Bill Pronzini - The Vanished

‘Suitcase?’

‘Left it in the room. Maid found it when she went in to clean the next day.’

Well, I thought. Well, now. ‘He didn’t come back to claim the case, or call about it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Then-do you still have it?’

He nodded. ‘Down in the basement.’

‘Would you mind if I had a look at it?’

‘Through it, you mean?’ he asked shrewdly.

‘Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.’

‘I don’t know as I can allow that, since the case don’t belong to you…’

‘I’m working for Sands’ fiancée,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t heard from him since before he came up here, and she’s damned worried. They were supposed to be married sometime this month.’

The old guy studied me for a time. ‘Fact?’ he asked.

‘Fact.’

‘Can I see that license of yours again?’

‘Sure.’

I showed it to him, and I could see his lips moving, memorizing my name and address. While he was doing that, I got a card out of another part of the wallet-one of those with my office and home address on it-and handed it to him. He read it over, looked at me out of one eye, and then shrugged. He opened the cash register and put the card in there, under the money drawer, and took out a thick ring of keys. Walking slowly, as if his feet pained him, he came out from behind the desk.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you down to the basement. I’ve got to be around while you look through that case, but I can’t leave the desk for but a couple of minutes. We’ll have to take it up here.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said.

We went through a door and down some dark, narrow steps. The basement was at their bottom, through another door, and it was cold and damp and filled with the kinds of things you would expect to find in a hotel basement: boxes and crates and trunks and some discarded furniture and cartons of accounting stuff and piles of miscellany. The suitcase was off in one corner.

I said as I bent to it, ‘Is this all he had in the way of luggage?’

‘That’s it.’

‘He went away with the clothes on his back, then?’

‘Far as I know, he must have.’

The case was not heavy. I picked it up and we walked back to the stairs. The old guy clicked off the lights and locked the door again, and we started back up.

I said, ‘Did Sands have any visitors the one night he was here?’

‘None that I know about.’

‘Make or receive any calls?’

‘Nope.’

‘Did he say anything to indicate where he was going from here, what he planned to do?’

‘Not as I can recall. He didn’t say much of anything, except to ask for a room.’

We came into the lobby again. I said, ‘Anywhere?’

‘Guess so. By the desk there’s okay.’

I put the case down and opened it, kneeling on the worn carpeting. I emptied it slowly, carefully, putting the contents in neat piles where the old guy could see them. Then I began to sift through the items, methodically.

There was not much. One pair of slacks and one sports shirt, freshly laundered and conservatively cut and colored; a change of underwear and socks; a rumpled gray gabardine suit, a couple of years old and fairly expensive; a necktie of dubious taste, in the current wide fashion; a packet of air-mail letters, tied with a rubber band, that were from Elaine Kavanaugh and addressed to Sands at an APO number; and a small leather kit bag containing a band-type razor, an aerosol can of shaving cream, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of aspirin, a tube of gel hair lotion, and a small can of body talc, a spare comb, and a spring case filled with men’s jewelry.

I went over the bottom of the case, but there was nothing except some lint and a German pfennig. The kit bag had nothing but the personal hygiene items, and all the clothing pockets were empty. Or I thought they were until I poked an index finger into the slit handkerchief pocket on the suit jacket and came up with a piece of white notepaper folded in a small square. I opened it, and in a neat masculine printing I read:

Galerie der Expressionisten

Blumenstrasse 15

The old guy was watching me from behind the desk. ‘What you got there?’ he asked.

I showed it to him.

‘Looks like German,’ he said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Mean something, does it?’

That was a good question. I was thinking about the stolen sketch of Roy Sands, and wondering if Galerie der Expressionisten was an art gallery, and if it was, whether or not there was a connection between the two. ‘Do you mind if I keep it?’ I asked the old guy.

‘Well, it rightly belongs to this Sands fella.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But I don’t see no harm in you copying down what it says there, long as you put the original paper back where you got it.’

So I copied the words onto a piece of hotel stationery and put that in my wallet, and then I packed everything back into the case and the old guy and I made another trip down to the basement. When we came back up I put a five-dollar bill on the counter. ‘For your time and help,’ I told him.

‘I’d rather not, you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘If I take money from you, it’d put a bad taste in my mouth-kind of like I was accepting bribes or doing something unethical.’

I said I understood, and we looked at each other the way a couple of guys will once they’ve decided they comprehend and approve of one another. We shook hands, and he went back to his ledger and I went back to the cold, wet snow falling across the night.

I picked up my car at the county lot and drove out toward the University of Oregon campus and found a nice-looking motel. I checked in there and called the Eugene police department and told Sergeant Downey what I had found at the Leavitt Hotel; he said he would look into it a little further and that he would contact me if he learned anything more.

I put in a call to the Royal Gate Hotel in San Francisco, and Elaine Kavanaugh was in her room. ‘I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to call,’ she said when I identified myself. Her voice was very tense, and I had the impression she was holding her breath. ‘Did you find out anything?’

‘A little,’ I said. I told her all the places I had covered, and I told her about the hotel and the suitcase. She was silent for a long moment; then, in a small voice, she said, ‘It doesn’t look very good, does it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘We don’t have enough information to do any speculating.’

‘He wouldn’t have left his things in that hotel room unless something had happened to-’ She broke off, and I could hear her take a tremulous breath that was almost a sob. ‘I’m afraid,’ she whispered. ‘I’m very afraid.’

There was nothing for me to say to that; any words I could have come up with would have sounded forced and tenuous. I let several seconds pass, a coldness on my shoulders, and then I said, ‘I don’t know what this means, if anything, but I found a piece of paper in the pocket of your fiancé’s suit-the one in his suitcase at the hotel here. It had the name of a gallery printed on it, and an address that was obviously German-fifteen Blumenstrasse.’

‘Gallery? You mean an art gallery?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Well, what was the name?’

‘Galerie der Expressionisten,’ I said.

‘I’ve never heard of it. What city is it in?’

‘There was none listed on the paper.’

‘Do you think this gallery has something to do with the portrait of Roy? Do you think it means anything?’

‘It might. I don’t know.’

‘Roy disappeared for some reason. Maybe… well, maybe the gallery and the portrait are mixed in somehow. Mightn’t that be possible?’