Breakdown

Chapter 12

The male voice on the line said, “Containers, Inc. Good afternoon.” You can never be sure about voices on the telephone but it sounded like the tight-lipped guy I’d dealt with earlier.

“Containers, Inc.,” I repeated, roughening my own voice, making it a little deeper. “Some kind of business outfit, are you?”

“… Yes?”

“Teresa Melendez work there?”

“Yes, she does, but she’s not here today.”

“You know where I can reach her?”

“I suppose at her home. Who’s this, please?”

“Officer Walter Keene, San Francisco Police. Badge number seven-three-nine-nine-two.”

“The police?”

“That’s right. Mind telling me if Ms. Melendez is married?”

“Married? I don’t understand …”

“We’re holding a man who claims to be her husband. Assault and battery, drunk and disorderly. He busted up a bar in the Mission. He can’t hardly talk, he’s so sozzled; all we could get out of him is he’s married to this Teresa Melendez. He had your telephone number on a piece of paper in his pocket.”

“Oh,” the guy said. “Well, it might be her ex-husband. Is his name Arturo?”

“That’s it. She divorced him, huh?”

“Last year.”

“Well, he thinks he’s still married and he keeps yelling for her. What’s her address and telephone number?”

There was a silence.

“Hello?” I said. I didn’t have to work at sounding annoyed. “You there?”

“Yes. I’m not sure I ought to give out that information….”

“This is the police department, for Christ’s sake. What’s your name, mister?”

That convinced him; citizens don’t like angry-sounding cops to have their names. He cleared his throat and said meekly, “If you’ll hold the line just a minute …”

“Hurry it up, all right?”

He went away. The phone booth smelled of somebody’s cheap cigar; I opened the door all the way. This was a dark, Western-style neighborhood tavern on Geneva, not far off Mission, that wasn’t doing much business at four o’clock on a rainy workday afternoon. Half a dozen customers hunched like sullen vultures over the bar and the jukebox was silent. I’d come in here to make the call because car phones sound like just what they are-they don’t filter out traffic noises- and everybody knows police vehicles aren’t equipped with cellular phones. If you’re going to run a bluff, you’d better run a good one.

It was a minute or so before the guy came back on. “Officer Keene?” I grunted, and he said, “Sorry to be so long. Teresa Melendez lives at eight-oh-six Atlanta Street in Daly City. Her telephone number …” and he went on to give me that.

“Got it,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Glad to be of help, officer.”

He was a good citizen, he was.

* * * *

In the car I called Harry Fletcher at the Department of Motor Vehicles and asked him to run Teresa Melendez’s name through the computer, let me know what kind of car she drove and its license number. I could have called Harry in the first place, after I’d determined that she wasn’t listed in the San Francisco phone book (which includes Daly City) under either Teresa or T. Melendez; but for all I knew there were fifty Teresa Melendezes living in the Bay Area. Even if there were only two or three, it would have taken too much time to sift out the right one.

I asked Harry to get me the same information on Rafael Vega’s vehicle. If Vega was shacked up with Teresa Melendez, his car would be somewhere in the vicinity of her home; and if I spotted it, then I’d know for sure without having to knock on her door blind.

* * * *

It was Four Forty when I turned off Industrial Way into the parking lot at Containers, Inc. Dusk was already settling, like thick soot drifting down through gray water, and the outside lights-widely spaced sodium-vapor arcs on metal poles-were on. When it got to be full dark, the arcs would put a greenish tinge on the night and create pockets of deep shadow where the light didn’t quite reach.

I drove slowly past the parked cars. I had no idea what kind Coleman Lujack drove, but whatever it was, it figured to be expensive. There was only one expensive model slotted among the compacts and junkers-a new Chrysler Imperial- and that was his, all right. It had a personalized license plate that readCOLE L.

I backed into a space near it, midway between two of the sodium-vapor lights. From there I could watch the office entrance, but I was in shadows and at enough of an off angle so that the staff inside couldn’t see me from their desks. I maneuvered myself into a comfortable position and settled down to wait.

After ten minutes the mobile phone interrupted the monotonous beat of the rain. Harry Fletcher. Teresa Melendez, he said, drove a five-year-old Honda Civic, license number 1BTQ 176; the vehicle registered to Rafael Vega was a Buick Skylark, vintage 1987, license number 1MXX 989. My memory isn’t what it once was, so I wrote all of that down in my notebook.

A little after five, people began to file out of both the office and the factory. None of them was Coleman Lujack. I spied the tight-lipped guy but he didn’t notice me; his transportation was on the opposite side of the lot. I got glances from a couple of the workers who passed near my car, but they weren’t interested enough to ask me what I was doing there. Hard rain and long workdays dampen curiosity as well as spirits.

The lot was mostly empty by five thirty-just Coleman’s Imperial and three other cars. It was cold in my clunker by then, with the wind and dampness seeping in through cracks around the wired-shut passenger door, and I was cramped and getting hungry and running out of patience. Come on, Coleman, I thought. Shag ass. Don’t you have a hot toddy or something to go home to?

If he did he wasn’t in a hurry to get it. It was almost six before he finally showed. He was wrapped in a gray trench coat and carrying an umbrella that he left furled as he crossed the lot; the rain had let up into a fine mist. He was one of those people who look straight ahead when they walk, as if they’re peering down the length of a piece of three-inch pipe, so he didn’t see me until he was at the door of his Chrysler and I was already out of my car. Then he came to stiff attention and stared as I approached him, his head making little involuntary bobbing movements, like a bird watching an oncoming cat.

“What are you doing here?” he said. He sounded nervous and put out, with an undercurrent of something that might have been fear.

“Waiting for you.”

“Why? We don’t have anything to discuss. If we had I would have seen you earlier.”

“There are some questions I want to ask you.”

“What questions?”

“Why don’t we go inside? Or sit in your car where it’s dry?”

“No,” he said, “I can’t take the time. I have an appointment.”

“It won’t take long.”

He hesitated, as if weighing the idea, then shook his head and bent to unlock the driver’s door.

“Rafael Vega,” I said. “Illegal aliens. Coyotes.”

His reaction was like watching a piece of badly edited film: freeze frame for three or four seconds, followed by jerky action in which he finished the unlocking process and yanked the door open. He said without looking at me, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Okay. Try this: Nick Pendarves didn’t kill your brother.”

“Nonsense.”

“Is it, Mr. Lujack?”

I thought for a second that he was going to dive into the car to avoid both me and the issues I’d just raised; but he didn’t do it. He straightened slowly, faced me again. The greenish effect of the nearest arc light gave his skin an unhealthy cast.

He said, “Of course Pendarves is guilty. All the evidence-”

“Evidence can be faked.”

“You have proof that it was?”

“Not yet. But I’m working on it.”

“On whose authority?”

I didn’t answer that.

“I see,” he said. “So I suppose you expect me to pay you.”

I didn’t answer that either.

“How long will it take? Another month or two-or six? And at what, two or three hundred dollars a day?”

I had my hands in my overcoat pockets and I kept them there so I wouldn’t be tempted to hit him. I hurt him with my eyes, though; I must have because he winced and fastened his own gaze on my mouth.

“Why are you afraid of the truth, Mr. Lujack?”

“I’m not afraid of the truth. I know the truth.”

“Do you? All right, who killed Frank Hanauer? Your brother?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, Pendarves didn’t do it. So who did?”

“I doubt if we’ll ever know, now.”

“Because Thomas is dead? That doesn’t necessarily follow. Don’t you want his name cleared?”

“If possible, yes. But you haven’t been able to do it in a month and neither have the police.”

“I still can, if you cooperate.”

“I’ve given you all the cooperation I’m going to.”

“It wouldn’t be the INS you’re worried about, would it?”

“Damn the INS,” he said. “All I’m worried about is my sanity. I’ve taken all the grief and anguish I can stand; so has Tom’s widow. As far as we’re concerned, it’s over now, finished. Let the dead alone and the living go on living.”

Nice little kiss-off speech-emotional, forceful, sincere. I didn’t buy a word of it. But there was nothing I could do about it. I just stood there while he folded himself into the front seat, looked up at me long enough to say, “Please don’t bother me or Eileen again. If you do …” Then he slammed the door, as if to emphasize the implied threat. I heard the lock click an instant before he ground the starter.

I backed off a couple of steps, holding my anger in check, as he drove off. He thought he’d handled me just right. He thought this was the end of my nosing around in his and his brother’s private affairs. He thought that whatever he was hiding was going to stay hidden.

He thought wrong.

* * * *

According to my map, Atlanta Street was in a narrow little section of Daly City flanked by the western slopes of the San Bruno Mountains, Colma’s Olivet Memorial Park and Serbian Cemetery, and the Cypress Hills Golf Course. For some reason known only to its developers, there being no body of water within miles, most of the streets had been given nautical-type names: Harbor, Dockside, Windjammer, Frigate, Pirate Cove. Maybe it had to do with the fact that the section resembled a short peninsula jutting out from the Daly City mainland. More likely, the names had nothing to do with anything except fledgling cleverness. Just another variety of cute kitsch, after the fashion of the gnomes in Eileen Lujack’s gardens.

As the crow flies, only a few miles separated Teresa Melendez’s home from Containers, Inc. But the crow would have had to fly straight up over the San Brunos, just as I had to drive up over them on Guadalupe Canyon Parkway, and that increased the distance considerably. Guadalupe Canyon was where the end of the notorious car chase in Bullitt was filmed-the one that inspired the endless, mindless succession of TV-show car chases and cinematic demolition derbies that continue to offend the senses. But that was more than twenty years ago, before the road underwent improvements and its daily traffic load was still light. Nowadays they couldn’t have closed it off for a couple of days as they did back then; it had become a well-traveled commuter thoroughfare and the animals in the rush-hour zoo would have rioted at the inconvenience.

I turned off Guadalupe onto Orange Street, made a wrong turn, and discovered that most of the little peninsula-the part with the nautical street names-was hidden away behind a high rustic retaining wall that extended east-west for several blocks. The only through street had a guardhouse and guard at the entrance, and when I passed by I could see acres of trailers on landscaped lots. So the landlocked peninsula was mostly a fancy trailer park bounded by brown hillsides and a couple of cemeteries and made up of streets called Frigate and Pirate Cove. I didn’t even try to figure it out. There are some things that defy deductive reasoning.

I found Atlanta Street finally; it dead-ended at the street along which the retaining wall ran. Ninety-eight percent of the residences in this part were the standard Daly City variety dubbed “little boxes” by Malvina Reynolds-squarish row houses standing shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors, built close to the sidewalk, garage below and living quarters above, narrow entranceways between with staircases leading up to the front doors. The other two percent, scattered here and there, were newish detached houses and older cottage-style dwellings that looked uncomfortably out of place, like liberals that had wandered by mistake into a stadium full of right-wing fundamentalists. Eight-oh-six Atlanta turned out to be one of the cottages, small and white-frame and not too well kept up, with a little front garden behind a low fence and a carport instead of a garage on one side. Lights burned behind drawn curtains, and there was one vehicle parked under the carport, so somebody was home.

The parked car was a brownish compact. I couldn’t make out the license plate as I drove past, but I was pretty sure the make was Honda and the model Civic. The curb in front was empty; so were the curb spaces before another cottage on one flank and row houses on the other. An empty white van waited at an angle across the way; it was the only street-parked vehicle in the immediate vicinity.

I circled the next block and came back on Atlanta. No sign of Rafael Vega’s Buick anywhere along there. I tried the cross streets, taking it slow. That didn’t buy me anything either.

So maybe I was wrong about Vega and Teresa Melendez.

And maybe I was right and he was out buying groceries or liquor or condoms, or doing any one of a hundred other things.

I drove over to Mission and stopped at the first restaurant I saw, a Mexican place that specialized in Yucatan dishes. I ate a burrito with prawns and mushrooms and cilantro; I drank three cups of coffee; I sat and thought about things and didn’t have any brainstorms. At eight o’clock I put myself back in the car and returned to Atlanta Street.

The lights were still on in Teresa Melendez’s cottage. The Honda Civic was still parked under the carport. And there still wasn’t any sign of Rafael Vega or his Buick Skylark.

Behind the parked van was curb room for another car, as well as some shadow from an overhanging pepper tree. I thought I could sit there for a while without attracting attention. I made a U-turn, parked, drifted low on the seat, and waited.

Seconds crawled and minutes crept, the way they had in the parking lot at Containers, Inc., the way they always do on a stakeout. God, how I hated stakeouts-short or long, it didn’t make any difference. The passive waiting, the boredom, the slow, slow passage of dead time. How many did this make in the past thirty-odd years? How many empty, wasted, lost hours? Too damn many. The physical discomfort was also becoming less tolerable, especially on nights like this, with the rain stopping and starting, stopping and starting, and the wind and the cold sneaking into the car and conspiring to numb my feet. Nights like this, I felt every one of my years. Nights like this, I understood why old men wrap themselves in sweaters and shawls and then sit close to heaters, stoves, blazing fires.

Nine o’clock. Nothing happened at 806, except that the light in the front window went out. But there was still a light on at the rear; I could see the faint glow of it against the wet dark.

If he was out somewhere and coming back, I thought, wouldn’t she put the front porch light on for him? No, hell, not necessarily … not if he was going to park under the carport too and go in through the rear door. For all I knew, that glow over there was theback porch light.

Nine thirty. And that was all I could take-of the cold, of the waiting, of the boredom. Besides, the later it got and the longer I sat here, the shorter the odds that somebody would notice me and call the cops. I wasn’t even sure why I’d sat here this long, put myself through the discomfort. If Vega was shacking up with Teresa Melendez, what did it matter if I braced him tomorrow instead of tonight? I’d put almost a month into this investigation; another few hours hardly mattered much.

I wondered if I was becoming an obsessive-compulsive where my work was concerned. I’d always had that tendency, always been able to control it before it got out of hand. But now? The earthquake had something to do with intensifying it, but mostly the cause was those three desperate months in the mountain cabin. Another little legacy of change. And something else for me to worry about in my spare time.

* * * *

I made myself go home, instead of out to Taraval and the Hideaway. It would have been after ten by the time I got there, and some of the regulars would already have left. If I was ever going to find out anything from them, which at this point seemed unlikely, it wouldn’t be tonight.

There was one message waiting for me. From Eileen Lujack. She said she’d decided to call me because she was going to spend the evening with a friend. She said my home number was on the business card I’d given her, as if she were telling me something I didn’t know. She said, “I thought about what you said today and I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to keep investigating. I really don’t. I think the best thing for everybody is if we just let the dead alone and the living go on living.”

Coleman Lujack’s phrase, word for word.

* * * *