Fear of the Dark (5 page)

“Bullshit,” Lilly said.

“He never asked for money or nothin’,” Gaines continued, letting her comment pass. “The cops wanted me to say it was robbery, but it wasn’t. I told ’em, shit, I seen a robbery once, I know how they go down. This was murder, man, all the way.”

“And Buddy was his man.”

“Absolutely.”

“Bullshit,” Lilly said again.

Gunner turned to her. “Lilly. Baby. Who in the world would want to kill J.T.?”

“You don’t wanna hear this,” Gaines moaned.

Gunner waved him off and Lilly said, “Sweet Lou.”

Which, true to Gaines’s word, was something Gunner didn’t care to hear.

What interest could a drug-runner in entrepreneur’s clothing like “Sweet” Lou Jenkins have in the death of a barkeeper on the opposite side of town?

“Sweet Lou?”

Lilly nodded. He had been afraid she would.

“I didn’t think they knew each other,” he said.

“They didn’t. J. wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with Lou, everybody knows that.”

“So why should Lou want to kill him?”

Lilly lifted her huge shoulders up in a ponderous shrug, then let them drop. “I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is J. got a call from that college boy pimp who works for Lou a few days before he died. You know the one I mean?”

“Price,” Gaines said, if only to speed things along.

“Price, right. The fashion plate lawyer with the fancy mouth and pretty car. He called J. here at the club and got him all hot and heavy, had him talkin’ about killin’ people, and shit. J. took the call back in the office, and closed the door so I wouldn’t hear what he was sayin’, but he raised enough hell that I got the gist of it anyway, even out here workin’ the bar. It had somethin’ to do with Lou wanting a piece of the Deuce, I think. J. must’ve said, ‘Stay the fuck away from my place’ about fifty times before he hung up.”

“You ask him about it afterward?” Gunner asked.

“Of course. And I still got the marks to prove it.”

“He wouldn’t talk about it.”

“No. He said it was just Deuce business, nothin’ for me to worry about. He was gonna handle it, he said.”

“You ever actually hear him mention Sweet Lou by name?”

“No.”

“Or Price?”

“No. But I was the one answered the phone. The boy says, ‘Let me speak to J.T.,’ right to the point, no hello or nothin’. I asked him, ‘Who should I say is callin’?’ and he just says, ‘Tell him it’s in regards to our recent dialogue at the Kitchen.’ Now how many niggers
you
know use the word ‘dialogue’ like that?”

It was Gunner’s turn to shrug. “A few. You read something other than
Jet
once a month, that’ll happen to you.”

“Not to nobody callin’ here, it don’t.”

“Okay. So it was Lou’s man Price on the phone. Go on.”

The big woman stared at him. “Go on, what?”

Gunner stared back. “So where does Sweet Lou come in?”

“He don’t,” Gaines said, shaking his head skeptically.

Lilly glared at him and said, “Who owns the Kitchen, Howard? And who else around here works hand-in-hand with white people every day?”

“Lilly, I keep tellin’ you, the boy that shot J.T. and Buddy didn’t work for Sweet Lou! He was poor white trash, probably a bigger ‘literate than anybody you know, and that ain’t Sweet Lou’s speed. Lou uses class people, white, black, and otherwise, and nothin’ else but. Ain’t that right, Gunner?”

“So they say.”

“He
could’ve
worked for Sweet Lou,” Lilly insisted stubbornly.

“Not the man
I
saw,” Gaines argued, his patience wearing thin. “The man I saw, Lou wouldn’t’ve hired to change a flat.”

“Describe the guy,” Gunner said, pulling a small notebook from his shirt pocket. He borrowed a pen from Lilly and turned to one side to use the backrest of the booth for support as he took notes. Gaines painted a surprisingly complete portrait of someone he had seen only once for a man whose own vocabulary was nothing to brag about.

“You ever see him before?” Gunner asked, almost rhetorically. “Or since?”

“No,” Gaines said, “but …” He had a pained expression on his face.

“But what?”

“This ain’t gonna help you any, ’cause it don’t exactly come from a reliable source. But Sheila said she had. Seen him before, that is.” His eyes were on Lilly, expecting the news to get a rise out of her.

Lilly only laughed.

“Like I said. It don’t come from a reliable source,” Gaines said.

Gunner wasn’t laughing. “She say
where
she thought she’d seen him before?”

Gaines shook his head. “Not to me. And I heard what she told the cops that night, and she didn’t tell them shit. She played dumb and went home soon as they let us all go. I seen her a few days after that, in Ralph’s market, and that’s when she told me. She was all messed up about it, scared to be seen anywhere. She figured the boy had recognized her, too, and was lookin’ to shut her up. You should’ve seen her rushin’ to get in and out of that market.”

“Have you spoken to her since?”

“No.”

“Who else knows about this? Anybody?”

“Nobody. Who’m I gonna tell that believes anything Sheila’s got to say? I don’t believe it myself.”

“You don’t.”

“No. But I believe
she
believes it. Ain’t that what those shrinks on TV always say?”

Gunner looked at Lilly. She said, “Hey, I told you, she ain’t been in here. And if she had, she’d have known better than to tell
me
she’d seen that funny-eyed motherfucker before. I’d have found out where, or killed her tryin’.”

Gunner asked Gaines if he knew the full name of Sheila’s partner the night of J.T. and Buddy’s murder.

“Ray Hollins,” Gaines said. “Said he was a fighter out of Detroit, Golden Glove just turned pro in the featherweight division, but he didn’t look like no fighter to me.” He winked at Lilly and the two of them had a good laugh.

Gunner asked what Hollins did look like, and Gaines told him, sketching yet another vivid picture of a perfect stranger.

“Sheila likes those skinny ones, I think,” he said, chuckling.

Gunner was putting his notebook away. He put Lilly’s pen in his pocket, too, and got away with it.

Gaines asked, “You gonna go see her, huh?”

Gunner nodded. “Why not?”

“Hey, if you got to, you got to. Maybe she’s tellin’ the truth for once in her life, who knows? But I tell you what—you go over there, you better step light.” He took the detective’s hand again and said, “ ’Cause that girl was crazy to begin with. Now she’s all wound up, she could be dangerous.
Downright
dangerous.”

“I hear you, Howard,” Gunner said.

“Besides, you know what she always says: ‘Just ’cause I’m paranoid …’”

“‘… that don’t mean they ain’t out to get me.’ Yeah, I remember.”

Gunner made it to his feet and winked at his friends, grinning.

“I say it all the time myself,” he said, and walked out before it could dawn on Lilly that he was starting up a new tab, after all.

he name on her California driver’s license—which had expired more than two years ago—was Sheila Denise Pulliam, but everybody called her Mean Sheila. Those who were unaware of the story behind the nickname could not understand how she could have possibly earned it, for in truth she was a pussycat, warm and outgoing and generous to a fault. They didn’t know about the four-year stretch she had pulled at the Georgia Rehabilitation Center for Women in the late seventies, or the boyfriend-turned-pimp she had murdered to get there.

Back in the late spring of ‘83, Sheila had come west following her early release from prison with the vague hope that she could make the kind of money on her back in Los Angeles no whore could aspire to in Athens, Georgia. She fully expected something less than the paradise propaganda consistently promised, but the overcrowded world of has-beens and losers she came to find dealt her a devastating blow nevertheless. The City of Angels’s reputation as the motherlode of opportunity turned out to be one it deserved, to her mild surprise, but her advisers in Georgia had failed to acquaint her with a fact simple mathematics could have easily pointed out: where opportunity knocks, desperate people rush
en masse
to answer its call. Hookers like Sheila, pouring forth in daily waves from the terminals at LAX and boarding platforms at Grand Central Station, were as rare in California as a good tan, and just as valuable.

And there was only so much Solid Gold to go around.

So Sheila had settled into impoverished mediocrity without a great deal of struggle and made L.A. her home. At thirty-three she was too tired to do anything else. She worked the Inglewood district for two years under the guidance of a rookie flesh peddler named Pee Wee, then went independent and moved her wares thirteen miles south to Compton, where she enjoyed a fair amount of prosperity. Independence would have cost most working girls some teeth, but Sheila wasn’t the youngest piece in Pee Wee’s stable and he was constantly having to apologize for her refusal to perform a good third of the day’s most popular acts of perversion. He let her go almost gladly. She played around in Hollywood for a while, but the fierce competition and high risk of arrest drove her back to the inner city. She bought a tiny house that sat behind a larger one on the 2200 block of 153rd and let a trickle of steady neighborhood business supplement the wages of welfare.

Gunner had known Sheila for well over two years, but had never made the trip to her place of residence until now. She was hot for his body, always had been, and he disliked his chances of fending her off on her own turf, convinced as he was that any sexual contact between them would do irreparable harm to both their friendship and his appreciation of sex with living partners.

On this day, however, standing on the balding patch of lawn that served as both the backyard of the large home facing the street and the front yard of Sheila’s smaller unit to the rear, Gunner assumed that seduction would be the last thing on Sheila’s mind. Howard Gaines and Lilly had described her as a petrified recluse, a woman of already questionable courage afraid for her life, and if he was at all uneasy about being here—and there was no point in denying that he was—it was strictly due to his ignorance of the devices she had on hand to protect herself with. Devices he had no doubt the slightest provocation would lead her to use, no questions asked.

Gingerly, then, he checked the windows of the tiny four-room cottage she lived in for indications of life, but the curtains were drawn and too thick with dust to see through. Rather than press his nose to the glass to get a better look—the blazing afternoon sun would make him all too easy to see from inside as it was—he moved on to the door of the little house and rang a bell that didn’t appear to be working. He left the bell alone and started to knock politely on the door. A dog somewhere behind him used the racket as an excuse to make some noise of its own, and he turned around to watch a good-sized Doberman claw at the screen door of the main house’s back porch, acting like an animal that hadn’t seen red meat in months.

Made to feel like an open-face sandwich, Gunner sped his business along and tried the door, which he expected to find locked. Leaning slightly forward to set his weight against it, he sprawled unceremoniously into the dark house when someone inside jerked the door wide open and stepped aside, into the shadows.

Gunner caught his balance before hitting the floor and ducked a poor right hand his unseen host threw at the back of his head, but took a left hook with better aim flush on the chin. He staggered backward, farther into the blackness of the room, and a straight right tried to follow the left, but this one he sensed coming and let go by, countering with two sharp rights of his own, throwing them where he judged a kidney to be and hitting pay dirt. What felt like a lightweight body doubled up around his hand, and the narrow face of a young black man with the ghost of a mustache dropped clearly into view, bathed in a tight wedge of sunlight the open front door was welcoming into the house.

Gunner launched a hard left at the nose above the mustache and the sound of bone meeting bone rang sharply through the air. The stranger took a short flight back into obscurity and came to rest Gunner knew not where, making enough noise to strongly suggest that he would be there for a while.