Bindlestiff nd-10

by Bill Pronzini

  I shut off the machine, shut off the lights, and started to shed my clothes. I had just enough time to get out of my pants before the bed reached up like a hungry lover and gathered me in.

  Chapter 15

  Somewhere, a long way off, bells were ringing. I crawled down the steep embankment, trying to get away from the train that was bearing down on me. A guy who looked like Lester Raymond was leaning out of the open door of one of the boxcars, screaming obscenities about death; he smelled like burning flesh. Then he jumped off, and disappeared-poof, like magic stuff-and over the sound of the bells the hobo named Flint said, “You want sympathy? Hey, man, sympathy is what you find in the dictionary between shit and syphillis.” Then Raymond was there again, beating my head against something hard and unyielding. Then I woke up.

  The ringing bells belonged to the telephone. I fumbled the handset out of its cradle, dropped it, picked it up off the floor, and said, “Yuh?”

  “Are you all right?” Kerry’s voice said worriedly. “My God, I just saw the morning papers.”

  “Yuh,” I said again. “I’m all right.”

  “Are you sure? You don’t sound all right…”

  “You woke me up. What time’s it?”

  “Nine o’clock. The papers said you got a concussion…”

  “Mild concussion. I’m fine, don’t worry.”

  “Don’t worry? You idiot, of course I worry. What is it with you and murder cases? You just get your license back, you get a new client, and bang, here you are all over the news again. And with a concussion besides.”

  I was awake now. I sat up, wiggled my hips until I had my back braced against the headboard, and ran my free hand over my face; it made a sound like a cat scratching on a door. My head didn’t hurt too much, which was a surprise. Neither did my bad arm. I was in great shape, all right. Another couple of days, I thought sourly, and I would be well enough to go out and play a strenuous game of checkers with the other old farts in the park.

  “Don’t lecture me, okay?” I said. “I can’t deal with lectures until I’ve had my morning coffee.”

  “One of these days you’re going to stay out of trouble on a case, and I’m going to be so surprised I won’t believe it.”

  “Did you hear what I said about lectures?”

  “You can be so damned exasperating sometimes,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with you.”

  “I can think of a couple of things.”

  “Hah.”

  “Hey, can I help it if things keep happening to me? If I don’t have any luck?”

  “No luck? You’ve got more luck than ten people, or else you wouldn’t still be walking around in one piece.”

  “Nuts,” I said. “Did the law get Lester Raymond yet?”

  “If they did it was too late to make the papers.”

  Damn, I thought. Could Raymond pull off the same kind of vanishing act as he had fifteen years ago? The odds were against it. The first time around he’d been as lucky as Kerry claimed I was; this time the FBI would catch up to him before he could go to ground long enough to establish a new identity. It was only a matter of time.

  Kerry said, “Are you going to lose your license again?”

  “Huh? What makes you ask that? Is there something in the papers?”

  “No, there’s nothing in the papers. But my God, you just got it back and now this. What if they take it away from you again?”

  “They won’t do that.”

  “No? How do you know?”

  I didn’t know, but I said, “That’s what they told me up in Oroville. The FBI and the local cops. They’re not holding it against me that Raymond got away.”

  “Well, if that’s what they told you…” She sounded relieved, which was more than I could say for myself at the moment. Then, after a couple of seconds of silence, she laughed wryly and without much humor.

  I said, “What’s funny?”

  “Oh, I was just remembering something you said to me the other night. About how you’d never hop a freight, and the closest you intended to get to one was the Oroville hobo jungle. Famous last words. You did hop a freight-and you did it just like a bindlestiff.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You could have ended up a stiff bindlestiff, too, like the character in Cybil’s pulp story, if Lester Raymond had been a little stronger.”

  “Are we back on the lecture circuit again?”

  “Not if I’ve made my point.”

  “I got it the first time around. I’m fairly bright that way, you know.”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “How does your head feel?”

  “Not too bad today. But the bandage they put on probably needs to be changed. You want to come over and play nurse for a while?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether or not you’ve got any ideas about playing doctor.”

  “Lady,” I said, “I don’t think I could play doctor today if my life depended on it. My caduceus is out of whack along with everything else; it might be days before it’s working again.”

  She laughed. “Okay, comedian. Go put some coffee on; I’ll be there pretty soon.”

  I got out of bed and doddered into the kitchen and put the coffee on. By the time it was ready, I had taken a quick shower, shaved two days’ growth of stubble off my face, and got my pants on. I was just pouring myself a cup when the telephone rang again.

  Eberhardt. “I just been reading about you,” he said.

  “You and everybody else.”

  In the old days he would have made some smart-ass remark about my penchant for trouble. But the old days were gone. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Not too bad, considering.”

  “FBI give you a hard time?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oroville police?”

  “No. I don’t think this is going to land me in hot water with the State Board, Eb. Everybody up there was pretty decent to me.”

  “Good. Listen, you got some free time this afternoon?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. Why?”

  “I thought you might want to stop over. Shoot the breeze a little.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. The partnership thing.

  “It’s kind of lonely around here,” he said. “I could use some company. What do you say?”

  I wanted to say no; I wanted to say, “Look, Eb, I haven’t had time to think about you and me working together, I haven’t made up my mind yet.” But I couldn’t do it. All I said was, “Sure, okay. Early afternoon? Kerry’s on her way over this morning…”

  “Any time you want. I’ll be here.”

  He rang off, and I replaced the handset and sat down on the edge of the bed and sipped my coffee. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken, I thought. Then I sighed and played back the message tape on the answering machine, so I could write down the telephone number Hannah Peterson had left yesterday. Of the two Bradford sisters, she seemed the easiest to deal with first.

  But when I dialed the number, there was no answer. I let it ring a dozen times, just to be sure, before I pushed the button down.

  I looked up Arleen Bradford’s number in my book, steeled myself, and called her to get that conversation over with. Only she wasn’t home either. After three rings there was a click, and her recorded voice said, “This is Miss Arleen Bradford speaking. I am not available at present. Please leave your name and number, and I will return your call.”

  So I left my name and number, feeling somewhat relieved. Feeling somewhat cynical too. You talk to my machine, I talk to yours. Everything was so damned impersonal these days; machines were taking over. “Hello. This is John Doe’s computer calling to hire your computer to investigate Jane Smith’s computer. Click. Whirr. Clang.”

  I took my coffee back into the kitchen. There were some eggs and a package of bacon in the fridge; I cooked up some of each, and sat down to eat them. And then the downstairs door buzzer went off.

  I thought it was Kerry; she ha
d a key, but sometimes she rang the bell anyway from force of habit. I went out and punched the button that released the foyer door lock, without bothering to ask through the intercom who it was. Then I opened the door and waited for her to come up the stairs.

  But it wasn’t Kerry who appeared in the hallway moments later. It was Jeanne Emerson.

  I blinked at her, standing there in my undershirt with my belly hanging over the waistband of my pants. I sucked it in as she approached, for all the good that did; I still felt fat and old and sloppy. She was dressed in a pair of slacks and a tank top that did nice things for her breasts, and she had a big portfolio case in one hand. Her black hair glistened as if she had rubbed it with some kind of oil. The fragrance that came from her as she approached was spicy and exotic, full of Oriental mystery-or so my nose and my hot little brain imagined.

  “I was hoping you’d be home,” she said, smiling in a grave sort of way. “Do you mind my stopping by?”

  “Uh, no,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “I wasn’t sure if I should, after what happened to you in Oroville. I probably should have called first, but…”

  “No, it’s all right.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Sure. Sure thing.”

  I stepped aside and she brushed past me; that spicy perfume or whatever it was tickled my nose again and put funny thoughts into my head. When I turned to shut the door I saw her wince. She was staring at the back of my skull where they’d shaved off some of the hair and stuck the bandage on.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said.

  “I hope not. Do you have much pain?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s good.” She studied me speculatively for a moment. Then she smiled again, a different kind of smile this time. “Do you know what a sin-eater is?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “A sin-eater. A person who takes on the sins of others, absorbs them for purposes of absolution. It’s an old Cornish superstition.”

  “Is that what you think I am? A sin-eater?”

  “In a way,” she said. “But it’s not the sins of the individual you keep taking on; it’s the sins of the world. In microcosm, of course.”

  She’s kidding me, I thought. Or is she? In any case, she was making me feel self-conscious. Here I was, standing around in my underwear thinking dirty thoughts, and she was nominating me for sainthood again.

  “Well, uh,” I said, and stopped because I couldn’t think of anything to say. Then I was aware again of the portfolio she was carrying. “What have you got in there?” I asked her, not very brightly.

  “Oh, yes-some photos I did for a piece on secondhand bookstores a couple of years ago. They’ll give you an idea of the sort of thing I want to do with your pulps.” She was looking at the shelves of them as she spoke. “That is an impressive collection,” she said.

  “Well, I’ve been at it a long time.”

  She opened the portfolio and took out a handful of eight-by-ten glossies and put them on the coffee table. “These are black-and-white,” she said. “I was going to do a black-and-white study, but all those bright colors are wonderful. Color would be much better.”

  She went to the nearest of the shelves and I waddled over there after her; if I’d had a tail it probably would have been wagging. I watched her take down one of the pulps that I’d arranged so their covers faced into the room, slip it out of its protective plastic bag, and study it.

  “This is fantastic,” she said. “I didn’t know they had covers like this.”

  What she was holding was an early issue of Dime Mystery with cover art that depicted three half-naked young girls tied up in a room full of red firelight, an old hag with a gnarled cane and an evil leer, and a drooling Neanderthal type, whose name was probably Igor, dragging another attractive young victim into the lair. The issue’s featured stories were “Murder Dyed Their Lips” by Norvell W. Page and “Slaves of the Holocaust” by Paul Ernst.

  “It’s typical of the shudder pulps back in the thirties,” I told her.

  “Shudder pulps?”

  “Also known as weird menace pulps. Sex-and-sadism stuff, though pretty mild by today’s standards.”

  “Are women always treated so shabbily in these magazines?”

  “The torture stuff? Pretty much, I’m afraid.”

  She put the copy back on the shelf. “Then that’s something I’ll want to touch on in the article. Contrast the attitudes of the thirties with those of today.”

  I said, “About that article, Ms. Emerson…”

  “Jeanne. Now don’t tell me you’re going to say no.”

  “Well…”

  She stepped closer to me and put her hand on my arm and looked up into my face. It was an imploring look, but there was intimacy in it, too. That and the nearness of her and that damned musky perfume were enough to start me drooling like old Igor on the pulp cover.

  And so of course the door opened and Kerry walked in.

  She’d used her key; and she’d done it quietly enough so that neither Jeanne Emerson nor I had heard it in the latch. She started to sing out a hello, stopped dead when she saw us. Jeanne let go of my arm and backed up a step. I just stood there like a dolt.

  The three of us looked at one another. The expression on Kerry’s face said: What’s she doing here? The expression on Jeanne Emerson’s face said the same thing. Christ only knew what the expression on my face said.

  Nobody spoke for what seemed like a long time. Then I said, “Uh,” and “Uh” again, and finally found some words to go with the grunts: “Kerry, this is Jeanne Emerson. She’s a photojournalist, she wants to do a piece on me…”

  “I’m sure she does,” Kerry said.

  “She just dropped by to show me some photos…”

  “Mm. How do you do, Ms. Emerson?”

  “Fine, thanks. And you? Kerry, is it?”

  “Kerry Wade. I’m just dandy.”

  They smiled at each other in that overly pleasant, calculating way women have in situations like this. It made me nervous. I wanted to say something else, but anything I was liable to toss out between them would only make matters worse. I kept my mouth shut.

  Kerry said at length, “We were going to have breakfast. Won’t you join us, Ms. Emerson?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve already had my breakfast. Some other time, perhaps.”

  “I’m sure I’d enjoy it.”

  “I’m sure I would, too.” Jeanne went to the coffee table and scooped up her portfolio case. “I’ll leave these glossies here for you to look at,” she said to me. “In a day or two I’ll call you and we’ll set a time to begin shooting.”

  “Well, uh…”

  “Good-bye, Ms. Wade,” she said to Kerry. “Nice meeting you.”

  “The same here, Ms. Emerson.”

  When she was gone, Kerry looked at me for a time without saying anything. I felt like a kid who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Except that I hadn’t been. Thinking about something doesn’t mean you intend to do anything about it.

  “She came by unexpectedly,” I said. “What could I do? Tell her not to come in?”

  “Did I say anything?”

  “No. I’m just trying to explain…”

  “Why do you think you have to explain?”

  “Kerry, I told you before about Jeanne Emerson. I told you about that magazine article she wants to do…”

  “You didn’t tell me you were such good friends.”

  “We’re not good friends.”

  “It looked like you were getting to be when I came in.”

  “Nuts,” I said. “Let’s not talk about Jeanne Emerson, okay? Let’s have breakfast.”

  So we had breakfast and we didn’t talk about Jeanne Emerson. We didn’t talk about much of anything. Kerry was as overly pleasant to me as she’d been to Jeanne, which meant that there was a storm of unknown magnitude brewing inside her. I wished she would let it come out; I wished she would cloud up and
rain all over me, as they used to say. But that didn’t happen. All I got was the saccharine and the moody silence.

  Over coffee in the living room, I said, “Eberhardt called after you did; he wants me to stop over for a while this afternoon. Why don’t you come along? That’ll keep him from pestering me about the partnership thing.”

  “Oh goody, I like to be useful.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant-ah Christ. Look, we won’t stay long, and afterward we can go for a drive or something…”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve got some work to do this afternoon that I’ve been putting off.”

  “But-”

  “I’ll just change your bandage and be on my way.”

  What could I say? There wasn’t anything you could say to her when she was in one of her moods; all I could do was weather it until it passed.

  Twenty minutes later, I was alone with a new bandage on my skull and a new headache inside it. I looked at the four walls for a while. Then I sighed and put on a shirt, put on a coat, and went out and got into my car.

  And the old sin-eater headed over to Eberhardt’s place to scarf up some more sin on his long and wearying journey into sainthood.

  Chapter 16

  Eberhardt lived in Noe Valley, in an old two-storied house that had belonged to a bootlegger during Prohibition. Or so Eberhardt had told me once; he’d had a lot of beer at the time and he might have been putting me on. He’d lived there for nearly three decades, since a few months after his marriage to Dana. And he had almost died there six weeks ago.

  I found a place to park in front and went up onto the porch and rang the bell. It took him a while to answer the door, and when he did I was struck again by how much he’d changed since the bribe thing and the shooting. There was so much gray in his hair now that it looked as though it had been dusted with snow. His face, once a smooth, chiseled mixture of sharp angles and blunt planes, had a slackness to it-the beginnings of an old man’s jowliness-that made him look a dozen years older than he was. He had lost weight, too, at least fifteen pounds; he looked bony and gaunt, and the slacks and pullover he wore hung on him like old clothes on a scarecrow. When I’d asked him about the weight loss the last time I stopped by he’d tried to make a joke out of it by saying, “It’s nothing, I just been off my feed a little lately.” But that was pretty much the way it was. He just wasn’t eating the way he should, if he was eating much at all.