Breakdown

Chapter 24

The older I get, the more it seems I’ve lived my life not in a linear fashion-day to day, year to year-but in blocks and scraps of time. These exist in my memory like an archipelago, some large islands, some small, each made up of a momentous event, a deep impression, a profound insight, a living nightmare. With each passing year, a few of the tinier islands sink and never resurface, and a few others become distorted as if by mist. The larger ones will be there to the end, waiting for me to inhabit them again, even if I never do.

The aftermath of the Lujack case was a series of little reefs and atolls, adjuncts to the one big island. All of them, unlike the island itself, would eventually sink or be shrouded in obscurity. But not for a while. Not for a long while, some of them.

* * * *

Douglas Mikan was arrested along with Pendarves and charged with harboring a fugitive and being an accessory in the slaying of Coleman Lujack. He collapsed while in custody and had to be hospitalized. Acute neurasthenia, the doctors said, compounded by fear-psychosis and guilt. Add another breakdown to the list.

I spoke to Paul Glickman about the charges against Douglas. Glickman said that given the extenuating circumstances, and the fragile state of Mikan’s mental health, it was doubtful that the DA’s office would move to bring him to trial. And even if they did prosecute, no jury would convict. Douglas Mikan, he said, would never see the inside of a prison.

But he was wrong. Douglas Mikan was already in prison, and he would stay there for the rest of his natural life. Solitary confinement, with no possibility of parole.

* * * *

Pendarves and Rafael Vega, fittingly enough, were held under guard in adjoining rooms in the prison wing at S.F. General. Made calm and rational by an antipsychotic drug, Pendarves signed a full confession. So did Vega, on the advice of his public defender, so he could cop to a second-degree murder charge.

I was privy to both confessions, thanks to Eberhardt’s influence at the Hall of Justice. It had all gone down pretty much as I’d surmised and as Pendarves had indicated at the Hideaway. Vega confirmed that part of Coleman Lujack’s plan had been to murder Pendarves that night at Stow Lake and then dispose of his body. Pendarves’s escape had prodded them into hurrying up their run-out preparations, with Coleman’s final destination being South America. They were afraid that if Pendarves were caught, and he spilled what he knew about the coyote connection, they would be detained pending a full investigation.

They had argued long and hard, Vega said, over the necessity of killing both Thomas and Pendarves; Vega hadn’t wanted any part of it at first. But the decision to kill me had evidently been made with little or no argument. One more murder didn’t matter much to either of them by then.

There are all kinds of crazies with guns.

* * * *

Thoughts while lying in bed waiting for sleep: Was I a potential crazy with a gun? Something of a loner, tendency to brood, given now to sudden black rages and monomaniacal pursuits and the breaking of laws I had once obeyed to the letter … I wasn’t all that different from Nick Pendarves and others like him. Did I have the capacity for the same terrible type of breakdown, like a poisonous seed growing in the new, dark side of me?

No. No. There is a line between change and collapse, self-awareness and self-delusion, monomania and psychosis, and it’s not such a fine or easy one to cross. Not for a man like me. I would never willfully harm an innocent person, under any circumstances. I have too much respect for life, too much empathy for the victims of wanton violence, too much love of justice and order. These are the things that make me who and what I am; they are too deeply rooted to ever be blighted, to ever allow the nurturing of an evil seed.

I had changed, no question of that. But no matter how profound the changes were, I would never break down.

* * * *

Kate Johnson survived her gunshot wound. I couldn’t bring myself to visit her in the hospital, but I did send flowers. They were not acknowledged.

* * * *

Ten days after Vega’s confession, INS field agents and members of the Border Patrol’s elite antismuggling unit, working in cooperation with the Mexican government, made a sweeping series of arrests that broke the back of the coyote operation financed by the Lujacks. Fifty-seven people on both sides of the border were taken into custody.

The ironic thing was, the INS had had only sketchy information on the ring until I came along and until Vega supplied the details. Their investigation, which had only just begun, would have taken months; and even then they might not have come up with enough hard evidence to convict the Lujacks. Coleman and Thomas had panicked prematurely. Done all that they’d done without any real justification.

The INS hadn’t broken them down, nor had anybody else including me. They had simply self-destructed.

* * * *

I did not go back to the Hideaway. I would no longer have been welcome. In my own way I had betrayed and deceived the regulars too, and such sins could never be forgiven. But the main reason was that I didn’t want to see it or its denizens again-the same reason a man might not want to walk through the rubble of a quake-collapsed building he had once frequented. Some places, some states of mind, can’t be reconstructed once they’ve been battered down. The Hideaway would never be the same for the regulars, so how could it be anything at all for me?

But I kept thinking about the ones who had been there that Sunday evening, Kate and Bob Johnson and Douglas Mikan in particular. I kept wondering if they would ever feel safe again.

* * * *

The night before Kerry’s birthday in early February, she and I had dinner together at my flat-our own private celebration. Her birthday, like Christmas, would be spent with her mother.

While we were eating Kerry said, “Cybil finally read the literature from Children of Grieving Parents. I talked her into it last night.”

“Well,” I said, pleased. “How did she react to it?”

“Skeptically. She’s still afraid. But she’ll think about it, if I know Cybil, and then she’ll want to talk about it some more. If I can just get her to see one of the volunteer parents …” Kerry sighed. “Nothing’s going to change before late spring at the earliest, I’m afraid.”

“But it will change. That’s the important thing.”

“Everything changes,” she said. “Including my building.”

“Your building?”

“It’s going condo.”

“… Are you sure?”

“Yep. On June first, unless I decide to make the other tenants hate me by trying to block it. They think it’s a great idea. I love my apartment but I don’t know if I love it enough to buy it, or even if I can afford the probable asking price. What if I can’t, and Cybil won’t go to a care facility after all? I’d have to find a new place and then move her and me both-”

“Hey,” I said, “don’t start fretting prematurely. It’ll all work out. Even if there are problems, we’ll get through them.”

“We?”

“You and me together. Look at what we’ve been through in the past. One crisis after another, and we’ve weathered them all. Care facilities and condos are a piece of cake.”

“Since when did you become such an optimist?”

“I’ve been an optimist,” I said, “ever since I fell in love with you.”

She fixed me with a long silent look. Then her face scrunched up and she burst into tears. Then, bawling and snuffling, she hurried off to the bathroom.

I’m damned if I know what I said to upset her.