Free Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini Page B

have realized until after he’d rushed out that he needed directions to wherever it was. And he might have stopped somewhere else to ask how to get there.
    I went to see if I could get there myself.

Chapter 9
     
    I made an arbitrary decision and turned west out of the library parking lot, toward the downtown area. There were a bunch of industrial establishments, and a couple of restaurants along Lincoln Boulevard in that direction; I wasted forty minutes asking questions and showing the newspaper photo to a dozen people. Nobody had seen Bradford on Tuesday or on any other day. Nobody seemed to give much of a damn about hoboes either.
    So I turned around finally and drove back toward Oro Dam Boulevard, past the library to the east. A middle-aged attendant at a service station on the main drag allowed as how he might have seen a guy who looked like Bradford walking by on Tuesday afternoon; he always noticed tramps, he said, because sometimes they came in and tried to mooch a handout. But he’d been busy at the time and he couldn’t be sure it was the same guy in the photograph.
    There was another service station across the street; I drove in there and talked to a fat kid with pimples who said he’d also been on the job on Tuesday afternoon. “I think I seen him,” the kid said. “He started in here like he wanted to ask me something, but I was waiting on a customer. So he went on out again.”
    “Do you remember which direction he headed?”
    “North. Yeah, toward the dam.”
    In the next block there were a couple of fast-food places, an auto supply store, a music store, and a combination grocery and liquor retailer. I drew a blank at all of them. But on the corner of the next block after that, I came on a place called the Green Garden Café—a small lunchroom with a lot of potted plants in the window and a bunch more decorating the long, narrow room inside.
    There was nobody in the café when I entered except for a fairly good-looking bleached-blond waitress in her twenties and a burly guy about the same age wearing the uniform of a deliveryman, with his shirt sleeves rolled up so you could see that his arms were covered with tattoos. The two of them were down at the other end of the counter, facing each other across it. The waitress was grinning all over her face and watching the burly guy expectantly. Neither of them seemed to notice I had come in.
    “Here’s another one,” the guy was saying. “You’ll love this one, Lynn. How come the Italians don’t have a national fish?”
    “How come?”
    “They did,” he said, “but it drowned.”
    The blonde let out a hoot like a goosed owl and leaned against the counter, giggling. When she got her breath back she cracked him on the arm and said, “God, Bernie, you’re so funny !”
    “Yeah,” Bernie said. “Ain’t that a pisser?”
    “You make my sides hurt.”
    “Yeah,” Bernie said. “So did you hear about the two old ladies walking along the beach one day? They think it’s deserted, see, they’re just out for a little air; but they come around this rock, there’s a guy lying there on a blanket and he’s naked.”
    “Naked,” the waitress said, nodding. She had started to giggle again in anticipation.
    “Yeah. One of them nudists, you know? So the two old broads stop and one of them points. The guy’s lying on his back so you know what she’s pointing at, right?”
    “Right.” More giggles. “Oh, sure.”
    “Well, she points and she says to the other old lady, ‘You know,’ she says, ‘life sure is funny. When I was ten I didn’t know that thing existed. When I was twenty I was curious about it. When I was thirty I was enjoying it. When I was forty I was asking for it. When I was fifty I was begging for it. When I was sixty I was paying for it. And now that I’m seventy—’”
    “Right, now that she’s seventy . . .”
    “‘Now that I’m seventy,’ she says, ‘when my life is almost over, there it is growing wild.’”
    The