Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

I drove past the entrance, peering over at the museum yard. There was no sign of Raymond. Near the dead-end barrier, an unpaved drive angled alongside the PG amp;E substation; I pulled up there and left the car in the shadows behind the building, where it couldn’t be seen from across the street. Then I moved over into the trees and underbrush that flanked the railroad right-of-way, and cautiously worked my way parallel to the museum fence until I got to where I could see the back of the roundhouse.

The engine doors were still open. The interior lights let me see the Baldwin locomotive’s cowcatcher and part of her blunt nose. There was no longer any steam coming out of the exhaust, and the boiler had been shut down; no sounds drifted over from there, or from anywhere else in the vicinity. If Raymond was inside the roundhouse he was doing something pretty quiet.

He was inside, all right; I had been standing there waiting and watching for five minutes when he appeared alongside the locomotive and came walking outside. He paused long enough to light a cigar, take a couple of deep puffs on it. Then he went across the yard to the side gate, unlocked it, stepped through, locked it again behind him, and vanished into the shadows fronting the cottage.

He would be coming back to the roundhouse sooner or later, though; otherwise he wouldn’t have left the engine doors open or the lights on. I would have to hurry. And I would have to be damned careful while I was poking around inside there. I didn’t have a gun and it seemed likely that he did. I did not want to end up where I was afraid Charles Bradford had.

Quickly, I went back along the fence to a point where the high bulk of the roundhouse loomed between me and the cottage. A long time ago, a tree had fallen against the fence here; the wire mesh was bent inward slightly and flattened down and rusted at the top. Somebody had come out with a power saw and cut the tree into six-foot segments, also a long time ago, because the segments were still scattered over the ground and starting to rot. One of them lay close to the fence; when I got up on the decaying log I could reach the tubular top bar and get enough of a grip on it to haul myself up.

The problem was, I couldn’t maintain much of a hold with the crabbed fingers on my left hand and I had to do most of the work with my right, clenching my teeth against the pain. It took me a good three minutes of grunting and heaving to hoist my fat backside over the bar and drop down on the other side. The noise I made doing it seemed loud enough to alert half the town, but that was a product of tension and my heightened senses. The cottage was two hundred yards away, and the sounds wouldn’t have carried that far.

Still, I ran ahead to where one of the old passenger coaches was set roughly parallel to the back wall of the roundhouse. I knelt along the coach’s front end, massaging my cramped hand, flexing it. I listened and watched the cottage for more than a minute before I was satisfied Raymond wasn’t coming back to investigate.

All right. I moved back to the other end of the car, crossed to the roundhouse’s side wall, then went forward again to the rear corner. Still no movement over at the cottage. I slipped around the corner, ducked inside through the open door.

And stopped in front of the turntable and tried to keep from gagging. There was a burnt-meat smell in the air, faint but nauseatingly pungent. That told me all I needed to know; I was too late, all right, but not by much more than an hour.

I went ahead anyway, around on the right side of the Baldwin and then up through the gangway and inside the cab. The smell, as I had known it would be, was coming from inside the firebox. I did not want to pedal open the butterfly doors and look inside, but I steeled myself, breathing through my mouth, and did it just the same.

There wasn’t anything left to see-just the glowing embers of the coal fire spread out over the grate. The body of Charles Bradford had long since been reduced to ashes.

If you kept stoking the fire in one of these steam boilers, you could get it as hot as an old-fashioned crematorium.

That was what Raymond had been doing when I interrupted him earlier. And that was what had happened to me back at the library, the thing in retrospect that hadn’t been quite right. It had been late afternoon, Raymond had closed the museum for the day, but there he was, feeding coal into the box as if he’d been preparing to take this old hog for a run. But there wasn’t anywhere to take it; and you don’t stoke the boiler full up on a relic like this just to check the steam pressure or how the valves are working. Christ knew where he’d had the body stashed then-not up in the cab, or he’d have been more nervous than he was, but probably somewhere close by.

I took my foot off the floor pedal, and the doors snapped shut, and I started to turn away. Something that gleamed dully on the deck caught my eye; it was under the fireman’s seat, up against the footboard. I squatted on my heels and scraped it out and held it up in my palm.

It was a piece of copper, elliptical in shape, about three inches long, with some sort of design etched into the metal; through an eye at the top was a broken length of thin chain.

Bradford’s pendant, the one Arleen had made for him back in high school.

That put the clincher on things. The chain must have caught on something and broken when Raymond stuffed Bradford’s body inside the firebox; he hadn’t noticed the pendant there on the deck afterward. I straightened, still trying not to gag, and put it into my pocket. The charred-flesh smell was making me nauseous. Raymond must be a cold-blooded bastard to have hung around in here after the cremation.

Well, he wasn’t going to get away with murder this time. I had plenty enough evidence now to bring the local cops out here and have him arrested. And plenty enough to convict him of a third count of willful homicide.

I turned into the gangway. Outside, a long way off, a locomotive’s air horn cut into the early-evening stillness-probably a freight coming into Oroville from the north. I dropped off the running board and swung toward the open doors.

And Raymond was there, just walking into view on the gravel outside.

He saw me at the same time and came to a sudden halt. There was a frozen moment during which we both stared at each other. He didn’t have a weapon of any kind, at least not in either of his hands. The air horn wailed again, and I thought: Goddamn it! and Raymond made a noise like an animal and turned and ran.

I pounded after him, cursing myself for not having got out of here sooner. The side gate stood open now and he was heading straight for it. Heading for the cottage, I thought, going after a gun. I wasn’t in very good physical shape, but neither was he-a couple of overweight middle-aged guys unused to this kind of exertion. He stumbled just after he got through the gate, and I caught him ten steps beyond.

I hit him from behind with my right shoulder and forearm, sent him sprawling. But the impact and my own momentum threw me off stride, too, and I went down on top of him just as he started to roll away. We flipped over together, clawing at each other, grunting like two pigs in a wallow. Pain erupted the length of my bad arm; gravel gouged into my body and the side of my face, stinging. When we came up we were both on our knees. He broke loose of me and swung at my head, and even though I saw it coming and tried to duck away, the blow caught me over the left ear and knocked me flat again.

He scrambled to his feet, staggering, turning. But I was already heaving up onto all fours, with my head full of buzzing noises and my left arm half numb, and I was between him and the cottage. He might have charged me, tried to take me in a hand-to-hand fight, but he didn’t do it. He had no way of knowing about my bad arm, and maybe he sensed that I might be the stronger; or maybe panic had hold of him and he was not thinking at all. Whatever the reason, he turned his back to me and ran again-away from the cottage, back along the fence toward the woods at the rear of the museum grounds.