Not Long for This World (3 page)

She said the last in passing, already executing a fast retreat. Gunner had to do some serious hustling to catch up with her out on the sidewalk, where she stood at the curb waiting for traffic to clear on Grand, trying to get back to the courthouse. It was after 6
P.M.
and the sky was growing dark, giving up the ghost of day ever so grudgingly. DeCharme seemed not to notice Gunner at her side.

“Guess I blew the interview back there,” Gunner said dryly.

“Don’t worry yourself about it,” DeCharme said, eyeing the street. “I should never have come to you in the first place. We have our own detectives. One of them will help me.”

Gunner shook his head. “You don’t want to deal with those clowns.”

“No,” DeCharme agreed. “I don’t. They’re overworked and not very good. But they’re at least willing to deal with
me
, and that’s something, isn’t it?” She turned to him at last, glowering. “Toby Mills is
twenty-two years old
, Mr. Gunner. He’s just a child, to most people’s way of thinking. He has time to wise up, to turn his life around. Yet you want to write him off, sight unseen, because you think you know him and every kid like him like the back of your proverbial hand. Well, join the club.” She clapped her hands sarcastically. “The world’s full of experts like you. And they’re all just as amenable to seeing the poor bastard hang for one thing or another … even if it has to be something he didn’t do.”

“That’s a big ‘if,’” Gunner said defensively.

“Not for me it isn’t. I’ve spoken to Mills. Have you?”

Her eyes wouldn’t leave his, throwing down the gauntlet, and he could actually feel himself diminishing under the weight of her gaze.

“No,” he told her reluctantly. “Not yet.”

He took the public defender’s arm and led her across the street.

chapter
two

T
he prisoner-visitation room at the Los Angeles County Jail facility on Bauchete Street in the heart of downtown was a three-ring circus, sans clowns, at noon the next day, a Friday.

The room was bad enough any other day of the week, the heavyset, baby-faced guard at the door said, but Fridays were always the worst. For the endless procession of prisoners and visitors that packed the little room to its maximum capacity from dawn to dusk, it was harder to be on the inside looking out on Fridays, and almost as hard to be on the outside looking in. The weekend was waiting, two days of endless promise under the bright light of Southern California sunshine, and the incarcerated were all too aware of the pleasures, both sacred and profane, of which they were about to be deprived. Tempers were short on Fridays, and physical violence was not uncommon. Sexual frustrations, erupting on either side of the conference tables, often led to some steamy and embarrassing scenes.

The garrulous young guard grinned at Gunner wolfishly. “
Real
embarrassing,” he said.

Gunner and DeCharme were assigned to the only vacant hardwood table at the south end of the room’s long, evenly spaced row of six, near a pair of barred windows and the warm wash of sunlight they provided. They sat down on the cold aluminum of some cheap folding chairs at the table and took in the crowded room while waiting for Toby Mills to be escorted in. As a motley crew of gray- and blue-garbed prisoners conferred with friends and family, lawyers and accomplices, a pool of mixed voices speaking several different’ languages splashed off the flatlatexed walls and rolled through the stale, smoke-filled air, rising and falling in volume like an eccentric ocean tide. Through the din, Gunner found himself eavesdropping on the Hispanic couple at the next table, who were engaged in a heated, bilingual debate on the merits of grand theft auto; the uniformed inmate was defending the practice in English, while his portly, swarthy wife was soundly denouncing it
en español
.

Before a winner of the pair’s exchange could be established, a lean black guard with a clean-shaven head dropped Toby Mills into the chair opposite Gunner and DeCharme, acting not unlike a man taking out the garbage. He frowned at DeCharme, frowned harder at Gunner, then moved off again, having made not even the most casual of introductions. Gunner watched him come to rest not far away, at a spot along one wall where their table could be easily observed; he made himself comfortable there and grew still, his eyes never leaving Mills for a minute.

“He don’t like me,” Mills said gleefully.

Gunner turned his attention from the guard to appraise DeCharme’s client, without concern for discretion. Mills let him look, enjoying the spotlight. He was just short of average height, somewhere around five seven or five eight, with jet-black skin, lady-killer eyes, and an iron-man build too well-defined for his undersized blue prison blouse to conceal. He had high cheekbones and small ears, and his hair was cut to an all-but-invisible length all the way around, with the exception of a tiny rat’s tail hanging at the back of his head. His teeth were good, but his gums were discolored, and a meandering scar drew an ugly tan line from the corner of his mouth to the edge of his earlobe on the left side of his face. The scar did a dance whenever he smiled, and he looked like the kind of man who did a lot of smiling, for nothing but the worst possible reasons.

Gunner was immediately able to see the guard’s problem with him.

“Who’s this nosy motherfucker?” Mills asked DeCharme curiously, eyeing Gunner with the kind of amusement most people reserved for circus clowns.

“This is Aaron Gunner, Toby. The private investigator we talked about earlier.” DeCharme was blushing slightly, and she glanced briefly in Gunner’s direction, apologizing.

“No shit,” Mills said.

“Toby, I’ve hired Mr. Gunner to find Rookie. He’s on bur side, all right?”

“Oh, yeah. I hear you. He’s a cop, but he’s on our side. He’s here to help.”

“Yes.” DeCharme glared at him, the cords in her neck pulled taut and hard.

Feigning boredom, Mills yawned and said, “So how’s he gonna do that? Man ain’t asked me shit yet. How the fuck he gonna help me, he don’t never ask me nothin’?”

His eyes were on Gunner, and the scar on his cheek was dancing again. DeCharme turned and joined him in waiting for Gunner’s response, encouraging the detective to take the floor with a light shrug of her shoulders.

Gunner absorbed Mills’s indignant grin with great restraint, his own expression a masterpiece of neutrality. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely audible above the room’s throbbing wall of sound.

“How fast do you heal, sweet pea?” he asked Mills.

“Say what?”

DeCharme bit down hard on her lower lip.

“I take this chair I’m sitting in and crack your skull with it,” Gunner said, “how long you think you’ll be laid up? A few weeks? Five or six months, maybe?”

Mills’s scar stopped dancing. Gunner pulled his chair up closer to the table and said, “I think you’d better give it some thought. Because your ‘homeboy without a cause’ routine is weak, and if I hear another ten seconds of it, I’m going to jack your smart ass up and explain it any way I want, with your partner over there as my star witness.” He nodded his head at the guard who had dropped Mills off at the table; the bald man in the crisp Sheriff’s Department uniform was still watching their conference with open interest. “Or do you think he’d side with you?”

Mills didn’t answer. He sat in silence and allowed the last glint of charm to dissolve from his face like a serpent shedding its skin. He stiffened in his chair and glared at Gunner with eyes narrowed down to mere slivers of white, fingering the edge of the table with both hands, battling indecision.

Gunner and DeCharme let him have all the time he needed to make up his mind.

“What you wanna know?” he asked Gunner finally.

“For starters, where were you the night Lovejoy was killed?”

Mills looked at DeCharme. “She ain’t told you that?”

“I’m not asking her. I’m asking you. I’d like to see if you still remember how the story goes.”

Mills shrugged. “I was with a friend.”

“Be more specific.”

“You mean, what was her name?”

Gunner nodded.

“Sharice Phillips. My girlfriend. Me an’ Sharice was together that night. You can ask her.”

“Together where? Doing what?”

“We was at the movies. At the Baldwin theater, up in Baldwin Hills. They got three screens at the Baldwin.”

“Tell me what you saw,” Gunner said.

Mills made the scar quaver anew, seemingly remembering. “We seen a little of everythin’. We seen some of that new Sylvester Stallone movie,
Heavy Artillery
; we seen some of this love-story flick, I forget what they call it; and we seen almost all of that stupid-ass
Friday the Thirteenth
,
Part Eight
, or Nine, or whatever number they up to now. I think it’s Eight. Yeah, Eight.”

“So you were bouncing from screen to screen.”

“Yeah. Right. From screen to screen.”

“Anybody see you who might remember it? The cashier in the booth out front, or an usher, maybe?”

Mills shook his head. “Didn’t nobody workin’ there see us that night. We didn’t see no cashier, ’cause we snuck in the side door, like we always do. And we didn’t see no ushers, ’cause we didn’t wanna see none. I didn’t wanna have to bust nobody up if one of ’em tried to say somethin’ ’bout us not havin’ no tickets, or ’bout us sneakin’ in all the theaters, some shit like that.”

“You have any idea how long you were there? From what time to what time?”

Again, Mills shrugged indifferently. “We was there all night, is all I know. From ’bout eight o’clock ’til they closed, I guess.”

Gunner looked at DeCharme.

“LAPD says Lovejoy was killed somewhere in the neighborhood of ten-thirty, give or take fifteen minutes,” she said.

Which meant that Mills had a fine alibi, providing his presence in Baldwin Hills—no stone’s throw from the site of Lovejoy’s murder—could be verified.

“How did you get to the theater? You drive, or did she?”

“I did.”

“What were you driving?”

“My mom’s car. Seventy-nine Olds Cutlass, gold with a white top. What difference do it make what we was drivin’?”

“If no one saw you or Sharice in Baldwin Hills that night,” DeCharme said, before Gunner could reward Mills’s curiosity with an insult, “maybe they saw your mother’s car, and will remember it. Although Oldsmobiles—”

“Don’t usually leave lasting impressions on people,” Gunner said, completing DeCharme’s thought. “If you parked it in a crowded lot, it was probably only one Olds out of a hundred there.”

Mills nodded his head silently, understanding.

“You see Rookie Davidson at all that evening?” Gunner asked him, shifting gears abruptly.

The teenager shook his head. “Uh-uh. Didn’t see the Rook all that day.”

“He wasn’t at the movies with you and Sharice?”

“Hell, no,” Mills said, disdaining the chance to hitch Davidson up to his comfortable alibi. “He was back in the ’hood drivin’ for the man what popped Dr. Love, how he gonna be with us?”

Gunner paused, genuinely surprised by the admission. “You know that for a fact?”

“What?”

“That Rookie was the driver in the Lovejoy killing.”

“Oh yeah,” Mills said. “Had to be him.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“The car, man. S’posed to’ve been a blue Mav’rick, right? That’s Rookie’s ride, a blue Mav’rick. ’Sides, that’s what homeboy does, ain’t it?”

“What’s that?”

Mills looked at Gunner as if he were some low-intelligence life form too dense to be believed. “
Drive
, man,” he said simply. “Rookie don’t do nothin’ for the set but drive.”

He said it as if Davidson were capable of nothing else; as if he had found his niche in life and could not possibly deviate from it. In the organizational matrix of the contemporary street gang, Gunner thought, one’s very role in life was probably just as easily defined as that.

“Why would Rookie have been driving that night? He have something against Lovejoy personally that you’re aware of?”

“Shit yeah, he did. We all had somethin’ ’gainst Dr. Love personally,” Mills said matter-of-factly. “The Blues, the Troopers, the motherfuckin’ Tees—everybody. Didn’t no set want Dr. Love in they ’hood, ’cause all he ever caused ’bangers was trouble. Always buggin’ homeboys to give up they set, to stop gangbangin’ and shit. Look at this bogus peace conference thing he was tryin’ to get everybody to come to. You know about that?”

Gunner nodded.

“Shit. Peace conference my ass. That ain’t gonna ’complish nothin’, ’cept get a few more homeboys’ heads fucked up”

“I take it you weren’t invited to attend.”

“Invited? Yeah, we was invited. Matter of fact, now you mention it, it was Dr. Love what invited us. In person. Came around the ’hood one day, tryin’ to make his goddamn conference sound like somethin’ fresh, like some special event was gonna change our whole lives, or somethin’. I told ’im, ‘Sorry, Doc, but my homies an’ me, we got other plans that day. Count us the fuck out.’”

He laughed.

“It doesn’t sound like you two hit it off too well,” Gunner said.

“No. We didn’t,” Mills admitted.