Bill Pronzini - The Snatch

The others were in the living room, and we went in there. Donleavy was standing over by the draped window with Eberhardt, talking softly to him. Karyn Martinetti had been sitting on the couch; she got to her feet when she saw me and threw her arms around my neck without shame and kissed me hard on the cheek. Her hair was very soft and smelled of violets in a pleasantly vague sort of way.

She whispered, “Thank you,” and stepped back, smiling, her eyes still wet. Then she turned back to the couch and sat down with her arm around Gary’s shoulders.

Martinetti and the maid, Cassy, entered from the opposite end of the living room. She was carrying a silver tray with some brandy snifters and a full decanter and a large glass of Cola on it; a wide smile on her thin mouth made her seem brighter, prettier, than I remembered her. There was no one else present that I could see, and I thought that that was just as well. I would not have trusted my manners if Channing had been there, not after that phone call this morning.

Martinetti poured us all a drink from the decanter and gave the glass of Cola to Gary, and we drank a toast. I put mine back neat, and saw that Donleavy and Eberhardt had done the same thing. Donleavy came over to where I was. “I’ve got something to show you and Eberhardt,” he said. “But not in here.”

“All right.”

He nodded and said to Martinetti, “You’ll excuse us, won’t you? We’ve got some things to talk over.”

“Of course.”

“We’ll use your study, if that’s all right.”

“Yes, certainly.”

Donleavy went out into the entrance hall and down the side hallway and through the ornately carved doors into the study. Eberhardt and I followed him. Donleavy shut the door and went over to the desk and switched on the lamp there. Then he took a small rectangular object from the pocket of his suit jacket and laid it carefully in the pool of illumination on the polished surface.

It was made of black styrene plastic, about the size of a small wooden matchbox. On the near side was a tiny on-and-off slide switch. There was a rubber grommet in one end, with four thin spidery wires-one red, one white, one green, one blue-protruding from it, about six inches each in length; at the end of each wire was a tooth-type alligator clip with a tiny rubber boot covering it as a preventive against shorting.

Donleavy said, “I guess you know what that is.”

“Phone bug,” Eberhardt said sourly.

I asked, “Where’d you find it?”

“I didn’t find it myself,” Donleavy said a little ruefully. “Reese found it. Reese is an eager-beaver, and he gets a lot of ideas. Every now and then, one of them pays off-like this one.” Donleavy reached out and tapped the telephone on the desk with the blunt tip of his forefinger. “He opened up the base of this unit here, about a half-hour before you called, and there it was.”

I looked at the bug. It was a simple package, nothing more than a miniature frequency-modulation transmitter. Its wires would have been attached, by way of the tooth clips, to the four leads coming into the phone; either an incoming or outgoing call would have activated it and transmitted an FM signal to a monitor somewhere in the immediate area. Judging from the size of the package, the monitor would have to have been put up within approximately a half-block radius. With a bug like that you could pick up conversations through a standard FM radio, tuned to a place on the dial which was not licensed for local broadcasting; somebody sitting in a car, for example, could monitor calls on the automobile’s radio. Or if he was afraid of the conspicuousness of a lengthy plant, all he would have to have done would be to run a patch cord between the input jack on a cassette tape recorder and the earphone jack on a portable radio, and then secrete both units in any one of a hundred places in the vicinity. The phone conversations would be fed directly from the opened line through the radio and into the recorder, ready for him to replay when he retrieved the equipment.

Donleavy said, “We’ve got a couple of men out combing the area now, but I don’t expect them to find anything. Not with a bug like this one.”

“This complicates hell out of things, doesn’t it?” I said slowly.

“Yeah, and I don’t like it one goddamn bit.” Donleavy went over and sat down on the couch with a ponderousness that reminded me of Oliver Hardy. He crossed his ankles and folded his hands on top of his paunch, and he looked very soft sitting there that way. He was about as soft as petrified wood. “There’s no way of telling how long that thing was in the phone; could have been planted before the kidnapping or after it. If we knew which one, it would help.”

“Assuming that it has something to do with the snatch in the first place,” Eberhardt said morosely.

“Nuts to coincidences,” Donleavy said.

I asked, “Does Martinetti have any ideas?”

“Well, to begin with, he tells me that he had a party here two nights before the boy was taken from Sandhurst, one of those catered deals out on the terrace with about sixty or seventy people milling around. Any one of them could have planted the bug; it would take about three minutes, and the only requirements, a pocket screwdriver and maybe a little knowledge of electronics.”

“What about after the snatch?”

“It’s possible. Martinetti and Channing were down to Martinetti’s office in Redwood City, going over his books most of the night of the kidnapping; Mrs. Martinetti went to bed early, so did the maid, and Proxmire went home.” He waved a hand toward the draped windows behind the desk. “The catches on those windows could be slipped with a penknife; anybody could have come in here that night and bugged the phone and gotten away in less than ten minutes with no trouble at all.”

“If it happened that way,” I said, “whoever it was had to know there was a kidnapping-that the boy had been abducted from the military academy that day.”

“Yeah.”

“In addition to the headmaster at Sandhurst, the only ones who knew that were myself, Channing and Proxmire and the maid and the Martinettis.”

“Well, the headmaster-Young-has an unimpeachable reputation and a bank account in six figures,” Donleavy said. “He seems to be in the clear.”

“Which puts emphasis on the theory that one of the people here engineered a hijacking of the ransom money,” I said. “But all of them were right in this house at the time Lockridge and I were attacked up in the hills.”

“One of them could have had an accomplice,” Eberhardt suggested.

“There are too damned many accomplices in this thing,” Donleavy said. “But I’ll admit it’s a possibility.”

I said, “Are you eliminating the theory of Lockridge having any partner except the Hanlon girl-at least as far as his murder is concerned?”

“I think we can, yeah, from what the girl told you. We also got a report on Lockridge from the Cleveland police first thing this morning, and as far as they could find out, he was strictly a loner.”

“What was his background?” Eberhardt asked.

Donleavy made a distasteful noise with his lips. “Rogue cop,” he said. “He was thrown off the Louisville police force about twelve years ago, for taking bribes from a string of horse parlors. He moved up to Cleveland and tried to get on with some security outfits, but with his past, they wouldn’t touch him. He’d never been in trouble in the Cleveland area, and the police there don’t have anything on him. But it’s rumored that he had some underworld connections here and there, among others, and that he paid the rent hustling angles and information.”

“Kidnapping doesn’t fit that kind of guy too well,” Eberhardt said. “But I guess three hundred thousand dollars is plenty of temptation for any man to gamble for.”