It's Not a Pretty Sight (10 page)

Ollie was big, fat, and consistently ill-tempered, and what he couldn’t pulverize with his bare fists, he could mangle beyond recognition. Gunner had seen him do it.

“You’re scared of
Ollie
?”

“I tell you what. If you can find a man in this room who
isn’t
scared of him, I’ll pick up your tab tonight. And call that man a doctor.”

Jetta laughed. Cheating on Ollie was a nonstop party for her because men took all the risks; her husband didn’t have it in him to harm a hair on her head, and she had always known it. How could a woman resist having a little fun at such a man’s expense when hurting his feelings was the only consequence of getting caught?

“He loves you, Jetta,” Gunner said. “Why don’t you give the man a break?”

“A
break
? Honey, every time I let that fat fool get in the same bed as me, I’m givin’ him a break!” She laughed again. The tight blue dress she was wearing was only barely able to hold her little breasts in check, it was cut so low in front.

Gunner just shook his head, disgusted with her. He’d been amused by her promiscuity only seconds ago, and now he couldn’t think of a thing in the world more loathsome.

“What’s the matter with
you
?” Jetta asked.

“Nothing’s the matter with me. I just don’t like being asked to help you fuck over a friend, that’s all.”

“A
friend
? Ollie ain’t your friend!”

“He sure as hell is more mine than yours.”

“Say what?”

“You heard me. You—”

“Gunner, baby, I gotta talk to you,” Mean Sheila cut in, having suddenly appeared at their table. The Deuce’s resident prostitute was in her usual drunken state, too impaired by liquor to realize she was interrupting a full-scale argument in the making.

“Not now,” Gunner said, waving her off brusquely.

“Nigger, you’re
crazy,
” Jetta said to Gunner, doing the investigator one better by ignoring Sheila altogether.

“I’m not crazy. I’m just honest. Your act isn’t funny anymore, Jetta. It’s old and it’s tired, and it’s cheap.”

“Cheap?”

“Gunner—” Sheila said, gamely trying to interject again.

“Who the hell you callin’
cheap
!”

“You,” Gunner said flatly. “You see anyone else around here with their legs open?”

Jetta’s hand flashed out to throw her drink in his face, but he caught her wrist before she could raise the glass off the table. Furious, she leapt to her feet to attack him properly, as Mean Sheila finally got the hint and backed off, heading for cover. She didn’t get far. Within seconds, a sea of bodies swallowed her up on its way to Gunner and Jetta’s table, everybody screaming at once, everybody smelling blood.

Eventually, four Good Samaritans managed to pry Gunner and Jetta apart; one for him and three for her. Gunner gave up peaceably, but Jetta did anything but, kicking, scratching, and cursing like a woman possessed.

And then Lilly pushed her way to the center of the crowd.

Jetta stopped struggling and shut up,
boom
, just like that, and everyone else did likewise. Playtime was over.

“All right, what the fuck is goin’ on here?” Lilly asked, sounding not unlike a woman about to kick some very serious ass. She was looking straight at Gunner.

“This nigger here—” Jetta started to say.

“Shut up, Jetta. I’m talkin’ to
him,
” Lilly said.

Jetta shut up.

Not waiting for Gunner to speak up, Lilly said, “I told you ’bout bringin’ your problems in here and startin’ shit with my customers, didn’t I? Did I tell you I wasn’t gonna have it, or not?”

Gunner wanted to answer, to explain that everything he had said to Jetta to incite this mini-riot had been meant not for her but for Claudia Lovejoy—he could see that now with surprising, if belated, clarity—but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. He felt foolish enough as it was; confessing to everyone here that his rejection of Claudia was killing
him
more than it ever would
Claudia
would surely just make matters worse.

So he said nothing, which of course made the house grow quieter still. Because of all the things one could do to get on Lilly’s nerves when she was trying to chew you out, nothing worked quite as well as refusing to defend yourself.

Nothing.

“Go get the phone,” Lilly said.

No one could believe they had heard her correctly.

“What?” Gunner asked.

“I said go get the phone. You weren’t so busy tearin’ my place up, you’d’ve heard me the first time.” She gestured toward the bar and the telephone nearby. “You got a phone call.”

“Who is it?”

“How the hell should
I
know? Do I look like your goddamn secretary?”

Before he could ask any more stupid questions, Gunner went to the phone.

It was Ziggy.

“We got problems, kid,” he said.

Gunner threw his head back and closed his eyes. “Pearson’s dead.”

“No. Not dead. But he’s on a respirator, in a coma. His doctors don’t expect him to ever come out of it.” He paused to see if Gunner would respond to that, then said, “He lost a lot of blood, and there was some kind of internal infection, my man wasn’t too clear on the specifics. In any case, he’s in pretty bad shape.”

Gunner still didn’t say anything.

“You there?”

“Yeah. I’m listening.”

“Look, try not to worry about it. He might pull out of it, you never know. And as long as his condition is up in the air, the cops will probably sit tight and leave you alone. They wanted to take you in on an assault charge, they could have done that Saturday night. The fact that you’re still walking around suggests they’re not interested in charging you with anything short of manslaughter. And they may never get that opportunity, if we’re lucky.”

“I don’t feel lucky,” Gunner said.

“Relax, kid. It’s gonna be okay. Just try to lay low for a while and stay near the phone. All right?”

“Sure, Ziggy. Thanks.”

Gunner could feel Lilly’s bream on the back of his neck even as he hung up the phone.

“You finished?” she asked. Stunning him yet again with her uncanny ability to cross her arms across the endless expanse of her chest.

“Yeah. Thanks.” He tried to slink away.

“Oh, no. I’m not finished with you yet.” She stepped to one side, barring his way.

“Lilly, please. Not tonight …”

“Oh, yes, tonight. You did it again. Started some shit in here after I told you I wasn’t havin’ any. Didn’t you?”

“Yes. I did.”

“Jetta says you called her a ho. That true?”

“A ‘ho’?” Gunner looked around, reminded of the woman he’d been brawling with only moments earlier, and found Jetta back at her table, entertaining what stragglers remained from the crowd that had gathered there to watch them go at each other. She appeared to have completely forgotten about him. “No. I did not call her a ho. I just told her I was getting a little weary of watching her come in here all the time, trying to catch flies between her thighs. That’s all.”

He hadn’t really meant it as a joke, but Lilly took it that way all the same. She cracked up.

“Get the hell out of here,” she said, using both hands to push him around to the other side of the bar where he belonged. “Go on, get!”

It was a piece of advice he fully intended to take, until he heard a familiar voice call out after him just as he was walking out the door.

Mean Sheila again.

“Sheila, baby, I’ve got to go,” Gunner said, trying to be patient with her. “Lilly says—”

“This is only gonna take a minute,” Sheila said.

“Come see me at Mickey’s tomorrow.”

“But Elvin said—”

“Elvin said
what
?”

Elvin was Elvin Hodge, the young taxi driver sitting in a booth over by the window. Gunner hardly knew him.

“He said you said it was important. That you needed to know right away,” Sheila said.

“Needed to know
what
right away? I don’t—”

“He said you lookin’ for a girl name’ Goldy. You wouldn’t be talkin’ ’bout Goldy Cruz, would you?”

He had almost been out the door. Too concerned with the life expectancy of Michael Pearson to remember what had brought him here in the first place: the nagging fear that Pearson’s friend Goldy was real, and not imaginary. If he had only started for the Deuce’s door five minutes earlier …

He would not be so afraid now.

The first thing Gunner learned was that her name had nothing to do with gold teeth.

Nor the color of her hair, nor the kind of jewelry she liked to wear. It wasn’t a play on her last name, nor was it reflective of any resemblance she might have borne to Goldilocks, friend to the Three Bears.

It was all about shoes.

They called Carol Cruz “Goldy” because every pair of shoes the hooker owned was gold. Forty-three pair in all, she said, either bought gold or dyed gold later. It was just a habit she’d gotten into as a kid.

“I like the way gold looks on my feet,” she told the investigator, dazzling him with her mental dexterity by shrugging, smoking, and chewing gum all at the same time. The pink wad in the black woman’s mouth had to be as big as a golf ball.

Sheila had said they could find her working the Inglewood district, standing on the corner of Prairie and 112th Street like somebody waiting for a bus where no bus stop was apparent, and she’d been right on. There Goldy stood, just another working girl like Sheila, only younger and remotely more attractive; about thirty, wearing a tight white sweater that buttoned down the front, and a pair of tattered denim cutoffs with tassel-like threads ringing the hem of each leg. A braided mass of phony blond cornrows had been woven into her hair, clashing violently with her dark brown skin.

When Gunner finally got around to asking her the only question that really mattered, it took her forever to tell him the truth.

And even then, it came too soon.

seven

“Y
OU
’
RE PUSHING ME
, G
UNNER
. I
SWEAR TO
G
OD
,” P
OOLE
said the next morning.

“She was telling the truth, Poole. I’d bet my life on it.”

“Your life is already spoken for. If Pearson dies, it belongs to me. I told you that Sunday.”

“But if he didn’t kill Nina—”

“For Chrissake, we’re talking about a hooker here! Somebody he used to throw a little change at every time he needed a hand job!”

“I realize that. But—”

“Hookers do what they’re paid to do, Gunner. That’s the nature of their profession. If a John tells ’em to jump, they jump. And if he tells them to bark like a dog, or moo like a cow, or tell anybody who asks that he was with them on Christmas morning, between the hours of six and ten-fifteen …”

“It wasn’t like that, Poole. She didn’t
want
to talk to me. I had to
make
her talk.”

It was only a slight exaggeration. He hadn’t had to tie her to the rack, exactly, but he had been forced to bide his time with her before she stopped playing stupid.

“You know a man named Michael Pearson?” Gunner had asked her, after all of Mean Sheila’s introductions were out of the way.

“Michael who?”

“Pearson. Michael Pearson.”

The hooker thought about it. Too long.

“Uh-uh. Don’t know nobody by that name,” she said, trying to mask the lie behind a nonchalant exhalation of cigarette smoke.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Don’t know the man.”

“Because he said he was a john of yours. Last Tuesday night.”

“He wasn’t no John of mine.”

“Black man in his mid-thirties, light-skinned, handsome, with a square jaw and a thin mustache. Hair all greased back on the sides. You don’t remember being with anybody like that?”

“No.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“What?”

Taken aback, Sheila said, “Gunner, baby, what—”

“I said you’re full of shit,” Gunner said to Goldy, while motioning for Sheila to hold her tongue. “I just described probably half the men you’ve ever been with, how the hell are you going to tell me you don’t remember being with a John like that?”

“I said—”

“I know what you said. And I know it’s bullshit. What I don’t know is why you’re lying. Are you trying to cover his ass, or yours? Or both?”

He let his eyes lean on her for a while, then said, “Maybe you’d remember him better if I told you he was dying. He’s at County-USC right now. In a coma.”

Her face changed, but not the way he thought it would: She
smiled.

“That’s too bad,” she said, taking another long drag from her cigarette. Southbound traffic on Prairie was blasting the trio with cold air regularly, but she seemed to be the only one not to notice. Or care.

“Then you
do
know him.”

“I didn’t say that. I just said it was too bad what happened to him, that’s all.”

“Look. Maybe you don’t understand. I don’t give a damn for Pearson. If you don’t want to do him any favors, that makes two of us. But I’m the one who put him in the hospital, and I need to know how bad I should feel about that if and when he dies. Do you understand? If he was lying about being with you last Tuesday, I’ve got no reason to lose any sleep over him. But if he was telling me the
truth
—”