“Was that all there was to it?”
“No,” Flint said. “Kid went over into the yards and come back a while later. I seen him.”
“I seen him too,” Woody said. “So did G-Man. Three of us was there together. G-Man had him some Cadillac and he didn’t mind sharing it.”
“‘Cadillac’?”
Woody grinned; what teeth he had were decayed stumps. But it was the black guy who answered my question. “Bottle of Thunderbird,” he said. “Cadillac of tramp wine.”
“Did anything happen when the streamliner showed up the second time?”
“He didn’t know we seen him,” Flint said. “He was headin’ for the road with a signal lantern in one hand and a tool kit in the other. Swiped ’em from one of the sheds.”
“Prob’ly on his way into town to try sellin’ the stuff for the price of dope,” the black tramp said. He shook his head. “Damn long-hairs give hoboes a bad name. Yard bulls hassle all of us because of ’em.”
“Just what I says to G-Man,” Woody agreed. “And he says something ought to be done about it and by God, he was goin’ to. I told him why don’t he mind his own business, but he wouldn’t listen. Reckon he was still thinkin’ about the streamliner tryin’ to cut him with that knife.”
“You mean he chased after the kid?”
Woody wagged his head. “Nope. Says he’s goin’ to report what the long-hair done; tell the yardmaster or one of the bulls. He went off into the yards. Left the Cadillac with Flint and me. Nice fella, G-Man.”
“What time was that?”
“I dunno. Three o’clock, maybe.”
“Did you see him again?”
“Nope.”
“How about the kid?”
“Nope.”
“Freight come through since then bound for Pasco?”
“Yesterday morning,” Flint said.
“So Bradford-G-Man-could have hopped it.”
“Could have, but he didn’t. Me and Woody and Toledo was all over there when she pulled in; we seen the tramps that got aboard. G-Man wasn’t one of ’em.”
“There been any other northbound freight?”
“Nope,” the black man, Toledo, said. “Next one’s due tomorrow morning.”
I considered that. Then I asked, “The streamliner happen to mention his name?”
“Not that I heard,” Flint said, and Woody wagged his head again.
“What did he look like?”
“Long hair like all of ’em got. Yellow. Scrawny little bugger; couldn’t of weighed more than a hundred and thirty stripped.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Levi’s. No shirt, just one of them sheepskin vests-”
In the distance there was the wailing blast of a locomotive’s air horn. The three old tramps stirred immediately and came to their feet as one. Toledo said to me, “That be the noon southbound out of Medford. She comin’ in to change crews.”
They started away from me toward the path that led up the gully wall. Trains were their lives, and with one coming in-and my ten dollars’ worth of information just about used up anyway-they had lost interest in me. Flint, the one with the arthritis, had trouble making it up the slope. Toledo hoisted him under one brawny arm, the way you’d pick up a child, and carried him to the top.
I went up after them. The Medford freight was just clattering into view from the west-a string of maybe thirty cars, most of them boxes and flats. The air horn shattered the hot morning stillness again.
The three hoboes headed into the yards, toward the siding the freight was shuttling onto. I followed them, but it wasn’t the freight I was interested in. The person I wanted to talk to now was Western Pacific’s day yardmaster.
Chapter 6
I found the yardmaster in his office, in the trailer I had noticed earlier near the entrance to the yards. His name was Coleman and he was about sixty, lean and sinewy, wearing an orange hard hat even though he was sitting at his desk. I was honest with him about who I was and what I was doing there; he seemed willing to cooperate. The only problem was, he had nothing to tell me.
“No,” he said when he was done looking at the newspaper photograph, “I’ve never seen this man before.”
“But you were here around three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon?”
“I was. Out by the freight storage shed, as I recall, discussing a shipment of wheel flanges with a local businessman. Nobody who looked like this fellow Bradford came to see me.”
“Well, maybe he talked to one of the yard security men…”
Coleman shook his head. “If he had, it would have been reported to me. Theft is a serious offense around here and we damned well don’t put up with it. We did miss a signal lantern and a tool kit two days ago; the lock on one of the sheds was forced. But no one owned up to seeing the man who stole them or I’d sure know about it.” He paused. “Who did you say told you about this?”
“Three oldtimers who live over in the hobo jungle,” I said. “Woody, Flint, and Toledo.”
“Well, they’ve been around a long time and there’s not much goes on that they don’t know about. They’re as reliable as tramps can be.” Coleman shrugged. “Maybe Bradford changed his mind about reporting the theft. Hoboes don’t want to get involved, as a rule.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe he did.”
I left the trailer and went back across the yards and the open field to where I had parked my car. I didn’t know what to think now. If Bradford had changed his mind about reporting the streamliner, where had he gone instead? And why hadn’t he hopped the freight for Pasco, as the newspaper article said he’d planned to do?
I wondered if he might have stopped by the rescue mission. That seemed as good a bet as any, so I drove back there and into the gravel lot. Off to one side of the mustard-yellow building were a couple of gardening sheds and a vegetable patch; drawn up in front was a battered old pickup truck. There was no sign of anybody in the vicinity. And when I got out and went up to the front door I found it locked; a hand-lettered sign taped to it said BACK AT 2:30.
What now? I thought as I returned to the car. I decided to try canvassing the houses that faced the rail yards, on the chance that one of the residents had seen Bradford on Tuesday and maybe had some knowledge of where he’d gone. I spent an hour doing that, but it got me nothing except a lot of blank looks and doors slammed in my face.
Was it possible Bradford had gone into town and taken a flop for the night? It didn’t seem likely. But he might still have gone into Oroville for some other reason-and so might the streamliner with his stolen loot; I remembered Toledo saying that the kid had probably done that to sell the stuff for the price of dope. I still had no proof that there was any connection between Bradford’s apparent disappearance and the streamliner, or that the two of them had had any further contact, but it was an angle worth checking out.
I drove back to Oro Dam Boulevard and then took Myers Street downtown. Oroville wasn’t a very big place; the downtown area was maybe a dozen square blocks of old buildings, some with turn-of-the-century false fronts, and narrow sidewalks that didn’t have many people on them. The part of it that catered to transients and local down-and-outers was a couple of sleazy blocks along Montgomery and Huntoon streets, near the river-and near a green cinder-block structure that housed the Oroville Police Department. It was almost as if the cops had established themselves close by in order to keep an eye on the town’s unsavory elements.
It occurred to me when I saw the police station that maybe Bradford had been arrested as a vagrant. Hoboes were always being rousted by cops in small railroad towns, particularly if they wandered in among the local gentry. If Bradford had been picked up he might have missed his northbound freight yesterday because he was in jail. I drove up to the green cinder-block building, parked the car in a slot facing the river, and went inside to find out.
The officer at the desk was a young, flat-faced sergeant with straw-colored hair who gave his name as Huddleston. You have to be careful in how you deal with small-town cops; some of them don’t like private detectives from the big city-a sort of professional hostility, because they think you’re there to stir up trouble on their turf. But Huddleston wasn’t like that. He was polite, if a little reserved, and when I showed him the photostat of my license his face registered nothing more than mild curiosity.