The Vanished - [Nameless Detective 02] Page 6

  The answers were all the same: he wouldn’t.

  Unless he was not a sneak thief at all.

  Unless he was a guy after something in particular, something important enough to make all that risk worthwhile.

  The portrait of Roy Sands?

  It had to be that. I had nothing else that would interest anybody—certainly nothing of special value. I had not had another case in over a month, and that one a simple skip-trace. It had to be the portrait, all right. Coincidence was the only other explanation, and if a lifelong distrust of coincidence was not enough to discredit that possibility, the facts as I saw them were enough.

  But what made the portrait important enough to steal? A lot of silly and melodramatic ideas crossed my mind—some kind of coded message, a microdot, a concealed masterpiece of some type—and I discarded them all for those very reasons. It had been a simple head-and-shoulders sketch of Roy Sands, and that’s all it had been.

  Who, then? Elaine Kavanaugh knew I had it, obviously; but because she had given it to me, there seemed to be no conceivable reason why she would want to steal it back again, or have it stolen by someone else. Chuck Hendryx and Rich Gilmartin also knew I had it—and maybe Doug Rosmond as well; he could have spoken to one of them during the day, and that one could have mentioned the portrait. It was likely that Rosmond had known I would be out with his sister tonight, and either Hendryx or Gilmartin could have come over from Marin County and watched my flat and waited until I left, plus a little longer because of the hour, and then broken in.

  All of which told me nothing definite. Hell, it did not have to be one of those three at all. At this point, there was simply no way of knowing. But there was one thing I did know, one fact which seemed certain: the theft of the sketch had something to do with the disappearance of Roy Sands, directly or indirectly. And it made that disappearance seem a hell of a lot stranger than it had sounded that morning.

  I got up and paced the room, smoking and brooding and getting nowhere, and when the doorbell finally rang I jumped half a foot. I let in two uniformed cops, neither of whom I knew, and showed them around the flat and told them what had happened and what had been stolen, without elaborating on any of my theories. They were polite and solicitous, especially after they found out what I did for a living and that I had been on the cops for fifteen years, and I tried to answer their questions without letting my impatience show through. No, I hadn’t gotten a good look at the man. No, I didn’t know if he had gotten away on foot or in a car. Yes, I was certain he had been wearing gloves. No, I could not tell them anything more than I already had.

  When they were gone—leaving me with the empty assurance that they would do what they could to recover my stolen property—I had another brandy for my nerves and then went into the bedroom and dialed the number of the Royal Gate Hotel. The switchboard rang Elaine Kavanaugh’s room and she answered immediately, as if she had been lying tensely awake in the darkness, waiting for the telephone to ring. ‘Yes? What is it?’

  I told her who was calling; then: ‘Somebody broke into my apartment tonight while I was out. I came home and caught him at it and chased him out, but he got away without me getting a look at him.’

  I could hear her breathing over the wire. She said at length, ‘I don’t understand. I’m sorry for you, but why did you call me?’

  ‘I have my doubts that this was an ordinary burglary attempt,’ I said. ‘The only thing stolen, except for a couple of inconsequential items that seem more like an afterthought than anything else, was that sketch of your fiancé you gave me this morning.’

  ‘The sketch? Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘But—why would anybody want to steal that?’

  ‘I was about to ask you the same question.’

  ‘I have no idea. None at all.’

  ‘What can you tell about that sketch, Miss Kavanaugh?’

  ‘Just what I told you at your office. I found it among Roy’s things when I was looking through them. That’s all.’

  ‘Where exactly among his things?’

  ‘Inside his duffel bag.’

  ‘Was there anything else in there that might connect with the sketch?’

  ‘No, just clothing and such. Do you really think this is important?’

  ‘It might be,’ I said. ‘Are you sure he never told you about the portrait in any of his letters?’

  ‘Yes, I’m certain he never mentioned it.’

  ‘Then you don’t have any idea where he had it done?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or when?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or who drew it?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, no.’

  ‘Do you remember a signature? I can’t recall seeing one.’

  ‘I don’t think it was signed.’

  I shifted the receiver to my left hand. ‘Did you tell anyone about the sketch? That you’d found it, that you’d given it to me?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Is your fiancé interested in painting, can you tell me that?’

  ‘Painting? No ... not really. He likes sports, hunting, masculine things.’

  ‘Why do you suppose he sat for the sketch, then?’

  ‘Why—to surprise me, I suppose. He knows how much something like that would please me, and I ... well, I just assumed he had it done for me.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you ... think the theft of the sketch has something to do with his disappearance? Really think so?’ Her voice had grown very soft, and there was anguish in it now.

  ‘I don’t know. It might have.’

  ‘But I don’t see what! It was just a good portrait of Roy, that’s all.’

  ‘So it would seem,’ I said. ‘Did your fiancé happen to mention in any of his letters how he got along with his buddies—Hendryx and Gilmartin and Rosmond, in particular?’

  ‘How he got along with them? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Was he on good terms with each of them?’

  ‘Well, of course he was. They’ve been friends for years, all of them. I don’t see—’

  ‘I’m just fishing in the dark, Miss Kavanaugh. I’m sorry if I upset you, but I thought you’d want to know about the theft and I did want to ask you some questions about the portrait.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, of course. But I ... oh God, this is so confusing, so frightening on top of everything else. What does it mean? What can it mean?’

  I had no answer for her. I said, ‘I’ll call you tomorrow from Eugene, Miss Kavanaugh. Maybe some of the answers are up there.’

  ‘I hope so. I can’t take much more of this waiting, this not knowing.’

  I said a few gentle parting words, replaced the receiver, and released an audible breath. My watch told me it was almost 1:00 a.m. I thought: She’s not going to sleep much tonight, maybe you should have waited until tomorrow to tell her about it. Well, it was too late now; I had called her, and she had had nothing to tell me. A lot depended now on what I was able to find out in Oregon; if I ran into a blank up there, there was not much more I could do for Elaine Kavanaugh short of interrogating Hendryx and Gilmartin and Rosmond—and if one of them had stolen the sketch, he would not be likely to admit it to me.

  I went out to the utility porch and fussed with the door again, wedging it more tightly shut, and then I walked through the apartment shutting off lights. I looked at the broken lamp in the living room, and finally kicked what was left of it into a corner; I was in no mood to do any cleaning up tonight. In the bedroom I undressed and got into bed and lay there looking up at the dark ceiling, listening to the low moans and creaks and cries of the old building, waiting for sleep to come.

  I had to wait a long time ...

  * * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  My flight to Eugene left on schedule at nine the next morning, and it was quiet and uneventful and took something better than an hour. I sat over the wing, tired and vaguely irritable from lack of sleep, and broode
d about the theft of Roy Sands’ portrait; it got me no further than the brooding I had done the previous night. I thought about Cheryl, then, and that made things considerably better for the duration.

  It was snowing a little, not much, when we arrived. I rented a car at Mahlon Sweet Field, because it was the simplest way to do things and in the long run the most economical; and I asked the clerk for a city map and directions to the Western Union office in Eugene proper. He didn’t know where it was. I looked it up in the telephone directory and found that it was on Pearl Street, and then located Pearl on the map. I traced out a route that seemed the quickest—and took Highway 99 south-east into the city.

  The snow was coming down pretty good now, and there was a lot of traffic. Eventually I reached the down-town area I wanted, left the car in the county parking lot at 7th and Oak, and walked down to Pearl.

  The Western Union office had a poorly designed facade, front trim and entrance door set in light green-glass facing material; there were some display candygrams in the front show window, for the holiday season. I entered a large, weakly lighted room with a lobby marked off by counters, the furnishings and transmitting stations behind them giving the impression of age and heavy wear.

  A girl about twenty-three, with flaxen hair and a long, tragic face, listened to me tell her who I was and why I was there; she seemed a little awed by my profession. Since the telegrams sent by Sands had gone out after six o’clock, she told me, it would have been a guy named Johnny Saddler—the night man—who had handled the business. She said he came on at six.

  I thanked her and left the building, and I could feel her eyes on me as I went through the door and out into the lightly falling snow. It was the old Bogart image, embellished and nurtured by radio and television; they expected you to talk tough and to make cute wisecracks, or at the very least to leer suggestively with one side of your mouth. It stopped being amusing after a while, or even diverting, and became only tedious.

  I had noticed that the Eugene City Hall was in the immediate downtown area, and I decided to pay a visit there before I did anything else. It turned out to be a modern affair—wood grille façade made of vertical timbers stained a dark brown—and comprised an entire city block between 7th and 8th avenues, Pearl and High streets; the offices were built around a landscaped court, and the entire area was raised some six to eight feet above the surrounding streets. The police station was on the northwest corner, and you got in there through a solid blue door set into a complete glass storefront.

  I spent a little while with a sergeant named Downey—a thin man with an unprepossessing manner—and he said they had been notified by the San Francisco Missing Persons people about Sands and had a file going on him. But they had nothing I did not already know; and they had already questioned Johnny Saddler about the wires, with no helpful results. Downey expressed a willingness to back me up if I needed help in my questioning, since I did not have a valid investigator’s license for the State of Oregon. We determined that the goddamn snow was never going to let up, and when I left, it was well past the lunch hour.

  I decided I could use a sandwich and some coffee, and I hunched my shoulders against the cold, melting flakes and made my way down to Broadway and along there to a modern shopping mall in the heart of the city. I located a café, and at a small table in the rear I spread the city map open and studied it; then I used their telephone directory to copy down several addresses on the map’s margins. Eugene is a relatively small city, and most of the places I planned to check were concentrated in the same general area. Also, and just for the hell of it, I looked up the name Jackson in the directory; there was no listing for a Nicholas, Nick, or N. Jackson.

  After I had eaten, I braved the snow again and got to work.

  I tried the car-rental agencies first. There were not many, and it didn’t take me long to run through them. I came up empty; no one named Roy Sands, or answering Sands’ description, had hired a car in the city of Eugene—or at Mahlon Sweet Field—before or after Christmas.

  I went around to, or called, the various other transportation outlets—bus, train, airline; but with only a verbal description, and the fact that this was the holiday season, a time of heavy travel, I learned nothing at all. It had only been a shot in the dark anyway.

  A check of the new- and used-car lots, on the off-chance that Sands had had enough money to either purchase outright or put a down payment on an automobile, netted me another blank. Business had been relatively slow in the trade, and the managers and salesmen I spoke with assured me they would have remembered anyone named Sands— anyone looking as I described him—making a purchase.

  I went to the offices of theEugene Register-Guard next, and spoke with the city editor on the idea that some small incident involving a non-resident might have taken place around Christmas, something that might not have come to the attention of the police. I also wanted to know if the name Jackson had been prominent in the local news for any reason. I was reaching blindly now, but you could never tell when some wild card would give you the break you were looking for. The city editor could not remember anything along the lines I wanted, but he let me look through the newspaper’s morgue. I wasted a half-hour there, and came out as empty as I had gone in: no unusual incidents, and the only Jackson an eighty-year-old woman who had died of heart failure.

  It was five-thirty by then, and I was cold and tired and wet. I thought about getting a motel for the night, settled for a cup of coffee instead, and returned to the Western Union office to double-check with Johnny Saddler. He turned out to be a young college type, and he wore granny glasses and had a thin grayish mustache like insect larvae laid out to hatch under a very thin, sloping rock.

  I let him look at my license, and told him what I wanted, describing Roy Sands; but he was not half as impressed as the girl had been. His eyes said that he was totally uninterested in who I was or why I was there—cops in any form were a drag—and his mouth said that there were a lot of people who came in to send telegrams around Christmas time, he couldn’t be expected to remember every one of them even if they sent a dozen wires with money instead of three, sorry I couldn’t have been of more help, sir.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and went out of there.

  I stood on the wet, neon-lit street outside and thought: Where would Sands go after leaving here? He sent the wires after eight in the evening, and since he hadn’t rented a car, it seemed likely that he had been on foot. A taxi? A bus? Well, maybe—if he had a specific destination in some part of the city. But if he didn’t have, and if he had been on foot and there had been nobody waiting for him, and if he had been lugging that suitcase of his and unfamiliar with the surroundings, he might have thought of getting a place to spend the night.

  That was a fair bet—as fair a one as I had been able to come up with yet. I did not much care for the idea of canvassing hotels, motels, boarding houses, and the like in the immediate downtown vicinity, but it would be putting otherwise unproductive hours to good use. As much as I wanted a hotel of my own, and a nice hot bath, I decided to earn my money; I was not up here for rest and relaxation.

  I took the area immediately surrounding Pearl Street and then expanded the radius outward in a widening helix, intending on four full blocks in each direction before I gave it up. I went to seven places, gathering discouragement, and then I came to number eight. And there it was.

  It was called the Leavitt Hotel, and it was on 5th Avenue not far from the Post Office and the City and County Jail. Snow clinging to window ledges and to the wide old-fashioned porch on the front softened somewhat the eroded face of the tired frame structure; but it—and the darkness—did nothing to conceal the imitation-brick siding of a color we used to call shit-brindle. It was one of these transient hotels, rooms by day, week, and month, an average sort of place that might appeal to salesmen with stringent expense accounts and maybe some pensioners who would live there the year round. The lobby was small, sparsely set up, very clean, but it was an old building
and the smell and aura of age was strong in there.

  An old guy with white hair as fine as rabbit fur and a face as benign as a saint’s was working over a ledger behind the desk. He wore a bow tie and a yellow pencil tucked comfortably behind his right ear, and the glasses tilted out on the end of his nose were as thick as binocular lenses. He gave me a gentle smile as I approached.

  I got my wallet out and showed him my license photostat. He blinked a couple of times and ran his tongue over his dentures and looked mildly curious—but that was all. I described Roy Sands, and explained that he had been in Eugene on the twenty-first of December. At the moment, I said, I was working on the possibility that Sands may have stayed a night or two in the down-town area.