“What about this house?”
“I pay rent,” she said. “Poor spick like me can’t afford to buy a house in Los Estados Unidos.”
There was nothing more I could say to her, nothing I could do for her. I went to the door, opened it. “If Coleman tries to get in touch with you, don’t talk to him. Don’t tell him I was here. I don’t want him to know I’m hunting him.”
“What you going to do when you find him?”
“Turn him over to the authorities.”
She smiled, and it was a terrible thing to see. “Then I hope el jefe comes here first,” she said. “If he does I’ll cut his fucking heart out, feed it to the neighbor’s dogs.”
She meant it. Hell hath no fury like a woman left alone with the bloody remains of a dead love.
* * * *
Chapter 17
The Serramonte Shopping Centre is only a couple of miles from Atlanta Street, off Highway 280 that runs down the backbone of the Peninsula. I drove over there and hunted up a coffee shop, another in an endless succession of lookalike plastic-food emporiums in which I consumed all sorts of bad grub and frittered away time. Sometimes I felt as if my whole life was an intricate series of wanderings on a giant game board, moving here and there toward some nebulous prize, and in the process perpetually finding myself on the square that saidCoffee Shop, Open 24 Hours, Families Welcome.
I had no appetite after the session with Teresa Melendez, but the rumblings in my stomach and the dull ache behind my eyes said I had better eat something. If you don’t keep putting fuel into a battered fifty-eight-year-old corpus, the thing will quit running and maybe break down for good. That was especially true after the abuse I had subjected the corpus to last night. So I ordered a bowl of beef stew and an English muffin — two items that even the worst cooks can’t screw up too badly-and brooded my way through them.
I was beginning to see how things in the Lujack case fit together, and most of what I saw I didn’t like worth a damn. One element was particularly galling.
Glickman and Eberhardt and I had been as wrong as you can be about Thomas Lujack: He had in fact run down and killed Frank Hanauer.
It was the only explanation that accounted for everything that had happened since. His defense, the whole vague conspiracy theory, had been a smokescreen designed to obscure his guilt; and Eberhardt and I had not been hired to find a third witness, nor to prove him innocent, but on the thin hope that we’d come up with something in Pendarves’s background that Glickman could use in court to discredit his testimony. We’d been pawns, Eb and me. Or maybe fools was a better word-a pair of fools prancing and dancing for the benefit of a desperate knave.
I figured it this way:
Five or six years ago, the Lujack brothers had conspired with Rafael Vega to finance a large-scale coyote operation in Southern California. At Vega’s instigation, probably; he had the contacts on both sides of the border. For some reason, most likely plain greed, Hanauer had been left out of the deal. It had taken him five years to get a whiff of what his partners were into, and when he did, early in December, he’d taken it badly. On the evening of the fifth, after everyone else at Containers, Inc., was gone, Hanauer had confronted Thomas; maybe threatened him with exposure, maybe demanded a retroactive cut of the profits. In any case, it had been a heated exchange, and Hanauer had ended it by walking out. But Thomas had a violent temper, the kind that sometimes overwhelms reason; he’d rushed outside in Hanauer’s wake and turned his car into a lethal weapon. By the time he’d come to his senses, it was too late to do anything but frantically try to cover up. He abandoned his Caddy, came back to the factory on foot through the Bayshore Yards, and arrived on the scene with his hastily improvised story. When one of the witnesses, Dinsmore, opened up the possibility of a missing third witness, Thomas seized on that and made it a major design in his fabric of lies and obfuscations.
The rest of it wasn’t as clear-cut-I didn’t have enough details yet-but I could see enough of it to make informed guesses about the gaps. The impulsive and very public killing of Hanauer was one major catalyst. There had to be another too, and judging from what Teresa Melendez had told me, it was that the coyote operation had recently started to break down. Any number of things could be responsible for that: greed, internal screwups, an informant, an INS or Mexican government spy. Whatever the reason, the feds were getting close to busting it wide open. And the Lujacks and Vega knew it.
Taken together, those two factors had created a pressure-cooker situation. Coleman, the nervous Nellie, would seem the most likely to break down first under the strain; in fact he was the coolest and deadliest of the lot. El jefe. Instead it was Thomas, a bundle of nerves under his casual facade, who had cracked first. And what cracked him was the specter of a homicide charge upgraded to first-degree when his involvement with the coyotes was made public, and a certain conviction on the basis of Pendarves’s unimpeachable eyewitness testimony.
Pendarves’s brush with death on Monday night, like the hit-and-run killing of Hanauer, was just what it appeared to be-a harebrained attempt by Thomas to save his own ass. Had he been stupid enough to use his wife’s BMW? It wouldn’t surprise me. In any case, the attempt had failed. But the dilemma Thomas faced was the same as if he’d succeeded: He needed an alibi. Same solution too: his brother. It was unlikely he’d planned it beforehand; and even if he had, he wouldn’t have told Coleman, the level-headed one, because Coleman wouldn’t have stood still for it. Thomas had gotten in touch with his brother immediately afterward and fessed up, and Coleman had agreed to supply the alibi.
Only he didn’t do it out of brotherly love; he’d done it to buy some time. He sent Thomas home to his wife, then called Vega and arranged for the two of them to meet that same night. It was clear to Coleman by then that Thomas was cracking, becoming a serious threat to his safety. So Thomas had to die-quickly, before he could do any more damage, and in such a way that no suspicion would fall on either Coleman or Vega. Coleman had convinced Vega to do the job by offering him enough money to finance his flight to Mexico City.
What kind of man plots the murder of his own brother? A cold-blooded, ruthless one, motivated by greed and self-preservation and maybe some deep-seated hatred for his weaker, handsomer sibling. A sociopath. I could see Coleman in that role with no difficulty at all.
Questions: Why had they decided to frame Pendarves? Why not just kill Thomas and make his death look like an accident or suicide? Pendarves was a threat only to Thomas … or was he a threat to Coleman and Vega as well? I remembered Pendarves’s mention of Antonio Rivas on Monday night, and Eberhardt’s guess that Rivas not only knew about the Lujacks’ hiring of illegals but also about the coyote connection. Suppose Rivas had let something slip to Pendarves about the coyotes. And suppose Pendarves had gone on Tuesday to confront either Thomas or Coleman, threatened to tell the INS what he knew if Thomas ever tried to harm him again … maybe even attempted to blackmail one or the other of them. Pendarves wasn’t all that bright; it was the sort of angry, fear-motivated thing he might do. If he had, it provided Coleman with plenty of motive for wanting to get rid of him along with Thomas.
Scenario: Coleman and Vega used some kind of ruse to lure Pendarves away from his house Tuesday night, and another ruse to lure Thomas out there. Vega then cracked Thomas on the head, drove the BMW into the empty garage, left the engine running and Thomas stretched out on the floor, and closed the garage door behind him. Exit Thomas, while Vega left the scene in his own car or via public transportation.
What was still murky was what they’d done about Pendarves. Had they plotted to kill him too? If I was right about Pendarves’s actions, then it was a good bet they had. It eliminated two threats and screwed the frame down tight.