The Vig dh-2 Read online

  Glitsky had to ask. "With a neck brace she looked radiant?"

  He shook his head. "She didn't have the brace. She stopped needing that a couple of months ago."

  "But-" Glitsky said, remembering that Maxine had had the brace on when found dead. "Never mind, go on."

  "Well, there's nothing more. We made love. I gave her the money. She left." He stubbed out the newly lit cigarette. "I thought… anyway, that's the last time I saw her."

  Glitsky let the silence build for a minute before he stood up. "Ray," he said, "if I were you I'd get myself a good lawyer."

  "But I was here all last night. I didn't leave the flat."

  "That's what you said. "

  "You don't believe me?"

  "I'd believe you better if you'd made some phone calls or ordered out for pizza or something."

  Ray started to say something but stopped himself again. "Well, I guess that's about it, then."

  Glitsky stood by the door for an extra beat while Weir held it open for him. "That's about it," he said.

  Normally, Hardy worked from around 12:30 to 7:30 P.M. and Moses McGuire picked up at 6:00 until 2:00 A.M. So for an hour and a half almost every day they shared duties behind the rail.

  "Who ordered that?" Moses was a purist. Hardy was squeezing a lime wedge over a Manhattan. Moses whispered, "Whoever ordered that, cut him off."

  Hardy looked down at the drink, seeing it for the first time. He swore and dumped it into the sink. He tapped the side of his head, grabbed a fresh glass and the sweet vermouth, and started another one. "Good catch," he said.

  "Cherry," Moses said, "is the proper garnish for a Manhattan. You need your Mr Boston?" Referring to the bartender's guidebook.

  Hardy finished making the drink, put it in front of the customer and came back down to the front of the bar, where Moses was now sitting on his stool, talking to his sister Frannie.

  "He's like a thermos," Hardy said.

  Frannie sipped at her club soda. Hardy thought she looked fantastic-highlights in her red hair, green eyes almost laughing again. "A thermos?"

  "You know how a thermos keeps hot things hot and cold things cold?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Well"-Hardy paused-"how does it know?"

  Frannie smiled, impossibly attractive-sexy. Impossible because this was Moses' little sister, about five months pregnant. Impossible because Hardy had known her since she was in high school. Impossible she had come so far -Hardy had not seen her since a couple of weeks after Eddie died. Eddie, her husband.

  Hardy's eyes left her, went to Moses, who leaned back on his stool. "A guy puts a lime in a Manhattan, I feel it down to my toes."

  "Hey, I'm a little distracted, all right?"

  "Maybe it's the gun." Moses did not like having a loaded weapon in the bar, but Hardy had come straight from downtown and was not about to leave it outside in his topless Samurai.

  "What gun?" Frannie said.

  "Nothing," Hardy said.

  But Moses explained. A little.

  "This morning?" Frannie asked, suddenly worry all over her.

  "It's no big deal," Hardy said.

  "Some guy's trying to kill you and it's no big deal?"

  "He puts a lime in a Manhattan…"

  "Yes, okay, it's entered my mind, all right?" His eyes went from Moses to Frannie. "Anyway, it's not definite anybody's trying to kill me."

  "But you're walking around with a gun?"

  Hardy leaned over the bar. He smelled jasmine. "Frannie, I took the gun with me this morning. I haven't gotten around to getting home yet. End of story."

  "But you're not going home?"

  He straightened up. "I've considered it, living there and all like I do."

  "But what if this man tries to get you? What if he goes to your house?"

  "Tell the truth, I'm more worried about me having to, or being tempted to, kill him if I see him, which my friend Abe tells me would be a problem."

  "Well, I don't think you should go home. I think it's too dangerous."

  Hardy patted Frannie's hand on the bar. "Okay," he said, closing the subject.

  Moses had gotten up and was pulling a Bass Ale at the spigot. "How about you think about tending some bar."

  "I'm talking to your sister."

  "And she is my date tonight. I'm off work and I am pouring beer. Something is wrong here."

  Surprisingly, Frannie covered Hardy's hand and squeezed it. "I mean it," she said. A look passed between them. Hardy had been telling himself he wasn't all that worried. Naturally, he'd been a little concerned, but the earlier adrenaline fear he'd felt in Rusty's blood-soaked bedroom had passed.

  Now, Frannie hearing about it fresh, she was passing some of it back to him. And it was a fact that he had garnished the Manhattan with lime. He tried to tell himself that it was just the way women were, especially Frannie, who'd so recently lost her husband. Nervous. But suddenly he wasn't sure that was all it was.

  "Two margaritas, no salt," Moses called over, and Hardy started pouring into the blender. Moses sidled up next to him. "No sugar, either," he said.

  Hardy couldn't get the till to balance, and he had continued to pour some pretty shabby drinks. Gin and coke. Rum and ginger ale. Thinking about it made him shudder. He'd started three Black and Tans backward, forgetting that while Guinness floats on Bass Ale, the opposite wasn't true.

  It was just after midnight and he had closed down the bar early. No sense continuing the charade longer than he had to. The clientele would get over it. After all, this was the Little Shamrock, Established in 1893. It wasn't going to go out of business over closing early one time. Moses might bitch a little, but Hardy would explain it later.

  He found he just couldn't pay attention thinking that someone was going to come in and shoot him just as he was reaching up to the top shelf or wiping down a section of the bar with his rag or ringing up a drink tab.

  After talking to Tony Feeney, Hardy had at last been able to get his gun back, and now it was stuck in his belt behind him as he counted the money for the sixth time. It was no use. He had $597 in cash and the register showed he'd rung up $613. It wasn't going to balance.

  He went to his tip jar and made up the difference, then crossed to the dart boards with a last Guinness, trying to decide what he was going to do.

  He had talked to Glitsky and found out that he hadn't gone down to talk to Louis Baker, that the ex-con was still on the streets.

  Glitsky had started to explain something about other suspects, but Hardy, working the bar, was busy and didn't have time for police procedural bullshit. Suspects be damned. Louis Baker had threatened Hardy's life and was free as a bird. Thanks for all your help, Abe.

  What Hardy was not going to do now, he was sure, was go home. Rusty Ingraham had gone home.

  He kept all his dart paraphernalia in a well-worn leather holder that he carried with him at all times, most often in the inside pocket of whatever jacket he happened to be wearing. Now he took it out and began fitting the pale blue plastic flights into the twenty-gram tungsten darts.

  There was one Tiffany lamp on over the bar and two in the dart area. Hardy had dimmed them down as low as they would go. He looked up at the clock on the mantel across from the bar, which hadn't ticked since the Great Earthquake in 1906 and didn't look like it was about to start now. Standing up, preparing to throw a round of darts, he first went back and checked for the third time that the front door was locked.

  Since he was up anyway he went into the bathrooms, both of which had barred back windows, but you couldn't be too sure. The place seemed secure.

  He stepped up to the dart line and flung his first dart. It missed the whole board. Hardy stared at the dart, stuck in the wall next to the board, as though it were a vision. There was no way he could miss the whole board. That was like Nicklaus whiffing a tee shot. Even warming up, you didn't miss the board.

  Well, at least no one else was around to see it. He went and retrieved the dart, then took the.38 out f
rom under his belt and put it on the table next to his Guinness.

  It wasn't only going home, he realized. He shouldn't even be here at work. Baker could ask anyone and find out where Hardy spent his days, and Dismas wasn't going to tend bar with his loaded police Special on his hip. Or even on a shelf under the bar.

  He started throwing again, more naturally now. Not really aiming. The round all fell within the '20.'

  His first thought was to go to Jane's, but not only didn't he have a key to her place, it was where he used to live when he was a D.A.

  Moses? Everybody here knew Moses was his good buddy, knew where Moses lived.

  Abe? Screw Abe.

  Pico and Angela Morales? They had kids and little if any extra space.

  He thought about a hotel, but since San Francisco's main industry had become tourism, you couldn't get a room here anymore for under $150 a night, and Hardy, doing okay, still did not have that kind of money. And who knew how long it would be?

  Well, it couldn't be too long. If Glitsky didn't do something, then Hardy would. Flush Baker, make him commit.

  Then what? Blow him away? He shied from the thought, but there was something there.

  He finished his Guinness and pulled the darts from his last round out of the board. He picked up his gun, took his empty pint glass to the sink and turned off the lights at the switch by the mantel. Letting himself out the front door, Hardy stood in the recess off the sidewalk, his hand on the gun's butt, scanning the shadows, listening.

  There was a high, patchy cloud-cover and it was not very cold. Traffic on Lincoln was very light. Hardy stepped onto the sidewalk, turned right and walked quickly back around the corner to Tenth, where he had parked.

  Distracted when he'd come to work, he had left the top down on his Samurai, and as he slid onto the damp driver's seat he saw that somebody had opened his glove compartment. Papers were strewn on the passenger seat, on the floor.

  Looking around again, he saw nothing move. Behind him, beyond the near buildings, the Sutro tower rose in front of a crescent moon, a skeleton clawing at the scudding clouds.

  Hardy put the car in gear and turned onto Lincoln, up toward Stanyan and the tower. It wasn't a skeleton. It was just a bunch of metal and bolts and wire-an idol to the great god television. Maybe seeing it close up would help. No sense in getting worked up over imaginings, letting the mind play tricks.

  But Rusty Ingraham was missing, dead. That wasn't a trick. He had been at home, forewarned even, and Louis Baker had found a way to get to him.

  Hardy was sure Louis would also find a way to get to him.

  He kept driving, not knowing where he was going.

  Chapter Six

  " ^ "

  Why are you still working?"

  The coffee was beyond good-Graffeo's best made in an espresso machine. Hardy, still pretty tired after a rough night on Frannie's couch, was dressed in the clothes he'd arrived in a little after 2:00 A.M. He looked over the steaming mug at Frannie Cochran.

  The last time he had seen her, her husband's death was still strangling her.

  Four months ago it had been strangling everybody. Especially because it had looked at first as though Eddie Cochran-twenty-five, idealistic, happily married with a just-pregnant wife, on his way to Stanford Business School in the fall-had killed himself.

  But neither Moses nor Hardy had been able to believe it, and they wanted to make sure Frannie got her quarter million dollars in insurance if Eddie had been killed. Moses had offered Hardy twenty-five percent of the Shamrock if he could pretend he was a cop again and prove Eddie had not killed himself. Which Hardy had done.

  And getting involved with Eddie's death had done something for Hardy, too. His original life goal had not been to bartend at an Irish place in San Francisco. He, like Eddie Cochran, had once burned with idealism, with notions of good works. But the flame had died down, along with his law career and his marriage to Jane, in the aftermath of his son's death. When Michael was seven months old Hardy had left the sides of his crib halfway down on the first night the child was able to pull himself up. The fall to the floor was about four feet. Michael landed on his head.

  Afterward, Hardy had dropped out, damned if he was going to care about things if they were going to hurt that bad. Moses McGuire, whose life Hardy had saved in Vietnam, had taken him on as a bartender at the Shamrock, and years had passed, one after another, all pretty much the same.

  Until, that is, Eddie died. Until Eddie had been killed. And finding out about it, having to care, had jump-started something in Hardy. Even as it had killed something in Frannie.

  But now she was looking alive again, blooming. Literally. The baby she was carrying barely showed in her belly. She wasn't wearing maternity clothes yet, though Hardy knew she was nearly five months along. First pregnancies could be like that. Jane had been the same way with Michael. There had been no obvious body change except bigger breasts for almost six months and then whammo, the stomach popped out and everything became more real right away.

  Hardy took Frannie in, her red hair washed and gleaming, green eyes squinting as she sipped her own decaf. She had taken to using light makeup around her eyes, some lipstick. Her cheeks had filled out from the hollow carved by her grief, and now she appeared to laugh easily again, as she had before. She laughed now.

  "And what would I do if I didn't work, then?"

  "Eat bonbons. Watch soap operas. Go shopping. Be a woman of leisure."

  "Nice view of womanhood."

  "Okay, how about become an astronaut, run for Congress, conduct Mahler's Fifth."

  "Better."

  "But you're pregnant. You should take it a little easy until after the baby's born."

  "If I take it too easy I'll get fat."

  "Well, you're gonna anyway."

  She pouted at him. "I will not be fat. I will be pregnant. There is a difference, Mr Hardy, and I'll thank you to remember it."

  Hardy looked at her nonexistent stomach. "Sorry, baby," he said to it, reaching over and patting.

  She put her hand over his and held it there a second. "I almost don't believe it still," she said. "If it would kick or something. There's no other sign…"

  Hardy took his hand away and his eyes rested for a second on her breasts. "Yes there is," he said.

  She laughed, embarrassed, sipped at her coffee. "I don't know. I guess I just decided to keep working until it's born. It's nice not to need the money, but I want to keep busy. If I get too much time to think…"

  Hardy knew what too much time to think could do. Frannie had gotten nearly a quarter million dollars from Eddie's life insurance. She was twenty-five years old. There would be time not to work if she wanted that.

  Hardy reached out and patted her hand again. "And now a houseguest to boot."

  "I'm sorry about the couch," she said.

  "The couch is fine."

  "And you're really in trouble, aren't you?"

  Hardy shook his head. "Not trouble. Maybe a little danger. It's why I need a place nobody would think to look for me."

  "And it's also why you have a gun with you."

  "That too."

  Frannie put down her mug. "It's still hard for me to believe people just get up in the morning intending to go and shoot somebody."

  Hardy nodded.

  "And you're sure this man…?"

  "Louis Baker."

  "Louis Baker. You're sure he killed your friend?"

  Hardy worked it around for the time it took him to swallow his coffee, nodded again. "Yep."

  "Then why didn't Abe Glitsky go arrest him yesterday?"

  Hardy had thought about that a lot last night. Why hadn't Abe just gone down and taken him off the streets? It worried him, but he said only that Abe had told him that there were other suspects.

  "But couldn't he arrest more than one person and question them all?"

  Hardy shook his head. "They don't like to arrest people unless they charge them. Abe said my suspicions weren't evid
ence."

  "Well, isn't there any? Evidence I mean."

  "I don't know. It'll turn up."

  "And you're sure he did it?"

  They were sitting at a teak table in a round breakfast nook off the kitchen. Hardy looked past Frannie, down the hill, to a school-bus stop at the corner. A dozen or so students were milling around-mostly black kids. For a moment, Hardy wondered if his certainty about Baker might possibly have to do with his color. There were other possibilities, things that might've happened there on Rusty's barge. But the probability, the overwhelming probability, was Baker. Hardy didn't base his suspicions on Baker's race. Hell, Glitsky was half-black, and Abe was one of his best friends. He had to smile at that-"Some of my best friends…"

  "Dismas?"

  She saw the smile lines fade around his eyes. He came back to her, refocusing. "Sorry. Went away for a minute."

  "You see something?"

  "Yeah, I saw a bunch of kids down there and wondered if I was getting to be a racist. But then I thought about Baker, who is nothing like you or me or them."

  Frannie had been raised by her brother Moses and had known Hardy since Moses had gotten back from Vietnam. Hardy had saved Moses' life over there. She had sat on his lap when she was twelve and thirteen, fantasizing about her brother's friend, Dismas the hero, now a policeman, handsome in his pressed blue uniform. Then Hardy had gone on to law school and become an assistant district attorney. He'd gotten married and had a child with Jane Fowler, then the boy had died and Hardy had gotten divorced, quit his job and had been around more, first drinking at Moses' place, the Little Shamrock, then becoming a bartender there.

  That's when she had gotten to know him again, stopping in for a beer at the Shamrock to visit Moses. And had it not been for the "keep off" sign he had worn like a badge, she might have started fantasizing again. But instead she turned him into a litmus test. She would not date a guy twice unless he was "at least as good a man as Dismas Hardy," she told her college girlfriends. And she'd found one-Eddie Cochran-and she had married him. And lost him…