Not Long for This World (10 page)

“Look, man, we done already told the cops we don’t know where homeboy is,” Rucker said, agitated. “How many times we gotta say it?”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time, LeRon. I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator. You know what a private investigator is?”

“Yeah, I know. I heard you. So what? Don’t matter what you call yourself, ain’t no Blue gonna start talkin’ to nobody ’bout one of the homeboys just ’cause he say he workin’ for Toby. We ain’t that stupid.”

“I’m hip,” Mullens agreed enthusiastically.

“This could all be bullshit,” Rucker said. “How we s’posed to know it ain’t all bullshit?”

Again, Gunner was reminded of Mills’s warning that Harold “Smalltime” Seivers was the only member of the Blues set Gunner was likely to find cooperative, and now the investigator was beginning to regret not having taken his word for it.

“Toby says if you have any doubts about me, you can talk to his sister Jody,” Gunner said, unable to keep a slight edge from his voice. “She’ll vouch for me.”

Rucker, doing all the talking now, put both hands up in a mocking gesture of disappointment and grinned. “Ain’t no Jody here,” he said. Mullens cracked up and the two exchanged a hearty series of low- and high-fives.

Gunner walked around the teacher’s desk to stand before them, close enough so that they both had to look up to meet his gaze. “You little jokers are wasting my time,” he said.

“Say what?” Rucker asked, still grinning.

“Either answer my questions or tell me where I can find Smalltime. One or the other.”

“You think he gonna talk to you, man?”

“I think somebody had better. Because I can’t do jack shit for your boy Toby until somebody does, and I don’t care enough about his sorry ass to even try. If he really is innocent of Darrel Lovejoy’s murder, I’m going to have to find Rookie to prove it, and I need the Blues’s help just to get started. It’s as simple as that.”

“Toby didn’t kill Dr. Love, man,” Rucker said.

“I’ll believe that when I hear it from Rookie.
If
I ever find him.”

He was looking for an excuse to quit, and they knew it. He was placing Mills’s fate squarely in their hands, granting them the power to choose his own course in the process: perseverance or surrender, hanging in or walking away. Everything was suddenly riding on how easy they were willing to make the next ten minutes for him.

Still, even cognizant of what hung in the balance, their choice did not come quickly. The silence was threatening to curl the corners of the homework assignments hanging from the classroom walls when Rucker finally broke it.

“All right. You wanna talk to ’Time, we’ll take you to ’im. After we outta school. An’ if he say he wants to talk to you, we’ll talk to you. That’s the deal.”

“Right. Cool,” Mullens agreed.

They waited for Gunner to show some sign of appeasement.

Gunner just nodded his head, feeling like the winner of a million dollars’ worth of nothing and a year’s supply of grief.

At a quarter past three Monday afternoon, they found Smalltime Seivers the first place they looked, and in Gunner’s mind a mystery immediately presented itself: To what did the Blue owe his nickname?

Because there was nothing small about him.

Harold Seivers was a six-foot-six stack of fat and muscle who must have tipped the scales in the general neighborhood of 250 pounds. He had arms like the pillars supporting a freeway overpass and a beer-barrel torso that deserved its own ZIP code. He looked out at the world through a pair of glossy eyes set deep in the shade of a hard, protruding brow, and his slick, knobby head rose from massive shoulders with nothing resembling a neck to support it. He was wearing a black fishnet tank top and navy blue sweat pants, and a pair of off-brand tennis shoes set off with blue laces, all in the largest sizes Gunner had ever seen.

He was standing among a group of men gathered out in front of a liquor store at the corner of Central and 121st as Gunner and his two tour guides parked their separate cars nearby. Smalltime was lifting his tank top up and out of the way, using both hands, in order to give the diverse crowd of old winos and gangly youngsters surrounding him an unobstructed view of his stomach and the hideous serpentine scar dissecting it. Running diagonally across his swollen abdomen, moving northeast by southwest past his sunken navel, it was clearly the work of a knife, perhaps even several—but not of the variety one could find in the average kitchen drawer.

A hurried surgeon wielding an arsenal of scalpels had left this mark upon him, Gunner knew; it was the signature physicians often left behind when repairing the damage rendered by gunshot wounds to the lower torso.

If Smalltime saw his friends approaching, he didn’t acknowledge it; he was too busy reveling in the amazement of his drunken elders and the adulation of his starry-eyed juniors. The scar was just another way of holding their interest, maintaining their awe-inspired worship, which was his most consistent daily purpose, so monotonous had the twenty-year-old’s already-stagnant life become. Rucker and Mullens described this form of occupation for Gunner as simply “chillin’ out”; Gunner’s name for it was something altogether different, and one he decided would be better left unsaid.

The members of Smalltime’s audience finally caught sight of Rucker and Mullens advancing upon them and the party was abruptly over. The old men took their liquid lunches and wild exclamations a few yards farther down the block, while the younger men crossed in scattered formation over to the other side of 121st, in a hurry, against traffic. They had all been perfectly willing to risk spending an hour or so in the company of one unagitated Imperial Blue, but life in the shooting gallery that was South-Central Los Angeles had taught them that standing out on an open street corner with two or more gang members of any persuasion was tantamount to a death wish very likely to be fulfilled.

Mullens and Rucker reached Smalltime first, but it was Gunner the big man had his eyes on, even throughout the trio of Blues’s ritualistic greetings. His expression was not easily interpreted, but his interest in the investigator seemed to carry no malice or overt mistrust; he appeared merely to be studying an anomaly, trying to identify an unfamiliar object in his path before it could identify itself.

Rucker spoke to him briefly, whispering, and then attempted to announce Gunner formally, but Smalltime waved the effort off.

“I know who he is,” he said, moving forward until Gunner was close enough to breathe upon. He appraised the investigator for a long, silent minute, then said, “You the private eye, right? The one come by my house lookin’ for me Saturday?”

Gunner nodded his head uneasily. He didn’t care much for his low-angle view of the big kid but could think of no way to improve it, short of standing on a milk crate.

“Jody told me to be lookin’ out for you,” Smalltime said. “She say Toby’s lawyer done hired a private eye name a Aaron Gunner to try an’ get Toby off, some brother gonna be lookin’ for whoever it was what really killed Dr. Love. She say the man gonna need our help, so we should do everything we can to cooperate.”

He let the comment lie there, without embellishment. Gunner tried to wait him out, hoping Smalltime would go on in his own time, but that approach didn’t work, and he came to doubt that it ever would.

“So what’d you tell her?” he asked finally.

Smalltime shrugged, flexing his giant shoulders effortlessly. “I told her I didn’t know what we was gonna do,” he said. “I told her it was gonna depend, on what kinda shit this private eye gonna ask us, and what he be like. You know, how he strikes me.”

The younger man grinned, proudly. “I’m a careful man, right? I gotta have me some kinda respect for somebody, ’fore I up and decide to tell ’em all my homeboys’ business, an’ shit.”

“This process take long?” Gunner asked him.

“What’s that?”

“This respect thing you’re talking about. How long’s it take to get? An hour, a day, what? Should I go grab a pizza and a beer and come back, or see you again in a week?”

Smalltime grinned again, getting the joke. “Can’t be rushed, man,” he said.

Rucker and Mullens broke out laughing, clowning and stumbling all over themselves for Gunner’s benefit. Smalltime tossed them a short glance, still grinning, then said to Gunner, “But I like you. You like to fuck with people, same as me. Don’t take no week to figure that out.”

He turned his grin on Rucker, who was suddenly silent. “Cat thinks you’re an asshole, but he brought you here, anyway. That tells me somethin’ right there.” He laughed as Rucker took his abuse quietly, answering only with the shifting of his feet and the closing of one open hand, his left. Mullens stepped farther from his side, gingerly, giving him room to boil.

“What kind of help you need?” Smalltime asked, turning back to Gunner.

“He lookin’ for Rookie, same as the cops,” Rucker said, making an accusation out of the statement. “He ‘spects us to tell ’im where homeboy’s at, an’ shit.”

“Did you tell him?” the giant Blue asked.

“Hell no,” Mullens said, his eyes full of denial. “We didn’t tell ’im nothin’, ’Time.”

“We told ’im we ain’t sayin’ shit ’bout nobody ’til we talked to you, man,” Rucker said. “That’s why we here, so you can tell ’im yourself, pers’nally, to go fuck ’imself.”

Smalltime paused, as if the suggestion was something worth considering. He looked Gunner’s way again after a brief period of rumination and said, “What you want with Rookie?”

“Same thing the authorities do. I want to talk to him.”

“That’s bullshit,” Rucker snapped. “You wanna bust ’im!”

“Fuck busting him,” Gunner said. “That’s not what I was hired for. All I want is to find out who it was in the car with him the night he rolled on Darrel Lovejoy.”

“How you know he did?” Smalltime asked. “How come everybody so goddamn sure it was us what wasted Dr. Love? Why couldn’t it’ve been the Tees? Or the Troopers? Shit, the fuckin’ Hoods be just as down on him as us, why they always wanna blame everything on a Cuz set?”

“I don’t know,” Gunner said, not wanting to get into that discussion. “All I can tell you is that your man Toby doesn’t seem to have any doubts. He’s just guessing, same as the police, but he told me he’d bet the farm that Rookie was involved in Lovejoy’s murder.”

“Toby said it was Rookie what rolled on Dr. Love?”

“He said the description of the car used in Lovejoy’s killing fits Rookie’s to a tee, and Rookie’s a driver for the Blues, so who else could it have been?”

“Man, now you
know
he’s lyin’,” Rucker implored Smalltime, dismissing the validity of Gunner’s testimony with a flip of the wrist. “Toby wouldn’ta said shit like that ’bout Rookie, not to him, not to nobody.”

“The way Toby looks at it, Rookie screwed him first,” Gunner said, eyeing Rucker, “so he figures he doesn’t owe him much in the way of set loyalty.”

“The Rook still a Blue,” Rucker said. “No matter what he done. So what if he
was
drivin’ when Dr. Love got rolled on? It’s the cops what say Toby was the one rode with ’im done the shootin’, not Rookie.”

“Then Rookie
was
the driver that night?”

“No! I didn’t say that. I just said, what if he did? So what?”

It was a lie told too late. He had already allowed Gunner to hear the ring of truth in his voice, and now the detective could easily tell the difference between the two.

A snow-haired black man with a dirty apron tied around his waist appeared at the open door of the liquor store behind Smalltime, and the three Blues all turned in his direction when Gunner glanced his way. The store was apparently his, and he had a pained look on his face that said he objected to the assembly taking place out in front of it, but he let the look speak for itself and said nothing, cognizant of who a trio of these trespassers were and the myriad ways in which such people often reacted to attempts to dislodge them. To save face, he rubbed his hands on his apron and nodded his head, saying hello, but there was no mistaking his shame as he ducked back inside immediately after, an old man choking on his own fear of children.

“Look,” Gunner said to Smalltime, “you boys are going to have to make a choice here. You can’t protect Rookie and help Toby at the same time. Something’s gotta give.”

The Blues were silent. Smalltime scratched his chin to kill time, then said, “What you want us to do?”

“I want you to quit messing around and start giving me some straight answers. Was Rookie driving the car when Lovejoy was killed or not?”

Smalltime produced another shrug. “Prob’ly.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means don’t nobody know for sure, but the way he was actin’ that day, he must’ve had somethin’ like that on his mind. And he
is
hidin’ out, right?”

“When you say the way he was acting, what are you talking about? How was he acting?”

“Well, like … he talked a lot of shit that day, way I remember it. Tellin’ guys what he was gonna do to ’em if they didn’t shut up, an’ shit like that. Cappin’ on ’em, an’ stuff. That what the Rook usually do when he nervous, talk smack, like when we about to go ’bangin’ some Tees, or somethin’.