Bill Pronzini: Breakdown

“Hell with the cops.”

“What if he tries it again?”

“I’ll make sure he don’t.”

“How?”

“Never mind how. That’s my business.”

“Better just leave it to the cops,” I said.

“Hell with the cops,” Pendarves said again.

“Fix him in court then, on the witness stand. If you didn’t see the driver you can’t be positive who it was …”

Pendarves wasn’t listening. His head was down, his face set so tightly it was full of spasming nerves and ridges of muscle. He smoked his Pall Mall in fast, deep drags, as if he were trying to burn it up as quickly as he could.

Pretty soon he said, talking to himself, “Rivas … yeah, that’s it. Make damn sure the bastard leaves me alone. Him and that brother of his both.”

“Who’s Rivas?”

No answer. What was left of his cigarette seared his fingers; he said, “Shit!” and jabbed it out viciously.

“Nick, who’s Rivas?”

The sudden pain had brought him out of himself. His head snapped around my way and his eyes focused on me for the first time. “Canino,” he said, “what the hell you sucking around for?”

“Hey, I was just trying to help-”

“Keep your questions to yourself.” He shook himself, the way you’d shake off a sudden chill. “Max, give me another double.”

“Sure.”

Another voice, shy and halting, said, “Nick …”

Pendarves swung around. When I looked back I saw Douglas Mikan standing a couple of feet away, fingering the knot in his tie.

“What you want?”

“I just … make sure you’re all right …”

“Leave me alone, you fat wimp.”

Mikan backed off, staring at Pendarves like a hurt puppy. All the other regulars were staring at him, too, now. Conversation had died.

“What’s everybody gawking at?” he demanded.

Down the bar Ed McBee said, “Don’t take it out on us, Nick. We’re on your side.”

“Yeah.”

“Notify the cops, that’s good advice-”

“Butt out, Ed, huh? All of you just mind your business and let me take care of mine.”

He swung around again as Max set him up with his second double. He put that one away as quickly as the first, then shoved away from the bar and stalked to the door in his rusty-jointed stride and was gone into the night.

I stayed where I was for about ten seconds. Then I shook my head and said, “Ah, the hell with it,” as if I had lost my taste for beer and bar-lounging. I got up and went after Pendarves.

He was down the block a ways, just crossing Taraval- doing it cautiously, head twitching left, right, left, right. I went in the same direction but on this side of the street. I saw him get into his car, a beat-up Plymouth Fury with a loose rear bumper; heard the starter grind as I hurried across 47th Avenue. Thirty yards separated me from my car when he maneuvered out of the parking space; twenty yards when he made a too fast turn out of sight on 47th, heading north.

I was on the run by then, with my keys in my hand. It took me less than fifteen seconds to get the door unlocked, the car started and into a fast U-turn across the streetcar tracks. When I made the swing onto 47th, the Plymouth was two blocks away, approaching the Rivera Street intersection. Almost immediately its taillights flashed bloodily in the blowing fog and Pendarves turned right onto Rivera. I accelerated to close the gap-but I needn’t have bothered. Two blocks east, the Plymouth had slowed again and was just turning into the weedy driveway next to a weathered yellow-brown corner house.

The house belonged to Pendarves. The way it looked, he was not going anywhere but home.

He quit his car, leaving it in the drive rather than putting it away in the sagging garage that crouched at the rear edge of his property. I drove past as he disappeared through a gate between the garage and the house. In the next block I made another U-turn and pulled in to the curb and cut my lights. From there I could see the mist-wreathed front of his house, the Plymouth sitting dark in the driveway.

Pretty soon lights went on inside the house. And stayed on. I sat there for twenty minutes: Pendarves did not come back out. Whatever he intended to do about Thomas Lujack, he apparently wasn’t going to do it tonight.

Well, all right. That part of it was on hold. As for the rest of it …

For three weeks I had been working on Pendarves at the Hideaway, the only public place he frequented with any regularity, trying to pry some sort of useful information out of him; and now for the first time all that effort had paid some dividends. In fact, this was the first real break Eberhardt and I had had since we’d undertaken our investigation. The only trouble was, it was potentially disastrous in more ways than one. If Thomas really had tried to run Pendarves down tonight, it blew us right out of the water.

Thomas Lujack was our client.

And we were trying to prove him innocent of one hit-and-run murder charge already.

* * * *

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?”