Bill Pronzini - The Vanished

‘Well, I’ll have to get some traveler’s checks.’

She came quickly to her feet and went to where her purse was on the nightstand and got a checkbook out of there. She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Five hundred dollars-will that be enough for right now?’

‘More than enough.’

She wrote very fast and tore the check out and brought it to me. I put it away in my wallet. ‘I should be going now,’ I told her. ‘There are a lot of things I have to do.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I’ll let you know later today what sort of flight schedule I can work out.’

‘That’s fine.’

We went to the door and got the farewells said, and I left her there alone with the kind of thoughts you should never be alone with. And as I rode down in the elevator, I realized the nature of that inexplicable pollutant which had clouded her skin with such inner grayness.

It was fear-raw and desperate fear.

There was one envelope in my office mailbox, and my answering service reported no calls in the day and a half I had been away. I put on coffee and opened the valve on the steam radiator and sat down to open the envelope. It was an advertising circular from a mail-order house in New Jersey that specialized in stuff like hand-guns and balanced Indonesian throwing knives with double-edged blades. Some business enterprise-and some laws to sanction it. I put the circular away in the waste-basket and pulled out the telephone book and set about booking airline accommodations to Germany.

It took a little time, but I managed to arrange a seat on a direct polar route flight from San Francisco to London, leaving the following afternoon at three. From London, I would take a connecting flight to Frankfurt. Kitzingen, it turned out, was some one hundred kilometers south, on the Main River, and I would have to rent a car and drive down there from Frankfurt.

When I had all of that set up, I dialed Cheryl’s number and there was no answer. Well, that took care of that for the moment. I sat back and lit a cigarette, and the telephone rang.

It was Chuck Hendryx, wondering if I had gotten back from Oregon yet and if I had learned anything of import. I told him about the hotel, and about the suitcase. He said, ‘I don’t like the looks of it. Roy wouldn’t just leave his stuff in that hotel unless he’d gotten into some kind of jam-a bad one, you know?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you got any ideas?’

‘Not really.’

‘Well, what do you do now?’

‘I go to Germany,’ I said.

‘Germany? What for?’

‘Because Elaine Kavanaugh wants me to.’

‘I don’t see the point,’ Hendryx said. ‘Wherever Roy is, it sure as Christ isn’t Germany.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but we’re dead-ended in Oregon and San Francisco. We’ve got nothing at all to work on. There’s an outside chance I may find something over there.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like whether or not that portrait of him means anything,’ I said, and I told him about the theft of it from my apartment.

The only reaction I got was: ‘Who the hell would want to steal a thing like that?’

‘I don’t know. Somebody seemed to want it-and badly.’

‘It couldn’t be valuable, could it?’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Then stealing it doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Not much seems to in this thing.’

‘Yeah.’

I threw him a soft curve. ‘What do you know about the Galerie der Expressionisten?’

‘The what?’ he said. Some pitch.

‘The Galerie der Expressionisten. It’s an art gallery in Kitzingen.’

‘I never heard of it. Why?’

‘The name came up, that’s all.’

‘Is that where Roy had the portrait made?’

‘Possibly. That’s one of the things I’ll be checking.’

‘Well, I hope you find something that leads to Roy. I just don’t see how that sketch can tie in, but I hope it does if it turns him up. Keep in touch, right?’

‘Sure.’

So my questions had gotten me nothing at all. I had not really expected them to; if Hendryx-or Gilmartin or Rosmond-had stolen the portrait, they would be on guard against possible slips. The thing was, I could not really envisage any of them doing it. There just didn’t seem to be any logical reason why one of the three would want to run heavy risks to get his hands on a portrait of his best friend.

That started me thinking about this Nick Jackson again, and I rang up my friend Salzberg at the Presidio. He had the information for which I had asked. Jackson had been born in Salem, Oregon, was divorced, and had no permanent civilian residence; but his widowed mother still lived in Salem, and a brother, Dave, resided in Portland.

I spent the next half-hour on the phone long-distance to Salem and Portland, feigning an old friendship with Jackson. I learned that he was still stationed in Okinawa-but that he had come back to the States for Christmas, returning on the fifteenth of December. He had arrived in Oregon, with a WA nurse on his arm, on December 24; he and the nurse had gone to San Francisco from Hawaii, the mother told me, and the two of them had been touring the coast, since the WAC was from Georgia and had never been west of the Mississippi until now. Jackson had stayed with Dave and his family in Portland until six days ago, and then he and the nurse had left to do some touring. His leave was up on the twenty-fifth of the month, and he was scheduled to return to Okinawa, via Hawaii, on the twenty-fourth-flying out of Portland on that date. As to where Nick Jackson had been at the time Roy Sands disappeared, and where he was at the moment, neither mother nor brother could tell me.

I swiveled my chair around and stared out the window for a time. None of what I had learned about Jackson had to mean anything, of course, but it was considerable food for thought-especially because San Francisco had been Jackson’s first stateside stop, and his whereabouts between the fifteenth and twenty-fourth of last month were unaccounted for. Depending upon what I learned in Germany, I would have to decide whether or not to fly up to Portland when I returned. In the meantime, Jackson remained on my mind; and he had plenty of company there.

I went into the alcove and rolled out the stand with my portable typewriter on it. For the next half-hour I worked out a report for Elaine Kavanaugh on my investigation thus far, making a duplicate for my files. When I had that finished, I tried Cheryl’s number again; there was still no answer.

I notified my answering service that I was leaving for the day, and that I would not be in for several days hence. Then I turned off the heat and started across the office to get my overcoat. Before I reached the coat tree, the door opened and Rich Gilmartin came in.

‘What’s the word,’ he said. The corners of his mouth and his silky Continental mustache were pulled up in a glad-hand grin. He wore corduroy trousers with a knife crease and a leather jacket lined in thick white fur.

‘How are you, Gilmartin?’

‘No kicks. I had to come in to the Presidio today, and so I thought I’d stop by and see if you were back.’

‘I came in this morning.’

‘Find out anything in Eugene?’

Well, I thought, let’s do it all over again and see what happens. So I did it all over again- relating what I had discovered in Oregon and then going into the theft of the sketch-and nothing happened. Gilmartin possessed a good poker face, and he maintained the same expression throughout. He had no idea why anybody would want to steal the sketch, it had looked like nothing more than a simple street-artist’s work to him-was I sure that whoever had broken into my flat was after that specifically? He had never heard of the Galerie der Expressionisten, he said; art galleries were definitely not his bag. And he echoed Elaine’s and Hendryx’s sentiments that the abandoned suitcase did not look very good for Roy Sands.