The Vanished

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The side of his head had been crushed by a blow from some heavy, blunt instrument-very probably the stained and rusted tire iron which lay alongside the body. The condition of his clothes, his flesh, the nesting presence of insects-God!-told me that he had been in there for some time, and even though there was not much left of the face for positive identification, I had no doubt at all that it was Sands.

The nausea came boiling up into my throat, and I turned away and walked stiffly to the blackened redwood stump. I leaned against that and dragged air into my lungs, and momentarily the feeling passed. A couple of blackbirds chattered in a slender thread of sunlight nearby, and then flew off together; it was very still again.

The whole sick business began to take shape in my mind. I knew beyond a doubt now the nature of the thing that had been nagging at me, the thing I had failed to consider because there had been no reason for considering it, the thing that had been subconsciously bothering me all along with its lack of rhyme or reason, its alien presence in the pattern of events as I had uncovered them.

I had been able to find no reason why Sands would have gone to Eugene, Oregon, and that was because he had never gone there. He had not sent those wires, had not been the man who checked into the transient hotel, he was dead then, he was dead and buried under those rocks behind me. The entire thing with Eugene had been a red herring, a fact I had finally guessed when I touched my face there by the bridge. Sands had been beaten by Holly, and it was incontrovertible that such a beating would have left his face as swollen and discolored and marked as mine; but neither the hotel nor the Western Union clerk had mentioned Sands as having looked battered and broken-a fact they could not have helped but notice despite a hat and a muffler and a coat with a turned-up collar, a fact one or both would have related to me.

So it was not Sands they saw, it was his murderer, the guy who had come in here after Holly left.

It had to be that way. You could figure it, and it was simple now: the guy had done the killing and buried the body, after first taking Sands’ motel key off the corpse, his wallet, and any other identification which might have been there. Then he had returned to the Redwood Lodge, slipped into Sands’ unit, and packed everything in the single suitcase. In his own car he had driven up to Eugene, and on Tuesday night, the twenty-first, he had sent those wires and he had registered at the Leavitt Hotel. Later that evening, or the next morning, he had simply walked out, leaving the suitcase there with Sands’ stuff in it.

End of the line.

In the beginning he had wanted an investigation, because that investigation would begin with the Eugene angle-the wires to California-and would eventually turn up the hotel angle, the packed suitcase, would eventually conclude with the logical assumption that the baffling disappearance had happened in Oregon. That was why no wire had been sent to Elaine Kavanaugh-to deepen the mystery. And he had figured, rightly, that a hat and a muffler and a turned-up collar would be an effective disguise-no one else but Holly knew about the beating- and that an investigator would have no reason to doubt that the man had been Sands, that a scrawled signature in a hotel register was authentic.

But my particular investigation had not stopped at the dead end in Oregon. Elaine Kavanaugh had insisted that I go to Germany, and this was something the killer had not bargained for. He had not wanted me snooping around over there, uncovering the connection between Sands and Diane Emery, and so in panic he had made those threatening telephone calls to Elaine and me in the wild hope that they would prevent excavations at Kitzingen. All they had succeeded in doing, of course, was assuring me that there was something to be learned in Germany-but panic and fear are usually irrational, especially when murder is their catalyst.

So it had to be someone Sands knew well; someone who had been aware of the debts incurred in the poker game, the amount of those debts, in order to send the wires from Eugene; someone who had hated Roy Sands for an as yet undetermined reason, and who had known he was coming to Roxbury, and who had followed him, and who had waited his chance and then moved in and killed him. It had to be the same man who had stolen the portrait from my apartment, who had made the calls. Nick Jackson was out of it now; he could not have known about those poker debts, or that Sands was coming to Roxbury- much less about the portrait of Sands and that Elaine Kavanaugh had given it to me, or about my trip to Germany in the few hours elapsed between the decision and the threatening calls. No, it had to be one of Sands’ three service buddies, the way it had seemed all along- Hendryx or Rosmond or Gilmartin.

Which one?

Which one?

The portrait-why was the portrait important, why had it been stolen? To prevent me from showing it in Eugene, because in its clear, sharp detailing it was better than any photograph and might perhaps destroy the careful masquerade the killer had undertaken there? Yeah, that was certain to be part of the reason; but I had the feeling that there was more to it than that, something deeper and, if less rational, even more important to the man who had murdered Roy Sands. A pattern was beginning to take shape now, and it was an ugly pattern, one of jealousy and love and hate, one of twisted human emotions that had culminated in cold-blooded murder…

I stood with all of these answers and half-answers spinning free-fall inside my head, with the thing that had been Roy Sands lying crushed and huddled in the shallow grave a few feet behind me. I turned away, stumbling a little, and started back along the path toward the bridge and my car. The one thing I knew I had to do immediately was to contact the authorities.

My shoes scuffling through the profusion of leaves was the only sound-and then there was another, suddenly, an unmistakable metallic sound.

I stopped abruptly to listen. Nothing now, no blackbirds, no jays, just the teasing wind. My heart began to slug faster, and I went forward again, coming to the junction of slope and path and creek, moving past it, around the slope to where I could see the picnic grove and my car-my car with the hood raised and somebody, a man, I could not see his face, jerking at something inside there.

I began to run.

I ran along the path without thinking, acting on reflex, opening my mouth to shout, and strangling the cry; needles of pain lanced through my body from the exertion of aching muscles. I reached the bridge and started over it, too late remembering how noise carries in a quiet forest area; the slap of my shoes on the wooden planking was like the hollow cracking of whips. He looked up, the briefest of glances in my direction, and I still could not see his face, he had a plaid hunter’s jacket on and a hunter’s cap pulled down and he had a rifle held loosely by the stock; I felt the instinctive urge to throw myself flat and gain some kind of cover, faltering, running toward the center of the picnic grotto in a diagonal trajectory because cover was there.

The guy turned and fled.

Dark trousers and the jacket flapping loose above, the rifle extended out on his right and him running spindle-legged down the road. My lungs were on fire, but I managed to change direction, going after him, seeing him disappear around the bend in the road, vaulting the double-link chain, stumbling past my car, almost falling, mouth open and sucking air like a blowfish, thinking: Let him go, he’ll kill you, he killed Sands, you’re no goddamn hero. But I kept on running; it was as if I could not bring myself up, as if I was running on a belt with no way to stop.

A sudden roaring dissolved the stillness of the woods, an automobile engine coming to life; he had wheels parked somewhere along the road. I staggered around the bend, and a hundred yards ahead a car was pulling away, tires howling, spraying soft dirt-a green car, a green Pontiac, the same green Pontiac I had seen in front of number seven at the Redwood Lodge a little earlier that same morning.

I stopped running, gasping, watching the car hurtle down the road. He followed me up here, I thought, he followed me from San Francisco, followed me out to Hammock Grove this morning-and I turned, running again back to my car.

Lungs screaming, I leaned over the fender, looking into the engine compartment. He had pulled all of the spark-plug wires loose, and the rotor was missing. If he had taken that goddamn rotor with him…

I made a soft, meaningless sound in my throat, and rubbed thick sweat out of my eyes, and tried to get my breathing down to normal. Goddamn cigarettes, the goddamn weeds, oh, the goddamn filthy goddamn coffin nails! directing rage and impotent frustration at the handiest outlet. I pressed my cheek against the cold metal surface of the fender, and after a hellish long time my lungs cleared and I could function.

I went looking for the rotor, maybe he had thrown it away, he had to have thrown it away. Another five minutes went by, a year went by, and there it was, lying on a bed of leaves thirty feet from the car. I took it back and got it into place, and then went to work on the plug wires. It took time, time, and I could not seem to locate the proper sequence; the car was old and the firing order had not been stamped on the engine block, as with the newer models. I discovered once that I was shouting obscenities, and closed my mouth to cut that off, and the sweat ran in rivers along my body. My lungs ached and my body ached. I wanted to lie down somewhere in the cool shade of one of the redwoods, to sleep, to rest. But I kept at it, and finally I knew I had the right progression; when I kicked the engine over this time, it caught and held.

I got the hood down and backed the car around and headed back to Roxbury. I drove too fast, hunched over the wheel, trying not to think, to concentrate only on the driving. But I was thinking just enough, just enough.

Why hadn’t he killed me back there, with that rifle? Why hadn’t he shot me when he had the chance, why had he just disabled the car and not very effectively at that? One answer, one possibility, and I felt physically sick because it was too late now, I knew in my mind that it was too late now.

I came into Roxbury and off on the left was the Redwood Lodge. The green Pontiac was there, in front of number seven, slewed up to the front porch. Too late, too damned late. My foot came jamming down on the brakes, and I heard them lock with a screaming of metal and the tires screaming in a different cadence on the macadam, the machine yawing this way and that. I fought the wheel, wrenching it hard to the left-more screaming-and then I was onto the graveled half-moon and braking next to the Pontiac, jumping out with the engine still throbbing, swaying up onto the porch. The door was standing partially ajar, oh Jesus, and I put the flat of my hand against the wood and shoved it wide.

He was there.

He was turning, very slowly, in the center of the room, suspended from one of the rafter beams by a length of hemp rope looped around his neck, his head lolling to one side, neck broken, eyes staring, turning, dead.

Doug Rosmond had hanged himself, just as Diane Emery had done in Kitzingen, Germany, less than three months before.