Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  It was not long before Tris, who turned out to be a plain-looking brunette in her middle twenties, came back from the can. She looked at the photo, looked at it again, gnawed on her lower lip, and said at length, “Well, I don’t know. It might have been the same fellow. I only saw him for a moment.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Through the window.” She nodded toward the plate-glass window that took up the left-hand wall flanking the entrance door. “I was just getting ready to close up and I happened to glance out and there he was.”

  “Which way was he heading?”

  “West, I think.”

  “On this side of the street?”

  “No, on the other side.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

  “No,” she said. “I noticed him because he looked like a hobo and you don’t see many of them out here. But he wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary, just walking along, and it was closing time and I was in a hurry because I had a date. I just didn’t pay that much attention to him.”

  “How long after you saw him did you leave the shop?”

  “About five minutes, I guess.”

  “And he wasn’t anywhere around then?”

  “Well, if he was I didn’t see him.”

  I thanked her and Jorgensen and went outside again. The Orchard-Sweet packing plant loomed across the street; I walked over there and inside the warehouse. It smelled almost overpoweringly of cooked fruit, like the pervasive odor of aging wine in a winery. None of the dozen or so employees seemed bothered by it, though. You probably wouldn’t even notice it if you’d been working there for any length of time.

  I showed the clipping around—it was starting to get worn from all the handling—but all I got in return were headshakes and negative words. I went out through the open rear doors to where two Latino forklift operators were loading crates into a boxcar on a rail siding. They both said they didn’t know nothing about no bums, man.

  And that seemed to be that. Firth Road looked like a dead-end in more ways than one.

  Yet if Tris Wilson was a reliable witness, and I judged that she was, I had definitely established that Bradford had been out here at five-thirty on Tuesday afternoon. Why had he come here? Who was it he’d wanted to see?

  I only had one lead left to pursue—those microfilm files of the Los Angeles Times at the library. If I couldn’t find the needle in that haystack I had two choices: I could hang around Oroville and keep flashing Bradford’s photo in the hope that somebody recognized him and could tell me where he’d gone; or I could call Miss A. Bradford, admit defeat, and head back home to San Francisco. I doubted if I would do the latter, though, at least not right away. Now that I was back in harness, it would be damned frustrating to have to walk away empty-handed on my first new case. Bad for business, too, if word got around.

  Well, there was no point in worrying about any of that until the time came. Right now, there was the library.

  Chapter 11

  Mrs. Kennedy took me into the microfilm room, an air-conditioned cubicle at the rear of the library, and plunked me down in front of one of those magnifying machines that look like hair dryers. Then she brought me the tapes for the August and September 1967 issues of the L.A. Times, showed me how to thread the machine, and left me alone.

  I started with the first of August and worked ahead chronologically, skipping the want ads, the sports and fashion and business sections and concentrating on the news and feature pages, because the odds were better that Bradford had been after something there. I paid particular attention to the more unusual local items—crimes, personal tragedies, bizarre accidents, acts of heroism, political and business scandals, things like that.

  At the end of an hour and a half I had reached August 31 and all I had to show for the effort was a headache; the damn screen on the viewing machine was scratched, the light was too glary, and the pages came through blurred so that you had to squint to read the newsprint. There was no mention of Charles Bradford anywhere. Nobody named McGhan, Dallmeyer, Jorgensen, or Tris Wilson—or, for that matter, Coleman, Baxter, or Mrs. Kennedy—was mentioned either. Oroville appeared a couple of times, once in the case of a hobo who’d been found stabbed in an empty boxcar, but there wasn’t any connection in that that I could find. The guy who’d done the stabbing, another tramp with a felony record, had been arrested the following day.

  I rolled the last of the August tapes out of the machine, then got up muttering to myself and took a couple of turns around the room to give my eyes a rest and ease the knotted muscles in my shoulders and neck. My left arm and hand were starting to cramp up again, too. I thought: This is a waste of time. Bradford could have been looking for anything, even a business advertisement or somebody’s recipe for clam chowder. You’ll never find it this way, groping for it blind.

  Yeah, I thought then, wearily. And went back to the machine and began cranking through September 1967.

  And got lucky, by God, and found it.

  September 9, page eleven. In a story under a two-column headline that read: TWO DIE IN MALIBU SHOOTING. It was a love-triangle thing; a guy named Lester Raymond, who worked for one of the oil companies, had followed his wife out to the Malibu beach house of an architect named Peter Hawes, caught her and Hawes in bed together, and blown both of them away with a .45 caliber “Korean War souvenir.” One of Hawes’ neighbors had heard the shots, seen Raymond run out of the beach house, and got the license number of his car when he sped away. The police had not found him at the time the story was written. What caught and held my attention was a paragraph on Raymond’s background near the end of the account.

  Raymond was described by friends as having a violent temper. An avid builder of model railroads, he was arrested for assaulting and threatening to kill a fellow enthusiast during a dispute at a West Covina model railroaders convention in 1962....

  Quickly I cranked the film ahead to September 10. The follow-up story said that Raymond had still not been apprehended. It also said that he had apparently managed to make off with thirty thousand dollars in cash and another seventy thousand in negotiable securities belonging to Peter Hawes. There was some mystery as to why Hawes had had that much money lying around his house, which probably meant that there was something illegal or at least shady about it.

  September 11. Raymond was still at large. The police lieutenant in charge of the investigation had “no comment to make at this time” on the missing money and securities. There was another mention of Raymond’s hobby: he had belonged to a Los Angeles-based model railroad club called the Cannonballers.

  The September 12 edition had nothing about the case. I kept cranking. What I was looking for now was a photograph of Lester Raymond; the Times doesn’t use that many photos with its crime coverage, and there hadn’t been one accompanying any of the previous three accounts. There wasn’t any with the story I found in the September 13 edition either, but the emphasis there had shifted from Raymond to the reasons for Peter Hawes having $100,000 on hand. According to the police, Hawes had intended to use the money to make a narcotics buy—heroin and marijuana; they had linked him to a group that was smuggling the stuff in from Mexico. Hawes was described as “an alleged supplier of drugs to professional and film people in the Malibu area.” Raymond, as far as anybody knew, was still a fugitive.

  There were two more stories, one on September 14 following up on the drug angle and the last, little more than a squib, on September 16; the only new information they contained was the fact that Raymond’s car had been found abandoned on a sidestreet in Ventura. And that was it. Raymond and the missing money were not mentioned again in September, which meant that he hadn’t been apprehended during the rest of that month. When had the authorities caught up with him? I wondered.

  Or had they caught up with him at all?

  I rewound the spool of microfilm, shut off the machine. And sat there brooding. And after a time something jogged in my memory, something the WP yardmaster, Co
leman, had said to me when I asked if he’d been at the yard around three on Tuesday afternoon: I was. Out by the freight storage shed, as I recall, discussing a shipment of wheel flanges with a local businessman. Wheel flanges-yeah. I began to get it then. I didn’t like it much, but I could see the way the whole thing with Charles Bradford on Tuesday might have happened.

  But I needed more information before I could be sure enough to do anything about it. I went out front and got Mrs. Kennedy’s permission to make a collect call on the telephone in her office. It was after seven o’clock now; Arleen Bradford would be long gone from Denim, Inc. I dialed her home number, went through the usual rigmarole with the long-distance operator. And the line was busy.

  I hunted up Mrs. Kennedy again and asked for the files of Oroville’s city directory. What I was looking for appeared in the directory for 1972. All right. I returned to her office and tried Arleen Bradford’s number again. This time, the line was clear; Miss Bradford answered on the third ring and agreed to accept the charges.

  “Have you found my father yet?” she asked immediately. There was more eagerness in her voice than she might have been willing to admit to.

  “Not yet, no. But he may still be here in Oroville and I’m on his trail.”

  “Then why did you call?”

  “To ask you some questions that might be important. You told me yesterday that your father belonged to a model railroad club in Los Angeles. What was the name of the club? Was it the Cannonballers?”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “What does that have to do with—”

  “Please, Miss Bradford. Just answer my question. Was your father’s club the Cannonballers?”

  “Why . . . yes, I believe it was.”

  “Then he must have known a man named Lester Raymond.”

  “Who?”

  “Lester Raymond. Also a member of the Cannonballers in the late sixties. He murdered his wife and her lover in Malibu in 1967 and ran off with a hundred thousand dollars in cash and negotiable securities.”

  She was silent for a few seconds. Then she made a vague bewildered sound and said, “Yes. Lester Raymond . . . yes. Daddy knew him; he came to our place several times before all of that happened. But I don’t—”

  “You met Raymond yourself, then?”

  “Of course. I was living at home at the time.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Big, hairy, going bald on top—one of those macho-male types.” Her voice dripped disapproval.

  “Was he bearded or clean-shaven?”

  “Clean-shaven.”

  Clean-shaven and going bald, I thought. But a man could always grow a beard; and the hairpieces they had nowadays were so good you had to be an expert to tell that they weren’t the real thing. I asked, “Did he have a round face, gray eyes, bushy eyebrows?”

  “Yes, that sounds like him.”

  “Can you remember if he was ever captured?”

  “I . . . don’t think he was, no. Except for Hannah running off the minute she turned eighteen, he was all Daddy talked about for weeks afterward—how he’d managed to vanish into thin air. . . . Now will you please tell me what something that happened fifteen years ago has to do with my father’s present whereabouts?”

  “I’m not sure yet, Miss Bradford.” I had no time to explain it to her and I didn’t want to alarm her prematurely. “I’ll call you again as soon as I have something definite to report,” I said, and hung up before she could say anything else.

  Dallmeyer, I thought. It’s got to be Dallmeyer.

  It figured this way: Lester Raymond not only manages to elude the police in 1967, he manages to alter his identity and cover his tracks so well that they’re never able to trace him. That sort of thing isn’t easy to do, but people have done it before—and with enough intelligence, plenty of luck, and $100,000 to make the task a little easier, Raymond gets away with it. Maybe he stays in California somewhere; more likely, he heads out of state and establishes himself in a place a few hundred or a few thousand miles away. Most men with that kind of money burning a hole in their pocket would go through it in a short period of time, but suppose Raymond has enough sense to invest it or to start a business, make the money work for him, double or triple it in a few years. He’s not a professional criminal, after all; he committed murder and theft on irrational impulse, not through premeditation. Basically he’s just an average citizen.

  Five years pass. He figures he’s home free by this time, so for whatever reason he decides to come back to California, to a small town more than six hundred miles from Los Angeles. And because he’s always been interested in trains, he uses some of his capital to buy a railroad museum under the name of Dallmeyer and again settles down to the quiet life of a model citizen.

  For ten years he resides in Oroville with nobody the wiser as to who he really is. But then circumstance, or fate—call it what you wanted—brings Charles Bradford here. And puts Raymond at the Western Pacific freight yards at the same time Bradford goes there from the hobo jungle to report the streamliner’s theft. Wheel flanges were a railroad item; the only local businessman who was likely to order a shipment of them was the owner of a railroad museum. The logistics of it had to have worked that way.

  Bradford sees Raymond talking to the yardmaster, probably without Raymond seeing him, and recognizes him. It’s been fifteen years since he’s laid eyes on his old friend, and Raymond has added the beard and hairpiece; but you don’t forget what your friends look like, particularly one as notorious as Lester Raymond. Still, Bradford isn’t completely sure, so he doesn’t approach Raymond in the yards. Maybe he hangs around long enough to watch Raymond drive away in that van with the name of the museum on it; that’s how he knows where to go looking for him later on. Then Bradford heads for the library to check past city directories to find out how long the Roundhouse Museum has been in operation, and to refresh his memory on the details of Raymond’s fifteen-year-old crime in Malibu.

  When he leaves the library Bradford heads out to Firth Road to confront his former pal. Object: blackmail. Not major blackmail, necessarily; maybe Bradford is only after a few bucks and a hot meal. But he’s after something. He’s down-and-out and maybe bitter about it, and he’s gone to too much trouble to be looking up a fugitive murderer because of simple curiosity or for old time’s sake.

  What was it Kerry had said to me last night, the line from the poem about hoboes? Each man’s grave is his own affair. Yeah. Hannah Peterson had told me her father didn’t care about money, was only interested in the adventurous hobo life. A fat lot greedy Hannah Peterson knew. In more ways than one, she was her father’s daughter.

  But the real irony was that Bradford hadn’t known there was twenty thousand dollars waiting for him from his late uncle’s estate; that he didn’t have to resort to blackmail to get money, to maybe turn his life around. . . .

  Without more facts, that was as far as I could piece things together. What had happened after Bradford arrived at Firth Road was still a mystery. But it figured to be one of two things. The first was that Raymond had paid him off and Bradford had left Oroville for parts unknown—that he’d received enough money to take a bus instead of a freight train, or maybe even to have bought a secondhand car. The other possibility was a hell of a lot grimmer.

  The other possibility was murder.

  Raymond had a violent temper; he had killed twice before when that temper was aroused. It was plenty possible that Bradford’s blackmail demand, particularly if it was for a substantial amount of cash, had bought him a bullet or a cracked head instead. I hoped that wasn’t the way it had been, but I had an uneasy hunch that it was.

  There wasn’t any basis for the hunch . . . or maybe there was. Something had begun to scratch at the back of my mind, something about my own meeting with Raymond /Dallmeyer that hadn’t been quite right. . . .

  And then I knew what it was, and the skin along my back tightened and began to crawl. “Jesus,” I said aloud. “Sweet Jesus!
”

  I jumped up from the desk and ran out through the main part of the library, startling Mrs. Kennedy and a couple of patrons. I should have gone straight to the local police with it—but telling them the whole story, convincing them to question the man they knew as Dallmeyer and search the museum, would take too much time. Hours, maybe. By then it would be too late. It might already be too late, but there was still a chance that it wasn’t. I had to go out to Firth Road myself.

  Chapter 12

  It was dusk when I made the turn off Oro Dam Boulevard, shut off my headlights, and drove slowly toward the museum complex. Nightlights burned on poles inside the wire-mesh fence; there were lights on inside the roundhouse, too, and in one of the facing windows of the cottage at the rear. The van I had seen earlier was still parked on the same diagonal back there.

  I drove past the entrance, peering over at the museum yard. There was no sign of Raymond. Near the dead-end barrier, an unpaved drive angled alongside the PG&E substation; I pulled up there and left the car in the shadows behind the building, where it couldn’t be seen from across the street. Then I moved over into the trees and underbrush that flanked the railroad right-of-way, and cautiously worked my way parallel to the museum fence until I got to where I could see the back of the roundhouse.

  The engine doors were still open. The interior lights let me see the Baldwin locomotive’s cowcatcher and part of her blunt nose. There was no longer any steam coming out of the exhaust, and the boiler had been shut down; no sounds drifted over from there, or from anywhere else in the vicinity. If Raymond was inside the roundhouse he was doing something pretty quiet.

  He was inside, all right; I had been standing there waiting and watching for five minutes when he appeared alongside the locomotive and came walking outside. He paused long enough to light a cigar, take a couple of deep puffs on it. Then he went across the yard to the side gate, unlocked it, stepped through, locked it again behind him, and vanished into the shadows fronting the cottage.