The Snatch - [Nameless Detective 01]

by Bill Pronzini

  There was genuine contrition on the deeply hollowed surface of his face, in the tired and pouched depths of his eyes. I said, “You were under a heavy strain, Proxmire, I can understand that.”

  “Yes, but I had no call to come down on you that way. I . . . feel like a complete ass.”

  “We all feel like asses now and then,” I said. “Let’s just forget about it, why don’t we?”

  “No hard feelings?”

  “No,” I said, “no hard feelings.”

  “You’re a generous man,” Proxmire said, and gave me his hand. I took it, and he smiled, and we stepped into the house.

  The others were in the living room, and we went in there. Donleavy was standing over by the draped window with Eberhardt, talking softly to him. Karyn Martinetti had been sitting on the couch; she got to her feet when she saw me and threw her arms around my neck without shame and kissed me hard on the cheek. Her hair was very soft and smelled of violets in a pleasantly vague sort of way.

  She whispered, “Thank you,” and stepped back, smiling, her eyes still wet. Then she turned back to the couch and sat down with her arm around Gary’s shoulders.

  Martinetti and the maid, Cassy, entered from the opposite end of the living room. She was carrying a silver tray with some brandy snifters and a full decanter and a large glass of Cola on it; a wide smile on her thin mouth made her seem brighter, prettier, than I remembered her. There was no one else present that I could see, and I thought that that was just as well. I would not have trusted my manners if Channing had been there, not after that phone call this morning.

  Martinetti poured us all a drink from the decanter and gave the glass of Cola to Gary, and we drank a toast. I put mine back neat, and saw that Donleavy and Eberhardt had done the same thing. Donleavy came over to where I was. “I’ve got something to show you and Eberhardt,” he said. “But not in here.”

  “All right.”

  He nodded and said to Martinetti, “You’ll excuse us, won’t you? We’ve got some things to talk over.”

  “Of course.”

  “We’ll use your study, if that’s all right.”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  Donleavy went out into the entrance hall and down the side hallway and through the ornately carved doors into the study. Eberhardt and I followed him. Donleavy shut the door and went over to the desk and switched on the lamp there. Then he took a small rectangular object from the pocket of his suit jacket and laid it carefully in the pool of illumination on the polished surface.

  It was made of black styrene plastic, about the size of a small wooden matchbox. On the near side was a tiny on-and-off slide switch. There was a rubber grommet in one end, with four thin spidery wires—one red, one white, one green, one blue—protruding from it, about six inches each in length; at the end of each wire was a tooth-type alligator clip with a tiny rubber boot covering it as a preventive against shorting.

  Donleavy said, “I guess you know what that is.”

  “Phone bug,” Eberhardt said sourly.

  I asked, “Where’d you find it?”

  “I didn’t find it myself,” Donleavy said a little ruefully. “Reese found it. Reese is an eager-beaver, and he gets a lot of ideas. Every now and then, one of them pays off—like this one.” Donleavy reached out and tapped the telephone on the desk with the blunt tip of his forefinger. “He opened up the base of this unit here, about a half-hour before you called, and there it was.”

  I looked at the bug. It was a simple package, nothing more than a miniature frequency-modulation transmitter. Its wires would have been attached, by way of the tooth clips, to the four leads coming into the phone; either an incoming or outgoing call would have activated it and transmitted an FM signal to a monitor somewhere in the immediate area. Judging from the size of the package, the monitor would have to have been put up within approximately a half-block radius. With a bug like that you could pick up conversations through a standard FM radio, tuned to a place on the dial which was not licensed for local broadcasting; somebody sitting in a car, for example, could monitor calls on the automobile’s radio. Or if he was afraid of the conspicuousness of a lengthy plant, all he would have to have done would be to run a patch cord between the input jack on a cassette tape recorder and the earphone jack on a portable radio, and then secrete both units in any one of a hundred places in the vicinity. The phone conversations would be fed directly from the opened line through the radio and into the recorder, ready for him to replay when he retrieved the equipment.

  Donleavy said, “We’ve got a couple of men out combing the area now, but I don’t expect them to find anything. Not with a bug like this one.”

  “This complicates hell out of things, doesn’t it?” I said slowly.

  “Yeah, and I don’t like it one goddamn bit.” Donleavy went over and sat down on the couch with a ponderousness that reminded me of Oliver Hardy. He crossed his ankles and folded his hands on top of his paunch, and he looked very soft sitting there that way. He was about as soft as petrified wood. “There’s no way of telling how long that thing was in the phone; could have been planted before the kidnapping or after it. If we knew which one, it would help.”

  “Assuming that it has something to do with the snatch in the first place,” Eberhardt said morosely.

  “Nuts to coincidences,” Donleavy said.

  I asked, “Does Martinetti have any ideas?”

  “Well, to begin with, he tells me that he had a party here two nights before the boy was taken from Sandhurst, one of those catered deals out on the terrace with about sixty or seventy people milling around. Any one of them could have planted the bug; it would take about three minutes, and the only requirements, a pocket screwdriver and maybe a little knowledge of electronics.”

  “What about after the snatch?”

  “It’s possible. Martinetti and Channing were down to Martinetti’s office in Redwood City, going over his books most of the night of the kidnapping; Mrs. Martinetti went to bed early, so did the maid, and Proxmire went home.” He waved a hand toward the draped windows behind the desk. “The catches on those windows could be slipped with a penknife; anybody could have come in here that night and bugged the phone and gotten away in less than ten minutes with no trouble at all.”

  “If it happened that way,” I said, “whoever it was had to know therewas a kidnapping—that the boy had been abducted from the military academy that day.”

  “Yeah.”

  “In addition to the headmaster at Sandhurst, the only ones who knew that were myself, Channing and Proxmire and the maid and the Martinettis.”

  “Well, the headmaster—Young—has an unimpeachable reputation and a bank account in six figures,” Donleavy said. “He seems to be in the clear.”

  “Which puts emphasis on the theory that one of the people here engineered a hijacking of the ransom money,” I said. “But all of them were right in this house at the time Lockridge and I were attacked up in the hills.”

  “One of them could have had an accomplice,” Eberhardt suggested.

  “There are too damned many accomplices in this thing,” Donleavy said. “But I’ll admit it’s a possibility.”

  I said, “Are you eliminating the theory of Lockridge having any partner except the Hanlon girl—at least as far as his murder is concerned?”

  “I think we can, yeah, from what the girl told you. We also got a report on Lockridge from the Cleveland police first thing this morning, and as far as they could find out, he was strictly a loner.”

  “What was his background?” Eberhardt asked.

  Donleavy made a distasteful noise with his lips. “Rogue cop,” he said. “He was thrown off the Louisville police force about twelve years ago, for taking bribes from a string of horse parlors. He moved up to Cleveland and tried to get on with some security outfits, but with his past, they wouldn’t touch him. He’d never been in trouble in the Cleveland area, and the police there don’t have anything on him. But it’s rumored that he had some un
derworld connections here and there, among others, and that he paid the rent hustling angles and information.”

  “Kidnapping doesn’t fit that kind of guy too well,” Eberhardt said. “But I guess three hundred thousand dollars is plenty of temptation for any man to gamble for.”

  We let silence build for a few moments, thinking our own thoughts. An idea occurred to me, and I said, “Listen, suppose Lockridgedid have a partner after all, a kind of silent partner, somebody who knew him for one reason or another and who also knew the Martinettis. Suppose this silent partner got in touch with Lockridge with the kidnap scheme and brought him out here to California to do the job. Hell, somebody had to tip Lockridge to the situation; according to the Hanlon girl, he’d only been out here for three weeks, and he was talking about ‘a business deal’ from the beginning. It doesn’t figure that he would come all the way from Cleveland to pull a snatch without having a victim in mind; and living back there, how would he know who to pick in California?”

  “Why wouldn’t the silent partner do the job himself?” Eberhardt asked, making argument.

  “Maybe because the boy knew him by sight,” I answered. “It would have been a risky proposition, pulling it off himself if he was known to any member of the family.”

  “Okay, you’ve got a good point,” Donleavy said. “It would explain the kidnap note on Martinetti’s stationery adequately enough, from what he tells me about his office layout—and it would also explain something else that’s been bothering me: how Lockridge knew the San

  Bruno hills well enough, being from out of state, to use that dirt road as a ransom drop. Sure, he could have driven around looking for a likely place, but since he was staying in San Francisco, why would he pick something so far south? There are other isolated areas, closer ones, that he might have chosen.” He uncrossed his ankles and crossed them the other way. “But what it doesn’texplain is the bug.”

  “It could if the bug is nothing more than a red herring to hamper an investigation. The partner and Lockridge could have cooked that up figuring you would examine every possibility.”

  “That makes them out to be master criminals,” Eberhardt said in his dour way. “Master criminals are fine for those pulp magazines of yours, but they’re a plain crock in real life and you know it.”

  Donleavy’s eyes were speculative. “Now that I think of it, I can figure an explanation for the tap myself. This silent partner, assuming there is one, would likely have wanted as little contact with Lockridge as possible once Lockridge reached California—for obvious reasons. If he distrusted him, he could have used the bug to make sure Lockridge kept up his end of the deal.”

  “Fine,” Eberhardt said, “but why would he bring Lockridge in in the first place if he distrusted him? And why, for Christ’s sake, would this silent partner kill Lockridge up at the drop site? Why wouldn’t he just wait until the pickup had been made and the money safely taken away, and then do the job on Lockridge if he was planning a double-cross?”

  I gave him the theory I had conceived in the hospital. “It’s pretty isolated up there in the hills, Eb. A body wouldn’t necessarily be found for some time.” I went on to tell him why it could be that this hypothetical silent partner had not waited until I was gone before killing Lockridge—that he had gotten excited by the prospect of the money, made his attack too quickly and merely wounded Lockridge with the first thrust of his knife instead of killing him, thus giving him time to cry out and warn me of what was happening.

  “It makes sense, I suppose,” Eberhardt said, but his voice was skeptical.

  Donleavy said, “Yeah, it’s pretty thin, all right— but it’s better than anything else we’ve got at the moment. The only trouble with it, we don’t have any goddamned idea where to begin looking for a silent partner.” He sucked in his cheeks and puffed them out, the way he had in the hospital. “The girl didn’t give you anything at all on a connection between Lockridge and somebody else out here?”

  “Nothing,” Eberhardt said. “As far as she knows, Lockridge conceived and executed the whole thing himself.”

  Donleavy yawned and patted his mouth the way Oliver Hardy used to do it; all he needed was a derby hat and a wide silk tie and a little mustache under his nose. He said, “Why do you suppose Lockridge brought the girl into it? It doesn’t figure that she was part of any conspiracy, if there is one—and from what you told me over the phone, she only knew it was a kidnapping when Lockridge took the boy to the San Francisco house.”

  “Well, she said she was in love with the guy,” Eberhardt said. “Maybe it was reciprocal, and he felt he could trust her. Maybe he figured it would be better to have somebody with the kid the whole time, and thought she was too dumb to tumble to the kidnap idea.”

  “I guess we’ll never know about that now,” Donleavy said sadly. “It doesn’t figure this silent partner— again, if there is one—knew about her.”

  “I’d say it was pretty unlikely.”

  We kicked around what Lorraine Hanlon had told Eberhardt and me for a little while, and then Donleavy sighed and got up on his feet again. He went to the desk and put the phone bug in his pocket; the way he was handling it, he had already gone over it for prints—and the fact that he had not mentioned that, told me there had been none. He yawned again and looked at me and said, “Martinetti told me he’d hired you to do some investigating on this business. You planning to keep on with it now the boy is home?”

  “If he still wants me, and you don’t object, I guess I will,” I told him.

  “I figured as much,” Donleavy said. “You seem to be all right, and you’ve been on this thing from the start; that’s why I let you sit in just now. I can trust you to notify the office if you come up with anything, can’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’ve got my sanction then. I need all the help I can get.” He said the last without irony.

  There was a knock on the door, and Donleavy went over and opened it and spoke in low tones to a thin guy with a brushlike mustache. Then he shut the door again and came back and said, “That was one of the men I sent out to scout the area. None of the neighbors remember anybody hanging around before the snatch or after it; they turned up exactly nothing.”

  He puffed out his lips and sighed and looked at Eberhardt. “Do me a favor, would you? Ring up your Hall and see if Reese is still there?”

  Eberhardt made the call for him, and Reese had not left as yet. Donleavy spoke to him, briefly, and put the receiver down and said, “I’m going to talk to the Hanlon girl myself, if you don’t mind. Reese has a tendency to be too eager in his questioning, and he overlooks things; besides that, I like to be in on it first-hand. I told him to wait for me to get there.”

  Eberhardt inclined his head. “Listen,” he said, “can I ride up with you? Hot shot here probably wants to talk to his client, and I got to get back.”

  “Glad to have you,” Donleavy said.

  We left the study then, without having reached any conclusions or made any startling discoveries after the revelation of the phone tap. It was just like most police work: a lot of conjecture, a little bullshit, and a constant rehashing of pertinent facts. Sometimes you clicked on something, and sometimes you didn’t; but it was time well spent, because in the long run that was the way most cases were solved.

  * * * *

  17

  After Eberhardt and Donleavy had said their goodbyes to the Martinettis, I went with them out to the street. It was dark now, and very cool and still; the night air contained the faint, almost anachronistic presence of woodsmoke. It was a nice evening, all right.

  I asked Donleavy, “When are you going to release the news of the boy’s homecoming to the press?”

  “Later on tonight, probably, after I have a talk with the Hanlon girl.”

  “Don’t worry,” Eberhardt said. “We’ll see that you get the hero’s mantle, hot shot.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I said.

  They got into the dark brown Ford—
the Plymouth was gone, now—and Donleavy took it away up the street. I watched it turn right at the first corner and leave Tamarack Drive empty and silent again.

  I retraced my steps across the footbridge and through the gate. I was conscious of a gnawing sensation in my stomach now, but it had nothing to do with the knife wound; I had eaten nothing all day except a couple of pieces of toast while I waited for the taxi this morning. After I talked with Martinetti, I decided I would drive into Burlingame and get something to eat before returning to San Francisco.

  I went along the gravel path, and Martinetti was on the terrace, at the outdoor bar, motioning to me. I angled across the lawn on the circular stepping stones and walked across the terrace to where he was standing. The drapes across the bay window were parted in the center, and as I passed by I could see Karyn Martinetti still sitting on the couch with her son. I could not tell if they were alone, or if Proxmire was in there with them.