Frannie was wrapped in a white terrycloth robe. She had dried her hair and it gleamed like a red halo around her face.
Hardy walked back to the couch, avoiding her eyes. “Just pondering what Abe would call the moral ambiguities-”
“Of what?”
He motioned to the table. “This stuff.”
But that wasn’t all and he knew it. He sat down. Frannie leaned, arms crossed, against the doorjamb.
“Dismas?” she said.
He knew if he looked up he was in trouble, so he reached out and started arranging papers in the folder. Frannie came and stood next to him. He raised his head and she put her hands in his hair and pulled him into her. She opened the robe and his face was against her belly, the smell of powder and woman, her skin warm and tight, her heart pounding under it.
“Come on,” she said, and he followed her into the bedroom.
Chapter Thirteen
Lace was at the Mama’s putting up some plywood over the hole where Dido had broken the window.
The fog, which had come in late the night before, was already lifting. A light breeze fluffed at Lace’s flannel shirt. As far as Lace knew, no one in the cut had seen or heard anything about Louis Baker since two nights before, and Lace was figuring Louis ought to show up soon if he had any notion at all of claiming the cut, because it was slipping away fast.
Last night, Dido not yet in the ground, and Samson who ran the next cut over was seeing that no one worked out of this one. Lace and Jumpup, they’d laid low, letting things shake out.
He felt bad about Dido. Dido had been like his big brother, his protector. Lace wasn’t sure how he was going to handle Louis Baker when he came back, but the first thing was to get his confidence, make him think he’d change allegiances like the wind blew. He didn’t want Louis Baker feeling like he had to kill him the way Louis had had to kill Dido to secure the cut. So he’d make up to Mama, keep close and informed, fix the window and bide his time. Then when Louis came back and wasn’t looking, something bad would happen to him.
The Mama stuck herself out around the back of the building, a mountain of a woman in a multicolored caftan. She had cooked up a pan of cornbread inside and had butter and honey to go on it. Lace drove in another nail and let himself into the kitchen.
The Mama sat at the table, cutting into the pan. The cornbread smell filled the room.
“Sit down, child,” she said. “Eat up.”
Lace obeyed her, savoring the flavors, the butter melted into the bread, a little honey over the top. Mama poured him a glass of milk.
“Police brought back my car,” the Mama finally said. “Louis didn’t do it no harm.”
“They find him?”
“He got shot,” she said. “Everybody always wants to be shooting.”
Lace just nodded.
“Probably now he go back to the House. Police say it might be better if he don’t live now, what they might fix to do to him.” She cut another square of cornbread and put it on Lace’s plate. “They’re saying he killed Dido, you hear that?”
“He did kill Dido,” Lace said.
The Mama nearly exploded. “Why you say that?” Then, more quietly, “What make you think that trash, boy?”
Lace had to chew a minute before he could swallow. His mouth was dry and he took a gulp of milk. “Dido’s shot and he runs,” he mumbled out.
“You thinking like the police now,” she said. “Running don’t make you guilty. Running keep you out of the way, that’s all. First thing the Man do is look for somebody like Louis, maybe done some bad things before. Easy to lay it off on Louis, then.”
“Maybe.”
“Okay. Why Louis want to kill Dido?”
It was so obvious he had trouble saying it. “He want the cut, Mama.”
“You think Louis that dumb? He shoot Dido and run away from the cut he wants?”
“He didn’t do it, he shouldn’t have run.”
The Mama shook her head. “Child, child, child. Where you comin’ from? He gotta run. He got no choice.”
Lace went back to his cornbread, thinking that the Mama maybe made some sense… Louis had fought with Dido and the war was still going on with Dido breaking the window, but it would have been plain stupid to kill Dido, especially to get at the cut. Be like putting up a flag saying you did it.
Be more like it if somebody used the fighting between Dido and Louis to get rid of one and set up the other. Free up the cut, too. Lace needed to think on that.
Hardy ran his hand along Frannie’s side before he slipped out of bed. She stirred, made a noise in her throat and settled back into sleep. Hardy pulled the blanket up over her, moving her hair away from her face.
They had been awake most of the night, talking and loving one another. Like old friends in one way, but in the other-Hardy was amazed at what had gone on. Now, showering, the images of Frannie over him, under him, things they’d done the second and then third time, he found himself getting excited again and turned up the cold water so he could get on with the day, with his real life.
His real life.
He put on a pot of coffee, wondering what his real life had become lately, ever since Rusty Ingraham had walked into the Shamrock. Until then he’d been doing okay-in some ways, he thought, better than okay. Certainly better than the sleepwalk he’d been in before he got back with Jane. And things with Jane were at least steady. He worked bartending with easy hours doing something he mostly enjoyed.
And then-it was like the question you sometimes heard at parties-what if somebody told you that you were going to die in three days, or six months? What would you do differently?
And of course the ‘right’ answer was “I’d just keep doing what I’m doing.”
Well, somebody had made Hardy believe that he might die in the very near future, and he hadn’t done anything like what he’d been doing. What did that mean? That he hadn’t been happy with what he was doing? And how did he feel about what he was doing now? If he had one day left, would he choose to spend it with Frannie or Jane? Or alone?
Well, if he was lucky he had more than one day left, and didn’t have to make that decision. The sun was high. The fog was mostly burned off. Hardy thought that when he moved back into his house-whenever that happened-he’d start going down to Graffeo’s for coffee. It really was better than his canned espresso.
He went to the front door and found the Sunday paper on the stoop. He looked out at the line of cars parked along the curb, trying to imagine himself last night, huddled behind one, a gun trained on Abe Glitsky’s back. It looked so different in the sunlight. Had he really done that?
Had he and Frannie really done all that, too? And what would that look like in the daytime?
He opened the paper in the nook and a front-page story got his attention right away. Hector Medina was back in the news. Fred Treadwell, it seemed, had now accused Medina of killing his dog and threatening his own life. There were two sidebars on Hector. One outlined the seven-year-old accusation that he had been a killer cop. Case closed. Hardy was still an ex-cop and ex-D.A., and that sort of reporting bothered him, never mind that he had been suspicious of Medina’s self-serving protests of innocence to him. The other sidebar was an interview with Medina-evidently some reporter had called him at home the night before the paper went to press. All Hardy read there was a refrain of Medina’s complaint to him-once you’d been accused, you might as well have done it, since everyone treated you like you had anyway. Of course he hadn’t killed any dog, but everyone would believe he had, although he said it was the dumbest accusation he’d ever heard. Why would he kill the man’s dog? And so forth.
For a second it crossed Hardy’s mind that maybe he’d done the same thing with Louis Baker. He was a bad man. Therefore he was guilty of bad things that happened. And it followed-once you got accused of doing bad things, you might as well go ahead and do them. In for a penny, in for a dollar.
No. Not in Baker’s case. He’d been at Rusty’s. He’d gotten shot after breaking into Jane’s, for God’s sake, looking for him…