Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective) Read Online Free PDF Page B

balloon and deflated her. Score one for the side of manipulated males everywhere.
    Then I thought: You damned fag , you—and burst out laughing.

Chapter 4
     
    “ S he actually thought you were gay?” Kerry said. She seemed to think that was the most comical thing she’d ever heard; there were tears of mirth in her eyes. “Lord, I wish I’d been there to see it!”
    “It was some session, all right,” I said.
    “It must have been.” She wiped her eyes on her napkin, and then put one elbow on the table and cupped her chin in her hand and gave me her oh-you’re-such-a-delightful-man look. “There’s never a dull moment in your life when you’re working, is there? First you take a job to go chasing after a hobo, then you have a run-in with a sex bomb who thinks you’re gay. Wow.”
    I couldn’t tell whether or not she was putting me on. She had an off-the-wall sense of humor, and I suspected that she took a great deal of satisfaction in keeping me off balance whenever she could. Sometimes she made me feel awkward and confused, sometimes she made me angry, and sometimes she made me feel like a jerk. But none of that did anything to change my attitude toward her. She was so damned attractive it made me ache a little just to look at her: shiny auburn hair, wide mouth, green eyes that changed color according to her mood, and a body—as Raymond Chandler once wrote—to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. She was also intelligent and mostly fun to be with, and I loved her like crazy.
    Jeanne Emerson? I thought. Hannah Peterson? Give me Kerry Wade any old time.
    It was a little after seven o’clock and we were sitting in a cozy Japanese restaurant on Irving Street, near the University of California Medical Center, having sashimi and chicken yasai and cups of hot sake. And I had just finished telling her all about my day: Arleen Bradford, my imminent trip to Oroville, and Hannah Peterson. Other diners were looking at us because of Kerry’s outburst of laughter—not that I cared much.
    I said, “It’s still a pretty routine job. If I get lucky and Bradford is still in Oroville, I’ll be back home tomorrow night.”
    “Maybe so. But you’ve got to admit, it does have its unusual elements.”
    “That’s for sure.”
    “You know,” she said, “I’ll bet he really is enjoying himself.”
    “Who? Bradford?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m not so sure. The man’s down-and-out. And being a hobo is a hell of a road to have to travel, once you get started on it.”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Hoboing has its romantic aspects. Besides . . . ‘Every man on his grave stands he, and each man’s grave is his own affair.’”
    “Huh?”
    “Two lines from a poem about hoboes I read once. They just popped into my mind.”
    “Pretty profound stuff,” I said. “But I still say it’s a hell of a road to have to travel.”
    “You don’t think it can be adventurous?”
    “Not as far as I’m concerned.”
    “You mean you’ve never wanted to ride the rails, just once, to see what it was like?”
    “No.”
    “Well, suppose you have to go up to Washington to find Bradford. How will you travel?”
    “Drive, I guess.”
    “It’d be faster by train,” she said. “You could always hop a freight and pass yourself off as one of the tramps.”
    “Is that supposed to be funny?”
    “No, I’m serious. That’s what I’d do if I were you. Just for the experience.”
    “That kind of experience I don’t need.”
    “Why not?”
    “I’m too old for it, for one thing.”
    “You’re not any older than Charles Bradford.”
    I had a mental image of myself huddled in the corner of a dusty boxcar, staring out at a lot of dark, empty terrain, listening to the rhythm of the wheels and the locomotive’s whistle echoing in the night. It wasn’t a very pleasant image. It made me feel cold.
    “No thanks,” I said. “The closest I intend to get to a freight train is the Oroville hobo jungle. And the sooner I get