“What questions?”
“Why don’t we go inside? Or sit in your car where it’s dry?”
“No,” he said, “I can’t take the time. I have an appointment.”
“It won’t take long.”
He hesitated, as if weighing the idea, then shook his head and bent to unlock the driver’s door.
“Rafael Vega,” I said. “Illegal aliens. Coyotes.”
His reaction was like watching a piece of badly edited film: freeze frame for three or four seconds, followed by jerky action in which he finished the unlocking process and yanked the door open. He said without looking at me, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay. Try this: Nick Pendarves didn’t kill your brother.”
“Nonsense.”
“Is it, Mr. Lujack?”
I thought for a second that he was going to dive into the car to avoid both me and the issues I’d just raised; but he didn’t do it. He straightened slowly, faced me again. The greenish effect of the nearest arc light gave his skin an unhealthy cast.
He said, “Of course Pendarves is guilty. All the evidence-”
“Evidence can be faked.”
“You have proof that it was?”
“Not yet. But I’m working on it.”
“On whose authority?”
I didn’t answer that.
“I see,” he said. “So I suppose you expect me to pay you.”
I didn’t answer that either.
“How long will it take? Another month or two-or six? And at what, two or three hundred dollars a day?”
I had my hands in my overcoat pockets and I kept them there so I wouldn’t be tempted to hit him. I hurt him with my eyes, though; I must have because he winced and fastened his own gaze on my mouth.
“Why are you afraid of the truth, Mr. Lujack?”
“I’m not afraid of the truth. I know the truth.”
“Do you? All right, who killed Frank Hanauer? Your brother?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, Pendarves didn’t do it. So who did?”
“I doubt if we’ll ever know, now.”
“Because Thomas is dead? That doesn’t necessarily follow. Don’t you want his name cleared?”
“If possible, yes. But you haven’t been able to do it in a month and neither have the police.”
“I still can, if you cooperate.”
“I’ve given you all the cooperation I’m going to.”
“It wouldn’t be the INS you’re worried about, would it?”
“Damn the INS,” he said. “All I’m worried about is my sanity. I’ve taken all the grief and anguish I can stand; so has Tom’s widow. As far as we’re concerned, it’s over now, finished. Let the dead alone and the living go on living.”
Nice little kiss-off speech-emotional, forceful, sincere. I didn’t buy a word of it. But there was nothing I could do about it. I just stood there while he folded himself into the front seat, looked up at me long enough to say, “Please don’t bother me or Eileen again. If you do …” Then he slammed the door, as if to emphasize the implied threat. I heard the lock click an instant before he ground the starter.
I backed off a couple of steps, holding my anger in check, as he drove off. He thought he’d handled me just right. He thought this was the end of my nosing around in his and his brother’s private affairs. He thought that whatever he was hiding was going to stay hidden.
He thought wrong.
* * * *
According to my map, Atlanta Street was in a narrow little section of Daly City flanked by the western slopes of the San Bruno Mountains, Colma’s Olivet Memorial Park and Serbian Cemetery, and the Cypress Hills Golf Course. For some reason known only to its developers, there being no body of water within miles, most of the streets had been given nautical-type names: Harbor, Dockside, Windjammer, Frigate, Pirate Cove. Maybe it had to do with the fact that the section resembled a short peninsula jutting out from the Daly City mainland. More likely, the names had nothing to do with anything except fledgling cleverness. Just another variety of cute kitsch, after the fashion of the gnomes in Eileen Lujack’s gardens.
As the crow flies, only a few miles separated Teresa Melendez’s home from Containers, Inc. But the crow would have had to fly straight up over the San Brunos, just as I had to drive up over them on Guadalupe Canyon Parkway, and that increased the distance considerably. Guadalupe Canyon was where the end of the notorious car chase in Bullitt was filmed-the one that inspired the endless, mindless succession of TV-show car chases and cinematic demolition derbies that continue to offend the senses. But that was more than twenty years ago, before the road underwent improvements and its daily traffic load was still light. Nowadays they couldn’t have closed it off for a couple of days as they did back then; it had become a well-traveled commuter thoroughfare and the animals in the rush-hour zoo would have rioted at the inconvenience.
I turned off Guadalupe onto Orange Street, made a wrong turn, and discovered that most of the little peninsula-the part with the nautical street names-was hidden away behind a high rustic retaining wall that extended east-west for several blocks. The only through street had a guardhouse and guard at the entrance, and when I passed by I could see acres of trailers on landscaped lots. So the landlocked peninsula was mostly a fancy trailer park bounded by brown hillsides and a couple of cemeteries and made up of streets called Frigate and Pirate Cove. I didn’t even try to figure it out. There are some things that defy deductive reasoning.
I found Atlanta Street finally; it dead-ended at the street along which the retaining wall ran. Ninety-eight percent of the residences in this part were the standard Daly City variety dubbed “little boxes” by Malvina Reynolds-squarish row houses standing shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors, built close to the sidewalk, garage below and living quarters above, narrow entranceways between with staircases leading up to the front doors. The other two percent, scattered here and there, were newish detached houses and older cottage-style dwellings that looked uncomfortably out of place, like liberals that had wandered by mistake into a stadium full of right-wing fundamentalists. Eight-oh-six Atlanta turned out to be one of the cottages, small and white-frame and not too well kept up, with a little front garden behind a low fence and a carport instead of a garage on one side. Lights burned behind drawn curtains, and there was one vehicle parked under the carport, so somebody was home.
The parked car was a brownish compact. I couldn’t make out the license plate as I drove past, but I was pretty sure the make was Honda and the model Civic. The curb in front was empty; so were the curb spaces before another cottage on one flank and row houses on the other. An empty white van waited at an angle across the way; it was the only street-parked vehicle in the immediate vicinity.
I circled the next block and came back on Atlanta. No sign of Rafael Vega’s Buick anywhere along there. I tried the cross streets, taking it slow. That didn’t buy me anything either.
So maybe I was wrong about Vega and Teresa Melendez.
And maybe I was right and he was out buying groceries or liquor or condoms, or doing any one of a hundred other things.
I drove over to Mission and stopped at the first restaurant I saw, a Mexican place that specialized in Yucatan dishes. I ate a burrito with prawns and mushrooms and cilantro; I drank three cups of coffee; I sat and thought about things and didn’t have any brainstorms. At eight o’clock I put myself back in the car and returned to Atlanta Street.
The lights were still on in Teresa Melendez’s cottage. The Honda Civic was still parked under the carport. And there still wasn’t any sign of Rafael Vega or his Buick Skylark.
Behind the parked van was curb room for another car, as well as some shadow from an overhanging pepper tree. I thought I could sit there for a while without attracting attention. I made a U-turn, parked, drifted low on the seat, and waited.
Seconds crawled and minutes crept, the way they had in the parking lot at Containers, Inc., the way they always do on a stakeout. God, how I hated stakeouts-short or long, it didn’t make any difference. The passive waiting, the boredom, the slow, slow passage of dead time. How many did this make in the past thirty-odd years? How many empty, wasted, lost hours? Too damn many. The physical discomfort was also becoming less tolerable, especially on nights like this, with the rain stopping and starting, stopping and starting, and the wind and the cold sneaking into the car and conspiring to numb my feet. Nights like this, I felt every one of my years. Nights like this, I understood why old men wrap themselves in sweaters and shawls and then sit close to heaters, stoves, blazing fires.