Was that it?

Hardy got up, walked around his desk and opened the window in his office. It was after one o’clock and a light warm breeze freshened the room. He stuck his head out to smell the roses, only there weren’t any roses around.

Sitting again, he studied what he’d written. Okay, then, impressions. Rusty down and out. Using public transport. Saying he’d called the warden and was told that Louis Baker had cleaned up his act and not buying that. Saying that guns were for ‘cop types’ like Hardy. Then saying he wanted to buy a gun.

Had the idea just occurred to him? The switch in attitude from guns being for cop types to wanting one for himself?

It slowed Hardy down. Rusty had taken a bus out from downtown. Hardy could imagine him devising his phonecall protection idea, finding where Hardy worked from any number of old mutual acquaintances. But none of that was acting scared-it was more like caution. Rusty hadn’t really been frightened. He had been planning to go home. Hell, he had gone home.

But calling San Quentin to find out exactly when Baker was getting released? That, to Hardy, was more than caution. That appeared to be fear. Didn’t it?

He stared out the window, back down to his notes. There were two mentions of things he’d found out from the warden at San Quentin-the circumstances surrounding Louis’s release and the fact that Louis had been a model prisoner. If Rusty had called out of fear, to find out exactly when he had to start worrying harder, would he have gotten into a discussion at the same time about what kind of guy Louis had become? If you’re tied to the tracks and a train is on the way, do you think about whether it’s a passenger or a freight?

He must have, or probably might have, called San Quentin two times. So what?

Hardy looked at his silent phone. He wasn’t doing anything else. He spoke to four functionaries, perhaps prisoners, before he got to the warden, Jack Hazenkamp.

Hardy had met Hazenkamp a couple of times in his prosecutor days, seen him speak on prison conditions, recidivism rates, the usual. He was a guy who seemed to have spent a lot of time in the military, but during his talks Hardy had found him surprisingly-well, not exactly a liberal, but fairly sympathetic. The cons were his charges, he didn’t mollycoddle them, but they were by and large people, not statistics.

Hardy, had gotten through to him by telling the various intermediaries that he was an attorney (true enough), and it was about Louis Baker. He sat at his desk, his yellow notepad pulled in front of him.

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.”