Not Long for This World (11 page)

“And he stayed straight, wouldn’t get high. Phi and Donnell an’ Cube tried to get ’im to do some rock, but he wouldn’t do none. Said he was cuttin’ down, some shit like that. Ain’t that right, Phi?”

Mullens nodded his head, leaving Gunner to guess the details.

“The Rock don’t never turn down no rock, man,” Smalltime said. “Never.”

“Boy’s a head,” Mullens said, agreeing.

Meaning Rookie was into crack, and not casually.

“Then there’s the thing with the crib,” Smalltime went on. “We had—I mean we got a place where we keep all our shit—you know, our rods an’ everything. It’s a secret place, ain’t nobody s’posed to know where it is but the homeboys, but somebody still ripped it off. Motherfucker just broke in one night an’ took everything, didn’t leave shit. That’s how we figure whoever it was done Dr. Love got hold of Toby’s piece.”

“And you think Rookie was the one who stole it.”

Smalltime just shrugged.

Gunner asked if any one of the three had an idea where Rookie could be holed up, watching Rucker’s face, in particular.

Smalltime shook his head. “Not me.”

“Uh-uh,” Mullens said.

Rucker said nothing.

“Or seen him since the shooting?”

“I ain’t,” Smalltime said.

“No,” Mullens said.

Which again brought all eyes to bear upon Rucker, who looked to be as committed to his oath of silence as ever, and not because the deal he and Mullens had struck with Gunner had simply slipped his mind.

“Quit fuckin’ ’round, Cat,” Smalltime said ominously.

Rucker appeared to be unmoved, until he said, “I ain’t seen
him
. But I seen his car, once.”

“The Maverick?” Gunner asked.

Rucker nodded. The guilt he was operating under was almost palpable. “The King was drivin’ it. I seen ’im drive it into a junkyard and leave it, one of them junkyards down on San Pedro. You know, downtown.”

“When was this?”

“’Bout a week ago. Last Tuesday, I think.”

“You’re sure it was Rookie’s car?”

“Yeah, man. I’m sure.”

“You talk to the King yet?” Smalltime asked Gunner. “That’s Rookie’s old man, the King.”

The detective shook his head. “I tried his place once, early Saturday morning, but he wasn’t home. I’ll have to try him again eventually, I suppose, but I’d just as soon not. Toby tells me he’s an asshole I’m not likely to get a lot out of, and suggested I talk to Rookie’s brother Teddy instead.”

“So? You talk to Teddy, then?”

“I saw him Saturday. He wasn’t much help, either.”

“No shit,” Smalltime said, not surprised. “Teddy an’ the Rook, they ain’t been gettin’ ’long too good lately. Rookie say they had another fight, an’ Teddy told ’im not to come around no more.”

“When?”

“Couple weeks ago. Three or four, somethin’ like that.”

“You know what the fight was about?”

“Same thing all they fights is about: Teddy don’t like no little brother of his gangbangin’. He always talkin’ to Rookie ’bout quittin’, pressurin’ ’im to leave ’is set, an’ Rookie don’t wanna hear that shit. So they fight.”

“You don’t think Teddy would put Rookie up somewhere anyway, under the circumstances?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But usually, Teddy gets pissed, he stay pissed.”

“And the King?”

“The King? Man, I don’t know ’bout him. I guess he might put Rookie up, Rookie made it worth ’is while. Why don’t you go talk to the man? He the one Cat seen drivin’ the Rook’s car, right?”

Gunner nodded, conceding the point. He understood that aiming the investigator in the King’s direction was an effort on Smalltime’s part to terminate the interview, to dismiss Gunner gracefully, and he rather admired the approach.

“I was you, I’d go talk to ’im,” the big kid repeated, trying to be helpful. “’Less you got some more questions for us.”

“No,” Gunner said, deciding to fold his tent for the moment, letting Smalltime think his diversionary tactic had worked. “Not right now, anyway.”

“Cool.”

“But I do have a couple of favors to ask.”

“Favors? Yeah? Like what?”

Gunner paused before answering, hoping to make the request sound as harmless as possible. “I need to see the crib you were talking about earlier. The Blues’s old hiding place for weapons. I assume you aren’t still using it?”

“Uh-uh. No way,” Rucker said, infuriated. “Where we keepin’ our shit ain’t none of your fuckin’ business!”

Smalltime appeared to agree. “What you wanna see that place for?”

Gunner said, “If Toby’s gun was stolen like you and Toby say, we find the man who did the stealing and we’re halfway home to finding out who used it on Darrel Lovejoy. Rookie may have just told the gunman where to look; he didn’t have to be the one who actually pulled the theft off.”

Following his logic, if ponderously, Smalltime nodded his head.

Rucker was not so easily enlightened. “He’s full of shit, ’Time,” he said. “No way we can show ’im our crib!”

“I’ll think about it,” the big kid told Gunner, in a way that was meant to warn both the detective and Rucker that the matter was closed to further discussion. “If you gotta do it, you gotta do it. But talk to the King first. Leave lookin’ the crib over for last.”

“Sure,” Gunner said. He made it seem as if he was giving something up, when in fact he was getting exactly what he wanted.

“What’s the other thing? You said you had a couple favors to ask.”

“Yeah. I did. It’s about Michael Clarke. Cube.”

“What about him?”

“I hear he’s got a nasty disposition, that he’s a real ballbuster, and all that. He cut up Toby’s lawyer, I understand.”

Behind Smalltime, Rucker let a smirk slide onto his face. “Sho did,” he said.

Smalltime shrugged again, not knowing what to say. “Lady said the wrong thing. He scratched her a little. That’s Cube.”

“Uh-huh. That’s what I mean.” Gunner met the big kid’s eyes directly, reducing the conversation to a one-on-one exchange between them. “I want you to tell that little prick that if he ever tries anything like that with me, I’ll kill him. Not loosen a few of his teeth or blacken his eye—I’ll turn his head three hundred and sixty degrees and break his fucking neck. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand you even crazier than I thought, talkin’ like that ’round us,” Smalltime said, gesturing toward Rucker and Mullens as if they were an army of thousands. “Tellin’ us how you gonna fuck up one of our homeboys, an’ shit.”

“I’m only telling you what I’ll do if the little sonofabitch fucks with me first. I don’t want any trouble with you or any Blue, but if somebody decides they want a piece of me, they’d better want it bad enough to die for it, because I’m not going to play. I’ve got a job to do, Harold, and I can’t do it and watch my back, too. That’s all I’m trying to tell you.”

“Cube got a mind of his own, man. Don’t matter what nobody say, he gonna do what he wants to do.”

“Do me a favor and tell him anyway,” Gunner said. “And if he doesn’t care to listen, that’s his privilege. And his funeral.”

Mullens and Rucker stood at Smalltime’s side while the big Blue thought it over. They were waiting for the word, any word, that would release them to take Gunner apart, like guard dogs straining at the leash.

Only the word never came. Instead, Smalltime shrugged one final time and said to Gunner, “I’ll tell ’im. If I see ’im ’fore you do.”

“Thanks,” Gunner said. “You three have been a lot of help.”

The kind of help, he thought to himself as he walked away, any sane man would have preferred to do without.

chapter
seven

G
unner’s cousin Dell Curry was an electrician, not a Bible scholar, but he was known to attend 10:30 Mass at Transfiguration Catholic Church on Martin Luther King Boulevard and Third Avenue with something akin to regularity, and that made him the closest thing to an authority on Scripture Gunner could find in his address book. Del had had all of Sunday night and a good part of Monday morning to interpret Deuteronomy 19:18-19, the Bible verses Claudia Lovejoy had claimed her hot-tempered phone caller had used to make whatever point it was he was trying to make, and so Gunner called him from a dis-repaired, off-brand pay phone following his meeting with Smalltime Seivers and company feeling certain that his cousin had come up with something by now.

“Like I’ve got nothing better to do,” Del said. The phone made him sound as if he were voicing his complaint from a lunar command module on the wrong side of the moon.

“Well?”

“You could have looked this up yourself, you know. All you had to do was read it; the verse is self-explanatory: ‘And the judges shall make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his. brother; then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother; so shalt you put the evil away from among you.’ Get it?”

Gunner didn’t respond.

“Aaron, there’s no mystery here, man. It means what it says. The punishment for offering up false testimony against your fellowman is exile. Removal from the fold. Tell a lie, get out of town. Okay?”

“What kind of false testimony?”

“In this context, any that would cast doubt on a man’s faith or commitment to God. But you could apply it to any form of perjury, I suppose.”

“And that’s it? There’s nothing more to it than that?”

“If there is, you’re gonna need somebody smarter than me to find it. What were you expecting, the meaning of life, or something?”

“I don’t know what I was expecting. Just some insight into what Claudia Lovejoy’s friend could have been so worked up about, I guess. But ‘false testimony’ … hell, Del, that tells me nothing.”

“If that’s supposed to be your way of saying thank you, you’re welcome. You through with the car yet?”

“No. You need it?”

“Need it? No. You want to buy it?”

Gunner laughed. “Thanks for the research, Del.”

He hung up as Del started to laugh, too.

It was only four o’clock, but Gunner was ready to write Monday off. The unsettling formation of black rain clouds that had been dangling the threat of a merciless downpour over the head of Los Angeles all day seemed finally ready to ante up, and the freezing shadow it spread out over the city made everything outdoors look dingier and more depressing than it really was.

The depression Gunner could handle, but it was the trauma of commuting in bad weather that had him thinking of ducking for early cover. He didn’t want to be around when the sky finally gave out and began to pave the streets of a million Porsches with water, glassy and slick and full of surprises.

Still, leaving the bad pay phones of the Imperial Blues’s hunting grounds behind, he found himself risking the elements anyway, pressing his borrowed Korean two-door west on El Segundo toward Gardena, because Kelly DeCharme wasn’t paying him to stay dry and he had a sneaking suspicion Royal Davidson, aka the King, might not be an easy man to pin down if Gunner didn’t turn the trick fairly soon.

Davidson lived in a tiny two-bedroom, wood-frame house on 132nd Street between Western and Halldale, a dilapidated stack of salmon-colored kindling with shingled sides and a huge front porch. Yellowed shades were drawn closed at both of the windows facing the street but the sound of a TV being changed from channel to channel announced the presence of someone inside as Gunner, for the second time in three days, reached for the doorbell. He had just made it to the porch when the rain he had hoped to avoid began to fall.

Surprisingly, Gunner only had to ring the doorbell twice before the someone inside answered it. A middle-aged black woman with a head full of curlers in Day-Glo colors appeared on the other side of the locked screen door, holding a heirless green bathrobe closed around her.

“Yes?”

She had a bowling-pin figure and the kind of face that looked as if it was perpetually braced for bad news. Gunner squinted at it through the shredded mesh of the screen door and introduced himself, holding his license chin-high, where she could get a good look at it. She was nodding her head in recognition before he could finish telling her what it meant.

“Another cop,” she said petulantly.

Gunner put the license away and said nothing, saving the denials for another day.

“I suppose you wanna see the King,” she said.

“You’re pretty sharp.”

“He ain’t here. And let me save you the trouble of askin’ your next two questions: No, I don’t know where he is, and I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“That just about covers it. Thanks.”

“Why can’t you goddamn people leave him alone? He’s already told you a thousand times, he doesn’t know where that little shit son of his is. Rookie ain’t lived in this house for nine months!”

“So where’s he been living?”

“With his older brother Teddy. Where else?”

She saw Gunner’s face register mild surprise and said, “Don’t you guys remember anything?”

Stuck for an answer, Gunner glanced over his shoulder at the rain now falling in earnest beyond the shelter of the porch, beating down on the earth with windblown fervor. The sky had turned fully black and the temperature outside was falling rapidly.