“But didn’t they get Baker at Jane’s? And doesn’t that mean he was after you?”
“Absolutely.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Well?”
“It doesn’t mean he killed Rusty, or Maxine, or the guy in the projects. It only means he was after me.”
“Okay, but you can infer-”
“Sure you can. It’s what I’ve been doing all along.” He sat down on the couch and Frannie came over. “Last night I almost shot Abe. No, listen. I was one-hundred-percent certain it was Louis Baker on your porch, here to kill me. But I couldn’t take him out without making sure, thank God. Something stopped me from pulling the trigger.”
Frannie sat back, not knowing where he was going.
“If I couldn’t kill Baker last night, how can I do it now?”
“How would you be doing that?”
“Multiple murder rap, he’ll get the gas chamber…”
“But Abe even said-”
“Sure. But Abe’s instincts aren’t always wrong. Often, in fact, they’re right. I mean, I was so scared the last few days I wasn’t interested in anything but saving my ass. And that meant pointing to Baker.”
“And now?”
“Now, I think I can see for the first time that Abe might have had a point, back there when this whole thing started. In his shoes, knowing what he knew, and didn’t know, I’m not sure I would have arrested Baker right away either-”
“But Abe, knowing what he did, finally did arrest Baker, didn’t he?”
“Not exactly. Baker got shot outside Jane’s house, where we suppose he was looking for me to kill me.”
“But didn’t Abe say he was going to charge him?”
“No. It sounded like he said he was going to quit. Maybe let the Ingraham case slide and be happy to have Baker go down for the woman’s murder, or the burglary, or even breaking his parole. He’s fed up, is all.”
“But Baker was coming to kill you!”
“Don’t get me wrong, Frannie. I don’t care too much about what happens to one Louis Baker. But he ought to go down for what he’s actually done.”
“So let a jury decide that. Or Abe.”
“Juries can be wrong, and Abe’s not interested in his current mood.” Hardy flipped some pages in Abe’s file, leaning over the coffee table. “There’s another thing,” he said.
She sat forward, a hand on his back. “What’s that?”
“One way or the other I’m deeply involved in all this, right? So let’s, for argument, let’s say Baker didn’t kill Rusty. Let’s even, just for fun, say Rusty isn’t dead. If either or both of those are true, then why am I, Dismas Hardy, part of this at all… unless I’m being set up.”
“But set up for what?”
Hardy closed the file and leaned back against the couch. “Exactly.”
Hardy was thinking that maybe Frannie’s infatuation had ended, since she was already pissed off at him for going to see Louis Baker in the hospital. He should just leave it alone, she said. But he still felt some danger. If he was being set up… Or maybe he wanted to stay at Frannie’s a little longer and needed an excuse. Or maybe he felt less than a paragon and wanted to soothe his conscience now that his life wasn’t, so far as he knew, directly threatened. It was all jumbled, but also somehow connected.
He and Frannie had had their first fight. She said that compulsive need to find out, to do the right thing, had killed her husband. She wasn’t about to have it happen to Hardy too.
But Hardy knew that idealism hadn’t killed Eddie Cochran four months ago. A bullet in the brain had killed him, and Eddie had had no more control over who had put it there than he did over the wind. Eddie had been going along, living his life, trying to make it a good one, and someone had ended it-abruptly, senselessly. If something in Frannie needed to believe that Eddie’s idealism had gotten him involved in things that had led to that lonely parking lot in the middle of the night, Hardy could accept that. He knew it had been someone else’s agenda, not Eddie’s, that had ended his life.
He put it out of his mind as the guard let him into the hospital room. He had called Abe from Frannie’s and Abe had cleared an interview with Baker, even if he didn’t approve of it. He had made Hardy promise not to take his gun.
Even with tubes in his arms and a hose running into his nose, Baker looked intimidating. Hardy backed away from the bed and glanced at the door to the room, making sure the guard was still just outside.
He couldn’t place him. Hardy had no distinctive memory of what Baker had looked like nine years before. A big black man. He’d sent away a lot of them.
“Yo, Louis,” he said.
Baker opened his eyes. He was still heavy-lidded, perhaps sedated, but there was recognition there. Baker’s eyes had a yellowish tint, both the white and the brown iris. “Well, if the mountain ain’t come…” After the one phrase he closed his eyes again.
Hardy pulled up a chair so he could be close to Baker’s face. “I hope you got a better lawyer than last time,” he said. He watched Baker for a reaction but there wasn’t any. He might have gone back to sleep.
“ ’Cause when you get better from this tragic accident that’s put you in the hospital, then you’re going to go sit in a small green room and breathe some real bad air. But, you know, the good part is you won’t breathe it for too long.”
Baker opened his eyes. “Talk about bad air.”
“They say the gas is painless, but you hear stories. Guys who get the first whiff and their heads jerk back and eyes bug out, like they’re gagging on fire. It’s gotta be agony, don’t you think? But again, I guess it doesn’t last too long.”
“I ain’t going to no gas chamber on a B and E.”
“Fuck the B and E. I’m talking the murders.”
“I didn’t do no murders.”
“You didn’t do Rusty Ingraham? You better have a good lawyer.”
“I didn’t even see no Rusty Ingraham. I tole the cop that.”
“And you know, he wanted to believe you, but finding your prints over at Rusty’s place made him skeptical. You know that word, Louis, skeptical? It means he thinks you’re full of shit.”
Baker closed his eyes again.
“You sleepy, Louis? You want me to go away? ’Cause we got you on Rusty’s barge, we got you in the cut. We got three dead people with your name all over ’em.” Hardy saw movement under Baker’s eyelids-he was thinking about things.
Hardy hadn’t formally interrogated anyone since he’d left the D.A.’s office, but you didn’t lose the knack. It was kind of fun, in fact, realizing that Louis probably thought he was still a prosecutor.
“Three?” Baker opened his eyes, pulled himself up. “What three? You trying to tag me for every murder in the county last week? What’s a matter, you got nobody else on parole?”
The effort of talking cost Louis, and he had to lie back down, breathing out through his mouth.
“I ain’t do a thing, you all decide I’m going back down.”
“How’d you get a gun, Louis? Shooting at cops. Breaking and entering. You call that not doing a thing?”
Louis picked up his hand, waving all of that off. “It ain’t killing.”
Hardy sat back in his chair. It was not rare for a killer to deny killing anybody. But he had Louis arguing, talking. You had to use what you had and keep ’em talking.
“No, killing was Rusty Ingraham, killing was the woman at his place, killing was the homeboy in the cut.”
“What woman at Ingraham’s?”
“Her name was Maxine Weir.”
“There wasn’t no woman-” Louis stopped abruptly, retreating again behind his closed eyes, lying back.
Hardy leaned forward, smiling now. “Oops,” he said.
“I want my lawyer here.”
Hardy leaned over closer and whispered in Baker’s ear. “Fuck you, Louis. Fuck your lawyer. This is me and you.”