Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

He drank some of his wine, moved restlessly to one of the windows and stood looking out into the yard. “Too many memories here,” he said, half to himself. “I should have moved out long ago.”

“Is that why you’ve got the house up for sale?”

“Part of the reason. Hannah’s selling her place, too. We bought some land up in the mountains east of Glen Ellen and we’re building a house on it. We’re going to be married when it’s finished.”

“Oh,” I said, “I see.”

He nodded. “We’ve both had offers since we put the houses on the market, but they’ve been too low. Things in real estate are tight right now-” He broke off. “To hell with real estate,” he said. “It’s Hannah we should be talking about.”

“When was the last time you saw her, Mr. Runquist?”

“Friday evening, at her house. She called me at the winery that afternoon, after the Oroville police notified her of her father’s death, and I went over to be with her. She was pretty upset. She’d never been close to her dad, but finding out he’d been murdered… that hit her hard.”

“It’s a hell of a thing, all right.”

“She told me about seeing you, trying to convince you not to go up there hunting for him. Maybe you should have listened to her; maybe it would have been better for all of us if you’d stayed out of Oroville.”

There was no censure in his voice, only anguish. He wasn’t blaming me. If she’d told him she thought I was a homosexual it did not seem to matter to him. And if that was the case I liked him for his tolerance, too.

I said, “Her father would still be dead, even if I’d stayed away. And Raymond would have got away with murder a second time.”

“I know,” Runquist said. “But Christ, what if Raymond did come down here after Hannah? What if he’s responsible for her disappearance? What if…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew what he was thinking. He tilted his wine glass again; his hand was a little unsteady.

“I still don’t see how that’s possible,” I said. “What reason could Raymond have for harming Mrs. Peterson?”

“I don’t know. All I know is, she’s missing and she shouldn’t be.”

“How long did you stay with her on Friday?”

“Until about six o’clock.”

“Why did you leave her then?”

“I had a meeting scheduled here at my house; I’m chairman of the committee for this year’s Sonoma Wine Festival. I wanted to cancel it, but Hannah said no, she’d be all right.” He turned from the window and began to pace. “The meeting broke up about eight o’clock. I was just about to telephone Hannah, but she beat me to it. She said she’d had a call and she had to go out, but her car was out of gas. That’s happened to her before; she’s always forgetting to fill up when she’s low. She knows I keep a five-gallon can in my garage and she wanted me to bring it over.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. Right away.”

“How did she seem?”

“Even more upset than earlier. Frantic, almost. She said she had to be somewhere and she was already late.”

“That’s not much to get frantic over.”

“I know. I tried to get her to tell me where she had to go, who she was seeing, but she wouldn’t say. Hannah can be… well, she can be stubborn sometimes.”

Yeah, I thought, I’ll bet. “I don’t suppose she said anything about the phone call either?”

“No. As soon as I poured the gas into her tank, she drove off.” He frowned, as if he’d just remembered something. “There was a sleeping bag in the back seat,” he said.

“Sleeping bag?”

“Yes. I noticed it just before she drove away. She’s not the kind to go out camping, not Hannah. It must have belonged to her late husband. But what was she doing with it in her car?”

I shook my head; there was nothing to be gained by trying to answer questions like that. “Was that the last time you saw or spoke to her?”

“The last time, yes.”

I pulled one of the chairs out from the table and straddled it with my arms resting on its back. “She called me, too, on Friday night,” I said, “and left a message on my answering machine. I don’t know what time-she didn’t say-but it had to have been before eight-thirty. That was when I got home from Oroville and checked the machine.”

Runquist quit pacing. “Why would she call you? You live in San Francisco; how could you do anything for her that I couldn’t?”

Another rhetorical question. I said, “All she said was that she wanted me to get in touch with her right away and that it was important.”

“Did you try to call her that night?”

“No. I was tired and I thought it was only that she was upset about her father. I called twice yesterday; no answer either time.”

Runquist finished his wine, went immediately to the refrigerator and emptied the bottle into his glass, and started to work on that.

I asked him, “Are you sure Mrs. Peterson hasn’t been home since Friday night?”

“Not positive, no. But I called again at ten-thirty that night and she wasn’t there. I should have gone over and waited for her but I didn’t. I didn’t go to her place until yesterday morning, after I tried calling twice more and still didn’t get an answer.”

“You have a key to her house?”

“Yes. We’re engaged, I told you that.”

“I’m just asking, Mr. Runquist.”

“Her bed hadn’t been slept in,” he said.

“Was everything in order inside the house?”

“As far as I could tell, it was.”

“Did you check to see if any of her clothes or other belongings were missing?”

“Yes,” he said. “Everything was still there. Her suitcases, too-I made sure of that.”

“What did you do then?”

“Talked to her neighbors. None of them had seen her. Then I came back here and called everyone I could think of that she knows; none of them had seen or talked to her either. That was when I started to get scared. I even drove up to the house we’re building in the mountains. When she still hadn’t turned up by six o’clock I went to the police. I told you on the phone what they said.”

“Did you check her house again this morning?”

“Before I called you,” he said. “Her bed still hadn’t been slept in, and nothing had been touched.”

I got up from the chair. “It might be a good idea if I had a look at the house,” I said. “Would you mind going over there with me, letting me in?”

“No, of course not. Anything you want.”

He finished his wine, plunked the glass down on the table, and led me out to the front porch. The jack-o’-lantern grinned at us from the table-an incongruity in the bright Sunday morning sunshine. It made me think, in spite of myself, of witches and goblins and things that went bump on dark nights.

Hannah Peterson’s house was on Lovall Valley Road, out near the Buena Vista Winery. It was a modern ranch-style surrounded by a redwood fence, with plenty of lawn in front, an attached two-car garage, and a swimming pool glinting at the rear. On one side were acres of gold and scarlet grape vines stretching off into the distance; on the other side was a fenced pasture with a couple of horses grazing in it. A FOR SALE sign similar to the one at Runquist’s place was imbedded in the middle of the lawn.

I parked in the driveway, and Runquist and I got out and went over onto a porch studded with old oak wine barrels that had been turned into planters for ferns and other decorative plants. He used his key to unlock the front door. “Hannah!” he called as we stepped inside. “Hannah!” But his voice echoed emptily in the stillness.

Runquist took me from room to room. As he’d said earlier, nothing was out of order; the place, in fact, was immaculate-the kind of house I had never felt comfortable in because there was no personality to it, no sense of the individual who occupied it. Swedish Modern furniture, carpeting and drapes and accessories that complimented it perfectly; pictures hung just so, ashtrays and lamps and vases arranged just so, the tile and fixtures in the kitchen and bathrooms gleaming. No books or magazines anywhere; people who don’t read always put me off a little. It was like walking through a museum exhibit. The only thing that gave any indication that I was in a house belonging to Hannah Peterson was a huge, impressionistic painting of an ancient steam train that hung in the family room at the rear.