Bill Pronzini: Bindlestiff

Then I thought: You damned fag, you-and burst out laughing.

“ She actually thought you were gay?” Kerry said. She seemed to think that was the most comical thing she’d ever heard; there were tears of mirth in her eyes. “Lord, I wish I’d been there to see it!”

“It was some session, all right,” I said.

“It must have been.” She wiped her eyes on her napkin, and then put one elbow on the table and cupped her chin in her hand and gave me her oh-you’re-such-a-delightful-man look. “There’s never a dull moment in your life when you’re working, is there? First you take a job to go chasing after a hobo, then you have a run-in with a sex bomb who thinks you’re gay. Wow.”

I couldn’t tell whether or not she was putting me on. She had an off-the-wall sense of humor, and I suspected that she took a great deal of satisfaction in keeping me off balance whenever she could. Sometimes she made me feel awkward and confused, sometimes she made me angry, and sometimes she made me feel like a jerk. But none of that did anything to change my attitude toward her. She was so damned attractive it made me ache a little just to look at her: shiny auburn hair, wide mouth, green eyes that changed color according to her mood, and a body-as Raymond Chandler once wrote-to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. She was also intelligent and mostly fun to be with, and I loved her like crazy.

Jeanne Emerson? I thought. Hannah Peterson? Give me Kerry Wade any old time.

It was a little after seven o’clock and we were sitting in a cozy Japanese restaurant on Irving Street, near the University of California Medical Center, having sashimi and chicken yasai and cups of hot sake. And I had just finished telling her all about my day: Arleen Bradford, my imminent trip to Oroville, and Hannah Peterson. Other diners were looking at us because of Kerry’s outburst of laughter-not that I cared much.

I said, “It’s still a pretty routine job. If I get lucky and Bradford is still in Oroville, I’ll be back home tomorrow night.”

“Maybe so. But you’ve got to admit, it does have its unusual elements.”

“That’s for sure.”

“You know,” she said, “I’ll bet he really is enjoying himself.”

“Who? Bradford?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not so sure. The man’s down-and-out. And being a hobo is a hell of a road to have to travel, once you get started on it.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Hoboing has its romantic aspects. Besides… ‘Every man on his grave stands he, and each man’s grave is his own affair.’”

“Huh?”

“Two lines from a poem about hoboes I read once. They just popped into my mind.”

“Pretty profound stuff,” I said. “But I still say it’s a hell of a road to have to travel.”

“You don’t think it can be adventurous?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned.”

“You mean you’ve never wanted to ride the rails, just once, to see what it was like?”

“No.”

“Well, suppose you have to go up to Washington to find Bradford. How will you travel?”

“Drive, I guess.”

“It’d be faster by train,” she said. “You could always hop a freight and pass yourself off as one of the tramps.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“No, I’m serious. That’s what I’d do if I were you. Just for the experience.”

“That kind of experience I don’t need.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too old for it, for one thing.”

“You’re not any older than Charles Bradford.”

I had a mental image of myself huddled in the corner of a dusty boxcar, staring out at a lot of dark, empty terrain, listening to the rhythm of the wheels and the locomotive’s whistle echoing in the night. It wasn’t a very pleasant image. It made me feel cold.

“No thanks,” I said. “The closest I intend to get to a freight train is the Oroville hobo jungle. And the sooner I get out of there, the better I’ll like it.”

A lock of her auburn hair had fallen over one eye, giving her a vaguely sultry look, like a redheaded Lauren Bacall. She brushed it away and took a thoughtful bite of her chicken yasai. “What’s a hobo jungle like, anyway?” she asked. “I’ve never been anywhere near one.”

“Good. They’re not very pretty. And not very safe either. Not everybody who beds down in them is one of your romantic vagabond types.”

“No?”

“No. Fugitives ride the rails, too-thieves, murderers, you name it. And toughs, jackrollers.”

“What’s a jackroller?”

“Somebody who rolls drunks or tramps for their money, and isn’t afraid to use violence when he does it.”

“Really? Well, you’d better be careful when you go running around up there.”

“Don’t worry, I will.”

She nodded, then looked thoughtful again. Pretty soon she said, “You know, I think my mother wrote a story about a hobo jungle once. In fact, I’m sure she did. It was published in Clues.”

Kerry’s mother, Cybil, was a former pulp writer, and a very good one; surprisingly, she had written some of the best hard-boiled detective stories to appear in the forties, under the male pseudonym of Samuel Leatherman. Ivan Wade, Kerry’s father, was also a former pulp writer, but he had specialized in horror fiction. I liked Cybil and hated Ivan the Terrible, primarily because he thought I was too old for Kerry-I would be fifty-four my next birthday and she would be thirty-nine-and was always after her to break off our relationship.

I said, “Do you remember the title of Cybil’s story?”

“Not offhand. I… wait, yes I do. It was one of those dumb titles they used to put on pulp detective stories, ‘The Case of the Stiff Bindlestiff. ”’

“Ouch,” I said.

“Pretty bad, all right. But it was a good story; it had to do with some sort of smuggling activity involving tramps and trains.”

“I’ll look it up when I get home. Was it one of her Max Ruffe stories?”

“I think it was.”

Max Ruffe was Cybil’s best pulp character, a tough, cynical, but still human private eye. Not all of her Ruffe capers were first-rate, because pulp writers had had to turn out reams of copy in order to make a living and couldn’t afford to spend much time rewriting or polishing, but the best of them put her in a league with Chandler and Hammett and the other big guns.

We ate in companionable silence for a time. Then Kerry said, “Have you thought any more about what you’re going to do about Eberhardt?”

“Some.”

“Still no decision?”

“Not yet. It’s such a damned no-win situation, no matter which way I go.”

“No-win for whom? Not for you, not if you tell him no.”

“Not as far as business is concerned, maybe. But I’ve got a feeling it would put an end to our friendship.”

“If it does it’s his fault, not yours.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Does his friendship really mean that much to you? After all that’s happened?”

“Come on,” I said, “you know the answer to that. I don’t have many close friends; and I’m not the kind to give one up just because he made a mistake. Besides, Eberhardt needs all the support he can get right now.”

Kerry nodded; she understood. “If you decide that you do have to take him in with you,” she said, “couldn’t you do it on a trial basis? Three months or so, to see how it works out?”

“I thought of that. But I don’t think he’d go for it. It would look like I’m testing him.”

“Well, what if you take him in and it doesn’t work out? You’d have to dissolve the partnership to protect yourself. And that would probably end the friendship anyway.”

“I know. But at least I’d have tried. And maybe it would work out. You never know for sure until you try.”