Not Long for This World (16 page)

“Face it, Gunner,” Booker said. “We’re digressing. All you’ve got to offer where Most is concerned is your own interpretation of what Downs had to say, and from what I’ve heard so far, she didn’t say much. Furthermore, you’re working the wrong homicide, as Rod here points out. The Lovejoy killing is a closed case; the drive-by we’re trying to make heads or tails of this morning is the one that went down nine hours ago.”

“And you don’t think there could be a connection between the two, is that it?”

“Based on what you’ve given us to go on? No. I don’t.”

Gunner said, “Could be I’m being overly cynical, Booker, but I wonder if you’re not just saying that because the case you’ve got against Mills, even without Downs, is too good to pass up.”

Booker gave him a second hard look, this one accompanied by a fierce twiddling of his thumbs. It was beginning to look as if that was as close as the man could come to flying off the handle.

“I’ll excuse you for that insult to my professional integrity because you’ve had a rough night,” he said stiffly. “But if you make any more such baseless inferences of misconduct on my part, I promise you I’ll make a personal project out of seeing you do the wrong end of fifteen-to-twenty for your part in last night’s fiasco.”

He sat back in his chair for the first time, daring to be seen in a relaxed state during working hours. “You’re reaching, Gunner, that’s all. You’re way out in left field. What happened last night was exactly what we expected to happen, sooner or later. The Blues made a run at Tamika Downs, either to shut her up or to make an example of her. The kind of target she made of herself, we knew they’d have to go after her eventually.”

“And we were ready for ’em, too,” Toon said bitterly. “We had the woman covered like a blanket; there was no way they could have reached her if you hadn’t fucked up the works.”

“Look, get off that, Toon, all right?” Gunner said. “Lewellen I’ll bite the bullet for, but Downs was dead with or without my help. Whoever it was in the Nova was parked down the street in the dark, for Christ’s sake; the first time Downs showed her face, he was going to be on top of her before Harper and Lewellen could stop stirring the sugar in their coffees.”

“According to you, she’d just fixed herself up for the night. Where the hell was she going to be going after that? To the beach?”

“All right, all right. Cool off, both of you,” Booker said, raising his voice for the first time. He still had done little or nothing characteristic of an angry man, yet Gunner and Toon had no trouble recognizing the fact that he was through playing referee in their little on-again-off-again cockfight. He wanted the floor to himself now, and they were wise enough to let him have it.

“Did anybody know you had plans to tail Downs last night?” the Assistant D.A. asked Gunner.

“No. Nobody.”

“You’re sure about that.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I didn’t know myself until I was damn near parking the car. I did it on a hunch; it was a spur of the moment thing.”

“You didn’t mention to any of the Blues you talked to that you might be looking her up eventually?”

“No. Hell, no.”

“Did any of them say anything to you to give you reason to believe they might be out to get her? Did anyone threaten her in any way?”

Gunner shook his head. “Other than to refer to her in some rather unflattering terms, they had very little to say about the lady.”

“What kind of terms?”

“Come on, Booker. You know the terms. ‘Stupid,’ ‘bitch’ … the usual endearments.”

“But no one threatened to kill her?”

“No.”

“That go for the Davidsons, too? Rookie’s father and brother?”

“Yes.”

“What Blues did you talk to, specifically? Besides Mills, of course.”

Gunner ran the short list down for him: Rucker, Mullens, and Seivers.

Booker looked up and over at Toon, and the CRACK unit leader shook his head in a way that seemed to say, Not a chance.

“You don’t approve of my choices?” Gunner asked Toon.

“On the contrary,” Toon said, grinning. “I think you picked the perfect group of kids to hassle. They’re harmless, all of ’em.”

“Which is to say they’re only interested in killing each other,” Booker said. “Not overly inquisitive private investigators.”

“If Davidson didn’t do Downs and Lewellen last night, another Blue did,” Toon said. “And it’ll probably turn out to be a Blue of another breed altogether, like Mills. The kind a novice like you would’ve pissed off just by casting a shadow on his Nikes.”

“You don’t want to try and ask this class of gangbanger the time of day, Gunner,” Booker said. “It wouldn’t be healthy. You find yourself on the same side of the street as any one of them, you’d be smart to keep your questions to yourself and just go back the way you came.”

“Take the kid they call Cube, for example,” Toon said. “Real name’s Michael Clarke, but they all call him Cube—”

“For ‘Ice Cube,’” Gunner said, ending the sentence for him.

“For ‘Ice Cube.’ Right. You heard about him, huh?”

“There was no way not to. He’s the talk of the town.”

“Yeah. I’ll bet he is. And there’s good reason for that. Namely, that he and the gestapo would’ve had a lot in common. The Cube’s that fucked up.”

“I see.”

“What I’m trying to tell you is, you give a kid like Cube half a chance, you’re gonna wind up butt-naked on a gurney at the county morgue. And there’s a lot of kids out there like him, make no mistake. Blues, Littie Tees, you name it.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Gunner said, “but I sense all this cautionary info leading up to something.”

“Do you?” Booker asked.

“In a very roundabout way, I think you’re advising me to quit. Pack up my bags and leave the big, bad juvenile delinquents to you professionals.”

“I wouldn’t exactly describe what we’re doing as ‘advising,’” Toon said. “Mr. Booker and I are
telling
you: You don’t know what you’re dealing with here. You’re an amateur in a fucking war zone.”

“I’m no more an amateur than Willie Raines,” Gunner suggested.

“Shit. Willie Raines. That goddamn peace conference of his is going to be the biggest bust since the Edsel. He thinks he can just call the Blues and Tees together, get ’em to break some bread and shake hands, and a hundred years of programmed behavior is going to fly out the window, just like that. The man doesn’t understand a fucking thing about the social and political underpinnings of gangbanging. And neither do you.”

“But you’re an expert, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right. I’m an expert. It’s my job to be an expert. While publicity hounds like Raines are dicking around under the pretense of trying to save these kids’ souls, I have to try and save their
lives
. You tell me which is harder, when most of these poor sonsofbitches have as much to look forward to in death as they do in life.

“You live in this neighborhood. You know what I’m talking about. Take one. kid, male. Put him in a fatherless family of eight that lives in a two-bedroom bungalow full of roaches and bad plumbing. Give his mother a problem with the bottle and a tenth-grade education, and send him to a school where the books are eleven years old and the teachers are too preoccupied with the prospect of getting shot to teach anybody anything. Give him a college-educated older brother who can’t afford to buy a two-bedroom home in Lynwood and then move a gold-laden, Four-fifty SL-driving crack dealer into the house next door. What’ve you got, inevitably? Somebody that learns fast not to give a shit about tomorrow, that’s what. A turned-off, tuned-out, full-fledged illiterate dying to take his dead-end future out on the whole goddamn world.”

“Nobody has the time to sit here and tell you horror stories, Gunner,” Booker said. “Toon and I just think you ought to have some kind of understanding of the dynamite you’ve been playing with. There are seventy thousand kids in this city affiliated with over four hundred and fifty different gangs, and last year they were responsible for the deaths of four hundred and seventeen people,” an all-time high. These kids you’ve been talking to, they kill when they’re loaded and they kill when they’re straight, and at least half the time they kill somebody other than who they were out to get in the first place, simply because some poor bastard happened to look like somebody else, or was caught standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong colored shoelaces or driving the wrong colored car.”

“The kind of toys they play with, those kind of mistakes are gonna happen,” Toon said matter-of-factly. “You take what they used on Downs, for example. Ballistics says it was an Uzi. A semi-automatic, nine-millimeter assault gun with a thirty-round clip. The Israeli Army trains a man for three weeks before they’ll actually issue him one, and here we’ve got fourteen-year-old eighth graders firing them off in the street ten minutes after buying one.”

“If you want to continue playing Twenty Questions with Mills’s homeboys, we can’t stop you,” Booker said grudgingly. “You’ve been legally retained to do so, however unwisely. But what we can do is, we can make you two promises. One, if you come across the wrong gangbanger, you’re not going to see any switchblade knives or single-round zip guns. Those days are history. You’re going to see an Uzi or an AK-Forty-seven, a twelve-gauge sawed-off or an M-Sixteen. More sophisticated weaponry than that of half the countries in Western Europe.”

“And number two?”

“Number two is, we’re going to be watching you. Carefully. Because the first time you give us any reason to believe you really are as irresponsible an idiot as you appeared to be last night—any reason at all—we’re going to put you out of action. For good.”

“In other words, we don’t wanna see any more fuckups,” Toon said, translating the Assistant D.A.’s edict in more basic terms. “No more interference in police affairs. No more dead witnesses. And, be sure you read me good on this last one:
no more dead cops
. You’ve just used up your lifetime quota. Just conduct your piddly-ass business and stay the fuck out of my unit’s way. We’ve got enough to worry about without having you out there building a fire under the Blues.”

Gunner waited for either man to dismiss him officially, but Booker and Toon had nothing left to offer him save for a pair of blank expressions that made the sudden silence in the room unbearable. Gunner stood up.

“Is that it?”

Booker nodded. Toon didn’t do anything.

Still, Gunner wouldn’t leave. He had an ace left to play, and he didn’t want to be caught holding it later.

“Get out of here, Gunner,” Toon said.

“You still looking for Davidson’s car?”

“What the hell do you think?”

“If I could tell you where to find it, and Whitey Most’s prints were to turn up on the upholstery somewhere, you’d have to bring him in, wouldn’t you?”

Toon glared at him. “This better not be a hypothetical question.”

“There’s nothing hypothetical about it. I think I know where the car is. Or at least, where it was as of a few days ago.”

He told them everything he knew about King Davidson’s sale of Rookie’s Ford Maverick to a downtown salvage yard, leaving out only the details of the clean-up job the King had done on the car before disposing of it. Booker took the name of the yard down on a note pad and handed it to Toon.

“Thanks,” he said to Gunner grudgingly. “We find anything in or on the car to implicate Most, we’ll pick him up and give you a call. Fair enough?”

Gunner nodded, only half-believing him. He turned away from Booker to watch Toon screw his face up even tighter, as if the sight of the investigator was getting harder to take by the second. Gunner knew his mind was on Doug Lewellen.

“For whatever it’s worth, Toon, I’m sorry,” Gunner told him.

The dead cop was still dead after he had said it, but he somehow felt relieved nevertheless.

It was crazy, but Gunner wasn’t ready to go home. He had been up and on his feet for over twenty-four hours now, dodging rain and gunfire with dogged equanimity, but the last place he wanted to drag his weary bones to rest was home. The warm bed waiting there was an inviting thought, but it, like the rest of Gunner’s bland little Stanford Avenue duplex, was empty, and the drone of loneliness was the kind of companionship the detective wanted no part of this morning.

The rain he had braved the night before was no longer falling, but it was clear that it was only taking a breather; the sky above was still black and bloated, making no attempt to hide its intentions. Unfazed, Gunner bought a five-dollar breakfast at Jack-in-the-Box and drove to Mickey Moore’s Trueblood Barbershop on Wilmington and Century to eat it. Mickey was a forty-four-year-old veteran of the Korean War who collected original Motown 45s and still cut a black man’s hair the old-fashioned way:
down to the bone
. Sooner or later, every head in South-Central Los Angeles turned up under Mickey’s shears, and any ex-serviceman who had ever had the pleasure invariably left Mickey’s chair as a friend. No one knew the painful ups and downs of the lonely war veteran’s reentry to civilian life better, or tried as hard to help those that he could.

Gunner would have been the first to point this out about Mickey. He had often been the beneficiary of some of the barber’s more selfless gestures, and Mickey was coming up with new ones every day. He had roughly two hundred square feet of unused storage space at the rear of his shop, and three weeks ago he had offered it to Gunner as a place from which to operate, rent-free. Gunner took two days to accept the gift, but only to give his pride some time to get used to the idea of falling even deeper into Mickey’s debt than he already was.

The barber was in the process of giving Joe Worthy, one of his many regular customers, his once-a-month trim when Gunner arrived. Gunner promptly moved to the pay phone hanging on one wall inside and called Kelly DeCharme, briefly filling her in on the highlights of his long night.

“You’ve been a busy man,” she said when he was through, no apparent sarcasm intended.

“I’ve been a stupid man,” he said irritably. “But I plan to get smarter. Think you can make it over to County to see Mills sometime today? I’d like to hear what his feelings are for his boss Whitey Most these days. Maybe they don’t get along as fabulously as Toon: likes to think.”