Gunner nodded, only half-believing him. He turned away from Booker to watch Toon screw his face up even tighter, as if the sight of the investigator was getting harder to take by the second. Gunner knew his mind was on Doug Lewellen.
“For whatever it’s worth, Toon, I’m sorry,” Gunner told him.
The dead cop was still dead after he had said it, but he somehow felt relieved nevertheless.
It was crazy, but Gunner wasn’t ready to go home. He had been up and on his feet for over twenty-four hours now, dodging rain and gunfire with dogged equanimity, but the last place he wanted to drag his weary bones to rest was home. The warm bed waiting there was an inviting thought, but it, like the rest of Gunner’s bland little Stanford Avenue duplex, was empty, and the drone of loneliness was the kind of companionship the detective wanted no part of this morning.
The rain he had braved the night before was no longer falling, but it was clear that it was only taking a breather; the sky above was still black and bloated, making no attempt to hide its intentions. Unfazed, Gunner bought a five-dollar breakfast at Jack-in-the-Box and drove to Mickey Moore’s Trueblood Barbershop on Wilmington and Century to eat it. Mickey was a forty-four-year-old veteran of the Korean War who collected original Motown 45s and still cut a black man’s hair the old-fashioned way: down to the bone. Sooner or later, every head in South-Central Los Angeles turned up under Mickey’s shears, and any ex-serviceman who had ever had the pleasure invariably left Mickey’s chair as a friend. No one knew the painful ups and downs of the lonely war veteran’s reentry to civilian life better, or tried as hard to help those that he could.
Gunner would have been the first to point this out about Mickey. He had often been the beneficiary of some of the barber’s more selfless gestures, and Mickey was coming up with new ones every day. He had roughly two hundred square feet of unused storage space at the rear of his shop, and three weeks ago he had offered it to Gunner as a place from which to operate, rent-free. Gunner took two days to accept the gift, but only to give his pride some time to get used to the idea of falling even deeper into Mickey’s debt than he already was.
The barber was in the process of giving Joe Worthy, one of his many regular customers, his once-a-month trim when Gunner arrived. Gunner promptly moved to the pay phone hanging on one wall inside and called Kelly DeCharme, briefly filling her in on the highlights of his long night.
“You’ve been a busy man,” she said when he was through, no apparent sarcasm intended.
“I’ve been a stupid man,” he said irritably. “But I plan to get smarter. Think you can make it over to County to see Mills sometime today? I’d like to hear what his feelings are for his boss Whitey Most these days. Maybe they don’t get along as fabulously as Toon: likes to think.”
DeCharme made a small sound of concurrence and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
After agreeing to check with the public defender again later in the day, Gunner left the phone and immediately sat down in a poorly upholstered chair near a stack of unreadable magazines to eat his breakfast and watch as Mickey brought Worthy’s head around to the desired shape, that of a prizewinning, flat-topped garden hedge. The trio’s banter was light and inconsequential until Worthy asked Gunner how his latest case was going, and Gunner endeavored to tell him, deleting some details here, embellishing others there.
Gunner did not confide in the pair with the thought in mind that either man could offer him any sage advice; he told his tale of woe merely to expunge it, to purge the good and bad of it from his memory while its details were still sharply drawn and within his reach. For him, the last seventy-two hours had been a roller-coaster ride of mixed emotions, and he was anxious to learn whether or not he had made it so merely by overreacting to certain stimuli.
“You makin’ a mistake in the first place, messin’ with them damn gangbangers,” Mickey said when Gunner’s account was finished, shaking his head like a bad boy’s weary mother. He was as bald as a jaybird and everyone knew it, but he insisted on wearing a ridiculous and totally unconvincing rayon Afro wig because he was certain that no one in their right mind would trust a man with no hair of his own to take a pair of scissors to theirs.
“It was me,” Joe Worthy said, “I wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with none of ’em. They’re crazy, all of ’em.”
Gunner could do nothing but nod his head; it was as if they had read his mind. He had gone into this thing despising Toby Mills and everything his homeboys and their ilk represented, and nothing had happened so far to improve his opinion of them. He had always made it his business to avoid gangbangers like the plague, to look the other way whenever they reared their ugly heads, and yet here he was, up to his neck in their latest assault on his city, his home. He had taken a job best suited to a man with three times more compassion and ten times less resentment than he had to offer his client, and he couldn’t figure out why.
“Think I should quit?” he asked Mickey and Joe Worthy, asking the question as if he might actually adhere to their answer to it.
“Shit, too late for that,” Mickey said. “You already went and committed yourself.”
“Man gotta finish what he starts,” Worthy agreed, nodding emphatically. “No matter what it is.”
“Uh-huh.” Gunner stood up. “That’s what I thought you old geezers would say.”
He tossed the waste of his breakfast into a trash can behind Mickey, then turned to leave them for the confines of his little office in the rear. Only he never got there. The tiny bell over the door to Mickey’s shop sounded, signaling a new arrival, and the woman standing there stopped him cold when he looked up to see who it was, just as she had stopped Mickey and Worthy dead in their tracks, too.
It was Claudia Lovejoy.
They sat in the cold, dimly lit blandness of Gunner’s quarters in the back and drank the only kind of coffee Mickey ever kept around, a generic brand of instant with a bite like Drano. Lovejoy had left home without her umbrella, and looked it, but even wet and disheveled, dressed in running shoes and sweats, she was spellbinding.
Gunner tried to offer her a seat on the unsightly, thrift-shop couch that sat against one wall, hoping she would allow him to join her there, but she opted for the chair in front of his desk instead, forcing him to take his own chair on the desk’s other side. The formality of the arrangement discouraged him, but he resolved to make the best of it.
“I heard about what happened last night,” Lovejoy said, gamely trying to finish her cup of Mickey’s godawful coffee. “It was all over the news this morning. They said you were being held by the police for questioning.”
Gunner shrugged. “I was. They only let me go about an hour ago.”
“Are you all right?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, I thought you might have been hurt in the shooting. There was no mention of your condition in any of the news reports.”
“I’m fine,” Gunner assured her, unable to keep a small grin of self-satisfaction from his face.
The grin caught Lovejoy’s attention and she bristled, unamused. “You were lucky this time,” she said. “You could have ended up like the Downs woman very easily. You’re not too fatheaded to see that, are you, Mr. Gunner?”
Gunner didn’t know what to say. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Lovejoy said. “You’re dealing with young people who are best left alone. Believe me.”
“Now where have I heard that before?”
“Don’t make light of this, Mr. Gunner. If you’ve been hearing the same kind of things from the police, it’s probably because we both know what we’re talking about. You keep playing around with Toby Mills and his friends, you’re going to ask someone the wrong question, or say the wrong thing to someone, sooner or later.”
“And wind up like Darrel?”
“Yes. Exactly. And wind up like Darrel!”
She tried to accentuate the point by harshly returning her coffee cup to the edge
of Gunner’s desk, but she came up short on the cup’s landing and it shattered in her hand, instead. She leapt to her feet with obvious embarrassment, shaking. Her clothes and Gunner’s desk were the only apparent casualties of the accident.
“I’m sorry.” She had to struggle to say it as Gunner came around the desk to check on her.
Mickey Moore came flying through the curtains at the door like a den mother on the warpath, but Gunner caught his eye and waved him off, and the barber disappeared again without a word.
After watching in silence for a moment as Lovejoy wiped coffee from her clothes, Gunner asked if she was okay.
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“Would you like me to get you a wet rag or something for your clothes? Mickey has some hot towels up front, if you think that would help.”
“No, really. This is just an old sweatsuit of mine, it’s not worth the bother.” She finally looked at him directly again, her gaze discouraging him from questioning her further.
Gunner nodded, getting the message. “I shouldn’t have brought Darrel’s name into this,” he said. “It was an insensitive thing to do.”
“Yes. It was. But you were right. I did have Darrel in mind when I decided to come here like this, to warn you of things of which you’re obviously already aware. I had no right to do it; I don’t know what made me think I did.”
“Would it be too much to hope that you did it because you’ve changed your mind about me? Or am I still just an unscrupulous worm without principles, as far as you’re concerned?”
Lovejoy affected a light shrug, almost smiling. “Let’s just say I’ve had some time to reevaluate you,” she said, “and I’m not so sure my original impression was a fair one.”
“Good.”
“But that doesn’t mean I understand you. Any more than I understood Darrel. This reluctance of yours to retreat—to admit you’re in over your head and withdraw—baffles me completely. Men like you and Darrel, you forge ahead with your little war games, wisdom be damned, in pursuit of some nonexistent, macho concept of self-respect, and for what? What do you ever gain that’s more valuable than all that you lose?”
For want of a decent answer, Gunner shook his head. “I don’t know. But I think you’re comparing apples to oranges with Darrel and me. My initiative can generally be chalked up to pig-headedness, not courage. I don’t think you could safely say the same about Darrel’s.”
“No. I suppose not.” She smiled forlornly. “Still, I do see a lot of Darrel in you. His self-righteous indifference to reason; the inability to take no for an answer. I noticed that about you right away. No wonder I treated you so badly.”
“No harm done,” Gunner said.
“Maybe that’s what I thought I was doing coming here to ask you to quit: saving Darrel from the Blues; trying to keep that stubborn, stubborn man from dying all over again.” Rainwater glistened on her brow, but she let it be. She just stood there and let her eyes fill slowly with tears, no longer caring to hold them back.
Gunner tried to approach her but she backed away, shaking her head. “No! Please!” She put an arm out to stop him and he heeded it, however reluctantly.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like, feeling so whole one minute and barren the next,” she said, as infuriated by her tears now as she had been upon her first meeting with Gunner. “To have everything and then nothing—so quickly! So quickly …” She looked at him imploringly, as if hoping he could imagine it. “It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”
“No. It doesn’t.”
Her voice barely above a whisper, she said, “I wasn’t ready to be alone so soon. I pray for strength, but it doesn’t come …”
Without thinking, Gunner started toward her again, and this time she offered him no resistance. He took her face in both hands and said, “I’ve been praying, too.”
Then he showed her just what it was he’d been praying for.
chapter ten
He took her home and made love to her, taking her body into his hands like a glass bubble he was afraid to break.
Gunner’s bedroom was a dungeon of pitch-black shadows, but the utter darkness they were operating in could do nothing to obscure the power of her beauty or the magnitude of her need. Her skin was as smooth as the finest silk and her flesh in the nude kept all the promises it had made to him clothed: Her legs were velvety cords of hard muscle and her breasts spilled out of his open palms in firm, resilient abundance.
From the beginning, it was she who manipulated Gunner to her liking, silently telling his hands what to do with her own, demanding and receiving his total compliance to her design. She handled her breasts for him, feeding her rose-colored nipples into his mouth like a nursing mother, and steered his tongue from the nape of her neck down to the tepid space between her legs, drawing a slow, meandering course across her torso in the process. On and on she went, directing him from one diverse pleasure to the next, undulating spasmodically but never making a sound, save for a low, feline rumble of contentment she occasionally failed to suppress.
Gunner was given no say in their lovemaking until Lovejoy had fully tortured him with waiting, and had brought her own mouth to bear upon him in all the ways she had taken satisfaction from his. Even then, as she finally took him inside of her, relinquishing the reins of control for good, she did so in accordance with her own rhythm, guiding his entry and every stroke so that each was a long, deliciously protracted affair.
It was a technique that neither of them had the strength or the will to endure for long; the blinding white rush of orgasm they’d been working up to came quickly for them both, glorious and debilitating, seemingly interminable.
They lay in each other’s arms afterward and surprised themselves with silence. The bitter weeping Gunner had braced himself to hear never came, while he in turn failed to offer her any of the clumsy apologies she had feared he might. Neither was disappointed.
Hours later, when nothing remained of the love they had shared but a faint, benign glow, they resolved to start again—Gunner’s way.
Late that afternoon, he drove Claudia Lovejoy back to Mickey’s, where they had left her car many hours before. He had begged her to stay with him until Wednesday morning, knowing he was pressing but not giving a damn, but she had firmly declined his invitation.
The rain had continued its renewed assault all during their retreat, though it was falling now with only halfhearted enthusiasm, making a nuisance of itself and little more. Night, in the meantime, was coming on fast. Mickey’s shop was dark behind its windows and traffic on Wilmington was light, tentative, as Gunner joined Lovejoy in the cold car to say his goodbyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked. She looked infinitely better than she had that morning, but still lost, preoccupied.
She smiled. “Yes. I’m fine.”
“I have an idea this may not be the best time to look for any meaning in what we’ve just done.”
“No. This isn’t.”
She let her eyes do her pleading for her, imploring him to leave well enough alone.
He nodded his head and turned away, searching the street in vain for something else to hold his attention.
“You ever hear of a man named Whitey Most?”
She was taken aback by his abrupt change of subject but eventually shook her head. “I don’t believe so, no. Who is Whitey Most?”
Gunner shrugged. “Nobody special. Just a crack dealer I thought your husband might have had a run in with, once. But if the name doesn’t mean anything to you …”
She gave it some more thought, only to shake her head again. “I’m sorry.”
“Did Darrel have an office of any kind? A place where he kept papers and records, that sort of thing?”
She paused, surprised by the question. “He had an office at Peace Patrol headquarters. They have a suite in a medical building over on Hoover and a Hundred Twelfth. Why?”
“Is everything still there, or has it all been cleaned out?”
“I
t’s all still there, as far as I know. I haven’t gone by to take anything. Do you want to see it?”
Gunner nodded his head.
“Right now?”
“The sooner the better. Do you have a key?”
Lovejoy nodded, getting that faraway look in her eyes again. Gunner didn’t know what to make of it at first, but when he finally understood, he felt foolish and dense for not having figured it out sooner.
“You haven’t been there since he was killed, have you?”
“No.” She tried to smile. “I haven’t. I guess I’ve been putting it off.”
“I can go alone, if you prefer.”
“No. I want to come. Really.”
He watched her try the smile again, and though a try was still all it was, it was good enough for him.
“Okay,” he said.
She started the car.
The official home of the L.A. Peace Patrol was a four-story office building that dated back to the mid-1960s, when architects couldn’t get enough of checkerboard facades of cheap plate glass set in unimaginative rows. Whatever had been holding it together all these years was losing its grip, and what must have looked like an Erector Set construction even when it was new, now looked like a death trap waiting for the next blip on the Richter scale to take a nose dive into the street.
Despite the apparent danger, there were tenants on every floor, mostly medical professionals who found the rent palatable if not the accommodations. Daring to test the building’s willingness to support them, the Peace Patrol operated out of a third-floor suite of offices sandwiched between those of an orthodontist named Scott and an ear, nose, and throat man named Rheins. Roaming the empty hallways like a pair of midnight men, Gunner and Lovejoy came to the door they were looking for and stood beneath a stuttering overhead fluorescent lamp as Lovejoy used a noisy chain of keys to let them in.
When they finally made it inside to view the offices beyond the door, nothing about them suggested that the Peace Patrol was getting anything for their monthly rent they weren’t paying for. The carpet throughout was worn and discolored, the walls were in need of paint and repair, and the panels of the acoustic-tile ceiling overhead were either spotted with old water stains or missing altogether. As if to remain true to the overall morose mood of the place, the receptionist’s desk out front was also an abomination: Bearing a Styrofoam cup of cigarette ashes floating in a shallow wash of cold coffee, the tattered blotter pad atop it was tattooed with unintelligible names and phone numbers scribbled three layers deep, while the wastepaper basket on the floor beside it was overflowing with trash.
Not Long for This World Page 13