Hardy sat there now, at the bar. It was just after eleven in the morning, and he looked through the streaked windows to the other Francis across the way-the Saint Francis Hotel, which dwarfed the Drake. A few blocks further north, the Bankamerica building threw its fifty-six stories’ worth of shade around the surrounding ten blocks of downtown; the Transamerica Pyramid, the Embarcadero Center Towers-in their fashion as symbolic, Hardy thought, as the spires of medieval cathedrals. Just a different god.
Hardy took his coffee and walked across the faded rug of the nearly empty Starlight Room. Except for due south, which afforded a view of the shipyards and Hunter’s Point, every direction was blocked by highrises.
Hardy had danced up here with Jane, had stood with his arm around her at the floor-to-ceiling windows, looking down all around them at their city. It had been a genteel place, a spot to touch base or regroup, out of step with the hipness of the rest of the city. Even then it had been, from Hardy’s and Jane’s perspective, where ‘old people’ of forty or fifty drank Happy Hour doubles and danced to a combo, not a rock band.
Now Hardy felt like one of the old people himself. A voice behind him said, “They gotta get to these windows.”
Hardy spun around, jittery. For a moment he had almost forgotten he was being hunted. “It doesn’t really matter,” he said, “there’s not much to see anymore.”
Hector Medina was a short, squat man with a square face and thinning hair. He wore a brown business suit and black shoes, which were not shined. He showed Hardy his security-cop’s badge and they went back to the bar, where Hardy had his coffee refilled and Medina ordered a glass of plain water, no ice, no lime. “
“This must be my week for cops,” he said. “Memory lane.”
“I’m not on the force anymore,” Hardy said. “The message I left…”
“Yeah I got it. Ex-cop, cop. I’m an ex-cop. I still feel like a cop.”
“You’re chief of security here, aren’t you?”
Medina coughed. “Yeah. Some Japanese tour lady loses her purse and I get to investigate and find it under her bed. A farmer from Kansas finds out the hooker he picked up is a guy and has a fit. Tough cases.” He sipped at his water. “Shit, what am I talking about? It’s a good job. But don’t mistake it for real police work.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “So how can I help you?”
Hardy wasn’t sure how Medina could help him. It wasn’t entirely clear to him why he’d even come down here, but it was better than sitting at Frannie’s with a loaded gun and a head full of questions. He’d thought he might as well get some of them answered. “It’s about Rusty Ingraham.”
Medina picked up his glass again, then put it down. “You know, I had a feeling.”
“Why’s that?”
“You know Clarence Raines?”
The name sounded familiar but Hardy shook his head.
“The department is fucking him over. Him and his partner.”
“Is he one of the guys they’re bringing up-”
“Yeah, yeah. Those guys. So Clarence came to see me to ask about…”
“… because something like this happened to you?”
“Something exactly like this. Except they didn’t wind up killing their suspect, what’s his name, Treadwell. They should have. At least my guy couldn’t talk.”
“So what’d you tell Clarence?”
“My advice? I told him, him and his partner both, to go into business.”
Hardy didn’t get that.
“Business, you know. Sporting goods, insurance, something out of the line, ’cause their police careers are over right now. Once you’re charged…” He finished his water.
“That’s what happened to you?”
“Ingraham,” Medina said.
“He brought the charges?”
“No, no. He’s too clean for that. Too hands off. He just pointed the finger and sicced the dogs on me.”
“But you got off.”
“Cause the D.A. knew a good cop when he saw one. He knew the asshole I killed was a dirtbag. Scum of the earth.”
“Who’d tried to kill you anyway, right?”
Medina looked over Hardy’s shoulder, silent. Then, “There was a gun in his hand. It never went to trial.”
Hardy fiddled with his coffee cup. A man could say a lot saying nothing, admitting nothing. Hardy might never know the story, but it was becoming clear to him that maybe Ingraham had been onto something with Medina-the accusation might not have been all air.
“So you wouldn’t say Ingraham and you were close?”
Medina grunted, smiled. “You could say I’d like to kill the son of a bitch, frankly.”
“You won’t have to.”
Medina blinked, his look going over Hardy’s shoulder, then back. He seemed to settle back on his stool, as though some tension he had been holding in a long time was finally releasing its grip. “My luck keeps holding,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I haven’t seen Ingraham or talked to him in maybe five years, and last week I called him up and this week he’s killed. Somebody will probably check his phone records, put it together and want to talk to me about it.”
“You called him up?”
Medina sighed. “Clarence coming to see me, talking about his situation, it got me stirred up.”
“So what did you say to him?”
Again that guttural grunt. “That’s what’s funny. I didn’t say a damn thing. I heard his voice and realized I didn’t want to prove it, that’s all. It was over. If I want to do something, I’ll work with Clarence’s hand. Mine’s folded.”
Medina lifted the glass to his mouth, saw it was empty and still tried to suck the last drops from it. “I gotta get back to work. Nice talking to you.”
He got to the elevator button, pushed it, then walked back to Hardy. “If I wanted to kill Ingraham, and believe me, I thought about it, I would’ve done it seven years ago when it would’ve done some good, and there wouldn’t have been any evidence there, either.”
The elevator door opened and Medina turned a half-step toward it.
“Nobody says you killed Ingraham,” Hardy said.
“Somebody will,” Medina said. “You watch. You get accused once, you’re in the loop.”
Medina made it to the elevator as the doors were closing. If he was putting on an act, it was damn convincing.
Hardy, checking in with Glitsky from the pay phone by the men’s room, heard, “No body yet, Diz.”
“It’s out in the bay somewhere, Abe. He must have fallen or been thrown overboard and the tide took him out.”
“I don’t know if it’s that strong. The tide, I mean.”
“How about if you guys check that?” Hardy heard a crunching in the phone. Glitsky was chewing ice again. “You know, your teeth are all going to crack and fall out.”
“We dragged the canal, Diz. We can’t drag the whole bay.”
“Isn’t the blood type enough?”
Glitsky had told him that the second blood stain, from the bed out the door to the pool by the rail, was B negative, fairly rare. Ingraham’s old records confirmed that had been his type.
Ice crunched in the phone’s earpiece. “Means somebody with B negative bled. Doesn’t mean Ingraham died.” Crunch crunch. “Necessarily.”
“Sure, Abe. Probably somebody just had a nosebleed. The bullet hole in the bed must have been there before.”
“Hey, we’re going on somebody was shot, probably Ingraham. But we have a real live dead person, Diz. Maxine Weir. And her husband’s got means, motive and no alibi for opportunity.”
Hardy was losing his patience. “I’m telling you, Abe, Louis Baker did this. He killed them both-”
“Why would he kill the girl?”
“She was there. I don’t know.”
“You just said it. You don’t know. Look, to make you happy I’ll go see Baker today.”
“Thank you.”