The Vig

by John Lescroart

  So he sat enjoying the hum of men working—day guys in at night, bullshitting, getting coffee, picking up mail and paperwork. He was soaring on adrenaline—getting the warrant and arresting Treadwell, making some real management decisions—and was taking the opportunity to write it up for Chief Rigby. Sometime in the next week, he was confident the City and County would find some way to clear the money for the overtime. Or they wouldn’t find it in the budget and they’d have to borrow from another pot. Batiste thought even the most fuzzy-headed bleeding hearts among the supervisors might realize that taking killers off the street should be a priority item for a police department.

  Still, homicide inspector wasn’t a punch-in job and it was plain stupid to act like it could be. Of course, the powers that be in this Looney Tune city might still kick his ass over it.

  “Fuck it,” he said.

  “Fuck what?”

  Abe Glitsky was back, standing in the doorway, not looking very sick. Batiste had no intention of mentioning it. “Oh, I don’t know, take your pick. The supervisors, Rigby and his chicken patrol.” He put the tip of his pen in his mouth. “Come to think of it, I ought to mention that. They got money for that, they can pay some overtime.”

  “Right on,” Abe said, pulling a chair out from the wall. “Listen, Frank, I want you to know, I’ve sent in that application to L.A.”

  The lieutenant put his pen down. “Don’t do that.”

  Glitsky shifted in the chair. “It’s already done.”

  “Well, I mean don’t go. What’re you gonna do there in L.A.?”

  “What am I doing here?”

  “You know what you’re doing here. We need you here.”

  Glitsky smiled, the scar a tight white line through his lips. Batiste held up a hand. “That’s not b.s., Abe. I don’t spout the line, you know that. And I need you here.”

  “Thanks, Frank, that’s nice to hear. But if you get a call for a reference, give them some kind words, would you?”

  He nodded. “Of course I’ll do that. But look, why don’t you take a few days off, think about it. Maybe you’re just having a little burnout. Take a vacation.”

  “I took today off and thought about it, Frank. I’m not burned out. I still want to be a cop. Worse, I suppose, I am a cop, like it or not. I just want to be able to do my job.”

  Batiste ran down the day’s improvements.

  “Yeah, I heard. That’s great, but it’s like a Band-Aid.”

  “Come on. It’s not all that bad here. It’s just bureaucracy, and that’s everywhere. You think L.A. will be better? It’s so much bigger, it’s got to be worse.”

  “I can’t see the chief in L.A. pulling lab time over homicides ‘cause some guys do a bullshit prank.”

  “Chicken shit,” Frank corrected him, and Abe had to smile. “There’s rot from the top, Frank, and I’m not sure it’s just bureaucracy.”

  “Whatever it is, is over.” Batiste got up from behind his desk, went and opened the door. “Forget the past week and look out there. Business as usual.”

  Abe half turned to look. “It’s like your wife has an affair that’s ended and you’re supposed to pretend it didn’t happen?”

  “Sometimes, maybe, yeah.” He closed the door all the way. “But you didn’t come in here to ask for a reference. I mean, you were already in on something else.”

  “You ought to be an investigator, Frank. Figuring out shit like that.”

  Batiste was back in his seat behind the desk. He unwrapped a hard candy from his top drawer and popped it into his mouth. “So you were working.” Said with satisfaction.

  “Rusty Ingraham.” Glitsky grimaced. “I’m sounding like Hardy, but Maxine Weir …”

  “Yeah? We got the perp on that, don’t we?”

  “An arrest has been made, right.”

  “But?”

  “Tying things up. Different angles keep popping out.”

  He told Batiste about his talk with Johnny LaGuardia, the fact that it looked like a professional had done the hit on Maxine, which could include Medina or LaGuardia himself, but seemed to rule out the husband.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Batiste raised a hand. “This is all very interesting, but what about the alleged perp, what’s his name?”

  “Baker.”

  “Baker. What about Baker? He’d pick up the Armor All trick in the joint, don’t you think?”

  Glitsky thought on it. “Maybe so. But the problem is also in my guts. The problem is Rusty Ingraham’s missing body, the husband’s lousy alibi, except why would he know about Armor All? And today—am I wrong—we find our own Hector Medina going proactive on another violent crime. What’s going on?”

  Batiste moved the candy around, making a sucking noise. “You want my take, it really sounds to me like you got the right guy. Shit, Abe, there’s always some loose ends.”

  “This is not just loose ends, Frank,” Abe said. “This is a hair ball.”

  Louis Baker wasn’t going back in.

  They had him now. He’d thought he could pull it off, but then with the shooting, there was no way. That alone, forget the other, the stuff Ingraham and Hardy were talking about, would put him back. He wasn’t going.

  He wasn’t putting up with the game of another trial. Everything stacked against him anyway from day one. And this time, what Hardy had said, going for the gas chamber.

  No way.

  The hospital room was dark. There was dim light out through the open door into the hallway, where he knew the guard sat.

  He was quietly working the sheet back and forth over a jutting bit of metal that protruded from the bars at the side of the bed. A nurse walked by, exchanged a few words with the guard. He saw her silhouette in the doorway and lay still.

  Then she was gone. He waited a minute, listening. The chair in the hall creaked, the guard probably settling back.

  He got a tear in the top of the sheet and, trying not to move anything but his hands, began ripping a strip down to the bottom.

  He only needed three strips. He wanted to get each one started at the top—that was the hardest part, the first tear—so he went back to the little bit of metal, working the old hospital sheet over it again and again, until, again, he got it to tear.

  He pulled the new strip down a ways, using only the strength of his hands, showing no movement outside the covers, got maybe ten inches, then started over again at the top.

  You only needed three strips to braid.

  You braided the three eight-foot strips of sheet into a rope maybe seven feet long. You made a noose in that rope and tied one end to the same metal bar you were using to make the tear. You put the noose around your neck and rolled off the other side of the bed.

  He wasn’t going back in.

  20

  Kevin Driscoll was forty-two years old. His marriage to May was going through the readjustment of having two children, ages one and two. He hadn’t been laid in three weeks, resented it strongly and this morning had been awakened at 4:45 by Jason’s apparently random screaming. Kevin Driscoll had a sore throat. Perpetually, but this morning particularly.

  As branch manager, he was out on the floor at Wells Fargo Bank and wondered, taking in the customers and tellers and various assistant vice-presidents (everybody above a teller was an a.v.p.), if the world had always been like this or whether he was only seeing it clearly for the first time. The conventional wisdom was that hardship showed you your true colors—maybe it was true of everything else. When you were having a hard time, you saw everything else in its true colors.

  And what he saw depressed him further.

  There were seven people waiting in the service line. He would never have thought of it before, but now he wondered how many of them were parents. At least three, maybe four. Had any of them slept in months? No wonder people were crabby at the windows all the time.

  And at the windows—only two open. Four more tellers congregated conspicuously at chief teller Marianne’s desk catching up on th
e gossip.

  Another man came in. Eight people in the service line now. Tuesday-morning rush and not one teller even considering heading to a window. Let ‘em wait, right. The teller mentality.

  Kevin coughed and cleared his throat, hoping Marianne or someone would catch the hint. He hated to have to step into this most basic operations procedure, but getting these people to move sometimes took direct action. The problem was, in his mood he’d likely appear as angry as he was, and that was to be avoided. Bank managers didn’t have personalities. They were unflappable.

  But he stood up. He’d caught the looks of the customers—rolled eyes or helpless gestures. Shuffling back and forth. Cattle in the pen.

  “Hey! Somebody want to open another window? What are you people doing back there?”

  Kevin swore to himself. He held a restraining hand up to the security guard who was moving in. He didn’t blame the customer who yelled. He felt like yelling himself.

  He walked to the bullpen. “Marianne,” he said quietly.

  She looked up, forever sedentary, endlessly serene, a chief teller for seven years. A hundred and eighty pounds of essence of bovine. But sweet. So fucking sweet he wanted to kill her. She smiled. “Yes, Kevin?”

  He gestured to the line, forcing a patient smile that he thought threatened to cramp every muscle in his face.

  Sighing, Marianne dispatched one of her minions. One. And the girl didn’t hurry. She was carefully counting her drawer when the customer who’d yelled said, “Fuck this!” and turned out of the line.

  Another satisfied customer.

  “Marianne,” he repeated.

  She gave him a little wave and mouthed, “They’ll wait,” then sent another soldier moseying off to the front.

  “Are you the manager?”

  It was only 10:15. Kevin turned, steeling himself. No matter what, he told himself, don’t swing at the customer.

  “Yes?” Definitely the smile muscles were cramping up. “How can I help you?”

  The man had not bothered waiting in the line. Maybe he wanted to open an account and Kevin could deal him off to one of his employees currently having coffee around the a.v.p. gossip desk. He did not feel like he could trust himself talking to anyone. Perhaps he should say he was sick, check into a motel and sleep about sixteen hours.

  The customer was clearly trying to cut a certain type of figure, but Kevin wasn’t sure he pulled it off. Was he trying to look like a businessman? Or a pastiche of one with perhaps some artistic statement-mismatched pants and coat, a green tie that was too wide over a pale blue shirt, hiking boots. His longish hair was either heavily moussed or simply greasy. In any event, he was upset, saying something about eighty-five thousand dollars.

  The number drove off a little of Kevin’s fatigue. He stopped the man in mid-sentence. “Yes, sir. Would you like to sit down, please? Come in where we can talk quietly? Perhaps some coffee?”

  The floor had already seen enough vocal disturbance for one day. The thing to do was to get him into one of the conference rooms.

  Kevin was walking and the customer had no other option if he wanted to keep talking with him. It also gave Kevin another minute to get himself under control again, to put his own thoughts together.

  Of course he remembered Maxine Weir. Who wouldn’t remember her? Ignoring even the eighty-five thousand dollars (which, of course, he wasn’t likely to do), a man who had not been laid in three weeks did not forget those black tights and high heels. If you’d gotten it in the last five minutes, you’d still perk up at the sight of those nipples peeking out through the holes of the loosely knit skin-colored sweater.

  Kevin held the door for the man. It shushed closed behind them. He showed no inclination to sit.

  “Now, how can I help you?” he asked.

  The privacy of the conference room worked some on the man. He was still upset, but the raving tone was gone. “My name is Ray Weir and my wife and I have—had—an account here …”

  “You used to have an account here?”

  “No. We still do. I mean, I do. My wife”—he paused—“my wife, uh, died last week. Was killed.”

  Kevin let out a breath. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Weir. And you’re settling …?”

  “I’m not settling anything. I’m here to find out what happened to a check for eighty-five thousand dollars. An insurance check. The insurance company said my wife signed for it last week, but I called your customer service and there’s no record it was deposited. I called the police and asked if they’d found it among her stuff but so far it hasn’t turned up.”

  “No,” Kevin said. “I’m afraid it won’t. She cashed it.”

  “What do you mean, she cashed it?”

  Kevin coughed again, stalling for time. His throat was killing him. It was probably turning into strep again.

  “She, your wife, came in last week with the check. She brought her attorney with her.”

  “And you cashed it? Just like that?”

  Kevin backed away a step or two. “Not exactly just like that. I suggested she deposit the money and we put a hold on your account until the money cleared, but her attorney made me call the carrier and verify the funds, which wasn’t really necessary since it was a cashier’s check, after which I couldn’t very well refuse, could I?”

  “So you cashed it?”

  There was no denying it. “Yes. We cashed it.”

  “Right there?”

  “Right here. She took a third of it, then, and gave it to her attorney. He had evidently negotiated the settlement, and those are typical fees, I believe. One-third of the recovered amount.”

  “But in cash?”

  Ray Weir had to sit down. All the fight was out of him.

  “I recommended to her, privately, that this aspect was very unusual. I had to report the transaction to the police—anything over ten thousand dollars in cash. Drugs, you know. But she’d made up her mind. She wanted the money that day. It was hers. The funds were there to cover it. She was a customer. What could I do?”

  “But it was half mine, that money. It was half mine.”

  “I’m sorry, but the check was made out to her, not to both of you.”

  “I mean, we were married. Separated but married. Married when she got into the accident.”

  What could he say? The man kept talking. “It was amicable, the separation. We agreed to split everything. And we hadn’t even filed for divorce yet. Maybe we would’ve worked it out.”

  Kevin remembered the way this man’s wife had clung to her attorney, had almost gleefully handed over nearly $30,000 in cash to her attorney. Except for the moment during which Kevin had spoken with her privately, she’d never lost physical contact with her attorney. Ray Weir and his wife weren’t ever going to have worked anything out. She had a new man, her attorney, and she was clinging on.

  Kevin felt a wave of nausea and then the fatigue kicked in again. He sat down two chairs away from where Ray Weir slumped.

  The customer looked at him. “So what can I do now?” he asked.

  The sun, morning bright, reflected into Kevin’s eyes off the shiny mahogany conference table. He closed his eyes against the glare, then forced them open to answer Ray Weir. “I can’t help you on that,” he said.

  Hardy had been out jogging and missed Glitsky’s call, which first chided him for moving around so much and being so difficult to get hold of, then telling him about Baker’s attempted suicide.

  He stood in his office, still sweating, in his shorts and sweatshirt: The weather had warmed up again.

  Why had Baker tried to kill himself?

  Hardy’s first take was that it was an admission of guilt, another nail in his coffin. Like Abe, he kept having these ambivalent feelings about old Louis. Since he’d talked to Baker the other day and gotten to know Ray Weir, now that Hector Medina was killing dogs, Hardy had pretty much convinced himself that, whatever else Louis Baker had done, and no doubt it was plenty, he hadn’t killed Maxine Weir.

  And it
wasn’t so much that Baker had denied anything. That would have been easy enough to discount. No. What had been compelling was Baker’s seemingly genuine ignorance of Maxine’s presence on the barge. Even if you were pretty inured to killing people, the least you’d do is notice.

  Of course, the fact that he hadn’t killed Maxine didn’t absolutely necessarily mean he hadn’t killed Rusty, but that stretch, in the real world, was too long for Hardy’s reach.

  And that left the question of why Baker had been at Rusty’s in the first place. It was pretty thin. Hardy tried to picture Rusty taking Baker back to the barge. Gun in hand. Not very likely …

  But why not? After all, how well had he known Rusty? Rusty had seemed much like himself. An ex-D.A., a guy from Hardy’s own club—someone who’d been through some shit and now just wanted to be left alone. That’s why he’d come to see Hardy in the first place, wasn’t it? He’d been afraid. Or he’d sure seemed afraid, enough to convince Hardy, who had no reason to be skeptical about it. Matter of fact, he’d infected Hardy with the fear bug. So …?

  But had Rusty really been so much like him? Okay, there were the externals, which were similar, but there was also the description he’d gotten from Karen Moore of a pretty twisted, driven guy—the compulsive gambler, the user of women.

  So it came down to who he believed—Louis Baker or Rusty. Not easy. Not anymore. He didn’t believe that Rusty had had a gun—else why would he have stopped at the gun shop and ordered another one that he couldn’t pick up for three days? Except Louis’s story about the day’s events had some kind of ring to them. In a way it was too far-fetched to have been made up. At least completely. Rusty meeting Baker at the bus station to drive him—