Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  She saw me and paused, and she must have hopped up immediately as I passed. I had only taken a half dozen more strides along the hallway when I heard her call behind me, “Hey there, sugar,” in a voice that sounded as if it had been marinating in a vat of bourbon. When I turned she was leaning against the door jamb, one hand resting on an outthrust hip; the pose was as old as time, and so was the smile on her bright red mouth. “What’s your hurry?”

  “I’m here on business,” I said.

  She laughed. “That makes two of us, sugar. Come on in when you’re through and we’ll get acquainted.”

  “I don’t have the time. Thanks anyway.”

  “Special rate for big guys like you.”

  “Uh-uh. Sorry.”

  I pivoted away and went on down the hall, looking at the numerals on the closed doors. When I got to the one with 6 on it I moved up close and put my ear against the panel. There wasn’t anything to hear. I rapped on the wood and called out, “Mr. Smith?”

  No answer.

  I knocked again, waited through another fifteen seconds of silence, then reached down and tried the knob. Locked—what else? “Mr. Smith? You in there?”

  “He’s in there, all right,” the pudgy hooker said. She hadn’t gone back inside her room; she was still leaning back there against the jamb, watching me. “But he ain’t gonna open the door.”

  “No? Why is that?”

  She came down to where I was, making a little production out of it, like a stripper coming down a burlesque-house runway. “How come you want him?” she asked in an undertone. “Don’t tell me you’re the Man?”

  “The Man” was what street people called a pusher, a dealer in drugs. “No,” I said.

  “I didn’t think so. You ain’t a cop either; I can spot a cop with my eyes shut.”

  Sure you can, honey, I thought. She was so good at spotting cops, she probably had an arrest record as long as a bad novel.

  “So what do you want with that grubby little shit in there?” she asked. “If his name is Smith, mine’s Bo Derek.”

  “It’s a private matter.”

  “Yeah, sure. Well, he ain’t gonna answer the door, like I said. But if you want to get in there and wake him up I can help you out.”

  “How?”

  “The door locks in this fleabag are all the same. You got a key to one room, you got a key to all of ’em.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yep. You can use my key, sugar.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten bucks.” She grinned and stroked her hip suggestively. “Put another twenty with it and you can use me too.”

  Everybody had a hand out these days; money was everything, money was life itself, and nobody seemed to much give a damn how he got it. The “Screw-’em-all-except-me” philosophy was becoming universal. These were hard times, all right. If you didn’t watch out for your own ass, nobody else was going to do it for you.

  I got a sawbuck out of my wallet, waggled it in front of her nose, and said cynically, “The key, sugar. Just the key.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” she said, and I thought: The hell I don’t. But she turned back toward her room, disappeared inside for a few seconds, reappeared carrying the key. I let her have the ten in exchange for it, slid the key into the latch, turned it until the tumbler clicked, and then withdrew it and gave it back to her.

  “So long,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

  “You too, sugar.”

  She returned to her room, jiggling her fleshy hips to let me see again what she thought I was missing. I waited until she went inside and shut the door; then I faced number six. And rotated the knob and shoved the door inward, cautiously, hanging back on the balls of my feet just in case.

  But I didn’t think there was going to be any trouble—and there wasn’t. He was sprawled on his back on the bed, a skinny kid of about twenty-five with sallow skin, a concave chest, pipestem legs, and filthy yellow hair that lay in long matted ropes over the pillow. Even though he was conscious and his eyes were staring straight at me, he didn’t know I was there. He didn’t know he was there either: he was about as stoned as you can get. Little giggles came out of him like invisible bubbles out of one of those kids’ soap toys. The room was hot and sticky and foul with the sweet-acid smell of marijuana.

  I shut the door, breathing shallowly through my mouth, and went over to a window that looked out on an airshaft and opened it to let in some fresh air. Then I moved over by the bed. The ashtray on the nightstand was full of roach butts, and there were two fresh joints in an empty can of Prince Albert tobacco. The way it looked, he’d managed to sell the stolen lantern and tools, scored a load of grass from one of the local suppliers, and come here to do some solo flying; that would explain why he hadn’t left the room for two days, why he’d paid for both days in advance.

  But judging from the number of butts in the ashtray, and how stoned he was, he’d been smoking something stronger than plain grass. Marijuana soaked in angel dust, probably, I thought. Angel dust was a chemical compound called PCP, an animal tranquilizer, and it was not very expensive. What it was was dangerous. People had suffered brain damage and any number of other side-effects from taking it.

  That didn’t stop dopers like this one from using it, though, because it was supposed to give you a terrific high. They were the new lost generation, these kids, drifting from one place to another, looking for something they’d never find in a hazy half-world of drugs and dreams. Highs were all that mattered to them; escape from a reality they feared or hated or were bewildered by. Only they never got high enough, because there wasn’t anything on this earth that could elevate them to where they wanted to be. And sooner or later, if they didn’t get help or wise up on their own, they would take a trip—real or drug-induced—that they wouldn’t come back from.

  The kid wasn’t wearing anything except a pair of dirty shorts; his pants were on the floor, along with his sheepskin vest and a pair of heavy motorcycle boots. I picked up the pants, found a wallet in one of the back pockets. There was no money in it, but it did contain a California driver’s license with his picture on it. He had to carry the ID in case the police rousted him, because without it he’d be arrested on the spot. The license said that his name was Stanley McGhan and that once upon a time he had lived in El Cajon, down by San Diego.

  I put the wallet away, sat on the edge of the bed, and slapped him open-handed across the face. He didn’t move and he didn’t stop giggling. I swatted him again, and kept on swatting him, rhythmically, back and forth, back and forth, until my arm got tired and his face glowed a fiery red. The giggles quit first, after about five minutes; then he stirred, tossed his head around on the pillow; and finally he began to come out of it.

  As soon as his eyes focused on me, and enough of his memory came back for him to remember where he was, he started to struggle. I said, “Take it easy, Stanley,” and slapped him again. Fear danced on his face; he tried to lunge off the bed. But the drugs still had control of his motor responses, so that he might have been trying to fight his way up through water. It was pathetic, and it made me feel angry—at him for screwing up his life, and at myself for sitting here and pounding on him like some sort of surrogate father.

  I slapped him another time, threw him back flat on the bed and pinned him with my weight. “Listen to me, Stanley,” I said. “I’m not a cop and I’m not here after your dope. You understand?”

  I had to repeat it twice more before it registered. He quit struggling then and his mouth opened and closed a couple of times like a beached trout’s. “Who’re you, man?” he said. “What you doin’ in my room?”

  “I’m looking for the man you had a fight with at the hobo jungle. Right after you came off the freight from Sacramento on Tuesday.”

  He heard me, all right; and his eyes were clear enough, so that he understood what I was saying. But his face twisted up as if the words made no sense to him, as if he thought he might still be hallu
cinating.

  “Thin guy,” I said, “middle fifties, wearing a charm on a chain around his neck. You wanted some of the food he was cooking and he wouldn’t give it to you, so you pulled a blade on him. Remember?”

  He remembered; you could see the relief come into his expression, because it was something that did make sense and it meant he had a grasp on sanity again. But it was fear I was looking for and the fear was gone. The memory of Charles Bradford held no terror for him, seemed to hold nothing at all for him except confusion.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “Did you see him again after the fight? Talk to him again at the hobo jungle or here in town?”

  “No. What’s goin’ on? What . . .?”

  “Think hard, Stanley,” I said. “When I leave here you don’t want me to come back. You don’t want me to smack you any more. Right?”

  “Right. Yeah.”

  “Did you see him again after the fight?”

  “No. I told you, man, no!”

  He was telling the truth, I thought. He had to be; he was still too stoned to pull off a convincing lie. I let go of him and straightened off the bed. He lay there without moving, staring up at me, his face still full of confusion. Anguish, too: he was sliding back into the real world again, where there was hassle and pain, and he didn’t like that. He didn’t like it at all.

  I looked at him a couple of seconds longer, trying to make up my mind what to do about him. But then he made a noise in his throat, halfway between a sob and another of those giggles, and rolled over and pawed the Prince Albert can off the nightstand. That made up my mind for me. I did not owe Stanley McGhan a damned thing; I owed myself and I owed the law, and that was all. I was on my way out the door when he shoved one of the remaining joints into his mouth and struck a match with trembling hands to light it.

  The pudgy hooker’s door was open again; I went on past it this time without looking inside. Downstairs, I used a public phone to call Sergeant Huddleston at the police station and told him where he could find his thief. That solved his problem for him; and that of Coleman, the yardmaster at Western Pacific. But I was still left with mine, and it was as puzzling as ever.

  What had happened to Charles Bradford?

  Chapter 8

  I stopped for a sandwich and a cup of coffee at a café on Myers Street, and it was after three o’clock when I drove into the gravel lot fronting the Guiding Light Rescue Mission. A white van with the name of the mission printed on its side was parked next to the pickup now. And the front door of the building stood open.

  I pulled in next to the van, got out, and entered a big common room, with benches along one side and some folding chairs and a dais on the other. No religious trappings except for a cross and a bronze sculpture of the Virgin Mary on the wall behind the dais. The room was deserted, but after a couple of seconds a giant of a guy materialized through a door at the far end and approached me.

  He was at least six-five and three hundred pounds, and he had a dark red beard and enormous hands; his size, the plaid shirt and corduroy trousers he wore, and the beard gave him the appearance of a lumberjack. But when he got up close you could see the missionary look—the mixture of compassion and piousness—in his eyes.

  “Good afternoon,” he said. “May I help you?”

  “I hope so. Are you the proprietor?”

  “I am. J.L. Baxter. The J.L. stands for Jerome Leon; my parents were fine people, but . . .” He shrugged and smiled quizzically at me.

  I explained who I was and why I was there, then pointed out Bradford in the newspaper photo. “Have you ever seen this man before?”

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have. I spoke to him a couple of days ago.”

  “Do you remember what time that was?”

  “Late afternoon. Around four.”

  “Did he come here to the mission?”

  “Not exactly. I was out working in my vegetable garden and he was walking across the field from the freight yards. When he saw me he detoured over.” Baxter smiled again, a little sadly this time. “I thought he might want shelter or a hot meal, but he only wanted to ask me a question.”

  “Do you mind telling me what that question was?”

  “Not at all. He wanted to know where the library was.”

  “The library?”

  “It surprised me, too,” Baxter said. “A library is not the sort of institution hoboes are generally interested in.”

  “Did he say why he wanted to go to the library?”

  “No. And I didn’t ask.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “No, nothing,” Baxter said. “He seemed a bit preoccupied and in a hurry, and he went off again as soon as I gave him directions.”

  “How do you mean, preoccupied?”

  “Oh, very much self-involved at the moment. As if he was excited about something.”

  “You haven’t seen him since then, by any chance?”

  “Not.”

  I described Stanley McGhan, but Baxter had never set eyes on anyone who looked like the streamliner; he’d only been working in his vegetable garden a few minutes when Bradford came by, he said. So he’d probably been inside when the kid passed with his stolen goods.

  I asked Baxter how to get to the library, thanked him for his time; listened to him wish me luck, and then went back out to my car. Now what the hell? I was thinking. Up to this point, everything had added up: Bradford’s fight with McGhan, the kid’s theft of the lantern and tool box, Bradford and a couple of retired tramps seeing Stanley make his getaway, Bradford deciding to be public-spirited and report the theft and then going off into the yards—all a logical sequence of events. But then it all seemed to go haywire. Bradford hadn’t talked to the yardmaster or any of the yard bulls; instead, he’d come hurrying back past the mission a little while later, excited about something and apparently on his way to the public library. Something must have happened in the yards to shift gears for him. But what? And what could a hobo possibly want at the library?

  Well, maybe somebody there could give me some answers. I started the car and went to find out.

  The library wasn’t far away, less than a mile from the mission on Lincoln two blocks east of Oro Dam Boulevard. It was a low, newish, beige-and-brown building with the words BUTTE COUNTY LIBRARY in big raised letters on the front wall. There were only three other cars in the parking lot; Oroville’s hall of learning, it seemed, wasn’t exactly a popular hangout for the residents.

  The checkout desk, L-shaped and made of blond wood, was just inside the front door. Behind it, a thin young guy with a nose like a boat hook was pasting card pockets into a stack of recent acquisitions. The only patrons I saw were an old guy sitting at one of the tables, shuffling through a stack of magazines, and a studious-looking kid browsing in the section marked NEW ARRIVALS—7-DAY BOOKS.

  I told the thin guy behind the desk what I wanted and started to show him the Examiner photo, but he said he hadn’t been on duty Tuesday afternoon; the person I wanted to see was Mrs. Kennedy, the head librarian. She was there, doing something over in the stacks, and he went and got her for me.

  Mrs. Kennedy was about sixty, silver-haired, energetic, and garrulous. She peered at the photo through a pair of reading glasses and said immediately, “Oh yes, I remember him. Frankly, I was amazed when he came in. I mean, I could see that he was a tramp—the way he was dressed and the pack he was carrying and all.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “They just don’t come in here. I mean, the library is the last place you’d expect to find a hobo.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Do you know what it was he was looking for?”

  “Well, that amazed me even more. I was at the desk and he stopped and the first thing he asked was if we keep microfilm files of old newspapers.”

  “Old newspapers?”

  “Yes. Well, I told him that we do, and he asked if the Los Angeles Times was one of them.”

  “Is it?�
�

  “Oh yes. Most libraries keep microfilms of at least one major daily newspaper, you know, and the Los Angeles Times is the standard one in small branches such as ours. We also have files of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York—”

  “Yes, ma’am. Did he ask to see the Times files?”

  “He did. The ones for the months of August and September of 1967.”

  I ruminated about that for a couple of seconds. Screwier and screwier, I thought. “Did he give you any indication of what he wanted from those files?”

  “No, he didn’t,” she said. “He studied them for twenty minutes or so, in our microfilm room. That was all.”

  Twenty minutes was hardly enough time to wade through two months’ worth of issues of a thick daily newspaper. That being the case, it would seem that Bradford had to have known more or less what he was looking for.

  “You said those files were the first thing he asked about,” I said. “Was there something else he was interested in seeing?”

  Mrs. Kennedy nodded. “The Oroville city directories for the past fifteen years. He spent another few minutes with those. Isn’t that strange?”

  “It is,” I agreed. “Very. I don’t suppose he told you why he wanted to look at the directories?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Did he ask for anything else?”

  “No. As soon as he was finished with the directories, he practically ran out of the building. He almost knocked me down and he didn’t even bother to apologize. Well, I was speechless, I really was.”

  I didn’t believe that for a minute. “Did you happen to see which direction he went?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “I was too perplexed to pay any attention.”

  I considered asking her for those same microfilm files of the L.A. Times for August and September 1967. But without more information, some clue as to what Bradford had been looking for, it would be like hunting the proverbial needle in a haystack. The same was true of the Oroville city directories. My best bet was to try to trace Bradford’s movements after he’d left the library.