Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective) (24 page)

It seemed a hell of a price to pay for justice.

“What are you going to do now?” Arleen Bradford said. “Are you going to take me to the police?”

“Yes.”

“I could fight you. You know I’m strong.”

“But I’m stronger.”

“Would you hit me?”

“If I had to.”

“Then I won’t fight you. I don’t like to be hit. I don’t like rough men.”

“All right. Come on, then.”

She got up, slowly, and smoothed her skirt, and we went over to my car. She said, “I won’t be in jail very long. I can’t stand to be locked up. I’ll find a way to kill myself.”

No you won’t, I thought; there’ll be doctors to see to that. I didn’t say anything.

When she was inside the car I opened the trunk, stripped off my sodden clothes, and put on the change of old stuff I keep in there for fishing trips and unplanned overnight stops. It took me some time because of the weakened left arm. And because my head was pounding fiercely and making me a little dizzy.

On my way around to the driver’s door, I glanced at the house—the house that might never be finished now. Bindlestiff Manor. And for some reason I had a sharp mental image of the hobo jungle up in Oroville, of the three old tramps and the way they’d come alive when the Medford freight rolled in. And I imagined I could hear the low cry of the locomotive’s air horn, like a lament in the night that went on and on.

I got into the car. Arleen Bradford looked at me and said, as if she sensed what I was thinking, “Why did he have to disgrace himself by becoming a hobo? Everything would have been all right if he’d stayed in Los Angeles and found some kind of job. He’d have his inheritance now, he’d still be alive.” She plucked at my arm. “Why did he do it?” she said. “Why did he have to die?”

Every man on his grave stands he, and each man’s grave is his own affair.
And each woman’s, too.

I started the car and drove us away from there.

I
did not tell the authorities about the time I’d spent in the well. Arleen Bradford didn’t tell them about it either ; she was badly frightened at the prospect of being locked up, and for the most part that was what she kept babbling about. I still smelled a little funny, even with the change of clothes, but none of the county cops and neither of the two FBI agents who showed up later bothered to ask me about it.

There were a couple of reasons I left out the part about the well. One was that I didn’t want it to get into the newspapers. And it would have; it was just the kind of macabre thing reporters and city editors love to exploit, and they’d have splashed it all over the front pages of the
Chronicle
and the
Examiner
and half a dozen other tabloids in the Bay Area, complete with photographs. I had had enough of that sort of sensational publicity; I couldn’t afford any more, especially not now. The stuff that would get into the papers about me finding the bodies and bringing Arleen Bradford in was bad enough, considering that my position with the State Board of Licenses was still pretty shaky.

The second reason I didn’t mention the well incident was Harry Runquist. I was the one who called to tell him what had happened. The cops wouldn’t do it right away because he wasn’t Hannah’s next of kin; and as much as I hated the job, it would have been cruel to let him go on sitting and waiting beside the phone. He took it the way I knew he would, unraveling a little at the edges; I was glad I could not see his face just then. If it came out about the well, all the grisly details of me being trapped in there with the two bodies, it would have been that much worse for him. I did not want to be cruel that way either.

On the drive back home that night I decided I was not going to tell anybody what I’d been through up there. It was an experience I wanted to start forgetting, and that meant not talking about it. There would be dreams—there were always dreams after ugly incidents like this one—but they would stop after a while. The memory would fade and blend with all the other memories after a while, too. And only come back now and then, like an old twinge of pain or a malaria chill.

So when Kerry showed up after work on Monday night, over her snit at me and bubbling with questions, I told her everything that had happened in the Valley of the Moon but I didn’t tell her about being in the well. She noticed that my left hand was still pretty cramped up, but I told her it was because of what had happened on the freight train in Oroville. The upshot of the omission and the little white lie was that she didn’t start lecturing me again. And she didn’t try to make me dwell on the case, either, which was fine with me.

“Have you heard any more from the State Board?” she asked.

“No.”

“That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

It was and I said so. We were sitting in the kitchen, Kerry with a cup of coffee and me with a can of Schlitz. She looked wonderful in a black skirt with a gold chain belt and an emerald-green blouse. I looked like a slob because I’d just finished taking a shower when she got there and I was still in my old chenille bathrobe, the one she’d been after me for weeks to get rid of; she said it looked like something mice had been nesting in.

She asked, “Have you talked to Eberhardt?”

“No. Not since Saturday.”

“How did it go then?”

I gave her a capsule account of the conversation I’d had with him.

“Sounds grim,” she said. “Have you made up your mind yet about the partnership?”

“No. I will pretty soon, though. Pretty soon.”

She was silent for a couple of seconds. Then she gave me an up-from-under look, one of those shrewd jobs of hers. “What about your Chinese girlfriend?” she said. “Did you talk to her today?”

“Ah, Kerry, come on. There’s nothing between Jeanne Emerson and me.”

“But she’d like there to be.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

“Sure it is,” I said. And it ought to have been, but I was afraid it wasn’t. Jeanne Emerson
had
called again today, while I’d been downtown letting the FBI ask me a bunch more bright questions, and left a message saying she’d like to get together some night this week. To talk about the article, she’d said, but she’d also suggested we have dinner. I hadn’t called her back. Yet.

Kerry said, “Are you going to see her again?”

“How do you mean, ‘see her’?”

“Are you going to do that article with her?”

“I don’t know, maybe.”

“What if she tries to seduce you?”

“Hah.”

“But what if she does? What would you do?”

“Fight her off with a whip and a chair.” But the question made me feel uncomfortable. “Listen,” I said seriously, “don’t be jealous, okay? I was jealous of you and look where that got us; we almost broke up over it. I don’t want that to happen again.”

“What makes you think I’m jealous?”

“Well, you’ve been acting jealous . . .”

She reached over and picked a piece of lint or something off the sleeve of my bathrobe. Then she winked at me. “For a detective, you make a lot of wrong deductions. That’s because you’re too literal-minded.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t be too sure I was as jealous as I seemed on Saturday,” she said. “Maybe I just wanted you to think I was jealous.”

“Oh, so that’s it. What were you doing, testing me?”

She shrugged. “Figure it out, detective,” she said and winked at me again.

I gave her a long speculative look. Then I said, “So what do you want to do?”

That caught
her
off balance. “About what? Dinner, you mean?”

“We can worry about dinner later. I was thinking about now, the next couple of hours.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

“Practice my salesmanship, for starters.”

“Salesmanship?”

“In case I ever lose my license again and wind up having to take a job as a clerk in a men’s store.” I stood and leered down at her. “Would you care to see something in a bathrobe, madam?”

“My goodness! Such as what, sir?”

I took her into the bedroom and showed her.