Breakdown

by Bill Pronzini

  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 confrontation 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.

  Why?

  Dammit, why would Pendarves kill him this way?

  My stomach had begun to act up, as it always did when I was this close to violent death. I was not breathing well, either, but that was mostly the fault of the carbon monoxide. Quickly I patted Thomas’s coat and pants pockets: he wasn’t carrying a gun or any other kind of weapon. On my feet again, I went over by the door and sucked again at the night air until my stomach settled and I had better breath control. Then I was ready to get on with it.

  Nothing on the floor near Thomas or anywhere else on that side of the BMW. I got down and looked under the car. Nothing there, either, as near as I could tell without a flashlight. I opened the driver’s door, being careful not to smudge any prints that might be there, and poked through the glove box and found the registration slip. The owner of the car was Thomas’s wife, Eileen. I sifted among the other items in the compartment. No gun, no other kind of weapon, and nothing that told me anything I didn’t already know. The rest of the car’s interior was just as barren.

  I’d been in that damned garage long enough. I went back outside, shutting the light off on the way. Raining again; the wind had died down but the night seemed even colder. I looked up toward the house. The one light still burned, and it was still the only one on. He’s not there, I thought. No sign of his car, and I’ve been here long enough to attract his attention if he was hanging around waiting for the monoxide to do its work. But why would he go off and leave the BMW pumping away in the garage? Where’s the sense in that, in any of this?

  The gate into the rear yard was latched but not locked. I went through it and across a section of weedy grass, skirted some bushes, and came to a flight of stairs that led up to where
the lighted window was. Under the stairs was a door; the way the house had been built, it would give into a basement. It was sure to be locked tight but I tried it anyway. Yeah. I moved over and climbed the stairs, warily but not trying to be sneaky about it.

  At the top was a little platform porch railed on the two sides. The door into the house was as tight-locked as the one into the basement. On the jamb was a doorbell, something you find occasionally on the backsides of older houses. I thought it over for a few seconds and then pushed the bell. Inside, the thing made a low, flat, buzzing sound. I stood with my ear against the door, listening for footsteps. All I heard was silence.

  After half a minute I leaned out over the railing for a look through the lighted window. Kitchen, all right. I could see about half of it, including the sink and drainboard, the refrigerator, part of a stove, part of a Formica-topped table and two chairs. Everything was immaculate, gleamingly so, like a fifties-style remodeler’s showroom. That surprised me a little; Pendarves hadn’t impressed me as an orderly man. Just the opposite, in fact—he was pretty careless about his appearance. But then, maybe he had somebody come in and clean for him, and what I was seeing was the result of a recent tidying.

  I straightened, put my hand on the doorknob, took it away again. No real point in my trying to get inside the house. Pendarves wasn’t here; and if there was anything to find on the premises, it was the cops’ job to find it.

  Descending the stairs, I hurried across the yard and through the gate and alongside the garage. Except for the fog-smeared streetlights and nearby house lights, there was nothing to see; I was still alone on the property. I crossed the empty expanse of Rivera to where my car was parked. Got in and stripped off my gloves and sat for half a minute to let my breathing even out again; my lungs still weren’t working right.

  I was lifting the receiver on the mobile phone when the night went red behind me.

  The redness brightened swiftly, making the fog look as though it were drizzling blood. I sat unmoving, watching in the rearview mirror as a black-and-white prowl car came into sight, heading west on Rivera. It was moving at a pretty good clip, its dome light slashing at the wet dark, until it passed through the intersection; then the driver braked abruptly and swerved over to the curb in front of Pendarves’s garage.

  A brace of patrolmen piled out. Both carried flashlights, switched them on at the same time; the beams burned bright tunnels through the red-splashed drifts of fog. They stopped together at the garage door, as if they were surprised to find it half open and the car engine shut off inside. They seemed to hold a hurried conference, after which they drew their sidearms in unison. One of them eased the door up a little farther and ducked under it; the other went into a shooter’s crouch and swept the interior with his light. After a few seconds the crouching one straightened again, turned away and moved along the near-side wall, out of my range of vision.

  I put the phone receiver back in its cradle, thinking: Somebody beat me to it. One of the neighbors, who spotted me poking around? But then why were the cops surprised at what they found over there? Sure, the call could have been made before I opened the door, but that had been at least twenty minutes ago. Prowler calls in this neighborhood, with the Taraval precinct station only a little over a mile away, were routinely answered in half that time.

  As I watched, the garage door went up all the way. Then the patrolman inside turned his flash on Thomas Lujack’s corpse, held it there until his partner came in through the access door and joined him. Both of them still had their weapons drawn. If they’d caught me on the premises, as they would have if they’d arrived five minutes sooner, they’d have hassled me pretty good.

  The way it was now, I wouldn’t get much more than the fish-eye. All I had to do was go on over there, nice and slow, and then tell them the exact truth. I could give them enough bare facts to save time and trouble when the homicide inspectors arrived. Besides, it was the law-abiding and the smart thing to do.

  I didn’t do it.

  Up until a year ago, I would have—without hesitation. But I was neither the man nor the detective I had been a year ago. There was a wrongness about the whole scenario over there; I had felt it as soon as I realized who the dead man was, and the arrival of the prowl car had shoved it up close to the surface. Thomas Lujack’s death hadn’t ended my involvement with him, or with Nick Pendarves; I felt that, too, just as strongly. It seemed imperative to keep my name out of the official report, to not blow my cover at the Hideaway.

  I waited until one of the patrolmen radioed in and the two of them together drifted into the shadows toward the house. Then I started the car and went away from there, running dark like a thief in the night.

  * * * *

  Bad night all around.

  I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even get into a doze. My lungs ached and my head felt clogged with too many random thoughts, like a pressure building up. After a while the unease came, crimping at the edges of my mind. Then the claustrophobia, as if the darkness was contracting around me—outside pressure added to the pressure within. Even when I turned on the light the sensation of being squeezed and suffocated did not lessen any. Anxiety attack, the first in three months.

  The clock said one thirty when I got up. I paced from room to room but it did no good; the trapped, fearful feeling seemed to worsen. There was nothing for it then but to get out and away. I dressed quickly and left the building and put my car around me again and began to drive with the window rolled down and the wind blowing icy mist against my face.

  I drove here and there, going nowhere. Wet shiny streets, mostly deserted, reflecting splinters of light that stabbed into my eyes and made them burn again. Over in the Tenderloin, the night people were out alone or in little shadowy groups— pimps, whores, pushers, muggers; drunks and addicts and flesh-hungry johns. The predators and their prey, even more voracious in bad weather because it made tempers short and patience thin. On Marina Boulevard, the empty Green looked like a barren graveyard, the tall bobbing masts of the boats in the yacht harbor like skeletons performing a danse macabre. Along the fringes of the Presidio it was as if I were passing through a tropical rain forest—trees and bushes dripping, dripping, making me think of acid rain eating away unseen at leaves and roots so that one day there would be nothing left but blighted gray vegetable matter … seen one dead tree, you’ve seen them all. At Cliff House and Ocean Beach, wind-driven surf boiled foaming over the rocks and raged at the shore, and there was no peace in that, either—there can never be peace in the presence of raw violence. At 47th and Rivera, where raw violence had taken place earlier, there was the illusion of peace because the police were gone and the dead man was gone and the house was dark … but the illusion was worse than the violence itself; an illusion is a lie and a lie is always worse than the truth… .

  I drove some more, another half hour or so—here and there, going nowhere. At last I could feel the fatigue taking over, and with it came the beginnings of ease both physical and mental. The night felt less ominous, less tragic; it was merely lonely, the way even good nights are. I knew I could go home then, that when I got there the flat would no longer be a tightening snare. And I was right.

  I slept immediately and dreamlessly, for a little more than four hours. When I awoke at 8:00 a.m., to face the dull gray of another day, I was all right again.

  * * * *

  Chapter 9

  The telephone rang at eight thirty, as I was getting dressed. Eberhardt or Paul Glickman, I thought. It was Eberhardt.

  “You hear the news yet?” he said.

  “What news?”

  “I figured,” he said. “Why the hell don’t you read the newspapers? Or listen to the damn radio?”

  “My life is depressing enough without wallowing in other people’s misery. What’s up?”

  “Thomas Lujack is dead, that’s what’s up. Murdered last night. Way it looks, Nick Pendarves killed him.”

  I feigned astonishment. There would be no use in confi
ding in Eb; he would only raise a fuss. He has been a conservative, law-loving man all his life, except for one foolish slip a few years ago; ever since that slip, he has become even more rock-ribbed in his outlook. Besides, I had no satisfactory explanation to give him for my actions last night—or at least none that would satisfy him.

  Thomas Lujack’s death had made page two of the Chronicle, not because of the circumstances but because of the tie-in to the Hanauer thing. The details were sketchy, so Eb had thought to call one of his cronies at the Hall of Justice for a complete rundown.

  His account contained two pieces of information that I paid particular attention to. One was the fact that the call alerting the police had been anonymous: male voice saying that something funny was going on at Pendarves’s address, the garage door was shut and a car engine was running inside. That explained the reactions of the two patrolmen. It also added to my feeling of wrongness about the whole business. The other piece of information gave me pause, though, because it tended to support the circumstantial evidence: Pendarves had disappeared. His Plymouth Fury had been found abandoned near Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park at six this morning.

  I asked, “What’s the official theory?”

  “Either Thomas went to see Pendarves on his own hook or Pendarves asked him to come. Depending on which, there was some kind of fight or Pendarves deliberately cold-cocked Thomas; then he finished the job. One way it’s first-degree, the other way maybe it’s second-degree. Up to him and his lawyer to convince a jury.”