“I’ll do that. Thanks again.”
19
FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, he hadn’t let Mickey cut his hair in years. What hair his head deemed to sprout had long ago been reduced to fuzz a wet razor at home could easily shave away, so a barber’s professional hand was no longer necessary. But every now and then, he longed for a sharper look than he could produce himself, staring into his bathroom mirror, so he’d sit in his landlord’s chair and let the old man do his thing.
That’s how Pyotr Burdzecki found them when he showed up at Mickey’s shop that morning, the investigator sitting in the first barber’s chair, sheathed in a striped apron, the first barber himself turning Gunner this way and that, using clippers to shape the hair on his face the way a carpenter might wield a rasp to sculpt fine lines into a sconce. No one else sat waiting for their turn in the chair, and the classic soul and jazz that usually provided a soundtrack to the barber’s work and endless chatter were strangely absent.
Burdzecki walked in looking like a mouse braving a cage full of owls, his eyes wild with suspicion and resentment for having had this trip into the unknown forced upon him. Gunner had made a point of not giving Burdzecki his name, so all the white man could say by way of introduction was, “I’m supposed to be meeting a man here.”
“That would be me,” Gunner said.
“Good. You got my money?”
“Sure. But I’ve got a few questions for you first.” Mickey kept right on shaving his face, treating Burdzecki’s presence like a buzzing he could barely hear.
“Questions? I ain’t got time for questions. Just pay me for my tire and let me get the fuck out of here.”
“I think you’re going to want to make time for these questions. They’re about the murder of Darlene Evans and whatever part you played in it.”
“Darlene?” His scowl went to the next level, suspicion turned to fury. “What the fuck is this? Who are you?”
“My name’s not important. What is is that I spoke to a young woman this morning named Roxanne Niles. You don’t know her, but she knows a friend of yours—Eric Woods—and she says she saw Eric with the gun that killed Darlene the night before she died. I think he was placing Harper Stowe’s fingerprints on it while Stowe slept.”
“So? What’s that got to do with me?”
“Maybe nothing. Except that there isn’t much that goes down at Empire Auto that you don’t know about, considering the nature of your business there and how often you’re there to conduct it. If anybody was in position to see Eric coming or going that early in the morning, either before or after killing Darlene, it was you.”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“No? Then I’m sorry I bothered you. Enjoy the rest of your day.”
“What about my tire?”
“Fuck your tire.”
Burdzecki hesitated, undone by the choice Gunner was forcing upon him: leave before any real damage could be done, or stay to find out exactly how much this smart-ass nigger really knew? He walked right up to one side of the barber’s chair, putting less than an arm’s length between himself and the man sitting in it.
“Why the hell would Eric wanna kill Darlene?”
“I don’t think he planned to kill her. I think he only planned to rob her. But something went wrong. Either Darlene put up a fight or refused to cooperate, something, and she wound up dead.”
“So if you already know so much, asshole, what the fuck do you need me for?”
“I need you to tell me why. Eric’s got a thing for his boy Harper’s girl, so the robbery had to be motivated at least in part by his need to make Harper go away. Framing him for an armed robbery he didn’t commit was the endgame, but I wonder if there wasn’t more to his jacking Empire than that. Like the most obvious, for instance: money.”
Burdzecki didn’t say anything.
“The first time I talked to Eric down at Empire, you pulled into the lot like a man who was overdue to get paid. And Eric went running after you like maybe he was the one you’d come there to see. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but now it seems hard to miss.”
“So he owes me money. What’s that prove?”
“How much is he into you for?”
“That’s my business.”
“Forget I asked. The answer’s obvious. It’s got to be well over five bills to have caused so much drama.”
“Hey, I didn’t cause any goddamn drama. Like I keep tellin’ you, whatever Eric did, it don’t have shit to do with me.”
“You mean, unless you put him up to it?”
Finally, Burdzecki had his answer: this nigger knew just enough to be dangerous.
“I want my money,” he said. “Right fuckin’ now.”
Gunner didn’t move.
Mickey finally turned his clippers off. “I think you’d better leave,” he told Burdzecki.
“Shut the fuck up, old man. Nobody was talkin’ to you.”
“This is my shop. I tell you to leave, you leave.”
Burdzecki slapped the barber hard across the face, nearly knocking him off his feet. Gunner was out of the chair in a flash, apron flying. He clamped his left hand around Burdzecki’s throat and threw a punch with his right, sending the white man crashing to the floor. Gunner moved in to follow before he could rise, but Burdzecki scrambled out of reach, right hand seeking something hidden at the back waistband of his pants.
Gunner pounced, frantic, knowing all was lost if he couldn’t stop Burdzecki from drawing whatever weapon he was reaching for. The two men tumbled across the checkered floor, cursing and grunting, each one grasping for any part of the other he could get a hand on. But it was a struggle destined to be brief; Burdzecki was younger and stronger, and Gunner quickly realized it was only a matter of time before Burdzecki’s right hand finally found the gun at his back.
“You wanna slap me now, son?”
Burdzecki froze as if struck by lightning. Mickey was holding a gun of his own to the white man’s head. He’d run to the back office and retrieved Gunner’s Ruger P-85.
Gunner struggled to his feet, trying to catch his breath, but Brudzecki remained on the floor, motionless, eyes locked on the Ruger and the angry old man holding it.
“Thanks, Mick. I can take it from here,” Gunner said. He held out his hand for the Ruger.
But Mickey paid him no mind. “Wants to come in my place and treat me like one of his bitches. Hit me with an open hand like somebody he ain’t gotta worry about hittin’ back.” There was a tremor in his voice and his eyes were damp.
“Give me the gun, Mickey.”
Again, Gunner’s landlord ignored him. His only point of interest in the room was Burdzecki.
“How about it, boy? I look like a bitch to you? Speak up!”
“No,” Burdzecki said. Like Gunner, he understood this was no game Mickey was playing.
Gunner reached for the Ruger once more, and this time, Mickey turned to face him.
“I’m a grown man. I might be old, but I ain’t too old to deserve some respect!”
“He’s a fool, Mick. Fuck him. Come on.”
Like a melting ice floe, Mickey slowly gave in, reason taking hold. He came up from his crouch to place the Ruger in Gunner’s outstretched hand. The exchange was the chance Burdzecki had been waiting for. He finally got his own gun free. Gunner snatched the Ruger from Mickey’s grip just seconds before Burdzecki could fire, and put a single bullet in the white man, just under the left eye.
“Jesus!” Mickey cried.
Burdzecki’s body crumpled to the floor and grew still. Blood began to spill across the black and white linoleum beneath the dead man’s head.
Gunner kicked the black Hi-Point .45 out of the corpse’s hand, then stepped forward to check the body for a pulse. He didn’t find one.
“You might want to put up the ‘Closed’ sign,” he told Mickey, starting toward his back office, “while I call 911.”
Hours later, when a relentless LAPD was through with him, Gunner m
et Kelly DeCharme for a late lunch out on the plaza of the LA County Courthouse building downtown, where a vast, roiling sea of attorneys and jurors was taking in the sun. At a table near the running fountain, he told the attorney about his busy morning, working his way backward from his killing of Pete Burdzecki. Any other time, he would have admired the woman’s understated beauty, the way she made this charcoal business suit look like a skin-tight evening gown—but not today.
“Oh, babe, I’m so sorry,” DeCharme said.
She worried over him as he relived the scene at Mickey’s in detail, the incident having left a mark upon him she understood would only grow over time. But when he got around to offering his report in full, shorthanding his recent interviews with Eric Woods and Johnny Rivera, she couldn’t help but let her excitement show.
“We have to have Woods picked up before he disappears,” she said, glowing. “If he finds out Burdzecki’s dead and how he died, he might put two and two together and take off.”
“He might.”
She dug her cell phone from her purse and made her second call today to the D.A.’s office, this time to schedule a meeting with the ADA assigned to Harper Stowe’s case. As luck would have it, she was told the ADA was in the county courthouse now, so she asked for a call back as soon as the attorney was out of trial. Then she went back to her half-eaten salad.
“I wish we had more. All we had on which to base a case against Woods were Burdzecki and the girl. Now that Burdzecki’s dead—”
“Now that he’s dead, I’m not.”
“Of course. You only did what he forced you to do. It’s just….” She took a deep breath and laid a hand on his. “I just wish there’d been some other way.”
She was echoing the very doubts he held himself. But there had been no other way. “I drew him out to Mickey’s to talk, that’s all. I thought he’d be more forthcoming outside his comfort zone. Nothing would have happened had he just walked away. But he came in there with a Hi-Point .45 in his pants and slapped a sixty-eight-year-old man with an open hand hard enough to spin his head around. If I hadn’t killed the sonofabitch, Mickey would have.”
Kelly gave in with a nod and a smile, but it was obvious she still had her reservations.
“Can you come with me to talk to the ADA?”
“Afraid not. I’m going by the hospital to see Zina, try to get her to talk to me one more time.”
“Really?” She seemed surprised.
“You don’t think I should?”
“It’s not that. I only….” She was on shaky ground, and she proceeded with the care of someone who knew it. “Her mother was having an affair. A daughter takes that sort of thing very hard, Aaron. As would her father. If they both knew and, in a fit of jealousy, Del did what the police say he did—what the evidence suggests he did—is it really that hard to see Zina defending him after the fact by blaming it all on Noelle?”
If he were willing to be honest about it, his answer would be no. It was the way all the pieces were finally starting to form a whole. But all he said now was, “I have to hear it from her. She knows the truth and she owes it to her grandparents to tell it. She owes it to me to tell it.”
The attorney in Kelly wanted a better answer than that, but she let him go without asking for one, much to his relief.
With their granddaughter no longer at death’s door, Daniel and Corinne Curry had finally left her unattended at the hospital, if only temporarily. Gunner called his uncle on his way to Harbor UCLA and discovered Del’s father and mother had Ubered to their hotel room in Inglewood, intending to be there just long enough to shower and change clothes. It was Corinne’s first such respite since their arrival in Los Angeles and only Daniel’s second.
“Wait for me there,” Gunner told his uncle. “Both of you. We need to talk.”
“We can talk when we get back to the hospital.”
“No. We need to talk now. Away from Zina.”
“How far away are you?”
“Ten minutes. Wait for me, Uncle.”
Daniel Curry didn’t like it, and Gunner knew his wife would like it even less, but Del’s father said, “We’ll wait ten minutes. Then we call for another ride. If it gets here before you do, we’re leaving.”
Gunner agreed to his uncle’s terms and hung up the phone, then drove straight out to Harbor UCLA, where his niece finally had no one around to protect her from his questions.
Zina was sitting up, sipping juice through a straw, when Gunner walked into the room. A tray of untouched food sat on a stand beside her. Sleepy-eyed and listless, the crown of her head wrapped like a cocoon, she was still strung up like a Christmas tree with wires and tubes, but this seemed more precautionary now than necessary to keep her alive.
“You’re looking good, Zina,” Gunner said. He set down the flowers he’d brought along as a peace offering on a chair.
“I don’t wanna talk to you,” his niece said, her voice as coarse as a gravel path. Her left hand groped for the nurse’s call button at her side, but Gunner found it first.
“Take it easy. Nobody wants to hurt you. I just want to ask you some questions.”
“No. Leave me alone!”
“I’ll leave you alone when you tell me what I want to know.”
“I already told the police everything.” What little voice she had started with was already half-gone.
“You told them a lie. Your mother didn’t shoot your father, Zina. He killed himself.”
“No.” She shook her head.
“His wife was having an affair. His business was in the toilet, and his only employee was doing his office assistant and his daughter, both.” Zina’s eyes lit up the room. “Oh, yeah, I know all about you and Glenn. And I know Del didn’t like it any more than your mother did. What I don’t know is why he took that gun to your crib Monday morning. Something set him off. What was it?”
“Nothing. I don’t—”
Gunner leaned in close, his patience for the girl’s lies, and all the others he’d been fed over the last four days, completely exhausted. “Listen to me. If you don’t tell me today, you’ll tell me tomorrow. Or the day after that, or the day after that. Because I’m not going to stop asking. Not ever.”
She tried to call out for the nurse, but the sound she made had no chance of reaching the door, let alone the nurse’s station beyond.
Gunner bore down. “He’ll take the blame for everything, do you understand? If you don’t tell the truth, they’ll put Del in the ground Monday morning thinking they’re burying a murderer. Is that what you want?”
Her head swung side to side. “No!”
“Then tell me what happened. Why did your father bring that gun to your crib?”
“He didn’t! I brought it!”
It was the kind of confession that should have come with tears, some show of anguish or remorse, but all this was was fury. Bitter, unrepentant fury.
“Daddy didn’t have nothin’ to do with it. He shouldn’t have even been there!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I called her, not him!” She had to stop to catch her breath. “If Momma’d just stayed out my bus’ness, let me see whoever the hell I wanted to see, none of this would’a happened. But she had to ruin everything!”
“So you killed her?”
“No! It was an accident. Daddy tried to take the gun away. He thought I was gonna use it, but I just wanted to make Momma say it. What she did.”
“You mean her affair with Buddy.”
The name took her aback. “What?”
“Your mother’s lover. Somebody in a position to know told me she’d had a one-night stand with a man named Buddy.”
Surprise turned to something else as he watched, a smile slowly making its way onto the young woman’s face. She would have laughed outright had the pain not become too much. “You don’t know anything,” she said, her voice dripping with pity for his ignorance.
“Everything all right in here?”
The nurse who stood at the open door was not the same black woman who had forcibly removed Gunner from the room the day before; this one was white and more formidable. She had posed the question for Zina to answer, but her eyes were on Gunner and the call button remote he still held in his hand.
“No!” Zina said, expending the last ounce of voice she had left. “Make him go away!”
A brief stalemate held them all at bay, the question of how much Gunner cared to chance his second eviction from the room in twenty-four hours hanging in the balance.
The nurse started toward him. “Sir—”
“It’s okay. I’m leaving.” He turned to Zina, tossed the remote call button into her lap. “But I’m not done with you.”
20
“I TOLD YOU HE WAS GOING TO DO THAT. Didn’t I?” Corinne Curry said. Her lips were trembling with rage.
“Yes, you did.” Daniel Curry stood toe-to-toe with his nephew in the middle of the Currys’ hotel room, no less infuriated by Gunner’s insolence than his wife. “You lied to us, Aaron. You played us for two old fools. But I tell you what—it’ll be the last time.”
“Uncle—”
“If you go out to that hospital again without our permission, I’ll have you thrown in jail. So help me God, I mean it.”
“It’s not my lies you should be worrying about. It’s hers. Zina hasn’t told the truth about a damn thing to anybody—me, you, the police—since she came out of that coma. And I’m sick of it. I wasn’t going to wait any longer for her to come correct.”
“You don’t know what’s correct!” Corinne said, both hands balled into fists at her sides. “And neither does she.”
“You’re wrong. She does know. And now, I think I might know, as well.” He turned to his uncle. “Are either of you interested in hearing it?”
Corinne wanted no part of what Gunner had to say, but her husband overruled her. He had been riding Gunner to find the truth behind their son’s death since he and his wife stepped off the plane at LAX three days ago, and now that Gunner thought he knew it, Daniel Curry could hardly turn a deaf ear. So Gunner sat Del’s parents down and told them how he thought it had all played out, a mixed bag of what he knew to be fact and what he yet could only surmise. It was a pathetic and lurid story of a man caught in a downward spiral on all sides: the wife he obliviously neglected and forced, at least momentarily, into the arms of another man; and the pair’s daughter, a self-absorbed woman-child who, stung by her parents’ constant interference in her sex life, somehow learned of her mother’s infidelity and became so enraged by the hypocrisy of it that she sought to rub her mother’s nose in it at the point of a gun. A gun that eventually went off, as guns were so prone to do, in terrible and unpredictable ways.
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