“All right, don’t.” He stabbed the button again. “She hasn’t let anybody out. Jesus! You know who runs this department? Fucking Marylouise Bezdikian!” He stopped spewing. “You think we ought to get Abe and Carl in, let ’em know before the others?”
Batiste shrugged. “Tough call, Joe. Up to you.”
Frazelli worried it a minute, twisting his ring. “Fuck it,” he said. “Who needs it? It’s their problem.”
In Frazelli’s office, in the outer office, everything went suddenly silent, then picked up again.
“Angels passing,” Batiste said.
“What’s that?”
“Like that, when it’s all of a sudden quiet. My wife says it’s angels passing.”
“Passing gas, more likely,” said Frazelli, poetic as a cement truck. He went back to twisting his ring.
“You know,” Batiste said, “I got one other question you don’t mind?”
“Shoot.”
“Well, you know, you hear things…”
Frazelli listened, knowing what was coming.
“Well, point is, I don’t want to come in some morning and find a Triple-A bumper sticker on the door, you know?”
Frazelli knew. Triple-A was department slang for Affirmative Action Asshole. The wedding ring suddenly was getting a real workout. Realizing what he was doing, the lieutenant stopped himself, put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, feet on his desk.
Frank had plenty of time to find out how things worked. Why ruin the moment for him now? “You know, Frank,” Frazelli said, “you hear that shit all the time. But you got the gig ’cause you earned it, pure and simple. Anybody thinks otherwise, you send ’em to me, even after I’m retired and out on the Bay fishin’.”
The intercom buzzed. Marylouise said, “The cake’s here.”
Frazelli stood up. “You ready?” he asked. “Let’s go have some cake.”
Jane was with him, her hand resting easily on the inside of his thigh. She sat close up next to him at the end of the bar by the large windows, drinking a negroni. She’d throw her head back and laugh her deep laugh. She glowed in the Friday dusk.
Hardy had opened up a little after one, working a short shift. McGuire preferred to work Friday night because of the good tips, where Hardy liked to come in and set up, then have Friday night to himself. Jane and he used to call it date night. Maybe it would be again.
He’d gone back to work on Wednesday, using his time behind the bar, he realized-the way he always had-to keep the pretense of being a social animal without really having to interact. It suited him now, the disengagement, so long as he knew why he was doing it. He had felt dazed, somehow, wanting to be alone.
Yesterday, he’d gone downtown and worked out his statement. Glitsky hadn’t been around. The new lieutenant told him that with Glitsky, Griffin and the two priests corroborating their story, they’d declared Eddie’s death a homicide.
Moses’s reaction had been mixed. At first he was all hyped up, happy to have Frannie covered. But then a distance, a sullen melancholy politeness crept in that Hardy had only now just figured out.
He understood it, but it didn’t seem right to him. Moses, after all, had hired him to do a job and offered him something as payment. It had been a contract, as binding as anything written up, signed and notarized.
And Hardy wasn’t worried about Moses reneging on their deal -he wouldn’t do that. What bothered him was Moses’s reaction to it. How could they work as partners, after being friends for so long, with that friction between them? And it was obvious that Moses, having thought about the reality of it and not the grand romance of the gesture, was resenting it-losing a quarter of the bar he’d owned for most of a decade.
When he’d come in tonight, with a scowl and a manila folder, Hardy guessed he’d brought some papers to sign. Even Jane, who hadn’t laid eyes on the man in some years, had said, “This isn’t the McGuire I knew.”
The crowd wouldn’t really get going for another half hour. Hardy pushed himself up off his stool. He kissed Jane casually, saying he’d be right back, then walked the length of the bar to where Moses was watching a game of liar’s dice as though it were the World Series. In other words, pointedly ignoring Hardy.
“Hey, Mose.”
He looked up.
“I quit,” Hardy said.
Moses squinted, moved over and forward a step, and leaned over the bar. “What?”
“I quit. I’m not bartending anymore, starting now.”
He flashed him a broad and phony grin and went back to join Jane.
“What do you mean, you quit?” Moses was in front of him again.
“Just send me my profit checks,” Hardy said. “I couldn’t live around you feeling guilty all the time. Let’s go, Jane.”
“You’ve still got this pan?” Jane said. “It looks brand new.”
Hardy nodded over his eggs. “Treat things right, they last,” he said.
They’d gone to dinner, then back to Hardy’s, then to bed too early to sleep, so now, sometime after midnight, they were eating before going back in and devouring each other some more.
The doorbell rang.
“Reasonable hour,” Hardy said. He yelled down the hallway. “Go away.”
The bell rang again. Hardy swore, went into his room and put on a pair of jogging shorts.
“Who is it?” he asked at the door.
It was McGuire. He held the folder in one hand. “I’m a horse’s ass,” he said.
“Yep, you are.”
“You want this stuff?”
Hardy shifted on his bare feet. “You want to give it to me?”
“You earned it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
McGuire gave it a last thought. “Yeah.” He nodded. “You want to sign these papers?”
“No. Tomorrow will be fine. I’ve got some company now.”
“But you could just…”
“Tomorrow, Mose, when I come in to open, okay?”
He closed the door on his friend and, turning, saw Jane standing waiting for him at the end of the long hall.
John Lescroart
JOHN LESCROART, the New York Times best-selling author of such novels as The Mercy Rule, The 13th Juror, Nothing but the Truth, and The Hearing, lives with his family in northern California.
