Breakdown nd-18

by Bill Pronzini

  Breakdown

  ( Nameless Detective - 18 )

  Bill Pronzini

  Bill Pronzini

  Breakdown

  Chapter 1

  I was late getting to the tavern that Monday night because I let myself put in too much overtime on a routine skip-trace. Not that being late mattered much. After three barren weeks, this angle on the Lujack case had turned into a protracted waste of time. If it weren’t for the fact that all the other angles seemed to be just as dead-ended, I would have dropped it by now.

  Besides, working nights kept me from brooding too much about all the bad things that had darkened Kerry’s life-and mine-during the past few months.

  I parked my car near the foot of Taraval, where it ends at 48th Avenue. It was a raw late-January night, with a chill wind herding a low scudding mist in from the ocean a few hundred yards away. From where I parked, you could see no more than fifty feet beyond the Great Highway, which parallels 48th here; all of Ocean Beach was obscured behind shifting traceries of gray. The pedestrian-crossing signal at the Great Highway glowed an eerie red, like a disembodied hand caught and held in motionless warning by the mist.

  At the moment there was no traffic of any kind in the vicinity, even though it was only eight thirty. There were lights in some of the squat row houses and two-unit apartment buildings along this block of Taraval, and in the scattered few business establishments in the block back across 47th, but the people were all shut away behind closed doors and drawn curtains. Life at this western edge of the city-Out There at the Beach, San Franciscans call it-is nothing like life at its teeming inner core. It has a closed-off, clannish ambiance, a different taste and texture than any other neighborhood. Part of the reason is a heterogenous mix of conservative and funky architectural styles and life-styles; of residents old and new, blue-collar and white-collar, Asian and Anglo, neo-hippies and newlyweds, and a large percentage of retirees. The other part is intangible. Maybe the salty air and the heavy fogs and cold winds have something to do with it; maybe living on the edge-of the city, of a great land mass, of earthquake country-has something to do with it too. The reshaping and landscaping of much of Ocean Beach and the Great Highway, part of an ongoing beachfront sewer project and the need to control the hazard of windblown sand, has done little to alter the strangeness. And if anything, the devastating 7.1 quake in October has increased it. You can feel it as soon as you go Out There.

  I donned the cloth cap I always wore to the tavern. Or rather, that Art Canino, shop steward for a South San Francisco plumbing contractor, always wore. Then I buttoned the collar on my overcoat and got out into that freezing wind.

  Quiet here, too, on a night like this. If it weren’t for the foghorns, bleating distantly like lost strays, you could imagine yourself in one of the small seacoast towns upstate. The pulse-beat of the city was faint here on clear days, and when it was muffled by the fog you couldn’t hear it at all. I went at an angle across the empty street, back toward 47th. Several blocks away, the headlight on one of the big L Taraval streetcars probed dimly through the fog; but even though those LRVs make a lot of noise, and even though I could feel the vibration from this one as I crossed the tracks, I couldn’t hear it yet-as if it were approaching through a different dimension.

  The tavern’s entrance was just a narrow storefront between a dry-cleaning establishment and one of the two-unit apartment buildings. Above the door, a blue-neon cocktail glass cast a faint glow that had no particular warmth or welcome to it. The lower two-thirds of the adjacent window was covered by heavy blue cloth suspended from a horizontal pole; you couldn’t see inside through the upper third unless you happened to have a stepladder handy. The name of the place was painted on the window glass in flaky blue lettering that I couldn’t read until I was just a few feet away:

  HIDEAWAY

  I went in. Most of the regulars were there, maybe a dozen altogether tonight, all but one comfortably arranged at the cluster of tables along the right-hand wall and in the rear booths. The man seated alone at the bar was not Nick Pendarves. The regulars all looked my way as I entered, but none of them smiled or nodded or offered words of greeting. Three weeks was not enough time to make me one of them; three months might not be enough. But they knew me now, and no longer seemed to resent my presence, and they were friendly enough on an individual basis.

  At the far end of the bar, where I usually sat, I hoisted myself onto a cracked leather stool. Pendarves wasn’t anywhere in the long, narrow room. The door to the men’s john was open, which meant that he wasn’t in there either.

  The bartender took his time coming my way. But that didn’t mean anything; he took his time serving everybody. His name was Max. If he had another name, nobody had spoken it within my hearing. He was a pudgy little guy in his early fifties, muscular through the chest and shoulders, with an egg-shaped head covered with spiky tufts of gray-black hair that made you think of pig bristles. He wouldn’t gossip or let you buy him a drink; he held himself aloof even from the regulars.

  And he used words sparingly and grudgingly, as if he had been given a small allotment and was afraid of using it up.

  “What’ll it be?”

  “Usual,” I said.

  “Bud Light?” He had a good memory for what people drank.

  “Bud Light.”

  He set me up with the beer and a frosty glass, then moved a plastic bowl my way. Well, well, I thought. I had finally reached the intermediate beer-nut level of acceptance.

  “Nick been in yet tonight?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Wonder how come. He’s usually here by eight.”

  Max shrugged.

  “Working late, maybe,” I said.

  Max shrugged again and went down to the other end of the plank.

  I sat nursing my beer, waiting. I would give Pendarves the better part of an hour-long enough to maintain my cover as the newest of the neighborhood barflies. Ten minutes walked away dragging their heels. I was in no mood for passive sitting tonight, and there was little enough here, other than the regulars, to absorb my attention. The Hideaway had no jukebox, and the small TV over the backbar was seldom turned on except by special request; an old-fashioned dartboard was about the only standard tavern diversion. The talk was muted, an irregular background drone that I didn’t feel like contributing to. I tried to keep my thoughts neutral but Kerry was there, Kerry and her mother, worrying at the edges of my mind. Finally I got up and went to the dartboard and began tossing darts at it, just to have something to do.

  There are all sorts of neighborhood taverns in a city of neighborhoods such as San Francisco is. Straight and gay, white-collar and blue, ethnic and cosmopolitan, rough-trade and genteel, pickup joints and “family” watering holes; hangouts for the literati and holding pens for the illiterati; places dripping with authentic local atmosphere, adorned with phony atmosphere for the benefit of suckers and slumming tourists, completely lacking in atmosphere of any kind. But there aren’t many taverns like the Hideaway anymore, in San Francisco or anywhere else in the country. They’re a dying breed, soon to enter the same extinct category as black-tie supper clubs and dime-a-dance emporiums. They’ll survive only as long as circumstances permit and enough of their patrons remain above ground to make them marginally profitable.

  The Hideaway was just what its name suggested: a sanctuary, a literal hideaway for the men and women who frequented it. It was as much a social club and senior-citizens center as a place for the consumption of alcohol, the drowning of sorrows, and the celebrating of small victories. Most of the clientele were over fifty and had been coming here for years, or at least had lived in the neighborhood for a long time — retirees and near-retirees, widows and widowers, loners and misfits; the disab
led and the forgotten, the has-beens and the never-wases. They came for the companionship of others like themselves, and because it was a place close by where they could escape the loneliness and frustrations of their private lives. That was why outsiders, casual drop-ins, were tolerated but never encouraged: They were threats to the sanctuary’s delicate balance, reminders of the uncaring world-at-large that the regulars sought to avoid.

  An old tavern, the Hideaway, in business continually since just after Repeal and operating under its present name for more than forty years. It was owned now by the widow of Sam Delaney, the man who had christened it Hideaway. She was in poor health, and there was some concern among the regulars that when she died her relatives would sell the property and the new owners would shut it down. If that happened, it would be a serious tragedy in their lives. There were other bars in the neighborhood, but not in the immediate vicinity and none like the Hideaway. Without it, some of these people would be lost. More than one of them, I thought, would not survive its closing for very long.

  There was not much to the place, as far as the decor went. Just an oblong, high-ceilinged room, ill-lighted and musty with the smells of alcohol and tobacco, of salt-damp and age and the flavors of all the people who had made it their second home for over half a century. Long bar on the left as you came in; half a dozen well-used tables and chairs and one long cushioned bench along the wall on the right; four low-backed booths built into the far right-hand corner, two on the back wall and two on the side wall. Ancient linoleum on the floor, worn through in several places so that you could see the dark oiled boards underneath. Walls adorned with faded black-and-white photographs of a vanished San Francisco: the original Cliff House, Ocean Beach in the thirties, this neighborhood when it was all salt grass and sand dunes, before Dolger and the other developers bought up the land and covered it with “affordable” housing.

  The first time I’d come here, just after the new year began, the Hideaway had struck me as a drab, cheerless bar ruled by ghosts and despair. But after three weeks, I had a different impression. This may have been a haven for the elderly and the disaffected, but they didn’t come here to mourn or exchange bitternesses or sit around morosely waiting to shake hands with the Grim Reaper. Most of them were vital people; they brought their hobbies, opinions, insights, and verbal pleasures in with them, and shared them freely. There was sadness here, and a sense of tragedy, but there was laughter and joy too-and a kind of warmth and camaraderie that I found enviable.

  Each of the two booths along the back wall had a green-shaded droplight over it. In one of them now, a retired civil servant named Harry Briggs was playing chess with fat, fortyish, painfully shy Douglas Mikan, the youngest of the regulars, who had inherited just enough money from an overprotective mother so that he didn’t have to work. They played often and well and were very serious about their chess; they almost never spoke to each other while a match was in progress. In the other back booth, Peter Vandermeer sat reading a pamphlet with great concentration. He was nearly eighty, thin and sinewy, once a cable-car motorman and now an amateur historian who probably knew more obscure facts about California history in general and San Francisco history in particular than most college professors. A couple of nights ago he had spent twenty minutes telling me more than I ever wanted to know about the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915.

  The only person at the bar, down at the far end, was Ed McBee, a longshoreman whose wife had died not long ago. Over at the tables, there was Charlie Neale, who had a crippled right leg as the result of some sort of industrial accident. And Kate and Bob Johnson, who belonged to different political parties and had evidently spent most of their married life arguing politics. And Annie Stanhope, constantly knitting from a huge bag of yarn while she drank vast amounts of dry sherry that never seemed to have any effect on her. And Frank Parigli, who had some kind of night watchman’s job and who spent his mornings combing Ocean Beach for driftwood and shells; his hobby was making collages, which he sold to gift shops for the tourist trade. And Lyda Isherwood, big and brassy, with a loud voice and a louder laugh; she claimed to have once run a whorehouse in Nevada (nobody seemed to believe her), and told bawdy stories in a surprising variety of accents and dialects. There were others too, some whose names I had learned and some I knew nothing about. But their faces were all familiar now, and even though I was here under a false name and false pretenses, and in another week or so my life would no longer intersect with theirs, I felt an odd sort of kinship with them. If I lived Out There at the Beach instead of in Pacific Heights, if I didn’t have Kerry — and, to a lesser degree, Eberhardt-this was the kind of place and these were the kind of people I might find myself gravitating to.

  Kerry. I threw another dart, too hard and a little wildly. Thinking: I don’t have her now, do I? And what if this thing with her mother gets worse, drags on and on?

  Outside, somewhere close by, there was the sudden squeal of tires on pavement, the crescendo-and-fade of a car passing at high speed. Nice driving on a foggy night, I thought. And promptly forgot about it.

  But not for long.

  Just about a minute had passed when the tavern’s door whacked open. I felt the night’s gusty breath all the way over where I was standing by the dartboard-and I watched Nick Pendarves blow in.

  Pendarves was a tallish, gangly man in his mid-fifties, a couple of years younger than me. He wore his usual gray work shirt and gray work pants and gray-and-black plaid jacket, but you didn’t think of him in terms of gray; you thought of him in terms of rusty. He had rust-colored hair, the kind of voice that sounded as if it were corroded, and a slow, jerky way of moving, as if all his joints needed oiling- the Tin Man of Oz left out too long in bad weather. But there was something different about him tonight; I saw it even at a distance and it put me on instant alert. His movements were quicker and more agitated than usual, and he paid no attention to the other regulars as he came down the bar. He leaned up against it between two of the stools, clutching at the beveled edge as if for support.

  I moved over to where he was. When I got close enough I could see that his craggy face was pale, that the fire of bitter anger blazed in his eyes. He paid no attention to me, either, as I claimed one of the stools near him.

  “Bourbon,” he said to Max. “Double shot.”

  Max cocked his head, as much of an expression of surprise as he was ever likely to betray. Like me, Pendarves was a beer-drinker; in three weeks I had never seen him order anything else.

  “Well? What the hell you waiting for?”

  I watched Max get busy, Pendarves light an unfiltered Pall Mall with unsteady hands. Then I asked, “What’s up, Nick? You look kind of shook.”

  “Son of a bitch tried to run me down,” he said without looking my way.

  “Who did?”

  “Tried to kill me, by God.”

  “When? Just now?”

  “Come out of nowhere while I was crossing the street. Couldn’t of missed me by more than a couple feet. I hadn’t jumped when I did … Christ!”

  Max put the double shot down in front of him. Pendarves threw it off as if it were water, rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. His eyes looked as hot as the tip of his cigarette.

  “Kids?” Max said.

  “Kids my ass. One guy, no goddamn headlights. He done it on purpose. Swerved right at me.”

  I said, “Who’d do a thing like that?”

  “Thomas Lujack, that’s who.”

  “… Guy you’re testifying against?”

  “Him. Yeah.”

  “You sure it was him?”

  “Sure enough.”

  “So you got a good look at him this time too?”

  “Too dark. But it was Lujack-who the hell else? Tried to run me down like he done his partner. Well, he won’t get away with it.”

  Max said, “Call the cops, Nick.”

  “Hell with the cops.”

  “What if he tries it again?”

  “I’ll make sure he do
n’t.”

  “How?”

  “Never mind how. That’s my business.”

  “Better just leave it to the cops,” I said.

  “Hell with the cops,” Pendarves said again.

  “Fix him in court then, on the witness stand. If you didn’t see the driver you can’t be positive who it was …”

  Pendarves wasn’t listening. His head was down, his face set so tightly it was full of spasming nerves and ridges of muscle. He smoked his Pall Mall in fast, deep drags, as if he were trying to burn it up as quickly as he could.

  Pretty soon he said, talking to himself, “Rivas … yeah, that’s it. Make damn sure the bastard leaves me alone. Him and that brother of his both.”

  “Who’s Rivas?”

  No answer. What was left of his cigarette seared his fingers; he said, “Shit!” and jabbed it out viciously.

  “Nick, who’s Rivas?”

  The sudden pain had brought him out of himself. His head snapped around my way and his eyes focused on me for the first time. “Canino,” he said, “what the hell you sucking around for?”

  “Hey, I was just trying to help-”

  “Keep your questions to yourself.” He shook himself, the way you’d shake off a sudden chill. “Max, give me another double.”

  “Sure.”

  Another voice, shy and halting, said, “Nick …”

  Pendarves swung around. When I looked back I saw Douglas Mikan standing a couple of feet away, fingering the knot in his tie.

  “What you want?”

  “I just … make sure you’re all right …”

  “Leave me alone, you fat wimp.”

  Mikan backed off, staring at Pendarves like a hurt puppy. All the other regulars were staring at him, too, now. Conversation had died.

  “What’s everybody gawking at?” he demanded.

  Down the bar Ed McBee said, “Don’t take it out on us, Nick. We’re on your side.”

  “Yeah.”