Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

Well, maybe somebody there could give me some answers. I started the car and went to find out.

The library wasn’t far away, less than a mile from the mission on Lincoln two blocks east of Oro Dam Boulevard. It was a low, newish, beige-and-brown building with the words BUTTE COUNTY LIBRARY in big raised letters on the front wall. There were only three other cars in the parking lot; Oroville’s hall of learning, it seemed, wasn’t exactly a popular hangout for the residents.

The checkout desk, L-shaped and made of blond wood, was just inside the front door. Behind it, a thin young guy with a nose like a boat hook was pasting card pockets into a stack of recent acquisitions. The only patrons I saw were an old guy sitting at one of the tables, shuffling through a stack of magazines, and a studious-looking kid browsing in the section marked NEW ARRIVALS-7-DAY

I told the thin guy behind the desk what I wanted and started to show him the Examiner photo, but he said he hadn’t been on duty Tuesday afternoon; the person I wanted to see was Mrs. Kennedy, the head librarian. She was there, doing something over in the stacks, and he went and got her for me.

Mrs. Kennedy was about sixty, silver-haired, energetic, and garrulous. She peered at the photo through a pair of reading glasses and said immediately, “Oh yes, I remember him. Frankly, I was amazed when he came in. I mean, I could see that he was a tramp-the way he was dressed and the pack he was carrying and all.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“They just don’t come in here. I mean, the library is the last place you’d expect to find a hobo.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Do you know what it was he was looking for?”

“Well, that amazed me even more. I was at the desk and he stopped and the first thing he asked was if we keep microfilm files of old newspapers.”

“Old newspapers?”

“Yes. Well, I told him that we do, and he asked if the Los Angeles Times was one of them.”

“Is it?”

“Oh yes. Most libraries keep microfilms of at least one major daily newspaper, you know, and the Los Angeles Times is the standard one in small branches such as ours. We also have files of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York — ”

“Yes, ma’am. Did he ask to see the Times files?”

“He did. The ones for the months of August and September of 1967.”

I ruminated about that for a couple of seconds. Screwier and screwier, I thought. “Did he give you any indication of what he wanted from those files?”

“No, he didn’t,” she said. “He studied them for twenty minutes or so, in our microfilm room. That was all.”

Twenty minutes was hardly enough time to wade through two months’ worth of issues of a thick daily newspaper. That being the case, it would seem that Bradford had to have known more or less what he was looking for.

“You said those files were the first thing he asked about,” I said. “Was there something else he was interested in seeing?”

Mrs. Kennedy nodded. “The Oroville city directories for the past fifteen years. He spent another few minutes with those. Isn’t that strange?”

“It is,” I agreed. “Very. I don’t suppose he told you why he wanted to look at the directories?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Did he ask for anything else?”

“No. As soon as he was finished with the directories, he practically ran out of the building. He almost knocked me down and he didn’t even bother to apologize. Well, I was speechless, I really was.”

I didn’t believe that for a minute. “Did you happen to see which direction he went?”

“No, I didn’t,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “I was too perplexed to pay any attention.”

I considered asking her for those same microfilm files of the L.A. Times for August and September 1967. But without more information, some clue as to what Bradford had been looking for, it would be like hunting the proverbial needle in a haystack. The same was true of the Oroville city directories. My best bet was to try to trace Bradford’s movements after he’d left the library.

He’d been on foot, and as far as I knew he wasn’t familiar with the layout of Oroville. If he’d been heading for some place here in town, as his study of the directories seemed to indicate, he might not have realized until after he’d rushed out that he needed directions to wherever it was. And he might have stopped somewhere else to ask how to get there.

I went to see if I could get there myself.

I made an arbitrary decision and turned west out of the library parking lot, toward the downtown area. There were a bunch of industrial establishments, and a couple of restaurants along Lincoln Boulevard in that direction; I wasted forty minutes asking questions and showing the newspaper photo to a dozen people. Nobody had seen Bradford on Tuesday or on any other day. Nobody seemed to give much of a damn about hoboes either.

So I turned around finally and drove back toward Oro Dam Boulevard, past the library to the east. A middle-aged attendant at a service station on the main drag allowed as how he might have seen a guy who looked like Bradford walking by on Tuesday afternoon; he always noticed tramps, he said, because sometimes they came in and tried to mooch a handout. But he’d been busy at the time and he couldn’t be sure it was the same guy in the photograph.

There was another service station across the street; I drove in there and talked to a fat kid with pimples who said he’d also been on the job on Tuesday afternoon. “I think I seen him,” the kid said. “He started in here like he wanted to ask me something, but I was waiting on a customer. So he went on out again.”

“Do you remember which direction he headed?”

“North. Yeah, toward the dam.”

In the next block there were a couple of fast-food places, an auto supply store, a music store, and a combination grocery and liquor retailer. I drew a blank at all of them. But on the corner of the next block after that, I came on a place called the Green Garden Cafe-a small lunchroom with a lot of potted plants in the window and a bunch more decorating the long, narrow room inside.

There was nobody in the cafe when I entered except for a fairly good-looking bleached-blond waitress in her twenties and a burly guy about the same age wearing the uniform of a deliveryman, with his shirt sleeves rolled up so you could see that his arms were covered with tattoos. The two of them were down at the other end of the counter, facing each other across it. The waitress was grinning all over her face and watching the burly guy expectantly. Neither of them seemed to notice I had come in.

“Here’s another one,” the guy was saying. “You’ll love this one, Lynn. How come the Italians don’t have a national fish?”

“How come?”

“They did,” he said, “but it drowned.”

The blonde let out a hoot like a goosed owl and leaned against the counter, giggling. When she got her breath back she cracked him on the arm and said, “God, Bernie, you’re so funny!”

“Yeah,” Bernie said. “Ain’t that a pisser?”

“You make my sides hurt.”

“Yeah,” Bernie said. “So did you hear about the two old ladies walking along the beach one day? They think it’s deserted, see, they’re just out for a little air; but they come around this rock, there’s a guy lying there on a blanket and he’s naked.”

“Naked,” the waitress said, nodding. She had started to giggle again in anticipation.

“Yeah. One of them nudists, you know? So the two old broads stop and one of them points. The guy’s lying on his back so you know what she’s pointing at, right?”

“Right.” More giggles. “Oh, sure.”