Not Long for This World

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “So you rolled on him. You took a page right out of Teddy Davidson’s book and faked a drive-by.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Most was angry now, pumped up by the recollection of how Lovejoy had just tried to shrug him off like a minor annoyance, and in his rage was ready to admit to—or boast about—anything pertaining to his revenge.

  “Your boy Toby was playing games with your rock, and Rookie was always a little spaced-out errand boy close at hand, so you let the Blues play scapegoat.”

  “Shit, why not the Blues? Cops had to think somebody’s set did it, right? The Rook, that boy’s always fucked up, anyway. I figure him, I just be puttin’ him outta his misery. But Toby …” He shook his head sadly, like a mother talking about a stray son. “That boy, he just pissed me off. Off. I set the boy up, give ’im a piece, a real piece, and what does he do? He disses me, that’s what. Uses my own shit to try and ace me out, like he’s some kinda fuckin’ entrepreneur, or somethin’. So I say, cool. That’s the way he wants it, fine. I deal him into the drive-by. I tell Rookie to get me homeboy’s gun, one got his prints all on it and shit, and I give him some piddly errand to run when we’re gonna do it, so he won’t have no kind of alibi when the Man picks him up. I fix his ass, you understand? I got another man can run in his place; I don’t need no goddamn backstabbers workin’ for me.”

  “You’re talking about Cube Clarke,” Gunner said.

  “Yeah, that’s right. The Cube.”

  “He was the one who tipped you to where Rookie was hiding in San Fernando.”

  “Yeah. He heard it from a friend of a friend, like I told you the other night. See, the Cube, he ain’t like most gangbangers. That’s what I like about ’im. The Cube, you tell ’im what to do, what you need, and it’s done. No questions asked.”

  “Especially when you can give him something fun to do like roll on Tamika Downs, no doubt.”

  Most tried to make his face look apologetic, but it came off as something far less. “Tamika, she brought that on herself. I was gonna trust the bitch to keep her mouth shut, but she seen a couple cops sittin’ outside her house an’ went to pieces, made me lose all faith in her ass. So, I put the Cube to work, yeah. An’ it’s just like you say: He got off on it. Didn’t give me no shit, just went. The Cube, that motherfucker workin’ for you, you’re his homeboy. You understand what I’m sayin’? ‘Fuck the set, gimme my money.’”

  He laughed again, obviously admiring such mercenary wisdom.

  Gunner watched him cackle, the Ruger feeling somehow heavier in his hand, and decided he had heard enough. He stood up from his chair and started to circle the desk, toward Most, moving like he had something other than a short walk in mind.

  “Do me a favor, Whitey,” he said, waiting until he was right on top of the dealer to speak. “Don’t laugh. I don’t like the sound of it.”

  Most grinned, eager to please, and said, “Whatever you say, my man.”

  And then the last thing Gunner thought possible happened: Most used his right arm.

  His right arm was supposed to be useless, he had taken a bullet, possibly even three, somewhere in his upper torso only two nights ago, and the sling he was wearing made a powerful argument that his right arm had paid the price. Gunner had even been compensating accordingly, favoring Most’s right side, thinking himself wise, using the man’s handicap to remain out of harm’s way. But no. Most had brought the appendage up out of the sling like the head of a cobra, just a blur that had knocked the Ruger aside long enough for its owner to let loose with a straight left hand that caught the startled, stupefied investigator flush on the jaw.

  That was twice now Gunner had been caught watching someone’s “wrong” hand.

  It was an error to be ashamed of, certainly, but Gunner didn’t have time to feel ashamed. Most had knocked the Ruger from his grasp and was diving to the floor after it, with lousy form and decidedly bad intentions. The dealer’s left hand hadn’t had much behind it, but it had served its purpose all the same: Gunner couldn’t get to Most, or the Ruger, in time.

  Most had the gun aimed at his face before he could join the dealer on the floor. Gunner froze in place, holding the pose of a cat about to pounce, but he could see by the gleam in Most’s eye that it was a wasted effort. Unconditional surrender was not what Most had in mind. The dealer had the upper hand now, and he wasn’t going to do anything with it but put a hole in Gunner’s forehead and go back for his fifty grand.

  A flash of white lightning lit the walls of the room, and a cruel, guttural thunderclap accompanied it—but Gunner did not go down. Most did. Something made a bloody mess of his left collarbone, separating him from the Ruger, and sent him sprawling, limbs akimbo, over Gunner’s desk and down to the floor on the other side. His awkward landing alone suggested he would not be getting up again.

  Gunner turned to find Rod Toon standing in the doorway, his chrome-plated .38 Special smoking in his right hand like a fat cigar. Behind him, fighting with the curtains hanging in the doorway, Mickey Moore and his seven customers were trying to look past Toon into the room, jostling for position, muttering excitedly among themselves.

  Without saying a word to Gunner, Toon crossed the room to where Most lay and felt for a pulse.

  To no one’s great disappointment, he never found one.

  chapter fifteen

  The thing that had saved Gunner’s life was that Rod Toon believed in one-upmanship, too.

  His suspicion that the investigator was holding out on him, keeping secrets, had inspired him to assign a pair of plainclothes officers to the task of following Gunner around, but he had done so in the hope of getting something more out of it than a stranglehold on Gunner’s P.I. license. No one had been more frustrated by the gaping holes in Rookie Davidson’s wild story than Toon, nor more anxious to solve them, and he had made up his mind that when the time came to fill them, to lay the whole thing down for Assistant District Attorney James Booker with every who, what, where, and when perfectly in place, he would be the man with all the answers, not Gunner.

  One-upmanship.

  Gunner’s shadows had been placed on his tail only hours after his release from police headquarters early Saturday morning, but they had missed him at home and did not actually pick him up until he and Whitey Most showed up at Mickey Moore’s Trueblood Barbershop at a few minutes before three that afternoon. They recognized Most at once but made no move to apprehend him; Toon had given them specific orders to just sit tight and notify the CRASH unit detective directly if anything worth reporting developed, and that was what they did. Toon slapped the red dome light to the roof of his car and raced over as fast as he could.

  Had he stepped through the curtained doorway leading to Gunner’s office five minutes sooner than he had, things might have worked out exactly as he had planned. He could have handcuffed Gunner to a water pipe, grilled Whitey Most himself, and handed the completed tale of Darrel Lovejoy’s murder to James Booker on a silver platter. Instead, despite all the precautions he had taken to avoid such an eventuality, he ended up yet again at the mercy of Gunner’s sense of recall.

  He was not a happy camper.

  So this time, when his three-round verbal sparring session with Toon and Booker was finished, Gunner was not sent home with a stern warning and a stinging slap on the wrist. This time, they made reservations for him at the Black Bar Saloon, aka city jail, and advised him to get used to the decor of the place. The official charges pressed against him were “obstruction of justice” and “aiding and abetting a known fugitive,” and they earned him, at least to start, two nights of bad sleep in a crowded cell and the use of a toilet bowl that looked like a plumber’s worst nightmare.

  It was mid-afternoon Monday when Ziggy, his fifty-two-year-old Jewish lawyer and a triathlon-running health freak, finally managed to get him released on bail. During the ride home, Ziggy didn’t have many kind things to say about the way Gunner had handled things, but he did have some interesting news: One, the coroner’s a
utopsy on Whitey Most’s body had revealed that Most had suffered little more than a bloody and painful, though nondebilitating, flesh wound the previous Thursday night in San Fernando, hence his unexpected use of his bandaged right arm Saturday afternoon; two, the case against Toby Mills had been dropped, and Mills was on the street; and three, most significantly, Teddy Davidson had taken it on the lam. He had killed one cop and wounded another when they tried to pick him up for questioning early Saturday night, and apparently did not reappear again until the following day. It was only “apparent” that he had reappeared Sunday because the Reverend Willie Raines was the only one who claimed to have seen him. Raines had called the police late Sunday afternoon to say that Davidson was in his custody and was ready to give himself up, but when the squad cars arrived at the minister’s Baldwin Hills home, Davidson was nowhere to be found. According to Raines, he had changed his mind about surrendering and had run off again, without giving Raines any idea where he might go.

  In his absence, the police had gone through Davidson’s home and come up with more reasons for Davidson to keep running than he would ever need: a dozen or so assorted rifles and handguns, a closet full of gangbanger attire in all the colors of the rainbow, and a key chain strung with car keys, over thirty in all. The guns and the clothes seemed to need no explanation, in light of the fact that ballistics had identified several of the weapons as those used in the murders of some of the deceased gangbangers on Darrel Lovejoy’s list, but the keys were a source of confusion until somebody remembered what kind of business Davidson was in and who made up a good part of his customer base. Evidently, Davidson had been duplicating the keys to cars gangbangers were bringing into his shop, then “borrowing” the cars just long enough to use them on his faked drive-bys.

  It was a brilliant setup.

  In searching for Davidson’s motives for his crimes, the police and the local press, for whom the “tire salesman gone mad” story was a big one, uncovered only a few, though one stood out from the others like a sore thumb: On the afternoon of September 7, 1988, three teenage gangbangers from the Rockin’ 90s Hood set walked into a laundromat at 9116 Central Avenue and opened fire on the six people inside with two sawed-off shotguns and an automatic rifle, killing three and wounding three. Two of the dead were members of a rival Hood set, the Central Club Players, mere wannabes at twelve and fourteen, respectively; the third was a twenty-seven-year-old day-care-center teacher named Jennifer Wilkes. Wilkes had been six months pregnant at the time of her—and her unborn baby’s—untimely death.

  She also had been engaged to marry Teddy Davidson in October of that same year.

  In the wake of the unsettling news that Darrel Lovejoy, his trusted and beloved cofounder of the L.A. Peace Patrol, had irt fact been, at the very least, a conspirator in the murder of the very children the organization was supposedly dedicated to assist, the Reverend Willie Raines was holding up admirably well. He, of course, claimed complete ignorance of his partner’s wrongdoings, vowed to make restitution in any way possible, and assured both the members of his immediate church and his vast following among the general public that both the Peace Patrol and his Children of God Ministries were capable of withstanding any amount of close scrutiny the authorities might care to bring to bear upon them. He was determined to diffuse any talk whatsoever that his one-year-in-the-making, precedent-setting youth gang peace summit—scheduled to take place that very Wednesday—could not proceed as planned.

  The police, who had never been too crazy about the idea of the summit in the first place, weren’t too happy with the timing of it—but they were willing to try anything that might keep the lid on what was now a highly unpredictable, possibly even explosive, L.A. gang scene. If he could get the ’bangers scheduled to participate to go through with the peacemaking process, they told Raines—despite everything the ’bangers had learned about Darrel Lovejoy and the true fate of some of their deceased homeboys—then he had their blessings. And their respect.

  Toon, for one, didn’t think the minister would be able to pull it off, but he hardly had the time to argue about it. There was still the matter of Tamika Downs and Officer Doug Lewellen’s murders to attend to. It helped to finally know that Cube Clarke had been the Blue responsible for the double murder, as Gunner’s latest statement to the police indicated, but it was beginning to look as if finding Clarke to extract a confession to that effect was going to be as big a headache as finding Rookie Davidson had proven to be. Cube had gone underground, apparently taking the green-of-sorts Chevy Nova with the missing headlight with him. And Toon’s people were fast getting tired of searching for them both.

  Still, Toon was not complaining. There was something new to be thankful for these days, and it made his load lighter just to remind himself of it. Sometimes, the thought even put a smile on his face. Aaron Gunner was off the street, and out of his hair.

  He had won the game of one-upmanship, after all.

  “It’s a lie. Something that vile, disgusting man made up just to slander Darrel and make himself look less deplorable.”

  “I don’t think so, Claudia.”

  “Then you’re a fool. Anyone who knew Darrel—anyone—would know that it’s not true. That it’s just not possible. Darrel could never have murdered anyone.”

  Gunner thought to point out that no one had accused Claudia Lovejoy’s late husband of committing murder, per se—all the evidence available to date merely indicated that he had commissioned someone else to actually commit several—but he figured the distinction would be no consolation to the woman, whatsoever. Less than two months ago, she had been forced to watch as the people of Los Angeles gently lowered Darrel Lovejoy into his grave—and now she was having to watch them dig him right back up again, for another pass through the muck and the slime of the living.

  “What about the note? It was Darrel’s handwriting. Even you admitted that.”

  “So what if it was his handwriting? That note could have meant anything! Just because a sick man made a death list out of it doesn’t mean that’s what it really was!”

  She was beautiful. No amount of righteous indignation could change that. It was Tuesday, early evening, and he had finally caught up to her at home, having grown tired of leaving messages that were only going ignored on her telephone answering machine. She let him in reluctantly, resentfully, and they settled in the living room to do what he said he had come to do: say goodbye.

  However, now that she was sitting here before him, the very picture of casual voluptuousness in a slate gray knitted sweater with a scalloped neck and a pair of pale blue hip-hugging denim trousers—her radiant face flushed with color and her green eyes dancing with light—there was no way he could do it. Saying goodbye was the last thing on his mind. For all the belated regrets she might be feeling for the night they had shared together, he had none, and he was not going to dismiss outright the magic of it as something that could never be duplicated or sustained.

  “When they catch Teddy Davidson, you’ll see,” she said. “He’ll tell you. He did what he did on his own; Darrel had nothing to do with it.”

  Davidson still hadn’t turned up, and the police had all but stopped looking for him in Los Angeles. Investigators had learned that he had rented a car in Phoenix, Arizona, late Monday afternoon, and the search for him had moved eastward accordingly. He and Rookie had relatives in Houston, Texas, and that was where it was widely assumed he was headed.

  “I’d like to take you to dinner,” Gunner said, tired of being a participant in an argument he didn’t really need to win. “Tonight.”

  Lovejoy shook her head adamantly. “No. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Be fair. To yourself and to me. Please.”

  She was still shaking her head.

  It took Gunner close to forty minutes to make her stop, but for a long time afterward he would regard it as time well spent.

  Wednesday morning, his eyes finally opened to the truth, and it was like getting hit by a train an
d a sudden awareness of his own stupidity all at once.

  He was a private investigator; it was his job to look beyond the obvious, and yet he had had to lie down with a magnificent woman to see the light. Whether it was the sheer power of the sex alone, or the realization that this time her reasons for being with him had had more to do with conscious want than unconscious need, he awoke in Claudia Lovejoy’s bed at exactly eleven-twenty-five with a new, frighteningly feasible outlook on her husband’s murder, an outlook he wasted no time in testing for validity.

  He turned to her and found that she, too, was awake, her head propped up in her left hand, watching the odd expressions roll over his face as the revelation established itself firmly in his mind. There was nothing on the bed with which to mask her nudity except for a single sheet in pastel blue, but she wasn’t making much use of it. It was drawn up only to her navel and her breasts were playing peekaboo with his eyes. If he wanted to, he could draw up the memory of the things he had done to Lovejoy—and the things she had done to him—only mere hours ago.…

  “You get the paper?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Do you get a paper? A newspaper. Is there one outside right now?”

  She yawned deliciously. “The Times. But why …?”

  He pulled his pants on and ran to the front door. As promised, the Wednesday morning Los Angeles Times was waiting for him atop the tattered welcome mat on the porch.

  He returned to the bed and immediately leafed through the first section, but he should have known better. The local press had shown the Reverend Willie Raines’s street-gang peace summit nearly as much unapologetic skepticism as the LAPD, and there was no way the Times was going to waste any part of its first twenty-eight pages telling people about it. It ran its story on the summit on the first page of the Metro section—the place where all poor-sister stories of only local import could be found—and it probably thought itself being generous just doing that.