Bill Pronzini: The Vanished

‘At nine, Cheryl.’

‘Good-bye,’ she said, and she was gone.

I put the receiver down, thinking: She’s been hurt in some way, badly hurt, and that’s why she’s got this defensive barrier up, why she’s so hesitant. But she’s lonely, too, even lonelier than I am, and she’s willing to take the chance, willing to find out if there’s anything to this attraction we both felt.

I began to feel considerably better. This meeting tonight could be the beginning of something good for both of us, given enough time and patience and understanding. Something very good.

An end to loneliness.

They were digging up the pavement a half-block from my apartment in Pacific Heights, and I had to park four streets away and walk back. The staccato chattering of jackhammers and the diesel roar of trucks were deafening. As if parking in Pacific Heights wasn’t impossible enough, the goddamn city.

I turned into the foyer of my building, a tired old Victorian lady clinging to the time-tattered remnants of elegance, looking backward to the era when she had been a fine private home and no one had anticipated a global war. She still commanded a high price because of her location, and I could not have afforded her if it were not for the fact that I had lived with her for almost eighteen years under the singular supervision of a benevolent landlord.

There was no mail in my box, and no respite from the noise inside my second-floor flat; even with all the windows closed and locked, you could hear the volume of sound in the street outside. I went through the cluttered living room, stepping over this and kicking that aside. I was at an age, and had a temperament, that no longer required care and neatness. As I had suspected Hendryx of being, I was a slob-not proud of it, just accepting it.

I got a beer out of the refrigerator, reentered the living room, and sat down on the couch. From there I could see the laminated-wood shelving which covered the side wall beyond the bay windows, and which contained better than five thousand copies of detective and adventure pulp magazines I had collected over the years. That was my one hobby, the accumulation of pulps, and when I was feeling low I could usually immerse myself in an issue of Black Mask or Dime Detective, or one of the other seventy-five titles I possessed, thoroughly enough to circumvent the mood.

The lurid covers, some of which I had placed so that they faced into the room, made a nice contrast to the heavy, ponderous pseudo-Hepplewhite furniture, the faded rose-design rug and wallpaper. The magazines were segregated by title and date, and I had an index made up so that when I received a quote from one of the suppliers I dealt with, I could easily check what I had against the for-sale listing.

I sipped some of my beer, and Cheryl was on my mind, and the missing Roy Sands-and Erika, too, as she always seemed to be when I was conscious of my pulp magazines. Every time I looked at them, I could hear the words Erika had said to me in this very room some two and a half months ago, harsh and stinging words: ‘ You want to know the real reason you quit the police force to open up that agency of yours, the real deep-down reason? I’ll tell you: it’s an obsession to be just like those pulp-magazine detectives and you never would have been satisfied until you’d tried it. Well, now you’ve tried it, for ten years you’ve tried it, and you just don’t want to let go, you can’t let go.

You’re living in a world that doesn’t exist and never did, in an era that’s twenty-five years dead. You’re a kid dreaming about being a hero, and yet you haven’t got the guts or the flair to go out and be one; you’re too honest and too sensitive and too ethical, too affected by real corruption and real human misery to be the kind of lone wolf private eye you’d like to be. You’re no damned hero, and it hurts you that you‘re not, and that’s why you won’t let go of it. And the whole while you’re eating and sleeping and living yesteryear’s dream world, to salve your wounded pride you’re deluding yourself that you’re an anachronism in a real-life world that couldn’t care less one way or the other. You’re nothing but a little boy, and I’m damned if I’ll have a little boy in my bed every night of the year…’

The thing of it was, the thing I could never make her understand, was that even if she was right, it did not matter-it was not important. How I became what I am, or why, is irrelevant to the simple fact that I am what I am. I could not change, for her or for anyone. But that had not been enough for Erika, and it had ended between us for primarily that reason.

And now, maybe, after two and a half empty months, there was Cheryl.

I finished my beer and went into the cluttered bedroom and dragged my battered suitcase out of the closet. I had called United Airlines from my office and made a reservation on the 9:00 a.m. flight to Eugene the following morning; as I had told Doug Rosmond, that was my next logical step on behalf of Elaine Kavanaugh. I had also called Elaine at her hotel to ask about this Jackson, the one Rosmond had mentioned as once having had trouble with Roy Sands. She did not know who Jackson was, and could not recall Sands’ ever using the name in any context whatsoever. I had also rung up Chuck Hendryx, and that call had netted me a little more information.

Hendryx had said, ‘Sure, I remember the trouble Roy had with that prick Jackson. I didn’t know he was from the Northwest, though, and that’s why I didn’t say anything about it.’

‘Do you know where Jackson is now?’

‘Well, the last I heard he was on Okie.’

‘Okinawa?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When was that?’

‘Last year sometime. One of the boys at Larson happened to mention his name.’

My final call before leaving the office had been to a guy named Salzberg, who was an Army lieutenant stationed at the Presidio and whom I had known for thirty years, since the Second War. We had talked a little, and then I had asked him if he’d bend regulations a bit and find out about this Nick Jackson for me; since Jackson had been stationed at the Presidio three years ago, there would be a file on him that would have a civilian address, or at least the address of civilian relatives-and from there I could determine his current whereabouts. Salzberg likes the sauce pretty good, and on the promise that I would drop a bottle around one of these nights, he agreed to do what he could, adding that it would probably take a day or two. I had hoped to have the information in time for the Eugene trip, but he’d said that there was no way he could get to the files before midday tomorrow; I had had to be content with that.

I finished packing my bag, and then went in and soaked in a tubful of hot water for a while. I put on a fresh suit, and some whorish cologne just for the hell of it, and decided I presented a respectable enough image when I looked the package over in the bathroom mirror.

There was a delicatessen over on Union which I frequented regularly, and I stopped in there for some supper. Then I drove out toward the beach, chewing chlorophyll tablets to get rid of the taste and odor of garlic sausage. I felt like a shy kid on his first big date, apprehensive and yet filled with a tingling sort of excitement; it was somehow kind of nice to feel that way again…

The Golden Door was a neighborhood cocktail lounge, but it was that kind of quiet, sedate, well-mannered place where you would take a wife or a mistress with equal freedom. Beyond the gold-painted door which gave it its name, there was a long narrow room with a bar on the right and some low tables on a raised section to the left. At the far end, the room widened like the bulb on the end of a thermometer into a sunken circular area; in there were a couple of kiln-type fireplaces made out of white brick, extending to the ceiling, and some wall nooks and booths where you could have plenty of privacy. The decor was gold and brown, and they kept it relatively dark with diffused amber lights in the walls and ceiling.