Breakdown nd-18

by Bill Pronzini

  I thought then of the last time I’d seen her, the week before Christmas when Kerry and I picked her up at the airport. I had barely recognized the frail, stooped, white-haired woman whose eyes were dim and haunted, no longer sweet. Even now I could hear the thin, unfamiliar voice saying to Kerry on the ride back to the city, reliving what she had already relived a hundred times, “He was out in the garden all afternoon, tending his flowers. … It was a warm day and I told him to wear his sun hat but you know your father, he never listened, he was such a stubborn man. … I was in the kitchen making an early supper when I heard him come inside. … I poured a beer for him and took it in and he was sitting in his chair, so still, I knew immediately he was dead. … He never spoke a word, isn’t that just like him, he simply sat down in his chair and died….” Cybil Wade: seventy-five, recently widowed, and unable to cope with either death or life, unable to remain in the Los Angeles home she and Ivan had shared for over fifty years because “I see him everywhere in that house…. I’ll go out of my mind if I stay there. …”

  She hadn’t said much to me that day, had seemed hostile. The hostility had burgeoned over the holidays, gotten to the point where I couldn’t even call Kerry at home without triggering an emotional outburst in her mother. The reason was simple: I had never cared for Ivan Wade and he had never cared for me and we’d made no secret of our mutual dislike. More than once he’d tried to break up Kerry’s relationship with me; he felt I was too old for her, worked at a dangerous profession, was unworthy for other reasons that had to do with paternal expectations and jealousy. More than once we’d had angry words. Cybil and I had always gotten along well, but since Ivan’s death she had translated my troubles with him into a mistaken belief that I was glad he was dead, and so she had grown to hate me for my imagined callousness.

  Kerry knew what kind of man her father had been, and what kind of man I was; she didn’t resent me as Cybil did. Yet she also knew, without it having been mentioned by either of us, that while I wasn’t happy Ivan was gone, I felt no real sorrow at his passing. That knowledge was like a small wedge between us, one that only time would work loose. It had made the last few weeks that much more difficult for both of us.

  We each ordered a seafood salad for lunch. Kerry picked at hers, then abandoned it completely in favor of what was left of her chablis. The wine put a darker flush on her cheeks than the cold had done. It seemed to relax her, too, so that we were able to maintain a pretense of ease in each other’s company. But a pretense is all it was. Even though we didn’t talk any more about either Cybil or Ivan, they were there at the table with us like a pair of ghosts.

  We didn’t linger over coffee. Outside, I walked with her to the building in which Bates and Carpenter had its offices. When we entered the lobby she drew me away from the nearest people, leaned close with her fingers tight on my arm, and murmured against my ear, “I think I can get off a little early tomorrow, around three thirty. How about you?”

  “Sure. I don’t have anything pressing.”

  “I could meet you at your place around four.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “I need you,” she said. “You know?”

  “I know, babe. I need you too.”

  “Call me after lunch tomorrow, just to make sure.”

  I said I would. She kissed me quickly, and touched my cheek, and hurried away across the lobby. I watched her until she got into one of the elevators; then I went back out into the wet afternoon.

  Thinking: Assignation made in a public place. Like two new and furtive lovers living for the present because the future is uncertain.

  It made me sad, and a little excited, and a little afraid.

  * * * *

  Chapter 4

  When I got back to the office I found Eberhardt waiting. He was lounging at his desk, fouling the air with smoke from one of his stubby old briars. I’d given him a good Danish tobacco for his birthday, but predictably enough he’d gone back to smoking his favorite blend-an evil black mixture of latakia and dried horse turds, judging from the smell of it.

  “I got to Rivas right at noon,” he said, “and we didn’t talk long. So I figured I might as well come back here.”

  I nodded. “Glickman call?”

  “No messages on the machine, no calls since I came in.”

  “Damn. Means he hasn’t been able to locate Thomas.”

  “Doesn’t have to be anything in that.”

  “I know, but I don’t like it.”

  “You won’t like this either,” he said. “Pendarves didn’t show up for work today.”

  “Oh, fine. He at least call in with an excuse?”

  “Yeah. Head cold.”

  “Uh-huh.” I went over and cracked the window that looks down toward the rear end of the Federal Building on Golden Gate. Cold wind and drizzle were preferable to lethal tobacco smoke. “What else did you find out from Rivas?”

  “Doesn’t seem to be anything thick between him and Pendarves. He claims they haven’t said more than fifty words to each other the past week, and none at all in two days.”

  “You think there’s any chance he’s the third witness?”

  “Next to none.”

  “Another bust, then.”

  “Not exactly. I did pry something out of him on Containers, Inc.-something Rivas admits he let slip to Pendarves once.”

  “And that is?”

  “The Lujacks are running an illegal shop.”

  “Illegal? Meaning what?”

  “Most of their labor force is undocumented aliens,” he said. “Out of the drive-by hiring halls in the Mission.”

  “The hell.”

  “Puts a whole new slant on things, doesn’t it.”

  It did that, if it was true. Somewhere around a million illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America now live in California, thousands of them in San Francisco’s Mission District and in Daly City farther west; many have no jobs and no way of getting legitimate work without green cards from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. So the drive-by halls were born, and have flourished in the city and throughout the state.

  On a dozen or more street corners in the Mission, illegals congregate early every morning, like cattle in pens, waiting for employers on the prowl for cheap labor to come driving along. A painting contractor, for instance, goes to a drive-by hall that specializes in illegals with painting skills; picks as many men as he needs for a particular job, or series of jobs, and hauls them to and from the sites; and pays them wages far below union scale-in cash, always, so there is no record of their employment. If the employer is a plumbing contractor, or runs a gardening business, or owns a factory that makes containers and requires the services of multipurpose workers, he goes to the street corner where his particular brand of illicit labor has assembled.

  The police can’t do much about the drive-by halls except to disperse crowds of men that sometimes become unruly; they don’t have the jurisdiction. The INS has enacted a law carrying stiff penalties for employers caught hiring illegals, but they’re too understaffed and overworked to effectively enforce it. So both the illegals and the cheap-labor bosses make out fine: One side avoids the need for applications, interviews, union cards, and green cards; the other side avoids paying union wages, as well as withholding tax and FICA to the state and federal governments. But the big loser isn’t the IRS or the Franchise Tax Board or the INS. It’s the citizen and legitimate union worker, no matter what his race or job skill, who can’t find work to support his family because the positions have all been filled by illegals.

  The real villains are the greedy employers. So far, after two meetings with Thomas Lujack and three weeks of work on his defense team, I had maintained a neutral attitude toward him; I neither liked nor disliked him, neither believed nor disbelieved in his innocence. If he was employing illegals, it tipped my feelings over onto the negative side. But it didn’t make any difference in how we handled his case; didn’t make him guilty of vehicular homicide or a
ttempted vehicular homicide.

  I asked, “How long have they been using illegals?”

  “A long time, according to Rivas,” Eberhardt said. “Years.”

  “How come you didn’t pick up a whisper of it before this? Hell, how come the Daly City cops didn’t when they were investigating Hanauer’s death?”

  “The Lujacks have got it covered up pretty well, for one thing. You’d have to go deep into the company books to get a real smell of it. There’s never been a complaint to the INS, evidently.”

  “How’d Rivas find out about it?”

  “How do you think? He’s Mexican and lives in the Mission.”

  “Has he got a green card?”

  “Oh, yeah. He showed it to me.”

  “If he told Pendarves and you,” I said, “he must have told others. You’d think somebody would’ve let it slip.”

  “Who’s going to blab a thing like that to the cops, get himself branded as a snitch? I had to practically threaten it out of Rivas, poor bastard. And I had to promise him we’d keep shut about where the information came from. At that, I don’t think I got the full story.”

  “What do you think he held back?”

  “Beats me.”

  After a few seconds I said, “Now I’m wondering if this has anything to do with Hanauer’s murder.”

  “Same here. But I don’t see how.”

  “Neither do I. And even if it did, why wouldn’t Thomas himself have come out with it to save his own hide? Hiring illegal aliens is a minor offense compared to second-degree homicide.”

  “I can think of one reason,” Eberhardt said.

  “Yeah. He’s guilty as hell on all counts. But that still doesn’t explain how the illegals thing could have triggered the hit-and-run.”

  “Some sort of fight about it, maybe. One of them wanted to keep hiring illegals, the other one didn’t.”

  “That’s not much of a motive for murder. Did Rivas know which of the Lujacks does the actual hiring? Or was it Hanauer, maybe?”

  “None of them. Shop foreman named Vega, Rafael Vega.”

  “You know this Vega?”

  “Talked to him briefly a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t leave much of an impression one way or the other. But Rivas seems to be afraid of him.”

  “He give you any idea why?”

  “No. Wouldn’t talk about it.” Eberhardt’s pipe had gone out; he paused to relight it. “So what do you think? Should I have a talk with Vega?”

  “Let’s both have a talk with him. Coleman Lujack too.”

  “Now or later?”

  “Now,” I said. “It beats sitting around here waiting for Glickman to call.”

  * * * *

  Industrial way angles off Bayshore Boulevard just beyond where Bayshore crosses the southwestern boundary line between San Francisco and Daly City. It’s an odd, grim little pocket of light industry, low-income housing, and urban squalor. Here you have the desolate, 440-acre ruins of Southern Pacific’s Bayshore Yards; and nearby, the predominantly black Sunnydale Housing Projects, overrun with poverty, drugs, and drug-related gang violence-the same projects that had “terrified” a touring HUD official in the Reagan Administration a few years ago, even though he had visited them in the company of a police escort. Not far away, crowning the low Daly City hills, are saggy rows of the “ticky-tacky” houses ridiculed by Malvina Reynolds in her protest song “Little Boxes.” Within a two-mile radius are two of the city’s major sports and recreation centers, Candlestick Park and the Cow Palace; Highway 101, the main arterial leading down the Peninsula; the rugged San Bruno Mountains and the upscale hillside community of Brisbane.

  An odd little street, Industrial Way, within the odd little pocket-a three-block-long dead end lined with small manufacturing and warehousing companies, an auto-body shop, an outfit that makes statuary for gardens and cemeteries, and one big land-ocean freight-forwarding operation. There is no other industry in the immediate area; Industrial Way and its tenants sit alone, flanked on one side by Bayshore Boulevard climbing toward Brisbane, and on the other side by the abandoned railroad yards.

  It was a little before two when I turned onto Industrial. Eberhardt and I had flipped a coin to see who would drive and I’d lost. The morning drizzle had evolved into a misty rain, with dark low-hanging clouds. The weather gave the ravaged yards an even gloomier aspect: war zone after a recent cease-fire. The property had been this way for several years now, steadily worsening since a fire of dubious origin destroyed one of the main buildings and Southern Pacific decided to phase out operations here. Before that, for nearly seventy years, the Bayshore Yards had been one of the line’s main repair centers for locomotives and cars: miles of track, a big roundhouse, warehouses, other facilities. Now most of the track had been taken up, the buildings were just burned-out shells, parts of which had collapsed during the recent earthquake, and the only reminders of what the acreage had once been used for were the rusting corpses of a water tower, some hoists, a few discarded boxcars, flats, and tankers. Those, and SP’s one remaining operational facility here: their freight claims department on Sunnydale at the far end of the property.

  Beside me, Eberhardt said, “This place depresses me every time I come out here. You know what I mean?”

  “Too well.”

  “I used to go into the Bayshore Yards when I was a kid,” he said. “One of the wipers in the roundhouse was a friend of my old man’s and he’d let me hang around sometimes, watch the work that was going on. I had a thing about trains in those days. Wanted to be a gandy dancer.”

  “Track worker? You?”

  “Yeah, well, I was a kid. Eleven or twelve. Go out on a handcar, swing a nine-pound sledge like John Henry, repair track … hell, it seemed like a pretty exciting life.”

  “Sure. Hard work, low pay, and a high risk factor.”

  “Just like being a cop,” he said wryly.

  “You made the right choice, Eb.”

  “I suppose. But man, the yards were really something in those days. Now look. Nothing left but rats and weeds and junkies wandering in to shoot up. Vandals don’t even bother with it anymore. It’s a crying shame the SP doesn’t do something about it.”

  “Seems I heard they’re trying to sell the property.”

  “Who to?”

  “Anybody who’ll buy it, I guess.”

  “You’d think the city would be interested. Or San Mateo County. Or both together. They could clean it out, put in a park maybe. Cheap housing, if nothing else.”

  “The city’s deeper in debt than the federal government,” I said. “San Mateo County too, for all I know.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Shit,” he said.

  Containers, Inc., was at the far end of Industrial Way-a large corrugated-iron building that housed the manufacturing plant and shipping facilities, with a much smaller structure built onto the near side for the office staff. From a distance, the whole thing had the appearance of a squared-off metal igloo. There was no fence around it, but at night the grounds were lighted by sodium-vapor arc lights, and the entire building was protected by an alarm system; a private security patrol also cruised the area after dark. It was that kind of area.

  Opposite the office wing was a small parking lot, jammed now with a couple of dozen vehicles. I pulled in there, found an empty slot and filled it.

  The death of Frank Hanauer, the murder charge against Thomas Lujack, and all the publicity surrounding the affair did not seem to have had any adverse effect on the factory’s business. Over on the far side, where the loading docks were, trucks jockeyed around and men and forklifts worked busily; the steady thrum of machinery came from inside the big building. Not that the activity surprised me at all. Nothing much interferes with the grinding wheels of industry these days, not where a product-in-demand is concerned. Everybody needs boxes to put things in, commercial establishments in particular; and in a consumer society, the product is all that matters. Who cares who makes the boxes-illegal aliens, space aliens, ev
en murderers-just so long as they get made.

  We went into the main office, a good-sized room divided in half lengthwise by a waist-high counter. On our side were some uncomfortable-looking visitors’ chairs and a closed door; on the other side were four desks occupied by three women and one man, two of the women working computer terminals, the man talking on the telephone. The third woman, whose desk was nearest the counter, didn’t seem to be doing much of anything; and she evidently didn’t want to be disturbed while she was not doing it. I had to call to her twice before she deigned to acknowledge our presence.

  Her name, according to one of those little wood-and-brass identifiers, was Teresa Melendez. She was young and dark and buxom and ripe-looking, the kind of woman who would weigh two hundred pounds someday if she was not careful about her diet. She said, “What can I do for you?” in a bored monotone with not too much accent. This was the first time I’d been here, but Eberhardt had paid a couple of previous visits; if she recognized him, she gave no indication of it.

  “We’d like to see Thomas Lujack,” I said.

  “He’s not here.”

  “Has he been in today?”

  “No.”

  “How about Coleman Lujack?”

  “You have an appointment?”

  “I think he’ll see us without one.”

  I gave her one of the agency cards with both Eberhardt’s and my name on it. Ms. Melendez didn’t even glance at it. She put her back to us and went away through a doorway, not hurrying, showing off her hips under a tight leather skirt. Eberhardt watched with considerable interest, until I said, “And you engaged to be married soon, you old lecher.” Then he scowled and looked at a spot on the wall, pretending he didn’t know what I was talking about.