Fear of the Dark (20 page)

“That would be my guess, yeah,” Gunner said.

“That’s what Buddy and I thought, too,” Brother Jamaal said. “But neither of us could figure out what it could be a payoff for, or how it might relate to Lou’s deal with Roland, until Buddy did some checkin’ into Stewart’s background and came up with the yearbook. He seemed to have the whole picture clear in his mind after that, only he wouldn’t share it with me. He told me just to hang onto the tape for him and be cool, that he’d straighten everything out and get back to me if he needed it.”

“But he never did.”

“No. A week later, he was dead. Everybody said a crazy had killed him, one more fucked-up white man tryin’ to throw a wrench into the machine, and it was easier to accept that explanation than to deal with the possibility that Roland or Sweet Lou had had him killed. So I pretended to believe it. And I think I almost did, until you showed up and started askin’ people a lot of questions I should have had the guts to ask myself.”

“¡Cuidado! ¡La pelota!”

Off to Gunner’s right, a red rubber handball escaped a handful of Mexican children playing nearby and bounded over the railing into the black tar, landing about six feet from the edge of the pit. There were eleven people standing at the railing in all, including the recently arrived father of the children to whom the ball belonged, but no one moved to the toy’s rescue. No one, apparently, was that crazy.

“Anybody know about the tape besides you and Buddy?” Gunner asked Hill, as someone finally ran off to find a park attendant.

Brother Jamaal shook his head. “Not unless Buddy told somebody about it, no. You’re the only one I’ve told.”

“And there’s only the one copy?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive. Why?”

“Because somebody’s been trying to find it, I think. They tore up Buddy’s apartment rooting around for it, maybe last week some time. They haven’t tried your place yet?”

Hill shook his head again. “We weren’t tight, me and Buddy. Not with each other, not with anybody. We only got together for this deal the one time, and that only out of necessity. Nobody’s figured us for a team yet, I guess.”

“That’s good,” Gunner said, nodding his head pensively. “That means you’ve still got a little time.”

“Yeah? For what?”

Gunner turned a hard smile in his direction. “To live,” he said, matter-of-factly. “What else?”

Red lips on an ugly face. That was Lilly.

“Oh, you believe me now, huh? About Sweet Lou wantin’ to kill J.?”

“I have reason to believe Sweet Lou may have been involved in J.T.’s death, yes.”

“You’ve come to tell me you’re sorry, then. For not listenin’ to somebody when they try to tell you somethin’.”

“I’m sorry, Lilly. Really.”

“Uh-huh. You’re sorry, all right. You and Howard both.”

J.T.’s widow scowled, lighting a fresh cigarette. The sign in the window said the Acey Deuce was open for business, but no one seemed to want to believe it. Just a few minutes early for the noon rush, Gunner and a mammoth man of the cloth were the only customers in the place. The parson was squeezed into a booth near a window looking onto the street, and Gunner was at the bar, grilling Lilly.

“So now you believe me, you gonna do anything about it?” the large black woman asked. “Or do I have to hire you for that? Like somebody who wasn’t fillin’ your glass three times a week for free, not so long ago?”

“You don’t have to do anything but stop bitching for five minutes and answer a few questions,” Gunner said. “You feel up to that?”

“Yeah. I feel up to it. What do you wanna know?”

“I want you to tell me again about that phone call you say J.T. received from Lou Jenkins’s man Jimmy Price. I want you to try to remember everything you may have overheard.”

Lilly told the story again, although it seemed even thinner the second time around. Someone had called the Deuce looking for J.T. several days before his death, and Lilly had answered the phone. An articulate young black man she could only assume was Price asked to speak to her husband regarding their “recent dialogue at the Kitchen,” Jenkins’s Lynwood restaurant and base of operations, and the ensuing conversation between the two men had been an ugly one. J.T. took the call behind closed doors and exploded, cursing like a madman, making wild threats. Most of what he said was unintelligible from where Lilly was forced to try and make it out, on the other side of an insulated wall and closed office door, but one thing, at least, was not: J.T. did not want Price or Lou Jenkins anywhere near his place.

“‘You motherfuckers stay away from my place!’ J. kept sayin’,” Lilly recalled, getting the attention of the parson in the booth by the window without particularly wanting it. “Over and over. ‘Stay the fuck away from my place, or I’ll have the police on your ass!’”

“But he never mentioned Price or Jenkins by name,” Gunner said.

“No.”

“Or the Deuce?”

The question took Lilly by surprise. She mulled it over for a moment, then shook her head. “No. I don’t think he ever said ‘the Deuce,’ specifically—now that you mention it.”

Gunner did some ruminating of his own before asking, “You ever see Price or Jenkins come in here? Would you know them if you served them?”

“Yeah, I’d know. You can’t live and work in this community without comin’ face-to-face with those two, ’ventually. They’re goddamn institutions.”

“But they’ve never been to the Deuce that you know of.”

“No.”

“How about the Kitchen? You or J.T. ever visit the Kitchen?”

Lilly shrugged. “A couple times. Once for dinner, once for lunch.”

“J.T. ever go there alone?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Gunner paused. “Can you think of any reason Jenkins might have to want to buy into the Deuce? Either partially or outright?”

Lilly shook her head. “No. This is a bar, baby, not a gold mine.”

And Jenkins couldn’t have been looking to open a new distributorship in the area: unless he had lost his lease, the record store only two blocks north on Vermont was his, lock, stock, and barrel, and anyone who wasn’t deaf, dumb, and blind knew it, the local authorities included.

“Then maybe J.T. wasn’t talking about the Deuce,” Gunner said.

Lilly started to ask him what he meant, but the door to the bar opened and someone invited himself in, catching her eye. It was Little Pete, the neighborhood hot-weapons merchant, a man whose diminutive size made “Little” seem too generous a name for him. Dressed like a Depression-era pencil salesman and sporting a face he refused to shave more than once a week, he looked as insolvent as ever.

“You’re late,” Gunner said.

“My mornin’ appointment ran long,” Little Pete said, coming closer. He could just see over the counter of the bar without standing on his tippy-toes. “How you doin’, Lilly?”

“I’m doin’ fine, Junior. And I’m gonna keep on doin’ fine, providin’ you ain’t brought no shit in here.”

“Who? Me? Carry firearms on my person? Never. That’s illegal, sister.”

“Have a drink and sit down a minute, Pete,” Gunner said, gesturing for Lilly to set the tiny man up at the far end of the bar. “I’ll be right with you.”

Little Pete nodded casually and followed Lilly to a distant stool, which he managed to climb before the bartender had intuitively filled the glass sitting there with the libation of his choice, Johnny Walker Red and Seven-Up. Perhaps feeling ignored, the Deuce’s only other customer, the overweight parson in the window booth, got up and walked out, and Lilly neither stopped him nor said good-bye.

“What’s he doin’ here?” the big woman asked Gunner upon her return, tilting her head in Little Pete’s direction. “He have somethin’ you need, all of a sudden?”

“Let’s just say I don’t feel safe in this world running around with just a comb in my pocket,” Gunner said. “If that’s all right with you.”

Lilly shrugged. “It’s your ass.”

“That’s right. It is.” He gave Little Pete a quick glance and went on. “Now. As I was saying. If Jenkins was after some place of J.T.’s, but the Deuce was of no use to him that we can see, then maybe he wasn’t after the Deuce at all. Maybe he was after something else. Some
place
else.”

“Some place else? Like what? Where? The Deuce is all we’ve got that’s worth anything.” She paused. “I mean, the
market
ain’t worth nothin’…”

She was looking past him at the rear of the club, seeing something that wasn’t really there.

“What market?” Gunner asked.

“J. bought it, last year some time. That old boarded-up Vons market on Manchester and Hoover, across from the fire station. He was gonna make one of those superstores of liquor out of it, he said, if we could ever scrape up enough money to get it into shape.”

“J.T. bought that dump?”

“Yeah. Real estate and J. never did mix too well, God bless the fool.”

“Anybody been using it, that you’re aware of? Are you leasing it out, or anything like that?”

Lilly shook her head. “Are you kiddin’? What’s anybody gonna use it for? Ain’t nothin’ in there but some shelves and stuff. I went there once right after J. bought it, and it’s worthless, like I said. Just an empty buildin’ with a fence around it.”

“You have a key to the fence? And the doors?”

“I think so. You want to see ’em?”

“Yeah, I would. Although I don’t think they’ll do either of us any good.”

Lilly stared at him. “Why not?”

“Because,” Gunner said, “the locks will have been changed by now. Unless I miss my guess.”

“I’ll get ’em for you anyway,” Lilly said, shrugging again, and disappeared into the back of the bar, behind the door marked Employees Only.

Finally, Gunner moved to Little Pete’s end of the bar and sat down. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Pete,” he said.

The short man lifted his shoulders indifferently. “Anything for a preferred customer. What can I do for you?”

“You can help me make it through the night, partner. It’s going to be a long one, I think.”

“That right?”

“Yeah.”

“How many players you expectin’ to see?”

“I don’t know. More than the legal limit.”

Little Pete pulled a makeshift catalog from one of his pockets and set it on the counter of the bar between them.

“In that case, may I make a few suggestions?” he asked.

“Please do,” Gunner said, pulling the catalog closer. “Please do.”

here was a lookout out front. He was supposed to be just a rummy killing time on the sidewalk, waiting for night to pass into day three steps from the gate of the chain-link fence surrounding the property, but he had shown Gunner more interest than he warranted when the detective made his first pass by the gate to look the place over.

He was a mop-headed, middle-aged man with a pungent aroma and a keen eye, dressed in a tattered pair of dungaree work pants and a polyester shirt with an oversized collar. The bag in his hand had a bottle in it, and the bottle was more than a prop, because he was drunk. Too drunk to be taken for sober, but not drunk enough to miss anything important. He was going to be hard to get past.

Reaching this conclusion himself, approaching the lookout again as his trip around the block came to an end, Gunner decided not to try. The corner of Manchester and Hoover at two in the morning Saturday could not be described as dark, by any means, but the lot that interested the detective was, and traffic along both major boulevards was transient, at best. The gas station on the northeast corner of the intersection was open, but there were no cars at the pumps and the attendant was nowhere to be seen. Performed properly, an open mugging had a good chance of going unnoticed.

Gunner closed upon the tipsy lookout fast and dropped him with a right hand thrown from the hip. A blue Ford showing a strong disregard for the speed limit raced by on the northbound side of Hoover obliviously. Propped up against the chain-link fence, out cold, the lookout struck as unassuming a figure as ever.

Gunner’s hunch about Lilly’s keys had been right: none of them opened the padlock on the gate. He stopped pushing his luck and went around to the 88th Street side of the lot to jump the fence in relative obscurity.

The former Vons market Lilly had inherited was a vast, boarded-up, graffiti-covered mess, seemingly impossible to penetrate, but one door in the back still looked like a door: it was locked securely by dual padlocks, top and bottom, and was free of any crosshatched wood slats nailed across its face. Gunner shunned any further use of Lilly’s keys, undid the tape he had used to tie a stumpy tire iron to his right calf, and went to work on the door, compromising quiet for speed.