“You damn sure better believe I did. I was thinkin’ more along the lines of three
days
, not three
weeks.
Who the hell can afford to pay you for three weeks?”
Gunner started to laugh. Slowly at first, then in earnest. Goody just watched him in silence, until the younger black man finally shook his head, rose up from his chair, and headed for the door.
“Hey! What the hell’s so funny?” Goody demanded, calling out after him.
Gunner stopped and turned around, holding Goody’s office door open in his left hand. He wasn’t laughing anymore, but he still found the round little man’s naiveté worth a smile. “Mr. Goody, I couldn’t find a lost
dog
in three days. And a lost dog
wants
to be found.”
Goody just stared at him.
“I tell you what. Keep your money. Maybe Dartmouth will turn up on his own, you never know.” He started to walk out again.
“Waitaminute, waitaminute. Hold on a minute! You’re gonna need more than three days, is that what you’re tryin’ to tell me?”
Once more, Gunner postponed his departure to turn and regard Goody directly. “I’m trying to tell you there’s no way to predict how much time I’m going to need. Depending on how well Dartmouth’s made himself disappear, I could find him next week, or never at all.”
“Never at all
?”
“That’s right. There is always that possibility. Of course, that’s not very—”
Goody grunted derisively and, waving his right hand to shoo his guest out the door, said, “In that case, Mr. Gunner, don’t let me keep you, please. You obviously need to find yourself a richer client, and I need to find myself a more confident private investigator. No hard feelings.”
Gunner raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“You heard me. I am not a fool. I will not pay you to do nothing. My pockets are not that deep.”
“I see. I’m trying to scam you, is that what you think?”
“That is my impression, yes. You walk in here and talk about nothing but all the things you
can’t
do for me, instead of all the things you
can.
And I’m supposed to hire you anyway. Why? If you can’t promise me results, why in God’s name shouldn’t I just go out and look for Dartmouth myself?”
“Because you’re not a skip tracer, Mr. Goody. You’re a camcorder salesman,” Gunner said.
“But if you can’t find him any better than
I
can—”
“I never said that. What I said was that I can’t guarantee you anything. There’s a difference. Perhaps I should have explained to you what that difference is.”
This last comment was designed to make Goody feel stupid, and it achieved the desired effect. The store owner was shamed into silence.
“But look, I’m easy,” Gunner went on. “You’re right—I’m the detective and you’re the prospective client, whatever you want you should get. You tell me what you want to hear, and I’ll say it. You want guarantees, I’ll give you guarantees. Never mind that I won’t be able to make good on any of them. If it’s your preference to be disappointed later, rather than now, that’s
your
business, right?”
“It’s my preference not to be disappointed at all,” Goody said.
“Yes, well, disappointment sometimes comes with the territory, Mr. Goody. Skip tracing is not an exact science, it often takes a great deal of luck to locate a subject. And time. Generally, however, it takes neither. Generally, the man or woman you’re looking for turns up rather easily. I’d say the average time invested is about three weeks. Maybe Mr. Dartmouth would turn up sooner than that, who knows? But I’m not going to tell you now that he
will
, and then have you bitching and moaning to me later when he doesn’t. I don’t do business that way. I promise what I know I can deliver, and nothing more.
“So here’s the deal: I charge you a fair fee for my time, and then I charge you again for the results of that time, if and when there are any. If you still think that sounds like some kind of a rip-off …” He shrugged. “Then I guess you were right the first time. You need to find yourself another private investigator, and I need to find myself another client.”
Gunner struck a confident pose and waited for Goody to make up his mind.
Which apparently required the store owner to do little but return the investigator’s stare and twiddle his fingers, both in complete and unnerving silence. Gunner watched the fingers work to keep from going insane, meaty little stubs of flesh rolling about one another in a furious ballet of concentration. It was almost fascinating. But not quite.
“I’ll pay you for ten days,” Goody said at last, his voice weighed down by the humiliation of concession. “And if you haven’t found Dartmouth by then …” He didn’t bother to complete the sentence, knowing he didn’t have to. His meaning was clear.
“Fair enough,” Gunner said.
He closed Goody’s office door and sat back down.
There was a pay phone just around the corner from Best Way, outside a liquor store on Manchester Boulevard. In fact, there were two, but only one was working; the handset on the other was hanging from its shredded cord like the victim of a lynching, which, in a way, it was. Stripped of both its receiver and transmitter, it was only a plastic shell now, just one more slice of inoperative blight for the people of South-Central to get used to. The working phone, meanwhile, was in use, providing the means for a dark-skinned, fat woman with a thousand pink curlers in her hair to relate the story of her life to a girlfriend who, as near as Gunner could tell, never had a word to say of her own.
Fortunately, Gunner had no interest in the phones themselves, but in the directories that dangled beneath them. All but the lower third of the cover on the White Pages was missing, but what remained was enough to identify the volume as a relatively new one. Gunner opened the book and started flipping through it, hoping the page he needed would not be among those previous users had ripped out and walked away with like so many coupons in a neighborhood flier.
It wasn’t.
Three Dartmouths were listed in the book:
Dartmouth, L.
;
Dartmouth, William B.;
and
Dartmouth, R.
R., as in Robert, or Richard, or …
Russell?
Life was not supposed to be this good to anyone, but every now and then it honored Gunner with a gift, all wrapped up in fancy paper and tied with a bow. Go figure.
He snatched the page out of the book and rushed back to his car before the Fates could change their minds.
“You gonna tell him?” Howard Gaines asked, several hours later.
“Who? My client?”
Gaines nodded and grinned. Gunner knew damn well who he was talking about.
“Tell him what? That I’ve found an ‘R. Dartmouth’ in the phone book?” Gunner shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve gotta check it out first, make sure the ‘R’ doesn’t stand for Rodney, or Rachel. Something like that.”
Gaines laughed, risking the loss of what few healthy teeth remained anchored in his mouth. “Shit. You know what it stands for. You just tryin’ to keep the man on the clock a few more days, that’s all.” He gulped down the last of his beer—by Gunner’s count, his sixth of the night—and slid the empty bottle across the bar, toward the huge black woman in the dirty apron standing behind it. “Ain’t that right, Lilly?”
Lilly Tennell grunted, offering her usual response to most things said about Gunner. She and the investigator were friends of many years, but this was obvious to no one, least of all the two of them. The Acey Deuce was the lone point of commonality between them. Gunner liked to drink here, and Lilly liked having him do so. Not because she needed his business, exactly, but because her customers seemed to find him entertaining. Hell if she could figure out why.
Gunner, meanwhile, liked to think of Lilly as an overweight, overbearing, humorless example of Afro-American sisterhood wearing too much red lipstick. Other than that, she was great.
As was the Deuce itself—for a dump. The South-Central bar was ice cold in the winter and a steambath in the summer, as inviting to strangers as a lumpy mattress in a cheap motel room. Its mirrors were cracked and its chairs all listed to one side or another, and there wasn’t a red vinyl booth in the entire house that wasn’t coughing up balls of foam padding somewhere. But it felt like home. Everything about the Deuce was as dirt poor and bone tired as the people it shared the neighborhood with, so walking through its doors into the stifling despondency of its ambiance had a certain comfort to it.
In short, it was a hot spot, if any place so far south of Wilshire and east of La Cienega could be called such a thing. It had personality, it had a loyal following, and some nights, like this one, it even had a crowd. Despite all of Lilly’s smart-ass, sarcastic grunting.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gunner asked her.
“It means Mr. Goody better sell himself a mess of TVs this week, he wants to pay the bill you’re gonna send ’im,” she said. She glanced at Gaines and winked.
“Who’s ‘Mr. Goody’?” Gunner asked, trying to sound as if the name were new to him. He hadn’t mentioned who his client was, just that he was a local businessman looking for a credit holder named Russell Dartmouth.
“Brother, you must forget what I do for a livin’,” Lilly said. “I knew it was Goody you was talkin’ ’bout the minute you opened your mouth.”
Gunner thought about asking her how, but decided he might be better off not knowing. Lilly was scary enough as it was.
“You workin’ for Mr. Goody?” Gaines asked. “Over at Best Way?”
“That’s confidential,” Gunner said, discreet to the bitter end.
“Man, don’t play Mr. Goody like that. He’s all right. I buy stuff over at Best Way all the time.”
“Don’t play him like what? I’m not ‘playing’ anybody.”
“But you found the man he told you to find, an’ you ain’t gonna tell ‘im.”
“I found a name in the phone book, Howard. That’s all.”
“You found
his
name in the phone book.”
“I found a name
similar
to his in the phone book. You don’t listen.”
“But—”
“Look. I’ll make a deal with you. I won’t tell you how to sweep floors, if you won’t tell me how to run a skip trace. All right?”
“How to sweep floors?”
“That’s right. You think it’s funny, accusing me of trying to cheat somebody, but if the wrong people ever heard you—”
“What wrong people?”
“—I could lose my goddamn license. Then you and I would have to go somewhere to do something about your mouth. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Hell no, he don’t understand,” Lilly said, breaking in before Gaines could say another word. “And neither do I. Why the hell you goin’ off on him like that? He didn’t do nothin’ to you!”
“The hell he didn’t. He said—”
“Look here, Gunner. Enough is enough. Every time you come in here lately, you lookin’ for a fight with somebody, an’ I ain’t gonna have it no more. You hear what I’m sayin’?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Every man in this place got some kinda woman trouble, but you the only one waits till he comes through my door to decide he wants to get pissed off about it. You need to grow the hell up!”
Gunner had no immediate retort for that. What she was saying was basically true: He
was
looking for a fight. And Claudia Lovejoy was the reason.
Gunner’s on-again, off-again relationship with Lovejoy had finally come to an end, less than a week ago, and the investigator was not dealing with it well. Twenty-one months of trying, and the pair still couldn’t synchronize their levels of commitment. For the most part, Gunner had been the one ready to go forward, Claudia the one holding back. Being careful for them both, she called it. Like the two of them together were a bomb that needed defusing, or something. Gunner had hung in as long as he could, hoping she’d lose her reluctance to trust him with time, but she never did, and worse, gave him no reason to believe she ever would.
So he finally pulled the plug.
It would have been a painful thing to do in any case, but the way Lovejoy reacted to it only added insult to injury. No tears, no heavy sighs, no words of regret; just relief masked over by a thin layer of melancholy.
Still, after all this, Gunner had thought he was doing a pretty good job of being cool about it, keeping his confusion and resentment to himself. He didn’t think anyone would be able to read what really lay below the surface. He didn’t think anyone knew him that well.
Leave it to Lilly to prove him wrong.
“Come on, Lilly, damn,” Gaines said, throwing an arm around Gunner’s shoulders. “Leave the man alone. He didn’t mean nothin’.”
“I don’t care if he meant somethin’ or not. You ain’t his whippin’ boy, an’ neither is anybody else in here. You hear what I’m sayin’, Gunner? Or you gonna find yourself another place to hang?”
“Aw, Lilly—” Gaines started to say.
“She’s right, Howard,” Gunner said, cutting him off. Looking at Gaines and not at her, because he couldn’t meet her gaze. “I was out of line, and I’m sorry.” He offered Gaines his hand, and Gaines took it.
“That’s better,” Lilly said.
Somebody had been shouting at her for the last five minutes, trying to get her attention, but she’d been resolutely ignoring the distraction. Now that she’d put Gunner’s head back on straight, she didn’t have to pretend anymore that she couldn’t hear the fool, wearing her damn name out from clear across the room.
“Who the hell is that callin’ me?” she asked, peering out over the crowd.
“Me!” the irate customer said, standing up and waving. “We want some service over here!”
It was Beetle Edmunds, the carpet cleaner, sitting in a corner booth with two overdressed women Gunner had never seen before. He was shorter than an upright ironing board, had a head the size of a cantaloupe and a backside the shape of a giant steel kettle, but Beetle’s own self-image was that of a Zulu warrior. Not even the nickname people had given him years ago could convince him that he looked just like a bug.
“Beetle, you better sit down and shut up,” Lilly said, her use of his name getting a laugh the way it usually did. “I’ll get there when I get there.”
“Woman, I been callin’ you for a half hour! You gonna come over here right
now!’ ‘
Beetle said, sounding to Gunner as if he was only half joking.