Not Long for This World (8 page)

“What kinds of things would they argue about?”

“The same things all business partners do. Finances. Personnel. Delegation of duties. Never anything sinister.”

“They ever talk about dissolving the partnership? Was control of the Patrol ever an issue?”

“No. Never. They’d make noises about splitting up now and then, but nothing would ever come of it. They needed each other too much. Darrel was the man with the know-how and the Reverend was the man with the money. They could never have duplicated the Patrol’s success alone, individually, and they knew it. And despite all their differences, I think they truly loved each other.”

“As a man of the cloth, Raines wouldn’t seem to have any other choice,” Gunner said.

Lovejoy smiled again, recognizing his cynicism. “You’re one of those people who have an easier time believing in Santa Claus than in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, aren’t you?”

“My faith in Christ is merely on shaky ground, Mrs. Lovejoy. What’s gone completely is my faith in some of his messengers. There’s a certain slickness to Willie Raines I find inappropriate in a man with his supposed priorities.”

“You think he’s a fake.”

“Not a fake exactly, no. I just think he’s far more than advertised. He sells himself as a man of the spirit but exhibits more than a passing interest in things of the flesh. He might be committed to heaven, all right, but I think he intends to party awhile before he gets there.”

Claudia Lovejoy shook her head. “You’ve got him all wrong,” she said.

Gunner shrugged again. “Maybe. All I know is, Raines never met a camera lens he didn’t like, and you generally find that kind of fastidious self-promotion in men looking to get ahead in this world, not the next one.”

Lovejoy didn’t offer a rebuttal; she could see that Gunner’s mind was made up where Raines was concerned.

“The Reverend’s a good man,” she said simply. “He’s been very kind to me since Darrel’s death. Very kind.”

“I’m sure he has.”

“You’d feel differently if you met him, I think.”

“Perhaps I would. Is that something you could arrange?”

“I don’t see why not. Although he’d probably be no more willing to help your client’s cause than I, at least initially. Would you like me to talk to him?”

Gunner shook his head. “Not just yet. But I’d like to be able to call you in the next few days should I decide it’s necessary. How can I reach you?”

Lovejoy drew a business card from her purse and used Gunner’s pencil to write her home phone number on the reverse. Gunner exchanged it for one of his own and turned hers over to glance at its printed side before sliding it into his wallet.

“You’re a chiropractor?”

Lovejoy nodded her head modestly. “I don’t look like one?”

Gunner shook his own head and grinned, his mind wandering. He had always been partial to massage as a form of sexual foreplay. Wouldn’t chiropractic work just as well?

“Drive me back to my car, Mr. Gunner,” Claudia Lovejoy said, eyeing him. “Please.”

Without a word, Gunner did as he was told, thinking that she must have seen the dreamy look on his face somewhere before.

chapter
five

M
onday morning had rain on its mind. The sun was just an amorphous, impotent ball of light hiding behind a darkening screen of cloud cover when Gunner showed up at Tamika Downs’s door, punching the clock at the outrageous hour—for him—of a few minutes past nine.

The steadfast memory of Claudia Lovejoy had followed him here, having unexpectedly made a sleepless shambles of his Sunday night, but Gunner was bound and determined to work his way around it. This was clearly the wrong time to become infatuated with a beautiful widow, and Lovejoy was clearly the wrong widow with whom to become infatuated. She was the kind of woman, he knew, with whom the point of no return was only one senseless, if blissful, step away.

Reminding himself of this, he knocked on Downs’s door and willed the thought of Lovejoy into submission, focusing instead on his surroundings. The door before him was in fairly decent shape itself, but the two-bedroom home it was attached to was the kind of eyesore wrecking balls were invented to obliterate. It sat in the middle of a particularly desolate stretch of Croesus Avenue in Watts, a graffiti-marred, wood-frame lean-to with a water-based paint job and a busted-up chimney. The front yard was landscaped with dirt. It was as unsuitable a source of shelter for a woman with four children, Gunner mused as he waited for someone inside to respond to his incessant knocking, as it would have been for three little pigs trying to hide from the big bad wolf.

His arm had grown tired of pounding on the door when he finally heard feet padding around on what sounded like a bare wooden floor, and a voice said, “Who is it?”

Gunner shouted out his name and identified himself as a private investigator.

“A what?”

Gunner raised his voice another notch, moving closer to the door, and repeated himself. “I’m a private investigator! A detective! I’m looking for Ms. Tamika Downs!”

A long silence ensued. Then: “You sure you ain’t no reporter? Let me see some kinda I.D.”

The door cracked open and a bloodshot eye peeked out of the darkness. Gunner took his wallet out of his coat and displayed the license inside prominently, patiently. “I have some questions regarding the murder of Darrel Lovejoy I’d like to ask Ms. Downs, if she could spare me just five minutes of her time,” he said. “You wouldn’t be she, would you?

“Who you workin’ for?” the owner of the eye demanded.

“Toby Mills,” Gunner replied.

Another long silence. “What if I don’t wanna talk to you?”

Gunner shrugged. “I get in my car and go home. But if your testimony regarding my client is accurate, you’d have no reason not to want to talk to me. You’ve told your story to everybody else.”

“Yeah. So what? You workin’ for Toby Mills, you prob’ly just wanna try and catch me in a lie, to see if I still got my story straight, or somethin’.”

Gunner shook his head softly from side to side. “I just want to ask you a few questions. That’s all. To tell you the truth, you’d be doing me a favor if you could convince me that Mills is guilty.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I don’t much like him. The only reason I’m here is because his lawyer’s money is the right color.” He held a twenty-dollar bill up to the crack in the door enticingly. “All-American green.”

Downs let Gunner squirm around in a state of uncertainty for a full minute, then reached out to snatch the bill from his hand and pulled the door completely open, gesturing for him to come inside.

“I only got five minutes, like you said,” she told him firmly.

She was a plain-looking woman in her early thirties, painfully thin and emaciated. Her dark skin was dry and ashen, and her hair was a short brush of brown that stood up on her head like an unwieldy bouquet of ragweed. There was no discernible shape to her body; the bland housedress she wore just seemed to lie there, as empty as it would have been on a hanger in her closet. She had shiny cheeks and a mouth full of large, disgruntled teeth.

She was right at home in her living room. It was a poorly lit rest stop for mutilated furniture and broken toys, tasteless wall paintings and empty beer bottles. A pie tin atop a wobbly end table served as proof that she had had a badly burnt omelet for breakfast.

“You can sit down, if you want,” Downs told Gunner, directing him toward the crushed and spotted cushions of an old sofa at the center of the room.

“No, thanks. I’ll stand.”

Downs made a face and dropped into a high-backed wicker chair with more holes in it than a cheese grater.

“Where are the kids?” Gunner asked, trying to make preliminary small talk.

“At school. ’Cept the youngest, Dana. She’s stayin’ with my mother for a while.” She frowned. “You wanna talk about my kids, or how I seen Mr. Lovejoy get shot?”

“You weren’t kidding about the five minutes.”

“No. I got things to do today, Mr.… What’d you say your name was?”

“Gunner. Aaron Gunner.”

“Yeah. I got things to do today, Mr. Gunner. My time’s valuable, just like yours.”

“All right. Let’s talk about the shooting. How much of it did you see, exactly?”

“I seen everything. From beginnin’ to end.”

“Tell me about it.”

Downs took a deep breath, as if she was going to try to recite the story on a single lungful of air. “I was at the bus stop on the corner of Wilmington and a Hundred Twenty-fourth Street, about ten-fifteen at night, a Friday night, when I see this car come flyin’ ’round the corner toward me—”

“You were waiting for a bus?” Gunner asked, cutting her off.

“That’s right,” Downs said. “The forty-one bus, the Wilmington bus. I was gonna take the forty-one up to a Hundred Seventh Street and walk home.”

Gunner took out his notebook and pencil and started to take notes. “Home from where, exactly?”

“My sister’s. Rhonda’s. Rhonda, she lives on Blakely, near a Hundred Twenty-fourth Street. I got a ride over to her house that afternoon, but she couldn’t give me no ride back, ’cause her old man took her car while I was there and didn’t come back ’til late. So I had to try and take the bus home.”

“You were alone?”

“Uh-huh. My mother had the kids that whole weekend; she takes ’em for me one weekend a month. Anyway, I’m standin’ there waitin’ for the bus, when this car comes flyin’ ’round the corner, like I said. The Maverick.”

“You know for sure it was a Maverick?” Gunner asked, exposing his chauvinistic doubt that a woman could have knowledge of such things. “it couldn’t have been some other make? Something similar in appearance, like a Pinto or a Comet?”

“It was a Maverick,” Downs said. “I use’ to work in a Pep Boys; I know the difference ’tween a Maverick and a Pinto.”

Gunner nodded his head, allowing her to think he was conceding the point rather than merely choosing to move on. “Describe the car,” he said.

“I told you. It was a Maverick. A Ford Maverick, I don’t know what year. Dark blue, with them shiny wheels and big tires gangbangers be so crazy about. It had a dent in the front, a big one on the right side, like somebody done backed into it in a parkin’ lot or somethin’, and there was bumper stickers all over the back,
KDAY
and the
RAIDERS
, stuff like that.

“Naturally, I heard the car ’fore I seen it, but I seen it in time to get a good look at it and the boys what was in it. There’s a streetlight right on that corner; I couldn’t’ve missed their faces if I’d’ve tried.”

“Describe them for me. The way you described them for the police.”

Downs appeared to want to object, but said, “The kid in the front drivin’, he was dark-skinned and scared-lookin’, with a face like a girl’s. Had a sharp, pretty nose and a thin mouth, and long curly hair fallin’ all around his eyes, like Michael Jackson. You know, that jheri-curl shit.”

“You’re talking about Rookie Davidson.”

Downs nodded. “Rookie Davidson, right.”

“And Toby Mills?”

“Mills was darker, harder lookin’. Had bright eyes and a scar on his face, runnin’ down his cheek like this,” Downs said, tracing the exact path of Toby Mills’s disfiguring trademark from the corner of her mouth to the bottom of her ear on the left side of her face. “And he didn’t have hardly no hair on his head, ’cept for a rat’s tail in back. He was sittin’ in the back of the car, doin’ all the shootin’.”

“No one else was in the car?”

“No. Just them. Davidson drivin’, and Mills shootin’. Mills leaned out the window and just started shootin’, didn’t shout ‘Blue,’ or nothin’. I thought he might be shootin’ at me, ’til I turned around and saw Mr. Lovejoy lyin’ there, bleedin’ all over the parking lot, his groceries all out on the ground, and shit.”

“Did you know who Lovejoy was at the time?”

“Not at first. But later, when the police came, I found out it was him. I couldn’t believe it.”

“And you were the only witness to the shooting? Nobody else at the bus stop, or in the store or parking lot, saw any part of it?”

“There was a man in the parkin’ lot who saw it, I think, but he got in his car and took off ’fore the cops showed up. And I was the only one waitin’ at the bus stop.”

Nodding again, Gunner said, “You ever see Mills or Davidson before that night?”

“No. Never,” Downs answered quickly.

“And yet you made a positive I.D. of both, based on what you were able to see one night inside a compact car traveling at what, forty, forty-five miles an hour?”

“I told you,” Downs said, “there’s a streetlight on that corner. A
bright
streetlight.”

“I see. You must have gotten a pretty good look at what they were wearing, then, huh?”

“What they were wearin’? You mean their clothes? Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “I didn’t see nobody’s clothes. The Davidson boy, he had a hat on his head, I can tell you that, but don’t ask me what kind. It was a baseball cap, is all I know.”

There was a pack of Marlboros on the table beside her, and she picked it up to take one. She made the task of lighting up look arduous, but Gunner was unable to decide whether that meant she was starting to come down with a bad case of nerves or was merely a stumblebum with matches.