Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

I got taken then to a door marked CHIEF OF POLICE. On the other side of it was a small, functional office containing nondescript furniture and two men, both of them standing: Collins, and an angular guy of about fifty with a long, narrow face and spatulate hands. The angular one’s name was Lydecker, it developed. He was Oroville’s chief of police.

Lydecker told me to sit down. He and Collins remained standing. “Looks like you were right about Jim Dallmeyer,” he said. But he didn’t sound too pleased about it.

“No sign of him at the museum?”

“No sign of him anywhere,” Collins said. “His van was gone when we got there. Front door of the cottage was standing wide open. Dresser drawers pulled out, closet in the bedroom half-empty-looks like he packed and beat it in a hurry.”

“Then you believe me now?”

“We believe you. We searched the place and found a couple of incriminating things-a wallet belonging to Charles Bradford, for one. We’ve got an APB out on Dallmeyer right now.”

“But we’d have him in custody already,” Lydecker said to me, “if you’d played it by the book. Christ, man, why didn’t you come to us right away instead of trying to take him by yourself?”

“What can I say? I screwed up; I admit it. But I didn’t go out there with the idea of tackling him myself, trying to play hero. I thought it would take too long to convince you to investigate, and I figured maybe he hadn’t cremated Bradford’s body yet. Proof was all I was after. I found it, too-that pendant…”

Lydecker was shaking his head. “You screwed up, all right,” he said, “and I don’t like it. On the other hand, you did turn up a homicide in my town, and a multiple killer to boot… Hell, I don’t know what to do about you.”

I didn’t say anything. Things were a little dicey now; if he wanted to make trouble for me, I stood to lose my license all over again. In fact, with the publicity this was bound to get, maybe I stood to lose it no

matter what Lydecker decided to do. I could just see the headlines: PRIVATE EYE IN HOT WATER AGAIN. FIRST DAY BACK IN BUSINESS-ANOTHER HOMICIDE.

My head had begun to throb as intensely as before. My thoughts were running a little fuzzy at the edges, too. I hoped they weren’t going to keep me here very long. If this session lasted much more than another fifteen minutes I was liable to fall asleep in the chair. Or fall out of the damned chair altogether.

It didn’t last much longer, thank God. They had some questions for me, mainly about the details of my activities in Oroville, for clarification purposes. I did some babbling in answer to the last one Lydecker asked-I was pretty woozy by then and my mouth flapped like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s-and that convinced them to call a halt to the proceedings.

Evidently they had decided beforehand to put me up for the night at a local motel, rather than stick me back in the holding cell. Collins said something about the motel and took me outside to his car and drove me a short distance to a place that had a blue neon sign and some buildings arranged in a half-circle. Then we were in a room, and he said somebody would be back for me in the morning. Then I was alone, sitting on the edge of the bed. Then there was nothing-an absolute void, dreamless, that wasn’t like sleep at all.

The young, flat-faced sergeant, Huddleston, was the one who came for me in the morning. He woke me by banging on the door, and I staggered out of bed and let him in. I must have looked pretty bad; the first thing he said was, “Man, you had it rough last night, didn’t you?”

I mumbled something only half coherent, because I was still trying to fight off the loginess of sleep, and shambled into the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water. It made my teeth chatter, and that in turn made my head hurt. But it was a muted kind of aching, not unlike that of a hangover. The inside of my mouth tasted like I had swallowed something that had crawled out from under a woodpile, something nobody should ever try to eat.

Huddleston was standing in the bathroom doorway. “How do you feel?” he asked.

“I may live,” I said. “I’m not sure yet.”

“I had a concussion once. I know what it’s like.”

“Yeah.”

“Yours isn’t too bad, though. Hospital called to say the X ray they took turned out negative-no serious damage.”

“Good. Did anybody find Raymond yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Damn.”

“Don’t worry, he won’t get away this time.”

“I hope not. Okay if I take a shower?”

“Go ahead.”

All I had on was my underwear; somehow I had managed to take off the rest of my clothes last night. I stripped down, turned on the shower, and got under it for about five minutes-hot, cold, hot, cold. That woke me up. I would have liked to brush my teeth, to get rid of that foul taste in my mouth; I settled instead for rinsing them with cold water from the sink tap. I caught a glimpse of myself in the medicine cabinet mirror when I was done. What I looked like was one of those sub-human types who dunked women in vats of boiling oil in the sex-and-sadism pulp magazines of the thirties.

“You’re too goddamn old to take this kind of abuse,” I said to my reflection. “You were better off forcibly retired, you know that? You never did know what was good for you.”

When I went out into the other room Huddleston was sitting in the only chair, smoking a cigarette. He watched me pick up my shirt, find the little vial of pain capsules the doctor had given me last night, and eat two of them. Then he said, “There’s an FBI agent from Sacramento waiting down at the station. He wants to talk to you.”

“FBI, huh?”

“It’s their baby, too, on account of Raymond leaving California with the stolen money and securities fifteen years ago. Dallmeyer is Lester Raymond, all right; his fingerprints were all over his cottage and they matched up in the FBI computer.”

I had my shirt on and I was getting into my pants. “How did they know he left the state?”

“He cashed some of those negotiable securities in Las Vegas and a couple of other places back in ’67 and ’68,” Huddleston said. “But he was slick about it-he left the FBI with a cold trail each time. Turns out he lived in Omaha and Denver before he came to Oroville ten years ago.”

“Oh?”

“Sergeant Collins found evidence at the cottage that proves it. Chief Lydecker notified the Bureau last night.”

“What’s the word on Charles Bradford?”

“Not much doubt that Raymond killed him and cremated the body, just like you said. County lab people came down from Chico and ran tests on the ashes in the locomotive’s firebox; they found bone and dental fragments.”

I thought of Arleen Bradford and Hannah Peterson. “Did anybody notify Bradford’s next of kin?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Chief probably did, though. One of the reporters for the local paper got hold of the story this morning; there’ll be a bunch more from the wire services and Christ knows where else in town before long. Our department wouldn’t look too good if Bradford’s daughters got the news from tonight’s papers instead of from us.”

Reporters, I thought. Ah Christ, here we go again.

“Did you want to do it?” Huddleston asked. “Tell the daughter who hired you?”

“Hell, no.”

“I don’t blame you. It’s a lousy job. I had to tell a woman once that her two teenage kids were killed in an accident. I went out and got drunk afterward; it didn’t help much.”

“It never does,” I said. “What about the rest of it? Am I being blamed for letting Raymond get away? Officially, I mean.”

Huddleston shrugged, jabbed out his cigarette in a glass ashtray on the table beside him. “You made a mistake,” he said. “So what else is new? People make mistakes every day. Important thing is, you exposed a murder-and a murderer.”