The building, I could see in the shine of the headlights, was weather-beaten pineboard, a dull eroded gray with a lot of humps and knots like a beachcomber’s shack. It was enclosed in front by a similar board fence, and off on one side was a small matching shed. There was a look of instability to it all, as if a good stiff storm wind would hurl the cottage and the shed out over the cliffs and into the ocean.
I switched off the lights and got out of the car. Cold wind whistled in from the sea, eddying the fog like mildewed garlands around my head. The sound of the turbulent Pacific seemed unnaturally loud out here, as if the bluff were a tiny atoll and the ocean was all around it, hammering at it, chipping it apart and consuming it piece by piece, inexorably. I shivered a little and pulled the overcoat tight around my neck, moving quickly to the unlatched gate in the fence.
A crushed oyster-and-clam-shell path, grown through with coarse grass, extended into a wide rectangle before the door; on both sides of it, ice plant caressed the rough boarding of the cottage with shining green fingers. I went up to the rectangle and reached out and knocked on the door.
No answer. I waited half a minute, and then knocked again, listening for some sound from within. There was nothing except the stentorian and relentless roaring of the wind-lashed Pacific flinging itself on the rocks beyond and below.
I worked saliva into my mouth and took a couple of careful steps sideways, into the ice plant. My shoes crushed the wet pulpy tendrils with the same sound as when you step on a thick-shelled beetle. I leaned forward, retaining a breath, and put my eye up to one of the bars in the louvered shutters and looked inside the cottage.
A mélange of mismatched furniture—rattan, overstuffed fabric, imitation Danish Modern—and the light coming from an inverted and milky-bowled floor lamp. Mail-order stereo components, all of which had apparently been built from kits, on tiers of shelves made out of brick building blocks and lengths of wood along one otherwise bare wall. A small wooden table cluttered with capacitors and resistors, solder and spools of wire and a soldering gun, various-sized parts and tools. Bare wood floor, a darkened archway to another room—nothing else. I touched my tongue to my cold lips and moved as far to the left as I was able so that I could see more of the room: more bare wall, a battered portable television set on a roll-stand, a cylindrical brass-finished smoking stand. The area immediately in front of the door was still blocked from my vision.
I stepped back onto the crushed-shell rectangle and knocked on the door a third time. Still nothing. Before I could consider the advisability of the move, I reached out and grasped the knob and twisted it slowly, silently. The door opened a couple of inches under my hand.
There was the smell of something in there, a lingering chemical odor that I had known a long time ago and would never forget: spent gunpowder. The hairs at the base of my neck rose, and a different kind of chill swept over me now; I could feel my heart begin to jump irregularly in my chest and there was sweat under my arms and flowing cold-hot along my sides. My stomach throbbed and ached.
I released the knob and pushed the door open with the tips of my fingers, keeping my body motionless. It swung inward with a faint, odd, empty sound, and then I could see the flooring across the threshold that had not been visible from the window.
A man lay on his right side there, a couple of feet into the room, facing away from me. His legs were drawn up, and both hands were frozen in clawed agony at his chest. Blood had spilled out between the spread fingers; a pool of it, with appendages as thin as spider’s legs jutting out into the cracks in the boarding, shone a deep burgundy in the pale light.
I took a couple of steps inside, moving woodenly. The man was about thirty, dressed in faded corduroy trousers and canvas shoes and a white terry-cloth pullover with the word Art stitched in blue script over the left pocket. His face was contorted, the eyes squeezed so tightly shut they seemed sewn, and he had bitten through his lower lip in his agony.
I knelt down by his head and made myself look at his chest. It was a bullet wound, all right, but there was no sign of exit. I touched the skin at the base of his neck: still warm. He had not been dead very long.
I straightened up and kept on staring down at the thing that had been Art Shanley, undeniably Art Shanley, and I thought: He’s the one, yes, he’s got to be the one. He learned of the kidnapping from his brother and saw his chance ro get his hands on more money than he’d ever seen before or would see again. He went down to Martinetti’s late that same night and planted the bug in the phone and waited all the next day—maybe in his car, maybe just walking around with a portable radio—for the ransom call to come in. When it did, he went up to the drop site early and hid out there to wait for Lockridge, the kidnapper, and for me to show up with the money. But he was too quick after I put the suitcase on that sandstone rock, too nervous maybe, and he used the knife on Lockridge before I was gone. When I came back down, he slashed me and then got out of there with the money and he was in the clear—hethought he was in the clear.
I kept staring down at him, and the sight of his twisted features jarred my mind and suddenly I began thinking very clearly, very rationally, very rapidly. A lot of little things fused and grew and begat bigger things, and I began to tremble, standing there, tremble with more than mere coldness, the sound of the churning ocean growing and growing in my ears until it filled the room with crushing, cataclysmic noise. We had thought it all tied together, the kidnapping and the hijacking, but they were two separate entities, paralleling one another but never coming together until tonight. Now that I knew that, I knew also who had killed Art Shanley—who, and why, not all the answers, but enough of them, too many of them, and the knowledge made disgust flow through me with the palpable bitterness of camphor.
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 th
undering 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 tonight 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 enou
gh, 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 . . .”
The Snatch - [Nameless Detective 01] Page 18