Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

Back and forth, back and forth. Make up your mind, damn it, I thought. Why can’t you make up your mind?

We went into the kitchen. Eberhardt said, “You thirsty? I got some beer in the box.”

“I guess I could use one.”

He opened the refrigerator and took out a couple of bottles of Henry Weinhard’s. “I’m not supposed to drink anything alcoholic yet,” he said. “Bad for my insides, the doc says, because they’re still on the mend. The hell with him, too.”

“It’s your funeral, Eb.”

“Damn right it is.” He gave me one of the bottles, twisted the cap off his. “Let’s go out in the yard. Not too much sun lately; might as well take advantage of it while we got it.”

It was a small yard, enclosed by a board fence, with a Japanese elm and a barbecue pit and some bushes and a couple of pieces of outdoor furniture. We’d been out here just before the shooting, drinking beer, talking, getting ready to cook a couple of steaks; it made me faintly uneasy to be back in the yard, too.

We sat on the outdoor furniture and drank our beers and talked about nothing much for a while. Then Eberhardt asked me about Charles Bradford and Lester Raymond, so I told him the way it had been-all the details, the stuff that hadn’t got into the papers.

When I was done he said, “You’re a hell of a detective; I always said that. But your problem is, you don’t know when to quit.”

“I’ve been a cop too long, I guess. I always want to know all the answers.”

“You need somebody to keep an eye on you,” he said. “Before you get killed or thrown in jail. Or they take your license away permanently.”

“Eb…”

“Yeah, I know. I’m pushing about you taking me into your agency. And you haven’t decided yet, right?”

“Not yet, no.”

He leaned forward in his chair. “Listen,” he said, “all I want is a chance. Just a chance. I’ll go nuts if I sit around here doing nothing much longer.”

“What about one of the bigger agencies? You could hook up with the Pinks, with your background. They’d have more for you to do, you’d make more money…”

“Yeah, pulling crappy guard duty somewhere. I don’t want that kind of job.”

“What do you think it’s been like for me the past twenty years, Eb? A lot of hard, mostly crappy work, no glamour, and damned little money. I barely made enough to get by when things were going good.”

“I told you before, I can bring in some business.”

“But would it be enough to support both of us? These are tough times, you know that. I don’t see that they’re going to get much better either.”

“If you’re going to say no,” he said, “go ahead and say it. I won’t hold it against you.”

The hell he wouldn’t. I could see that in the hard, bitter shine of his eyes. “I’m not going to say no yet; I’m not ready to say anything yet. Give me a few more days, will you?”

“Sure. A few more days. But I got to have something to do pretty soon or I’ll start climbing the goddamn walls.”

Silence settled between us. But it was not the good companionable silence of the old days; it was strained, like that between two strangers.

I broke it finally by saying, “There’s an American League playoff game on TV. You feel like watching it?”

“Nah. Greedy jocks, greedy owners, stupid announcers-who the hell cares about professional sports these days? Not me, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t have to hang around, you know,” he said. “You probably got a hot date with Kerry coming up anyway.”

“Sure,” I lied. “That’s right.”

“Call me when you make up your mind,” he said, without looking at me. “I won’t bug you again, meanwhile.”

There wasn’t anything more for me to say. I nodded, gripped his shoulder, and left him sitting there in his lawn chair staring at something only he could see.

I was in a low mood when I got back to my flat, and ten minutes on the telephone shoved it all the way to the bottom. Kerry was the first person I called, to see if she wanted to have dinner with me; she said no, she was still working and she didn’t feel much like company tonight. She sounded grumpy, so I asked, “Are you still miffed about Jeanne Emerson?” and she said, “Don’t be silly.” But then she said, “Why don’t you go have dinner with her? I’m sure she could whip up an Oriental delicacy or two for you.” After which she muttered something about talking to me later and rang off.

So then I called Hannah Peterson’s number in Sonoma; she still wasn’t home. But Arleen Bradford was, and in a pretty emotional state. The first thing she said to me was, “It’s all your fault,” in a shrill, angry voice. “Why did you have to let Lester Raymond get away? Why couldn’t you have gone to the police?”

“Look, Miss Bradford-”

“He murdered my father!” She almost shouted the words, so that I had to pull the receiver away from my ear.

“The police will get him,” I said. “He’s not going to-”

“I won’t pay you any more money. You hear me? I won’t pay you another cent after what you did!”

And bang, she slammed the receiver down in my ear.

I sighed, went out of the bedroom, turned on the TV, and tried to watch the baseball game for a while. But nothing much was going on, and when one of the announcers said in response to a fielding error, “He gets paid a million dollars a year to catch popflies like that,” I got up in disgust and shut the thing off.

I drove down to Union Street and bought myself an anchovy-and-pepperoni pizza for dinner. But by the time I drove back up the hill, found a parking place, and walked to my flat, the pizza was cold. I put it into the oven to warm it up, left it in too long, and burned the crust. Then I discovered I was out of beer.

It was one of those days, all right. And there was only one way to deal with days like that.

I took two aspirin for my headache and went to bed with a hot pulp.

The telephone jarred me out of sleep on Sunday morning, just as it had on Saturday morning. The nightstand clock said a few minutes past nine. It wasn’t anybody I knew this time; a youngish-sounding male voice gave his name as Harry Runquist and then said, “I’m Hannah Peterson’s fiance. I’m calling from Sonoma.”

I said, stifling a yawn, “What can I do for you, Mr. Runquist?”

“Do you know where Hannah is? You’re the last person I can think of who might know.”

“Where she is?”

“Because if you do, you’ve got to tell me. I’ve been half out of my head worrying about her.”

There was a kind of controlled desperation in his voice; it made him sound hoarse. And it woke me all the way up. “I don’t know where Mrs. Peterson is,” I said. “I’ve only talked to her once and that was three days ago. How long has she been missing?”

“Since Friday night.”

“Have you tried calling her sister?”

“I tried calling everybody,” Runquist said. “Nobody’s seen her, nobody knows where she might be. I even went to the police last night. They said you had to wait forty-eight hours before you could file a missing-person report. I tried to tell them about her father, about this son of a bitch Raymond, but they wouldn’t listen.”

“What about Raymond?”

“They said they hadn’t had any reports of him being in this area; they said I was worrying about nothing-she was upset about her father and she probably just went off somewhere to be by herself. But they don’t know Hannah. She wouldn’t do that, not without telling me.”

“Are you saying you think Lester Raymond might be responsible for her disappearance?”

“No. I don’t know. There’s just no other reason I can think of for her vanishing like this.”