Bill Pronzini: Breakdown

So there we were as of today, flat up against failure. And now a new and confusing wrinkle had been added-the alleged attempt on Pendarves’s life tonight.

If it had been a deliberate attempt, then who else but Thomas Lujack? He’d been increasingly nervous of late, fretting about the lack of results. Given his anxiety, and his temper, it was possible that he’d lost control tonight-as he’d allegedly lost control for some reason on the night of December 5-and set out to eliminate the one man who could assure his conviction.

And yet, was he screwy enough to have tried doing it with a car-a method that would point straight at him? I didn’t want to think so. But the fact was, I did not know enough about what went on inside the man, or about the motives behind Hanauer’s murder, to make a proper judgment.

There were two other alternatives: Somebody else had tried to run down Pendarves tonight; or it had been an accident, one of those crazy coincidences that happen sometimes, and Pendarves’s imagination had blown it up into something sinister. The first of the two made sense only if the somebody were acting on Thomas’s orders, somebody he paid to eliminate Pendarves; but where was the sense, looking at it from Lujack’s point of view, in premeditating a murder that would surely backfire on him, prejudice his defense, and probably convict him on two counts of vehicular homicide? The second alternative was much more likely. It was also the one I wanted it to be, because it negated an ugly twist in a case that was already too complicated and frustrating.

We’d have a better handle on that part of it tomorrow, after we found out what Thomas had to say and after I saw Pendarves again later on. If it was just a false alarm … well, that was fine. But in any event we were still smack up against a stone wall on the Hanauer killing.

If Lujack hadn’t run him down, then who had? And why?

* * * *

Tuesday was another gray, blustery day, with a steady drizzle thrown in for added discomfort. I awoke to it late, feeling dull and logy from less than half the sleep I needed, and I was still out of sorts when I got down to the office at nine thirty-as gray inside as the day itself. Not even the prospect of seeing Kerry for lunch cheered me much.

The office Eberhardt and I share is a big converted loft in a building on O’Farrell Street, not far off Van Ness. Before we took it over a few years ago, when we became partners, it had housed an art school whose owner had had a skylight installed. The skylight had shattered during the big quake. The world’s ugliest light fixture had also come crashing down, things had fallen off walls and desks, and cracks had spiderwebbed the ceiling. I had been there to see it all happen — alone in the office at four minutes past five that October evening, rinsing out the coffeepot in the alcove sink. If I’d been at my desk instead, the damn light fixture might have done me some damage, because it caromed off the desk and knocked my chair over.

As a San Francisco native I’ve been through a lot of quakes; but as soon as that one hit, with such jolting violence, I knew it was a bad one-maybe the Big One. My first thought had been for Kerry’s safety; I’d believed then that she was still at work on an upper floor in one of the untested new Financial District high rises. In fact she’d left early that day, had just entered her apartment, and hadn’t been hurt or even shaken up too badly. But it was a couple of chaotic hours before I found that out, and several more tense hours until I learned that Eberhardt and Bobbie Jean, who had been together in Marin County, had also survived unhurt.

There had been no structural damage to this building, so we were spared having to vacate and find new office space. Over the next couple of weeks, we had prodded our somewhat sleazy landlord into repairing the ceiling, putting in a new skylight and a new (and much less offensive) light fixture, and had otherwise gotten on with our business and our lives. But you don’t forget an experience or a tragedy of that magnitude. It hadn’t been the Big One after all, but it had given us all a bitter taste of what the Big One would be like.

Seismologists are now predicting a one-in-three likelihood of a 7.5 temblor on the Hayward Fault within the next thirty years, with a projected five thousand dead and forty billion dollars in damages. Those are frightening odds, grim figures. But what do you do in the face of them? Pack up and move away? There’s no place that is perfectly safe; natural disasters can happen anywhere. Besides, your chances of dying from a fall in your own bathtub are greater than dying in the worst earthquake; knowing that, how many people get rid of their bathtubs? What you do is to learn the lessons taught by this last quake, the Little Big One, and learn them well, and then put your trust in providence and the law of averages and go on without fear. A life lived in fear is no life at all….

On this January morning the office was cold and bleak, with the weight of the day pressing down against the rain-streaked skylight. I put on the steam heat, put water on to boil for coffee, and checked the answering machine. No messages. Then I called the law offices of Glickman and Crandall, on Pacific Avenue downtown. Paul Glickman wasn’t in yet but was expected within the hour. I left a message to have him return my call as soon as he arrived.

It took me thirty minutes to type a report and billing invoice on yesterday’s skip-trace. Eberhardt had treated himself to a New Year’s present of a small computer, but I’d held firm about not getting one for myself. In an age when detective work is dominated by electronic devices and young three-piecers specializing in high-tech industrial espionage and hostile corporate takeovers, I take a certain amount of pride in being a technophobic throwback. I specialize in old-fashioned, low-tech investigative work. I’ve never been able to fathom the inner workings of Big Business; and anything more mechanically complicated than an electric typewriter makes me nervous. I feel about computers the way aborigines once did about cameras: I’m afraid the damn things will try to steal my soul.

Even so, I might have succumbed to their timesaving lure by now if it weren’t for their users’ constant proselytizing. There is something about owning a computer that turns normal, even meek individuals-and Eberhardt was no different since he’d gotten his-into slavering zealots who will never rest until they’ve convinced you to become one of them. Not long ago, a guy I know called me a dinosaur because I don’t own a computer; and he got angry, actually angry, when I told him I had no intention of ever owning one … as if I’d said I had never been to church and was a budding Satanist besides. Computer technology: the New Religion. I would rather listen to a pack of Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to convert me to their brand of the Old Religion than I would to one computer disciple telling me in reverent terms how much his life had changed for the better since he’d gotten his Apple or Kay-Pro, and how happy I’d be if only I would renounce my heathen ways and come to worship at the electronic shrine.

It was ten fifteen, and I was making a telephone background check for another client, when Glickman called on the other line. I cut my conversation with the TRW credit people short, then spent five minutes giving Glickman a detailed account of what had happened last night.

He listened without interruption. Unlike some criminal attorneys, he was neither egocentric nor publicity-seeking; and he operated on the principle that other professionals knew their business as well as he knew his and would go about doing their jobs in the most effective ways possible. That made him easy to work with-a rarity among high-powered lawyers these days.