Breakdown - [Nameless Detective 19]

by By Bill Pronzini

  Why?

  Dammit, why would Pendarves kill him this way?

  My stomach had begun to act up, as it always did when I was this close to violent death. I was not breathing well, either, but that was mostly the fault of the carbon monoxide. Quickly I patted Thomas’s coat and pants pockets: he wasn’t carrying a gun or any other kind of weapon. On my feet again, I went over by the door and sucked again at the night air until my stomach settled and I had better breath control. Then I was ready to get on with it.

  Nothing on the floor near Thomas or anywhere else on that side of the BMW. I got down and looked under the car. Nothing there, either, as near as I could tell without a flashlight. I opened the driver’s door, being careful not to smudge any prints that might be there, and poked through the glove box and found the registration slip. The owner of the car was Thomas’s wife, Eileen. I sifted among the other items in the compartment. No gun, no other kind of weapon, and nothing that told me anything I didn’t already know. The rest of the car’s interior was just as barren.

  I’d been in that damned garage long enough. I went back outside, shutting the light off on the way. Raining again; the wind had died down but the night seemed even colder. I looked up toward the house. The one light still burned, and it was still the only one on. He’s not there, I thought. No sign of his car, and I’ve been here long enough to attract his attention if he was hanging around waiting for the monoxide to do its work. But why would he go off and leave the BMW pumping away in the garage? Where’s the sense in that, in any of this?

  The gate into the rear yard was latched but not locked. I went through it and across a section of weedy grass, skirted some bushes, and came to a flight of stairs that led up to where the lighted window was. Under the stairs was a door; the way the house had been built, it would give into a basement. It was sure to be locked tight but I tried it anyway. Yeah. I moved over and climbed the stairs, warily but not trying to be sneaky about it.

  At the top was a little platform porch railed on the two sides. The door into the house was as tight-locked as the one into the basement. On the jamb was a doorbell, something you find occasionally on the backsides of older houses. I thought it over for a few seconds and then pushed the bell. Inside, the thing made a low, flat, buzzing sound. I stood with my ear against the door, listening for footsteps. All I heard was silence.

  After half a minute I leaned out over the railing for a look through the lighted window. Kitchen, all right. I could see about half of it, including the sink and drainboard, the refrigerator, part of a stove, part of a Formica-topped table and two chairs. Everything was immaculate, gleamingly so, like a fifties-style remodeler’s showroom. That surprised me a little; Pendarves hadn’t impressed me as an orderly man. Just the opposite, in fact—he was pretty careless about his appearance. But then, maybe he had somebody come in and clean for him, and what I was seeing was the result of a recent tidying.

  I straightened, put my hand on the doorknob, took it away again. No real point in my trying to get inside the house. Pendarves wasn’t here; and if there was anything to find on the premises, it was the cops’ job to find it.

  Descending the stairs, I hurried across the yard and through the gate and alongside the garage. Except for the fog-smeared streetlights and nearby house lights, there was nothing to see; I was still alone on the property. I crossed the empty expanse of Rivera to where my car was parked. Got in and stripped off my gloves and sat for half a minute to let my breathing even out again; my lungs still weren’t working right.

  I was lifting the receiver on the mobile phone when the night went red behind me.

  The redness brightened swiftly, making the fog look as though it were drizzling blood. I sat unmoving, watching in the rearview mirror as a black-and-white prowl car came into sight, heading west on Rivera. It was moving at a pretty good clip, its dome light slashing at the wet dark, until it passed through the intersection; then the driver braked abruptly and swerved over to the curb in front of Pendarves’s garage.

  A brace of patrolmen piled out. Both carried flashlights, switched them on at the same time; the beams burned bright tunnels through the red-splashed drifts of fog. They stopped together at the garage door, as if they were surprised to find it half open and the car engine shut off inside. They seemed to hold a hurried conference, after which they drew their sidearms in unison. One of them eased the door up a little farther and ducked under it; the other went into a shooter’s crouch and swept the interior with his light. After a few seconds the crouching one straightened again, turned away and moved along the near-side wall, out of my range of vision.

  I put the phone receiver back in its cradle, thinking: Somebody beat me to it. One of the neighbors, who spotted me poking around? But then why were the cops surprised at what they found over there? Sure, the call could have been made before I opened the door, but that had been at least twenty minutes ago. Prowler calls in this neighborhood, with the Taraval precinct station only a little over a mile away, were routinely answered in half that time.

  As I watched, the garage door went up all the way. Then the patrolman inside turned his flash on Thomas Lujack’s corpse, held it there until his partner came in through the access door and joined him. Both of them still had their weapons drawn. If they’d caught me on the premises, as they would have if they’d arrived five minutes sooner, they’d have hassled me pretty good.

  The way it was now, I wouldn’t get much more than the fish-eye. All I had to do was go on over there, nice and slow, and then tell them the exact truth. I could give them enough bare facts to save time and trouble when the homicide inspectors arrived. Besides, it was the law-abiding and the smart thing to do.

  I didn’t do it.

  Up until a year ago, I would have—without hesitation. But I was neither the man nor the detective I had been a year ago. There was a wrongness about the whole scenario over there; I had felt it as soon as I realized who the dead man was, and the arrival of the prowl car had shoved it up close to the surface. Thomas Lujack’s death hadn’t ended my involvement with him, or with Nick Pendarves; I felt that, too, just as strongly. It seemed imperative to keep my name out of the official report, to not blow my cover at the Hideaway.

  I waited until one of the patrolmen radioed in and the two of them together drifted into the shadows toward the house. Then I started the car and went away from there, running dark like a thief in the night.

  * * * *

  Bad night all around.

  I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even get into a doze. My lungs ached and my head felt clogged with too many random thoughts, like a pressure building up. After a while the unease came, crimping at the edges of my mind. Then the claustrophobia, as if the darkness was contracting around me—outside pressure added to the pressure within. Even when I turned on the light the sensation of being squeezed and suffocated did not lessen any. Anxiety attack, the first in three months.

  The clock said one thirty when I got up. I paced from room to room but it did no good; the trapped, fearful feeling seemed to worsen. There was nothing for it then but to get out and away. I dressed quickly and left the building and put my car around me again and began to drive with the window rolled down and the wind blowing icy mist against my face.

  I drove here and there, going nowhere. Wet shiny streets, mostly deserted, reflecting splinters of light that stabbed into my eyes and made them burn again. Over in the Tenderloin, the night people were out alone or in little shadowy groups— pimps, whores, pushers, muggers; drunks and addicts and flesh-hungry johns. The predators and their prey, even more voracious in bad weather because it made tempers short and patience thin. On Marina Boulevard, the empty Green looked like a barren graveyard, the tall bobbing masts of the boats in the yacht harbor like skeletons performing a danse macabre. Along the fringes of the Presidio it was as if I were passing through a tropical rain forest—trees and bushes dripping, dripping, making me think of acid rain eating away unseen at leaves and roots so that one d
ay there would be nothing left but blighted gray vegetable matter . . . seen one dead tree, you’ve seen them all. At Cliff House and Ocean Beach, wind-driven surf boiled foaming over the rocks and raged at the shore, and there was no peace in that, either—there can never be peace in the presence of raw violence. At 47th and Rivera, where raw violence had taken place earlier, there was the illusion of peace because the police were gone and the dead man was gone and the house was dark . . . but the illusion was worse than the violence itself; an illusion is a lie and a lie is always worse than the truth. . . .

  I drove some more, another half hour or so—here and there, going nowhere. At last I could feel the fatigue taking over, and with it came the beginnings of ease both physical and mental. The night felt less ominous, less tragic; it was merely lonely, the way even good nights are. I knew I could go home then, that when I got there the flat would no longer be a tightening snare. And I was right.

  I slept immediately and dreamlessly, for a little more than four hours. When I awoke at 8:00 a.m., to face the dull gray of another day, I was all right again.

  * * * *

  Chapter 9

  The telephone rang at eight thirty, as I was getting dressed. Eberhardt or Paul Glickman, I thought. It was Eberhardt.

  “You hear the news yet?” he said.

  “What news?”

  “I figured,” he said. “Why the hell don’t you read the newspapers? Or listen to the damn radio?”

  “My life is depressing enough without wallowing in other people’s misery. What’s up?”

  “Thomas Lujack is dead, that’s what’s up. Murdered last night. Way it looks, Nick Pendarves killed him.”

  I feigned astonishment. There would be no use in confiding in Eb; he would only raise a fuss. He has been a conservative, law-loving man all his life, except for one foolish slip a few years ago; ever since that slip, he has become even more rock-ribbed in his outlook. Besides, I had no satisfactory explanation to give him for my actions last night—or at least none that would satisfy him.

  Thomas Lujack’s death had made page two of the Chronicle, not because of the circumstances but because of the tie-in to the Hanauer thing. The details were sketchy, so Eb had thought to call one of his cronies at the Hall of Justice for a complete rundown.

  His account contained two pieces of information that I paid particular attention to. One was the fact that the call alerting the police had been anonymous: male voice saying that something funny was going on at Pendarves’s address, the garage door was shut and a car engine was running inside. That explained the reactions of the two patrolmen. It also added to my feeling of wrongness about the whole business. The other piece of information gave me pause, though, because it tended to support the circumstantial evidence: Pendarves had disappeared. His Plymouth Fury had been found abandoned near Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park at six this morning.

  I asked, “What’s the official theory?”

  “Either Thomas went to see Pendarves on his own hook or Pendarves asked him to come. Depending on which, there was some kind of fight or Pendarves deliberately cold-cocked Thomas; then he finished the job. One way it’s first-degree, the other way maybe it’s second-degree. Up to him and his lawyer to convince a jury.”

  “You buy all that?”

  “Any reason I shouldn’t?”

  “For one thing, why would they meet in the garage?”

  “That’s where Pendarves was when Thomas showed up. Or Thomas was knocked out somewhere else and Pendarves carried him into the garage afterward.”

  “All right. But why kill him with carbon monoxide?”

  “Some screwy idea that jumped into Pendarves’s head, maybe on account of it was also a good way to get Thomas’s car off the street and buy himself some time. Who knows why people do crazy things? They don’t know themselves, half the time.”

  “Were his fingerprints on the BMW?”

  “No. Which doesn’t mean diddly and you know it.”

  “Yeah. Gloves.” The same reason they hadn’t found my prints on the BMW. “So Pendarves set up the monoxide thing and then just took off, huh?”

  “Panicked and took off, right.”

  “Why didn’t he just hang around and wait for the monoxide to do its job and then get rid of both the car and the body? He’d be in the clear that way.”

  “Like I said, he panicked. It happens.”

  “Inspectors find any evidence that he went on the run? Suitcases and clothing missing?”

  “No,” Eberhardt said, “but so what? He could have packed light; you can’t always tell. There isn’t anything in the house that’s worth much.”

  “Why would he abandon his car?”

  “Throw the law off his scent. Called a cab or somebody he knew and had himself picked up in the park and driven to Greyhound or the airport or any one of a hundred places. Takes time to check all the possibilities.” He paused. “Listen, you got a reason for being so doubtful?”

  “No specific reason,” I said. “I’m playing devil’s advocate, that’s all. But doesn’t it seem a little off-the-wall to you?”

  “A little, I guess,” he admitted. “What’re you thinking? That it might tie into the Hanauer case? Same person who ran down Hanauer killed Thomas?”

  “Possible, isn’t it?”

  “Anything’s possible. But hell, why? Why frame Pendarves? Where’s the sense in that?”

  “Where’s the sense in Hanauer’s murder or any of the rest of it? I want the answers, Eb. Don’t you?”

  “Sure. Thomas’s wife and brother probably will too. Don’t let’s get ahead of ourselves.”

  “Yeah. Either of them able to shed any light on what happened?”

  “No. Coleman told the cops he hadn’t talked to Thomas since yesterday afternoon and then it was about business. The wife said he stayed in the city after the conference with you and Glickman. Called her and told her he had some things to take care of and he’d be home late, but he didn’t say what the things were.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to Glickman. Then we’ll see how things stand.”

  We rang off. And as I finished dressing I thought: I don’t care about the circumstantial evidence or what anybody says —it didn’t happen the way it looks. It’s a phony, a setup. Nick Pendarves damned well did not kill Thomas Lujack.

  * * * *

  Glickman said, “The family hasn’t decided if they want you men to continue your investigation. They’re still in shock.”

  “You talk to both the wife and brother?” Eberhardt asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Separately?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they both said the same thing?”

  “More or less. It’s not surprising that they should be indecisive at this point—”

  “It is to me,” I said. “Why would they need to think about it? Pendarves may or may not have killed Thomas, but he didn’t run down Frank Hanauer. And Thomas probably didn’t either. Don’t they want his name cleared?”

  “I should hope so.”

  “And while they’re making up their minds? What are we supposed to do? Sit around on hold?”

  “Legally there is nothing any of us can do until the family makes a decision.”

  “Which could take days.”

  “Yes. But I doubt it’ll be more than twenty-four hours.”

  I glanced at Eb, who shrugged. Eberhardt the philosophical; Que saràsarà. There were times when I wished I could adopt his detached professional attitude, but this wasn’t one of them. I fidgeted on Glickman’s upholstered visitor’s chair. We were in his private office on Terrific Street, and the antique ship’s clock on one wall said that it was already five minutes before noon.

  To Glickman I said, “Did you tell them there’s some doubt Pendarves is guilty? That Thomas’s murder may in fact be tied directly to Hanauer’s?”

  “I told them you expressed that concern, yes. Coleman asked if there was any evidence to support it. I had to tell him no.�
��

  “That’s part of the reason for us staying on the job. To find evidence to support it.”

  “I told him that too. He said he would think about it.”

  “Yeah,” Eberhardt said. “Think about it.”

  “Will you talk to them again?” I asked Glickman. “Try to use your influence?”

  “Certainly. But you must understand, I’m in a touchy legal position here. I can only go so far.”

  Strict letter of the law, I thought. Well, good for you, Paul. I hope nothing happens to turn your head. I hope you keep on being one of the lucky ones.

  * * * *

  Eberhardt went to finish up a routine background investigation and I went back to the office, where I dug Thomas Lujack’s home telephone number out of the file. Ten rings, no answer. We hadn’t been given Coleman’s home number, but I knew that he lived in Burlingame; and even though the number was unlisted, it took me all of ten minutes to get it. And all of five seconds to reach his answering machine. I hung up without leaving a message. If I was going to talk to him, I wanted it to be in person.