Breakdown

Chapter 8

I knelt there for a time, stunned and confused, trying to come to grips with what I’d found. What in God’s name was Lujack doing here, dead, in Pendarves’s garage? The only thing I could think of was that he’d come to talk, even though he’d been warned to stay clear of Pendarves, the confrontation had turned ugly, and he had lost the punch-up. But why here in the garage? Why was he dead of carbon monoxide from the BMW he must have been driving? And where was Pendarves?

A car hissed by on Rivera without slowing; the sound of its passage brought me out of myself. I took a closer look at the blood smear on Thomas’s head. Under his thick mat of hair, just above the occipital bone, the skin was split and looked darkly bruised. But there was nothing distinctive about the wound; it could have been made by just about anything, including the concrete floor. I lifted and turned the body again. He was wearing the same Harris tweed jacket, mint-green shirt, and designer jeans, and they looked the same as they had in Glickman’s office: no tears or blood spatters or stains of any kind. I peered at his face, then paid some attention to his hands. No marks on his flesh, either. If he’d been in a fight, he had been struck only in the body and hadn’t landed any solid blows himself-which seemed unlikely. He could have been thrown down in a struggle and banged his head on the concrete, but it was a better bet that he’d been clubbed from behind. The closed garage, the running engine, the presence of both Thomas and his car ruled out freak accident and suicide. This was homicide, plain and simple. Coldblooded, premeditated murder.

Why?

Dammit, why would Pendarves kill him this way?

My stomach had begun to act up, as it always did when I was this close to violent death. I was not breathing well, either, but that was mostly the fault of the carbon monoxide. Quickly I patted Thomas’s coat and pants pockets: he wasn’t carrying a gun or any other kind of weapon. On my feet again, I went over by the door and sucked again at the night air until my stomach settled and I had better breath control. Then I was ready to get on with it.

Nothing on the floor near Thomas or anywhere else on that side of the BMW. I got down and looked under the car. Nothing there, either, as near as I could tell without a flashlight. I opened the driver’s door, being careful not to smudge any prints that might be there, and poked through the glove box and found the registration slip. The owner of the car was Thomas’s wife, Eileen. I sifted among the other items in the compartment. No gun, no other kind of weapon, and nothing that told me anything I didn’t already know. The rest of the car’s interior was just as barren.

I’d been in that damned garage long enough. I went back outside, shutting the light off on the way. Raining again; the wind had died down but the night seemed even colder. I looked up toward the house. The one light still burned, and it was still the only one on. He’s not there, I thought. No sign of his car, and I’ve been here long enough to attract his attention if he was hanging around waiting for the monoxide to do its work. But why would he go off and leave the BMW pumping away in the garage? Where’s the sense in that, in any of this?

The gate into the rear yard was latched but not locked. I went through it and across a section of weedy grass, skirted some bushes, and came to a flight of stairs that led up to where the lighted window was. Under the stairs was a door; the way the house had been built, it would give into a basement. It was sure to be locked tight but I tried it anyway. Yeah. I moved over and climbed the stairs, warily but not trying to be sneaky about it.

At the top was a little platform porch railed on the two sides. The door into the house was as tight-locked as the one into the basement. On the jamb was a doorbell, something you find occasionally on the backsides of older houses. I thought it over for a few seconds and then pushed the bell. Inside, the thing made a low, flat, buzzing sound. I stood with my ear against the door, listening for footsteps. All I heard was silence.

After half a minute I leaned out over the railing for a look through the lighted window. Kitchen, all right. I could see about half of it, including the sink and drainboard, the refrigerator, part of a stove, part of a Formica-topped table and two chairs. Everything was immaculate, gleamingly so, like a fifties-style remodeler’s showroom. That surprised me a little; Pendarves hadn’t impressed me as an orderly man. Just the opposite, in fact-he was pretty careless about his appearance. But then, maybe he had somebody come in and clean for him, and what I was seeing was the result of a recent tidying.

I straightened, put my hand on the doorknob, took it away again. No real point in my trying to get inside the house. Pendarves wasn’t here; and if there was anything to find on the premises, it was the cops’ job to find it.

Descending the stairs, I hurried across the yard and through the gate and alongside the garage. Except for the fog-smeared streetlights and nearby house lights, there was nothing to see; I was still alone on the property. I crossed the empty expanse of Rivera to where my car was parked. Got in and stripped off my gloves and sat for half a minute to let my breathing even out again; my lungs still weren’t working right.

I was lifting the receiver on the mobile phone when the night went red behind me.

The redness brightened swiftly, making the fog look as though it were drizzling blood. I sat unmoving, watching in the rearview mirror as a black-and-white prowl car came into sight, heading west on Rivera. It was moving at a pretty good clip, its dome light slashing at the wet dark, until it passed through the intersection; then the driver braked abruptly and swerved over to the curb in front of Pendarves’s garage.

A brace of patrolmen piled out. Both carried flashlights, switched them on at the same time; the beams burned bright tunnels through the red-splashed drifts of fog. They stopped together at the garage door, as if they were surprised to find it half open and the car engine shut off inside. They seemed to hold a hurried conference, after which they drew their sidearms in unison. One of them eased the door up a little farther and ducked under it; the other went into a shooter’s crouch and swept the interior with his light. After a few seconds the crouching one straightened again, turned away and moved along the near-side wall, out of my range of vision.

I put the phone receiver back in its cradle, thinking: Somebody beat me to it. One of the neighbors, who spotted me poking around? But then why were the cops surprised at what they found over there? Sure, the call could have been made before I opened the door, but that had been at least twenty minutes ago. Prowler calls in this neighborhood, with the Taraval precinct station only a little over a mile away, were routinely answered in half that time.

As I watched, the garage door went up all the way. Then the patrolman inside turned his flash on Thomas Lujack’s corpse, held it there until his partner came in through the access door and joined him. Both of them still had their weapons drawn. If they’d caught me on the premises, as they would have if they’d arrived five minutes sooner, they’d have hassled me pretty good.

The way it was now, I wouldn’t get much more than the fish-eye. All I had to do was go on over there, nice and slow, and then tell them the exact truth. I could give them enough bare facts to save time and trouble when the homicide inspectors arrived. Besides, it was the law-abiding and the smart thing to do.

I didn’t do it.

Up until a year ago, I would have-without hesitation. But I was neither the man nor the detective I had been a year ago. There was a wrongness about the whole scenario over there; I had felt it as soon as I realized who the dead man was, and the arrival of the prowl car had shoved it up close to the surface. Thomas Lujack’s death hadn’t ended my involvement with him, or with Nick Pendarves; I felt that, too, just as strongly. It seemed imperative to keep my name out of the official report, to not blow my cover at the Hideaway.

I waited until one of the patrolmen radioed in and the two of them together drifted into the shadows toward the house. Then I started the car and went away from there, running dark like a thief in the night.

* * * *

Bad night all around.

I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even get into a doze. My lungs ached and my head felt clogged with too many random thoughts, like a pressure building up. After a while the unease came, crimping at the edges of my mind. Then the claustrophobia, as if the darkness was contracting around me-outside pressure added to the pressure within. Even when I turned on the light the sensation of being squeezed and suffocated did not lessen any. Anxiety attack, the first in three months.

The clock said one thirty when I got up. I paced from room to room but it did no good; the trapped, fearful feeling seemed to worsen. There was nothing for it then but to get out and away. I dressed quickly and left the building and put my car around me again and began to drive with the window rolled down and the wind blowing icy mist against my face.

I drove here and there, going nowhere. Wet shiny streets, mostly deserted, reflecting splinters of light that stabbed into my eyes and made them burn again. Over in the Tenderloin, the night people were out alone or in little shadowy groups- pimps, whores, pushers, muggers; drunks and addicts and flesh-hungry johns. The predators and their prey, even more voracious in bad weather because it made tempers short and patience thin. On Marina Boulevard, the empty Green looked like a barren graveyard, the tall bobbing masts of the boats in the yacht harbor like skeletons performing a danse macabre. Along the fringes of the Presidio it was as if I were passing through a tropical rain forest-trees and bushes dripping, dripping, making me think of acid rain eating away unseen at leaves and roots so that one day there would be nothing left but blighted gray vegetable matter … seen one dead tree, you’ve seen them all. At Cliff House and Ocean Beach, wind-driven surf boiled foaming over the rocks and raged at the shore, and there was no peace in that, either-there can never be peace in the presence of raw violence. At 47th and Rivera, where raw violence had taken place earlier, there was the illusion of peace because the police were gone and the dead man was gone and the house was dark … but the illusion was worse than the violence itself; an illusion is a lie and a lie is always worse than the truth….

I drove some more, another half hour or so-here and there, going nowhere. At last I could feel the fatigue taking over, and with it came the beginnings of ease both physical and mental. The night felt less ominous, less tragic; it was merely lonely, the way even good nights are. I knew I could go home then, that when I got there the flat would no longer be a tightening snare. And I was right.

I slept immediately and dreamlessly, for a little more than four hours. When I awoke at 8:00 a.m., to face the dull gray of another day, I was all right again.

* * * *