The Vig

Chapter Thirteen

Lace was at the Mama’s putting up some plywood over the hole where Dido had broken the window.

The fog, which had come in late the night before, was already lifting. A light breeze fluffed at Lace’s flannel shirt. As far as Lace knew, no one in the cut had seen or heard anything about Louis Baker since two nights before, and Lace was figuring Louis ought to show up soon if he had any notion at all of claiming the cut, because it was slipping away fast.

Last night, Dido not yet in the ground, and Samson who ran the next cut over was seeing that no one worked out of this one. Lace and Jumpup, they’d laid low, letting things shake out.

He felt bad about Dido. Dido had been like his big brother, his protector. Lace wasn’t sure how he was going to handle Louis Baker when he came back, but the first thing was to get his confidence, make him think he’d change allegiances like the wind blew. He didn’t want Louis Baker feeling like he had to kill him the way Louis had had to kill Dido to secure the cut. So he’d make up to Mama, keep close and informed, fix the window and bide his time. Then when Louis came back and wasn’t looking, something bad would happen to him.

The Mama stuck herself out around the back of the building, a mountain of a woman in a multicolored caftan. She had cooked up a pan of cornbread inside and had butter and honey to go on it. Lace drove in another nail and let himself into the kitchen.

The Mama sat at the table, cutting into the pan. The cornbread smell filled the room.

“Sit down, child,” she said. “Eat up.”

Lace obeyed her, savoring the flavors, the butter melted into the bread, a little honey over the top. Mama poured him a glass of milk.

“Police brought back my car,” the Mama finally said. “Louis didn’t do it no harm.”

“They find him?”

“He got shot,” she said. “Everybody always wants to be shooting.”

Lace just nodded.

“Probably now he go back to the House. Police say it might be better if he don’t live now, what they might fix to do to him.” She cut another square of cornbread and put it on Lace’s plate. “They’re saying he killed Dido, you hear that?”

“He did kill Dido,” Lace said.

The Mama nearly exploded. “Why you say that?” Then, more quietly, “What make you think that trash, boy?”

Lace had to chew a minute before he could swallow. His mouth was dry and he took a gulp of milk. “Dido’s shot and he runs,” he mumbled out.

“You thinking like the police now,” she said. “Running don’t make you guilty. Running keep you out of the way, that’s all. First thing the Man do is look for somebody like Louis, maybe done some bad things before. Easy to lay it off on Louis, then.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay. Why Louis want to kill Dido?”

It was so obvious he had trouble saying it. “He want the cut, Mama.”

“You think Louis that dumb? He shoot Dido and run away from the cut he wants?”

“He didn’t do it, he shouldn’t have run.”

The Mama shook her head. “Child, child, child. Where you comin’ from? He gotta run. He got no choice.”

Lace went back to his cornbread, thinking that the Mama maybe made some sense… Louis had fought with Dido and the war was still going on with Dido breaking the window, but it would have been plain stupid to kill Dido, especially to get at the cut. Be like putting up a flag saying you did it.

Be more like it if somebody used the fighting between Dido and Louis to get rid of one and set up the other. Free up the cut, too. Lace needed to think on that.

Hardy ran his hand along Frannie’s side before he slipped out of bed. She stirred, made a noise in her throat and settled back into sleep. Hardy pulled the blanket up over her, moving her hair away from her face.

They had been awake most of the night, talking and loving one another. Like old friends in one way, but in the other-Hardy was amazed at what had gone on. Now, showering, the images of Frannie over him, under him, things they’d done the second and then third time, he found himself getting excited again and turned up the cold water so he could get on with the day, with his real life.

His real life.

He put on a pot of coffee, wondering what his real life had become lately, ever since Rusty Ingraham had walked into the Shamrock. Until then he’d been doing okay-in some ways, he thought, better than okay. Certainly better than the sleepwalk he’d been in before he got back with Jane. And things with Jane were at least steady. He worked bartending with easy hours doing something he mostly enjoyed.

And then-it was like the question you sometimes heard at parties-what if somebody told you that you were going to die in three days, or six months? What would you do differently?

And of course the ‘right’ answer was “I’d just keep doing what I’m doing.”

Well, somebody had made Hardy believe that he might die in the very near future, and he hadn’t done anything like what he’d been doing. What did that mean? That he hadn’t been happy with what he was doing? And how did he feel about what he was doing now? If he had one day left, would he choose to spend it with Frannie or Jane? Or alone?

Well, if he was lucky he had more than one day left, and didn’t have to make that decision. The sun was high. The fog was mostly burned off. Hardy thought that when he moved back into his house-whenever that happened-he’d start going down to Graffeo’s for coffee. It really was better than his canned espresso.

He went to the front door and found the Sunday paper on the stoop. He looked out at the line of cars parked along the curb, trying to imagine himself last night, huddled behind one, a gun trained on Abe Glitsky’s back. It looked so different in the sunlight. Had he really done that?

Had he and Frannie really done all that, too? And what would that look like in the daytime?

He opened the paper in the nook and a front-page story got his attention right away. Hector Medina was back in the news. Fred Treadwell, it seemed, had now accused Medina of killing his dog and threatening his own life. There were two sidebars on Hector. One outlined the seven-year-old accusation that he had been a killer cop. Case closed. Hardy was still an ex-cop and ex-D.A., and that sort of reporting bothered him, never mind that he had been suspicious of Medina’s self-serving protests of innocence to him. The other sidebar was an interview with Medina-evidently some reporter had called him at home the night before the paper went to press. All Hardy read there was a refrain of Medina’s complaint to him-once you’d been accused, you might as well have done it, since everyone treated you like you had anyway. Of course he hadn’t killed any dog, but everyone would believe he had, although he said it was the dumbest accusation he’d ever heard. Why would he kill the man’s dog? And so forth.

For a second it crossed Hardy’s mind that maybe he’d done the same thing with Louis Baker. He was a bad man. Therefore he was guilty of bad things that happened. And it followed-once you got accused of doing bad things, you might as well go ahead and do them. In for a penny, in for a dollar.

No. Not in Baker’s case. He’d been at Rusty’s. He’d gotten shot after breaking into Jane’s, for God’s sake, looking for him…

Hardy put the paper down and was staring out the windows. He felt hands on his shoulders, massaging, coming around to rest on his chest. Frannie kissed the top of his head, and he leaned back into her.

“Hi,” he said.

She patted his chest and straightened up. “I love you,” she said, sliding into the chair next to him, looking in his eyes, “and you’re confused.”

Hardy smiled. “Not so confused.”

“Good.”

“Not that I have any idea what I’m doing, what we’re doing, what any of this means.”

“That’s okay. I don’t either.”

Hardy took her hand. “It’s not casual, though, you know?”

“I know.”

“I’m just trying to figure out what’s my so-called real life.”

“Me or Jane?”

He shook his head. “Not just that. That’s part of it.”

“I’m not staking any claim, you know. But I do want you to know that I love you.”

Hardy looked down at the hand he held. Eddie’s wedding ring was still on her finger. He wanted to say a lot of things-that saying you loved somebody was staking a claim, that he didn’t know where to put his own infatuation, that he didn’t trust what he called “love, the feeling”-he trusted “love, the attitude.” The problem was that he had the feeling with Frannie. With Jane, he was starting to think he had the attitude and was trying to manufacture the feeling, often with decent success. But it wasn’t the same as the racing he felt in his veins now.

He did, however, know that he wasn’t going to just say “I love you” right now. That was too open to misinterpretation.

Instead he lifted her hand and kissed it. “You know when I said I wasn’t so confused?” he said.

She nodded.

“I lied.”

Frannie laughed her wonderful laugh, fixing him with dancing eyes. “Oh, Dismas. Let’s just enjoy this. Eddie’s gone and I miss him horribly and Jane’s not in the picture right now and we’re two grownups who’ve known and cared about each other forever and now are attracted to each other.” She squeezed his hand. “Okay, very attracted. We’ve got a little window in time we can have just for ourselves, so let’s take it. I’m not trying to find a father for the baby and you don’t have to decide between me and Jane, at least until what you call your real life starts again.”

“I’ve never thought of the ‘love as a window in time’ theory.”

“How about if there isn’t any theory?”

“Then something can happen you’re not ready for.”

Frannie laughed again, shaking her head. “You ever think that life is something that happens and that you’re not ever completely prepared for?”

“Yeah, and it makes me uncomfortable.”

“I know. So you want to control everything, but things can’t be controlled. Eddie being killed. Michael dying. Louis Baker putting you and me together like this. It’s just out of our control.”

“How about last night?”

Now a slow smile. “Last night was a freight train without brakes going downhill and you know it.”

“But something had to get it started.”

“It started when you rang my bell here. It started before I married Eddie. It started when I met you. And in our, as you say, real lives, we had it under control. Then this funny thing happened with your life being threatened. Just like funny things happen all the time.”

“Well, your window of time is closing. Jane is coming back. I should move back home. Louis Baker’s in custody. Why don’t I feel like things are over? Settled?”

Frannie leaned over and shut him up with a kiss. “Because some things are just starting.”

Hardy got up and went out to the living room, where last night’s comforter lay heaped on the couch. Glitsky’s file was still open on the coffee table.

Frannie came up behind him and put her arms around his waist, her face against his back. “Okay, here’s the thing,” he said. “Everything seems connected somehow-you, me, this Baker situation. And my instincts are telling me it’s not over. There’s too much unresolved-”

“You mean with Baker?”

“I mean with Rusty Ingraham. But I’m also wondering if that instinct is really me just wanting to prolong things here with you, put off my return to real life.”

She rubbed her hands up and down the front of his shirt. “What’s unresolved?”

He crossed over to the table, picked up the file. “This stuff here. Also, in the paper this morning another guy involved in all this shows up around another violent crime.”

“But didn’t they get Baker at Jane’s? And doesn’t that mean he was after you?”

“Absolutely.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Well?”

“It doesn’t mean he killed Rusty, or Maxine, or the guy in the projects. It only means he was after me.”

“Okay, but you can infer-”

“Sure you can. It’s what I’ve been doing all along.” He sat down on the couch and Frannie came over. “Last night I almost shot Abe. No, listen. I was one-hundred-percent certain it was Louis Baker on your porch, here to kill me. But I couldn’t take him out without making sure, thank God. Something stopped me from pulling the trigger.”

Frannie sat back, not knowing where he was going.

“If I couldn’t kill Baker last night, how can I do it now?”

“How would you be doing that?”

“Multiple murder rap, he’ll get the gas chamber…”

“But Abe even said-”

“Sure. But Abe’s instincts aren’t always wrong. Often, in fact, they’re right. I mean, I was so scared the last few days I wasn’t interested in anything but saving my ass. And that meant pointing to Baker.”

“And now?”

“Now, I think I can see for the first time that Abe might have had a point, back there when this whole thing started. In his shoes, knowing what he knew, and didn’t know, I’m not sure I would have arrested Baker right away either-”

“But Abe, knowing what he did, finally did arrest Baker, didn’t he?”

“Not exactly. Baker got shot outside Jane’s house, where we suppose he was looking for me to kill me.”

“But didn’t Abe say he was going to charge him?”

“No. It sounded like he said he was going to quit. Maybe let the Ingraham case slide and be happy to have Baker go down for the woman’s murder, or the burglary, or even breaking his parole. He’s fed up, is all.”

“But Baker was coming to kill you!”

“Don’t get me wrong, Frannie. I don’t care too much about what happens to one Louis Baker. But he ought to go down for what he’s actually done.”

“So let a jury decide that. Or Abe.”

“Juries can be wrong, and Abe’s not interested in his current mood.” Hardy flipped some pages in Abe’s file, leaning over the coffee table. “There’s another thing,” he said.

She sat forward, a hand on his back. “What’s that?”

“One way or the other I’m deeply involved in all this, right? So let’s, for argument, let’s say Baker didn’t kill Rusty. Let’s even, just for fun, say Rusty isn’t dead. If either or both of those are true, then why am I, Dismas Hardy, part of this at all… unless I’m being set up.”

“But set up for what?”

Hardy closed the file and leaned back against the couch. “Exactly.”

Hardy was thinking that maybe Frannie’s infatuation had ended, since she was already pissed off at him for going to see Louis Baker in the hospital. He should just leave it alone, she said. But he still felt some danger. If he was being set up… Or maybe he wanted to stay at Frannie’s a little longer and needed an excuse. Or maybe he felt less than a paragon and wanted to soothe his conscience now that his life wasn’t, so far as he knew, directly threatened. It was all jumbled, but also somehow connected.

He and Frannie had had their first fight. She said that compulsive need to find out, to do the right thing, had killed her husband. She wasn’t about to have it happen to Hardy too.

But Hardy knew that idealism hadn’t killed Eddie Cochran four months ago. A bullet in the brain had killed him, and Eddie had had no more control over who had put it there than he did over the wind. Eddie had been going along, living his life, trying to make it a good one, and someone had ended it-abruptly, senselessly. If something in Frannie needed to believe that Eddie’s idealism had gotten him involved in things that had led to that lonely parking lot in the middle of the night, Hardy could accept that. He knew it had been someone else’s agenda, not Eddie’s, that had ended his life.

He put it out of his mind as the guard let him into the hospital room. He had called Abe from Frannie’s and Abe had cleared an interview with Baker, even if he didn’t approve of it. He had made Hardy promise not to take his gun.

Even with tubes in his arms and a hose running into his nose, Baker looked intimidating. Hardy backed away from the bed and glanced at the door to the room, making sure the guard was still just outside.

He couldn’t place him. Hardy had no distinctive memory of what Baker had looked like nine years before. A big black man. He’d sent away a lot of them.

“Yo, Louis,” he said.

Baker opened his eyes. He was still heavy-lidded, perhaps sedated, but there was recognition there. Baker’s eyes had a yellowish tint, both the white and the brown iris. “Well, if the mountain ain’t come…” After the one phrase he closed his eyes again.

Hardy pulled up a chair so he could be close to Baker’s face. “I hope you got a better lawyer than last time,” he said. He watched Baker for a reaction but there wasn’t any. He might have gone back to sleep.

“ ’Cause when you get better from this tragic accident that’s put you in the hospital, then you’re going to go sit in a small green room and breathe some real bad air. But, you know, the good part is you won’t breathe it for too long.”

Baker opened his eyes. “Talk about bad air.”

“They say the gas is painless, but you hear stories. Guys who get the first whiff and their heads jerk back and eyes bug out, like they’re gagging on fire. It’s gotta be agony, don’t you think? But again, I guess it doesn’t last too long.”

“I ain’t going to no gas chamber on a B and E.”

“Fuck the B and E. I’m talking the murders.”

“I didn’t do no murders.”

“You didn’t do Rusty Ingraham? You better have a good lawyer.”

“I didn’t even see no Rusty Ingraham. I tole the cop that.”

“And you know, he wanted to believe you, but finding your prints over at Rusty’s place made him skeptical. You know that word, Louis, skeptical? It means he thinks you’re full of shit.”

Baker closed his eyes again.

“You sleepy, Louis? You want me to go away? ’Cause we got you on Rusty’s barge, we got you in the cut. We got three dead people with your name all over ’em.” Hardy saw movement under Baker’s eyelids-he was thinking about things.

Hardy hadn’t formally interrogated anyone since he’d left the D.A.’s office, but you didn’t lose the knack. It was kind of fun, in fact, realizing that Louis probably thought he was still a prosecutor.

“Three?” Baker opened his eyes, pulled himself up. “What three? You trying to tag me for every murder in the county last week? What’s a matter, you got nobody else on parole?”

The effort of talking cost Louis, and he had to lie back down, breathing out through his mouth.

“I ain’t do a thing, you all decide I’m going back down.”

“How’d you get a gun, Louis? Shooting at cops. Breaking and entering. You call that not doing a thing?”

Louis picked up his hand, waving all of that off. “It ain’t killing.”

Hardy sat back in his chair. It was not rare for a killer to deny killing anybody. But he had Louis arguing, talking. You had to use what you had and keep ’em talking.

“No, killing was Rusty Ingraham, killing was the woman at his place, killing was the homeboy in the cut.”

“What woman at Ingraham’s?”

“Her name was Maxine Weir.”

“There wasn’t no woman-” Louis stopped abruptly, retreating again behind his closed eyes, lying back.

Hardy leaned forward, smiling now. “Oops,” he said.

“I want my lawyer here.”

Hardy leaned over closer and whispered in Baker’s ear. “Fuck you, Louis. Fuck your lawyer. This is me and you.”

“I’ll get a mistrial.”

“I’ll deny it, and who’s going to believe you?”

Louis tried to lift himself on the bed, which brought on a coughing fit. The oxygen hose came out of his nose. Hardy stood and pulled his chair back while the guard came over and pushed a button by the bed. In another minute a nurse was there. The coughing fit had passed and Louis lay still, looking dead.

The nurse replaced the oxygen tubes and checked the bandages on Baker’s chest and thigh. Hardy could see the blood through the gauze-a line of blood and drool had run from Baker’s mouth. There was a low gurgling sound, and Hardy realized it was Baker’s breathing.

The nurse turned. “He shouldn’t really talk.”

Hardy decided to keep pretending to be official until someone called him on it. “I’ll only be another five minutes. This is a murder suspect.”

“Do you want him alive to go to trial?”

Hardy glanced at Baker, then back at the nurse. “Not particularly, but I’ll keep it short anyway.”

Hardy pulled his chair back up and noticed the nurse saying something to the guard at the door.

“Now where were we?” Hardy said. “Oh yeah. You were on Ingraham’s barge.”

Baker was still struggling with his breath, as though he’d been running. “There wasn’t no woman there,” he said.

“You told Sergeant Glitsky you weren’t there.”

“He puts me there, he thinks I did the man.”

“Correct.”

“The man brung me there.”

“Who did?”

“Ingraham.”

“Ingraham brought you where he lives? You want me to believe that?”

“You believe what you want anyway. I’m telling you what happen.”

“Okay. What happened?”

“I get off the bus an’ the man is there waitin’. He goes, ‘Come take a ride with me,’ and I pass on it. But he’s packing.”

“You’re telling me Rusty Ingraham pulled a gun on you?”

Baker nodded. “I told you. He shows me his piece and we go to his car. I figure he’s going to shoot me, but we drive about two miles and next I know we’re on his boat.

“He says he hears I’m tryin’ to be a citizen now, good behavior up the House, like that. We sit drinking water on his couch and he say he hope all that’s true, but in case it isn’t, he wants me to know where he lives so by mistake I don’t ever come near the place, which if I do he’s gonna shoot first, self-defense, do I get the message?”

The gurgling sound came again deep in his throat, and Baker swallowed a couple of times, making a face.

“Then what?” Hardy asked.

“Then I up and leave. I walk around, getting away from there. I’m a free man.” The guard came walking up. “The nurse said two minutes.”

Hardy stood, looking down at Baker. He was still swallowing, a light sheen of sweat across his brow. He opened his eyes. “I didn’t kill nobody,” he said.

The guard rolled his eyes at Hardy. “They never do, do they?” he said.