Breakdown - [Nameless Detective 19]

by By Bill Pronzini

  She sat through the whole recital without interrupting. Her face was grave when I finished, but whatever she was feeling was hidden away inside. And when she spoke she had nothing to say about Vega or the shooting of Coleman Lujack. Experience had taught her just how dangerous my profession could be sometimes, and that there was no point in carrying on about it. I was still around, still in one piece; that was what mattered.

  Quietly she said, “It’s not over for you yet, is it?” She knew me so well—so much better than I could ever know her.

  “It won’t be over until whoever killed Coleman is identified and locked up. It has to come full circle; there has to be a closing.”

  “But why do you have to close it? Why not the police?”

  “It’s not that I have to be the one,” I said. “It’s that I have to keep trying until somebody does it. You understand the distinction?”

  “I think so.”

  “I thought you would. Eberhardt doesn’t.”

  “That’s because he’s uncomplicated.”

  “I wish I were too, sometimes.”

  “But you’re not.” She smiled—a little wistfully, I thought. Then she asked, “Who shot Coleman, if it wasn’t Paco Vega or Teresa Melendez? Thomas’s widow?”

  “Probably not. She just isn’t the type.”

  “Any woman is the type, if she wants revenge badly enough.”

  “I suppose so. More likely it’s somebody mixed up in the smuggling racket. Pendarves would be a good candidate too . . . if he’s alive.”

  “But you don’t think he is?”

  “Everything I know about Coleman and Vega says they plotted Pendarves’s murder along with Thomas’s.”

  “Maybe they did, and something happened to prevent it.”

  “You mean there was an attempt on Pendarves’s life and he got away? Sure, it’s possible. It would give him another reason for hiding out, and an even stronger motive for shooting Coleman. But if that’s it, where has he been holed up since Tuesday night? He has few friends, none close enough to risk prison on an accessory charge.”

  “No woman in his life?”

  I shook my head. “I thought for a while he might’ve been having an affair with one of the women regulars at the Hideaway, but that idea didn’t pan out.”

  “Why not?”

  “According to Lyda Isherwood, who claims to have once been a madam in Nevada, he’s been paying for his sex ever since his divorce five years ago. Plus there’s the fact that he’s a hard-core sexist and a psychological abuser. Women don’t seem to want to have much to do with him.”

  “Then why did you think he was having an affair?”

  “The shape his house was in. I had a glimpse of the kitchen; it was spotless. Pendarves is or was a slob, and much too cheap to hire a housekeeper. Somebody had to do the cleaning up for him.”

  “Why does it have to be a woman?” Kerry said.

  “What?”

  “The person who cleaned his house for him. Why does it have to be a woman? Why couldn’t it be a man?”

  “... I don’t know, I just assumed . . .”

  “Men clean houses too. And cook and wash clothes and change diapers ... all sorts of things like that.”

  “Okay, okay. But in this situation . . . hell, Pendarves isn’t gay, I’m positive of that. . . .”

  “Who said anything about gay? It doesn’t have to be a sexual relationship. You said he’s a psychological abuser. Why couldn’t he have a male friend, somebody weak and easily manipulated, that he could have bullied into doing his housecleaning for him? And bullied into hiding him from the police?”

  I stared at her without speaking. Then I got off the couch and took a couple of turns around the room, working on what she’d said. Somebody weak and easily manipulated. Well, why not? Another Hideaway regular; the tavern was the most likely place for Pendarves to have formed such a relationship. But why hadn’t anybody there mentioned it?

  They don’t know, I thought. Pendarves is close-mouthed, keeps to himself. The friend could be that way too. Either that, or . . .

  Weak and easily manipulated—and withdrawn, uncommunicative. A man who had expressed a deeper concern for Pendarves’s well-being than any of the other regulars the night of the abortive hit-and-run ... a man fastidious in dress and habits, who would undoubtedly keep a fastidious house and could be talked into keeping his friend’s house the same way ... a man who, now that I thought about it, hadn’t been present at the Hideaway during my last few visits, even though he usually came in every night to play chess.

  Douglas Mikan.

  The sad-eyed, painfully shy mama’s boy—Douglas Mikan.

  * * * *

  Chapter 22

  I told Kerry she was wonderful, briefly explained about Douglas Mikan, and went after the telephone directory. He was listed. Or at least there was a D. Mikan at 2316 Great Highway, which would be just a few blocks from the tavern.

  There was an edge in me now, but not the bad kind; a controlled excitement, a sense that thanks to Kerry I might be nearing that final closing off. “I’d better go out there and check on this right away,” I. said.

  “You won’t take any chances?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, if Pendarves is at Mikan’s and he’s the one who shot Coleman Lujack, he’ll probably be armed.”

  “I know. I’ll go slow and easy.”

  On my way Out There at the Beach, I did some more thinking about Nick Pendarves and Douglas Mikan. At first consideration, they seemed like strange bedfellows. Pendarves —blue-collar, minimally educated and unsophisticated, no interests beyond his work, his bar time, maybe some TV, and a hooker now and then to satisfy his biological needs. Mikan— white-collar, younger by more than fifteen years, sensitive, intelligent, probably asexual, interested in chess and history and world travel and any number of other things. When you looked a little more closely, though, there were similarities between the two, and strong character traits in each that made it natural they would gravitate to each other. Both were loners, yet both craved the company of others; their “regulars” status at the Hideaway proved that. One was an abuser who didn’t care if he was liked or respected, just so long as he got what he wanted. The other was withdrawn, malleable, a man-child who had been cast adrift by his mother’s death and who would typically yearn to be needed as she had needed him. . . . All in all, a perfect foil for an abusive personality.

  Pendarves and Mikan—why hadn’t I seen it before? Too busy trying to make things fit into convenient patterns; and too willing to accept a sexual stereotype, as Kerry had pointed out. A product of my generation, that was me. Even though I did not believe in any form of sexism, fought against it in others, there were times when I was as unintentionally piggy as Eberhardt. ...

  Between Taraval and Sloat Boulevard, before the Great Highway enters its newly landscaped stretch, its east side is just another strip of mismatched private residences. Number 2316 was one of them—a weathered, green-shingled cottage squeezed so tightly between a two-unit apartment building and a two-story house that it looked as though it was trapped there. A concrete walk bordered by two neat, slender rows of artichoke plants led in to it. Across its narrow front porch was a wrought-iron security gate. And in one of the facing windows, a light showed palely behind drawn monk’s cloth drapes.

  I felt a momentary longing for Vega’s .38. But it was just as well that I had turned it over to the police last night. I wouldn’t need a weapon if I handled things right. There was no reason I had to bring Pendarves in myself; all I had to do was determine his presence, get away clean, and notify the authorities. I ought to be able to tell if he was there by trying to talk my way inside—Art Canino come from the Hideaway to find out if Douglas was feeling all right, since he hadn’t been in the past few evenings—and then gauging Mikan’s reaction. It would work if I was careful and did or said nothing to arouse suspicion.

  A stiff sea wind beat at me as I got out of the car. No fog out here
today, and none lying in wait offshore; the sky was coldly clear to the horizon, turning a dusky indigo now as the last of the sunset colors bled out of it. I let the wind push me along the walk to where the gate barred my way. It wasn’t quite latched, I saw then. But I didn’t touch it. I stopped and laid my finger on a round white button set into the frame.

  No one buzzed me in. Or opened the front door. Or showed himself behind either of the curtained windows.

  Empty house? Or somebody in there, hiding?

  I rang the bell continuously for part of a minute. Then I pushed on the gate, and it swung inward, and I climbed three steps onto the narrow little porch. Carefully I tried the door, using two fingers on the knob; it was locked. I banged on the panel, loudly, and called Mikan’s name, identifying myself as Art Canino. Still no answer.

  If I break in, I thought, and they’re in there, Pendarves is liable to start shooting. But it’s just as likely there’s nobody home. Otherwise, why wasn’t the security gate locked tight? And why wouldn’t Mikan just answer the door, find out what I wanted, and then get rid of me? Keep me from coming back again, that way. And ease their minds about why I’d come.

  Just as likely, too, that Pendarves is dead and this is a wild-goose chase. Don’t forget that.

  I bent for a close look at the door latch, and that made up my mind. People nowadays think a security gate and window bars are all the protection they need, so they don’t bother to put dead-bolt locks on the doors. Then they leave the house and go away and forget to make sure the gate is secure. No wonder the burglary rate in this city was so damned high.

  With one of the blades in my pocket knife, I tripped the spring lock. Took me less than thirty seconds. I went in slow and wary, but not being furtive about it.

  Nothing happened.

  Nobody home.

  I let out a long breath, shut the door, stood looking around. I was in a tiny foyer that opened on my left into a living room lit by a ginger-jar table lamp. And what a living room it was. The furnishings were few and functional, of the forties Sears, Roebuck type but well preserved and gleaming with polish; the carpet was rose-patterned, threadbare in places, very clean. That much was ordinary. The rest of the room was extraordinary: It assailed the eye in a riot of color and imagery.

  Postcards. Picture postcards.

  There must have been thousands of them covering every inch of wall space, fanned out on top of the furniture, hanging from the ceiling on lengths of white ribbon like bright flypaper strips or homemade mobiles. Most looked to be of recent vintage and the photographic, wish-you-were-here sort, depicting scenes from foreign lands and the more interesting parts of the U.S. There were also hand-painted cards, some evidently quite old; poster and advertising cards; cards featuring boats, trains, other forms of transportation; cards showing people, animals, birds, monuments, buildings. Holiday cards, religious cards, patriotic cards, novelty cards . . . just about every conceivable type of picture postcard ever manufactured except the erotic and the pornographic. Nearly all of the hanging ones had been written on and sent through the mail; one of the old cards, of the Steel Globe Tower at Coney Island, bore a 1907 postmark. I glanced at the names of the senders and addressees on a few of the others. None had been written by or sent to Douglas Mikan, nor by or to anyone bearing his family name. Only one had been mailed to someone in San Francisco; the others bore such far-flung addresses as Baltimore, London, and Fiji.

  He buys them through dealers, I thought, or picks them up in junk shops and secondhand stores. And they’re more than just a hobby; they’re his secret fantasy life. All the places he’s never been and probably will never go. Other peoples’ dreams fulfilled, shared vicariously and long after the fact by a sad, shy, lonely little man named Douglas Mikan.

  I turned out of there, made my way down a central hallway. But there was no getting away from the postcards; they were everywhere, on every wall including those in the hallway, bathroom, and kitchen. The place was alive with them . . . and yet there was no lifein them, only the static memory of life. It was like wandering through a mausoleum filled with bright, shiny, two-dimensional corpses.

  Two doors off the hall were shut. The first one opened into what must be Douglas’s bedroom: as neat and clean as the rest of the place, the bed made up with military precision, the concentration of postcards the heaviest. He’d affixed some directly to the ceiling—his favorites, I thought, so he could lie in bed at night and look up at them and dream his impossible dreams. On the dresser was a big silver-framed photograph of a pinch-faced, unsmiling woman with gray hair and hard little eyes. His mother. If the photo was an accurate reflection of the woman herself, ii was little wonder he’d turned out the way he had.

  Behind the other door was a guest bedroom, furnished with a single bed, a dresser, a couple of nightstands. The bed was made, though not quite as carefully as Douglas’s own. Postcards coated two of the walls; the other two had cards only just below ceiling levels out of reach of a normal-sized man—yet the bare parts bore discolored squares and rectangles and clinging bits of adhesive where cards had been mounted. They bore something else too: gouge marks, deep in places, as of fingernails dug hard into the plasterboard and dragged downward.

  I peered closely at some of the gouges. Then I got down on one knee and looked under the bed. Something was caught under one of its rollers; I slid it loose. A piece of jaggedly torn postcard of the old hand-painted type, the stiff paper yellowed and the inked words on the back faded. Douglas wouldn’t have torn one of his prized possessions that way; and it didn’t look as though it had been done accidentally. . . .

  I left the room, went through the kitchen and then out a rear door into a tiny backyard. Near a narrow walkway alongside the cottage were a brace of garbage cans, each lined with a black disposal bag. Inside the first I opened were hundreds of torn-up postcards—the ones that had formerly decorated the spare-bedroom walls.

  Pendarves, I thought. Who else but Pendarves, in a fit of pique or sudden anger. And afterward, Douglas the tidy, Douglas the timid and abused, had swept up the mutilated remains and put them in with the garbage.

  Two minutes later, I had proof that Pendarves was alive and had been living here recently. And that he was the one who had shot down Coleman Lujack last night.

  In a nightstand drawer in the guest bedroom I found a nearly empty pack of Pall Malls—Pendarves’s brand. Mikan was a nonsmoker. In the scuffed dresser was a gray work shirt and a pair of gray work pants, both laundered and neatly folded. Pendarves’s customary outfit. His size too. I had never seen Douglas except in a suit and tie, and these clothes wouldn’t fit him anyway.

  Another drawer in the dresser yielded a large cigar box, inside of which I found some gun oil, a couple of chamois cloths stained with the oil, several cleaning brushes, and a spare clip for a 9mm automatic pistol. I rummaged through the rest of the drawers, the closet, but there was no sign of the gun itself, or of any other type of weapon.

  Before I left the room again I paused to stare at the stripped and gouged walls. What had thrown Pendarves into such a destructive fit? Being cooped up here for so long, probably. He was the same type as Thomas Lujack, a man who bottled things up until he reached an explosion point of sudden violent rage. Five days ago he’d become the object of a police manhunt, with no way to prove his innocence and no place to run. Trapped here all that time, in the home of a weak man he no doubt despised, the pressure building, building . . . and finally, early yesterday or maybe Friday night, he’d erupted. First, he had destroyed the postcards. Then, when that wasn’t enough of a release, he’d got his hands on a 9mm automatic, taken Douglas’s car, and gone hunting the man who may have tried to kill him, who’d turned his life upside down and put him in this intolerable position.

  But where was he now? Had he come back here after the shooting, spent the night here? And where was Mikan?

  I went back through the cottage, poking into closets and drawers and cupboards. There was no gun anywhere on the
premises; either Pendarves had gotten rid of the automatic, or more likely, he was still armed with it. Nor was there anything in any of the rooms to give me an idea of where he might be.

  As for Douglas . . .

  The Hideaway? I thought.

  If the two of them were no longer together, if Pendarves had taken off again in Mikan’s car, alone, the tavern was the natural place for Douglas to go—his home away from home, the one other spot he could find a measure of solace. And if anyone knew Pendarves’s whereabouts, it was Douglas. It wouldn’t take long to check out.

  The gaudy, mock-cheerful corpse faces of the postcards had become oppressive; I avoided looking at them as I moved to the front door. I could understand the impulse that had led Pendarves to attack the ones in the guest room. After five days of being surrounded by all these cards, I might have done the same thing.