The Vig dh-2

by John T Lescroart

And use Hardy to do it.

  Putting it together: the call to San Quentin making sure Baker was getting out. Three days later, after you work out the plan, you ditch your car and report it stolen. You go through some inconvenience for a month taking buses to establish some credibility. Then you see your friend Hardy and tell him Baker's getting out and is planning to kill both of you. You do your best to scare the shit out of him, then you order a gun-the picture of a man terrified for his life.

  You pick up Louis Baker in the bus station, making your only mistake, which is driving your car. Risks proving you a liar, especially if they ever get to questioning Baker about it. You want him to leave some-any-physical evidence that he was on your barge. A thumbprint would be plenty to police who were already predisposed-because of Hardy's testimony-to believe the ex-con did it.

  Then what?

  You shoot Maxine, administer yourself a flesh wound, leave a bloody trail to the edge of the barge, drop the gun overboard, dress the wound, get in your car-which no one thinks you have anymore-and head out. But where to?

  And the world comes to believe you're dead. You've got a lot of money, in cash. You're washed up in San Francisco. Your vig is eating you up. All your old friends have written you off. Go someplace else. Start over…

  "A man in deep thought."

  Courtenay, in black and hot-pink Spandex, was six feet of impressive woman. When she had told Hardy she would run on down to meet him, she had meant it literally. Her face was flushed with a light sheen of sweat, set off by a pink band around her forehead. The close-cropped blond hair was nearly white in the daylight.

  She pulled up a stool across from him at the window. "You've already had some."

  Hardy looked down at his empty dish. "I'll have another one with you. What do you want?"

  He went to the counter and ordered-two chocolate chocolates. When he got back to her, she said, "I was mad at you."

  "You didn't have to come down here."

  "Yes, I did. You never told me you were a cop."

  Hardy popped a spoonful of ice cream. "I'm not."

  She was still breathing heavily from her run. After a minute she said, "I came down to ask you please not to tell Warren. Ray said you-"

  He held up a hand.

  "Let's leave Ray. Ray's not important."

  "He's important if Warren ever finds out."

  "I thought you had an open relationship, you and Warren."

  "Let's put it this way. We don't ask each other. Maybe one or the other assumes, and it's safer to assume your partner is not faithful because it's probably true. But that's not the same as wanting to be confronted with it, especially if it's one of your best friends."

  "And especially if you and your regular partner work together."

  "Okay, especially then." She put her spoon down. "Look, I'm not making excuses. Ray and I did what we did. Maybe it helped him a little, made him feel better. I'm sorry about the timing of it being the night Maxine got killed, but remember, we didn't know that at the time."

  "So you're not really having an affair with him?"

  A slow smile spread into a wide grin. "Why? You interested? I thought you were just being a cop, the other night and now."

  Hardy shrugged. "I told you, I'm not really a cop at all. I used to be. Now some things have happened around this whole thing with Maxine and Rusty Ingraham-"

  "Like what?"

  Hardy took a bite of ice cream, knowing it was going to sound melodramatic. But it was the truth. "People are dying, getting killed. I'm not too happy thinking I might be on the list. If I'm right about some things, it could make me a threat…"

  "How?"

  Hardy ran down most of the events of the past week, but tried to stick to facts only.

  She put her hand over his on the counter as he finished. "Since we knew them-Rusty and Max-do you think we're in trouble, too?"

  "I don't know. The loop seems to head in a different direction. Rusty was evidently into the mob for a lot of money."

  "But why you? You're not in with those people, are you?"

  "That's the big question. I got into it the day everything started. I'm part of it." She waited, and he decided to open up some. "Well, if Rusty's still alive, for example, and let's just say he killed Maxine and set up Louis to take the fall, then do you think he's going to let me walk around? I'm the only guy can put this together, which means I'm the only guy who's a threat to him. He may or may not realize it yet, but it's sure to occur to him, and I'd prefer not to wait around for that glorious moment to arrive."

  "But Rusty's not alive. You said-"

  Hardy held up a hand. "From the beginning, Rusty's body has been missing. I went to a lot of trouble to prove how it could have disappeared because I kept assuming he was dead. It was possible, plausible, even reasonable, but mostly it was what I wanted to believe because of some other preconceptions, courtesy of Rusty, so I believed it."

  Slowly, she licked ice cream off her spoon. "So why did you want to see me?" she asked.

  "Because maybe you know something and don't know you know it."

  "About what?"

  "Maxine. Rusty. Both of them."

  She licked the spoon again. A bit of ice cream remained on her lower lip. Hardy itched to reach over and wipe it off.

  "Well, I didn't know Rusty that well. It was a little tense with Ray around so much, you know? I mean, who are you friends with?"

  "But Maxine came around with Rusty?"

  "Oh yeah, of course. She was in the movie. She wanted to see how it came out."

  "And she came with Rusty?"

  "A lot at first. Then it kind of got old. I think Max just lost the dream." She smiled, making a joke. "The vision thing, you know?"

  "I don't really know."

  She pushed out her beautiful lower lip. "You know, before, the dream had always been making it in films…"

  Hardy smiled. "As opposed to movies?"

  "Stop." She pointed a threatening finger. "Anyway, after she and Rusty got together, it was like they both decided what they were doing wasn't working. I mean, Maxine was like thirty-three or something like that, which is really pretty old for making it as an actress, I mean the kind of actress she was-the looks thing, you know. And Rusty, he just said he wanted to stop being a lawyer, go someplace else, live another life, get away from all the stress, as he called it. I think they fed each other that way."

  "Did they say what they wanted to do?"

  "Oh, you know, take the money and run. Live on the beach, do nothing, get a tan."

  Hardy shook his head. "That doesn't sound like Rusty. He was a pretty driven guy, wasn't he? Type A to the max."

  "Well, I guess that's why they picked Acapulco." She scraped the last of the ice cream from the bottom of the bowl, giving it her full attention. "I mean, Rusty could be as Type A as he wanted around his gambling, which he said relaxed him but it really didn't seem to, and Maxine could lie around on the beach and drink margaritas."

  "Are there casinos in Acapulco?"

  "Yeah, I think so, but that's not it, that kind of gambling. They talked about jai alai. It's like horse racing, except with people. Rusty was going to make their living betting on jai alai."

  "This was really their plan? They talked about this? Why didn't you mention this before?"

  "What was to mention? As far as I knew they were both dead. Which pretty much means they weren't living in Acapulco, doesn't it? And it wasn't really both of them with that plan anyway. At least not at first. Then it was mostly Maxine. Another big dream of hers that didn't come true."

  Chapter Twenty-three

  " ^ "

  Hardy felt like a horse's ass. What was he really doing here in Acapulco at a cliffside restaurant waiting for the sun to set and the boys holding torches to dive off the cliffs into the oncoming surf?

  A mariachi band was serenading an American couple at the next table. Hardy poured his Tecate into a glass and squeezed a lime into the beer. He didn't particularly like Te
cate, but he liked Corona less, and those were the options.

  Sometimes, he'd told himself, you've just got to do something. And he thought he'd been sure.

  Certain enough in any case to risk crossing the border with his.38 Special taped under the fender of his Samurai. He didn't want to think about what would have happened if they had stopped him in Tijuana and searched the car. But he'd driven into Mexico perhaps twenty times before in his life and had never been hassled going in. Coming back, of course, they'd inspected his car three or four times. Hardy had come to the conclusion that if people wanted to bring something-anything-into Mexico, the official word was bienvenidos. It was a poor country. They'd take anything you wanted to provide.

  For the two and a half non-stop days that it had taken him to get here, sleeping only an hour or two at a time in the car, his hunch had grown more and more into a conviction. Rusty Ingraham was alive-and he was in Acapulco.

  Rusty Ingraham, he had been sure, had come to him for no other reason than to have him point the finger at Louis Baker and let nature take its course. And that course ought to lead, with the other clever little games such as buying a gun, presumably for protection against Baker, that he never picked up, to the conclusion that Rusty was dead, killed by Louis Baker.

  And that, in turn, gets Rusty off the hook for his crushing vig and puts Louis where he belongs back in the slammer. Or the gas chamber. Either way, Louis Baker was a pawn. Dismas Hardy was a tool. Rusty Ingraham would be free to live out poor Maxine's dream.

  The sun kissed the Pacific. Flaming red bougainvillea covered the trellis that bounded the patio where he sat. A warm offshore breeze lulled. He sipped his Tecate.

  Across the chasm that divided him from the divers, one of them, still torchless, fell forward. Hardy watched the slow arc as the body cleared the outcropping and fell the long long way down. It was the fourth boy he'd seen go off since arriving here, and he found he couldn't work up a casual touristy feeling about it.

  He leaned out over the trellis, making sure the wave below would be there for the boy's arrival. This was not, to him, a relaxing way to unwind.

  He left his beer with a tip and went out to the road leading back into town. Half a dozen taxis were lined at the entrance to the place, but he put his hands in his pockets and started walking down the hill.

  Palm fronds still littered the roadway. Hurricane Carmine had hit two days before. It hadn't done much damage, but cleanup here did not proceed at the same pace as back home. Especially if you couldn't pay for it. The phone in his hotel still wasn't working, for example, but then again, he wasn't staying at the Princess.

  He had arrived the day before and slept through the late afternoon and through the night-seventeen hours. This morning he'd walked down from his hotel, the El Sol (eighteen dollars per night-definitely not the Princess), near the base of the mountains, through the awakening town to the Esplanade. He took an outside table at a place facing the beach and had pineapple juice, some poor coffee and a plate of huevos rancheros, taking it slow, letting the sun get hot, the parasailors floating up around the bay like colored balloons.

  Sunday morning. Church bells.

  On his way out to the jai alai stadium, still walking, getting the feel of the place, he had stopped at a church and stood in the back, listening to the Mass in Spanish. The ritual appealed to him, but he wished they still said the Mass in Latin. There was nothing universal about this Mass, nothing, he thought, catholic. It made him feel like the foreigner he was here. At communion, he snuck back out.

  The sun pounded hot on his head. He bought a hat for a dollar and continued walking.

  Hardy loved Mexico. He went every year to fish or dive or soak up sun and either dry himself out or tank up-the place was good for either. He and Jane had taken their honeymoon at Cabo San Lucas long before it was anything but a sleepy fishing village with a thatched-roof airport. Long walks on empty beaches. Huge, nearly free margaritas at the Finis Terra, throwing the glasses down over the cliffs to the water below. Nights and afternoons and mornings of lovemaking.

  Jane.

  Driving down, he had had time to think about her, about Frannie. Part of him recognized that he might have decided to come down here, ostensibly seeking Rusty Ingraham, because Jane was due home from Hong Kong. It would give him a few more days. Not that it was the whole reason, and not that he was proud of it, but it was there.

  He and Jane had both been supposing, in a casual kind of way, that eventually they would drift back into marriage. There would be no future talk of trying for another child -that had already come up and Jane's age, career and the tragedy with Michael had sealed her opinion on that far past the reaches of any discussion. She wanted-and Hardy did not blame her-comfort, respect, lack of hassle. A civilized life. He didn't blame her, but he didn't want the same thing.

  She had already hinted more than once that Hardy would probably, eventually, go back to practising law, buy a few suits, become a professional. She would not force him to do any of that, of course, but it-probably-would come to pass naturally. The problem was, when it came to it, as it seemed to have done now, he knew he was going somewhere, moving toward some definite place after his years of laying low behind the bar of the Shamrock. Something was guiding him, and it wasn't some urge toward passivity and comfort, toward three-piece suits and a better wedge of Brie.

  Maybe, four, five months ago, looking into the death of Frannie's husband, he'd come to believe, after years of denying the possibility, that one person-he, Dismas Hardy-could make a difference. And that it even mattered.

  Else why was he down here?

  Back to old Abe's tragic fallacy. Did he think he was down here to restore order to the cosmos? He had to laugh at that. But if Rusty Ingraham was here, he was going to bust his ass in a bad way. And he was going to get the charges dropped against Baker-the ones he'd influenced.

  That was his mission. It was something Frannie might yell at him about. She might even hate him from time to time for being made up like that. But at least Frannie would know where he was coming from. He was, she said, like Eddie that way.

  To Jane, the concept would be Greek.

  Come on, Diz, was that fair?

  Jane would understand it on a theoretical level. She would admit that the world might be better if everybody always did the right thing. Of course. But there were issues everywhere you looked, and you had to decide which ones were yours. And that decision had to be based on some kind of a cost-benefit analysis. Adults understood that. You didn't just go off and crusade your whole life. If you did, you were a professional do-gooder, and everybody knew they didn't get much done, did they?

  But he wasn't crusading his whole life. He just wanted to get this one thing straightened out. It had been pushed in his face-it was his issue.

  And he could hear Jane's answer to that. Why take the risk? If you did nothing, what would it matter? So what, Louis Baker is in jail-he deserves to be. Didn't he break into my house? Wasn't he trying to kill you? And if Rusty Ingraham is gone, let him go. Who cares? He's gone, it's over.

  But Jane, he killed Maxine Weir.

  I'm sorry. Police business. Not yours. Let it go…

  He had come up to the stadium, deserted and empty, and looked at his watch. The first game wouldn't be for a couple of hours. He shook his head-bad timing-and backtracked toward town.

  He had sat outside under an awning at a place he had passed coming out. The Tecate had been warm, impossible to swallow even with lime. He had read a Los Angeles Times, two days old, cover to cover.

  He had still felt hopeful. He was here. He would find Rusty Ingraham. He would go home and explain things to Jane. He would tell Frannie he was in love with her, and what did she want to do about it?

  But all that had been before he had gone to the stadium. Now, the afternoon behind him, he kicked palm fronds and tried to remember why he had thought he would be able to locate one person here.

  The jai alai stadium was nowhere near as
big as Candlestick Park, but Hardy guessed it still held maybe fifteen thousand people. It was certainly a good-time place. Hardy was surprised no one he knew had ever tried to put together a jai alai field trip. Beer and tequila were everywhere. Outside the gate fifty-gallon oil drums had been cut in half and set up for grilling, covered with everything from what looked like braided coat hangers to corrugated iron, piled high with shrimp, snapper, chorizo, mounds of green onions, peppers, mystery meats. Slap it in a tortilla and pour on salsa, who knew or cared? It was a fantastic, reeking bonanza of smells and smoke, and Hardy, chewing a shrimp burrito, walked through it, mingling, taking it in.

  Inside, the place was packed. The first disappointment, and it was major, was that there weren't any windows for betting. Hardy cursed himself for not doing his homework. He had just assumed…

  Well, there was no help for it now. The way it worked in jai alai was that each section had two runners, or bookies, or whatever they were called-one in a red hat and one in a green hat. They moved up and down the stands almost like peanut vendors in the States, calling out the constantly changing odds, throwing some kind of ball to prospective bettors, who put their money in a slot in the ball and took out the chit with the current line.

  So Hardy's original idea of waiting by a window for Rusty to show up looked bleak. He took in the stadium. All through the stands the red and green hats bobbed and zagged. Following any one of them would be a job.

  Hardy watched a game or two, hoping against hope that being lucky might make up for not being smart, that Rusty would just pop out of the crowd, maybe bump into him.

  He found that he liked the game a lot. Real mano a mano stuff. Handball with no rules about interference or much else. Couple of gladiators playing to the death.

  Up at Seguridad he had thought of having Rusty paged when he realized it was a stupid idea… If Rusty was here and heard his name he would also know someone didn't think he was dead. He would relocate and it would be all over.

  Two more hours, five bottles of orange pop, and thirty-five dollars that he bet on the last couple of games went down the drain. The stadium emptied and Hardy stood by one of the dozen or so gates. A lot of people walked by him. Two of them resembled Moses McGuire. None of them looked like Rusty Ingraham.