Breakdown

by Bill Pronzini

  “Did she mention her mother?” I asked.

  “No. No, she didn’t.”

  Downstairs in the lobby I shut myself inside a public telephone booth and called Kerry’s home number. The line burred to itself eight or nine times, and I was about to hang up when Cybil’s frail voice said, “Hello?”

  I cleared my throat. “May I speak to Kerry, please.”

  “… She’s at work.”

  “Oh, of course. What time did she—”

  “Who is this?”

  I said my name. “Cybil, I hope you’re feeling—”

  She hung up on me. Fast and hard.

  * * * *

  It was foggy in Daly City. But then, it is almost always foggy in Daly City, no matter what the weather happens to be in San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area. Something to do with proximity to the ocean and wind currents. Wisps of the stuff crawled along the rooflines of Teresa Melendez’s white-frame cottage, blew down into the empty carport. The Honda Civic wasn’t anywhere on the street either. Nor was Rafael Vega’s Buick Skylark.

  Another impasse.

  Well?

  * * * *

  Eberhardt was at his desk when I came into the office, reading what looked to be magazine tear sheets with an expression of mildly horrified fascination. He put the sheets down in a hurry when he saw me, as if I’d caught him doing something not quite wholesome.

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s you.”

  “Who’d you think it might be? The vice squad?”

  “Huh?”

  “What’ve you got there? Dirty pictures?”

  “This? Nah.”

  “What then? You were pretty engrossed.”

  “Yeah, well … never mind. Where you been all morning?”

  “Working. How about you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Waiting for a call right now. You talk to Glickman?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “Little while ago. One guess what he had to say.”

  “Coleman Lujack fired him, and us by extension.”

  “Right. We’re to keep our noses out of Coleman’s business from now on. That’s a direct quote from Coleman.”

  “The hell with him. You have a chance to do much digging into his finances yet?”

  “Some. Provocative stuff but none of it conclusive.”

  “Same here. Provocative and nasty.”

  I told him about my talks with Coleman and Paco Vega, my so-far uncorroborated guess about Rafael Vega and Teresa Melendez, and what I’d learned from Orloff about the coyotes. He agreed that it was a good bet the Lujacks had gotten themselves mixed up in the “travel agenting” of illegal aliens, probably through Vega and his contacts, and probably by financing one of the coyote rings. Eb’s check on Coleman had turned up a situation parallel to his brother’s: He, too, appeared to be living a little too high off the hog for his share of the Containers, Inc., profits. At a conservative guess, each of them had to be raking in around fifty thousand dollars annually as their share of the scam.

  “But there’s no hard proof of any of it,” Eberhardt said. “And we still don’t know who killed Hanauer and why. And if you’re right about Thomas, who killed him and why.”

  “I’ll lay you odds Coleman and Vega had a hand in at least one of those murders and probably both.”

  “His own brother?”

  “Why not? Cain killed Abel, didn’t he?”

  “Who? Oh, the Bible … yeah.”

  “Vega’s the key,” I said. “Find him, we find the answers and the proof we need.”

  “He’s in Mexico by now. Why else would he have disappeared?”

  “I’m not so sure, Eb. I think maybe he’s still around.”

  “Because of what Paco said about him shacking up with some bimbo? Hell, the kid could be wrong. So could you about Teresa Melendez.”

  “I’ll find out by tonight, one way or another.”

  “You intend to keep working on this, huh? Even though we’ve been canned?”

  “Sure. Don’t you?”

  He gave me his long-suffering look. “We’re on shaky ground and you know it. Coleman and the widow could make big trouble for us—harassment, invasion of privacy. We could lose our licenses.”

  “Not if we bust the whole thing wide open.”

  “Big if. I say play it smart and back off. Turn what we have over to that INS guy—what’s his name, Orloff?—and let him handle it.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “We were hired to prove Thomas didn’t kill his partner. We haven’t proved it yet.”

  “Ahh. His hands were dirty whether he ran Hanauer down or not. Just as dirty as Coleman’s and Vega’s. What difference does it make if he was guilty of homicide or not?”

  “It makes a difference,” I said. “You want to give up on the case, go ahead. But I’m going to see it through.”

  He shook his head. “You are one stubborn wop, you know that?”

  “So you keep telling me. Anything new on Pendarves?”

  “Well, he’s not hiding out at Antonio Rivas’s place, I can tell you that. There wouldn’t be room. In addition to Rivas there’s his wife, three kids, mother-in-law, and pregnant seventeen-year-old unmarried niece—all in five rooms on Bryant Street.”

  “What about the information Rivas was holding back?”

  “I couldn’t get it out of him. I doubt if has anything to do with Pendarves anyway.”

  “The coyote angle?”

  “That’s my guess,” he said. “Rivas got a whiff of it, but he’s not talking on account of he’s afraid of Vega.”

  I asked if he’d checked with the Hall of Justice for an update on the police search for Pendarves. He had, and there were no new developments. And no leads at all on how Pendarves might have gotten out of the city and the Bay Area, if he had gotten out. One of the people they’d contacted was Pendarves’s ex-wife, Jenna, in Chico; her comment was that she hadn’t had any dealings with him since the divorce and that she hoped he rotted in hell. Her sister was even more outspoken. If he showed up around there, she said, she’d blow his head off with her shotgun.

  “Maybe somebody already did,” I said. “Blow his head off, I mean.”

  “Are you back on that kick again?”

  “If he isn’t dead—dead since last Tuesday night—why hasn’t there been a trace of him since?”

  “I can think of ten reasons—”

  His telephone bell cut him off and put an end to the argument.

  While he took the call I glanced through my mail, discarded all but a small check I’d been expecting, and then dealt with my one phone message. It was from Barney Rivera, an old friend and chief claims adjuster for Great Western Insurance’s local office. Periodically he tossed bones our way, little ones that the company’s small investigative staff was too busy to bury on its own, and I caught another one when I called him back—a home-accident claim in which fraud was a possibility.

  As I hung up I saw that Eberhardt was reading the magazine tear sheets again, with the same expression of mild horror that he’d worn earlier. I said, “What is that you keep reading?”

  He blinked, put the sheets down. There was a silence; then he sighed and said, “Article from some magazine. Bobbie Jean found it.”

  “Article about what?”

  “She thinks it’s the funniest thing she ever read.” He scowled. “I don’t think it’s a damn bit funny,” he said.

  “Well, what’s it about?”

  “Private parts.”

  “… Say that again?”

  “You heard me. Private parts.”

  “Whose private parts?”

  “Men’s. The, uh, dingus.”

  “Dingus,” I said.

  “Yeah. You think it’s possible for a guy to break it?”

  “Break it?”

  “His dingus. You think it could happen?”

  “What do you mean, break it?”

  “Just what I said.
You know what ‘break’ means.”

  “Impotency? Is that what you’re—”

  “No, goddamn it. Break it. Fracture it like a bone.”

  I stared at him “You mean while it’s erect?”

  “No, while it’s dangling like a piece of linguine! Sure I mean while it’s erect!”

  “I don’t believe we’re having this conversation,” I said.

  “All right then, forget it. Just forget it.”

  Neither of us said anything for a time. Eberhardt sat fiddling with one of his pipes, his shaggy brows pulled down in a glower. His face was red.

  “Eb,” I said finally, “let me see the article.” He didn’t object, so I got up and went over and read it standing beside his desk.

  The title was “You Broke YourWhat?” and it was written in a wryly humorous style. But it contained quite a few anatomical facts and medical case histories that made it seem all too authentic. It said that in the penis there are two tubelike masses of tissue called the corpora cavernosa, which become filled with blood during sexual arousal and thus cause an erection. Each of these tubes is covered with a fibrous sheath that stretches thin—so thin that in certain freak instances it can be made to rupture. Also at danger, in even rarer cases, are the outer sheath of the penis and the urethra.

  There have been close to two hundred documented cases of penile fracture, the article said. In about half of them, the fracture occurred during intercourse or attempted intercourse —a freak accident, what the French call a faux pas de coit, in which the man either “missed the introitus” and hit a solid portion of his partner’s anatomy, or rammed his member into a mattress or other object disassociated from his partner, or performed so vigorously and “in such an unusual position” that the penis literally cracked as if it were made of glass. In other reported cases, the victim had caused fracture by means of careless masturbation, catching his organ in his pajamas, falling out of a tree, and swatting his erect member with his hand so he wouldn’t have to get out of bed and urinate. One man had even done the damage, so the article said, in a corral on a horse ranch; facts on this case history were mercifully vague.

  On the one hand, all of this was painful to read about and to contemplate; on the other hand, it was pretty amusing stuff and I couldn’t help smiling a little and chuckling a couple of times. This only increased Eberhardt’s glower. When I finished reading and handed the tear sheets back to him, he said, “You think it’s funny too, huh?”

  “No, not really. Still, some of those cases …”

  “Yeah, I know. How the hell could you miss the target? Or ram your dingus into the mattress?”

  “I guess it all depends on the circumstances,” I said.

  He quit scowling and gave me an anxious look instead. “You don’t think it’s all a hoax? You think it could really happen?”

  “Sounds plausible to me.”

  “Jeez,” he said. Then he said, “What do you suppose they do in a case like that?”

  “Who?”

  “Doctors. Don’t be dense.”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well, I mean, do they treat it like they would a busted arm? You know, put it in some kind of cast?”

  The image that conjured up brought another chuckle out of me. “Sure,” I said, “a great big one. So the guy can impress his friends, have everybody sign it.”

  “Ha ha,” he said sourly. “Big joke. How would you like it if it happened to you, wise guy?”

  “I wouldn’t, but there’s not much chance it will. You worried it might happen to you?”

  “Hell, no. What makes you think I’m worried?”

  “You sound worried.”

  “Bullshit. It’s just … I can’t think of anything more humiliating, that’s all. You’d never live it down if anybody found out. And what if the damage was permanent? What if you could never have sex again?”

  “That’s a pretty sobering thought, all right.”

  “Break your dingus,” he said. “What’ll we find out next?”

  * * * *

  Chapter 14

  After a late lunch at Zim’s I drove out to foggy Daly City for another check on Teresa Melendez’s house. Still no Buick Skylark in the vicinity. And at first, no Honda Civic. But when I circled the block and came back for a final drive-by, there it was, laboring uphill on Atlanta Street, farting smoke through a defective exhaust.

  I slowed, and so did the Civic to make the turn into the cottage’s driveway. La Melendez was the woman behind the wheel. As near as I could tell from a distance, she was alone in the car.

  I pulled over in front of the house and got out and walked fast up the drive. I was fed up with all the skulking around and the game of Is she Rafael Vega’s girlfriend or isn’t she? The time had come for a direct approach. If the answer was yes and Vega got told I was on his tail and why, maybe it would bring him out into the open where I could get at him. And if the answer was no, then I could quit sniffing around Teresa Melendez and do my hunting elsewhere.

  She was leaning into the Honda’s backseat when she heard me coming. She backed out in a hurry, clutching a bag of groceries in the crook of one arm, and gave me a tense, wary look. There was no immediate recognition in it; maybe she was afraid I was a rapist, or at least a dirty old man. She was wearing a belted raincoat and a scarf over her black hair. Her lipstick was too red; it made her mouth look like a bloody slash.

  “Afternoon, Ms. Melendez,” I said. “Remember me?”

  “No,” she said, but now she did; I could see it in her eyes. I could also see that she liked having me there about as much as she would have liked confronting a rapist. She remained tense, wary. Her other persona—the bored, aloof sexpot—was nowhere to be seen.

  “Sure you do. The private detective. My partner and I were at the factory the other day, to see your boss.”

  “Oh … yeah. What you want here?”

  “Talk to you.”

  “Why?”

  “I think you know the answers to some questions.”

  “I don’t know nothing. And you don’t work for Mr. Lujack no more.”

  “He tell you that?”

  She licked her mouth, made it glisten like freshly spilled blood. A sudden frown pulled the corners of it down, giving her a pouty look. Some men would think she was hot stuff, but I didn’t happen to be one of them.

  “How’d you find out where I live?” she demanded.

  “Finding things out is what I do for a living.”

  “You’re the one called up yesterday. Pretending to be a cop … all that crap about Arturo.”

  “Did I?” I smiled at her. “I don’t remember.”

  “?Que pasa? I told you, I don’t know nothing.”

  “You know Rafael Vega.”

  “… What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “He’s mixed up in Thomas Lujack’s murder.”

  “Rafael? You’re crazy… .”

  “That’s not the only thing he’s mixed up in either.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Coyotes, Teresa. You know what they are, don’t you?”

  She knew. Little worms of fear crawled in her eyes now. She couldn’t quite hold my gaze; hers kept dancing away, coming back, dancing away. “Crazy,” she said again, but it came out weak and strained this time. “Demente, that’s what you are.”

  “Where is he, Teresa?”

  “Who?”

  “Rafael Vega.”

  “How should I know?”

  “You’re good friends, aren’t you?”

  “Pah. He’s just somebody I work with.”

  “Never dated him or anything like that?”

  “He’s married.”

  “Uh-huh. When did you see him last?”

  “Last week. This week he didn’t show up for work.”

  “How come?”

  Shrug. “Maybe he’s sick.”

  “With the flu?”

  “Who knows? He didn’t call in.”
<
br />   “Then why’d you tell me he was sick with the flu?”

  “… What? I never told you that.”

  “Sure you did. On the phone two days ago.”

  She shook her head; shook it again. Despite the cold, there was a thin film of sweat on her upper lip. “Listen, why you bothering me? Huh? Why don’t you go talk to his family?”

  “I already have. His son thinks he’s been seeing another woman. Been shacking up with her.”

  “Me? He says it’s me?”

  “No. I do.”

  “Well, you know what? You’re full of shit.”

  “Why didn’t you go to work yesterday, Teresa? Why aren’t you working now?”

  “I don’t have to tell you why I do anything. I don’t have to talk to you no more. Get out of here, leave me alone.”

  “No reason you shouldn’t talk to me, if you’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “I mean it—leave me alone. You want me to call the cops? You want me to start screaming?”

  “All right,” I said. “But when you see Rafael, give him a message from me. Tell him I’m looking for him. Tell him I know all about the coyotes—”

  She spun away from me, so abruptly that she lost her grip on the bag of groceries. The sack fell at her feet, broke open, spilled out a loaf of bread and a six-pack of Stroh’s and half a dozen other items. She was rattled enough, and wanted clear of me badly enough, not to care. Without even hesitating she plowed through the strewn groceries and then through a gate in the fence and was gone around the rear of the cottage.

  I stayed where I was until I heard the door slam. I hadn’t been wrong, I was thinking, hadn’t been wasting my time. She was Rafael Vega’s mistress, all right. She knew what he was mixed up in—some of it, anyway—and where he was or how to reach him. She would deliver my message. And when she did, things were going to happen.

  Good or bad, things were going to happen.

  * * * *

  I hung around the neighborhood for the better part of an hour, driving a little, parking in different locations where I could keep an eye on her house. But she didn’t leave again, and nobody came to see her. Finally, at three thirty, I gave it up and went on my way.

  Snagging Rafael Vega wasn’t going to be that easy.