Bindlestiff nd-10

by Bill Pronzini

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said as Runquist opened the refrigerator.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Too big for me, though.”

  “You live here alone, do you?”

  “Ever since my divorce two years ago.” He took out a bottle of white wine, poured some into a glass, put the bottle away again. “My ex-wife got custody of our daughter; took Monica back east to live with her mother. I got the house.”

  He sounded bitter about it. But it was none of my business, so I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about the jack-o’-lantern on the front porch. Runquist must have carved it for himself, for some sort of nostalgic reason; that, coupled with the model train layout, told me a good deal about what kind of man he was. I already knew what kind of woman Hannah Peterson was, or thought I did, and I wondered if he had made a mistake falling in love with her. She had doubtless made a lot of men unhappy in her life, men who saw only her beauty and her superficial charm. Because I found myself liking Runquist, I hoped he wasn’t going to be just another name on the list.

  He drank some of his wine, moved restlessly to one of the windows and stood looking out into the yard. “Too many memories here,” he said, half to himself. “I should have moved out long ago.”

  “Is that why you’ve got the house up for sale?”

  “Part of the reason. Hannah’s selling her place, too. We bought some land up in the mountains east of Glen Ellen and we’re building a house on it. We’re going to be married when it’s finished.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I see.”

  He nodded. “We’ve both had offers since we put the houses on the market, but they’ve been too low. Things in real estate are tight right now-” He broke off. “To hell with real estate,” he said. “It’s Hannah we should be talking about.”

  “When was the last time you saw her, Mr. Runquist?”

  “Friday evening, at her house. She called me at the winery that afternoon, after the Oroville police notified her of her father’s death, and I went over to be with her. She was pretty upset. She’d never been close to her dad, but finding out he’d been murdered… that hit her hard.”

  “It’s a hell of a thing, all right.”

  “She told me about seeing you, trying to convince you not to go up there hunting for him. Maybe you should have listened to her; maybe it would have been better for all of us if you’d stayed out of Oroville.”

  There was no censure in his voice, only anguish. He wasn’t blaming me. If she’d told him she thought I was a homosexual it did not seem to matter to him. And if that was the case I liked him for his tolerance, too.

  I said, “Her father would still be dead, even if I’d stayed away. And Raymond would have got away with murder a second time.”

  “I know,” Runquist said. “But Christ, what if Raymond did come down here after Hannah? What if he’s responsible for her disappearance? What if…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew what he was thinking. He tilted his wine glass again; his hand was a little unsteady.

  “I still don’t see how that’s possible,” I said. “What reason could Raymond have for harming Mrs. Peterson?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is, she’s missing and she shouldn’t be.”

  “How long did you stay with her on Friday?”

  “Until about six o’clock.”

  “Why did you leave her then?”

  “I had a meeting scheduled here at my house; I’m chairman of the committee for this year’s Sonoma Wine Festival. I wanted to cancel it, but Hannah said no, she’d be all right.” He turned from the window and began to pace. “The meeting broke up about eight o’clock. I was just about to telephone Hannah, but she beat me to it. She said she’d had a call and she had to go out, but her car was out of gas. That’s happened to her before; she’s always forgetting to fill up when she’s low. She knows I keep a five-gallon can in my garage and she wanted me to bring it over.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. Right away.”

  “How did she seem?”

  “Even more upset than earlier. Frantic, almost. She said she had to be somewhere and she was already late.”

  “That’s not much to get frantic over.”

  “I know. I tried to get her to tell me where she had to go, who she was seeing, but she wouldn’t say. Hannah can be… well, she can be stubborn sometimes.”

  Yeah, I thought, I’ll bet. “I don’t suppose she said anything about the phone call either?”

  “No. As soon as I poured the gas into her tank, she drove off.” He frowned, as if he’d just remembered something. “There was a sleeping bag in the back seat,” he said.

  “Sleeping bag?”

  “Yes. I noticed it just before she drove away. She’s not the kind to go out camping, not Hannah. It must have belonged to her late husband. But what was she doing with it in her car?”

  I shook my head; there was nothing to be gained by trying to answer questions like that. “Was that the last time you saw or spoke to her?”

  “The last time, yes.”

  I pulled one of the chairs out from the table and straddled it with my arms resting on its back. “She called me, too, on Friday night,” I said, “and left a message on my answering machine. I don’t know what time-she didn’t say-but it had to have been before eight-thirty. That was when I got home from Oroville and checked the machine.”

  Runquist quit pacing. “Why would she call you? You live in San Francisco; how could you do anything for her that I couldn’t?”

  Another rhetorical question. I said, “All she said was that she wanted me to get in touch with her right away and that it was important.”

  “Did you try to call her that night?”

  “No. I was tired and I thought it was only that she was upset about her father. I called twice yesterday; no answer either time.”

  Runquist finished his wine, went immediately to the refrigerator and emptied the bottle into his glass, and started to work on that.

  I asked him, “Are you sure Mrs. Peterson hasn’t been home since Friday night?”

  “Not positive, no. But I called again at ten-thirty that night and she wasn’t there. I should have gone over and waited for her but I didn’t. I didn’t go to her place until yesterday morning, after I tried calling twice more and still didn’t get an answer.”

  “You have a key to her house?”

  “Yes. We’re engaged, I told you that.”

  “I’m just asking, Mr. Runquist.”

  “Her bed hadn’t been slept in,” he said.

  “Was everything in order inside the house?”

  “As far as I could tell, it was.”

  “Did you check to see if any of her clothes or other belongings were missing?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Everything was still there. Her suitcases, too-I made sure of that.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Talked to her neighbors. None of them had seen her. Then I came back here and called everyone I could think of that she knows; none of them had seen or talked to her either. That was when I started to get scared. I even drove up to the house we’re building in the mountains. When she still hadn’t turned up by six o’clock I went to the police. I told you on the phone what they said.”

  “Did you check her house again this morning?”

  “Before I called you,” he said. “Her bed still hadn’t been slept in, and nothing had been touched.”

  I got up from the chair. “It might be a good idea if I had a look at the house,” I said. “Would you mind going over there with me, letting me in?”

  “No, of course not. Anything you want.”

  He finished his wine, plunked the glass down on the table, and led me out to the front porch. The jack-o’-lantern grinned at us from the table-an incongruity in the bright Sunday morning sunshine. It made me think, in spite of myself, of witches and goblins and things that went bump on dark nights.

  Chapter 18

  Hannah Peterson’s house w
as on Lovall Valley Road, out near the Buena Vista Winery. It was a modern ranch-style surrounded by a redwood fence, with plenty of lawn in front, an attached two-car garage, and a swimming pool glinting at the rear. On one side were acres of gold and scarlet grape vines stretching off into the distance; on the other side was a fenced pasture with a couple of horses grazing in it. A FOR SALE sign similar to the one at Runquist’s place was imbedded in the middle of the lawn.

  I parked in the driveway, and Runquist and I got out and went over onto a porch studded with old oak wine barrels that had been turned into planters for ferns and other decorative plants. He used his key to unlock the front door. “Hannah!” he called as we stepped inside. “Hannah!” But his voice echoed emptily in the stillness.

  Runquist took me from room to room. As he’d said earlier, nothing was out of order; the place, in fact, was immaculate-the kind of house I had never felt comfortable in because there was no personality to it, no sense of the individual who occupied it. Swedish Modern furniture, carpeting and drapes and accessories that complimented it perfectly; pictures hung just so, ashtrays and lamps and vases arranged just so, the tile and fixtures in the kitchen and bathrooms gleaming. No books or magazines anywhere; people who don’t read always put me off a little. It was like walking through a museum exhibit. The only thing that gave any indication that I was in a house belonging to Hannah Peterson was a huge, impressionistic painting of an ancient steam train that hung in the family room at the rear.

  I opened closet and cabinet doors at random, with Runquist’s tacit consent. I did not expect to find anything, and I didn’t. The closets and cabinets were as clean and neat as the rest of the place.

  In the master bedroom, the spread over the bed was rumpled and pulled down at one corner; that was the only thing I had noticed anywhere that was out of place. I asked Runquist, “How do you know Mrs. Peterson didn’t sleep here the past two nights? Was the bed like this on Friday?”

  “Yes., She was lying down when I got here; that’s how the spread got pulled around like that. If she’d slept here either night she’d have made the bed when she got up. She’s compulsive that way.”

  We started back to the front room. “Mrs. Peterson’s late husband left her this house, is that right?” I asked.

  “Right. Joe Peterson. He built it for her.”

  “Built it himself, you mean?”

  “Yes. He was in the construction business.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Only by name. He died three years ago. Heart attack; he was twenty-five years older than Hannah.”

  We reentered the living room. I said, “You told me you talked to the neighbors yesterday. Just the immediate neighbors or what?”

  “Everybody who lives within a block of here. There aren’t that many; this is almost the country out here. None of them saw her at any time on Friday night.”

  “Does she normally park her car in the driveway?”

  “No. Inside the garage.”

  I nodded, and he moved away from me in that restless way of his and started a turn around the immaculate living room. Only it wasn’t quite as immaculate as I’d first thought; I noticed now, as Runquist paced in front of the fireplace, that in the middle of the hearth there was a small pile of ashes and charred paper overlain with cigarette butts. The rest of the bricks in there had been swept clean.

  I went over and knelt down and poked through the pile. Some of the pieces of paper were not completely charred; they were glossy-like the remains of photographs that had been torn up and then set afire. I fished out the largest of the unburnt pieces. It was the bottom third of a color snapshot, showing the legs of a man and a woman and an expanse of lawn or meadow.

  Runquist had come over beside me. I straightened and held the fragment out so he could see it. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Part of a photograph,” he said.

  “Sure. But what I’m asking is, why would Mrs. Peterson tear up and burn a bunch of photos?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You weren’t here when she did it?”

  “No.”

  “Were these remains here on Friday afternoon?”

  “I don’t remember,” Runquist said. “Why? You think it means something?”

  “Maybe. People don’t normally destroy photographs this way; and not on the same day they’ve learned of a death in the family, unless they have a pretty good reason for it. Any idea what this snap might have been of?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think it’s anything I’ve ever seen before.”

  “Does Mrs. Peterson have a photograph album? Or a box or something where she keeps photos?”

  “If she does she never showed it to me.”

  “Where does she keep her personal papers and things?”

  “I don’t… wait, yes I do. The sitting room-she uses that as an office.”

  The sitting room was off the master bedroom. It was smallish, with not much in it except for a sofa, a reading lamp, an antique console radio, and a trestle desk set against the wall next to a curtained window. I said, “I’ll need your permission to look through the desk.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I opened each of the drawers. Pens and pencils and other paraphernalia, notepaper, envelopes, file folders crammed with paid bills and receipts and canceled checks-but no photographs of any kind. I turned away from the desk. In one wall were a pair of sliding mahogany doors; I pushed one of them open and looked into a closet full of cardboard packing boxes, small cartons of stationery supplies, odds and ends. And on top of one of the packing boxes, two thick leather-bound photo albums.

  I carried the albums over to the desk. Runquist stood peering over my shoulder as I opened one and began leafing through the pages. The pictures were all family-type snaps, most in color and nearly all of Hannah Peterson at various ages up to about sixteen, doing the various things that kids do to get their pictures taken. An older girl who had to be Arleen Bradford was in some of the photos; Charles Bradford was in a couple more; and a faded-looking blond woman with nondescript features was in half a dozen of the early ones. Bradford’s wife, probably. I wondered what had happened to her. Neither Arleen nor Hannah had mentioned their mother, as if she had never really been an important part of their lives. Or of their father’s.

  The second album was much more interesting. The first few pages were all Hannah, of course; she had to be something of a narcissist to have collected all these photos of herself. Not that that was surprising; I had met the lady, after all. Two pages of Hannah at her high-school senior prom where she had evidently been the belle of the ball, judging from the number of boys hanging around her. A page of Hannah in cap-and-gown at her graduation ceremony, and another page of Hannah in a bikini at some lake, with more boys paying homage. And then four pages of nothing but those little paper corners you use to keep photographs in place in an album, some stuck to the pages and some lying loose as if the photos they’d held had been ripped out.

  I turned another page. A couple of snaps had been pulled off there, too, and of the ones remaining, one was lying at an angle near the bottom, a corner of it bent as though the album had been closed on it. A photo Hannah had meant to burn and overlooked? I picked it up and studied it.

  Color shot of a teenage Hannah standing alone on the bank of a wide river, one hand on her hip, giving either the camera or whoever had taken the picture a provocative look. I turned it over. On the back, in red ink in a fancy feminine hand, was written “Me in Nebraska.”

  There was something about that notation that started vague stirrings in my memory, like ripples on placid water. I handed the snapshot to Runquist. “Does this mean anything to you?”

  “Nebraska,” he said. “That’s where Hannah lived with her first husband.”

  “Oh? Where in Nebraska?”

  “Omaha, I think.”

  “What was his name, do you know?”

  “Adams. I can’t remember his first name. She doesn’t t
alk about him much; I don’t think their split was very friendly.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, she did mention once that they fought a lot. He was more than twenty years older, like Joe Peterson was; I don’t know why she kept taking up with older men.” He pawed at his face again. “She also said something once about having to sneak away when she finally decided to leave him. He wouldn’t have let her go if she hadn’t, she said.”

  “So she was afraid of him?”

  “I think she was, yeah.”

  Omaha…

  I flipped through the rest of the album. There were no other photos of Hannah or anybody else in Nebraska; that had evidently been the batch she’d destroyed. The rest of the photos included several men. I asked Runquist if he’d ever seen a picture of Hannah’s first husband, this Adams.

  “No,” he said.

  “So you wouldn’t know if any of these guys might be him?”

  “No. She never showed me any of these photos.”

  Omaha. Omaha, Nebraska…

  Then I had it, the connection, and I said, “Jesus Christ!” before I could check myself. Because there was a jolt in it; there was a hell of a jolt in it.

  Runquist said, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Just an idea.”

  “What sort of idea?”

  I couldn’t look at him; he’d have seen it in my expression. I caught up the two albums, took them back to the closet and shut them away. By the time I turned around again, I had my facial muscles under control.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m going to go talk to the neighbors again; there might have been somebody you missed. Suppose you stay here, in case she comes back. Or calls.”

  “All right.”

  “While you’re waiting you can write me out a list of names and addresses of Mrs. Peterson’s friends in this area. I know you talked to all of them yourself, but I want to check with them again. Will you do that?”

  “Sure, whatever you want.”

  I got out of there; went over past the fenced pasture where the horses were grazing, toward a big white house on the other side. My mind kept working, putting it all together, making me sweat a little. I did not want to believe it was possible, but there it was.