Bill Pronzini: Breakdown

“You or Hanauer ever have trouble with your workers? Somebody you had to fire, for instance?”

“I know I didn’t. Frank would have mentioned it if he had. Besides, neither of us hires or fires the factory workers. Our shop foreman takes care of that.”

“Rafael Vega.”

“Right.”

“Did Vega have trouble with any of the illegals during the past year?”

“Nothing he reported …” Thomas’s voice trailed off, and he frowned. At length he said, “Well, there was one clash between him and Frank. But it was so minor I’d forgotten all about it.”

“What kind of clash?”

“Words, that’s all. A couple of months ago.”

“Were you there at the time?”

“Yeah. It got a little heated.”

“What did they have words about?”

“Production. We had a rush order for a hundred gross of number ten singlewalls, one that Frank brought in personally, and we were behind schedule. He blamed Vega for the delay.”

“You said the exchange got heated. How heated?”

“Oh, they did some shouting at each other. Vega threatened to quit, but that was just chili-pepper talk.”

“That all he threatened to do?”

“You mean did he make any threats against Frank? No, it wasn’t like that. Nothing personal. Just one of those workplace flare-ups, that’s all. The next day it was like it never happened.”

“How did Hanauer and Vega get along otherwise?”

“… All right. No problems.”

“You sound a little hesitant.”

“I’m just trying to remember. To be honest, I don’t think Frank liked Vega much. And the feeling was probably mutual. But again, it wasn’t personal.”

“What was it, then?”

“I guess you’d call it bigotry,” Thomas said. “Frank didn’t care for Mexicans. Didn’t actively hate them, you understand-just didn’t much care for them as a race. He thought they were lazy.”

“Uh-huh. And Vega knew or sensed this.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“How about you? What’s your opinion of Latinos?”

“I’m no bigot, if that’s what you mean. I like Mexicans just fine.”

Sure you do, I thought. That’s why you hire illegal aliens and pay them starvation wages without any benefits. That’s why you use phrases like “chili-pepper talk.”

I said, “You and Vega get along all right?”

“Sure. Fine.”

“You pay him well?”

“Damn well. He’s never had a kick coming on that score.”

“So he has no reason to hate or dislike you.”

“Not unless he’s a bigot.”

“You think he might be?”

“He keeps it to himself, if he is.”

“Tell me about him.”

Thomas shrugged. “Good worker, keeps his people hopping. We never have to worry about the manufacturing end with him on the job. He can be hard-nosed sometimes-fiery. You know how those Mexicans are. The Latin temperament.”

“Meaning he sometimes flies off the handle?”

“Sometimes.” Thomas smiled his self-deprecating smile. “He’s got my kind of pop-off temper. Especially after he’s been drinking.”

“He drinks on the job?”

“No, no. I mean when he’s hung over, after a wet night.”

“That happen often?”

“Not often, no. I don’t think he’s a heavy boozer. Once or twice a month he’ll come in and you can tell he was shitfaced the night before. That’s about it.”

Glickman had been sitting quietly all this time, listening to my Q amp; A with Thomas. Now he stirred and said to his client, “It’s possible, whether you think so or not, that this man Vega has motive to want to harm both you and your late partner. If you’d been completely honest with us from the beginning …”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence; Thomas got the point. “Okay, I was wrong and I apologize. What else can I say?”

“Is there anything else you’ve neglected to tell us?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“However small it might be.”

“I swear it-nothing.”

“Because if there is,” Glickman said, “and I find out about it, I’ll resign immediately as your defense attorney. And I’ll be obliged to pass on my reasons to whomever you get to replace me.”

I said, “That goes for me too.”

Thomas bobbed his head and said that he understood. He looked innocent and eager to please; but there was sweat on him now and he seemed even more nervous. Had he been honest, or was he trying to con us by deflecting suspicion elsewhere? Was he what he appeared to be, an unethical but basically decent businessman caught in a web of circumstance, or was he in fact a cold-blooded murderer?

I just could not make up my mind, one way or the other.

* * * *

From Terrific Street, I drove back to O’Farrell and the office. Eberhardt wasn’t there, but the answering machine had a message from him.

“Vega wasn’t home,” his voice said. “Nobody else was, either. One of the neighbors told me Mrs. Vega works too, cooks in some restaurant in South San Francisco, doesn’t get home until after six. There’s also a son living with them; neighbor didn’t know where I could find him or his father. I’d go back out there after six but I’ve got an early date with Bobbie Jean in San Rafael. Vega can wait until tomorrow, no? Let me know how it went with Glickman and Thomas. I’ll be home until five forty-five or so.”

No, dammit, I thought, Vega can’t wait until tomorrow. But my annoyance didn’t last long. There was no sense in blaming him for not being a workaholic. Detective work is just a job to him-nine-to-five and on to more important things. Hell, he was getting married in a few months. I couldn’t expect him to put extra hours into a muddled and maybe futile case like this one, just because it was frustrating the hell out of me.

I called him at home and told him how things had gone with Glickman and Thomas Lujack. Then I told him I’d do the follow-up on Rafael Vega myself, tonight.

He said, “You trying to make me feel guilty?”

“No. I don’t have anything better to do.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. Give my love to Bobbie Jean.”

I locked up for the night and walked to Van Ness and ate an early dinner at Zim’s. It was just six when I came back and got the car out of the parking garage near the office, and six fifteen when I turned off Mission Street onto Sixteenth.

On a dreary weekday evening like this one, at the tag end of rush hour, the Mission looks like any other crowded ethnic neighborhood of older buildings and graffiti-scabbed walls; you need a hot summer Saturday to appreciate its full ambiance and flavor. The people hurrying along the wet sidewalks and the types and names of the business establishments told you that the population here was heavily Latin. But this was far more than a barrio. It was a place where old cultures clashed with new; where you could sample the pleasures of yesterday’s world and the probable horrors of tomorrow’s; where the good and the bad and the ugly coexisted and cohabited in a tolerant, dynamic, and too often deadly disharmony.

When I was a kid growing up a few miles from here, in the Outer Mission, this neighborhood had been solidly working-class, populated mostly by Irish immigrants, and dominated by two-hundred-year-old Mission Dolores and its newer, ornate basilica. The district’s metamorphosis had been gradual at first, radical in the past decade or so. It was still solidly working-class, at least at its residential core, and still one of the poorer neighborhoods in the city, but Mission Dolores was no longer its spiritual hub-a fact you might find surprising, given the strong Latin emphasis on religion, if you weren’t aware of all the other factors that had gone into making it what it was today. It had no hub, no focal point now; it was a kind of mutant, neither one thing nor another, neither bad nor good, just a teeming, formless entity that writhed this way and that and went nowhere at all. And it was still mutating-into what was anybody’s guess.