Breakdown

Chapter 3

Tuesday was another gray, blustery day, with a steady drizzle thrown in for added discomfort. I awoke to it late, feeling dull and logy from less than half the sleep I needed, and I was still out of sorts when I got down to the office at nine thirty-as gray inside as the day itself. Not even the prospect of seeing Kerry for lunch cheered me much.

The office Eberhardt and I share is a big converted loft in a building on O’Farrell Street, not far off Van Ness. Before we took it over a few years ago, when we became partners, it had housed an art school whose owner had had a skylight installed. The skylight had shattered during the big quake. The world’s ugliest light fixture had also come crashing down, things had fallen off walls and desks, and cracks had spiderwebbed the ceiling. I had been there to see it all happen — alone in the office at four minutes past five that October evening, rinsing out the coffeepot in the alcove sink. If I’d been at my desk instead, the damn light fixture might have done me some damage, because it caromed off the desk and knocked my chair over.

As a San Francisco native I’ve been through a lot of quakes; but as soon as that one hit, with such jolting violence, I knew it was a bad one-maybe the Big One. My first thought had been for Kerry’s safety; I’d believed then that she was still at work on an upper floor in one of the untested new Financial District high rises. In fact she’d left early that day, had just entered her apartment, and hadn’t been hurt or even shaken up too badly. But it was a couple of chaotic hours before I found that out, and several more tense hours until I learned that Eberhardt and Bobbie Jean, who had been together in Marin County, had also survived unhurt.

There had been no structural damage to this building, so we were spared having to vacate and find new office space. Over the next couple of weeks, we had prodded our somewhat sleazy landlord into repairing the ceiling, putting in a new skylight and a new (and much less offensive) light fixture, and had otherwise gotten on with our business and our lives. But you don’t forget an experience or a tragedy of that magnitude. It hadn’t been the Big One after all, but it had given us all a bitter taste of what the Big One would be like.

Seismologists are now predicting a one-in-three likelihood of a 7.5 temblor on the Hayward Fault within the next thirty years, with a projected five thousand dead and forty billion dollars in damages. Those are frightening odds, grim figures. But what do you do in the face of them? Pack up and move away? There’s no place that is perfectly safe; natural disasters can happen anywhere. Besides, your chances of dying from a fall in your own bathtub are greater than dying in the worst earthquake; knowing that, how many people get rid of their bathtubs? What you do is to learn the lessons taught by this last quake, the Little Big One, and learn them well, and then put your trust in providence and the law of averages and go on without fear. A life lived in fear is no life at all….

On this January morning the office was cold and bleak, with the weight of the day pressing down against the rain-streaked skylight. I put on the steam heat, put water on to boil for coffee, and checked the answering machine. No messages. Then I called the law offices of Glickman and Crandall, on Pacific Avenue downtown. Paul Glickman wasn’t in yet but was expected within the hour. I left a message to have him return my call as soon as he arrived.

It took me thirty minutes to type a report and billing invoice on yesterday’s skip-trace. Eberhardt had treated himself to a New Year’s present of a small computer, but I’d held firm about not getting one for myself. In an age when detective work is dominated by electronic devices and young three-piecers specializing in high-tech industrial espionage and hostile corporate takeovers, I take a certain amount of pride in being a technophobic throwback. I specialize in old-fashioned, low-tech investigative work. I’ve never been able to fathom the inner workings of Big Business; and anything more mechanically complicated than an electric typewriter makes me nervous. I feel about computers the way aborigines once did about cameras: I’m afraid the damn things will try to steal my soul.

Even so, I might have succumbed to their timesaving lure by now if it weren’t for their users’ constant proselytizing. There is something about owning a computer that turns normal, even meek individuals-and Eberhardt was no different since he’d gotten his-into slavering zealots who will never rest until they’ve convinced you to become one of them. Not long ago, a guy I know called me a dinosaur because I don’t own a computer; and he got angry, actually angry, when I told him I had no intention of ever owning one … as if I’d said I had never been to church and was a budding Satanist besides. Computer technology: the New Religion. I would rather listen to a pack of Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to convert me to their brand of the Old Religion than I would to one computer disciple telling me in reverent terms how much his life had changed for the better since he’d gotten his Apple or Kay-Pro, and how happy I’d be if only I would renounce my heathen ways and come to worship at the electronic shrine.

It was ten fifteen, and I was making a telephone background check for another client, when Glickman called on the other line. I cut my conversation with the TRW credit people short, then spent five minutes giving Glickman a detailed account of what had happened last night.

He listened without interruption. Unlike some criminal attorneys, he was neither egocentric nor publicity-seeking; and he operated on the principle that other professionals knew their business as well as he knew his and would go about doing their jobs in the most effective ways possible. That made him easy to work with-a rarity among high-powered lawyers these days.

When I was done he asked, “Do you think Pendarves was telling the truth?”

“About the car almost running him down? Yes. There’s not much doubt he had a close shave.”

“But it could have been an accident.”

“Sure. It could also have been deliberate and somebody other than Thomas Lujack was driving the car. Pendarves admitted it was too dark to see clearly. Naming Lujack might have been an emotional response.”

“Pendarves isn’t normally an emotional man, is he?”

“No.”

“Is it likely, then, that he’ll follow through on his threats?”

“I’d say no but I can’t be sure. He’s a hard man to get a fix on.”

“I don’t want to go to the police if it can be avoided,” Glickman said, “especially if he didn’t report the near-miss. Our position is shaky enough without this kind of inflammatory thing getting into the record.”

“You’ll talk to Thomas right away?”

“As soon as I can reach him.”

“I’d like to have a few words with him myself. Would you mind arranging a meeting later today at your office?”

“Not at all. I expect to be free after three, if that’s convenient for you.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve spoken to our client.”

I was still waiting at twenty past eleven, when I finished my background check, and still waiting at eleven thirty. That was long enough. I switched on the answering machine, locked up the office, and went to keep my lunch date with Kerry.

* * * *

Lucy’s cafe, one of those trendy nouvelle cuisine places that caters to the Financial District business crowd, was near the foot of California Street, within hailing distance of the Ferry Building and my former office on Drumm. The ad agency where Kerry worked as a senior copywriter, Bates and Carpenter, maintained a permanent reservation on three tables there; and when one or more of them were not being used for business purposes, B. amp; C.‘s employees were allowed to use them for personal luncheons.

I had been there ten minutes when she arrived. Usually she was prompt for appointments. Usually, too, she came into a place, public or private, with an air of self-possession and good cheer. Not today, though. Not for the past two months. She came in slowly, shoulders rounded a little, and even from a distance you could tell that she was under a strain. Up close, the signs were obvious. She had lost weight again, so that she had the same gaunt-cheeked, hollow-eyed look I had confronted when I came back from my three-month kidnap ordeal. Hurt lay in her gray-green eyes, and it hurt me to see it there and not be able to do something, anything, to wipe it away.

We smiled at each other as she sat down and shrugged out of her coat, untied a scarf that protected her auburn hair. She tried to make her smile bright, but it did not come off. It had a pale, brittle quality at the edges.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Damn meeting.”

“No problem.”

After a few seconds she said, “I look like the wrath of God, don’t I?”

“No. You look fine.”

“Liar. There seem to be mirrors everywhere I turn these days. I never realized there were so many mirrors in this city.”

“Cold outside,” I said, to change the subject. “You want something hot to drink?”

“No, I’d rather have some wine.”

I signaled one of the waiters and when he came she ordered a half carafe of chablis. She didn’t look at me as she spoke, as if she were afraid I would say something censorious; she had a tendency to drink too much when things were difficult, and we both knew it, and in the past there has been some friction between us because of it. But I hadn’t said anything yet in this case and I wouldn’t. Only a self-righteous jerk would chastise a woman for drinking too much when she had recently lost her father and her mother was a borderline basket case.

When we were alone again I reached over and took her hand. It was cold, the skin dry, papery. She said, “What I wouldn’t give for a good night’s sleep. I doubt if I slept four hours last night.”

“Cybil?”

“She was up until dawn. Pacing.”

“Is that something new?”

“More or less. Around her bedroom, up and down the hall-nonstop. She tries to be quiet but I still hear her.”

“You talk to her about it?”

“This morning. She promised she wouldn’t do it anymore. God, she’s so vague, so abject. She keeps saying what a burden she is and how sorry she is for being one; she’s constantly begging me to forgive her. She’s so afraid.”

“Of you putting her in some kind of home.”

“That, and of being dependent on strangers, and of dying alone. I keep trying to reassure her but it doesn’t sink in. Nothing sinks in.”

I said gently, “You’re sure she’s not suffering from Alzheimer’s or something similar?”

“Sure enough. Her memory is fine … too fine. She talks on and on about the past, about Ivan. It’s grief and depression and something else too, I’m not sure what.” Kerry shook her head; her eyes were moist. “I used to think she was strong, stronger than my father, better able to handle a crisis. But now … she’s not the same person I grew up with, that I’ve known all my life. She’s changed, and I don’t just mean because of Ivan’s death.”

She got old, I thought. In spirit as well as years. One day not so long ago, even before Ivan’s fatal heart attack, she woke up and she was old.

I didn’t say that to Kerry; it would have been cruel. I said, “She still won’t talk to a grief counselor?”

“No. She breaks down and cries every time I suggest it. She won’t see or talk to anyone but me. Won’t leave the apartment for any reason now. When I’m there she follows me around like a puppy. When I’m not there she just sits and stares at the TV. Or cleans; she’s scrubbed the kitchen floor three times in the past week.”

“Maybe you ought to talk to somebody, then-a doctor who specializes in geriatric cases.”

“I’ve thought of that. Psychotherapeutic medication might help Cybil’s depression, except that she wouldn’t take it voluntarily. She’s never believed in drugs. And a reputable doctor wouldn’t prescribe medication anyway without examining her first.”

“I meant for counseling,” I said. “Advice on how to cope with the situation, what to do about it.”

“Maybe you’re right. I’ve got to do something, I know that. I still want to believe she’ll snap out of it on her own, but I know in my heart she won’t.”

The waiter arrived with her wine, and a silence developed between us while we looked at the menus. I found myself remembering Cybil the first time I’d met her, at a convention of pulp writers and collectors like myself, several years ago- the same convention at which Kerry had come into my life. Cybil had been in her sixties then, yet still vibrant, attractive, young at heart; a mature version of the beautiful woman she must have been in the 1940s, when she and Ivan both made their living writing stories for the mystery and fantasy pulp magazines. Russell Dancer, another pulpster who had long carried the torch for her, called her “Sweeteyes”-a name that fit her perfectly. Cybil Wade had been a sweeteyed presence that the years had failed to damage.

I thought then of the last time I’d seen her, the week before Christmas when Kerry and I picked her up at the airport. I had barely recognized the frail, stooped, white-haired woman whose eyes were dim and haunted, no longer sweet. Even now I could hear the thin, unfamiliar voice saying to Kerry on the ride back to the city, reliving what she had already relived a hundred times, “He was out in the garden all afternoon, tending his flowers. … It was a warm day and I told him to wear his sun hat but you know your father, he never listened, he was such a stubborn man. … I was in the kitchen making an early supper when I heard him come inside. … I poured a beer for him and took it in and he was sitting in his chair, so still, I knew immediately he was dead. … He never spoke a word, isn’t that just like him, he simply sat down in his chair and died….” Cybil Wade: seventy-five, recently widowed, and unable to cope with either death or life, unable to remain in the Los Angeles home she and Ivan had shared for over fifty years because “I see him everywhere in that house…. I’ll go out of my mind if I stay there. …”

She hadn’t said much to me that day, had seemed hostile. The hostility had burgeoned over the holidays, gotten to the point where I couldn’t even call Kerry at home without triggering an emotional outburst in her mother. The reason was simple: I had never cared for Ivan Wade and he had never cared for me and we’d made no secret of our mutual dislike. More than once he’d tried to break up Kerry’s relationship with me; he felt I was too old for her, worked at a dangerous profession, was unworthy for other reasons that had to do with paternal expectations and jealousy. More than once we’d had angry words. Cybil and I had always gotten along well, but since Ivan’s death she had translated my troubles with him into a mistaken belief that I was glad he was dead, and so she had grown to hate me for my imagined callousness.

Kerry knew what kind of man her father had been, and what kind of man I was; she didn’t resent me as Cybil did. Yet she also knew, without it having been mentioned by either of us, that while I wasn’t happy Ivan was gone, I felt no real sorrow at his passing. That knowledge was like a small wedge between us, one that only time would work loose. It had made the last few weeks that much more difficult for both of us.

We each ordered a seafood salad for lunch. Kerry picked at hers, then abandoned it completely in favor of what was left of her chablis. The wine put a darker flush on her cheeks than the cold had done. It seemed to relax her, too, so that we were able to maintain a pretense of ease in each other’s company. But a pretense is all it was. Even though we didn’t talk any more about either Cybil or Ivan, they were there at the table with us like a pair of ghosts.

We didn’t linger over coffee. Outside, I walked with her to the building in which Bates and Carpenter had its offices. When we entered the lobby she drew me away from the nearest people, leaned close with her fingers tight on my arm, and murmured against my ear, “I think I can get off a little early tomorrow, around three thirty. How about you?”

“Sure. I don’t have anything pressing.”

“I could meet you at your place around four.”

“I’d like that.”

“I need you,” she said. “You know?”

“I know, babe. I need you too.”

“Call me after lunch tomorrow, just to make sure.”

I said I would. She kissed me quickly, and touched my cheek, and hurried away across the lobby. I watched her until she got into one of the elevators; then I went back out into the wet afternoon.

Thinking: Assignation made in a public place. Like two new and furtive lovers living for the present because the future is uncertain.

It made me sad, and a little excited, and a little afraid.

* * * *