The Vig

by John Lescroart

  He touched the corner of her mouth with a finger, lifting it as he would do to a baby. “A little smile,” he repeated.

  She tried, and he pushed again at her lip, playfully. The smile, when it came, nearly broke his heart.

  He would have to deal with Johnny LaGuardia.

  Flo Glitsky and Frannie Cochran were doing dishes together. They watched Dismas and Abe walking in the small playground that bordered the backyard the Glitskys shared with their neighbors downstairs. They had moved into the duplex when O.J. was born, unable then, as they still were, to afford their own house on Abe’s salary in San Francisco.

  Now, of course, there was no chance at all, but the duplex was rent-controlled and they paid less than most everybody else they knew. Her own house was one of the dreams Flo wasn’t going to get, but she had her three healthy boys and her man who loved her, and if that was the trade, she’d take it any day.

  “Are you really leaving?” Frannie asked her.

  It was all that had been on Flo’s mind for the last two days. She had never seen Abe this down. He had actually applied to the Los Angeles Police Department and was talking about moving there as if it were settled. All Flo knew about L.A. was that if Abe thought housing was high here, they wouldn’t stand a chance there. And she’d heard the public schools there were in bad shape—the teachers mere truant officers whose jobs were to keep kids off drugs and off the street until three o’clock. And not only didn’t Flo believe in private schools, she knew they wouldn’t be able to afford one anyway. And her boys were all smart.

  Flo shook her head. “I’ll let Abe work out what he has to, and then I guess we’ll make some decision.”

  “That’s how you do it, isn’t it?” Frannie said. “That was always it with me and Eddie. What he wanted and what I wanted, back and forth, until we got somewhere together.” She wiped at a soapy plate. “I’ve gotten out of that habit. I miss it, I think.”

  Flo took the plate from her, starting to dry it. “How long has it been now?”

  “Four and a half months.”

  Flo, like the other cops’ wives Frannie knew, didn’t let herself think too often about losing her husband. It was a possibility that came with the territory, and you accepted it and went on if you wanted to stay together. “You’re holding up better than I would,” Flo said.

  Abe kicked at the tanbark under the swing he and Hardy were on. His arms were looped around the chains and as he kicked he rotated from side to side, facing Hardy then turning away.

  “How are you gonna be a good cop anywhere if you don’t care?”

  “How many guys care?”

  Hardy waited on the rotation, until Abe was faced back toward him. “I think about four, but you were always one of them.”

  Glitsky, spinning now on the swing, shook his head. “Now I’m a professional policeperson. I go where they pay me to. Enforce the law.”

  “And the brass decide?”

  “Correcto.”

  Hardy did a pull-up on the A-frame of the swing. He did another one, the two big guys playing on the monkey bars.

  “Besides,” Abe said, “Lanier is handling it. They’ll pass off my cases to McFadden ‘cause he’s the other solo, and Baker will go down like he should. Order will be restored to the cosmos.”

  Hardy was hanging full-length from the frame. “You reading Shakespeare again?”

  Glitsky stood out of the swing. “Criticism. The Tragic Fallacy by Krutch. You ought to check it out. Says there can’t be any tragedy unless there’s a Zeitgeist of ultimate order that can be destroyed and then restored.”

  “Zeitgeist,” Hardy said.

  “Kraut word. Means the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era, such as our very own, for example.”

  “I know what it means, Abe. I’m a college graduate.”

  “So that’s why we don’t have any modern tragedy. We don’t believe in the importance of any one individual anymore. Since nobody screwing up can destroy the order of the cosmos, then nobody getting enlightened can restore it, see?”

  “I was just thinking about this yesterday.”

  Glitsky cast a sideways glance at his friend. “So how’d we get on this anyway?”

  “You said Louis Baker going down will restore order to the cosmos.”

  Glitsky nodded. “Yeah, right. Let’s go get another couple of beers.”

  They headed back to the house, but Hardy still couldn’t let it go. “But my problem is the blindside thing—it was like ‘what girl?’”

  “Maybe he was concentrating on Rusty so hard he didn’t even notice Maxine.”

  “You don’t notice a naked woman you have to shoot three times?”

  Glitsky stopped again by the back door. They stood on a square of porch, hands in their pockets. The boys were playing somewhere within earshot, maybe around the front of the house. Hardy blew out, surprised to see a vapor trail. The chill had come in fast—a high-pressure cold that had wiped the sky almost purple.

  “Okay, so he noticed her.”

  “But, Abe, that’s my point. Baker said he had no idea what I was talking about when I said a woman had been killed at Rusty’s. And he sounded convincing, even to these ears.”

  Glitsky shrugged. “He was lying.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, that’s your problem.”

  “And if he wasn’t, it means he wasn’t there when Rusty got shot.”

  “Diz. Listen up now. His prints were there.”

  “Jesus, Abe, my prints were there, too.”

  “A-ha!” Abe raised a forefinger. “Another hot lead in the case.”

  “You can laugh.”

  “I do laugh, Diz. Dig it. Yesterday you were the personification of outraged public crying for the head of Louis Baker. I, modestly, represented the restraining force of law in our society—”

  “You got a pair of boots?”

  “What?”

  “It gets any deeper, I’m gonna need boots.”

  Glitsky put an arm around his friend’s shoulder. “I am making a point. And the point is that we, the police, aren’t supposed to go flip-flopping according to the whims of the public we’re supposed to protect. That, old buddy, includes you. Yesterday you thought Louis Baker was guilty of everything you could think of. Today, what? You’re trying to have me check out other suspects just after I find out—and for the first time—that Louis is finally in fact a righteous suspect? Prints at Rusty’s. Puts him there. Now he’s got a motive. He’s got opportunity. Now he’s a suspect, and now you want me to drop him? There is some irony here.”

  “I don’t want you to drop him. I just thought in your thirst for justice you might want to be completely thorough—”

  Glitsky blew out through tight lips. “I’m the one who has been thorough here all along. I continue to be. But several things have changed since just yesterday. One, Louis got himself a gun and did some B and E. This makes his rehabilitation in prison somewhat suspect—at least to me. Second, he was in fact at Rusty’s. We knew neither of these things yesterday, and knowing them now moves old Louis up several rungs on the maybe-he’s-guilty ladder. I really would like a beer.”

  But Hardy didn’t move when Abe pushed at the door. Glitsky sighed. “Okay, what?”

  “You’ve looked at Medina already. Who is Johnny LaGuardia? Where does Ray Weir fit into all this? There’s just things you as a cop can do that I can’t.”

  “Thousands.”

  “Well, shit, Abe. Do a few of them.”

  Abe shook his head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I am out of here, Diz. Gone. Los Angeles may need me and that is another jurisdiction. These aren’t going to be my cases and I don’t need the aggravation. Plus, I think there’s a good chance that our Louis Baker in fact did all this, and there’s enough to bring him in on it, and after that it’s up to the D.A. and twelve of Louis’s peers, if they can find them.” He pushed at the door again. “It’s
no longer police business and certainly not mine. Now, you want a beer or what?” But he stopped again. “Besides, why do you care? Baker is off the street. Go back to work. Let the wheels of justice grind fine, why the hell don’t you?”

  Hardy looked at the sky, stuffing his hands further into his pockets. “ ‘Cause if he didn’t do it—I’m not saying he didn’t, but if … He doesn’t deserve to die for it and I’d be killing him if I let it go—”

  “You bleeding your heart for Louis Baker?”

  “I’d love to ace him in a fair fight and that’s a fact.”

  “You know your odds of getting a fair fight out of him?”

  “Slim, I would guess.”

  “And none.”

  “Well, at least it would be just me and him.”

  ‘Mano a mano?”

  Hardy shrugged. “I can’t back into what would amount to me killing him. I’ve just developed a case of seasonable doubt, is all.”

  “You don’t think he was coming after you?”

  Hardy nodded. “Yeah, I guess I do think that.”

  “Well?”

  “We’re gonna hang the bastard because he’s mad at me?”

  Glitsky shook his head, pushed again at the door.

  Hardy followed him up the stairs. At the top of the steps they stopped one last time. “I’ve got no great hots to save Baker, you know,” Hardy said. “But something else has got to be going on here. It’s just too convenient.”

  “You think somebody paid him to bust into Jane’s house?”

  “No. I think he did that on his own.”

  “So what else?”

  “So me is what else. I’ve been part of this since the beginning, and now suddenly Baker’s on ice and somehow it’s over. But I’m still involved. Especially if I’m being used to patsy up Baker when maybe he didn’t do it. Anything capital, anyway.”

  Glitsky, his hand on the kitchen door, ran a finger across the scar that went through his lips. “So you want me to help?”

  “A little look around is all.”

  “Let me think about it,” Abe said. He turned the knob. “Okay, I’ve thought about it. No.”

  He opened the door and said hi to Flo and Frannie.

  15

  It didn’t feel like he’d thought it would—seeing your own images up there on the screen, your words being spoken by people who pretended to care about them. In his imaginings, the scene always had him sitting next to Maxine, both of them puffed with accomplishment, she up there filling the screen with her beauty and talent, he for the idea, the words, the artistic vision behind it all.

  But now the reality was so different. As it always seemed to be lately. He was slumped in his easy chair, smoke curling from a cigarette in his left hand. Courtenay and Warren sat on the couch, the room rearranged for the screening. And Maxine? The only place Maxine lived—on the screen—didn’t seem real anymore. And yet that was all that was real.

  It was his first movie. This was the final cut with sound before the music was added. There was beer and champagne in the kitchen sink for afterward. Other acquaintances, friends, reclined or sat Indian-style on the floor, watching Maxine say his words, do his bidding, live the part he’d created for her.

  The doorbell sounded and he half turned to see someone he didn’t recognize, a man, enter and sit on the floor. Ray Weir put him out of his mind. This film, unreal though it might be, was all that was now left of Maxine. He should pay attention.

  He wanted to stop the reel and just look at her. God, she was … had been … beautiful. He supposed he still loved her. No. He knew he still loved her, always would. She had been his friend and his muse. She had been what had separated him from the other drones cranking out words and scenes and treatments.

  Okay, so the movie wasn’t exactly an “A” feature. You made compromises when you started out, when you needed a credit or two for credibility. Everybody in the business understood that.

  Those earlier scenes, nearly doing it with Bryan—their friend who played the stepfather—they were pretty tasteful, Ray thought, although Warren had done a good job of making it seem they were really screwing. But Maxine had told him about it after they’d shot that day, about the angles they’d had to use to look real and still avoid—she’d said, “You know, penetration.”

  But this was to be only the first step in a long career. They were going to do it again—an entire work, an oeuvre of films by Ray Weir, starring Maxine …

  They weren’t too old, in spite of Maxine’s giving up on it. That was all Rusty Ingraham’s doing, that negative stuff, the change in her.

  He squirmed in his chair. In the room’s flickering light, he saw the film still had everyone’s attention. Bryan was there. No girlfriend with him of course. Warren had his arm around Gourtenay, who had done a fine editing job. The print was good and clean. This was a professional effort—screenplay by Ray Weir.

  They couldn’t take their eyes off Maxine. But it was his story that was holding them. Don’t forget that.

  He turned a little more. The guy who’d come in halfway through was walking along the back wall, hands in pockets, checking out the glossies of Maxine on the back wall. Maybe he was another cop come back to talk to him.

  Man, Ray, he thought, what are you going to do about Wednesday night?

  He glanced across at Courtenay again, saw she was leaning into Warren, whispering something. The frame on the wall froze on Maxine’s perfect body midair in a dive into the water. Without any music it was eerie. Gradually, he became aware of the sound of the projector.

  Then someone flicked the room lights on and suddenly there was applause. Courtenay was next to him, hugging him, pulling him over next to Warren. Bryan took a bow. Ray found himself applauding.

  Courtenay Moran was nearly six feet tall. She wore her blond hair cropped to within an inch of her scalp all over except at the nape of her neck, where a longer strand was held in a ponytail by a hot pink ribbon.

  “It just seems pretty soon to be partying after his wife’s death, is what I mean,” Hardy was saying.

  He watched her blow some smoke toward the ceiling. They stood on the landing at the top of the stairway outside the open front door to Ray’s duplex. Hardy held a can of beer and leaned against the doorpost. In the living room, where they’d watched the movie, people were still mingling, binding into little groups, then quickly splitting off. He didn’t know what this kind of schmoozing was called, or what its purpose was, where the longest you talked to anybody was forty seconds, but it wasn’t getting him anywhere, so he’d walked up to Courtenay in the kitchen because she was beautiful and because he’d seen her talking to Ray.

  She wore a leather flight jacket that made her broad shoulders seem broader. Her eyes were surrounded with a very dark blue-black makeup that seemed to set them more deeply into her milk-white face. Hardy thought that in a photograph, Courtenay’s face might appear jutting, bony. But here now, the bones were in the right places.

  “Who’s partying?” she asked. “You call this partying?”

  Hardy looked back into the living room. A record was playing a heavy Latin beat and some dancing had started. “It’s not exactly a wake,” he said. Several of the dancers appeared to him to be trying to copulate with their clothes on.

  “That’s just the Lambada,” Courtenay said. “It’s harmless.”

  Hardy tipped up his beer. Sometimes hunches could be a waste of time, and it was beginning to look as though this whole trip to Ray Weir’s would turn out to be one of them.

  He stared at the dancers another minute. “Looks like foreplay,” he said.

  “Depends on how good you are.” She smiled, looking right in his eyes.

  He pulled the door closed, leaving them alone on the landing, the music thumping low and insistent. Courtenay stepped up to Hardy and kissed him, her hand behind his neck. She was just his height, and the angle felt strange, but it was a good kiss that he didn’t fight as much as he might have thought he should if h
e’d thought about it. She stepped back.

  “I just wanted to do that,” she said.

  “Okay. Worse things have happened to me.”

  “Want to try it again?”

  She wasn’t really coming on to him. Well, maybe a little. But he flashed on Frannie, from there to Jane, and then to the Lambada going on through the door, and he realized that it simply wasn’t him. “I think it would be better if we didn’t,” he said.

  “All right,” she said. She took a final drag on her cigarette, dropped and stepped on it. “I always guess wrong,” she said.

  It was the pro forma San Francisco woman’s first reaction to rejection, Hardy knew—the assumption that the man was gay.

  “For the record,” he said, “my sexual preference is more or less as it appears.”

  She looked straight across at him, her height still a little disconcerting. Her face softened. “You’re married.”

  “Involved.”

  “And you’re faithful?”

  That stung a little, but Hardy let it go.

  “As long as they don’t find out,” she said, “what’s the problem? I don’t tell Warren. He’d leave me and there goes not only him but my career, and I do love him. But love and sex—don’t confuse ‘em or you’ll screw them both up.”

  A few days before, Hardy could have said he didn’t confuse them, they went together. Maybe they still did with him, but he had some figuring out to do. “I’m here about Maxine and Ray.”

  “Are you with the police?”

  “No.”

  “Were you involved with Maxine?”

  This time Hardy laughed. “Not how you might interpret it, but it was with Rusty Ingraham.”

  “Was he a friend of yours?”

  “Why do you ask it like that? Is it so unlikely?”