The Vig

by John Lescroart

  “So you talked to Treadwell?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About Raines and Valenti?”

  He nodded. “Tried to talk him out of it. Of his charges of police brutality, gay bashing.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing,” Medina said. “Nothing. He listened to me, about what it’s like being accused of something crazy, how you never get out from under it. Then he said fuck you, good-bye.”

  Glitsky looked at Melanie, watched a kid ride by on a skateboard, tried to figure what he was missing here. “So why were you afraid Treadwell had talked? When I called you, you said, ‘So the faggot talked.’ Remember? What did that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I been afraid he’d accuse me of something again—trespass, I don’t know. Something. It’s his style. And I’m the right guy to do it to. People are lined up to believe bad shit about me.”

  Glitsky gave it a moment, finishing his beer. “But nothing about Ingraham?”

  “I never said a word to him and that’s God’s truth.”

  Glitsky stood up, stretched out his back. “You know, Hector,” he said, “you’ve been in this business so you know. There’s a feeling you get when people aren’t telling you everything. They may not be lying exactly, but there’s something else happening.”

  “I never talked to him!”

  Melanie jumped next to her father. He patted her leg and she leaned into him, staring now at Glitsky.

  “That’s what you said. For the record, though, do you remember where you were Wednesday night, three days ago?”

  Medina didn’t even have to think. Knew right off. “I worked a double shift that day, eight to four, four to midnight. It’s in the log.”

  Glitsky nodded. “I’m sure it is.”

  Medina patted his daughter again, this time on the head. “Let’s do the tires next, honey,” he said. She jumped up and ran over to the bucket. “Look, I got this kid to raise. That’s what I do. I lead a quiet life, keep out of trouble.”

  “But you went to Treadwell’s.”

  Medina looked up at the white sky and drained his beer. “Hey, sometimes you gotta do something for your soul.” He gestured around the hopeless plot. “You think this is enough?”

  Abe took it in, nodded, and thanked Hector for his time.

  Back on the freeway Glitsky opened his car windows and let the wind blow over him. Hector Medina talking about the good of his soul rang as true as ex-Interior Secretary Watt claiming a deep and abiding concern for the environment. And if talking to Treadwell was good for his soul, worth threatening the quiet life he had with his daughter, how much more satisfying would it be to have aced Rusty Ingraham? Now that would have been real good for the soul.

  Of course the log said he had worked a double shift on Wednesday, so he had an alibi, but alibis were made to be broken. His name might be in the log, but Glitsky wondered if anybody had actually seen him. And even if they had, it wasn’t a far stretch to imagine that a guy like Medina knew people who did bad things—either returning favors or for cash up front.

  So now he had two out of three suspects with a reason to dust Ingraham. If only he could count on the fact of Rusty’s death. And maybe Hardy would find something …

  He guessed it all came down to the lab. If there were prints or hairs or fibers on the barge that belonged to Ray Weir, he’d have probable cause and go get the guy. On the other hand, what if they found evidence that Baker or Medina had been there? Then, even without a body, Glitsky had to admit that things started to look bad for Rusty Ingraham. And maybe for Hardy too.

  When he had been released from prison, Louis Baker was given his two hundred dollars gate money. Buying the paint for Mama’s place, the windows, some food, had run him $161.19 all told. And he’d given the Mama a ten for the tennis shoes. The bus ride home, this and that, had come to another ten, give or take some change, and breakfast this morning had been three and a half.

  So he was down to twelve bucks. And no place to stay, and still no gun.

  It was different than it had been before he was sent down. Every pawnshop had bars on the windows now. He could see the thin tape around all the doors and windows with the alarm trip-wires, and although he’d always been able to pick a lock, he had never really been much of a B and E man. The technology made him cautious.

  But the fact was he needed money, and he needed a weapon. He was not about to be brought back in, even for questioning. If they tried to take him back down, he’d take some of them with him. He was thinking about the wardens, about Ingraham, about Hardy, about all the people who’d done it to him. There might even be something fun about shooting it out, going out in a blaze. Quick and easy. And it sure wasn’t shaping up that he was going to have much of a life on the outside.

  It was a small liquor store. He’d been watching the traffic for about two hours, a small steady trickle of people in and out. There had been bars up across the windows before it opened, but now they were tucked back accordion-style on both sides of the front door.

  Louis walked in out of the afternoon sunshine. He was pretty sure when he’d been outside, but once he was inside he was positive. The location was right. A white guy running a liquor store in this neighborhood ought to have a gun under the counter, but you couldn’t always bet on it. But when you saw the National Rifle Association calendar over the cold cabinets you could start putting your money down.

  He came in the door, saw the counter ran along the wall to his right about fifteen feet. The man was in his mid-fifties. He sat on a stool behind the register, and Louis nodded at him, friendly as you please, as he came in. He’d made sure the place was empty, but he hadn’t gotten five feet inside the door when a police car pulled up out front and a guy in blue got out.

  Shit.

  Louis walked casually to the back left corner of the store. What he wanted was something long and relatively heavy. The cop went to the back, opened one of the cold shelves and stood looking at soft drinks.

  You didn’t want to start with the cop, especially with his partner out in the car. A lone guy, you could maybe get him from behind, put him down, but if he did that here the proprietor would probably shoot him, and if he didn’t the partner would.

  Louis kept scanning the shelves as though he were looking for something, thinking c’mon, c’mon, c’mon. Finally, the cop found his 7-Up or whatever cops drank and was at the counter.

  He had to stall a minute or two, but he couldn’t take very much longer without getting somebody suspicious. He reached into his pocket and made a pretense of counting his money. Showing he already had money, that was a good idea. Counting to see if he had enough to buy that special bottle of something.

  He heard the register ring. Okay, it was time. He reached up to the top shelf and took down a bottle of Galliano. It was made for this kind of work.

  But the cops were still there, parked right at the curb. Louis looked right at them. “Bright out there,” he said.

  The man turned his head and squinted a little. The cop in the passenger seat was lifting the can to his mouth. Louis saw a display of sunglasses at the other end of the counter. Come on, he kept thinking. Drive.

  The man behind the counter had taken the bottle and was ringing it up. Louis put on a pair of shades, looking at himself in the mirror above the display. The cop was saying something to his partner, laughing. Goddamn, move.

  “That all?” the proprietor said.

  Louis left the pair of glasses on, reaching into his pocket for his money. The car outside made a clunk noise, dropping into gear, and Louis smiled. “I think the shades, too.”

  The man had put the bottle into a paper bag and Louis threw some bills on the counter, picking up the bottle.

  He leaned forward to pick up the money. “I don’t think this is …” was as far as the man got before Louis swung, hitting him over the left ear.

  Before the man hit the ground Louis had vaulted over the counter. A snub-nose revolver hung by its trigger
guard from a nail under the counter. There was a box of cartridges next to it on the shelf. Louis put the gun and the cartridges into his pants pocket, jabbed at the register until it opened and took out all the bills. He lifted the tray and found two hundreds and five fifties. He put a foot against the man’s head on the floor and gave it a nudge. He was out cold and would not be waking up in the next thirty seconds, which was all Louis needed.

  He jumped back over the counter and stood at the door, looking both ways. There was no one within fifty yards so he walked outside, hands in his pockets, and turned right. At the corner he turned again, heading back up toward. Fillmore and Mama’s car.

  If they were going to nail him for a couple of murders, a little candy-ass liquor-store boost wasn’t going to have much effect on his sentencing either way. And it evened out the odds, which was what you needed to survive—a little edge. That and knowing who to take out next.

  “Are you kidding me?” Abe Glitsky was saying. “Are you kidding me?”

  The tech, a young Filipino, maybe twenty-six, seemed to shrivel back into himself. “These were my orders, sir.”

  Abe put his hand to his head and pulled at his hairline. He took a step backward, spun around in a full circle, trying to get a grip, and came back to the counter.

  “Look, son, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to take it out on you, but I have a murder investigation I’m running my ass all over town trying to complete and I need your reports.”

  “Yes, but we’re told to … we have an inventory of nearly eighty objects from the chief’s office that we are to give first priority.”

  “Over a murder scene? The chief wants the chicken-shitters apprehended over a murderer? I don’t believe it.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said.

  “Does Rigby think whoever did this was dumb enough to leave prints around? You think cops might think of that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Abe put both hands on the counter and pressed down. On the wall behind the boy was a poster of a laughing man saying, “You want it when??!!” Another one, next to the first, said, “What part of NO don’t you understand?” Ha ha.

  Suddenly he let up his pressure on his hands, un-tensed his shoulders and, without another word, turned and walked through the door, slapping the wall on his way out.

  It was clear what he had to do. He had to stop fighting the system here. It was what it was, and you were either a part of it or you weren’t. For a long time he’d been a part of it. Now he’d just spent a Saturday trying to do things right. Because he cared about doing his job. He could accept not getting paid for his time, could accept Lanier’s easy-out attitude with Louis Baker. Might have even accepted a lab refusing to work overtime and having him wait until Monday.

  But what he couldn’t handle was that the chief of police was using the crime lab on a priority basis to catch a couple of pranksters who’d put some chickens in his office.

  Downstairs at his desk Glitsky opened his top drawer and took out the application he’d filled out for the LAPD. He sat down, read it over, signed it and addressed an envelope. On his way out he dropped it in the mailbox by the back door of the Hall.

  Hanging in the water, motionless, the tide pushing him where it would, Hardy thought he’d give it a couple of tankfuls’ worth of air—maybe forty-five minutes—and see where he was when he came up.

  Still reluctant to go back to his house and not wanting to overstay his welcome at Frannie’s—was that really it?—he had borrowed one of Pico’s wetsuits, rented the tanks, bought a mask and dropped into the water off Ingraham’s barge at a little after six o’clock when the tide was already running out. It was a feeble current at this point, but it was moving him and Hardy thought it would be strong enough.

  If Rusty had been in bed when he was shot it was reasonable to think he hadn’t been wearing much that would weigh him down, so he would simply float out, just under the surface, as Hardy was doing now.

  He started immediately moving out toward the bay, which was good for his theory about what had happened to Rusty. He had thought there was some chance, hard by the barge, that the tide would create an eddy and he would go around in circles. But he had swum to the point he thought Rusty had gone over and then let himself hang in the water, and after a couple of false starts when he was nudged back into the barge, he found himself out in the channel.

  Even with the face mask, visibility was very poor, perhaps two feet. Under the water there was only the sound of his breathing. He wore gloves and foot pockets without fins, the same material as his wetsuit. The China Basin Canal was a rarely used waterway, but he kept half an ear out for the sound of an engine-he didn’t favor the idea of being rammed by a boat coming in to tie up.

  Otherwise, he hung in the water, warm, insulated, invisible—and safe. In some ways it was comparable to a night drop in a parachute, an experience Hardy had had more times than he cared to remember. For the first time in four days Louis Baker left his consciousness.

  But he also felt Frannie’s arms around him as he’d held her in the park. He saw her eyes boring into his, her smile working its way under his fears and defenses. There was her body pressed against him, full breasts and belly, not any kind of little girl, not anybody’s little sister … a grown woman in full flower waiting for her baby’s birth.

  Hardy remembered, was forced to remember, the time with Jane when she was carrying Michael. The beginning of nesting. The changes in the house, painting the baby’s room, buying the things that had seemed so impossible—tiny sets of clothes, rattles, stuff:

  He shook himself out of that. When Michael died, it had nearly killed him. Jane too. Even now he wasn’t sure how far over it he had gotten. He tried never to let himself think of him, of that time with Jane, and he thought there was no way he’d allow that to happen to him again. Sometimes you learned your lesson—he wasn’t meant to be a father. It got into him too deep, that sense of hope, where there was meaning to things that even his well-practiced cynicism couldn’t deny … And the baby Frannie was carrying wasn’t even his.

  And what about Jane?

  Jane had been through it with him, all of it, finally getting back to him, reaching through whatever dark tunnel he’d constructed to let him see some light, to realize that life wasn’t all black. There were good times. There was love. Sex. Whatever it was, it was more than sex. He’d gotten along well without that for enough years to know. So call it love, Diz. You tell Jane you love her. You feel like it’s love.

  But, admit it, not like it used to be. Not the bells ringing and heart pounding and choked up with happiness, unable-to-talk kind of love.

  So what do you want? Be real, Diz. That’s puppy love, and sure, you don’t have that with Jane. How could you, after you lost your baby together, after the divorce, after another intervening marriage for her?

  And come on, be fair. There are good things with Jane but she just has much more of her own life, doesn’t need you as much as Frannie seems to.

  No commitment, though, right? He, once in a while, trying to talk about the long term, and Jane not ready, always not ready yet …

  He yanked himself away from such thoughts. The water had, by degrees, become clearer. He could easily see his hand at the end of his extended arm. A shadow—perhaps a striped bass—flashed in his peripheral vision.

  After surfacing he saw he was within fifty yards of the mouth of the canal. He looked at his watch. It had only taken twenty-two minutes and the tide wasn’t even running at full ebb yet. The last rays of the sun still lit the top of the skyline and the towers on the Bay Bridge, but the canal and its banks were in shade. He struck out for the shore, feeling he’d accomplished something.

  12

  Manny Gubicza had his manicurist in the office. He had set up a small table to the right of Gubicza’s desk with a couple of bowls of lotion, a little cushion on a towel to rest his hand, some emery boards and files. Manny didn’t look at the manicurist at all. He sat back, eyes closed, his mas
sive desk between himself and Fred Treadwell.

  Out the window behind Gubicza’s head the sky was still light. Although it was a Saturday, Manny Gubicza was in full lawyer regalia. The coat of his three-piece suit was hung onto a wooden valet just behind and to the left of his chair. There were the purple suspenders and matching purple tie, the light lavender silk handmade shirt with the monogram MAG stitched in slightly darker color over the breast pocket. The shirt was French-cuffed, of course, and now with the cuffs pulled back for the manicure, the ruby cufflinks sat a couple of inches apart on the desk, staring at Treadwell like the eyes of a drunk bulldog.

  “All in all, I think it’s worth the risk,” Gubicza was saying. “We can’t just do nothing.”

  Treadwell was still in shock and mourning. After Hector Medina had left the night before, he had cried himself out, then finally called Manny and made this appointment to discuss their strategy. This morning he had made the arrangements to bury Poppy and left him off at the vet’s. It had been the longest, saddest day of his life.

  “Is there any way we can kill him?” Treadwell asked. “I’d rather kill him than anything else.”

  Gubizca shook his head. “Fred, we’re trying to get you off on a double murder. I don’t think, strategically, it’d be wise to kill someone else right now.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Gubizca glanced at the manicurist, who didn’t look up. “I know you’re hurting. It’s natural.” He started playing with one of the cufflinks. “But it’s my job to keep you out of jail. I am the first to admit I find this behavior atrocious. Unbelievable, really. I’ve never heard of anything like it. I can’t believe the police would be so stupid.”

  “He wasn’t the police. I don’t believe he was the police.”

  Gubizca flicked his right hand dismissively. “Of course, he is. Officially or not, he represented them, and it seems to me this is a death threat against you.”