The Vanished

CHAPTER SEVEN

My flight to Eugene left on schedule at nine the next morning, and it was quiet and uneventful and took something better than an hour. I sat over the wing, tired and vaguely irritable from lack of sleep, and brooded about the theft of Roy Sands’ portrait; it got me no further than the brooding I had done the previous night. I thought about Cheryl, then, and that made things considerably better for the duration.

It was snowing a little, not much, when we arrived. I rented a car at Mahlon Sweet Field, because it was the simplest way to do things and in the long run the most economical; and I asked the clerk for a city map and directions to the Western Union office in Eugene proper. He didn’t know where it was. I looked it up in the telephone directory and found that it was on Pearl Street, and then located Pearl on the map. I traced out a route that seemed the quickest-and took Highway 99 south-east into the city.

The snow was coming down pretty good now, and there was a lot of traffic. Eventually I reached the down-town area I wanted, left the car in the county parking lot at 7th and Oak, and walked down to Pearl.

The Western Union office had a poorly designed facade, front trim and entrance door set in light green-glass facing material; there were some display candygrams in the front show window, for the holiday season. I entered a large, weakly lighted room with a lobby marked off by counters, the furnishings and transmitting stations behind them giving the impression of age and heavy wear.

A girl about twenty-three, with flaxen hair and a long, tragic face, listened to me tell her who I was and why I was there; she seemed a little awed by my profession. Since the telegrams sent by Sands had gone out after six o’clock, she told me, it would have been a guy named Johnny Saddler-the night man-who had handled the business. She said he came on at six.

I thanked her and left the building, and I could feel her eyes on me as I went through the door and out into the lightly falling snow. It was the old Bogart image, embellished and nurtured by radio and television; they expected you to talk tough and to make cute wisecracks, or at the very least to leer suggestively with one side of your mouth. It stopped being amusing after a while, or even diverting, and became only tedious.

I had noticed that the Eugene City Hall was in the immediate downtown area, and I decided to pay a visit there before I did anything else. It turned out to be a modern affair-wood grille façade made of vertical timbers stained a dark brown-and comprised an entire city block between 7th and 8th avenues, Pearl and High streets; the offices were built around a landscaped court, and the entire area was raised some six to eight feet above the surrounding streets. The police station was on the northwest corner, and you got in there through a solid blue door set into a complete glass storefront.

I spent a little while with a sergeant named Downey-a thin man with an unprepossessing manner-and he said they had been notified by the San Francisco Missing Persons people about Sands and had a file going on him. But they had nothing I did not already know; and they had already questioned Johnny Saddler about the wires, with no helpful results. Downey expressed a willingness to back me up if I needed help in my questioning, since I did not have a valid investigator’s license for the State of Oregon. We determined that the goddamn snow was never going to let up, and when I left, it was well past the lunch hour.

I decided I could use a sandwich and some coffee, and I hunched my shoulders against the cold, melting flakes and made my way down to Broadway and along there to a modern shopping mall in the heart of the city. I located a café, and at a small table in the rear I spread the city map open and studied it; then I used their telephone directory to copy down several addresses on the map’s margins. Eugene is a relatively small city, and most of the places I planned to check were concentrated in the same general area. Also, and just for the hell of it, I looked up the name Jackson in the directory; there was no listing for a Nicholas, Nick, or N. Jackson.

After I had eaten, I braved the snow again and got to work.

I tried the car-rental agencies first. There were not many, and it didn’t take me long to run through them. I came up empty; no one named Roy Sands, or answering Sands’ description, had hired a car in the city of Eugene-or at Mahlon Sweet Field-before or after Christmas.

I went around to, or called, the various other transportation outlets-bus, train, airline; but with only a verbal description, and the fact that this was the holiday season, a time of heavy travel, I learned nothing at all. It had only been a shot in the dark anyway.

A check of the new- and used-car lots, on the off-chance that Sands had had enough money to either purchase outright or put a down payment on an automobile, netted me another blank. Business had been relatively slow in the trade, and the managers and salesmen I spoke with assured me they would have remembered anyone named Sands- anyone looking as I described him-making a purchase.

I went to the offices of the Eugene Register-Guard next, and spoke with the city editor on the idea that some small incident involving a non-resident might have taken place around Christmas, something that might not have come to the attention of the police. I also wanted to know if the name Jackson had been prominent in the local news for any reason. I was reaching blindly now, but you could never tell when some wild card would give you the break you were looking for. The city editor could not remember anything along the lines I wanted, but he let me look through the newspaper’s morgue. I wasted a half-hour there, and came out as empty as I had gone in: no unusual incidents, and the only Jackson an eighty-year-old woman who had died of heart failure.

It was five-thirty by then, and I was cold and tired and wet. I thought about getting a motel for the night, settled for a cup of coffee instead, and returned to the Western Union office to double-check with Johnny Saddler. He turned out to be a young college type, and he wore granny glasses and had a thin grayish mustache like insect larvae laid out to hatch under a very thin, sloping rock.

I let him look at my license, and told him what I wanted, describing Roy Sands; but he was not half as impressed as the girl had been. His eyes said that he was totally uninterested in who I was or why I was there-cops in any form were a drag-and his mouth said that there were a lot of people who came in to send telegrams around Christmas time, he couldn’t be expected to remember every one of them even if they sent a dozen wires with money instead of three, sorry I couldn’t have been of more help, sir.

‘Yeah,’ I said, and went out of there.

I stood on the wet, neon-lit street outside and thought: Where would Sands go after leaving here? He sent the wires after eight in the evening, and since he hadn’t rented a car, it seemed likely that he had been on foot. A taxi? A bus? Well, maybe-if he had a specific destination in some part of the city. But if he didn’t have, and if he had been on foot and there had been nobody waiting for him, and if he had been lugging that suitcase of his and unfamiliar with the surroundings, he might have thought of getting a place to spend the night.

That was a fair bet-as fair a one as I had been able to come up with yet. I did not much care for the idea of canvassing hotels, motels, boarding houses, and the like in the immediate downtown vicinity, but it would be putting otherwise unproductive hours to good use. As much as I wanted a hotel of my own, and a nice hot bath, I decided to earn my money; I was not up here for rest and relaxation.

I took the area immediately surrounding Pearl Street and then expanded the radius outward in a widening helix, intending on four full blocks in each direction before I gave it up. I went to seven places, gathering discouragement, and then I came to number eight. And there it was.

It was called the Leavitt Hotel, and it was on 5th Avenue not far from the Post Office and the City and County Jail. Snow clinging to window ledges and to the wide old-fashioned porch on the front softened somewhat the eroded face of the tired frame structure; but it-and the darkness-did nothing to conceal the imitation-brick siding of a color we used to call shit-brindle. It was one of these transient hotels, rooms by day, week, and month, an average sort of place that might appeal to salesmen with stringent expense accounts and maybe some pensioners who would live there the year round. The lobby was small, sparsely set up, very clean, but it was an old building and the smell and aura of age was strong in there.

An old guy with white hair as fine as rabbit fur and a face as benign as a saint’s was working over a ledger behind the desk. He wore a bow tie and a yellow pencil tucked comfortably behind his right ear, and the glasses tilted out on the end of his nose were as thick as binocular lenses. He gave me a gentle smile as I approached.

I got my wallet out and showed him my license photostat. He blinked a couple of times and ran his tongue over his dentures and looked mildly curious-but that was all. I described Roy Sands, and explained that he had been in Eugene on the twenty-first of December. At the moment, I said, I was working on the possibility that Sands may have stayed a night or two in the down-town area.

‘Well,’ the old guy said, ‘I guess he did.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Sands, you said his name is?’

‘Roy Sands, right.’

‘That description don’t tell me much, but I recollect the name. My eyesight’s bad but my memory ain’t, for a fact.’ He shuffled over a couple of steps and opened a leatherbound register lying on the counter and riffled through some pages. He found what he wanted, bent closer, peering, and then nodded. ‘Uh-huh, Roy Sands. Night of December twenty-one. Took a room for a week, one of the singles at fourteen per.’

The gods are beginning to smile a little, I thought. I said, ‘Did you check him in personally?’

‘I did.’

‘Was he alone?’

‘Yep.’

‘Did he seem worried, nervous, preoccupied? Like that?’

‘All he seemed was cold,’ the old guy said. ‘It was snowing that night, too, and he was all bundled up in a hat and a topcoat and a muffler. He kept hugging himself like he had a chill.’

‘Did he stay the full week here?’

‘Nope.’

‘How long, then?’

‘Only the one night.’

‘He checked out the next day?’

‘Didn’t check out at all. He just sort of- disappeared, I guess you could say. But he’d paid in advance, and the key was here at the desk, so it wasn’t any of our worry. Except for his suitcase.’

‘Suitcase?’

‘Left it in the room. Maid found it when she went in to clean the next day.’

Well, I thought. Well, now. ‘He didn’t come back to claim the case, or call about it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Then-do you still have it?’

He nodded. ‘Down in the basement.’

‘Would you mind if I had a look at it?’

‘Through it, you mean?’ he asked shrewdly.

‘Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.’

‘I don’t know as I can allow that, since the case don’t belong to you…’

‘I’m working for Sands’ fiancée,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t heard from him since before he came up here, and she’s damned worried. They were supposed to be married sometime this month.’

The old guy studied me for a time. ‘Fact?’ he asked.

‘Fact.’

‘Can I see that license of yours again?’

‘Sure.’

I showed it to him, and I could see his lips moving, memorizing my name and address. While he was doing that, I got a card out of another part of the wallet-one of those with my office and home address on it-and handed it to him. He read it over, looked at me out of one eye, and then shrugged. He opened the cash register and put the card in there, under the money drawer, and took out a thick ring of keys. Walking slowly, as if his feet pained him, he came out from behind the desk.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you down to the basement. I’ve got to be around while you look through that case, but I can’t leave the desk for but a couple of minutes. We’ll have to take it up here.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said.

We went through a door and down some dark, narrow steps. The basement was at their bottom, through another door, and it was cold and damp and filled with the kinds of things you would expect to find in a hotel basement: boxes and crates and trunks and some discarded furniture and cartons of accounting stuff and piles of miscellany. The suitcase was off in one corner.

I said as I bent to it, ‘Is this all he had in the way of luggage?’

‘That’s it.’

‘He went away with the clothes on his back, then?’

‘Far as I know, he must have.’

The case was not heavy. I picked it up and we walked back to the stairs. The old guy clicked off the lights and locked the door again, and we started back up.

I said, ‘Did Sands have any visitors the one night he was here?’

‘None that I know about.’

‘Make or receive any calls?’

‘Nope.’

‘Did he say anything to indicate where he was going from here, what he planned to do?’

‘Not as I can recall. He didn’t say much of anything, except to ask for a room.’

We came into the lobby again. I said, ‘Anywhere?’

‘Guess so. By the desk there’s okay.’

I put the case down and opened it, kneeling on the worn carpeting. I emptied it slowly, carefully, putting the contents in neat piles where the old guy could see them. Then I began to sift through the items, methodically.

There was not much. One pair of slacks and one sports shirt, freshly laundered and conservatively cut and colored; a change of underwear and socks; a rumpled gray gabardine suit, a couple of years old and fairly expensive; a necktie of dubious taste, in the current wide fashion; a packet of air-mail letters, tied with a rubber band, that were from Elaine Kavanaugh and addressed to Sands at an APO number; and a small leather kit bag containing a band-type razor, an aerosol can of shaving cream, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bottle of aspirin, a tube of gel hair lotion, and a small can of body talc, a spare comb, and a spring case filled with men’s jewelry.

I went over the bottom of the case, but there was nothing except some lint and a German pfennig. The kit bag had nothing but the personal hygiene items, and all the clothing pockets were empty. Or I thought they were until I poked an index finger into the slit handkerchief pocket on the suit jacket and came up with a piece of white notepaper folded in a small square. I opened it, and in a neat masculine printing I read:

Galerie der Expressionisten

Blumenstrasse 15

The old guy was watching me from behind the desk. ‘What you got there?’ he asked.

I showed it to him.

‘Looks like German,’ he said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Mean something, does it?’

That was a good question. I was thinking about the stolen sketch of Roy Sands, and wondering if Galerie der Expressionisten was an art gallery, and if it was, whether or not there was a connection between the two. ‘Do you mind if I keep it?’ I asked the old guy.

‘Well, it rightly belongs to this Sands fella.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But I don’t see no harm in you copying down what it says there, long as you put the original paper back where you got it.’

So I copied the words onto a piece of hotel stationery and put that in my wallet, and then I packed everything back into the case and the old guy and I made another trip down to the basement. When we came back up I put a five-dollar bill on the counter. ‘For your time and help,’ I told him.

‘I’d rather not, you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘If I take money from you, it’d put a bad taste in my mouth-kind of like I was accepting bribes or doing something unethical.’

I said I understood, and we looked at each other the way a couple of guys will once they’ve decided they comprehend and approve of one another. We shook hands, and he went back to his ledger and I went back to the cold, wet snow falling across the night.

I picked up my car at the county lot and drove out toward the University of Oregon campus and found a nice-looking motel. I checked in there and called the Eugene police department and told Sergeant Downey what I had found at the Leavitt Hotel; he said he would look into it a little further and that he would contact me if he learned anything more.

I put in a call to the Royal Gate Hotel in San Francisco, and Elaine Kavanaugh was in her room. ‘I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to call,’ she said when I identified myself. Her voice was very tense, and I had the impression she was holding her breath. ‘Did you find out anything?’

‘A little,’ I said. I told her all the places I had covered, and I told her about the hotel and the suitcase. She was silent for a long moment; then, in a small voice, she said, ‘It doesn’t look very good, does it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘We don’t have enough information to do any speculating.’

‘He wouldn’t have left his things in that hotel room unless something had happened to-’ She broke off, and I could hear her take a tremulous breath that was almost a sob. ‘I’m afraid,’ she whispered. ‘I’m very afraid.’

There was nothing for me to say to that; any words I could have come up with would have sounded forced and tenuous. I let several seconds pass, a coldness on my shoulders, and then I said, ‘I don’t know what this means, if anything, but I found a piece of paper in the pocket of your fiancé’s suit-the one in his suitcase at the hotel here. It had the name of a gallery printed on it, and an address that was obviously German-fifteen Blumenstrasse.’

‘Gallery? You mean an art gallery?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Well, what was the name?’

‘Galerie der Expressionisten,’ I said.

‘I’ve never heard of it. What city is it in?’

‘There was none listed on the paper.’

‘Do you think this gallery has something to do with the portrait of Roy? Do you think it means anything?’

‘It might. I don’t know.’

‘Roy disappeared for some reason. Maybe… well, maybe the gallery and the portrait are mixed in somehow. Mightn’t that be possible?’

‘At this point anything might be possible, Miss Kavanaugh,’ I said, and sighed inaudibly. I wanted to tell her that rhetorical questions, even though we all indulge in them from time to time, served no real purpose; but I thought that if I did, it would sound cruel. ‘Do you want me to check around up here another day?’

‘Is there any more you can do?’

‘Not really. I’ve covered everything I can think of.’

‘Then I suppose you’d best come back to San Francisco.’

‘Do you want me to come by your hotel when I get in?’

‘Yes, I think that would be a good idea.’

We said good-bye, and I went over to the motel coffee shop and ate a hot dinner and drank some hot coffee to go with it. A long soak in the bathtub and I was ready for bed. I buried myself between the warmth of fresh sheets and a quilted comforter, but for the second night in a row sleep came slowly, reluctantly. A nonsense thing kept running around inside my head:

The time of Sands is running out, the shifting, whispering, vanishing Sands…