Bill Pronzini: The Vanished

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 the Eugene 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.

‘Well,’ the old guy said, ‘I guess he did.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Sands, you said his name is?’

‘Roy Sands, right.’

‘That description don’t tell me much, but I recollect the name. My eyesight’s bad but my memory ain’t, for a fact.’ He shuffled over a couple of steps and opened a leatherbound register lying on the counter and riffled through some pages. He found what he wanted, bent closer, peering, and then nodded. ‘Uh-huh, Roy Sands. Night of December twenty-one. Took a room for a week, one of the singles at fourteen per.’

The gods are beginning to smile a little, I thought. I said, ‘Did you check him in personally?’

‘I did.’

‘Was he alone?’

‘Yep.’

‘Did he seem worried, nervous, preoccupied? Like that?’

‘All he seemed was cold,’ the old guy said. ‘It was snowing that night, too, and he was all bundled up in a hat and a topcoat and a muffler. He kept hugging himself like he had a chill.’

‘Did he stay the full week here?’

‘Nope.’

‘How long, then?’

‘Only the one night.’

‘He checked out the next day?’

‘Didn’t check out at all. He just sort of- disappeared, I guess you could say. But he’d paid in advance, and the key was here at the desk, so it wasn’t any of our worry. Except for his suitcase.’