Not Long for This World (6 page)

“There’s the matter of his car. The blue Maverick,” Gunner said. “And the witness who’s placed both Mills and Rookie inside it.”

“Yeah, the witness. I’d forgotten about her. She’s something else to think about, isn’t she?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that she’s a real bolt out of the blue. A rare find. Most people I know see a man killed in a drive-by, they don’t rush out to make it a matter of public record. They go home and try to forget about it, pretend it never happened.”

“You trying to say she’s lying?”

“I’m trying to say that maybe she’s confused,” Davidson said. “With a man like Lovejoy getting killed and all, maybe she saw an opportunity to be a star and jumped on it. All the police would’ve had to do was coax her a little bit. Convince her it was a Maverick she saw, and not a Pinto or a Comet. You know how things like that can happen.”

Gunner did but chose not to say so.

“Or maybe she’s just saying what she was told to say,” Davidson continued. “Maybe the Blues are being fingered for Lovejoy’s murder because it’s so easy to see them doing it.”

“You’re talking about a frame.”

“That’s right. And why not? Where is it written that all of Lovejoy’s enemies had to be gangbangers, that no one else could have wanted to see the man dead?”

Davidson was asking better questions than Gunner was, and the role reversal made the detective uncomfortable.

“I were you, I’d look at all the possibilities,” Davidson suggested.

“Thanks. I intend to.”

Gunner took a business card from his wallet and passed it across the desk.

“I’m getting paid to clear Mills of Lovejoy’s murder, if I can manage it,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t do the same for Rookie if the opportunity presents itself. All I’m after is the truth; I don’t care who it condemns or vindicates. If you hear from Rookie, tell him that for me. Give him my number; tell him I just want to talk.”

“Sure,” Davidson said, pocketing the card without even looking at it, like a street flyer he intended to trash at his earliest convenience.

“You love the kid like you say, you’ll let me help him,” Gunner said, standing up. “Because I don’t think there’s anyone else out there who even cares enough to try.”

He waited for Davidson to nod before showing himself to the door.

chapter
four

H
arold ain’t home,” the little boy at the door said.

“How about your mother? Can I talk to her?”

The boy shook his dusty head from side to side. “Momma’s at work.”

There were five kids in all that Gunner could see from where he was standing outside the decrepit two-bedroom apartment in Willowbrook in which Harold “Smalltime” Seivers lived: the boy at the door, who looked about five; two younger boys and a slightly older girl watching television on the floor; and a toddler of indeterminate sex dressed in blue, pulling on the curtains of a window on the far side of the room. The girl and one of the boys on the floor were playing tug-of-war with a pair of pliers, fighting for the right to change the channel on their knobless and archaic rotary-tuned television set.

“Isn’t someone watching you?” Gunner asked the boy at the door.

“Gwen’s watchin’ us,” the boy said.

“Gwen?”

Her tiny charge was nodding his head when Gwen finally appeared, rushing into the living room from somewhere off in the back. She was a nine- or maybe ten-year-old, with a round face and uncombed hair, dressed in the same Pick ’n Save coordinates as the other children, only in sizes best suited for the not-so-pleasingly plump.

“Who you talkin’ to, Byron?” she demanded, reaching the apartment door to yank the boy standing there behind her, shielding him from Gunner with her body like a huffy mother hen.

“I was looking for Harold,” Gunner said, as if that explained everything.

“Harold ain’t home,” Gwen said.

“Are you his sister?”

She nodded.

“You know when Harold might be back?”

She shook her head. She wasn’t going to elaborate, either. “What you want him for?”

“I want to talk to him. Regarding some friends of his. Toby Mills and Rookie Davidson. You know Toby and Rookie?”

She shook her head again. “I don’t know none of Harold’s friends. Momma says to stay away from ’em. You a policeman?”

“I’m a private investigator. That’s like a policeman, only different.”

The girl just stared at him, as confounded by his answer as she had every right to be. Feeling foolish, he changed the subject.

“Gwen, you know where I might find Harold now?”

“No. He could be anywheres.”

She was distracted by a loud cry behind her. The toddler in blue had found a can of Michelob somewhere and had poured most of its contents all over himself/herself trying to down it.

“I gotta go, mister,” the girl told Gunner, starting to close the door in his face.

Gunner stuck a hand out, said, “Waitaminute, waitaminute. What time will your mother be home? Maybe I could talk to her.”

“I don’t know. I ain’t supposed to tell nobody what time Momma comes home. I gotta go.”

Against Gunner’s meager objections, she pushed the door closed with authority.

Gunner stepped off the porch and raised his eyes forlornly skyward, assessing the light of day as he let the sting of rejection slowly subside. He decided Saturday afternoon was probably good for another two hours in the sun, and was sure something worthwhile could be accomplished in those two hours, if he was to put his mind to it. However, he was not surprised to realize he didn’t
want
to put his mind to it. What he wanted to do was fold up his tent and go home. So he did.

Something about having doors closed in his face always had that effect on him.

Working on the Sabbath day was one of the few sins Gunner had never enjoyed committing, especially during the football season. He had found early on in his investigative career that lethargic Sunday mornings spent staring at a color television invariably led to stuporous Sunday afternoons, days that simply did not lend themselves well to the pursuit of professional accomplishment.

On this particular Sunday, however, less than twenty-four hours after the detective’s interrogations of Teddy Davidson and a pair of Harold Seivers’s younger siblings, the usual excuses for deferring work until Monday did not apply. The football season was three months away and the Lakers/Supersonics game at the Forum was an evening affair. If he wanted to live with himself, he had no choice but to start what most people would come to appreciate as a day of rest with a latemorning visit to the home of Claudia Lovejoy, Darrel Lovejoy’s widow.

He preferred to think of the move as his idea, but he was man enough to know better. Teddy Davidson had turned his attention to Claudia Lovejoy the day before when Davidson had suggested the possibility that Darrel Lovejoy might have had enemies outside the youth-gang hemisphere. It was a thought Gunner would have come upon of his own accord, eventually, but for now he had only Davidson to thank for it, and the debt rubbed his pride the wrong way.

Perhaps it was this sense of ambivalence that led Gunner to drop in on the Lovejoy home unannounced, a tactical blunder that left him knocking on the door of an empty house in Lynwood when he arrived shortly before twelve noon. It was a mistake he had made before and had vowed never to make again, but for once, all it cost him was time. He had a hunch where he might find the widowed Mrs. Lovejoy, and unlike most of the hunches he tended to play whenever a racing form wormed its way into his hands, this one actually paid off.

The Reverend Willie Raines’s First Children of God Church was a newly constructed oblique monument located on the northeast corner of Van Ness and 104th Street in Inglewood, an angular architectural expression in red brick and stained glass, and when noon services broke there at one-thirty in the afternoon, Claudia Lovejoy was among the mass of people who poured from its doors out into the street.

Gunner had never met the lady, but since her husband’s death, she had had enough television-news minicams stuck in her face to make her instantly recognizable, even from a fair distance. Without the notoriety, however, she would have stood out from the crowd all the same. Claudia Lovejoy was blessed with the kind of beauty that held a man’s eyes longer than he wanted to look.

The secret to her allure was an unusual contradiction, a clash of physical characteristics as rare as it was mesmerizing. Her skin was the color of white chocolate, smooth and unblemished, yet the ethnicity of her facial features seemed to have been lifted from a woman much closer to her African ancestry: Her lips were generous and her cheekbones high and proud. Dark, slashing eyebrows were raised in perpetual skepticism over green eyes of limitless clarity, eyes that drew a man into their emerald depths and would not let go. She appeared to be in her early thirties, short and lean but not petite; nothing petite had that many curves in so many appropriate places.

She was wearing a white cotton dress with a cowl neckline when Gunner picked her out of the crowd, her black hair pulled tight and glistening across her scalp, away from her face, as if to give it room to glow. He let her get all the way to her car in the parking lot before approaching her; she had exited the church in the company of a pair of much older women in garage-sale hats, and he preferred to wait until they had said their goodbyes to introduce himself and state the nature of his business.

It took a while, but the two older ladies finally waddled off. Claudia Lovejoy slipped a key into the door of her wine-colored late-model Toyota sedan and started to turn it, then sensed Gunner standing nearby and looked up.

“May I help you?”

There had been no trace of fear in her voice, only an innocent, almost playful curiosity. Resisting the urge to put off his bad news as long as possible, Gunner explained himself quickly and flashed his credentials, then watched as the joy of God drained from her face like sand from an hourglass.

“You have a great deal of nerve coming here, Mr. Gunner. I suppose you realize that.”.

“I’m a little pressed for time, Mrs. Lovejoy. I’m sorry.”

“The little hood you represent killed my husband.”

“The kid’s a hood, granted,” Gunner said, “but he may not be the one who killed your husband.”

“The police appear to be satisfied that he is.”

“If you’ll excuse me for saying so, the police find satisfaction in a great many things. The truth, unfortunately, is not always one of them.”

“So what do you want with me?”

There were a number of possible answers to that question, but only one of them had no implication of carnal knowledge. Gunner kept things clean and said, “A few moments of your time. There are some questions I need to ask that only you can answer reliably.”

“And I assume you want to ask them now?”

“If at all possible, yes. I’m a little pressed for time, as I said. Have you had breakfast yet?”

The woman in white shook her head, waiting in icy silence for the invitation she knew was coming.

“Would you like to?” Gunner asked, humbling himself for the cause.

She considered the question and stared at him while she was at it, finding no small pleasure in the spectacle of a man teetering on the brink of an embarrassing rejection. Then she nodded her head and waited demurely for Gunner to show the way.

Ordinarily, Ray’s was no place for a man to go for breakfast if he didn’t have all day to wait for it, but the rules that applied to the restaurant’s general clientele rarely applied to Gunner, and so he took Claudia Lovejoy there anyway. A small, nondescript kitchen on the corner of Western and Forty-eighth Street, Ray’s was a breakfast-only establishment as famous for its excellent food as its all-too-limited space in which to enjoy it; only its generous portions made it worth overlooking the annoyance of the intimidating line of people forever ringing its exterior.

No one had ever actually told Gunner he could circumvent the line whenever he cared to drop in, but it had worked out exactly that way ever since Gunner had saved a headwaiter’s life at Ray’s one afternoon two years before. Halfway through Gunner’s breakfast, a drunken patron built like a small. Caterpillar tractor became enraged by a whopping twelve-cent overcharge on his bill, and was about to find the waiter’s jugular vein with a dull carving knife when Gunner broke a chair over his head. Gunner figured to get a free meal out of the deal, and he did. Every meal after that, however, he had paid for, though his name always managed to get him through the front door without the usual thirty-minute delay.

As it had today.

An overstuffed couple in line at the door made a brief show of complaint, but otherwise Gunner and Claudia Lovejoy were shown to a table quickly and without incident. Once they had settled into their seats, Gunner ordered ham and eggs, and Claudia did the same, but it seemed she had done so just to have an excuse to play with her fork at the table. Gunner watched her ruminate in silence for a few minutes, then decided enough was enough. He was going to feel like an ass for putting Lovejoy through another unpleasant interrogation whether he chose to procrastinate for five minutes or five days beforehand.