Not Long for This World (9 page)

“You don’t mind my askin’, is this gonna take much longer? I mean, like I said, I got a few things to do today.”

The detective shook his head. “Not much longer, no.” He was watching her closely now, his curiosity piqued.

“Well?” Downs prodded.

“I’d like to know what made you stick around,” Gunner said. “For the police, I mean. Most people in your shoes would have taken off, disappeared, the way you say some guy in the parking lot did.”

Downs shrugged and injected a cloud of secondhand smoke into the room. “I thought about it,” she said.

Gunner just looked at her.

“But, you know, I just seen a man get killed in cold blood. A man wasn’t doin’ nothin’ to nobody, just goin’ to the store for his family like I do every day. And I thought to myself, that could’ve been me them boys done like that, shot up and left in the street to die like a dog. Me, or my sister, or my mother, or one of my children. Gangbangers ’round here be doin’ people like that all the time.

“So I guess I got mad. Mad for myself, mad for Mr. Lovejoy, mad for everybody else gotta deal with these crazy children, day in and day out. So I stayed. I stayed and told the police what I seen.”

“Even though you knew it could be dangerous.”

“Yeah. I knew.” She shrugged again. “I just didn’t care no more.” A cloud of personal gloom lingered in her eyes for a brief moment. “Life for some people,” she said, “it’s hard enough without havin’ to worry ’bout teenagers gunnin’ you down every time you stick your head out your front door. What happened, I guess, I just got tired of livin’ afraid all the time.”

It all sounded very noble, but she was making it work, lending it just enough credibility to hold Gunner’s unqualified skepticism at bay.

“You ever have any trouble with the Blues before this?” Gunner asked her.

“No. Not the Blues, not the Seven-and-Sevens, not no set ’round here. I ain’t stupid.”

“You received any threats of any kind since the murder? From anybody claiming to be a Blue, specifically?”

“I got some calls at first, yeah, ’til I got an unlisted number. Ain’t got none since, though.”

“Then you’re not concerned that somebody will try to harm you eventually.”

“I just told you. I’m all through bein’ afraid. Ain’t gonna do me no good to be afraid, right?” She stood up. “I ain’t no hero, Mr. Gunner. I’m just tryin’ to do the right thing. For everybody. Them two boys killed a good man, maybe even a great man, and I just happened to be standin’ there when they did it. Lucky me.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really gotta go.”

She came toward him, moving on feet that seemed less steady than they had only moments before. Or was that only Gunner’s imagination?

He put his pencil and notebook away and said, “I assume you’ve asked for police protection.”

Downs shook her head and went right past him to the front door. “No,” she said, her hand on the knob. “I don’t want no police protection.”

“I thought you said you weren’t a herb,” Gunner said. “That’s playing it awfully heroic, isn’t it?”

“It ain’t playin’ anything. I just don’t wanna be bothered with police all over my house, followin’ me wherever I go. That’d only create more ’tention than I got already.”

“They have ways to be discreet, you know.”

“It don’t matter. I don’t want ’em hangin’ around. I can take care of myself.”

Gunner nodded his head toward the living room window and said, “Then I think you’d better go out there and tell the boys in the Buick to go home. They probably won’t, of course, but you never know.”

“Say what?” Downs went to the window and pulled back the curtains, agitated. “What Buick? Where?”

“The green one across the street, near the end of the block. With the plain-Jane hubcaps and telephone antennae.

“There’s two green cars down there,” Downs said.

Gunner went to the window to join, her and said, “The Buick’s the one in front. I spotted it when I first pulled up. Unless there’s a rock house next door, I think they’re here for you.”

“Shit,” Downs said softly.

“You’re really better off with them there,” Gunner said, heading for the door without having to be given any more hints. “But if you insist that they back off, I expect in time that they will.”

Downs turned away from the window, clearly perturbed. “It don’t matter,” she said, drawing the last breath from the Marlboro in her hand. “They wanna watch me, let ’em watch me. I don’t give a damn.”

It was the least convincing thing she had said all day.

chapter
six

N
ow came the hard part.

Working a case he had wanted no part of but had failed miserably to turn down, Gunner had made it past the sneering hubris of his client Toby Mills to this point by dealing with the case’s peripheral characters first, leaving out of sight and out of mind the central ones he so dreaded meeting. As he knew it would eventually, however, this tack had finally run its course, and now there was nothing left to do but fish or cut bait, introduce himself to the rest of Mills’s lodge brothers or admit to Kelly DeCharme that he wasn’t up to it, after all.

Gangbangers
.

He almost cared as little for the word as he did for those it referred to. It made Mills and his like sound almost innocuous, like a band of rambunctious boys who were sometimes prone to kicking up a little racket. The reality was, that was more than “banging” the Cuzzes and Hoods were out there doing every waking moment, from one end of Los Angeles’s South-Central ruins to the next—it was killing and maiming, making widows of wives and orphans of babies, cripples of high school basketball stars and martyrs of straight-A students. Theirs was a dance of death, pointless and seemingly without end, and only a fool or a hero would expose himself to the insanity of it any more than his everyday circumstances already demanded.

Gunner sat in the idle Hyundai, at the far corner of a shopping center parking lot on Wilmington and El Segundo, and took an hour to decide how big a fool—or hero—he wanted to be.

Lunch break was less than an hour away when Gunner finally arrived at Centennial High School in Compton.

Kelly DeCharme’s data file included a surprisingly extensive dossier on the Imperial Blues hierarchy, a nine-member-strong inner circle, and most of the teenagers it named were enrolled at Centennial. Gunner came expecting to find less than half of them here, knowing how rarely gangbangers abandoned the streets to attend classes, but this was as close to neutral ground as any upon which he was ever likely to meet them, and he preferred to conduct his interviews, at least for the moment, outside of what they liked to think of as their home turf.

He entered Centennial’s main hall and asked a pair of chubby girls loitering near the door for directions to the Administration office. One of the two looked like someone he might like to see fifteen pounds lighter and a dozen years older, but the other one needed a lot more help than that. They giggled coquettishly upon pointing in opposite directions, then got their act together and charted an accurate course for him to follow, down the corridor to his right, second door on the left.

The Boys’ Dean was a man named Benjamin Rafeed, a middle-aged, stocky black man with a pointed head and tiny eyes, eyes that worked hard to see past the smoked lenses of thick horn-rimmed glasses. He was a standard-issue hard-nosed educator in a white short-sleeved dress shirt, and he greeted Gunner’s visit to Centennial as enthusiastically as a mob boss would that of an IRS auditor.

“You can’t ask nothin’ gonna stir these boys up, now,” he told Gunner gravely, leaning as far back in the swivel chair behind his desk as he dared. His collar on one side was turned up slightly, exposing the solid blue clip-on tie hanging from his neck for the fashion fraud it was. “Their fuses are pretty damn short as it is, and I don’t want one of ’em goin’ crazy on the grounds. We’ve had two killings already this year, and I intend to see to it that there isn’t a third. I’ve got other students to consider, you understand.”

Gunner nodded his head agreeably, willing to promise Rafeed anything just to get him moving. The wall clock at the dean’s back read 11:22; the lunch break from which many a mischievous student would not return was little more than thirty minutes away.

“You working for Toby Mills, huh?” Rafeed asked.

“That’s right.”

“You ever dealt with kids like these before? Kids who would just as soon shoot you in the face as shake your hand?”

“I’ve known my share of gangbangers. I live on Stanford and a Hundred Seventh, I don’t have a whole lot of choice.”

“Then you know what you’re getting into, the risks you’ll be taking.”

“I’m a big boy, Mr. Rafeed. Don’t worry yourself about me, please.”

Rafeed just stared at him, worrying anyway. “We’ll set you up in Room Two fifteen upstairs,” he said after a moment. “I’m afraid Rucker and Mullens will have to do, though.” He looked over a note on his desk. “Seivers, Henderson, and Clarke are all absent today. Same as every day.”

Gunner couldn’t help but grimace. The ever-elusive Harold (Smalltime) Seivers, the Blue Toby Mills had specifically recommended he seek out, had again managed to be absent when Gunner came calling. And the others were not supposed to be the talkative type.

“Still …

“Rucker and Mullens will be fine,” Gunner told Rafeed, taking a chance on his powers of persuasion.

Room 215 turned out to be a combination English Lit./World History classroom furnished with thirty-four student desks, a teacher’s mahogany desk and chair, and an out-of-round globe of the world with the word
fuck
emblazoned in red ink across the flatlands of Australia. The olive green chalkboard spanning one wall was similarly decorated, but the walls themselves were spotless and smooth and smelled of fresh paint. Rafeed let Gunner in and left him immediately after, promising to send LeRon Rucker and Phillip Mullens up just as soon as they responded to his summons. Gunner sat down at the teacher’s desk and looked out over the room while he waited, trying to imagine it filled with thirty-four teenagers packed together like clowns in a Volkswagen bug at the circus, children caught in a game of fiscal numbers that made individual attention and tutoring, not to mention breathing space, an impossible favor to ask of any one teacher, underpaid or no.

It wasn’t a pretty thought.

“You look like a cop,” somebody at the door said.

Gunner turned around. Two teenage boys stood at the edge of the room near the door, appraising him from a safe distance, one seeking shelter behind the other, both seemingly in no hurry to get a closer look at the man they were here to see.

“I’m a private investigator,” Gunner said, standing up, “not a cop.”

It was a distinction he was forced to point out to people with amazing regularity, and for some reason, it always made him feel small.

The shorter of the two boys near the door, the brave one taking the point, came forward and collapsed into one of the student desks in the middle of the first row, just off to Gunner’s left.

“Mr. Rafeed says you wanna see us.”

“You LeRon Rucker and Phillip Mullens?”

“Yeah. ’Cept don’t nobody call me that, LeRon. They call me Cat.”

“Like in Fast Cat,” Rucker’s friend Mullens explained, abruptly cheering up and taking a seat next to him. “’Cause he got spots all over his ass, like a fuckin’ leopard.”

“Fuck you,” Rucker said, trying to reach Mullens’s face with an open hand, laughing at their inside joke.

Rucker was only sixteen, according to Kelly DeCharme’s dossier, but he looked much older than that, even to Gunner’s imperfect eye. He was heavy-boned and light-skinned, with a freckled (or “spotted”) face that seemed capable of growing much more than the reddish stubble presently shading his cheeks. There were lines under his pale gray eyes and at the corners of his mouth, etchings of time that seemed borrowed from a man who had had more than sixteen years to grow so discernibly tired of living.

Mullens, by comparison, looked like a six-foot-two baby waiting for a diaper change. He was reportedly a full year older than Rucker, but nowhere was that apparent. He had full-moon eyes and a flawless, dark complexion, and the kind of slight build most men could break with a good insult. Twin lightning bolts had been formed upon both sides of his almost hairless head by an artistic barber. Like Rucker, he wore tattered denim pants, a silk-screened T-shirt, and a sixty-five-dollar pair of unlaced hi-top Reebok basketball shoes, but in his case, the shoes suggested something more than a trendy fashion statement. He had the moves, the mannerisms, of a bona fide player.

Which could explain why the Blues called him Phi, short for the name the freewheeling Houston University basketball team of the early eighties went by: Phi Slamma Jamma.

“I take it Mr. Rafeed has explained to you that I’m here on Toby Mills’s behalf,” Gunner said, trying awkwardly to get his show on the road.

“He said you workin’ for his lawyer,” Mullens recalled, “an’ you wanna ask us some questions.”

“That’s right.”

“What kind of questions?” Rucker asked.

Gunner took the direct route. “I’m trying to find Rookie Davidson, and I don’t have the slightest idea where to start looking. I thought you two might be able to help.”