Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

I backed off in a hurry, started toward the big white house again. The sun was past its zenith now, beating down on the top of my sore head. Past noon. Less than five hours. Not much time, even if I had had anything specific to work with.

Hannah, I thought, where did you go on Friday night?

Where the hell did you go?

The woman who answered the door at the big white house hadn’t seen Hannah Peterson in several days, she said. What did I want with Hannah, anyway? I told her I was a friend of Harry Runquist’s and that it was a personal matter. She said, “Humpf,” and gave me a sour look; it was plain that she neither liked nor approved of Hannah. I chalked it up to female jealousy. The woman was forty and frumpy, with hair that poked up from her skull like a cluster of steel springs out of a torn mattress.

But I not only got the same negative response to my questions from half a dozen other neighbors over the next thirty minutes, I also got the same sense of disapproval or dislike or both. And two of the people I talked to were men. One matronly type referred to Hannah as “that woman”; one of the men, who was about sixty, assumed a righteous air and clacked his dentures and said he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d chased off to a motel with some man. He sounded a little envious just the same.

So Hannah wasn’t popular with her neighbors. So what? She was a walking advertisement for sex. Most women would resent her for that, and most men would covet her either openly or behind proper facades. She also had plenty of money, inherited from a husband twenty-five years her senior, and she probably hadn’t worked a day in her life. Not many people would like her much, I thought, and those that did would be poor love-sick bastards like Runquist or carbon copies of Hannah herself-sybaritic, money-hungry types with things in their past that they never mentioned to anyone.

I had covered all of the houses within two blocks of Hannah’s place to the west, and within a block and a half to the east. There was one more left to try on the east side, to make it two blocks both ways; if I drew a blank there as well, there didn’t seem to be much point in going any farther.

It was a small cottage set well back from the street inside a wood-and-wire fence. The front yard was lush with a variety of fruit trees-apple, peach, plum-and rows of pea and bean and tomato vines, plus a watermelon patch, a squash patch, and bunches of artichoke and swiss chard plants. It looked like one of those deluxe Victory Gardens FDR kept urging people to plant during the Second World War. In the middle of it, a stooped, skinny guy in his seventies was industriously whacking away at the ground with a hoe. Behind him, on the porch, a round little woman about the same age was sitting in the shade, drinking something out of a glass and watching him. The two of them seemed content with their respective roles-him working, her watching.

I went up to the front gate. “Excuse me, sir,” I called to the guy. “I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute.”

He quit hoeing, squinted at me for a couple of seconds, and apparently decided I looked respectable enough to deal with. He started in my direction. There was a lot of bounce in his step; he may have been old in years, but he had some spark left.

“What can I do for you?” he said when he got to the gate.

“I’m trying to locate a woman named Hannah Peterson,” I said. “She-”

“Who?”

“Hannah Peterson. She lives a couple of blocks down that way”-I gestured-“in the house with vineyards on one side and the horse pasture on the other.”

“Oh, her,” he said, and grinned. He glanced over his shoulder at the round woman on the porch. Then he winked at me. “The blonde with the big tits,” he said.

“Uh-huh. Right.”

“Well? What do you want with her?”

“I’m a friend of the man she’s engaged to. Harry Runquist. He’s pretty worried about her; she’s been missing since Friday night.”

“She has? Missing, you say?”

“Yes. I was wondering if maybe you’d seen her sometime Friday evening. Or any time since.”

“Saw her yesterday morning,” he said. “So how could she be missing since Friday night? Don’t make any sense.”

“Are you sure it was yesterday morning you saw her?”

“Sure I’m sure,” he said. “I may be old, but I ain’t senile. I know one day from another.”

“What time yesterday morning?”

“Around nine o’clock. I was on my way to the grocery. Edna-that’s my wife-needed some milk.” He frowned. “Ain’t got a cow,” he said regretfully.

“Where was it you saw Mrs. Peterson?”

“Inside her garage.”

“You mean the garage door was open when you drove bay?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“What was she doing?”

“Looked like she’d been loading something into her car,” he said. “Trunk was up.”

“Was she alone?”

“Not exactly. Another car’d just pulled into the driveway. Company, I reckon.”

“Did you see who was in it?”

“Nope. I was too busy looking at the blonde’s tits.” He winked at me again. “Man never gets too old to look at a nice set of tits.”

“Had you ever seen the car before?”

“Which car?”

“Not Mrs. Peterson’s; the other one.”

“Can’t say that I had, no.”

“Do you remember what kind it was?”

“Hell, I don’t know nothing about cars,” he said. “They all look alike to me. Just a car, that’s all.”

“New, or an older model?”

“More new than old, I guess.”

“What color?”

“Green. Dark green.”

“So you drove on past,” I said, “and went to the store. How long was it before you came back?”

He shrugged. “Twenty minutes, give or take.”

“Was the dark green car still in Mrs. Peterson’s driveway?”

“Nope.”

“How about Mrs. Peterson’s car?”

“I dunno. Garage door was down.”

“Did you see any sign of her?”

“Nope. And believe me, son, I was looking. Tits like she’s got.. ” He sighed, glanced back at his wife again, sighed a second time, and said, “Sure must be nice,” in the same regretful voice he’d used when he said he didn’t have a cow.

I thanked him and started back toward Hannah’s house. I thought I could take his story pretty much at face value; he was a long way from being senile, and he hadn’t struck me as the type to make up stories. And if it was the truth, then Hannah Peterson hadn’t disappeared Friday night but sometime yesterday.

But that fact only clouded the issue even more. Why hadn’t her bed been slept in Friday night? Why, if she’d stayed away all night, had she come back to her house yesterday morning? To load something into her car, maybe-but what? And who had been in the other car, the dark green one?

When I got back to Hannah’s house I rang the doorbell and Runquist let me in. He’d found some wine here, too; there was a big glass of it, red this time, in his left hand.

“No calls, nothing,” he said. He gave me a painfully hopeful look. “You find out anything?”

“Maybe. But I don’t know yet what it means.”

I repeated the gist of my conversation with the elderly neighbor. But I still kept my speculations about Hannah and Lester Raymond to myself.

“I don’t get it,” Runquist said. He sounded even more bewildered and worried than before. The wine was starting to get to him; you could see it in the glaze of his eyes. “If she was all right yesterday morning, why didn’t she call me? And where was she Friday night?”

More rhetorical questions, just like the ones I’d been asking myself. I said, “Do any of Mrs. Peterson’s friends drive a dark green, late-model car?”