He popped his gum for Gunner’s benefit, his teeth working industriously behind a John Doe smile. “Take the name of your client, for example. If I were to ask you who you’re working for, you’d say a fine young thing by the name of Verna Gail, Dorris’s big sister, because you haven’t exactly been making it a secret and you’d figure that’s something I already know. And then, if I were to wonder where you were between the hours of one and four P.M. Thursday, you’d tell me about the dynamite book you took all day to read, tucked between the sheets of your bed at home with no one around to interrupt. Right? Am I right?”
Gunner was silent.
Poole laughed again. “Uncanny, isn’t it, how a dumb-shit cop like me always seems to know these things?”
“Uncanny,” Gunner agreed, dourly. “You ought to get yourself an agent, Lieutenant.”
“An agent? Naw. An agent would want me to take my act out on the road. Do Vegas, Atlantic City—go on a world tour, maybe. And that’s not for me. I’m just a simple joe, trying to make a living in a crazy world—same as you.
“I mean, hell, I don’t want to pin Townsend’s murder on you, Gunner. You didn’t kill anybody, I know that. So what if some grease monkey at an ARCO station says he gave you directions to Townsend’s place? So what if we did lift a few of your prints off the “can” in his bathroom? That’s no kind of evidence to take a man in on. Especially if the rap’s murder-one.”
He sat up in his chair and lowered his voice to something just above a whisper. “Trouble is, like I said, you’re all I’ve got. And a lot of people I know, people I work for, in fact, would say you’re more than good enough. Good enough for the department, good enough for the D.A.”
“But you don’t want to turn me over to the D.A.,” Gunner said, glaring at Poole with open contempt.
“No. Nobody’s turning the screws yet, why should I? For a few hours, at least, I’ve got time. Time to sit back, look around, and maybe find the real McCoy. That would be a kick, wouldn’t it?”
“It’d be a first, is what it would be.”
“Okay. Maybe so. But it’s the only shot you’ve got at spending your next twenty birthdays on the street, my man, and that’s straight from the fucking heart. Because unless somebody better comes along fast, I’m gonna make like a tailor and try Townsend’s murder on you for size. And if it fits, it fits. Case closed. You read me, brother?”
“Tell me what you want, Poole. Say it and get it over with, for Chrissake.”
“I want some help, goddammit. That’s what I want. I want to do the right thing, for once. Race relations in this country are the worst they’ve been in twenty-five years, and the heat’s driving everyone in this city nuts. Maybe it hasn’t exactly been this department’s policy to bust the right black people for homicides up to now, but I figure this is as intelligent a time to start as any. Because Townsend did kill Buddy Dorris—we found the murder weapon in the dumpster with his body—and whoever killed him is gonna be one hell of a popular guy with your people when we make an arrest.
“We grab the wrong guy, and anything could happen. The Fire Next Time, maybe. And I don’t want that on my conscience, such as it is.”
Gunner shrugged. “So?”
“So go home and make up your mind what you want to be for the rest of your life. An electrician or a private detective. You want to be an electrician, stay in bed and relax for a couple of days; another black-and-white’ll be dropping by the pad, sooner or later, to bring you in for good. You want to be a detective, on the other hand, start doing what detectives do and save your ass.”
He smiled, smacking his gum again. “You’ve got seventy-two hours. After that, you’re A.P.B. meat.”
Gunner stood up. “Am I supposed to say thanks, or something?”
Poole said, “You’re supposed to be a cop, for once in your life. Think you can do that?”
Gunner was halfway out of the cubicle when Poole called him back. “Oh, before I forget—just thought I’d ask—you still use that elephant gun you used to carry? The Special?”
Gunner shook his head. “Had to sell it some time back. To buy something frivolous like food, I think.”
The homicide detective got a big kick out of that, his gum flying around in his mouth like a numbered ball in a keno scrambler. “See? I did it again. I knew you were gonna say somethin’ like that.”
Gunner mumbled something deliberately unintelligible and walked away.
erna Gail had an apartment in a clean little building on Budlong Avenue between Century and Imperial, a late-model fortress with bars on the windows and a security gate, but nobody answered back when Gunner used the intercom out front to buzz her first-floor unit. For the third straight day, he tried it several times, forcing himself to be patient, but it didn’t get him anywhere; if he had any friends inside, they weren’t making it known.
It was Saturday. The Cobra had been out of the downtown storage garage he normally kept it in for three days now, and it needed a wash. The passenger seat would never be the same; Townsend’s blood was still in the leather, though the stains it left behind after Gunner’s vigorous scrubbing could no longer be easily recognized for what they were, barring forensic scrutiny. There was a car wash a few blocks away on Imperial at Normandie, but Gunner drove past it to the Church’s Fried Chicken stand on the opposite corner and dialed Verna’s number from a phone in the parking lot. The line wasn’t busy; as it had Thursday night and all day Friday, it rang in his ear like a broken alarm clock. He slapped the receiver back onto its cradle and tried something different, something, in retrospect, he should have tried sooner: he flipped through a dilapidated copy of the phone book for a listing for Buddy Dorris.
There were only two full pages of the “D” section left intact, but Buddy was on one of them: beside the name Dorris, Bud L. was an address falling along the 9200 block of Holmes Avenue on the edge of Watts, followed by a phone number Gunner started to dial, then decided not to use. He butchered the page ripping it out of the book and stuffed it into his pocket, reducing the book’s overall range of “D” listings to a certifiably worthless smidgen.
The Cobra had three kids in a freshly primered Chevrolet lowrider bouncing around on their seats as it rolled northbound on Wilmington toward the last home Buddy Dorris would ever know, but Gunner was too caught up in a mire of grim thought to notice, as he had been for the last forty-eight hours.
Somebody had set him up for Denny Townsend’s murder, and they hadn’t done it just to see a funny look come over his face. He wanted to believe that he alone was the target of the exercise, that there was a personal vendetta behind the frame that necessitated his specific involvement in it, but he knew that wasn’t the case. The objective had been Townsend’s execution, pure and simple, and Gunner had just been one of the tools the job required. Apparently, he was making quite a reputation for himself as a brainless instrument of the psychotic, a prize sucker with the smarts of a good bird dog and the net worth of a disposable razor, and he didn’t much like it.
He pushed into Watts and watched the surface of the streets deteriorate with his descent, the white concrete’s black tar repair scars playing a staccato beat against rubber as the convertible eagerly crushed them underfoot. To his way of thinking, pavement was as clear an indicator of a community’s well-being as anything that rested above it, and the mutilated tarmac maze of south-central Los Angeles was its most glaring badge of insolvency, a readily available reminder of poverty Gunner didn’t need, but could never quite ignore. It said something about the ghetto’s place in the heart of City Hall, about the great regard elected officials had for the safety and comfort of the poor, and it drove Gunner to review all the other things that were wrong with living on the short side of the dollar. Like cops who snatched men from their homes in the middle of cold showers to see more cops with questions and threats of life imprisonment, or black people who thought nothing of cutting a swath through their own kind just to appease whatever demons they were courting at th
e moment.
Demons like vengeance, for example.
When Gunner finally found Verna Gail, she was knee-deep in a mess someone else had left behind, in an apartment too small for most men to share with the rodents that lived there, and her frame of mind was not to his liking. He had hoped to find her in high spirits, was counting on a strain or two of her patented acerbic laughter to take his rage up and over the top, to make what he wanted to do a little easier to justify, but the wilted rag doll who failed to greet him at the door wasn’t going to be much fun to knock around.
Somebody, it seemed, had tumble-dried the contents of Buddy’s apartment, turning everything upside down and bouncing it off the walls for good measure. They hadn’t had much furniture to toy with, but what there had been they’d done a good job on. All that was left of it was a shredded couch lying on its back and a few piles of refuse sitting in the middle of the living room, intermingled puzzles with too many missing pieces to count. Record albums, books, a cheap stereo, and a small television were mixed in with the wreckage, mangled fragments of plastic and metal, glass, and newsprint.
It all made for an interesting distraction, but it had nothing to do with why Gunner was here.
Verna was sitting on the skeletal carcass of the overturned couch when he invited himself in. She was staring at a wall that held nothing of interest to the naked eye but a discolored patch of plaster. Mascara was splashed across her face like war paint and her hair was a jumbled wreck. He tried to wait for her to come around, but it was like waiting for the heat to give up and go away.
“Hey,” he said, simply.
She looked up, startled. The orbs of her eyes flashed white in the darkness, lightning against a black summer sky.
“We need to talk,” Gunner said.
She looked at him with the same level of interest she had shown for the patch of plaster on the wall, but with considerably less respect. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “I never gave you this address.”
“It’s in the book. You’ve been here since Thursday night?”
“I’ve been in and out. What’s it to you?”
“You can’t guess?”
“I don’t want to guess. And I don’t want to talk. Or can’t you see I’m a little busy right now?”
He was on top of her before she had a chance to react, drawing her to her feet. The grip he held on her left bicep she wasn’t going to break in a lifetime. “This shit can wait. Our business can’t. I want to know who killed the white boy for you, Verna. And where I can find him.”.
“What?”
“You’ve only got ten seconds. Keep fucking around.” Standing only inches from her face, he pulled on her arm, hard.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“You told me to my face you’d kill the poor bastard, and like a moron I shrugged it off. You’d get your chance, you said. Maybe at the trial. Only you weren’t up to the wait, were you?”
“No! You’re crazy!”
“Crazy’s got nothing to do with it! What I am is scared shitless. I’ve never pulled a day in a state cage and I’m not going to pull any now. Tell me what I want to know, Verna. Who killed the white boy for you?”
“Nobody! I didn’t even know he was dead!” She jerked away from him all at once, with everything she had, and he allowed her to slip from his grasp. His fingers had left an imprint on her skin, and she stood there working to erase it, her gaze trying to cut him in half.
“I wasn’t the only friend of Buddy’s looking for that white boy! Everybody and their mother was trying to find him. He could’ve been wasted by anybody!”
Gunner’s merciless glare was more than equal to hers. “‘Anybody’ didn’t hire me to take the fall for it. You did.”
She shook her head, still rubbing her arm. “I hired you to find the man, that’s all. Not to play you or anybody else for a fool. I’d’ve put a bullet in his head, given the chance, hell yes, but only if I could take the credit for it. Buddy was my brother, not yours.
“Only I never got the chance. You never gave me the chance. Because you let somebody else find him first—didn’t you?”
She laughed, finally, daring him to challenge her right to view him as a joke, and won out. Gunner didn’t move.
“But maybe I shouldn’t complain. You told me you were lousy, and I wouldn’t listen. I thought you were just being modest.”
“You’re full of shit,” Gunner said, reaching for her again.
She backed away, out of his range. “Believe what you want to believe. I’ve told you what I know, and that’s the best I can do for you. If the cops want to think you killed the white boy, that’s your problem, not mine.”
“Is that right.”
“Yeah. That’s right. That was you out there beatin’ the bushes for him, not me.”
“You’re confused, sister. And your memory’s failing you. I beat the bushes for the man, all right, but I didn’t have any motive to kill him. I didn’t give a shit about Buddy or the Brothers of Volition, I’m as apolitical as a guy can get. But I’ve come upon some lean times lately, that’s a matter of record, and when some broad with a great body and a fistful of money showed up in my kitchen a few days ago to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse …”
“What offer? I didn’t hire you to kill anybody!”
“Didn’t you?”
It was Gunner’s turn to laugh. He threw his head back as she came at him with her nails extended, and he caught her wrists, one in each hand, before she could get to his eyes. She thrust a knee up at his groin, but he blocked it with his thigh and shoved her aside, releasing her arms. She backpedaled a few steps and her right hand found the canvas back of a broken director’s chair sitting nearby. The chair was up over her head before he could stop her and the best he could do was shield his face with his left forearm as she brought it down on him, putting all her weight behind the blow.
He had been driving himself toward her when the chair disintegrated around his head, and he groped blindly for her throat as his momentum carried him forward, finding her face instead. His left hand held her head in a vise, its fingers splayed wide across her features, as his right looped up to hover, trembling, beside his ear, torqued into a fist coiled to strike.
Verna’s eyes shut tight as Gunner let it go.
A framed Time magazine cover of the Reverend Jesse Jackson exploded on the wall behind her, just over her left shoulder. She felt a spray of glass shards at the back of her neck and moved away, squinting, no longer bound by his left hand. The frame dropped to the floor like the blade of a guillotine and was still. Gunner’s right hand was covered in blood.
He was shaking. She watched him stand there, bleeding profusely, and grimaced. He let her look and said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally, shrugging.
He took a step toward her and brushed the knuckles of his right hand across the yellow front of her blouse, smearing it with blood.
“So am I,” he said.
She leaned forward and kissed him, hard. His response was immediate, surprising them both. He was erect when her hand found him, and his breathing was labored, short. He moved his mouth down the nape of her neck and peeled her ruined blouse open, slipping his right hand into the left cup of her bra to ease the full, heavy mound of her breast into the open. The dark flesh of the nipple was hard with arousal even before he brought his lips down around it.
The hand she was using to explore him paused in its vigorous work abruptly, as she lost herself in the playful teasing of his tongue and teeth, and she reached up to free her right breast for him, stroking the nipple to attention with her own hand until he was ready for it. Her breathing, too, had changed its rhythm, dramatically.
“The bedroom,” she said, forcefully, and she only had to say it once.
He took her up in his arms and followed her directions to Buddy’s bed.
Several hours later, they turned the couch up off its back onto the two legs it had lef
t, retrieved its ravaged cushions from various parts of the room, and sat down to talk. Verna found some beer in the kitchen and brought them both an open bottle. There was no mention of a truce, but that, in effect, was what they were trying. It seemed like the thing to do.
“What happened here?” Gunner asked, surveying the wreckage of Buddy’s apartment. The fresh bandage on his right hand was growing damp with a crimson stain.
Verna sipped her beer and shook her head. “I don’t know. A break-in, I guess.”
“When?”
“I’m not sure. This is how I found it yesterday morning, the first I’d been here since the night before Buddy died. It could have happened Thursday, or Wednesday—or two weeks ago, for all I know.”
“You talk to any of the neighbors? Maybe somebody heard it go down.”
“No, I didn’t. But I could ask around, I guess.”
“Anything missing? Would you know it if there were?”
“You mean like valuables? Money, jewelry—things like that?”
Gunner shrugged. “Anything.”
She did a quick inventory of the room, said, “Not that I can tell. What you see is pretty much what he had. A few chairs, some records, a handful of books. That cheap-ass stereo.”
“Then they didn’t take anything.”
“No. I don’t think so. Does that mean something?”
Gunner shrugged again. “Probably not.”
“Then why all the questions?”
“Force of habit.”
“You don’t think this was a burglary, do you?”
“It may have started out as a burglary, sure. But thieves don’t usually trash a place like this unless …”
“Unless what?”
Gunner looked at her. The blood on her blouse had dried a dark brown. “Unless something goes wrong. Something happens to set them off and they take it out on the furniture.”
Verna shook her head. “You’re not making any sense,” she said.
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