He looked different. With his stolen money he had gone into the St Vincent de Paul store and bought himself some clothes that fit, traded in the tennis shoes for hiking boots, picked up a Forty-Niners jacket, some sunglasses and a mock leather driving cap. He shaved in the bathroom of a gas station on Geary before walking back to his car.
He knew the address-he had burned it into his mind nine years ago. Turning left out of the lot on Fillmore, he headed up to Jackson Street, where Hardy had lived, might still live-you never knew. Either way he’d find him soon enough.
It was funny with Rusty Ingraham dead now, and Dido, and how the unexpected sometimes just put things in your hands. You left the joint, you maybe got intentions to go a certain way, but things happened around you and pretty soon you’re sailing along like you never gave a thought to direction. The wind blew, you’d be a fool to fight it.
And now they wanted him for murder again, like they’d always done. There’s trouble, first they looked to him. This time he hadn’t even gotten the smell of the prison soap off him before the hassling began. Okay. Just so he knew.
It wasn’t like they said it would be, but then he hadn’t really believed them anyway. But he wondered why they spent so much time trying to convince the cons with the lie. In the House, see, they kept telling you that things would be different on the outside. There’re all kinds of agencies and people set up to get you going straight. Which, you know, the first year you just roll your eyes and figure they got to tell you something-might as well be a fairytale. You’re in the joint a while, though, and it starts sounding possible, like, maybe there really are jobs out there.
But none of the guys who’d been out and came back seemed to get those jobs. Which was natural… who was going to hire an ex-con when he can get somebody he might need to trust?
In the end you believed what you wanted to believe. And the proof was here. Louis Baker, out about three days, doesn’t need no good intentions no more. Hard to live up to anyway. Now, since he’s going down for it anyway, he’s going to do something to make himself feel good.
He pulled into the curb under a streetlamp across from the old Victorian. There was one light in the front window, the kind people left on when they weren’t home.
Louis got out of the car, put his hands in his jacket pocket, where the gun was, and walked over, up the steps, rang the doorbell. He took a couple of deep breaths and squeezed the grip on the gun.
After no one answered he tried the door, but a glance had already told him that would be a tough way in. There was a new, heavy-looking deadbolt set into the door just above the knob.
But going in the front door wasn’t his style anyway. He descended the stoop and walked along the side of the house, where a cement strip drained the area between this Victorian and the building nearly flush up against it. There were three windows in that wall, all of them locked.
Coming around the back corner, he kicked the metal lid of a garbage can and it skidded for what seemed like ten seconds, sounding like a small army passing through. Several dogs started barking and Louis pressed himself deep into the shadows up against the house.
The dogs were good, he thought. Dogs were always knocking over garbage cans. Cats, too. Even raccoons. He’d wait. Prison had made him good at waiting. It would get quiet again.
He craned his neck up around him. It was maybe fifteen feet to what looked in the darkness to be a tall back fence on the other side of which an apartment building rose five or six stories. Each story had about six windows facing him, some lit, but he saw no silhouette that came to look down at the noise. On either side there wasn’t even a fence-the buildings started at the property line. This would be a bad place to get trapped. There was no way out except back up the shoulder-width alley he had just come down.
He made out the wooden porch a couple of steps off a back doorway. Stepping away from the house, avoiding the garbage can lid, he saw some stairs going down under the porch. There were two windows side-by-side down there in a little well under the porch, and one of them was open an inch at the top.
Louis wasn’t going to throw the house. He was going to find out if Hardy still lived there, then if so, wait until he came home. He let himself into a laundry room and felt his way in the dark to the doorway, then up a couple of steps to what felt like a kitchen.
His eyes were adjusting. There was also a little light seeping down the hallway from the living room. On the floor by the front door he saw a pile of mail that had been dropped through the mail slot. It appeared whoever lived here now was someone named Jane Fowler, and she’d been gone for at least a week already.
He dropped the envelopes back on the floor and returned to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, but the pickings were slim. A couple of bottles of white wine, one of them half empty. A loaf of bread. Some plastic containers wouldn’t hold enough food for a child. Four bottles of dark beer.
He took out one of the beers, the bread and a jar of peanut butter and went over to rummage through some drawers near the sink for a knife. The light from the refrigerator cut an arc through the darkness of the kitchen, falling on the wall by the door to the hallway.
Chewing on his sandwich, he took a hit of the beer and nearly gagged. The stuff was dark and thick and tasted like liquid sen-sen. He looked at the bottle-he had thought it was beer but it was called stout and the only thing it had in common with beer was its bottle. He poured it out into the sink.
He took one of the half-bottles of wine from the refrigerator and washed out his mouth. With the light he could now make out things in the kitchen. He walked over to where the light fell near the door and looked at the calendar-and stopped everything.
The name Dismas-not very common-appeared about five places in September. He smiled, swallowed his sandwich in a gulp and went back to work.
The telephone was in an alcove in the hallway, and he risked now turning on the hall light. He would only be here a few more minutes. The phone sat on an answering unit on a built-in shelf under which were a couple of phone books. Next to the phone was a Rolodex. Louis Baker flipped to H and there it was. Out in the Avenues, maybe two miles west. Take him fifteen minutes.
Flo was doing the dishes. Glitsky sat at the table, playing Monopoly with the three kids. The boys were named Isaac, Jacob, and OJ.-Flo had drawn the line at Esau. OJ. was only eight, but he already had a hotel on the boardwalk and Glitsky was hanging out in jail, waiting for doubles. The boys always got a kick out of their father the cop being in jail, but Abe didn’t want to get out and land on anything, and this way the other boys could eliminate each other and he might have a chance to buy some cheap property and get back in the game.
The telephone rang, and Abe was in the middle of yelling “Let it go!” when Flo picked it up on the first ring. He heard her say, “Just a minute, he’s right here,” then appear in the doorway. “It’s work,” she said.
“It always is.”
“But it’s your turn,” OJ. whined.
“Let Jake roll for me.” He shook a finger at his oldest son. “Don’t get doubles.”
He walked into the kitchen. “Glitsky,” he said into the receiver.
“Sergeant,” the voice said, “this is Paul Ghattas.” There was a pause. “From the lab.”
He pictured the Filipino boy he had chewed out earlier in the day. There was a scream from the other room as one of his sons landed on a bad property. Flo disappeared, and he heard her telling them to keep it down. Ghattas was saying something, but Glitsky couldn’t get his mind on it. He had told himself he was leaving the force as soon as he could and relocating to Los Angeles, and these cases that no one else seemed to care about could take care of themselves. “I’m sorry,” he said, “what did you say?”