your father, is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Why? If it’s to convince him to give up the hobo life, I’m afraid that’s not in my—”
“What he does with his life is his own business,” she said. Her voice was full of cold disapproval, like a spinster schoolteacher discussing a wayward child. “I want you to find him and deliver a message, that’s all.”
“What sort of message?”
“That he contact me immediately, regarding his Uncle Kenneth’s estate.”
“I don’t understand, Miss Bradford.”
“His uncle died ten months ago,” she said. “No one in the family thought Uncle Kenneth had any money, but it turned out that he did—all in stocks and bonds. Hardly a fortune, but enough to make several bequests. One to me, one to my sister Hannah, and one to my father, among others: twenty thousand dollars to each of us. The attorneys handling the estate made every effort to locate Daddy at the time the will was probated, but they were unsuccessful.”
“When was it that he dropped out of sight?”
“A year and a half ago, not long after he lost his job with the Office of Minority Business Enterprise.”
“That’s a Federal agency, isn’t it?”
“Yes. And a productive one before that idiot in Washington started his massive cutbacks. My father had been with the Los Angeles branch of OMBE for eighteen years—he worked in Procurement, obtaining construction contracts for minority firms—but this administration has no respect for minorities or for individuals. He was given a month’s notice and thrown out on the street.”
“Did he try to find another job?”
“Of course. The last time I spoke with him on the telephone, just before he . . . went away, he said he’d been jobhunting almost daily. But he wasn’t qualified for anything except bureaucratic work, and he has no particular skills. No one would hire him.”
I knew all about that. And all about the state of the economy and the high rate of unemployment. Nobody had been willing to hire me during the past two and a half months either. But I said, “Why would he have decided to become a hobo? I mean, he could have taken on menial jobs without traveling around in boxcars. Riding the rails isn’t the kind of thing you expect of an ex-government bureaucrat.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s degrading and disgusting, and I think he’s a fool.” She sounded a little angry now, as if she’d taken the fact that he was hoboing as a personal insult. “But that’s neither here nor there. I suppose he did it because he considers the life of a tramp adventurous.”
“How do you mean?”
“He has always been fascinated by trains,” she said. “And by hoboes, God knows why. His favorite book was that dreadful thing of Jack London’s, The Road . He collected books on trains, and he belonged to a model railroad club in Los Angeles. Our flat was always full of tracks and miniature cars and grown men wearing engineer’s caps. Pure nonsense.”
“Mmm.”
“He’s a fool,” she said.
Maybe he is, I thought, but you’re a pip yourself, lady. I said, “If you don’t mind my asking, why are you going through the expense of locating him?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t seem to like your father very much, and you consider him a fool. Why pay a detective to hunt for him so he can claim his inheritance?”
“He is entitled to the money,” she said stiffly. “My sister may not care if he gets it, but I do; I know my duty.”
“Why doesn’t your sister care?”
“Because she doesn’t care about anyone except herself. She never has. Besides, she’s greedy.”
“Greedy?”
“There is a stipulation in Uncle Kenneth’s will that if any of us were to die before the estate cleared probate, or if any of us fails to claim his bequest within two years, that person’s share is to be divided among the remaining two. Hannah would like nothing better than to get her hands on another ten thousand dollars.”
“She’s not very
Christine Zolendz, Frankie Sutton, Okaycreations