Not Long for This World (2 page)

“I beg your pardon?” London said.

Gunner pointed. “His joint. His penis. Right here.”

London snatched the photo from his hands and pressed his nose to it. “Are you trying to tell the court that Mr. Compton’s joint—I mean, his penis—is actually
visible
in this picture?”

“Well,” Gunner said, shrugging, “I admit it’s not that easy to see—I recall hearing the girl on the left there saying something to that effect, in fact—but it’s there, all right. That sure as hell isn’t a marital aid.”

“He’s lyin’!” Compton roared, leaping to his feet indignantly. “Shawanna never said nothin’ like that! Shit, she couldn’t get enough!”

“That will be all, Mr. Compton!” Judge Spillman shouted, trying to be heard over the din of the suddenly excited courtroom audience and the pounding of his own gavel.

“Your Honor,” a red-faced London said, before the laughter in the room had fully subsided, “I submit that these photographs prove only that Mr. Compton shared a room with some friends on four separate occasions, and that they do not in any way indicate an ability on his part to experience or maintain an erection!”

“I didn’t say anything about ‘maintaining,’” Gunner said. “You asked me to tell you what I saw in the photograph, not how many micro-seconds I had to photograph it.”

Laughter again exploded throughout the room.

“He’s a goddamn lie!” Compton cried at the top of his lungs, once more on his feet. Glaring at Gunner, he snapped, “I can outlast you any day of the week, motherfucker!”

Gunner just smiled.

London lowered his head like a beaten dog and returned to his seat beside Compton as Spillman’s arm swung his gavel again and again, hammering out an order of silence that, London knew, was not soon to be obeyed.

“That was quite a performance in there,” someone said with obvious amusement.

Gunner turned to find an attractive brunette in a pinstriped suit standing beside him, joining the crowd waiting for an elevator out in the second-floor courthouse hallway. The suit was a beige linen-blend number of little distinction, common and ordinary, but the same could not be said for the woman inside it. She was in her mid-twenties, Gunner guessed, and tall—an easy five ten—with a light mane of golden brown hair and a dark European face that was wonderfully ambiguous: large brown eyes and a full mouth, complemented by an understated, angular nose.

“My name is Kelly DeCharme, Mr. Gunner,” she said, offering the black man her hand. “I’m with the Public Defender’s office. The gentleman who answered your office phone—Mickey, I believe his name was—told me I could find you here.”

Gunner accepted her hand without comment, silently cursing Mickey Moore—whose barbershop in Watts he had recently started using as an “office”—for making his itinerary a matter of public record. Then he waited for the catch. There was always a catch when someone from the Public Defender’s office went out of their way to introduce themselves, especially when they looked like DeCharme.

“You put on quite a show in there, as I said. Compton’s goose is as good as cooked.”

“You really think so?”

“Please. The man absolutely crucified himself. You pushed all the right buttons, and he did the rest.”

“You flatter me, Ms. DeCharme.”

“Granted, Judge Spillman struck Compton’s outbursts from the record, and warned the fine men and women of the jury to disregard his comments, but I think we both know how much good that’s likely to do. Don’t we?”

An elevator arrived. Gunner and DeCharme allowed it to fill and depart without them. The public defender had the kind of naughty-girl smile on her face that was, in the detective’s experience, often best erased with a kiss.

“I’m afraid I no more know what that jury will do than I know the reasons for our discussing it,” Gunner said.

“Which is your way of asking me to get to the point, I believe.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, it is.”

“Would you mind very much if I did so over a drink?”

“A drink?”

“That’s right. A drink. In lieu of a bribe. Or can’t you be taken advantage of when properly intoxicated?”

She tried the smile on him again, and Gunner returned it with one of his own, openly intrigued. “Now
you
’re pushing all the right buttons, Ms. DeCharme,” he said.

They jaywalked across Grand Avenue to the Los Angeles County Music Center’s three-theater complex and found a table at the bistro that lay directly opposite the courthouse, snuggled into the eastward base of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The place was dark and languid, as full of life as a Christmas tree on the third of January. DeCharme ordered a Corona in the bottle, while Gunner stuck with his old standby, Wild Turkey on ice, confident that DeCharme would not tolerate any attempt on his part to pick up the check.

They drank in a delicate silence until DeCharme grew tired of it and asked, “Does the name Toby Mills mean anything to you, Mr. Gunner?”

Gunner decided it didn’t, after some deliberation, and said so.

“How about Darrel Lovejoy? You ever hear of him?”

This time Gunner nodded. “He was the anti-gangbanger who was murdered a few weeks back. The one the press made such a fuss over about a year ago. A couple of kids shot him in a drive-by, supposedly.”

DeCharme nodded her own head, spilling a wisp of brilliant chestnut hair before her face. “That’s him. Founder and CEO of the L.A. Peace Patrol, one of the most successful anti-gang community-service organizations in the inner city. He and the Reverend Willie Raines ran the program together. He did some good work and turned a lot of bad kids around before he was murdered, but he pissed off just as many in the process, so you can imagine how thin the ice was he’d been skating on. Any one of the hundred or so youth gangs presently operating in the South-Central area could have ‘done’ him, as they say, and been thrilled to admit it.

“Ordinarily, sorting through them all to find the gang actually responsible for his murder might represent a monumental task for the police to undertake, but this time around they’ve had some rather unusual help. It seems they’ve found a witness who’s positively identified the killers as members of the Imperial Blues, a local Cuz set active in the neighborhood in which Lovejoy was killed. Not far from your own neighborhood, if I’m not mistaken.”

The observation didn’t seem to mean much to Gunner. “I believe so. Yeah.”

“Then you are familiar with the Blues.”

Gunner shrugged. “I know only what I can’t help but know. I bump into a few kids flashing their colors every now and then, and come across their spray-paint artwork from time to time.” He stopped short, making the connection belatedly. “This Mills kid was supposed to be a Blue, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“He’s the one they have in custody? The trigger man?”

“The alleged trigger man. Yes. His prints were among several found on a weapon the police turned up a few days after the murder, but that doesn’t make him the one who used it on Lovejoy. There’s only the testimony of Tamika Downs to imply that, and for my money, that kind of evidence leaves plenty of room for doubt.”

“Downs is the witness?”

DeCharme finished off her beer and nodded again. “She’s an unemployed barroom dancer with four kids to support and no past history of humanitarianism to speak of, yet she’s appeared out of nowhere to voluntarily identify Mills and a second Blue by the name of Rookie Davidson as the pair in the car. Which either makes her a very special lady or a very dishonest one, because I just can’t see it. I mean, since when do unwed welfare mothers of four like Downs put their asses on the line for a dead man?”

“As a rule?” Gunner asked. “Never. But maybe she’s a special case.”

DeCharme waited for him to explain.

“You live in that part of the world—and I assume Downs does—you learn pretty fast that cooperating with the police in a murder case—especially one dealing with a gangbanger—is no way to enhance one’s life expectancy. But”—he shrugged and took a sip of his drink—“every now and then you come across somebody with no interest in the odds. Somebody who’s been hit too close to home and has decided they’ve had enough. Lovejoy
was
an unusual man. If Downs was among his many fans, her sudden show of good citizenship could figure.”

DeCharme gave that some thought, momentarily forgetting to hold up her end of the conversation.

“Maybe,” she said eventually, not sounding at all sold on the idea.

Gunner tossed another generous shot of Wild Turkey down his throat and said, “I take it you’re either Mills’s or Davidson’s court-appointed attorney.”

DeCharme rewarded his insight with a woefully hollow smile. “Give the man a cigar,” she said.

“Mills is your client?”

She nodded.

“And Davidson?”

She shook her head. “Davidson doesn’t need a lawyer—yet. As of this morning, he’s still at large. Which, you’ll no doubt be happy to know, finally brings me around to that point I promised almost an hour ago I’d get to.”

She pushed her empty beer bottle aside to clear the space between them and leaned forward on her elbows to take advantage of it. “Toby Mills wasn’t in that car the night Darrel Lovejoy was murdered, Mr. Gunner. If Rookie Davidson was driving, he was playing chauffeur for someone else.”

“Uh-huh. And who says that? Mills?”

“That’s right. Says Mills. And I believe him. Don’t ask me why.”

“No. I don’t think I will.”

“He was out in his mother’s driveway changing the oil in his sister’s car when they arrested him, for Christ’s sake. That doesn’t sound like a guilty man to me.”

“So if the gunman in the car wasn’t Mills, who was it?”

“That’s where you come in. Because Mills doesn’t know. He can drop some names and make a few guesses, but that’s not going to buy him much, is it?”

“You need Davidson.”

“At this point, yes. He’s supposed to be something of a weak sister, just a junior flip; Mills says the police’ll have no trouble getting the truth out of him once he turns up.”

She passed a photograph across the table toward him. It was a blown-up mug shot of Rookie Davidson, as the name across his chest advertised. He was a dark-skinned kid with a jheri-curl haircut and a frail goatee who looked about fifteen years old. If he had posed for such photos before, he had yet to harden from the experience; the expression on his face was the kind a man generally wore just prior to wetting his pants.

“And if he doesn’t turn up?” Gunner asked.

“We just need a name, Mr. Gunner. Proof of the real gunman’s identity. If you could manage to get that without Davidson’s help, that would be fine, of course.”

Gunner smiled dourly. “Of course.”

DeCharme saw the smile and said, “I say something wrong?”

The black man rolled the ice cubes around in his glass absently, watching them play leapfrog in a shallow sea of thinning bourbon. “Generally speaking, Miss DeCharme,” he said, facing her again, “gangbangers aren’t my favorite people. I don’t much like their manners, or the heavy iron they’re so fond of demonstrating in public places. They kill children in sandboxes and grandmothers on porch swings in the never-ending process of killing themselves, and that kind of fatal inefficiency pisses me off no end. So I do what I can to see that our paths cross as rarely as possible. You know what I mean?”

DeCharme said nothing, unwilling, at least for the moment, to argue with him.

“While I’ve never met your client, I’d imagine he’s a hard-nosed little man-child I’d dislike immediately. Big and bad, cold to the bone, a master of the scathing, monosyllabic cry of social protest. Abusive and cynical; a postadolescent wound looking for a place to bleed.

“The reason I don’t have to meet Mills to safely assume all this is because I deal with hoods like him every day, down in our little war-torn corner of the world. I see the bloody messes they make up close and personal, hours and sometimes days before they make the evening news. All it takes is a walk around the block, any time of day or night, whether I’m in the mood for the carnage or not.”

“So what’s your point?”

“My point is, I can’t see why I should have the slightest interest in what happens to your client, counselor. Can you? You want me to help such a fucked-up antisocialist get his act back out on the street—my street, remember—you’re going to have to explain my motivation for me.”

“You have a job to do as a licensed operator for the state of California,” DeCharme said pointedly. “How’s that for motivation?”

Gunner laughed, an abrupt, guttural edge to his voice turning heads around them. “I’m going to need a little more incentive than that, lady,” he said.

“I’ll pay you what you’re worth, for as long as it takes. That’s incentive enough for most people.”

Gunner’s laughter ground abruptly to a halt. “Maybe. But you’re not trying to hire most people. You’re trying to hire me. And the thing about me is, I have to give a damn about the people I represent. Otherwise, I do piss-poor work, believe me,”

The public defender stood up quickly, fished through her purse, and tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “In that case, Mr. Gunner, I’m afraid I’ve wasted your time. Because Toby Mills obviously fails to meet your high standards in people. And quite frankly, you fail to meet mine.”