Bill Pronzini: The Vanished

Hendryx apparently decided I was all right. He said, ‘Come on inside, it’s colder than the proverbial witch’s tit out here. My wife and kids are home, but they won’t bother us.’

We went through the door and into a beam-ceilinged living room done in light hues that complemented the bleached-pine walls. The floor was parqueted pine, bare except for a couple of circular braided rugs. The far wall was fashioned of buff-colored brick, and a three-foot square opening cut off-center served as a fireplace; there were several logs burning in there-green pitch pine that hissed and crackled and sent up rainbow sparks in a miniature fireworks display. The place was clean and neat enough, but it held a vague air of stiffness, as if its natural state were one of perpetual chaos.

Hendryx shut the door and gestured toward one of the upholstered chairs. ‘Sit down, make yourself comfortable. Drink?’

‘Thanks, no.’

He looked a little ruefully at the tumbler in his hand. ‘Too damned early for it, really, but I need something to bolster my courage. You got any kids?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not married.’

‘Christ, I wish I wasn’t sometimes. Not that I don’t love my old lady, or the three boys, but you live away from ‘em most of the year and you can’t get used to ‘em again. It’s like being in a kind of limbo: half-bachelor, half-married, you know?’

‘Well,’ I said, and shrugged.

‘Sure,’ Hendryx said. ‘That kind of life does have its advantages, though.’ He gave me a broad wink.

I smiled, because it was the only thing for me to do, and thought: The old double standard. Well, he looks like the sybaritic type, all right-Don Juan at the cross-roads. I wonder if his family doesn’t like traveling because he doesn’t want them to like traveling? Oh, the hell with that; you’re becoming a righteous fart in your old age.

I watched Hendryx sit down on the divan across from me and put his tumbler on the heavy glass top of a wrought-iron coffee table. He got a cigarette from a pocket in his vest and lighted it and threw the match on the floor without any compunction at all. And I thought now: The world is full of slobs, too. Brother, meet a brother. But this place could never hold a candle to my apartment, even in its natural state.

I said, ‘As I told you on the phone, Mr. Hendryx, I’ve been asked to investigate the disappearance of Roy Sands.’

‘By Elaine Kavanaugh, uh-huh. Well, I don’t blame her for calling a guy like you into it; the cops haven’t given her any satisfaction, and she’s shook up and has the right to be. It’s a damned peculiar thing, Roy vanishing like that.’

‘You don’t think he may have changed his mind about marrying the girl? Or had second thoughts, anyway, and went off somewhere to think it over?’

‘Hell no,’ Hendryx said emphatically. ‘He wanted to marry her, all right. He was kind of a close-mouthed guy, but when he did talk personal things, it was mostly this Elaine. He’d fallen for her, no doubt about that, and marriage was what he wanted.’

‘Then he felt strongly toward her when he came back to the States last month?’

‘Sure. He mentioned her name a couple of times on the plane, and you could see it in his eyes. He asked me and Doug Rosmond and Rich Gilmartin if we’d come to the wedding- sometime this month, I think he said. He had one of us picked out as best man, but he wouldn’t say who. We all agreed to go; hell, he’s a buddy and we’re kind of a team, you know? He was supposed to contact us after Christmas sometime and let us know the arrangements.’

‘Did you talk with Sands after your arrival in San Francisco?’

‘For a couple of minutes the day after- Sunday,’ Hendryx answered. ‘He’d gone through processing, and he was on his way out of the Presidio wearing civvies and carrying a small suitcase.’

‘Did he mention where he was going?’

‘Well, I kidded him about Elaine, you know, but he was in this sober mood-the way he’d get sometimes when a thing was on his mind. He said he was planning to see her pretty soon, but that he had something to take care of first, up north.’

‘Up north?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Just that, no specific place?’

‘Nope.’

‘And he didn’t elaborate on the business he had to take care of?’

Hendryx shook his head. ‘At the time I figured if he wanted to tell me about it, he would have.’

‘Do you have any idea what it was?’

‘Not a one.’

‘Did he have any friends that you know about in the Pacific Northwest? Oregon, for example?’

‘The only friends Roy had were his service buddies,’ Hendryx said. ‘I told him more than once that he ought to re-up, marry Elaine and bring her with him, but she wanted a house and kids, that kind of crap, and she’d talked him into it too. He would be lost at first, you know? He doesn’t make friends that easy.’

‘He say anything to you before he left the Presidio?’

‘The usual: so long, keep it limp-like that.’

‘That was the last time you talked to him, then?’

‘Yeah.’

I started to ask him about the wires from Oregon, but before I could, there was the sound of a car coming into the clearing out front. A horn blared several times, shrilly, and Hendryx got to his feet. ‘Company,’ he said. ‘Hang on, will you?’

‘Sure.’

He went to the door and through it. I sat watching the dying curls of smoke from his cigarette, moistening my lips a little and rubbing the palms of my hands across my trouser legs. I had had seven cigarettes already today, and if I wanted to keep my consumption under a pack every twenty-four hours I was going to have to start rationing.

To have something to do with my hands, I took the rolled sketch of Roy Sands from my inside jacket pocket; I had put it there, along with the notes I had taken during the interview with Elaine Kavanaugh, just prior to leaving the office. I unrolled the sketch and looked again at Sands’ likable face and wondered what sort of trouble he could have gotten himself into. People don’t disappear without good cause; and if a change of heart about marriage had not prompted Sands into momentary hermitage-and I was inclined to believe Elaine that it hadn’t-then the set of circumstances she had outlined meant that he was very definitely in some kind of tight.

The sound of male voices on the veranda preceded the opening of the door by a couple of seconds, and then Hendryx came back inside. With him was a second man a couple of years younger. This guy was lean and wiry and eight inches under six feet, and you knew immediately that he had taken a lot of abuse concerning his height over the years, and that he would be constantly on the defensive about it. He owned a wealth of graying-brown hair, worn long and shaggy and combed into drifts on a narrow skull to give him added stature; in addition, he sported a thick, silky-looking mustache-one of these fashionable Continental jobs that slant down to the chin on both sides of the mouth-and there was some gray in that too. Intelligent brown eyes peered out from under question-mark brows, and he carried himself with an air of confident, no-bullshit masculinity; he would do a lot of talking, and command a lot of attention, and be hell-on-wheels in a back-to-back barroom brawl.

Hendryx led the guy over to where I was, and I got on my feet for the introductions. The bantamweight was Rich Gilmartin, which made things a little easier for me since I had planned on looking up Sands’ third Army buddy later on; he had just dropped by, he said, for a quick one and to see if Chucko wanted to sit in on a stud game some cats were setting up in San Rafael tomorrow night. Hendryx explained who I was and why I was there, and then went to a portable bar against the side wall to fix drinks.