The warden came on brusquely, hurried. “Hazenkamp.”
“Warden, I’d like to ask you a question or two about Louis Baker-”
“Already? What’s he done?”
Hardy was planning on explaining it all briefly, up to the suicide attempt, but the warden stopped him as soon as he heard Rusty Ingraham’s name.
“Ingraham is dead?”
Hardy went over it a little.
“My God,” the warden said. “Talk about a mistake.”
“How’s that?”
“Ingraham called a couple of times in the past month or so.”
“A couple of times?” Hardy repeated.
“Yes, twice I think. He seemed very frightened. It now appears he was justified. I told him he didn’t need to worry. Baker wasn’t a threat.” Hazenkamp swore softly. “I have to tell you that this surprises me, and I don’t entertain many illusions in these matters.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you know, most of them come back or get killed trying.”
Hardy waited.
“But Louis Baker-well, you put your hopes on a few of them, I guess. Have to or go crazy.”
“And Baker was one of those?”
“Well, you either believe in rehabilitation or you don’t.”
“And you do?”
“Not too much. But you get an occasional good feeling. We don’t let guys out on minimum time unless we have some confidence they’re gonna try to go straight.”
“So you knew Baker personally?”
“I know most of them personally. It’s not like you don’t have time to meet them. I sort of make it a point.”
“And Baker…?”
Hardy could hear the man breathing on the other end of the line.
“Baker was tough. Very tough. Had most of the wrong tapes playing in his brain when he got here. But as I said, you like to think you get a feeling for these things when you’ve been in it as long as I have, and he was one case where I really believed the man had changed. He wasn’t a psycho. In his case, and I don’t say this too often, I think he grew up tough and mean because he had to survive.”
“I knew him back then, warden. He was a very serious felon.” Hardy knew a lot of the things Louis Baker had done. He didn’t exactly buy the environmental theory.
“Oh, I’m not denying that. He’ll never be, let’s say, a Republican. But,” his voice went up in pitch, hope resurfacing, “he wasn’t a drug user, his brain wasn’t fried out, he got along with other guys, was on the basketball squad, gave boxing lessons-maybe a loner, but the kind who could affect other people. Not a killer. At least I didn’t think so…”
“Maybe not.”
“But I thought you said…”
Hardy went on with the story-Maxine Weir, the man in Holly Park, the shootout with the cops, the attempted suicide… “So my question,” he finished, “is does it make any sense to you? Didn’t the parole board give him tests, interviews, that kind of thing?”
“Of course. And recommended on informed opinion-”
“-That he get out?”
“That’s why he did.”
“How often are you wrong?”
As soon as he asked, Hardy regretted it. All the slack -weary or otherwise-left the voice, and he was talking to a drill sergeant again, and a defensive one at that. “Recidivism is, I’m sure you realize, a major problem. But if you’re going to let these people out, if you’re going to believe anybody can be rehabilitated, then you do it when the evidence-”
“I understand all that. It just seemed, in Baker’s case, you might have felt something more. Personally.”
There was a longish pause. Hardy looked out his window. Maybe, he thought, Hazenkamp was doing the same thing up in Marin.
“You know, Mr Hardy, I knew a hell of a lot of guys like Baker in the corps. They come in tough, mean and young and all they want in life is to kick ass, be on top, never show they’ve got a weakness in them because where they come from, weakness is what you get stomped on for. Black or white, it doesn’t matter. Poor seems to be the big thing. No options. So for a while we-both in prison and in the corps-we authority figures get their attention. Bust them all the way down so we can build them up.”
“I was a Marine myself, sir,” Hardy said.
Another pause, shorter. “Then you remember. The junkyard dogs. Then something happens. At least once in a while. They get on a team, somebody saves their ass or maybe they save somebody’s.”
Hardy remembered how he had been after his parents’ death, joining the Marines, getting his bad self reamed a few times, then getting to Nam and pulling Moses McGuire, still his closest friend, out from under enemy fire at Chi Leng. Hazenkamp was right-it could change you.
“And that happened to Baker?”
“I think so… thought so. You know, Mr Hardy, there are model prisoners, as they call ’em, and then there are the guys that, you’d swear to God, the attitude just seems to go away. They’re not just model prisoners-you forget they’re prisoners period. That was Baker. Not that he wasn’t still tough-you didn’t push him-but he didn’t need to be anymore. You get what I’m saying? Anyway, it’s the same thing I told Ingraham. Just leave it alone and you won’t have any trouble.”
“Yeah, but Ingraham didn’t leave it alone.”
“Well, I still feel that Louis Baker could have taken quite a lot of abuse before he felt his options were gone.”
“But if there were that much? Abuse, I mean. Pressure.”
“Well, then he’d revert. You get cornered, you go back to what you know.”
Hardy could understand that. Being tagged for three murders you didn’t commit in the first couple of days after a long term in San Quentin would make anyone feel cornered. So then you decide to break out, go after somebody, someone who represents the people who are doing this to you-in Baker’s case, Hardy. And then because you’re out of practice, you fuck up, and all the good done in nine years is wiped out, all the hope of ever having a life is over, and you try to kill yourself. It could have gone that way…
Hardy glanced at his notepad while he still had Hazenkamp on the line. At the top of the page he’d written the number 2 with an exclamation point and circled it.
“One more thing if you’ve got a second, sir. The two times Ingraham called, were they about the same thing?”
“Yeah. The first time was more general-if he ought to be worried, how Baker was doing, he’d heard about him getting paroled, like that.”
“And the other time?”
“Well, that was the one last week, where he wanted to know the specifics-what time he got released, where he was going. I figured it couldn’t hurt. He seemed pretty strung out. I tried to calm him down. Told him again -really I didn’t think Baker was going to bother him.” He sighed. “But he did.”
“Warden, by any chance do you keep a phone log? Do you have the date of Ingraham’s first call?”
“Why?”
Over the line Hardy heard paper turning. “Just filling in the blanks.”
“Okay, here it is. August twenty-sixth. Does that fill one in?”
Hardy moved things around on his desk. Blowfish, paperweight, legal pad. Slips of paper with other notes from other days. A couple of blue jays squawked on a wire outside his window. He looked at the page he’d been studying earlier and put it next to the one he was now writing on.
Ingraham’s car had been reported stolen three days after his first call to San Quentin. “It’s a possibility,” he said.
He thanked Hazenkamp and hung up. So Rusty hears from a parole-officer friend that Louis Baker is getting out of prison. About the same time, he knows he’s getting a third of an $85,000 settlement from Maxine Weir. Three days later, his car is stolen. He doesn’t rent a car against the settlement from the insurance.
Baker said Rusty picked him up and drove him to his barge the same day Rusty had so clearly for all to see taken a bus out to the Shamrock.