Not Long for This World

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  The girl just stared at him, as confounded by his answer as she had every right to be. Feeling foolish, he changed the subject.

  “Gwen, you know where I might find Harold now?”

  “No. He could be anywheres.”

  She was distracted by a loud cry behind her. The toddler in blue had found a can of Michelob somewhere and had poured most of its contents all over himself/herself trying to down it.

  “I gotta go, mister,” the girl told Gunner, starting to close the door in his face.

  Gunner stuck a hand out, said, “Waitaminute, waitaminute. What time will your mother be home? Maybe I could talk to her.”

  “I don’t know. I ain’t supposed to tell nobody what time Momma comes home. I gotta go.”

  Against Gunner’s meager objections, she pushed the door closed with authority.

  Gunner stepped off the porch and raised his eyes forlornly skyward, assessing the light of day as he let the sting of rejection slowly subside. He decided Saturday afternoon was probably good for another two hours in the sun, and was sure something worthwhile could be accomplished in those two hours, if he was to put his mind to it. However, he was not surprised to realize he didn’t want to put his mind to it. What he wanted to do was fold up his tent and go home. So he did.

  Something about having doors closed in his face always had that effect on him.

  Working on the Sabbath day was one of the few sins Gunner had never enjoyed committing, especially during the football season. He had found early on in his investigative career that lethargic Sunday mornings spent staring at a color television invariably led to stuporous Sunday afternoons, days that simply did not lend themselves well to the pursuit of professional accomplishment.

  On this particular Sunday, however, less than twenty-four hours after the detective’s interrogations of Teddy Davidson and a pair of Harold Seivers’s younger siblings, the usual excuses for deferring work until Monday did not apply. The football season was three months away and the Lakers/Supersonics game at the Forum was an evening affair. If he wanted to live with himself, he had no choice but to start what most people would come to appreciate as a day of rest with a latemorning visit to the home of Claudia Lovejoy, Darrel Lovejoy’s widow.

  He preferred to think of the move as his idea, but he was man enough to know better. Teddy Davidson had turned his attention to Claudia Lovejoy the day before when Davidson had suggested the possibility that Darrel Lovejoy might have had enemies outside the youth-gang hemisphere. It was a thought Gunner would have come upon of his own accord, eventually, but for now he had only Davidson to thank for it, and the debt rubbed his pride the wrong way.

  Perhaps it was this sense of ambivalence that led Gunner to drop in on the Lovejoy home unannounced, a tactical blunder that left him knocking on the door of an empty house in Lynwood when he arrived shortly before twelve noon. It was a mistake he had made before and had vowed never to make again, but for once, all it cost him was time. He had a hunch where he might find the widowed Mrs. Lovejoy, and unlike most of the hunches he tended to play whenever a racing form wormed its way into his hands, this one actually paid off.

  The Reverend Willie Raines’s First Children of God Church was a newly constructed oblique monument located on the northeast corner of Van Ness and 104th Street in Inglewood, an angular architectural expression in red brick and stained glass, and when noon services broke there at one-thirty in the afternoon, Claudia Lovejoy was among the mass of people who poured from its doors out into the street.

  Gunner had never met the lady, but since her husband’s death, she had had enough television-news minicams stuck in her face to make her instantly recognizable, even from a fair distance. Without the notoriety, however, she would have stood out from the crowd all the same. Claudia Lovejoy was blessed with the kind of beauty that held a man’s eyes longer than he wanted to look.

  The secret to her allure was an unusual contradiction, a clash of physical characteristics as rare as it was mesmerizing. Her skin was the color of white chocolate, smooth and unblemished, yet the ethnicity of her facial features seemed to have been lifted from a woman much closer to her African ancestry: Her lips were generous and her cheekbones high and proud. Dark, slashing eyebrows were raised in perpetual skepticism over green eyes of limitless clarity, eyes that drew a man into their emerald depths and would not let go. She appeared to be in her early thirties, short and lean but not petite; nothing petite had that many curves in so many appropriate places.

  She was wearing a white cotton dress with a cowl neckline when Gunner picked her out of the crowd, her black hair pulled tight and glistening across her scalp, away from her face, as if to give it room to glow. He let her get all the way to her car in the parking lot before approaching her; she had exited the church in the company of a pair of much older women in garage-sale hats, and he preferred to wait until they had said their goodbyes to introduce himself and state the nature of his business.

  It took a while, but the two older ladies finally waddled off. Claudia Lovejoy slipped a key into the door of her wine-colored late-model Toyota sedan and started to turn it, then sensed Gunner standing nearby and looked up.

  “May I help you?”

  There had been no trace of fear in her voice, only an innocent, almost playful curiosity. Resisting the urge to put off his bad news as long as possible, Gunner explained himself quickly and flashed his credentials, then watched as the joy of God drained from her face like sand from an hourglass.

  “You have a great deal of nerve coming here, Mr. Gunner. I suppose you realize that.”.

  “I’m a little pressed for time, Mrs. Lovejoy. I’m sorry.”

  “The little hood you represent killed my husband.”

  “The kid’s a hood, granted,” Gunner said, “but he may not be the one who killed your husband.”

  “The police appear to be satisfied that he is.”

  “If you’ll excuse me for saying so, the police find satisfaction in a great many things. The truth, unfortunately, is not always one of them.”

  “So what do you want with me?”

  There were a number of possible answers to that question, but only one of them had no implication of carnal knowledge. Gunner kept things clean and said, “A few moments of your time. There are some questions I need to ask that only you can answer reliably.”

  “And I assume you want to ask them now?”

  “If at all possible, yes. I’m a little pressed for time, as I said. Have you had breakfast yet?”

  The woman in white shook her head, waiting in icy silence for the invitation she knew was coming.

  “Would you like to?” Gunner asked, humbling himself for the cause.

  She considered the question and stared at him while she was at it, finding no small pleasure in the spectacle of a man teetering on the brink of an embarrassing rejection. Then she nodded her head and waited demurely for Gunner to show the way.

  Ordinarily, Ray’s was no place for a man to go for breakfast if he didn’t have all day to wait for it, but the rules that applied to the restaurant’s general clientele rarely applied to Gunner, and so he took Claudia Lovejoy there anyway. A small, nondescript kitchen on the corner of Western and Forty-eighth Street, Ray’s was a breakfast-only establishment as famous for its excellent food as its all-too-limited space in which to enjoy it; only its generous portions made it worth overlooking the annoyance of the intimidating line of people forever ringing its exterior.

  No one had ever actually told Gunner he could circumvent the line whenever he cared to drop in, but it had worked out exactly that way ever since Gunner had saved a headwaiter’s life at Ray’s one afternoon two years before. Halfway through Gunner’s breakfast, a drunken patron built like a small. Caterpillar tractor became enraged by a whopping twelve-cent overcharge on his bill, and was about to find the waiter’s jugular vein with a dull carving knife when Gunner broke a chair over his head. Gunner figured to get a free meal out of the deal, and he did. Every meal a
fter that, however, he had paid for, though his name always managed to get him through the front door without the usual thirty-minute delay.

  As it had today.

  An overstuffed couple in line at the door made a brief show of complaint, but otherwise Gunner and Claudia Lovejoy were shown to a table quickly and without incident. Once they had settled into their seats, Gunner ordered ham and eggs, and Claudia did the same, but it seemed she had done so just to have an excuse to play with her fork at the table. Gunner watched her ruminate in silence for a few minutes, then decided enough was enough. He was going to feel like an ass for putting Lovejoy through another unpleasant interrogation whether he chose to procrastinate for five minutes or five days beforehand.

  “Tell me about your husband, Mrs. Lovejoy,” the detective finally said.

  Lovejoy looked up from her food sculpting, her gaze cool and impassive, and said, “What would you like to know?”

  “I’d like to know if his friends can be believed when they say what a fine man he was, for one thing. Call me a skeptic, but I can’t help but wonder if anybody could have been as squeaky clean and wholesome as your husband was reputed to be.”

  “If you’re asking me whether or not Darrel was perfect, Mr. Gunner, the answer is no. Of course he wasn’t. He was, however, scrupled. Which is more than I can say for you.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s right. You. I know who you work for, Mr. Gunner. Remember? If you were a man of high principles, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “My principles have nothing to do with this, Mrs. Lovejoy.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Gunner eyed her coldly. “It should be obvious to you by now that I’m a man with some modicum of principles,” he said. “Because you’ve been treating me like shit since our first hello, and I’ve yet to voice any serious objections. How much more ‘scrupled’ can one get than that?”

  Lovejoy blushed, and for a moment Gunner wondered if he had pushed her too far. “If I’ve been rude to you, Mr. Gunner, I apologize,” she said. “But surely my poor behavior needs no great explanation. I’ve only been a widow for three weeks now. It takes time to adjust.”

  Gunner nodded his head, conceding the point. She was a woman someone had only recently crushed underfoot, and as such her cheerless disposition should not have been unexpected.

  “Look. This is just awkward for me, that’s all,” she went on. “You’re working to get Toby Mills off the hook for Darreil’s murder, and by my very presence here, I’m helping you, even though I share none of your reservations regarding Mills’s guilt.”

  “So I’ve noticed. What makes you so certain Mills is guilty?”

  “I read the newspapers, like everyone else. I know what kind of evidence the police have turned up against him. The gun alone should be proof enough of his involvement for anyone.”

  “Then your judgment isn’t based on any personal insight or knowledge of Toby Mills.”

  “No.”

  “Ever see or hear of Mills before your husband’s death? Did Darrel ever mention him by name, that you can recall?”

  “No.”

  “How about Rookie Davidson?”

  “No. Darrel rarely discussed gangbangers with me. He didn’t like to bring his work home, and that, as you might imagine, was fine with me.”

  “Then you can’t say for sure that Darrel even knew Mills or Davidson.”

  Claudia Love joy dropped the fork in her hand as if it had offended her in some way; the racket it made on her plate was enough to stop conversation three tables away. “Look,” she said, “why is it so hard for some people to accept the obvious? Darrel made enemies of little hoods like Mills and Davidson every day of his life. He was playing with fire, trying to turn these kids around, and it finally caught up with him. It’s as simple as that. It’s how I knew things would end for him—for us—all along.”

  To Gunner’s complete surprise, she was suddenly fighting back tears, anger and pain welling up in her eyes all at once, and the momentary lapse in her iron-woman performance only enraged her all the more. Refusing to draw any further attention to her plight by dabbing at her eyes, she said, “It may sound trite to you, Mr. Gunner, but I loved my husband very much. And while I wish I could speculate on the hows and whys of his death in a less emotional manner, I’m afraid I lack that kind of self-control just yet.”

  Gunner nodded his head and said nothing, watching her struggle to repair her misplaced cool. Her beauty, already overwhelming, had taken on a new brilliance now that her facade of hostile indifference was lifted, and its effect on him was as profound as it was unexpected.

  All the questions he wanted to ask her now had nothing to do with her husband or the Imperial Blues.

  “Maybe we should talk about something else for a while,” he said.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as yourself. Tell me who you are. What you are.”

  “That sounds like small talk to me.”

  Gunner grinned. “I suppose it is. Anything wrong with that?”

  She thought about it for a moment. When she decided there wasn’t, she said, “Who I am is no great mystery. The news media have seen to that. I’m the bereaved widow of the late Darrel Lovejoy. The woman in black. As for what I am, I can’t say. I used to be a wife and aspiring mother, but I’m neither of those things now.”

  “You could always be again.”

  “Yes. I could.” She smiled thinly. “But in the meantime, I’m lost. I could go back to Minnesota to be with my family for a while, but I know that wouldn’t last. I’ve been away too long to ever return there for good. When you’ve gone two years without shoveling snow, you’re cured of the jones forever.”

  “Darrel left no family here?”

  “No. No one. And that fact always surprised people, because they liked to think his motivation for the things he did came from somewhere outside of himself, when that wasn’t the case at all. What Darrel did, he did on his own, by his own volition. He was the ‘wonderful human being’ everybody thought he was. No matter how bogus he must have seemed to some, he was a man who cared about people the way most of us only care about ourselves, and he loved me like no man I have ever known. So, if you came here hoping I’d tell you he was a wife-beater and an adulterer, a drunkard and a drug-abuser, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you.”

  “Then there’s no reason to believe someone other than a gangbanger may have killed him.”

  “None. None whatsoever.”

  Gunner downed the last of a by-now-cold cup of coffee and said, “All right. Assuming that’s true, we’re only rounding the possible suspects down to every kid in every gang he ever dealt with.”

  “I’m afraid that’s about the size of it, yes. Darrel had been shot three times previously, Mr. Gunner. He was a constant target of theirs. If it wasn’t the Blues who killed him, it was the S.S. or the Little Tees. Cuzzes or Hoods from one set or another, I’m absolutely convinced of that.”

  “How is it they knew where to find him?”

  “You mean at the minimarket?”

  “Yes.”

  “Darrel was a creature of habit. He made that walk regularly, and I expect they knew that. I had wondered why they chose that location, too. I had always thought—I had always feared—that if something like that ever happened to Darrel, it would happen in front of our own home. But the police explained that it probably happened where it did because they wanted it to get a lot of attention. They wanted it seen.”

  “Then the attempt on Darrel’s life did come as a complete surprise to him, you think.”

  “Of course.”

  “He wasn’t particularly moody or on edge at the time of his death?”

  “No. No, he wasn’t.” She thought about it. “He was a little more quiet than usual, but nothing more than that. Why?”

  “Because warnings don’t usually precede your run-of-the-mill gangbanger drive-by. They’re too spur of the moment to allow time for all that. If Mills and
Davidson rolled on your husband like everybody says they did, he shouldn’t have been acting as if he knew what was coming.”

  Lovejoy nodded her head slowly, following his logic. Then her eyes lost focus, the way eyes always did when the person behind them had checked out of the present to revisit the past.

  “You just remember something?” Gunner asked her.

  She blinked twice, coming out of it, and shook her head. “No. It’s nothing. He was just quiet that week, that’s all. I thought …” She paused, then shook her head again. “Never mind. Really.”

  Gunner looked at her. He didn’t like leaving such loose ends dangling, but she seemed determined to deny him the chance to pursue it. It was an odd way to act about “nothing,” but the issue was only worth pressing if what she was trying to hide was something relevant to Gunner’s case, and not something that was merely none of his business.

  “What about parents?” Gunner asked eventually. “If Darrel was making enemies of gangbangers, he had to be bending a few of their parents out of shape in the process. Moms or Dads who didn’t appreciate what they saw as his Patrol’s constant harassment of their children.”

  “There were a few of those, of course. How could there not be? The parents of most gangbangers are masters of denial; they don’t like it when strangers confront them with the truth about their babies. But these people aren’t killers, Mr. Gunner. They’re just weak. Ignorant.”

  “Many murderers are,” Gunner said.

  “Well, maybe so. In any case, as I’ve already told you, Darrel kept me pretty much in the dark where the Patrol was concerned, so I really can’t say for sure whether or not he ever had a serious run-in with somebody’s parent. If you want my opinion, though, I’d rule the ‘angry parent’ theory out.”

  Gunner did a little heavy thinking, then asked whether Darrel Lovejoy had ever locked horns with anyone, past or present, in the Peace Patrol family.

  Lovejoy shook her head. “Darrel did too good a job of recruiting for that. The people he brought aboard were always people he could get along with and trust implicitly. He realized from day one that many of the people who would be attracted to the Patrol were going to be fanatics on the fringe, men or women with chips on their shoulders looking for an excuse to bust some heads, so he was always careful to weed those types out.”