Bill Pronzini: Breakdown

“Development on the Lujack case, finally. But I don’t like most of it and neither will you.” I told him about the alleged hit-and-run attempt, the fact that there had been no answer at Thomas’s house when I called.

“Hell,” he said, “none of that has to mean anything. Could’ve been a case of careless driving and Pendarves overreacted.”

“Sure. Or it could be Thomas is guilty as hell on both counts.”

“You call Glickman yet?”

Glickman was Paul Glickman, Thomas’s attorney-one of the better criminal lawyers in the Bay Area, and the man who had hired us to work as defense investigators. I said, “No. That can wait until morning. I’ll call him first thing and have him set up a meet with Thomas.”

“You don’t think Pendarves’ll do anything crazy tonight?”

“I doubt it. He was pretty sore, making threats, but he’s no hotheaded kid. Besides, everybody in the tavern heard him. He’d have to be a fool to try anything after that.”

“What kind of threats?”

“Nothing specific. Said he’d fix Thomas, that kind of thing.”

“Doesn’t sound too serious.”

“No. The name Rivas mean anything to you?”

“Rivas, Rivas … why?”

“Pendarves mentioned it. Some vague connection to the Lujack brothers.”

“… Familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”

“Somebody Pendarves works with at Roofco, maybe?”

“That’s it,” Eberhardt said. “Rivas, Antonio Rivas. I talked to him the first day I was out there.”

“Friend of Pendarves?”

“Just coworkers, according to Rivas.”

“So maybe he lied.”

“Why would he … oh, I get it. You think Rivas might be the third witness.”

“Possible, isn’t it?”

“Possible, sure. If there really was a third witness. But why would Pendarves cover up for a guy like Rivas?”

“You talked to him. What kind of guy is he?”

Silence on the line; Eberhardt was thinking about it, working his memory. “Friendly, outgoing,” he said at length. “Little dude in his twenties, been in this country three or four years, speaks broken English. Nothing in common with Pendarves that I can see.”

“They get along all right?”

“No gripes from Rivas. No love and kisses, either. Just two guys who work together, different as night and day.”

“Rivas wouldn’t be the hardcase type, would he?”

“No way. Why?”

“I was thinking Pendarves might try hiring somebody to do some strong-arm work on Thomas.”

“Forget it. Rivas’d be the last person for that.”

“Suppose he’s got a mean friend or relative?”

“I don’t see him as a go-between either.”

“Okay. I’m just shooting blind here. Have another talk with him tomorrow, see if you can find a connection. You can get to him when Pendarves isn’t around?”

“I can try. I doubt they eat lunch together.”

“I’m eating mine with Kerry tomorrow, but I should be back by one,” I said. “I’ll have Glickman set up the meet with Thomas for sometime after two.”

“Right.”

I drank a glass of low-fat milk and then tried to watch something on TV. My powers of concentration were nil tonight. Finally I took some calcium lactate, which Kerry had once told me was as effective as Nembutal in helping you sleep, and undressed and put the bedclothes more or less in order and got in among them.

And lay there in the dark, with my mind going clickety-clickety-clickety. The calcium lactate was no good tonight; about the only thing that would have worked was a blow on the head with a hammer.

I was aware of the ticking of the bedside clock, like a counterpoint to the wind. Time, passing time. More than ten months now since the end of my private taste of hell, when I had been kidnapped by a madman and chained to the wall of an isolated mountain cabin and left there to die slowly of starvation. I was mostly healed now; the last crippling anxiety attack had been almost three months ago, just after the earthquake, and I no longer seemed to constantly need people around me to ward off the fear of being trapped and alone. But there were scars, deep and disfiguring scars. I had been changed by my ordeal, profoundly and irrevocably. I had lost the virtue of patience, for one, and gained a capacity for sudden rage, sudden violence; I was capable of things that once I would have considered unethical, unthinkable. Such as the resolution I had brought to a case last May, up at Lake Tahoe. If the truth about that had come out, I would have lost my license and maybe my life. I’d been aware of this at the time but I had done it anyway. And would again, if I had it to do over.

Once I had known myself pretty well, known what I would do in just about any situation. Not anymore. There was a new, dark side to my personality that I did not know at all, and that for the rest of my life I would have to be on guard against….

Outside the wind was gathering strength. Making banshee noises as it rattled window glass, shook unseen objects. Pacific Heights is one of the city’s hillside neighborhoods, close to the ocean and the bay, and when the wind blows it blows strongest up here. Most nights I don’t mind it. Tonight, it added to my restlessness.

To keep from listening to it, I swathed my head in blankets and pillows. And to keep from thinking broody thoughts about myself, or about Kerry and her mother, I tried the subject of Eberhardt and Bobbie Jean Addison, his soon-to-be bride.

They had been seeing each other for more than a year now, seriously for eleven months. He’d first popped the question last May, and kept popping it until she finally relented. I was happy for both of them, because for both of them it was a good match. Not only did they love each other, they were perfectly suited in temperament and emotional needs. Eb had lived alone for years, since his divorce from his first wife, Dana, and hated every minute of his enforced bachelorhood; he was the kind of man who needed a wife and the illusion that he was “being taken care of.” Bobbie Jean had suffered through two bad marriages, had raised two daughters on her own, professed to be soured on matrimony, and seemed to enjoy her independence. In spite of that, she was the kind of woman who needed to prove to herself that she could make a relationship with a good man work; that she had not become selfish, closed off in her feelings, incapable of giving as well as receiving love.

They were planning an April wedding. Why April? I’d asked them. Neither had a satisfactory answer. They’d just decided on April, that was all-one of those mutual decisions two people make for no reason other than that it seems right to them. As if it had been divinely ordained. I didn’t believe in that theory of life and the universe, and yet there were things in my life, too, that seemed predetermined or inevitable- some right, others wrong, as if I were being manipulated by outside forces….

The hell with that. I threw another mental switch, rerouted my thoughts onto the Lujack case.

It was a strange one, all right. Full of complications and enigmas that seemed to defy rational explanation even after three weeks of both routine and creative investigation. The facts were these:

Thomas Lujack and his brother, Coleman, owned and operated a small factory off Bayshore Boulevard, just across the Daly City line. The factory-Containers, Inc.-manufactured a variety of cardboard and fiberboard cartons for industrial and commercial use. The two men had founded it in the early seventies, weathered a couple of rough years, and with the financial aid and marketing expertise of a man named Frank Hanauer, had gradually built it up into a successful operation that currently employed some thirty people full-time and grossed close to three million a year. The Lujacks each owned forty percent of Containers, Inc.; Hanauer, in return for his early investment, owned the other twenty percent.