Bill Pronzini: The Vanished

‘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.

It was fourteen-by-eighteen in size, a head-and-shoulders sketch without background, done in pastel chalk over which a lacquer-type fixative had been applied. I know very little about art, but it seemed to me that the artist who had drawn the portrait was gifted with real talent; it was faintly expressionistic, with bold lines and heavy shadows and somewhat enlarged features, rather than an example of classic portraiture. The man it depicted was about my own age, middle-to-late forties; he had dark-brown hair with a little wave in it and gray eyes and the kind of nose that is often described as aquiline. His mouth was curved in a faint, boyish grin, and he possessed a kind of rugged, craggy, masculine virility.

I looked up at Elaine. ‘How good a likeness is this?’

‘Really quite good,’ she answered. Her eyes shone, and I knew Roy Sands was in her mind, vivid and smiling just for her. ‘It captures the… oh, I don’t know, the essence of Roy. I don’t know how else to put it.’

I looked at the sketch a little more, and then rolled it up again and slid the rubber band around it. I set it to one side of my blotter. ‘All right, Miss Kavanaugh,’ I said gently. ‘Could you tell me where you’re staying?’

‘The Royal Gate Hotel, on Powell Street.’

I made a note of that, and then we got on our feet and touched hands and said some things to one another-mild entreaties and milder reassurances. I showed her to the door and watched her walk down the hall to the elevator. She walked very stiffly, her head pulled back, resignation in her step, and it was like watching a prisoner walking a cellblock, a prisoner with nothing waiting for her except a barred cell and an endless succession of solitary nights and hopelessly shattered dreams.

It was a painful image, fraught with symbolic meaning. I shook myself a little and closed the door and went back to my desk for a cigarette.

Pinewood Lane was a narrow blacktopped road that wound and curled and doubled back on itself through the thickly wooded foothills behind Fairfax-a half-hour drive north across the Golden Gate Bridge. The homes were spaced well apart, and you had occasional glimpses of shingled alpine roofs or railed verandas or huge rectangles of glass hidden among the towering conifers and eucalyptus. It took some money, and a taste for nature and the sequestered life, to live up there; I wondered if those who had them knew how potentially blessed they were in a time of increasing universal hunger, overpopulation, and ecological apathy.

I found number forty-eight without difficulty. There was a gateless stone arch at the foot of the entrance drive, with the numerals 48 carved out of pinewood at the center of the curvature. I drove beneath that and followed the drive through thick, velvety green firs, climbing slightly and somewhat circuitously.

I glanced down at the temperature gauge as I drove, and it registered hot, as it had begun to do several miles back. The car had not run properly since it had been severely damaged during the course of a kidnapping case I had been involved in a couple of months previously-a sordid and lamentable business because it had directly precipitated the split between Erika and me, and for several other reasons as well. I had had the car in to the garage three times in the past six weeks, and it looked as if I would have to take it in again, with the engine overheating the way it was.

The drive came out of the evergreens finally and hooked sharply to the left, ending in a small clearing at the rear of which sat a large, rustic home raised off the earth on heavy wood pillars. It was constructed of bleached-pine boarding, with a wide veranda running the width of it and extending back on both sides. The wall of the house was solid glass, except for a wooden area beneath the roof peak. On my right, a steep set of stairs rose up to the veranda and what I assumed would be the main entrance.

I parked near the stairs and got out of the car into a whistling, ice-tinged wind; it was as cold over here as it had been in San Francisco, in spite of a pale winter sun setting up a shimmering glare overhead. I started up the stairs, and a door opened above and a man came out onto the veranda carrying a tumbler filled with ice and a liquid that appeared by its color to be either Scotch or bourbon. Like Sands, he was about my age, and he wore slacks and a hand-tooled leather vest open over a white turtleneck. He was about my size and height, too, starting to paunch in the same way I had but consciously sucking in on it in a kind of grimly determined struggle to maintain a youthful physique.

I reached the top of the stairs and he said, ‘Hi, I’m Chuck Hendryx. You must be the guy who called.’

I said that I was. Before driving all the way up here, I had gotten him on the phone and told him my name and why I wanted to see him, and he had said he would be home all day and to drop by at my convenience. I had intended to talk to Doug Rosmond first, since he was considerably closer, but there had been no answer when I tried his sister’s number. I had also telephoned the Missing Persons Bureau at the Hall of Justice before leaving my office; they had nothing for me on the disappearance of Roy Sands.

Hendryx and I shook hands and sized one another up the way two men will do, meeting for the first time. He was thick-shouldered, with a wedge-shaped face and bright, alert brown eyes set deeply above his wide cheekbones. He was losing his hair-a dark sandy color-and making a desperate attempt to conceal it by intricate machinations with a comb; when it really started to go, in another couple of years, I had the thought that he would probably buy one of those permanent toupees that you can wear underwater or while sky-diving out of airplanes. There were two small moles on either side of the mouth, like two boulders marking the entrance to a cave; but the smile which quirked his lips assured you that there was nothing ominous or unfriendly lurking within.