Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective) (10 page)

“No,” the waitress said, “how many?”

“Six. One to grab the victim and five to write the ransom note.”

She hooted—and I walked out into the good, clean air and shut the door quietly behind me.

T
he two-block length of Firth Road was flanked by shade trees and looked as deserted as most of the rest of Oroville. The electrical outfit, Jorgensen Electric, and the Orchard-Sweet fruit packing plant were situated across from each other in the first block; the strong, pungent smell of cooked apples and plums came out of the big warehouse there. On the second block the Pacific Gas & Electric substation and the railroad museum were also set opposite each other, with the museum on the north side. Beyond the dead-end of the street, and some dense shrubbery and scrub pine, I could see the raised right-of-way of a main line of rail tracks.

I decided to start with the substation. But if there was anyone on duty inside, I couldn’t raise him. I gave it up after a time and crossed to the museum.

It was a good-sized complex set behind a wire-mesh fence: a big, high-domed roundhouse, a smaller outbuilding that looked to be some kind of storage shed, two old passenger coaches and a caboose arranged in front of and alongside the roundhouse for touring purposes, and the remains of a spur track at the rear that had probably once connected with the rail lines beyond. A sign on the front gate said the same thing as one I’d passed out on Oro Dam Boulevard: ROUNDHOUSE RAILROAD MUSEUM. Another sign below it read: RELICS OF THE FABULOUS AGE OF STEAM RAILROADING. ADMISSION $1.00. But the gate was closed and locked, and so was the ticket booth just inside, and there was a third sign on the booth that said: CLOSED.

On the east side of the complex, outside the fence and shaded by live oaks, was a small cottage that probably belonged to the man who ran the museum—Dallmeyer, Bernie the comic said his name was. Parked near it on a diagonal was a van with the museum’s name painted on the side. I started back there, following a rutted gravel drive that skirted the edge of the fence. As I did I noticed that there were puffs of white vapor coming up from behind the roundhouse. At first I thought it was smoke; then I saw how quickly it evaporated and realized it was steam.

When I got to within thirty yards of the cottage I could see that the rear engine doors of the roundhouse were open; the steam was billowing out from inside. Ahead, a side gate appeared in the fence. I stopped when I got to it, because its fork latch was in place but its padlock was hooked open through the wire to one side. I hesitated, glancing at the cottage. Nobody came out of it. After ten seconds or so I shrugged, lifted the fork latch, and went through the gate and across toward the open engine doors.

As I neared them I could hear the sharp hiss of escaping steam and other sounds that meant a steam locomotive’s boiler had been fired: the stuttering clamor of valves, the staccato beat of the exhaust. The locomotive, I saw a moment later, was an old Baldwin that had to have been built during the twenties; it was sitting on a turntable a dozen yards inside the roundhouse. Overhead lights blazed, giving me a clear look at the rest of the cavernous interior: whitewashed walls, swept floors, trusses, gleaming engine pits; and along the walls, tool bins and racks and workbenches, plus a number of glass-fronted cases containing historical photographs, small equipment such as reflector lanterns and switch keys, and posters, timetables, uniform caps and badges, and other memorabilia.

Through the locomotive’s narrow, oblong, front glass panel, I could see a man working inside the cab. He didn’t seem to see me, though; he was intent on what he was doing. I waited another ten seconds, then walked over to where I could look up through the gangway to the deck inside.

The guy up there was stoking the firebox—using a fireman’s shovel to scoop coal out of the tender, then pivoting and driving one foot against a floor pedal to open the butterfly doors and feed the coal to the blaze within. He was fiftyish, thick through the shoulders and hips, with a mop of gray-flecked hair, shaggy brows, and a full beard; the rest of his face was heat-reddened and sweaty. He wore a long leather fireman’s apron to protect his clothing from coal dust and cinders.

“Hello!” I called to him. “Hello in the cab!”

He heard me above the thrumming of the boiler and the throb of the valves, and whirled toward the gangway with the shovel cocked in front of his body. He stared at me for a couple of seconds. Then his surprise gave way to anger and he said, “Christ! You scared hell out of me. How did you get in here?”

“Through the side gate. It was unlocked. I’m sorry if I—”

“You’re trespassing, you know that?”

“Yes, and I apologize. Are you Mr. Dallmeyer?”

“That’s right. What do you want?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I’m trying to find a man named Bradford, Charles Bradford. A hobo who dropped off a freight in the WP yards two days ago.”

He gawped at me again out of bright gray eyes. “Why’re you looking for a hobo? You a policeman?”

“No, it’s nothing like that. A couple of San Francisco reporters were up here doing a feature story on modern hoboes. Bradford got his picture taken, and his daughter saw it when it appeared in the paper. I’m trying to locate him for her.”

“Well, what makes you think he’d have come out here?”

“I’ve traced him as far as Firth Road,” I said. “At least, it seems this is where he came on Tuesday afternoon.”

“What time on Tuesday afternoon?”

“Sometime between five and six.”

“I wasn’t here then,” Dallmeyer said. “I closed up at four-thirty; I had to drive down to Yuba City to pick up some Southern Pacific dining-car relics for the museum.”

“What time did you get back, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“It was almost midnight.”

I nodded. “Would you mind taking a look at Bradford’s photograph, just for the record?”

“I suppose not. But I haven’t seen any tramps hanging around here, I can tell you that right now. I’d have run them off if I had. They’re bad for my business.”

“Sure, I understand.”

He propped the shovel against the side bulkhead, wiped his hands on a rag from the engineer’s seat, and then swung down off the running board. His face was still red and damp with perspiration. I gave him the
Examiner
photo, pointing out which of the men was Bradford. He looked at it, shook his head, and said, “No, I never saw him before. I never saw any of these men before.”

I took the clipping back and put it into my shirt pocket.

“Can’t imagine what a hobo would be doing way out here,” Dallmeyer said. “They all hop the freights over by the WP yards; hardly ever this far out. How’d you trace this Bradford to Firth Road, anyhow?”

“It was a pretty complicated procedure, Mr. Dallmeyer,” I said. “And I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’d better be on my way.”

“Well, I’ll walk out to the gate with you. I must have forgotten to lock it and I don’t like to leave it open like that.”

We left the roundhouse and went across the yard to the gate, where I apologized again for the trespass. He said, “No problem. I hope you find that hobo you’re looking for.” Then he let me out and padlocked the gate latch. He was already back inside the roundhouse by the time I reached the end of the gravel drive.

I walked up to the next block and entered Jorgensen Electric. The owner, Eric Jorgensen, was a fat jowly man in his late fifties who looked like a Boston bull terrier. “Nope,” he said when I asked him about Bradford. “Didn’t see any tramps while I was here on Tuesday. I’d have sure noticed one, too. But I left about half past four; he could have come after that.”

“You closed up for the day at four-thirty, you mean?”

“Nope. Tris did that at half past five, like always.”

“Who would Tris be?”

“Girl who answers the phone and waits on customers and does my books for me. Tris Wilson, my brother’s girl.”

Jorgensen was the only person in evidence at the moment. I asked, “Is she here now?”

“Yep. Using the can. Tris spends more time in the can than a bad burglar with a bladder problem.” He thought that was funny and laughed to prove it. I let him have a small smile, which was more than I’d done for Bernie; Jorgensen, at least, was not a jerk.

It was not long before Tris, who turned out to be a plain-looking brunette in her middle twenties, came back from the can. She looked at the photo, looked at it again, gnawed on her lower lip, and said at length, “Well, I don’t know. It
might
have been the same fellow. I only saw him for a moment.”

“Ma’am?”

“Through the window.” She nodded toward the plate-glass window that took up the left-hand wall flanking the entrance door. “I was just getting ready to close up and I happened to glance out and there he was.”

“Which way was he heading?”

“West, I think.”

“On this side of the street?”

“No, on the other side.”

“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

“No,” she said. “I noticed him because he looked like a hobo and you don’t see many of them out here. But he wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary, just walking along, and it was closing time and I was in a hurry because I had a date. I just didn’t pay that much attention to him.”

“How long after you saw him did you leave the shop?”

“About five minutes, I guess.”

“And he wasn’t anywhere around then?”

“Well, if he was I didn’t see him.”

I thanked her and Jorgensen and went outside again. The Orchard-Sweet packing plant loomed across the street; I walked over there and inside the warehouse. It smelled almost overpoweringly of cooked fruit, like the pervasive odor of aging wine in a winery. None of the dozen or so employees seemed bothered by it, though. You probably wouldn’t even notice it if you’d been working there for any length of time.

I showed the clipping around—it was starting to get worn from all the handling—but all I got in return were headshakes and negative words. I went out through the open rear doors to where two Latino forklift operators were loading crates into a boxcar on a rail siding. They both said they didn’t know nothing about no bums, man.

And that seemed to be that. Firth Road looked like a dead-end in more ways than one.

Yet if Tris Wilson was a reliable witness, and I judged that she was, I had definitely established that Bradford
had
been out here at five-thirty on Tuesday afternoon. Why had he come here? Who was it he’d wanted to see?

I only had one lead left to pursue—those microfilm files of the
Los Angeles Times
at the library. If I couldn’t find the needle in that haystack I had two choices: I could hang around Oroville and keep flashing Bradford’s photo in the hope that somebody recognized him and could tell me where he’d gone; or I could call Miss A. Bradford, admit defeat, and head back home to San Francisco. I doubted if I would do the latter, though, at least not right away. Now that I was back in harness, it would be damned frustrating to have to walk away empty-handed on my first new case. Bad for business, too, if word got around.

Well, there was no point in worrying about any of that until the time came. Right now, there was the library.

M
rs. Kennedy took me into the microfilm room, an air-conditioned cubicle at the rear of the library, and plunked me down in front of one of those magnifying machines that look like hair dryers. Then she brought me the tapes for the August and September 1967 issues of the L.A.
Times
, showed me how to thread the machine, and left me alone.

I started with the first of August and worked ahead chronologically, skipping the want ads, the sports and fashion and business sections and concentrating on the news and feature pages, because the odds were better that Bradford had been after something there. I paid particular attention to the more unusual local items—crimes, personal tragedies, bizarre accidents, acts of heroism, political and business scandals, things like that.

At the end of an hour and a half I had reached August 31 and all I had to show for the effort was a headache; the damn screen on the viewing machine was scratched, the light was too glary, and the pages came through blurred so that you had to squint to read the newsprint. There was no mention of Charles Bradford anywhere. Nobody named McGhan, Dallmeyer, Jorgensen, or Tris Wilson—or, for that matter, Coleman, Baxter, or Mrs. Kennedy—was mentioned either. Oroville appeared a couple of times, once in the case of a hobo who’d been found stabbed in an empty boxcar, but there wasn’t any connection in that that I could find. The guy who’d done the stabbing, another tramp with a felony record, had been arrested the following day.

I rolled the last of the August tapes out of the machine, then got up muttering to myself and took a couple of turns around the room to give my eyes a rest and ease the knotted muscles in my shoulders and neck. My left arm and hand were starting to cramp up again, too. I thought: This is a waste of time. Bradford could have been looking for anything, even a business advertisement or somebody’s recipe for clam chowder. You’ll never find it this way, groping for it blind.