It's Not a Pretty Sight (3 page)

“Or else what? What you gonna do?”

“Or else I got somethin’ for you, that’s what.” He didn’t want to, but he had to smile when he said it, betraying his lack of any genuine intent.

“Is that right? You got somethin’ for me? Well, honey, guess what—I got somethin’ for you, too.” With that, Lilly reached down, felt around under the bar for a moment, then finally withdrew a giant can of insect spray, careful to hold it label out so that everyone could see it. “And you gonna get some of it, right now!”

As the house erupted in laughter, Beetle included, the big bartender scurried around the bar and ran toward his table, the spray can held aloft as if she was going to give him a shot on the top of his head as soon as she could reach him.

Chuckling, Gunner turned around to watch the two of them go at it, and caught a glimpse of Gaines’s face as he did so. Not only was the janitor the only man at the Deuce not laughing, but he looked like he was going to be sick. In fact, it appeared to Gunner that he’d actually broken out in a cold sweat.

“You all right?” Gunner asked him.

Embarrassed, Gaines shrugged, trying to play his condition off. “Yeah, sure. I’m cool.” He turned to take another hit of his beer, forgetting that he’d emptied the bottle several minutes ago. “I just …”

Gunner waited for him to go on, but Gaines didn’t say anything. “What?”

Gaines tried a brave smile. “I just sort of freaked out when Lilly reached up under the bar like that. You know? I thought she was gonna … I thought what she was reachin’ for was …” He couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out.

“J.T.’s gun?”

Gaines nodded. “I know she wouldn’t do that, bring it out just to be funny an’ all, but still … I don’t know. It spooked me, that’s all.” He shrugged again.

Gunner didn’t ask for any further explanations because he didn’t need any. He understood what the man was talking about completely. The last time Gaines had seen the shotgun Lilly kept fastened to the underside of the Deuce’s bar, in the middle by the beer taps where she could get to it easily if she had to, Lilly’s late husband, J.T., had been wielding it, just before a crazy white man using an old army Colt had splattered him all over the mirrored wall Gunner and Gaines were facing right now. It had happened a long time ago, but some nights, Gaines often admitted, he could walk into the Deuce and still hear Mean Sheila screaming, and see the corpse of Buddy Dorris—the killer’s second victim that night—crumple to the floor like a headless rag doll.

It was something Gunner and Lilly would forever be envious of, Gaines’s sensitivity to any reminder of J.T.’s death. Lilly had been asleep in the bar’s back storeroom that fateful night, and Gunner had been drinking at home, having run up a bar tab at the Deuce his old friend J.T. had finally grown tired of begging him to pay. How things might have been different had either of them been around to witness, let alone prevent, J.T.’s murder no one could say, but Gunner and Lilly liked to punish themselves for being absent that night all the same. They felt like they owed J.T. that much, at the very least.

Gaines slid off his stool and shoved a hand in his pocket, rummaging for whatever meager cash might be found there.

“You taking off?” Gunner asked him.

“Yeah. I gotta get home.” He shrugged one last time.

When he tried to toss a couple of balled-up bills on the counter, Gunner pushed them back into his hand and told him to forget it, the beer was on him tonight.

“You don’t have to do that,” Gaines said.

“Nobody said I did. But I want to. For jumping all over you like I did a minute ago. It’s what Lilly would want me to do, I’m sure.”

Gaines didn’t buy that explanation, of course—he knew Gunner was just feeling sorry for him—but he seemed to lack the energy to press the matter any further. “Okay,” he said, shoving his two pitiful little bills back into his pocket. “Thanks, man.”

Then he was gone.

Afterward, with Lilly still busy elsewhere, Gunner got up and went around to the other side of the bar to refill his own glass, something Lilly always gave him hell for doing, but that he occasionally did nonetheless. He was putting the bottle of Wild Turkey back on the shelf when somebody he hadn’t heard coming said, “Hey, Gunner. I been lookin’ all over for you, man.”

Gunner spun around to see Too Sweet Penny, acting like he’d been planted on a stool at the bar all night. It wasn’t an unusual place for a lush to be, a barstool, but this lush of late was the homeless kind, the kind who generally did all his drinking from a brown paper bag while perched on a bus bench or a stoop. Too Sweet used to be a regular at the Deuce, when he had both a job and a wife with one of her own, but now that he had neither, he almost never entered the place. Lilly gave him too much grief for begging her customers for the cost of a drink from time to time.

Still, rare as this visit to the Deuce was, Gunner wasn’t nearly as surprised by Too Sweet’s presence in the bar as he was by the expression on the old man’s face. He’d either been crying, or was giving a lot of thought to doing so. The Lord knew Too Sweet had enough reasons to cry if he wanted to, hard as three years on the street could be on a man his age, but the fact of the matter was, crying wasn’t Too Sweet’s style.

So why, Gunner had to wonder now, was he sitting here tonight with the unmistakable shadow of mourning draped across his face?

“What’s going on, Too Sweet?” the investigator asked, making out like he couldn’t tell something was wrong.

Too Sweet swallowed once, hard, and said, “I come lookin’ for you ’cause I thought you’d wanna know. ’Fore it’s all on the TV, an’ shit.”

“What?”

“I remembered you an’ the girl used to be tight, almost got married once, even. I said, man, that used to be Gunner’s girl …”

“Who?”

“Nina Hillman,” Too Sweet said. “You knew her, right? Wasn’t she the one you almost married?”

“Nina Hillman?”

“That ain’t her name no more, Hillman. She goes by ‘Pearson’ now, her married name. But I know it’s the same girl, I used to see her around all the time.”

Gunner’s throat was suddenly dry. “Something happened to Nina?”

Too Sweet nodded. “I just come from over by her house. Cops and people all in the street over there, sayin’ she’s dead.”

“Dead?” Gunner stiffened.

“They say the husband did it. Took a shotgun an’ blew that poor child’s head off, they said. They lookin’ for him now.” He shook his head at the pointlessness of it all, and just kept right on shaking it, as if that might somehow change something.

“Too Sweet. Are you sure about this? You have to be sure, man. If you’re not—”

“Man, I’m sure. I’m as sure ’bout this as anything I ever said in my life.” He bit down on his lower lip as tears began to glisten in his red-rimmed eyes. “I wouldn’t lie ’bout somethin’ like this, man. Beautiful girl like that …”

Gunner believed him. It was the last thing he wanted to do, but he believed him.

Nina Hillman was dead.

Gunner came around the bar to where Too Sweet sat and put five dollars on the counter in front of him. “Thanks,” he said, gently patting the old man’s shoulder. “Lilly gives you any trouble, just tell her why you came. She’ll understand.” He started for the door.

“What you gonna do?” Too Sweet called after him, wiping his eyes with the back of one wrist.

But Gunner never stopped to turn around. Not because he didn’t hear, but because he had no answer for the question.

two

H
E HAD SEEN THE HOUSE ONLY ONCE.

Ten years ago, the day of Nina’s wedding, he’d driven past it twice, unable to make himself do anything more with his invitation than sample the festive sounds of her reception from a moving car. The little two-bedroom on Ninety-fifth Street between Main and San Pedro had been clean but unremarkable, a single-story California cottage done up in white and charcoal gray. “Nice” and “pleasant” were both the best and worst things one could possibly say about it.

As they were today, Gunner discovered. Though the gray trim had given way at some point to a pale, lifeless blue, the house remained as ineffectual as ever. Only now, its dull veneer was beginning to show some age, even in the poor light of dusk. Its red shingled roof was dry and discolored, the screen door out front had a hole in it the size of a medicine ball, and the address marker on one of the two pillars standing on the porch was missing a digit, the last one of three. It was still a better-looking house than most on the block, but it offered the eye nothing to latch on to, save for one conspicuous detail: the yellow strands of crowd control tape the LAPD had looped around its perimeter.

It was the tape that finally brought Gunner to the end of his waning optimism. The crowd of people and law enforcement officers Too Sweet had described were nowhere in evidence, save for one lonely black-and-white parked at the curb, but the tape was proof enough that the old man’s story had been accurate, at least in part. Because the tape was the Man’s way of saying “Keep off the grass” at a crime scene, and while the crime wasn’t always a homicide, it was more often than not, especially here in the ’hood. The wide yellow bands and the coroner’s wagon just seemed to go hand in hand.

Gunner forced himself out of the car and approached the house.

Two uniforms were pushing through the front door when he reached the porch. The cleanup crew left behind to put the site to bed. One looked like a high-school weight lifter, the other the little brother who looked up to him. Both were Caucasian males in their mid-twenties, and both eyed Gunner like a nail they wanted to drive into the nearest wall.

“I’m sorry, sir, but you have to get back behind that tape,” the smaller man said brusquely. “You can’t be up here.”

“This is a crime scene,” the other added, sounding even more annoyed than his partner. “Just like the tape says. You should have bothered to read it before you stepped through it—”

Gunner reached for his wallet and produced his ID, being careful to be quick so that neither man would have time to misinterpret the motion. “I just want to ask a few questions,” he said.

“If it’s about what happened here—” the smaller man started to say. The name on the tag pinned to his breast was “Tripplehorn.”

“The lady of the house was a friend of mine. I just want to know if she’s okay,” Gunner said.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t answer any questions,” the big cop said. His name was Finch. “If you’re not a member of the direct family—”

“Was this a homicide?”

“Sir, I believe we asked you to get back behind that tape.”

“Was this a homicide?” Gunner asked again.

After a while, Finch said, “Possibly.”

“Was the deceased a female? Black, late thirties, five nine, five ten, about a hundred and thirty pounds?”

Finch and Tripplehorn eyed each other; then the latter said, “That’s right.” Not even trying to hide his burgeoning suspicions.

Gunner looked away for a moment, feeling himself starting to lose it. “Has the body been identified yet?”

“I’m afraid that’s all we can tell you right now, sir. But maybe you’d like to come down to the station and talk to the detectives in charge of the case. I’m sure they’d be happy to answer any questions you might have about your friend.”

Clever man, Gunner thought. Get the potential suspect to turn himself in by offering him a hot cup of cocoa and a shoulder to cry on down at the friendly neighborhood police station.

“Who should I ask for?”

“Lieutenant Matt Poole and Detective John Gruber,” Finch said, anxious now to get in on the glory he could see his buddy Tripplehorn setting himself up for.

“Matt Poole? This is his case?”

“That’s right. You know him?”

Gunner nodded, somewhat relieved. “Yeah.”

“Well, you wanna talk to him, like Mike here suggested, we’re going in right now, soon as we lock up. You want, you can follow us.”

Another clever young man.

Gunner just nodded and told him he had a deal.

“So what’s your interest?” Matt Poole asked. Looking as always like a fully dressed mannequin that had fallen off the back of a truck and onto the Santa Monica Freeway. During rush hour.

“I think the lady was a friend of mine,” Gunner said: Poole put his coffee cup down slowly and eyed the black man in earnest, his eyes filling up with something that strongly resembled sympathy. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

He was sitting and Gunner was standing in the former’s new cubicle at the LAPD’s Southwest station, where Poole stood out like a Packard in a Ferrari showroom. His old digs at the department’s now defunct Seventy-seventh Street station had suited him better than these, Gunner thought; old paint and scarred linoleum made the detective look almost human. But against a backdrop of walls without plaster patches and bright, almost cheery overhead lighting, well … he looked
sick.

“Her name’s Hillman,” Gunner said. “Nina Hillman.”

“Hillman?”

“Sorry. Pearson. Nina Pearson. I keep forgetting, Hillman was her maiden name.”

Poole hesitated again, delicacy requiring the effort that it did with him. “We don’t have a positive ID yet, but that’s who we believe the deceased is, yeah. Mrs. Nina Pearson.”