Bindlestiff nd-10

by Bill Pronzini

  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.

  Chapter 21

  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 fi
gures 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.

  A couple of hundred yards beyond the Glen Ellen turnoff, I noticed a sign at the edge of a private road that said: VINELAND WINERY PREMIUM SONOMA VALLEY WINES • TASTING ROOM. Runquist’s place. I could see it as I passed by, an old brick building coated with ivy, nestled back in a grove of trees with the vineyards stretching away at the rear.

  The turnoff I wanted was a mile or so farther on. Trinity Road. The only road you could take from the Valley of the Moon to the Napa Valley across the Mayacamas Mountains that divided the two-a distance of maybe fifteen miles, I knew, because I had driven it a couple of times in the past. The mountains were heavily wooded, dotted with occasional small vineyards over toward the Napa side, and offered some spectacular views of one valley or the other, depending on which end of the road you were on. So naturally people with money had begun building secluded homes up there several years back; a lot more were being built even in these economically depressed times by people like Hannah Peterson and Harry Runquist.

  Trinity Road, a narrow two-laner, began to wind upward almost immediately after I made the turn off Highway 12. There were some switchbacks in it, too, because the ascent was so steep and rapid. I had gone less than a mile when the vista began to open up on my right and behind me as I climbed. It was pretty spectacular, all right. The vineyards, the little villages here and there, and in the distance, rising dark against the sky, the Sonoma Mountains that bounded the valley to the west.

  I pretty much had Trinity Road to myself. There weren’t any other cars going in my direction, and I only passed one heading the other way. I kept one eye on the odometer, because Runquist had told me the house he and Hannah were building, or rather the lane that led to it, was exactly 3.2 miles from the Highway 12 intersection. It was the only private road within several hundred yards, he’d said. And to make sure I didn’t miss it, there was a whitewashed gate between two mossy old stone cairns at the foot of it.

  I had no trouble; I saw the lane and the gate and the stone cairns as soon as the odometer clicked off 3.2 miles. I slowed, swung over onto it, stopped in front of the gate. Fir and oak trees grew dense and in close to both Trinity Road and the lane here; all I could see ahead and on either side was a narrow ribbon of crushed gravel that curled away to the left, then vanished into the woods.

  When I got out and went over to the gate I found that it wasn’t locked, just fastened with a spring-type latch. I swung it open; drove through and kept on along the lane. There was not much point in reclosing the gate while I was on the property.

  The lane hooked through the trees for maybe a hundred yards before it emerged into a good-sized clearing. The far left-hand side of the clearing fell away into a long slope covered with chaparral and scrub pine; that was where the house was being built. It was not difficult to understand why Hannah and Runquist had picked this spot. There was a mostly unobstructed view of the valley from Kenwood on the north to El Verano on the south.

  I parked on the near side of the house. It was almost half-finished and bigger than the kind you usually saw up in the mountains. Hannah would have insisted on that, I thought, for show, if for no other reason. The side deck was a good twenty feet wide and jutted out over the slope on steel support girders; the railing for it hadn’t been built yet. The back half of the place was still an open mini-forest of vertical beams. On the grassy earth in front and alongside were stacks of two-by-twos and two-by-fours, sheets of plywood, roofing shingles, bricks, and other building materials.

  There wasn’t anything else to see from where I was, no sign of anybody or that anybody had been here recently other than the construction people. After a few seconds I got out into a light mountain breeze that carried the smells of pine and chaparral and cut lumber. Some bees made buzzing noises in a patch of clover nearby; birds chattered at each other in the trees. Otherwise, the clearing was wrapped in that soft kind of stillness you only find in the country.

  I went over to the rear of the house, up onto the deck. The floor was empty except for a handful of forgotten nails; equally empty were the unfinished rooms inside. I made my way through the forest of beams anyway, past the skeleton of a massive fireplace and into the roofed-over front section. Most of the walls were up in there, and another fireplace was nearing completion in what was probably the master bedroom. A stack of bricks and a wooden mortar tray were on the floor in front of the hearth.

  So was a quilted nylon sleeping bag. And a paper bag that had come from Jack in the Box. And an empty half-pint bottle of sour-mash whiskey.

  Those things erased any doubt that Hannah Peterson had come up here on Friday night. And it looked as though she hadn’t been alone when she got here; she wasn’t the type to eat fast-food or to drink sour mash straight out of a bottle. Or, as Runquist had said, to spend the night in a sleeping bag in an unfinished house. Unless she was forced to, I thought. Had she spent the night here with Raymond? There was only the one sleeping bag. Well, if she had slept with him she’d done it under duress and it amounted to rape. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t enough of a coldhearted bitch to willingly sleep with the man who’d just murdered her father.

  The sleeping bag was zippered all the way open and folded back; I could see without touching it that there wasn’t anything inside. I sat on my haunches and used thumbs and forefingers to open the paper sack. It contained what I’d expected it to-the remains of a fast-food supper. From the feel of the lone french fry, it had been there a while.

  I straightened and took a turn around the room. There wasn’t anything else to find in there; or in any of the remaining rooms. The way it seemed, Raymond had spent Friday night here, with or without Hannah, and then beat it sometime yesterday. But Hannah had been back at her place in Sonoma at nine A.M.; if Raymond was the one in the dark-green car that had pulled into her driveway, where and how had he got the car? And what was he doing at her house? And what had Hannah been loading into her Toyota?

  I didn’t like the way things were shaping up. It had all appeared to be coming together, and maybe it still was, but I was beginning to get a sense of twists and turns and hidden hazards, like a bad road on a dark night with a bridge down somewhere up ahead.

  Outside again, I went around to the other side of the house. More building materials; a lightweight aluminum roofer’s ladder leaning against the wall; one of those portable outhouses you see nowadays on construction sites. Across thirty yards of grassy open space, at the edge of another patch of woods, were a tumbledown shed and what was left of an old stone well. The shed and the well, and those ancient, moss-caked cairns down at the foot of the lane, told me somebody else had lived on this property before Hannah and Runquist purchased it. But not in a good long while, judging from the condition of that shed. There had probably been a house here, too, that had had to be razed before they could start putting up the new one.

  Another lane, or a continuation of the one from Trinity Road, cut through the trees over there; from where I stood I couldn’t see where it led to. I looked at it for a few seconds. Then I crossed to the edge of the clearing and looked at it some more, closer up.

  What I saw deepened my growing sense of uneasiness. This lane hadn’t been used much; its surface was all but obliterated by a thick carpeting of pine needles and oak leaves and rotting humus. But there were faint parallel marks in the carpet now, as if a car had gone along there recently. A clump of tall grass that grew at the clearing’s rim had been crushed, too, and the soft earth underneath showed the clear imprint of a tire tread.


  Maybe one of the builders had driven over here for some reason, I thought. Except that the imprint was narrow and fairly shallow, not the kind a heavy vehicle like a pickup truck or van would make. It was the tread of a passenger car’s tire, and a small passenger car at that.

  I went along the lane, walking in the middle, listening to the bird sounds and the dry brittle cracking of the leaves and needles underfoot. Feeling a slow gathering of tension across my neck and shoulders. The lane made a sharp dogleg to the left after twenty yards, extended another twenty after that, and petered out at a massed jumble of decayed boards and creepers and shrubs that rose up at the base of a sheer rock wall. It had once been a building of some kind-a small barn, maybe, or a chicken coop-but that had been long ago.

  To the left there were not many bushes, just a lot of grass that grew thick and knee-high. The two parallel tracks that hooked through it, around to the rear, were plainly visible. I knew what I was going to find as soon as I saw those tracks, and when I got around behind the decayed building I found it: a car parked nose up to a blighted live oak, half-hidden there in the grass-a beige Toyota Tercel, license plate 735-NNY. Hannah Peterson’s car.

  The windows were all rolled up; I bent to peer through the one in the driver’s door first, then the one in the rear door. The interior was empty, nothing at all on the seats or the floor or the dashboard or the rear-window deck. But the keys were still hanging from the ignition slot.

  I got out my handkerchief, wrapped it around my right hand, and tried the driver’s door. It wasn’t locked. I leaned in and punched the button to open the glove compartment. A map of Sonoma County, a map of California, a plastic envelope containing the car’s registration and owner’s manual, two unopened packages of Marlboro cigarettes, and a small flashlight. I shut the compartment, looked around in front and back another time without finding anything. Then, still using the handkerchief, I slid the keys out of the ignition and went around to the rear and opened the trunk.