Breakdown - [Nameless Detective 19]

by By Bill Pronzini

  “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.”

  “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.

  * * * *

  Back to the office. Eerhardt was gone, and there were no messages. I considered doing some work on the home-accident case for Barney Rivera, but I was too restless for routine business; it could wait until Monday. I locked up and went away again almost immediately.

  Four thirty on a Friday afternoon; a long, lonely weekend stretching out ahead of me. Unless Kerry could get away, which wasn’t likely. Cybil demanded all of her free time. I wondered again where she’d been today, if she’d consulted a geriatric specialist and what she’d been advised. Well, she’d call when she had something to tell me.

  I held an image of her up in front of my mind’s eye. And as always, I felt the old sweet ache start up. A man shouldn’t love a woman as much as I loved Kerry; that much emotional attachment isn’t healthy, because there is too much dependency tied up in it. Somebody in my line of work needs to be independent. Loners don’t get distracted; loners have total focus on the job at hand; loners make the best detectives.

  Loners die lonely, I thought.

  The hell with that, I thought. I’m emotional and dependent. ... So what? I’m also too damned analytical for my own good. Sentimental slob and deep-thinker—how’s that for an epitaph?

  In the car again, I started home to my flat. And then changed my mind on the way up Pine and kept going past my turnoff at Laguna. I was in no frame of mind for a passive evening at home. When I felt like this I needed to keep moving, keep doing things, keep working.

  Out There at the Beach was where I went, even though it was too early for the Hideaway. For no particular reason I drove by Nick Pendarves’s house. On the property next to the garage where Thomas Lujack had died, a man was out working busily in his garden. As soon as I saw him I pulled over to the curb. The police would have talked to him by now, without much result, but there was no reason I shouldn’t have a few words with him myself. Better that than just driving aimlessly.

  Fog banks were piled up over the ocean, spilling landward, but overhead the sky was still partly clear and turning a sooty gray-black. There was maybe twenty minutes of light left, and the neighbor was making the most of it. He was in his sixties, lean and spry, wearing old clothes and gardening gloves and a Giants baseball cap. An array of tools was spread out among shrubs and flower beds and climbing-plant trellises, and he was using a pair of clippers to shape some kind of bush that looked pretty shapely already. A gardener—the manic type. The past few days of rain and soggy ground would have been hell for him. And who knew but what it would start raining again tomorrow.

  I leaned on a low grape-stake fence and hailed him. A much higher board fence, along which a geometrically trimmed hedge grew, separated his property from Pendarves’s. That fence was why he probably hadn’t seen or heard much the night of Thomas Lujack’s death.

  He came over with a certain amount of reluctance. But his curiosity got the better of his passion for gardening when I told him I was a detective investigating the murder next door. He assumed I meant police detective; I didn’t correct the assumption. His name was Anderson, Lloyd P. Anderson. He hadn’t ever told his wife what the P stood for, he said, so he wasn’t about to tell me.

  “Told the other officers everything I know,” he went on, “which ain’t much. Hell, it ain’t anything. The wife and me missed all the excitement. Watched a damn crime movie on TV that night, while a real crime was going on right under our noses. Makes you think, don’t it?”

  “It does that.”

  “Nick Pendarves . . . it’s still hard to believe. Oh, sure, he’s got a temper, but murder? You never figure somebody you know, somebody living, right next door, is capable of a thing like that.”

  “How well do you know him, Mr. Anderson?”

  “Hardly at all, considering we been neighbors twelve years. He kept to himself. Not that there’s anything unusual about that. Most of us do, out here. Value our privacy more than your average city dweller.”

  “So you wouldn’t have any idea where he might have gone.”

  Anderson shook his head. “Still haven’t found a trace of him, eh?”

  “Not yet. Do you know any of his friends? Anybody who came around to see him regularly?”

  “Nope. Didn’t seem to have many friends or visitors, not since his wife left him. But like I said, we value our privacy
out here. He minded his business and I minded mine. Except for the one little run-in we had two years ago, but that didn’t amount to much.”

  “What run-in was that?”

  “Oh, just a disagreement,” Anderson said. “That’s how come I know about his temper. In the middle of it I thought he was going to haul off and smack me one.” He grinned wryly. “I’d of sued the pants off him if he had. I know my rights.”

  “What was the disagreement about?”

  “Weeds.”

  “Sir?”

  “Weeds,” Anderson said. “His property was full of ‘em. Weeds and high grass, dry grass, growing right up alongside our boundary fence there. All up around that tinderbox garage of his too. Fire hazard. I told him that, told him he better cut ‘em down.”

  “And he refused?”

  “At first. What was I worrying about fire for, he said, when we live in the fogbelt. I finally offered to pay part of the cost. Figured it might shame him and it did, up to a point. He gave in and had the weeds and grass cut, but damned if he didn’t present me with a bill for half the charges. He didn’t try to stick me for having his junk carted way at the same time, though. I’d of drawn the line at that and I guess he knew it.”

  “Junk?”

  “Out behind his garage. Old tires, rusty pipe, all sorts of crap. He’d of let any more pile up and it’d been worse than an eyesore. We’d of had rats, sure as hell.”

  “He sounds like the careless type,” I said.

  “Careless? Hell, he’s a pure slob. You been inside his house? That’s where I talked to him; I went over there and he invited me in. Regular pigsty.”

  I thought of the immaculate kitchen I had glimpsed through the window on Tuesday night. “You wouldn’t happen to know if he had somebody come and clean for him recently?”

  “Nope. Why’d you ask that?”

  “I saw his kitchen. It’s spotless.”

  “That so?” Anderson was surprised. “Don’t seem like him, hiring a woman to clean up his mess. Might marry one, get himself a legal maid, but pay for housekeeping? Not Nick Pendarves.”

  “Maybe he didn’t hire it done.”

  “Well, he didn’t do it himself,” Anderson said. “Not if that kitchen is spotless. I’d bet money on that.”

  So would I. What I was thinking now was that maybe Lyda Isherwood was wrong about Pendarves’s love life being confined to occasional sessions with a call girl. Maybe he had a lady friend after all. And if I found her, maybe I would also find him.

  * * * *

  The atmosphere in the Hideaway that night was more subdued than usual, as if the thing with Pendarves, still unresolved as it was, was starting to weigh heavy on his drinking companions. It was not that they were beginning to doubt his innocence; believing in that was too important to them. It was just that it had gone on too long. What they wanted now was to put the whole unpleasant business behind them so they could begin to forget it had ever happened.

  There were none of the animated group exchanges of my last visit—not much talk at all. I heard laughter only twice while I was there, brief spurts of it that had a strained, hollow quality, like nervous chuckles at a wake. Several of the regulars sat alone: Harry Briggs in one of the droplit booths, playing chess by himself because Douglas Mikan was absent; Peter Vandermeer in the adjoining booth, absorbed as usual in a book; Ed McBee at the bar and Lyda Isherwood at one of the tables. The rest were in small clusters of two and three.

  I sat for a time with Lyda. At first she was reluctant to talk, which was a good indicator of how low her spirits were; the loud bantering voice and booming laugh were just memories tonight. She was a little drunk, too, on brandy old-fashioneds. She finished one just after I sat down, and I bought her another. That loosened her up enough to answer my questions.

  “A girlfriend? Nick? Nah,” she said, “not him. He’s been paying for it since his wife quit him. Call girls, you know? I know all about that racket. I used to run a whorehouse outside Carson City during the war. World War II. You believe it?”

  “I believe it.”

  She waved one of her thick arms. “Most of ‘em in here don’t. But it’s the gospel truth. Big fancy whorehouse outside Carson City. Red plush furniture, four-poster beds, silk sheets. Silk sheets, by Christ. Then it burned down. Right to the damn ground and I was out of business. I couldn’t afford to open another place, not unless I wanted to do it cheap and I’m not cheap. Never a cheap lay, never a cheap madam.”

  “Lyda, about Nick—”

  “What about Nick?”

  “Isn’t it possible he’s seeing somebody here? On the sly?”

  “You serious, Art? Your name’s Art, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You serious, Art? Why’d he want to do that?”

  “Maybe the woman’s married,” I said.

  “Nah, no way.” Lyda gave a loose-lipped, humorless grin. “No woman here is that stupid, married or otherwise.”

  “Why would a woman have to be stupid to take up with Nick?”

  “He’s a user, that’s why. Male chauvinist pig.”

  “He abuses women, you mean? Like he abused his wife?”

  “Abuses anybody that’ll let him,” Lyda said. “He had a dog, he’d run that dog’s legs off just for a pat on the head. That’s the way he is. Everybody knows it and don’t let ‘em tell you any different.”

  “Where do you think he is, Lyda? Who’d hide him out?”

  “Nobody that didn’t like to be used,” she said.

  I gravitated to the company of several of the other regulars, but none of them had any more to tell me than Lyda had. If Pendarves was seeing a woman, Hideaway denizen or not, he’d been doing it with a covert secrecy the CIA would have envied. Either that, or the people here knew all about it and for one reason or another were keeping it strictly among themselves.

  I gave it up at ten o’clock. The edge was off my restlessness, and the prospect of being alone in my flat had grown more appealing than the company here. More than on any other night since I’d been coming to the Hideaway, the place and its patrons depressed me.

  Outside, the fog had rolled in thick and sinuous—a great woolly blanket of it that deadened all sounds except the fretful warnings of the foghorns, fuzzed lights and obscured objects more than a few feet away. The sidewalks, as usual, were deserted. A car whispered by on 48th Avenue, another over on the Great Highway that looked as though it were plowing through drifts of dirty snow. The beach beyond was totally hidden, as if behind a rippling wall.

  I crossed 47th, went past a couple of parked cars to where mine waited in midblock. I got my keys out as I cut around the front end to the driver’s door. Most of my attention was on the door lock; the fog was clammy and the wind chill and I was in a hurry to get inside, put the heater on. Stupid lapse in caution. I didn’t see him until he came gliding around from the rear, crouched low. Or hear him until he said, “Don’t move, man, don’t move!” in a rough voice shaking with tension, the English a little broken and Mexican-accented.

  Rafael Vega, sure as hell.

  With a gun in his hand.

  * * * *

  Chapter 15

  It was to close to the way in which I had been kidnapped, the beginning of those three months of hell. Dark night, empty streets, me on the way to my car and home, him lurking in the shadows and catching me off guard and throwing down on me. Maybe that was why I did it. Or maybe it was that the new, dark side of me seized momentary control. I’ll never know for sure. There was no conscious thought involved, and therefore no memory later.

  Frozen tableau for a span of time that might have been as few as two seconds or as many as ten. Vega at a standstill a couple of paces away, holding the handgun at arm’s length; me just as motionless, still bent forward at the waist—seeing him with a tremendous clarity as if he were on a brightly lit stage instead of a dark city street. Medium height, wiry, somewhere around 160 pounds; thick black hair blown wild by the wind; angular face all pin
ched up, lips wet and rubbery-looking; eyes wide and full of fear and death. All of that so clear, so sharply detailed, and then in the next instant obliterated by a black tide of fury that seemed to swell through my head. And I did what I had no notion of doing, what I would never have done before my abduction.

  I reached out and tore the gun from his hand.

  He neither pulled the trigger in reflex nor reacted in any other way. One second he was pointing the weapon at me; the next I had my hand on it and was ripping it free of his fingers. But I did not have a tight grip and I couldn’t hold on to it. It fell clattering; kicked under my car without going off. Vega made an astonished bleating sound, staggered backward with his eyes popping. I remember that plainly: His eyes seemed enormous, great bulbous staring things ready to burst from his skull. I think I made a noise myself, a kind of crazy roaring.