A melange of mismatched furniture-rattan, overstuffed fabric, imitation Danish Modern-and the light coming from an inverted and milky-bowled floor lamp. Mail-order stereo components, all of which had apparently been built from kits, on tiers of shelves made out of brick building blocks and lengths of wood along one otherwise bare wall. A small wooden table cluttered with capacitors and resistors, solder and spools of wire and a soldering gun, various-sized parts and tools. Bare wood floor, a darkened archway to another room-nothing else. I touched my tongue to my cold lips and moved as far to the left as I was able so that I could see more of the room: more bare wall, a battered portable television set on a roll-stand, a cylindrical brass-finished smoking stand. The area immediately in front of the door was still blocked from my vision.
I stepped back onto the crushed-shell rectangle and knocked on the door a third time. Still nothing. Before I could consider the advisability of the move, I reached out and grasped the knob and twisted it slowly, silently. The door opened a couple of inches under my hand.
There was the smell of something in there, a lingering chemical odor that I had known a long time ago and would never forget: spent gunpowder. The hairs at the base of my neck rose, and a different kind of chill swept over me now; I could feel my heart begin to jump irregularly in my chest and there was sweat under my arms and flowing cold-hot along my sides. My stomach throbbed and ached.
I released the knob and pushed the door open with the tips of my fingers, keeping my body motionless. It swung inward with a faint, odd, empty sound, and then I could see the flooring across the threshold that had not been visible from the window.
A man lay on his right side there, a couple of feet into the room, facing away from me. His legs were drawn up, and both hands were frozen in clawed agony at his chest. Blood had spilled out between the spread fingers; a pool of it, with appendages as thin as spider’s legs jutting out into the cracks in the boarding, shone a deep burgundy in the pale light.
I took a couple of steps inside, moving woodenly. The man was about thirty, dressed in faded corduroy trousers and canvas shoes and a white terry-cloth pullover with the word Art stitched in blue script over the left pocket. His face was contorted, the eyes squeezed so tightly shut they seemed sewn, and he had bitten through his lower lip in his agony.
I knelt down by his head and made myself look at his chest. It was a bullet wound, all right, but there was no sign of exit. I touched the skin at the base of his neck: still warm. He had not been dead very long.
I straightened up and kept on staring down at the thing that had been Art Shanley, undeniably Art Shanley, and I thought: He’s the one, yes, he’s got to be the one. He learned of the kidnapping from his brother and saw his chance ro get his hands on more money than he’d ever seen before or would see again. He went down to Martinetti’s late that same night and planted the bug in the phone and waited all the next day-maybe in his car, maybe just walking around with a portable radio-for the ransom call to come in. When it did, he went up to the drop site early and hid out there to wait for Lockridge, the kidnapper, and for me to show up with the money. But he was too quick after I put the suitcase on that sandstone rock, too nervous maybe, and he used the knife on Lockridge before I was gone. When I came back down, he slashed me and then got out of there with the money and he was in the clear-hethought he was in the clear.
I kept staring down at him, and the sight of his twisted features jarred my mind and suddenly I began thinking very clearly, very rationally, very rapidly. A lot of little things fused and grew and begat bigger things, and I began to tremble, standing there, tremble with more than mere coldness, the sound of the churning ocean growing and growing in my ears until it filled the room with crushing, cataclysmic noise. We had thought it all tied together, the kidnapping and the hijacking, but they were two separate entities, paralleling one another but never coming together until tonight. Now that I knew that, I knew also who had killed Art Shanley-who, and why, not all the answers, but enough of them, too many of them, and the knowledge made disgust flow through me with the palpable bitterness of camphor.
I turned away and let my eyes sweep the room, and there was a telephone on a black metal stand next to the bright-cushioned Danish couch. I went over and reached out for the receiver, and then I heard shuffling sounds from the darkness beyond the archway, strangely discernible above the deafening sea, and I realized that I had been a fool to come inside, a fool not to have considered the possibility that the killer was still on the premises, but it was too late now, too damned late, and when I pivoted he was there in the gloom beyond, with a gun held laxly in his right hand, a specter gaining substance as it moved into the light, stopping full-born and staring at me with the most terrible eyes I had ever seen-eyes that reflected all of man’s most hellish nightmares.
I stood facing a swindler, a murderer-and worse, perhaps much worse: a man so merciless, so cruel, that he had arranged the kidnapping of his own son.
I stood facing what was left of Louis Martinetti.
* * * *
20
The gun was a.32-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, walnut-butted, with an almost nonexistent barrel- a belly gun that looked almost toylike in the largeness of Martinetti’s hand. He held it half-turned, palm up at a forty-five-degree angle, and the bore of it pointed loosely at my lower body.
His face had the look of food mold in the dim light from the floor lamp, and his lips twitched and danced in a kind of macabre rhythm, like the muscle spasm of a dead man. The deep excavations were back beneath his cheekbones. But the eyes-oh Jesus, those eyes! — caught and held your own gaze, and even though you wanted to look away, look anywhere but into those diseased and frightening depths, you could not seem to do it. They were hypnotic, holding you mesmerized with all the horror they contained.
I stood rigidly, my arms pressed tight against my sides, and I looked into those eyes and, curiously, I was not afraid. I should have known fear, because there was fear all around me in that room and because I was facing a gun that had already killed one man tonight-and yet, it was absent from my mind. I felt only a great despondency at the knowledge of what man can become, and an anger, too, and a nauseous disgust. I felt very tired, and very cold. But that was all-truly, that was all.
Neither Martinetti nor I spoke for a long time, and the thundering roar of the vast ocean swirled around us, reverberating, swelling the air in that room and swelling it until it seemed as if the pressure of the noise would burst the walls. And then it became no louder, as if waiting, as if maintaining that pitch like a great clarinetist would maintain the screaming high notes of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Iceburg Blues,” the power of it awesome and frightening but not as frightening as Martinetti’s eyes.
I said the words that were thick on my tongue, “You son of a bitch.”
He released a prolonged, sighing, shuddering breath and raised his left hand and passed it over the loose wetness of his mouth. “Yes,” he said, and that single word was no more than a death rattle, all inflection abrogated by the consuming sound of the Pacific.
“What motivates you, Martinetti? What do you use for a conscience, for a soul? What are you, for God’s sake?”
Something, a ghastly presence, came and went on his face. “I don’t know,” he said with a kind of sick wonder. “I don’t know!”