It's Not a Pretty Sight (23 page)

Gunner’s guess at the moment was Stanhouse.

Then there was Agnes Felker to consider. Being a basket case and a murderer were not always the same thing, but the two roles did intersect with certain regularity. And Felker was most definitely a basket case. A gun-toting basket case, in fact. Which brought to mind the one thing she had that no one else Gunner had talked to over the last two days appeared to: a suitable weapon. A shotgun similar or identical to the one somebody had used to spray Nina’s pretty little head all over her kitchen. It was the only thing that really made Felker a viable suspect—having once been slapped by Nina at the dinner table didn’t seem to give her much in the way of motive—but until he heard from Poole regarding those ballistics tests, the weapon had to be looked upon as reason enough for Gunner to keep the book on Felker open.

As for Wendy Singer and Angela Glass? They were wild cards. Both had feelings for Nina that seemed to go beyond the norm, but that was it. Singer was worth watching only because she’d been less than candid with Gunner about a number of things, all of them seemingly inconsequential, and Glass’s only apparent qualification as Nina’s murderer was her alibi. She’d told him she was at the library at the time of Nina’s death, and that would have been weak even if she’d said it with some conviction.

Gunner finished off his third bottle of Red Dog beer and opened up a fourth, deciding on the spot to start the next day back at Sisterhood House. Gary Stanhouse was the suspect he most wanted to pursue, but Stanhouse was going to have to wait. Because all Gunner knew about the attorney right now was where he worked and the license plate number of his car. The latter could be turned into a home address eventually, maybe even as early as Thursday afternoon, but until then, there didn’t seem to be anything Gunner could do with Stanhouse but harass him down at Bowers, Bain and Lyle for the second day in a row, a tactic that almost certainly would buy the investigator nothing more than some kind of official escort from the building. The way to work Stanhouse, Gunner knew, was to squeeze him, but not just at work. At home, at the supermarket, at the health club—even at church on Sunday. And that was going to take time. And patience.

In the meantime, he’d go back to Sisterhood House and talk to Causwell. Confront her with Serrano’s charges that she’d been in love with Nina, and see what developed. He could get her mad enough, she just might tell him more than she wanted him to know. After that …

He never could get focused on the “after that.” He became too preoccupied with the odd sensation that something was eluding him. Something important. It was a feeling he had often, and sometimes it meant something, and sometimes it didn’t. It was either a significant piece of data trying to dislodge itself from his brain, or just an imaginary one, like the itch an amputee feels on a leg that is no longer there.

Gunner swallowed some more beer and waited for the truth to reveal itself.

But he was waiting in vain.

Hours later, the phone rang twice. First at two
A.M
., then at two-thirty.

The first call woke him from a sound sleep, the phone’s shrill ring jarring his nerves the same way it had the night before. Only this time, he answered it immediately, having not a doubt in his mind who he’d find on the other end of the line.

“Dartmouth? That you?” he asked.

“Your turn next, motherfucker,” the caller said. Still whispering into the mouthpiece of the phone like a depraved ghost.

“You come after me, you crazy sonofabitch, I’m gonna have something for you. You hear what I’m saying? Save yourself some grief and turn yourself in.”

Silence.

“Dartmouth!”

“You gonna bleed, brother. You like to bleed?”

The line went dead.

Gunner was still trying to decide if the voice had indeed been Dartmouth’s, when the phone rang a second time, thirty minutes later. He let it ring for several minutes before he picked it up, not completely convinced the sound was real and not something he was simply imagining.

“Look, you sick fuck—” he started to say.

And then Ziggy said, “Whoa, kid, whoa! It’s me!”

“Ziggy?”

“Sorry to wake you, kid, but I just found out myself, and I didn’t wanna take a chance on missing you in the morning.”

It was just as Gunner had thought, almost twenty-four hours earlier: A ringing telephone at this ungodly hour really
was
the sound of death calling.

He was out of the house by eight the next morning. With Pearson dead, he had to start acting like his next hour of freedom would be his last, because it could very well be. All Poole had to do was decide to hold a grudge, and the DA’s office would do the rest. It was like Ziggy had said: Gunner could become a wanted man at any time.

Sticking to the plan he had formulated the night before, he made his first stop at Sisterhood House, intending to have a second go-round with both Shirley Causwell and Wendy Singer. But just as he was trying to pull in, Singer was pulling out of the front gate, looking somewhat harried and disheveled behind the wheel of an old Ford station wagon. She would have driven right past him if he hadn’t honked his horn for her to stop.

He got out of the Cobra and walked over to her window, just as she was rolling it down.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gunner, but this is really a very bad time,” she said.

“Trouble?”

“It’s Agnes Felker. Have you spoken to her yet?”

“I saw her for a few moments yesterday, yeah. Why? What happened?”

Her voice slightly breaking, Singer said, “She’s in the hospital. I was just going out to see her now.”

Gunner started to ask why, then realized he already knew the answer. Instead, he said, “You mind if I come along?”

Singer shrugged and waited for him to park his car.

Her doctors did not expect Agnes Felker to live. She was fifty-seven years old, and had suffered enough serious injuries to kill a woman half her age. One of her attending physicians told Singer she had suffered a fractured skull, a dislocated shoulder, four broken ribs, and a bruised kidney. She had also lost four teeth. Asleep in her bed in the emergency ward at County-USC hospital, she looked like a mummified corpse awaiting burial, connected to a panoply of machines by more wires and hoses than either Gunner or Singer cared to count.

The ambulance that had brought her in had actually been called for her boyfriend Otha, who was dead. He was dead because Felker had shot a hole in his chest big enough to put a man’s leg through, after he had laid his hands on her for the last and final time. The way it was explained to Singer, the couple’s neighbors had first heard the sound of a shotgun blast, then found Otha out in the hallway outside the couple’s apartment, bleeding all over the carpet like a stuck pig. The neighbors called 911, but by the time the paramedics arrived, the wounded man was beyond their help. They found Felker in her living room before she could expire, the shotgun she had finally found the nerve to use beside her mangled body. No one in charge of her care would even pretend that they liked her chances of pulling through.

Felker’s daughter, Betty, had been the one who called Singer down, knowing the shelter director from her mother’s time as a resident out at Sisterhood House. As big as her mother was tiny, Betty had no patience for Agnes’s submissive role as an abuse victim; in fact, she was downright cold about it. As soon as Singer and Gunner had arrived, she’d left them to visit the cafeteria downstairs, showing more signs of annoyance than grief, though she did seem to be finding some satisfaction in Otha’s death, which she said had been long overdue.

Singer was far more emotionally distraught. When the doctors would only allow her a look at Felker through the emergency room window, she tried to argue her way through the doors, but her heart just wasn’t in it. She was like a grieving mother: too drained and tired to do much more than raise her voice. Gunner watched her suffer and could not help but be impressed; her compassion for Felker was real and deeply felt.

After about an hour, Singer grew tired of waiting for something bad to happen and told Gunner she was ready to leave.

Downstairs in the car, she finally broke down.

It was a long, bitter cry, the end result of something that had been building up inside her for some time. Gunner tried to reach for her, but she waved him off, acting like his touch was something to be avoided at all costs.

“No. Don’t,” she said.

Gunner sat back and waited.

Eventually, she wiped her eyes with a handkerchief he’d given her, staring straight out the windshield to avoid his gaze, and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend for you to see that.”

“It’s okay,” Gunner said.

“No. It’s not. I should have developed a much thicker skin by now. It’s ridiculous, a person in my line of work not being able to handle this sort of thing better.”

“It’s not ridiculous.”

She finally turned to face him, blue eyes blazing, and said, “You didn’t have anything to do with it, did you? When you went out to see her yesterday, I mean? Because if you
did—
”

“Me? What could I have done to cause this?”

“I don’t know. I only know Otha was a very jealous man, and something must have triggered his attack. I just thought, if you had words with him yesterday, if you gave him any reason at all to believe you and Agnes were seeing each other …”

Gunner shook his head, said, “I never said a word to the man. In fact, I never even met him. I saw somebody outside their apartment building who I
thought
might be him, yeah, but that was about it.”

She studied his face for a moment, then nodded, believing him. “Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Forget it,” Gunner said, smiling so she’d know he was being sincere.

He hadn’t thought the gesture would earn him a smile in return, but it did—and he knew right then it was time to reevaluate his opinion of her.

She wanted to go back to Sisterhood House immediately, but he talked her into sharing a late breakfast with him instead. She looked different to him somehow, now that he’d caught a glimpse of the woman behind the mother figure, and he was curious to find out what it would be like to spend some time with her outside of her work environment.

They went downtown to the Pantry Cafe and sat at a booth in the back. The early-morning rush was over, but the famous establishment was still busy, filled with wonderful sounds and aromas, the air thick with a hundred conversations going on at once. They both had coffee, Gunner with patty sausages, eggs, and pancakes, Singer with oatmeal and raisin toast, no butter.

“I need to ask you a question,” Singer said at one point.

Gunner said, “Sure.”

“Not that I think you’re an expert, or anything, but … you might have some insight on the matter.”

Gunner watched her stir sugar into her coffee and waited.

“Why do black men do it? Hate their women, I mean. What’s the reason for it, exactly?”

“I didn’t realize we all had that problem,” Gunner said.

“I’m sorry. I phrased that badly, didn’t I?”

“No, no. You just made a sweeping generalization. Maybe you should try it again. Ask me something like, why do
so many
black men
seem
to hate their women?”

“All right. Why do they?”

“I don’t know. You said yourself, I’m no expert on the subject. You, on the other hand, have experience in the field.
You
should be telling
me
how it works.”

“I know. I should. But I’m curious to hear your perspective on it. Being a black man yourself—”

“We don’t all think alike, Ms. Singer. No more than we all look alike. Men like Otha are, as foreign to me as they are to you—
I
don’t know what makes them tick.”

“But you can guess.”

“My guess would be that brothers like Otha have a self-esteem problem, number one. And number two, they can’t handle the pressure they feel black women put on them to be perfect. Perfect lovers, fathers, providers—the works.”

“Would you care to elaborate on that a little?”

“Elaborate? No. What’s to elaborate?”

“Well, when you say these men have a self-esteem problem—”

“I mean that they feel worthless. Like they’re society’s most expendable objects. They consider themselves powerless, incapable of controlling the direction of their own lives, so—”

“So they seek control elsewhere.”

“Yes.”

“And the pressure to be perfect? What did you mean by that?”

“I meant that the standard some black women hold a man up to is unreasonably high. And that failing to meet that standard can sometimes do as much to cut a man down at the knees as anything another man could ever do to him. Possibly even more.”

“You’re saying the black woman’s expectations are too great.”

“I’m saying generations of abuse have made skeptics out of a great number of black women today, and skeptics are the hardest people in the world to satisfy. Never mind love and respect.”

“And this is why black men feel entitled to hate them. To call them bitches, and hos, and all that.”

Gunner glared at her. “You asked me where the hostility comes from, and I told you what I think. I wasn’t attempting to justify anything.”

“Do you think you could?”

“I wouldn’t try. Look, I told you Tuesday, I don’t beat women, and I don’t care for the jerks who do. You don’t want to take my word for that, fine, but please stop asking me to defend myself every fifteen minutes. All right?”

Singer started to say something, but chose to remain silent instead.

“What is it? Do I remind you of somebody, or something? Some guy you used to know who treated women badly? Is that it?”

“No,” Singer said. “It isn’t you. It’s me. Generations of abuse have made skeptics out of
all
of us, Mr. Gunner. Black women, white women—all of us. Only some of us are better at working around it than others.”

She’d said it like it was a deep, dark secret, her eyes darting here and there, head turned away from him, the fingers of both hands drumming silently on the sides of her coffee cup. And suddenly Gunner saw something in her he had never seen before: a victim. A woman who knew how to survive abuse, because she had survived it herself.