Maybe, four, five months ago, looking into the death of Frannie’s husband, he’d come to believe, after years of denying the possibility, that one person-he, Dismas Hardy-could make a difference. And that it even mattered.

Else why was he down here?

Back to old Abe’s tragic fallacy. Did he think he was down here to restore order to the cosmos? He had to laugh at that. But if Rusty Ingraham was here, he was going to bust his ass in a bad way. And he was going to get the charges dropped against Baker-the ones he’d influenced.

That was his mission. It was something Frannie might yell at him about. She might even hate him from time to time for being made up like that. But at least Frannie would know where he was coming from. He was, she said, like Eddie that way.

To Jane, the concept would be Greek.

Come on, Diz, was that fair?

Jane would understand it on a theoretical level. She would admit that the world might be better if everybody always did the right thing. Of course. But there were issues everywhere you looked, and you had to decide which ones were yours. And that decision had to be based on some kind of a cost-benefit analysis. Adults understood that. You didn’t just go off and crusade your whole life. If you did, you were a professional do-gooder, and everybody knew they didn’t get much done, did they?

But he wasn’t crusading his whole life. He just wanted to get this one thing straightened out. It had been pushed in his face-it was his issue.

And he could hear Jane’s answer to that. Why take the risk? If you did nothing, what would it matter? So what, Louis Baker is in jail-he deserves to be. Didn’t he break into my house? Wasn’t he trying to kill you? And if Rusty Ingraham is gone, let him go. Who cares? He’s gone, it’s over.

But Jane, he killed Maxine Weir.

I’m sorry. Police business. Not yours. Let it go…

He had come up to the stadium, deserted and empty, and looked at his watch. The first game wouldn’t be for a couple of hours. He shook his head-bad timing-and backtracked toward town.

He had sat outside under an awning at a place he had passed coming out. The Tecate had been warm, impossible to swallow even with lime. He had read a Los Angeles Times, two days old, cover to cover.

He had still felt hopeful. He was here. He would find Rusty Ingraham. He would go home and explain things to Jane. He would tell Frannie he was in love with her, and what did she want to do about it?

But all that had been before he had gone to the stadium. Now, the afternoon behind him, he kicked palm fronds and tried to remember why he had thought he would be able to locate one person here.

The jai alai stadium was nowhere near as big as Candlestick Park, but Hardy guessed it still held maybe fifteen thousand people. It was certainly a good-time place. Hardy was surprised no one he knew had ever tried to put together a jai alai field trip. Beer and tequila were everywhere. Outside the gate fifty-gallon oil drums had been cut in half and set up for grilling, covered with everything from what looked like braided coat hangers to corrugated iron, piled high with shrimp, snapper, chorizo, mounds of green onions, peppers, mystery meats. Slap it in a tortilla and pour on salsa, who knew or cared? It was a fantastic, reeking bonanza of smells and smoke, and Hardy, chewing a shrimp burrito, walked through it, mingling, taking it in.

Inside, the place was packed. The first disappointment, and it was major, was that there weren’t any windows for betting. Hardy cursed himself for not doing his homework. He had just assumed…

Well, there was no help for it now. The way it worked in jai alai was that each section had two runners, or bookies, or whatever they were called-one in a red hat and one in a green hat. They moved up and down the stands almost like peanut vendors in the States, calling out the constantly changing odds, throwing some kind of ball to prospective bettors, who put their money in a slot in the ball and took out the chit with the current line.

So Hardy’s original idea of waiting by a window for Rusty to show up looked bleak. He took in the stadium. All through the stands the red and green hats bobbed and zagged. Following any one of them would be a job.

Hardy watched a game or two, hoping against hope that being lucky might make up for not being smart, that Rusty would just pop out of the crowd, maybe bump into him.

He found that he liked the game a lot. Real mano a mano stuff. Handball with no rules about interference or much else. Couple of gladiators playing to the death.

Up at Seguridad he had thought of having Rusty paged when he realized it was a stupid idea… If Rusty was here and heard his name he would also know someone didn’t think he was dead. He would relocate and it would be all over.

Two more hours, five bottles of orange pop, and thirty-five dollars that he bet on the last couple of games went down the drain. The stadium emptied and Hardy stood by one of the dozen or so gates. A lot of people walked by him. Two of them resembled Moses McGuire. None of them looked like Rusty Ingraham.

Okay, he’d watch the famous Acapulco cliff divers…

All right, now he’d done that. Now what?

He found himself back at the Esplanade. A tiny strip of coral sky still clung to the horizon, and already there were a million stars. Well-dressed Americans-mostly couples, or maybe that was only Hardy’s vision of it-sat with aperitifs at outside tables. The breeze had changed, blowing out across the town toward the water. The night smelled faintly of oil and urine.

Hardy sat on the beach, facing away from the lights. He could hear the lap of water across the sand. Behind him there was always guitar music, male voices singing, softly, far away.

They had jai alai in Las Vegas, Nevada. There was a stadium in Tijuana about a thousand miles closer to home and still across the border. Puerto Vallarta, maybe. Oaxaca? Ixtapa? Who knew how many places?

If Rusty was here, and he was starting to think that was a pretty big if, and if he was going regularly to bet on jai alai, then Hardy would still need to have at least one person at every gate if he wanted some reasonable chance to get him.

There was no way. He didn’t have that kind of money and he didn’t know anybody. Maybe Abe could get the local police involved, send down a picture of Rusty…

Right, Diz. Count on that one.

He lay back into the sand, crossing his hands under his head, staring up at the man in the moon.

The El Sol wasn’t anywhere near the beach. Beyond the street-front lobby each ground-floor unit on both wings of the hotel had sliding glass doors that opened onto a red-tiled terrace that looked out on the pool. More bougainvillea climbed the filigreed wrought-iron to the second-floor walkway. Palms and banana trees, spared by location from most of the wrath of the hurricane, dotted the inner courtyard.

Hardy sat outside on his terrace with a rare cigar and a bottle of El Presidente brandy. He wasn’t really drinking -he’d poured an inch into the juice glass from the bathroom about forty minutes before and half of it was still there. He’d been in Mexico enough to know that, all clichés notwithstanding, you really didn’t drink the water. And he was sick of orange pop.

Since one of the advertised features of the El Sol-in neon over the door of the lobby-was a telephone in every room, Hardy had a telephone. He also had a television set. The fact that neither worked didn’t surprise him very much. He thought it might be fun someday to settle down here in Mexico and open a luxury hotel-Ice machines! Pinball! Cable TV! Magic fingers! And, of course, telephone. None of them would have to work. The fact that you had them made you special.

He had some luck calling San Francisco earlier from the pay phones near the post office. He got Jane’s answering machine and told her where he was, that he might get back in a week. The cryptic and enigmatic Hardy.