Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page A

outsiders.”
    “I’ll do that.”
    He gave the clipping back to me, and I went off to the southeast through tall grass that was so dry it crunched like eggshells underfoot. The gully was a good three hundred yards away—shallow, wide, with underbrush and scrub pine growing along both banks. Clustered at the bottom were half a dozen one-room shacks made out of wooden frames and tar paper, a couple of them with corrugated-iron roofs; some had badly hung doors, some had nothing more than a flap of heavy tar paper across their entrances, and none had glass windows. I didn’t see any power lines; they probably didn’t have running water, either.
    There was a communal fireplace in the center of the little complex, and sitting around it on rickety chairs that had no doubt come out of a trash dump were three old men—bindlestiffs who had retired because of old age or health reasons, but who wanted to live out their lives near the railroad. They had been passing around a near-empty gallon jug of white port wine, but they quit doing that when they saw me.
    I made my way down a narrow path into the gully, my shoes sliding on the loose earth. None of the three men got up and none of them moved; they just sat there, stiff and staring, like blocks of gnarled old wood. They were all in their late sixties or early seventies, and one of them, the biggest and maybe the youngest, was black. Like the previous two tramps I’d talked to, their expressions were guardedly neutral.
    I pulled up about ten feet from them. “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I could use some help. I’m looking for—”
    “Help’s something we’re fresh out of,” the black man said. He had white hair and a grizzled white beard, and he must have weighed in at two hundred and fifty pounds, not much of it fat. The thumb on his left hand was missing. “Try the mission. They got lots of it, so they say.”
    “Sympathy, too,” one of the white guys said. “Plenty of help and plenty of sympathy.”
    “Sympathy, hell,” the other white guy said. “You know where you find sympathy? In the dictionary between shit and syphillis.”
    All three of them laughed. Then they quit laughing and looked at me, and the black one said, “This here’s private property, man. You trespassing.”
    I reached into my back pocket, being careful about it so they didn’t get any wrong ideas about what I was going for, and took out my wallet. Inside I found a ten-dollar bill and held it up where they could see it. Then I nodded toward the gallon jug the black guy was holding on his lap.
    “You’re almost out of wine,” I said. “Hot day like this, a man gets pretty thirsty.”
    None of them said anything, but they were watching the money.
    “Ten bucks buys a cold jug for each of you,” I said.
    They stirred, exchanged quick looks. The black man asked, “What else you figure it buys?”
    “A little information, that’s all. I’m looking for a hobo named Charles Bradford. He came through here two days ago on his way north and managed to get his picture taken.” I put my wallet away and held up the newspaper clipping.
    “Them San Francisco reporters,” the first white guy said. He was over seventy, thin and wizened, and he had a crippled-up look about him, the way people suffering from acute arthritis do. “We wouldn’t talk to ’em.”
    “Well, Bradford talked to them,” I said. “And if he’s still around I need to talk to him.”
    “Cop,” the second white man said. There was so much ground-in dirt on his seamed face that he looked sooty, as if he’d been caught in the middle of a recent fire.
    I sensed that if I admitted my profession it would close them off; hoboes didn’t like cops, and it did not matter if they were public, private, or the railroad variety. I said, “No, I’m not a cop.”
    “I know a cop when I see one.”
    “Do cops offer to buy you a jug of wine?”
    “He got you there, Woody,” the black guy said. He seemed to have