Breakdown

Chapter 13

The San Francisco branch of the Immigration and Naturalization Service is downtown on Sansome, in the U.S. Customs complex. I got there at nine thirty on Friday morning, found the office open for business, and talked my way into an audience with a deputy district director named Clement Orloff.

Orloff was young, officious, conservative in attitude and appearance, and a hard-line INS loyalist. He didn’t want to tell me anything until I told him exactly what I was working on, complete with names and addresses. I said I wasn’t there to turn anybody in; I said I needed more time and information before I could make any direct accusations; I said I wasn’t trying to hide anything or I wouldn’t have come to see him in the first place, would I? We argued a little, and I stonewalled him, and finally his zealousness got the better of him and he agreed to answer my questions. But I’ll be damned if he didn’t insist on taping the conversation.

“Tell me about the coyotes,” I said.

“Smugglers,” Orloff said promptly. “Also known as ‘travel agents.’ Scum, as far as we’re concerned. They prey on their own kind.”

“Smuggle illegals across the border, is that it?”

“No. To U.S. points after the illegals have found their way across.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“For a fee, the coyotes arrange and provide transportation from border areas to cities up north-areas where other illegals congregate and where they can find work.”

“The coyotes operate down around San Diego, then?”

“Thick as flies,” Orloff said. “The illegals need them to get past the San Onofre checkpoint.”

“What’s that?”

“The last Border Patrol checkpoint, on Highway Five sixty-seven miles from the border-our last defense against illegal immigration into Southern California. If an illegal gets safely past San Onofre, there’s not much to stop him from reaching the L.A. area and then migrating elsewhere.”

“Are the coyotes organized?”

“Some are, some aren’t.”

“But there are large rings?”

“Certainly.”

“Big money in that type of smuggling, right?”

“Lord, yes. Illegals come over the border in droves. We caught well over a million last year, and that is no more than twenty-five percent of the estimated total influx. Most of the ones that are caught and sent back try again until they make it.”

“Looking for the promised land,” I said.

“Mmm. Of course, IRCA has been a major deterrent. Otherwise the situation would be much worse.”

“IRCA. That’s the immigration reform law passed a few years ago?”

“Yes. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of ‘Eighty-Six. It provides amnesty for qualified families, and penalizes employers for hiring illegals and requires them to file documents verifying that their foreign workers are authorized to be in this country. An excellent program.”

“Seems to me I’ve heard rumblings that it isn’t working as well as expected.”

“Of course it’s working,” Orloff said defensively. “More than four million illegals have achieved amnesty so far. But that’s not enough for La Raza Centra Legal and the other liberal groups.”

“What’s their position?”

“Oh, that IRCA hasn’t eliminated the basic economic incentive for immigrants to come here, and that it hasn’t really slowed the influx of illegals because a lot of the amnesty people are providing an established network to bring in impoverished friends and relatives. They want all sorts of additional reforms.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“Doesn’t it, though.”

I was not about to argue the point with him; trying to argue with a loyal bureaucrat is a job for other zealots and masochists. I said, “Let’s get back to the coyotes. How do they operate?”

“Well, the organized rings have brokers who work both sides of the border. Mexicans with valid U.S. visas that allow them to travel back and forth undisturbed. On U.S. soil they congregate where the illegals do after crossing. In San Ysidro, for instance, there’s a supermarket ten blocks from the border that is a coyote hotbed.”

“If you know about these places, why can’t you shut them down?”

“We try, God knows. Agents from Brown Field-that’s the main Border Patrol station down there-raid them periodically. And undercover agents from our antismuggling unit do what they can to infiltrate the gangs. But there are too many illegals, too many coyotes, and too few of our people., .” He made a frustrated gesture.

I asked, “What happens once the deals are set and money changes hands?”

“The illegals are loaded into cabs and driven to safe areas,” Orloff said. “Then they’re transferred to private vehicles-trucks of different sizes, passenger cars. The coyotes pack them in like sardines for the runs north. Illegals have been found under the hood and crammed into the trunk, sucking on hoses for air. More than a few have died en route.”

Christ. “What’s the going rate per person?”

“Depends on the final destination. Seventy-five dollars to Santa Ana, one hundred dollars to L.A. Some of the freelance coyotes charge more. They’re even worse scum; they’ve been known to abandon passengers after being paid.”

“The organized rings need financing to get started, don’t they? So they can hire brokers and drivers, buy vehicles if needed?”

“That’s right.”

“Where does the money come from? Strictly from Mexican interests, or are there Anglos who play dark angels?”

“There are Anglos,” Orloff said. Not without reluctance, as if he didn’t like to admit that some of his own countrymen could also be scum. “Is that the reason you’re here? You know someone, an Anglo, who might be involved with the coyotes?”

“Maybe, maybe not. As I told you, I’m not sure of my facts just yet.”

“If you have knowledge of felony activity involving the federal government, it’s your duty-”

“Let’s not start that again, Mr. Orloff. I know my duty- to the federal government, and to my profession, my clients, and myself. When there’s anything definite to report, I’ll report it. You have my word on that.”

“I hope your word is your bond,” he said sententiously, and made a little production of switching off his tape recorder.

We both got on our feet. He didn’t offer to shake hands before I went out; neither did I. Each of us had our reason. He didn’t want to touch a private detective of questionable moral fiber and possible liberal cant. I didn’t want to touch an asshole.

* * * *

The sky had quit its copious leaking during the night, and this new day wasn’t as gray or damp as the past several had been. There were patches of blue here and there in the overcast, through which a pale winter sun kept trying to shine. Hallelujah. The wind was still gusty and chill, but then you couldn’t expect too much sudden improvement in the weather at this time of year. I took advantage of the dry air and pale sun by walking over to the building where Bates and Carpenter had its offices, three blocks from the INS encampment. I thought that since I was in the neighborhood, I’d take a little of my time and a little of Kerry’s to see how she was bearing up.

But she hadn’t come in today. Her secretary, Ellen Stilwell, didn’t know exactly why-just that Kerry had called to say she had some “personal business” to attend to.

“Did she mention her mother?” I asked.

“No. No, she didn’t.”

Downstairs in the lobby I shut myself inside a public telephone booth and called Kerry’s home number. The line burred to itself eight or nine times, and I was about to hang up when Cybil’s frail voice said, “Hello?”

I cleared my throat. “May I speak to Kerry, please.”

“… She’s at work.”

“Oh, of course. What time did she-”

“Who is this?”

I said my name. “Cybil, I hope you’re feeling-”

She hung up on me. Fast and hard.

* * * *

It was foggy in Daly City. But then, it is almost always foggy in Daly City, no matter what the weather happens to be in San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area. Something to do with proximity to the ocean and wind currents. Wisps of the stuff crawled along the rooflines of Teresa Melendez’s white-frame cottage, blew down into the empty carport. The Honda Civic wasn’t anywhere on the street either. Nor was Rafael Vega’s Buick Skylark.

Another impasse.

Well?

* * * *

Eberhardt was at his desk when I came into the office, reading what looked to be magazine tear sheets with an expression of mildly horrified fascination. He put the sheets down in a hurry when he saw me, as if I’d caught him doing something not quite wholesome.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s you.”

“Who’d you think it might be? The vice squad?”

“Huh?”

“What’ve you got there? Dirty pictures?”

“This? Nah.”

“What then? You were pretty engrossed.”

“Yeah, well … never mind. Where you been all morning?”

“Working. How about you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Waiting for a call right now. You talk to Glickman?”

“No. Did you?”

“Little while ago. One guess what he had to say.”

“Coleman Lujack fired him, and us by extension.”

“Right. We’re to keep our noses out of Coleman’s business from now on. That’s a direct quote from Coleman.”

“The hell with him. You have a chance to do much digging into his finances yet?”

“Some. Provocative stuff but none of it conclusive.”

“Same here. Provocative and nasty.”

I told him about my talks with Coleman and Paco Vega, my so-far uncorroborated guess about Rafael Vega and Teresa Melendez, and what I’d learned from Orloff about the coyotes. He agreed that it was a good bet the Lujacks had gotten themselves mixed up in the “travel agenting” of illegal aliens, probably through Vega and his contacts, and probably by financing one of the coyote rings. Eb’s check on Coleman had turned up a situation parallel to his brother’s: He, too, appeared to be living a little too high off the hog for his share of the Containers, Inc., profits. At a conservative guess, each of them had to be raking in around fifty thousand dollars annually as their share of the scam.

“But there’s no hard proof of any of it,” Eberhardt said. “And we still don’t know who killed Hanauer and why. And if you’re right about Thomas, who killed him and why.”

“I’ll lay you odds Coleman and Vega had a hand in at least one of those murders and probably both.”

“His own brother?”

“Why not? Cain killed Abel, didn’t he?”

“Who? Oh, the Bible … yeah.”

“Vega’s the key,” I said. “Find him, we find the answers and the proof we need.”

“He’s in Mexico by now. Why else would he have disappeared?”

“I’m not so sure, Eb. I think maybe he’s still around.”

“Because of what Paco said about him shacking up with some bimbo? Hell, the kid could be wrong. So could you about Teresa Melendez.”

“I’ll find out by tonight, one way or another.”

“You intend to keep working on this, huh? Even though we’ve been canned?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

He gave me his long-suffering look. “We’re on shaky ground and you know it. Coleman and the widow could make big trouble for us-harassment, invasion of privacy. We could lose our licenses.”

“Not if we bust the whole thing wide open.”

“Big if. I say play it smart and back off. Turn what we have over to that INS guy-what’s his name, Orloff? — and let him handle it.”

“No,” I said.

“Why the hell not?”

“We were hired to prove Thomas didn’t kill his partner. We haven’t proved it yet.”

“Ahh. His hands were dirty whether he ran Hanauer down or not. Just as dirty as Coleman’s and Vega’s. What difference does it make if he was guilty of homicide or not?”

“It makes a difference,” I said. “You want to give up on the case, go ahead. But I’m going to see it through.”

He shook his head. “You are one stubborn wop, you know that?”

“So you keep telling me. Anything new on Pendarves?”

“Well, he’s not hiding out at Antonio Rivas’s place, I can tell you that. There wouldn’t be room. In addition to Rivas there’s his wife, three kids, mother-in-law, and pregnant seventeen-year-old unmarried niece-all in five rooms on Bryant Street.”

“What about the information Rivas was holding back?”

“I couldn’t get it out of him. I doubt if has anything to do with Pendarves anyway.”

“The coyote angle?”

“That’s my guess,” he said. “Rivas got a whiff of it, but he’s not talking on account of he’s afraid of Vega.”

I asked if he’d checked with the Hall of Justice for an update on the police search for Pendarves. He had, and there were no new developments. And no leads at all on how Pendarves might have gotten out of the city and the Bay Area, if he had gotten out. One of the people they’d contacted was Pendarves’s ex-wife, Jenna, in Chico; her comment was that she hadn’t had any dealings with him since the divorce and that she hoped he rotted in hell. Her sister was even more outspoken. If he showed up around there, she said, she’d blow his head off with her shotgun.

“Maybe somebody already did,” I said. “Blow his head off, I mean.”

“Are you back on that kick again?”

“If he isn’t dead-dead since last Tuesday night-why hasn’t there been a trace of him since?”

“I can think of ten reasons-”

His telephone bell cut him off and put an end to the argument.

While he took the call I glanced through my mail, discarded all but a small check I’d been expecting, and then dealt with my one phone message. It was from Barney Rivera, an old friend and chief claims adjuster for Great Western Insurance’s local office. Periodically he tossed bones our way, little ones that the company’s small investigative staff was too busy to bury on its own, and I caught another one when I called him back-a home-accident claim in which fraud was a possibility.

As I hung up I saw that Eberhardt was reading the magazine tear sheets again, with the same expression of mild horror that he’d worn earlier. I said, “What is that you keep reading?”

He blinked, put the sheets down. There was a silence; then he sighed and said, “Article from some magazine. Bobbie Jean found it.”

“Article about what?”

“She thinks it’s the funniest thing she ever read.” He scowled. “I don’t think it’s a damn bit funny,” he said.

“Well, what’s it about?”

“Private parts.”

“… Say that again?”

“You heard me. Private parts.”

“Whose private parts?”

“Men’s. The, uh, dingus.”

“Dingus,” I said.

“Yeah. You think it’s possible for a guy to break it?”

“Break it?”

“His dingus. You think it could happen?”

“What do you mean, break it?”

“Just what I said. You know what ‘break’ means.”

“Impotency? Is that what you’re-”

“No, goddamn it. Break it. Fracture it like a bone.”

I stared at him “You mean while it’s erect?”

“No, while it’s dangling like a piece of linguine! Sure I mean while it’s erect!”

“I don’t believe we’re having this conversation,” I said.

“All right then, forget it. Just forget it.”

Neither of us said anything for a time. Eberhardt sat fiddling with one of his pipes, his shaggy brows pulled down in a glower. His face was red.

“Eb,” I said finally, “let me see the article.” He didn’t object, so I got up and went over and read it standing beside his desk.

The title was “You Broke YourWhat?” and it was written in a wryly humorous style. But it contained quite a few anatomical facts and medical case histories that made it seem all too authentic. It said that in the penis there are two tubelike masses of tissue called the corpora cavernosa, which become filled with blood during sexual arousal and thus cause an erection. Each of these tubes is covered with a fibrous sheath that stretches thin-so thin that in certain freak instances it can be made to rupture. Also at danger, in even rarer cases, are the outer sheath of the penis and the urethra.

There have been close to two hundred documented cases of penile fracture, the article said. In about half of them, the fracture occurred during intercourse or attempted intercourse — a freak accident, what the French call a faux pas de coit, in which the man either “missed the introitus” and hit a solid portion of his partner’s anatomy, or rammed his member into a mattress or other object disassociated from his partner, or performed so vigorously and “in such an unusual position” that the penis literally cracked as if it were made of glass. In other reported cases, the victim had caused fracture by means of careless masturbation, catching his organ in his pajamas, falling out of a tree, and swatting his erect member with his hand so he wouldn’t have to get out of bed and urinate. One man had even done the damage, so the article said, in a corral on a horse ranch; facts on this case history were mercifully vague.

On the one hand, all of this was painful to read about and to contemplate; on the other hand, it was pretty amusing stuff and I couldn’t help smiling a little and chuckling a couple of times. This only increased Eberhardt’s glower. When I finished reading and handed the tear sheets back to him, he said, “You think it’s funny too, huh?”

“No, not really. Still, some of those cases …”

“Yeah, I know. How the hell could you miss the target? Or ram your dingus into the mattress?”

“I guess it all depends on the circumstances,” I said.

He quit scowling and gave me an anxious look instead. “You don’t think it’s all a hoax? You think it could really happen?”

“Sounds plausible to me.”

“Jeez,” he said. Then he said, “What do you suppose they do in a case like that?”

“Who?”

“Doctors. Don’t be dense.”

“How should I know?”

“Well, I mean, do they treat it like they would a busted arm? You know, put it in some kind of cast?”

The image that conjured up brought another chuckle out of me. “Sure,” I said, “a great big one. So the guy can impress his friends, have everybody sign it.”

“Ha ha,” he said sourly. “Big joke. How would you like it if it happened to you, wise guy?”

“I wouldn’t, but there’s not much chance it will. You worried it might happen to you?”

“Hell, no. What makes you think I’m worried?”

“You sound worried.”

“Bullshit. It’s just … I can’t think of anything more humiliating, that’s all. You’d never live it down if anybody found out. And what if the damage was permanent? What if you could never have sex again?”

“That’s a pretty sobering thought, all right.”

“Break your dingus,” he said. “What’ll we find out next?”

* * * *