Bill Pronzini - Shackles

Barnwell looked pleased with himself as he approached me: The fat worm had turned, and in the process had discovered he still had some sting in his tail. He was a sweetheart, he was. People like him… what made them that way? But I knew the answer; the answer was simple. Life made them that way. The hard, bad, sad, grinding task of living the lives they had constructed for themselves.

When he got to where I was he looked me straight in the eye. He had beat up on his wife and that had dissolved most of his fear, made him a man again for a little while. He said, “She had Tucker’s address, all right I knocked it right out of her, the two-timing bitch.”

“Well?”

“Two-ten Poplar Street.”

“In Vacaville?”

“Yeah. He called her with it after he moved. She said it was innocent, he just wanted us to know in case any of his friends come around or mail showed up for him. But that’s bullshit. He never had no friends except Jacobs and he never got no mail.”

“When did she last hear from Tucker?”

“Right after he moved, she said. Maybe that’s bullshit too. She might of seen him yesterday, for all I know.”

“One more thing. What kind of car does Tucker drive?”

“Chrysler. New one. I dunno the model.”

“What color?”

“Brown.”

“I don’t suppose you noticed the license number?”

“Nab. Who notices license numbers?”

“All right, Mr. Barnwell. Just remember what I told you about making phone calls.”

“I’ll remember. Like I said before, I got nobody to call. And I’ll see to it she don’t call nobody neither, least of all Tucker. Make sure she don’t if I have to bust her fuggin arm for her.”

O. Barnwell, humanitarian. O. Barnwell, the Christian ideal.

Vacaville is a farming and ranching community off Highway 80, some thirty-five miles west of Sacramento. The literal translation of the name is cowtown, which is appropriate enough, but in fact the town was named after the Vacas, a family of Hispanic settlers in the area. A quiet place, Vacaville, plain and old-fashioned in looks and outlook, hot and dusty in the summer-one of those towns with plenty of history and yet no particular historical attraction for the modern tourist. The only reasons you’d go there were to visit friends or relatives, or business, or to see one of the inmates at the California Medical Correctional Facility nearby. On first reflection, you wouldn’t think somebody like Frank Tucker would want to live there. But if he was the kind of man Barnwell had painted him-hired muscle, more brawn than brain-it was exactly the type of town he might pick. For one thing, a few ranchers and farm owners still believed in taking a hard line with recalcitrant laborers, the ones who had the gall to fight for better than starvation wages; such bosses weren’t above hiring somebody to knock heads when the “wetbacks” and the “greasers” and the “chihuahuas” got out of hand. Another reason for Tucker to pick Vacaville was that the cost of living was relatively low, by California standards these days; and a third was that as long as you didn’t mug old ladies on the street or break up bars on Saturday nights, the local law probably wouldn’t pay any attention to you. It was also possible that Tucker had some reason-contacts, a close friend-for wanting to be close to the prison facility.

It was just one o’clock when I drove into the smallish downtown area. I stopped at a convenience store to ask directions to Poplar Street. It was a few blocks off the main drag-an older residential neighborhood, the sidewalks shaded by big leafy oaks and elms. The private houses were mostly of pre-World War II vintage, but a few newer homes and small apartment complexes had sprung up here and there, none of them particularly aesthetic: weeds in a mossy old garden. The apartment building at number 210 was a two-story, brown stucco affair that looked more like a cut-rate motel. Eight units, four up and four down, all the doors facing the street, the ones on the second level reachable by outside staircases and a long low-railed balcony along the front.

There was an asphalt parking area, just as you’d find at a motel; no trees, no shrubs, no flowers except for some potted plants next to one of the street-level apartments. I put the Toyota into a painted parking slot and went looking for mailboxes. No mailboxes. Each apartment bore a number and each one had a private mail slot. Number 2 downstairs, the one with the potted plants next to it, also bore a neatly hand-printed card in a brass holder: Manager. There was no doorbell, so I banged on the panel a couple of times. Nobody came to see what I wanted.

I turned away with the intention of talking to one of the other residents; there were three cars in the lot besides my rental. No, make that four: a green, low-slung Firebird with a woman at the wheel was just turning in off the street. It skidded into a space next to the Toyota and a round brown Spanish face topped by piles of shiny black hair poked out of the window and said in a gravelly voice with not much accent, “You looking for me?”

“I am if you’re the manager.”

“Hold on a minute.”

She got out of the Firebird in wiggly, puffing movements-a big woman in an orange flowered dress that made her look even bigger. She leaned back in for a bag of groceries, then waddled over to where I waited.

“I’m Mrs. Ruiz,” she said good-naturedly. “If you’re selling something, I don’t want it.” She paused for a beat and then said, “Not that you look much like a salesman.”

“I’m not. I’m looking for one of your neighbors.”

“Which one?”

“Frank Tucker.”

Her mouth got puckery, as if I’d squirted lemon juice along with the name. “Him,” she said. “You a friend of that bum?”

“No. I just want to talk to him.”

“Some kind of cop, right?”

“How did you guess that?”

“Only two kinds want to talk to Frank Tucker-cops and other bums. But you’re too late.”

“Too late?”

“He’s gone. Moved out.”

“When?”

“Couple of weeks ago, like a thief in the night.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Straight to hell, I hope.”

“No forwarding address?”

“Hah!” Mrs. Ruiz said. “He owed two weeks’ rent, the bum. So who do you think takes all the crap from the owner of this place? Me, that’s who. Like it’s my fault Frank Tucker is a bum. My ex-husband warned me, he said ‘Don’t volunteer to be manager, querida, it’s nothing but headaches.’ Well, he was right for once, the only time he was ever right about anything. And I didn’t listen.”

“Can you tell me-”

“The owner’s got some nerve,” she said, still indignant. “I told him in the beginning Frank Tucker was a bum and we shouldn’t rent to him. He said rent to him anyway. I told him Tucker was an ex-convict too, as soon as I found out, but he-”

“How did you find out?”

“What, that he’s an ex-convict? I heard him talking to one of his friends. He was drunk or he wouldn’t have said it so loud.”

“Which prison was he in? The medical facility here?”

“No. Folsom.”

Folsom was a maximum security prison off Highway 50 east of Sacramento, not as well known outside the state as San Quentin but with the same kind of hard-core inmate population. I had helped send a few men to Folsom over the years… Folsom, Folsom. And a slender man in his thirties, with straight brown hair…

I said, “Did he say how long he’d been in Folsom?”

“No.”

“Or when he got out?”

“No.”

“This friend he was talking to-what did he look like?”

“Like a bum,” Mrs. Ruiz said, “what else?”