Breakdown

Chapter 16

You think you know, based on past experience, exactly how your mind and body will react to a certain set of stimuli — but you’re not always right. The subconscious has its own perversities. I thought that when I was alone in my flat the episode with Vega would trigger another anxiety attack, or at least an edgy and mostly sleepless night. I thought that Saturday, when it finally came, would be one of the now-rare bad days-and that I would have to spend part of it wiring myself back together again.

None of that happened. I soaked in a hot bath for an hour with no slippage of calm, I took some aspirin and nonprescription cold capsules, I went to bed and to sleep right away — such a deep, exhausted sleep that I neither dreamed nor woke up until an hour past dawn. And when I awoke I felt all right: a little shaky, my limbs full of aches and sharp pains, my chest tender and my breathing scratchy, but with my mind clear and my nerves at ease. I didn’t even have a runny nose from the wetting in the ocean.

I put myself through my normal routine of exercises, a half hour’s worth, taking it slow at first until cramped muscles relaxed and the stiffness and shakiness were gone. A shower and two cups of coffee used up another half hour. By eight thirty I was dressed and on my way out of there.

No more pussyfooting around, not after last night. Coleman Lujack and I were going to have it out.

* * * *

First stop: Containers, Inc. Coleman’s Imperial wasn’t on the lot; neither was anybody else’s car. The factory was shut down as usual for the weekend.

All right.

I drove back to 101 and headed south toward Burlingame.

* * * *

Just North of the airport exit, the mobile phone buzzed. When I picked up, Eberhardt’s voice said, “Yeah, I figured you’d be on the move already. Where are you?”

“Why?”

“I’m asking you, that’s why.” There was an edge to the words. “Where?”

“Down the Peninsula. On the way to see Coleman Lujack.”

“What for?”

“Ask him some questions.”

“About Rafael Vega, maybe?” he said.

“Among others. Why? Something about Vega?”

“You don’t know, huh?”

“No. What should I know?”

“You go to the Hideaway last night?”

“Yeah, I was there.”

“Anything happen? Say between ten and eleven?”

“Like what?”

“Like Vega, goddamn it. You have a run-in with him?”

“What’s this all about, Eb?”

“Vega’s in the hospital,” he said. “Found on Ocean Beach last night, half-drowned, with a concussion and a couple of compressed vertebrae in his neck. Somebody put in an anonymous call, told Emergency Services where to find him.”

“What’s his condition?”

“He’s alive. If he’s lucky he won’t be permanently paralyzed.”

“He do any talking?”

“No. Able but not willing.”

“Police find his car?”

“Not far away and nothing much in it. Don’t you want to know which part of the beach?”

“I can guess.”

“Yeah. You didn’t have anything to do with it, huh?”

“What would you do if I did?”

“Knock some sense into your head-that’s what I’d like to do. What happened out there?”

“I’m not going to talk about it on the phone, Eb.”

“Come over to my place, then.”

“No. Not now.”

“When?”

“Later. Later today.”

“What’re you up to? What do you want out of Coleman?”

“I told you-the answers to some questions.”

“You think he sicced Vega on you, is that it?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Listen, you rock-headed bastard, you do anything to him …”

“I’m not going to do anything to him. I’m just going to talk to him.”

“Like you talked to Vega last night?”

“I didn’t talk to Vega last night. I didn’t hurt him either.”

“But you were out there on the beach with him. You’re the one made the anonymous call.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What’s the matter with you lately?” Eberhardt said. “You used to play things by the book. Now you go around busting laws left and right. You want to lose your license again?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You still there?”

“I’m still here.”

“Well then talk to me, for Christ’s sake. Tell me the truth for a change. Every time we talk lately, you either lie through your teeth or futz around with half-truths. I’m your partner and your friend; I’m on your side. Don’t you know that?”

“I know it,” I said.

“Then tell me what the hell’s going on.”

“Later. After I talk to Coleman.”

“If it’s not too late by then.”

“It won’t be too late.”

“I’ll be home all day,” he said, and banged down the receiver at his end. Hard.

What’s the matter with you lately?

Rhetorical question, Eb, I thought. How can I explain it to you when I don’t fully understand it myself?

* * * *

Coleman Lujack’s house was a two-story mock Tudor just across the northwestern dividing line between Burlingame and exclusive Hillsborough. The fact that his was a Burlingame address probably saved him a couple of thousand dollars a year in property taxes, woodsy Hillsborough land being worth much more per acre than that of its neighbors.

Before I got out of the car I took Vega’s gun-a Charter Arms.38 Special-from the glove compartment and flipped open the gate. All five chambers were full. I emptied out two of the cartridges, rotated the cylinder until one empty chamber was under the hammer and the other next to it in the firing line; then I slipped the piece into my jacket pocket. I might need the threat of it, but I did not want to use it except as a last resort. The empty chambers were a buffer against another onslaught of black fury and sudden impulse. A man who doesn’t respect his weaknesses, new or old, is a damned fool.

I went up through a formal rock garden to the front porch. There was a burglar alarm system wired into the house; the tiny red warning light on a panel next to the door indicated it was switched on. I rang the bell anyway. Rang it two more times before I gave up and walked around to the driveway. At the garage I found a window to peer through. There was a car inside, but it wasn’t Coleman’s Imperial; it was a low-slung white foreign job. His wife’s probably.

I quit his property and began canvassing the neighbors, telling them it was urgent that I get in touch with Coleman. The third one I tried, an athletic young woman in jogging clothes who lived across the street, told me Coleman and his wife had gone off about six o’clock last evening. As far as she knew, they hadn’t returned.

“They took suitcases,” she said. “I happened to notice him putting them into the trunk of his car. So I guess they went away for the weekend or longer.”

“Would you have any idea where?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

I spoke to three other neighbors. None of them had any idea, either.

I wondered if Eileen Lujack did.

* * * *

She wasn’t at home. Or at least she didn’t answer the bell, even though I worked on it pretty good.

Out with one of her friends, probably, I thought. She wasn’t the type who would be comfortable alone, especially at such a painful time in her life. The question was how long she’d be gone-a few minutes, an hour or two, the whole day?

Back in the car, I rolled the window down and sat there waiting. The sky was clear down here, the day warmish for January; people were out in the yards of two of the neighboring houses, normal people doing normal Saturday morning things like gardening and tossing a football around. A couple of them began to pay attention to me after half an hour or so. It doesn’t take long for curiosity to turn into apprehension, and I wasn’t up to any hassle on a day when I was not one of the normal people myself. I gave Eileen Lujack another five minutes. When she still didn’t come, I went.

* * * *

There was some sun and blue sky in Daly City too, though it was fighting a losing battle with the fog. By mid-afternoon the area would be socked in again. On Atlanta Street, as on Sweet William Lane, people were outside taking advantage of the good weather while it lasted. Teresa Melendez wasn’t one of them, but at least she was home. Or her Honda Civic was anyway.

I parked across her driveway and went up and leaned on her doorbell. No response. But when I let up on the button I thought I heard steps inside; then the curtain in the adjacent window flicked a little and I had a glimpse of her face as she peered out. I pushed the bell again and said loudly, “You’d better talk to me, Teresa. Unless you want to talk to the police instead.”

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.

* * * *