You Can Die Trying (28 page)

Kubo still refused to obey. “I’m not crazy,” he said.

“Jesus Christ. I’m begging you. Don’t make me do this, god-damnit!”

Kubo’s right hand released the Smith & Wesson as if to surrender it, just as his left went for the Ruger at his waist. Jenner hit him once over the heart, and the blast propelled Kubo backward like a doll on a string, into the wall behind him. He knocked over a table and the lamp atop it fell to the floor, smearing Harriet Washington’s floral wallpaper with blood as the Ruger tumbled out of his grasp. He was still breathing when Jenner got to him, but everyone in the room knew he was a dead man.

Hilton started to get up, but Gunner put an arm out and forced him into his seat again, where Gunner himself intended to remain. A cop had just killed his own partner, and in a minute, Gunner knew, he was going to start looking around for someone to blame. Leaving the couch before being given permission to do so might not be enough to win the honors, but you never knew.

When Jenner finally turned around to face them, they knew that Kubo was dead. He came over to where they were sitting and stood over them, just as Kubo had done only minutes earlier, and gave them a good, hard look at the gun in his hand.

“I’ve got you to thank for that, you son of a bitch,” he said to Gunner.

If he was looking for an argument, he wasn’t going to get one.

“He was a good cop. I don’t give a shit what you say. And I don’t want to see his reputation go down the toilet.” He paused. “But that’s exactly what’s going to happen, I bring you two in. Isn’t it?”

Gunner still wouldn’t say anything.

Jenner put the nose of his automatic up against the black man’s forehead and smiled.

“Decisions, decisions,” he said.

16

Sometimes, luck was enough.

And Gunner held no delusions about his living to see another day being anything else but. He had told Danny Kubo what he thought was a lie, only to discover he had told him the truth, instead. While he had indeed gone to see Dick Jenner Thursday morning, before his confrontation with Sonny Flowers at Mitchell Flowers’s home, he hadn’t believed for a moment that Jenner might have actually followed Kubo to Harriet Washington’s residence. That had just been something to say in order to draw Kubo’s attention to the window. The idea was to wait for Kubo’s eyes to turn away, then make a break for the kitchen and the back door beyond. No one had been more surprised—and relieved—than Gunner when Jenner’s appearance in the kitchen doorway had rendered such a desperate gambit unnecessary.

Another cop in Jenner’s shoes, facing the choice between besmirching his dead partner’s memory and killing a pair of black nobodies who were at least indirectly responsible for his partner’s death, might have put the bullet in Gunner’s head that Jenner had ultimately refused to. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to make up a story that would explain two more bodies in the room, if Jenner had wanted to do that; as an IAD man, he almost certainly would have known what to say, and what not to. A lie, and the small measure of revenge that would have come with it, was the most attractive option Jenner had available to him—and yet he had refused to tell it. Despite the cost to Kubo’s name, he had opted for the truth instead. Turning Gunner and Hilton over to Denny Loiacano, he had stood back while they buried Kubo under a mountain of dishonorable allegations, then supplied Loiacano with the gun he had talked Deanna Lugo into giving him, just for good measure. In short, he had played the good cop, because that, ironically, was what Jenner was: a good cop.

Hell yes, Gunner had been lucky.

And in the days that followed, his good fortune held. Pervis Hilton’s sudden willingness to talk to the police might have persuaded Milton Wiley to do little more than turn himself into the authorities, but it had moved Wiley’s friend Howie Foster to start talking like somebody who was getting paid by the syllable. Gunner kept waiting for someone to mention his client’s attempts to extort hush money from Wiley, but no one ever did, and the omission made Gunner’s life just that much easier. Neither Mitchell Flowers, nor his brother Sonny, really deserved the break, but Gunner felt as though
he
did, and he was glad to get it. So much so that he refused to worry that Wiley might choose to blow that particular whistle later, whenever—and
if
ever—he finally decided to come clean.

All in all, Harriet Washington and Dick Jenner represented the only real down side to the end of Gunner’s work for Mitchell Flowers. Washington, because she had had to learn the truth about both her lawyer and her baby brother in the same fashion as most of the general public: by watching the evening news on TV Thursday night; and Jenner, because he never spoke to Gunner again. He knew how much his making peace with the investigator would help to assuage Gunner’s guilt over Danny Kubo’s death, and he had no interest in doing Gunner that particular favor. The half-dozen or so calls Gunner made to him downtown once the police had sent the investigator home for good never received an answer.

What Jenner didn’t know was that Gunner’s reasons for wanting to talk with the IAD man went beyond mere forgiveness. He was also looking for answers. He was comfortable with the knowledge that his old friend Kubo had died an insane man, but it bothered him that he could not say where Kubo’s insanity had begun, and his wisdom had left off. For Kubo had made it sound as if no other measures but his own would stand a chance of ridding the LAPD of the racism it was becoming more and more infamous for. And if a
cop
felt that way …

Gunner didn’t want to believe the system was really that far gone.

So he tried to get Dick jenner to consent to a little reassuring heart-to-heart, only to have his invitations go unacknowledged. It took some time, but eventually he convinced himself that it didn’t matter; whatever the ingrained state of the department’s prejudices, it was none of his business, and not his worry.

And then one day, the flowers came.

Long-stemmed red roses; an even dozen. The strange looks he had gotten from Mickey, Weldon Foley, and Foley’s homie, Joe Worthy upon his entrance into Mickey’s shop that morning had been confusing until he had seen the bouquet, resting in a familiar gold lamé box atop his desk, a gift card attached.

Mickey followed him like a puppy dog into the back of the shop and, watching him read the card, said, “Lady left those for you early this mornin’. You know her?”

Gunner felt a grin slide over his face. “I think so. Yeah.”

“Not well, I hope,” Mickey said. “ ’Cause I got news for you—”

Gunner waved him off and read the card:

My Darling Aaron,

I was wrong about you. You were wonderful. Please

give me a chance to apologize? Tonight? I’ll be sitting

at the bar at McQueen’s. You know the place. Eight

o’clock. Don’t be late!

Love,
H.K.

“So tell me somethin’,” Harry Kupchak said, doing a sloppy job of refilling Gunner’s empty beer mug. “How’d the boys down at the office like Peaches?”

He was already laughing.

“Exactly as you might expect. They think I’ve taken a walk on the wild side,” Gunner said.

“No shit.”

“No shit. I think my landlord’s drawing up eviction papers as we speak.”

Gunner smiled as Kupchak fell out again, then went to work on his beer and took a good look around. McQueen’s was a boisterous little bistro on Figueroa and Flower streets that was apparently where every self-respecting cop working out of the Southwest station house spent his or her after-hours. Laughter and vulgarity spilled across the room from all directions, and smoke lingered in the air like levitating ghosts at nearly every table. The lighting was as subdued as the oldies music emanating from the jukebox.

Had it not been for one plainclothes officer in a corduroy jacket shooting pool over near the door, Gunner would have been the only black person in attendance tonight.

“How the hell’d you find her, anyway?” Gunner asked Kupchak, picking up their conversation right where it had left off.

“Just because I’m an asshole, Gunner, that doesn’t mean I don’t have friends. The guy who was at the desk the day you dropped her off at the station, I had him and an art department guy put together a composite for me. All I had to do after that was show it around, ’til I found somebody who knew her, and where I could find her.”

“You have to do much talking to get her to do it?”

“Are you kidding? I think she’s startin’ to enjoy the work. It’s a lot easier than what she’s used to, right?”

They both laughed.

“Anyway, this makes us even,” Kupchak said.

“I guess it does.”

“Except, you need another favor. Don’t you?”

“Did I say I need another favor?”

“You didn’t say it. It’s just a feeling I get, watching you. Maybe I’m wrong.”

Gunner let him stare for nearly a full minute, then said, “I’ve got a few questions I wanted to ask you. That’s all.”

“What kind of questions?”

Gunner shrugged, trying to downplay the significance of the subject. “Questions about cops like McGovern. Bigots who wouldn’t recognize a decent black man if one fell out of the sky on top of them. You know the kind I mean.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I want to know where they come from, Kupchak. I want to know what happens to them out there that they forget what it’s like to give a damn about anybody but themselves.”

Kupchak tightened his jaw to keep the cordial smile on his face in place, then raised his beer mug to his mouth and said, “Forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me. I might surprise you.”

Kupchak kept him waiting. He didn’t speak until the last of his beer was gone, and only then after he had refilled his own glass. “War, Gunner,” the policeman said. “That’s what happens to ’em. Only nobody wants to admit it.

“People wanna believe it’s just a job, police work. Like driving a cab, or selling insurance. But you tell me what cabbie has to clean up the mess a drunk leaves behind after he’s bounced his baby girl off the walls of his apartment like a goddamn basketball. Or what insurance man has to wrestle with an old woman wielding a butcher knife on her front lawn while all her neighbors stand around shouting obscenities at him. ‘White motherfucker’ this, and ‘asshole’ that. Shit. You call that a job?”

“So being a cop’s a dirty business. Everybody knows that going in.”

“Nobody knows jack shit going in. That’s the trouble. Rookies always think they’re prepared for what’s coming, but they never are. Nobody could be. Crack houses on every other corner; nine-year-old kids committing execution-style murders; women being cut up or beaten senseless by jealous boyfriends or dusted pimps. Some cops, they learn to live with it after a while, sure. But others …” He went back to his beer to fill a short silence. “They get a little crazy. Out of control. But that’s what happens in a war, right? Not everybody comes out whole.”

“Except you people aren’t grunts, Kupchak. And this isn’t some jungle in Cambodia. The people you’re talking about being at war with are US citizens, man, not the goddamn Vietcong.”

“So what the hell’s the difference? We were the enemy over there, and we’re the enemy right here. The people of this community hate our guts just as much as the gooks ever did.”

“I think you’re wrong. I think you’re confusing hatred with fear.”

“Fear?”

“That’s right. Fear. These people are too busy being afraid of you to hate you, Kupchak. You’ve got them scared shitless.”

“Yeah? Well, what a coincidence. They’ve got us scared shitless, too. Because we’re the only ones tryin’ to fight this fight by any rules, Gunner. All the fuckin’ crazies we have to go up against—all the kids with their Uzis, and whacked-out car thieves with their tire irons and baseball bats—they don’t give a fuck about the rules, all right? They don’t
have
any rules. We’re the ones who have to try and be civilized about this shit, not them.”

“You’re talking about the lowlifes. I’m talking about everybody else. You can’t keep lumping us all in with the scumbags just becuase we all happen to look alike to you.”

“Shit. All we
see
are lowlifes,” Kupchak said. “What do you think? This isn’t Malibu we’re talking about here, Gunner, it’s the fuckin’
ghetto.
And by and large, the people we run into aren’t CPAs or Boy Scout troop leaders. They’re drunks and crack heads, ex-cons and cons-to-be. Drug pushers and wife-beaters, professional crybabies who don’t do a fuckin’ thing all day but hang out, while the rest of the world is busting its ass trying to pay for their food stamps. I hate to say that, but it’s true.”

“Bullshit,” Gunner said.

The room had suddenly grown quiet. Somewhere over the last several minutes, Kupchak and his black civilian friend had become the center of everyone’s attention.

“Hey, Harry! You need some help over there?” a voice called out from a far corner of the room.

“Bullshit? What’s bullshit?” Kupchak asked Gunner, ignoring his friend across the way.

“Everything you just said. All that crap about your seeing nothing but lowlifes. If that’s really how you feel, Kupchak, you boys need to have your eyes examined. Because you’re only seeing part of the picture.”