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Authors: Gar Anthony Haywood

Tags: #Mystery

Fear of the Dark (9 page)

BOOK: Fear of the Dark
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“Why aren’t you surprised?” Poole asked Gunner, mopping his tie with a coat sleeve. “Don’t tell me you already knew?”

“Day-old news is old news, Lieutenant. You want to surprise people, do card tricks.”

“Bet your client’s all messed up about it, huh?”

“Actually, I haven’t seen her since I heard, so I can’t say. But I imagine she’s taking it pretty well.”

“I don’t suppose you’d know who did the dirty deed?”

Gunner didn’t like the chair he was sitting in; it was hard and uncomfortable, designed to make interrogations a miserable experience. “Like any good citizen, I would have come forward if I did.”

“You could make an educated guess,” Poole said.

“You dragged me in here to make an educated guess? Okay. How’s this: it was somebody black. Sympathetic to the Brothers of Volition and pissed about what happened to Buddy Dorris. Does that narrow the field down any for you?”

“You think Townsend killed Buddy Dorris?”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t know if he did or not; I never caught up to the man to ask him. But he fit the bill, and was making himself hard to find for some reason.”

“Was he?”

“Yeah. He was.” Gunner had no trouble following Poole’s train of thought. “Like I said, I never caught up to the man.”

Poole let the expression on his face say how much he believed that, but didn’t press the issue. “How’d you come to be looking for Townsend in the first place? You pick up his scent all by yourself, or did somebody steer you his way?”

Guardedly, Gunner said, “I was steered.”

“By who?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Poole sipped his coffee, then asked, “Need a few days of peace and quiet to change your mind?”

“Look, don’t give me that bullshit, Poole. It doesn’t make any difference who steered me his way, all right?”

Poole watched Gunner squirm about in the hard wooden chair and laughed at his little joke. Poole was no good at playing the tough cop—the hardline dialogue fell off his tongue like a lead weight. He could fake it from time to time on a sucker new to the territory, but practicing on Gunner was an embarrassing mistake. The black man knew him too well.

“Okay, okay,” the lieutenant said. “Let me rephrase the question. Anybody else looking for Townsend that you know of?”

“Not for him specifically, no. But the streets have been crawling with people looking for the guy who killed Buddy Dorris, and maybe that’s the same thing, and maybe it isn’t. You think I’m the only one to notice Townsend had a bad left eye?”

Poole shrugged. “Probably not. But you’re the only one I’ve got. And you know what they say—a bird in the hand …”

He was a fair man, Poole, but not one gifted with a lot of perseverance when it came to breaking cases; any slob he could get the shoe to fit was all right by him, ninety percent of the time.

“Kiss my ass, Lieutenant. You don’t
have
a bird in your hand.”

Poole smiled at him.

“Why would
I
want to kill the sonofabitch? All I had to do to earn my money was turn him over to you.”

“Or just point your nose in his direction.”


I don’t work like that anymore
,” Gunner said.

“But you used to. All the time.”

Gunner shook his head. “Not anymore.”

“Not even for close personal friends? I hear you and the lady paying your bills are like this.” He pressed the first two fingers of his right hand together and held them up in the air.

Gunner said, “You don’t hear anything, Poole. That’s your problem. You can’t get enough of your own voice, how’re you going to hear anyone else’s?”

Poole laughed again and sat down, stretching out in the chair behind his desk luxuriously. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, popping a stick of gum into his mouth. “We don’t have to go through all this shit. I had the answers to my questions three hours before you got here. I’m just talking to you for the exercise.”

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 the moment.

Demons like vengeance, for example.

BOOK: Fear of the Dark
12.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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