Breakdown - [Nameless Detective 19]

by By Bill Pronzini

  Dinsmore did contribute one potentially important observation: After the car struck Hanauer and roared away, he saw Pendarves come running out to where Hanauer lay in the street; and he said he had an impression that there was another person standing near Pendarves’s car, someone who had also witnessed the hit-and-run. But he couldn’t be sure because of the distance, the unsure lighting, and the fact that it had all happened so fast; it might have been nothing more than a shadow. There was no sign of a third witness when he ran outside and joined Pendarves. And Pendarves had flatly denied that anyone had been with him on the Roofco lot.

  It was Dinsmore who called the police. Two patrol cars and an Emergency Services ambulance arrived within fifteen minutes. Hanauer was beyond help; the Daly City coroner said later that he must have died instantly. The ambulance had been there about a minute when Thomas Lujack came hurrying on foot out of the Containers, Inc., yard—lured to the scene, he claimed, by the ambulance siren. He expressed amazement, dismay, bewilderment at the death of Hanauer and Pendarves’s accusation that he had been driving the car. He said he’d been in his office working since Hanauer’s departure; stated that as far as he knew, his Cadillac was still parked on the factory lot; admitted that yes, he’d heard the screeching tires and gunned engine a few minutes earlier but assumed it was just wild-riding kids. Why would he run down Frank Hanauer, for God’s sake? They’d been friends and business partners for close to twenty years.

  The police had checked the Containers, Inc., lot and found Thomas’s Cadillac missing. It hadn’t taken them long to locate it, abandoned on Bayshore Boulevard less than a quarter mile from the entrance to Industrial Way. The right front fender was caved in, fresh blood and skin tissue and bone fragments adhering to the grille. The key was still in the ignition—a spare key, Thomas said, one he’d kept in a magnetized container behind the rear bumper. His other key was on his ring, and the container was no longer behind the bumper. Who knew he’d kept it there? Why, nobody except his wife and brother. But it was a common hiding place for a spare key; or maybe someone had seen him getting it at the factory one day a couple of weeks ago, when he’d misplaced his key ring. Somebody must be trying to frame him, he said . . . but he had no idea of who or why.

  They didn’t believe him. Pendarves stood fast to his ID of Lujack as the Caddy’s driver; Thomas admitted to being the only person at the factory after Hanauer left; and there was the fact that the Caddy had been abandoned close by. The police theorized that Thomas had returned to Containers, Inc., on foot through the old railroad yards that paralleled Industrial Way to the east. He’d had plenty of time to do that, and to concoct his story on the way; and it being night and the area deserted, he could have managed it without being seen. The evidence was enough so that they’d arrested him on a charge of vehicular homicide.

  He’d hired Paul Glickman, who convinced a judge to set a reasonable bail. Meanwhile, the police turned up no apparent motive for Thomas to have murdered Hanauer—but this was canceled out, as far as they were concerned, by the fact that Thomas had a violent temper and an arrest record: He had once been charged with aggravated assault in a restaurant dispute. The week after Christmas, the San Mateo County DA’s office decided to prosecute on a charge of second-degree homicide. The DA refused to plea-bargain, but Thomas said he wouldn’t have pled guilty to a reduced charge anyway because he was an innocent man. If and when the case came to trial, Glickman would defend him on that basis.

  And that was where Eberhardt and I came in.

  Our job was to a) prove Thomas Lujack’s innocence by finding out who had stolen his car and run down Hanauer, and why; or b) discredit Pendarves’s damning testimony by proving that he was an unreliable witness. In three weeks we hadn’t been able to do either. Dozens of interviews and background checks, and my nightly fishing trips at the Hideaway, had produced zero answers and zero leads.

  No one seemed to have any motive for doing away with Frank Hanauer. He had been well liked by everybody; had never spoken of problems with Thomas or Coleman Lujack or anyone else at Containers, Inc. For all intents and purposes, he was as unlikely a candidate for murder as you could find.

  Similarly, no one seemed to have the kind of grudge against Thomas that would lead to a murder frame. He was mostly well liked, despite his roughhouse temper; happily married and afflicted with no major vices. The only possible enemy we were able to turn up was the man he’d had the fight with in the restaurant. But that had happened five years ago; and the other party—a salesman—said he barely remembered the incident, and besides, he’d been in New York on a business trip on December 5.

  There were no black marks against Nick Pendarves, either, unless you counted the fact that his wife had divorced him in 1984 for unspecified reasons, and refused to talk to us when we contacted her at her present address in Chico. He had worked for Roofco for twenty-three years and was considered a valued employee; he lived alone in his house on Rivera Street and had never had any problems with his neighbors; he spent part of almost every evening at the Hideaway, the only socializing of any kind that he indulged in. He had no close friends—no friends at all, apparently, except for other patrons of the tavern. He was a taciturn man, one who kept to himself for the most part and was not easy to know. But if nobody particularly liked him, nobody particularly disliked him either. We couldn’t find any reason why he would have lied in his positive ID of Thomas Lujack as the hit-and-run driver, or why he would lie about the presence of a third witness. Nor could we find even a mote of evidence to verify that there had been a third witness. None of the other Roofco employees had been given permission to work overtime that night, and Pendarves had been alone in the building when the last of his coworkers left. That seemed to rule out a Roofco employee as the ethereal witness; and the deserted nature of Industrial Way at 7:00 p.m. on a Tuesday night seemed to rule out a passerby or someone who had come for a personal rendezvous with Pendarves.

  So there we were as of today, flat up against failure. And now a new and confusing wrinkle had been added—the alleged attempt on Pendarves’s life tonight.

  If it had been a deliberate attempt, then who else but Thomas Lujack? He’d been increasingly nervous of late, fretting about the lack of results. Given his anxiety, and his temper, it was possible that he’d lost control tonight—as he’d allegedly lost control for some reason on the night of December 5—and set out to eliminate the one man who could assure his conviction.

  And yet, was he screwy enough to have tried doing it with a car—a method that would point straight at him? I didn’t want to think so. But the fact was, I did not know enough about what went on inside the man, or about the motives behind Hanauer’s murder, to make a proper judgment.

  There were two other alternatives: Somebody else had tried to run down Pendarves tonight; or it had been an accident, one of those crazy coincidences that happen sometimes, and Pendarves’s imagination had blown it up into something sinister. The first of the two made sense only if the somebody were acting on Thomas’s orders, somebody he paid to eliminate Pendarves; but where was the sense, looking at it from Lujack’s point of view, in premeditating a murder that would surely backfire on him, prejudice his defense, and probably convict him on two counts of vehicular homicide? The second alternative was much more likely. It was also the one I wanted it to be, because it negated an ugly twist in a case that was already too complicated and frustrating.

  We’d have a better handle on that part of it tomorrow, after we found out what Thomas had to say and after I saw Pendarves again later on. If it was just a false alarm . . . well, that was fine. But in any event we were still smack up against a stone wall on the Hanauer killing.

  If Lujack hadn’t run him down, then who had? And why?

  * * * *

  Chapter 3

  Tuesday was another gray, blustery day, with a steady drizzle thrown in for added discomfort. I awoke to it late, feeling dull and logy from less than half the sleep I needed, and I was still out of
sorts when I got down to the office at nine thirty—as gray inside as the day itself. Not even the prospect of seeing Kerry for lunch cheered me much.

  The office Eberhardt and I share is a big converted loft in a building on O’Farrell Street, not far off Van Ness. Before we took it over a few years ago, when we became partners, it had housed an art school whose owner had had a skylight installed. The skylight had shattered during the big quake. The world’s ugliest light fixture had also come crashing down, things had fallen off walls and desks, and cracks had spiderwebbed the ceiling. I had been there to see it all happen —alone in the office at four minutes past five that October evening, rinsing out the coffeepot in the alcove sink. If I’d been at my desk instead, the damn light fixture might have done me some damage, because it caromed off the desk and knocked my chair over.

  As a San Francisco native I’ve been through a lot of quakes; but as soon as that one hit, with such jolting violence, I knew it was a bad one—maybe the Big One. My first thought had been for Kerry’s safety; I’d believed then that she was still at work on an upper floor in one of the untested new Financial District high rises. In fact she’d left early that day, had just entered her apartment, and hadn’t been hurt or even shaken up too badly. But it was a couple of chaotic hours before I found that out, and several more tense hours until I learned that Eberhardt and Bobbie Jean, who had been together in Marin County, had also survived unhurt.

  There had been no structural damage to this building, so we were spared having to vacate and find new office space. Over the next couple of weeks, we had prodded our somewhat sleazy landlord into repairing the ceiling, putting in a new skylight and a new (and much less offensive) light fixture, and had otherwise gotten on with our business and our lives. But you don’t forget an experience or a tragedy of that magnitude. It hadn’t been the Big One after all, but it had given us all a bitter taste of what the Big One would be like.

  Seismologists are now predicting a one-in-three likelihood of a 7.5 temblor on the Hayward Fault within the next thirty years, with a projected five thousand dead and forty billion dollars in damages. Those are frightening odds, grim figures. But what do you do in the face of them? Pack up and move away? There’s no place that is perfectly safe; natural disasters can happen anywhere. Besides, your chances of dying from a fall in your own bathtub are greater than dying in the worst earthquake; knowing that, how many people get rid of their bathtubs? What you do is to learn the lessons taught by this last quake, the Little Big One, and learn them well, and then put your trust in providence and the law of averages and go on without fear. A life lived in fear is no life at all. . . .

  On this January morning the office was cold and bleak, with the weight of the day pressing down against the rain-streaked skylight. I put on the steam heat, put water on to boil for coffee, and checked the answering machine. No messages. Then I called the law offices of Glickman and Crandall, on Pacific Avenue downtown. Paul Glickman wasn’t in yet but was expected within the hour. I left a message to have him return my call as soon as he arrived.

  It took me thirty minutes to type a report and billing invoice on yesterday’s skip-trace. Eberhardt had treated himself to a New Year’s present of a small computer, but I’d held firm about not getting one for myself. In an age when detective work is dominated by electronic devices and young three-piecers specializing in high-tech industrial espionage and hostile corporate takeovers, I take a certain amount of pride in being a technophobic throwback. I specialize in old-fashioned, low-tech investigative work. I’ve never been able to fathom the inner workings of Big Business; and anything more mechanically complicated than an electric typewriter makes me nervous. I feel about computers the way aborigines once did about cameras: I’m afraid the damn things will try to steal my soul.

  Even so, I might have succumbed to their timesaving lure by now if it weren’t for their users’ constant proselytizing. There is something about owning a computer that turns normal, even meek individuals—and Eberhardt was no different since he’d gotten his—into slavering zealots who will never rest until they’ve convinced you to become one of them. Not long ago, a guy I know called me a dinosaur because I don’t own a computer; and he got angry, actually angry, when I told him I had no intention of ever owning one ... as if I’d said I had never been to church and was a budding Satanist besides. Computer technology: the New Religion. I would rather listen to a pack of Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to convert me to their brand of the Old Religion than I would to one computer disciple telling me in reverent terms how much his life had changed for the better since he’d gotten his Apple or Kay-Pro, and how happy I’d be if only I would renounce my heathen ways and come to worship at the electronic shrine.

  It was ten fifteen, and I was making a telephone background check for another client, when Glickman called on the other line. I cut my conversation with the TRW credit people short, then spent five minutes giving Glickman a detailed account of what had happened last night.

  He listened without interruption. Unlike some criminal attorneys, he was neither egocentric nor publicity-seeking; and he operated on the principle that other professionals knew their business as well as he knew his and would go about doing their jobs in the most effective ways possible. That made him easy to work with—a rarity among high-powered lawyers these days.

  When I was done he asked, “Do you think Pendarves was telling the truth?”

  “About the car almost running him down? Yes. There’s not much doubt he had a close shave.”

  “But it could have been an accident.”

  “Sure. It could also have been deliberate and somebody other than Thomas Lujack was driving the car. Pendarves admitted it was too dark to see clearly. Naming Lujack might have been an emotional response.”

  “Pendarves isn’t normally an emotional man, is he?”

  “No.”

  “Is it likely, then, that he’ll follow through on his threats?”

  “I’d say no but I can’t be sure. He’s a hard man to get a fix on.”

  “I don’t want to go to the police if it can be avoided,” Glickman said, “especially if he didn’t report the near-miss. Our position is shaky enough without this kind of inflammatory thing getting into the record.”

  “You’ll talk to Thomas right away?”

  “As soon as I can reach him.”

  “I’d like to have a few words with him myself. Would you mind arranging a meeting later today at your office?”

  “Not at all. I expect to be free after three, if that’s convenient for you.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve spoken to our client.”

  I was still waiting at twenty past eleven, when I finished my background check, and still waiting at eleven thirty. That was long enough. I switched on the answering machine, locked up the office, and went to keep my lunch date with Kerry.

  * * * *

  Lucy’s café, one of those trendy nouvelle cuisine places that caters to the Financial District business crowd, was near the foot of California Street, within hailing distance of the Ferry Building and my former office on Drumm. The ad agency where Kerry worked as a senior copywriter, Bates and Carpenter, maintained a permanent reservation on three tables there; and when one or more of them were not being used for business purposes, B. & C.’s employees were allowed to use them for personal luncheons.

  I had been there ten minutes when she arrived. Usually she was prompt for appointments. Usually, too, she came into a place, public or private, with an air of self-possession and good cheer. Not today, though. Not for the past two months. She came in slowly, shoulders rounded a little, and even from a distance you could tell that she was under a strain. Up close, the signs were obvious. She had lost weight again, so that she had the same gaunt-cheeked, hollow-eyed look I had confronted when I came back from my three-month kidnap ordeal. Hurt lay in her gray-green eyes, and it hurt me to see it there and not be able to do something, anything, to wipe it a
way.

  We smiled at each other as she sat down and shrugged out of her coat, untied a scarf that protected her auburn hair. She tried to make her smile bright, but it did not come off. It had a pale, brittle quality at the edges.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Damn meeting.”

  “No problem.”

  After a few seconds she said, “I look like the wrath of God, don’t I?”

  “No. You look fine.”

  “Liar. There seem to be mirrors everywhere I turn these days. I never realized there were so many mirrors in this city.”

  “Cold outside,” I said, to change the subject. “You want something hot to drink?”

  “No, I’d rather have some wine.”