Bill Pronzini: Breakdown

She hadn’t said much to me that day, had seemed hostile. The hostility had burgeoned over the holidays, gotten to the point where I couldn’t even call Kerry at home without triggering an emotional outburst in her mother. The reason was simple: I had never cared for Ivan Wade and he had never cared for me and we’d made no secret of our mutual dislike. More than once he’d tried to break up Kerry’s relationship with me; he felt I was too old for her, worked at a dangerous profession, was unworthy for other reasons that had to do with paternal expectations and jealousy. More than once we’d had angry words. Cybil and I had always gotten along well, but since Ivan’s death she had translated my troubles with him into a mistaken belief that I was glad he was dead, and so she had grown to hate me for my imagined callousness.

Kerry knew what kind of man her father had been, and what kind of man I was; she didn’t resent me as Cybil did. Yet she also knew, without it having been mentioned by either of us, that while I wasn’t happy Ivan was gone, I felt no real sorrow at his passing. That knowledge was like a small wedge between us, one that only time would work loose. It had made the last few weeks that much more difficult for both of us.

We each ordered a seafood salad for lunch. Kerry picked at hers, then abandoned it completely in favor of what was left of her chablis. The wine put a darker flush on her cheeks than the cold had done. It seemed to relax her, too, so that we were able to maintain a pretense of ease in each other’s company. But a pretense is all it was. Even though we didn’t talk any more about either Cybil or Ivan, they were there at the table with us like a pair of ghosts.

We didn’t linger over coffee. Outside, I walked with her to the building in which Bates and Carpenter had its offices. When we entered the lobby she drew me away from the nearest people, leaned close with her fingers tight on my arm, and murmured against my ear, “I think I can get off a little early tomorrow, around three thirty. How about you?”

“Sure. I don’t have anything pressing.”

“I could meet you at your place around four.”

“I’d like that.”

“I need you,” she said. “You know?”

“I know, babe. I need you too.”

“Call me after lunch tomorrow, just to make sure.”

I said I would. She kissed me quickly, and touched my cheek, and hurried away across the lobby. I watched her until she got into one of the elevators; then I went back out into the wet afternoon.

Thinking: Assignation made in a public place. Like two new and furtive lovers living for the present because the future is uncertain.

It made me sad, and a little excited, and a little afraid.

* * * *

When I got back to the office I found Eberhardt waiting. He was lounging at his desk, fouling the air with smoke from one of his stubby old briars. I’d given him a good Danish tobacco for his birthday, but predictably enough he’d gone back to smoking his favorite blend-an evil black mixture of latakia and dried horse turds, judging from the smell of it.

“I got to Rivas right at noon,” he said, “and we didn’t talk long. So I figured I might as well come back here.”

I nodded. “Glickman call?”

“No messages on the machine, no calls since I came in.”

“Damn. Means he hasn’t been able to locate Thomas.”

“Doesn’t have to be anything in that.”

“I know, but I don’t like it.”

“You won’t like this either,” he said. “Pendarves didn’t show up for work today.”

“Oh, fine. He at least call in with an excuse?”

“Yeah. Head cold.”

“Uh-huh.” I went over and cracked the window that looks down toward the rear end of the Federal Building on Golden Gate. Cold wind and drizzle were preferable to lethal tobacco smoke. “What else did you find out from Rivas?”

“Doesn’t seem to be anything thick between him and Pendarves. He claims they haven’t said more than fifty words to each other the past week, and none at all in two days.”

“You think there’s any chance he’s the third witness?”

“Next to none.”

“Another bust, then.”

“Not exactly. I did pry something out of him on Containers, Inc.-something Rivas admits he let slip to Pendarves once.”

“And that is?”

“The Lujacks are running an illegal shop.”

“Illegal? Meaning what?”

“Most of their labor force is undocumented aliens,” he said. “Out of the drive-by hiring halls in the Mission.”

“The hell.”

“Puts a whole new slant on things, doesn’t it.”

It did that, if it was true. Somewhere around a million illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America now live in California, thousands of them in San Francisco’s Mission District and in Daly City farther west; many have no jobs and no way of getting legitimate work without green cards from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. So the drive-by halls were born, and have flourished in the city and throughout the state.

On a dozen or more street corners in the Mission, illegals congregate early every morning, like cattle in pens, waiting for employers on the prowl for cheap labor to come driving along. A painting contractor, for instance, goes to a drive-by hall that specializes in illegals with painting skills; picks as many men as he needs for a particular job, or series of jobs, and hauls them to and from the sites; and pays them wages far below union scale-in cash, always, so there is no record of their employment. If the employer is a plumbing contractor, or runs a gardening business, or owns a factory that makes containers and requires the services of multipurpose workers, he goes to the street corner where his particular brand of illicit labor has assembled.

The police can’t do much about the drive-by halls except to disperse crowds of men that sometimes become unruly; they don’t have the jurisdiction. The INS has enacted a law carrying stiff penalties for employers caught hiring illegals, but they’re too understaffed and overworked to effectively enforce it. So both the illegals and the cheap-labor bosses make out fine: One side avoids the need for applications, interviews, union cards, and green cards; the other side avoids paying union wages, as well as withholding tax and FICA to the state and federal governments. But the big loser isn’t the IRS or the Franchise Tax Board or the INS. It’s the citizen and legitimate union worker, no matter what his race or job skill, who can’t find work to support his family because the positions have all been filled by illegals.

The real villains are the greedy employers. So far, after two meetings with Thomas Lujack and three weeks of work on his defense team, I had maintained a neutral attitude toward him; I neither liked nor disliked him, neither believed nor disbelieved in his innocence. If he was employing illegals, it tipped my feelings over onto the negative side. But it didn’t make any difference in how we handled his case; didn’t make him guilty of vehicular homicide or attempted vehicular homicide.

I asked, “How long have they been using illegals?”

“A long time, according to Rivas,” Eberhardt said. “Years.”

“How come you didn’t pick up a whisper of it before this? Hell, how come the Daly City cops didn’t when they were investigating Hanauer’s death?”

“The Lujacks have got it covered up pretty well, for one thing. You’d have to go deep into the company books to get a real smell of it. There’s never been a complaint to the INS, evidently.”

“How’d Rivas find out about it?”

“How do you think? He’s Mexican and lives in the Mission.”

“Has he got a green card?”