“Nobody gets this much rock on a layaway plan, lady,” he said. “Your credit’s not that good. Somebody’s supplying you for free, and I’d like to know why.”
“You’re crazy! I paid fifty dollars for that shit!”
Gunner twisted her wrist once, pinching the fragile bones beneath her flesh in a merciless vise that buckled her knees. “I’m not going to stand in the rain and listen to lies. You want me to catch my death of cold or something?”
Downs let out a little cry of anguish and crumpled some more, tears streaming down her face.
“Please! He’ll kill me if I talk to you!”
“Then we’d better make this fast, before he catches us out here shooting the breeze—don’t you think?”
Gunner clamped down on her wrist again and Downs began to nod her head frantically, acquiescing. The rain was still falling like an anvil dropped from a high rise and she was soaked to the gills, the wig on her head filled with water and weighing her down. Gunner was in only slightly better shape.
“Toby Mills wasn’t in Rookie Davidson’s car the night Darrel Lovejoy was killed, was he?” Gunner asked.
Downs shook her head, eyes cast downward. “No. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know if he was or not.”
“How’s that again?”
“I couldn’t see who was in the car! I couldn’t really see that good; it was dark.”
She was chewing her lip again, head still down but eyes turned upward to steal a peek at him, checking his reaction. Gunner released her wrist, afraid of what he might do to it if he didn’t. “Then somebody paid you to lie.”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you that. I told you.”
“You’re getting on my nerves, Tamika.”
“Look, ask me anything else. Anything. Just don’t ask me to give you the nigger’s name!”
“All right. Forget his name, for now. Unless I miss my guess, I already know it, anyway. So tell me about the deal, instead. What was it? Free rock for a month to be at the bus stop when it happened, to say it was Mills and Davidson in the car? Something like that?”
“Something like that, yeah,” Downs said, nodding.
“That was Whitey Most I saw you with earlier, wasn’t it?” Gunner asked straightforwardly.
Downs didn’t answer, but her eyes betrayed her surprise.
“Yes or no, Tamika. All I need’s a simple yes or no.”
She made her choice faster than he anticipated, and it wasn’t among those he had listed for her. He had found it too easy to be physical with her, and had relaxed, confident that her will to fight had been sufficiently broken. It was a false assumption she brought to his attention by ripping the two packets of crack cocaine from his right hand while shoving him backward and off-balance against a row of trash cans directly behind him. He had no time to do anything but fly ass-backward over the cans and land in a soggy heap on his back, garnished liberally with garbage and fully relieved of his pride. By the time he recovered and reached her backyard gate, she was already clambering into the house.
She was trying to lock the door behind herself when he got there, but she panicked before completing the job and never threw the dead bolt, choosing to retreat farther into the house instead. With only the lower lock on the door to stop him, Gunner lowered a shoulder and broke into the house easily, catching a glimpse of the fleeing Downs up ahead as he dodged splinters from the doorjamb flying about his head.
Downs disappeared into the dark living room at the front of the house and Gunner ran like a madman through a small and untidy kitchen in pursuit, driven by fear to reduce her lead before she could pull a gun from a nearby dresser drawer and aim it at his face as he rounded the next corner. She was diving into the bathroom off a short hallway leading to the bedrooms in the back, perhaps with just such a scenario in mind, when the detective finally reached her, and this time she couldn’t close the door fast enough to lock it behind her.
With only Downs’s paltry weight behind the door to stop him, Gunner forced his way into the bathroom with little difficulty and dragged her back out into the hallway. She was kicking and screaming for all she was worth, doing little damage but making one hell of a racket, and yet no one appeared to come to her aid. Gunner guessed the children she had professed such concern for earlier were either very sound sleepers or absent from the premises.
Issuing no further ultimatums for her to ignore, the detective marched Downs into the living room and straight out the front door into the street, setting a course for the unmarked police car parked across the way. The two LAPD plainclothesmen formerly inside the car were already starting across the street toward him, one white man and one black, hands gravitating toward their holstered weapons. Downs was begging for a reprieve, but Gunner wasn’t listening.
The officers were only halfway across Croesus, and Gunner and Downs were still on the latter’s front lawn, when a single headlight out of the north washed over the men in the street, announcing the presence of an onrushing doom. A battered and rusted ’67 Chevrolet Nova that once upon a time had been lime green screamed out of the blinding rain in the distance to speed past Downs’s address, the driver inside strafing the front of Downs’s home with a helter-skelter spray of automatic-weapon fire. Gunner threw his hostage facedown onto the lawn and hit the dirt himself, reacting well, but playing tag with an arbitrary hail of bullets was a tricky business and he knew either he or Downs, if not both, would manage to catch one or two slugs even before he kissed the ground.
He was right.
As he lay on the water logged grass, his nose buried in a pool of mud, he heard the sound of dissimilar gunfire join that of the automatic rifle, and then a hard whump! preceding the Nova’s tire-squealing song of escape. Tentatively, he raised his head and turned his gaze to the street. A few brave residents had started to spill out of their homes and assemble at each curb, watching as one of the plainclothes officers assigned to Tamika Downs’s surveillance—the black one—tended to his fallen comrade, who was sprawled out on his back on the tarmac with his limbs splayed in awkward, unnatural positions.
Feeling sick, Gunner turned his head again to check on Downs, and the news there was just as bad. She, too, lay in an extraordinary position, left arm up, right arm down, her stomach flat to the ground but her head bent to the side, toward him. She was bleeding profusely from a throat wound and her eyes were open, searching the night for that last instant of crack-induced euphoria of which Gunner had deprived her.
Foolishly, the detective started to get to his feet, but a voice behind him said, “I think you want to stay right where you are, mister,” and that’s exactly what he did.
Because the black cop with the dead partner getting rained on in the street had his gun drawn now, and he looked like he just might want to use it.
chapter nine
Angry cops and pissed off D.A.s were nothing new to Gunner.
Eleven years on the job had taught him that the sight of a private investigator was often all it took to send either form of public servant into a frothing, venomous rage; theirs was an adversarial relationship decades old and still going strong. The names changed and the threats varied from man to man, but for the most part, a cop or a district attorney’s routine was always the same. Depending upon the nature of his offense, either real or imagined, Gunner could almost guess beforehand what would be said, and how.
But Assistant District Attorney James Booker was different.
Booker was the forty-one-year-old prosecuting attorney whose job it was to represent the state in the Darrel Lovejoy murder case, and he was not a man to whom one could immediately warm up, even on his better days. He was an angular-faced black man of medium height who prided himself on a body-fat ratio of less than 8 percent and a rapport with the LAPD to which few members of the District Attorney’s office could lay claim. He was a snow-haired ex-navy man with a wife and three children, and he moved the way he spoke, with economy and precisio
n.
In the first light of Tuesday morning, playing host to Gunner’s reluctant guest in a small interrogation room at the LAPD’s dilapidated Seventy-seventh Street Station, located in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles, Booker was facing an abundance of aggravations: the loss of both his prize witness in the Lovejoy case—Tamika Downs—and a six-year veteran of the LAPD’s crack antigang unit known as CRASH (for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums); the still-at-large status of the pair’s drive-by killer; and Gunner, the unwitting idiot it seemed he had to thank for it all. He had every right to be distraught—even Gunner had to admit that—and yet only Rod Toon, the third man in the room and the head of the CRASH task force, could see that Booker was livid. To Gunner, seated on the opposite side of the barren desk that separated them, Booker appeared to be little more than miffed.
“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that that was the weakest damn story I have ever heard,” the Assistant D.A. said to the investigator, using the same tone of voice to issue the critique that he might have used to read a bedtime story to one of his kids.
“Ditto for me,” Toon said, smirking from a standing position behind him. “I think maybe you’d better reconsider and call your lawyer after all, Slick.”
For a change, Gunner had a comfortable chair to sit on during an LAPD grilling, but he squirmed in it just the same. His tooth was bleeding again and someone was playing the inside of his skull like a kettledrum. The thought of having Ziggy, his attorney, around to offer Gunner his own special brand of professional mothering was beginning to look like a better idea all the time, but the detective wasn’t ready to concede that such a measure was necessary. Besides, he was trying to convince his inquisitors of both his innocence and good intentions, and running for the shelter of a good lawyer was in his opinion no way to accomplish the feat.
“I’m afraid that’s all the truth there is to tell, fellas,” he said, shrugging.
“Or all the lies,” Toon said.
Toon was three years Booker’s junior but he wasn’t likely to live as long; he was a prisoner to junk food and his body showed it, from the rubbery bulk of his clean-shaven cheeks to the massive thighs straining the seams of his polyester slacks.
“You ask me, Jim, we ought to yank this joker’s papers and put him away for a couple of years. Take him off the street.”
“Look, what do you want me to say? I was in the process of turning Downs over to your boys when the shooting started. How the hell is what happened my fault?”
“I think that’s something you ought to be smart enough to figure out for yourself,” Booker said, still talking like an insomnolent DJ pulling the graveyard shift on a beautiful-music station. “Or are you just too dense to see how deep you’re in it this time?”
“Hell, Jim, he knows what he did,” Toon piped in eagerly, stepping forward to look down his nose at Gunner from shorter range. “You should have let somebody know you were in the goddamn house, Gunner. Harper and Lewellen didn’t know who the fuck you were; you come dragging Downs out into the street like you did, what the hell were they supposed to think?”
“What you did was, you made an asinine play,” Booker said, declining to follow Toon’s example of lost cool, “and it’s cost us a great deal. One good cop and an irreplaceable witness in a homicide case. Now I’m glad to hear that you were trying to do the sensible thing by turning Downs in when the shit hit the fan, but I’m afraid that does little to alter the fact that there must have been a thousand better ways to go about it.”
“You had no business being there in the first place, asshole,” Toon added. “It was our fucking stakeout, not yours.”
“In that case,” Gunner said, “either Harper or Lewellen should have had their ass in position to watch the alley, just like I did. Or did they learn to cover only one entrance to a house from you?”
Toon started to go after him, but Booker said, “Take it easy, Rod. Mr. Gunner here’s in enough trouble. He doesn’t need any infirmary time to compound his misery.” As Gunner watched, Toon took a moment to think about it, then heeled like a good watchdog, as always showing Booker more respect than he generally reserved for D.A.s.
“You could use some serious attitude adjustment, my friend,” Booker said to Gunner, finally betraying a trace of emotion, albeit a slight one. “Our mutual associate in homicide, Matthew Poole, says you’re okay, as far as private licenses go, but you don’t act okay to me. Doug Lewellen was a good friend of mine. Not to mention Rod’s. I think we’d both feel a lot better about you if you’d show us some sign of remorse, and accept your fair share of responsibility for his death.”
He gave Gunner a cold, hard stare and said nothing more, waiting for an answer.
Gunner let him look but would not be induced to offer a quick reply. He knew that Booker was right, of course; up to this point, Gunner had been making a complete jerk of himself, callously deflecting any and all blame for the deaths of Downs and Lewellen as if there were something or someone else upon which to pin it. Booker and Toon could only assume that he was too ashamed of his ineptitude to admit to any wrongdoing, but Gunner knew there was more to his mode of denial than that.
In truth, his feigned insensitivity was designed to keep the pair from realizing that he was already shouldering all the guilt he could handle, and not merely because he had been the common denominator who had brought both Doug Lewellen and Tamika Downs to the spot where their killer eventually found them. There was also the matter of an earlier contribution to the tragedy of Monday evening to consider, and the undeniable probability that Downs’s late-night trek to her candy man had only escaped Harper and Lewellen’s attention because the detective had stupidly made her aware early Monday morning of the LAPD’s interest in her home.
Considering the price of this momentary lack of discretion, and who had ultimately paid it, it was the kind of secret that could get a man shot in the back of the head some dark and lonely night somewhere down the road. Accidentally, of course.
Sixteen or seventeen times.
“Tell me what you’d like to hear, Booker,” Gunner said, tiring of the charade. “You want to hear me say I fucked up? Okay. I fucked up. Badly.”
“So far so good,” Booker said dryly.
“You want apologies now, I imagine.”
“You imagine correctly.”
“Okay. Give me a number. Tell me how many it’ll take to bring Lewellen and Downs back, and you’ve got it. Because I’ll say I’m sorry as many times as you and Toon can stand to hear it if that’s what it’ll buy me. Otherwise, I fail to see the point.”
“Please. Jim,” Toon pleaded, “let me show this sonofabitch the ‘point.’ As a favor to me—go get yourself a cup of coffee or take five to call the missus. I won’t leave a mark on the bastard, I swear to God.”
“No,” Booker said sharply.
“Look, Toon,” Gunner said, “all I’m trying to say is, what’s done is done. I zigged when I should have zagged, and making me feel like shit isn’t going to change it. Instead of leaning on me to make yourselves feel better, I think we’d all be better off if you’d devote your energies to finding that Chevy Nova.”
“Now he’s giving advice,” Toon said.
“We’ll find the car, don’t worry,” Booker promised. “That’s just a matter of time.”
“You run a make on it?”
“Of course we ran a make on it,” Toon said, still fuming. “But all we’ve got is a partial on the plate, so a positive I.D.’s going to be tough. Not that the name of the registered owner would mean much. No Blue drives a Nova, that we’re aware of. Chances are good it was stolen, and only sometime tonight. It probably hasn’t even been reported missing yet.”
“Then you do figure it was the Blues again.”
Booker nodded. “The only thing left to be decided is which one. Davidson has to be our first choice, obviously.”
“Obviously?”
“It adds up, doesn’t it? He does the driving for Mi
lls on the Lovejoy drive-by, then tries to get himself and Mills off the hook by killing Downs.”
Gunner shook his head. “I don’t think it was Rookie. From what I’ve heard about the kid, he might have the stomach for one murder a month, but not two.”
“You know somebody better qualified, do you?”
“I might. What about Whitey Most?”
“What about him?”
“You pick him up yet?”
“No. We see no need to talk to Mr. Most at this time,” Booker said flatly.
“Do you mind if I ask why?”
“Because Most doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with anything,” Toon snapped, interjecting. He had taken the weight off his feet by sitting on a corner of the desk, and Gunner was mildly amazed that it could handle such an oversized load without doing cartwheels across the room. “The man in that car was an Imperial Blue; it shouldn’t take a Rhodes scholar to figure that much out. What the hell do we want with Whitey Most?”
“I thought I already explained that. It was Most who put Downs up to fingering Toby Mills and Rookie Davidson for Darrel Lovejoy’s murder.”
“Downs said that?” Booker asked. “Verbatim?”
“Not verbatim, no. She said it in so many words.”
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“It means she told me she hadn’t really seen Mills or Davidson in the car that night, that it had been too dark on the corner to see who it was. She said she was only placing the Blues at the scene because someone was paying her to do so.”
“And this someone was Most?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Did she say what possible motive Most could have had for all this?”
“No.”
“You have one in mind, then? Something maybe we’ve overlooked?”
Gunner didn’t, of course. It was the one question they could hit him with all day and probably never get a sensible answer to.
“Sheeeiiit,” Toon said disgustedly, “where the hell’s he gonna get a motive for a dealer to frame his best goddamn runner for murder? Every day Mills spends in jail probably costs Most close to three grand!”
Not Long for This World Page 11
