Breakdown

by Bill Pronzini

  “Mrs. Vega, will you tell me why you’re so worried about your husband?”

  “He … since last night he has not been home. Always before he tells me first before he goes away, but this time …” She shook her head and sighed and said, “Ay de mi,” as if in supplication.

  “You have no idea where he might be?”

  “No one has seen him, no one knows. Paco has gone to ask others, friends of my husband. …”

  “Paco?”

  “My son. He believes … ah, no. No.”

  “He believes what, Mrs. Vega?”

  “Nada. No es importante.”

  “What time did you last see your husband?”

  “Half past ten. Here, in this room.”

  “Did he say where he was going when he left?”

  “No. He said nothing.”

  “Why would he go out at that hour?”

  “The telephone call … it must have been.”

  “Someone called him right before he went out?”

  “Si.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “No. He talked in the kitchen … not long.”

  “How did he act after the call?”

  “Act? ?Que quiere dear?”

  “Was he upset, angry, excited?”

  “Upset … disconcerto? Si, disconcerto.”

  “Who might he have gone to meet? Someone from his work, maybe? Or a close friend?”

  I thought I saw her wince before she said, “Rafael knows many people. Many people …” She shook her head again; reached for the glass of burgundy and took a small swallow and then held the glass in both hands, as though they were cold and the wine radiated warmth.

  “You said he always tells you when he’s going away. Did you mean away on a trip?”

  “Si.”

  “Does he take many trips?”

  “No. Not many.”

  “How often?”

  “Two times, three times each year.”

  “For how many years now?”

  She made a vague gesture.

  “Where does he go on these trips?”

  “San Diego sometimes. Mexico sometimes.”

  “Where in Mexico?”

  Another vague gesture.

  “Does he have friends in San Diego? Relatives?”

  No answer. Again she drank from her glass, a larger swallow this time.

  “Does he go alone on these trips,senora?”

  “Si, alone,” she said. Firmly and positively, the way you do when you’re not at all sure of something and trying to convince yourself it’s so.

  “So you think he might have gone to Mexico or San Diego this time?”

  “Only last month he was away,” she said.

  “For how long.”

  “Four days.”

  “What do you think he does when he’s away?”

  No answer.

  “Is it part of his job to go on these trips?”

  No answer.

  “Mrs. Vega, I know your husband hires illegals for Containers, Inc. Is that why he—”

  “What the hell’s the big idea, pancho?”

  He was standing in the hall doorway, a beefy kid who walked soft for his size: I hadn’t heard him come into the house and apparently neither had Mrs. Vega. He was about twenty, wearing a thick down jacket and a pair of Levi’s jeans; his bandit’s mustache would give him a ferocious look even when he wasn’t angry. He was angry now. His eyes blazed, the cords in his neck bulged, and he stood with his feet apart and his hands fisted on his hips. There was nothing belligerent in the pose. His anger struck me as the protective variety.

  “What you bothering my mother for?” he said. “Asking so damn many questions?”

  “Are you Paco?”

  “Yeah, I’m Paco.” He took a couple of steps into the parlor. “Who’re you, man? INS green-carder?”

  “No.”

  “You sure talk like one.”

  I stood up, doing it slowly so he wouldn’t get any wrong ideas. “I’m a private investigator,” I said. “Working on behalf of your father’s employer, Thomas Lujack. I’ll show you my ID if you want to see it.”

  “… You trying to get Lujack off? The murder charge?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, you’re wasting your time. That marrano is guilty as hell. I hope they stick his ass in the gas chamber.”

  Mrs. Vega said, “Paco!” in a thick-sharp voice.

  “Sure, Mama, I know—you don’t like that kind of talk in your house. Well, I don’t like you drinking so much wine either. What good’s that stuff gonna do? Bring him back, make things better?”

  “Paco,” she said, and this time it was like a moan. Softly she began to cry.

  He said, “Christ,” but he went over and put his hand gently on her shoulder, leaned down to whisper something in Spanish. The words didn’t make her stop crying, but they did make her put her glass on the table and then reach up to clutch at his hand.

  “Why do you think Thomas Lujack is guilty?” I asked Paco.

  “What I think is my business.”

  “Why don’t you like him, then? Something to do with your father?”

  “Look, man, why don’t you get out of here? There’s nothing for you in this house.”

  “You have any idea where your father is?”

  “No. I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

  “Why not? You wouldn’t be afraid he had something to do with Frank Hanauer’s murder, would you?”

  “What? Man, you’re crazy. Get out of here.”

  “Why does he go to San Diego, Paco? Why to Mexico?”

  He pulled away from his mother, stood flat-footed again with his hands curled into fists. “I’m not gonna tell you again. Out, right now, or I throw you out.”

  He meant it; it was in his eyes. I had pushed him as far as you could push a man in his own home. I raised my own hands, slowly, and held them palms outward as I said, “I’m going. I didn’t come here to make trouble. All I’m after is the truth.”

  “You got everything you’re gonna get out of us. So don’t come back. Understand?”

  Without answering I moved over to the doorway. Paco stood watching until I passed through into the hall; then he turned back to his mother. She was still sobbing quietly. Just before I opened the front door, I heard him speak to her in Spanish. He didn’t know that I had a working knowledge of the language, so he didn’t bother to lower his voice. The words were as clear as they were bitter.

  “Hush, Mama,” he said. “He’s not worth your tears.”

  He didn’t mean me. He was talking about his father.

  * * * *

  When I got back to my car I found that somebody had broken into it. The passenger door had been jimmied open, snapping the lock so that I ended up having to tie the door shut with a piece of wire. The only thing of real value, the mobile phone unit, was intact and undamaged, which meant that the thief hadn’t had the right tools or was scared off or was just some poor desperate junkie looking for cash or small valuables. In any case the glove compartment had been hurriedly rifled.

  An old clunker like mine, I thought. Parked on the street for little more than an hour, nothing in it worth stealing except a difficult-to-remove cellular phone, and it had still been an instant target.

  Life in the Mission at the beginning of the nineties.

  Life in the goddamn city.

  * * * *

  Chapter 7

  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 wi
th 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 full 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 urgenc
y 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.