Breakdown nd-18

by Bill Pronzini

  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 pinched 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.

  He turned tail and ran.

  I would have caught him in the first twenty yards but I slipped on the wet pavement, ricocheted off a parked car and down to one knee. By the time I got my feet under me again he had opened up a thirty-yard lead. He ran in a loose-jointed zigzag fueled by terror, throwing wild looks over his shoulder as he pounded across the streetcar tracks and out onto 48th. Beyond, on the Great Highway, the vague lights of an oncoming car sliced through the fog from the north. If Vega saw the lights he misjudged the nearness of the car; he barreled up across the landscaped median strip between 48th and the highway, kept right on going under the furry red DON’T WALK signal.

  Squeal of brakes, long angry horn blast, the headlights pinning him for a second, then veering away as the car swerved. The front bumper hit him, but the car was almost stopped by then and it didn’t knock him down. He bounced off in a kind of lurching pirouette, stayed on his feet, and plunged upward along the wide sandy path that led to Ocean Beach.

  I lost sight of him for a few seconds; the fog had him in a tight gray embrace. As I pelted across the median strip, the car frog-hopped ahead through the crosswalk and stalled. I ran around behind it. The engine roared just as I cleared the fender, and the pavement took a skin of rubber off screaming tires; the driver did not want any part of Vega or me or our trouble.

  When I came up onto the sandy trail I saw Vega again through rents in the mist, slogging upward less than twenty yards away. The sand was wet but not hard-packed and he couldn’t generate any speed. Neither could I, after another few strides along the path. But I seemed to be gaining on him anyway.

  Over the pound of blood in my head I could hear the breakers for the first time-a dull muffled roar punctuated by the rasp of my breathing and the whisper and grind of my shoes digging into the sand. Years since I’d been to this section of Ocean Beach, before the sewer project began, but they couldn’t have widened or altered the shape of it much: low dunes flanking the trail here, stretching out parallel to the Great Highway; from the dunes to the waterline, fifty yards of flat, sandy beach … nothing on it but driftwood and sand dollars, dog crap and human litter. There was no place for him to go or hide out there. If I didn’t lose him in the fog …

  Now he was up to where the trail crested and then dropped down to the flat part of the beach. The mist was thick here, eddying close to the ground and as wet as rain; I had to keep swiping at my eyes to clear moisture out of them. At that I saw him only in disjointed glimpses, as if he were a figure in one of those flickery early silent films.

  Ten yards separated us now. He threw another look over his shoulder, and when he saw how close I was, panic drove him sideways over the waist-high chain link fence that bordered the path. On hands and knees he scrambled through ice plan
t and tule grass, up the side of the nearest dune.

  I vaulted the fence in an awkward twisting motion, came down wrong and sprawled out on my face in a clump of ice plant. Its slick, wet, swollen leaves had the feel of a dead man’s fingers. I clawed up through it, getting my legs under me. Vega was almost to the top of the dune, but when he caught hold of a clump of grass to pull himself the rest of the way, it tore free in his hand and he slid partway back down. That gave me just enough time to get a hand on his ankle. He flailed wildly with his feet, kicked free, managed to pitch his body over the top of the dune. But I was still right behind him, digging hard into the sand. When I came up over the top he was scrabbling through a shallow depression to the base of the next dune. He wasn’t going to have enough time to climb that one and he knew it; he twisted around so that he was on his back, facing me with his legs and arms up like a cat in fighting position.

  I threw myself at him. One of his knees dug into my belly, made me grunt in pain, and he shoved me off with enough force to roll me over. Wet sand got into my open mouth, down into my throat; I gagged, spat, shook my head as I scraped back onto my knees. He was right there, trying awkwardly to kick me in the head. I went at him again, knocked him backward. But I could not get my body on his, could not find enough leverage for a solid blow.

  We punched at each other, squirming and sliding around. Neither of us did any damage. He kept screaming at me the entire time, garbled Mexican obscenities in a gasping voice soaked in fear. He thought he was fighting for his life. Maybe he was. The rage in me was as black and merciless as death.

  The skirmish seemed to go on and on, like that dream where you’re trying to run away from something, or toward something, and you can’t move your arms and legs except in a dragging way that is savagely frustrating. It couldn’t have lasted more than a minute; it seemed ten times that long. We might have kept it up to the point of exhaustion if I hadn’t failed to protect my head after a wild swing. A handful of flung sand caught me full in the face and for a few seconds I went blind.