Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

We got outside and over to my car. Huddleston gave me his hand and said, “Good luck,” and I said, “I may need it,” and got into the car and drove out of there as fast as I could without breaking any laws.

If I could go to my grave without coming back to Oroville again, there was still a chance I’d die a happy man.

It was almost eight o’clock when I drove across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. The trip had taken me four hours-I had stopped three times, once for gas, once for something to eat, and once for coffee-and I felt lousy. My head throbbed, my thoughts were muzzy, my left arm and hand were sore again. A five-year-old kid with a cap pistol could have tried to mug me and I would not have been able to fend him off.

When I got to my flat I took a beer out of the refrigerator and then went into the bedroom and switched on my answering machine. There were several messages, one of which was from Arleen Bradford and another of which was from Hannah Peterson. Miss A. Bradford said I should call her as soon as I could; she sounded pretty distraught. Her sister said, “This is Hannah Peterson. Please call me right away, it’s very important. I need to talk to you about what happened to my father.” She sounded distraught, too, even more so than Arleen. Charles Bradford must have meant more to her than I’d given her credit for.

I drank most of the beer as I listened to the playback tape. That was a mistake; I didn’t remember until I drained the last of the can that you’re not supposed to drink alcohol when you’ve got a concussion. That one beer had the effect of three or four stiff drinks of hard liquor; I began to feel woozy, light-headed. Arleen Bradford and Hannah Peterson could wait until tomorrow. I was in no shape now to deal with grief or anger or whatever else the two of them wanted to throw at me.

I shut off the machine, shut off the lights, and started to shed my clothes. I had just enough time to get out of my pants before the bed reached up like a hungry lover and gathered me in.

Somewhere, a long way off, bells were ringing. I crawled down the steep embankment, trying to get away from the train that was bearing down on me. A guy who looked like Lester Raymond was leaning out of the open door of one of the boxcars, screaming obscenities about death; he smelled like burning flesh. Then he jumped off, and disappeared-poof, like magic stuff-and over the sound of the bells the hobo named Flint said, “You want sympathy? Hey, man, sympathy is what you find in the dictionary between shit and syphillis.” Then Raymond was there again, beating my head against something hard and unyielding. Then I woke up.

The ringing bells belonged to the telephone. I fumbled the handset out of its cradle, dropped it, picked it up off the floor, and said, “Yuh?”

“Are you all right?” Kerry’s voice said worriedly. “My God, I just saw the morning papers.”

“Yuh,” I said again. “I’m all right.”

“Are you sure? You don’t sound all right…”

“You woke me up. What time’s it?”

“Nine o’clock. The papers said you got a concussion…”

“Mild concussion. I’m fine, don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry? You idiot, of course I worry. What is it with you and murder cases? You just get your license back, you get a new client, and bang, here you are all over the news again. And with a concussion besides.”

I was awake now. I sat up, wiggled my hips until I had my back braced against the headboard, and ran my free hand over my face; it made a sound like a cat scratching on a door. My head didn’t hurt too much, which was a surprise. Neither did my bad arm. I was in great shape, all right. Another couple of days, I thought sourly, and I would be well enough to go out and play a strenuous game of checkers with the other old farts in the park.

“Don’t lecture me, okay?” I said. “I can’t deal with lectures until I’ve had my morning coffee.”

“One of these days you’re going to stay out of trouble on a case, and I’m going to be so surprised I won’t believe it.”

“Did you hear what I said about lectures?”

“You can be so damned exasperating sometimes,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with you.”

“I can think of a couple of things.”

“Hah.”

“Hey, can I help it if things keep happening to me? If I don’t have any luck?”

“No luck? You’ve got more luck than ten people, or else you wouldn’t still be walking around in one piece.”

“Nuts,” I said. “Did the law get Lester Raymond yet?”

“If they did it was too late to make the papers.”

Damn, I thought. Could Raymond pull off the same kind of vanishing act as he had fifteen years ago? The odds were against it. The first time around he’d been as lucky as Kerry claimed I was; this time the FBI would catch up to him before he could go to ground long enough to establish a new identity. It was only a matter of time.

Kerry said, “Are you going to lose your license again?”

“Huh? What makes you ask that? Is there something in the papers?”

“No, there’s nothing in the papers. But my God, you just got it back and now this. What if they take it away from you again?”

“They won’t do that.”

“No? How do you know?”

I didn’t know, but I said, “That’s what they told me up in Oroville. The FBI and the local cops. They’re not holding it against me that Raymond got away.”

“Well, if that’s what they told you…” She sounded relieved, which was more than I could say for myself at the moment. Then, after a couple of seconds of silence, she laughed wryly and without much humor.

I said, “What’s funny?”

“Oh, I was just remembering something you said to me the other night. About how you’d never hop a freight, and the closest you intended to get to one was the Oroville hobo jungle. Famous last words. You did hop a freight-and you did it just like a bindlestiff.”

“Yeah.”

“You could have ended up a stiff bindlestiff, too, like the character in Cybil’s pulp story, if Lester Raymond had been a little stronger.”

“Are we back on the lecture circuit again?”

“Not if I’ve made my point.”

“I got it the first time around. I’m fairly bright that way, you know.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “How does your head feel?”

“Not too bad today. But the bandage they put on probably needs to be changed. You want to come over and play nurse for a while?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether or not you’ve got any ideas about playing doctor.”

“Lady,” I said, “I don’t think I could play doctor today if my life depended on it. My caduceus is out of whack along with everything else; it might be days before it’s working again.”

She laughed. “Okay, comedian. Go put some coffee on; I’ll be there pretty soon.”

I got out of bed and doddered into the kitchen and put the coffee on. By the time it was ready, I had taken a quick shower, shaved two days’ growth of stubble off my face, and got my pants on. I was just pouring myself a cup when the telephone rang again.

Eberhardt. “I just been reading about you,” he said.

“You and everybody else.”

In the old days he would have made some smart-ass remark about my penchant for trouble. But the old days were gone. “You okay?” he asked.

“Not too bad, considering.”

“FBI give you a hard time?”

“Not really.”

“Oroville police?”

“No. I don’t think this is going to land me in hot water with the State Board, Eb. Everybody up there was pretty decent to me.”

“Good. Listen, you got some free time this afternoon?”

“I don’t know, maybe. Why?”