It's Not a Pretty Sight (17 page)

“I bet my competition’s got a service bill to pay every month, too. Not to mention a landlord who acts like a landlord, and not a Beepers-R-Us salesman.”

“All I’m sayin’ is, you had a beeper or a car phone, you would’ve got these messages a lot sooner.”

“Messages? I haven’t heard any messages.”

“Okay. You don’t want my advice, fine. Man named Goody’s called you three times. He sounds desperate. That ain’t the stereo store guy, is it?”

“The one and only,” Gunner said, pinching his eyes shut and grimacing. He had no more time for Goody’s nonsense.

“You want the number?”

“No. Did Ziggy call? Or any policemen, maybe?”

“Nope. Just this guy Goody, and Kimmy Renfro. She says Gaylon needs to speak with you.”

“Oh. That’s right,” Gunner said, nodding. “We’re supposed to be going to the Laker game Saturday night.”

Gaylon Brown was Renfro’s seven-year-old son, and Gunner’s private little reclamation project. Nobody had asked the investigator to take an interest in the boy, least of all Renfro; he’d just decided it was something he had to do. There was no explaining it. The first time he’d seen Gaylon, just under a year ago, the boy was vandalizing a neighborhood liquor store with two of his knuckleheaded friends, just a bright-eyed little six-year-old who thought nothing his homies told him to do could possibly be wrong. Gunner had tried to put a scare into him, told him if he didn’t straighten up and fly right, he was going to throw his little ass off an overpass onto the nearest freeway. The boy had acted like he got the message, until Gunner let him go and he and his two accomplices met back up a safe distance away and flipped Gunner the bird, laughing like he was the biggest fool any of them had ever seen.

Gunner had been a force to reckon with in Gaylon’s life ever since.

It didn’t make any sense, deciding on a whim to start playing part-time father figure to a child he didn’t know and hadn’t sired, but he couldn’t see his way around it. And it felt good, somehow.

“Oh, and your girl Claudia called,” Mickey said.

“Claudia? What did she want?”

“She didn’t say. You want me to start askin’ women what they want with you when they call, you’re gonna have to deputize me, or somethin’. Swear me in, and give me a badge, and shit.”

“I tell you what, Mickey. I’ll pay the rent on time this month. How’s that?”

“Rent was due a week ago,” Mickey said dryly, finally turning to take Gunner’s advice and return to the front of the shop. “Who you tryin’ to kid?”

Once he was alone, the first call Gunner made was to Kimmy Renfro.

She sounded dog-tired. It was what he imagined all single mothers of four sounded like at a quarter after six, less than two hours after quitting time on a workday.

“Kimmy, this is Gunner. I’m returning your call.”

“Oh, yeah, Mr. Gunner. Gaylon wanted to talk to you. Somethin’ ’bout the game this Saturday. You tell ‘im you were takin’ ‘im to a basketball game?”

“The Laker game, yeah. But that was dependent upon him doing that reading I told him to do.”

“You mean from those books you gave ’im?”

“Yeah. He was supposed to spend fifteen minutes each night with one of them. I didn’t care which.”

They were little more than picture books, one Disney and two Afrocentric titles, but Gunner just wanted him to get used to the feel of a book in his hands. Developing a genuine affinity for reading would come later.

“He’s been readin’ ‘em,” Kimmy said, sounding more than a little proud of the fact. “Every night ’fore he goes to bed. One of ’em he’s read three times.”

“Good.”

“So I guess that means he’s goin’ to the game Saturday.”

“Yeah. I guess he is. Can you put him on a minute?”

Kimmy, said sure, and went to get him.

After a few seconds, the youngest of her three sons came on the line. “Hello?”

“Hey, boy,” Gunner said. “This is Uncle Gee. What’s up?”

That was the name Gaylon had invented for him: Uncle Gee. It made the investigator feel like an aging rapper.

“Nothin’,” Gaylon said.

“What do you mean nothin’? I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

“I wanted to know if we goin’ to the game. Like you said.”

“You been reading your books like I told you to?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we must be going.”

Gaylon asked who was playing.

“Lakers and the Spurs. What’s happenin’ with Pee Cee? You see him today?”

Pee Cee was Gaylon’s eight-year-old mentor from hell, a thug-in-the-making who had been the ringleader behind most of Gaylon’s past misadventures, including the liquor store vandalism that had brought Gaylon to Gunner’s attention in the first place.

“No. I don’t hang with Pee Cee no more,” Gaylon said. Telling a lie of the “little white” variety, at the very least.

“He’s not your ’boy no more?”

“No.”

“Good. ’Cause he’s a dummy, like I told you. And you’re too smart to be hanging around with dummies. Isn’t that right?”

“Uh-huh.”

It was a hard thing for a kid to hear, that his best friend in the world was poison to him, but Gunner was weaning Gaylon off the older boy’s influence little by little, bit by bit.

“Tell your mother I’ll be picking you up around five on Saturday,” Gunner said. “Can you remember that?”

“Uh-huh. Round five,” Gaylon said.

The next call the investigator made was to Claudia. He had to sit in front of the phone for a full minute beforehand, trying to prepare himself for what she might have to say. Expecting anything and everything but an expressed desire to reconcile.

She didn’t disappoint him.

“I came across some of your things here at the house. A couple of books and a few CDs,” Claudia said. “I thought you might want to come by sometime this week and get them.”

If there was any joy in her life at this moment, her voice did nothing to convey it; as she had for several months now, she seemed detached to the point of insensibility. It drove Gunner crazy.

“Sure,” he said. “What time would be good for you?”

“You mean tonight?”

“I thought I’d come by on the way home, yeah.”

“Okay. That’ll be fine, I guess. See you then.”

He didn’t realize she was saying good-bye until he heard the dial tone droning in his ear.

When he arrived at Claudia’s house, she had his things in a box right by the door, so she could just hand them to him and send him on his way without ever having to ask him to come in. He stood on the porch and took the box out of her hands as day turned to night overhead, a black silk screen falling over a red-washed sky.

“This should be everything,” she said. Her casual attire did nothing to blunt the green-eyed beauty that invigorated him still.

“Thanks,” he said.

An icy silence followed, until Gunner finally said, “So how have you been?”

“I’ve been okay. And you?”

“Good.”

“How’s work?”

“Work’s good. A little unsteady, but good.”

She nodded to show she was pleased to hear it.

“Have you been seeing anyone?” he asked abruptly.

“Aaron—”

“Yeah, you’re right. That was a stupid question, I’m sorry.”

Bad timing. That, more than anything, was to blame for this awkward moment, two lovers who had once been good for each other struggling to say a simple good-bye.

They had met almost two years ago in the course of a case Gunner was working. She was a grief-stricken widow, and he was the private investigator trying to prove the innocence of her husband’s accused murderer. Drawn to her from the moment he first set eyes on her, he had caught her at the most vulnerable period in her life, and out of need, she had responded to him. It was this inauspicious beginning to their relationship that gave Claudia reason to doubt the validity of everything that came afterward, and it was her doubt that inevitably led him to put an end to the constant series of breakups and makeups their life together had become.

He had little right to be angry, being the one who had actually pulled the plug on their affair, yet Claudia’s indifferent reaction to it all made him crazy. To say that their time together was doomed to be wasted was one thing; to shed not one single tear over the fact was quite another.

But that was Claudia. Fortified by the Lord to be impervious to pain.

“I’d better go,” he said.

She didn’t say a word to stop him.

Three o’clock in the morning, his phone rang. A jarring, nerve-wrenching sound that awoke him immediately.

It was the sound of death calling.

He would have let his answering machine pick up, except that it hadn’t been working for weeks. Which had been okay up to now; the only calls he wanted to be bothered with he could just as easily take at Mickey’s. Like Roman Goody’s calls, for instance.

Jesus, he hoped this wasn’t him.

He waited a few seconds, just to see if the ringing would stop on its own, then fumbled around in the dark for the receiver and found it. “Yeah?”

After a long stretch of unnerving silence, someone said, “Get ready to die, motherfucker.” And hung up.

The voice had been little more than a whisper, the androgynous rasp of someone breathing into the phone, and not much else. He thought it was familiar, but he couldn’t be sure. What he could be sure about was how eerie it had sounded, like something right out of a cheap horror movie, and how well it had gotten its intended job done.

It scared Gunner shitless.

Odds were it was a prank call, just some idiot with the vocal cords of a ghoul who’d chosen Gunner’s number at random out of the book.

But it took him a while to fall asleep again, all the same.

The first thing Wednesday morning, he called Ziggy.

The lawyer had nothing new to report about Pearson’s condition, and the police still hadn’t come calling—yet. Gunner told him about Goldy Cruz, and how he had been spending almost all of his time since his conversation with her.

“You’re tellin’ me Pearson might not be the guy?” Ziggy asked.

“That’s what I’m telling you, yeah. He
might
not be the guy. I don’t know if he is or not, yet.”

“But you intend to find out.”

Gunner didn’t answer that.

“I don’t like it. These personal matters, they can make a man do some foolish things, he isn’t careful. And you’re in enough trouble as it is.”

“You’re suggesting I should let the cops handle it?”

“That’s what they get paid for, isn’t it?”

“And if Pearson dies? You think they’re going to keep Nina’s murder case open more than five minutes after he’s tagged and bagged?”

Ziggy fell silent, thinking it over. “You can tell me you can do this without getting overly emotional about it, I guess I’m okay with it. But if you can’t—”

“Overly emotional? When the hell have you ever known me to get overly emotional?”

“I’m gonna ignore that pathetic attempt at humor and simply tell you to keep in touch. Okay? I don’t hear from you every six hours or so, I’m gonna ask our good friend Lieutenant Poole to haul your ass in for your own protection.”

“I’ve got condoms for my own protection, thanks.”

“You know what you need? You need a pager. That way I could just page you when I need to talk to you, ’stead of waiting around for you to call.”

“You been talking to Mickey?”

“Mickey? Why?”

“It’s a fucking conspiracy. That’s what it is. You two had your way, I’d never have a moment’s peace from either one of you.”

“We just wanna know you’re okay, kid. That’s all.”

Ziggy cracked up and got off the phone.

Trini Serrano wasn’t in, so Gunner left a message for her on her answering machine, asking for a callback as soon as she could get around to making one. Next, he called to make a noontime appointment with the personnel director at Bowers, Bain and Lyle, the law firm Mimi Hillman had said was Nina’s last place of employment before her stint at Sisterhood House. And finally, he dropped in on Agnes Felker. Unannounced.

She lived in a ramshackle apartment building on the northbound side of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, about six blocks west of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Only a few feet from her door on the second floor, what looked like a homeless man was curled up in a ball on the floor at the end of the hall, sleeping soundly. Or dead. The sheets of old newspaper draped over his body in lieu of a blanket made it hard to tell which.

Gunner knocked on the door three times before someone on the other side began moving around, betraying their presence inside.

“Who is it?” a coarse, though barely female voice demanded. There was no peephole in the door, so the question was entirely necessary.

“My name is Aaron Gunner. I’m looking for Agnes Felker,” Gunner said, shouting to be heard.

“Who?”

“I’m a private investigator. I’d like to ask you some questions about Nina Pearson—”

The door came flying open, without warning. The woman who had thrown it aside stood there at the threshold of the apartment and glared at him, holding the cold metal nostril of a single-barreled shotgun just under his chin.

“Jesus Christ,” Gunner said, feeling his bladder threaten to let go.

She was a vicious-looking little thing, a dark-skinned, fiftyish woman with short black hair greased flat against her scalp and shaped into curls framing her face; an angry, masculine, high-cheekboned face that a cosmetic overload did nothing whatsoever to soften. She had a wide, red mouth lined with large, incredibly even teeth, and a small, bony body. And her anger was something that seemed to radiate from her being like heat off a hot stove.

“Come on in here, motherfucker,” she said. “Come on.”

She backed into the room slowly, and Gunner followed, arms raised over his head, certain each step would be his last. When they were both inside the apartment—a poorly furnished, litter-strewn place surrounded by the world’s most disheartening wallpaper—she put another foot of empty space between them and told him to close the door.

“Now, wait a minute,” Gunner said. Afraid to argue with her, but more afraid to be alone with her in an enclosed area.

“I said close the goddamn door,” Felker told him again.