“Well, what makes you think he’d have come out here?”
“I’ve traced him as far as Firth Road,” I said. “At least, it seems this is where he came on Tuesday afternoon.”
“What time on Tuesday afternoon?”
“Sometime between five and six.”
“I wasn’t here then,” Dallmeyer said. “I closed up at four-thirty; I had to drive down to Yuba City to pick up some Southern Pacific dining-car relics for the museum.”
“What time did you get back, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“It was almost midnight.”
I nodded. “Would you mind taking a look at Bradford’s photograph, just for the record?”
“I suppose not. But I haven’t seen any tramps hanging around here, I can tell you that right now. I’d have run them off if I had. They’re bad for my business.”
“Sure, I understand.”
He propped the shovel against the side bulkhead, wiped his hands on a rag from the engineer’s seat, and then swung down off the running board. His face was still red and damp with perspiration. I gave him the Examiner photo, pointing out which of the men was Bradford. He looked at it, shook his head, and said, “No, I never saw him before. I never saw any of these men before.”
I took the clipping back and put it into my shirt pocket.
“Can’t imagine what a hobo would be doing way out here,” Dallmeyer said. “They all hop the freights over by the WP yards; hardly ever this far out. How’d you trace this Bradford to Firth Road, anyhow?”
“It was a pretty complicated procedure, Mr. Dallmeyer,” I said. “And I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’d better be on my way.”
“Well, I’ll walk out to the gate with you. I must have forgotten to lock it and I don’t like to leave it open like that.”
We left the roundhouse and went across the yard to the gate, where I apologized again for the trespass. He said, “No problem. I hope you find that hobo you’re looking for.” Then he let me out and padlocked the gate latch. He was already back inside the roundhouse by the time I reached the end of the gravel drive.
I walked up to the next block and entered Jorgensen Electric. The owner, Eric Jorgensen, was a fat jowly man in his late fifties who looked like a Boston bull terrier. “Nope,” he said when I asked him about Bradford. “Didn’t see any tramps while I was here on Tuesday. I’d have sure noticed one, too. But I left about half past four; he could have come after that.”
“You closed up for the day at four-thirty, you mean?”
“Nope. Tris did that at half past five, like always.”
“Who would Tris be?”
“Girl who answers the phone and waits on customers and does my books for me. Tris Wilson, my brother’s girl.”
Jorgensen was the only person in evidence at the moment. I asked, “Is she here now?”
“Yep. Using the can. Tris spends more time in the can than a bad burglar with a bladder problem.” He thought that was funny and laughed to prove it. I let him have a small smile, which was more than I’d done for Bernie; Jorgensen, at least, was not a jerk.
It was not long before Tris, who turned out to be a plain-looking brunette in her middle twenties, came back from the can. She looked at the photo, looked at it again, gnawed on her lower lip, and said at length, “Well, I don’t know. It might have been the same fellow. I only saw him for a moment.”
“Ma’am?”
“Through the window.” She nodded toward the plate-glass window that took up the left-hand wall flanking the entrance door. “I was just getting ready to close up and I happened to glance out and there he was.”
“Which way was he heading?”
“West, I think.”
“On this side of the street?”
“No, on the other side.”
“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”
“No,” she said. “I noticed him because he looked like a hobo and you don’t see many of them out here. But he wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary, just walking along, and it was closing time and I was in a hurry because I had a date. I just didn’t pay that much attention to him.”
“How long after you saw him did you leave the shop?”
“About five minutes, I guess.”
“And he wasn’t anywhere around then?”
“Well, if he was I didn’t see him.”
I thanked her and Jorgensen and went outside again. The Orchard-Sweet packing plant loomed across the street; I walked over there and inside the warehouse. It smelled almost overpoweringly of cooked fruit, like the pervasive odor of aging wine in a winery. None of the dozen or so employees seemed bothered by it, though. You probably wouldn’t even notice it if you’d been working there for any length of time.
I showed the clipping around-it was starting to get worn from all the handling-but all I got in return were headshakes and negative words. I went out through the open rear doors to where two Latino forklift operators were loading crates into a boxcar on a rail siding. They both said they didn’t know nothing about no bums, man.
And that seemed to be that. Firth Road looked like a dead-end in more ways than one.
Yet if Tris Wilson was a reliable witness, and I judged that she was, I had definitely established that Bradford had been out here at five-thirty on Tuesday afternoon. Why had he come here? Who was it he’d wanted to see?
I only had one lead left to pursue-those microfilm files of the Los Angeles Times at the library. If I couldn’t find the needle in that haystack I had two choices: I could hang around Oroville and keep flashing Bradford’s photo in the hope that somebody recognized him and could tell me where he’d gone; or I could call Miss A. Bradford, admit defeat, and head back home to San Francisco. I doubted if I would do the latter, though, at least not right away. Now that I was back in harness, it would be damned frustrating to have to walk away empty-handed on my first new case. Bad for business, too, if word got around.
Well, there was no point in worrying about any of that until the time came. Right now, there was the library.
Chapter 11
Mrs. Kennedy took me into the microfilm room, an air-conditioned cubicle at the rear of the library, and plunked me down in front of one of those magnifying machines that look like hair dryers. Then she brought me the tapes for the August and September 1967 issues of the L.A. Times, showed me how to thread the machine, and left me alone.
I started with the first of August and worked ahead chronologically, skipping the want ads, the sports and fashion and business sections and concentrating on the news and feature pages, because the odds were better that Bradford had been after something there. I paid particular attention to the more unusual local items-crimes, personal tragedies, bizarre accidents, acts of heroism, political and business scandals, things like that.
At the end of an hour and a half I had reached August 31 and all I had to show for the effort was a headache; the damn screen on the viewing machine was scratched, the light was too glary, and the pages came through blurred so that you had to squint to read the newsprint. There was no mention of Charles Bradford anywhere. Nobody named McGhan, Dallmeyer, Jorgensen, or Tris Wilson-or, for that matter, Coleman, Baxter, or Mrs. Kennedy-was mentioned either. Oroville appeared a couple of times, once in the case of a hobo who’d been found stabbed in an empty boxcar, but there wasn’t any connection in that that I could find. The guy who’d done the stabbing, another tramp with a felony record, had been arrested the following day.
I rolled the last of the August tapes out of the machine, then got up muttering to myself and took a couple of turns around the room to give my eyes a rest and ease the knotted muscles in my shoulders and neck. My left arm and hand were starting to cramp up again, too. I thought: This is a waste of time. Bradford could have been looking for anything, even a business advertisement or somebody’s recipe for clam chowder. You’ll never find it this way, groping for it blind.