Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

“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.

  “Sorry I took so long,” he said. “I was on the phone.”

  “Anybody important?”

  “No,” he said. “It was Dana.”

  I went inside and he shut the door. This was the living room, where the shooting had happened; Eb had got it right in front of the door, and I had been scorched when I came running in through the swing door from the kitchen. He’d put throw rugs over the carpet where the two of us had lain, because the rug-cleaning people hadn’t been able to get out all of the bloodstains. He was going to buy a new carpet one of these days, he’d told me, as soon as he could afford it.

  The room, the memories of that Sunday afternoon and its aftermath, made me feel uneasy all over again. I had been here four times since the shooting—it had been the same each time. I wondered if Eberhardt was plagued by the same specters, and if he was, how he could go on living here with them. And with the ghosts of his dead marriage.

  I said, “Dana called? How come?”

  “Her sister’s husband had a heart attack, he’s in intensive care over in Marin General. She thought I’d want to know. Hell, what for? My ex-brother-in-law’s an asshole; we never got along. I never heard a word out of him or Dana’s sister the whole time I was in the frigging hospital.”

  I had nothing to say.

  “She didn’t sound too good,” Eberhardt said. “Dana, I mean. And not just because of the heart attack. I think she’s having trouble with her boyfriend.”

  Dana was living with a Stanford University law professor in Palo Alto. The professor may have been the reason she’d left Eb, or he may have come into her life afterward; in any event, she’d told me in the hospital right after the gun job that she loved him.

  I said, “Why do you think that? She didn’t say anything along those lines, did she?”

  “No. But she wanted to talk; and she did some hinting around.” He made a bitter noise that was not quite a laugh. “Could be she’ll want to come crawling back one of these days.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. Dana was proud, stubborn, and independent; she was not the kind to come crawling back if her relationship ended. But I said, “Would you take her back?”

  “Hell, no. I’d kick her out on her ass.”

  “I thought you still cared for her . . .”

  “Not any more. I hate her guts.”

  He’d changed inside, too, that was the thing. He was harder now, colder, emptier. The toughness used to be tempered by compassion, but every time I talked to him these days I got the feeling he no longer cared about anybody, not even himself. Dana was part of it, but the biggest part was that bribe. He’d lost his self-respect, and he was floundering around in a sewer of guilt and shame and self-pity.

  But maybe I could haul him out. Give him a sense of purpose again; give him back his self-respect. Give him the partnership . . .

  You’re not Eberhardt’s keeper, Kerry had said to me. And You didn’t have anything to do with him being where he is now. And Isn’t what you want the important thing? She was right on all three counts. She also didn’t think it would work out; she was likely right about that too. What was the sense in giving Eberhardt the partnership if it didn’t do either of us any good?

  Back and forth, back and forth. Make up your mind, damn it, I thought. Why can’t you make up your mind?

  We went into the kitchen. Eberhardt said, “You thirsty? I got some beer in the box.”

  “I guess I could use one.”

  He opened the refrigerator and took out a couple of bottles of Henry Weinhard’s. “I’m not supposed to drink anything alcoholic yet,” he said. “Bad for my insides, the doc says, because they’re still on the mend. The hell with him, too.”

  “It’s your funeral, Eb.”

  “Damn right it is.” He gave me one of the bottles, twisted the cap off his. “Let’s go out in the yard. Not too much sun lately; might as well take advantage of it while we got it.”

  It was a small yard, enclosed by a board fence, with a Japanese elm and a barbecue pit and some bushes and a couple of pieces of outdoor furniture. We’d been out here just before the shooting, drinking beer, talking, getting ready to cook a couple of steaks; it made me faintly uneasy to be back in the yard, too.

  We sat on the outdoor furniture and drank our beers and talked about nothing much for a while. Then Eb
erhardt asked me about Charles Bradford and Lester Raymond, so I told him the way it had been—all the details, the stuff that hadn’t got into the papers.

  When I was done he said, “You’re a hell of a detective; I always said that. But your problem is, you don’t know when to quit.”

  “I’ve been a cop too long, I guess. I always want to know all the answers.”

  “You need somebody to keep an eye on you,” he said. “Before you get killed or thrown in jail. Or they take your license away permanently.”

  “Eb . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m pushing about you taking me into your agency. And you haven’t decided yet, right?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  He leaned forward in his chair. “Listen,” he said, “all I want is a chance. Just a chance. I’ll go nuts if I sit around here doing nothing much longer.”

  “What about one of the bigger agencies? You could hook up with the Pinks, with your background. They’d have more for you to do, you’d make more money . . .”

  “Yeah, pulling crappy guard duty somewhere. I don’t want that kind of job.”

  “What do you think it’s been like for me the past twenty years, Eb? A lot of hard, mostly crappy work, no glamour, and damned little money. I barely made enough to get by when things were going good.”

  “I told you before, I can bring in some business.”

  “But would it be enough to support both of us? These are tough times, you know that. I don’t see that they’re going to get much better either.”

  “If you’re going to say no,” he said, “go ahead and say it. I won’t hold it against you.”

  The hell he wouldn’t. I could see that in the hard, bitter shine of his eyes. “I’m not going to say no yet; I’m not ready to say anything yet. Give me a few more days, will you?”

  “Sure. A few more days. But I got to have something to do pretty soon or I’ll start climbing the goddamn walls.”

  Silence settled between us. But it was not the good companionable silence of the old days; it was strained, like that between two strangers.

  I broke it finally by saying, “There’s an American League playoff game on TV. You feel like watching it?”

  “Nah. Greedy jocks, greedy owners, stupid announcers—who the hell cares about professional sports these days? Not me, that’s for sure.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t have to hang around, you know,” he said. “You probably got a hot date with Kerry coming up anyway.”

  “Sure,” I lied. “That’s right.”

  “Call me when you make up your mind,” he said, without looking at me. “I won’t bug you again, meanwhile.”

  There wasn’t anything more for me to say. I nodded, gripped his shoulder, and left him sitting there in his lawn chair staring at something only he could see.

  I was in a low mood when I got back to my flat, and ten minutes on the telephone shoved it all the way to the bottom. Kerry was the first person I called, to see if she wanted to have dinner with me; she said no, she was still working and she didn’t feel much like company tonight. She sounded grumpy, so I asked, “Are you still miffed about Jeanne Emerson?” and she said, “Don’t be silly.” But then she said, “Why don’t you go have dinner with her? I’m sure she could whip up an Oriental delicacy or two for you.” After which she muttered something about talking to me later and rang off.

  So then I called Hannah Peterson’s number in Sonoma; she still wasn’t home. But Arleen Bradford was, and in a pretty emotional state. The first thing she said to me was, “It’s all your fault,” in a shrill, angry voice. “Why did you have to let Lester Raymond get away? Why couldn’t you have gone to the police?”

  “Look, Miss Bradford—”

  “He murdered my father!” She almost shouted the words, so that I had to pull the receiver away from my ear.

  “The police will get him,” I said. “He’s not going to—”

  “I won’t pay you any more money. You hear me? I won’t pay you another cent after what you did!”

  And bang, she slammed the receiver down in my ear.

  I sighed, went out of the bedroom, turned on the TV, and tried to watch the baseball game for a while. But nothing much was going on, and when one of the announcers said in response to a fielding error, “He gets paid a million dollars a year to catch popflies like that,” I got up in disgust and shut the thing off.

  I drove down to Union Street and bought myself an anchovy-and-pepperoni pizza for dinner. But by the time I drove back up the hill, found a parking place, and walked to my flat, the pizza was cold. I put it into the oven to warm it up, left it in too long, and burned the crust. Then I discovered I was out of beer.

  It was one of those days, all right. And there was only one way to deal with days like that.

  I took two aspirin for my headache and went to bed with a hot pulp.

  The telephone jarred me out of sleep on Sunday morning, just as it had on Saturday morning. The nightstand clock said a few minutes past nine. It wasn’t anybody I knew this time; a youngish-sounding male voice gave his name as Harry Runquist and then said, “I’m Hannah Peterson’s fiancé. I’m calling from Sonoma.”

  I said, stifling a yawn, “What can I do for you, Mr. Runquist?”

  “Do you know where Hannah is? You’re the last person I can think of who might know.”

  “Where she is?”

  “Because if you do, you’ve got to tell me. I’ve been half out of my head worrying about her.”

  There was a kind of controlled desperation in his voice; it made him sound hoarse. And it woke me all the way up. “I don’t know where Mrs. Peterson is,” I said. “I’ve only talked to her once and that was three days ago. How long has she been missing?”

  “Since Friday night.”

  “Have you tried calling her sister?”

  “I tried calling everybody,” Runquist said. “Nobody’s seen her, nobody knows where she might be. I even went to the police last night. They said you had to wait forty-eight hours before you could file a missing-person report. I tried to tell them about her father, about this son of a bitch Raymond, but they wouldn’t listen.”

  “What about Raymond?”

  “They said they hadn’t had any reports of him being in this area; they said I was worrying about nothing—she was upset about her father and she probably just went off somewhere to be by herself. But they don’t know Hannah. She wouldn’t do that, not without telling me.”

  “Are you saying you think Lester Raymond might be responsible for her disappearance?”

  “No. I don’t know. There’s just no other reason I can think of for her vanishing like this.”

  I remembered the telephone message I’d had from Hannah Peterson on Friday night. She had sounded pretty distraught, all right, almost pleading—and maybe frightened. But of Lester Raymond? It just didn’t make sense that he would try to harm one of Charles Bradford’s daughters.

  “You’re a detective,” Runquist said. “Maybe you could find her, find out what’s going on. I want to hire you.”

  “Well, I’m not sure that I—”

  “I love Hannah, mister,” he said, and his voice had dropped to a tense, gravelly whisper, like a man coming down with laryngitis. “I’m wild about her. And I don’t know what else to do. Somebody’s got to do something. Come up here and talk to me about it, will you? I’ll pay you whatever you want. Only for God’s sake help me find her!”

  What can you say to that kind of emotional plea? Only one thing, if you’re somebody like me.

  “All right, Mr. Runquist,” I said. “I’ll come up and talk to you. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Chapter 17

  It was a little better than an hour’s drive to Sonoma, forty miles northeast of San Francisco, and my watch said eleven-fifteen when I got to the big, tree-shaded plaza in the middle of town. It’s a pretty place, Sonoma, located at the lower end of the Valley of the Moon and surrounded by wooded hills, orchards, farm
land, and vast acres of vineyards. Although the wines of the Napa Valley to the east are more prominent, a lot of people who know about such things say that the Sonoma Valley produces wines of equal if not superior stature. There are a trio of wineries within the city limits of Sonoma, in fact, one of which, Buena Vista, has the distinction of being the first winery in California; it was founded in 1832 by a Hungarian named Agoston Haraszthy, who selected and imported thousands of cuttings from the finest vineyards of Europe and who was responsible for creating the type of wine called zinfandel. I knew all of that because I had spent a fair amount of time up here over the years. If I ever moved out of the city, which wasn’t likely, Sonoma was the place I would come to.

  I turned right in front of the city hall. As early as it was, there were a lot of people out and around—picnickers in the plaza, the inevitable tourists wandering around gawking at the place where California’s independence from Mexico had been declared in 1846 and at the Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, and the other old frame and adobe brick buildings that flanked the square. Church bells echoed in the distance. The air was warm and heavy with the smell of growing things and, faintly, of pulped grapes: this was the time of year the crush takes place. All in all, a pleasant small-town Sunday morning. Except that Harry Runquist wasn’t enjoying it, and Hannah Peterson, wherever she was, probably wasn’t either. And for a parcel of reasons, neither was I.

  Runquist had told me he lived on East Napa Street, half a dozen blocks from the plaza. I found the place within a couple of minutes: a big, old, twenties Victorian with a lot of gingerbready trim on the front porch and windows that had leaded-glass borders. The number, 618, was plainly visible on one of the fancy porch columns. A huge carob tree shaded both the front lawn and a realty company’s FOR SALE sign jutting up near the sidewalk.

  I made a U-turn at the next corner and came back and parked in front of the house. When I got up on the porch I saw that there was a pumpkin sitting on a table to one side; even though Halloween was still better than three weeks away, it had already been carved into a jack-o’-lantern. There was a screen door, with the main door behind it standing wide open. From somewhere inside I could hear a steady clacking, clattering sound—the kind a toy or model train makes.