Breakdown - [Nameless Detective 19] Read online

  “Nick, who’s Rivas?”

  The sudden pain had brought him out of himself. His head snapped around my way and his eyes focused on me for the first time. “Canino,” he said, “what the hell you sucking around for?”

  “Hey, I was just trying to help—”

  “Keep your questions to yourself.” He shook himself, the way you’d shake off a sudden chill. “Max, give me another double.”

  “Sure.”

  Another voice, shy and halting, said, “Nick . . .”

  Pendarves swung around. When I looked back I saw Douglas Mikan standing a couple of feet away, fingering the knot in his tie.

  “What you want?”

  “I just . . . make sure you’re all right . . .”

  “Leave me alone, you fat wimp.”

  Mikan backed off, staring at Pendarves like a hurt puppy. All the other regulars were staring at him, too, now. Conversation had died.

  “What’s everybody gawking at?” he demanded.

  Down the bar Ed McBee said, “Don’t take it out on us, Nick. We’re on your side.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Notify the cops, that’s good advice—”

  “Butt out, Ed, huh? All of you just mind your business and let me take care of mine.”

  He swung around again as Max set him up with his second double. He put that one away as quickly as the first, then shoved away from the bar and stalked to the door in his rusty-jointed stride and was gone into the night.

  I stayed where I was for about ten seconds. Then I shook my head and said, “Ah, the hell with it,” as if I had lost my taste for beer and bar-lounging. I got up and went after Pendarves.

  He was down the block a ways, just crossing Taraval— doing it cautiously, head twitching left, right, left, right. I went in the same direction but on this side of the street. I saw him get into his car, a beat-up Plymouth Fury with a loose rear bumper; heard the starter grind as I hurried across 47th Avenue. Thirty yards separated me from my car when he maneuvered out of the parking space; twenty yards when he made a too fast turn out of sight on 47th, heading north.

  I was on the run by then, with my keys in my hand. It took me less than fifteen seconds to get the door unlocked, the car started and into a fast U-turn across the streetcar tracks. When I made the swing onto 47th, the Plymouth was two blocks away, approaching the Rivera Street intersection. Almost immediately its taillights flashed bloodily in the blowing fog and Pendarves turned right onto Rivera. I accelerated to close the gap—but I needn’t have bothered. Two blocks east, the Plymouth had slowed again and was just turning into the weedy driveway next to a weathered yellow-brown corner house.

  The house belonged to Pendarves. The way it looked, he was not going anywhere but home.

  He quit his car, leaving it in the drive rather than putting it away in the sagging garage that crouched at the rear edge of his property. I drove past as he disappeared through a gate between the garage and the house. In the next block I made another U-turn and pulled in to the curb and cut my lights. From there I could see the mist-wreathed front of his house, the Plymouth sitting dark in the driveway.

  Pretty soon lights went on inside the house. And stayed on. I sat there for twenty minutes: Pendarves did not come back out. Whatever he intended to do about Thomas Lujack, he apparently wasn’t going to do it tonight.

  Well, all right. That part of it was on hold. As for the rest of it . . .

  For three weeks I had been working on Pendarves at the Hideaway, the only public place he frequented with any regularity, trying to pry some sort of useful information out of him; and now for the first time all that effort had paid some dividends. In fact, this was the first real break Eberhardt and I had had since we’d undertaken our investigation. The only trouble was, it was potentially disastrous in more ways than one. If Thomas really had tried to run Pendarves down tonight, it blew us right out of the water.

  Thomas Lujack was our client.

  And we were trying to prove him innocent of one hit-and-run murder charge already.

  * * * *

  Chapter 2

  Before I ended my vigil on Pendarves’s house, I used the car phone to call Thomas Lujack’s home in the San Carlos hills. I wanted to hear what he had to say about tonight’s incident, and I wanted to alert him to the threats Pendarves had made. I also wanted to find out if he was there, because if he was, he couldn’t have tried to run Pendarves down. It would take a professional race-car driver to get from this part of San Francisco to his place in not much more than half an hour.

  There was no answer.

  I didn’t like that much, either.

  * * * *

  It was after ten when I got to my building in Pacific Heights. A crack in the front stoop was the only damage it had suffered in the earthquake; the landlord still hadn’t repaired it. Except for most of my collection of pulp magazines being dislodged from their shelves, and some broken crockery, my flat and personal possessions had come through all right too. The only real damage I’d had to deal with was at the office, where I’d been when the quake hit, and even that was pretty minor.

  Tonight the flat had a barren, comfortless feel—the way the homes of some of the Hideaway’s disaffected must feel to them, I thought. Reaction to the mood I was in. And to the fact that the place needed cleaning, tidying ... no, hell, what it needed was Kerry. What I needed was Kerry.

  She hadn’t been here in ten days; I hadn’t been to her apartment in Diamond Heights since before Christmas. For the second straight year we hadn’t been able to spend the holidays together. Nor had we been able to spend a night together since Cybil’s arrival. We’d been to bed only twice in all that time—my saggy old bed on a pair of stolen afternoons. Momentary releases of tension, that was all they were, quick and passionless and almost painful. What made it worse was that they were the only things I’d been able to do for her since the twenty-first of November—the only things. I was on standby: waiting until I was needed.

  I hung up my overcoat and cap, turned up the thermostat. It was cold in here; that damned January wind was sharp enough to penetrate steel. Into the bedroom then, where I keep the telephone and answering machine, to check for messages. There weren’t any. The bed looked as though it had been ransacked: I had not slept well the past few nights. I sat on the edge of it and punched out Eberhardt’s number.

  I’d tried to call him on the car phone, but the line had been busy both times. It was free now and he answered on the third ring, with an un-Eberhardt-like lilt in his voice.

  “Hello to you too,” I said. “Who’d you think it was? An obscene caller?”

  “Ha ha,” he said. Eberhardt is my best friend as well as my partner, and the salt of the earth, but he has absolutely no sense of humor. He thinks the funniest man who ever lived is Bob Hope. “I just got through talking to Bobbie Jean; I thought she forgot something. What do you want this late?”

  “Development on the Lujack case, finally. But I don’t like most of it and neither will you.” I told him about the alleged hit-and-run attempt, the fact that there had been no answer at Thomas’s house when I called.

  “Hell,” he said, “none of that has to mean anything. Could’ve been a case of careless driving and Pendarves overreacted.”

  “Sure. Or it could be Thomas is guilty as hell on both counts.”

  “You call Glickman yet?”

  Glickman was Paul Glickman, Thomas’s attorney—one of the better criminal lawyers in the Bay Area, and the man who had hired us to work as defense investigators. I said, “No. That can wait until morning. I’ll call him first thing and have him set up a meet with Thomas.”

  “You don’t think Pendarves’ll do anything crazy tonight?”

  “I doubt it. He was pretty sore, making threats, but he’s no hotheaded kid. Besides, everybody in the tavern heard him. He’d have to be a fool to try anything after that.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “Nothing specific. Said he’d fix Thoma
s, that kind of thing.”

  “Doesn’t sound too serious.”

  “No. The name Rivas mean anything to you?”

  “Rivas, Rivas . . . why?”

  “Pendarves mentioned it. Some vague connection to the Lujack brothers.”

  “. . . Familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”

  “Somebody Pendarves works with at Roofco, maybe?”

  “That’s it,” Eberhardt said. “Rivas, Antonio Rivas. I talked to him the first day I was out there.”

  “Friend of Pendarves?”

  “Just coworkers, according to Rivas.”

  “So maybe he lied.”

  “Why would he ... oh, I get it. You think Rivas might be the third witness.”

  “Possible, isn’t it?”

  “Possible, sure. If there really was a third witness. But why would Pendarves cover up for a guy like Rivas?”

  “You talked to him. What kind of guy is he?”

  Silence on the line; Eberhardt was thinking about it, working his memory. “Friendly, outgoing,” he said at length. “Little dude in his twenties, been in this country three or four years, speaks broken English. Nothing in common with Pendarves that I can see.”

  “They get along all right?”

  “No gripes from Rivas. No love and kisses, either. Just two guys who work together, different as night and day.”

  “Rivas wouldn’t be the hardcase type, would he?”

  “No way. Why?”

  “I was thinking Pendarves might try hiring somebody to do some strong-arm work on Thomas.”

  “Forget it. Rivas’d be the last person for that.”

  “Suppose he’s got a mean friend or relative?”

  “I don’t see him as a go-between either.”

  “Okay. I’m just shooting blind here. Have another talk with him tomorrow, see if you can find a connection. You can get to him when Pendarves isn’t around?”

  “I can try. I doubt they eat lunch together.”

  “I’m eating mine with Kerry tomorrow, but I should be back by one,” I said. “I’ll have Glickman set up the meet with Thomas for sometime after two.”

  “Right.”

  I drank a glass of low-fat milk and then tried to watch something on TV. My powers of concentration were nil tonight. Finally I took some calcium lactate, which Kerry had once told me was as effective as Nembutal in helping you sleep, and undressed and put the bedclothes more or less in order and got in among them.

  And lay there in the dark, with my mind going clickety-clickety-clickety. The calcium lactate was no good tonight; about the only thing that would have worked was a blow on the head with a hammer.

  I was aware of the ticking of the bedside clock, like a counterpoint to the wind. Time, passing time. More than ten months now since the end of my private taste of hell, when I had been kidnapped by a madman and chained to the wall of an isolated mountain cabin and left there to die slowly of starvation. I was mostly healed now; the last crippling anxiety attack had been almost three months ago, just after the earthquake, and I no longer seemed to constantly need people around me to ward off the fear of being trapped and alone. But there were scars, deep and disfiguring scars. I had been changed by my ordeal, profoundly and irrevocably. I had lost the virtue of patience, for one, and gained a capacity for sudden rage, sudden violence; I was capable of things that once I would have considered unethical, unthinkable. Such as the resolution I had brought to a case last May, up at Lake Tahoe. If the truth about that had come out, I would have lost my license and maybe my life. I’d been aware of this at the time but I had done it anyway. And would again, if I had it to do over.

  Once I had known myself pretty well, known what I would do in just about any situation. Not anymore. There was a new, dark side to my personality that I did not know at all, and that for the rest of my life I would have to be on guard against. . . .

  Outside the wind was gathering strength. Making banshee noises as it rattled window glass, shook unseen objects. Pacific Heights is one of the city’s hillside neighborhoods, close to the ocean and the bay, and when the wind blows it blows strongest up here. Most nights I don’t mind it. Tonight, it added to my restlessness.

  To keep from listening to it, I swathed my head in blankets and pillows. And to keep from thinking broody thoughts about myself, or about Kerry and her mother, I tried the subject of Eberhardt and Bobbie Jean Addison, his soon-to-be bride.

  They had been seeing each other for more than a year now, seriously for eleven months. He’d first popped the question last May, and kept popping it until she finally relented. I was happy for both of them, because for both of them it was a good match. Not only did they love each other, they were perfectly suited in temperament and emotional needs. Eb had lived alone for years, since his divorce from his first wife, Dana, and hated every minute of his enforced bachelorhood; he was the kind of man who needed a wife and the illusion that he was “being taken care of.” Bobbie Jean had suffered through two bad marriages, had raised two daughters on her own, professed to be soured on matrimony, and seemed to enjoy her independence. In spite of that, she was the kind of woman who needed to prove to herself that she could make a relationship with a good man work; that she had not become selfish, closed off in her feelings, incapable of giving as well as receiving love.

  They were planning an April wedding. Why April? I’d asked them. Neither had a satisfactory answer. They’d just decided on April, that was all—one of those mutual decisions two people make for no reason other than that it seems right to them. As if it had been divinely ordained. I didn’t believe in that theory of life and the universe, and yet there were things in my life, too, that seemed predetermined or inevitable— some right, others wrong, as if I were being manipulated by outside forces. . . .

  The hell with that. I threw another mental switch, rerouted my thoughts onto the Lujack case.

  It was a strange one, all right. Full of complications and enigmas that seemed to defy rational explanation even after three weeks of both routine and creative investigation. The facts were these:

  Thomas Lujack and his brother, Coleman, owned and operated a small factory off Bayshore Boulevard, just across the Daly City line. The factory—Containers, Inc.—manufactured a variety of cardboard and fiberboard cartons for industrial and commercial use. The two men had founded it in the early seventies, weathered a couple of rough years, and with the financial aid and marketing expertise of a man named Frank Hanauer, had gradually built it up into a successful operation that currently employed some thirty people full-time and grossed close to three million a year. The Lujacks each owned forty percent of Containers, Inc.; Hanauer, in return for his early investment, owned the other twenty percent.

  According to everyone we’d talked to, the Lujacks and Hanauer got along fine: no personal or business rifts of any kind. Yet on the evening of Tuesday, December 5, Frank Hanauer had been deliberately run down and killed by a Cadillac Seville belonging to and allegedly driven by Thomas Lujack.

  The two men had worked late that night, long past the company’s five o’clock closing, on the feasibility of opening a branch factory in Fresno. Coleman Lujack had stayed late, too, but only until six fifteen. When he left, his brother and Hanauer were the only ones on the premises. Both Lujacks swore that the work had gone smoothly, with not even a minor disagreement.

  A little after seven o’clock, Hanauer had left the premises alone and set out on foot along Industrial Way, the dead-end street on which Containers, Inc., was located. That morning he’d left his car at an auto body shop a block away, to have a dent in the fender repaired; the shop was closed by that time, but because Hanauer had expected to work late, he’d made arrangements with the shop’s owner to leave the car locked outside. He had walked about a hundred yards when Thomas Lujack’s Caddy swung off the factory grounds, accelerated, veered into Hanauer when he tried to dodge out of the way, continued to the open end of the street at a high rate of speed, and disappeared east on Bayshor
e Boulevard.

  There were two known witnesses to the hit-and-run—and maybe an unknown third. Industrial Way is just what its name implies, a street lined with a variety of small manufacturing companies and warehouses; none of the businesses operates at night, so at 7:00 p.m. the street is virtually deserted. On this particular Tuesday, however, the Lujacks and Frank Hanauer weren’t the only ones working late. An accountant named Allen Dinsmore, employed by Soltech, a solar-heating equipment company, was finishing up an overdue profit-and-loss statement. And Nick Pendarves, shop supervisor at a roofing supply outfit called Roofco, who had put in some overtime checking a late-arriving shipment of shingles, had just locked up and was about to get into his car.

  The hit-and-run happened right in front of Roofco, less than fifty feet from where Pendarves was standing. It was dark, but there was a moon that night, and a streetlamp not far away; Pendarves claimed he’d had a clear look at the man driving the Caddy. It was Thomas Lujack, he said, and no mistake. He knew Thomas by sight, recognized him instantly. Allen Dinsmore could neither corroborate nor refute Pendarves’s ID. He had been more than seventy-five yards away, too far to tell much of anything about the driver.