Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “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.

  Chapter 5

  Oroville 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 grou
ped 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.

  Crossing the ditch, I went up through thirty yards of barren earth strewn with rocks. A path had been worn through the dry brown grass beyond, angling upward over one of the hummocks; I moved along there. I still didn’t see or hear anybody—not until I was halfway across the top of the hummock. Then, a short distance away on my left, where the terrain flattened out again and there were the remains of several campfires, I spotted a man standing in front of a scrub pine.

  At first I couldn’t tell what he was doing; but as I moved closer, I realized he was shaving. There was a broken piece of mirror attached to the tree by a piece of string, and he was peering into it as he scraped at his face with a straight razor. He wasn’t using any lather. Just the razor and some water from a tin can he held in his other hand.

  I walked up on one side of him, slowly, so that he could see me coming in the mirror. But he didn’t turn. And he didn’t quit scraping the razor over his cheek. He was a big guy, with not much hair and a roll of fat on his neck that bulged over the collar of a faded blue T-shirt. He looked about forty.

  Five paces from him I stopped and said, “Morning. Mind if I talk to you for a minute?”

  No answer. He dipped the razor blade into the tin can, shook the water and beard stubble off it, and went right on shaving.

  “Excuse me,” I said, a little louder. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  Still no answer. The scrape of the blade was audible in the stillness.

  “Look, mister,” I said, “I know you can see me in that mirror. Are you deaf or what?”

  He took the razor away from his face, dunked it in the can again, shook it—and then, in unhurried movements, he pivoted in my direction. His eyes had a bloody look, and there was something a little wild about them; they stared right through me.

  “Fuck off, ’bo,” he said.

  The words came out quiet, without any heat, but they were thick with menace just the same. The skin along my back tightened. I didn’t like those eyes, and I didn’t like the way he was holding that razor. He was nobody to prod; he was nobody I wanted to deal with at all.

  I said, “Sure, ’bo,” in the same kind of voice he’d used, and took a couple of steps away from him to my right. He didn’t move, watching me. I put my back to him, a little tensely, and went past a couple of the cold campfires to where the path cut between some shrubs. Nothing happened. I made myself walk without looking back until I came up onto another piece of high ground. When I turned my head he was facing the mirror again, working the razor over his chin—just a fellow having himself a quiet morning shave.

  A short distance ahead I came to another clearing. This one was occupied by two men sprawled in the shade of a live oak. One of them was leaning against a propped-up backpack, the kind campers use, and the other was lying with his head pillowed on a bedroll.

  The one leaning against the backpack saw me first; he said something to the other man, and they both got to their feet in wary movements. I hesitated before I approached them, feeling just as wary. But they didn’t look particularly dangerous, and I did not see any potential weapons; I went ahead. They were standing shoulder to shoulder when I reached them, watching me with eyes that were neither friendly nor unfriendly. A couple of more or less harmless tramps, these two. As long as nobody did anything to rile them up.

  “Howdy, gents,” I said. “You been around here long, have you?”

  They were still sizing me up. Even though I was wearing an old pair of slacks and a chambray work shirt—you didn’t go mucking about in a hobo jungle dressed in a suit and tie—they knew I wasn’t one of their fraternity.

  “What’s it to you?” the taller of the two said, finally.

  “I’m trying to find a man who was here two days ago. Hobo named Charles Bradford, on his way to Washington to pick apples.”

  “Yeah?”

  “His daughter’s trying to locate him. For family reasons.” I dug out the photograph I had clipped from the Examiner and passed it over. “Bradford’s the man on the far left.”

  The two tramps studied the photo. “Don’t know him,” the tall one said. “You, Hank?”

  “No,” Hank said.

  “We just rolled in this morning, mister. Headed south. You better talk to one of the residenters.”

  “You mean hoboes who live here permanently?”

  “Yeah. Over that way.” He pointed to the southeast. “There’s a gully. You’ll find it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’d walk in careful if I was you. They don’t take much to outsiders.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  He gave the clipping back to me, and I went off to the southeast through tall grass that was so dry it crunched like eggshells underfoot. The gully was a good three hundred yards away—shallow, wide, with underbrush and scrub pine growing along both banks. Clustered at the bottom were half a dozen one-room shacks made out of wooden frames and tar paper, a couple of them with corrugated-iron roofs; some had badly hung doors, some had nothing more than a flap of heavy tar paper across their entrances, and none had glass windows. I didn’t see any power lines; they probably didn’t have running water, either.

  There was a communal fireplace in the center of the little complex, and sitting around it on rickety chairs that had no doubt come out of a trash dump were three old men—bindlestiffs who had retired because of old age or health reasons, but who wanted to liv
e out their lives near the railroad. They had been passing around a near-empty gallon jug of white port wine, but they quit doing that when they saw me.

  I made my way down a narrow path into the gully, my shoes sliding on the loose earth. None of the three men got up and none of them moved; they just sat there, stiff and staring, like blocks of gnarled old wood. They were all in their late sixties or early seventies, and one of them, the biggest and maybe the youngest, was black. Like the previous two tramps I’d talked to, their expressions were guardedly neutral.

  I pulled up about ten feet from them. “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I could use some help. I’m looking for—”

  “Help’s something we’re fresh out of,” the black man said. He had white hair and a grizzled white beard, and he must have weighed in at two hundred and fifty pounds, not much of it fat. The thumb on his left hand was missing. “Try the mission. They got lots of it, so they say.”

  “Sympathy, too,” one of the white guys said. “Plenty of help and plenty of sympathy.”

  “Sympathy, hell,” the other white guy said. “You know where you find sympathy? In the dictionary between shit and syphillis.”

  All three of them laughed. Then they quit laughing and looked at me, and the black one said, “This here’s private property, man. You trespassing.”

  I reached into my back pocket, being careful about it so they didn’t get any wrong ideas about what I was going for, and took out my wallet. Inside I found a ten-dollar bill and held it up where they could see it. Then I nodded toward the gallon jug the black guy was holding on his lap.

  “You’re almost out of wine,” I said. “Hot day like this, a man gets pretty thirsty.”

  None of them said anything, but they were watching the money.

  “Ten bucks buys a cold jug for each of you,” I said.

  They stirred, exchanged quick looks. The black man asked, “What else you figure it buys?”

  “A little information, that’s all. I’m looking for a hobo named Charles Bradford. He came through here two days ago on his way north and managed to get his picture taken.” I put my wallet away and held up the newspaper clipping.