Not Long for This World (18 page)

Gunner nodded his head.

“Right now?”

“The sooner the better. Do you have a key?”

Lovejoy nodded, getting that faraway look in her eyes again. Gunner didn’t know what to make of it at first, but when he finally understood, he felt foolish and dense for not having figured it out sooner.

“You haven’t been there since he was killed, have you?”

“No.” She tried to smile. “I haven’t. I guess I’ve been putting it off.”

“I can go alone, if you prefer.”

“No. I want to come. Really.”

He watched her try the smile again, and though a try was still all it was, it was good enough for him.

“Okay,” he said.

She started the car.

The official home of the L.A. Peace Patrol was a four-story office building that dated back to the mid-1960s, when architects couldn’t get enough of checkerboard facades of cheap plate glass set in unimaginative rows. Whatever had been holding it together all these years was losing its grip, and what must have looked like an Erector Set construction even when it was new, now looked like a death trap waiting for the next blip on the Richter scale to take a nose dive into the street.

Despite the apparent danger, there were tenants on every floor, mostly medical professionals who found the rent palatable if not the accommodations. Daring to test the building’s willingness to support them, the Peace Patrol operated out of a third-floor suite of offices sandwiched between those of an orthodontist named Scott and an ear, nose, and throat man named Rheins. Roaming the empty hallways like a pair of midnight men, Gunner and Lovejoy came to the door they were looking for and stood beneath a stuttering overhead fluorescent lamp as Lovejoy used a noisy chain of keys to let them in.

When they finally made it inside to view the offices beyond the door, nothing about them suggested that the Peace Patrol was getting anything for their monthly rent they weren’t paying for. The carpet throughout was worn and discolored, the walls were in need of paint and repair, and the panels of the acoustic-tile ceiling overhead were either spotted with old water stains or missing altogether. As if to remain true to the overall morose mood of the place, the receptionist’s desk out front was also an abomination: Bearing a Styrofoam cup of cigarette ashes floating in a shallow wash of cold coffee, the tattered blotter pad atop it was tattooed with unintelligible names and phone numbers scribbled three layers deep, while the wastepaper basket on the floor beside it was overflowing with trash.

Seeing the look on Gunner’s face after bringing up the lights, Lovejoy said, “Yes, I know. It is disgusting, isn’t it?”

Gunner started to disagree, but she was already moving, leading the way into a short hallway off the receptionist’s area. They passed four offices full of dated furniture and obsolete word-processing equipment—two on the left and two on the right—and went directly to the larger office at the hallway’s end, where a placard on the door bore Darrel Lovejoy’s name, sans one mutinous plastic
o
.

Here, the hand of a more orderly man was in evidence, though the same budgetary restraints were, as well. The huge oaken desk that served as the room’s centerpiece was clean and uncluttered, and the wastepaper basket beside it was nearly empty, but it still looked like something the Salvation Army would snub its nose at, as did the high-jacked swivel chair leaning to one side behind it, having as it did only three of four casters left on which to stand. An old wooden coatrack and a squat two-drawer metal file cabinet were the only other pieces of furniture in sight, but the walls were lined with photographs to offset this deficiency: Darrel Lovejoy shaking hands with the mayor; Darrel Lovejoy handing a football off to O. J. Simpson; Darrel Lovejoy accepting an award from the Big Brothers of America.

And Darrel Lovejoy in partnership with the Reverend Willie Raines, ad infinitum.

“Do you know what you’re looking for?”

Gunner turned from his innocent inspection of her late husband’s recorded past, to find Claudia Lovejoy still standing out in the hall, hugging herself in the open doorway as if the room were a cold ill wind she was afraid to brave.

Gunner shrugged. “Not really. Hate mail, maybe. Anything that could attach a name or a face to some of your husband’s enemies.”

“He wouldn’t have kept any hate mail. He never read it.”

“The anonymous stuff, no. I would think he’d just chuck that. But anything that might have come from someone he knew, he might have held on to.”

“I don’t understand. Are you talking about blackmail?”

“I’m not talking about anything, yet. I’m just saying, if someone other than the Blues had a motive to kill your husband, there might be something here that proves it.”

“Someone like who? This dealer you asked me about before? This Whitey something-or-other?”

Gunner nodded, seeing no point in denying the obvious truth. He
was
hoping to find something that could connect Most to Lovejoy.

There was nothing, however. The room was free with its secrets—neither the desk nor the filing cabinet was locked—but none of the information it volunteered was of any real value to him. While Lovejoy’s apparent skill in calligraphy lent an unusual old-world flair to many of the items Gunner pored over, nothing else about the documents left much of an impression. There were receipts and business cards, old newspaper clippings and a notebook full of handwritten gangbanger case studies, correspondence of every kind, and a wide selection of inspirational self-help books, including two leather-bound copies of the King James Bible. There were names among all of it, written on legal pads and listed in address books, taken down in pencil and ink with varying degrees of legibility and in a variety of different script styles that were a tribute to Lovejoy’s chirographic virtuosity—but the name Whitey Most, or any other he might have considered noteworthy, never turned up.

The case studies, at least, made for some fascinating reading—the Imperial Blues were covered extensively and Gunner recognized many of those mentioned—but like the rest of what he had seen, nothing in any of the entries particularly enlightened or surprised him.

Sensing his disappointment from where she stood in the hall, refusing to cross the threshold of the room as she had throughout his gentle defilement of her late husband’s personal effects, Claudia Lovejoy said, “Guess you didn’t find anything, huh?”

The question had sounded innocent enough, but Gunner looked up at her and realized immediately that it had not been a question at all, innocent or otherwise. She was asking him to leave. He had rattled the bones of Darrel Lovejoy’s ghost enough for one night, and her patience for playing his accomplice had run out.

Without a word, Gunner cleaned up after himself and left the room, taking only the notebook of gangbanger case studies with him.

“Mind if I borrow this for a few days?” he asked her out in the hall.

She took it from his hand and looked it over, weighing its significant worth. After a moment, she shrugged and handed it back.

“How will that help you?”

Gunner tossed her a shrug of his own. “I’m not sure. I only skimmed through it. That’s why I’d like the extra time with it.”

Lovejoy nodded and started out, taking for granted that he would follow.

The ride back to Gunner’s car was an uneasy one. There was no small talk and no attempts to manufacture any. Even the car’s wipers were silent; the rain had finally given up for good and the windshield was dry and clear. This was the way Lovejoy obviously wanted it and Gunner wasn’t going to contribute to her unexpected mood change by forcing the issue. He had decided he had done all the trespassing he was going to do tonight.

They arrived at Mickey’s and Lovejoy pulled up alongside Gunner’s borrowed Hyundai, leaving the engine running as she waited for him to get out. Without warning, and before she could protest, he reached out to draw her near and kissed her, briefly but not entirely without conviction. She pulled away, but too late, too diffidently.

“Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”

He stepped out into the street and managed to close the door behind him before the Toyota sped off, spraying rainwater in a heavy, unrepentant gray mist behind it.

chapter
eleven

T
he walls in Dr. Earvin Ashe’s office were too thin. Sound passed through them like smoke through a screen door, and whoever it was presently howling in the Chair of Pain was scaring the bejesus out of everybody out in the waiting room.

“I think maybe we should postpone this conference until after you get out of here,” Kelly DeCharme said, standing to leave.

Gunner shook his head and latched onto her hand. “We’d better do it now. I may not be capable later.”

DeCharme nodded and sat down again, seeing his point. If Gunner’s visits to the dentist were anything like hers generally were, the detective would be lucky to have use of his toes three hours after the Novocain set in, let alone his tongue.

“All right. So what are you going to do now?”

“Look up Whitey Most. What else?”

“Despite the fact Toby doesn’t think he had anything to do with Lovejoy’s murder.”

“Despite that fact, yeah. I wasn’t there when you saw Mills yesterday, but if you say he only seemed to halfway mean all the fine things he said about Most, that’s good enough for me. Maybe he’s thinking he can settle things with Most on his own.”

“What about Rookie’s car? Most’s prints didn’t turn up anywhere on it, you said.”

“That’s right. They didn’t.” Gunner had spoken to Rod Toon two hours ago and was told that Rookie’s Maverick had been found exactly where Gunner had said it could be. “And if the cops want to assume a lack of prints means he never spent a night in the backseat, that’s their business. Me, I can’t afford to be so sure. Rookie’s old man said he’d cleaned the car up before getting rid of it, maybe he did a real bang-up job. Besides, the way Toon described what was left of the car when they picked it up yesterday, there may not have been much of a backseat to dust.”

DeCharme nodded again, trying hard to seem at ease. This wasn’t where she had wanted to hold this meeting, but they weren’t making very good connections by phone—Gunner had forgotten to call her as promised the day before—and the investigator’s broken tooth had been put off long enough.

“You’re not actually thinking about talking to Most directly?” DeCharme asked.

“You figure he might object?”

“Let’s just say I’ve never met a dealer of illegal narcotics who could accurately be described as garrulous.”

“Yeah. That’s been my experience, too. So I thought I’d just follow him around for a while. Watch him make the rounds, get to know some of his friends. Maybe I’ll learn something.”

“You mean about Rookie, I hope.”

Gunner shrugged, staunchly absorbing the discomfort of the movement. “If I’m lucky, yeah.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Yes, good. I’m all for pursuing this Whitey Most angle as long as finding Rookie Davidson remains the focus of your investigation. Otherwise, I’m not sure I see the point. You’ve managed to establish Rookie’s participation in the Lovejoy murder, but Most’s is strictly speculative. Were it up to me, I wouldn’t spend a great deal of time worrying about Most when Rookie’s still the only witness my client’s case really needs.”

“Nobody said I was giving up looking for Rookie,” Gunner said. “I’m merely suggesting that it might be wise to start looking for alternative methods for getting your client off. If Most is connected in any way to Lovejoy’s murder, it’s possible he could tell us as much about it as Rookie. Maybe more. And if he’s not, he’s still Rookie’s supplier, according to the King. How much imagination does it take to see Rookie seeking him out, sooner or later?”

DeCharme pondered the question as a little Hispanic girl with a swollen jaw, sitting in her mother’s lap on the other side of the room, began to whimper, justifiably dismayed by the terror serenade still playing somewhere beyond Dr. Ashe’s anteroom door.

“This dentist of yours does use some form of anesthesia?” the public defender asked.

“He does on me. I’m afraid I insist.”

“You sure you wouldn’t rather see my dentist? His name is Tate; he has an office in Inglewood. You never hear anybody screaming bloody murder in his waiting room.”

“Gunner! Aaron Gunner!”

It was Ashe’s overweight and implacable receptionist, a white-clad, two-legged mountain of pink flesh brandishing pen and clipboard like sword and shield. Gunner stood up, and DeCharme eagerly did the same, relieved to be on her way.

“Don’t misunderstand,” she said, getting back to business. “It’s not that I’m convinced you’re not on to something with Most. But we go to trial in two weeks. Whatever route you decide to take from here, you’re going to have to make it pay off, one way or another. And fast.”

Gunner nodded and said, “Naturally. No sense keeping a choirboy like Mills behind bars any longer than necessary.”

The cries of Ashe’s anguished patient finally died, abruptly. Gunner’s turn to entertain the lions had arrived.

DeCharme walked out before he could ask her to wish him good luck.