Bindlestiff

Chapter 1

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.”

I was silent again, because I didn’t know what to say.

“You don’t have to give me an answer right away,” Eberhardt said. “Just think about it, will you? Will you do that?”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

“Okay. Thanks.” And he rang off.

So there it was: the catch. He’d called in a favor from the Chief to get my license back, and now he wanted to call in one from me and form an agency partnership. Eberhardt as a private eye? Christ.

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.