Bill Pronzini: Bindlestiff

I was silent again, because I didn’t know what to say.

“You don’t have to give me an answer right away,” Eberhardt said. “Just think about it, will you? Will you do that?”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

“Okay. Thanks.” And he rang off.

So there it was: the catch. He’d called in a favor from the Chief to get my license back, and now he wanted to call in one from me and form an agency partnership. Eberhardt as a private eye? Christ.

The idea didn’t set well at all. In the first place, I knew Eb. He’d said he would let me call all the shots, but he’d been able to pull rank on me for twenty years; sooner or later he’d start trying to do it again. In the second place, I had been a loner for too many years to want to take on a partner. I liked working alone, doing things my own way and at my own pace. The idea of having to share decisions and divvy up the workload wasn’t too appealing. And in the third place, before the suspension I had barely made enough most weeks to pay the bills; and opening up shop again after all the hassle and publicity of the past few months was not going to be easy. Maybe Eberhardt could bring in some business, as he’d said, but there were no guarantees. Things could be lean for a long time. One man could get by on crumbs, but if you had to divide the crumbs between two men, both of them were liable to starve.

On the other hand, he was responsible for the State Board reversing itself. I owed him for that, and it was no small debt. If I told him no I’d be the one to feel like a shit. He would understand why I was rejecting him, but the turn-down would be there between us just the same, like a wedge. The bribe incident had already driven in one wedge, right to the point of cracking; another one was liable to split us up for good-destroy what was left of thirty-five years of friendship.

Damn, I thought. Damn! What am I going to do?

I went out into the kitchen, opened my last can of Schlitz, and took it into the living room and sat nursing it, looking at the stacks of pulps on the floor. Now, maybe, I wouldn’t have to sell off any more of my collection than these five hundred issues. I should have felt more elated, more excited at that and at the prospect of getting back to work. Well, maybe it would all come sailing in on me pretty soon and I would jump up and let out a whoop or something and dance around singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Probably not, though. Too much had happened over this crazy summer-too many complications.

My life had quit being simple during a week in June. First my relationship with Kerry, whom I’d met a few weeks previous and fallen hard for, had become strained for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was me pressuring her to get married. Then what had seemed like a business boom-three jobs in two days, all of an apparently routine nature-had degenerated into chaos: two unrelated homicides, a theft for which I’d briefly been blamed, a threatened lawsuit by one of my clients, and me stupidly and accidentally letting a murderess take it on the lam. All of this had made the papers, of course, as had my getting lucky and coming up with solutions for all three bizarre cases, so that the damned reporters had had a field day calling me “Supersleuth” and a lot of other things.

The Chief of Police hadn’t liked any of that. According to him, I was making the Department look bad by upstaging his detectives. It was a public relations matter, he’d said; my acts were detrimental to the police image. Eberhardt had tried to intercede on my behalf, but he was only a lieutenant attached to Homicide, without enough cachet to make the brass listen to reason. Before long, I was out of business.

Then, as if all of that wasn’t bad enough, there’d been the shooting in mid-August. I had been over at Eberhardt’s house one Sunday afternoon, the two of us guzzling beer and commiserating-his wife Dana had left him for another man back in May and he’d been in a funk ever since-and the doorbell had rung, and when he went to answer it a Chinese gunman had put two slugs from a. 357 Magnum into him. And one into me moments later, when I came blundering in after the shots.

Eberhardt had been critically wounded; it was a miracle he hadn’t been killed outright. I’d been luckier: the bullet had taken me in the shoulder and damaged some nerves, crippling up my left arm. The police hadn’t caught the gunman. They figured him for a contract slugger, but they had no idea why a contract had been put out on Eberhardt.

When I got out of the hospital I had an anonymous call from a Chinese who claimed that Eberhardt had taken a bribe, that that was what was behind the assassination attempt. I refused to believe it at first, but I was angry and I had to find out one way or the other. So I’d set out on my own investigation. It had ultimately led me to the man who’d ordered the hit; it had also led me to the truth about the bribe. And the truth was that Eberhardt had taken it, all right-or almost taken it-for looking the other way on a felony investigation.

He’d done it because he’d been despondent about Dana throwing him over; because he was getting old and tired of the long hours and the low pay and having to fight off temptation every time it reared up-all the sad, painful reasons good men sometimes commit acts that go against everything they’ve ever believed in. But he’d changed his mind about going through with it, then started waffling as to whether or not to change it back again. He’d still been waffling when he was shot, and he simply did not know, he said, what his final decision would have been.

We left it at that. And because I was the only other person who knew the truth-both the Chinese slugger and the man behind him had died, through no fault of mine-I left it up to Eberhardt to decide what he would do when he got out of the hospital: forget the whole thing had ever happened and go on with his police career; make a clean breast of things to the Department, face a public scandal, and probably be thrown off the force and lose his pension; or take a voluntary retirement, for personal reasons, which would allow him to keep the pension he’d earned for more than thirty years of service as a dedicated, honest cop. He had opted for voluntary retirement-probably the choice I’d have made if I had been in his position. He was now officially a civilian.

The only good thing to come out of the whole mess was that Kerry and I had got back together, and reached an understanding about our relationship, and were starting to grow closer than we’d ever been. Eberhardt and I were still friends, but there was that wedge between us, and now there might be another one.

Complications.

Nothing was simple any more. Nothing was the way it used to be..

I got up after a while, when I finished my beer, and went back into the bedroom and called Kerry at Bates and Carpenter, the ad agency where she worked as a copywriter. She was excited when I told her about Eberhardt getting me back into harness, but she shared my concern over the partnership thing.

“What do you think you’ll do?” she asked. “Which way are you leaning?”

“You know me, babe, so you know the answer to that already. But it’s going to take me a while to decide whether or not I can do it to him.”

“What about you? Isn’t what you want the important thing now?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe.”

“Well, I think it is. You’re not Eberhardt’s keeper, you know. You didn’t have anything to do with him being where he is now. And you don’t owe him anything either, not any more.”

“He got my license back, didn’t he?”

“He also got you shot.”

I sighed. “Let’s not talk about that. I’ve been doing enough brooding about the past as it is.”