“What’s that?”
“Old Louis is still out, walking around. And I believe he’s killed everybody he’s wanted to in the past couple of days except for one special dude.” He slammed the door and stuck his head back through the window. “Me.”
11
Hardy lay on a blanket looking at the clear blue sky, his head on Frannie’s lap. A friend of hers, Cindy something, was finished singing an old Jackson Browne song about just packing up your sorrows, leaving them on the curb, and the Trashman, he’d just haul them away …
“I wish,” Hardy said.
“Oh, stop.” Frannie cuffed him on the side of the head. “How many days like this do we get, and you just won’t let yourself enjoy it. That was great, Cindy, in spite of old sour face here.”
“Hey, I loved the song.” Hardy sat up. The holster felt plain silly under his arm, but he was not about to go out to a public place like Golden Gate Park and risk running into …
So in spite of the warmth of the day, over his shirt he wore an old blue-and-white Yosemite windbreaker that had belonged to Frannie’s late husband Eddie.
“That’s all you can do with troubles,” Cindy said. “Just let them go. What’s gonna be is gonna be.”
About as comforting as it was original.
“It shouldn’t be so bad,” Frannie said. “Look where we are right now.”
Which was in the Shakespeare Garden in the park, the three of them sitting on a blanket littered now with the remains of the lunch Cindy had brought over for Frannie. She had friends who kept doing nice things for her. She was that kind of person, Hardy knew. He and Cindy had split a couple of sips of Chi-anti out of a straw bottle, but Frannie was sticking to her no-alcohol pregnancy regimen. A light breeze blew high in the trees over them.
Cindy strummed some other chords on her guitar. Hardy thought Cindy was cute. Nice. But no Frannie. Not close. Most of the other people Frannie’s age struck him as way younger than he was, which of course was true, but in Frannie’s case he never thought about it. Cindy, with her turned-up little nose and her guitar playing, seemed more a contemporary of the teenagers who were playing Frisbee out across the lawn than a twenty-five-year-old woman.
Hardy leaned back down on Frannie’s lap. “You’re right,” he said. “Look where we are.”
Cindy played another song, and Hardy, drowsy, closed his eyes. He felt Frannie put her hand on his chest where the Yosemite logo was, probably thinking about Eddie. He pushed that out of his mind. He was here and Cindy was right. Never mind originality. Que sera sera, Hardy thought, but it meant something different for him. No doubt Cindy … maybe Frannie too … thought Jackson Browne was an oldie—how about Patience and Prudence doing “Que Sera Sera” on the Hit Parade? Hardy had only been four or so but he remembered that …
When he opened his eyes, Cindy had gone. The Frisbee game had stopped. The breeze had died down.
“Hi,” Frannie said.
“Did I sleep?”
“About an hour.”
“Where’d Cindy go?”
“Back home. She says good-bye.” She put both her hands under his head and lifted. “You want to get up? I’m a little stiff.”
“You could’ve woken me, you know.”
Frannie stood and stretched her back. “I don’t think you’ve been getting very good sleep these past few nights. Couldn’t hurt to catch up a little.”
“I can’t believe it. I never do that.”
Frannie shrugged, gathering up the blanket. “Well, you did.”
“I hope I didn’t hurt Cindy’s feelings.”
“She liked you a lot.”
“Why? What did I do? Fall asleep. Kvetch about her songs.”
Frannie stopped her picking up and faced him. “Dismas. You are yourself. No games. You do what you do, not trying to make any impression. It’s just who you are. And I think you’re great. You should know that.”
“Okay.”
“And now you’re embarrassed.”
Hardy leaned back against a tree. Frannie’s eyes were bright green under her shining red hair. Although looking at her no one would have concluded that she was pregnant, she had filled out so that Hardy could hardly see the frail girl he’d caught when she fainted at Eddie’s graveside.
“You’re the one,” he said. “I’m very proud of you.”
She knew what he was talking about. Her eyes seemed to shine with the threat of tears, but she held them back, scrunching her nose up and forcing a smile. She walked up to him, put her arms around him and hugged him hard. “You go and pack your sorrows,” she said. “Trashman comes tomorrow.”
He felt something turn over inside of him. He looked out through the trees, trying to decide what it was.
“A body?”
“Well, something very close to a body.”
“That’s dead.”
“Yeah.”
Pico Morales shook his head. Pico was the curator of the Steinhart Aquarium, also located in Golden Gate Park, and Hardy had dropped Frannie off at the Japanese Tea Gardens and gone over to see his friend, who worked every day but Sunday. They stood now in the glow behind the tanks in the tropical fish section. In the tanks fluorescent reds and blues and yellows and greens floated against the glass or darted from rock to rock. On the other side a steady stream of people filed by, hypnotized.
“I don’t have any ideas,” Pico said.
“Come on, Peek, seawater is your life.”
“But bodies aren’t.”
They moved down a couple of tanks. “What I need is just something that would act like a human body in seawater. That would float the way a body would.”
“A rubber mat, something like that?”
“I don’t know. Wouldn’t something like that, on the surface, catch some wind? And that would affect it.”
Pico made a note on a clipboard attached to one of the tanks.
“What do you see?” Hardy asked. Both of the men were squinting into a tank.
“That angel fish, see under its eye, that little spot? It bears watching, is all. We’ve been getting these cancers lately, maybe fungus. I don’t know what it is. We’re analyzing our tropical water.”
“You have different water?”
Pico straightened up. “You’re the one who said it. Seawater is my life. It might be anything. Second-generation problems if we got a goddamn cyanide batch. Who knows?”
“Cyanide?”
Pico was moving to the next tanks. “The tropical hunters, Diz,” he said. “A lot of them use cyanide over the reefs.”
“But doesn’t cyanide kill the fish?”
“It does. Breaks my heart. Another hundred years we might not even have any reefs left. I’m not kidding. The cyanide kills the coral too. But”—he held up a finger—“but a few of the hardier little devils make it, and they fetch a small fortune, which is why it keeps getting done.”
“And you buy your fish from these guys.”
Pico looked at him. “You think we’d support that shit? We are very picky about our suppliers, but some fish get through the cracks. At least maybe they do. We see some pink-eye in an angel fish, it makes me wonder.”
They came out to the room Hardy was most familiar with, just off Pico’s office. A huge circular concrete tank sat four feet off the floor, three-quarters filled with seawater. In that tank Hardy, Pico and a small group of other volunteers had spent many hours walking around with great white sharks. A great white shark can’t breathe if it isn’t moving through water, and these giants had almost always been hauled in traumatized near to death from being caught and taken on fishing boats. Every one had eventually died, but it remained Pico’s dream to have the first great white shark in captivity in his aquarium.
The two men pulled themselves up and sat on the concrete lip of the pool. Pico took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and fit up. “But bodies,” he said, “you know what a human body is, essentially? It’s a big bag of seawater.”
“I think it’
s your poetic side I love the best,” Hardy said.
“It’s true. Chemically, it’s like ninety-seven percent the same thing.”
“Okay.”
“So a body floating in seawater would be like part of the water. Freshwater, depending on air in the lungs and how much the tissue had become waterlogged or whatever, the body would move up or down, but in salt water, the specific densities are so close it would always float. You could spray dye on the water and watch where it goes, and that’d tell you the same thing.”
Hardy kicked his feet against the concrete. “Nope. Same thing as a rubber raft, where the wind or a passing boat might change the course. It’s got to float, but not on the surface.”
Pico said, “Aha,” and jumped down onto the floor.
“What?” Hardy followed him into his office.
Pico reached behind the door and pulled down one of the wetsuits that hung there. They were always there—the volunteers used them when they walked the sharks.
“The closest thing to a body is a body. Put this on, go and hang in the water and see where it takes you.”
How did things get so complicated? Glitsky was thinking. He was driving south on 101 past Candlestick Park, on his way out of the city and out of his jurisdiction to interview an ex-cop with only the slightest connection to any active case. He shook his head. Flo was right—he cared too much. He had to turn over every rock to make as sure as he could he at least didn’t get the wrong man …
One of his first cases … Haroun Palavi, in the country about seven months, importing rugs from Iran, had killed his wife and the in-laws living with them. Neighbors had heard them all screaming at one another for weeks. When Glitsky questioned Haroun he had no alibi—he’d been in his warehouse working alone. There were no other plausible suspects. Haroun’s fingerprints were all over the murder weapon, which he’d tried to explain by saying that he’d come in and just picked up the gun he’d found near his wife’s parents. He was scared. He thought the killer might still be around.
So Glitsky had arrested Haroun. He’d investigated and found that one of the neighbors, another Iranian woman, had talked a lot to Haroun’s wife and found out that she was miserable in this country and wanted to go home. Haroun was ruining her life and her parents’ lives. At the time, Glitsky had thought that she’d probably just nagged Haroun until she pushed him over the edge. He didn’t understand these Iranians anyway, but he did know, or thought he knew, that they had this eye-for-an-eye mentality, and seemed, in general, to hold life pretty cheap. Haroun hadn’t done a very good job of learning English, either.
So Haroun had gone to trial and was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen-to-life second-degree murder plus two for the gun, of which he served three days before they found him with a crushed skull and a broken neck on the floor of his cell. It was an effective way to kill yourself, Glitsky thought, diving headfirst from your upper bunk onto cement, although most people lacked either the nerve or the imagination for it.
And that would have been the end of the case except that about two months later the Iranian neighbor woman turned up dead, too, and it finally transpired that Haroun’s business partner, Revi Mahnis, couldn’t take a woman’s no for an answer. Under questioning he revealed that Haroun’s wife had threatened to tell Haroun that he’d been propositioning her. So he’d had to kill her or be humiliated and out of business. Both. And, because her parents were there, he had to kill them, too.
It had been Glitsky’s darkest moment on the force, knowing that his preconceptions and prejudices had killed an innocent man. He wasn’t about to let it happen again …
He took the San Bruno turnoff and doubled back on the frontage road, looking for a street name. It was a light-industry and duplex neighborhood wedged between the freeway and El Camino Real.
He didn’t want to be hasty in jumping to a conclusion about who had murdered Maxine, but it still bothered him, coming down here because the lab was backed up and Hardy had said that Hector Medina had a possible connection to Rusty Ingraham. It was a reach. Here he’d got a righteous murder victim and, if you looked at the statistics, the best suspect—an estranged husband. If he was writing a book on murders he’d start with the chapter on families. After that the book would get thin pretty quick.
But the lab still didn’t have squat on the results of picking apart Ingraham’s barge, so he still couldn’t place Ray Weir at the scene. He was pretty sure they’d find something that did that, and when they did he’d go down and bring Ray in. Not exactly open-and-shut, but just about as close as they came.
As for Rusty Ingraham, Abe wanted to believe that he was hiding out from the jealous husband Ray Weir. But he had to admit Hardy’s point that he would have at least gotten in touch made some sense. Of course, until there was either a body or some compelling reason why there wasn’t one, Rusty remained officially alive, and, more to the point, not a homicide victim. And if he wasn’t a homicide victim he wasn’t Glitsky’s business. Life was complicated enough.
He’d gotten Medina’s number from the telephone book and called down for an appointment.
“So the faggot told, huh?”
Glitsky hadn’t known what he was talking about “I wanted to see you about Rusty Ingraham.”
A laugh. “That, too. All the roosters home to roost. Well, come on down. I got nothing to hide.”
There were cars parked on lawns all down the street, oil smears on driveways, bottle caps, beer cans and broken glass in the curbs. It was a hot, still, gas-smelling afternoon. The four trees on the street had lost their leaves; an abandoned yellow schoolbus with broken windows sat on its rims at the corner. The sky seemed to hang low, a hazy blue-white.
Medina was wearing a dirty white tank-top T-shirt over baggy khakis, washing his car in his front yard with a teenage girl. The one-story frame house had once been painted lime green with yellow trim, colors from a decade before, once perhaps brightly gay, now faded to garish.
As Glitsky got out of his car Medina began drying his hands on a chamois. The girl didn’t even look up—just kept wiping at the front windshield with a soapy sponge. Medina crossed the small yard and met Glitsky near his car by the curb.
“I’d rather we didn’t say anything in front of Melanie,” he said. He didn’t offer to shake hands.
Glitsky leaned against his car’s hood. “You got me stumped,” he said.
Medina, squat and flat-footed, turned the chamois over in his hands. “You don’t have to play games with me. I used to be a cop.”
“Sure, I remember you. I understand you got a raw deal. What kind of games might I be playing?”
“Good guy, bad guy?”
Glitsky spun around from his waist, exaggerating. “Somebody else here I don’t see?”
The girl called, “Daddy, I need more soap.”
He turned to her. “In the bucket, sweets. Just go to the bucket.” He came back to Glitsky. “My daughter. She’s not all here.”
Glitsky watched her go to the bucket and squeeze out her sponge, then come back to the car. He took a breath and let it out. “Why I’m here is because you talked to a friend of mine, Dismas Hardy, and said you’d had something to do with Rusty Ingraham in the last couple of weeks. Ingraham’s missing and I wondered if you might have a lead on it, if he said anything to you about where he might go.”
Medina shook his head, as if clearing it. “Hardy said Ingraham was dead.”
“Hardy jumps to conclusions. Something went down where he lives. We found some blood matches his type, but no body. He could be alive, anywhere.”
“Shit,” Medina said.
“Shit what?”
“Shit he’s not dead, that’s what.”
“Well, he might be. We just don’t know. But either way, if you talked to him—”
“I didn’t. I told your friend I didn’t.”
“He said you’d called him.”
Medina shifted on his feet, stared out over Glitsky’s shoulder. Abe waited him o
ut.
Medina turned around and said his daughter’s name. “Melanie.” She stopped cleaning the windshield, obedient. “You wanna get us a couple beers?”
He motioned with his head and went to sit in the shade of the cement steps by the front door. Glitsky followed, glad to get out of the heat. When Melanie came out, Medina patted next to him and she sat down. He popped the tab on a can of Lucky Lager and handed one to Glitsky, did one for himself, giving Melanie a little sip first.
“I never talked to him. You can believe me or not, I don’t care.”
Glitsky drank beer.
“I did call him, but I just hung up. What was the point? What was I gonna say that would make any difference after all this time?”
“Okay …” Glitsky didn’t know where he was going.
“I mean, Ingraham was the wrong target. If I wanted to do something, not feel so goddamn”—he stopped, searching for the right word—“impotent, there’s better fish to fry.”
At Abe’s lack of response, he said, “I’m talking about Treadwell.”
“Who’s Treadwell?”
“Treadwell. The faggot who’s trying to set up Valenti and Raines.”
“Treadwell,” Glitsky repeated. “Is there a connection here I’m missing?”
Medina wiped some sweat off his forehead with the chamois. “The thing with Ingraham, what he did to me, that’s done now. I do my job, take care of Melanie best I can. I mean since Joan left after the … the trouble, it’s been all me. And this, this anger is in me all the time.” The aluminum can made a cracking sound in his hand. “So for a minute there I had a notion to go settle things with Ingraham. That’s all it was. The call.”
“So what about Treadwell?”
Medina’s eyes narrowed to a squint as he brought the beer can up to his mouth. Stalling. “Nothing,” he said. “Treadwell was nothing too.”
“Hector,” Abe said. “You brought up Treadwell. I didn’t.
Medina squeezed the can again, studied it. “I figured if I talked to Treadwell it might do some good for those cops Valenti and Raines. Ingraham, it was long past the time it could mean anything.”
The Vig Page 13