Breakdown nd-18

by Bill Pronzini

  Still no response.

  “Which is it going to be? Me or the cops? Make up your mind.”

  I counted to six, silently, before the latch clicked and the door popped inward a couple of inches. She was already walking away from it when I entered. Halfway across the room she stopped and stood slump-shouldered without turning while I shut the door behind me. It wasn’t much of a room, because it had no discernible stamp of individuality; it might have been a living room in anybody’s house anywhere, filled with nondescript furniture and nondescript trimmings and painted and carpeted in nondescript colors. It might have been an Anglo’s living room; there was nothing Mexican or Spanish in it that I could see. The room told me as much about Teresa Melendez and the life she led as I needed to know.

  Still without turning she said, “Rafael isn’t here,” in a dull, emotionless voice.

  “I know.”

  “He’s in the hospital.”

  “I know that too.”

  She came around slowly to face me. She was wearing an old housecoat over a slip and blouse. Her long hair had been hastily combed; the lipstick and makeup she wore, just as hastily applied, didn’t hide the dark bags under her eyes or the sallowness of her skin. The bored sexpot and the defiant mistress were both gone today. In their place was a shopworn, bitter woman, puffily soft and unattractive-the woman she would probably be in another ten or fifteen years.

  She said, “You put him there?”

  “In the hospital? No.”

  “You know who did?”

  “Coleman Lujack,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, and nodded once, and shaped her lips as if she wanted to spit. “Big Savior. Big Judas.”

  She moved a couple of paces, sat heavily on the arm of a shapeless couch. I stayed where I was. The room smelled of stale cigar smoke and stale liquor and fried food and something else I couldn’t define. Despair, maybe.

  “All night I waited for him,” she said. “I knew it was bad when he didn’t come. Bad for him, bad for me …finito. This morning … the newspaper … I went to the hospital but they wouldn’t let me see him. They said I wasn’t a relative. They wanted to know who I was and why I was there. I ran out quick and came home. Where else am I gonna go?” She looked up at me. “You think he’ll die?”

  “I‘m not a doctor.”

  “I hope he does,” she said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’ll go to prison if he doesn’t. He’s afraid of prison. He told me that once. Be better for him if he dies.”

  “Tell me why he’ll go to prison.”

  “Why do you think? His work with the illegals.”

  “The coyotes, you mean.”

  “He was only helping our people,” she said. “But the INS, the Anglos in their big government offices … they don’t understand. They’d put him in prison for that.”

  “Not for that,” I said. “For robbing your people, for feeding on their poverty.”

  She didn’t want to hear that; she shook her head.

  “That’s why they’re called coyotes, Teresa.”

  “No,” she said. “He wasn’t one of them.”

  “All right, have it your way. He’s a good man, just a pawn in the Lujacks’ hands. It was their idea, then. Coleman and Thomas. They financed his work with the illegals.”

  She made the spitting mouth again. “El jefes,” she said.

  “Was Frank Hanauer in on it too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Rafael didn’t say?”

  Headshake.

  “Why was Hanauer killed? Some kind of doublecross? Or was it because he wasn’t involved and made a stink when he found out?”

  Headshake.

  “Who ran him down? Rafael?”

  “No!”

  “Who then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did Rafael kill Thomas Lujack?”

  “No! He wouldn’t do nothing like that.”

  The hell he wouldn’t, I thought. “He’s been living here with you the past week, hasn’t he? Since Monday.”

  Shrug.

  “He came here late that night, after he’d been to see Coleman.”

  Another shrug.

  “Were you expecting him?”

  “No. I was sleeping. He was all shook up.”

  “Why?”

  “Something el jefe wanted him to do.”

  “But he didn’t tell you what it was.”

  “No.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said we’d go away together. He said he’d had enough of his fat cow of a wife.”

  “And you agreed to go along.”

  “I love him,” she said, and shrugged again.

  “Where were you going? Mexico?”

  “Mexico City. He knows people there.”

  “Sure he does. How soon did you plan to leave?”

  “When his business was finished.”

  “The business he was doing for Coleman.”

  “El jefe was paying him a lot of money.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know. Rafael, he said we would live good in Mexico City. He said I would have servants….”

  “Why did he want to go back to Mexico? Why couldn’t the two of you just stay here?”

  “They’d be after him pretty soon, he said. Here they’d find him; in Mexico, no.”

  “The INS?”

  “Pigs,” she said.

  “So he was afraid of being arrested. That’s the real reason he moved in with you, you know. To hide out until he was ready to leave for Mexico.”

  “What if it is? What does it matter?”

  “Was Coleman afraid of being arrested too? Was he planning to leave the country?”

  “He’s an Anglo,” Teresa said bitterly. “El jefes don’t have to run away. They don’t get punished.”

  “Sometimes they don’t; this isn’t one of them. Did Rafael talk to Coleman yesterday?”

  Nod. “El jefe called him.”

  “Here? He knew Rafael was staying here with you?”

  “He knew. Rafael told him.”

  “What time did he call?”

  “Seven o’clock. Just after Rafael came back.”

  “Back from where?”

  “Seeing people, making arrangements.”

  “For your trip to Mexico City?”

  Nod.

  “Did you tell him I’d been here?” “I told him.”

  “And what I said about him and the coyotes?”

  “Everything you said.”

  “Did it upset him? Make him angry, more afraid?”

  “What you think? He called you names. Hijo de puta. Maricon. You know what those names mean?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I know what they mean. Is that all he said?”

  “You wouldn’t bother us again-no Anglo would.”

  “Were you in the room when he talked to Coleman?”

  “No. He made me go in the kitchen.”

  “So you don’t know what they talked about.”

  “I didn’t want to know.”

  “How soon afterward did Rafael leave again?”

  “A few minutes.” She had the hem of her housecoat bunched in one hand; she twisted it even more tightly now, so that I heard the thin tearing of threads of material. “All night I waited,” she said to her lap. “No more waiting now. Just … finito. I won’t see him again, never. All finito.”

  “For him,” I said, “and living good in Mexico City. But not for you, Teresa.”

  “For me,” she said.

  “No. You’ll come out of this all right. You’re not mixed up in anything illegal. The police won’t hassle you, and neither will the INS as long as you’ve got a green card.”

  “You think I care? I don’t have Rafael, I don’t have a job pretty soon, I don’t have money to go anywhere. I don’t have nothing except a green card.”

  “What about this house?”

  “I pay rent,” she said
. “Poor spick like me can’t afford to buy a house in Los Estados Unidos.”

  There was nothing more I could say to her, nothing I could do for her. I went to the door, opened it. “If Coleman tries to get in touch with you, don’t talk to him. Don’t tell him I was here. I don’t want him to know I’m hunting him.”

  “What you going to do when you find him?”

  “Turn him over to the authorities.”

  She smiled, and it was a terrible thing to see. “Then I hope el jefe comes here first,” she said. “If he does I’ll cut his fucking heart out, feed it to the neighbor’s dogs.”

  She meant it. Hell hath no fury like a woman left alone with the bloody remains of a dead love.

  * * * *

  Chapter 17

  The Serramonte Shopping Centre is only a couple of miles from Atlanta Street, off Highway 280 that runs down the backbone of the Peninsula. I drove over there and hunted up a coffee shop, another in an endless succession of lookalike plastic-food emporiums in which I consumed all sorts of bad grub and frittered away time. Sometimes I felt as if my whole life was an intricate series of wanderings on a giant game board, moving here and there toward some nebulous prize, and in the process perpetually finding myself on the square that saidCoffee Shop, Open 24 Hours, Families Welcome.

  I had no appetite after the session with Teresa Melendez, but the rumblings in my stomach and the dull ache behind my eyes said I had better eat something. If you don’t keep putting fuel into a battered fifty-eight-year-old corpus, the thing will quit running and maybe break down for good. That was especially true after the abuse I had subjected the corpus to last night. So I ordered a bowl of beef stew and an English muffin — two items that even the worst cooks can’t screw up too badly-and brooded my way through them.

  I was beginning to see how things in the Lujack case fit together, and most of what I saw I didn’t like worth a damn. One element was particularly galling.

  Glickman and Eberhardt and I had been as wrong as you can be about Thomas Lujack: He had in fact run down and killed Frank Hanauer.

  It was the only explanation that accounted for everything that had happened since. His defense, the whole vague conspiracy theory, had been a smokescreen designed to obscure his guilt; and Eberhardt and I had not been hired to find a third witness, nor to prove him innocent, but on the thin hope that we’d come up with something in Pendarves’s background that Glickman could use in court to discredit his testimony. We’d been pawns, Eb and me. Or maybe fools was a better word-a pair of fools prancing and dancing for the benefit of a desperate knave.

  I figured it this way:

  Five or six years ago, the Lujack brothers had conspired with Rafael Vega to finance a large-scale coyote operation in Southern California. At Vega’s instigation, probably; he had the contacts on both sides of the border. For some reason, most likely plain greed, Hanauer had been left out of the deal. It had taken him five years to get a whiff of what his partners were into, and when he did, early in December, he’d taken it badly. On the evening of the fifth, after everyone else at Containers, Inc., was gone, Hanauer had confronted Thomas; maybe threatened him with exposure, maybe demanded a retroactive cut of the profits. In any case, it had been a heated exchange, and Hanauer had ended it by walking out. But Thomas had a violent temper, the kind that sometimes overwhelms reason; he’d rushed outside in Hanauer’s wake and turned his car into a lethal weapon. By the time he’d come to his senses, it was too late to do anything but frantically try to cover up. He abandoned his Caddy, came back to the factory on foot through the Bayshore Yards, and arrived on the scene with his hastily improvised story. When one of the witnesses, Dinsmore, opened up the possibility of a missing third witness, Thomas seized on that and made it a major design in his fabric of lies and obfuscations.

  The rest of it wasn’t as clear-cut-I didn’t have enough details yet-but I could see enough of it to make informed guesses about the gaps. The impulsive and very public killing of Hanauer was one major catalyst. There had to be another too, and judging from what Teresa Melendez had told me, it was that the coyote operation had recently started to break down. Any number of things could be responsible for that: greed, internal screwups, an informant, an INS or Mexican government spy. Whatever the reason, the feds were getting close to busting it wide open. And the Lujacks and Vega knew it.

  Taken together, those two factors had created a pressure-cooker situation. Coleman, the nervous Nellie, would seem the most likely to break down first under the strain; in fact he was the coolest and deadliest of the lot. El jefe. Instead it was Thomas, a bundle of nerves under his casual facade, who had cracked first. And what cracked him was the specter of a homicide charge upgraded to first-degree when his involvement with the coyotes was made public, and a certain conviction on the basis of Pendarves’s unimpeachable eyewitness testimony.

  Pendarves’s brush with death on Monday night, like the hit-and-run killing of Hanauer, was just what it appeared to be-a harebrained attempt by Thomas to save his own ass. Had he been stupid enough to use his wife’s BMW? It wouldn’t surprise me. In any case, the attempt had failed. But the dilemma Thomas faced was the same as if he’d succeeded: He needed an alibi. Same solution too: his brother. It was unlikely he’d planned it beforehand; and even if he had, he wouldn’t have told Coleman, the level-headed one, because Coleman wouldn’t have stood still for it. Thomas had gotten in touch with his brother immediately afterward and fessed up, and Coleman had agreed to supply the alibi.

  Only he didn’t do it out of brotherly love; he’d done it to buy some time. He sent Thomas home to his wife, then called Vega and arranged for the two of them to meet that same night. It was clear to Coleman by then that Thomas was cracking, becoming a serious threat to his safety. So Thomas had to die-quickly, before he could do any more damage, and in such a way that no suspicion would fall on either Coleman or Vega. Coleman had convinced Vega to do the job by offering him enough money to finance his flight to Mexico City.

  What kind of man plots the murder of his own brother? A cold-blooded, ruthless one, motivated by greed and self-preservation and maybe some deep-seated hatred for his weaker, handsomer sibling. A sociopath. I could see Coleman in that role with no difficulty at all.

  Questions: Why had they decided to frame Pendarves? Why not just kill Thomas and make his death look like an accident or suicide? Pendarves was a threat only to Thomas … or was he a threat to Coleman and Vega as well? I remembered Pendarves’s mention of Antonio Rivas on Monday night, and Eberhardt’s guess that Rivas not only knew about the Lujacks’ hiring of illegals but also about the coyote connection. Suppose Rivas had let something slip to Pendarves about the coyotes. And suppose Pendarves had gone on Tuesday to confront either Thomas or Coleman, threatened to tell the INS what he knew if Thomas ever tried to harm him again … maybe even attempted to blackmail one or the other of them. Pendarves wasn’t all that bright; it was the sort of angry, fear-motivated thing he might do. If he had, it provided Coleman with plenty of motive for wanting to get rid of him along with Thomas.

  Scenario: Coleman and Vega used some kind of ruse to lure Pendarves away from his house Tuesday night, and another ruse to lure Thomas out there. Vega then cracked Thomas on the head, drove the BMW into the empty garage, left the engine running and Thomas stretched out on the floor, and closed the garage door behind him. Exit Thomas, while Vega left the scene in his own car or via public transportation.

  What was still murky was what they’d done about Pendarves. Had they plotted to kill him too? If I was right about Pendarves’s actions, then it was a good bet they had. It eliminated two threats and screwed the frame down tight.

  They might have gotten away with it if I hadn’t shown up at Pendarves’s property that night. My investigation since had kept the pressure on; and I’d made it clear enough that I was getting close to the truth. So I had to die too. That was what the telephone conversation between Coleman and Vega last night had been about.

  The
big question now was where Coleman was. Had he, like Vega, decided some time ago to pack up and run? Probably, if he believed the feds were close to nailing him. It was in character for him to have salted away a large sum of cash as a safety valve; and the past week or so he could have been quietly liquidating assets. What argued against him having already fled was the fact that he’d sent Vega after me. Why bother to have me killed if he was planning to disappear as soon as last night? No, there was only one good reason he’d want me out of the way, the same reason he’d ordered the murder of his brother: to gain enough time to finish stockpiling cash and arranging to cover his tracks when he finally did run.

  Then why had he gone off with his wife last night? To give himself an alibi for the time of my death, just in case something went wrong? No, that didn’t add up; he could have just stayed home, surrounded himself with people. To stash his wife somewhere for a few days, so he’d be free to complete his preparations and then slip away quietly when he was ready? That made sense if he didn’t intend to take her with him, if she hadn’t been privy to any of his schemes, and particularly if she had money or jewelry that Coleman could appropriate. But where would he stash her? Someplace the two of them regularly frequented, maybe; some little getaway spot….

  A sense of urgency prodded me out of the coffee shop and into my car. I couldn’t afford to just hang loose and wait for Coleman to come back home. Once he found out Rafael Vega was in the hospital and I was still alive, he’d run and run fast; he wouldn’t have much choice. I had to find him before that happened. If it hadn’t already happened.

  I drove over to 280 and headed south, back to San Carlos and Sweet William Lane.

  * * * *

  There was a white Olds Cutlass parked in Eileen Lujack’s driveway. But nobody came to open the door when I rang the bell. An offshoot of the front walk led around the side of the house; I followed it through a rose garden, past another of those damn gnomes peering slyly from behind a bush. On the other side of the garden, along the rear, was a stone-floored patio; a swimming pool, covered now for the winter, occupied the far end and some molded-plastic outdoor furniture was arranged on the near side. Two women sat at one of the tables, drinking out of mugs and taking in the still-warmish afternoon sun. The one facing my way was Eileen Lujack.