The Vig

by John Lescroart

  Lace or Jumpup would be there when the cars stopped, asking if there was any stuff. They were both good at sniffing the heat, but even so, you didn’t let them hold any product. You never knew, some plain-clothes might get clever and not drive a city-issued Pontiac.

  No. How you keep control was, you held the product yourself, and the money, walking one end of the cut to the other. It wasn’t smart to let a line form. Dido smiled at the image, maybe he’d open a drive-away stand.

  It was late now, the night pretty much over. He stood in the shadow by Louis Baker’s place and watched as the college-boy customer walked back and got into his car. He heard the girls giggling in the backseat. The car took off, spitting out tiny rocks and asphalt behind it. Lace came up beside him.

  “Maybe we call it tonight,” Dido said, his voice still sounding odd, croaking. He looked at Baker’s wall, painted over white again. That man would have to be dealt with. It had been a good night, and would have been perfect but for the fight.

  He took the roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off two for Lace, nodding in the direction of Baker’s wall. “Man thinks he beat me, but who’s working the cut?” he said.

  Lace wasn’t saying anything.

  “What?” Dido asked. “I don’t hear you.”

  “What you want me to say?”

  “I asked who’s working the cut.” He didn’t wait for Lace to respond. “You don’t think I got it, you let me know.”

  “You got it,” Lace said.

  “You think that homeboy got me worried?”

  Dido picked up a stray length of two-by-four and walked over to Baker’s new side window, a black shining rectangle in the white wall. “Here’s how much he scares me.” He swung the board. The sound of the breaking window echoed down the cut and before the echo had died down, Dido was walking back to the other end to meet Jumpup.

  Lace walked alongside, looking back over his shoulder toward Louis Baker’s place. Waiting for the door to open and Louis Baker to come charging out.

  A few cars passed on the street, but they didn’t look to be more customers. None had stopped by the time they got to Jumpup, who was sitting on the curb, waiting.

  “Let’s take it in,” Dido said, and handed Jumpup his couple of bills. The three of them started walking back where they had been, making one more pass at the cut, seeing it was secure.

  As they passed the first building someone called out Dido’s name. They all stopped, staring into the blackness. “You keep walking,” Dido said to the two boys. He took a step or two toward the shadows, figuring it might be someone from another cut seeing them going in, wanting to buy the last of his stash.

  The first booming shot took Dido in the stomach and Lace saw him back up a step. He grunted and said, “Hey!” The second shot knocked him over onto his back on the ground. He didn’t say anything after that.

  “Mama. Mama, get up.”

  There was one light on in the front room, maybe sixty watts under a yellow shade on a pitted end table next to the couch. But with the blinds pulled it shouldn’t draw any attention outside. Mama was dressed but she wasn’t moving. A bottle of sherry lay on its side on the floor beside the couch.

  Something hurt on Louis Baker’s hand and he realized that in shaking her he had picked up a piece of glass from the shards that had rained down on her. And if she hadn’t even stirred when the window broke right over where she was passed out, it wasn’t likely he was going to have much luck getting her up now.

  But he had to get out of here, and she had a car with keys. First the breaking window, then the shots, had awakened the whole project. Now, Baker could hear people gathering outside, a few calling out, trying to do something about Dido. Nothing anybody was going to be able to do for Dido ever again.

  Mama groaned and shifted on the couch. He tried shaking her, hard, one more time, but she was out. “Mama!” Pieces of glass fell from the back of the couch onto her. Louis Baker sat back on his heels and his face relaxed. He had not even glanced at the end table, and there the keys were, where they had been dropped.

  Outside, he took a last look at the crowd that had now formed around where Dido lay. In the distance he heard a siren. He walked up the street, looking straight ahead. He found Mama’s tiny old Dodge Colt and squeezed himself into the seat behind the wheel.

  The radio came on with the motor and he heard James Brown singing “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” He left it playing, turning up past the park where he’d been working out, leaving all of this behind for good.

  10

  “Okay, you’ve given me your phone number, now how about your address?”

  “What time is it?” Hardy asked into the phone.

  “Must be the crack of six-thirty, thereabouts.”

  Frannie came and stood, rubbing her eyes like a little kid, in the kitchen doorway. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “It’s Glitsky.” Then into the phone, “No, I know it’s you. What?”

  “I need your address,” Glitsky said. “I thought I’d stop by, pick you up, we go for a drive over to Holly Park where somebody who had a fight last night with Louis Baker got himself shot a little later. You interested?”

  Hardy gave him the address.

  Glitsky had shamed Hardy into leaving his gun back at Frannie’s, saying that between him and Marcel Lanier and whatever other police personnel were on the scene they would probably have enough firepower to stop Louis Baker if he jumped out from behind some tree or crawled from under some rock and tried to blow Hardy away.

  They pulled in and parked behind an ambulance. The cut was populated by a few men in uniform and a small knot of official-looking people who seemed to be just getting around to moving the body. Glitsky and Hardy walked up, and Glitsky nodded to the men pushing the gurney and lifted the covering.

  A man in jeans and a Giants jacket appeared beside them.

  “Hey, Abe.”

  Glitsky nodded, introducing Hardy to Marcel Lanier. “Something hang up the techs?” He looked at his watch. “Six hours and the body’s still here?”

  Lanier shrugged. “Lightning response this part of town.”

  “How’d you get the call? You’re days.”

  Lanier hunched his shoulders. “Guilt got to me. All that golf last week. I just got so far behind on stuff I thought I’d hang in and pull some paper. This came in, and I remembered you’d been coming out here yesterday. Hey, did you hear about this rooster, huge fucking rooster with—”

  “Not now, Marcel. What went down here?”

  “Bad long night,” Lanier said. “Talking to these people is like pulling teeth.”

  Glitsky nodded at the gurney. “Looks like this guy’s night was worse.”

  Marcel took in Hardy. “So why are we having visiting day?”

  Glitsky explained the connection.

  “See, that’s why I called him,” Lanier said to Hardy. “I knew he’d been out here, figured it might be connected.”

  “I didn’t think you’d talked to Baker,” Hardy said to Glitsky.

  “I can be a surprising guy. Following up, that’s all.”

  “You should have brought him in, Baker I mean,” Lanier said.

  Glitsky pulled at where the scar ran through his bottom lip. “I would have, except there was the technicality of charging him with something.”

  “The word ‘murder’ comes to mind,” Hardy said.

  Glitsky just looked at Hardy, then spoke to Lanier.

  “How do you know Baker killed this guy? What’s his name, anyway?”

  Lanier consulted a little white pad with a spiral on the top. “Jackson Jefferson Grant, street name of Dido. Wonder why his mother left out Lincoln?” He furrowed his brow. “Probably his brother,” he said. “Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt Grant.”

  Glitsky sighed with feeling. “Can we get back to why you think Baker did Grant?”

  Lanier put his hands in his pockets and said to Hardy that Glitsky wasn’t much fun lately. Then he went into
it. “Baker comes back to the Project two days ago, right away gets in a beef over painting his place”—he pointed—“over there. The beef continues over the next day, and last night Baker and Dido duke it out right here in the cut, witnessed by about fifty citizens, three of whom volunteered the information. Then last night, maybe five minutes before he gets it, Dido breaks Baker’s side window. I figure what happened is it woke up Baker, he said that’s enough, came out, blew him away, then ran for it.”

  “Did anybody see him?”

  “When?”

  “During the shooting. Did anybody see Baker shoot this guy?”

  Lanier looked at the sky. “The shots came from off the cut in the dark. People saw him a minute or two later. That’s close enough for me.”

  “I guess that is close enough,” Glitsky said. Sarcastic.

  “This is one bad dude, Abe. He’s out of prison three days and he’s already killed two folks.”

  “Three,” Hardy said. “This guy, Maxine, and Rusty.”

  Glitsky felt his patience going again. “We don’t know about Rusty. We don’t even know if Rusty’s dead or not. And we don’t know he killed Maxine either. And we don’t know for sure whether he killed Grant here, and we still don’t know he’s trying to kill you, Diz—”

  “He killed Dido,” Lanier said. “You can take that to the bank.”

  Hardy shook his head. “It’s funny, Abe, how I know all that stuff and you don’t.”

  “Abe’s in a bad mood lately,” Lanier said. “It colors his judgment.”

  They were walking down the cut toward Baker’s place. “You find the gun?” Glitsky asked.

  “Nope. What’s the problem there?”

  “Just that it’s traditional to try and find something tying a murderer to the crime.”

  Lanier and Hardy exchanged glances. “Look, Abe, if you want to take this thing in another direction, I’ll, give you the case. But for no overtime and no support, they get what they pay for. This guy Baker is a righteous badass. He stole his own Mama’s car after killing Dido and I’ve got plenty to bring him in on. Am I right or not?”

  Glitsky stopped walking and stared around at the scarred buildings, the boarded windows, the grassless, bottle-strewn cut. He shouldn’t confuse what might have happened on Rusty Ingraham’s barge with the shit that had obviously gone down here between Louis Baker and the late Dido Grant. “You’re right,” he said.

  “Fuckin’-A I am,” Lanier said.

  Since they were here, Glitsky thought he might as well try and find out what time Louis Baker had gotten in on Wednesday night. Cover all the bases. Maybe they were right. Maybe he was forgetting to think like a cop.

  Foreign turf. It made Louis Baker nervous.

  There hadn’t been much sleeping. He had known where he was going when he got into the car. Up to the Fillmore. Ain’t nobody going to notice a black man in the ‘Mo. Least any particular one, one you’d attach a name to.

  He’d pulled up behind the Baptist Tabernacle Church and let the car keep running for the heat until the sun started to come up. It wouldn’t do to leave the car out on the street. The Man didn’t really check plates as a matter of course, but the way his luck had been running, he didn’t want to put out any invitations. Just sitting in the car in the big lot was enough, so as soon as it was light he had to leave it.

  He’d been hungry, but the first thing was to get some protection—a knife, a gun, something. A gun would be best. He wasn’t going to have the Man after him again, taking him down without some kind of fight. He’d waited too long to get out and he wasn’t going back. He’d take somebody with him or do himself first. ‘Cause back in the House wasn’t living. It wasn’t even surviving. It was just time.

  There was something clean about knowing now for sure that the Man was on his ass again. It restored things to how they’d always been. When that one yesterday—the colored man—had come out to the Project, to his place, and talked to him, it was just warming up.

  He’d heard about that in the House, how they would do that. Come at you the first day or so, keep you off balance. Get you back in for something as soon as they could think of it.

  Well, there wasn’t any doubt now with Dido dead. They got everything they wanted handed to them on a platter. It was just as well. What he and the warden had talked about, maybe going straight, had gone bad right at the bus station. Ingraham …

  The sun was up enough now. Better get out and moving.

  Ingraham’s image up in his mind before him, that honky I-got-it-you-never-will smile. He closed the car door quietly and made his way along the Cyclone fence up toward the brick church, allowing himself a smile now. Who was dead? Not him. Laugh that one away, counselor.

  But then Hardy wasn’t dead, was he? And he, Louis Baker, was on the run again, this time for killing Dido, Ingraham, whoever else they wanted to think of. No doubt about that. He was set up real good.

  And Hardy’s face came up and pushed Ingraham’s aside. Hardy, still alive, walking around enjoying his freedom. Was that right? Was that justice?

  He knew it was all the justice he was ever going to see. He turned out of the lot onto Fillmore Street, hands in his pockets.

  He knew a store here, around the corner, sold guns. A gun would be the thing. He couldn’t buy it, of course, but getting into places had never been a problem for Louis Baker.

  They were in the car driving back to Frannie’s. Glitsky had asked Hardy over to his house for a barbecue the next afternoon, their first social engagement since the old days.

  At Holly Park, Glitsky had said, a badly hungover Mama hadn’t seemed to understand a great deal of what Glitsky had asked her about Louis Baker, but she did say enough to leave him wide open as a suspect on Wednesday night. He had arrived at the Project sometime after dark, she couldn’t be sure of the time. But after dark meant at least eight. He’d been released from San Quentin at two P.M., and it was less than an hour’s bus ride from there to San Francisco. He’d told her he had stayed downtown to “take care of some business.”

  “What business could he have had downtown, ma’am,” Abe had asked, “if he’d been locked up for about nine years?”

  She hadn’t known the answer to that.

  Hardy, sitting in the room listening while Lanier and Glitsky talked, believed she damn well knew the answer and said so to Abe as they were driving to Frannie’s.

  “Yeah, well, you know,” Glitsky said, squinting against the morning sun as he swung east on 280 up toward 101. “It’s not as if I can’t believe Baker killed these people, but it’s my job to get the evidence to prove he did. There’s a difference.”

  “Well, it’s my job to stay alive, and we both know the guy’s a killer. You can agree he killed at least one of these people.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Come on, Abe. You don’t see that?”

  Glitsky tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “Diz, what I see is the famous ‘usual suspect.’ Face it, the guy’s a black ex-con and we all know the recidivism rate is like a hundred and two percent, he’s got no family and no—”

  “Oh, spare me.”

  Glitsky held up a hand. “I’m not saying I feel sorry for him. I’m looking at facts. He’s a shithook, okay. No job. No chance of getting one. So he’s going to go wrong again if only because that’s what he does, it’s how he knows to get by. If anything, if he gets accused of any other murders where he happens to be in the neighborhood, I’ll be tempted to think he’s less likely, just hard-core unlucky—”

  “Yeah, well, if the murder happens to be me, do me a favor, check him out.”

  The car swung west again and they exited the freeway at Fell/Laguna. “You know, Diz, if I didn’t have such a good suspect in Maxine’s husband, I’d think about Baker more. I don’t even have Baker at the barge.”

  “Was her husband there? Weir?”

  “No … not yet.”

  “Pretty compelling. Next thing you’ll be questioning Hector Medina.”
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  “Who’s Hector Medina?”

  Hardy ran down Medina’s connection to Ingraham, the recent contact. Glitsky thought about it. Turning down Divisadero, heading over to Frannie’s, he shook his head. “You want to get back to basics, I got the same problem with him that I have with Baker.”

  Hardy knew what was coming.

  “Rusty Ingraham’s body. Where is it? It’s only been two days, three. He might have just run away. He’s not even a missing person yet.

  “I think Weir may have killed her and shot Ingraham, maybe left him for dead, and now lying low—”

  “So why hasn’t he called me? We had this deal, remember. It’s what started this whole thing.”

  “Have you checked your messages?”

  “I’ve called in five or six times, most recently after you got me up this morning.”

  “Well, I’ll give you that—I think he would have called you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But then why don’t we have a body? We dragged the canal.”

  “It must have floated out. Did you check for that?”

  “I wouldn’t even know how to. Our resources, especially lately, are a little limited. You saw how quick they got Dido off to the morgue. Anyway, the tide at China Basin doesn’t seem strong enough, and I was there last night, paying attention.”

  “What if I show you it is strong enough?”

  “Then your case for Rusty being dead gets better. It gets closer to something I can look into more officially. Anyway, Lanier’s got an all-points out for Baker.”

  They pulled up in front of Frannie’s. “I still worry about one thing, though,” Hardy said.