Breakdown

Chapter 2

Before I ended my vigil on Pendarves’s house, I used the car phone to call Thomas Lujack’s home in the San Carlos hills. I wanted to hear what he had to say about tonight’s incident, and I wanted to alert him to the threats Pendarves had made. I also wanted to find out if he was there, because if he was, he couldn’t have tried to run Pendarves down. It would take a professional race-car driver to get from this part of San Francisco to his place in not much more than half an hour.

There was no answer.

I didn’t like that much, either.

* * * *

It was after ten when I got to my building in Pacific Heights. A crack in the front stoop was the only damage it had suffered in the earthquake; the landlord still hadn’t repaired it. Except for most of my collection of pulp magazines being dislodged from their shelves, and some broken crockery, my flat and personal possessions had come through all right too. The only real damage I’d had to deal with was at the office, where I’d been when the quake hit, and even that was pretty minor.

Tonight the flat had a barren, comfortless feel-the way the homes of some of the Hideaway’s disaffected must feel to them, I thought. Reaction to the mood I was in. And to the fact that the place needed cleaning, tidying … no, hell, what it needed was Kerry. What I needed was Kerry.

She hadn’t been here in ten days; I hadn’t been to her apartment in Diamond Heights since before Christmas. For the second straight year we hadn’t been able to spend the holidays together. Nor had we been able to spend a night together since Cybil’s arrival. We’d been to bed only twice in all that time-my saggy old bed on a pair of stolen afternoons. Momentary releases of tension, that was all they were, quick and passionless and almost painful. What made it worse was that they were the only things I’d been able to do for her since the twenty-first of November-the only things. I was on standby: waiting until I was needed.

I hung up my overcoat and cap, turned up the thermostat. It was cold in here; that damned January wind was sharp enough to penetrate steel. Into the bedroom then, where I keep the telephone and answering machine, to check for messages. There weren’t any. The bed looked as though it had been ransacked: I had not slept well the past few nights. I sat on the edge of it and punched out Eberhardt’s number.

I’d tried to call him on the car phone, but the line had been busy both times. It was free now and he answered on the third ring, with an un-Eberhardt-like lilt in his voice.

“Hello to you too,” I said. “Who’d you think it was? An obscene caller?”

“Ha ha,” he said. Eberhardt is my best friend as well as my partner, and the salt of the earth, but he has absolutely no sense of humor. He thinks the funniest man who ever lived is Bob Hope. “I just got through talking to Bobbie Jean; I thought she forgot something. What do you want this late?”

“Development on the Lujack case, finally. But I don’t like most of it and neither will you.” I told him about the alleged hit-and-run attempt, the fact that there had been no answer at Thomas’s house when I called.

“Hell,” he said, “none of that has to mean anything. Could’ve been a case of careless driving and Pendarves overreacted.”

“Sure. Or it could be Thomas is guilty as hell on both counts.”

“You call Glickman yet?”

Glickman was Paul Glickman, Thomas’s attorney-one of the better criminal lawyers in the Bay Area, and the man who had hired us to work as defense investigators. I said, “No. That can wait until morning. I’ll call him first thing and have him set up a meet with Thomas.”

“You don’t think Pendarves’ll do anything crazy tonight?”

“I doubt it. He was pretty sore, making threats, but he’s no hotheaded kid. Besides, everybody in the tavern heard him. He’d have to be a fool to try anything after that.”

“What kind of threats?”

“Nothing specific. Said he’d fix Thomas, that kind of thing.”

“Doesn’t sound too serious.”

“No. The name Rivas mean anything to you?”

“Rivas, Rivas … why?”

“Pendarves mentioned it. Some vague connection to the Lujack brothers.”

“… Familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”

“Somebody Pendarves works with at Roofco, maybe?”

“That’s it,” Eberhardt said. “Rivas, Antonio Rivas. I talked to him the first day I was out there.”

“Friend of Pendarves?”

“Just coworkers, according to Rivas.”

“So maybe he lied.”

“Why would he … oh, I get it. You think Rivas might be the third witness.”

“Possible, isn’t it?”

“Possible, sure. If there really was a third witness. But why would Pendarves cover up for a guy like Rivas?”

“You talked to him. What kind of guy is he?”

Silence on the line; Eberhardt was thinking about it, working his memory. “Friendly, outgoing,” he said at length. “Little dude in his twenties, been in this country three or four years, speaks broken English. Nothing in common with Pendarves that I can see.”

“They get along all right?”

“No gripes from Rivas. No love and kisses, either. Just two guys who work together, different as night and day.”

“Rivas wouldn’t be the hardcase type, would he?”

“No way. Why?”

“I was thinking Pendarves might try hiring somebody to do some strong-arm work on Thomas.”

“Forget it. Rivas’d be the last person for that.”

“Suppose he’s got a mean friend or relative?”

“I don’t see him as a go-between either.”

“Okay. I’m just shooting blind here. Have another talk with him tomorrow, see if you can find a connection. You can get to him when Pendarves isn’t around?”

“I can try. I doubt they eat lunch together.”

“I’m eating mine with Kerry tomorrow, but I should be back by one,” I said. “I’ll have Glickman set up the meet with Thomas for sometime after two.”

“Right.”

I drank a glass of low-fat milk and then tried to watch something on TV. My powers of concentration were nil tonight. Finally I took some calcium lactate, which Kerry had once told me was as effective as Nembutal in helping you sleep, and undressed and put the bedclothes more or less in order and got in among them.

And lay there in the dark, with my mind going clickety-clickety-clickety. The calcium lactate was no good tonight; about the only thing that would have worked was a blow on the head with a hammer.

I was aware of the ticking of the bedside clock, like a counterpoint to the wind. Time, passing time. More than ten months now since the end of my private taste of hell, when I had been kidnapped by a madman and chained to the wall of an isolated mountain cabin and left there to die slowly of starvation. I was mostly healed now; the last crippling anxiety attack had been almost three months ago, just after the earthquake, and I no longer seemed to constantly need people around me to ward off the fear of being trapped and alone. But there were scars, deep and disfiguring scars. I had been changed by my ordeal, profoundly and irrevocably. I had lost the virtue of patience, for one, and gained a capacity for sudden rage, sudden violence; I was capable of things that once I would have considered unethical, unthinkable. Such as the resolution I had brought to a case last May, up at Lake Tahoe. If the truth about that had come out, I would have lost my license and maybe my life. I’d been aware of this at the time but I had done it anyway. And would again, if I had it to do over.

Once I had known myself pretty well, known what I would do in just about any situation. Not anymore. There was a new, dark side to my personality that I did not know at all, and that for the rest of my life I would have to be on guard against….

Outside the wind was gathering strength. Making banshee noises as it rattled window glass, shook unseen objects. Pacific Heights is one of the city’s hillside neighborhoods, close to the ocean and the bay, and when the wind blows it blows strongest up here. Most nights I don’t mind it. Tonight, it added to my restlessness.

To keep from listening to it, I swathed my head in blankets and pillows. And to keep from thinking broody thoughts about myself, or about Kerry and her mother, I tried the subject of Eberhardt and Bobbie Jean Addison, his soon-to-be bride.

They had been seeing each other for more than a year now, seriously for eleven months. He’d first popped the question last May, and kept popping it until she finally relented. I was happy for both of them, because for both of them it was a good match. Not only did they love each other, they were perfectly suited in temperament and emotional needs. Eb had lived alone for years, since his divorce from his first wife, Dana, and hated every minute of his enforced bachelorhood; he was the kind of man who needed a wife and the illusion that he was “being taken care of.” Bobbie Jean had suffered through two bad marriages, had raised two daughters on her own, professed to be soured on matrimony, and seemed to enjoy her independence. In spite of that, she was the kind of woman who needed to prove to herself that she could make a relationship with a good man work; that she had not become selfish, closed off in her feelings, incapable of giving as well as receiving love.

They were planning an April wedding. Why April? I’d asked them. Neither had a satisfactory answer. They’d just decided on April, that was all-one of those mutual decisions two people make for no reason other than that it seems right to them. As if it had been divinely ordained. I didn’t believe in that theory of life and the universe, and yet there were things in my life, too, that seemed predetermined or inevitable- some right, others wrong, as if I were being manipulated by outside forces….

The hell with that. I threw another mental switch, rerouted my thoughts onto the Lujack case.

It was a strange one, all right. Full of complications and enigmas that seemed to defy rational explanation even after three weeks of both routine and creative investigation. The facts were these:

Thomas Lujack and his brother, Coleman, owned and operated a small factory off Bayshore Boulevard, just across the Daly City line. The factory-Containers, Inc.-manufactured a variety of cardboard and fiberboard cartons for industrial and commercial use. The two men had founded it in the early seventies, weathered a couple of rough years, and with the financial aid and marketing expertise of a man named Frank Hanauer, had gradually built it up into a successful operation that currently employed some thirty people full-time and grossed close to three million a year. The Lujacks each owned forty percent of Containers, Inc.; Hanauer, in return for his early investment, owned the other twenty percent.

According to everyone we’d talked to, the Lujacks and Hanauer got along fine: no personal or business rifts of any kind. Yet on the evening of Tuesday, December 5, Frank Hanauer had been deliberately run down and killed by a Cadillac Seville belonging to and allegedly driven by Thomas Lujack.

The two men had worked late that night, long past the company’s five o’clock closing, on the feasibility of opening a branch factory in Fresno. Coleman Lujack had stayed late, too, but only until six fifteen. When he left, his brother and Hanauer were the only ones on the premises. Both Lujacks swore that the work had gone smoothly, with not even a minor disagreement.

A little after seven o’clock, Hanauer had left the premises alone and set out on foot along Industrial Way, the dead-end street on which Containers, Inc., was located. That morning he’d left his car at an auto body shop a block away, to have a dent in the fender repaired; the shop was closed by that time, but because Hanauer had expected to work late, he’d made arrangements with the shop’s owner to leave the car locked outside. He had walked about a hundred yards when Thomas Lujack’s Caddy swung off the factory grounds, accelerated, veered into Hanauer when he tried to dodge out of the way, continued to the open end of the street at a high rate of speed, and disappeared east on Bayshore Boulevard.

There were two known witnesses to the hit-and-run-and maybe an unknown third. Industrial Way is just what its name implies, a street lined with a variety of small manufacturing companies and warehouses; none of the businesses operates at night, so at 7:00 P.M. the street is virtually deserted. On this particular Tuesday, however, the Lujacks and Frank Hanauer weren’t the only ones working late. An accountant named Allen Dinsmore, employed by Soltech, a solar-heating equipment company, was finishing up an overdue profit-and-loss statement. And Nick Pendarves, shop supervisor at a roofing supply outfit called Roofco, who had put in some overtime checking a late-arriving shipment of shingles, had just locked up and was about to get into his car.

The hit-and-run happened right in front of Roofco, less than fifty feet from where Pendarves was standing. It was dark, but there was a moon that night, and a streetlamp not far away; Pendarves claimed he’d had a clear look at the man driving the Caddy. It was Thomas Lujack, he said, and no mistake. He knew Thomas by sight, recognized him instantly. Allen Dinsmore could neither corroborate nor refute Pendarves’s ID. He had been more than seventy-five yards away, too far to tell much of anything about the driver.

Dinsmore did contribute one potentially important observation: After the car struck Hanauer and roared away, he saw Pendarves come running out to where Hanauer lay in the street; and he said he had an impression that there was another person standing near Pendarves’s car, someone who had also witnessed the hit-and-run. But he couldn’t be sure because of the distance, the unsure lighting, and the fact that it had all happened so fast; it might have been nothing more than a shadow. There was no sign of a third witness when he ran outside and joined Pendarves. And Pendarves had flatly denied that anyone had been with him on the Roofco lot.

It was Dinsmore who called the police. Two patrol cars and an Emergency Services ambulance arrived within fifteen minutes. Hanauer was beyond help; the Daly City coroner said later that he must have died instantly. The ambulance had been there about a minute when Thomas Lujack came hurrying on foot out of the Containers, Inc., yard-lured to the scene, he claimed, by the ambulance siren. He expressed amazement, dismay, bewilderment at the death of Hanauer and Pendarves’s accusation that he had been driving the car. He said he’d been in his office working since Hanauer’s departure; stated that as far as he knew, his Cadillac was still parked on the factory lot; admitted that yes, he’d heard the screeching tires and gunned engine a few minutes earlier but assumed it was just wild-riding kids. Why would he run down Frank Hanauer, for God’s sake? They’d been friends and business partners for close to twenty years.

The police had checked the Containers, Inc., lot and found Thomas’s Cadillac missing. It hadn’t taken them long to locate it, abandoned on Bayshore Boulevard less than a quarter mile from the entrance to Industrial Way. The right front fender was caved in, fresh blood and skin tissue and bone fragments adhering to the grille. The key was still in the ignition-a spare key, Thomas said, one he’d kept in a magnetized container behind the rear bumper. His other key was on his ring, and the container was no longer behind the bumper. Who knew he’d kept it there? Why, nobody except his wife and brother. But it was a common hiding place for a spare key; or maybe someone had seen him getting it at the factory one day a couple of weeks ago, when he’d misplaced his key ring. Somebody must be trying to frame him, he said … but he had no idea of who or why.

They didn’t believe him. Pendarves stood fast to his ID of Lujack as the Caddy’s driver; Thomas admitted to being the only person at the factory after Hanauer left; and there was the fact that the Caddy had been abandoned close by. The police theorized that Thomas had returned to Containers, Inc., on foot through the old railroad yards that paralleled Industrial Way to the east. He’d had plenty of time to do that, and to concoct his story on the way; and it being night and the area deserted, he could have managed it without being seen. The evidence was enough so that they’d arrested him on a charge of vehicular homicide.

He’d hired Paul Glickman, who convinced a judge to set a reasonable bail. Meanwhile, the police turned up no apparent motive for Thomas to have murdered Hanauer-but this was canceled out, as far as they were concerned, by the fact that Thomas had a violent temper and an arrest record: He had once been charged with aggravated assault in a restaurant dispute. The week after Christmas, the San Mateo County DA’s office decided to prosecute on a charge of second-degree homicide. The DA refused to plea-bargain, but Thomas said he wouldn’t have pled guilty to a reduced charge anyway because he was an innocent man. If and when the case came to trial, Glickman would defend him on that basis.

And that was where Eberhardt and I came in.

Our job was to a) prove Thomas Lujack’s innocence by finding out who had stolen his car and run down Hanauer, and why; or b) discredit Pendarves’s damning testimony by proving that he was an unreliable witness. In three weeks we hadn’t been able to do either. Dozens of interviews and background checks, and my nightly fishing trips at the Hideaway, had produced zero answers and zero leads.

No one seemed to have any motive for doing away with Frank Hanauer. He had been well liked by everybody; had never spoken of problems with Thomas or Coleman Lujack or anyone else at Containers, Inc. For all intents and purposes, he was as unlikely a candidate for murder as you could find.

Similarly, no one seemed to have the kind of grudge against Thomas that would lead to a murder frame. He was mostly well liked, despite his roughhouse temper; happily married and afflicted with no major vices. The only possible enemy we were able to turn up was the man he’d had the fight with in the restaurant. But that had happened five years ago; and the other party-a salesman-said he barely remembered the incident, and besides, he’d been in New York on a business trip on December 5.

There were no black marks against Nick Pendarves, either, unless you counted the fact that his wife had divorced him in 1984 for unspecified reasons, and refused to talk to us when we contacted her at her present address in Chico. He had worked for Roofco for twenty-three years and was considered a valued employee; he lived alone in his house on Rivera Street and had never had any problems with his neighbors; he spent part of almost every evening at the Hideaway, the only socializing of any kind that he indulged in. He had no close friends-no friends at all, apparently, except for other patrons of the tavern. He was a taciturn man, one who kept to himself for the most part and was not easy to know. But if nobody particularly liked him, nobody particularly disliked him either. We couldn’t find any reason why he would have lied in his positive ID of Thomas Lujack as the hit-and-run driver, or why he would lie about the presence of a third witness. Nor could we find even a mote of evidence to verify that there had been a third witness. None of the other Roofco employees had been given permission to work overtime that night, and Pendarves had been alone in the building when the last of his coworkers left. That seemed to rule out a Roofco employee as the ethereal witness; and the deserted nature of Industrial Way at 7:00 P.M. on a Tuesday night seemed to rule out a passerby or someone who had come for a personal rendezvous with Pendarves.

So there we were as of today, flat up against failure. And now a new and confusing wrinkle had been added-the alleged attempt on Pendarves’s life tonight.

If it had been a deliberate attempt, then who else but Thomas Lujack? He’d been increasingly nervous of late, fretting about the lack of results. Given his anxiety, and his temper, it was possible that he’d lost control tonight-as he’d allegedly lost control for some reason on the night of December 5-and set out to eliminate the one man who could assure his conviction.

And yet, was he screwy enough to have tried doing it with a car-a method that would point straight at him? I didn’t want to think so. But the fact was, I did not know enough about what went on inside the man, or about the motives behind Hanauer’s murder, to make a proper judgment.

There were two other alternatives: Somebody else had tried to run down Pendarves tonight; or it had been an accident, one of those crazy coincidences that happen sometimes, and Pendarves’s imagination had blown it up into something sinister. The first of the two made sense only if the somebody were acting on Thomas’s orders, somebody he paid to eliminate Pendarves; but where was the sense, looking at it from Lujack’s point of view, in premeditating a murder that would surely backfire on him, prejudice his defense, and probably convict him on two counts of vehicular homicide? The second alternative was much more likely. It was also the one I wanted it to be, because it negated an ugly twist in a case that was already too complicated and frustrating.

We’d have a better handle on that part of it tomorrow, after we found out what Thomas had to say and after I saw Pendarves again later on. If it was just a false alarm … well, that was fine. But in any event we were still smack up against a stone wall on the Hanauer killing.

If Lujack hadn’t run him down, then who had? And why?

* * * *