sixteen
L
OOSE ENDS
. T
HAT WAS ALL
G
UNNER HAD LEFT TO WORK
with now.
Back in his office at Mickey’s, sitting behind his desk like the despondent CEO of a bankrupt savings and loan, he sorted through the pieces of his investigation, looking for some clue as to what direction he should move in next, and found not a one. Discovering Nina’s diary had given him the idea he had found the mother lode, the key, central piece of evidence around which every murder investigation revolved. Who better to tell him who might have wanted Nina dead than Nina herself?
But the diary had been a false lead.
Reading it from cover to cover two more times had convinced him of that. With the exception of Nina’s account of the Alvin Bascomb killing, the book neither enhanced his knowledge of the people in her life he was already acquainted with, nor introduced him to any he had not previously been aware of. The diary confirmed and explained a number of things he’d had lingering questions about, yes—such as the nature of her relationship with Trini Serrano, which had, apparently, been sexual only in Nina’s rather paranoid imagination—but other than that, it was useless to him. Just a sad reminder of what a hodgepodge of confusion and disappointment Nina’s life had been toward its final days.
So he tossed it, reviewed what remained of his hand, and saw nothing. Nothing but discards and jokers. Serrano was out of the picture, having motive but no opportunity; Causwell and Singer had opportunity, but no clear-cut motive; Stanhouse had motive and opportunity, but hadn’t yet shown Gunner the backbone of a murderer; Felker had a weapon, but only a water-thin motive at best; and Glass had neither motive nor opportunity. Put them all in a lineup, and what did you have? A rogue’s gallery of unlikely suspects, with the emphasis on “unlikely.”
Gunner called Matthew Poole, unable to think of anything better to do.
“Well. The mountain comes to Mohammed,” the police detective said, surprising Gunner by actually answering the phone himself.
“That doesn’t mean what I think it means, I hope,” Gunner said.
“Please. You’d be eating dinner on the county right about now, that was true. I was just making a joke.”
“A joke by definition is funny, Poole. Better not tell any more until you can remember that.”
“State your business, Gunner. I’m busy.”
“I’ll do that in a minute. But while I’ve got you on the phone, you might as well tell me what your intentions are. Just so I’ll know.”
“My intentions? You mean for you?”
“I figure it’s been half a day now, you wanted to hold me accountable for Pearson, you would’ve picked me up by now. Maybe I’m wrong.”
“You want me to tell you you’re in the clear? That what you want?”
“Only if it’s true, Poole. If it’s not—”
“I’ll put it to you like this, Gunner: You wanna make plans for dinner tonight, go ahead. Same for lunch tomorrow, ’less I miss my guess. Beyond that, I can’t tell you. The DA’s office has been talkin’ like they might be interested in prosecuting, but it’s probably just talk. I won’t know for sure until sometime tomorrow.”
He waited for Gunner to comment, but all he heard coming back over the line was silence.
“Hey. You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Thanks, Poole.”
“You’re welcome. That all you wanted to know?”
“Actually, no. You never called me back about the gun. When I called you yesterday. You didn’t get my message?”
“I got it. But here’s the problem: This ain’t a goddamn research library. It’s a police department. So it’s not my job to hop to every time you call looking for information. Especially if it relates to an ongoing homicide investigation.”
“I had a reason for asking the question, Lieutenant.”
“I’m sure you did. But so what?”
“Listen. Enough with the snappy dialogue. I found out yesterday one of Nina’s old girlfriends out at the shelter happens to own a shotgun. I know, because I saw it. Up close and personal. It looked like a Browning, single-barrel pump action, but I’m not sure. I thought if Nina was killed with something similar, you might want to check it out.”
“Who’s this girlfriend we’re talking about? Give me a name.”
“Her name’s Felker. Agnes Felker.” Gunner spelled it. “And guess what, you lucky bastard?”
“What?”
“She used the gun in question to kill a man last night. Her boyfriend Otha. He put her in the hospital, and she put him in the morgue. Seems she shot him after he beat her half to death, she’s out at County-USC as we speak.”
“Then there ought to be an open ticket on her somewhere.”
“Yeah. And with the gun being held in evidence—”
“I get it, I get it. I get with ballistics, see if we can make a match between this weapon and ours.”
“Right.”
Poole said he’d see what he could do. Coming from him, that was like a guarantee in writing.
“So what else you got going, cowboy?” he asked.
“Plenty. I’ll be filling you in later, don’t worry.”
Poole laughed, said, “You’re full of shit. You’ve got nothin’ going, Gunner, and you never will. Because the man who killed Nina Pearson is dead. All this runnin’ around you’re doin’ trying to find another perp is a big waste of time. Yours
and
mine.”
“I don’t think so, Lieutenant. But I want to thank you for sharing that opinion with me,” Gunner said.
“Don’t mention it. Have a nice day.”
And with that, Poole was gone.
It took some doing, but he found a number for one of the detectives working the Roman Goody murder case, the brother named Bunche, and called him, just to let him know Russell Dartmouth had been in the neighborhood earlier. Bunche said thanks for the info, he and his partner Bertelsen would get right on it.
After that, Gunner drove over to the Acey Deuce for a drink. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, but that was too bad; he was down and he was tired, and he needed something to take the edge off his self-deprecation.
“You start any shit in here today, boy, you’re gone for good,” Lilly said, soon as his ass hit a stool at the bar.
Gunner looked around for the barkeeper’s benefit, first over one shoulder, then the next. His entrance had brought the number of patrons at the bar to a whopping five.
“You see anybody in here to start any shit
with
?” he asked.
“I don’t care if there ain’t but you an’ me in here. I catch you sayin’ an unkind word to your shadow on the wall, you gonna be lookin’ for someplace else to do your drinkin’. Try me an’ see.”
She poured Gunner his usual and went away, confident nothing further needed to be said.
For the next fifteen minutes or so, Gunner sat there alone, ruminating. Thinking about Stanhouse, mostly. Trying to decide how much sense it would make now to put a tail on him over the weekend. It was still the only thing left he could think to do, but he couldn’t see how it would accomplish anything. Even if Stanhouse didn’t know it was coming, the chances that he would do anything to incriminate himself—like lead Gunner to the weapon he’d used on Nina—were almost nonexistent. With the lawyer
expecting
to be put under surveillance—as he’d practically come right out and said he was when the two men had spoken earlier in the day—the odds became greater still that Gunner would learn nothing whatsoever from watching him. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
When Lilly inevitably came back around to check on him, Gunner asked her to hang for a while, he had a question he wanted to ask her.
“What kinda question?” the ruby-lipped giant wanted to know.
“I was just wondering whether or not you’ve ever been with somebody who liked to slap you around,” Gunner said.
“Slap me around? What, you mean a man?”
“A man, yes. What the hell else would I be talking about?”
Lilly laughed. Not at his sorry wisecrack, but at the question he was asking. Like she hadn’t heard anything so stupid all day. “Lemme ask you somethin’, Gunner,” she said. “You was my man, would
you
wanna try slappin’ me around?” She threw her head back and laughed again, genuinely amused.
And hell if she didn’t have a point. Lilly was bigger than half the men Gunner had ever seen in his life, and meaner than all but maybe a dozen. Any man who put his hands on her, she didn’t
want
his hands on her, was playing with his life.
“No offense, Lilly, but size isn’t everything,” Gunner said. “You might not take any shit in here, but that doesn’t mean you won’t take any in the bedroom. Does it?”
“I don’t take any shit from anybody
anywhere,
” Lilly said.
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
The big woman stood on the other side of the bar and looked at him, the broad grin she’d been wearing slowly leaving her face. It took some time to disappear completely, but when it did, she said, “You ain’t gonna believe this, but I only had one man in my life ignorant enough to put his hands on me, an’ that was J.T., back when we first got married.”
She was right; Gunner didn’t believe it. Her late husband had been almost as big as Lilly, but most of the man was heart; J.T. could raise hell if he had to, but friends didn’t come any better.
“J.T.?”
“He only did it once. We’d been married three weeks, just found a place and moved in together, over on Wadsworth Avenue near Ninety-first Street. This was almost thirty years ago, September 1968—I was nineteen, an’ he was twenty-one. He come home late one night, smellin’ like liquor an’ some other woman, an’ I let ‘im hear about it. So he slapped me. One time, hard, on the left side of my face right here.” She pointed to her left cheek like the blow had left a mark that could still be seen.
“What did you do?” Gunner asked.
“I’ll tell you what I did. I called the cops on his ass. Cried into that phone like he’d tried to kill me, told every damn lie I could think of to get him put in jail. J.T. about wet his pants.”
“I take it he ran.”
Lilly shook her head. “He never did run. He was too afraid to. I think he thought it would be better for him, he stuck around to tell the police
his
side of the story, ’fore I could tell ’em mine. But they never let that poor man open his mouth. Those two cops come in that apartment an’ had the cuffs on him soon as I pointed him out. I should’ve known what was gonna happen to him right then, but I was still too mad to care. I just let ’em take him away.”
“Down to the station.”
“Yeah. Down to the station. I didn’t see or hear from him again for two days.”
“Two days?”
Lilly nodded, said, “They took that man to jail an’ whipped his ass for two whole days. He’d called his momma that first night to bail him out, but she didn’t have the bail money, so she called me. Beggin’ me to drop the charges against him an’ get him released, ’fore they could kill him in there. By that time, I wasn’t angry no more, so I did what she said, I went down to the police station to get him out. This was the next day. Only they said they couldn’t find him. They said he’d been transferred to another jail overnight, and they didn’t know which one, ’cause his paperwork was lost. Some bullshit like that. Back then, they could do that kinda shit to black folk, it happened all the time.”
“So when did they finally ‘find’ him?”
“’Bout six in the morning the next day. They didn’t call me or nothin’, they just let him go. I didn’t know he was out till he walked in the door. An’ if you could’ve seen what those policemen had done to him …” She shook her head, almost thirty years later still haunted by the memory. “Lord, it broke my heart. ’Cause I was the one turned him over to those animals, right? I hadn’t told all those lies on him—”
“Bullshit. You did the right thing,” Gunner said.
“Brother, I was lucky. I might’ve done the right thing, but I was lucky.”
“But he never put his hands on you again. Did he?”
Lilly shook her head again, said, “Never. He never
raised
his hand to me again after that. And we were married twenty-one years.”
“What would you have done if he
had
tried it again? You ever ask yourself that?”
“I know what I woulda done. I’d’ve left him. Quick as a flash. What do I need you around for, you can’t treat me with some respect?”
“That’s a good question. It’s a shame more women don’t ask it.”
“More
women
? You mean more
men.
”
“I mean everybody. Men
and
women. Respect is something we all deserve—we received a little more of it, maybe we’d get along a little better.”
“Kinda hard to respect a nigga don’t wanna work, Gunner. Just wants to drink, and sleep, and chase tail all the time.”
“Jesus. Here it comes.”
“You know it’s true.”
“The hell I do. As long as your image of the black man is that fucked up—”
“I never said I was talkin’ ’bout all of you. Just most of you. Ask any sister on the street, she’ll tell you. A woman would have better luck findin’ diamonds on the sidewalk than she would a decent black man.”
“Maybe the trouble is, most women want both. The diamonds
and
the decent black man.”
“Shit. Now you soundin’ like the fool wrote that book. You know the one I mean.”
“What book?”
“The one that sister wrote a few years back. Talkin’ ’bout how all the black man’s problems are the fault of the black woman, an’ shit. I forget what it’s called.”
“What Every Black Man Needs to Know to Understand the Black Woman,
” Aubrey Coleman said, moving over to Gunner and Lilly’s end of the bar. The Deuce’s resident academic, he’d been sitting a few stools down talking to Eggy Jones, going on about some movie he’d recently seen on TV, when he overheard Lilly’s description of the book.
“That’s it,” Lilly said, snapping her fingers. “That’s the one. What’s the fool’s name wrote it?”
Coleman shook his dreadlocked head, said, “I never read it. I just heard what people were sayin’about it, back when it came out. The sister was a Muslim, though, I remember that.”
“The one did all the talk shows? That sister?” Gunner asked.
“Yeah. Her,” Coleman said, putting his drink on the bar and sitting down.
“Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael
—she was on all those shows. Had sisters in the audience rushin’ the stage, tryin’ to get at her ass. Remember?”