“You have somebody you can call who can stay with you tonight?” Gunner asked gently. “Or would you like me to?”
Mimi shook her head. “I don’t need anybody to stay with me. I’m fine.”
“You really shouldn’t be alone tonight, Momma.” At some point during his time with Nina, he had started calling Mimi “Momma Hillman,” and he’d been doing it ever since.
“Why not? I killed that girl. I deserve to be alone.”
“Momma, don’t,” Gunner said, reaching out to pat her hand.
“It’s true. I killed her. It’s nobody’s fault she’s dead but mine.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not ridiculous! I should have gotten that child some help! I should have bought myself a gun and killed that man a long time ago!”
Without knowing it, she’d all but answered the question Gunner had been working his way up to asking. “You mean Michael?”
“He’s sick. There’s something …
wrong
with that man. I thought …” She shook her head and turned away. “I thought he could change. I thought if we both prayed for him, if we just kept
praying
for him …”
Her voice trailed off, her eyes fixed on the floor.
Gunner waited a moment, then said, “You’re convinced he’s the one who killed her?”
She looked up to face him again slowly, clearly dumb-founded by the absurdity of the question.
“Momma. Listen. I know you don’t want to talk about this right now, but … I have to know for sure. It’s
important.
If there’s any chance it was somebody else, any chance at all—”
“It was
him
,” Mimi said, making sure he understood her this time. “It was
Michael.
He told her he was going to kill her, and he did. He was the only one could’ve done that—” She stopped abruptly, suddenly remembering the butchery she was referring to, and had to pause a moment to gather herself before going on. “He was the only one could’ve hated my baby that much.”
Gunner nodded, anxious to get her mind—and his—off the subject of Nina’s remains. “In that case,” he said, “I only have one more question to ask. I need to know where can I find him. If you have any ideas—”
“Find him?” The big woman glared at him. “What do
you
want to find him for?”
Gunner didn’t say anything.
“Aaron, no. Don’t even think about it, you hear? Nina is dead. The time to help her is past. There is nothing you or I can do for her now except pray for her soul in heaven. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“I’m not going to hurt him, Momma. I just want to help the police bring him in.”
“The police don’t need your help. And neither does Nina. What are you doing here, anyway? Who told you Nina was dead?”
Gunner shrugged. “A friend. Someone who happened by the house while all the police were there and heard what happened.”
“And you just all of a sudden came running to help. Is that it?”
“I don’t—”
“None of this is any of your business, Aaron. It’s not your problem. Ten, eleven years ago, it might have been, but not now. Not anymore.”
“Momma, that’s not true.”
“It
is
true! You didn’t care about that girl! You haven’t given her a single thought since the day you let her go! But
now
you want to be outraged because somebody killed her. Now that she’s not here to see it, you want to come runnin’ to her rescue, like she was
your
wife, and not
his
!”
She stood up, before Gunner could offer any kind of rebuttal, and said, “Go home. Go home and mind your own business, like you’ve been doing for the last ten years. There’s nothing you can do for Nina, or me, now. Except maybe make things worse.”
Her insistent stare would not relent until he had risen to his feet, yet he made no immediate move for the door. “Maybe I deserve that, I don’t know. I’d have come around once or twice, like you say, just to make sure she was doing okay … maybe none of this would have happened. It’s for sure if I’d known Michael was abusing her …” He had to bite down on the thought, his eyes narrowing with anger. Thinking as much of Grace Mokes as he was of Nina.
“Anyway, none of that does anything to change the fact I’m hurting right now, same as you,” he went on. “Whether you think I’m entitled or not. And I’m going to keep right on hurting until the man who killed your daughter is off the street. Either in a cell, or in a box, one or the other.”
“That’s not what Nina would want,” Mimi said.
It was so true he almost nodded his head. “Nina wanted a lot of things she didn’t get,” he said instead.
Before his voice could crack again, he kissed his Momma Hillman on the cheek and went home.
“Well? Anything to report?”
Nine o’clock in the morning, and Goody was on the phone looking for results.
Gunner had no time for him today. “You’ll be the first to know when I do, Mr. Goody.”
“You’re not just getting started, I hope.”
“No. I’ve been up since three. Surely I’d be cheating you otherwise.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ll give you a call later this afternoon, Mr. Goody. Say around four.” He hung up, not caring if the big man was offended or not.
Then he rolled out of bed.
In the end, he did Goody’s bidding anyway. He didn’t have any choice. Finding Michael Pearson was foremost in his mind, but there was the little problem of Poole to deal with. All the promises the cop had made to Gunner the day before, he had sincerely meant to keep, so he was almost certainly out there somewhere, in one form or another, watching and waiting. Looking for Gunner to drop Pearson’s name, just drop his name, so he would have an excuse to take him downtown and get him started in a new line of work.
It wasn’t worth the risk.
Besides, it wasn’t going to take long to get Goody’s business out of the way. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, Gunner felt confident that the address he’d found in the phone directory yesterday would indeed lead him to Russell Dartmouth. It had been a while since he’d had this kind of break, and he was due.
The “R. Dartmouth” he had found in the phone directory lived in Venice, down in the Oakwood section where blacks and Latinos had been waging war with each other for years. Three minutes from the beach, less than two miles north of Marina del Rey’s billowing white sails and luxury oceanfront condominiums, Oakwood was a pocket of blight equal to anything Watts or Compton had to offer. Here, poverty had wielded its broad brush like a scythe, littering the sidewalks with black men and women, teenagers and little children, all dressed down and properly sedated for the business of being poor. They lived in tiny little houses with boarded-up windows and apartments filled with smoke. They trod upon grass that had never known a lawn mower, and kicked around empty beer cans just to hear the clatter.
And they eyed the passing of a stranger’s car like it was a messenger from Death, coming to claim them all.
It was nothing Gunner had never seen before, but the scene shook him up all the same. Because there was nothing a man or woman could do to deserve so cruel an existence. Nothing. Simply being born into a legacy of such squalor was not crime enough. And yet, here they were. The complacently condemned, crowding onto the trapdoor of the gallows for the hangman yet to come.
Gunner found the building he was looking for and parked the red Cobra right out in front of it, no longer as concerned with discretion as he was with expediency. He knew the car would attract the attention of all the wrong people sooner or later, but he wasn’t planning on being away from it for more than five or ten minutes. He was going to run up to Dartmouth’s apartment, establish that he’d found the right man, then leave. Throw Goody his bone to make him go away and then get back to the only work that really mattered to him right now: finding Michael Pearson. Poole or no Poole.
Gunner didn’t know what Russell Dartmouth’s last place of residence looked like, though Goody had supplied him with the address, but he felt safe in assuming the man’s move to Oakwood hadn’t done much to improve his living conditions. The apartment building in which Dartmouth now lived—if Gunner was indeed as lucky as he felt—was a two-story stack of cracked and crumbling stucco on Brooks Court between Sixth and Seventh Avenue that seemed to promise nothing but grief for visitors and inhabitants alike. Fronted by dead landscaping and covered in diverse, overlapping layers of unsettling brown paint, it appeared about as steady on its foundation as a drunk was on his feet; like something that had been destroyed by the Northridge earthquake of ’94 but had forgotten to fall down.
Gunner went inside, past a set of double glass doors rendered opaque by grime, and followed a mailbox labeled
DARTMOUTH
up to the second-floor balcony and room 21, the blare of dueling televisions and radios flooding the open courtyard behind him. He knocked on the door and waited. There was a window to his left, but a closed set of dirty blinds blocked his view of the apartment beyond, though it appeared to be completely dark. He knocked again.
Down below, a little boy was suddenly running rings around a dead palm tree, giggling like he’d never had so much fun in his life. Gunner turned to watch him, amused, and didn’t see the huge blur coming up on his right until it was too late to do anything but flinch.
A fist the size and approximate weight of a truck battery hit him just above the right ear and put him flat on his back on the balcony floor, blinking into a wash of white light he thought would never fade. The need to drift off into unconsciousness was strong and immediate, but he fought it with all he had, convinced he was a dead man if he didn’t.
“Why the hell you keep messin’ with me, man? Why you keep
messin’
with me?” he heard the voice of a madman demand.
The guy had surprised him by coming at him from out on the balcony, rather than from the inside of the apartment. He was little more than an outline to Gunner, but an outline was enough to make one thing, at least, perfectly clear: He was
big.
Not heavy or muscular, particularly, but tall; somewhere in the neighborhood of six seven or six eight. A giant. And Goody had placed Dartmouth’s height at around six one or six two.
The fool needed glasses.
“Waitaminute …” Gunner murmured, trying to get to his feet. But none of his limbs would work as intended and the leviathan standing over him wasn’t interested in talk.
“Wait a minute, my ass! Fuck wait a minute!” the big man howled, using his right foot to kick Gunner twice in the ribs. Gunner rolled over and curled up like a pill bug, fighting to breathe and hold on to his breakfast at the same time.
Who in the hell does this maniac think I am
? Gunner wondered.
“I’m sick of this shit, man! I’m sick of you people fuckin’ with me! You motherfuckers gonna learn to leave me alone! You gonna
learn
!”
He was lifting Gunner up by the shoulders, preparing to throw him over the railing.
While his vision was improving, all of Gunner’s other faculties were shot; he couldn’t breathe, his ribs were killing him, and his head felt like the core of a detonating grenade. A gun would have come in handy, but he wasn’t carrying one today; he’d left his Ruger P85 at home, as he did most days. Smart.
The big man had him up in the air now, about waist-high.
There was no time to throw a punch, and not much reason to; with what he had to put behind one at the moment, a punch might not even get his friend’s attention. And he definitely needed more than the man’s attention. With what he figured to be five, maybe ten seconds left to live, he decided to try the one thing—the
only
thing—he felt relatively sure he could pull off with any real hope of success.
He grabbed hold of the big man’s balls.
First with one hand, then with both. Squeezing with all the power he could generate, not caring a bit if he tore something loose. But the giant cared. He abruptly went rigid and lowered Gunner to the floor, his grip on the investigator’s shoulders rapidly relaxing. He didn’t even feel like screaming, anymore.
Carefully maintaining his hold on his victim’s genitals, Gunner rose slowly to his feet and looked the big man over, able to see him clearly for the first time. He was a pale-skinned black man in his early thirties, with an oval bald patch on the top of his head and a long, narrow face; he had a thin man’s potbelly and a rat’s-nest beard, and eyes set so close together they nearly climbed up the sides of his nose.
Russell Dartmouth. Goody had gotten the height all wrong, but he’d been right about everything else.
“Say good night, Russell,” Gunner said, feeling revitalized.
He threw a quick right hand at the underside of Dartmouth’s left jaw and leaned into it, hoping to do with mass alone what he ordinarily accomplished with mass and velocity combined. Maybe it helped that Dartmouth had been caught unawares, and maybe Gunner had merely found his second wind, but either way the big man’s head snapped back nearly ninety degrees and he went down, falling all at once like he’d been lopped off at the knees. It was probably unnecessary, but Gunner went over afterward and kicked him in the side of the head, just to make sure his lights were out for good.
Not that any of Dartmouth’s neighbors gave a damn. Gunner was still waiting to see or hear so much as one, the kid who’d been playing down in the courtyard earlier notwith-standing. And even he was gone now, making the building’s odd desolation complete. Either the people who lived here were deaf, or they’d raised the act of minding one’s own business to the level of art.
Crazy.
Gunner had lost his wallet in the scuffle. He spotted it and some loose change scattered about nearby. He gathered it all up hastily, his ribs giving him hell for the effort, then went through Dartmouth’s pockets, looking for a set of keys. When he found it, he unlocked the door to the big man’s apartment and swung it open gingerly, waiting for another surprise. But he never got one. The apartment was empty, save for all the TVs and stereos, clock radios and assorted VCRs that stood in the middle of the front room, arranged neatly in little warehouselike stacks.
Goody would have been moved to tears.