It's Not a Pretty Sight (22 page)

The same woman, sitting at a crowded dining-room table, laughing.

Agnes Felker tearing pages out of a magazine, her face an iron mask of devious concentration.

And a blond woman sitting cross-legged on a hardwood floor, watching TV. The same one who had slapped Gunner silly in front of Wendy Singer’s office door the previous afternoon; he couldn’t remember her name.

Alex Schumacher, Serrano said it was.

“You know her?” Gunner asked.

“Not well, but I know her. Sure.”

“She really as crazy as she pretends to be?”

“Oh. I guess you got the treatment yesterday, huh?”

“If getting your face slapped into next Tuesday is the treatment, yeah. I did.”

“She say anything to you afterward, by any chance?”

“Not much. Does she usually?”

“Sometimes she recites a riddle, or a rhyme. Sometimes both.”

“I didn’t get a riddle or a rhyme. Just a smile.”

“Good for you. She didn’t rub it in. Anyway, in answer to your question, I don’t think she’s crazy, no. Alex just likes to shock people, that’s all. It’s her way of getting attention.”

“You don’t think it goes any deeper than that?”

“No. You’d expect to see it manifest itself in other ways, if it did. But it never does. Slapping a strange man’s face every now and then is as aberrant as her behavior ever gets, at least as far as I know.”

Gunner nodded as he looked over the five photographs again. Searching for something
significant
in one or more of them; something pronounced, or off center, that might catch his eye and give him some reason to wonder if it wasn’t a photograph Nina had taken that eventually led to her death …

But there was nothing like that here.

“Well. I think I’ve taken up enough of your time,” Gunner said, handing the photos back to his hostess. “Don’t you?”

“I was glad to help,” Serrano said, shaking his hand again.

He gave her a business card as she walked him to the door, and told her to give him a call, anything else came to mind she thought he might need to know.

“Oh, and by the way,” he said, “I almost forgot to ask.”

“Yes?”

“Where were you last Tuesday? Between the hours of seven
P.M.
and midnight?”

It was something of a cheap shot, waiting until he was walking out the door to ask her the question, but he wanted to see how she’d answer it after being led to believe the subject was never going to come up.

“I was working. Why?”

“Here locally, or somewhere out of town?”

“Out of town? Who told you I was out of town?”

“Nobody. But the ladies out at Sisterhood had said you were doing some work out on the East Coast somewhere, and that was why—” He stopped short, remembering something. “Oh. Wait a minute.”

“Yes?”

“I was going to say that that was why you haven’t been out to the house lately. Because you’ve been out of town. But you’ve already explained the real reason for that, haven’t you? About why you haven’t been around, I mean.”

“Because Wendy thinks I was Nina’s lover? Yes, I did,” Serrano said.

“Then you haven’t been out to the East Coast at all, have you?”

“The East Coast? No. I haven’t. I was in Detroit for two weeks back in November, but that was about it.”

“Sure.”

“It’s nice to hear Wendy’s made up a cover story for me, though. Better that my friends at her place think I’ve been out of town than that I’m a camera-wielding lesbian on the prowl for abused, defenseless young women like them. Right?”

She tried to smile, not wanting to appear too bitter about the slight, but it was an effort wasted.

Getting stabbed in the back was something only a fool could learn to smile about.

He was almost home when he remembered his promise to Mickey.

Roman Goody was somebody Gunner had tried to put in his “Never Again, So Help Me God” file nearly one week ago, but the man wouldn’t stay in the past. He wanted Gunner’s attention at least one more time, and he was apparently willing to call his office number at least two or three times a day until he got it. Gunner wasn’t the one taking Goody’s calls, so it would have been just fine with him to wait the fat man out, but since Mickey had already lost patience with that approach …

Gunner had to go see Goody tonight.

“Shit,” he said, turning the Cobra around.

It was a few minutes past five in the early evening, approaching the zenith of L.A.’s rush hour. Somebody had turned the thermostat down on the city, so that all Gunner could see above his head was a gray, somewhat chilly mist that the sun could not seem to burn its way through. It was almost cold, but not quite. Winter in the City of Angels, Gunner thought to himself.

Brrrrr.

A full two blocks before Gunner reached Best Way Electronics, he knew he should have called Goody sooner. The red and white Fire Department ambulance and all the black-and-whites parked out front were a dead giveaway.

He had hell getting through, but eventually he talked the uniforms out front into letting him inside the building, having had to represent himself as a private investigator still under Goody’s employ. One of them told him what all the excitement was about, though Gunner had already known. He had only asked to have his suspicions confirmed before he could go inside and find something worse than what he was expecting, though what that could possibly be, he didn’t know.

What he was expecting was about all the bad news he could stand.

thirteen

T
HEY WERE GETTING READY TO WHEEL THE BODY OUT ON
a gurney when he reached Goody’s office in the back, lab guys and plainclothes detectives going over the room like paleontologists poring over a dig.

Somebody had beaten Goody to a bloody pulp sometime early that morning and left him in his office to grow ripe. His store had been open for business for more than six hours before one of his employees finally decided he was worth worrying about, and opened his locked office door with a spare set of keys.

The Compton PD detectives working the case were strangers to Gunner, but they treated him decently enough. Their names were Bertelsen and Bunche; white cop, black cop, left shoe, right shoe. Different, yet the same. Once they’d put him through his paces a bit, making him explain and explain again who he was and what he was doing there, they pretty much told Gunner anything he wanted to know. And in return, he gave them a probable name for the perp they were looking for: Russell Dartmouth.

They’d let him take a peek under the sheet covering Goody’s body before the men from the coroner’s office rolled it away, and he’d told them then that Goody’s face—or what was left of it—had Dartmouth’s mark all over it. It was what his own face would have looked like had the big man been allowed to finish the job he’d started on Gunner only the week before.

“How can you be so sure it’s him?” Bunche asked, his back teeth vigorously pulverizing a mouthful of mini-mints. Every time Gunner turned around, he was working on another fistful of the things.

“Because he’s crazy,” Gunner said. “I told you.”

He lingered around the crime scene for nearly an hour, permitted to look but not to touch. It would have suited him fine to leave as soon as they gave him the okay, but he figured a quick exit might lead them to wonder what kind of investigator he was, not being curious enough to even look the place over. There wasn’t much to see, just the mess Goody’s killer had made drop-kicking him around, but Gunner went through the motions of examining it anyway, actually more interested in all the cop talk going on around him than anything else. The police photographer telling one of the lab techs a bad joke, something about a nearsighted squirrel and a horny raccoon; Bertelsen and Bunche waxing philosophical about the Endicott homicide, still unsolved and driving them nuts; Bunche and the M.E. arguing over the delay in the Gatewood autopsy; Bertelsen and one of the uniforms raking some cop named Brimmer over the coals for getting caught out of uniform with a hooker named Chip, who, as near as Gunner could tell, was a transvestite. Fascinating stuff, the conversations one could hear taking place at a crime scene. Irreverent, vulgar, and generally trivial to the point of game show fodder—but fascinating.

When the photographer started up another joke, this one dealing with a hippo in a gay bar, Gunner decided he’d been entertained enough.

He gave Bertelsen and Bunche the address in Venice where he and Dartmouth had had their little brawl, and left, Bertelsen suggesting as he walked away that he watch his back for a while. He’d shrugged the comment off at the time, but inside of five minutes, just as he was turning the key in the Cobra’s ignition, it inspired him to make a connection between two things he had somehow failed to connect before: Dartmouth and the unsettling phone call he’d received at three o’clock that morning. The memory was too vague now to be sure, but looking back on it, it seemed to Gunner that the caller who had so ominously warned him to “get ready to die” could indeed have been Dartmouth. It was an idea that actually answered more questions than it asked, not the least of which was why Goody might have wanted to spend the last two days of his life trying desperately to get the investigator on the phone. If Dartmouth had been showering him with phone calls similar to the one Gunner had received … well, it wasn’t hard to see Goody thinking it might be nice to have a hired gun like Gunner around to protect his considerable backside.

I’m just tellin’ you what he sounds like to me
, Mickey had said, when Gunner called for messages earlier in the day.
So if somethin’ happens later, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.
Hell if the sonofabitch hadn’t been right to be so concerned.

Gunner knew it would be a long time before he heard the end of this one.

His home was empty, but it took him a good fifteen minutes to convince himself of the fact. He’d come in through the back door and gone from room to room, entering each on catlike feet, not hitting a single light until he was done. The Ruger had been in his hand the whole time, ready to put a bullet in anything that might come at him without announcing itself first.

It was the last thing he needed, the specter of Russell Dartmouth hanging over his head to distract him, what with his investigation into Nina Pearson’s murder getting more complicated and impenetrable by the second. A lesbian lover and the mentor who’d been mistaken for one; a blonde who liked to slap strange men around, and an old woman who thought “nigger” was a perfectly acceptable noun; the stalker Nina had once worked for, and the overprotective shelter director whose roof she’d lived under just before her death. Individually bizarre they were, and collectively even more so. But where was the murder case hidden among them? Who deserved Gunner’s scrutiny, and who deserved his neglect?

Gunner had no idea.

Which was why he spent the better part of his evening trying to sort it all out, stretched out on his living room couch eating leftover fried chicken out of a cardboard bucket, one Bob James CD after another playing on the stereo. James was a favorite of Gunner’s, a soft jazz keyboardist whose music was invariably upbeat and soothing, and sometimes his lushly orchestrated arrangements could put Gunner in a zone of inspired thought and reflection. He was hoping that would be the case tonight.

His first thought was of Michael Pearson.

Nina’s husband still had the inside track on most likely suspect, but he was starting to get some company. Shirley Causwell and Gary Stanhouse were in the running for that title too, if what Trini Serrano had said about both this afternoon could be believed. Unfortunately, that was a big if. Much of what Serrano had told Gunner he’d had little trouble accepting, but this business about the bracelet she’d been trying to find when she went through Nina’s things didn’t quite sit right with him, he wasn’t sure why. She struck him as the kind of woman who would make no secret of her desire for Nina, if she had in fact felt any; she seemed far more insulted by the idea that Wendy Singer thought she was a cradle robber than that she was a lesbian. So when she said her love for Nina had been strictly platonic in nature, it seemed safe to assume she was telling the truth.

And yet …

She’d made a major mystery out of the inscription she claimed the missing bracelet bore. Why? Why be so tight-lipped about that, and so forthcoming with everything else? If the inscription wasn’t somehow shameful to her, or incriminating, why bother withholding it from him?

It didn’t make sense.

Finding the bracelet himself would help to explain things, of course, but Gunner wasn’t so sure he needed to be making that a priority just now. Not with Causwell and Stanhouse emerging as far more deserving objects of his attention. Even before Serrano had pointed an accusatory finger in their direction, Gunner had pretty much made the pair for what they were: wannabe suitors of the dead woman, emotionally disturbed and potentially violent. Causwell’s feelings for Nina he’d merely had his suspicions about, based on the way she’d sometimes said Nina’s name, or the open contempt she’d shown for the man who’d been abusing Nina for years—as if she took the abuse personally, like something
she’d
been the target of, and not Nina—but Stanhouse had been an open book to Gunner from the beginning. Both people had loved Nina, and both had been denied her. The challenge for Gunner now was to determine which of the two, if either one of them, had been enraged and/or discouraged enough by losing her to kill her.