Bill Pronzini: Breakdown

Behind the other door was a guest bedroom, furnished with a single bed, a dresser, a couple of nightstands. The bed was made, though not quite as carefully as Douglas’s own. Postcards coated two of the walls; the other two had cards only just below ceiling levels out of reach of a normal-sized man-yet the bare parts bore discolored squares and rectangles and clinging bits of adhesive where cards had been mounted. They bore something else too: gouge marks, deep in places, as of fingernails dug hard into the plasterboard and dragged downward.

I peered closely at some of the gouges. Then I got down on one knee and looked under the bed. Something was caught under one of its rollers; I slid it loose. A piece of jaggedly torn postcard of the old hand-painted type, the stiff paper yellowed and the inked words on the back faded. Douglas wouldn’t have torn one of his prized possessions that way; and it didn’t look as though it had been done accidentally….

I left the room, went through the kitchen and then out a rear door into a tiny backyard. Near a narrow walkway alongside the cottage were a brace of garbage cans, each lined with a black disposal bag. Inside the first I opened were hundreds of torn-up postcards-the ones that had formerly decorated the spare-bedroom walls.

Pendarves, I thought. Who else but Pendarves, in a fit of pique or sudden anger. And afterward, Douglas the tidy, Douglas the timid and abused, had swept up the mutilated remains and put them in with the garbage.

Two minutes later, I had proof that Pendarves was alive and had been living here recently. And that he was the one who had shot down Coleman Lujack last night.

In a nightstand drawer in the guest bedroom I found a nearly empty pack of Pall Malls-Pendarves’s brand. Mikan was a nonsmoker. In the scuffed dresser was a gray work shirt and a pair of gray work pants, both laundered and neatly folded. Pendarves’s customary outfit. His size too. I had never seen Douglas except in a suit and tie, and these clothes wouldn’t fit him anyway.

Another drawer in the dresser yielded a large cigar box, inside of which I found some gun oil, a couple of chamois cloths stained with the oil, several cleaning brushes, and a spare clip for a 9mm automatic pistol. I rummaged through the rest of the drawers, the closet, but there was no sign of the gun itself, or of any other type of weapon.

Before I left the room again I paused to stare at the stripped and gouged walls. What had thrown Pendarves into such a destructive fit? Being cooped up here for so long, probably. He was the same type as Thomas Lujack, a man who bottled things up until he reached an explosion point of sudden violent rage. Five days ago he’d become the object of a police manhunt, with no way to prove his innocence and no place to run. Trapped here all that time, in the home of a weak man he no doubt despised, the pressure building, building … and finally, early yesterday or maybe Friday night, he’d erupted. First, he had destroyed the postcards. Then, when that wasn’t enough of a release, he’d got his hands on a 9mm automatic, taken Douglas’s car, and gone hunting the man who may have tried to kill him, who’d turned his life upside down and put him in this intolerable position.

But where was he now? Had he come back here after the shooting, spent the night here? And where was Mikan?

I went back through the cottage, poking into closets and drawers and cupboards. There was no gun anywhere on the premises; either Pendarves had gotten rid of the automatic, or more likely, he was still armed with it. Nor was there anything in any of the rooms to give me an idea of where he might be.

As for Douglas …

The Hideaway? I thought.

If the two of them were no longer together, if Pendarves had taken off again in Mikan’s car, alone, the tavern was the natural place for Douglas to go-his home away from home, the one other spot he could find a measure of solace. And if anyone knew Pendarves’s whereabouts, it was Douglas. It wouldn’t take long to check out.

The gaudy, mock-cheerful corpse faces of the postcards had become oppressive; I avoided looking at them as I moved to the front door. I could understand the impulse that had led Pendarves to attack the ones in the guest room. After five days of being surrounded by all these cards, I might have done the same thing.

I cracked the door to make sure nobody was on the walk or on the street in front. Then, hurrying, I left the house to the static vistas and trite messages and never-to-be-realized yearnings that made it-for me, anyway-a museum of sadness.

* * * *

The block of Taraval on which the Hideaway stood was Sunday-evening deserted. There were vacant parking spaces directly in front of the tavern; I fitted my car into one of them. It was dark now but the blue-neon cocktail glass above the entrance wasn’t lighted. Burned-out tubing, maybe,

I thought as I locked the car. The place was open for business, because the familiar shine of lights was visible through the upper third of the window.

I was wrong on both counts.

When I opened the door and walked in, I didn’t do it warily because I expected to see a tableau as familiar as the lights. The Sunday night relief man, Sam Cotter, behind the bar mixing drinks, polishing glasses; some of the regulars in their customary places and little groupings, not too many of them yet since it was still early-talking and laughing, reading and knitting, bending elbows in their illusory safe place. I expected the ordinary; I had no reason to expect otherwise.

What I walked into was a hostage situation.

* * * *

I stopped just inside the door, the hair pulling all along my scalp. There were an even dozen people in the place, ten of them in a tautly seated bunch at the side tables and wall. Nine of the ten were regulars, among them Frank Parigli, Harry Briggs, Ed McBee, old man Vandermeer, Lyda Isherwood; the tenth was a thin bald man-Sam Cotter, the bartender. Numbers eleven and twelve were on the bar facing the others, like a pair of poorly matched lecturers about to address a small but intent audience. On the bar, not at it-haunches planted on the polished mahogany, legs dangling over the edge.

Douglas Mikan, pale, sick-looking in a dark-blue suit and tie, rocking a little with both hands pressed tight against his wishbone.

And nearest me and the door, Nick Pendarves in his usual gray work clothes, three or four days of beard stubble flecking his cheeks, the backbar lights glinting off the barrel of the 9mm automatic in his hand.

It was dead quiet in there. And dead still. All of them were frozen in position, looking at me. You could smell the fear; it came off all but Pendarves in a thick shimmer that was almost palpable. You could feel the tension too, as brittle as a layer of frost on grass.

Pendarves broke both the stillness and the silence. He waved the pistol in my direction-a sudden, convulsive movement of his arm. It seemed to set off a spasmodic reaction in the right side of his face; nerves and muscles twitched riotously from temple to jaw, like a nest of worms stirred up under a thin covering. The effect was chilling.

He said, “Canino, right? Art the fart,” in a thick, slurred voice. But he wasn’t drunk. The thickness was the product of emotions writhing as chaotically as the nerves and muscles in his face. “Come on in, Art the fart. Join the party, the water’s fine.”

He’d cracked completely under the strain-the last breakdown in a catalytic string that so far had demolished the Lujacks and Frank Hanauer. But Pendarves’s was the worst of all, the kind that creates monsters out of men and situations like this one. It happens so often nowadays that it has lost its once-stunning edge of horror, become almost a cliche: Just another crazy with a loaded gun and a mad-on against the world.