The Vig

by John Lescroart

He had talked to Glitsky and found out that he hadn’t gone down to talk to Louis Baker, that the ex-con was still on the streets.

  Glitsky had started to explain something about other suspects, but Hardy, working the bar, was busy and didn’t have time for police procedural bullshit. Suspects be damned. Louis Baker had threatened Hardy’s life and was free as a bird. Thanks for all your help, Abe.

  What Hardy was not going to do now, he was sure, was go home. Rusty Ingraham had gone home.

  He kept all his dart paraphernalia in a well-worn leather holder that he carried with him at all times, most often in the inside pocket of whatever jacket he happened to be wearing. Now he took it out and began fitting the pale blue plastic flights into the twenty-gram tungsten darts.

  There was one Tiffany lamp on over the bar and two in the dart area. Hardy had dimmed them down as low as they would go. He looked up at the clock on the mantel across from the bar, which hadn’t ticked since the Great Earthquake in 1906 and didn’t look like it was about to start now. Standing up, preparing to throw a round of darts, he first went back and checked for the third time that the front door was locked.

  Since he was up anyway he went into the bathrooms, both of which had barred back windows, but you couldn’t be too sure. The place seemed secure.

  He stepped up to the dart line and flung his first dart. It missed the whole board. Hardy stared at the dart, stuck in the wall next to the board, as though it were a vision. There was no way he could miss the whole board. That was like Nicklaus whiffing a tee shot. Even warming up, you didn’t miss the board.

  Well, at least no one else was around to see it. He went and retrieved the dart, then took the .38 out from under his belt and put in on the table next to his Guinness.

  It wasn’t only going home, he realized. He shouldn’t even be here at work. Baker could ask anyone and find out where Hardy spent his days, and Dismas wasn’t going to tend bar with his loaded police special on his hip. Or even on a shelf under the bar.

  He started throwing again, more naturally now. Not really aiming. The round all fell within the “20.”

  His first thought was to go to Jane’s, but not only didn’t he have a key to her place, it was where he used to live when he was a D.A.

  Moses? Everybody here knew Moses was his good buddy, knew where Moses lived.

  Abe? Screw Abe.

  Pico and Angela Morales? They had kids and little if any extra space.

  He thought about a hotel, but since San Francisco’s main industry had become tourism, you couldn’t get a room here anymore for under $150 night, and Hardy, doing okay, still did not have that kind of money. And who knew how long it would be?

  Well, it couldn’t be too long. If Glitsky didn’t do something, then Hardy would. Flush Baker, make him commit.

  Then what? Blow him away? He shied from the thought, but there was something there.

  He finished his Guinness and pulled the darts from his last round out of the board. He picked up his gun, took his empty pint glass to the sink and turned off the lights at the switch by the mantel. Letting himself out the front door, Hardy stood in the recess off the sidewalk, his hand on the gun’s butt, scanning the shadows, listening.

  There was a high, patchy cloud cover and it was not very cold. Traffic on Lincoln was very light. Hardy stepped onto the sidewalk, turned right and walked quickly back around the corner to Tenth, where he had parked.

  Distracted when he’d come to work, he had left the top down on his Samurai, and as he slid onto the damp driver’s seat he saw that somebody had opened his glove compartment. Papers were strewn on the passenger seat, on the floor.

  Looking around again, he saw nothing move. Behind him, beyond the near buildings, the Sutro Tower rose in front of a crescent moon, a skeleton clawing at the scudding clouds.

  Hardy put the car in gear and turned onto Lincoln, up toward Stanyan and the tower. It wasn’t a skeleton. It was just a bunch of metal and bolts and wire—an idol to the great god television. Maybe seeing it close-up would help. No sense in getting worked up over imaginings, letting the mind play tricks.

  But Rusty Ingraham was missing, dead. That wasn’t a trick. He had been at home, forewarned even, and Louis Baker had found a way to get to him.

  Hardy was sure Louis would also find a way to get to him.

  He kept driving, not knowing where he was going.

  6

  “Why are you still working?”

  The coffee was beyond good—Graffeo’s best made in an espresso machine. Hardy, still pretty tired after a rough night on Frannie’s couch, was dressed in the clothes he’d arrived in a little after 2:00 A.M. He looked over the steaming mug at Frannie Cochran.

  The last time he had seen her, her husband’s death was still strangling her.

  Four months ago it had been strangling everybody. Especially because it had looked at first as though Eddie Cochran—twenty-five, idealistic, happily married with a just-pregnant wife, on his way to Stanford Business School in the fall—had killed himself.

  But neither Moses nor Hardy had been able to believe it, and they wanted to make sure Frannie got her quarter million dollars in insurance if Eddie had been killed. Moses had offered Hardy twenty-five percent of the Shamrock if he could pretend he was a cop again and prove Eddie had not killed himself. Which Hardy had done.

  And getting involved with Eddie’s death had done something for Hardy, too. His original life goal had not been to bartend at an Irish place in San Francisco. He, like Eddie Cochran, had once burned with idealism, with notions of good works. But the flame had died down, along with his law career and his marriage to Jane, in the aftermath of his son’s death. When Michael was seven months old Hardy had left the sides of his crib halfway down on the first night the child was able to pull himself up. The fall to the floor was about four feet. Michael landed on his head.

  Afterward, Hardy had dropped out, damned if he was going to care about things if they were going to hurt that bad. Moses McGuire, whose life Hardy had saved in Vietnam, had taken him on as a bartender at the Shamrock, and years had passed, one after another, all pretty much the same.

  Until, that is, Eddie died. Until Eddie had been killed. And finding out about it, having to care, had jump-started something in Hardy. Even as it had killed something in Frannie.

  But now she was looking alive again, blooming. Literally. The baby she was carrying barely showed in her belly. She wasn’t wearing maternity clothes yet, though Hardy knew she was nearly five months along. First pregnancies could be like that. Jane had been the same way with Michael. There had been no obvious body change except bigger breasts for almost six months and then whammo, the stomach popped out and everything became more real right away.

  Hardy took Frannie in, her red hair washed and gleaming, green eyes squinting as she sipped her own decaf. She had taken to using light makeup around her eyes, some lipstick. Her cheeks had filled out from the hollow carved by her grief, and now she appeared to laugh easily again, as she had before. She laughed now.

  “And what would I do if I didn’t work, then?”

  “Eat bonbons. Watch soap operas. Go shopping. Be a woman of leisure.”

  “Nice view of womanhood.”

  “Okay, how about become an astronaut, run for Congress, conduct Mahler’s Fifth.”

  “Better.”

  “But you’re pregnant. You should take it a little easy until after the baby’s born.”

  “If I take it too easy I’ll get fat.”

  “Well, you’re gonna anyway.”

  She pouted at him. “I will not be fat. I will be pregnant. There is a difference, Mr. Hardy, and I’ll thank you to remember it.”

  Hardy looked at her nonexistent stomach. “Sorry, baby,” he said to it, reaching over and patting.

  She put her hand over his and held it there a second. “I almost don’t believe it still,” she said. “If it would kick or something. There’s no other sign …”

  Hardy took his hand aw
ay and his eyes rested for a second on her breasts. “Yes there is,” he said.

  She laughed, embarrassed, sipped at her coffee. “I don’t know. I guess I just decided to keep working until it’s born. It’s nice not to need the money, but I want to keep busy. If I get too much time to think …”

  Hardy knew what too much time to think could do. Frannie had gotten nearly a quarter million dollars from Eddie’s life insurance. She was twenty-five years old. There would be time not to work if she wanted that.

  Hardy reached out and patted her hand again. “And now a houseguest to boot.”

  “I’m sorry about the couch,” she said.

  “The couch is fine.”

  “And you’re really in trouble, aren’t you?”

  Hardy shook his head. “Not trouble. Maybe a little danger. It’s why I need a place nobody would think to look for me.”

  “And it’s also why you have a gun with you.”

  “That too.”

  Frannie put down her mug. “It’s still hard for me to believe people just get up in the morning intending to go and shoot somebody.”

  Hardy nodded.

  “And you’re sure this man …?”

  “Louis Baker.”

  “Louis Baker. You’re sure he killed your friend?”

  Hardy worked it around for the time it took him to swallow his coffee, nodded again. “Yep.”

  “Then why didn’t Abe Glitsky go arrest him yesterday?”

  Hardy had thought about that a lot last night. Why hadn’t Abe just gone down and taken him off the streets? It worried him, but he said only that Abe had told him that there were other suspects.

  “But couldn’t he arrest more than one person and question them all?”

  Hardy shook his head. “They don’t like to arrest people unless they charge them. Abe said my suspicions weren’t evidence.”

  “Well, isn’t there any? Evidence I mean.”

  “I don’t know. It’ll turn up.”

  “And you’re sure he did it?”

  They were sitting at a teak table in a round breakfast nook off the kitchen. Hardy looked past Frannie, down the hill, to a school-bus stop at the corner. A dozen or so students were milling around—mostly black kids. For a moment, Hardy wondered if his certainty about Baker might possibly have to do with his color. There were other possibilities, things that might’ve happened there on Rusty’s barge. But the probability, the overwhelming probability, was Baker. Hardy didn’t base his suspicions on Baker’s race. Hell, Glitsky was half-black, and Abe was one of his best friends. He had to smile at that—“Some of my best friends …”

  “Dismas?”

  She saw the smile lines fade around his eyes. He came back to her, refocusing. “Sorry. Went away for a minute.”

  “You see something?”

  “Yeah, I saw a bunch of kids down there and wondered if I was getting to be a racist. But then I thought about Baker, who is nothing like you or me or them.”

  Frannie had been raised by her brother Moses and had known Hardy since Moses had gotten back from Vietnam. Hardy had saved Moses’ life over there. She had sat on his lap when she was twelve and thirteen, fantasizing about her brother’s friend, Dismas the hero, now a policeman, handsome in his pressed blue uniform. Then Hardy had gone on to law school and become an assistant district attorney. He’d gotten married and had a child with Jane Fowler, then the boy had died and Hardy had gotten divorced, quit his job and had been around more, first drinking at Moses’ place, the Little Shamrock, then becoming a bartender there.

  That’s when she had gotten to know him again, stopping in for a beer at the Shamrock to visit Moses. And had it not been for the “keep off” sign he had worn like a badge, she might have started fantasizing again. But instead she turned him into a litmus test. She would not date a guy twice unless he was “at least as good a man as Dismas Hardy,” she told her college girlfriends. And she’d found one—Eddie Cochran—and she had married him. And lost him …

  She stared across the table at the worried face, so different than Eddie’s had been. Hardy’s face had lines and creases and whole chapters of his life on it. She thought now it was more interesting than handsome. But he was like Eddie—or Eddie had been like him—both worried so much about doing the right thing, about good motives. Dismas would never put it that way, but Frannie knew him, and that’s what it was.

  Now someone was trying to kill him, and he didn’t want to suspect him for the wrong reasons. She got up and went around behind him, putting her hands on his shoulders. “You and I both know you’re not a racist,” she said. “Not even close.”

  Hardy shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think of it as an issue anymore. Maybe that means I don’t care about it. All I know is that Baker was an animal ten years ago, and we put him in a cage and he swore when he got out he’d kill me and Rusty, and Rusty is dead and gone the day he gets out. What would you think? How much more evidence would you need?”

  She thought a moment, then leaned over and kissed him on the top of the head. “I don’t think much.”

  “That’s the right answer,” Hardy said.

  Abe Glitsky, running a little late for work, parked in a space behind the Hall of Justice and went in through the back door, nodding to the pair of uniformed officers who stood by the metal detectors. He turned left by the booking station and went around to the elevators, stopping to pick up an early morning candy bar.

  There were six elevators in the bank, and he waited, by his watch, three and a half minutes for the first door to open. During this time he spoke to no one and munched his candy bar, thinking about Hardy’s problem, deciding he probably had one. He owed it to his friend to talk to Louis Baker—at least talk to him, see where he had been two nights ago.

  It was dead quiet on the floor. For a moment he thought there must have been a sick-out or some other protest a little more formal than golf clubs. He stuck his head in Investigations and found no one around. No one.

  He had been around when Dan White killed Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the Hall had the same feel it had this morning. He opened the door to Homicide, passed through the small reception cubicle, which was empty, and opened the door.

  The wide-open room was jammed with what looked like every investigator—homicide, robbery, white collar, vice—in the department. The chief himself, Dan Rigby, was talking in front of Lieutenant Frank Batiste’s office.

  No one even acknowledged Glitsky’s arrival. He leaned back against the doorpost he had come through and folded his arms, listening. Rigby was speaking very quietly.

  “… persons responsible for this will be let go. You got a message to give me, any of you, you come deliver it in person, or you want to memo it, that’s fine, too. But this, this …” He paused and Glitsky saw the vein standing out on the side of his neck. “These insulting, demeaning, unprofessional acts not only won’t be tolerated, they will be investigated with the whole weight of the department, and the perps here will be charged with criminal trespass, criminal contempt”—he was hammering the word criminal—“destruction of city property, vandalism and anything else me and anyone on my staff can think of.”

  Rigby stopped talking. A couple of guys had come in behind Abe, catching only the last words. One of them said “What’s up?” which everyone ignored. Several people were smoking in the room, and even through the smoke Abe could detect a locker-room smell beginning to rise. People were nervous, moving in the few seats, shifting from foot to foot.

  Rigby looked around the room, making eye contact with everyone who had the guts to meet it. It took a long time, and nobody else said a word.

  “So,” he said finally, “I’m giving you perps—and I know you’re in this room—one chance this morning to own up. You come to me, to my office …,” and at this a couple of people snickered. “You think it’s funny?” Rigby bellowed. Even Glitsky jumped. The snickering stopped.

  Rigby went back to his near whisper. “You come up to
see me, wherever I am, by noon. Save the department the time and expense of finding out who you are and you’ll get to keep your pension. If we’re forced to launch a full-scale investigation to find you, you’re out of the department, you lose your pension and if I have any clout at all with the D.A., and I do, you’ll do time.”

  The guy behind Glitsky whispered again. “Somebody get killed? What’d I miss?”

  Rigby was coming through the massed bodies in the room, following one of his aides. Glitsky moved from the doorway to let him pass. Others started streaming out behind him.

  Frank Batiste had been standing next to Rigby and now motioned to Abe. He threaded his way around the outer wall, overhearing snatches of people’s remarks: “Guy can’t much take a joke, can he?”

  Impersonating Rigby’s whispered voice: “Criminal trespass, criminal criminal …”

  “At least he’ll get out of his office for a while, maybe see what’s going on around here.”

  “… my office by noon. Right. Like noon someday next month.”

  Laughter. And some people making noises under their breath as they left the room, sounding like cluck cluck cluck.

  “Jesus. What happened, Frank?”

  Batiste motioned Abe inside his office and closed the door behind them. “Just tell me you didn’t do this, Abe. Please tell me that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Come on, Abe.”

  “Swear to God, Frank. I just walked in this morning to this. I have no clue what’s going on.”

  Batiste searched Glitsky’s face for some sign that he was lying. Perhaps satisfied, he went around his desk and sat down wearily. “Last night somebody let themselves in Rigby’s office with about four chickens.”

  Glitsky had been to Rigby’s office a couple of times. There was a rug on the floor that had been a gift to the city from the Shah of Iran; a heavy, stunning mahogany desk; several pieces of leather furniture that, Glitsky guessed, cost about what a patrolman made in a year. It took a moment for the significance of the chickens to sink in, and when it did, he smiled. “Pretty clear message,” he said.