Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

“Okay. But things are finally turning around for you. Try to enjoy it, for heaven’s sake.”

“Will do.”

“Why don’t you meet me after work? We’ll go out and celebrate-have dinner, maybe see a show or something. All right?”

I didn’t feel much like celebrating, but I did feel like seeing her. “All right.”

“Good.” She paused. “Hey, you’ll be a working detective again next week. That’s what counts, isn’t it?”

“That’s what counts,” I said. And it was.

So I went down to the Hall of Justice two days later and talked to the Chief of Police, at his summons, and got things more or less patched up there. Two days after that, I drove up to Sacramento and had my interview with the State Board of Licenses. They seemed satisfied that I’d “learned my lesson,” as one of the Board members put it, and the vote to reinstate was unanimous; the Chief must have written them some strong letter at Eberhardt’s behest. They did not even place any restrictions on me, other than to stress that I cooperate fully with all public law enforcement agencies in the future.

And on Wednesday, the first of October, I was back in business.

Hunting the hobo, for starters.

The fact that I landed a client that same day was not much of a surprise, really, considering there had been a fair amount of publicity attached to the reinstatement of my license. Not that I minded the publicity in this case; it was just what I needed, and I had spoken freely to the half-dozen media people who’d contacted me. Some of the news stories were good-natured and the rest were straight reportage; nobody seemed to think a menace to society or to the city’s finest was being turned loose again. The consensus appeared to be, at least by implication, that an injustice had been righted and it was okay for me to be back in the detective game.

A gratifying number of people I knew, and a couple I didn’t know, agreed with that. After the news stories appeared, I received maybe two dozen calls over a three-day span-six from friendly cops who hadn’t agreed with the Chief’s original stance; one from another private investigator, a lady named Sharon McCone whom I’d met once and who was a friend of Eberhardt’s police crony, Greg Marcus; one from a claims adjustor at an insurance company and three from attorneys, all of whom I’d worked for in the past; one from a Chinese photojournalist, Jeanne Emerson, who wanted to do a feature article on my trials and tribulations; and the rest from a variety of acquaintances.

The call I’d most been waiting for, that first new client, came at a little past two o‘clock. It was from a woman who identified herself as Miss Arleen Bradford. She said she’d read about me in the papers, and could I come down to her office at Denim, Inc. right away to discuss a job she wanted done. It had to do with locating a missing relative, she said. She also said she had a meeting at four o’clock, so I would need to get there by three-fifteen. I told her I would be in her office by three-ten at the latest. And I caught myself grinning a little on my way out the door.

Denim, Inc. was a clothing manufacturer-jeans and denim jackets, for the most part. Their main offices were located in an old brick building on Mission Street, on the fringe of the Hispanic district. It was just

three when I parked in the front lot, five past when I got up to the fourth floor, and not quite ten past when one of a battery of secretaries ushered me through a door that bore the lettering: A. BRADFORD, PRODUCT MANAGER.

Arleen Bradford turned out to be a thin, wiry, prim-looking type in her mid-thirties. She might have been attractive if she’d put on about fifteen pounds, done something to her dark brown hair other than have it cut with a bowl and a pair of hedge clippers, and worn something besides a mannish gray suit and a blouse with so many frills and ruffles on the front that you couldn’t tell whether or not she had breasts. As it was, she looked like an uneasy combination of successful modern businesswoman and budding old maid. She sounded and acted that way, too. On the phone she had been crisp and businesslike, but she had also made a point of referring to herself as Miss Arleen Bradford, not Ms.

She gave me a brief appraising look, and her eyes said I was about what she’d expected a detective to be: one of those big, hairy brutes with dubious ethics and not many morals. She let me have her hand for about half a second and then took it away again as if she were afraid I might do something unnatural with it. She didn’t have a smile for me, and I didn’t have one for her, either.

“Thank you for being so prompt,” she said. “I have a meeting at four, as I told you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Please sit down.”

I sat in a plain chair with gray-frieze cushions. Judging from the surroundings, “product manager” was a title that carried relatively little weight in the company. The office wasn’t much, just a twelve-by-twelve cubicle containing her desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, and a window that looked out over Mission Street.

From one corner of the desk she picked up a newspaper folded into thirds and handed it to me without speaking. Then she went around and sat down. I looked at the paper. It was a copy of the Examiner, the afternoon tabloid, and it was folded open to a story on page three that was headlined: THE NEW GENERATION OF HOBOES. There was also a photograph of four men gathered around an open fire in a field; in the background, you could see railroad tracks and what appeared to be a freight yard.

I started to skim the story. It was one of those human interest features you see more and more of these days, about people who have fallen on economic hard times. Specifically, in this case, about out-of-work men who ride the rails from one place to another looking for menial jobs- men otherwise known as hoboes, tramps, vagabonds, bindlestiffs, knights of the open road. That sort of individual was supposed to be an anachronism, the story said, that had pretty much disappeared with the end of the Great Depression. But with unemployment at its highest rate since the thirties, and government cutbacks in a variety of job programs, there was a whole new generation of bindlestiffs out there riding the rods, sleeping in boxcars or in hobo jungles, eating mulligan stew and canned pork and beans, drinking cheap wine to chase away the cold and, sometimes, to keep their sad and painful memories at bay. The bunch of hoboes pictured were stopovers in Oroville, up in Butte County, one hundred and fifty miles northeast of San Francisco, where the Western Pacific Railroad had a switching station and freight yards. They had come off a cannonball freight from Los Angeles and were waiting to board another freight bound for Pasco, Washington, where they would pick fruit-

“The man on the far left is my father,” Arleen Bradford said.

I glanced up. “Pardon?”

“In the photograph,” she said in a flat voice, as if she were confessing some sort of unpleasant family secret. “My father, Charles Bradford.”

I studied the photo. The quality of reproduction was pretty good; you could see the faces of the four men clearly. The one on the far left was around my age, early to mid-fifties, with a gaunt, beard-stubbled face bisected by a thin blade of a nose. He wore a perforated summer cap with a wide visor, and an old work shirt open down the front. Around his neck was something that looked like a pendant, elliptical in shape and hanging from a thin chain.

“Are you sure it’s your father?” I asked her.

“Of course I’m sure. I haven’t seen him in three years, and he’s changed quite a lot, but there’s no mistake. Besides, he’s wearing the pendant I made for him when I was in high school.” Her mouth quirked bitterly. “Daddy never cared much for me, but he was always fond of that silly pendant. I can’t imagine why.”