Breakdown - [Nameless Detective 19]

by By Bill Pronzini

  Nick Pendarves was not in the Hideaway when I got there. I took the same stool I had occupied on my last visit and asked Max, the laconic bartender, if Pendarves had come and gone. He said no. I tried to get him to talk about the incident last night, but he wasn’t having any. Pulling words out of him was like trying to pull wood splinters out of your own behind: slow, frustrating, and ultimately futile.

  Most of the regulars were there, in their customary places. One who wasn’t in his customary place was shy Douglas Mikan, who was usually engaged in a chess match with Harry Briggs, the retired civil servant, in a back-wall booth. There was no sign of Briggs tonight and Mikan was sitting at the bar, one stool removed from mine, with his nose aimed downward into a glass of draft beer. As always, he wore a suit and tie—the only one of the regulars who dressed formally. His mother’s influence, I supposed. Her name had been Grace, according to the bar gossip I’d picked up, and she had also been a regular until her death a couple of years ago.

  Tonight there was a remote look on Douglas’s chubby moon face, as if he had ridden his thoughts to some faraway place—a pleasant enough place, because he didn’t look unhappy. Dreamer, I thought; wanderer in an imaginary world, maybe, that was far kinder to him than the one he lived in.

  “How come no chess tonight, Douglas?” I asked him.

  He mumbled something that sounded like, “Harry didn’t come in,” without looking at me.

  “Well, how about a game with me?” It was better than just sitting here at the bar, doing nothing while I waited. “I won’t give you much competition but I’ll try like hell.”

  The invitation seemed to please him. He accepted, asked Max for the chess set, which was kept behind the bar, and we went to one of the booths and set up a game. I tried to draw him out about Pendarves’s troubles while we played, but he was as reticent as Max. Between moves he sat staring at the board, as if I weren’t even there. So I sat quiet, too, and brooded about Rafael Vega.

  Who had called Vega at ten thirty last night? And why? The call could have had something to do with the alleged attempt on Pendarves’s life; the timing was about right. But if there was a connection, what was it? And why hadn’t he come home last night or shown up at work today? There were a lot of other questions I wanted answered too: Had Vega had anything to do with Frank Hanauer’s murder? Why did he make periodic trips to San Diego and Mexico? Why did his wife drink too much wine and react so strongly to what was, after all, only a twenty-four-hour absence? Why did his son think he was unworthy? And why did Paco dislike Thomas Lujack so much?

  Douglas beat me quickly and badly, twice, and then muttered something about having things to do at home. I was no challenge to his abilities; I wouldn’t have wanted to keep playing me either. He thanked me politely and waddled off, and I went back to sit at the bar with what was left of my beer.

  After a while Peter Vandermeer came up next to me to order a fresh drink. He was the elderly amateur historian who had staked a claim to the other back booth, where he pored over his books and pamphlets. We exchanged hellos, and he proceeded to tell me an amusing anecdote about Emperor Norton, one of San Francisco’s legendary characters, who in the 1870s had proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States and Defender of Mexico. The anecdote was good enough so that I bought his drink for him. He gave me a wink and a sly smile along with his thank-you; he seemed pleased with himself, as if he’d done something clever. Hell, he probably had. I’d paid for his drink, hadn’t I?

  I watched him resettle himself in the booth and open a thick battered old volume bound in buckram. Almost eighty and as sharp as a tack, with more curiosity and enthusiasm than most people half his age. Unlike Cybil Wade, he had grown old only in body, not in mind. And yet, until recently Cybil had been every bit as sharp-witted and young-spirited as Vandermeer. Genetics had a great deal to do with it; Alzheimer’s, for instance, had been proven to be a genetic disease. But there were intangibles too—environment, health, interests, attitudes. In the long run, I thought, it’s a crapshoot. If you survive, you grow old—that’s a given. But how you grow old is as unpredictable as world politics, as unknowable in advance as the existence of an afterlife.

  If I lived to be seventy-five or eighty, what would my life be like? I could no longer work, at least not actively, and work had always been my prime motivation. I had no family, no one close to me except Kerry and Eberhardt . . . and what if, in the great perverse scheme of things, I outlived both of them? What if I then fell ill or became incapacitated in some way and was no longer able to care for myself? I could no more live in a nursing home than Cybil could. It might not be so bad if I developed a disease like Alzheimer’s, because for the most part I wouldn’t know what was happening to me; but if I retained my faculties, then it would be hell existing in that kind of closed-in, waiting-for-the-end environment.

  Being old would be tolerable if your mind and body both cooperated; if you turned out like Peter Vandermeer over there. But even then, it couldn’t be any bed of roses. Society was controlled by the young, geared toward the young . . .and the young wanted little enough to do with the old, because they did not care to be reminded of their own vulnerability and mortality. So society shunned the elderly, pushed them off into “acceptable” corners—homes, retirement communities, pensioners’ hotels, senior citizens’ activities, sad little “social clubs” like the one I was sitting in right now.

  I’m fifty-eight, I thought. If I live another twenty years, I’ll be Peter Vandermeer ... if I’m lucky.

  The thought was chilling.

  I went into the men’s cubicle and used the urinal and then washed my hands and splashed a little water on my face. When I came back out again I felt better. But I did not look at Peter Vandermeer anymore. And I didn’t think about him anymore, either, at least in part because Ed McBee came in and created a distraction.

  McBee, a former longshoreman, was something of a film buff; and he liked nothing better than to express outrageous opinions that would get a rise out of his drinking companions. As soon as Max made him a bourbon and water, he started a conversation about movie comedy teams and which of them was the best. The consensus seemed to be evenly divided between Laurel and Hardy, which would have been my choice, and the Marx Brothers. McBee held out for the Three Stooges.

  To support his claim he produced a newspaper clipping, which he said was a translation of part of a long, scholarly article on the Three Stooges by an eminent French film critic, and commenced to read it aloud.

  “ ‘With the exception of the tragic comedian Jerry Lewis, no one in cinema has captured the human dilemma so movingly and eloquently as have Larry, Moe, and Curly—Les Trois Imbeciles. The impressive body of film work left by Les Trois Imbeciles resounds with a single transcendent theme. It is the Jungian notion of the male’s painful struggle to come to grips with his own unconscious, specifically with the deeply repressed feminine side of his nature—’ “

  Bob Johnson made a snorting sound. Somebody whose name I didn’t know said, “Horse manure!”

  Undaunted, McBee continued. “ ‘This struggle, so essential in man’s search for wholeness, is exemplified in such acknowledged film classics as the epic The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze and of course, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. ‘ “

  Annie Stanhope choked on her sherry. “ ‘Interpreting these works,’“ McBee read, “ ‘the film connoisseur must regard Larry, Moe, and Curly as a trinity, three parts of a single entity. In Moe, one senses man mired in his conscious state. Curly is man’s feminine unconscious, the embodiment of youth and innocence, the very qualities that man must recapture to come full circle in his life’s journey. Larry is perhaps the most complex recurring character in the history of American film. He represents man in transition, caught between the polarities of Moe and Curly. He is, one could say, a work in progress.’ “

  “Gawd,” Frank Parigli said, not without reverence. “ ‘In short, Moe must become Curly, by way of Larry, to achieve his fu
ll human potentiality. That profound pilgrimage is not without pain—even deep scars and bruises. Indeed, Les Trois Imbeciles display their particular genius when they give symbolic physical expression to the difficulties of the metamorphosis. Each precisely choreographed punch in the nose and each graceful poke in the ribs reverberates with meaning. Observe that it is Moe who metes out these blows, Moe whose psyche is characterized by repression and denial, Moe who utilizes violence to mute the imploring call to growth coming from his unconscious. C’est tragique! But there is no denying the plaintive urgency of the call nyuk! nyuk! nyuk! voiced by Curly. To ignore it is to convict oneself forever to the half-life of the unconscious.’“

  There was more, but the other regulars hooted it down. A half-serious, half-satirical debate ensued, with McBee holding his own against the rest of them. Most of it was amusing, but my attention kept wandering from the backbar clock to the street door and back to the clock. Coming up on eight forty-five and still no Pendarves. Maybe his brush with death had spooked him into staying clear of the Hideaway for a while . . . except that that sort of ostrich reaction didn’t jibe with my reading of him. Whatever else he might be, I felt pretty sure he was neither a coward nor a timid soul.

  The Three Stooges debate ended and the table conversation broke up into individual exchanges. I finished my beer, ordered another even though I didn’t want it, and tried not to fidget while the clock ticked away more empty minutes. Nine. Nine fifteen. Nine thirty. Still no Pendarves.

  The hell with it, I thought. I paid my tab and got out of there.

  * * * *

  There was a light on in the rear of Pendarves’s house, in what I thought might be the kitchen. The rest of the place was dark; I drove around onto 47th Avenue to make sure.

  At the end of the block I turned around, came back slowly, crossed the Rivera intersection, and parked near the corner. The Plymouth Fury was neither on the street nor in his driveway, but he could have put it away in the detached garage; the garage door was shut. So was he home, or was that light in the back just a burglar light?

  I’d already decided not to try talking to him at his house; even with the best of pretexts, my showing up there was liable to arouse his suspicions. But I still wanted him to be home. For him to go anywhere other than the Hideaway this late was unusual enough to arouse my suspicions. So I switched off the engine, turned my overcoat collar up, put my gloves back on, and went to find out one way or the other.

  The wind off the ocean was cold enough to burn where it touched the skin; and even though it wasn’t raining, the fog was so thick with moisture it functioned as a drizzle. Walking alone in heavy fog always gives me a remote, dreamlike feeling: blurred lights, oddly distorted shapes, sounds so muffled I could not even hear my own steps. In silence I crossed the empty street, went down the sidewalk alongside Pendarves’s house, and then past the hedge that separated his side yard from the weedy lot on which the garage had been built.

  Ahead, then, I could see puffs of vapor down low to the ground, at the bottom of the lowered garage door. At first I thought it was ground mist. But the puffs were too thinly pulsate, like steam escaping through a valve—

  Christ!

  I broke into a hard run, off the sidewalk and through the wet weeds onto the drive. Then I could hear the steady throb of the engine inside the garage; the fog and wind kept the sound of it from carrying more than a few yards. Then, too, I could smell—faint out here but unmistakable—the acrid stench of exhaust fumes.

  There was a handle on the weather-warped wood of the garage door, but nothing happened when I turned and then yanked on it. It must have had some kind of snap-lock inside: You could pull it down to engage the lock from out here but you couldn’t open it without a key. I ran around on the side nearest the house. An access door was set into the wall toward the back, the upper part of it glass. I caught the knob but it was locked too. Without thinking about it I turned sideways and drove my elbow against the glass; the wind took the sound of it shattering and broke that up into fragments too. Clouds of carbon monoxide came pouring out at me. I ducked my head away, reached through the jagged opening, managed to find the inside knob and free the push-button lock without cutting myself, and dragged the door open.

  The interior was so thick with fumes I couldn’t see the car. I plunged in blindly, holding my breath, narrowing my eyes to slits; struck metal almost instantly, barking my knee, then clawed along the car’s side until I located the handle on the passenger door. It was unlocked. I got the door open, bent my body inside. Despite the dull furry glow from the dome light I could barely see; the monoxide burned my eyes, made them run with tears. I had to rely on my groping hand to determine that the driver’s seat was empty.

  I fumbled for the ignition, twisted the key; the steady wheezing rhythm of the engine cut off. Smoke had filtered into my lungs by this time and it tore the air out of them in a series of explosive coughs. I levered up and over the seat back, just long enough to sweep one hand across a rear seat as empty as the front buckets; then I pulled back out of the car. By the time I staggered outside through the open doorway, my knees were rubbery and I was choking on the fumes.

  Ten paces from the door, I braced myself against the garage wall. It took minutes for the icy night air to clear the poison out of my lungs so I could breathe normally again without hacking. My eyes quit shedding tears but the fire in them lessened only a little. The taste of sickness was on the back of my tongue.

  Nobody came to help or hinder me, drawn by the escaping smoke or by the sounds I’d made. Both Rivera and 47th remained deserted. For the time being, this little drama was going to keep on being a one-man show.

  I let another two or three minutes go by, to make sure that the monoxide had thinned enough so it wouldn’t do any more damage to my lungs. I no longer felt any sense of urgency. As dense as those trapped fumes were, the car’s engine had been running a long time—much too long for anybody in there to have survived.

  When I finally did go back in I put my handkerchief over my mouth, something I should have thought to do the first time. A pace inside, I felt along the wall next to the door. An old-fashioned knob-style light switch was mounted there; when I twisted it, a low-wattage bulb came on above a workbench along the back wall. Dull saffron light glinted off the metal surfaces of the car.

  It wasn’t Pendarves’s old Plymouth Fury. It was a newish —and unfamiliar—silver-gray BMW.

  What the hell?

  I made sure the dozen feet of rough-concrete floor between the BMW’s front end and the bench was empty, then went to the passenger door and leaned inside for a better look at the interior. Empty seats, empty floorboards in the rear. I backed out. There was still enough smoke to keep the fires burning in my eyes and chest; I found the latch on the garage door, released it, hoisted the door about halfway. Wind blew in, gusting, and dried the fresh layer of sweat on my face. I spent ten seconds sucking at the cold air. Then I moved over to where I could see along the driver’s side.

  That was where he was, sprawled face downward in close to the front tire, arms and legs outflung. On the back of his head was a smear of blood, dark and coagulated but still wet enough to glisten in the shadow-edged light. But that wasn’t what caught and held my attention, what caused the top of my scalp to prickle and contract. It was the shape of him, and the clothes he was wearing.

  On one knee beside him, I took hold of his limp shoulder and lifted him part way onto his side. Just enough so that I could look into the empty staring eyes, the lean face mottled a shiny cherry-red color.

  Not Pendarves’s car, and not Pendarves.

  The dead man was Thomas Lujack.

  * * * *

  Chapter 8

  I knelt there for a time, stunned and confused, trying to come to grips with what I’d found. What in God’s name was Lujack doing here, dead, in Pendarves’s garage? The only thing I could think of was that he’d come to talk, even though he’d been warned to stay clear of Pendarves, the conf
rontation had turned ugly, and he had lost the punch-up. But why here in the garage? Why was he dead of carbon monoxide from the BMW he must have been driving? And where was Pendarves?

  A car hissed by on Rivera without slowing; the sound of its passage brought me out of myself. I took a closer look at the blood smear on Thomas’s head. Under his thick mat of hair, just above the occipital bone, the skin was split and looked darkly bruised. But there was nothing distinctive about the wound; it could have been made by just about anything, including the concrete floor. I lifted and turned the body again. He was wearing the same Harris tweed jacket, mint-green shirt, and designer jeans, and they looked the same as they had in Glickman’s office: no tears or blood spatters or stains of any kind. I peered at his face, then paid some attention to his hands. No marks on his flesh, either. If he’d been in a fight, he had been struck only in the body and hadn’t landed any solid blows himself—which seemed unlikely. He could have been thrown down in a struggle and banged his head on the concrete, but it was a better bet that he’d been clubbed from behind. The closed garage, the running engine, the presence of both Thomas and his car ruled out freak accident and suicide. This was homicide, plain and simple. Coldblooded, premeditated murder.