Not Long for This World (28 page)

It was mid-afternoon Monday when Ziggy, his fifty-two-year-old Jewish lawyer and a triathlon-running health freak, finally managed to get him released on bail. During the ride home, Ziggy didn’t have many kind things to say about the way Gunner had handled things, but he did have some interesting news: One, the coroner’s autopsy on Whitey Most’s body had revealed that Most had suffered little more than a bloody and painful, though nondebilitating, flesh wound the previous Thursday night in San Fernando, hence his unexpected use of his bandaged right arm Saturday afternoon; two, the case against Toby Mills had been dropped, and Mills was on the street; and three, most significantly, Teddy Davidson had taken it on the lam. He had killed one cop and wounded another when they tried to pick him up for questioning early Saturday night, and apparently did not reappear again until the following day. It was only “apparent” that he had reappeared Sunday because the Reverend Willie Raines was the only one who claimed to have seen him. Raines had called the police late Sunday afternoon to say that Davidson was in his custody and was ready to give himself up, but when the squad cars arrived at the minister’s Baldwin Hills home, Davidson was nowhere to be found. According to Raines, he had changed his mind about surrendering and had run off again, without giving Raines any idea where he might go.

In his absence, the police had gone through Davidson’s home and come up with more reasons for Davidson to keep running than he would ever need: a dozen or so assorted rifles and handguns, a closet full of gangbanger attire in all the colors of the rainbow, and a key chain strung with car keys, over thirty in all. The guns and the clothes seemed to need no explanation, in light of the fact that ballistics had identified several of the weapons as those used in the murders of some of the deceased gangbangers on Darrel Lovejoy’s list, but the keys were a source of confusion until somebody remembered what kind of business Davidson was in and who made up a good part of his customer base. Evidently, Davidson had been duplicating the keys to cars gangbangers were bringing into his shop, then “borrowing” the cars just long enough to use them on his faked drive-bys.

It was a brilliant setup.

In searching for Davidson’s motives for his crimes, the police and the local press, for whom the “tire salesman gone mad” story was a big one, uncovered only a few, though one stood out from the others like a sore thumb: On the afternoon of September 7, 1988, three teenage gangbangers from the Rockin’ 90s Hood set walked into a laundromat at 9116 Central Avenue and opened fire on the six people inside with two sawed-off shotguns and an automatic rifle, killing three and wounding three. Two of the dead were members of a rival Hood set, the Central Club Players, mere wannabes at twelve and fourteen, respectively; the third was a twenty-seven-year-old day-care-center teacher named Jennifer Wilkes. Wilkes had been six months pregnant at the time of her—and her unborn baby’s—untimely death.

She also had been engaged to marry Teddy Davidson in October of that same year.

In the wake of the unsettling news that Darrel Lovejoy, his trusted and beloved cofounder of the L.A. Peace Patrol, had irt fact been, at the very least, a conspirator in the murder of the very children the organization was supposedly dedicated to assist, the Reverend Willie Raines was holding up admirably well. He, of course, claimed complete ignorance of his partner’s wrongdoings, vowed to make restitution in any way possible, and assured both the members of his immediate church and his vast following among the general public that both the Peace Patrol and his Children of God Ministries were capable of withstanding any amount of close scrutiny the authorities might care to bring to bear upon them. He was determined to diffuse any talk whatsoever that his one-year-in-the-making, precedent-setting youth gang peace summit—scheduled to take place that very Wednesday—could not proceed as planned.

The police, who had never been too crazy about the idea of the summit in the first place, weren’t too happy with the timing of it—but they were willing to try anything that might keep the lid on what was now a highly unpredictable, possibly even explosive, L.A. gang scene. If he could get the ’bangers scheduled to participate to go through with the peacemaking process, they told Raines—despite everything the ’bangers had learned about Darrel Lovejoy and the true fate of some of their deceased homeboys—then he had their blessings. And their respect.

Toon, for one, didn’t think the minister would be able to pull it off, but he hardly had the time to argue about it. There was still the matter of Tamika Downs and Officer Doug Lewellen’s murders to attend to. It helped to finally know that Cube Clarke had been the Blue responsible for the double murder, as Gunner’s latest statement to the police indicated, but it was beginning to look as if finding Clarke to extract a confession to that effect was going to be as big a headache as finding Rookie Davidson had proven to be. Cube had gone underground, apparently taking the green-of-sorts Chevy Nova with the missing headlight with him. And Toon’s people were fast getting tired of searching for them both.

Still, Toon was not complaining. There was something new to be thankful for these days, and it made his load lighter just to remind himself of it. Sometimes, the thought even put a smile on his face. Aaron Gunner was off the street, and out of his hair.

He had won the game of one-upmanship, after all.

“It’s a lie. Something that vile, disgusting man made up just to slander Darrel and make himself look less deplorable.”

“I don’t think so, Claudia.”

“Then you’re a
fool
. Anyone who knew Darrel—
anyone
—would know that it’s not true. That it’s just not possible. Darrel could never have murdered anyone.”

Gunner thought to point out that no one had accused Claudia Lovejoy’s late husband of committing murder, per se—all the evidence available to date merely indicated that he had commissioned someone else to actually commit several—but he figured the distinction would be no consolation to the woman, whatsoever. Less than two months ago, she had been forced to watch as the people of Los Angeles gently lowered Darrel Lovejoy into his grave—and now she was having to watch them dig him right back up again, for another pass through the muck and the slime of the living.

“What about the note? It was Darrel’s handwriting. Even you admitted that.”

“So what if it was his handwriting? That note could have meant anything! Just because a sick man made a death list out of it doesn’t mean that’s what it really was!”

She was beautiful. No amount of righteous indignation could change that. It was Tuesday, early evening, and he had finally caught up to her at home, having grown tired of leaving messages that were only going ignored on her telephone answering machine. She let him in reluctantly, resentfully, and they settled in the living room to do what he said he had come to do: say goodbye.

However, now that she was sitting here before him, the very picture of casual voluptuousness in a slate gray knitted sweater with a scalloped neck and a pair of pale blue hip-hugging denim trousers—her radiant face flushed with color and her green eyes dancing with light—there was no way he could do it. Saying goodbye was the last thing on his mind. For all the belated regrets she might be feeling for the night they had shared together, he had none, and he was not going to dismiss outright the magic of it as something that could never be duplicated or sustained.

“When they catch Teddy Davidson, you’ll see,” she said. “He’ll tell you. He did what he did on his own; Darrel had nothing to do with it.”

Davidson still hadn’t turned up, and the police had all but stopped looking for him in Los Angeles. Investigators had learned that he had rented a car in Phoenix, Arizona, late Monday afternoon, and the search for him had moved eastward accordingly. He and Rookie had relatives in Houston, Texas, and that was where it was widely assumed he was headed.

“I’d like to take you to dinner,” Gunner said, tired of being a participant in an argument he didn’t really need to win. “Tonight.”

Lovejoy shook her head adamantly. “No. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Be fair. To yourself and to me. Please.”

She was still shaking her head.

It took Gunner close to forty minutes to make her stop, but for a long time afterward he would regard it as time well spent.

Wednesday morning, his eyes finally opened to the truth, and it was like getting hit by a train and a sudden awareness of his own stupidity all at once.

He was a private investigator; it was his
job
to look beyond the obvious, and yet he had had to lie down with a magnificent woman to see the light. Whether it was the sheer power of the sex alone, or the realization that this time her reasons for being with him had had more to do with conscious want than unconscious need, he awoke in Claudia Lovejoy’s bed at exactly eleven-twenty-five with a new, frighteningly feasible outlook on her husband’s murder, an outlook he wasted no time in testing for validity.

He turned to her and found that she, too, was awake, her head propped up in her left hand, watching the odd expressions roll over his face as the revelation established itself firmly in his mind. There was nothing on the bed with which to mask her nudity except for a single sheet in pastel blue, but she wasn’t making much use of it. It was drawn up only to her navel and her breasts were playing peekaboo with his eyes. If he wanted to, he could draw up the memory of the things he had done to Lovejoy—and the things she had done to him—only mere hours ago.…

“You get the paper?”

“Pardon me?”

“Do you get a paper? A newspaper. Is there one outside right now?”

She yawned deliciously. “The
Times
. But why …?”

He pulled his pants on and ran to the front door. As promised, the Wednesday morning Los
Angeles Times
was waiting for him atop the tattered welcome mat on the porch.

He returned to the bed and immediately leafed through the first section, but he should have known better. The local press had shown the Reverend Willie Raines’s street-gang peace summit nearly as much unapologetic skepticism as the LAPD, and there was no way the
Times
was going to waste any part of its first twenty-eight pages telling people about it. It ran its story on the summit on the first page of the Metro section—the place where all poor-sister stories of only local import could be found—and it probably thought itself being generous just doing that.

The gist of the article was predictable: Raines had pulled it off. In the wake of a scandal that had rocked his church and embarrassed him personally—one that authorities claimed had exposed his close confederate in all of his ministry’s antigangbanging activities as the mastermind behind a systematic assassination of L.A. street-gang members—he had found a way to make his greatest dream come true. The summit was on. Despite all the reasons their betrayal by Darrel Love joy—and, by association, the Peace Patrol itself—seemed to give them for declaring the conference a farce and backing out, six gangbangers representing six individual South-Central Cuz and Hood sets had succumbed to Raines’s spiritual and oratorical sleight of hand and agreed to attend it as planned. According to the
Times
, the sets that would convene at twelve noon Wednesday to huddle with Raines and each other in the tiny meeting hall of the Reverend’s First Children of God church in Inglewood were:

The Wall Streeters, Hood.

The Rockin’ 90s, Hood.

The Seven-and-Sevens, Cuz.

The Little Tees, Hood.

The Doom Patrollers, Cuz.

The Stormtroopers, Cuz.

Gunner tossed the paper down and started to throw the rest of his clothes on. The clock on Claudia Lovejoy’s night table said it was thirty-seven minutes past eleven.

“What is it?” Lovejoy asked apprehensively.

Gunner didn’t stop moving, just said, “Look at the sets who are going to show up at Raines’s peace summit today. Look at the
names
, then count how many there are.”

She picked up the paper and quickly scanned it. “Six. There are six.”

“That’s right. Six.
Only
six. You want to know why there are only six? Because the other three sets Raines had wanted to be there aren’t coming. The ’bangers he would have had to invite to see their sets represented—’bangers who would have told him to take his peace summit and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine—are still
alive
.”

Lovejoy watched him pull on his shoes with a dull look on her face and said, “Oh, my God.”

“That wasn’t Darrel’s list Teddy Davidson was working from, it was Raines’s. Davidson was weeding out the hard cases, all right, but he was doing it for Raines, not your husband. He was paving the way for the summit, altering the gangs’ chains of command so that Raines’s invitations to participate wouldn’t fall on deaf ears.”

Lovejoy nodded her head, seeing how clearly it made sense. Gunner started for the door.

“Where are you going?”

He stopped and looked at her, realizing what a lousy thank-you he had almost left her with. “To the church. I can’t prove a damn thing, but maybe I won’t have to. Good as Raines is at saving others, maybe he can still find a way to save himself.”

“Please, God, yes,” Lovejoy said.