Bill Pronzini: Breakdown

“Oh, yeah. He showed it to me.”

“If he told Pendarves and you,” I said, “he must have told others. You’d think somebody would’ve let it slip.”

“Who’s going to blab a thing like that to the cops, get himself branded as a snitch? I had to practically threaten it out of Rivas, poor bastard. And I had to promise him we’d keep shut about where the information came from. At that, I don’t think I got the full story.”

“What do you think he held back?”

“Beats me.”

After a few seconds I said, “Now I’m wondering if this has anything to do with Hanauer’s murder.”

“Same here. But I don’t see how.”

“Neither do I. And even if it did, why wouldn’t Thomas himself have come out with it to save his own hide? Hiring illegal aliens is a minor offense compared to second-degree homicide.”

“I can think of one reason,” Eberhardt said.

“Yeah. He’s guilty as hell on all counts. But that still doesn’t explain how the illegals thing could have triggered the hit-and-run.”

“Some sort of fight about it, maybe. One of them wanted to keep hiring illegals, the other one didn’t.”

“That’s not much of a motive for murder. Did Rivas know which of the Lujacks does the actual hiring? Or was it Hanauer, maybe?”

“None of them. Shop foreman named Vega, Rafael Vega.”

“You know this Vega?”

“Talked to him briefly a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t leave much of an impression one way or the other. But Rivas seems to be afraid of him.”

“He give you any idea why?”

“No. Wouldn’t talk about it.” Eberhardt’s pipe had gone out; he paused to relight it. “So what do you think? Should I have a talk with Vega?”

“Let’s both have a talk with him. Coleman Lujack too.”

“Now or later?”

“Now,” I said. “It beats sitting around here waiting for Glickman to call.”

* * * *

Industrial way angles off Bayshore Boulevard just beyond where Bayshore crosses the southwestern boundary line between San Francisco and Daly City. It’s an odd, grim little pocket of light industry, low-income housing, and urban squalor. Here you have the desolate, 440-acre ruins of Southern Pacific’s Bayshore Yards; and nearby, the predominantly black Sunnydale Housing Projects, overrun with poverty, drugs, and drug-related gang violence-the same projects that had “terrified” a touring HUD official in the Reagan Administration a few years ago, even though he had visited them in the company of a police escort. Not far away, crowning the low Daly City hills, are saggy rows of the “ticky-tacky” houses ridiculed by Malvina Reynolds in her protest song “Little Boxes.” Within a two-mile radius are two of the city’s major sports and recreation centers, Candlestick Park and the Cow Palace; Highway 101, the main arterial leading down the Peninsula; the rugged San Bruno Mountains and the upscale hillside community of Brisbane.

An odd little street, Industrial Way, within the odd little pocket-a three-block-long dead end lined with small manufacturing and warehousing companies, an auto-body shop, an outfit that makes statuary for gardens and cemeteries, and one big land-ocean freight-forwarding operation. There is no other industry in the immediate area; Industrial Way and its tenants sit alone, flanked on one side by Bayshore Boulevard climbing toward Brisbane, and on the other side by the abandoned railroad yards.

It was a little before two when I turned onto Industrial. Eberhardt and I had flipped a coin to see who would drive and I’d lost. The morning drizzle had evolved into a misty rain, with dark low-hanging clouds. The weather gave the ravaged yards an even gloomier aspect: war zone after a recent cease-fire. The property had been this way for several years now, steadily worsening since a fire of dubious origin destroyed one of the main buildings and Southern Pacific decided to phase out operations here. Before that, for nearly seventy years, the Bayshore Yards had been one of the line’s main repair centers for locomotives and cars: miles of track, a big roundhouse, warehouses, other facilities. Now most of the track had been taken up, the buildings were just burned-out shells, parts of which had collapsed during the recent earthquake, and the only reminders of what the acreage had once been used for were the rusting corpses of a water tower, some hoists, a few discarded boxcars, flats, and tankers. Those, and SP’s one remaining operational facility here: their freight claims department on Sunnydale at the far end of the property.

Beside me, Eberhardt said, “This place depresses me every time I come out here. You know what I mean?”

“Too well.”

“I used to go into the Bayshore Yards when I was a kid,” he said. “One of the wipers in the roundhouse was a friend of my old man’s and he’d let me hang around sometimes, watch the work that was going on. I had a thing about trains in those days. Wanted to be a gandy dancer.”

“Track worker? You?”

“Yeah, well, I was a kid. Eleven or twelve. Go out on a handcar, swing a nine-pound sledge like John Henry, repair track … hell, it seemed like a pretty exciting life.”

“Sure. Hard work, low pay, and a high risk factor.”

“Just like being a cop,” he said wryly.

“You made the right choice, Eb.”

“I suppose. But man, the yards were really something in those days. Now look. Nothing left but rats and weeds and junkies wandering in to shoot up. Vandals don’t even bother with it anymore. It’s a crying shame the SP doesn’t do something about it.”

“Seems I heard they’re trying to sell the property.”

“Who to?”

“Anybody who’ll buy it, I guess.”

“You’d think the city would be interested. Or San Mateo County. Or both together. They could clean it out, put in a park maybe. Cheap housing, if nothing else.”

“The city’s deeper in debt than the federal government,” I said. “San Mateo County too, for all I know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Shit,” he said.

Containers, Inc., was at the far end of Industrial Way-a large corrugated-iron building that housed the manufacturing plant and shipping facilities, with a much smaller structure built onto the near side for the office staff. From a distance, the whole thing had the appearance of a squared-off metal igloo. There was no fence around it, but at night the grounds were lighted by sodium-vapor arc lights, and the entire building was protected by an alarm system; a private security patrol also cruised the area after dark. It was that kind of area.

Opposite the office wing was a small parking lot, jammed now with a couple of dozen vehicles. I pulled in there, found an empty slot and filled it.

The death of Frank Hanauer, the murder charge against Thomas Lujack, and all the publicity surrounding the affair did not seem to have had any adverse effect on the factory’s business. Over on the far side, where the loading docks were, trucks jockeyed around and men and forklifts worked busily; the steady thrum of machinery came from inside the big building. Not that the activity surprised me at all. Nothing much interferes with the grinding wheels of industry these days, not where a product-in-demand is concerned. Everybody needs boxes to put things in, commercial establishments in particular; and in a consumer society, the product is all that matters. Who cares who makes the boxes-illegal aliens, space aliens, even murderers-just so long as they get made.

We went into the main office, a good-sized room divided in half lengthwise by a waist-high counter. On our side were some uncomfortable-looking visitors’ chairs and a closed door; on the other side were four desks occupied by three women and one man, two of the women working computer terminals, the man talking on the telephone. The third woman, whose desk was nearest the counter, didn’t seem to be doing much of anything; and she evidently didn’t want to be disturbed while she was not doing it. I had to call to her twice before she deigned to acknowledge our presence.