Breakdown Read online

  Thomas Lujack showed up ten minutes late and full of apologies. “Traffic’s snarled on the Bay Bridge,” he said. “People drive like idiots in bad weather.” He pumped my hand, pumped Glickman’s, hung his damp London Fog trench coat on an antique clothes tree, and plunked himself down on another of the visitors’ chairs.

  He was a couple of years younger than his brother, and far more stylish in his appearance and dress. Longish fox-brown hair, swept back on both sides in thick wings; silky-looking mustache that partially concealed a weak mouth. Wearing a Harris tweed sport coat today, over a mint-green shirt and designer jeans, with a couple of flashy gold chains looped around his neck. He made me feel rumpled and outmoded by comparison. He even managed to make Glickman look stuffy and bourgeois, like a Capitol Hill Republican.

  Usually he had an easy, breezy way about him that may have been natural and may have been calculated for effect. The past couple of times I’d seen him, though, he’d been as fidgety as his brother. Today he couldn’t seem to keep his hands still; they plucked at the creases in his trousers, touched his face, touched his hair, drummed at the arms of the chair, fiddled with the gold chains.

  He said to me, “I guess Paul’s told you I was at Coleman’s until nine last night.”

  “He told me,” I said. “So did Coleman.”

  “Ah? You talked to him? Well, good, good. Then you know I had nothing to do with what happened to Pendarves. If anything happened. I doubt it, myself.”

  “You go straight home after you left Coleman’s?”

  “Sure. Straight home.”

  “I called your house at a quarter of ten. There was no answer.”

  “Quarter of ten last night? That was about when I got there. You must have just missed me.”

  “Uh-huh. Where was your wife? Coleman said you called her before you left his place.”

  “At a friend’s. I picked her up on the way. I’ve been using her car since … well, since December fifth. She’s got a rental but she doesn’t like to drive much.”

  I watched his hands dip and flutter. The nervousness didn’t have to mean anything. Hell, if I were facing one vehicular homicide rap, and had just been accused of another by the star witness in the first case, I wouldn’t be sitting still either.

  I said, “You have any contact with Pendarves in the past three weeks? Any kind at all?”

  “Christ, no. You think I want anything to do with that schmuck?”

  “You might have tried to talk to him, see if you could convince him he was wrong about what he saw.”

  “Uh-uh. No way. Paul warned me against that.”

  “Suppose Pendarves tries to talk to you about last night. How do you handle him?”

  “I don’t,” Thomas said. “I steer clear of him.”

  “And if he makes any overt threat or action?”

  “I report it to Paul immediately.”

  Glickman’s hard steady gaze was fixed on his client. After a few seconds he said, “Now then, Mr. Lujack. We’ll discuss your practice of hiring illegal aliens.”

  Thomas sat still for a couple of beats, showing no reaction. Then his hands began to move restlessly again, and he smiled in a wry and self-deprecating way. “So you found out about that.”

  “Did you think we wouldn’t?”

  “Well, I hoped not. It’s not something I’m proud of.”

  “Why didn’t you confide in me?”

  “I didn’t see any reason to. Neither did Coleman. Why open up a can of worms if you don’t have to?”

  “If it’s opened publicly now,” Glickman said, “it won’t help you in court.”

  “I know. But it’s not going to get opened publicly, not if we keep it among ourselves.”

  I said, “What makes you so sure?”

  “The INS hasn’t tumbled in six years. Why should they now?”

  “Is that how long you’ve been employing illegals? Six years?”

  “About.”

  “Whose bright idea was it in the first place?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “It might. It ever occur to you that maybe there’s a connection between the illegals and Hanauer’s murder?”

  “Oh, come on. What possible connection could there be?”

  “You tell us, Mr. Lujack.”

  “None. None at all.”

  “Was it Hanauer’s idea?”

  “To hire illegals? No. It was Coleman’s.”

  “You and Hanauer approve it right away?”

  “More or less. We were still on shaky financial ground in those days and it was a way to save ourselves thousands of dollars a year. Hell, like it or not, undocumented workers have become a common business option—”

  “You or Hanauer ever have trouble with your workers? Somebody you had to fire, for instance?”

  “I know I didn’t. Frank would have mentioned it if he had. Besides, neither of us hires or fires the factory workers. Our shop foreman takes care of that.”

  “Rafael Vega.”

  “Right.”

  “Did Vega have trouble with any of the illegals during the past year?”

  “Nothing he reported …” Thomas’s voice trailed off, and he frowned. At length he said, “Well, there was one clash between him and Frank. But it was so minor I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “What kind of clash?”

  “Words, that’s all. A couple of months ago.”

  “Were you there at the time?”

  “Yeah. It got a little heated.”

  “What did they have words about?”

  “Production. We had a rush order for a hundred gross of number ten singlewalls, one that Frank brought in personally, and we were behind schedule. He blamed Vega for the delay.”

  “You said the exchange got heated. How heated?”

  “Oh, they did some shouting at each other. Vega threatened to quit, but that was just chili-pepper talk.”

  “That all he threatened to do?”

  “You mean did he make any threats against Frank? No, it wasn’t like that. Nothing personal. Just one of those workplace flare-ups, that’s all. The next day it was like it never happened.”

  “How did Hanauer and Vega get along otherwise?”

  “… All right. No problems.”

  “You sound a little hesitant.”

  “I’m just trying to remember. To be honest, I don’t think Frank liked Vega much. And the feeling was probably mutual. But again, it wasn’t personal.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “I guess you’d call it bigotry,” Thomas said. “Frank didn’t care for Mexicans. Didn’t actively hate them, you understand—just didn’t much care for them as a race. He thought they were lazy.”

  “Uh-huh. And Vega knew or sensed this.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “How about you? What’s your opinion of Latinos?”

  “I’m no bigot, if that’s what you mean. I like Mexicans just fine.”

  Sure you do, I thought. That’s why you hire illegal aliens and pay them starvation wages without any benefits. That’s why you use phrases like “chili-pepper talk.”

  I said, “You and Vega get along all right?”

  “Sure. Fine.”

  “You pay him well?”

  “Damn well. He’s never had a kick coming on that score.”

  “So he has no reason to hate or dislike you.”

  “Not unless he’s a bigot.”

  “You think he might be?”

  “He keeps it to himself, if he is.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  Thomas shrugged. “Good worker, keeps his people hopping. We never have to worry about the manufacturing end with him on the job. He can be hard-nosed sometimes—fiery. You know how those Mexicans are. The Latin temperament.”

  “Meaning he sometimes flies off the handle?”

  “Sometimes.” Thomas smiled his self-deprecating smile. “He’s got my kind of pop-off temper. Especially after he’s been drinking
.”

  “He drinks on the job?”

  “No, no. I mean when he’s hung over, after a wet night.”

  “That happen often?”

  “Not often, no. I don’t think he’s a heavy boozer. Once or twice a month he’ll come in and you can tell he was shitfaced the night before. That’s about it.”

  Glickman had been sitting quietly all this time, listening to my Q & A with Thomas. Now he stirred and said to his client, “It’s possible, whether you think so or not, that this man Vega has motive to want to harm both you and your late partner. If you’d been completely honest with us from the beginning …”

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence; Thomas got the point. “Okay, I was wrong and I apologize. What else can I say?”

  “Is there anything else you’ve neglected to tell us?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “However small it might be.”

  “I swear it—nothing.”

  “Because if there is,” Glickman said, “and I find out about it, I’ll resign immediately as your defense attorney. And I’ll be obliged to pass on my reasons to whomever you get to replace me.”

  I said, “That goes for me too.”

  Thomas bobbed his head and said that he understood. He looked innocent and eager to please; but there was sweat on him now and he seemed even more nervous. Had he been honest, or was he trying to con us by deflecting suspicion elsewhere? Was he what he appeared to be, an unethical but basically decent businessman caught in a web of circumstance, or was he in fact a cold-blooded murderer?

  I just could not make up my mind, one way or the other.

  * * * *

  Chapter 6

  From Terrific Street, I drove back to O’Farrell and the office. Eberhardt wasn’t there, but the answering machine had a message from him.

  “Vega wasn’t home,” his voice said. “Nobody else was, either. One of the neighbors told me Mrs. Vega works too, cooks in some restaurant in South San Francisco, doesn’t get home until after six. There’s also a son living with them; neighbor didn’t know where I could find him or his father. I’d go back out there after six but I’ve got an early date with Bobbie Jean in San Rafael. Vega can wait until tomorrow, no? Let me know how it went with Glickman and Thomas. I’ll be home until five forty-five or so.”

  No, dammit, I thought, Vega can’t wait until tomorrow. But my annoyance didn’t last long. There was no sense in blaming him for not being a workaholic. Detective work is just a job to him—nine-to-five and on to more important things. Hell, he was getting married in a few months. I couldn’t expect him to put extra hours into a muddled and maybe futile case like this one, just because it was frustrating the hell out of me.

  I called him at home and told him how things had gone with Glickman and Thomas Lujack. Then I told him I’d do the follow-up on Rafael Vega myself, tonight.

  He said, “You trying to make me feel guilty?”

  “No. I don’t have anything better to do.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. Give my love to Bobbie Jean.”

  I locked up for the night and walked to Van Ness and ate an early dinner at Zim’s. It was just six when I came back and got the car out of the parking garage near the office, and six fifteen when I turned off Mission Street onto Sixteenth.

  On a dreary weekday evening like this one, at the tag end of rush hour, the Mission looks like any other crowded ethnic neighborhood of older buildings and graffiti-scabbed walls; you need a hot summer Saturday to appreciate its full ambiance and flavor. The people hurrying along the wet sidewalks and the types and names of the business establishments told you that the population here was heavily Latin. But this was far more than a barrio. It was a place where old cultures clashed with new; where you could sample the pleasures of yesterday’s world and the probable horrors of tomorrow’s; where the good and the bad and the ugly coexisted and cohabited in a tolerant, dynamic, and too often deadly disharmony.

  When I was a kid growing up a few miles from here, in the Outer Mission, this neighborhood had been solidly working-class, populated mostly by Irish immigrants, and dominated by two-hundred-year-old Mission Dolores and its newer, ornate basilica. The district’s metamorphosis had been gradual at first, radical in the past decade or so. It was still solidly working-class, at least at its residential core, and still one of the poorer neighborhoods in the city, but Mission Dolores was no longer its spiritual hub—a fact you might find surprising, given the strong Latin emphasis on religion, if you weren’t aware of all the other factors that had gone into making it what it was today. It had no hub, no focal point now; it was a kind of mutant, neither one thing nor another, neither bad nor good, just a teeming, formless entity that writhed this way and that and went nowhere at all. And it was still mutating—into what was anybody’s guess.

  The Latinos were partly responsible for its present state, in particular the disillusioned young and the steady influx of frustrated and sometimes desperate illegals. So was the heavy concentration of drug dealers and cocaine, heroin, crack, and methamphetamine addicts in the four-block area around Sixteenth and Mission that has been dubbed the Devil’s Quadrangle. So was its floating population of drunks, hookers, misfits, drifters, and homeless citizens. So were the impoverished elderly, forced into the area’s shabby residential hotels by redevelopment projects in other parts of the city. So were the predators who preyed on the unfortunate and the unwary, and seemed to take periodic delight in setting fire to buildings both abandoned and occupied. So were the neighborhood activists, who had brought about small cosmetic and public-service improvements and who continued to lobby long and loud for major ones. And most recently, so were the New Bohemians, once entrenched in North Beach and then in the Haight-Ashbury, who had been drawn to the Mission by its still-affordable rents; who had opened repertory theaters, avant-garde art galleries, funky cafes where you could listen to poetry readings while you sipped espresso, bookstores new and used that specialized in radical political and feminist literature, and legitimate nightclubs as well as the bandit variety that operated without business permits. You could buy or do or see just about anything in the Mission these days, from the simple to the depraved. You could also lose your money or your life if you weren’t careful—and not just after nightfall.

  I drove up Sixteenth past Mission Dolores. Some of the older wood-frame homes and gingerbread-adorned apartment houses in this area had been damaged by the October quake, especially along Shotwell a few blocks east; but the structures flanking Albert Alley, the narrow little side street on which Rafael Vega lived, seemed to have survived with a minimum of harm. Parking on Albert or in its immediate vicinity was impossible; finding a space within walking distance took me fifteen minutes of circuitous driving. The rain had quit for the time being, but the wind still blew cold and damp. I was chilled by the time I completed a vigilant five-block walk and located Vega’s address.

  He and his family occupied the lower flat in a well-maintained two-unit Italianate Victorian, set back behind a gated fence and a nice little garden. By Inner Mission standards, it was a pretty affluent residence. The Vegas had cut themselves a slice of the American Dream, and never mind that it was at least partially at the expense of their Latino brethren.

  Lights glowed behind a drawn shade in one of the front windows, so somebody was home. Huddled on the porch, I rang the Vegas’s bell. Almost immediately, hurrying footsteps sounded inside. A porch light flicked on, locks clicked, and chains rattled, and then the door jerked inward—all as if the woman who stood there had been waiting eagerly for a caller. She was in her mid-forties, plump without being fat, with coffee-dark skin and black hair pulled into a tight bun. One hand came up to her mouth when she saw me. The worried look in her eyes staggered over the edge into fear.

  “Si? Yes? What do you want?” Her English was heavily accented, her voice a little thick—the kind of thickness that comes from alcohol. I could smell the wine on her breath.

  �
�Mrs. Vega?”

  A convulsive nod. “?Es el mi esposo? Dios mia, my husband?”

  “He’s why I’m here, yes, but I—”

  “What has happened to him? Where is he?”

  “Mrs. Vega, I’m here to see your husband, not to tell you anything about him.”

  She stared at me for two or three beats. Then the fear-shine in her eyes dulled and she sagged a little against the door, crossing herself. Relief seemed to have clogged her throat; she had to clear it before she could speak again.

  “Who are you? What do you want with Rafael?”

  “Just to talk to him.”

  “You are not from the—” She bit off the rest of the sentence: “police,” maybe, or “Immigration Service.”

  “I’m here on my own,” I said. I told her my name, but not what I did for a living. “Your husband and I work for the same man—Thomas Lujack.”

  “Ah,” she said, but it was just a sound without meaning.

  “May I come in, Mrs. Vega?”

  She hesitated. “Rafael … you know he is not here.”

  “I’ll talk to you instead, if that’s all right. It won’t take long. Con su permiso.”

  Again she hesitated, longer this time. Finally she made a motion with one hand, almost of resignation, and drew the door wider. “Come in.”

  I followed her across a short hall and through a doorway on the left. She was steady enough on her feet, but slow and deliberate in her movements: not drunk yet but working on it. Alcoholic? Her appearance said no. Her face was free of the blotchiness and doughy laxity of the habitual drinker, and her hair and her brown wool skirt and white blouse were in neat array.

  The room she led me into was a high-ceilinged front parlor. It was overstuffed with a hodgepodge of good quality but mismatched furniture, and dominated by religious paintings and a large statue of the Virgin Mary on the mantel above a walled-up fireplace. Two odors lingered on the too warm air: scented candle wax and red wine. There was a bottle of burgundy and a half-filled glass on the table next to a Mexican rocker.

  “You will have some wine?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “Nothing for me.”

  We both sat down, her on the rocker and me on a carved rosewood settee. She looked at her glass but didn’t pick it up. Instead she plucked at her skirt as if removing invisible flecks of lint. I noticed then that her hands were remarkably young and delicate—the hands of a woman half her age.