The Vanished Read online

  The Vanished

  Bill Pronzini

  His name was Roy Sands, and he had everything to look forward to. He was getting out of the service and coming home to marry his beautiful Fiancee. He had his debts paid, money in the bank, and a happy new life ahead of him. Then he disappeared.

  Bill Pronzini

  The Vanished

  The second book in the Nameless Detective series, 1973

  Chapter One

  January.

  A new year, another year-but nothing really changes. The passage of Time is inexorable, but Man is a constant, Man does not change, Man loves and hates and lives and dies exactly as he did millenniums ago. The same emotions govern his actions, the same things, in essence, delight or repulse or frighten or sadden him. The chosen are still the chosen, the lonely still the lonely.

  January.

  The bitter-cold winter air still smells of pollution, and wars like the amusements of mad children are still being fought in alien jungles. Poverty and disease, affluence and medical science, exist side by side, and Man ignores them all in the pursuit of shelter, career, nourishment, orgasm. Nothing has changed, and nothing will, because Man is Man-and a constant.

  January.

  A weekday morning four days after the one night in the year which should not be spent alone, a night I had spent alone, a night when I said ‘Happy New Year!’ to a roomful of silent emptiness and toasted Erika and toasted my convictions and toasted the fact that it was a new year and yet nothing had changed. A weekday morning like all the rest: cold, purposeless, giving birth to philosophical reflections which degenerate rapidly into little more than morbid self-pity.

  And then the office door opens, and a ray of hope comes in, and suddenly it is not quite so dark outside or in, life is not quite so futile as it seemed seconds earlier. All you need, when you’re feeling this way, is a purpose, a place to channel your energies, a way to end the maudlinism, the melancholy. All you need is your work, the thing in your life that motivates you, that brings you alive, that allows you to forget the loneliness and the emptiness of a crumbled love. That’s all you need.

  No. That’s part of what you need.

  But at the moment, it is enough.

  * * * *

  Her name was Elaine Kavanaugh, and she sat stiffly, nervously, in the leather-backed chair across my desk. She was a couple of years past thirty, with short dark hair and very white skin that held an almost brittle translucence, like opaque and finely blown glass. A pair of silver-rimmed glasses gave her oval face a studious, intense appearance. When the flaps of her tailored woolen coat fell open across her joined knees, I could see the hem of a medium-length blue skirt and nicely tapering legs in dark nylon.

  She was small-breasted and narrow-shouldered, but attractive enough in a fiercely virginal sort of way-the kind of girl who would cry miserably on her wedding night. And yet, there was also a strangely muted sensuality about her, a hidden-below-the-surface kind of thing, so that while you had the thought of her weeping after the consummation of marriage, you felt she would probably become an active sexual aggressor in no time at all. There were small, expensive black pearls in the lobes of her ears, and on the third finger of her left hand was a diamond-encrusted engagement ring that would have cost upward of a thousand dollars if the diamonds were genuine.

  I offered her a cup of coffee, but she shook her head; I got up and refilled my own cup from the pot on the two-burner I keep and sat down again. I watched her chew diffidently at the pale iridescent lipstick on her mouth. Her eyes, behind the lens of the glasses, were a magnified coltish brown, the pupils very black, the whites clean ivory; she had them focused on a spot several inches beyond my left shoulder, and her eyelashes flicked very rapidly up and down, like miniature black hummingbirds.

  She said, ‘I don’t quite know how to begin.’

  ‘I understand,’ I told her. ‘Take your time.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She cleared her throat, softly, and looked down at the large white beaded purse she was holding in her lap. While I waited for her to make up her mind to begin, I reached a cigarette out of the pack by the phone and began to roll it back and forth across the blotter without looking at it. I had been trying to give the damned things up for better than two months now, because of a fluctuating cough and a rasping in my chest that may or may not have been something worthy of medical attention; but they were the kind of habit that for some men is not easy to break, a crutch, a friend in times of stress, a thing to do with your hands and mouth and lungs when you’re uptight or impatient or inactive. I had managed to cut down on my consumption from almost three packages daily to less than one, but that was the best I had been able to do; it was the best I would at any time be able to do. The cough came only in the mornings now, and I was breathing somewhat easier, more freely. I knew I should still see a doctor, but I could not seem to bring myself to do it. I had never liked doctors, not since the Second World War and the things I had seen in the field hospitals in the South Pacific.

  I kept on rolling the cigarette under my index finger, resisting it, and finally Elaine Kavanaugh finished composing her thoughts and said, ‘I’ve come about my fiancé, Roy Sands. He’s missing, you see.’

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘Yes, he’s disappeared.’

  ‘How do you mean, Miss Kavanaugh?’

  ‘Well, he’s just… vanished,’ she said, and made a vague, helpless gesture with her hands. ‘No one seems to know what happened to him.’ She lowered her eyes and tightened her fingers around the beaded bag. ‘We… we were to be married later this month, Roy and I, we were going to drive up to Reno and see a justice of the peace and spend our honeymoon up there…’

  Oh Jesus, I thought, not one of these things, not now. I put the cigarette in my mouth and lit it and pulled deeply at it. As I dropped the match into the glass desk ashtray, my hand, through the exhaled smoke, seemed to look like one of those gnarled rubber affairs the kids wear on Halloween.

  I said, ‘Miss Kavanaugh…’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said before I could get the rest of it out. ‘The prospective bridegroom has serious second thoughts and departs for points unknown. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  I did not say anything.

  ‘Well, you’re wrong,’ she said with conviction. ‘I’ve known Roy for a long time- over two years now-and his marriage proposal wasn’t one of those meaningless things made in a moment of… Well, we talked about it very carefully before we decided to marry, we were very sure of one another.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He wouldn’t just run off, not this way.’

  ‘And what way is that?’

  ‘Without telling me,’ she said. ‘Just… vanishing. His last letter from Germany, just a week before he came home, was very explicit about our plans. He wanted me to use part of our money for a down payment on this house I had written about in Fresno. That’s where I live, you see, in Fresno.’

  ‘Our money, Miss Kavanaugh?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Roy and I have more than fifteen thousand dollars in our joint checking and savings accounts.’

  I sat up a little straighter and put my cigarette out in the ashtray; the smoke from it was like a screen between us. When the screen faded into nothingness, I said, ‘How much of that amount is legally your fiancé’s?’

  ‘Almost nine thousand.’

  ‘These accounts are in Fresno?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they haven’t been touched since he disappeared?’

  ‘No, certainly not. I have the savings bankbook, and the checkbook.’

  I said, ‘Have you been to the police yet, Miss Kavanaugh?’

  ‘Yes. They were very nice, but they said there was
n’t much they could do and not to expect anything if he didn’t… come back of his own volition.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I pulled the desk pad and pencil in front of me and wrote her name and a few other things down. ‘You don’t have any idea where your fiancé might be?’

  ‘No, none. I think something may have happened to Roy, an accident, amnesia… I don’t know. I’ve been so worried, and this morning I just couldn’t stand the waiting, the inactivity, and that’s why I came to you. I called up my attorney and he gave me your name; he said you were very reliable.’

  ‘I hope I am, Miss Kavanaugh,’ I said. ‘Suppose you tell me something about Roy Sands?’

  ‘Well, he’s a master sergeant in the Army,’ she said. ‘I mean, he was. He’s been in the service for twenty years, you see, and that makes him eligible for retirement with a nice pension and he chose to leave the service instead of re-enlisting when his tour came up just before Christmas. I met him at a U.S.O. dance here in San Francisco about two years ago; he was stationed at the Presidio at the time. He asked me out and then we started going together and we fell in love. After we were sure marriage was what we wanted, we made all sorts of plans and Roy bought me this ring’-she displayed the diamond engagement band with a kind of awkward pride-’and we opened the joint bank accounts just before he left for Germany.’

  ‘When was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Eleven months ago.’

  ‘Last February?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And he’s been in Germany since then?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At Larson Barracks, in Kitzingen.’

  ‘When did he return to the States?’

  ‘The eighteenth of last month.’

  ‘To San Francisco for his discharge?’

  ‘Yes. We were to spend Christmas and New Year’s together.’

  ‘But you never saw him after his return, is that right?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, no, I didn’t see him.’

  I told myself: You weren’t such a unique holiday case, guy; the world is full of lonely people. I said, ‘Are you sure he did return to San Francisco?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Elaine answered. ‘He was supposed to call me after he had arrived and gotten settled and everything, and when he didn’t by Sunday night, I contacted the Presidio. They said he had come in on the flight from Germany, but no one seemed to know where he went afterward. I talked to two of Roy’s friends, men who had been with him in Kitzingen and who had come over on the plane with him, and they didn’t know where he’d gone either.’

  ‘What did they say about his frame of mind?’

  A pair of thin horizontal lines, like furrows in a meadow of snow, appeared on her forehead. ‘Frame of mind?’

  ‘Did these friends mention if he seemed happy, sad, apprehensive, nervous?’

  ‘They said he talked about me, and about our marriage.’ Her voice had a slight tremor in it now. ‘They said I shouldn’t worry, everything would be all right, but I don’t know. I can’t help feeling…’

  I said, ‘Did you write to one another regularly while he was overseas?’

  She gave herself a small shake. ‘Yes, we were in close correspondence the entire time.’ She took the engagement ring between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand and rotated it from side to side, caressing it in a way that told me she was not aware of what she was doing. ‘I wrote to him at least twice a week, and he wrote to me three or four times a month; men aren’t as ardent letter-writers as women, of course.’

  ‘He gave no indication in his letters of anything being wrong?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  I wrote some more things on the pad. ‘Do you know where he’s from, originally?’

  ‘Kansas,’ she said. ‘Topeka.’

  ‘Would he still have family there?’

  ‘Oh no, Roy is an orphan. He has no family.’

  ‘Well, what about friends or acquaintances?’

  ‘You mean where he might be staying for some reason?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The only friends he has are in the service,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t possibly know all of them, but he was stationed here in California for about three years before he was sent to Germany and he probably knew a lot of fellows who came and went.’

  I drank some of my coffee and looked at the package of cigarettes and looked away from it and said, ‘Is there anything else you can tell me that might help, Miss Kavanaugh? There’s not really much here, so far.’

  ‘Well, there are the wires.’

  ‘Wires?’

  ‘Yes, telegrams. Three days after he arrived in San Francisco-the twenty-first of December-Roy wired money to three different friends who had been with him on the return flight from Germany.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘He’d lost it to them playing poker.’

  ‘How much money was involved?’

  ‘About a hundred dollars, I think.’

  ‘He paid off everyone he’d lost to in the game?’

  ‘Yes, there were only four of them playing.’

  ‘Where were the wires sent from?’

  ‘Eugene, Oregon.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why your fiancé would be in Eugene?’

  ‘No, none at all-none.’

  ‘And you didn’t receive any word from Oregon yourself?’

  ‘No, and I don’t understand that at all. Why would Roy send money paying off gambling debts to his friends, but nothing whatsoever to the woman he loves, the woman he’s going to marry?’

  I had no answer for that. I said, ‘How did you find out about the wires?’

  ‘From Chuck Hendryx. He’s one of Roy’s friends, the first one I talked with when I came to San Francisco. I knew him slightly from before; Roy introduced us, and we’d been over to Chuck’s home in Marin County a couple of times before he and Roy left.’

  ‘Is this Hendryx still in the Army, or was he discharged too?’

  ‘He’s a full career man, with twenty-three years in now,’ Elaine said. ‘He came home for the holidays, to be with his wife and family. They don’t like to travel, and so they stay here in California most of the year.’

  ‘Is he still home, do you know?’

  ‘Yes. He’ll be here until the end of January.’

  ‘Do you have his address?’

  ‘Forty-eight Pinewood Lane, Fairfax.’

  ‘You mentioned talking to another of your fiancé’s friends,’ I said. ‘Who would that be?’

  ‘Doug Rosmond.’

  ‘Was he one of the men who got a wire from Oregon?’

  She nodded. ‘He’s home on leave also, staying with his sister Cheryl here in San Francisco. Would you want his address too?’

  ‘Please.’

  She opened her bag and took out a thin address book and read me a location well out in the Parkside District, on Vicente near Ocean Beach. I wrote it down on the pad.

  ‘You said money was wired to three friends, Miss Kavanaugh. Can you tell me the name of the third?’

  ‘A man named Gilmartin, I think.’

  ‘Gil Martin?’

  ‘No, Gilmartin-one word. I can’t recall his first name.’

  ‘You didn’t talk with him, then?’

  ‘No, but Chuck did. He didn’t know anything that would help, either.’

  I rubbed the pencil eraser across the bridge of my nose. ‘Did you check with the authorities in Eugene?’

  ‘No. The Missing Persons people here told me they would do that.’

  ‘They apparently learned nothing, or you would have been notified by now.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘Is there anything further you can tell me, anything at all?’

  ‘I’ve thought and thought, and there’s just nothing.’ She met my eyes directly now, and hers seemed huge and imploring behind her glasses. ‘You do believe me that Roy hasn’t just… run off somewhere, don’t you
? I mean, you agree that the circumstances are very strange surrounding his disappearance?’

  ‘They would seem to be, yes,’ I said carefully.

  ‘Then you’ll investigate for me?’

  ‘As long as you understand that the odds of one man locating another, when the law enforcement agencies haven’t been able to do it, are not the best in the world.’

  She nodded positively. ‘I understand-but there is the chance, and that’s all that matters now.’

  ‘If I do locate him, my liability terminates with that location. I would simply tell you where he is, and after that it’s up to you.’

  She caressed her ring in that secret way again. ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ she said softly.

  I told her what I charged, plus expenses, and she said that was perfectly acceptable. I got one of the standard business contract forms from my desk and filled it in and had her sign it; then I gave her a copy and she gave me a check for one hundred dollars as a retainer.

  I said, ‘Will you authorize my going up to Oregon? It would seem necessary, and I’ll have to fly.’

  ‘Yes, certainly.’

  ‘Do you have a picture of your fiancé, by any chance?’

  ‘I gave the only good one I had to the Missing Persons-but I do have a sketch of him.’

  ‘Sketch?’

  ‘Yes, he must have had it done by one of those sidewalk artists in Europe somewhere. He had all his belongings sent to me in Fresno just before he came home. Naturally, I didn’t look through them right away, I don’t believe in prying-but when he disappeared as he did, I… well, I went over everything very carefully. There was no clue to where he might have gone, but I did find the sketch. I think he must have intended to surprise me with it later on.’

  ‘Did you happen to bring it with you?’

  Elaine moved her head affirmatively. ‘I knew you’d need a picture,’ she said. She took from her coat pocket a rolled sheet of that type of heavy rag paper which comes as part of an artist’s sketch pad. She handed it across to me. I took it and slipped off a blue rubber band and unrolled the paper, smoothing it out flat on my desk.