The Vig

Chapter Twenty-three

Hardy felt like a horse’s ass. What was he really doing here in Acapulco at a cliffside restaurant waiting for the sun to set and the boys holding torches to dive off the cliffs into the oncoming surf?

A mariachi band was serenading an American couple at the next table. Hardy poured his Tecate into a glass and squeezed a lime into the beer. He didn’t particularly like Tecate, but he liked Corona less, and those were the options.

Sometimes, he’d told himself, you’ve just got to do something. And he thought he’d been sure.

Certain enough in any case to risk crossing the border with his.38 Special taped under the fender of his Samurai. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if they had stopped him in Tijuana and searched the car. But he’d driven into Mexico perhaps twenty times before in his life and had never been hassled going in. Coming back, of course, they’d inspected his car three or four times. Hardy had come to the conclusion that if people wanted to bring something-anything-into Mexico, the official word was bienvenidos. It was a poor country. They’d take anything you wanted to provide.

For the two and a half non-stop days that it had taken him to get here, sleeping only an hour or two at a time in the car, his hunch had grown more and more into a conviction. Rusty Ingraham was alive-and he was in Acapulco.

Rusty Ingraham, he had been sure, had come to him for no other reason than to have him point the finger at Louis Baker and let nature take its course. And that course ought to lead, with the other clever little games such as buying a gun, presumably for protection against Baker, that he never picked up, to the conclusion that Rusty was dead, killed by Louis Baker.

And that, in turn, gets Rusty off the hook for his crushing vig and puts Louis where he belongs back in the slammer. Or the gas chamber. Either way, Louis Baker was a pawn. Dismas Hardy was a tool. Rusty Ingraham would be free to live out poor Maxine’s dream.

The sun kissed the Pacific. Flaming red bougainvillea covered the trellis that bounded the patio where he sat. A warm offshore breeze lulled. He sipped his Tecate.

Across the chasm that divided him from the divers, one of them, still torchless, fell forward. Hardy watched the slow arc as the body cleared the outcropping and fell the long long way down. It was the fourth boy he’d seen go off since arriving here, and he found he couldn’t work up a casual touristy feeling about it.

He leaned out over the trellis, making sure the wave below would be there for the boy’s arrival. This was not, to him, a relaxing way to unwind.

He left his beer with a tip and went out to the road leading back into town. Half a dozen taxis were lined at the entrance to the place, but he put his hands in his pockets and started walking down the hill.

Palm fronds still littered the roadway. Hurricane Carmine had hit two days before. It hadn’t done much damage, but cleanup here did not proceed at the same pace as back home. Especially if you couldn’t pay for it. The phone in his hotel still wasn’t working, for example, but then again, he wasn’t staying at the Princess.

He had arrived the day before and slept through the late afternoon and through the night-seventeen hours. This morning he’d walked down from his hotel, the El Sol (eighteen dollars per night-definitely not the Princess), near the base of the mountains, through the awakening town to the Esplanade. He took an outside table at a place facing the beach and had pineapple juice, some poor coffee and a plate of huevos rancheros, taking it slow, letting the sun get hot, the parasailors floating up around the bay like colored balloons.

Sunday morning. Church bells.

On his way out to the jai alai stadium, still walking, getting the feel of the place, he had stopped at a church and stood in the back, listening to the Mass in Spanish. The ritual appealed to him, but he wished they still said the Mass in Latin. There was nothing universal about this Mass, nothing, he thought, catholic. It made him feel like the foreigner he was here. At communion, he snuck back out.

The sun pounded hot on his head. He bought a hat for a dollar and continued walking.

Hardy loved Mexico. He went every year to fish or dive or soak up sun and either dry himself out or tank up-the place was good for either. He and Jane had taken their honeymoon at Cabo San Lucas long before it was anything but a sleepy fishing village with a thatched-roof airport. Long walks on empty beaches. Huge, nearly free margaritas at the Finis Terra, throwing the glasses down over the cliffs to the water below. Nights and afternoons and mornings of lovemaking.

Jane.

Driving down, he had had time to think about her, about Frannie. Part of him recognized that he might have decided to come down here, ostensibly seeking Rusty Ingraham, because Jane was due home from Hong Kong. It would give him a few more days. Not that it was the whole reason, and not that he was proud of it, but it was there.

He and Jane had both been supposing, in a casual kind of way, that eventually they would drift back into marriage. There would be no future talk of trying for another child -that had already come up and Jane’s age, career and the tragedy with Michael had sealed her opinion on that far past the reaches of any discussion. She wanted-and Hardy did not blame her-comfort, respect, lack of hassle. A civilized life. He didn’t blame her, but he didn’t want the same thing.

She had already hinted more than once that Hardy would probably, eventually, go back to practising law, buy a few suits, become a professional. She would not force him to do any of that, of course, but it-probably-would come to pass naturally. The problem was, when it came to it, as it seemed to have done now, he knew he was going somewhere, moving toward some definite place after his years of laying low behind the bar of the Shamrock. Something was guiding him, and it wasn’t some urge toward passivity and comfort, toward three-piece suits and a better wedge of Brie.

Maybe, four, five months ago, looking into the death of Frannie’s husband, he’d come to believe, after years of denying the possibility, that one person-he, Dismas Hardy-could make a difference. And that it even mattered.

Else why was he down here?

Back to old Abe’s tragic fallacy. Did he think he was down here to restore order to the cosmos? He had to laugh at that. But if Rusty Ingraham was here, he was going to bust his ass in a bad way. And he was going to get the charges dropped against Baker-the ones he’d influenced.

That was his mission. It was something Frannie might yell at him about. She might even hate him from time to time for being made up like that. But at least Frannie would know where he was coming from. He was, she said, like Eddie that way.

To Jane, the concept would be Greek.

Come on, Diz, was that fair?

Jane would understand it on a theoretical level. She would admit that the world might be better if everybody always did the right thing. Of course. But there were issues everywhere you looked, and you had to decide which ones were yours. And that decision had to be based on some kind of a cost-benefit analysis. Adults understood that. You didn’t just go off and crusade your whole life. If you did, you were a professional do-gooder, and everybody knew they didn’t get much done, did they?

But he wasn’t crusading his whole life. He just wanted to get this one thing straightened out. It had been pushed in his face-it was his issue.

And he could hear Jane’s answer to that. Why take the risk? If you did nothing, what would it matter? So what, Louis Baker is in jail-he deserves to be. Didn’t he break into my house? Wasn’t he trying to kill you? And if Rusty Ingraham is gone, let him go. Who cares? He’s gone, it’s over.

But Jane, he killed Maxine Weir.

I’m sorry. Police business. Not yours. Let it go…

He had come up to the stadium, deserted and empty, and looked at his watch. The first game wouldn’t be for a couple of hours. He shook his head-bad timing-and backtracked toward town.

He had sat outside under an awning at a place he had passed coming out. The Tecate had been warm, impossible to swallow even with lime. He had read a Los Angeles Times, two days old, cover to cover.

He had still felt hopeful. He was here. He would find Rusty Ingraham. He would go home and explain things to Jane. He would tell Frannie he was in love with her, and what did she want to do about it?

But all that had been before he had gone to the stadium. Now, the afternoon behind him, he kicked palm fronds and tried to remember why he had thought he would be able to locate one person here.

The jai alai stadium was nowhere near as big as Candlestick Park, but Hardy guessed it still held maybe fifteen thousand people. It was certainly a good-time place. Hardy was surprised no one he knew had ever tried to put together a jai alai field trip. Beer and tequila were everywhere. Outside the gate fifty-gallon oil drums had been cut in half and set up for grilling, covered with everything from what looked like braided coat hangers to corrugated iron, piled high with shrimp, snapper, chorizo, mounds of green onions, peppers, mystery meats. Slap it in a tortilla and pour on salsa, who knew or cared? It was a fantastic, reeking bonanza of smells and smoke, and Hardy, chewing a shrimp burrito, walked through it, mingling, taking it in.

Inside, the place was packed. The first disappointment, and it was major, was that there weren’t any windows for betting. Hardy cursed himself for not doing his homework. He had just assumed…

Well, there was no help for it now. The way it worked in jai alai was that each section had two runners, or bookies, or whatever they were called-one in a red hat and one in a green hat. They moved up and down the stands almost like peanut vendors in the States, calling out the constantly changing odds, throwing some kind of ball to prospective bettors, who put their money in a slot in the ball and took out the chit with the current line.

So Hardy’s original idea of waiting by a window for Rusty to show up looked bleak. He took in the stadium. All through the stands the red and green hats bobbed and zagged. Following any one of them would be a job.

Hardy watched a game or two, hoping against hope that being lucky might make up for not being smart, that Rusty would just pop out of the crowd, maybe bump into him.

He found that he liked the game a lot. Real mano a mano stuff. Handball with no rules about interference or much else. Couple of gladiators playing to the death.

Up at Seguridad he had thought of having Rusty paged when he realized it was a stupid idea… If Rusty was here and heard his name he would also know someone didn’t think he was dead. He would relocate and it would be all over.

Two more hours, five bottles of orange pop, and thirty-five dollars that he bet on the last couple of games went down the drain. The stadium emptied and Hardy stood by one of the dozen or so gates. A lot of people walked by him. Two of them resembled Moses McGuire. None of them looked like Rusty Ingraham.

Okay, he’d watch the famous Acapulco cliff divers…

All right, now he’d done that. Now what?

He found himself back at the Esplanade. A tiny strip of coral sky still clung to the horizon, and already there were a million stars. Well-dressed Americans-mostly couples, or maybe that was only Hardy’s vision of it-sat with aperitifs at outside tables. The breeze had changed, blowing out across the town toward the water. The night smelled faintly of oil and urine.

Hardy sat on the beach, facing away from the lights. He could hear the lap of water across the sand. Behind him there was always guitar music, male voices singing, softly, far away.

They had jai alai in Las Vegas, Nevada. There was a stadium in Tijuana about a thousand miles closer to home and still across the border. Puerto Vallarta, maybe. Oaxaca? Ixtapa? Who knew how many places?

If Rusty was here, and he was starting to think that was a pretty big if, and if he was going regularly to bet on jai alai, then Hardy would still need to have at least one person at every gate if he wanted some reasonable chance to get him.

There was no way. He didn’t have that kind of money and he didn’t know anybody. Maybe Abe could get the local police involved, send down a picture of Rusty…

Right, Diz. Count on that one.

He lay back into the sand, crossing his hands under his head, staring up at the man in the moon.

The El Sol wasn’t anywhere near the beach. Beyond the street-front lobby each ground-floor unit on both wings of the hotel had sliding glass doors that opened onto a red-tiled terrace that looked out on the pool. More bougainvillea climbed the filigreed wrought-iron to the second-floor walkway. Palms and banana trees, spared by location from most of the wrath of the hurricane, dotted the inner courtyard.

Hardy sat outside on his terrace with a rare cigar and a bottle of El Presidente brandy. He wasn’t really drinking -he’d poured an inch into the juice glass from the bathroom about forty minutes before and half of it was still there. He’d been in Mexico enough to know that, all clichés notwithstanding, you really didn’t drink the water. And he was sick of orange pop.

Since one of the advertised features of the El Sol-in neon over the door of the lobby-was a telephone in every room, Hardy had a telephone. He also had a television set. The fact that neither worked didn’t surprise him very much. He thought it might be fun someday to settle down here in Mexico and open a luxury hotel-Ice machines! Pinball! Cable TV! Magic fingers! And, of course, telephone. None of them would have to work. The fact that you had them made you special.

He had some luck calling San Francisco earlier from the pay phones near the post office. He got Jane’s answering machine and told her where he was, that he might get back in a week. The cryptic and enigmatic Hardy.

Isaac Glitsky, Abe’s son, said that Abe and Flo had been down in L.A. since Friday. Interviewing for a new job, Hardy figured, and making a weekend of it. Really doing it? When Hardy decided to head south, he didn’t mention it to Abe. He hadn’t felt like explaining his somewhat farfetched reasons, trying to justify taping his.38 up under the fender of his Samurai. Abe would have gone nuts. But now Isaac was supposed to ask where he was and Hardy told him and said he’d call back the next day.

Frannie hadn’t been home.

There was some quiet laughter across the way on another shadowed terrace. Someone had slipped into the pool. He heard a telephone ring faintly up in the lobby. He drew on his cigar and sipped the brandy.

The telephone!

He’d taken it outside to the terrace and periodically lifted the receiver to silence. Now suddenly there was a dial tone. He dialed Frannie’s number, waited. Waited some more.

“Hello.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Dismas?”

“C’est moi. No wait, wrong country, soy yo.”

“Are you all right? Abe called here. He didn’t know-”

“I know, but you did. I’m here. I’m okay.”

The pleasantries, getting used to the distance, the separation. The drive down, the hurricane, the phones being out.

“… which is why it’s taken so long to get through. How are you feeling?”

“Okay.”

Not too committal there. “Okay?”

The long-distance wires hummed in the silence.

“I’m okay. I went to the doctor’s Friday and heard the heartbeat.” The baby’s. She took a breath. “It’s really there and alive.” He could hear her eyes brimming. “I missed Eddie, I missed you, I had a bad night. I think I’m pretty confused about things right now.”

Hardy sipped some brandy. “Do you want me back up there?”

“I don’t think… I don’t know what I’d do with you right now. But I know I want you to be careful.”

“I’m always careful. I’m using block-out, wearing a hat, not drinking the water, the whole shebang.”

“Do you know what you want to do when you get back?”

As though she were sitting in front of him, Hardy shook his head. “No. What I’m trying to do now is figure out what lunacy made me decide I could find Rusty Ingraham down here, if he’s alive, if he’s here.”

“Maybe Abe could somehow get the police down there to help you?”

“Who’s going to help a civilian with no hard evidence look for a guy who’s considered dead? Abe won’t.”

“I don’t know. When he called”-she paused-“he’s your friend, Diz. He really sounded worried, wanted to know where you’d gone, why didn’t you tell him, all that.”

“It’s just not the kind of thing he would understand. That’s why he gets paid for what he does.”

“Well, he also told me to tell you to come home. The case is closed.”

Some parrots screeched in the top of one of the palms. Hardy’s stomach tightened. “They found Rusty’s body?”

“No, not that. Just a second, he had me write this all down.”

His cigar had gone out. The swimmer’s wake lapped the pool’s edge. Hardy found he was sweating, gripping the receiver white-knuckled.

“Okay,” she said, “are you still there?”

She told him that Glitsky said he had questioned a man named Hector Medina as he’d been planning to. The next day, the day Hardy left for Mexico, Hector evidently jumped from the top of the Sir Francis Drake to one of its lower roofs. They found between two and three thousand dollars in cash on him.

“So Abe thinks he killed this man Johnny LaGuardia. And he says it follows that he paid Johnny to kill Rusty Ingraham.”

“What about the girl that was with him?”

“Maybe, he says, it was just bad luck she was there. Anyway, that’s what Abe seems to think. That Hector Medina realized he was going to get caught for it and couldn’t face it.”

“Was there a note? Didn’t he have a daughter or something?”

“I don’t know. I guess no note. Abe would have said, wouldn’t he? I mean, in a message for you.”

“And Abe said he really thought that’s how it went down?”

“Well, he said it tied everything up pretty well.”

Lap of water, screech of parrot, the hum of the longdistance connection.

“Diz?”

“He’s in L.A. now, interviewing for a job down there. I wonder if maybe he just wanted to feel like his cases were settled.”

“Doesn’t it make sense to you?”

“I guess. No. Not really.”

“Abe told me you’d made a pretty good case that Rusty was dead.”

“I know. I did.”

“But now you don’t believe it?”

“Well, four days and fifteen hundred miles ago I wasn’t sure I believed it. Now, I’m here, I might as well give it a day or two more, but I have to say that after today, even if he’s alive, finding him doesn’t look very promising.”

“And what’ll you do if you do find him?”

“I don’t know. I guess it depends. Have a party, get drunk, tie him up and ride him back to San Francisco. Maybe go to the police here and try to have him extradited-”

“Would you please try to remember he might be dangerous?”

“Okay. I already thought of that.”

“I mean it, Dismas.”

“I mean it, too, Frannie. What more do you want me to say?”

She waited a beat. “I want you to say you’re coming home, that we’ll see each other again.”

“Okay, I’ll say that.”

Another beat. “You will?”

“God willin’ and the creek don’t rise,” he said.