Bill Pronzini: Breakdown

When I was done he asked, “Do you think Pendarves was telling the truth?”

“About the car almost running him down? Yes. There’s not much doubt he had a close shave.”

“But it could have been an accident.”

“Sure. It could also have been deliberate and somebody other than Thomas Lujack was driving the car. Pendarves admitted it was too dark to see clearly. Naming Lujack might have been an emotional response.”

“Pendarves isn’t normally an emotional man, is he?”

“No.”

“Is it likely, then, that he’ll follow through on his threats?”

“I’d say no but I can’t be sure. He’s a hard man to get a fix on.”

“I don’t want to go to the police if it can be avoided,” Glickman said, “especially if he didn’t report the near-miss. Our position is shaky enough without this kind of inflammatory thing getting into the record.”

“You’ll talk to Thomas right away?”

“As soon as I can reach him.”

“I’d like to have a few words with him myself. Would you mind arranging a meeting later today at your office?”

“Not at all. I expect to be free after three, if that’s convenient for you.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve spoken to our client.”

I was still waiting at twenty past eleven, when I finished my background check, and still waiting at eleven thirty. That was long enough. I switched on the answering machine, locked up the office, and went to keep my lunch date with Kerry.

* * * *

Lucy’s cafe, one of those trendy nouvelle cuisine places that caters to the Financial District business crowd, was near the foot of California Street, within hailing distance of the Ferry Building and my former office on Drumm. The ad agency where Kerry worked as a senior copywriter, Bates and Carpenter, maintained a permanent reservation on three tables there; and when one or more of them were not being used for business purposes, B. amp; C.‘s employees were allowed to use them for personal luncheons.

I had been there ten minutes when she arrived. Usually she was prompt for appointments. Usually, too, she came into a place, public or private, with an air of self-possession and good cheer. Not today, though. Not for the past two months. She came in slowly, shoulders rounded a little, and even from a distance you could tell that she was under a strain. Up close, the signs were obvious. She had lost weight again, so that she had the same gaunt-cheeked, hollow-eyed look I had confronted when I came back from my three-month kidnap ordeal. Hurt lay in her gray-green eyes, and it hurt me to see it there and not be able to do something, anything, to wipe it away.

We smiled at each other as she sat down and shrugged out of her coat, untied a scarf that protected her auburn hair. She tried to make her smile bright, but it did not come off. It had a pale, brittle quality at the edges.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Damn meeting.”

“No problem.”

After a few seconds she said, “I look like the wrath of God, don’t I?”

“No. You look fine.”

“Liar. There seem to be mirrors everywhere I turn these days. I never realized there were so many mirrors in this city.”

“Cold outside,” I said, to change the subject. “You want something hot to drink?”

“No, I’d rather have some wine.”

I signaled one of the waiters and when he came she ordered a half carafe of chablis. She didn’t look at me as she spoke, as if she were afraid I would say something censorious; she had a tendency to drink too much when things were difficult, and we both knew it, and in the past there has been some friction between us because of it. But I hadn’t said anything yet in this case and I wouldn’t. Only a self-righteous jerk would chastise a woman for drinking too much when she had recently lost her father and her mother was a borderline basket case.

When we were alone again I reached over and took her hand. It was cold, the skin dry, papery. She said, “What I wouldn’t give for a good night’s sleep. I doubt if I slept four hours last night.”

“Cybil?”

“She was up until dawn. Pacing.”

“Is that something new?”

“More or less. Around her bedroom, up and down the hall-nonstop. She tries to be quiet but I still hear her.”

“You talk to her about it?”

“This morning. She promised she wouldn’t do it anymore. God, she’s so vague, so abject. She keeps saying what a burden she is and how sorry she is for being one; she’s constantly begging me to forgive her. She’s so afraid.”

“Of you putting her in some kind of home.”

“That, and of being dependent on strangers, and of dying alone. I keep trying to reassure her but it doesn’t sink in. Nothing sinks in.”

I said gently, “You’re sure she’s not suffering from Alzheimer’s or something similar?”

“Sure enough. Her memory is fine … too fine. She talks on and on about the past, about Ivan. It’s grief and depression and something else too, I’m not sure what.” Kerry shook her head; her eyes were moist. “I used to think she was strong, stronger than my father, better able to handle a crisis. But now … she’s not the same person I grew up with, that I’ve known all my life. She’s changed, and I don’t just mean because of Ivan’s death.”

She got old, I thought. In spirit as well as years. One day not so long ago, even before Ivan’s fatal heart attack, she woke up and she was old.

I didn’t say that to Kerry; it would have been cruel. I said, “She still won’t talk to a grief counselor?”

“No. She breaks down and cries every time I suggest it. She won’t see or talk to anyone but me. Won’t leave the apartment for any reason now. When I’m there she follows me around like a puppy. When I’m not there she just sits and stares at the TV. Or cleans; she’s scrubbed the kitchen floor three times in the past week.”

“Maybe you ought to talk to somebody, then-a doctor who specializes in geriatric cases.”

“I’ve thought of that. Psychotherapeutic medication might help Cybil’s depression, except that she wouldn’t take it voluntarily. She’s never believed in drugs. And a reputable doctor wouldn’t prescribe medication anyway without examining her first.”

“I meant for counseling,” I said. “Advice on how to cope with the situation, what to do about it.”

“Maybe you’re right. I’ve got to do something, I know that. I still want to believe she’ll snap out of it on her own, but I know in my heart she won’t.”

The waiter arrived with her wine, and a silence developed between us while we looked at the menus. I found myself remembering Cybil the first time I’d met her, at a convention of pulp writers and collectors like myself, several years ago- the same convention at which Kerry had come into my life. Cybil had been in her sixties then, yet still vibrant, attractive, young at heart; a mature version of the beautiful woman she must have been in the 1940s, when she and Ivan both made their living writing stories for the mystery and fantasy pulp magazines. Russell Dancer, another pulpster who had long carried the torch for her, called her “Sweeteyes”-a name that fit her perfectly. Cybil Wade had been a sweeteyed presence that the years had failed to damage.

I thought then of the last time I’d seen her, the week before Christmas when Kerry and I picked her up at the airport. I had barely recognized the frail, stooped, white-haired woman whose eyes were dim and haunted, no longer sweet. Even now I could hear the thin, unfamiliar voice saying to Kerry on the ride back to the city, reliving what she had already relived a hundred times, “He was out in the garden all afternoon, tending his flowers. … It was a warm day and I told him to wear his sun hat but you know your father, he never listened, he was such a stubborn man. … I was in the kitchen making an early supper when I heard him come inside. … I poured a beer for him and took it in and he was sitting in his chair, so still, I knew immediately he was dead. … He never spoke a word, isn’t that just like him, he simply sat down in his chair and died….” Cybil Wade: seventy-five, recently widowed, and unable to cope with either death or life, unable to remain in the Los Angeles home she and Ivan had shared for over fifty years because “I see him everywhere in that house…. I’ll go out of my mind if I stay there. …”