But Rusty Ingraham was missing, dead. That wasn’t a trick. He had been at home, forewarned even, and Louis Baker had found a way to get to him.

Hardy was sure Louis would also find a way to get to him.

He kept driving, not knowing where he was going.

Chapter Six

Why are you still working?”

The coffee was beyond good-Graffeo’s best made in an espresso machine. Hardy, still pretty tired after a rough night on Frannie’s couch, was dressed in the clothes he’d arrived in a little after 2:00 A.M. He looked over the steaming mug at Frannie Cochran.

The last time he had seen her, her husband’s death was still strangling her.

Four months ago it had been strangling everybody. Especially because it had looked at first as though Eddie Cochran-twenty-five, idealistic, happily married with a just-pregnant wife, on his way to Stanford Business School in the fall-had killed himself.

But neither Moses nor Hardy had been able to believe it, and they wanted to make sure Frannie got her quarter million dollars in insurance if Eddie had been killed. Moses had offered Hardy twenty-five percent of the Shamrock if he could pretend he was a cop again and prove Eddie had not killed himself. Which Hardy had done.

And getting involved with Eddie’s death had done something for Hardy, too. His original life goal had not been to bartend at an Irish place in San Francisco. He, like Eddie Cochran, had once burned with idealism, with notions of good works. But the flame had died down, along with his law career and his marriage to Jane, in the aftermath of his son’s death. When Michael was seven months old Hardy had left the sides of his crib halfway down on the first night the child was able to pull himself up. The fall to the floor was about four feet. Michael landed on his head.

Afterward, Hardy had dropped out, damned if he was going to care about things if they were going to hurt that bad. Moses McGuire, whose life Hardy had saved in Vietnam, had taken him on as a bartender at the Shamrock, and years had passed, one after another, all pretty much the same.

Until, that is, Eddie died. Until Eddie had been killed. And finding out about it, having to care, had jump-started something in Hardy. Even as it had killed something in Frannie.

But now she was looking alive again, blooming. Literally. The baby she was carrying barely showed in her belly. She wasn’t wearing maternity clothes yet, though Hardy knew she was nearly five months along. First pregnancies could be like that. Jane had been the same way with Michael. There had been no obvious body change except bigger breasts for almost six months and then whammo, the stomach popped out and everything became more real right away.

Hardy took Frannie in, her red hair washed and gleaming, green eyes squinting as she sipped her own decaf. She had taken to using light makeup around her eyes, some lipstick. Her cheeks had filled out from the hollow carved by her grief, and now she appeared to laugh easily again, as she had before. She laughed now.

“And what would I do if I didn’t work, then?”

“Eat bonbons. Watch soap operas. Go shopping. Be a woman of leisure.”

“Nice view of womanhood.”

“Okay, how about become an astronaut, run for Congress, conduct Mahler’s Fifth.”

“Better.”

“But you’re pregnant. You should take it a little easy until after the baby’s born.”

“If I take it too easy I’ll get fat.”

“Well, you’re gonna anyway.”

She pouted at him. “I will not be fat. I will be pregnant. There is a difference, Mr Hardy, and I’ll thank you to remember it.”

Hardy looked at her nonexistent stomach. “Sorry, baby,” he said to it, reaching over and patting.

She put her hand over his and held it there a second. “I almost don’t believe it still,” she said. “If it would kick or something. There’s no other sign…”

Hardy took his hand away and his eyes rested for a second on her breasts. “Yes there is,” he said.

She laughed, embarrassed, sipped at her coffee. “I don’t know. I guess I just decided to keep working until it’s born. It’s nice not to need the money, but I want to keep busy. If I get too much time to think…”

Hardy knew what too much time to think could do. Frannie had gotten nearly a quarter million dollars from Eddie’s life insurance. She was twenty-five years old. There would be time not to work if she wanted that.

Hardy reached out and patted her hand again. “And now a houseguest to boot.”

“I’m sorry about the couch,” she said.

“The couch is fine.”

“And you’re really in trouble, aren’t you?”

Hardy shook his head. “Not trouble. Maybe a little danger. It’s why I need a place nobody would think to look for me.”

“And it’s also why you have a gun with you.”

“That too.”

Frannie put down her mug. “It’s still hard for me to believe people just get up in the morning intending to go and shoot somebody.”

Hardy nodded.

“And you’re sure this man…?”

“Louis Baker.”

“Louis Baker. You’re sure he killed your friend?”

Hardy worked it around for the time it took him to swallow his coffee, nodded again. “Yep.”

“Then why didn’t Abe Glitsky go arrest him yesterday?”

Hardy had thought about that a lot last night. Why hadn’t Abe just gone down and taken him off the streets? It worried him, but he said only that Abe had told him that there were other suspects.

“But couldn’t he arrest more than one person and question them all?”

Hardy shook his head. “They don’t like to arrest people unless they charge them. Abe said my suspicions weren’t evidence.”

“Well, isn’t there any? Evidence I mean.”

“I don’t know. It’ll turn up.”

“And you’re sure he did it?”

They were sitting at a teak table in a round breakfast nook off the kitchen. Hardy looked past Frannie, down the hill, to a school-bus stop at the corner. A dozen or so students were milling around-mostly black kids. For a moment, Hardy wondered if his certainty about Baker might possibly have to do with his color. There were other possibilities, things that might’ve happened there on Rusty’s barge. But the probability, the overwhelming probability, was Baker. Hardy didn’t base his suspicions on Baker’s race. Hell, Glitsky was half-black, and Abe was one of his best friends. He had to smile at that-“Some of my best friends…”

“Dismas?”

She saw the smile lines fade around his eyes. He came back to her, refocusing. “Sorry. Went away for a minute.”

“You see something?”

“Yeah, I saw a bunch of kids down there and wondered if I was getting to be a racist. But then I thought about Baker, who is nothing like you or me or them.”

Frannie had been raised by her brother Moses and had known Hardy since Moses had gotten back from Vietnam. Hardy had saved Moses’ life over there. She had sat on his lap when she was twelve and thirteen, fantasizing about her brother’s friend, Dismas the hero, now a policeman, handsome in his pressed blue uniform. Then Hardy had gone on to law school and become an assistant district attorney. He’d gotten married and had a child with Jane Fowler, then the boy had died and Hardy had gotten divorced, quit his job and had been around more, first drinking at Moses’ place, the Little Shamrock, then becoming a bartender there.

That’s when she had gotten to know him again, stopping in for a beer at the Shamrock to visit Moses. And had it not been for the “keep off” sign he had worn like a badge, she might have started fantasizing again. But instead she turned him into a litmus test. She would not date a guy twice unless he was “at least as good a man as Dismas Hardy,” she told her college girlfriends. And she’d found one-Eddie Cochran-and she had married him. And lost him…

She stared across the table at the worried face, so different than Eddie’s had been. Hardy’s face had lines and creases and whole chapters of his life on it. She thought now it was more interesting than handsome. But he was like Eddie-or Eddie had been like him-both worried so much about doing the right thing, about good motives. Dismas would never put it that way, but Frannie knew him, and that’s what it was.