Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  I turned another page. A couple of snaps had been pulled off there, too, and of the ones remaining, one was lying at an angle near the bottom, a corner of it bent as though the album had been closed on it. A photo Hannah had meant to burn and overlooked? I picked it up and studied it.

  Color shot of a teenage Hannah standing alone on the bank of a wide river, one hand on her hip, giving either the camera or whoever had taken the picture a provocative look. I turned it over. On the back, in red ink in a fancy feminine hand, was written “Me in Nebraska.”

  There was something about that notation that started vague stirrings in my memory, like ripples on placid water. I handed the snapshot to Runquist. “Does this mean anything to you?”

  “Nebraska,” he said. “That’s where Hannah lived with her first husband.”

  “Oh? Where in Nebraska?”

  “Omaha, I think.”

  “What was his name, do you know?”

  “Adams. I can’t remember his first name. She doesn’t talk about him much; I don’t think their split was very friendly.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, she did mention once that they fought a lot. He was more than twenty years older, like Joe Peterson was; I don’t know why she kept taking up with older men.” He pawed at his face again. “She also said something once about having to sneak away when she finally decided to leave him. He wouldn’t have let her go if she hadn’t, she said.”

  “So she was afraid of him?”

  “I think she was, yeah.”

  Omaha . . .

  I flipped through the rest of the album. There were no other photos of Hannah or anybody else in Nebraska; that had evidently been the batch she’d destroyed. The rest of the photos included several men. I asked Runquist if he’d ever seen a picture of Hannah’s first husband, this Adams.

  “No,” he said.

  “So you wouldn’t know if any of these guys might be him?”

  “No. She never showed me any of these photos.”

  Omaha. Omaha, Nebraska . . .

  Then I had it, the connection, and I said, “Jesus Christ!” before I could check myself. Because there was a jolt in it; there was a hell of a jolt in it.

  Runquist said, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Just an idea.”

  “What sort of idea?”

  I couldn’t look at him; he’d have seen it in my expression. I caught up the two albums, took them back to the closet and shut them away. By the time I turned around again, I had my facial muscles under control.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m going to go talk to the neighbors again; there might have been somebody you missed. Suppose you stay here, in case she comes back. Or calls.”

  “All right.”

  “While you’re waiting you can write me out a list of names and addresses of Mrs. Peterson’s friends in this area. I know you talked to all of them yourself, but I want to check with them again. Will you do that?”

  “Sure, whatever you want.”

  I got out of there; went over past the fenced pasture where the horses were grazing, toward a big white house on the other side. My mind kept working, putting it all together, making me sweat a little. I did not want to believe it was possible, but there it was.

  Hannah Peterson’s first husband hadn’t been anybody called Adams. His name had been Lester Raymond.

  She had been married to the man who had murdered her father.

  Chapter 19

  It had to be that way. Arleen Bradford had told me that Hannah had run off to Nebraska with her first husband; that she’d done it not long after Raymond murdered his wife and her lover and disappeared with all the cash and negotiable securities; and that Raymond was the macho type and used to come over to the Bradford place fairly often. Hannah had only been eighteen at the time, a young and impressionable age, and she’d inherited her father’s love of trains; another train buff like Raymond was just the type to attract her. Add all of that together with the fact Raymond had lived in Omaha himself for thirteen months in 1967 and 1968, and you had too many things that dovetailed too perfectly to be coincidence.

  The irony of it was bitter. Raymond had gone berserk when he found out about his wife’s infidelity, but he’d been playing around himself; some macho men were like that, the old double standard. Or, hell, maybe he hadn’t gone berserk after all. Maybe he’d known about the cash and securities, maybe he’d gone out to the architect’s place in Malibu with the intention of stealing the money, maybe the murders had been premeditated. So he could afford to go off with his young girlfriend, Hannah, and start a new life.

  In any case, where did Hannah herself fit in? Had she been a party to the killings and the theft? It wasn’t likely, not from what I knew about her. She may have had questionable morals, but she wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. Whatever had motivated Raymond that afternoon in Malibu, I doubted if she had found out what he’d done until afterward.

  Why had she stayed with him once she did find out? A combination of reasons, probably. Fear; Runquist had said she’d been afraid of the man. Fear of the law, too, of being put in jail as an accessory to homicide. Her youth. Love for Raymond, or at least a strong infatuation. Maybe a sense of adventure and excitement at the idea of living with a fugitive. And the money, of course. Yeah, money would have been a strong mitigating factor in anything Hannah had ever decided to do.

  Then why had she finally left him? Again, a combination of reasons. Disillusionment. Raymond was a lot older than she was, he was basically a law-abiding, hard-working citizen; he’d taken most of the money and put it into a house and a business in Omaha. Hannah wasn’t ready to settle down as the wife of a middle-aged man in Nebraska. So they’d fought, and the relationship had deteriorated, and finally she’d got up enough courage to sneak out one night and come running back home to California.

  But why home? Well, neither her father nor her sister knew the man she’d run off with was Raymond; they probably hadn’t known she was in Omaha either until she told them. So there was no danger to her there. Still, hadn’t she been afraid Raymond would come after her, for fear that she might expose him to the police? No, it wouldn’t work that way. She couldn’t have exposed Raymond without exposing herself as an accessory; Hannah was no martyr, and Raymond had to have known that as well as anybody. Maybe she’d written him a note, or called him once she was clear of Omaha. If he left her alone she’d never tell anyone about him, all she wanted was her freedom ... something like that.

  And Raymond hadn’t chased after her. What he’d done instead was to cover himself, just in case Hannah slipped up, by moving out of Nebraska and heading for Denver. That had all been late in 1968. Meanwhile Hannah had taken up with the rock musician and was busily engaged in forgetting about Lester Raymond. Except for those photos in her album, that is. For some reason—narcissism again, maybe—she’d kept four pages of snapshots of her and Raymond and Omaha for her own private viewing.

  It was easy enough to figure why she’d burned the photos on Friday night: after all these years Lester Raymond had come back into her life, and in the craziest, most terrifying way possible. No wonder she’d been distraught. It wasn’t just that her father had been murdered; it was that he’d been murdered by her former husband. Rage, or whatever emotion had been governing her at the time, had led her to rip the photos out of the album and destroy them.

  And then what?

  Sometime between six o‘clock, when Runquist left her, and eight o’clock, when she’d telephoned him, she had had another call. From Raymond? Yeah, it must have been. But why would he have contacted her of all people?

  Well, I thought then, why not? He was on the run again, with a fresh murder rap hanging over him; he didn’t have much money this time, he had no transportation; he was desperate. And when the story broke in the papers on Friday, Hannah’s name had been right there—“Hannah Peterson, of Sonoma.” She was the only person he could turn to for help, because he could force her to give it
to him; he had her in a box on the accessory thing back in 1967. If she refused to help him—with money, a car, a place to hide, whatever—he’d tell the police all about her involvement.

  But that was as far as I could take it on deduction and speculation alone. Where had Raymond called Hannah from on Friday night? Here in Sonoma? It didn’t have to be; he could have holed up anywhere in the vicinity, told her to come pick him up or bring him something. Why had she called me? And where were the two of them now? Had Raymond done something to her? Or was it just that she was on the road somewhere, with or without him, maybe on her way back home?

  I hadn’t told Runquist about any of this; the shape he was in, it would have pushed him right over the edge. The last thing I needed on my hands right now was a candidate for the twitch bin. Telling the police about it was another matter. I had to do that, and I would—but not just yet. The problem was, even with all my fancy deduction and speculation I didn’t have one shred of proof to back it up. Hannah had burned the photographs; none of her family or friends knew much about her first husband; the FBI obviously hadn’t identified her yet as the woman Raymond was married to in Omaha; and at first consideration the whole idea sounded screwy as hell. By the time I got done talking to the Sonoma cops, the county cops, the FBI, and Christ knew who else, it would be tomorrow afternoon.

  Maybe I could turn up a lead on my own, here and now. If I could manage that I would have something more substantial to take to the authorities. I’d give myself the afternoon, until five o’clock. If I hadn’t come up with anything by then, and if Hannah still hadn’t returned home, it was straight to the Sonoma Police Department. . . .

  One of the horses in the pasture made a loud snorting noise. It came from close by and it jarred me out of my musing. I had stopped walking and was leaning up against the fence, and the horse, a big reddish beast with hairy legs, was giving me a baleful look from about five feet away. Its teeth were bared as if it were thinking about taking a bite out of my neck.

  I backed off in a hurry, started toward the big white house again. The sun was past its zenith now, beating down on the top of my sore head. Past noon. Less than five hours. Not much time, even if I had had anything specific to work with.

  Hannah, I thought, where did you go on Friday night?

  Where the hell did you go?

  The woman who answered the door at the big white house hadn’t seen Hannah Peterson in several days, she said. What did I want with Hannah, anyway? I told her I was a friend of Harry Runquist’s and that it was a personal matter. She said, “Humpf,” and gave me a sour look; it was plain that she neither liked nor approved of Hannah. I chalked it up to female jealousy. The woman was forty and frumpy, with hair that poked up from her skull like a cluster of steel springs out of a torn mattress.

  But I not only got the same negative response to my questions from half a dozen other neighbors over the next thirty minutes, I also got the same sense of disapproval or dislike or both. And two of the people I talked to were men. One matronly type referred to Hannah as “that woman”; one of the men, who was about sixty, assumed a righteous air and clacked his dentures and said he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d chased off to a motel with some man. He sounded a little envious just the same.

  So Hannah wasn’t popular with her neighbors. So what? She was a walking advertisement for sex. Most women would resent her for that, and most men would covet her either openly or behind proper facades. She also had plenty of money, inherited from a husband twenty-five years her senior, and she probably hadn’t worked a day in her life. Not many people would like her much, I thought, and those that did would be poor love-sick bastards like Runquist or carbon copies of Hannah herself—sybaritic, money-hungry types with things in their past that they never mentioned to anyone.

  I had covered all of the houses within two blocks of Hannah’s place to the west, and within a block and a half to the east. There was one more left to try on the east side, to make it two blocks both ways; if I drew a blank there as well, there didn’t seem to be much point in going any farther.

  It was a small cottage set well back from the street inside a wood-and-wire fence. The front yard was lush with a variety of fruit trees—apple, peach, plum—and rows of pea and bean and tomato vines, plus a watermelon patch, a squash patch, and bunches of artichoke and swiss chard plants. It looked like one of those deluxe Victory Gardens FDR kept urging people to plant during the Second World War. In the middle of it, a stooped, skinny guy in his seventies was industriously whacking away at the ground with a hoe. Behind him, on the porch, a round little woman about the same age was sitting in the shade, drinking something out of a glass and watching him. The two of them seemed content with their respective roles—him working, her watching.

  I went up to the front gate. “Excuse me, sir,” I called to the guy. “I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute.”

  He quit hoeing, squinted at me for a couple of seconds, and apparently decided I looked respectable enough to deal with. He started in my direction. There was a lot of bounce in his step; he may have been old in years, but he had some spark left.

  “What can I do for you?” he said when he got to the gate.

  “I’m trying to locate a woman named Hannah Peterson,” I said. “She—”

  “Who?”

  “Hannah Peterson. She lives a couple of blocks down that way”—I gestured—“in the house with vineyards on one side and the horse pasture on the other.”

  “Oh, her,” he said, and grinned. He glanced over his shoulder at the round woman on the porch. Then he winked at me. “The blonde with the big tits,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. Right.”

  “Well? What do you want with her?”

  “I’m a friend of the man she’s engaged to. Harry Runquist. He’s pretty worried about her; she’s been missing since Friday night.”

  “She has? Missing, you say?”

  “Yes. I was wondering if maybe you’d seen her sometime Friday evening. Or any time since.”

  “Saw her yesterday morning,” he said. “So how could she be missing since Friday night? Don’t make any sense.”

  “Are you sure it was yesterday morning you saw her?”

  “Sure I’m sure,” he said. “I may be old, but I ain’t senile. I know one day from another.”

  “What time yesterday morning?”

  “Around nine o’clock. I was on my way to the grocery. Edna—that’s my wife—needed some milk.” He frowned. “Ain’t got a cow,” he said regretfully.

  “Where was it you saw Mrs. Peterson?”

  “Inside her garage.”

  “You mean the garage door was open when you drove bay?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “Looked like she’d been loading something into her car,” he said. “Trunk was up.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Not exactly. Another car’d just pulled into the driveway. Company, I reckon.”

  “Did you see who was in it?”

  “Nope. I was too busy looking at the blonde’s tits.” He winked at me again. “Man never gets too old to look at a nice set of tits.”

  “Had you ever seen the car before?”

  “Which car?”

  “Not Mrs. Peterson’s; the other one.”

  “Can’t say that I had, no.”

  “Do you remember what kind it was?”

  “Hell, I don’t know nothing about cars,” he said. “They all look alike to me. Just a car, that’s all.”

  “New, or an older model?”

  “More new than old, I guess.”

  “What color?”

  “Green. Dark green.”

  “So you drove on past,” I said, “and went to the store. How long was it before you came back?”

  He shrugged. “Twenty minutes, give or take.”

  “Was the dark green car still in Mrs. Peterson’s driveway?”

  “Nope.”

 
“How about Mrs. Peterson’s car?”

  “I dunno. Garage door was down.”

  “Did you see any sign of her?”

  “Nope. And believe me, son, I was looking. Tits like she’s got . . .” He sighed, glanced back at his wife again, sighed a second time, and said, “Sure must be nice,” in the same regretful voice he’d used when he said he didn’t have a cow.

  I thanked him and started back toward Hannah’s house. I thought I could take his story pretty much at face value; he was a long way from being senile, and he hadn’t struck me as the type to make up stories. And if it was the truth, then Hannah Peterson hadn’t disappeared Friday night but sometime yesterday.

  But that fact only clouded the issue even more. Why hadn’t her bed been slept in Friday night? Why, if she’d stayed away all night, had she come back to her house yesterday morning? To load something into her car, maybe—but what? And who had been in the other car, the dark green one?

  Chapter 20

  When I got back to Hannah’s house I rang the doorbell and Runquist let me in. He’d found some wine here, too; there was a big glass of it, red this time, in his left hand.

  “No calls, nothing,” he said. He gave me a painfully hopeful look. “You find out anything?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t know yet what it means.”

  I repeated the gist of my conversation with the elderly neighbor. But I still kept my speculations about Hannah and Lester Raymond to myself.

  “I don’t get it,” Runquist said. He sounded even more bewildered and worried than before. The wine was starting to get to him; you could see it in the glaze of his eyes. “If she was all right yesterday morning, why didn’t she call me? And where was she Friday night?”