The Vig

Chapter Fifteen

It didn’t feel like he’d thought it would-seeing your own images up there on the screen, your words being spoken by people who pretended to care about them. In his imaginings, the scene always had him sitting next to Maxine, both of them puffed with accomplishment, she up there filling the screen with her beauty and talent, he for the idea, the words, the artistic vision behind it all.

But now the reality was so different. As it always seemed to be lately. He was slumped in his easy chair, smoke curling from a cigarette in his left hand. Courtenay and Warren sat on the couch, the room rearranged for the screening. And Maxine? The only place Maxine lived-on the screen -didn’t seem real anymore. And yet that was all that was real.

It was his first movie. This was the final cut with sound before the music was added. There was beer and champagne in the kitchen sink for afterward. Other acquaintances, friends, reclined or sat Indian-style on the floor, watching Maxine say his words, do his bidding, live the part he’d created for her.

The doorbell sounded and he half turned to see someone he didn’t recognize, a man, enter and sit on the floor. Ray Weir put him out of his mind. This film, unreal though it might be, was all that was now left of Maxine. He should pay attention.

He wanted to stop the reel and just look at her. God, she was… had been… beautiful. He supposed he still loved her. No. He knew he still loved her, always would. She had been his friend and his muse. She had been what had separated him from the other drones cranking out words and scenes and treatments.

Okay, so the movie wasn’t exactly an ‘A’ feature. You made compromises when you started out, when you needed a credit or two for credibility. Everybody in the business understood that.

Those earlier scenes, nearly doing it with Bryan-their friend who played the stepfather-they were pretty tasteful, Ray thought, although Warren had done a good job of making it seem they were really screwing. But Maxine had told him about it after they’d shot that day, about the angles they’d had to use to look real and still avoid-she’d said, “You know, penetration.”

But this was to be only the first step in a long career. They were going to do it again-an entire work, an oeuvre of films by Ray Weir, starring Maxine…

They weren’t too old, in spite of Maxine’s giving up on it. That was all Rusty Ingraham’s doing, that negative stuff, the change in her.

He squirmed in his chair. In the room’s flickering light, he saw the film had everyone’s attention. Bryan was there. No girlfriend with him of course. Warren had his arm around Courtenay, who had done a fine editing job. The print was good and clean. This was a professional effort -screenplay by Ray Weir.

They couldn’t take their eyes off Maxine. But it was his story that was holding them. Don’t forget that.

He turned a little more. The guy who’d come in halfway through was walking along the back wall, hands in pockets, checking out the glossies of Maxine on the back wall.

Maybe he was another cop come back to talk to him.

Man, Ray, he thought, what are you going to do about Wednesday night?

He glanced across at Courtenay again, saw she was leaning into Warren, whispering something. The frame on the wall froze on Maxine’s perfect body midair in a dive into the water. Without any music it was eerie. Gradually, he became aware of the sound of the projector.

Then someone flicked the room lights on and suddenly there was applause. Courtenay was next to him, hugging him, pulling him over next to Warren. Bryan took a bow. Ray found himself applauding.

Courtenay Moran was nearly six feet tall. She wore her blonde hair cropped to within an inch of her scalp all over except at the nape of her neck, where a longer strand was held in a ponytail by a hot pink ribbon.

“It just seems pretty soon to be partying after his wife’s death, is what I mean,” Hardy was saying.

He watched her blow some smoke toward the ceiling. They stood on the landing at the top of the stairway outside the open front door to Ray’s duplex. Hardy held a can of beer and leaned against the doorpost. In the living room, where they’d watched the movie, people were still mingling, binding into little groups, then quickly splitting off. He didn’t know what this kind of schmoozing was called, or what its purpose was, where the longest you talked to anybody was forty seconds, but it wasn’t getting him anywhere, so he’d walked up to Courtenay in the kitchen because she was beautiful and because he’d seen her talking to Ray.

She wore a leather flight jacket that made her broad shoulders seem broader. Her eyes were surrounded with a very dark blue-black makeup that seemed to set them more deeply into her milk-white face. Hardy thought that in a photograph, Courtenay’s face might appear jutting, bony. But here now, the bones were in the right places.

“Who’s partying?” she asked. “You call this partying?”

Hardy looked back into the living room. A record was playing a heavy Latin beat and some dancing had started. “It’s not exactly a wake,” he said. Several of the dancers appeared to him to be trying to copulate with their clothes on.

“That’s just the Lambada,” Courtenay said. “It’s harmless.”

Hardy tipped up his beer. Sometimes hunches could be a waste of time, and it was beginning to look as though this whole trip to Ray Weir’s would turn out to be one of them.

He stared at the dancers another minute. “Looks like foreplay,” he said.

“Depends on how good you are.” She smiled, looking right in his eyes.

He pulled the door closed, leaving them alone on the landing, the music thumping low and insistent. Courtenay stepped up to Hardy and kissed him, her hand behind his neck. She was just his height, and the angle felt strange, but it was a good kiss that he didn’t fight as much as he might have thought he should if he’d thought about it. She stepped back.

“I just wanted to do that,” she said.

“Okay. Worse things have happened to me.”

“Want to try it again?”

She wasn’t really coming on to him. Well, maybe a little. But he flashed on Frannie, from there to Jane, and then to the Lambada going on through the door, and he realized that it simply wasn’t him. “I think it would be better if we didn’t,” he said.

“All right,” she said. She took a final drag on her cigarette, dropped and stepped on it. “I always guess wrong,” she said.

It was the pro forma San Francisco woman’s first reaction to rejection, Hardy knew-the assumption that the man was gay.

“For the record,” he said, “my sexual preference is more or less as it appears.”

She looked straight across at him, her height still a little disconcerting. Her face softened. “You’re married.”

“Involved.”

“And you’re faithful?”

That stung a little, but Hardy let it go.

“As long as they don’t find out,” she said, “what’s the problem? I don’t tell Warren. He’d leave me and there goes not only him but my career, and I do love him. But love and sex-don’t confuse ’em or you’ll screw them both up.”

A few days before, Hardy could have said he didn’t confuse them, they went together. Maybe they still did with him, but he had some figuring out to do. “I’m here about Maxine and Ray.”

“Are you with the police?”

“No.”

“Were you involved with Maxine?”

This time Hardy laughed. “Not how you might interpret it, but it was with Rusty Ingraham.”

“Was he a friend of yours?”

“Why do you ask it like that? Is it so unlikely?”

Courtenay looked Hardy up and down. “Uh huh. Very.”

Hardy thought on that a minute. “He’s dead.”

“What?” Clearly shocked.

Hardy told her about it. He let some silence hang. Then, “The wrong guy might be getting blamed. And I could be mixed up in that.”

“A friend of yours?”

“Not exactly. The police have this guy in custody. He’d threatened to kill me, too.” Hardy told her why, but also said he no longer had anything to do with the police or the law.

“So what’s the problem if he’s in jail?”

Hardy lifted his beer can to his lips, found it empty and sat down on the steps. Courtenay sat next to him. “I guess I want to be sure I believe it. I saw the guy today and got the feeling he didn’t know what I was talking about.” He paused. “He didn’t know Maxine was there.”

“So why are you here?”

“Because if the guy they got didn’t do it, somebody killed a friend of mine and nobody’s looking for him.”

“Or her.”

Hardy picked up his empty can again, shook it, found it empty. He looked far up at her. “You want to tell me about Ray?”

She dug out another cigarette and lit it up. “What’s to tell?”

“If he’s the jealous type, for example.”

She blew smoke at the ceiling. “It broke his heart, I’ll say that.”

“Maxine and Rusty?”

She nodded. “He couldn’t put it anywhere. Like, it’s gotta be over or not, right? I mean, Maxine’s practically living with this new guy, she’s moved out, what does Ray think? But he couldn’t accept it. You see that shrine to her in there? All those pictures-I think every damn composite she ever had done-and even after she’s dead?” She huddled into herself. “It’s kind of freaky, isn’t it?”

Hardy didn’t know if that was freaky or not. What he wanted to know was whether Ray had ever said he was going to do anything about it. Go get her back. Like that.

Courtenay shook her head. “He had to acknowledge it first, and he wouldn’t do that.” She blew out smoke, remembering. “Every day, he’d come by while Warren and I were editing. Always started out in control, how’s the film going, blah blah, and then he’d see some shots of Maxine and get stupid.”

“Stupid?”

“Like talk to her as if she were there. Argue with her, try to talk her into coming back, ask her on dates. Weird. So finally it just got too much. I mean, we’re trying to get a film cut here and it’s pretty intense, and Ray comes in-I don’t know, last week sometime-and Warren just cuts loose on him. Tells him to get the fuck out until he gets it settled. Go see her, figure out what’s happening and deal with it.” She stubbed out the butt on the landing.

“So then?”

“So he left, and next thing you know Maxine is dead.”

“Killed with Ray’s gun.”

She turned her eyes on him. “Is that true?”

“He says he’d given it to her when she moved out-for protection.”

She seemed to be wrestling with something. “Well, I don’t know about that… And the police haven’t arrested him?”

“They think they have a better suspect. I told you.”

She took that in. “Wow. He must be a good one.”

“A black guy on parole who’d threatened to kill Rusty, and whose fingerprints were at Rusty’s place.”

She digested that. “Yeah, that’s pretty good all right. I didn’t think Rusty could kill Maxine. Warren thinks he did but I just… I don’t know…”

“Let’s go see if we can find out,” Hardy said.

It reminded Hardy of college, sitting on the floor after midnight. Van Morrison was playing softly on the stereo. The Lambada people had gone home. Now it was just Courtenay and Warren, him and Ray. The other three were smoking marijuana, which Hardy hadn’t seen much of in recent years. He told them he had a lung condition.

They were all in a corner in candlelight, Warren and Courtenay nestled together into a beanbag chair, Ray and Hardy on the floor. Hardy had switched to water after his fourth beer, filling up the Silver Bullet can about half a dozen times.

The talk was about the movie business, minor league. Warren had gotten four or five investors together and raised close to $200,000, which by Hollywood standards, Warren said, wouldn’t make a decent short but got the forty minutes of soft porn, featuring Maxine, they’d watched earlier. Ray’s script was at least a credit and could help him get pitch-meetings with ‘real’ studios down in L.A. Warren gave Courtenay and himself a salary for directing and editing, and Warren got producer points, which probably explained his new clothes, the Movado watch and, Hardy surmised, his arm around Courtenay.

It was, Hardy saw, the entire world for these people. Everything was about could it work or not in a film.

Hardy stretched out on the floor. Courtenay put her foot on his, careful to make it seem casual. “Why’s it always a ‘film’? What ever happened to the good old movies?” Hardy asked. “I thought film was the stuff inside the camera.”

Warren looked wounded. “No. Film is videotape, television. Jesus.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s an important distinction,” Ray said.

“Sure,” Hardy agreed. “I get it. Film is for videotape. But tape is the film used to make a film. A real film, like a movie.” Courtenay pressed his foot. “In the camera, I mean.” Hardy figured he might be getting a little contact-high. He wiggled his toes.

“By Jove, I think he’s got it,” Courtenay said, playing Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.

There was silence between songs, then a low, soulful saxophone began wailing.

“Sounds like somebody crying,” Ray said.

“Can you blame her?”

Ray sat up. “Who?”

Warren snorted. “Who else?”

“Hey, come on!”

“You killed her, Ray,” Warren said. “You come on.”

“She’s not here!” Ray was pretty stoned. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Look around,” Warren said. “She’s more here than we are.”

The saxophone crescendoed. Hardy found himself, like the others, staring at the many faces, bodies and poses of Maxine Weir. It was eerie. In the candlelight, occasionally a flicker would make an eye appear to blink, a cheek seem to twitch.

“I didn’t,” Ray said.

Courtenay rearranged herself. “He didn’t,” she said to Warren.

Warren shifted to stoke up another joint. “Come on. The brace was so obvious. I wouldn’t never let that go in a film.”

“What’s obvious?” Ray asked.

“You might as well have told everybody it was you.”

Hardy was now carefully watching them both. Ray just shook his head. Warren passed him the joint, continuing, “Everybody knew she didn’t need the brace anymore. Putting it on her…” He spoke now to Hardy, explaining. “The whole thing started with the other guy, Rusty, because of the insurance, the accident, you know?” Then back to Weir. “It’s too obvious, Ray. You need to be more subtle.”

Hardy wondered if Warren thought Maxine’s death was some kind of joke, some rehearsal for a scene. He’d seen her, dead and naked, neck brace and all, and there hadn’t been anything sexy or funny about it. But he kept quiet.

“He didn’t do it,” Courtenay insisted. “Leave him alone, Warren.”

“I was here all night,” Ray said.

“You were not. I know because I was here all night. Sitting on the steps drinking a six-pack, waiting for you to come home.”

Even in the dimness, Hardy could almost feel Weir’s eyes shift. “Maybe I was asleep. I don’t remember.”

“How many people, you think, don’t remember what they were doing the night their wife died?”

“Leave him alone, Warren.”

“Well, I’m one of them,” Ray said. “I just know I was here. I didn’t go out. I told the police that.”

“The police have got somebody else,” Courtenay told Warren.

“They’re dreaming, then,” Warren said.

All this, almost friendly, casual in tone. Low-key, the joint going back and forth, Hardy listening, watching the three of them toss it around as though it were hypothetical. What got to Hardy, though, was the fact that Ray’s wife, whom he supposedly loved even unto death, was hardly cold, was being cremated the next day, and Ray wasn’t sad. Not at all.

He finally spoke up. “I know the guy they got, and they’re not exactly dreaming.”

Warren exhaled, into his theory now. “Yeah, well, Maxine dies, Ray isn’t where he says he is, he puts a neck brace on her to tell his friends-”

“That’s just bullshit, Warren.” Warren waved it right off.

“-to tell his friends what he’s done, what a mensch he is, for God’s sake, so the message is out you don’t fuck around with Ray Weir. Especially if you’re his property.”

Ray stood up, a little wobbly. “Everybody’s going home,” he said. The casual tone was gone.

Warren ignored him. “And to top things off, Ray now gets eighty-five grand insurance money all to himself to start financing his next film, which he already talked to me about.”

“What are you trying to do, Warren? Get Ray arrested?”

“What?” Genuinely startled. “Who’s going to arrest him?” Hardy, on his feet, found himself suddenly the center of attention. “Not me, gang. I’m a private citizen. Scout’s honor.”

“Shit,” Ray said, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m tired.”

“But you’re getting eighty-five thousand dollars?” Hardy asked.

Ray shrugged. “It’s no secret. Maxine’s insurance.” Warren and Courtenay were also up now. Hardy backed up a step and took in the trio. “If you’re so sure,” he said to Warren, “why don’t you turn him in?”

Warren crossed over to Ray and draped an arm over his shoulders. He smiled. “One doesn’t turn in one’s friends. And Ray and I are friends. Now we’re doing business too. You just like to have your partners be straight with you, that’s all.”

“I am being straight.” It came out like a whine. Warren looked at Ray. “I love you, man, but you are not being straight with me.”

Ray cast a pleading glance at Courtenay, who put her hands deep into her pockets and tossed her head. “Come on, Warren,” she said. “Whatever it is, it’s not Maxine. He’s allowed to have some secrets.”

“Yes, can’t I have a little private life? A little love life?”

“Sure. If that’s it. Why don’t you just tell me?”

He looked at his shoes. “I’m not exactly proud of this, Warren, but okay, maybe you ought to know. We are partners… I heard you knocking out there. I, uh, I had someone with me. A woman.”

Warren backed up a step. “So what’s the problem? You couldn’t tell me about having a woman over here? I know her?”

Ray shook his head. “She was like-” he stopped. “I paid for it.”

Courtenay stepped in. “Ray felt guilty about it, Warren. Can’t you understand that?”

“But he told you?”

“He got it off his chest.”

Warren draped an arm over Ray. “What’s to feel guilty about, man? We’re friends. You can tell me.”

Ray shrugged. “You know, with Maxine and all…”

Warren was matter of fact. “Hey, she left you, remember? You didn’t know she was going to get killed that night.”

“I know. But I’d been such a pain in the ass with you and Court about my broken heart and all. I just needed somebody.”

“Hey, we all do, right? It’s better than me thinking you killed somebody. I couldn’t believe the police hadn’t already picked you up.”

“Well, I told the police. And Court. I just didn’t want it spread around. Now I’ve really got to get some sleep, okay. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

Hardy still couldn’t detect any warm air coming from the car’s heater, and he only had another five blocks until he got to Frannie’s. He wondered if luxury cars had heaters that came on hot. Then he supposed most people who bought convertible canvas-roofed four-wheel-drive vehicles, as he had done, didn’t have heat on the top of their priority list. Ray Weir was lying. He hadn’t told the police he had an alibi. To the contrary, in fact. So much so that if Louis Baker should somehow get himself clear, Ray Weir would pop up next on the Who Killed Rusty Ingraham hit parade. Especially with this new money angle. He had jealousy going for him as well as some significant monetary gain, to say nothing of his gun being the murder weapon. Warren had been right about his friend. Absent the alibi, Ray was a good call for the trigger.

And every bone in Hardy’s body felt that the alibi was bogus. So Courtenay seemed to believe him. People tended to believe things that were confided to them, especially when, on the surface, at least, those things didn’t speak too well for the confider. But for just that reason clever people -and Ray Weir was starting to look solid for that category -had been known to confide intimate lies.

An effective technique-and in this case it had gotten Courtenay to back up Ray. She was also predisposed, which helped. Hardy wondered if she’d pressed Ray at all about who he’d been with, where they had gone. He figured not. The fact that he had ‘opened up’ to her about it would have been enough for her. The details wouldn’t have been important. Ray was feeling guilty about sleeping with someone else, betraying the object of his adoration, and on the very night of Maxine’s death, as it turned out. He just had to bare his soul to someone, to his close friend Courtenay. It was haunting him, tearing him up. Oh yes.

Hardy parked across the street from Frannie’s door and turned his front wheels into the hill to prevent runaway. He sat shivering, hands tucked under his armpits, wondering if Glitsky might start to care again if he found out about the $85,000 insurance money. It sure couldn’t hurt to bring it to his attention…

But why? Why not be happy about Louis Baker being off the streets again? Wasn’t that the goal? Shouldn’t he just move back home and go back to bartending at the Shamrock on Tuesday and pick up his life where he’d left off and be grateful he’d survived?

Except what was he going to pick up? Frannie might have called this a “window in time,” and maybe for her things could go back to being the same-he didn’t really believe that. Frannie was in his life now in a far different way than she’d been before. And, of course, that had changed the space where Jane had been so carefully placed.

And what about old Diz himself? He’d always thought of himself as a pretty good citizen, a man of some principle, if not part of the solution then at least not part of the problem either.

But now, a little shake of the cart, and Diz the white knight is ready to give up Louis ’cause he’s done some bad shit sometime? Maybe not what they’re getting him for, but something. He wondered, not for the first time, how he’d feel if Baker hadn’t been black.

But, shivering in his Suzuki Seppuku, since he was being honest with himself, he knew absolutely how he’d feel-he’d feel outraged that Louis Baker was being denied due process, that Louis Baker was being railroaded because of his background. Not that he might not have done it, but whether or not he did, they weren’t checking it out the way they should.

So why wasn’t he outraged?

Is it, Diz, because maybe this black/white thing here in the liberated ’90s was really only a matter of degree? Turn the fear up a notch and take a look at your true stripes. Hardy perceives his life threatened by Baker-whether or not that’s reality-and to protect himself, Hardy is delighted to lock Baker away forever or sit him in the gas chamber.

But wasn’t that always the reason? You perceive that your way of life, your neighborhood, whatever, is threatened, and your instinct is to protect yourself. You don’t worry about justice, the right thing. You just want the damn threat to go away. The fear to go away.

And you don’t really care, finally, if the fear is baseless.

You just don’t want to be confronted by it. You don’t want to live with it or even see it. So you don’t let them on your bus. Or in your neighborhood. Or date your daughter.

Hardy rubbed his eyes, feeling defenses rise against this vision of himself. That wasn’t him. Some of his best friends, etc., etc. Look at Abe Glitsky, for Christ’s sake.

And remember that just last night Louis Baker had, in fact, shot at the police while breaking and entering Jane’s house. This wasn’t some poor lamb he was dealing with here.

Fine. Grant that. But is he a murderer? More particularly, did he kill Rusty and Maxine? What happened out at Holly Park doesn’t have shit all to do with Dismas Hardy, does it, Diz?

Yeah, but here’s what it does have to do with. If Baker hadn’t killed Rusty-and okay, maybe that was still a big ‘if-then the guy (or woman, thank you, Courtenay) that did it… Ray Weir, for instance… was sure getting helped out by Dismas Hardy pointing at Louis Baker and saying, “Trust me, I’m an ex-cop and that’s your man.” Which Hardy had in fact done.

If any of this was so, and if Baker, admittedly no saint, had not killed Rusty, then Hardy found himself in a position that pissed him off. Because somebody had put him in this thing, maybe even helped him set up Baker for a fall. He thought he’d like to find out who, and kick some ass.

Hardy opened his car door and stepped out into the street. He had no desire to go back to his house, or to start bartending in two days. He owed it to himself to find out what was really going on here.

He looked up at the stars. Louis Baker could personally rot for all he cared. He knew that. But the situation surrounding him was tying Hardy in knots, and until he could get some of them untied he wouldn’t be free to get on with his life.