Breakdown - [Nameless Detective 19]

by By Bill Pronzini

  The next call I made was to Containers, Inc. A bored female voice—Teresa Melendez, no doubt—informed me that Mr. Coleman Lujack was not in the office today because there had been a death in the family. She didn’t seem to care much that a second of her three employers had died by violence. But that might say more about the Lujacks and the climate at Containers, Inc., than it did about her personally.

  I asked, “How about Rafael Vega? He come in today?”

  “No,” she said. “He’s still sick with the flu.”

  * * * *

  When Kerry arrived for our four o’clock date I was in the bedroom straightening up. She made a small joke about being honored by clean sheets and the absence of dust mites, but neither of us laughed much. She asked for a glass of wine, and I had a Diet Pepsi so she wouldn’t have to drink alone. We sat in the living room and made conversation for a few minutes, none of it about Cybil. There was a small awkwardness between us, as between new lovers, that we could not seem to banish. It was there even when we went to bed.

  We needed each other now more than ever, but for me, at least, our lovemaking was no better than it had been the last time. Part of it was the circumstances; part of it was that Kerry’s passion was tainted with a kind of desperation, as if she were trying too hard to please both of us, too hard to feel good and carefree again . . . and failing on all counts. All she got out of it, and all I got out of it, was physical release. And we both knew it.

  For a long while we didn’t speak. It was a dark silence, as dark as the dying day outside.

  “It’s hurting us, isn’t it,” she said finally. Statement, not question.

  “We’ll get through it, babe.”

  “Not this way. Not with Cybil living with me and shutting you out, not with us sneaking around and screwing in the afternoon like a couple of high-school kids. I hate this, damn it. Ihate it.”

  “Don’t blame Cybil—”

  “I don’t, any more than I blame Ivan for dying. It’s the situation that’s intolerable. I’m going to see somebody, right away ... no more waffling.”

  “Geriatric specialist?”

  “Somebody like that. I’ll check into it first thing tomorrow.”

  “You want me to come along when you go?”

  “No. It’s something I’d better do alone.”

  “Well, if you need me, for any reason . . .”

  “I know,” she said.

  She burrowed closer to me. And pretty soon I felt wetness against my arm and chest: She was crying without sound.

  “Why?” she asked then, as a child might—rhetorically and with great sadness. “Why do people have to get old?”

  * * * *

  At the Hideaway that night, there was plenty of lip service paid to Thomas Lujack’s murder and Nick Pendarves’s disappearance. Even Max was stirred up enough to offer a comment now and then. In the lives of most if not all of the regulars, it was the most exciting and shocking thing to happen in years, and they were having a ghoulish fling with it.

  They did not want to believe Pendarves was guilty, but that was because he was one of them. It made them uncomfortable to think that a man capable of cold-blooded murder might have been part of their close-knit little group. More importantly, it constituted a threat to their sanctuary and, by implication, to each of them individually. If Pendarves had killed a stranger, he might just as well have decided, to their way of thinking, to dispose of one of them. And if they weren’t safe here in the Hideaway, then they weren’t safe anywhere.

  The irony in that was their willingness to talk freely in my presence, as if circumstances had made me one of them now. The truth was, they didn’t know me any more than they knew Nick Pendarves . . . than they knew each other. Does anybody ever really know another person, even someone close? No, but we need to believe that we do. That’s one of the necessary illusions we live by: that we are always safe in the company of friends and loved ones.

  So I sat observing the regulars work like busy spiders at repairing the torn strands of their illusion. Nick Pendarves a murderer? Ridiculous! Why, there had to be some mistake, some other explanation. Somebody else must have murdered that bum Thomas Lujack. Or else it was some kind of crazy accident. Either way, Nick had gotten scared and run off. Hell, who wouldn’t run? Cops would say he did it, he’d known that. Damn cops. They’d as soon railroad an innocent man as go out and hunt down the guilty one. . . .

  There was only one mildly dissenting voice—Bob Johnson’s—and it didn’t take much to get him to relent and come around to the group position. At first he said, “Well, I don’t know . . . Nick could have done it. He’s got a temper, you know that.”

  “You ever see him raise a hand to anybody?” Kate Johnson asked.

  “No, I never did. But I heard him yell plenty of times. . . .”

  “I’ve heard you yell plenty of times, Bob Johnson. You never raised a hand to me or anybody else.”

  “Me and Nick are two different people.”

  “Not so different.”

  “What about that wife of his? What’s her name?”

  “Jenna,” somebody said.

  “Yeah, Jenna. She divorced him for abuse, didn’t she?”

  “She said he abused her. Nick said it was BS.”

  “Well, sure. What’d you expect him to say?”

  “Nick doesn’t seem like the sort to beat up a woman,” I said.

  “Didn’t beat her up,” Ed McBee said. “Wasn’t that kind of abuse. She claimed he bullied her, threatened her, made her do for him all the time like a slave. Claimed she didn’t have a life of her own.”

  Annie Stanhope snorted, aimed one of her knitting needles at McBee. “Jellyfish, that’s what Jenna is. No backbone. Let him wear the pants for years, did everything he told her without a whimper, and then decided she was tired of it and wanted a divorce. It was that high-hat sister of hers talked her into it. The one in Chico she went to live with.”

  “That sister’s a real ballbuster, all right,” Charlie Neale said. “Came in here once, made some smart remark about my crippled leg. Right to my face.”

  “What’d you do about it?” McBee asked.

  “Showed her my crutch. Said if she made another smart remark, she’d need a proctologist to remove it from her backside.”

  “The hell you did.”

  “The hell I didn’t. You know a good proctologist, Ed?”

  Everybody laughed. And that was the end of the dissent.

  A little later I managed to steer the conversation to possible places Pendarves might have gone to hole up. There were plenty of opinions but none that had any basis in fact. He didn’t have any relatives that the regulars knew about. Nor friends out of state or even out of the city. Nor property other than his house. Nor special places that he liked to visit; he didn’t fish or hunt and when he took his yearly vacation, McBee said, all he ever did was putter around his house or sit here in the Hideaway drinking beer.

  I asked if he was seeing a particular woman, or if he had seen one at any time since his divorce. Frank Parigli said, “Nah, he was all through with women after Jenna,” which prompted Lyda Isherwood to laugh her big, booming laugh.

  “That’s what you think,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Lyda?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Whores?” Parigli was incredulous. “You trying to tell us he paid for it?”

  “Plenty of men do. Haven’t you, Frank?”

  “No, by God.”

  “Not even once in your life?”

  “No!”

  “Well, Nick did. More than once.”

  “How in hell do you know?”

  “He told me so.”

  “Bull.”

  “Maybe he paid Lyda for it,” Neale said slyly.

  “Not me,” she said. “When I retired from the business I retired for good.”

  “You ought to retire that madam story,” McBee said. “You never ran a house in Nevada or anyw
heres else. Only thing you ever ran besides your mouth was that lunchroom down at China Basin.”

  Unruffled, Lyda winked at him. “That’s what you think, honey.”

  “What kind of hooker did Nick go for?” I asked her.

  “Call-girl kind. Not the cheapies, either. Hundred-dollar girls.”

  “Same one each time?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  McBee gave me a squinty look. “You don’t think some call girl would let him hole up with her, do you?”

  “Depends on the girl,” I said. “How well he knew her, how much money he had to offer.”

  “Bah. I don’t believe it.”

  “Neither do I,” Parigli said. “And I don’t care what Lyda says, I don’t believe Nick’s been paying for it. He’s not that sort.”

  “Every man’s that sort,” Lyda said, “at least until he gets too damn old to care. Deprive a horny male long enough and he’ll mortgage the house for a night with a circus fat lady.”

  I stayed until almost ten. By then the regulars had had enough alcohol and enough group reinforcement to gloss over Pendarves’s faults and foibles and elevate him to the status of martyr. The web of illusionary safety had been repaired, made strong again. I didn’t blame them. Take away an elderly person’s sense of security, and he’s left feeling naked and helpless. It is the last and most vital of all our necessary illusions; without it, life can become unbearably hopeless.

  As I walked through the wet night to my car, I thought with sudden insight: Isn’t that what’s happening to Cybil right now? Isn’t Kerry and Kerry’s apartment her last illusion of safety, and isn’t she terrified that without that sanctuary her life will become unbearably hopeless?

  * * * *

  Chapter 10

  Thursday morning.

  From the office I called Paul Glickman. He had nothing to tell me; he hadn’t been able to get back in touch with either Coleman Lujack or Thomas Lujack’s widow.

  Nick Pendarves was still among the missing.

  Eberhardt was late again. And there had been no messages on the answering machine.

  Status quo.

  I scribbled a note to Eberhardt, left it on his desk, locked the office, picked up my car, and headed south across the city to Highway 280.

  * * * *

  The house owned by Thomas and Eileen Lujack was high in the hills above San Carlos, at the end of a twisty little street ludicrously named Sweet William Lane. It was similar to most of the others in the neighborhood—big ranch-style place not more than twenty years old, built of wood and field-stone, with plenty of glass to take advantage of what, on a clear day, would be a miles-wide view of the bay from near San Francisco on the north to near San Jose on the south.

  Low, dark clouds obscured most of the view today, though at least it wasn’t raining here just now. The lot was big for this area, about two acres, the grounds well landscaped with lawn and shrubbery and flower beds; a gnarly old oak and a couple of acacias would provide shade in the summer. Scattered on the lawn and under the trees, peeping out here and there from among the vegetation, were at least twenty gaudily painted, three-foot-tall cast-iron gnomes, each one with a different facial expression ranging from weepy to lusty-leer. The gnomes gave the place a whimsical aspect, like some sort of Disney exhibit. Cute kitsch.

  At a conservative estimate I put the value of the property at half a million dollars. Pretty fancy digs for the part-owner of a box factory that grossed around three million a year. But then, Thomas and his wife may have bought it before 1975, when Bay Area real estate prices began the steep ascent to their present dizzying heights. Back then, you could have bought all of this for under $100,000.

  Sweet William Lane widened into a turnaround in front of the house, like a bulb at the end of a crooked thermometer. I parked near the driveway and went in along a fieldstone walk. One of the gnomes scowled at me as I passed; I scowled back at him. The front porch was half hidden by wisteria bushes, and the front door had a knocker in the shape of a smiling gnome’s head. More cute kitsch. I found a doorbell and used that instead.

  The door opened pretty soon, to reveal a thirtyish, ash-blond woman dressed in a black suit and a gray blouse. She frowned and blinked and said, “Oh. You’re not the taxi.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I mean, you’re not the taxi driver.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Are you Eileen Lujack?”

  “That’s right. Who are you?”

  I let her have my name and one of my business cards.

  “Oh,” she said, “yes, Tom mentioned you. I think your partner came to see me once, didn’t he? Elkhart or Eisenhardt or something like that?”

  “Eberhardt.”

  “Eberhardt, yes. You should have called first.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Before you came all the way down here to see me.”

  “I tried to call a couple of times yesterday—”

  “I was so upset, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. So I turned the bell on the phone all the way down. That way I couldn’t hear it when it rang.”

  “I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Lujack.”

  “Thank you. You’re very kind.”

  “Would you mind talking today? There are a few things I—”

  “Well, I can’t,” she said. “Not now. I’m going to be late as it is.” She looked at a platinum-gold wristwatch and then past me, down Sweet William Lane. “He should have been here by now. The taxi. I told them I had an eleven thirty appointment with the funeral people and they said they’d send somebody right away. That was forty minutes ago.”

  “If you’d rather not wait,” I said, “I could drive you.”

  “Oh, would you? You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all. We can talk on the way. Where is it you need to go?”

  “Just into town. San Carlos. Saxon and Jeffrey—that’s the name of the funeral home. But what about the taxi?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Well, he’ll come eventually and I won’t be here. The taxi company won’t like that. They might not come at all the next time I need them.”

  “You can call and cancel on the way. I have a phone in my car.”

  “You do? Oh, good. We’d better hurry then.”

  She went and got her purse, locked the door, and set the burglar alarm. While I waited I remembered what Eberhardt had told me after his talk with the lady. “She’s kind of a ditz,” he’d said. “Not quite as bad as your typical Hollywood dumb blonde, but close. Thomas didn’t marry her for her IQ, that’s for sure.” Eb can be a sexist sometimes, if a benign one, and at the time I’d put the description down to his piggy tendencies. But now that I had spent five minutes in Eileen Lujack’s company, I decided he’d been speaking the nonsexist truth. She was a tall, leggy, chesty, blue-eyed, clear-skinned, gnome-loving ditz. And if she had spent any of the last thirty-six hours grieving over her husband, you couldn’t tell it by looking at her.

  When we got to the car she gave it a wary look, as if she were afraid it might fold up around her like one of those comic jobs in a Mack Sennett two-reeler. She said, “What happened to your door?”

  “Somebody broke in a couple of nights ago. I haven’t had a chance to get the lock fixed.”

  Her expression said she was wondering why anybody in his right mind would break into a wreck like this, but she had the grace not to put the thought into words. I helped her in through the driver’s door, made an effort not to look at her legs as she scooted across the seat and swung them over the cellular phone unit, and then took my place under the wheel.

  “I guess you have trouble with cars too,” she said.

  “Well, not usually.”

  “We never used to. Not until that awful thing with Tom’s car and poor Frank Hanauer. Now the police have my car too. They . . . what’s the word when they keep your property?”

  “Impound.”

  “That’s right. They impounded it. Tom got me a rental when he started using mine b
ut I don’t like driving it. I don’t like driving at all, really, and today I just couldn’t. I should have called one of my friends but I didn’t think about it in time. . . .” She sighed heavily. “Are you sure you don’t mind driving me?”