Good Man Gone Bad

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “Yeah, that’s Rip.” She smiled at Gunner’s uncle, who was obviously smitten. “I mean, his name’s really Robert, Robert Jackson, but we’ve been calling him Rip ever since Pharaoh said he looks like Rip Black Winkle.” She started to laugh. “On account’a that beard, right? Rip Black Winkle!”

  She threw her head back and let the laugh go, too amused to do anything else. Jackson’s black beard was in deed a marvel, long and pointed and unruly, but Gunner wasn’t sure the moniker Pharaoh Doubleday had saddled him with was deserving of this much mirth.

  “And what do they call you?” Daniel Curry asked.

  “Me? I’m Evelyn. But some people call me Evie.”

  “Evie? That’s all?”

  “What do you mean, is that all?” She propped a hand on a hip and grinned, ignited by the old man’s flirting. “What do you think they should call me?”

  “Evelyn,” Gunner cut in. Partly out of embarrassment for his uncle and partly because something about this conversation had just become vitally important and he needed to figure out what it was. “This is Del’s father Daniel Curry. He and his wife came down from Atlanta for the funeral.”

  Evelyn’s face fell. The exact reaction Gunner had been hoping for. “Oh. I’m so sorry. I loved Del. We all did.”

  Properly deflated, as was also Gunner’s intent, Daniel Curry took her proffered hand. “Thank you.”

  Gunner gave the woman a look, distracted to the point of annoyance now, and she caught its meaning instantly. She eased her hand free from the grasp of Gunner’s uncle and said, “Well, it was nice meeting you. Have a pleasant evening.”

  She hurried off.

  “That was rather rude, Aaron.”

  “Why did you ask her that? What people call her?”

  “It was an innocent question.” Del’s father sipped his drink. Gunner waited for him to finish. “Beetle. Rip. Pharaoh. Seems like everyone in this place has one nickname or another. I just thought, someone as attractive as that young woman is—”

  “Wait.” Gunner raised a hand to silence his uncle in mid-sentence. “Hold on a minute.”

  He withdrew the printed contact and call log lists he’d had in his pocket all day and began to pore over the one the LAPD had downloaded from Zina’s phone first. He was looking for one name, in particular, and he found it.

  “Shit.”

  Del’s father leaned in, trying to see what it was that had his nephew so agitated. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Gunner moved on to the second list, the one the cops had taken off Del’s phone. The name was different here, but the phone number was the same.

  He dropped his head, riding the fine line between astonishment and disgust. The contempt he’d been reserving for Zina alone over the deaths of her parents had just changed hands.

  “Aaron,” Daniel Curry tried again.

  “Sorry, Uncle. But I can’t explain right now.” He stood up from the table, jammed the printouts back into his pocket. “Looks like I’ve got some midnight oil to burn.”

  Later that night, he went back to Zina’s, armed with the spare set of keys he had neglected to take from her parents’ home nine days ago. Noelle’s Buick Encore was still on the street where he last saw it, her purse undisturbed on the passenger seat within.

  With one eye open for an ambush should his friend Gordito spot him rooting around in the dark, he used the key on the chain emblazoned with a Buick logo to unlock the Encore’s doors, then slipped inside the car. He turned on the interior dome light, reached into Noelle’s purse, and pulled out a large Motorola smartphone in a rubberized pink case. He tried to turn it on, hoping his luck would hold, but it wasn’t to be: the battery was dead. He’d have to recharge it to complete the object of his mission here.

  He fumbled around in the Encore’s center console, found Noelle’s charger and cable, and beat a hasty retreat.

  The next morning, Viola Gates parked her car in the open lot of Del’s office building to find Gunner waiting for her. She’d received a call an hour earlier from someone who identified himself as a Detective Richardson from the LAPD, asking her to come, but that had just been Mickey Moore doing Gunner a solid.

  “He really put his heart and soul into that, didn’t he?” Gunner asked, nodding at the scratch Glenn Hopp had inflicted upon Gates’s Honda at Holy Cross Cemetery two days before. He had planned his approach so that she wouldn’t see him coming, and she visibly jumped at the sound of his voice.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Detective Richardson won’t be coming. He sent me in his place.”

  She started to get back in the car, but he barred her way, setting his feet to deliver the clear message that he wasn’t going to be moved. “I know what you did, Viola. And I can tell it right here with just you listening or I can put it on blast. Is that what you want?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You did plenty. Starting with falling for a man who couldn’t keep his joint in his pants if his fly were sewn shut.”

  She tried to push past him. “Let me go!”

  He grabbed her by both arms, his grip a vise, prepared to make this as ugly as she wanted it to be. “Somebody set Zina off last Monday by telling her that her mother had been sleeping around on her father. She got Del’s gun from the office and called Noelle down to her crib to confront her about it.”

  “Let go of me!”

  “She didn’t expect Del would show up, too, but he did, probably because Noelle urged him to come, thinking Zina intended to commit suicide, not murder. And you know what happened after that.”

  “I don’t know anything! Let me go, I said!” She managed to pull one arm free. An old man stepping out of a blue Ford he’d just parked nearby gave them a long look, then went on into the building.

  “You were the one who set Zina off, Viola. You told her about Noelle’s affair. Because it wasn’t just some random stranger she slept with, was it? It was your man Glenn. He wasn’t happy just doing Del’s daughter and office assistant, he had to fuck his wife, too.”

  Gunner had only become sure of this himself last night, after all of Daniel Curry’s talk about nicknames at the Deuce had inspired him to look for and find one among the list of contacts the LAPD had pulled from Zina’s phone: Bunny. Not Buddy, as Noelle’s girlfriend Iris Miller had mistakenly recalled, but Bunny—as in rabbit. As in Hopp. Someone whose phone number matched that of Del’s former assistant in Del’s own cell phone contact list.

  “You don’t know anything,” Zina had told him at the hospital, laughing at his stupidity, when he’d asked her who Buddy was. But now he was in on the joke.

  Davis ripped her other arm loose and staggered back a step, trembling with rage. “Yes, he fucked her. Once! Because her husband wouldn’t touch her anymore and he felt sorry for her. He only did what she practically begged him to do.”

  “And is that how you saw it that Monday, when you called Zina to tell her all about it?”

  “What call? I didn’t call anybody.”

  “Get off it. I’ve got Noelle’s phone and the call logs off Zina’s. You don’t think I recognize your number when I see it?”

  “So what if I called her? How was I supposed to know what that little bitch would do?” Her eyes grew wet and her voice started to quaver. “All I wanted was for her to leave us alone! She’s the one to blame for what happened, not me. All I did….” She choked on the denial, tried to offer it again. “All I did was tell her the truth.”

  “The truth? What, that the man she’s in love with is a dog?”

  “Yes! He’s a dog who doesn’t love her, or me, or anybody else. We’re all just meat to his sorry ass, and so was her mother!”

  She saw the look come over Gunner’s face and realized what she’d said, what kind of monster she sounded like. “Oh, no. I didn’t….” Gunner just glowered back at her. “Please. I never meant Mr. Curry or his wife any harm. I was angry and I didn’t think. If I could go back—”

  �
��You can’t,” Gunner said, his words a hammer striking a nail. He stepped aside to clear her path to the car. “All you can do is live with it. If you can.”

  He doubted that she could, and the thought gave him the strength to walk away without doing to her what he’d done to Glenn Hopp, less than an hour before.

  25

  IT ALL CAME POURING OUT of Zina eventually, as Gunner had known it must. She was selfish and immature, and just dumb enough to convince her uncle that Glenn Hopp would not be the last sexual sociopath she would trust with her heart; but she wasn’t a monster. She had feelings, and love for both her departed parents, and she had borne the guilt of what she’d done to pave the way for their deaths until she couldn’t bear it in silence any longer.

  Her grandmother was the first to hear the story in full. Daniel Curry was still keeping his distance from the girl, not trusting himself to remain calm in the face of any more of her lies, so he wasn’t in her hospital room when she finally came clean.

  By her own account, things had gone down pretty much as Gunner suspected.

  She had received a phone call Monday morning from a livid Viola Gates, who had taken much pleasure in informing her that the man they both loved had slept with Noelle Curry. It was an outrageous claim, surely a falsehood invented by Gates to drive a wedge between Zina and Glenn Hopp; but to Zina’s astonishment and outrage, her mother could not convincingly deny it when Zina called her to pose the accusation. And neither could Hopp.

  Half out of her mind with jealousy, Zina retrieved her father’s gun from his office and demanded a meeting with Noelle at Zina’s home, intending to both terrorize the truth out of her mother and rub her face in her incredible hypocrisy. The thought that their exchange might end in someone getting hurt, let alone killed, never entered Zina’s mind. And the last thing she expected was for Noelle to invite poor Del to the party.

  By the time Zina’s father arrived, his wife had confessed all to their daughter and was pleading for her forgiveness. Beside herself with anger and grief, Zina was still holding the gun and threatening to use it, on herself if not Noelle. Del tried to force the issue and a struggle for the gun—first between him and the two women, then between the two women alone—ensued. The weapon went off three times, two bullets striking Noelle and one wounding Zina.…

  And that was the last thing Zina could remember, prior to waking up in the ICU at Harbor UCLA Hospital a day later.

  The immensity of the tragedy she’d triggered, inadvertently or otherwise, was becoming clearer to her by the day. There was no way of getting around it. But it wasn’t her decision to steal Del’s handgun from his office to use as leverage against her mother that she regretted most. It was calling Noelle to her home that fateful morning, rather than Hopp. He was the one she should have threatened at gunpoint, not her mother, and if the man she called Bunny had lost his life that day, in the same way or worse….Well, that would have been poetic justice.

  As for Del, and why he’d tried to shoulder the blame for everything that happened that day, Zina could offer little insight, other than to second what Gunner had been saying all along: that that was simply who Del was. A good and kind man who would have gone to any length to protect his wife and daughter. Their lives, their reputations. Maybe it had been his hope that, in confessing to a crime he didn’t commit, then taking his own life, he’d be closing any inquiries into the shooting before Noelle’s affair with Glenn Hopp, or Zina’s role in her mother’s killing, could be revealed to the world. Why would the police look past the obvious, put his family’s darkest secrets out there for all to see in a search for suspects and motives, if he gave them their killer from the jump? Just one more crazy nigger with money problems gone off the rails. In the present state of the nation, what could be more believable than that?

  The irony was not lost on Gunner that Del would have very likely had his way were it not for his cousin. Detectives Luckman and Yee of the LAPD had been well prepared to start and stop their investigation into the shooting at Zina’s home last Monday with Del; Gunner was the only one determined to dig deeper. He now had all the answers to the hows and whys of Del’s death he’d been seeking, but they had come at the price of knowing his cousin surely slept no easier as a result of his meddling.

  Ignorance was never bliss, but sometimes, it was the far lesser of two evils.

  Early Friday morning, Gunner went down to Venice Beach to watch a seventy-four-year-old Jewish white man surf. He pulled his shoes and socks off, walked down to the edge of the water, and sat in an old beach chair to enjoy the show, the sun still in hiding behind a shield of gray. The ocean spray felt cool on his face and he couldn’t help but laugh, seeing the old man ride the modest two-foot waves as easily as a child riding a bike, his black wet suit fitted to his wiry frame like a second skin.

  Again and again, the old man climbed atop his board and rode a churning wave inland, then dragged it back out to catch another, until Gunner closed his eyes and nearly drifted off to sleep, the rise and fall of the surf providing a gentle lullaby.

  Finally, Ziggy Zeigler came in out of the water, dwarfed by the eight-foot surfboard at his side.

  “You should come out with me sometime, Aaron. There’s nothing else like it in the world.”

  “Aerialists say the same thing about the trapeze. I think my time has passed for both.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Was there some other reason you called me out here today, other than to encourage me to take up water sports?”

  His lawyer set his board down and sat cross-legged in the sand, striking a pose befitting a Hebrew Gandhi. “I need you to tell me again what happened to our friend Glenn Hopp Wednesday.”

  “I told you. I went to his crib to ask him some questions. He was reluctant to answer them, so I offered him a strong inducement to do so.”

  “You kicked his teeth in.”

  “Actually, I made it a point to leave his teeth intact, but a physical altercation did take place, yes.”

  “Can we make the argument that he threw the first punch?”

  “Not with a clear conscience, but there’s no one but Hopp to refute that assertion, and I’m pretty sure he’s not what most juries would call a reliable witness. I take it you’ve heard from his attorneys?”

  “He only has the one. She called me late yesterday. I’m supposed to see papers by early next week.”

  “They’re bluffing, Ziggy.”

  “Maybe. Hard to make an assault case stick when no police report was filed. But I’m going to keep an eye on my mailbox Monday, just to be on the safe side.”

  “And if they do file?”

  “We’ll do what we always do. Pull your sorry ass out of the fire.”

  Ziggy had spoken to him like that since the day they met, twenty-six years ago. He had only been forty-eight back then, and still it had sounded funny as hell, this old Jew from Encino, built like a steel I-beam, talking like a black cop ten years on the Compton beat.

  “I’m worried about you, kid.”

  “You’re always worried about me.”

  Gunner had closed his eyes again. The sun was starting to melt through the haze and the sand felt soft and smooth between his toes. Ziggy let him have his little moment.

  “Yeah, but this time it’s different. Mickey and Lilly do what they can, but Del was the one I could always count on to keep you from falling into every open grave you dig for yourself. He was your friend and he was family, and the truth is, I’m not sure how much longer you can stay in the game without him around to watch over you.”

  “So maybe it’s time I got out of the game.”

  “If I thought you could, I’d suggest it. Seems to me I already have, and more than once. But you don’t know anything else besides being a P.I., and it gives you too much perverse satisfaction to walk away from it.”

  Gunner opened his eyes again. “You sound like a man arguing with himself, Ziggy.”

  “I’m not arguing with anybody. I’m just sayi
ng: I don’t know what happens to you now that Del’s gone. So I worry about you. Call me an old softy.”

  Gunner smiled, touched as always by the old man’s list toward sentiment. Ziggy was a softy. And he was right. Del’s death was a game changer. Gunner’s relationship with Kelly DeCharme, should it build on the momentum already being generated, would be a stabilizing force in his life, to be sure, but it wouldn’t replace the one he’d shared with Del. It couldn’t. In his role as friend and brother, confidant and counselor, Del had been free to tell Gunner things his woman never could, and he’d never failed to meet that responsibility. Who could Gunner speak the unspeakable truth to now, or rely on to deliver a needed reprimand when commiseration was all he wanted?

  No one came to mind.

  “I’m going to be fine, Ziggy,” he said. “I’m going to take it one day at a time and see how it goes.”

  Ziggy nodded. “Sure, kid.”

  “I’ve got a new client. I start work for her Monday. Did I tell you that?”

  “No. That’s great.” The lawyer got to his feet and tucked his surfboard under one arm. “You coming?”

  Gunner shook his head. “I don’t think so. I kind of like it here. LA born and raised, and I get down to the beach two, maybe three times a year. Is that crazy, or what?”

  Ziggy smiled and pushed off, dragging the tail of his board behind him. Gunner sucked in a lungful of sea air and gazed out at the churning Pacific, seagulls wailing as they raced across the horizon. A pair of elderly women walked in bare feet through the low tide, sun hats big enough to cast a sailboat in shade, as a pot-bellied Asian man in a Speedo he had no business wearing jogged past them in the opposite direction. Out on the water, a woman in a black two-piece bathing suit dipped in and out of waist-high waves like a seal, smoothing her brown hair back every time she brought her shapely body up to the surface.

  Venice Beach, Gunner thought. The forgotten Los Angeles.

  He closed his eyes again, and this time allowed sleep to overtake him. When he awoke, almost fifty minutes later, the gray sky over the ocean had turned a pale blue and the cell phone in his pocket was humming. Roxanne Niles was calling him to say she had just quit her job at the mall.