“No. I told you, man, no!”
He was telling the truth, I thought. He had to be; he was still too stoned to pull off a convincing lie. I let go of him and straightened off the bed. He lay there without moving, staring up at me, his face still full of confusion. Anguish, too: he was sliding back into the real world again, where there was hassle and pain, and he didn’t like that. He didn’t like it at all.
I looked at him a couple of seconds longer, trying to make up my mind what to do about him. But then he made a noise in his throat, halfway between a sob and another of those giggles, and rolled over and pawed the Prince Albert can off the nightstand. That made up my mind for me. I did not owe Stanley McGhan a damned thing; I owed myself and I owed the law, and that was all. I was on my way out the door when he shoved one of the remaining joints into his mouth and struck a match with trembling hands to light it.
The pudgy hooker’s door was open again; I went on past it this time without looking inside. Downstairs, I used a public phone to call Sergeant Huddleston at the police station and told him where he could find his thief. That solved his problem for him; and that of Coleman, the yardmaster at Western Pacific. But I was still left with mine, and it was as puzzling as ever.
What had happened to Charles Bradford?
Chapter 8
I stopped for a sandwich and a cup of coffee at a cafe on Myers Street, and it was after three o’clock when I drove into the gravel lot fronting the Guiding Light Rescue Mission. A white van with the name of the mission printed on its side was parked next to the pickup now. And the front door of the building stood open.
I pulled in next to the van, got out, and entered a big common room, with benches along one side and some folding chairs and a dais on the other. No religious trappings except for a cross and a bronze sculpture of the Virgin Mary on the wall behind the dais. The room was deserted, but after a couple of seconds a giant of a guy materialized through a door at the far end and approached me.
He was at least six-five and three hundred pounds, and he had a dark red beard and enormous hands; his size, the plaid shirt and corduroy trousers he wore, and the beard gave him the appearance of a lumberjack. But when he got up close you could see the missionary look-the mixture of compassion and piousness-in his eyes.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “May I help you?”
“I hope so. Are you the proprietor?”
“I am. J.L. Baxter. The J.L. stands for Jerome Leon; my parents were fine people, but…” He shrugged and smiled quizzically at me.
I explained who I was and why I was there, then pointed out Bradford in the newspaper photo. “Have you ever seen this man before?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have. I spoke to him a couple of days ago.”
“Do you remember what time that was?”
“Late afternoon. Around four.”
“Did he come here to the mission?”
“Not exactly. I was out working in my vegetable garden and he was walking across the field from the freight yards. When he saw me he detoured over.” Baxter smiled again, a little sadly this time. “I thought he might want shelter or a hot meal, but he only wanted to ask me a question.”
“Do you mind telling me what that question was?”
“Not at all. He wanted to know where the library was.”
“The library?”
“It surprised me, too,” Baxter said. “A library is not the sort of institution hoboes are generally interested in.”
“Did he say why he wanted to go to the library?”
“No. And I didn’t ask.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“No, nothing,” Baxter said. “He seemed a bit preoccupied and in a hurry, and he went off again as soon as I gave him directions.”
“How do you mean, preoccupied?”
“Oh, very much self-involved at the moment. As if he was excited about something.”
“You haven’t seen him since then, by any chance?”
“Not.”
I described Stanley McGhan, but Baxter had never set eyes on anyone who looked like the streamliner; he’d only been working in his vegetable garden a few minutes when Bradford came by, he said. So he’d probably been inside when the kid passed with his stolen goods.
I asked Baxter how to get to the library, thanked him for his time; listened to him wish me luck, and then went back out to my car. Now what the hell? I was thinking. Up to this point, everything had added up: Bradford’s fight with McGhan, the kid’s theft of the lantern and tool box, Bradford and a couple of retired tramps seeing Stanley make his getaway, Bradford deciding to be public-spirited and report the theft and then going off into the yards-all a logical sequence of events. But then it all seemed to go haywire. Bradford hadn’t talked to the yardmaster or any of the yard bulls; instead, he’d come hurrying back past the mission a little while later, excited about something and apparently on his way to the public library. Something must have happened in the yards to shift gears for him. But what? And what could a hobo possibly want at the library?
Well, maybe somebody there could give me some answers. I started the car and went to find out.
The library wasn’t far away, less than a mile from the mission on Lincoln two blocks east of Oro Dam Boulevard. It was a low, newish, beige-and-brown building with the words BUTTE COUNTY LIBRARY in big raised letters on the front wall. There were only three other cars in the parking lot; Oroville’s hall of learning, it seemed, wasn’t exactly a popular hangout for the residents.
The checkout desk, L-shaped and made of blond wood, was just inside the front door. Behind it, a thin young guy with a nose like a boat hook was pasting card pockets into a stack of recent acquisitions. The only patrons I saw were an old guy sitting at one of the tables, shuffling through a stack of magazines, and a studious-looking kid browsing in the section marked NEW ARRIVALS-7-DAY
BOOKS
I told the thin guy behind the desk what I wanted and started to show him the Examiner photo, but he said he hadn’t been on duty Tuesday afternoon; the person I wanted to see was Mrs. Kennedy, the head librarian. She was there, doing something over in the stacks, and he went and got her for me.
Mrs. Kennedy was about sixty, silver-haired, energetic, and garrulous. She peered at the photo through a pair of reading glasses and said immediately, “Oh yes, I remember him. Frankly, I was amazed when he came in. I mean, I could see that he was a tramp-the way he was dressed and the pack he was carrying and all.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“They just don’t come in here. I mean, the library is the last place you’d expect to find a hobo.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Do you know what it was he was looking for?”
“Well, that amazed me even more. I was at the desk and he stopped and the first thing he asked was if we keep microfilm files of old newspapers.”
“Old newspapers?”
“Yes. Well, I told him that we do, and he asked if the Los Angeles Times was one of them.”
“Is it?”
“Oh yes. Most libraries keep microfilms of at least one major daily newspaper, you know, and the Los Angeles Times is the standard one in small branches such as ours. We also have files of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York — ”
“Yes, ma’am. Did he ask to see the Times files?”
“He did. The ones for the months of August and September of 1967.”
I ruminated about that for a couple of seconds. Screwier and screwier, I thought. “Did he give you any indication of what he wanted from those files?”
“No, he didn’t,” she said. “He studied them for twenty minutes or so, in our microfilm room. That was all.”
Twenty minutes was hardly enough time to wade through two months’ worth of issues of a thick daily newspaper. That being the case, it would seem that Bradford had to have known more or less what he was looking for.