The Vig

Chapter Twelve

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 massive 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.”

Gubicza 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.”

Gubicza 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.”

Gubicza 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.”

“But he killed Poppy!”

“Yes, I know. That’s horrible, it is, Fred. But I think what we must concern ourselves with is how to respond to this threat against you.”

Treadwell was leaning forward in the brocaded loveseat. “I want to punish him.”

“Of course you do. And that’s the right approach. I suggest we just continue with our original strategy. In a sense, our case is stronger, since this Medina fellow really was there and did damage, whereas in the other charge… well, you know, the evidence with them is rather slim.”

“My ankle is really broken. That’s real.”

Gubicza smiled, warm as a toad. “Yes, and we know how that really happened, don’t we? I’m not sure we want to get into that.”

Treadwell sat back and pulled his cast up to rest on the loveseat. Outside it had darkened, it seemed, all at once.

The manicurist finished Gubicza’s right hand and was moving the other side of his chair, bringing his table with him. The lawyer pushed a panel on his desk and the lights in the room became brighter. He reached out and pulled the chain on a small Tiffany-style lamp on his desk, holding his palm under it, admiring the manicurist’s completed handiwork. “Very nice,” he said.

“But what about what Medina said, about no one believing me this time?”

“Why would you lie about it? Why would you kill your own beloved pet?” He laid his left hand on the table now, and the manicurist began. “No. Don’t forget that the community is our strength. They will believe you. You are being harassed by the bigotry of the straight cops. And incidentally,” he said, “if we don’t present a pretty convincing case, you get charged with a couple of killings you did…” He covered the manicurist’s hand with his own and squeezed. “You didn’t hear that, David.” The lawyer came back to Treadwell. “Honestly, Fred. This could be a very good thing for our case.” He almost said, “I wish I’d thought of doing it myself.”

When he got back to the parking lot Louis Baker stood on the side of the court and watched six boys playing basketball. The court was between his car-Mama’s car-and where he now stood, and after nearly an hour he decided no one was watching it.

He could be wrong, but he had a hand on the gun in his pocket as he crossed the no-man’s-land in case it came to something.

He looked different. With his stolen money he had gone into the St Vincent de Paul store and bought himself some clothes that fit, traded in the tennis shoes for hiking boots, picked up a Forty-Niners jacket, some sunglasses and a mock leather driving cap. He shaved in the bathroom of a gas station on Geary before walking back to his car.

He knew the address-he had burned it into his mind nine years ago. Turning left out of the lot on Fillmore, he headed up to Jackson Street, where Hardy had lived, might still live-you never knew. Either way he’d find him soon enough.

It was funny with Rusty Ingraham dead now, and Dido, and how the unexpected sometimes just put things in your hands. You left the joint, you maybe got intentions to go a certain way, but things happened around you and pretty soon you’re sailing along like you never gave a thought to direction. The wind blew, you’d be a fool to fight it.

And now they wanted him for murder again, like they’d always done. There’s trouble, first they looked to him. This time he hadn’t even gotten the smell of the prison soap off him before the hassling began. Okay. Just so he knew.

It wasn’t like they said it would be, but then he hadn’t really believed them anyway. But he wondered why they spent so much time trying to convince the cons with the lie. In the House, see, they kept telling you that things would be different on the outside. There’re all kinds of agencies and people set up to get you going straight. Which, you know, the first year you just roll your eyes and figure they got to tell you something-might as well be a fairytale. You’re in the joint a while, though, and it starts sounding possible, like, maybe there really are jobs out there.

But none of the guys who’d been out and came back seemed to get those jobs. Which was natural… who was going to hire an ex-con when he can get somebody he might need to trust?

In the end you believed what you wanted to believe. And the proof was here. Louis Baker, out about three days, doesn’t need no good intentions no more. Hard to live up to anyway. Now, since he’s going down for it anyway, he’s going to do something to make himself feel good.

He pulled into the curb under a streetlamp across from the old Victorian. There was one light in the front window, the kind people left on when they weren’t home.

Louis got out of the car, put his hands in his jacket pocket, where the gun was, and walked over, up the steps, rang the doorbell. He took a couple of deep breaths and squeezed the grip on the gun.

After no one answered he tried the door, but a glance had already told him that would be a tough way in. There was a new, heavy-looking deadbolt set into the door just above the knob.

But going in the front door wasn’t his style anyway. He descended the stoop and walked along the side of the house, where a cement strip drained the area between this Victorian and the building nearly flush up against it. There were three windows in that wall, all of them locked.

Coming around the back corner, he kicked the metal lid of a garbage can and it skidded for what seemed like ten seconds, sounding like a small army passing through. Several dogs started barking and Louis pressed himself deep into the shadows up against the house.

The dogs were good, he thought. Dogs were always knocking over garbage cans. Cats, too. Even raccoons. He’d wait. Prison had made him good at waiting. It would get quiet again.

He craned his neck up around him. It was maybe fifteen feet to what looked in the darkness to be a tall back fence on the other side of which an apartment building rose five or six stories. Each story had about six windows facing him, some lit, but he saw no silhouette that came to look down at the noise. On either side there wasn’t even a fence-the buildings started at the property line. This would be a bad place to get trapped. There was no way out except back up the shoulder-width alley he had just come down.

He made out the wooden porch a couple of steps off a back doorway. Stepping away from the house, avoiding the garbage can lid, he saw some stairs going down under the porch. There were two windows side-by-side down there in a little well under the porch, and one of them was open an inch at the top.

Louis wasn’t going to throw the house. He was going to find out if Hardy still lived there, then if so, wait until he came home. He let himself into a laundry room and felt his way in the dark to the doorway, then up a couple of steps to what felt like a kitchen.

His eyes were adjusting. There was also a little light seeping down the hallway from the living room. On the floor by the front door he saw a pile of mail that had been dropped through the mail slot. It appeared whoever lived here now was someone named Jane Fowler, and she’d been gone for at least a week already.

He dropped the envelopes back on the floor and returned to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, but the pickings were slim. A couple of bottles of white wine, one of them half empty. A loaf of bread. Some plastic containers wouldn’t hold enough food for a child. Four bottles of dark beer.

He took out one of the beers, the bread and a jar of peanut butter and went over to rummage through some drawers near the sink for a knife. The light from the refrigerator cut an arc through the darkness of the kitchen, falling on the wall by the door to the hallway.

Chewing on his sandwich, he took a hit of the beer and nearly gagged. The stuff was dark and thick and tasted like liquid sen-sen. He looked at the bottle-he had thought it was beer but it was called stout and the only thing it had in common with beer was its bottle. He poured it out into the sink.

He took one of the half-bottles of wine from the refrigerator and washed out his mouth. With the light he could now make out things in the kitchen. He walked over to where the light fell near the door and looked at the calendar-and stopped everything.

The name Dismas-not very common-appeared about five places in September. He smiled, swallowed his sandwich in a gulp and went back to work.

The telephone was in an alcove in the hallway, and he risked now turning on the hall light. He would only be here a few more minutes. The phone sat on an answering unit on a built-in shelf under which were a couple of phone books. Next to the phone was a Rolodex. Louis Baker flipped to H and there it was. Out in the Avenues, maybe two miles west. Take him fifteen minutes.

Flo was doing the dishes. Glitsky sat at the table, playing Monopoly with the three kids. The boys were named Isaac, Jacob, and OJ.-Flo had drawn the line at Esau. OJ. was only eight, but he already had a hotel on the boardwalk and Glitsky was hanging out in jail, waiting for doubles. The boys always got a kick out of their father the cop being in jail, but Abe didn’t want to get out and land on anything, and this way the other boys could eliminate each other and he might have a chance to buy some cheap property and get back in the game.

The telephone rang, and Abe was in the middle of yelling “Let it go!” when Flo picked it up on the first ring. He heard her say, “Just a minute, he’s right here,” then appear in the doorway. “It’s work,” she said.

“It always is.”

“But it’s your turn,” OJ. whined.

“Let Jake roll for me.” He shook a finger at his oldest son. “Don’t get doubles.”

He walked into the kitchen. “Glitsky,” he said into the receiver.

“Sergeant,” the voice said, “this is Paul Ghattas.” There was a pause. “From the lab.”

He pictured the Filipino boy he had chewed out earlier in the day. There was a scream from the other room as one of his sons landed on a bad property. Flo disappeared, and he heard her telling them to keep it down. Ghattas was saying something, but Glitsky couldn’t get his mind on it. He had told himself he was leaving the force as soon as he could and relocating to Los Angeles, and these cases that no one else seemed to care about could take care of themselves. “I’m sorry,” he said, “what did you say?”

He grabbed the pencil and pad of paper from their spot stuck to the side of his refrigerator and started taking notes. Ghattas had evidently cajoled someone he knew at ballistics into doing some work, and they had definitely identified Ray Weir’s gun as the murder weapon. Of course, in the barge itself they had found prints from the female victim and from Rusty Ingraham, but on the lamp they had picked up prints from a small-time local enforcer named Johnny LaGuardia. There was a last print that kind of confused Ghattas.

“There was a drinking glass, tagged ‘Galley,’ with as clear a print as you’d want of a guy named Louis Baker.”

Glitsky felt a chill in his back.

“Problem is, we ran Baker and he’s in San Quentin.”

“The computer hasn’t caught up,” Abe said. “Baker got out on Wednesday.”

“Looks like he went right back to work.”

“Yes it does.”

Flo had come back into the kitchen and saw Abe staring at what he had written down. She heard him thank the man on the phone, saying he appreciated someone who still cared about getting his job done.

When he hung up he didn’t move for a minute, and Flo came over behind him and rubbed her hand up and down his back.

“Hardy’s in big trouble,” he said. “Baker was on the barge.”

Hardy felt Frannie’s hand in his back pocket. He felt the gun in its holster in the small of his back.

The fog had descended once again on the city. They were walking in zero visibility, three blocks straight uphill from where they had had dinner on Noe, three blocks to go before they got to Frannie’s place. Hardy had his arm around her-she walked leaning into him.

He looked up the hill. He knew there were streetlights all along, but he could only see the next one perhaps twenty feet ahead of them. Sometime during dinner, after the euphoria of proving that Rusty Ingraham could indeed have floated out into the bay had passed, he had come up against what that might mean in his here and now. But he had already had most of a bottle of wine by that time, and now he was explaining to Frannie that he felt unprepared if Louis Baker took this moment to attack.

“But he doesn’t even know where you are,” Frannie said.

“He found Rusty.”

“Rusty happened to be where he lived. You’re here.”

Hardy kept walking. Baker had had four days to locate him, and it was getting to the time where it was reasonable to think he’d have made some progress. It couldn’t be that hard to find someone you wanted to kill real bad.

They were coming into Frannie’s block now, the buildings tight up against each other, blue light from front-room television sets showing through a few windows. The wind blew straight downhill at them and they leaned into it and each other. Up ahead of them, Hardy heard a car door open and close. He tried to make out a shape in the dark fog, but there was nothing. Then, faintly, he heard footsteps echoing on the asphalt. He tightened his arm around Frannie.

“Hold it a second,” he said. He stopped them both, pulled them back into a building entrance a few doors down from Frannie’s. He took off his jacket and helped put it on Frannie. “You start walking back and wait around the corner,” he said. “If you hear anything sounds like shooting, get into a building somehow. You hear me?”

Taking his gun from the holster behind him, he squinted into the fog up the hill.

“Dismas, what are you-?”

He put a finger to his lips. “Go!” He watched her for a few steps, then he ran across the sidewalk. The curb was lined with cars. Hardy stepped between a couple out into the street, then turned uphill.

Okay, he said to himself, the guy’s big enough to be Baker. The man wore a heavy coat and a cap pulled low on his forehead. Hardy, crouching behind the wall of cars, did not take his eyes off him. It wasn’t just somebody taking a walk. He came down the street slowly, taking his time, looking into doorways, perhaps looking for a street address. He kept his hands in his coat pocket.

Hardy worked his way uphill. Frannie had disappeared around the corner. He was maybe five cars down from Frannie’s doorway when the guy turned into it. Hardy caught a glimpse of a face in the light from Frannie’s foyer -enough to see it was a black man.

Hardy gripped the gun, moving uphill. The man stood in the doorway, waiting for Hardy to open the door so he could blow him away. Hardy leveled his gun at his back, resting his arm on the hood of one of the cars. The man knocked on the door.

Hardy cocked the hammer. He wondered if this would classify as self-defense, or if he should call out and have Baker turn with a weapon in his hand. Hardy had seen some action in Vietnam, but he had never even considered killing anyone since, at least before this Baker madness started.

He should just pull the trigger and the problem would be over. Baker was wanted for murder. He had killed Ingraham and threatened to kill Dismas Hardy. Now he was here and no jury in the world would believe he was here for an Amway meeting. Shoot first, Diz, and live.

He took in a deep breath and began tightening his finger on the trigger as Abe Glitsky turned around in the doorway and peered into the gloom down the street.

“Jesus Christ,” Hardy said to himself. Not again. He uncocked his weapon and put it in the holster, then stood up and came onto the sidewalk.

“Hey, Abe,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

The three of them sat drinking hot chocolate at the table in the kitchen nook.

“That’s Jane’s house!” Hardy said.

“Is it?” Glitsky asked.

“It used to be ours together, back when Baker went down.”

Frannie still wore Hardy’s jacket, and she pulled herself down into it. “So he was looking for you.”

Hardy nodded.

Even Glitsky seemed to buy it, finally. “If that used to be Jane’s house…”

Hardy repeated the address, and Glitsky said that was it. Hardy sipped some chocolate. “Calling it coincidence gets a little thin about now, don’t you think, Abe?”

“So is he dead?” Frannie asked. “Louis Baker?”

Glitsky shook his head. “Not yet.” He turned to Hardy.

“He took two slugs. They got him in the County General.”

“How’d they get him?”

“He made some noise, turned some lights on-I guess he was out of practice on burglaries, or just overconfident. Anyway, one of the neighbors knew the house was supposed to be empty and called in. Our guys caught him strolling out. When he got cornered he opened up.”

Hardy leaned back in his chair. “So it’s over,” he said. He told Abe about his experiment with the tide.

“Well, not to be picky,” Abe said, “but that still doesn’t make Rusty dead.”

Hardy sighed. “All right, but like you said, it sure strengthens the argument.”

Glitsky held up a hand. “If you had somebody wants to argue. Me, I’m happy enough now it was Baker. He was on the barge with a motive and a handy weapon-ought to be good enough.”

“So you came around to tell me that?”

Glitsky shook his head. “I got the details on the way over on the squawk box. The reason I started over here was I found Louis had been at Rusty’s and I wanted to advise you to keep an eye out.”

“I’ve been doing that.”

“I know,” Abe said. “I’m not blind.” Glitsky wasn’t comfortable with private citizens walking around armed, even if it was his best friend, even if he had a permit. “So how close did you come to doing me?”

“Miles,” Hardy said.

Frannie refilled Glitsky’s mug. “He’s just been worried, Abe. You would be, too.”

“There, see?” Hardy tried to smile, but still felt like someone had kicked him in the stomach. He hadn’t made up his mind whether or not he was going to pull the trigger, but he’d come close enough.

It didn’t need it, but Glitsky blew on his chocolate. “Before I found out about Baker tonight, I thought I’d bring you my file, ease your mind some with some light reading.”

Hardy fingered the manila folder. “What’s to read?”

“This was before we had placed Baker on the barge, remember. To let you know that there were people involved here, good suspects, who didn’t know you from Ezechiel. I thought it might relax you a little, get Louis Baker off your brain.”

“But don’t you need your files?” Frannie asked.

Abe stood up. “I don’t think so, not anymore.”

“What’s the matter, Abe?”

Glitsky’s face hung like a bloodhound’s. His eyes were shot with red. “I figure I’m finished with it, Diz. Nobody cares anymore. You know what I mean… So, it sure looks like Baker, probably is Baker, why don’t we just gas him now and be done with it?

“It reminds me of the movie Casablanca, rounding up the ‘usual suspects.’ Well, that’s not police work. It’s not what I do, so fuck it.” He nodded to Frannie. “Excuse the French,” he said.

Outside the wind came up and whistled against the windows. Glitsky pushed his chair forward and said he had to be going home. Hardy and Frannie walked him to the door.

“So what now?” Hardy asked.

“Like I said, I’m going home. We’ll see you guys tomorrow, right?”

They watched him walk, hunched over into his coat, until he disappeared into the fog, and then Frannie closed the door. She turned to Hardy. “Ezechiel?” she said.

Hardy sat on the couch. The manila folder with Glitsky’s notes lay open on the coffee table in front of him. Somewhere back behind him he was vaguely aware of the shower Frannie was taking. His shirt was off and he had pulled the comforter up over his shoulders and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, reading, and maybe starting to see something for the first time.

He hated to admit it, but with Louis Baker no longer threatening him, the facts of the matter didn’t point all that more strongly to him than to, say, Ray Weir, the jealous husband, or even to Hector Medina, who had had a hard-on for Rusty for years.

Also, Abe had written ‘Johnny LaGuardia’ with three exclamation points after his name, with a notation about his prints being on the fallen lamp. Hardy had never heard the name Johnny LaGuardia, even from Abe, and he wondered what he had to do with anything three exclamation points’ worth.

But then he reminded himself that Louis Baker’s prints were also found on the barge, in the galley, and if Baker was there, then he did it.

Didn’t he?

He stood up, wrapping the comforter around him, and paced from the window to the hallway door and back. The fog seemed to glow in the streetlights, eddying gently now before him as it drifted down the hill.

It came back to him, then, the feeling of seeing Abe loom out of that same fog. Of almost shooting him in the back. Or not almost. Already his memory was getting selective about it. He hadn’t really been going to shoot if it had turned out to be Baker-had he?

Abe kept getting mistaken for Baker, didn’t he? Maybe, on some level, even for Hardy, they all did look alike.

Well, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep worrying over the fate of Louis Baker, who’d been at Rusty’s, had broken into Jane’s house, who for sure was the same badass he’d always been.

“What are you thinking?”

Frannie was wrapped in a white terrycloth robe. She had dried her hair and it gleamed like a red halo around her face.

Hardy walked back to the couch, avoiding her eyes. “Just pondering what Abe would call the moral ambiguities-”

“Of what?”

He motioned to the table. “This stuff.”

But that wasn’t all and he knew it. He sat down. Frannie leaned, arms crossed, against the doorjamb.

“Dismas?” she said.

He knew if he looked up he was in trouble, so he reached out and started arranging papers in the folder. Frannie came and stood next to him. He raised his head and she put her hands in his hair and pulled him into her. She opened the robe and his face was against her belly, the smell of powder and woman, her skin warm and tight, her heart pounding under it.

“Come on,” she said, and he followed her into the bedroom.