The Vanished

Something came out of the brilliant, diffused aureole of the flash beam, something dark and bulky, and I stumbled awkwardly to the right to get out of the way and collided with the drop-leaf table there, upsetting it. I went down onto my hands and knees, painfully, burning my palms on the worn nap of the carpet; above and behind me the something shattered hollowly against the rose wallpaper. Porcelain shards rained on the backs of my legs like thin, cold hailstones, and I thought: the shit, he threw the reading lamp at me, the goddam shit.

The flash beam went out, abruptly, and the room once more diminished into a deep-black; the guy, whoever, was running through the flat now, banging into things in the darkness. I got my feet under me and lurched upright, turning back to the wall. I found the switch finally, and pale light from the glass ceiling bowl flooded the room. My eyes ached from the glare of the flash; it took a moment to focus them so I could see well enough to navigate the cluttered expanse to the doorway on the opposite side, and I could hear him out on the utility porch, trying to get the side door open.

I kicked a footstool out of the way, viciously, and staggered into the kitchen and then out to the porch. The back door was standing wide open. Footsteps pounded down the flight of steep wooden stairs which jutted outward like a prominent rib cage from the old Victorian lady’s side wall. I swung through the door onto the pocket-sized platform which serves as a landing for my flat, and a dark man-shape wrapped in a trenchcoat and gloves and some kind of long-billed cap was down at the foot of the stairs; fog and deep shadow helped to camouflage his features, the size and shape of him.

I yelled at him, foolishly, but he was already running along the narrow cement-floored alleyway where the garbage cans and storage bins for my building and the adjacent one were kept. The thought that he might have a gun, or another weapon, did not occur to me until some time later; I clambered down after him, hanging onto the side railing to maintain my footing on the mist-slick stairs, and went into the alley running. The dark figure had already turned the corner, east, at the building front by then; and when I made it up there and through onto the sidewalk, there was no sign of him.

I ran up to the near corner. A car was coming toward me, its headlights magnified by the gray cloak of the fog, but there were four people in it and it was going much too slowly to mean anything. The car passed and I looked up and down the steepness of Octavia; but the area seemed deserted. Whoever he was, he had gotten away clean.

I walked back to the alleyway, trying not to pay any attention to the burning in my lungs from the cold damp air and the exertion. Light spilled into the passage from several flats in both buildings now, and there were anxious faces behind the glass of locked doors and windows. The guy who lives below me, a retired fire captain named Litchak, was standing on his platform, wearing a plaid bathrobe and a sharp scowl. He had a bungstarter in his right hand-a souvenir he had collected somewhere or other.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ he asked me as I started up the stairs.

‘I came home and found somebody in my apartment,’ I told him.

‘Sneak thief, huh?’

‘It looks that way.’

‘Figured that might be what it was all about. I heard all the banging around up in your flat, and then him come clattering down the stairs and you after him. He got away, I guess?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Sonsabitches,’ Litchak said. He made a motion with the bungstarter. ‘Well, it’s too bad the wife had the television blaring away or I might have heard him sooner. If I had, I’d have broken his goddamn head for him.’

‘Yeah,’ I said again.

‘You think he made off with much?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll check that now.’

I started past him, moving up the stairs. He called after me, ‘Keep your valuables in a safe deposit box, like I do. No sneak thief can hurt you when you’ve got your valuables locked up in one of those babies.’

I reached my own landing and went inside and looked at the door. The lock had been jimmied, hurriedly and unprofessionally; this was the way he had come in, then. I wedged the door closed with a broom handle and a piece of copper wire, and then I went into the kitchen and poured myself a couple of fingers of brandy to ease the jangling of my nerves. When I had that down, I walked through the apartment to see what, if anything, was missing.

Ten minutes later I rang up the Hall of Justice and told a desk sergeant that I had had a prowler, giving my name and address. He had already received one call pertaining to the disturbance, he said, and had dispatched a unit to the area. I could make a report to the investigating officers.

So I sat down on the couch in the living room to wait-and to think about the three items I had found were missing from the flat: twenty dollars in silver dimes and quarters from a wooden bank shaped like a beer keg that I kept on the bedroom dresser; a small case full of cuff links and tie clasps and the like, also from the dresser.

And the sketch of Roy Sands that Elaine Kavanaugh had given me that morning, from the inside pocket of the suit coat I had worn that day.

What the bloody hell?

Twenty bucks in coins and a case of cheap men’s jewelry might incidentally interest a sneak thief, but why would one take a rolled-up chalk portrait that was obviously of no real and immediate value-and neglect such easily pawnable items as a clock radio and a radium-dial wristwatch in a nightstand drawer? For that matter, why would a sneak thief take the chance of coming down an open alleyway and up stairs past one door, with three sets of doors and porch windows facing him across the passage? Why would he take the chance of standing fully exposed on the platform while he jimmied open the side door, and of doing it quietly enough so as not to alert any of the neighbors? And why would he choose a time well before midnight, when most people are awake if not still up and around?

The answers were all the same: he wouldn’t.

Unless he was not a sneak thief at all.

Unless he was a guy after something in particular, something important enough to make all that risk worthwhile.

The portrait of Roy Sands?

It had to be that. I had nothing else that would interest anybody-certainly nothing of special value. I had not had another case in over a month, and that one a simple skip-trace. It had to be the portrait, all right. Coincidence was the only other explanation, and if a lifelong distrust of coincidence was not enough to discredit that possibility, the facts as I saw them were enough.

But what made the portrait important enough to steal? A lot of silly and melodramatic ideas crossed my mind- some kind of coded message, a microdot, a concealed masterpiece of some type-and I discarded them all for those very reasons. It had been a simple head-and-shoulders sketch of Roy Sands, and that’s all it had been.

Who, then? Elaine Kavanaugh knew I had it, obviously; but because she had given it to me, there seemed to be no conceivable reason why she would want to steal it back again, or have it stolen by someone else. Chuck Hendryx and Rich Gilmartin also knew I had it-and maybe Doug Rosmond as well; he could have spoken to one of them during the day, and that one could have mentioned the portrait. It was likely that Rosmond had known I would be out with his sister tonight, and either Hendryx or Gilmartin could have come over from Marin County and watched my flat and waited until I left, plus a little longer because of the hour, and then broken in.

All of which told me nothing definite. Hell, it did not have to be one of those three at all. At this point, there was simply no way of knowing. But there was one thing I did know, one fact which seemed certain: the theft of the sketch had something to do with the disappearance of Roy Sands, directly or indirectly. And it made that disappearance seem a hell of a lot stranger than it had sounded that morning.

I got up and paced the room, smoking and brooding and getting nowhere, and when the doorbell finally rang I jumped half a foot. I let in two uniformed cops, neither of whom I knew, and showed them around the flat and told them what had happened and what had been stolen, without elaborating on any of my theories. They were polite and solicitous, especially after they found out what I did for a living and that I had been on the cops for fifteen years, and I tried to answer their questions without letting my impatience show through. No, I hadn’t gotten a good look at the man. No, I didn’t know if he had gotten away on foot or in a car. Yes, I was certain he had been wearing gloves. No, I could not tell them anything more than I already had.

When they were gone-leaving me with the empty assurance that they would do what they could to recover my stolen property-I had another brandy for my nerves and then went into the bedroom and dialed the number of the Royal Gate Hotel. The switchboard rang Elaine Kavanaugh’s room and she answered immediately, as if she had