A Man's Game

by Newton Thornburg

  “And when that doesn’t work, he just goes ahead and smokes him, is that it?”

  “Why not? Who else we got?”

  Lee smiled in disbelief. “Oh, come on, Sergeant—you know what the man is like. He’s a straight arrow. A family man. A nice guy.”

  “Mister Niceguy, huh?”

  “Exactly. The kind of man that might go wacko one day and blow away his boss or wife—now, that’s feasible. That’s what solid citizens do. But what they don’t do is plan and execute a hit like this. At most, they’d try to hire someone else to do it—and get caught in the process.”

  Lucca had begun to smile again, a very patronizing smile. “You like the guy, don’t you?”

  Lee was defensive. “Oh, I don’t know. I imagine most people do. He seems harmless.”

  “Not to me, he don’t. I had him pegged right off, the way he came in here that first day, ready to bite my head off. And then schmoozing us at his house the way he did. He’s got it in him, all right. Just the fact that he’d play footsie with a heavy hitter like Slade, that’s not your average Mister Niceguy.”

  “So what do we do?” Lee asked. “Arrest him? Bring him in and beat it out of him? Execute him maybe?”

  “Don’t be a smartass. I’m not saying he did it. I’m just saying he’s a suspect, that’s all. And we’re gonna start watching him.”

  “I thought it was a county case.”

  “It is. But they’re nowhere. I checked with Dixon over there, and they ain’t got a clue. Anyway, we’re all on the same side, last time I checked.”

  “You going to tell them about your designer friend?”

  The smile came again, this time tilted toward the impish. “Not so’s you notice. Not yet anyway.”

  Lee knew he was after something, was not just keeping her informed. So she asked the usual question. “What do you want me to do?”

  He didn’t respond for a few moments, just sat there sucking on his teeth and staring into space, as if he didn’t already know what her orders would be. Then he nodded thoughtfully, agreeing with himself.

  “Yeah, I think maybe you should see a little more of our friend Baird.”

  “Just what do you have in mind? Pillow talk?”

  “You said it—not me.”

  “What are we now—the KGB?”

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. All I said was get close to the guy. But now that I think about it…” He gestured at her body. “Hey, you might as well put all that equipment to good use. That is, other than motivating the brass to play favorites.”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing?”

  “If the shoe fits, Detective.”

  “Well, it doesn’t!”

  Lucca shrugged, as if it were a matter of vast indifference to him. “Getting back,” he said. “I want you to contact the guy. Make up some excuse and get closer to him, find out what he’s doing, how he’s holding up.”

  “And if he’s innocent?”

  “Then you get the pleasure of his company. After all, he’s such a nice guy, right?”

  Fifteen

  The following Saturday Baird was preparing to watch a football game on television—the Huskies playing Stanford—when he saw Sergeant Lucca pull up and park in front of the house. Kathy had gone clothes shopping with a girlfriend of hers, a fellow clerk at Bond’s, but Ellen was at home, upstairs, cleaning the bathrooms. Since Baird didn’t want her hearing whatever it was the detective had to say, he went out on the porch to intercept him. Evidently off duty, Lucca was tieless and wearing a zippered windbreaker. If he was carrying a gun, Baird could not see it. He came shuffling up the walk as if he had been on the road for months.

  “Good afternoon,” Baird said. “You always work Saturdays?”

  The detective shrugged. “You know the old saying—no rest for the wicked.”

  “Will this take long?”

  “Just a few questions, that’s all.”

  Baird went down the porch stairs, effectively blocking the sergeant’s advance. “My wife’s vacuuming,” he said. “It’ll be a little noisy in there. Why don’t we just walk up the street, toward the park?”

  Lucca smirked. “Sort of arm in arm?”

  “Not very likely.”

  “We could sit in my car.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “Okay, then. Lead on.”

  With Lucca duckwalking beside him, Baird led the way up the street, toward Lookout Park. The trees were already changing color, and the day itself was cool and gray, with a so-far unkept promise of rain in the air. Baird was not uncomfortable, however, since he was wearing a sweatshirt in addition to his usual Saturday jeans and loafers. Then too, he had his terror to keep him warm, his all-but-insupportable curiosity as to what the sergeant was about to say.

  “I was going to watch the game,” Baird said.

  “What game?”

  Baird looked to see if the man was serious. “The Huskies, you’ve heard of them? That great big school down there?” He nodded in the direction of the mile-distant Husky stadium, which sat at the edge of the lake like a split cathedral.

  “Oh, football,” Lucca said. “I don’t follow it. I’m not much of a sports fan.”

  “Well, it takes all kinds.”

  “Don’t it, though?”

  They walked in silence for a short distance. Then Lucca wagged his head, as if in wonderment. “Big surprise about Slade, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “I checked with the guys in Narcotics, and they say there’s nothing on the street about it. No rumors or anything. But then he wasn’t really a dealer, just a small-timer. Buy enough for himself and his johns mostly, maybe a couple other people. Not really a dealer.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “Well, it is to me. Of course, it’s my business.”

  They had come to the “lookout” portion of the park, a flat area with trees and benches and a broad vista to the east, which Lucca remarked on now.

  “Jesus, what a view, huh? You can see just about everything except the north end of the lake. That’s where they whacked him, you know. Or at least dumped him. North of Juanita, under one of them high bluffs.”

  The sergeant looked at him, but Baird said nothing.

  “It must’ve taken a weight off your shoulders, not having to worry about him anymore.”

  Baird sat down on one of the benches and Lucca joined him, dropping onto the seat with a grunt, as if the effort exhausted him.

  “TV said the sheriff’s police were handling the case,” Baird said.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that if I was you. Our squad, Metro, we got kind of a special purview. The tough cases, we seem to get them all, sooner or later.”

  “Then why don’t we get to it?” Baird said, lighting a cigarette.

  Lucca made a great show of following Baird’s lead, getting out his own pack and extracting a cigarette and lighting it as if he were just learning how.

  “Get to it?” he said. “Well, I guess you’ve got a point there. No reason not to. You’ll remember that a member of our squad saw you that one night with Slade—you remember Daniels, don’t you, the big black guy with the shaved head?”

  “So?”

  “So now one of Slade’s gay friends, a Lester Wall by name, he comes in and volunteers a bit of information. It seems he misses his old pal Jimbo. And he says that on a Saturday, the fifteenth of August, a man with your name and fitting your description comes into Gide’s little fern bar and without any invitation sits right down with him and Slade. And that eventually this guy and Slade, they leave together, for parts unknown.”

  Lucca looked over at Baird, openly curious as to what effect this information was having. But Baird said nothing, tried not to show anything. The sergeant dragged deeply on his cigarette, then went on with his story, not exhaling so much as letting the smoke gradually seep out of him, as if his lungs had caught fire.

  “Now this fellow Lester, he claims Slade said—right there in
front of you—that you had threatened to shoot him with a shotgun if he didn’t stay away from your daughter. Well, I could hardly believe my ears. I mean, it’s hard to figure, a smart, upstanding man like yourself saying a thing like that in front of a witness. Very indiscreet, Mister Baird—especially with Slade getting himself killed just nine days later.”

  Baird didn’t miss it, that Lucca had the time element right. But he let it pass, for the moment. “No, I didn’t say that in front of a witness. Slade said I said it—there’s a difference.”

  “So there is. My mistake.”

  “How do you know when he was killed? That old black lady on TV?”

  “Naw, witnesses are liable to say anything. And the more they say it, the more they believe it. Fortunately, we’ve got something that backs up the old lady, something real solid. And it’s ironic as hell. You remember that burglary you had, the one you said Slade did?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you remember the items you said were missing. One of them was a gold Lord Elgin calendar watch, right? With a broken wrist band, right? Well, guess what they found in one of Slade’s pockets. Just guess.”

  He was smiling at Baird now, or at least twisting his mouth into a tortured approximation of a smile. When Baird did not respond, the sergeant laughed.

  “Don’t want to guess, huh? Well, I can understand that. I guess if I was in your shoes, I wouldn’t want to say anything more than I had to either.”

  Baird dropped his cigarette onto the grass and stepped on it. “So the creep had my watch,” he said. “So what? That just proves he was the one who burglarized my house.”

  “The watch wasn’t waterproof. It stopped on Tuesday, August twenty-five, at one-fifty-four in the morning.”

  “So?”

  “So where were you at that hour, Mister Baird?”

  Baird tried hard to look both incredulous and amused. “Where was I? What the devil are you saying? I’m a suspect?”

  “You can hardly believe it, right?”

  “Yes—right.” Baird shook his head in disgust. “Jesus, this is too much, just too fucking much. But all right—you want to know where I was? I was home in bed. With my wife.”

  “And she’ll verify that?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course.” Lucca leaned forward on the bench and dropped his cigarette between his knees, onto the grass. He puckered his mouth, gathering spit, then dropped a gob of it onto the still-lit stub. It was as if he wanted to be as obnoxious as possible in front of Baird, making it abundantly clear that their relationship was not an equal one, that he could do almost anything he pleased and Baird would do well to just sit and take it.

  “I’ll tell you why I’m here,” he said now. “The case is already starting to break for us—some new developments I can’t tell you about yet. But they got me pretty well convinced that it was you who wasted that piece of shit. And I’m also convinced that the longer the investigation goes on, the tighter the noose is gonna get for you. So I wanted to give you some advice.” He looked at Baird, his expression almost kindly now. “You listening to me?”

  “How could I help it?”

  “Good. This is my advice. Don’t hang tough on this. Don’t play it out. You come forward now—that is, you come to me, voluntarily—and I can virtually guarantee you won’t be charged with first-degree murder. The threat Slade posed to your daughter, the things he probably said to you about what he was gonna do and all, you probably got a good case for temporary insanity. Hell, you might even walk. It could be. But that’s only if you turn yourself in.”

  Baird said nothing for a time. About a hundred feet ahead of them, near the point where the hill fell away and the brush thickened, a young man stood holding a frisbee while the dog he had been throwing it to, a Labrador, sat at his feet, quivering with anticipation. Closer, on another bench, an elderly couple sat in silence, looking down at the lake, where a large construction barge had forced the bridge to raise, stopping traffic in both directions. Even in daylight the brake lights of the cars sparkled like a string of rubies.

  Baird stood up. “Well, I’ve got a football game to watch.”

  “What’s your answer?” Lucca asked, getting up from the bench too.

  “Answer to what?”

  “Don’t play games, Mister Baird.”

  Baird started for home, not bothering to wait for the sergeant to catch up. “My answer,” he said, “is that I think you better stop working Saturdays. In fact, maybe you ought to think about taking a few weeks off and rest up. Do you a world of good.”

  “That’s not the answer I was looking for,” Lucca said.

  Baird shook his head in mock sympathy. “Jesus, I’m really sorry about that.”

  When he came in the front door, Ellen was waiting for him, looking every inch a cleaning woman, from the bandana tied over her hair to the jeans she wore, so threadbare they looked almost fashionable.

  “What did he want?” she asked.

  “Nothing important. A few questions about Slade, that’s all.”

  “Like what?”

  They were in the foyer, and he had no intention of standing there and being grilled as if he were a child.

  “The Huskies are on,” he said. “I’ve already missed a quarter.”

  She followed him through the museum to the family room, where he picked up the remote and turned the game on. Before he could slip into his recliner, she took the remote from him and pressed the mute button.

  “I asked you a question,” she said.

  He looked forlornly at the silent screen. The purple-and-gold had just scored a touchdown. “Sergeant Lucca seems to be suffering a nervous breakdown,” he said. “He’s got it in his head that because I saw Slade a couple of times—had a few drinks with him—I must be the one who killed him.”

  Ellen looked at him in disbelief. “You what?”

  “On two occasions I tracked Slade down and had a few drinks with him, tried to feel him out, see if he’d back off. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d worry about it.”

  “You were actually with him? You drank with him?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Did you threaten him?”

  “Of course. That was the whole idea.”

  “And when did all this take place?”

  Baird got out a cigarette and lit it.

  “Please don’t do that. Not in the house.”

  He ignored her. “When? The first time, oh, over a month ago. The second time, right after the break-in.”

  “And when does Lucca think you did the deed?”

  “You remember my calendar watch was one of the items missing after the burglary? Well, it turned up on Slade’s body, stopped at one-fifty-four A.M., Tuesday, the twenty-fifth.”

  “How does that tie you in?”

  “It doesn’t. As far as I can see, it just proves he stole it.”

  “And Lucca’s serious about this? He actually thinks you could have done it?”

  “I don’t know—maybe he’s just playing games. Who knows?”

  “Did you set him straight?”

  Baird looked at the TV again. A beer commercial was playing, showing the usual beautiful young people cavorting at a beach. “Well, I reminded him that I was a paper salesman, not a hit man.”

  Ellen took her bandana off and her hair spilled out, Titian red, newly colored. “He can’t be serious, can he?” she asked.

  “As I said—I don’t know.”

  It was then that Baird began to see something in her eyes, a kind of light way back, perhaps the first glimmering of doubt. “Jack, I know you didn’t do it. I know you couldn’t have done it,” she said.

  “That makes two of us.”

  “But why would Sergeant Lucca even think you could have done it? I mean, it’s preposterous.”

  “That it is.”

  “And even if it was in you, you wouldn’t have had any reason. The man never even touched Kathy.”


  Baird said nothing and Ellen kept looking at him, just as Lee Jeffers had done, only with the weird unblinking intensity that was hers alone.

  “I know you didn’t do it,” she repeated.

  “Of course I didn’t do it,” he said.

  But she kept staring at him, and Baird knew that if he looked away, he would look guilty. So he played her goddamn child’s game and stared right back, coldly. And that new thing in her eyes, the small dim light, seemed to brighten. Finally she put her hand over her mouth and stepped back, as if she’d been struck.

  “You didn’t do it!” she whispered.

  He made a face, weariness and disgust. “Ellen, don’t be an ass.”

  “Of course,” she gasped. “For her. You would do anything for her.”

  Baird took the remote from her and turned the sound up high. He dropped into his recliner and put his feet up. Then he looked up at her, with contempt and disbelief.

  “Get real, will you?” he said. “For Jesus Christ sake, you’re as bad as Lucca. You think I could actually kill someone?”

  Without answering, she turned and left the room. He heard her tennis shoes on the museum floor, practically running.

  Fuck her, he thought. Fuck them all.

  He doubted that Ellen would tell Kathy what she had just learned, or at least thought she had learned. Still, he knew it was considerably beyond him at the moment to see the look on his daughter’s face if Ellen did tell her and she came running to him for denial. He could more easily have shot Slade all over again. So he turned off the television and got out of the house before Kathy returned. Normally he would have put on a shirt and sportcoat, even to go to Leo’s, but on this day he made do with the sweatshirt and jeans. Also, he hadn’t shaved yet, which was a habit of his on Saturdays.

  So he fully expected Sally to comment on his shabby appearance. But it turned out that she was so angry at Leo about something that she had nothing left over for her patrons. She did not serve Baird’s vodka so much as plunk it down in front of him, letting the liquor run over, unmopped. He made no complaint, however, happy to put up with the poor service so long as its corollary was silence. He wanted just to sit there at the bar and watch the ballgame and drink enough to keep from screaming.