Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective) (20 page)

“Nope. And believe me, son, I was looking. Tits like she’s got . . .” He sighed, glanced back at his wife again, sighed a second time, and said, “Sure must be nice,” in the same regretful voice he’d used when he said he didn’t have a cow.

I thanked him and started back toward Hannah’s house. I thought I could take his story pretty much at face value; he was a long way from being senile, and he hadn’t struck me as the type to make up stories. And if it was the truth, then Hannah Peterson hadn’t disappeared Friday night but sometime yesterday.

But that fact only clouded the issue even more. Why hadn’t her bed been slept in Friday night? Why, if she’d stayed away all night, had she come back to her house yesterday morning? To load something into her car, maybe—but what? And who had been in the other car, the dark green one?

W
hen I got back to Hannah’s house I rang the doorbell and Runquist let me in. He’d found some wine here, too; there was a big glass of it, red this time, in his left hand.

“No calls, nothing,” he said. He gave me a painfully hopeful look. “You find out anything?”

“Maybe. But I don’t know yet what it means.”

I repeated the gist of my conversation with the elderly neighbor. But I still kept my speculations about Hannah and Lester Raymond to myself.

“I don’t get it,” Runquist said. He sounded even more bewildered and worried than before. The wine was starting to get to him; you could see it in the glaze of his eyes. “If she was all right yesterday morning, why didn’t she call me? And where was she Friday night?”

More rhetorical questions, just like the ones I’d been asking myself. I said, “Do any of Mrs. Peterson’s friends drive a dark green, late-model car?”

He shook his head as if to clear it and paced around for fifteen seconds or so. Then he said, “No. None of them I know own a green car. Who the devil . . .”

“Just take it easy, Mr. Runquist. Do you mind if we go out into the garage?”

“The garage? What for?”

“I want to take a look around.”

There was an entrance to the garage off the kitchen. Most of the floor space was empty and swept as clean as the interior of the house; there weren’t even any oil spots on the cement. I wandered around with Runquist at my heels. Washer-and-dryer combination, a small stack of firewood, some pieces of lawn furniture, a workbench that looked as though it hadn’t been used in a long time, and not much else. From what was in here now, I couldn’t even begin to guess what Hannah might have been loading into her car yesterday morning.

“What kind of car does Mrs. Peterson drive?” I asked.

“Toyota Tercel,” Runquist said.

“What year?”

“This year. She’s only had it a few months.”

“What color?”

“A sort of beige.”

“Do you know the license plate?”

“I think so. . . . Seven-three-five NNY.”

I jotted that down in the notebook I carry. While I was doing that I remembered what he’d told me earlier about driving over here Friday night to put gas in Hannah’s empty tank. I asked him if the five-gallon can had been full or if he’d put in less than that amount.

“Less,” he said. “I emptied the can, but there couldn’t have been much more than a gallon in it.”

“So she’d have had to stop somewhere pretty soon and fill up.”

“That’s what I told her just before she drove off.”

“Is there any particular gas station she goes to?”

He frowned. “Not that I can think of, no.”

“Does she prefer to pay cash for things like gas? Or does she use credit cards?”

“Plastic,” he said. “Always.”

“Which oil company cards does she have?”

“Mobil, Chevron . . . I think that’s all.”

Which meant that she’d probably gone to either a Mobil or Chevron station on Friday night. There couldn’t be that many of either in Sonoma or its outlying areas; if I could find the right one it might at least tell me which direction she’d been heading. I had nothing else to work on at the moment, no other angle. The dark-green car appeared to be a dead-end.

I said, “Did you write out that list of names and addresses of Mrs. Peterson’s friends I asked you for?”

“Yes. It’s inside.”

We reentered the house and Runquist went and got a sheet of notepaper from an end table next to the sofa. When he gave it to me I saw that there were eight names, seven of them women, all but two with Sonoma addresses; one of the two lived in Glen Ellen, the second in Napa. I folded the paper into thirds and put it into the inside pocket of my jacket.

Runquist asked, “What now?”

“I go to work. Do you want me to drop you back at your house?”

“Yeah. Everywhere I look here, I see Hannah.”

He drank the last of his wine, glanced around the room, and then said, “I’d better take this glass into the kitchen. Hannah doesn’t like dirty dishes sitting around the living room.”

He went out with the glass, and I thought: You poor bastard, you. Hannah Peterson had him so wrapped up he’d have crawled naked through the plaza if she’d asked him to. For his sake, I hoped she loved him just half as much as he loved her; that it wasn’t just his money and an interest in his winery she was after. For his sake, I hoped she was all right and came home safe and sound from wherever she was.

Runquist came back from the kitchen pretty soon and I followed him outside and waited while he locked up again. His movements were a little unsteady and he had some trouble getting his key into the deadbolt latch; I thought that he’d probably taken another shot of the red wine while he was in the kitchen. But I didn’t say anything to him about it. It was none of my business how he got through this, or how anybody got through a crisis except me.

I let him off in front of his house, listened to him urge me twice to call right away if there was anything he should know, wrote down his phone number in my notebook, and watched him make his way across the lawn. His shoulders were slumped; you could almost see the weight of the thing pressing down on him.

Up on the porch, the jack-o’-lantern grinned its idiot grin as he mounted the steps and I drove away.

It took me an hour and twenty minutes, five abortive stops, and a small piece of luck to find the filling station Hannah Peterson had stopped at on Friday evening.

It was a Chevron station on the Sonoma Highway—Highway 12—just outside the city limits to the north, not much more than a mile and a half from where she lived. But I’d gone south first, the direction that led to Napa and San Francisco, and that was why it was so long before I got around to the right place. But it was a good thing I’d done it that way. The guy who had waited on her that night had Sundays off, but he’d just dropped by for a few minutes to shoot the breeze with the attendant on duty; he was there when I drove in, and within earshot when I asked the kid who came to the car about Hannah.

“Sure,” he said, “I remember her.” He cracked thick, grease-blackened knuckles; he was that kind of guy. “She come in must of been about nine. A fox. Yeah, a real fox. But spacey, you know what I mean?”

“Upset. Strung out.”

“Right.” He cracked his knuckles again. “I thought maybe she was on something. Kept mutterin’ to herself, havin’ a regular old conversation like there was somebody else in the car with her.”

“What was she saying?”

“I dunno. Lot of gibberish to me.”

“Can you remember any of it?”

“Well . . . one thing she said a couple of times, didn’t make no sense. Sounded like ‘bundles of stuff.’”

“Bundles of stuff.”

“Yeah. Or maybe bundlestuff, like it was one word.”

I repeated that too: “Bundlestuff.” Then another, similar word popped into my mind and I said, “Wait a minute. Bindlestiff. Could the word have been bindlestiff?”

“Could of, yeah,” the knuckle-cracker said. He gave me a dubious look. “That supposed to mean something?”

“I don’t know yet. Can you remember anything else she said?”

“Nah. I wasn’t payin’ much attention. A fox, sure, but spacey; you never know with them spacey chicks, I had one pull a gun on me once. Just bundlestuff or whatever the hell. While I’m washin’ the windshield. ‘It’s got to be bundlestuff,’ she says.”

“Like that? ‘It’s got to be bindlestiff?”

“Yeah, come to think of it. Just like that.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure. Say, how come you’re askin’ about that blond fox, anyhow?”

“That was no blond fox,” I said, “that was my wife.”

He didn’t get it; all he got was the wife part. He backed off a step. “Hey, man, I didn’t mean no offense ...”

“None taken,” I said, and gave him a sour grin, and went over to where a public telephone booth stood at the edge of the station apron.

Inside, I found a dime in my pocket and dialed Runquist’s number. He picked up immediately, as if he’d been sitting there waiting to pounce on the thing. He said, “Hello?” twice, and when I told him who was calling he said, “Oh,” in a low voice; he’d wanted badly for it to be Hannah. But then he said, “What is it? What’ve you found out?” and he still sounded hopeful. He also sounded more sober than he had when I’d left him: he’d had enough sense to lay off any more wine.

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “Does the word ‘bindlestiff’ mean anything to you?”

“Bindlestiff?”

“It’s an old-fashioned term for hobo—”

“I know what it means. Why are you asking about bindlestiff?”

“Because I found the service station Mrs. Peterson stopped at on Friday night. The attendant who waited on her said she was muttering something to herself about bindlestiff.”

“The house we’re building,” Runquist said.

“Pardon?”

“That’s our pet name for it, the new place up in the mountains. Bindlestiff Manor.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“There isn’t any connection. Except that we’re both railroad buffs. We were up at the house site one day and Hannah made a joke about how it was too bad freight trains didn’t run through the mountains because that way it would be easy for her father to visit us. I said, then all the other hoboes would want to stop here, too, and we’d have to call the place Bindlestiff Manor.”

Cute, I thought. The old man’s riding the rails, living in hobo jungles and drinking cheap wine, because he can’t find a job; and his affluent daughter is not only building a fancy house up in the mountains, not only trying to stiff him out of his share of the family inheritance, but is also making jokes at his expense. Real cute.

“But why would she go up there by herself on Friday night?” Runquist was saying. “The house isn’t finished; there isn’t any electricity or plumbing. And she wouldn’t have spent the night there—not Hannah.”

Maybe she wouldn’t, I thought, at least not by choice, but Lester Raymond might have. Runquist seemed to have forgotten the sleeping bag in her car; I hadn’t. Suppose Raymond had demanded she find him a place to hide temporarily, over the weekend?
It’s got to be Bindlestiff . . .

“It could be a dead-end, Mr. Runquist,” I said. “The attendant here might have misunderstood her. But I’ll take a look at the house just the same.”

“But I drove up there yesterday; I told you that. There wasn’t any sign of her.”

“You looked inside the house?”

“I didn’t go all the way in, no. I didn’t see any need to; her car wasn’t there.”

“I still want to take a look around. Unless you have some objection . . .”

“No. God, no. I’m just trying . . . I don’t know what I’m trying to do. Go ahead, do whatever you think best.”

“How do I get to the place?”

He told me. It wasn’t more than fifteen miles from where I was now and it didn’t sound too difficult to find; I knew the area a little, and his directions were simple enough so that I didn’t even need to write them down.

“Listen,” Runquist said after a couple of seconds’ pause, “if she did go up there Friday night, do you think it was because of Lester Raymond?”

“I don’t know.”

“But if it was, then . . .”

I did not want to get into it with him; I did not want to have to lie to him. I said, “I’ll call you again later, Mr. Runquist,” and rang off.

I
drove north on Highway 12, through Boyes Hot Springs and Fetters Springs and Agua Caliente—places all well-known around the turn of the century for their mineral baths. Vineyards and low wooded hills took over beyond there; the autumnal reds and golds of the grape vines glistened in the afternoon sun like frozen fire.

Pretty soon the turnoff for the rustic little village of Glen Ellen appeared. Glen Ellen was where Jack London had lived the last years of his life—Jack London, the most famous of all the literary figures who had ridden the rails in their youth, the champion of road kids and gay cats and bindlestiffs. I remembered Arleen Bradford telling me that her father’s favorite book had been
The Road,
London’s collection of autobiographical essays on his hoboing days. Funny how trains and hoboes kept running through this whole business with the Bradford family and Lester Raymond, interwining now and then, like a peculiar leitmotif. And there was something a little dark and unsettling about it, too, something I did not want to dwell on at the moment.