Fear of the Dark (14 page)

She meant Gunner to take the news as a dismissal; she put a
Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You
smile on her face and fell silent.

“He been there long?” Gunner asked, pretending to miss her point entirely.

“Since Friday evening. Lew was a guest speaker at the Bay Area Veterans’ Association conference over the weekend, and asked Larry to tag along. Why?”

Gunner shrugged. “Just curious.”

“Exactly what kind of story is it you’re writing, Mr.…”

“Gunner.”

“That’s right. Mr. Gunner. What’s the slant of your piece, Mr. Gunner? What’s the angle?”

“Angle?”

“The angle, yes. You do know what an angle is, don’t you?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. What’s a newspaper story without an angle?”

“I thought you said you were with
Newsweek.
The magazine.”

Gunner shrugged again. “I don’t recall exactly what I said, frankly.
Newsweek
or the
Daily News
, one or the other. Does it matter?”

Her eyes left him for a moment, perhaps searching the crowded floor beyond Stewart’s quarters for a worker ant big enough to bounce Gunner out on his ear. He had made quite a stir out there among them earlier, as totally out of place as he was, and the novelty of his presence had not worn off yet. With the attention he was continuing to draw, help was just a raised voice away if the lady decided to ask for it.

“You’re not a reporter, then?”

“No.” Gunner dropped his wallet on Stewart’s desk where she could see it, open to his license in its yellowing plastic window. She read it right down to the fine print on the back, and more than once.

“You’re a private detective,” she said, pushing the wallet back across the desk at him, making the job sound like something she came across every day. It was beginning to look as if nothing Gunner had to offer was going to particularly move her one way or the other. “And you want to see Larry because …?”

“Because I’m in deep shit,” Gunner said, letting some of his irritation with her condescending manner show through, “and his phone number was burning a hole in my pocket. I found it among the personal effects of a friend of his and I was hoping he could tell me how it got there.”

“A friend of Larry’s?” More blatant skepticism. “Who?”

“His name was Denny Townsend. He was a white man, medium height, in his early thirties. Had a psyche only a mother could love and a left eye with more moves than a good game of chess. Sound familiar?”

Her face said it did, losing its well-defined implacability all at once. Gunner suddenly had her full attention, if not her total respect. “We have a worker,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “A volunteer, who comes in now and then to run errands for the staff. He’s not on our regular rolls, so I can’t look it up, but his name
could
be Denny. And I suppose he does have an eye similar to what you describe.” She was trying to remember him in detail, creating a stubborn silence. “You say he had Larry’s private number? The one you used earlier?”

Gunner nodded and showed her the flyer, without actually handing it to her. “These errands you say he ran. He run many of them for Stewart personally?”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t think so.”

“But this is Stewart’s handwriting?”

She gave the flyer a second, closer look. “It could be. But I don’t see how. If the man you’re referring to is the one I have in mind, Larry could not have intended this for him. Because Larry’s had no use for this fellow; he’s unfit for most things. In fact …”

She didn’t go on.

Gunner waited.

Allison shrugged and said, “I was just going to say that it wouldn’t really surprise me if your being here has something to do with his landing in some kind of trouble with the law. He’s that type, I think.”

“Yeah?”

She nodded. “I haven’t had much contact with him myself, actually, but what I’ve had sort of leads me to believe he could be dangerous to some people, under the wrong circumstances. Exactly what kind of trouble is he in?”

Gunner smiled wryly. “The worst possible. Somebody caught
him
‘under the wrong circumstances’ and put a hole in his pelvic region too big to sew up. He’s dead.”

Stewart’s phone rang abruptly. Allison seemed too preoccupied to answer it at first, but picked it up on the third ring and made short work of the call, slightly flustered and embarrassed to be so. When she turned to Gunner again, she had the look of someone who had lost her place in time and needed some help getting resynchronized with the universe.

“He was murdered,” Gunner said simply, anxious to move along. “Two and a half weeks after knocking off Buddy Dorris of the Brothers of Volition and a bartender too slow to stop him.”

Allison sat up in her chair. If she wasn’t genuinely surprised, she had some talent for pretending to be.

“How’s that again?”

“Buddy Dorris. Your boy Townsend was the hero who put the hit on him. You did know Buddy Dorris?”

“Of course.”

“But you weren’t aware that Townsend had killed him?”

Her contempt for the question was such that she declined to answer it.

“What do you want, Mr. Gunner? Spell it out, please.”

Gunner eagerly complied. “I want to talk to Stewart,” he said. “I want to ask him where Townsend got the idea to blow Dorris’s head off, and whether he got it before Stewart gave him his number, or after. What do you think?”

“I think you’ve made a big mistake,– that’s what I think. I think you’re looking for the wrong man.”

“Meaning who? Townsend or Stewart?”

“Take your pick. I don’t believe our man killed anybody, in the first place. And in the second, I’m certain no one here knew anything about it if he did. Larry most especially.”

She was back in the saddle again, chin held high and proud. Gunner glared at her renewed infuriating smugness and said, “Somebody somewhere did.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. Really. Townsend didn’t have the brainpower to tie his shoes without help, even you’d have to admit that. So he sure as hell didn’t do such a smash-up job taking Dorris out working all by his lonesome. He got assistance. Direction. Probably from the same party or parties trying to frame a good friend of mine for his murder.”

“And you think Larry is involved somehow?”

“I’ve never met Larry. You tell me. Why would a man in his position lay his private number on a fruitcake like Denny Townsend? Just to have his own certified psycho fetch his lunch from time to time?”

“I’m sure his reasons were more substantial than that,” Allison said, “but exactly what they were, I wouldn’t know.
I
certainly never considered using him for anything.”

“But if he had been working under Stewart for the campaign, performing legitimate duties of some kind, you’d have known about it?”

Allison shrugged. “In most cases, yes. Generally, Larry and I run this office together, in tandem, but we occasionally run our own little projects on the side. Is that a crime?”

Gunner shook his head. “Not unless Stewart’s idea of a little project is vastly different from mine.”

“Then you won’t be needing to talk to him after all. Will you?”

She was trying to nudge the black man out the door again. Either she didn’t care for the nature of his business, or she was very uncomfortable around people more darkly tanned than she. Exactly which of the two was the case, Gunner couldn’t say.

“If it’s all the same to you,” he said, firmly and with no great emotion, mastering his ebbing patience well, “I’d prefer to, regardless.”

“He’ll only repeat what I’ve already told you.”

“Somehow, I don’t doubt that. But I have to give it a shot just the same. He may not be up to admitting guilt of any kind, but he just might give me some insight into the way Townsend’s mind worked. Who the man’s friends were and where they hung out. Maybe even what they planned to do about the nationwide
nigger problem
your man Henshaw’s so concerned about.”

The liquid blue eyes lost their gleam. He had finally said something the blond could not deflect with moderate ease. “Lew Henshaw is not that kind of man,” she said angrily.

Gunner had to laugh. “How do you mean that, exactly? That he’s not the kind of man who likes to think of us black folk in those terms? Or rather that he’s never been dumb enough to publicly refer to us quite so disparagingly?”

“I mean that he’s not the racist, red-necked anachronism the press makes him out to be. Lew is a good man, Mr. Gunner. A fair man. And he doesn’t think of you people—of anyone—in that way.”

There. She had clarified it. Gunner
was
one of
Them.

A colored boy by any other name …

He wanted to laugh again, but found that he could not. Stupidity and raw beauty, especially in one so young, was no laughable mix. “You think he’s just talking about law and order, I guess. All that shit about ‘returning the streets to our children,’ and ‘raising justice from the dead.’”

“Lew wants an America we can all be proud of. All of us. You see something sinister in that?”

“He’s looking for
war
, lady. Not justice or freedom or any of those other flag-waving catch phrases his kind likes to throw around. He’s looking for war, in the streets. Between the white hats and the black hats, the good guys and the bad. You and me, Ms. Allison. One-on-one.”

The blond shook her head at him, the way she probably had at her mother as a little girl. “You’re wrong. You don’t know Lew. That isn’t what he wants at all.”

She had lost a step somewhere, and the difference in her countenance was startling. She had taken up Henshaw’s defense before, Gunner realized, to fend off other arguments along the same vein, other foes with similar angles of attack, and the wear and tear on her convictions was beginning to show through. It was a difficult business, obviously, believing in the dormant goodness of a basically parasitic man.

She got to her feet behind Stewart’s desk and gave Gunner one more glimpse of the armor-clad exterior she had shown before. School was out.

“If you have no more questions for me, Mr. Gunner, you’ll excuse me. But I’m afraid I have better things to do with my time than lobby for a vote Lew is clearly not going to get, no matter what kind of man he may or may not be. If you’ll leave me your card, I’ll be sure to see that Larry gets back to you as soon as he possibly can.”

Gunner took her in from where he sat and made a long, drawn-out exercise of pulling a business card from his wallet, teeming with ambivalence. The woman was young and well educated, easy on the eye and full of good intentions, but what she knew about black people wouldn’t make a short paragraph, and there was a sadness in that he could not reconcile.

He flipped his card in her general direction and stood up.

“Thanks for the time,” he said, and left her before the impulse to slap his third woman in six days grew too strong to overcome.

Outside, Gunner reached his car and came to notice a familiar vehicle pulling up to the curb nearby.

An old Postal Service jeep, badly painted and dented on one side.

Its driver, a giant man with a meager mustache, heaved a heavy box of what looked like computer paper from the jeep’s passenger seat and took it inside Henshaw’s campaign quarters. He hadn’t recognized Gunner.

But Gunner had recognized him, yellow windbreaker or no.

enny Townsend’s fat errand boy worked some long hours for Lewis Henshaw. The California skyline was tying up the loose ends of a fast fade to black, well after 6
P.M.,
when he finally called it a day and drove home to a little one-bedroom house with wood slat sides and a tar-paper roof on the seedier side of Venice, far removed from the Pacific Ocean and its neighboring affluent real estate. Situated near the east end of the 12000 block of Victoria Avenue, the house was an architectural corpse, weather-beaten and lifeless. No lights shone in the windows; no sounds crept through the walls.

Townsend’s friend had to open the gate of a chain-link fence surrounding the property to pull his jeep into the driveway. When he went back to lock it behind him, Gunner was standing there waiting, the only living soul on the street. The black man offered him an extended peek at the heavy S&W .357 in his right-hand coat pocket, giving him time to study its form in the dark, then stepped quickly inside the gate to join him on the other side of the fence.