on the horn at cross streets and corners and to maneuver her way through traffic. She knew how to use the Corvair’s standard transmission; I could hear the whine of the four-cylinder engine each time she geared down, and then again when she used a heavy foot before shifting up.

  She went up to Geary Boulevard and turned east, heading downtown, and I stayed a block behind her, driving too fast so I could keep her in sight. I hoped a traffic cop did not tag her, because I had the feeling that she would try to outrun a red light or a siren—anything that denoted police authority. She was driving scared, running scared. It was not too difficult to figure why.

  The librarian had been wrong, pathetically wrong. Her sister had not listened to her at all. When Elaine had told her, as she must have, that she had just been to see the detective involved in the Martinetti kidnapping, Lorraine had panicked. She was either too frightened or too deeply involved, or both, to want to give herself up to the police— and so she had run. I had no idea where she was running to, but it figured to be either to Lockridge’s accomplice—if he had had one other than, perhaps, the blonde—or to where the boy was being held. Or a combination of both. The way she was driving, the way she had come flying out of that apartment building, said it had to be that way.

  I drove grimly, both hands taut on the wheel, hunched forward a little. The Valiant had power steering, and it was loose and the car handled poorly; the model had never been built for maneuverability in the first place. It took all the concentration I was capable of to stay in a position where I could keep the green Corvair in sight, and that was just as well; it kept my mind off the gnawing ache in my stomach, the chilled numbness of my feet and hands which the car’s heater did nothing to dispel.

  The blonde made a sharp right turn, proceeding south, and beat the light into a left turn. I swore a little, coming up, and thought about running the red; but the cross traffic was heavy, and it would only have been inviting an accident. I reached the corner and peered down the slope of the street, and the blonde had gotten caught behind a beer truck at the light a couple of blocks down. I let breath spray between my teeth and took my hands off the wheel and worked some of the stiffness out of them, waiting for the green.

  When it came, I closed the gap to a block again. The blonde brought the Corvair over into the left-hand lane as we neared the southbound Central Freeway approach. I got into the same lane and made the same light that she did, and I was six cars behind her climbing the banked and curving entrance ramp onto the freeway.

  The midday traffic was heavy, and the Hanlon girl could not make any time at all on Central. She got around a couple of slow cars and a truck as we reached the Skyway and swung south onto Bayshore, opening the Corvair up, cutting across traffic with blind disregard until she had gotten into the outside lane. I edged over into the third of the four lanes and stayed there, moving out right or left when I encountered a car at a lesser speed than I was forced to drive.

  The blonde remained in the outside lane until we neared the off-ramp at Army Street, and then she veered over, two lanes diagonally, narrowly missing a Volkswagen microbus. She made it into the exit lane. I went over there, too, and there was one car between us as we came down into the interchange on Army.

  She turned right, onto Potrero Avenue, made three lights and missed a fourth. I was two blocks behind her. We passed San Francisco General Hospital, and when we reached Mariposa she swung right and went three blocks and made another right on De Haro. We were heading up onto Potrero Hill.

  It was an industrial and low-rent housing area, with steep inclines and a lot of dead-end streets. I knew it well enough; I had had a girl friend who lived on Missouri Street at one time, and I had grown up in the Noe Valley District,
not far away. I dropped back another block, giving her plenty of room; there was not much traffic now, and the risk of her spotting me was greater than it had been before.

  At 23rd Street she took the Corvair left, crossed

  Carolina Street and began climbing Wisconsin. I made the turn after her, just in time to see the green louvered rear deck of the Corvair swinging left onto Alaska Street.

  I could feel the muscles in my arms and legs relax, and I worked saliva into my mouth. Alaska was a dead-end street, a single protracted block in length; Wisconsin was its only release street. I took the Valiant to the corner and stopped on the near side of it, in front of a small neighborhood grocery store. I looked up the steep incline to the leveled-off turning circle at its upper end. Lorraine Hanlon had pulled the Corvair to the curb off on the right of it, in front of an old shambling white house set well back behind a gray-white picket fence grown over with dry-looking rose bushes. A green tar-papered roof and the upper half of the facing wall of the house were all that was visible from where I was.

  As I watched, the blonde got out of the Corvair and slammed the door and walked through a gate in the picket fence. She did not look anywhere except straight in front of her. A moment later she disappeared from my view.

  I sat there for a short time, debating, and then I got out of the Valiant and began to walk up the hill. I did it slowly, because there was a tense pulsing in my lower belly. The wind blew strong and bitter cold up here; you could hear it moaning funereally in the now-leaden sky. From the southwest and Daly City, streamers of fog clutched at San Francisco like the tendrils of some obscene parasitic vine.

  There were three houses on each side of the street going up, separated from one another by small brown yards and sagging fences of one kind or another. Shades and blinds and drapes were drawn against the hoary cheerlessness of the afternoon, and there was no sign of life anywhere. The only sound was the wind, and the empty, hollow slap of my shoes on the cracked sidewalk.

  I reached the circle and paused there to drag breath into my lungs. There was a rasping ache in my chest now, from the climb. I had not thought about my lungs in two days, because I had had too many other things on my mind and I had gotten a good start on kicking the cigarette habit and there had been no recurrence of the coughing or wheezing. I thought about them now, briefly, and then I stopped thinking about them altogether. The skin beneath the bandage on my forehead began to itch; I wiped away cold sweat with the back of my hand and looked over at the white house.

  It, and a smaller dwelling sided with brown wooden shingles, were angled like a pair of ears on the faceless head of the turning circle. A low wall constructed of weathered planks bisected the property and extended back as far as I could see. A glassed-in front porch covered the entire front of the house, and there was a set of steps inside a wooden block frame leading up to a screened-over front door. Split-bamboo blinds were lowered over the glass facing the street. Azalea and hydrangea shrubs, which would bloom wild in pink and white and lavender in the spring, filled the small yard between the picket fence and the house. Nothing moved anywhere on the grounds.

  I got some of my breath back and went without hurrying to where the Corvair was pulled carelessly to the curb. I knelt down by the left rear tire and unscrewed the air valve, and then went around to the right rear tire and did the same thing. I straightened up again and looked at the house. Stillness.

  I stepped away from the car, and I could hear the sibilance of escaping air from the tires. I walked directly to the brown-shingled cottage and went a little way down a weed-choked driveway paralleling the plank dividing wall, until I reached a point where I could see the rear grounds of the white house. Another plank wall extended the width of the property some forty feet in back of the dwelling, and then the terrain fell away sharply into a steep, rocky slope. It appeared to be unscalable.

  I began to feel a little better about things. I pivoted and started back along the driveway, and a door opened and a fat woman in her late forties came out onto a podium-sized side porch. She had bright, curly orange hair that looked like carrot peelings pasted to her scalp. She wore a faded housedress and shedding blue mules.

  I went over to the porch, and she came down a couple of steps and looked at me curiously, but without hostility. “Something you wanted?” she asked.

  “Police business,” I said.

  “Yeah? What’s going on?”

  “Do you know who owns the house next door?”

  She shrugged. “Some realty company.”

  “Can you tell me who’s renting it, then?”

  “Man and his wife and their kid.”

  “What name?”

  “Who knows?”

  I pointed over at the green Corvair. “Was that the wife who just drove up a couple of minutes ago?”

  “Didn’t see her, but that’s her car. She’s got a couple of flat tires, looks like.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “What about the husband?”

  “What about him?”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “I only seen him once, from a distance,” the woman said. “He looked like a million guys look, that’s all.”

  “When was that one time you saw him?”

  “Three days ago, I think it was.”

  “Tell me about the kid,” I said. “A little boy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How old?”

  “Nine or ten, maybe.”

  “Was he wearing a uniform?”

  “What kind of uniform?”

  “Any kind of uniform.”

  “No, he was wearing what kids always wear.”

  “Have you seen him in the past day or so?”

  “No, not since him and his old man came that first day,” the woman said. “You think I got nothing better to do than check who comes and goes around this neighborhood?”

  “Don’t you read the newspapers, lady?”

  She made a snorting sound. “If I want rape and murder, I turn on the television.”

  “All right, then. As far as you know, the boy’s still in the house.”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “The mother, I guess.”

  “Besides her.”

  “I couldn’t say,” the woman said. “Listen, what’s going on? You going to arrest somebody?”

  “Just routine, lady.”

  “Balls to that,” the woman said knowingly. “I just hope there ain’t going to be any shooting.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and I left her there and went out of the driveway and started down the hill. There was still no movement at the white house.

  When I got to the corner, I turned into the small grocery store there. A clock on the rear wall, above a refrigerated case, said that it was almost three. Eberhardt had told me yesterday that he was working the four-to-midnight swing, and it was a safe assumption that he would have that tour all week; chances were good that he would still be home now.

  I stepped up to a small check-out counter in front of a window looking out on Alaska Street. An old guy in a pair of red-and-gray suspenders was sitting on a stool, reading a pocketbook western. He looked up at me with tired eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. “Help you?”

  “Have you got a phone here?”

  “Pay phone?”

  “Any kind of phone.”

  “Local call?”

  “Police business,” I said.

  “Hell,” the old guy said, “whyn’t you say so?” He reached under the counter and brought out a telephone and put it down on the scarred surface. His eyes were not quite so tired now, watching me.

  I moved around to where I could look through the window. The Corvair was visible from there, and the gate in the gray-white picket fence. I dialed Eberhardt’s home number, and he answered on the third ring with typical cordiality: “Yeah, what is it?”

  “Plenty, Eb,” I said, and I gave it to him fast and sketched out. He did not interrupt. When I was finishe
d, he said, “You think this Hanlon girl is in there alone with the kid?”

  “It looks that way, but I can’t be certain.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “A little grocery store at the bottom of the hill.”

  “Can you see the house from there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure she can’t get out through the rear?”

  “Not down that slope, she can’t.”

  “And you disabled her car?”

  “Two flat rear tires.”

  “Okay,” Eberhardt said. “I’ll have a couple of plainclothesmen there in fifteen minutes, and squad cars on stand-by in the area.”

  “Are you coming yourself?”

  “Twenty minutes from here.”