Now They Call Me Gunner

by Thom Whalen

  * * *

  It had been a week since Gwen suffered the black eye. The swelling in her face was gone but I could tell that she was still bruised under her makeup.

  Lunch was over and the afternoon doldrums had set in when Gwen came to the order counter and said, “Hey, C.B., where’s Randal?”

  Gwen had shortened her nickname for me to C.B. I didn’t like that any better than the full version but there was nothing that I could do about it. Objecting wouldn’t stop her; it would only give her that much more satisfaction.

  Katie didn’t call me C.B., but she giggled a little every time she heard Gwen say it.

  She wouldn’t go out with me, so why should I care if she laughed at me?

  Randal said nothing about it. I don’t think he cared what anybody called anybody.

  “Randal’s in the back, hooking up a new tank of grape soda.”

  “Tell him that someone out here needs to talk to him.

  I went back and conveyed the message to him.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, they’re going to have to wait until I hook this up. You never know when we’re going to get a run on grape soda.”

  Almost certainly, never.

  I went back and peered over the order counter. The restaurant was empty but for the police chief standing by the cash.

  I went back to Randal. “I think it’s Chief Albertson who wants to talk to you.”

  “Well, he can wait just like anyone else,” Randal said. “Maybe he’s waiting for a grape soda.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Randal snapped the feed lines to the tank. There was a hiss as the C-O-two pressurized it. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “What?”

  “You’re coming with me. I don’t talk to cops without a witness.”

  Right. That was Randal’s rule. Don’t let the cops get you alone. He never broke his own rules.

  I followed him out to the front.

  When he passed Gwen, he said, “If this takes long, you’re going to have to cook.”

  “What about C.B.?”

  “He’s with me.”

  I didn’t know that Gwen could cook. I should have guessed. It’s not rocket science. It got stressful only when we got too many orders at once and the place was empty right now.

  “Katie’s going to have to stay late and staff the front,” she said.

  Randal didn’t reply, just walked over to the chief. “You want to talk?” he said.

  “Just to you. I don’t need him.” The chief nodded at me.

  “He’s with me,” Randal said.

  “What does he have to do with this?”

  “Nothing. He’s pure as the driven snow. That’s why he’s with me.”

  The chief cocked a disbelieving eyebrow. “You’re coming down to the station.”

  “I’d rather talk here.”

  The chief looked around. “Not very private. You wouldn’t want the whole town knowing your business.”

  “There’s a picnic table around the back. That’ll do.”

  “If that’s the way you want it.”

  “None of this is the way I want it. I don’t want to talk to you at all.” Randal led the chief and me out the front door and around the building.

  We sat on the benches, the chief and Randal facing each other directly across the table and me beside Randal, but at the end of the bench.

  “First, I got to tell you that you can have a lawyer if you want.” He turned to look at me. “You’re not a lawyer, I presume.” His smile was not pleasant. It did nothing to improve the homely face.

  “He’s in university,” Randal said. “He’ll be a lawyer some day.”

  I doubted that but said nothing. I knew my job. To be here. To say nothing. And most important, not to contradict Randal.

  “Suit yourself,” the chief said, “but we can get you a real lawyer if you want one. Doesn’t matter if you can’t pay for it. I’ll get you one anyway.”

  “I got the kid,” Randal said.

  “Sure. But you know that if you talk to me now and later you go to court, they might want to use something that you say.”

  “I get it.”

  “I’m just saying that you don’t have to say anything that you don’t want to say.”

  “I get it.”

  It wasn’t the standard wording for a Miranda warning, but it had all the elements. It would stand up in court if anyone ever asked me if Randal had been warned that he had the right to be silent and to have a lawyer present.

  “Have you seen Billy Paul lately?” the chief asked.

  “Not for a couple of weeks,” Randal said. “Have you?”

  “As a matter of a fact, I have,” the chief said. “Just this morning. A tourist was trying to catch a trout for breakfast at the far end of Smoke Pond and caught Billy Paul instead. Billy’d been in the water for a couple of weeks, looks like. He was soft and mushy. Gassy, too. The tourist lost his appetite for any fish he’d caught in that pond. In fact, I think he yakked up any fish that he’d eaten in the past week.”

  “I get the picture. Billy fall in and drown?”

  “He didn’t go into the water until after he got stabbed a couple of dozen times. His belly looked like Swiss cheese. I don’t think drowning is going to be the cause of death. He was in his sleeping bag along with a couple of stones to weigh him down. Which complicates the falling in part, too.”

  “I guess it would.”

  “What happened out there?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You got his bike.”

  “He brought it into town and he was alive when he sold it to me.”

  “For cash?”

  “Right. For cash.”

  “We didn’t find any money on him or at his camp.”

  “Looks like you got a motive for murder,” Randal said. “Someone robbed him and stole his money.”

  “Maybe stole his money and his bike.”

  “I told you, I bought his bike.”

  “Anyone else see him sell it to you?”

  “Nope. It was just him and me. He stopped me on the street after work one night and asked if I knew anyone who wanted to buy a chopper. I said I did. He named a good price. I didn’t dicker with him, just told him I’d get the money. The next morning, he rode the bike to my house and walked away with the money in his pocket and it was a done deal, just like that.”

  “And you didn’t see him again?”

  “Probably he hitched back to his camp and whoever picked him up cut him up and robbed him and dumped him in the pond.”

  “You were in ‘Nam.”

  “You been checking up on me.”

  “Sixty-seven to sixty-nine.”

  “That’s right,” Randal said.

  “Two tours?”

  “One tour.”

  “Then you should have been sent back in sixty-eight.”

  “It got extended.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “Bad luck.”

  “You get put in the brig over there?”

  “Something like that.” Randal set his jaw hard. “I don’t talk about it.”

  “I bet you don’t.” The chief raised an eyebrow. “You ever kill a man?”

  “I was door gunner on a Huey. I poured thousands of rounds of suppression into Charlie-infested jungle on every mission. You do the math.”

  “You ever kill a man up close and personal.”

  “In ‘Nam, everything was personal. Even the Charlie that you never saw.”

  “Was Billy Paul in Vietnam?”

  “I doubt that, sincerely. He didn’t have the sand for it.”

  “I don’t think that’s a question on the enlistment forms. ‘Have you got sand?’ They draft who they want, sand or no.”

  “He would have had sand when he came back. Billy had none. He was never over there.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Just to see him on
the street. Never had much reason or interest in passing time with him.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “He was Gwen’s ex. Gwen’s the waitress here. I saw her with him a couple of times but I never met him in person until he stopped me on the street to ask about who he could sell his bike to.”

  “So he recognized you?”

  “I guess so. I’ve been cooking here for a couple of years. Most of the people in town recognize me.”

  “You got a police record. You got arrested for beating a guy half to death in Buffalo.”

  “I got convicted for drunk and disorderly and served sixty days.”

  “That was the plea bargain. You got arrested for aggravated assault. Aggravated. That’s the bad kind. That was what you really did, not the drunk and disorderly that you pled.”

  “What’s proved in court is what really happened, as far as the law is concerned.”

  “You know a lot about the law?”

  “That’s just what a lawyer told me once.”

  “I don’t hold with a lot of legal mumbo jumbo,” the chief said. “In the real world, I see a violent guy who’s been trained to kill and who’s killed before and who’s brought it home with him and who’s come to my town and guess what? This violent guy shows up with a fancy bike and the owner of that bike is fished out of a pond with his guts chopped to hamburger. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put a story together.”

  “The owner of my bike wasn’t fished out of no pond. I’m the owner of my bike and I’m right here, safe and dry.”

  “Who owns that bike remains to be seen.”

  “Not unless you got the evidence it takes to prove it in court. Real evidence from the real world, not imaginary evidence from your little fairy story.”

  “We executed a search warrant on your place earlier today. We’ll have all the evidence that we need as soon as we get the results back from our lab in Syracuse.”

  “I don’t think so. Not unless you make up evidence to prove something that never happened. You don’t do that, do you? Fabricate evidence?

  The chief flushed with anger.

  Randal didn’t wait for him to speak. “Now, if you’ve finished harassing me, I’ve got to get prepped for dinner.”

  The chief sneered and found his voice. “I’m not harassing you. When I’m harassing you, you won’t have any doubt about it.” He got his emotions under control and forced as friendly a smile as he could manage. “Right now, I’m just trying to find out what happened. I want to hear your side of the story. I’m sure that it’s not as bad as people are imagining. You’re a reasonable guy. I’m sure that you had a good reason for getting mad at Billy.”

  “I told you what happened between me and Billy. Nothing. I bought his bike. I gave him money. He gave me keys. He walked away. I rode. End of story. Anything else you’re thinking is just your imagination working overtime. I’m going now. If you find any actual evidence that I did anything to Billy, then you can come back here and ask me about it. But don’t hold your breath. You won’t find anything because I didn’t do anything. I can’t say it plainer than that.”

  Randal stood and walked away.

  I scrambled after him.

  The police chief stayed at the table and watched us disappear around the corner.

  I’d learned the answers to two of my questions about Randal. He had killed a man. Probably a lot of men. And he had been in jail. Maybe more than once.

  It was obvious that there was a lot more to Randal than I had suspected. What he had told the chief had raised many more questions that burned in my brain. But I didn’t dare ask him. It was both frustrating and fascinating at the same time.