John Lescroart - The Vig

"Want to try it again?"

She wasn't really coming on to him. Well, maybe a little. But he flashed on Frannie, from there to Jane, and then to the Lambada going on through the door, and he realized that it simply wasn't him. "I think it would be better if we didn't," he said.

"All right," she said. She took a final drag on her cigarette, dropped and stepped on it. "I always guess wrong," she said.

It was the pro forma San Francisco woman's first reaction to rejection, Hardy knew-the assumption that the man was gay.

"For the record," he said, "my sexual preference is more or less as it appears."

She looked straight across at him, her height still a little disconcerting. Her face softened. "You're married."

"Involved."

"And you're faithful?"

That stung a little, but Hardy let it go.

"As long as they don't find out," she said, "what's the problem? I don't tell Warren. He'd leave me and there goes not only him but my career, and I do love him. But love and sex-don't confuse 'em or you'll screw them both up."

A few days before, Hardy could have said he didn't confuse them, they went together. Maybe they still did with him, but he had some figuring out to do. "I'm here about Maxine and Ray."

"Are you with the police?"

"No."

"Were you involved with Maxine?"

This time Hardy laughed. "Not how you might interpret it, but it was with Rusty Ingraham."

"Was he a friend of yours?"

"Why do you ask it like that? Is it so unlikely?"

Courtenay looked Hardy up and down. "Uh huh. Very."

Hardy thought on that a minute. "He's dead."

"What?" Clearly shocked.

Hardy told her about it. He let some silence hang. Then, "The wrong guy might be getting blamed. And I could be mixed up in that."

"A friend of yours?"

"Not exactly. The police have this guy in custody. He'd threatened to kill me, too." Hardy told her why, but also said he no longer had anything to do with the police or the law.

"So what's the problem if he's in jail?"

Hardy lifted his beer can to his lips, found it empty and sat down on the steps. Courtenay sat next to him. "I guess I want to be sure I believe it. I saw the guy today and got the feeling he didn't know what I was talking about." He paused. "He didn't know Maxine was there."

"So why are you here?"

"Because if the guy they got didn't do it, somebody killed a friend of mine and nobody's looking for him."

"Or her."

Hardy picked up his empty can again, shook it, found it empty. He looked far up at her. "You want to tell me about Ray?"

She dug out another cigarette and lit it up. "What's to tell?"

"If he's the jealous type, for example."

She blew smoke at the ceiling. "It broke his heart, I'll say that."

"Maxine and Rusty?"

She nodded. "He couldn't put it anywhere. Like, it's gotta be over or not, right? I mean, Maxine's practically living with this new guy, she's moved out, what does Ray think? But he couldn't accept it. You see that shrine to her in there? All those pictures-I think every damn composite she ever had done-and even after she's dead?" She huddled into herself. "It's kind of freaky, isn't it?"

Hardy didn't know if that was freaky or not. What he wanted to know was whether Ray had ever said he was going to do anything about it. Go get her back. Like that.

Courtenay shook her head. "He had to acknowledge it first, and he wouldn't do that." She blew out smoke, remembering. "Every day, he'd come by while Warren and I were editing. Always started out in control, how's the film going, blah blah, and then he'd see some shots of Maxine and get stupid."

"Stupid?"

"Like talk to her as if she were there. Argue with her, try to talk her into coming back, ask her on dates. Weird. So finally it just got too much. I mean, we're trying to get a film cut here and it's pretty intense, and Ray comes in-I don't know, last week sometime-and Warren just cuts loose on him. Tells him to get the fuck out until he gets it settled. Go see her, figure out what's happening and deal with it." She stubbed out the butt on the landing.

"So then?"

"So he left, and next thing you know Maxine is dead."

"Killed with Ray's gun."

She turned her eyes on him. "Is that true?"

"He says he'd given it to her when she moved out-for protection."

She seemed to be wrestling with something. "Well, I don't know about that… And the police haven't arrested him?"

"They think they have a better suspect. I told you."

She took that in. "Wow. He must be a good one."

"A black guy on parole who'd threatened to kill Rusty, and whose fingerprints were at Rusty's place."

She digested that. "Yeah, that's pretty good all right. I didn't think Rusty could kill Maxine. Warren thinks he did but I just… I don't know…"

"Let's go see if we can find out," Hardy said.

It reminded Hardy of college, sitting on the floor after midnight. Van Morrison was playing softly on the stereo. The Lambada people had gone home. Now it was just Courtenay and Warren, him and Ray. The other three were smoking marijuana, which Hardy hadn't seen much of in recent years. He told them he had a lung condition.

They were all in a corner in candlelight, Warren and Courtenay nestled together into a beanbag chair, Ray and Hardy on the floor. Hardy had switched to water after his fourth beer, filling up the Silver Bullet can about half a dozen times.

The talk was about the movie business, minor league. Warren had gotten four or five investors together and raised close to $200,000, which by Hollywood standards, Warren said, wouldn't make a decent short but got the forty minutes of soft porn, featuring Maxine, they'd watched earlier. Ray's script was at least a credit and could help him get pitch-meetings with 'real' studios down in L.A. Warren gave Courtenay and himself a salary for directing and editing, and Warren got producer points, which probably explained his new clothes, the Movado watch and, Hardy surmised, his arm around Courtenay.

It was, Hardy saw, the entire world for these people. Everything was about could it work or not in a film.

Hardy stretched out on the floor. Courtenay put her foot on his, careful to make it seem casual. "Why's it always a 'film'? What ever happened to the good old movies?" Hardy asked. "I thought film was the stuff inside the camera."

Warren looked wounded. "No. Film is videotape, television. Jesus."

"Sorry."

"It's an important distinction," Ray said.

"Sure," Hardy agreed. "I get it. Film is for videotape. But tape is the film used to make a film. A real film, like a movie." Courtenay pressed his foot. "In the camera, I mean." Hardy figured he might be getting a little contact-high. He wiggled his toes.

"By Jove, I think he's got it," Courtenay said, playing Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.

There was silence between songs, then a low, soulful saxophone began wailing.

"Sounds like somebody crying," Ray said.

"Can you blame her?"

Ray sat up. "Who?"

Warren snorted. "Who else?"

"Hey, come on!"

"You killed her, Ray," Warren said. "You come on."

"She's not here!" Ray was pretty stoned. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Look around," Warren said. "She's more here than we are."

The saxophone crescendoed. Hardy found himself, like the others, staring at the many faces, bodies and poses of Maxine Weir. It was eerie. In the candlelight, occasionally a flicker would make an eye appear to blink, a cheek seem to twitch.

"I didn't," Ray said.

Courtenay rearranged herself. "He didn't," she said to Warren.

Warren shifted to stoke up another joint. "Come on. The brace was so obvious. I wouldn't never let that go in a film."

"What's obvious?" Ray asked.

"You might as well have told everybody it was you."