The Vig

by John Lescroart

  Whoa.

  What did he drive him in? Rusty had taken the bus to the Shamrock. His own car had been stolen, remember?

  Hardy sat on the corner of his desk. The car was a question. The car was maybe key.

  How about if Hardy asked Louis and got told that they’d driven in an old model blue Volkswagen Jetta? Well, that would be interesting.

  Somehow his darts had found their way into his hands and he was throwing them into the board. One, two, three. Walk in and pull them, go back to the tape line on the floor and do it again. Not aiming, not working on form. Zen and darts.

  What if he only knew the color? Or the make?

  Okay, Hardy would ask Baker what kind of car they’d driven in. Color, anything. He’d see where that led.

  He picked up the phone, got the number to County Hospital and started to push buttons, then stopped himself. Last time, he’d needed Glitsky to get to Baker.

  But Abe wasn’t in at the Hall. Hadn’t been in, no sign he would be in. Hardy wondered where he’d called him from and what he might be doing, then talked to Flo and found that he was not working but avoiding the shop. They were at least still talking about Los Angeles and Abe wanted to keep some distance—more than usual—between himself and the rest of Homicide. Flo said if she heard from him, she’d ask him to call.

  He couldn’t get the car out of his mind. After a shower and a can of sardines he was back in his office, going over the notes he’d taken at the computer terminal. It wasn’t very fertile ground for either analysis or imagination.

  He picked up a pen and started writing down everything he could remember about last Wednesday, when Rusty had come into the Shamrock. He’d gotten off the bus. Hardy had remembered his drink—Wild Turkey. He’d told Hardy about Louis Baker getting out, that he’d called the warden at San Quentin to find out the time of release. Then he’d made his proposal that he and Hardy call each other. Finally bringing it around to maybe looking into buying a gun, and what type would be suitable.

  Was that it?

  Hardy got up, walked around his desk and opened the window in his office. It was after one o’clock and a light warm breeze freshened the room. He stuck his head out to smell the roses, only there weren’t any roses around.

  Sitting again, he studied what he’d written. Okay, then, impressions. Rusty down and out. Using public transport. Saying he’d called the warden and was told that Louis Baker had cleaned up his act and not buying that. Saying that guns were for “cop types” like Hardy. Then saying he wanted to buy a gun.

  Had the idea just occurred to him? The switch in attitude from guns being for cop types to wanting one for himself?

  It slowed Hardy down. Rusty had taken a bus out from downtown. Hardy could imagine him devising his phone-call protection idea, finding where Hardy worked from any number of old mutual acquaintances. But none of that was acting scared—it was more like caution. Rusty hadn’t really been frightened. He had been planning to go home. Hell, he had gone home.

  But calling San Quentin to find out exactly when Baker was getting released? That, to Hardy, was more than caution. That appeared to be fear. Didn’t it?

  He stared out the window, back down to his notes. There were two mentions of things he’d found out from the warden at San Quentin—the circumstances surrounding Louis’s release and the fact that Louis had been a model prisoner. If Rusty had called out of fear, to find out exactly when he had to start worrying harder, would he have gotten into a discussion at the same time about what kind of guy Louis had become? If you’re tied to the tracks and a train is on the way, do you think about whether it’s a passenger or a freight?

  He must have, or probably might have, called San Quentin two times. So what?

  Hardy looked at his silent phone. He wasn’t doing anything else.

  He spoke to four functionaries, perhaps prisoners, before he got to the warden, Jack Hazenkamp. Hardy had met Hazenkamp a couple of times in his prosecutor days, seen him speak on prison conditions, recidivism rates, the usual. He was a guy who seemed to have spent a lot of time in the military, but during his talks Hardy had found him surprisingly—well, not exactly a liberal, but fairly sympathetic. The cons were his charges, he didn’t mollycoddle them, but they were by and large people, not statistics.

  Hardy had gotten through to him by telling the various intermediaries that he was an attorney (true enough), and it was about Louis Baker. He sat at his desk, his yellow notepad pulled in front of him.

  The warden came on brusquely, hurried. “Hazenkamp.”

  “Warden, I’d like to ask you a question or two about Louis Baker—”

  “Already? What’s he done?”

  Hardy was planning on explaining it all briefly, up to the suicide attempt, but the warden stopped him as soon as he heard Rusty Ingraham’s name.

  “Ingraham is dead?”

  Hardy went over it a little.

  “My God,” the warden said. “Talk about a mistake.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Ingraham called a couple of times in the past month or so.”

  “A couple of times?” Hardy repeated.

  “Yes, twice I think. He seemed very frightened. It now appears he was justified. I told him he didn’t need to worry. Baker wasn’t a threat.” Hazenkamp swore softly. “I have to tell you that this surprises me, and I don’t entertain many illusions in these matters.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, you know, most of them come back or get killed trying.”

  Hardy waited.

  “But Louis Baker—well, you put your hopes on a few of them, I guess. Have to or go crazy.”

  “And Baker was one of those?”

  “Well, you either believe in rehabilitation or you don’t.”

  “And you do?”

  “Not too much. But you get an occasional good feeling. We don’t let guys out on minimum time unless we have some confidence they’re gonna try to be straight.”

  “So you knew Baker personally?”

  “I know most of them personally. It’s not like you don’t have time to meet them. I sort of make it a point.”

  “And Baker …?”

  Hardy could hear the man breathing on the other end of the line.

  “Baker was tough. Very tough. Had most of the wrong tapes playing in his brain when he got here. But as I said, you like to think you get a feeling for these things when you’ve been in it as long as I have, and he was one case where I really believed the man had changed. He wasn’t a psycho. In his case, and I don’t say this too often, I think he grew up tough and mean because he had to survive.”

  “I knew him back then, Warden. He was a very serious felon.” Hardy knew a lot of the things Louis Baker had done. He didn’t exactly buy the environmental theory.

  “Oh, I’m not denying that. He’ll never be, let’s say, a Republican. But”—his voice went up in pitch, hope resurfacing—“he wasn’t a drug user, his brain wasn’t fried out, he got along with other guys, was on the basketball squad, gave boxing lessons—maybe a loner, but the kind who could affect other people. Not a killer. At least I didn’t think so …”

  “Maybe not.”

  “But I thought you said …”

  Hardy went on with the story—Maxine Weir, the man in Holly Park, the shootout with the cops, the attempted suicide …”So my question,” he finished, “is does it make any sense to you? Didn’t the parole board give him tests, interviews, that kind of thing?”

  “Of course. And recommended on informed opinion—”

  “That he get out?”

  “That’s why he did.”

  “How often are you wrong?”

  As soon as he asked, Hardy regretted it. All the slack—weary or otherwise—left the voice, and he Was talking to a drill sergeant again, and a defensive one at that. “Recidivism is, I’m sure you realize, a major problem. But if you’re going to let these people out, if you’re going to believe anybody can be rehabilitated, then you do it
when the evidence—”

  “I understand all that. It just seemed, in Baker’s case, you might have felt something more. Personally.”

  There was a longish pause. Hardy looked out his window. Maybe, he thought, Hazenkamp was doing the same thing up in Marin.

  “You know, Mr. Hardy, I knew a hell of a lot of guys like Baker in the corps. They come in tough, mean and young and all they want in life is to kick ass, be on top, never show they’ve got a weakness in them because where they come from, weakness is what you get stomped on for. Black or white, it doesn’t matter. Poor seems to be the big thing. No options. So for a while we—both in prison and in the corps—we authority figures get their attention. Bust them all the way down so we can build them up.”

  “I was a Marine myself, sir,” Hardy said.

  Another pause, shorter. “Then you remember. The junkyard dogs. Then something happens. At least once in a while. They get on a team, somebody saves their ass or maybe they save somebody’s.”

  Hardy remembered how he had been after his parents’ death, joining the Marines, getting his bad self reamed a few times, then getting to Nam and pulling Moses McGuire, still his closest friend, out from under enemy fire at Chi Leng. Hazenkamp was right—it could change you.

  “And that happened to Baker?”

  “I think so … thought so. You know, Mr. Hardy, there are model prisoners, as they call ‘em, and then there are the guys that, you’d swear to God, the attitude just seems to go away. They’re not just model prisoners—you forget they’re prisoners period. That was Baker. Not that he wasn’t still tough—you didn’t push him—but he didn’t need to be anymore. You get what I’m saying? Anyway, it’s the same thing I told Ingraham. Just leave it alone and you won’t have any trouble.”

  “Yeah, but Ingraham didn’t leave it alone.”

  “Well, I still feel that Louis Baker could have taken quite a lot of abuse before he felt his options were gone.”

  “But if there were that much? Abuse, I mean. Pressure.”

  “Well, then he’d revert. You get cornered, you go back to what you know.”

  Hardy could understand that. Being tagged for three murders you didn’t commit in the first couple of days after a long term in San Quentin would make anyone feel cornered. So then you decide to break out, go after somebody, someone who represents the people who are doing this to you—in Baker’s case, Hardy. And then because you’re out of practice, you fuck up, and all the good done in nine years is wiped out, all the hope of ever having a life is over, and you try to kill yourself. It could have gone that way …

  Hardy glanced at his notepad while he still had Hazenkamp on the line. At the top of the page he’d written the number 2 with an exclamation point and circled it.

  “One more thing if you’ve got a second, sir. The two times Ingraham called, were they about the same thing?”

  “Yeah. The first time was more general—if he ought to be worried, how Baker was doing, he’d heard about him getting paroled, like that.”

  “And the other time?”

  “Well, that was the one last week, where he wanted to know the specifics—what time he got released, where he was going. I figured it couldn’t hurt. He seemed pretty strung out. I tried to calm him down. Told him again—really I didn’t think Baker was going to bother him.” He sighed. “But he did.”

  “Warden, by any chance do you keep a phone log? Do you have the date of Ingraham’s first call?”

  “Why?”

  Over the line Hardy heard paper turning. “Just filling in the blanks.”

  “Okay, here it is. August twenty-sixth. Does that fill one in?”

  Hardy moved things around on his desk. Blowfish, paperweight, legal pad. Slips of paper with other notes from other days. A couple of blue jays squawked on a wire outside his window. He looked at the page he’d been studying earlier and put it next to the one he was now writing on.

  Ingraham’s car had been reported stolen three days after his first call to San Quentin. “It’s a possibility,” he said.

  He thanked Hazenkamp and hung up. So Rusty hears from a parole-officer friend that Louis Baker is getting out of prison. About the same time, he knows he’s getting a third of an $85,000 settlement from Maxine Weir. Three days later, his car is stolen. He doesn’t rent a car against the settlement from the insurance.

  Baker said Rusty picked him up and drove him to his barge the same day Rusty had so clearly for all to see taken a bus out to the Shamrock.

  Hardy wondered how many cars got reported stolen that weren’t really stolen—that were ditched, hidden, trashed for any number of reasons, the most obvious of which, but certainly not the only one, being insurance. (The other reasons provided some food—hell, a whole Sunday dinner—for thought.)

  The telephone, that mute uncooperative toy that had stared silently at Hardy the whole time he’d been home, now jangled shrilly, demanding attention. Hardy, a slave to it, picked it up.

  21

  Abe Glitsky chewed on ice as he sat at the window at David’s on Geary. A banner on the Curran Theater across the street was advertising season tickets for the American Conservatory Theater. Abe was remembering the early years with Flo, when they’d gone to the ACT all the time, “taking advantage” of the City. Now they raised their kids and occasionally went out to dinner. They’d been to maybe three movies in the past year.

  Was it them? Or was the Theater really dead? The thought brought a smile. Had the city changed? Would L.A. be any different?

  He lifted a hand. Hardy was standing in the entrance to the dining room, then pulling out the chair across from him.

  Glitsky had reached Hardy on his second call. He had been working on his own agenda, not interested in going back to the Hall and giving Batiste the satisfaction. Hardy had wanted to know about Baker—was he still alive? He had found out some stuff about Ingraham. This and that, none of it seemingly related, finally mentioning the gambling, which was what LaGuardia had been trying to tell him yesterday.

  And Glitsky, hearing that, decided he and Hardy ought to get together and shake a tree or two. Maybe some of these people knew somebody, something else. Hardy jumped at the suggestion and here they were.

  “Abraham, que tal? Como va?” Hardy in high spirits.

  Abe chewed his ice. “I don’t know why we’re doing this,” he now said. Seeing his friend, in his own bleak mood, the idea for the get-together suddenly seemed amateurish, bullshit.

  Hardy reached over and took half of Abe’s bagel and cream cheese and took a bite. “You done with this?”

  “Yeah. Now.”

  “The situation sucks,” Hardy said between bites. “Baker didn’t do it.” He held up his hand, stopping any rebuttal. “Hey, don’t forget, I wanted it to be him, but I just can’t see it.”

  “You really don’t think Baker did it?”

  “Neither do you or we wouldn’t be sitting here this fine afternoon.”

  Glitsky got his iced tea filled. Hardy ordered a cup of coffee. “Okay, you first,” Abe said.

  “He was there, right?”

  “Abaloolie.” Abe grinned. “One of O.J.’s words.”

  But Hardy was rolling. “If he went to Rusty’s to kill him, he would have brought a gun, right? Right. He couldn’t possibly have left it to chance that Rusty would have a gun on board that he would somehow conveniently give to him so he could get shot.”

  “I’ve still got a problem with Rusty being shot,” Abe said.

  “Well, hold that. ‘Cause I’ve got a problem with the fact that old Louis had no clue there was a woman on board. Much less a naked one he blasted three times at point blank.”

  “Yeah,” Abe said, “that doesn’t exactly fly.”

  “So?” Hardy asked.

  “So what?”

  “So what are we left with?”

  “Like who else was there?”

  “Good, Abe.”

  “LaGuardia was there.”

  “Why was he there?”


  “To collect Rusty’s vig. But he says the girl, at least, was already dead when he got there. And, Diz, look, there is no way Johnny LaGuardia shoots anybody with a twenty-two.”

  “Ray Weir’s gun.”

  “Right.”

  “So was Ray there?”

  “Would Ray know about Armor All?” Glitsky explained the connection.

  “But was he there? We don’t know where he was, do we? We just know he wasn’t at home, where he says he was.”

  “How do we know that?” Abe asked.

  Hardy described Warren’s night, waiting on the steps with a six-pack. Waiting for his friend Ray to get home so they could have a few and get this Maxine melancholia out of the way.

  Abe tipped his glass up, flicking at it with his finger until the last of the ice fell into his mouth.

  “Is this what we call the break in the case?” he asked.

  Ray Weir’s eyes in his bathroom mirror were a new shade of red.

  It was probably the combination of the crying and the dope, but how could he face anybody this way? Especially the cops.

  Out on the steps. Waiting.

  He’d told them he’d be a minute. Visine in the eyes. Listerine. He opened the shade to bright afternoon sun. Already afternoon. Threw the window up. Some of the smoke wafted out.

  Another knock.

  “Come on, Ray, open up.”

  Suddenly just sitting on the floor. Half the pictures of Maxine torn from the wall, lying scattered around him. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “What?” Through the door.

  “I just can’t.”

  Some mumbling. Another pound…. “now or we’ll break it down.”

  “Leave me alone,” he yelled, collapsing onto his face, the bright sun going out, arms over his head. “Please, please, leave me alone.”

  “What’s he doing?” Hardy asked.

  Glitsky shrugged.

  The landing where Warren had allegedly sat with his beer, where Courtenay had hit on Hardy, was windowless. The downstairs entranceway provided some reflected light, and there was a slit under the door like a ribbon of brightness. Carpeted steps led to the hardwood landing, all of it heavy with mustiness and the smell of marijuana.