The Vig

Chapter Seven

The dreams had been bad, and Louis Baker hadn’t slept until nearly dawn.

In the dreams there was a bright light beckoning to him, but then there was always the yard bell waking him just before he could get to the light. Sometimes, though, before the bell, there would be some other people close around him, pushing up against him, not exactly going for the light themselves, really unaware of it, but getting in his way enough so he’d have to break through them, smashing faces, stomping on their bodies if he had to.

A couple of times he had woken up on the floor, drenched in sweat, still flailing at the people in his way.

The Mama wasn’t around as he came down the stairs. The house looked different, and it took him a while to realize it was the windows. There were things he still had to do, but he was glad he’d done the windows up first. Where you lived had to be right. Especially now, after those cell years. Now it was Mama’s place still, but he could feel it starting to be his turf. He didn’t want to sink into it yet. There was a lot to get straight, but the light through the windows felt like it gave him a start.

He stood at the kitchen sink, barefoot and barechested, his prison pants tied with a rope around his waist. He let the water run until it got hot. His hands rested on the cracked tile of the drain, and the porcelain was streaked brown and red with rust. He stared out through the window at the warm day. It must be late morning already, early afternoon, no bell to get you up whether you slept or not.

He arched his back, rotating his stiff neck to get the kinks out. Steam rose and clouded the window in front of him as he filled a juice glass with the hot water and went to sit down at Mama’s table. He dropped two teaspoons of Nescafé into the glass and stirred it with the handle of the spoon.

He had not yet done any inside painting, but he had pulled down the wallpaper where it had been peeling loose. Just came in yesterday after the boys had gone back to working the cut. He’d been pissed off, trying to decide how to handle Dido, and the hanging strips of dirty paper had pissed him off more and he’d ripped them down. Now the kitchen’s walls looked unfinished, but that was all right. Unfinished was all right. Unfinished meant you had started something, not let it go on its own.

A knock at the front door. Louis Baker got up with his juice glass and went to answer it. The front room, too, was lighter with the glass in the windows, although Mama kept the blinds drawn in here all day anyway.

The Man, he come in a lot of styles, Baker thought. This one, he be some kind of man of color, knows who he is. Something in Baker knew immediately what version of the Man he was dealing with-turnkeys got you good at that. The mean ones who wait ’til you were turned and sap the back of your legs. The others, doing their jobs. Some, scared all the time, having to keep the upper hand, dangerous. Most on the take one way or the other.

This one here, Baker sensed, was doing his job. Street clothes, but Baker knew who he was. He didn’t have to look at the badge the Man held out. Man could’ve said he was reading the meter, Baker knew the Man when he saw him.

Baker brought him back in the kitchen, sat at his chair with his back to the wall, motioned the Man to sit. He waited.

“We got a problem, Louis.”

He waited.

“A dead man over at China Basin.”

Baker felt his legs go mushy. He was glad he was sitting down. How could they have put him there already?

“I don’t know nobody in China Basin.”

The Man smiled. Not a smile made you like him, with the scar running through his lips top to bottom. Baker thought about his bad dreams. The people around him, keeping him from the light. They, some of ’em, smiled like this Man.

“You do, Louis, or you did.”

“No, man, I don’t. I been, you know, in the joint. I’m just out now two days. I don’t see nobody. I just been livin’ here, cleanin’ it up.”

“Cleanin’ it up?”

Louis pointed around. “The place, you know. Put up windows. Some paint.”

The Man half turned on his chair, came back to him. “You remember your trial, Louis? When you swore you’d kill the two guys who were putting you away?”

“Yeah, I did that. A mistake.”

“It was more a mistake actually to do it.” Digging.

“What you sayin’?” He almost said, out of habit, I didn’t kill Ingraham, but then the Man would say, How’d you know I was talking about Ingraham? It could have been Hardy. Better find out what the Man knows before you open your mouth, tell him something else. To the Man, denying and admitting were two sides to the same coin -both told him you knew something, did something.

“I’m saying it looks like Rusty Ingraham got shot dead two nights ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“So where were you?”

“I just tole you, I got off the bus. I came home.”

“Anybody see you?”

Louis scratched at his bare chest. “Why don’t you ask around?”

The Man slammed his hand on the table, some coffee spilling over the sides of the glass onto Baker’s hands. The time it took to recover and look up, the Man had his piece out on the table, leveled at his chest. “You want to play games with me, I’m good at games.”

“I ain’t playing no games.”

“Let’s play who killed Rusty Ingraham.”

He let his eyes rest on the gun a minute. “I ain’t playing no games,” Baker repeated. “You taking me in or we talking here?” Might as well get to it, he thought. They either made him there or they didn’t. If they did, thought they did, he was going back in.

He kept staring at the gun. People got shot resisting arrest. “You got another piece on you?” he asked. “Gonna plant me?”

It surprised him, the reaction. The Man straightened up a little, smiled that smile again, slowly pulled at the flap of his jacket and holstered the weapon.

“Here’s the message,” the Man said. “If I find even one of your hairs at Ingraham’s place, some cloth we can’t match in his closet, a fingerprint, anything, you’re on the bus. You hear me?”

What Baker heard was We got nothing on you.

His legs started firming up again.

But the Man kept talking. “And the other thing is this. The other D.A., Hardy. You remember Hardy?”

Baker nodded.

“Hardy is a friend of mine. If Hardy winds up dead for any reason, I’m not going to care about evidence. I’m talking you and me, and I’m hoping you hear me.”

This Man was good, Baker thought. Scary. “You hear me?” A whisper.

Baker nodded. “I hear you.”

The man stood up, did a full circle in the kitchen. “Nice wallpaper,” he said, and walked back through the living room and let himself out the front door, leaving it open.

Louis Baker gave it a while, finishing his coffee. The street outside was empty, the Man gone. He stretched in the doorway, then walked up the sidewalk to where the cut started.

The side of the place, whitened over yesterday by the time he had gone in, was sprayed over in swirls and designs of dark blue.

He walked up the cut, shirtless, his nostrils flaring. Dido’s name was written in six places along his wall.

Further up the cut he saw the brother talking to two white boys near the sidewalk. Passing something back and forth. The younger bloods, Lace and the other, were not in sight, though he knew they must be around.

Probably saw him coming and moved aside.

Glitsky had told him to find a reason to believe Rusty was dead, but Hardy had no ideas at the moment so he thought he would take care of business first.

He had left his car at the Union Square Garage, and after talking to Hector Medina had thought he would walk around to clear his head. He stopped for another cup of coffee, this one an espresso, in Maiden Lane and ate two cheese croissants. He was due at the Shamrock to start his shift in about an hour, and had to call Moses with the news that he wasn’t going to work at the Shamrock until his problem with Louis Baker was settled.

“What do you mean?”

“If I bartended another day there, the integrity of our bar would be badly compromised.” Hardy told him about his continuing creative drinkmaking the previous night.

“So pay more attention.”

“Not that easy, Moses. Somebody’s trying to kill me.” Hardy realized it sounded unreal, melodramatic. “Look,” he said, “I’m out of my house. Wouldn’t make much sense to go to my regular job. The guy finds out where I work, walks in and good-bye, Diz.”

“You know who it is?”

“Yeah.”

“You know where he is?”

“Generally.”

“Well?”

Hardy paused, again working that idea out. “It’s a possibility,” he said. “But the police have a good opportunity to get him first, and that would make it easier.”

“I don’t know if I’d give ’em too much time. The cops, I mean.”

Hardy didn’t feel like getting into whether or not he was going to shoot down Louis Baker on sight. “We’ll see,” he said. “In any case I hate to stick you, but I’m not coming in.”

“So how do I reach you?”

Something stopped Hardy from just saying, Oh, I’m at Frannie’s. He didn’t want her brother thinking she was being put in danger. He didn’t want Moses to let it slip at the bar-Oh, Hardy’s staying at my sister’s place.

He was also, in some way, reluctant to acknowledge to Moses his closeness to Frannie, to get into why he had decided to go to her place. Moses was her older brother. He had raised her. It would take too much needless explaining.

So Hardy just said, “You don’t reach me. I’ll be in touch.” And hung up.

Since he was right around the corner anyway, he then walked into I. Magnin’s, where Jane worked, and left a brief message for her to receive in Hong Kong. He wasn’t home. He’d explain later.

And all the while the idea had been brewing that if he could prove the genuineness of Rusty’s fear to Glitsky, then Abe would get on it with Louis Baker.

The afternoon yawned open before him. He couldn’t go home, wouldn’t go to work, and didn’t want to sit in hiding. He figured that the reason Abe was having trouble believing him was the way he’d come upon him-handcuffed-on the barge. It was coloring Abe’s view of his explanation of things-the undeniable involvement of Louis Baker. So Hardy needed some corroborating evidence that his story about Rusty was true, and the best bet for starters seemed to be to find out if Rusty had gone out to buy a gun, right from the Shamrock, as he had said he was going to. Since there was a mandatory three-day wait between sale and delivery on handguns, Ingraham’s weapon and the papers for it should be sitting in a store someplace on the bus line between the Shamrock and the China Basin canal.

Officer William Ling was off duty, but he was in for the long haul in police work, so regular hours were not something he concerned himself with. He knew and accepted the life of a beat cop, and for now it was all right that it was mostly tedium. Walking and walking some more, moving the bums along, orienting the tourists, directing traffic when called for-if he lived and worked in a small town he’d probably rescue a lot of kittens stuck up in trees. His area in the First Precinct-Market Street south to the China Basin canal, the bay west to 7th Street-did not have a lot of trees.

He wasn’t even in a squad car yet. The street beat was the initial weed-out. Every rookie cop had done it for a time -how long usually a function, like everything else, of who you knew, and Ling didn’t know anybody.

Well, that wasn’t true. Now he knew Inspector Sergeant Glitsky of Homicide. Whether Glitsky knew or remembered him was another question.

He figured he had already put in somewhere between ten and fourteen miles today, and it had been a hot one. Now, going on five o’clock, it was still warm with no wind or fog. There was even a rare trace of smog.

He came abreast of the Atlantis and nodded at the Wangs, who were sitting having tea on their aft deck. The Wangs had turned in the call on the armed man-the friend of Glitsky-who had been on Ingraham’s barge.

He stopped walking, taking in the sight before him. Previously his reasons for coming back to the scene of his first murder had been nebulous-a mixture of professional interest and private curiosity. Suddenly now, the area itself seemed full of opportunity-the yellow tape still surrounding Ingraham’s barge, the city dredge in the middle of the canal slowly crabbing its way out toward the bay. At least a half dozen persons were active in and around the barge -people to help, get to know, connections to make.

Ling let himself under the tape and presented himself to a man in shirtsleeves who looked to be in charge. Of course, he towered over Ling. Everyone was taller than Ling, but this man was well over six feet.

He shook Ling’s hand, checking something on the clipboard he held in his hand. “They call you Bill?” he asked.

“Just don’t call me late for dinner,” Ling said.

Ling was used to it. A double take, then the realization that, damn; this little Chink is a person under there. He smiled. The tall man stuck out his hand again. “Jamie Bourke. I’m running this drag line. You want to just watch or do something?”

“Doing something would be fine.”

“Not authorized, you understand, no overtime.”

Ling nodded. “I understand.”

“You wouldn’t believe the guys come around, offer to help, and suddenly you’re tagged for like ten hours o.t. and no budget for it.”

“It’s my first murder scene,” Ling said. “I’m interested in the process. I’d pay you to see it.”

“Yeah, well, that won’t be necessary either.” Bourke checked his clipboard again. “Problem is we’re just about done.”

“You find anything?”

“No body, which is the main thing we were looking for. Hard to believe this current would take it out to the bay. We did find a gun, though. Small caliber. Probably the murder weapon.”

Ling wanted to do something. Hell, he was here, wasn’t he? You don’t get remembered for standing around. “What about inside?” he asked.

“What about it?”

“Don’t they run all kinds of tests? Fingerprints, like that?”

Bourke smiled. “I don’t know the figures exactly, but fingerprints catch about as many people a year as footprints do.” Then, noticing Ling’s disappointment, he said, “Sure, go on down. The place has been dusted, but you see anything that looks interesting, bag it and bring it on up.” He gave Ling a zip-loc evidence bag from his jacket pocket.

The living room of the barge looked about as it had the previous morning, but the slanting rays of the sun coming through the door behind him gave the place the look of an old daguerreotype. Plus, it was hot. There was a sweet smell coming from somewhere that caught Ling unawares and almost made him gag, but after a couple of breaths he realized it was not really so strong-it might be the bilge, something in the canal or blood that had seeped into the floorboards.

The door to the hallway was open and the chalk figure where Maxine had died struck him. He could almost see her there again, the naked body contorted in that grotesque, stretched out, reaching pose, the metal neck brace like some bad joke.

But the bedroom itself told him nothing. There was a thin film of black dust covering everything he looked at. In here, in spite of what Bourke might say about the usefulness of fingerprints, the Homicide team had been thorough.

He realized he shouldn’t have been surprised. That was, after all, what the job was-check out everything in the hopes that something would tell a story.

Still, that left him, again, with no role.

The heat was really something, and he opened the back door, stepping out to the deck. He saw Bourke had moved down the canal, opposite the dredge, and was talking to a couple of people in yellow slickers who were combing through the goop brought up from the bottom of the canal. Those people, he thought, were earning their pay.

Taking a breath, he reentered the barge. Now the sun was lower, coming straight in through the front door, but he would rather have the light in his eyes than the stifling dead heat. The lamp that had been knocked over had not been righted. He knelt by it and saw that it, too, had been dusted for prints. The pieces of glass that had been there were gone-probably taken to the lab. Disappointed, he sat in the chair by the lamp and surveyed the rest of the room.

Nothing.

The galley was left, and it, at least, didn’t look like it had received the full treatment. Unfortunately, it was also a very small area that was very clean. The only sign that anyone had been there at all was a water glass sitting on the drain next to the sink, and that had probably been one of the techs having something to beat this heat. The sink itself was empty-no dirty coffee mugs, no dishes, pots or pans. Whoever had lived here kept the place neat.

Ling leaned against the galley door. Well, what did he expect? This was routine to the guys that did it. They wouldn’t likely miss much.

Then something struck him. He walked back into the galley and ran a finger along the window sill. No dusting powder. He had noticed it had been all over the windows in the bedroom and again in the living room. The metal spigot on the galley sink looked like a new fixture, its chrome bright and shiny. There was no dust on it. They hadn’t dusted this room!

In a way it made some sense. The line of action had clearly been from living room, through hallway, to bedroom and out the back. The team had no doubt looked into the galley and seen that nothing to do with the murder had happened in there.

But it was his only opportunity and he had to take it. They might laugh at him when the prints on the glass turned out to be a member of the Homicide squad, but he didn’t care. He’d been laughed at before. And he wasn’t going back up to Bourke empty-handed.

He took a clean handkerchief from his back pocket and carefully picked up the drinking glass, dropping it into the zip-loc bag.

Moses McGuire was behind the bar at the Little Shamrock, serving drinks to a five-thirty crowd and talking on the telephone. “I don’t know,” he said. “A black guy.”

“What’d he look like?”

“He looked black, Diz. Big, black and mean.”

Hardy, from Taylor’s gun shop on Eddy St, felt his head go light. “Did he say anything?”

“Yeah, he said something. What do you think, he just stood around? He asked for you and I said you wouldn’t be in for a while and could I give you a message and he said, ‘No, I’ll find him.’ Him meaning you.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“So what should I have done?”

“How’d he know about the Shamrock already? Who’s telling him this stuff?”

“Diz, we’re jamming here. He comes again, what do you want me to do? Then I gotta go.”

What could Moses do? Hardy knew the bar at this time on Friday nights, and if it was normal, Moses was right-it was jamming. Two deep the length of the bar.

Hardy couldn’t believe Glitsky still hadn’t arrested Baker. And now the guy shows up at Hardy’s work.

“Diz?”

“I’m thinking, Mose.”

“Think faster, okay.”

Hardy heard Moses tell people he was coming. Just a second. Be right there.

“Go tend bar,” he said.

“What about-?”

“I don’t know,” Hardy said. “Later.”

It was something Louis Baker had done in the yard. He didn’t much think about whether it did any good, or what its function was at all. But he had done it, day in and out, for the last six or seven years, and the habit wasn’t going to get broken. It was also probably what had kept him in shape. Now he took the basketball and began dribbling back and forth at the public court just up the hill from Holly Park. Except for the trees surrounding it, the court was about like the one in the yard. There were no nets on the baskets-you ran on pitted asphalt with no key, half-court or foul lines.

Mama had come back home sometime midafternoon with a load of clothes and some high-top sneakers that fit. Maybe she’d gone down to the Goodwill-you picked the right one, they could have better stuff than K-Mart.

Full dusk now, the park lights came on enough to continue. Louis hoped somebody would come by and try to get him off the court for their own game. He felt like kicking a little more ass. An hour before, he had had it out with Dido and his blood was still hot.

Warming up, he dribbled down the court, pounding the ball into the ground, laying it up to the hoop soft as patting a baby’s butt (that was for the control) and then slamming the pole coming around, getting the ball on the first bounce and doing it again, full court.

What he would do then in the yard was stand at about the free-throw line and forget about the basket. There was only the backboard, and he would stare at it, visualizing faces -other guys at the House, Ingraham, Hardy.

And he would slam the ball-two-handed shots or overhand-up against the backboard hard enough so it would come back to him at the free-throw line on one bounce max, sometimes even on the fly. Smashing the ball up against the faces he saw, grunting with the exertion, getting it out that way so the hatred and anger didn’t overtake him-so he was in control.

Dido had been strong but didn’t know how to fight, and Louis had hit him in the throat and put him down. Then, standing over him as he struggled for breath, he told him he wanted his house white again by the morning. He knew he might have to finish things with Dido, and he had come out here pumped up. But now it wasn’t Dido’s face he kept seeing on the backboard-it was the other D.A., Hardy -the one who had blown him the kiss.

He slammed the ball, barely hearing its boom against the backboard or its echo against the project houses down the hill.

Hardy’s face, smiling at him, taunting. He threw again and again until he was covered with sweat. He was in the courtroom, struggling to get at Hardy, fighting against the restraints of the guards, then later against the bars, until his arms hung down heavy as lead, useless.

He stood in the pool of artificial light, unable to lift the ball anymore, Hardy’s face still up there, smiling down at him.