Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  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.

  On the deck inside was a rifle partially wrapped in an old blanket, a small carton that contained a wood-handled revolver and boxes of cartridges for both it and the rifle, and a larger carton full of neatly folded clothing. The rifle, I saw when I pushed aside part of the blanket, was a bolt-action center-fire Savage—the kind hunters use for deer and larger game. The revolver was a Smith & Wesson .38 hammerless, a belly gun. The clothing in the bigger box was all men’s stuff, shirts and pants and lightweight jackets; on top, like some sort of crown, was an old railroader’s cap.

  Now I knew what Hannah Peterson had been loading into the trunk yesterday morning. And I had a pretty good idea why, too. The guns had probably belonged to her late husband; the clothes had either belonged to him or they were her father’s and she’d been storing them. Raymond was a fugitive and a multiple killer, and even though he’d likely beat it out of Oroville with his own gun, it made sense he’d have wanted more weapons and ammunition. Getting them from Hannah was a lot safer than stealing them. The same was true of fresh clothing; whoever the items in that carton had belonged to, he had been the same approximate size as Raymond.

  But what was it all still doing in the trunk? And why had the car been driven back here and hidden this way? And by whom?

  I shut the trunk lid, put the keys back into the ignition, closed the driver’s door. There were no other sections of crushed or bent grass in the area; the person who’d driven the car in here had walked back out along the wheel tracks, without detouring anywhere. I went back that way myself, around to the other side of the collapsed building. There wasn’t anything to find over there, no tracks of any kind. The Toyota had been brought here and abandoned—that was all.

  Okay, I thought. The rest of it was up to the police and the FBI. I’d done all I could without overstepping myself again; and I had dug up enough circumstantial evidence of a link between Hannah Peterson and Lester Raymond, or at least that something fishy was going on, to stir up official interest.

  I hurried back along the lane. When I reached the clearing I started across it at an angle toward the front of the house.

  And that was when I noticed the blood.

  It was a few yards away on my right, a sun-streaked blob of it that shone a dull red-brown against the bright chlorophyll green of the grass. I had seen too much blood in my life not to recognize it, even from a distance. Ah Jesus, I thought, Jesus. I veered over there and bent down to examine it. A big splotch, dry and dark and flaky to the touch; it had been there a while, but not too long—a day or so. Animal blood, maybe. Only it wasn’t animal blood; I felt that down deep where the gut feelings, the bad feelings, always come from. It was human blood and somebody had spilled a lot of it here yesterday. Too much for any kind of superficial wound.

  The tension, now, was like a hand clutching the back of my neck. I could feel the pain of it the length of my bad left arm, and in the tender bruised place on my scalp. Straightening, I began to walk a slow, widening spiral outward away from the splotch. The second bloodstain, smaller than the first, was ten feet to the west. The third, smaller still, was back to the north. The fourth and fifth lay in that direction, too, forming an irregular and grisly trail.

  And where the trail led was straight to the old stone well.

  It had been long abandoned, that well. If it had ever had a windlass of any kind it was gone now; there was nothing above ground except a foot or so of its circular shaft with a wooden lip cemented on top. Two wooden covers, like halved circles, had been built to fit over the lip, but neither was in place; they had been dragged off and were lying on the ground nearby. On the near side of the lip was a small thin smear of dried blood.

  I leaned over to look inside the well. But the overhanging tree branches blotted out the sun, and it was too dark in there for me to make out much except for the gleam of water. I trotted around to my car, taking care to avoid the bloodstains in the grass, and unhooked the heavy-duty flashlight from its clip under the dash. But when I got back to the well and aimed the light down inside I still couldn’t see much. There was water in it, all right, maybe a dozen feet below ground level—scummy and brown, its surface scabbed with dead leaves—but nothing else was visible, and there was no way of telling from up here how deep the water was.

  Leave it to the cops, I thought. Let them fish around and find out what’s in there. What could you do anyway? Tie a rope around yourself and one of the trees and climb down inside like some sort of screwball Tarzan?

  But I did not want to go away from here without knowing what was in the well. I had to know, damn it. I splashed the light around the sides. The well had been built of rough-edged fieldstone, c
aked now with moss, and the diameter of the shaft was about four feet. No handholds. No ladder of any kind . . .

  Ladder, I thought.

  I shut off the flash and crossed to the house, to where the lightweight aluminum ladder I had noticed earlier was propped. It was a ten-footer, and at the top was a pair of those metal hooks so that the ladder could be anchored for use on steep roofs. I carried it back to the well and lowered it inside. The wooden lip surmounting the outer rim was narrow enough for the hooks to fit over: the ladder hung straight and steady against the inner wall. The lip seemed strong enough to support my weight, and when I tested it by swinging over and standing on one of the ladder’s upper rungs, it proved out that way.

  There was one more thing I needed, and I went and hunted it up from the building materials near the house—a cut piece of two-by-two about five feet long. I took that back to the well, swung over onto the ladder again, and began to climb down. I did it slowly, a rung at a time, with the length of wood in my left hand, the flashlight in my pocket, and my right hand wrapped tight on the ladder.

  The smell in there was bad down near the water, dank and fetid. It was cold, too, colder than you’d expect only a few feet below ground. I could feel myself sweating from the tension, the sweat turning clammy in the cold darkness. I made myself breathe through my mouth.

  When I got to the bottom rung I was only a couple of feet above the scummy surface of the water. Carefully I eased my body around until I was facing away from the ladder. Then I clamped the two-by-two under my arm, maneuvered the flash out and switched it on. Opposite and below to my right, one of the stones jutted out a little; I stretched my right leg down there and anchored my shoe against the projection. It was an awkward stance—one foot on the stone, one foot and one hand on the ladder—but it was stable enough so that I could put the flash away again, take the two-by-two in my left hand, and reach down to probe the water.

  The first thing I discovered was that it was no more than three feet deep. The board went down that far and thunked against a solid floor, which meant that the well had been filled in with more rocks or maybe cement and the. stagnant water was what had seeped in during the last rain. I started to stir around with the wood—and almost immediately it bumped against a heavy yielding mass that shifted sluggishly under the water.

  I tried to snag it, to hoist it up to the surface. But my left arm was weakening from all the exertion, and I couldn’t seem to get any purchase. I shifted the two-by-two over to my right hand and wedged my hips back against the ladder so that I would not have to hold on with the left hand. The sweat was in my eyes now, stinging; I swiped it away before I probed again with the wood.

  This time I managed to catch it on some part of the underwater mass. And when I heaved up and back, the thing down there bobbed into shadowy view and I was looking into white staring eyes like peeled eggs, at matted blond hair and a bloated face that had once been pretty.

  Hannah Peterson.

  My stomach turned over; I had to tighten the muscles in my throat to keep from gagging. I jerked the two-by-two back to release it from the jacket she wore, to let the body sink again. When it pulled free it sliced through the water and struck something else—another heavy yielding mass directly under the ladder.

  Christ! I worked the wood down there, in movements that were a little agitated now, thinking: It can’t be another corpse; how could it be? But it was. The board caught in clothing again and up it came for me to stare at in disbelief.

  The second body was that of Lester Raymond.

  I was still staring when there was a sudden violent jerk on the ladder from up above. It was so violent and so unexpected that I had no chance to brace myself. My right foot slipped off the projection of stone; I dropped the length of wood and tried to twist around to clutch at the ladder, but it jerked again and that dislodged my left foot. I yelled, flailing with my arms—and in the next second I was in the water, half-submerged, struggling wildly to get my head out so I could breathe. Some of the foul stuff poured into my mouth, funneled into my throat; I retched it up. It was fifteen seconds or so before I got my legs down and my head up, and when I blinked my eyes clear and peered upward, all I saw was rough stone, blue sky, tree branches. The ladder was gone.

  Somebody had shaken me off deliberately and then pulled it out. Somebody had trapped me down here in three feet of stagnant water with a pair of corpses.

  Chapter 22

  For the first few seconds I felt an unreasoning panic fueled by revulsion and sudden claustrophobia. There was a scream building in my throat; I struggled to keep it there, because if I let it out it would be surrendering to the panic. I opened my mouth wide and forced myself to breathe deeply, evenly. I forced myself to stand still, too, with my arms splayed out and my hands flat against the stones on either side. The wildness went out of me in slow swirls, like water down a clogged drain, but when it was gone I had myself under control again.

  One of the bodies brushed against my leg, and I shuddered and backed up until my hips touched the wall. The water came to just above my waist. Something cold and clammy was pressed to my lower jaw; when I realized that and pawed it off I saw that it was a decay-blackened oak leaf. I tilted my head back. There was still nothing in the circular opening above except sky and the overhanging tree branches.

  Quiet up there, too. Even the birds had quit their chattering. The person who had left me to drown or die of starvation would be headed off the property by now—the same person who had killed Hannah Peterson and Lester Raymond and dumped their bodies down here. Returned to the scene of the crime, probably to do something about Hannah’s Toyota back there by the collapsed building. Spotted me, hid in the woods until I climbed down inside here, and then slipped up and grabbed the ladder. Dead men tell no tales. But I wasn’t dead yet, and when I got out of here I would tell plenty of tales because I had a pretty good idea who that person had to be.

  If I got out of here ...

  The back of my head had begun to throb and burn; some of the stagnant water had got in under the bandage and irritated the wound. I was shivering, too, from the chill of the water and the dank air. Move, I thought, keep moving. There’s got to be a way out.

  I waded toward the far side. The stones were obscured by shadow, so that I couldn’t see if there were any handholds or footholds that would let me climb up; the moss coating them had a sleek, ugly look, like the body of a slug. I remembered the flashlight. It was still in my pocket, but when I dragged it out and pressed the switch, nothing happened. Water had got inside the battery casing and made the thing useless.

  I dropped it and began to ease along the stones to my left, searching for a foothold. There were a few knobs and projections like the one I’d braced my foot on earlier, but that was all. You couldn’t climb up a vertical wall on little knobs and projections, for Christ’s sake. A frigging mountaineer couldn’t climb out of a stone well that way.

  But I kept moving along the wall, pawing at it. My leg bumped against one of the bodies again; it seemed to bob away like a bundle of something heavy and discarded. Bundle. Two bundles, not one. Two stiffs in a well. Bundle-stiffs. Bindlestiffs . . .

  Cut it out!

  I got a fresh grip on my control and hung on. I was going to get out of here, by God. I was going to find a way out of here.

  And I found one—the length of two-by-two.

  I was looking right at it, partially submerged with the upper end cocked against the stones in front of me. About five feet long, that piece of wood. The diameter of the well was no more than four feet. Twelve feet from the surface of the water to the wooden lip up there; three feet of water; fifteen feet overall from the bottom to the lip. And I was six feet tall, with a vertical reach of maybe three feet. Mathematics. Sure, that was the answer. Mathematics and that good heavy chunk of board.

  I started to reach out for it. Then I thought: No, no, find a place to anchor it first. Again I groped sideways along the stones. I had to go half way around befor
e I located a place—a moss-filled declivity formed by knobs on two stones laid atop each other, like a tiny recessed shelf, that was on a level with my wrists. I clawed at the moss, broke a nail and scraped my fingertips raw; but I got the indentation cleared out. By the feel of it, it was maybe a couple of inches wide and the same distance high—just about the size of the two-by-two.

  The board was over on my right; I caught hold of it in both hands and slid it up at an angle against the opposite wall. Then I brought the bottom part over and pushed it into the slot between the two stones. It went in all right, stayed in without slipping. I wiggled the board until the other end looked to be resting at a point directly across from the slot, its length bisecting the well at an upward angle.

  So far, so good. With my arms extended over my head, I waded out under the piece of wood until I could just touch it with my fingertips. Then I bent my knees, set myself, and jumped up and wrapped both hands around it and kicked my legs over against the facing wall. There was a tearing sensation in my left shoulder, an eruption of pain. But I managed to hang on, monkeylike, jouncing my body so my weight would pull the upper end of the board down tighter into the stones, wedge it there the way the lower end was wedged. I tried to keep most of the strain on my right hand and arm, but the left arm gave out anyway after four or five seconds and I had to let go. I kicked off the wall just in time, so that when I dropped my feet went straight down and I stayed upright and my head stayed out of that damned foul water.

  Panting and shivering, I waded backward and reached up to test the two-by-two. The upper end was still a little loose; if I tried climbing onto it now, it was liable to slip and I’d have to do the whole thing over again. I could not afford to take that chance. The chill water was a constant drain on my strength, and there was that weakness in my left shoulder and arm. When I went up on that board it had to be one time only, one concentrated effort and no mistakes.