Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective) (5 page)

I said, “It’s still a pretty routine job. If I get lucky and Bradford is still in Oroville, I’ll be back home tomorrow night.”

“Maybe so. But you’ve got to admit, it does have its unusual elements.”

“That’s for sure.”

“You know,” she said, “I’ll bet he really is enjoying himself.”

“Who? Bradford?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not so sure. The man’s down-and-out. And being a hobo is a hell of a road to have to travel, once you get started on it.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Hoboing has its romantic aspects. Besides . . . ‘Every man on his grave stands he, and each man’s grave is his own affair.’”

“Huh?”

“Two lines from a poem about hoboes I read once. They just popped into my mind.”

“Pretty profound stuff,” I said. “But I still say it’s a hell of a road to have to travel.”

“You don’t think it can be adventurous?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned.”

“You mean you’ve never wanted to ride the rails, just once, to see what it was like?”

“No.”

“Well, suppose you have to go up to Washington to find Bradford. How will you travel?”

“Drive, I guess.”

“It’d be faster by train,” she said. “You could always hop a freight and pass yourself off as one of the tramps.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“No, I’m serious. That’s what I’d do if I were you. Just for the experience.”

“That kind of experience I don’t need.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too old for it, for one thing.”

“You’re not any older than Charles Bradford.”

I had a mental image of myself huddled in the corner of a dusty boxcar, staring out at a lot of dark, empty terrain, listening to the rhythm of the wheels and the locomotive’s whistle echoing in the night. It wasn’t a very pleasant image. It made me feel cold.

“No thanks,” I said. “The closest I intend to get to a freight train is the Oroville hobo jungle. And the sooner I get out of there, the better I’ll like it.”

A lock of her auburn hair had fallen over one eye, giving her a vaguely sultry look, like a redheaded Lauren Bacall. She brushed it away and took a thoughtful bite of her chicken
yasai
. “What’s a hobo jungle like, anyway?” she asked. “I’ve never been anywhere near one.”

“Good. They’re not very pretty. And not very safe either. Not everybody who beds down in them is one of your romantic vagabond types.”

“No?”

“No. Fugitives ride the rails, too—thieves, murderers, you name it. And toughs, jackrollers.”

“What’s a jackroller?”

“Somebody who rolls drunks or tramps for their money, and isn’t afraid to use violence when he does it.”

“Really? Well, you’d better be careful when you go running around up there.”

“Don’t worry, I will.”

She nodded, then looked thoughtful again. Pretty soon she said, “You know, I think my mother wrote a story about a hobo jungle once. In fact, I’m sure she did. It was published in
Clues
.”

Kerry’s mother, Cybil, was a former pulp writer, and a very good one; surprisingly, she had written some of the best hard-boiled detective stories to appear in the forties, under the male pseudonym of Samuel Leatherman. Ivan Wade, Kerry’s father, was also a former pulp writer, but he had specialized in horror fiction. I liked Cybil and hated Ivan the Terrible, primarily because he thought I was too old for Kerry—I would be fifty-four my next birthday and she would be thirty-nine—and was always after her to break off our relationship.

I said, “Do you remember the title of Cybil’s story?”

“Not offhand. I . . . wait, yes I do. It was one of those dumb titles they used to put on pulp detective stories, ‘The Case of the Stiff Bindlestiff. ”’

“Ouch,” I said.

“Pretty bad, all right. But it was a good story; it had to do with some sort of smuggling activity involving tramps and trains.”

“I’ll look it up when I get home. Was it one of her Max Ruffe stories?”

“I think it was.”

Max Ruffe was Cybil’s best pulp character, a tough, cynical, but still human private eye. Not all of her Ruffe capers were first-rate, because pulp writers had had to turn out reams of copy in order to make a living and couldn’t afford to spend much time rewriting or polishing, but the best of them put her in a league with Chandler and Hammett and the other big guns.

We ate in companionable silence for a time. Then Kerry said, “Have you thought any more about what you’re going to do about Eberhardt?”

“Some.”

“Still no decision?”

“Not yet. It’s such a damned no-win situation, no matter which way I go.”

“No-win for whom? Not for you, not if you tell him no.”

“Not as far as business is concerned, maybe. But I’ve got a feeling it would put an end to our friendship.”

“If it does it’s his fault, not yours.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Does his friendship really mean that much to you? After all that’s happened?”

“Come on,” I said, “you know the answer to that. I don’t have many close friends; and I’m not the kind to give one up just because he made a mistake. Besides, Eberhardt needs all the support he can get right now.”

Kerry nodded; she understood. “If you decide that you do have to take him in with you,” she said, “couldn’t you do it on a trial basis? Three months or so, to see how it works out?”

“I thought of that. But I don’t think he’d go for it. It would look like I’m testing him.”

“Well, what if you take him in and it doesn’t work out? You’d have to dissolve the partnership to protect yourself. And that would probably end the friendship anyway .”

“I know. But at least I’d have tried. And maybe it
would
work out. You never know for sure until you try.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“No,” I said. “We’re different people, Eb and me; we don’t look at life or the detective business the same way. The reason we’ve got along so well all these years is that we’ve only seen each other two or three times a month, only worked together occasionally since I left the force. Put us together on a daily basis, his way of doing things would clash with mine. We’d probably wind up at each other’s throats.”

“Then the best thing to do is to say no right now. Don’t put either of you through it.”

“So I keep telling myself. The problem is, I can’t seem to get up enough gumption to go through with it.”

There was nothing more to say on the subject, not now, and we let it drop. Any further discussion would only have depressed me and I did not want to spoil the evening for either of us.

We drank a pot of tea and had
katsetura
, a Japanese sponge cake, for dessert. When we left the restaurant we went for a leisurely drive through Golden Gate Park, out past Sea Cliff and up into the Presidio to where you could look out over Baker Beach and the Golden Gate Bridge and the entrance to the Bay. It was a nice night, clear except for scattered wisps of cloud, and we lingered up there until well after dark. By the time I drove back crosstown and stopped the car in front of Kerry’s apartment building on Diamond Heights, it was after ten o’clock.

“I think I’d better say good night right here,” I said. “I want to get an early start for Oroville in the morning.”

“Poor baby. You’re tired, huh?”

“A little.”

“Just want to go home and crawl into bed.”

“Yeah.”

“Alone.”

“Yeah.”

“And go right to sleep?”

“Maybe I’ll read a little first . . .”

“Cybil’s story about the stiff bindlestiff?”

“If I have that issue of
Clues
. ”

“Clues,” she said. “You detectives are always after clues of one kind or another.”

“If you say so.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something. There are clues and then there are clues. And you never know where you might find them. There are clues right
here
, for instance.”

“Right where?”

“Right here in this car, right now.”

“What kind of clues?”

“The kind that’ll lead you to a body, if you pick up on them.”

“Whose body?”

“Mine,” she said. “Come on up for a few minutes, detective. See if you can find the body.”

“Well,” I said, weakening, “I guess I could do that. But just for a few minutes.”

“Sure. Just for a few minutes.”

So I went upstairs with her, and found the body all right, and it was a few
hours
before I got out again, long past midnight. I didn’t do any hunting for
Clues
when I got home to my flat; I was too tired to turn on the damn light.

O
roville was a small town with a permanent population of around ten thousand, set up against the foothills of the Sierra Nevada at the western edge of the Mother Lode. It had been built on an ancient river bed so rich in gold that a dredging outfit had once offered to buy and move every one of its buildings in order to mine the ground. Mining had been its principal industry from the days of the Gold Rush through the early 1900s. Then thousands of acres of olive, nut, and a variety of fruit trees had been planted in the surrounding area, and canning and packing companies moved in, and the Western Pacific established its freight yards on the outskirts. That brought in a substantial number of itinerant fruit pickers, a good many of whom were hoboes catching free rides on the freights that passed through.

And then, in 1967, the state of California had completed construction of the huge Oroville Dam on the Feather River that wound down through the town. This had created Oroville Lake a few miles to the north, which was popular with boaters, fishermen, and family day-trippers. During the warm-weather months, the itinerant fruit pickers were joined by droves of tourists; and summer-home and retirement communities had sprouted and flourished like weeds in the vicinity of the dam.

The town itself hadn’t changed much, though. If anything, it seemed to be deteriorating. It was quiet and tree-shaded, but the last time I had passed through, a little over a year ago on a fishing trip to the north fork of the Feather River, the old downtown area had had a neglected look and many of the homes were run-down. Recently there had been some trouble with a neo-Nazi faction in the area, which may or may not have had something to do with the fact that not many people were on the streets. Most of those who were out were grouped at the small shopping centers and fast-food places along Oro Dam Boulevard, the main through road. The overall feeling of the place was a little depressing.

I pulled into Oroville a few minutes before eleven on Thursday morning, after a nonstop, two-and-a-half-hour drive east to Sacramento and then north on Highway 70 through Marysville. It was hot up there, muggy, with a high cloud cover that gave the sky an unpleasant milky cast and the sun the look of a cataracted eye. The weather, the sky, and that leaden aura made me hope I would be on my way out of here again pretty soon.

I stopped at a Mobil station on Oro Dam Boulevard for gas and directions to the Western Pacific yards. They weren’t far away; I made a right-hand turn on Lincoln two blocks up and drove less than a mile before the freight yards appeared off on my right.

Ahead, a side road branched in that direction and paralleled the yards. On this side of the fork was a corrugated-iron building, painted a sort of mustard yellow and set back off the road behind a wide gravel lot; a sign in front proclaimed it to be the Guiding Light Rescue Mission. The article in yesterday’s
Examiner
had said that Oroville’s main hobo jungle was located near the mission.

I swung onto the side road. On the left, facing the Western Pacific facility, were several blocks of near-slum houses whose only redeeming features seemed to be an abundance of trees and other vegetation that softened their squalid lines; at least some of them, I thought, would belong to past and present railroad workers. The yards stretched out for a good fifth of a mile—an intricate network of tracks and sidings, a long roundhouse, corrugated-iron sheds, repair stalls, water and fuel tanks, overhead strings of sodium vapor lights, and switch engines and out-of-service boxcars, flats, tankers, and refrigerator cars. Near the entrance was a trailer that I took to be the yardmaster’s office. Beyond to the southwest were empty fields of dry brown grass, with bunched-up sections of rocky hillocks, thick underbrush, and wilted-looking live oaks and conifers. Somewhere over there, hidden by hummocks and brush, was the hobo jungle.

The road petered out a short way past the entrance to the yards, at a gate that barred access to a main line of tracks. I turned around and drove back to the fork and parked on the side of the road next to a dusty field. I walked across the field, then crossed another line of tracks to a shallow ditch. It was hot and still over here. You could hear faint noises coming from the freight yards; there weren’t any trains running at the moment. When I looked over the terrain to the east, to where the distant forested slopes of the Sierra loomed up dark and indistinct, the glare of the sun coming through that milky haze was almost blinding.