“Same one each time?”
“He didn’t say.”
McBee gave me a squinty look. “You don’t think some call girl would let him hole up with her, do you?”
“Depends on the girl,” I said. “How well he knew her, how much money he had to offer.”
“Bah. I don’t believe it.”
“Neither do I,” Parigli said. “And I don’t care what Lyda says, I don’t believe Nick’s been paying for it. He’s not that sort.”
“Every man’s that sort,” Lyda said, “at least until he gets too damn old to care. Deprive a horny male long enough and he’ll mortgage the house for a night with a circus fat lady.”
I stayed until almost ten. By then the regulars had had enough alcohol and enough group reinforcement to gloss over Pendarves’s faults and foibles and elevate him to the status of martyr. The web of illusionary safety had been repaired, made strong again. I didn’t blame them. Take away an elderly person’s sense of security, and he’s left feeling naked and helpless. It is the last and most vital of all our necessary illusions; without it, life can become unbearably hopeless.
As I walked through the wet night to my car, I thought with sudden insight: Isn’t that what’s happening to Cybil right now? Isn’t Kerry and Kerry’s apartment her last illusion of safety, and isn’t she terrified that without that sanctuary her life will become unbearably hopeless?
* * * *
Chapter 10
Thursday morning.
From the office I called Paul Glickman. He had nothing to tell me; he hadn’t been able to get back in touch with either Coleman Lujack or Thomas Lujack’s widow.
Nick Pendarves was still among the missing.
Eberhardt was late again. And there had been no messages on the answering machine.
Status quo.
I scribbled a note to Eberhardt, left it on his desk, locked the office, picked up my car, and headed south across the city to Highway 280.
* * * *
The house owned by Thomas and Eileen Lujack was high in the hills above San Carlos, at the end of a twisty little street ludicrously named Sweet William Lane. It was similar to most of the others in the neighborhood-big ranch-style place not more than twenty years old, built of wood and fieldstone, with plenty of glass to take advantage of what, on a clear day, would be a miles-wide view of the bay from near San Francisco on the north to near San Jose on the south.
Low, dark clouds obscured most of the view today, though at least it wasn’t raining here just now. The lot was big for this area, about two acres, the grounds well landscaped with lawn and shrubbery and flower beds; a gnarly old oak and a couple of acacias would provide shade in the summer. Scattered on the lawn and under the trees, peeping out here and there from among the vegetation, were at least twenty gaudily painted, three-foot-tall cast-iron gnomes, each one with a different facial expression ranging from weepy to lusty-leer. The gnomes gave the place a whimsical aspect, like some sort of Disney exhibit. Cute kitsch.
At a conservative estimate I put the value of the property at half a million dollars. Pretty fancy digs for the part-owner of a box factory that grossed around three million a year. But then, Thomas and his wife may have bought it before 1975, when Bay Area real estate prices began the steep ascent to their present dizzying heights. Back then, you could have bought all of this for under $100,000.
Sweet William Lane widened into a turnaround in front of the house, like a bulb at the end of a crooked thermometer. I parked near the driveway and went in along a fieldstone walk. One of the gnomes scowled at me as I passed; I scowled back at him. The front porch was half hidden by wisteria bushes, and the front door had a knocker in the shape of a smiling gnome’s head. More cute kitsch. I found a doorbell and used that instead.
The door opened pretty soon, to reveal a thirtyish, ash-blond woman dressed in a black suit and a gray blouse. She frowned and blinked and said, “Oh. You’re not the taxi.”
“No, ma’am.”
“I mean, you’re not the taxi driver.”
“Yes, ma’am. Are you Eileen Lujack?”
“That’s right. Who are you?”
I let her have my name and one of my business cards.
“Oh,” she said, “yes, Tom mentioned you. I think your partner came to see me once, didn’t he? Elkhart or Eisenhardt or something like that?”
“Eberhardt.”
“Eberhardt, yes. You should have called first.”
“Ma’am?”
“Before you came all the way down here to see me.”
“I tried to call a couple of times yesterday-”
“I was so upset, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. So I turned the bell on the phone all the way down. That way I couldn’t hear it when it rang.”
“I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Lujack.”
“Thank you. You’re very kind.”
“Would you mind talking today? There are a few things I-”
“Well, I can’t,” she said. “Not now. I’m going to be late as it is.” She looked at a platinum-gold wristwatch and then past me, down Sweet William Lane. “He should have been here by now. The taxi. I told them I had an eleven thirty appointment with the funeral people and they said they’d send somebody right away. That was forty minutes ago.”
“If you’d rather not wait,” I said, “I could drive you.”
“Oh, would you? You wouldn’t mind?”
“Not at all. We can talk on the way. Where is it you need to go?”
“Just into town. San Carlos. Saxon and Jeffrey-that’s the name of the funeral home. But what about the taxi?”
“Ma’am?”
“Well, he’ll come eventually and I won’t be here. The taxi company won’t like that. They might not come at all the next time I need them.”
“You can call and cancel on the way. I have a phone in my car.”
“You do? Oh, good. We’d better hurry then.”
She went and got her purse, locked the door, and set the burglar alarm. While I waited I remembered what Eberhardt had told me after his talk with the lady. “She’s kind of a ditz,” he’d said. “Not quite as bad as your typical Hollywood dumb blonde, but close. Thomas didn’t marry her for her IQ, that’s for sure.” Eb can be a sexist sometimes, if a benign one, and at the time I’d put the description down to his piggy tendencies. But now that I had spent five minutes in Eileen Lujack’s company, I decided he’d been speaking the nonsexist truth. She was a tall, leggy, chesty, blue-eyed, clear-skinned, gnome-loving ditz. And if she had spent any of the last thirty-six hours grieving over her husband, you couldn’t tell it by looking at her.
When we got to the car she gave it a wary look, as if she were afraid it might fold up around her like one of those comic jobs in a Mack Sennett two-reeler. She said, “What happened to your door?”
“Somebody broke in a couple of nights ago. I haven’t had a chance to get the lock fixed.”
Her expression said she was wondering why anybody in his right mind would break into a wreck like this, but she had the grace not to put the thought into words. I helped her in through the driver’s door, made an effort not to look at her legs as she scooted across the seat and swung them over the cellular phone unit, and then took my place under the wheel.
“I guess you have trouble with cars too,” she said.
“Well, not usually.”
“We never used to. Not until that awful thing with Tom’s car and poor Frank Hanauer. Now the police have my car too. They … what’s the word when they keep your property?”
“Impound.”
“That’s right. They impounded it. Tom got me a rental when he started using mine but I don’t like driving it. I don’t like driving at all, really, and today I just couldn’t. I should have called one of my friends but I didn’t think about it in time….” She sighed heavily. “Are you sure you don’t mind driving me?”
“Positive. I’m glad to help.”
She directed me downhill through a warren of little streets and onto Alameda de las Pulgas. On the way I called the local cab company and let her cancel her order. Afterward she sat stiff and erect, not too close to the wired-shut door, and folded her hands tightly around her purse.