Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  I stood for two or three minutes, massaging my left arm, going through some of the exercises the therapist had given me. The pain began to ease. I moved out under the two-by-two and jumped up again, using only my right hand; but that way I was only able to hang on for a second or two. I tried it again with the same results, but the third time I managed to stay suspended long enough to wrench downward violently on the top part of the board. When I waded back to test it this time it was wedged in tight between the walls: I couldn’t move it at all.

  I realized one of the corpses was lying against my leg and nudged it away. I could hear my teeth clacking together like old bones. The fingers on my left hand were stiffening up again from the cold. I needed that hand and arm—I could not make the climb otherwise—and I massaged them furiously from fingertips to armpit, exercised them, kept them out of the water. I did that for a good five minutes, not thinking about anything except getting out, getting out, feeling the sun on my body again.

  Some of the cramping went away finally; I could flex the fingers almost enough to make a fist. I was as ready as I would ever be.

  I squatted down until the water was just under my chin, so I could grope along the submerged part of the wall under the board’s lower end. It had a slimy, repulsive feel. But some twelve inches below the surface I found a jutting corner that seemed large enough to use for a toehold. I rubbed at it, stripping away some of the slick growth to make it less slippery. Then I got the edge of my shoe braced on the jutting corner, reached up and took a two-handed grip on the two-by-two, dragged in a deep breath, and shoved and hauled myself upward, grunting with the effort.

  The board seemed to move slightly under me. I felt the panic again—and then I was out of the water and draped over the wood with my right shoulder pressed against the wall. There was no more shift in the two-by-two—I might have imagined it—but I lay still anyway for a time. The strain on my left arm had turned it numb in places, as if parts of it were no longer attached; I wanted to rest a while before I had to use it again. But my abdomen was supporting all my weight and the two-by-two was cutting into it and making it difficult for me to breathe. I had to move right away.

  I pushed back from the wall, turning my body so that my head was toward the stones and inching backward up the angle of the board. Still no shift in the length of wood; it had to be wedged in pretty tight. I kept moving until I was stretched out along it from crotch to chin, then slowly swung my left leg over. And eased myself into an upright position, straddling the board like a kid facing the wrong way on a narrow seesaw.

  I sat like that, not moving, sweat leaking out of me, until my breathing returned to normal and little prickles of pain erased the numbness in my arm. The rough part was next: getting my feet under me, standing up on that slender two-inch expanse. I put my head back. The top of the well was only about eight feet away now; I could see the wooden lip, I could see more of the nearby trees and the fat gold underbelly of a cloud where the westering sun struck it. God, I thought, let me get up there.

  All right. I inched forward again until my knees butted against the stones; felt down along the wall on both sides. No toeholds there. I leaned up and brushed my palms over the mossy rock higher up. Small projections here and there, precarious handholds at best, but I had no other choice. I dug the fingers of my right hand into one of them, braced my left hand on the board and my right shoulder against the wall, lifted my right leg and cocked the knee over the wood. Shoved up, pulled up, got my knee down on the board—and almost lost my balance. Frantically I clutched at the stones, throwing my weight against them. If the board had shifted then I would have come right off it and toppled back into the water. But it stayed wedged and I kept my perch, kneeling on the one leg with the other still hanging down.

  My hands were slick with water and sweat, but I didn’t dare let go of the wall or the board long enough to dry them. The strain was making my head ache so badly that I had difficulty keeping my thoughts together. And that was good because thinking led to mistakes in a situation like this. You had to act on reflex and instinct.

  Balanced on the one knee, hands flattened against the wall, I turned my body so that I could bring the left leg up; put that knee down ahead of the other. Shifted my weight to the left leg, managed to draw the right one up far enough to get the sole of my shoe flat on the board. Crawled up the wall, pushing with the right foot, rising by inches. The muscles in the leg started to weaken, but by then I had the left shoe down too. Blank space of time, no more than a couple of seconds. And then I was standing up on the board, gasping, sobbing a little from the effort, belly and chest and the side of my face pressed against those cold, clammy stones.

  When I stretched my arms upward my fingers slid over the wooden lip on top, a couple of inches beyond it. All I had to do now was grab hold of the lip and haul myself up and out. But my left arm was going numb again; I had to bring it back and down and let it hang loose at my side. Both legs had a jellied feel. I don’t have enough strength, I thought. All this way, all this struggle, I can’t pull myself the hell up there.

  Then I thought: Goddamn you, yes you can. Yes you can! There’s not going to be a third corpse in this frigging well.

  The tingling came back into the left arm, and pretty soon a dull throbbing ache replaced the numbness. I concentrated on the arm, told myself I could feel strength seeping through the muscles and sinews. Made myself believe it. I already had my right hand hooked over the wooden lip; I brought the left up and made those crabbed fingers fasten around the lip too.

  I shut my mind down, tensed, and lunged upward.

  One of my flailing legs dislodged the two-by-two; I heard it skitter loose, fall and splash into the water. Pain ripped through my left shoulder and armpit, and the arm went numb again. I pulled frenziedly, my shoes scraping against the stones, not finding any purchase. For a moment I felt my grip on the wood slipping; then my right foot dug into a niche, held long enough for me to heave upward again and fling my right forearm over the lip. My head came up out of the well, and I saw the ground and the sun blazing through the trees, and somehow I got my left forearm over the lip too, and squirmed and struggled, and first my ribcage and then my belly slid over the upper ring of stones, over the curved wood . . .

  And I was clear of the well, lying face down in the good sweet grass.

  I was out.

  I lay there for a time in a patch of sunlight, I don’t know how long, waiting for it to warm me and some of the pain and tension to ebb out of my body. My mind felt sluggish, vague and dreamy. The last half-hour, all that had happened inside the well, seemed unreal, as if I had been given some kind of drug and had hallucinated the whole thing.

  The police, I thought eventually, you got to talk to the police. And that made me stir, get up on my feet. The wind blowing across the clearing gave me a whiff of what I smelled like; it brought bile up into the back of my throat. I looked at the well, shuddered, and looked away again. My left arm flopped around like a hunk of sausage when I started to walk; I grabbed it in my right hand and pulled it in against my chest. It was starting to tingle again, to hurt, so maybe it would be all right.

  I went around the front of the house, shambling a little, like a drunk on his way home from a wake. My car was still sitting where I’d left it. The rest of the clearing was deserted, or I thought it was until I got to the car and opened the driver’s door. Because when I did that I glanced across at the near side of the house, and somebody was sitting on a small pile of lumber over there. Just sitting, not doing anything else. Not even moving.

  The skin between my shoulder blades rippled. And my mind was clear and sharp again. I shut the car door, thinking : So this is the way it ends. She never left at all. She’s been sitting here the whole time.

  I understood why when I got to her. I understood a lot of things then, and all of them were ugly. Like murder. Like killing a sister.

  Like Arleen Bradford herself.

  Chapter 23

  Sh
e did not move as I approached. Just kept sitting there rigid and straight, hands flat on her thighs, legs crossed at the ankles, looking out over the valley. I stopped a couple of paces to one side of her. The sun was at my back, perched atop the distant crests of the Sonoma Mountains, and the way I stood put her in my shadow. But she still didn’t seem to know I was there.

  She was wearing an ankle-length skirt and a chaste white blouse and the kind of shoes mothers refer to as sensible. No makeup except for a little rouge on cheeks that were as white and thickly textured as gardenia blossoms. She looked all right until you saw her eyes. They were wide open and unblinking—not unlike those of Hannah Peterson’s corpse down there in the well, and just about as lifeless. Pieces of dull glass, like windows behind which lay dark and empty rooms. The Arleen Bradford I had met four days ago, the prim and proper and caustic one, didn’t live there anymore.

  I moved over in front of her, so that I was blocking her view of the valley. That made her see me; she blinked once, but nothing happened in those vacant eyes except for a flicker of recognition. Her body held the same rigid posture.

  “Oh,” she said, “you got out of the well.”

  “Yeah. I got out of the well.”

  “Did you find Hannah? She’s down there. Him, too. Lester Raymond.”

  “I found them.”

  “I knew you would when I saw you climb down inside.”

  “Is that why you tried to trap me in there?”

  “Of course.” There was no emotion in her voice; she understood what I said to her, she was rational and lucid, but something had short-circuited inside her. Or died inside her. It was like talking to a machine instead of a human being. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody else, but I was afraid. I knew you would go to the police. I don’t like to be locked up. Hannah locked me in a closet once when we were children. I hated that, I don’t want to go to prison.”

  You won’t go to prison, I thought. Not the kind of prison you mean.

  I asked her, “Why are you still here? Why didn’t you leave?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was going to. I was going to drive Hannah’s car back to Sonoma and leave it somewhere. That’s why I came all the way back here this afternoon. But then I would have had to do something with your car too. Drive to Sonoma twice, take taxis up here twice before I could go away again in my own car. It all seemed . . . I don’t know, suddenly it all seemed too much bother. I’ve been sitting here thinking what I should do. But now that you’re out of the well, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “Where’s your car now, Miss Bradford?”

  “Down by the gate.”

  “Dark green, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I left it there when I saw the gate open. I closed the gate yesterday when I left, so I knew someone was here. I walked up through the woods. I was very quiet; you didn’t hear me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “They didn’t hear me either. Hannah and him. I parked my car down by the gate yesterday, too, after I followed her here, and then walked up through the trees.”

  “You followed her from her house in Sonoma?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “She was acting peculiarly. Red eyes, face all puffy—she hadn’t been to bed all night. She wouldn’t talk to me, after I drove all the way up from San Francisco to see her about funeral arrangements for Daddy. She was putting things in her car when I arrived—one of them was a rifle. But she was always afraid of guns. She told me to go away and leave her alone. I knew something was wrong. I always knew when something was wrong in Hannah’s life. But I never imagined it was Lester Raymond. How could I have imagined a thing like that?”

  “What did you do when you saw him?”

  “I couldn’t believe it. Hannah and Lester Raymond. That was monstrous enough, but then I overheard them talking. She was married to him once; he was the man she ran off with when she was eighteen, right after he murdered his wife. And now he’d murdered Daddy and she was helping him. She was helping him.”

  “Not by choice,” I said. “He forced her to do it— threatened to tell the police about their past relationship, probably.”

  That didn’t seem to register. She said, “It made me sick to see them together, to know what they were. I’ve always hated her, you know. The pretty one, the favorite one. Daddy didn’t care how much I loved him, he only cared about Hannah and himself. But it was as if she’d killed him too. You see? Her and Raymond, they killed my daddy. So I killed them. An eye for an eye. That’s what the Bible says.”

  “How did you kill them?”

  “With my gun. The twenty-two automatic I kept in my car for protection. Hannah was afraid of them, but I wasn’t; I like guns. I’m a very good shot. I went and got it, and when I came back they were over on the other side of the house. Talking about a car—Hannah was going to buy a car for him. They didn’t see me until I came up behind them. Then it was too late. I shot them. Him first, then Hannah. She screamed, the treacherous little bitch. It was a lovely sound.”

  I looked away from her, out over the vineyards and the villages and ranches that dotted the valley. There was a taste in my mouth like ashes.

  “Then I dragged them over to the well and pushed them in,” she said. “I don’t look very strong, but I am.”

  I thought of the way she had jerked that ladder to pitch me off and then hauled it out. “Yeah,” I said.

  “I drove Hannah’s car back into the woods and hid it behind the remains of an old building. I didn’t think until this morning that I ought to take it back into Sonoma. If it was found abandoned up here, somebody might think to look in the well.” She cocked her head to one side. “Why did you think to look in the well?”

  “I’m a detective,” I said. “I found the car, and I found some bloodstains in the grass where you shot them and where you dragged the bodies. They led straight to the well.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Bloodstains. Yes. I should have thought of that, too. But there’s so much to think of. I couldn’t think of it all.”

  There’s always too much to think of when you commit murder, I thought. And always something that you don’t think of that trips you up. But it was pointless to say that to her. Her punishment had already started for her crimes, and it was far more profound than any society could mete out.

  “What did you do with the gun, Miss Bradford?”

  “It’s down in the well. I put it in Lester Raymond’s pocket before I pushed his body in. I didn’t think I would need it anymore and I wanted to get rid of it; it seemed like the thing to do. If I’d still had it I would have shot you too. Instead of trying to trap you in the well. That would have made things much easier.”

  “Would it?”

  She frowned in a confused way; it was her first facial expression since we’d been talking. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  I looked away again. There was not much else to say to her, or to find out from her; I had just about all of it now. All the major facts, anyway. I still didn’t know much about what had happened on Friday night, but the only two people who could have told me were dead. Some of it I could guess at. Such as why Hannah had called me: an initial reaction to hearing from Raymond, a blind groping for help toward the detective who’d flushed her ex-husband in Oroville; but I hadn’t been home, and when she’d had time to think it over she’d decided she couldn’t talk to anybody, that she had to do what Raymond wanted her to in order to protect herself. And it seemed a good bet that she’d spent the night right inside her own house. Her bed hadn’t been slept in because she hadn’t gone to bed; she’d sat up, chain-smoking—all those cigarette butts I’d found in the fire-place—and in the morning, red-eyed and puffy-faced, she’d begun loading the rifle and other stuff into her car. The car had been in the garage all night; that was why she’d been loading it in there, instead of out in the driveway.

  The rest of it, such as where Hannah had met Raymond on Friday night
and what they’d said to each other and what plans Raymond had been making for his escape, had died with the two of them. As had the exact circumstances of Charles Bradford’s death in Oroville. But those things weren’t important. None of it was important, really, except that three people were dead—two of them, Bradford and his daughter, senselessly—and that a couple of old crimes and several interconnected new ones had not gone unpunished.

  It seemed a hell of a price to pay for justice.

  “What are you going to do now?” Arleen Bradford said. “Are you going to take me to the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could fight you. You know I’m strong.”

  “But I’m stronger.”

  “Would you hit me?”

  “If I had to.”

  “Then I won’t fight you. I don’t like to be hit. I don’t like rough men.”

  “All right. Come on, then.”

  She got up, slowly, and smoothed her skirt, and we went over to my car. She said, “I won’t be in jail very long. I can’t stand to be locked up. I’ll find a way to kill myself.”

  No you won’t, I thought; there’ll be doctors to see to that. I didn’t say anything.

  When she was inside the car I opened the trunk, stripped off my sodden clothes, and put on the change of old stuff I keep in there for fishing trips and unplanned overnight stops. It took me some time because of the weakened left arm. And because my head was pounding fiercely and making me a little dizzy.

  On my way around to the driver’s door, I glanced at the house—the house that might never be finished now. Bindlestiff Manor. And for some reason I had a sharp mental image of the hobo jungle up in Oroville, of the three old tramps and the way they’d come alive when the Medford freight rolled in. And I imagined I could hear the low cry of the locomotive’s air horn, like a lament in the night that went on and on.

  I got into the car. Arleen Bradford looked at me and said, as if she sensed what I was thinking, “Why did he have to disgrace himself by becoming a hobo? Everything would have been all right if he’d stayed in Los Angeles and found some kind of job. He’d have his inheritance now, he’d still be alive.” She plucked at my arm. “Why did he do it?” she said. “Why did he have to die?”