Fear of the Dark (13 page)

Mayes shrugged again, trying to come off as bored. “Anything’s possible,” he said. “But a white man would’ve been hard pressed to hold a
personal
grudge against Buddy, considering Buddy never associated with one long enough to offend him.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a white man he offended,” Gunner said, impulsively.

Mayes laughed. Mouse, strangely, didn’t follow his lead: “You’ve got to be joking. Buddy’s friends at the Deuce—Gaines the custodian and Sheila the whore—may be a little dense, and generally drunk as hell to boot, but I think they know a white man when they see one. Don’t you?”

“You’re talking about the gunman. I’m talking about the man—or men—who may have paid him.”

Mayes did another fine impression of a stone. “Who said anybody did?”

Gunner’s eyes had shifted from Mayes to the calendar hanging on the wall to his left, just above his head. It was an advertising tool for a local mortuary, cheap and poorly illustrated, featuring capsulized biographies of notable black Americans throughout history. October was Nat Turner month. A man with the same goals as Mayes claimed to have today, as Dorris had had only weeks ago: to free the slaves. Get out from under the white man’s thumb and multiply, prosper.

Maybe Mayes and Dorris would each have an October to call their own, someday.

Gunner looked at Mayes again. “Townsend paid a bag man good money to make a drop of some personal items just hours before he died. The kind of money a one-eyed man doesn’t make selling magazine subscriptions door to door.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw the exchange. Or part of it.”

Mayes’s eyes left Gunner’s to glance at Mouse for a nearly indiscernible instant. “What did this bag man look like?”

Gunner shook his head, smiling. “Give me more credit than that, Mayes. Shit.”

“I was only about to propose that we talk to him. Civilly. What you did with him afterward would be your business.”

“I think I know my business, thanks.”

“You think you can find him alone?”

“I never said I intended to try.”

“You have something better to do?”

“I don’t know. Something else could turn up. Tomorrow’s a new day.”

Gunner dragged a hand across his forehead, perspiring profusely. The heat in the room was stifling, undaunted by the efforts of the overmatched fan to diminish it, and his clothes were glued to his skin.

“You’re making things unnecessarily hard on yourself,” Mayes said, shrugging. “You’d like to know who killed Townsend, and we’d like to know who, if anyone, he was working for when he murdered Buddy.
If
he murdered Buddy. A fool with a gun is one thing; a conspiracy’s something else. It’d save us both a lot of time if we could look for your bag man together.”

Gunner shook his head again. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t work out, Brother Mayes,” he said, standing up to leave.

Mayes remained seated, smiling minimally. “No? And why is that?”

Gunner directed his answer at Mouse, ignoring Mayes completely. “Because I only make an ass out of myself once a month,” he said. “And the next Brother I catch in my peripheral vision, I’m going to cripple. Whether they seem to be following me or not.”

He gave Mouse a good half-minute to absorb the threat, then saluted Mayes with a little nod and went to the door, aching, confronting the camcorder barring his way there directly. Brother Jamaal looked up from its eyepiece and stepped aside for him, his face bearing no suggestion of malice. When Gunner kicked the tripod out from under the camcorder as he passed it, sending the tape machine crashing to the hard concrete floor, Brother Jamaal’s face looked quite different.

“Special effects,” Gunner said to him, before strolling casually out the way he’d come in.

ichael “Brush” Bush wouldn’t invite Gunner into his home, or join him out on the front porch. He couldn’t have been more inhospitable if Gunner had been a perfect stranger trying to unload encyclopedias; he just stood there on the other side of his front door, holding it open only marginally, and shook his top-heavy head from side to side, disturbing not a strand of the kinky black hair pointed skyward on top of it.

“No can do, ’Ron. Sorry.”

Gunner upped the ante of his bribe to an even fifty, baiting Brush with the sight of yet another twenty-dollar bill. “Gimme a break, Brush,” he said wearily.

“It ain’t the money, man. I’d do it for nothin’ if I could, but I can’t. I shouldn’t’a done it the last time, you wanna know the truth.”

Brush was a thirty-one-year-old Senior Clerk for the California Department of Motor Vehicles Gunner had once shadowed for three weeks at the behest of a jealous wife. Most jealous wives would have been relieved to hear that Gunner had found Brush to be nothing if not a monogamous, happily married man, but it happened that Gunner’s client was someone else’s jealous wife, not Brush’s, and so the news had a somewhat atypical affect on the lady. In all likelihood, she would have succeeded in parting her old flame’s hair with a carving knife had Gunner not made the unethical decision to warn Brush she might be coming, and Gunner had been exploiting the man’s gratitude ever since.

“All I need is a name and an address, Brush. It’s an easy fifty bucks, man.”

Brush shook his head again. From the neck up, he
did
look like a Fuller brush. “They watchin’ the database like a hawk, ‘Ron. They catch me at a terminal lookin’ up shit for you, I’m dead. You gonna take care of my family while I look for another job? Huh?”

“Then just get me a name. I’ll get the address myself.”

“Forget it, man. I told you. No can do. Sorry.”

He closed the door without saying good-bye. Gunner stood on the porch for a moment, staring the door to the little house down, before putting his fifty dollars back in his pocket and retreating, thinking, hoping that maybe the fat man in the retired Postal Service jeep wasn’t worth talking to, anyway.

Favoring his tender ribs, Gunner lowered himself gingerly into the Cobra and checked his watch. It was a good twenty minutes after six. The street lamps in Carson were already glowing and all the kids in Brush’s neighborhood had been reeled in for the night. So much for Gunner’s Sunday. Better luck Monday.

However the hell he was going to spend it.

Late the next morning, Gunner slapped two slices of white toast around a hard fried egg and, still chasing the tandem down with a cup of strong coffee, caught up with Mean Sheila as she made her renewed rounds of the newly redeveloped storefronts along Compton Boulevard just east of Santa Fe, back in the hunt now that Denny Townsend was safely out of her hair. Word of the white boy’s death had not yet been made public, but Gunner understood that Sheila had news sources of her own, fast and reliable. He asked her how Muhammad Ali was doing, referring to Ray Hollins with all due respect, and she told him with no noticeable sense of loss that Hollins was back in Motown, had been since last Friday despite the police department’s recommendation that he remain in California until further notice. Sheila said he had been with her all of Thursday afternoon, and somehow Gunner believed her enough to leave it at that. His questions didn’t seem to bother her anymore so it figured there weren’t any recent murder conspiracies in her past.

Having convinced himself all over again that time spent with Sheila was time poorly spent, Gunner was finally left with but a single “lead” to pursue, if one chose to use the term loosely. From a pay phone not far from Sheila’s hunting grounds, he silenced the prerecorded voice of an operator with forty-five cents in change and dialed the number someone had scrawled on the back of the “Henshaw for Congress” flyer he had lifted from Denny Townsend’s apartment four days ago. The line rang in his ear a long ten seconds before a cheery female voice said, “Henshaw’s the Right Man, Larry Stewart’s desk,” disdaining any form of hello altogether.

It seemed Gunner had called Henshaw’s west L.A. campaign headquarters in Brentwood. That in itself wasn’t too surprising—Henshaw would have been the “right man” for Townsend, to be sure—but the particular phone Gunner had set to ringing there was.

Because Larry Stewart was no volunteer flunky screening calls at Henshaw’s base of operations between tours of duty at the Xerox machine, but was, in fact, the would-be Congressman’s campaign manager. The kind of upper-echelon cog in the candidate’s political machine who could be expected to take calls on his private line from Oscar-winning actors and famous labor leaders, magazine editors and political pollsters and forecasters—but not from psychotic, uneducated low-lifes like Denny Townsend.

And yet Townsend had somehow come upon Stewart’s phone number.

A minor enigma, perhaps, but Gunner decided to explore it just the same, having little else to do with his time. If all Townsend had been was one man with a plan, just another nut looking to get his name read aloud on the evening news, then Gunner had already seen the people who would have most wanted him dead, and there wasn’t much left for him to do except wait around for one of them to make a mistake. But if, by chance, Townsend had been something more—like a front man for one or more crazies of his demented persuasion, as his generosity toward his fat friend in the windbreaker seemed to suggest—then it was possible his death had come at the hands of people Gunner had not yet been introduced to, but would have to acquaint himself with soon.

Very soon.

So he told one big Black Lie over the phone and got himself in the door of Lewis Henshaw’s campaign headquarters on Wilshire and Yale, where Brentwood and Santa Monica came effortlessly together. A failed auto parts store had been stripped to its bare walls to make room for a small army of Henshaw’s faithful and enough second-hand furniture and ringing telephones to keep them feeling relatively at home. They were a diverse group, Henshaw’s people—short and white, tall and white, fat and white. It appeared the forty-six-year-old Chicago cop-turned-novelist/film consultant/politician was still unwilling to concede that the white vote alone was not going to get him over in the multi-ethnic wonderland that was west Los Angeles.

And that was just as well, Gunner mused, as he integrated the aspiring Congressman’s camp with his arrival, because with Henshaw’s record as a pig-headed, prejudicial applicator of the law in Illinois, the white vote was all he was likely to get, whether he liked it or not.

“Where would I find Larry Stewart?” Gunner asked a young man filling a paper cup at the water cooler near the door. The face that turned his way looked like an acne sampler, red and roughly textured.

The man caught his cup before it could hit the floor, closed his slack jaw, and pointed to a pair of half-height glass and fiberboard partitions arranged around one corner of the floor space in the rear.

For an executive of Stewart’s stature, it wasn’t much of an office, but the cold young beauty manning his desk inside seemed to take the responsibility of guarding it for him quite seriously.

“You didn’t sound black over the phone,” she said, her eyes taking Gunner in with open skepticism, not the least bit afraid to insult him. The solid gray business suit she wore didn’t have a crease in it, and she did as much for it as it did for her.

Gunner smiled agreeably and sat down.

“So I’ve been told,” he said. “Must be all those big words I use. Like
who, what
, and
where.”

She either didn’t understand him, or didn’t particularly care to. Without changing expression she introduced herself as someone named Terry Allison, Larry Stewart’s personal secretary and chief liaison with the volunteers under his command, and she was far more attractive than her voice, transmitted over an ambiance-filled telephone line, could have possibly made clear. She was an intoxicating distillation of southern California Dreamgirl prerequisites, a cliché come to life: moist blue eyes offset by skin the color of bronze, tanned to perfection and glowing; sandy blond hair giving off light like the sun, cut with a surgeon’s eye to the precise length of her shoulders.

And people liked to say they had been drawn to California by the weather.

“Larry’s in San Francisco,” she said when she was good and ready, and not a moment before. “With Lew. I’m afraid he won’t be back in Los Angeles until Thursday morning sometime.”