Seeing the look on Gunner’s face after bringing up the lights, Lovejoy said, “Yes, I know. It is disgusting, isn’t it?”
Gunner started to disagree, but she was already moving, leading the way into a short hallway off the receptionist’s area. They passed four offices full of dated furniture and obsolete word-processing equipment—two on the left and two on the right—and went directly to the larger office at the hallway’s end, where a placard on the door bore Darrel Lovejoy’s name, sans one mutinous plastic o.
Here, the hand of a more orderly man was in evidence, though the same budgetary restraints were, as well. The huge oaken desk that served as the room’s centerpiece was clean and uncluttered, and the wastepaper basket beside it was nearly empty, but it still looked like something the Salvation Army would snub its nose at, as did the high-jacked swivel chair leaning to one side behind it, having as it did only three of four casters left on which to stand. An old wooden coatrack and a squat two-drawer metal file cabinet were the only other pieces of furniture in sight, but the walls were lined with photographs to offset this deficiency: Darrel Lovejoy shaking hands with the mayor; Darrel Lovejoy handing a football off to O. J. Simpson; Darrel Lovejoy accepting an award from the Big Brothers of America.
And Darrel Lovejoy in partnership with the Reverend Willie Raines, ad infinitum.
“Do you know what you’re looking for?”
Gunner turned from his innocent inspection of her late husband’s recorded past, to find Claudia Lovejoy still standing out in the hall, hugging herself in the open doorway as if the room were a cold ill wind she was afraid to brave.
Gunner shrugged. “Not really. Hate mail, maybe. Anything that could attach a name or a face to some of your husband’s enemies.”
“He wouldn’t have kept any hate mail. He never read it.”
“The anonymous stuff, no. I would think he’d just chuck that. But anything that might have come from someone he knew, he might have held on to.”
“I don’t understand. Are you talking about blackmail?”
“I’m not talking about anything, yet. I’m just saying, if someone other than the Blues had a motive to kill your husband, there might be something here that proves it.”
“Someone like who? This dealer you asked me about before? This Whitey something-or-other?”
Gunner nodded, seeing no point in denying the obvious truth. He was hoping to find something that could connect Most to Lovejoy.
There was nothing, however. The room was free with its secrets—neither the desk nor the filing cabinet was locked—but none of the information it volunteered was of any real value to him. While Lovejoy’s apparent skill in calligraphy lent an unusual old-world flair to many of the items Gunner pored over, nothing else about the documents left much of an impression. There were receipts and business cards, old newspaper clippings and a notebook full of handwritten gangbanger case studies, correspondence of every kind, and a wide selection of inspirational self-help books, including two leather-bound copies of the King James Bible. There were names among all of it, written on legal pads and listed in address books, taken down in pencil and ink with varying degrees of legibility and in a variety of different script styles that were a tribute to Lovejoy’s chirographic virtuosity—but the name Whitey Most, or any other he might have considered noteworthy, never turned up.
The case studies, at least, made for some fascinating reading—the Imperial Blues were covered extensively and Gunner recognized many of those mentioned—but like the rest of what he had seen, nothing in any of the entries particularly enlightened or surprised him.
Sensing his disappointment from where she stood in the hall, refusing to cross the threshold of the room as she had throughout his gentle defilement of her late husband’s personal effects, Claudia Lovejoy said, “Guess you didn’t find anything, huh?”
The question had sounded innocent enough, but Gunner looked up at her and realized immediately that it had not been a question at all, innocent or otherwise. She was asking him to leave. He had rattled the bones of Darrel Lovejoy’s ghost enough for one night, and her patience for playing his accomplice had run out.
Without a word, Gunner cleaned up after himself and left the room, taking only the notebook of gangbanger case studies with him.
“Mind if I borrow this for a few days?” he asked her out in the hall.
She took it from his hand and looked it over, weighing its significant worth. After a moment, she shrugged and handed it back.
“How will that help you?”
Gunner tossed her a shrug of his own. “I’m not sure. I only skimmed through it. That’s why I’d like the extra time with it.”
Lovejoy nodded and started out, taking for granted that he would follow.
The ride back to Gunner’s car was an uneasy one. There was no small talk and no attempts to manufacture any. Even the car’s wipers were silent; the rain had finally given up for good and the windshield was dry and clear. This was the way Lovejoy obviously wanted it and Gunner wasn’t going to contribute to her unexpected mood change by forcing the issue. He had decided he had done all the trespassing he was going to do tonight.
They arrived at Mickey’s and Lovejoy pulled up alongside Gunner’s borrowed Hyundai, leaving the engine running as she waited for him to get out. Without warning, and before she could protest, he reached out to draw her near and kissed her, briefly but not entirely without conviction. She pulled away, but too late, too diffidently.
“Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”
He stepped out into the street and managed to close the door behind him before the Toyota sped off, spraying rainwater in a heavy, unrepentant gray mist behind it.
chapter eleven
The walls in Dr. Earvin Ashe’s office were too thin. Sound passed through them like smoke through a screen door, and whoever it was presently howling in the Chair of Pain was scaring the bejesus out of everybody out in the waiting room.
“I think maybe we should postpone this conference until after you get out of here,” Kelly DeCharme said, standing to leave.
Gunner shook his head and latched onto her hand. “We’d better do it now. I may not be capable later.”
DeCharme nodded and sat down again, seeing his point. If Gunner’s visits to the dentist were anything like hers generally were, the detective would be lucky to have use of his toes three hours after the Novocain set in, let alone his tongue.
“All right. So what are you going to do now?”
“Look up Whitey Most. What else?”
“Despite the fact Toby doesn’t think he had anything to do with Lovejoy’s murder.”
“Despite that fact, yeah. I wasn’t there when you saw Mills yesterday, but if you say he only seemed to halfway mean all the fine things he said about Most, that’s good enough for me. Maybe he’s thinking he can settle things with Most on his own.”
“What about Rookie’s car? Most’s prints didn’t turn up anywhere on it, you said.”
“That’s right. They didn’t.” Gunner had spoken to Rod Toon two hours ago and was told that Rookie’s Maverick had been found exactly where Gunner had said it could be. “And if the cops want to assume a lack of prints means he never spent a night in the backseat, that’s their business. Me, I can’t afford to be so sure. Rookie’s old man said he’d cleaned the car up before getting rid of it, maybe he did a real bang-up job. Besides, the way Toon described what was left of the car when they picked it up yesterday, there may not have been much of a backseat to dust.”
DeCharme nodded again, trying hard to seem at ease. This wasn’t where she had wanted to hold this meeting, but they weren’t making very good connections by phone—Gunner had forgotten to call her as promised the day before—and the investigator’s broken tooth had been put off long enough.
“You’re not actually thinking about talking to Most directly?” DeCharme asked.
“You figure he might object?”
“Let’s just say I’ve ne
ver met a dealer of illegal narcotics who could accurately be described as garrulous.”
“Yeah. That’s been my experience, too. So I thought I’d just follow him around for a while. Watch him make the rounds, get to know some of his friends. Maybe I’ll learn something.”
“You mean about Rookie, I hope.”
Gunner shrugged, staunchly absorbing the discomfort of the movement. “If I’m lucky, yeah.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Yes, good. I’m all for pursuing this Whitey Most angle as long as finding Rookie Davidson remains the focus of your investigation. Otherwise, I’m not sure I see the point. You’ve managed to establish Rookie’s participation in the Lovejoy murder, but Most’s is strictly speculative. Were it up to me, I wouldn’t spend a great deal of time worrying about Most when Rookie’s still the only witness my client’s case really needs.”
“Nobody said I was giving up looking for Rookie,” Gunner said. “I’m merely suggesting that it might be wise to start looking for alternative methods for getting your client off. If Most is connected in any way to Lovejoy’s murder, it’s possible he could tell us as much about it as Rookie. Maybe more. And if he’s not, he’s still Rookie’s supplier, according to the King. How much imagination does it take to see Rookie seeking him out, sooner or later?”
DeCharme pondered the question as a little Hispanic girl with a swollen jaw, sitting in her mother’s lap on the other side of the room, began to whimper, justifiably dismayed by the terror serenade still playing somewhere beyond Dr. Ashe’s anteroom door.
“This dentist of yours does use some form of anesthesia?” the public defender asked.
“He does on me. I’m afraid I insist.”
“You sure you wouldn’t rather see my dentist? His name is Tate; he has an office in Inglewood. You never hear anybody screaming bloody murder in his waiting room.”
“Gunner! Aaron Gunner!”
It was Ashe’s overweight and implacable receptionist, a white-clad, two-legged mountain of pink flesh brandishing pen and clipboard like sword and shield. Gunner stood up, and DeCharme eagerly did the same, relieved to be on her way.
“Don’t misunderstand,” she said, getting back to business. “It’s not that I’m convinced you’re not on to something with Most. But we go to trial in two weeks. Whatever route you decide to take from here, you’re going to have to make it pay off, one way or another. And fast.”
Gunner nodded and said, “Naturally. No sense keeping a choirboy like Mills behind bars any longer than necessary.”
The cries of Ashe’s anguished patient finally died, abruptly. Gunner’s turn to entertain the lions had arrived.
DeCharme walked out before he could ask her to wish him good luck.
“That’s him there,” Smalltime Seivers said. “The one with the fucked-up face. Looks like one of them ponies. I forget what you call ’em.”
“Palominos,” Gunner said.
“Yeah, that’s it. Palominos.”
Smalltime was pointing to one of three black men standing in a narrow alley behind the 1900 block of 114th Street in Watts, the trio conversing in the furtive but jocular manner inner-city drug sales always seemed to bring out in people. The man in question stood just over six feet tall and looked to be in his early thirties. He had a glistening jheri-curled mane of black hair that petered out at his shoulders, and ten fingers laden with more gold than the average jeweler’s window dared display. His most distinctive feature, however, was the spotty coloring of his flesh; even from a distance, it was obvious that he suffered from the disfigurement of vitiligo, a degenerative epidermal condition that gradually bleached skin of its darker pigmentation, spreading ever-expanding patches of pink flesh across the body. There were signs of the disease on both of his hands and at the open throat of his blue silk shirt, but the greatest casualty of his affliction, as Smalltime had pointed out, was his face; were it not for a large island of dark skin on his left cheek and a smaller one encompassing his right eye, the man easily could have passed for an albino in a dark wig.
No wonder they called Most Whitey, Gunner thought.
He and Smalltime were standing about thirty yards farther east down the alley from Most and his customers, hunched over the raised hood of Gunner’s borrowed silver and black Hyundai as if working to solve some debilitating automotive mystery of the Orient. Ordinarily, Smalltime might have been hard for Most to miss, but the alley was a popular place for amateur grease monkeys to labor over their latest wrecks, and the two had plenty of camouflage behind which to work. If Most had taken note of them, he showed no signs of caring.
“He ain’t gonna be here long,” Smalltime observed, pretending to be checking for loose spark-plug wires. “Looks like we caught ’im ’bout to finish up.”
Gunner nodded. Most’s small gathering had been joined by one lone woman in an iridescent bathrobe and matching house slippers, but there was no one to be seen behind her, either waiting boldly in line or hanging back discreetly.
“You have any idea where he might go from here?”
The big man looked at him blankly; Gunner had spoken like somebody trying to talk through a mouthful of undercooked mashed potatoes. Exactly as he had feared, his dentist had made a pincushion out of his lower jaw with his syringe of Novocain, and nearly a full two hours later, the lower half of Gunner’s face was still just a useless, distant memory.
He asked the question again, enunciating deliberately: You have any idea where he might go from here?
Smalltime shrugged. “I know a few places he might go.”
Gunner straightened up and made a show of wiping his hands on a dirty rag. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
He slammed the hood shut on the little Hyundai and got in behind the wheel. Smalltime took the passenger seat and the car did a fast tilt to his side, groaning, its suspension being crushed and compressed like a watch spring under a dead rhino. Gunner started the engine and began to back slowly out of the alley, away from Most.
“Okay. Now you seen ’im,” Smalltime said.
Gunner tried to play dumb, but the Blue wasn’t buying. Their arrangement, after all, had been explicit: In exchange for pointing Most out, Smalltime would get to hear to what the dealer owed the detective’s interest. Most was no great friend of his, Smalltime had said, but he was a close business associate of Toby Mills’s, and the Blues did make regular use of his services, at least indirectly, so the Blue could not see how making an enemy of him would benefit anyone. Enemies came easily enough in the ’hood; there was no need to go out and make more.
Gunner thought of himself in the Hyundai’s place, squashed under the big Blue’s weight like an empty pie tin, and decided to tell him a fraction of the truth, at least—that his interest in Most stemmed from the suspicion that Rookie Davidson might be paying the dealer a visit sometime soon, either out of need or simply out of habit.
“Yeah. I can buy that,” Smalltime said, nodding, satisfied that the investigator was: playing it straight with him.
As the little Hyundai labored along beneath his weight, he let his eyes linger on Gunner with open curiosity, apparently trying to solve whatever riddle it was the man represented to him. “When you gonna ask me?” he asked at last, grinning.
“Ask you what?”
“Why I ’bang. You know, why I ain’t doin’ somethin’ more ‘constructive’ with my life. Shit like that. You ain’t asked me nothin’ like that, yet.”
Gunner kept his eyes on the road. “Maybe I’m not interested,” he said.
“Shit. You’re interested. Everybody’s interested.”
“Maybe I’m not like everybody. Maybe I’ve heard all the answers to that question before, and couldn’t relate. I’m dense like that.”
“You’re sayin’ ’bangin’ don’t make no sense to you.”
“A lot of things don’t make any sense to me.”
“Man, you ain’t even curious ’bout my reasons?”
Gu
nner finally glanced at him. “What difference would it make if I were? You don’t want to hear my feeble pleas for reform and I don’t want to hear your lame explanations. If I thought anything I could say would wise you up, I’d make the effort. But I don’t. You’re a big boy, ’Time. I can’t talk you in to or out of anything, and I’m not going to lose any sleep trying. Sorry.”
Smalltime just looked at him. He had either come to understand Gunner better, or was simply more amused by him, because soon he was grinning again, from ear to ear.
The notebook Gunner had taken from Darrel Lovejoy’s office less than eighteen hours ago was sitting between the car’s front seats, and Gunner asked the Blue to take a look at it as they made their way back to the corner of Avalon and Imperial, where the detective had picked Smalltime up that morning. He had glanced through it himself the night before, in bed, but could find nothing in the case histories within that seemed unusual or significant, either obvious or written between the lines.
“What the fuck is this?” Smalltime asked, leafing through the notebook’s pages, amused.
“It belonged to Darrel Lovejoy. It’s a book of gangbanger case histories, but I’m not sure what it means. If you can read it all right, I’d like you to tell me what you make of it.”
Smalltime seemed inclined to object to the insinuation that he might not be able to “read it all right,” but he merely nodded his head again and dug into the book, maintaining a heavy silence until they reached their destination.
The Hyundai was sitting idle by the curb, its engine running, when he handed the notebook back to Gunner, still without comment.
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