Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

“You don’t really believe that.”

“No,” I said. “We’re different people, Eb and me; we don’t look at life or the detective business the same way. The reason we’ve got along so well all these years is that we’ve only seen each other two or three times a month, only worked together occasionally since I left the force. Put us together on a daily basis, his way of doing things would clash with mine. We’d probably wind up at each other’s throats.”

“Then the best thing to do is to say no right now. Don’t put either of you through it.”

“So I keep telling myself. The problem is, I can’t seem to get up enough gumption to go through with it.”

There was nothing more to say on the subject, not now, and we let it drop. Any further discussion would only have depressed me and I did not want to spoil the evening for either of us.

We drank a pot of tea and had katsetura, a Japanese sponge cake, for dessert. When we left the restaurant we went for a leisurely drive through Golden Gate Park, out past Sea Cliff and up into the Presidio to where you could look out over Baker Beach and the Golden Gate Bridge and the entrance to the Bay. It was a nice night, clear except for scattered wisps of cloud, and we lingered up there until well after dark. By the time I drove back crosstown and stopped the car in front of Kerry’s apartment building on Diamond Heights, it was after ten o’clock.

“I think I’d better say good night right here,” I said. “I want to get an early start for Oroville in the morning.”

“Poor baby. You’re tired, huh?”

“A little.”

“Just want to go home and crawl into bed.”

“Yeah.”

“Alone.”

“Yeah.”

“And go right to sleep?”

“Maybe I’ll read a little first…”

“Cybil’s story about the stiff bindlestiff?”

“If I have that issue of Clues. ”

“Clues,” she said. “You detectives are always after clues of one kind or another.”

“If you say so.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something. There are clues and then there are clues. And you never know where you might find them. There are clues right here, for instance.”

“Right where?”

“Right here in this car, right now.”

“What kind of clues?”

“The kind that’ll lead you to a body, if you pick up on them.”

“Whose body?”

“Mine,” she said. “Come on up for a few minutes, detective. See if you can find the body.”

“Well,” I said, weakening, “I guess I could do that. But just for a few minutes.”

“Sure. Just for a few minutes.”

So I went upstairs with her, and found the body all right, and it was a few hours before I got out again, long past midnight. I didn’t do any hunting for Clues when I got home to my flat; I was too tired to turn on the damn light.

Oroville was a small town with a permanent population of around ten thousand, set up against the foothills of the Sierra Nevada at the western edge of the Mother Lode. It had been built on an ancient river bed so rich in gold that a dredging outfit had once offered to buy and move every one of its buildings in order to mine the ground. Mining had been its principal industry from the days of the Gold Rush through the early 1900s. Then thousands of acres of olive, nut, and a variety of fruit trees had been planted in the surrounding area, and canning and packing companies moved in, and the Western Pacific established its freight yards on the outskirts. That brought in a substantial number of itinerant fruit pickers, a good many of whom were hoboes catching free rides on the freights that passed through.

And then, in 1967, the state of California had completed construction of the huge Oroville Dam on the Feather River that wound down through the town. This had created Oroville Lake a few miles to the north, which was popular with boaters, fishermen, and family day-trippers. During the warm-weather months, the itinerant fruit pickers were joined by droves of tourists; and summer-home and retirement communities had sprouted and flourished like weeds in the vicinity of the dam.

The town itself hadn’t changed much, though. If anything, it seemed to be deteriorating. It was quiet and tree-shaded, but the last time I had passed through, a little over a year ago on a fishing trip to the north fork of the Feather River, the old downtown area had had a neglected look and many of the homes were run-down. Recently there had been some trouble with a neo-Nazi faction in the area, which may or may not have had something to do with the fact that not many people were on the streets. Most of those who were out were grouped at the small shopping centers and fast-food places along Oro Dam Boulevard, the main through road. The overall feeling of the place was a little depressing.

I pulled into Oroville a few minutes before eleven on Thursday morning, after a nonstop, two-and-a-half-hour drive east to Sacramento and then north on Highway 70 through Marysville. It was hot up there, muggy, with a high cloud cover that gave the sky an unpleasant milky cast and the sun the look of a cataracted eye. The weather, the sky, and that leaden aura made me hope I would be on my way out of here again pretty soon.

I stopped at a Mobil station on Oro Dam Boulevard for gas and directions to the Western Pacific yards. They weren’t far away; I made a right-hand turn on Lincoln two blocks up and drove less than a mile before the freight yards appeared off on my right.

Ahead, a side road branched in that direction and paralleled the yards. On this side of the fork was a corrugated-iron building, painted a sort of mustard yellow and set back off the road behind a wide gravel lot; a sign in front proclaimed it to be the Guiding Light Rescue Mission. The article in yesterday’s Examiner had said that Oroville’s main hobo jungle was located near the mission.

I swung onto the side road. On the left, facing the Western Pacific facility, were several blocks of near-slum houses whose only redeeming features seemed to be an abundance of trees and other vegetation that softened their squalid lines; at least some of them, I thought, would belong to past and present railroad workers. The yards stretched out for a good fifth of a mile-an intricate network of tracks and sidings, a long roundhouse, corrugated-iron sheds, repair stalls, water and fuel tanks, overhead strings of sodium vapor lights, and switch engines and out-of-service boxcars, flats, tankers, and refrigerator cars. Near the entrance was a trailer that I took to be the yardmaster’s office. Beyond to the southwest were empty fields of dry brown grass, with bunched-up sections of rocky hillocks, thick underbrush, and wilted-looking live oaks and conifers. Somewhere over there, hidden by hummocks and brush, was the hobo jungle.

The road petered out a short way past the entrance to the yards, at a gate that barred access to a main line of tracks. I turned around and drove back to the fork and parked on the side of the road next to a dusty field. I walked across the field, then crossed another line of tracks to a shallow ditch. It was hot and still over here. You could hear faint noises coming from the freight yards; there weren’t any trains running at the moment. When I looked over the terrain to the east, to where the distant forested slopes of the Sierra loomed up dark and indistinct, the glare of the sun coming through that milky haze was almost blinding.

Crossing the ditch, I went up through thirty yards of barren earth strewn with rocks. A path had been worn through the dry brown grass beyond, angling upward over one of the hummocks; I moved along there. I still didn’t see or hear anybody-not until I was halfway across the top of the hummock. Then, a short distance away on my left, where the terrain flattened out again and there were the remains of several campfires, I spotted a man standing in front of a scrub pine.