Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective) (2 page)

The idea didn’t set well at all. In the first place, I knew Eb. He’d said he would let me call all the shots, but he’d been able to pull rank on me for twenty years; sooner or later he’d start trying to do it again. In the second place, I had been a loner for too many years to want to take on a partner. I liked working alone, doing things my own way and at my own pace. The idea of having to share decisions and divvy up the workload wasn’t too appealing. And in the third place, before the suspension I had barely made enough most weeks to pay the bills; and opening up shop again after all the hassle and publicity of the past few months was not going to be easy. Maybe Eberhardt could bring in some business, as he’d said, but there were no guarantees. Things could be lean for a long time. One man could get by on crumbs, but if you had to divide the crumbs between two men, both of them were liable to starve.

On the other hand, he
was
responsible for the State Board reversing itself. I owed him for that, and it was no small debt. If I told him no I’d be the one to feel like a shit. He would understand why I was rejecting him, but the turn-down would be there between us just the same, like a wedge. The bribe incident had already driven in one wedge, right to the point of cracking; another one was liable to split us up for good—destroy what was left of thirty-five years of friendship.

Damn, I thought. Damn! What am I going to do?

I went out into the kitchen, opened my last can of Schlitz, and took it into the living room and sat nursing it, looking at the stacks of pulps on the floor. Now, maybe, I wouldn’t have to sell off any more of my collection than these five hundred issues. I should have felt more elated, more excited at that and at the prospect of getting back to work. Well, maybe it would all come sailing in on me pretty soon and I would jump up and let out a whoop or something and dance around singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Probably not, though. Too much had happened over this crazy summer—too many complications.

My life had quit being simple during a week in June. First my relationship with Kerry, whom I’d met a few weeks previous and fallen hard for, had become strained for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was me pressuring her to get married. Then what had seemed like a business boom—three jobs in two days, all of an apparently routine nature—had degenerated into chaos: two unrelated homicides, a theft for which I’d briefly been blamed, a threatened lawsuit by one of my clients, and me stupidly and accidentally letting a murderess take it on the lam. All of this had made the papers, of course, as had my getting lucky and coming up with solutions for all three bizarre cases, so that the damned reporters had had a field day calling me “Supersleuth” and a lot of other things.

The Chief of Police hadn’t liked any of that. According to him, I was making the Department look bad by upstaging his detectives. It was a public relations matter, he’d said; my acts were detrimental to the police image. Eberhardt had tried to intercede on my behalf, but he was only a lieutenant attached to Homicide, without enough cachet to make the brass listen to reason. Before long, I was out of business.

Then, as if all of that wasn’t bad enough, there’d been the shooting in mid-August. I had been over at Eberhardt’s house one Sunday afternoon, the two of us guzzling beer and commiserating—his wife Dana had left him for another man back in May and he’d been in a funk ever since—and the doorbell had rung, and when he went to answer it a Chinese gunman had put two slugs from a .357 Magnum into him. And one into me moments later, when I came blundering in after the shots.

Eberhardt had been critically wounded; it was a miracle he hadn’t been killed outright. I’d been luckier: the bullet had taken me in the shoulder and damaged some nerves, crippling up my left arm. The police hadn’t caught the gunman. They figured him for a contract slugger, but they had no idea why a contract had been put out on Eberhardt.

When I got out of the hospital I had an anonymous call from a Chinese who claimed that Eberhardt had taken a bribe, that that was what was behind the assassination attempt. I refused to believe it at first, but I was angry and I had to find out one way or the other. So I’d set out on my own investigation. It had ultimately led me to the man who’d ordered the hit; it had also led me to the truth about the bribe. And the truth was that Eberhardt had taken it, all right—or almost taken it—for looking the other way on a felony investigation.

He’d done it because he’d been despondent about Dana throwing him over; because he was getting old and tired of the long hours and the low pay and having to fight off temptation every time it reared up—all the sad, painful reasons good men sometimes commit acts that go against everything they’ve ever believed in. But he’d changed his mind about going through with it, then started waffling as to whether or not to change it back again. He’d still been waffling when he was shot, and he simply did not know, he said, what his final decision would have been.

We left it at that. And because I was the only other person who knew the truth—both the Chinese slugger and the man behind him had died, through no fault of mine—I left it up to Eberhardt to decide what he would do when he got out of the hospital: forget the whole thing had ever happened and go on with his police career; make a clean breast of things to the Department, face a public scandal, and probably be thrown off the force and lose his pension; or take a voluntary retirement, for personal reasons, which would allow him to keep the pension he’d earned for more than thirty years of service as a dedicated, honest cop. He had opted for voluntary retirement—probably the choice I’d have made if I had been in his position. He was now officially a civilian.

The only good thing to come out of the whole mess was that Kerry and I had got back together, and reached an understanding about our relationship, and were starting to grow closer than we’d ever been. Eberhardt and I were still friends, but there was that wedge between us, and now there might be another one.

Complications.

Nothing was simple any more. Nothing was the way it used to be . . .

I got up after a while, when I finished my beer, and went back into the bedroom and called Kerry at Bates and Carpenter, the ad agency where she worked as a copywriter. She was excited when I told her about Eberhardt getting me back into harness, but she shared my concern over the partnership thing.

“What do you think you’ll do?” she asked. “Which way are you leaning?”

“You know me, babe, so you know the answer to that already. But it’s going to take me a while to decide whether or not I can do it to him.”

“What about
you?
Isn’t what you want the important thing now?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe.”

“Well, I think it is. You’re not Eberhardt’s keeper, you know. You didn’t have anything to do with him being where he is now. And you don’t owe him anything either, not any more.”

“He got my license back, didn’t he?”

“He also got you shot.”

I sighed. “Let’s not talk about that. I’ve been doing enough brooding about the past as it is.”

“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.

T
he 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—