Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

I got my private investigator’s license back on the first of October-and a job hunting for a hobo that same day.

The return of the license was far and away the more important of the two; without it I would not have got the hobo job, or any other job. That was the way it had been, in fact-no license, no livelihood-for the past two and a half months, ever since the State Board pulled my ticket for no damn good reason. Things had been so bad financially that I had had to give up my offices on Drumm Street. I had also pretty much given up hope that I would ever again work as a detective in California, the circumstances of the suspension being what they were. So getting the license back surprised the hell out of me.

But there was a catch to it. There’s a catch to everything these days. In this case, the way I was put back in business and the catch were one and the same.

My old cop friend, Eberhardt.

It had been a week earlier that he’d called to give me the news. When the telephone rang I was sitting in the middle of the living room floor in my Pacific Heights flat, surrounded by pulp magazines, old newspapers, a couple of cardboard boxes, some tape and a ball of string. What I’d been doing was bundling up five hundred detective pulps, most of them from the forties and early fifties, so I could ship them off to a guy in Oregon who had paid me two dollars apiece for them. I felt lucky to get that much because they were all obscure titles- Crack Detective, Smashing Detective, 10-Story Mystery — and not very much in demand among collectors. I needed the money to pay my rent and buy groceries and put gas in the car so I could keep on looking for a job, any kind of reasonable job, which nobody seemed to want to give me.

Still, I hated like hell to have to let go of those pulps; it was a bad precedent. If I didn’t find work pretty soon I’d have to sell another batch, and then maybe another, and before long all 6500 issues in my collection would be gone-the rare copies of Black Mask and Dime Mystery and Doc Savage and The Shadow and a dozen more titles, all gone. And then what? I’d spent better than thirty years accumulating those 6500 magazines, just as I’d spent better than thirty years working as one kind of cop or another. They were more than just a hobby; they had led me into detective work in the first place, because of my admiration for their heroes, and they represented a way of life, a code of ethics, that I had made my own. I had already had my job taken away from me; if I lost the pulps, too, what would I have left? Memories, that was all. Memories like dust motes in a patch of sunlight-and ten, twenty, even thirty more years of life without motivation.

That was what was wandering through my mind when Eberhardt called, and it was making me melancholy. I’d promised myself weeks before that I was not going to let this thing get me down any more, and for the most part, with Kerry’s help-Kerry Wade, my lady-I’d managed to keep from being depressed. But some days were worse than others. This was one of the bad ones.

Without thinking, I used my left hand to push myself off the floor. Pain shot up the forearm, all the way into my shoulder. I said something obscene and flexed the fingers; most of the chronic stiffness was gone now, but the hand was still crabbed up a little and I couldn’t quite use it normally yet. If I ever could. I was so preoccupied with the hand that I stumbled over one of the cartons; I cursed that, too, kicked it out of the way, and went into the bedroom and hauled up the telephone receiver and said, “Yeah?” like a dog growling at a bone.

“It’s me, Eberhardt,” he said. For years, his usual greeting had been something like “Hello, hot shot,” but that was before the shooting six weeks ago that had landed both of us in the hospital and Eberhardt in a coma for seventeen days. And before the bribe thing that had changed his life and the simple nature of our friendship.

It was the first time we’d spoken in more than a week. I said, “How’s it going? You mending okay?”

“Yeah. Getting around pretty good now. I got some news for you.” And he told me about the State Board reversing itself, agreeing to reinstate my license.

I couldn’t believe it at first. I said, “You’re not putting me on?”

“About something like that? Hell no. You still got to go up to Sacramento for an interview, and you got to agree not to step on any more official toes in the future, but that’s just a formality.”

“Well, Christ, what made them change their minds? I wasn’t scheduled for a review for another three and a half months…”

“I had a long talk with the Chief,” he said. “A couple of long talks-two weeks ago, just before I got out of the hospital. I asked him to back off on you-write a letter to the Board on your behalf.”

That surprised me, too; the Chief of Police had been responsible for the Board pulling my license in the first place. “And he went along with it?”

“Not at first. But I talked him into it-one last favor before my retirement. I figured he owed me that much; so did he, eventually.”

“I don’t know what to say, Eb.”

“Don’t say anything. It was the least I could do, after what happened. Hell, if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t have got shot. And you could’ve hung my ass out to dry on that Chinatown mess. I still don’t know why you didn’t. God knows, I deserved it.”

“The hell with that,” I said. “It’s over and done with; the sooner we forget about it, the better off we’ll both be.”

“Yeah,” he said, but he wasn’t going to forget it. Not if he lived to be a hundred. I knew that and so did he. “Listen, how you doing money-wise?”

“Not so good right now, but I’ll be okay. I just sold off some of my pulps.”

“I thought that was going to be a last resort.”

“Well, it’s about that time.”

“You get enough to rent another office?”

“No. But I can work out of here for the time being.”

“I could spare a loan of a few hundred…”

“Uh-uh,” I said. “We’ve been over that before. Thanks, but… no.”

He was quiet for a couple of seconds. There was something he wanted to say; I could sense it. Finally he said in a low, tentative voice, “I been thinking. You know, wondering what I’m going to do with myself now that I’m off the force. I can’t just sit around on my duff, even with my pension from the Department, and I’m too damn old to go into some other line of work. Being a cop is all I know how to do.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Yeah, well, I been thinking, like I said.”

“About what?”

“About getting into your end of things. Applying for a private detective’s license.”

I saw it coming then. But all I said was, “It’s a tough business. Hand-to-mouth.”

“I know that. I got contacts, though; and a good reputation, at least as far as the public is concerned. I could drum up some work here and there.”

I was silent.

“The only thing is,” he said, “I don’t know the ropes. I’d need somebody to point the way.”

I still didn’t say anything.

“Somebody like you,” he said.

“Where are you getting at, Eb?”

“Ah, Jesus, you know damned well what I’m getting at. I been wondering if maybe you’d want to take me in as a partner.” He went on quickly, before I could comment. “Look, I know I been a shit and I won’t blame you if you tell me to go to hell. But it might work out, the two of us together. I’m a good detective; you know that. And I’m willing to let you call all the shots.”

“I don’t know, Eb…”

“I wouldn’t get in your way. I mean that: you know the score and I don’t. I could do legwork, promo stuff to bring in clients, anything you want.”