Breakdown nd-18

by Bill Pronzini

  “That makes two of us.”

  “What I’m thinking,” I said, “is that maybe Rivas knows something more about the Lujacks and their tie-in with the illegals. And that maybe he also let that something slip to Pendarves.”

  “So you want me to have another talk with him.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt. Wouldn’t hurt for you to check into Coleman’s background and life-style either … see if he’s been spending more money the past five years than he should have been.”

  “Now? I thought we were still on hold until Thomas’s widow makes up her mind.”

  “She’ll come through. Why waste time?”

  “Uh-huh. All right, what the hell-I want answers as much as you do.” He drained his cup as I got to my feet. “So what’re you gonna be doing while I tackle Coleman and Rivas?”

  “Finding out what happened to Rafael Vega,” I said.

  * * * *

  La Moderna market was on Howard Street, half a block off Sixteenth in the heart of the Mission. A display window full of fresh fish and hanging strands of chorizo flanked the entrance on the left; on the right under an awning were open bins of vegetables and green and red chilis. There were customers inside but the place wasn’t crowded; it was a little after three and still raining hard. The butcher shop and meat counter ran the bodega’s full length and was staffed by two men in blood-spattered aprons. One of them, using a cleaver to whack a chunk of beef into soup meat, was Paco Vega.

  Finding him hadn’t been difficult. Eberhardt had neglected to ask the Vegas’ talkative neighbor where Paco worked, but when I’d looked her up twenty minutes ago, she’d given me the information without any prodding. While I was in Albert Alley I’d rung the doorbell at the Vega flat, on the chance that Mrs. Vega was home. There had been no answer.

  Paco was intent on his work and didn’t see me right away. The other butcher was telling a heavyset woman in black that they didn’t have any sesos today; she didn’t seem to want to believe him. I stood alone at the counter, watching Paco wield the cleaver. He did it with short, clean, professional strokes, but the strokes were harder than necessary; there was a dark, set expression on his face, and each time the blade thumped down, white muscle-knots appeared at the corners of his mouth. Paco Vega was an angry young man.

  He got even angrier when he finished and looked up and saw me. His eyes blazed for a couple of seconds; then he slammed the cleaver into the block, burying the upper edge a good two inches deep, and walked hard to where I was.

  “What the hell you doing here, man?” he said in a low, strained voice. “I thought I told you to stay away from me.”

  “Your mother, you said, not you.”

  “Yeah, well, it goes for me too.”

  “We need to talk, Paco.”

  “I got nothing to say to you.”

  “Now. In private.”

  “I just told you …”

  “About your father.”

  “… What about him?”

  “He’s in trouble and you know it.”

  “You’re full of shit, pancho.”

  “Am I? Then he’s no longer missing? Everything’s fine at your house again?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “I think it is,” I said. “It might also be police business. Now do we go someplace private and talk?”

  We locked gazes for about five seconds. But worry or fear had taken the edge off his anger; his eyes flicked away from mine and he licked his lips. “Through the door in back, near the coolers,” he said, and walked off that way himself.

  The door in back was actually two-swing doors with a sign on one of them that said No Entrada. I pushed through into a storeroom piled with crates and boxes, some full and some empty. Paco came through another swing door from the butcher shop, and without looking at me or saying anything he moved along an aisleway past the meat storage locker. I followed him out through a door at the rear, onto a short, narrow, L-shaped loading dock. There was an alley back there, and a space just wide enough for a medium-sized truck to pull in alongside the dock and then to back up to the short arm of the L for unloading. The space and the dock and the rain-swept alley were all deserted now.

  Paco moved away from the door by several paces, in close to the building where the wind wasn’t quite as sharp, then stopped and turned to face me. “So?” he said.

  I said, “Where’s your father?”

  “Oh come on, man. You think I know? He’s been gone four days now, no word, no nothing. My mother cares but I don’t. The hell with him.”

  “Suppose he’s been hurt or worse?”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s what she thinks. Not me.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Uh-uh. I came out here because of what you think.”

  “He’s involved in hiring illegals,” I said. “Has been for years. I don’t think that; I know it.”

  “Big deal. So’re a couple thousand others in this city, Hispanics and Anglos both. Go call the INS. You think they care? They don’t care, not about small-timers like my old man.”

  “Maybe he’s not such a small-timer.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Coyotes, Paco. The coyotes.”

  It was a pretty good blind shot. He went tight; you could see him drawing in on himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, pancho.”

  “No, huh?”

  “No. What’s coyotes got to do with anything?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I already told you.” He shook his head. “Man, you must think I’m some kind of dumb spick.”

  “On the contrary. I think you’re a pretty smart Latino.”

  “Yeah? Then why’d you mention the cops inside? So I’d come out here and tell you all I know about my old man and the wetbacks, right? Like I’m so stupid I don’t know the city cops can’t mess in INS business.”

  “They can if there’s homicide involved,” I said.

  Magic word. He repeated it, blinking: “Homicide?”

  “Two of your father’s employers in the past month. First Frank Hanauer and now Thomas Lujack.”

  “So? Some guy named Pendarves took Lujack out.”

  “Did he? I don’t think so.”

  Paco ran the back of his hand over the bandit’s mustache, rubbed the palm down over the front of his bloody apron. “What’re you trying to say? My old man was mixed up in murder?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Bullshit. He didn’t have nothing to do with either killing.”

  “How do you know he didn’t?”

  “You got proof he did? Show me some proof.”

  “Why’d he disappear if he’s not guilty of anything?”

  “Quit pushing me. I told you, I don’t know why.”

  “But you’ve got some idea. Maybe your mother has too. If I have to go talk to her again, I will.”

  That was the wrong thing to say; all it did was stir up his machismo. The white muscle showed again at the corners of his mouth. “Stay away from her,” he said. “I’m warning you, man-stay away from my mother!”

  He punctuated the words by delivering a flat-palmed punch to the fleshy part of my chest, above the heart. There was enough force behind it, and he caught me unawares enough, so that I was driven backward into the building wall. I hit it hard with my shoulders and spine-hard enough to unfocus my eyes for a second. Any harder and there might have been some damage to my backbone.

  Anger kindled bright and hot. I came off the wall sideways, like a ball bouncing crooked, and caught one handful of his apron and another handful of his hair and spun him around and slammed him up against the building. I had an urge to hit him, hurt him; managed to fight it off. He grunted, struggled, tried to punch my kidneys, but I had him pinned tight, with my hip and leg hard into his crotch so he couldn’t use his feet. The blows he struck were short-armed and didn’t hurt.

  It wasn’t long before he quit trying to fight. He said between his teeth, “Anglo bastard
!”

  “Easy now. Unless you want to keep things rough.”

  His mouth cramped up; he would have spit in my face if I hadn’t had his head turned at an off angle.

  “Where’s your father?” I asked him.

  “Fuck you.”

  I pulled his hair, not gently. “Talk to me, Paco.”

  “I don’t know where he is!”

  “Tell me what he’s into, then.”

  “… All right! You want to know what he’s into? He’s into young pussy, all the young pussy he can get!”

  I was silent. There was nothing for me to say just yet.

  “Why you think my mother drinks? Him and his young pussy.” It had been bottled up inside him for a long time; now that he’d let some of it out, the rest came spewing forth like vomit purge. “She knows he’s gonna leave someday, known it for years, but she pretends he won’t-keeps right on pretending we’re a big happy family. Well, now she’s got to face it and she can’t. Four days means he’s not coming back this time but she still can’t face it so she drinks herself sick and prays for him to come home the whole damn time. He’s a pig, he treats her like shit, and all she does is drink and pray for him to come home.”

  I let go of him and backed up a step, all in one motion. But he was not going to make any more trouble with me; it was his old man he hated, his old man he wanted to hurt. He leaned against the wall and hit it with his fist-three times, hard, hurting only himself.

  I asked, soft, “Who is she? The woman you think he ran off with?”

  “Who knows? Some young Latina with big tits, you can bet on that.”

  “You don’t have any idea who she is?”

  “No.” He smoothed his hair and then spat on the dock, but not in my direction. “He didn’t brag to anybody like he usually does. Not this time.”

  “Would he leave the city with her? Go back to Mexico, maybe?”

  “Depends on how much dinero he had put away. What’s to keep him here? Not my mother, not me, not any of his scams.”

  “What scams?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “His scams, you said. What scams?”

  “You already called it, man. Wetbacks.”

  “Just hiring them? Or is it more than that, like smuggling them across the border? Is that the reason for his trips to San Diego and Mexico?”

  Paco watched me for a clutch of seconds. His hard facade was back in place; the code of machismo would never let it crack for long. “Uh-uh,” he said through a tight, bitter smile. “I’m not gonna do your work for you. Not when it comes to my people.”

  “You want your father punished, don’t you?”

  “For what he’s done to my mother. But that’s my job- mine and a good lawyer’s. The other thing … no. You want him for that, you go get him on your own. You and the fuckin INS.”

  He shoved along the wall toward the door. I didn’t try to stop him. When he got there he stopped and half-turned and said, “I meant what I said about staying away from my mother. She’s had enough crap. You bother her again, you’ll be damn sorry.”

  And then he was gone.

  * * * *

  He’s still sick with the flu.

  The memory fragment came to me just after I exited the alley onto Howard, on my way to where the car was parked. I’d been walking fast because of the rain; now I walked even faster, remembering.

  On Tuesday Coleman Lujack had told Eberhardt and me that Rafael hadn’t called in to explain his absence. Today, the tight-lipped office worker had claimed Vega still hadn’t called in. But yesterday, Teresa Melendez had told me on the phone that Vega was “still sick with the flu.” And now she was off the job too.

  Some young Latina with big tits, Paco had said.

  Teresa Melendez?

  * * * *

  Chapter 12

  The male voice on the line said, “Containers, Inc. Good afternoon.” You can never be sure about voices on the telephone but it sounded like the tight-lipped guy I’d dealt with earlier.

  “Containers, Inc.,” I repeated, roughening my own voice, making it a little deeper. “Some kind of business outfit, are you?”

  “… Yes?”

  “Teresa Melendez work there?”

  “Yes, she does, but she’s not here today.”

  “You know where I can reach her?”

  “I suppose at her home. Who’s this, please?”

  “Officer Walter Keene, San Francisco Police. Badge number seven-three-nine-nine-two.”

  “The police?”

  “That’s right. Mind telling me if Ms. Melendez is married?”

  “Married? I don’t understand …”

  “We’re holding a man who claims to be her husband. Assault and battery, drunk and disorderly. He busted up a bar in the Mission. He can’t hardly talk, he’s so sozzled; all we could get out of him is he’s married to this Teresa Melendez. He had your telephone number on a piece of paper in his pocket.”

  “Oh,” the guy said. “Well, it might be her ex-husband. Is his name Arturo?”

  “That’s it. She divorced him, huh?”

  “Last year.”

  “Well, he thinks he’s still married and he keeps yelling for her. What’s her address and telephone number?”

  There was a silence.

  “Hello?” I said. I didn’t have to work at sounding annoyed. “You there?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure I ought to give out that information….”

  “This is the police department, for Christ’s sake. What’s your name, mister?”

  That convinced him; citizens don’t like angry-sounding cops to have their names. He cleared his throat and said meekly, “If you’ll hold the line just a minute …”

  “Hurry it up, all right?”

  He went away. The phone booth smelled of somebody’s cheap cigar; I opened the door all the way. This was a dark, Western-style neighborhood tavern on Geneva, not far off Mission, that wasn’t doing much business at four o’clock on a rainy workday afternoon. Half a dozen customers hunched like sullen vultures over the bar and the jukebox was silent. I’d come in here to make the call because car phones sound like just what they are-they don’t filter out traffic noises- and everybody knows police vehicles aren’t equipped with cellular phones. If you’re going to run a bluff, you’d better run a good one.

  It was a minute or so before the guy came back on. “Officer Keene?” I grunted, and he said, “Sorry to be so long. Teresa Melendez lives at eight-oh-six Atlanta Street in Daly City. Her telephone number …” and he went on to give me that.

  “Got it,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Glad to be of help, officer.”

  He was a good citizen, he was.

  * * * *

  In the car I called Harry Fletcher at the Department of Motor Vehicles and asked him to run Teresa Melendez’s name through the computer, let me know what kind of car she drove and its license number. I could have called Harry in the first place, after I’d determined that she wasn’t listed in the San Francisco phone book (which includes Daly City) under either Teresa or T. Melendez; but for all I knew there were fifty Teresa Melendezes living in the Bay Area. Even if there were only two or three, it would have taken too much time to sift out the right one.

  I asked Harry to get me the same information on Rafael Vega’s vehicle. If Vega was shacked up with Teresa Melendez, his car would be somewhere in the vicinity of her home; and if I spotted it, then I’d know for sure without having to knock on her door blind.

  * * * *

  It was Four Forty when I turned off Industrial Way into the parking lot at Containers, Inc. Dusk was already settling, like thick soot drifting down through gray water, and the outside lights-widely spaced sodium-vapor arcs on metal poles-were on. When it got to be full dark, the arcs would put a greenish tinge on the night and create pockets of deep shadow where the light didn’t quite reach.

  I drove slowly past the parked cars. I had no idea what kind Coleman Lujack drove, but whateve
r it was, it figured to be expensive. There was only one expensive model slotted among the compacts and junkers-a new Chrysler Imperial- and that was his, all right. It had a personalized license plate that readCOLE L.

  I backed into a space near it, midway between two of the sodium-vapor lights. From there I could watch the office entrance, but I was in shadows and at enough of an off angle so that the staff inside couldn’t see me from their desks. I maneuvered myself into a comfortable position and settled down to wait.

  After ten minutes the mobile phone interrupted the monotonous beat of the rain. Harry Fletcher. Teresa Melendez, he said, drove a five-year-old Honda Civic, license number 1BTQ 176; the vehicle registered to Rafael Vega was a Buick Skylark, vintage 1987, license number 1MXX 989. My memory isn’t what it once was, so I wrote all of that down in my notebook.

  A little after five, people began to file out of both the office and the factory. None of them was Coleman Lujack. I spied the tight-lipped guy but he didn’t notice me; his transportation was on the opposite side of the lot. I got glances from a couple of the workers who passed near my car, but they weren’t interested enough to ask me what I was doing there. Hard rain and long workdays dampen curiosity as well as spirits.

  The lot was mostly empty by five thirty-just Coleman’s Imperial and three other cars. It was cold in my clunker by then, with the wind and dampness seeping in through cracks around the wired-shut passenger door, and I was cramped and getting hungry and running out of patience. Come on, Coleman, I thought. Shag ass. Don’t you have a hot toddy or something to go home to?

  If he did he wasn’t in a hurry to get it. It was almost six before he finally showed. He was wrapped in a gray trench coat and carrying an umbrella that he left furled as he crossed the lot; the rain had let up into a fine mist. He was one of those people who look straight ahead when they walk, as if they’re peering down the length of a piece of three-inch pipe, so he didn’t see me until he was at the door of his Chrysler and I was already out of my car. Then he came to stiff attention and stared as I approached him, his head making little involuntary bobbing movements, like a bird watching an oncoming cat.

  “What are you doing here?” he said. He sounded nervous and put out, with an undercurrent of something that might have been fear.