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 therewas 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.”
We let silence build for a few moments, thinking our own thoughts. An idea occurred to me, and I said, “Listen, suppose Lockridgedid have a partner after all, a kind of silent partner, somebody who knew him for one reason or another and who also knew the Martinettis. Suppose this silent partner got in touch with Lockridge with the kidnap scheme and brought him out here to California to do the job. Hell, somebody had to tip Lockridge to the situation; according to the Hanlon girl, he’d only been out here for three weeks, and he was talking about ‘a business deal’ from the beginning. It doesn’t figure that he would come all the way from Cleveland to pull a snatch without having a victim in mind; and living back there, how would he know who to pick in California?”
“Why wouldn’t the silent partner do the job himself?” Eberhardt asked, making argument.
“Maybe because the boy knew him by sight,” I answered. “It would have been a risky proposition, pulling it off himself if he was known to any member of the family.”
“Okay, you’ve got a good point,” Donleavy said. “It would explain the kidnap note on Martinetti’s stationery adequately enough, from what he tells me about his office layout-and it would also explain something else that’s been bothering me: how Lockridge knew the San
Bruno hills well enough, being from out of state, to use that dirt road as a ransom drop. Sure, he could have driven around looking for a likely place, but since he was staying in San Francisco, why would he pick something so far south? There are other isolated areas, closer ones, that he might have chosen.” He uncrossed his ankles and crossed them the other way. “But what it doesn’texplain is the bug.”
“It could if the bug is nothing more than a red herring to hamper an investigation. The partner and Lockridge could have cooked that up figuring you would examine every possibility.”
“That makes them out to be master criminals,” Eberhardt said in his dour way. “Master criminals are fine for those pulp magazines of yours, but they’re a plain crock in real life and you know it.”
Donleavy’s eyes were speculative. “Now that I think of it, I can figure an explanation for the tap myself. This silent partner, assuming there is one, would likely have wanted as little contact with Lockridge as possible once Lockridge reached California-for obvious reasons. If he distrusted him, he could have used the bug to make sure Lockridge kept up his end of the deal.”
“Fine,” Eberhardt said, “but why would he bring Lockridge in in the first place if he distrusted him? And why, for Christ’s sake, would this silent partner kill Lockridge up at the drop site? Why wouldn’t he just wait until the pickup had been made and the money safely taken away, and then do the job on Lockridge if he was planning a double-cross?”
I gave him the theory I had conceived in the hospital. “It’s pretty isolated up there in the hills, Eb. A body wouldn’t necessarily be found for some time.” I went on to tell him why it could be that this hypothetical silent partner had not waited until I was gone before killing Lockridge-that he had gotten excited by the prospect of the money, made his attack too quickly and merely wounded Lockridge with the first thrust of his knife instead of killing him, thus giving him time to cry out and warn me of what was happening.
“It makes sense, I suppose,” Eberhardt said, but his voice was skeptical.
Donleavy said, “Yeah, it’s pretty thin, all right- but it’s better than anything else we’ve got at the moment. The only trouble with it, we don’t have any goddamned idea where to begin looking for a silent partner.” He sucked in his cheeks and puffed them out, the way he had in the hospital. “The girl didn’t give you anything at all on a connection between Lockridge and somebody else out here?”