You Can Die Trying (12 page)

“So you think we stacked the deck on him just to get him out of everybody’s hair.”

“Let me just put it this way: The idea’s not all that farfetched, once you stop to think about it.”

“Unless you’re stupid enough to believe we IAD jerks are too scrupulous to have taken part in such a thing. That what you mean?”

A wry smile might have taken the edge off the crack, but the IAD man was fresh out. He fixed Gunner with another icy stare and said, “I owed you a favor once. I don’t anymore. Have a nice life, Aaron.”

He started for the escalator nearby.

Rather than follow after him, Gunner stayed where he was and said, “I wasn’t necessarily talking about you, Danny.”

Kubo reached the escalator but stopped and turned around before getting on. “What?”

“You heard me. Maybe you wouldn’t have anything to do with a frame-up, but some of the people you work with …” He shrugged. “Well …”

Kubo started back toward him, slowly, moving with a deliberateness that Gunner didn’t like. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he said. Less than a foot of breathing space stood between the two men when he stopped to poke a rigid finger in the black man’s chest, using it for punctuation as he spoke. “So let me offer you a last piece of advice: Shut up. Before somebody shuts you up.”

Gunner held his ground, trying to give Kubo the impression the warning hadn’t shaken him. “Somebody like who?”

“If I have to answer that for you, I’ve been talking to a moron.”

“You mean a cop. Like your pal Jenner, for instance.”

Gunner was flat on his back before he knew what hit him, blinking water out of his eyes as Kubo stood over him, massaging the knuckles on his right hand with his left.

“That better be the last time you drop my partner’s name to anybody. You understand? Leave him the fuck out of this.”

A female salesclerk poked her head out of an oriental rug shop to watch Gunner knead his nose back into shape, making no attempt to get up off the floor.

“Is that a warning, Danny?”

Kubo nodded. “Yeah. That’s exactly what it is,” he said.

He went back to the escalator behind him and disappeared for good.

7

Gunner didn’t even know the woman’s name.

She was a heavy-set black woman in her late forties, with shiny high cheekbones and an incomplete set of lower teeth, and she lived in a mustard-colored house on Van Ness Avenue, only yards from the alley in which Lendell Washington had died. Gunner had hoped he could get the names of all three people who had claimed to have witnessed Washington’s death the year before from Danny Kubo, but pissing Kubo off the way he had had left him with no other recourse but to ask his client for the information, instead. Predictably, Mitchell Flowers hadn’t been able to identify any of the witnesses by name, but he had been able to send Gunner here, to the home of one witness Flowers had recognized only as someone he often saw watering her lawn during his late evening strolls.

Gunner had only had to ring her doorbell once to bring her to the door.

“Can I help you?” she asked, openly suspicious, but making a conscious effort to be pleasant about it.

Gunner flashed his ID at her and introduced himself, saying only that he was a private investigator looking into the circumstances of the Lendell Washington shooting. She told him her name was Helen Church, and agreed to answer his questions without much in the way of hesitation.

“I understand you saw it happen,” Gunner said.

“Yes. I did.” She nodded.

“Can you tell me about it?”

“What’s there to tell? That police officer shot that boy down in cold blood. It’s as simple as that.”

“By ‘in cold blood,’ you mean that he did it without provocation.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly what I mean. Without provocation. That boy didn’t have any gun. That was just something the police tried to say afterward, to make it look like the boy had it coming.”

“Do you mind if I ask where you were when the shooting occurred, Ms. Church?”

“No. I don’t mind.” She pointed three houses north down the street, indicating a spot along the west side of Van Ness, directly opposite the mouth of the alley Jack McGovern had allegedly chased Lendell Washington into. “I was right there. I was standing right over there.”

Nodding, Gunner looked the spot over, then turned around again. “And you happened to be over there because …?” He smiled, hoping to make the question seem innocent.

“Because I saw a policeman chasing a little boy down the middle of my street,” Church said, angrily, “and I wanted to see what the hell was going on.”

“At two-thirty in the morning.”

“Yes. What’s wrong with that?”

“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it.”

“No. But you were thinking it. Weren’t you?”

“Ms. Church—”

“Listen. If you lived around here, you’d know things like this happen all the time. Kids getting shot by policemen, I mean. It’s nothing new. A black person can’t step on the sidewalk these days without getting hassled or attacked by the police. That’s just the way they are down here.

“More people like myself stood up to them, let them know we aren’t gonna stand for the way they’ve been treating us, there’d be a lot more cops like that one—” She stopped, catching herself before she could say something she clearly did not want Gunner to know.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gunner, but I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore. It disturbs me too much to discuss it,” she said.

Then she closed the door before he could offer her an argument.

Gunner walked down to the alley itself before leaving, just to look around, but without really knowing what he was looking at—or what he was looking
for
—the effort didn’t buy him much. Scanning the oil-stained and rubbish-strewn alley for clues now was like trying to read a book long after the words had been bleached by time from its pages.

Gunner invested a full five minutes in the effort, then left to find something more constructive to do with his time.

Just as her sister had predicted, Charlene Woodberry didn’t really want to talk to Gunner. She claimed to have called him only because she felt so bad about the fate of her nephew Lendell, and it had seemed it might please her sister to do so. Gunner had no trouble believing the former, because Woodberry sounded wounded over the phone, like a mouse with its tail caught in a trap. He had to cup one hand over his free ear and the other over the payphone earpiece just to make sense of her whimpering.

As it happened, she was going to visit her son, Noah Ford, late that afternoon, she said, and she would take that opportunity to see if she could persuade him to meet with Gunner again. She couldn’t promise what he would say, as she had lost her power to seriously influence his actions long ago, but she would do what she could to encourage his full cooperation.

Had Deanna Lugo not also called him at Mickey’s while he’d been out getting beaten senseless by Danny Kubo and perhaps lied to by Helen Church, Gunner would have been at a loss trying to figure out what to do with the last few minutes of his day. He had already spoken to all the other principals of the case at least once, and there was no one left to question about Lendell Washington’s death other than Lugo and Danny Kubo’s partner, Jenner, whose cage Gunner was at the moment hesitant to rattle, for obvious reasons.

Finding Lugo at Southwest immediately after returning Charlene Woodberry’s call, Gunner asked her if she’d be willing to return with him to the alley in which the Washington shooting had taken place, and Lugo graciously consented.

Gunner was sitting behind the wheel of his own parked car when Lugo appeared around three-thirty, bringing a black-and-white Ford cruiser up to the curb on the alley side of Van Ness behind him. Her partner was nowhere in sight. Gunner watched her get out of the car in his rearview mirror, and one thing, at least, became immediately clear to him: she was the most attractive cop he had ever seen.

He stepped out of the Cobra and moved to join her.

“Mr. Gunner?”

“Officer Lugo. Thank you for coming.” He shook her hand, trying not to let the smile on his face betray too much of what he was thinking.

She was a dark-skinned Hispanic with straight, short-cropped black hair and piercing brown eyes, and her uniform fit her supple frame like a glove. There was nothing sexual about the way she smiled at him, but it held a tiny charge just the same.

“Sergeant Kupchak said I should hear you out. That’s the only reason I’m here,” she said.

“Okay.”

“He says you’re trying to prove Maggie got the shaft. That right?”

“I guess that’s one way of putting it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’ve been hired to prove Lendell Washington took a couple of shots at McGovern the night Washington was killed. That’s all.”

“Just like Maggie always said he did.”

“Yes.”

“You mind if I ask who hired you?”

“No. I don’t mind.”

She waited for him to go on, until it dawned on her that he wasn’t going to.

“You don’t want to tell me, is that it?”

“My client is someone who claims to have been here when the shooting took place. What else do you need to know?”

“Well, for starters, I’d like to know where the hell this client of yours was last November, when his testimony might have done Maggie some good.”

“That’s a fair question. Unfortunately, all I can say in answer to it is, my client didn’t feel it would be appropriate to come forward at that time,” Gunner said defensively.

“No shit. Some hero, your client.”

Gunner just shrugged. “I’m only working for the man, officer. Not nominating him for president.”

Lugo fell silent, obviously trying to decide how badly she wanted this conversation to continue.

“So. What do you want to know?” she asked after a while.

Gunner had her give him the complete tour, from the spot where McGovern claimed to have been standing when he’d opened fire on Lendell Washington, to the spot where Washington’s body had been found. The first was a point less than five yards from the alley’s entrance, while the second was about twenty yards farther into the alley than that. The alley itself was lined with dilapidated fences and tiny garages, and trash cans crumpled by time and misuse into grotesque sculptures of aluminum and plastic. The fences ranged in height from four to six feet; some were chain link, most were wooden slats. None stood particularly erect. The yards beyond were small, but for the most part well kept; tall grass was a rarity. There were outdoor light fixtures attached to two of the garages, but only one actually held a bulb, and all but a few of the garages had sloping, tar paper roofs, which meant that anything tossed atop them would have likely slid right back down to earth, or at least been easily detected by anyone standing below.

According to Lugo, Washington had breathed his last about halfway down the alley, in front of the graffiti-marred door of a lemon yellow garage. The low picket fence beside it allowed for a good view of a backyard someone obviously tended with great care. The lawn was green and well manicured, and the shrubbery arranged around it looked trim and healthy. Unless it had looked substantially different the previous November, there would have been no place in this yard for a gun to hide.

Lugo’s version of the events leading up to and following Washington’s death held no particular surprises. It was essentially the same story Harry Kupchak had told. McGovern and Lugo had shown up at the liquor store six blocks away just in time to scare Washington and Noah Ford off. The two robbery suspects had split up, and McGovern and Lugo had done likewise, McGovern chasing Washington here, Lugo chasing Ford a dozen blocks farther south. It was during her pursuit of Ford that she heard the shots emanating from the alley, Lugo said, and just as both Kupchak and Kubo had reported, she was nonspecific about the number of shots she had heard. She tried to contact McGovern on her handset radio to find out what, if anything, had happened, but McGovern was not responding to her calls at that time. In fact, he didn’t make contact with her until she and Ford had returned to the liquor store to retrieve the patrol car waiting there, after Ford had tried to sprint across a busy intersection against the light and was knocked off his feet by a passing car. McGovern gave Lugo his location and reported that Washington had been shot. She tossed Ford into the back of the patrol car and the two of them arrived at the alley minutes later, but by that time Washington was already dead and a host of witnesses were lingering about the alley, ready to seal McGovern’s fate.

That was about all she could remember, Lugo said.

Going back to the beginning of her story, having held all his questions until now, Gunner said, “You never saw the gun Ford allegedly used in the robbery?”

Lugo shook her head. “No.”

“What do you suppose happened to it?”

“I don’t know. He must have chucked it somewhere, I guess. You know—when he was running.”

“Or given it to Washington before they took off.”

Lugo shrugged. “Possibly. It’s hard to say what he did with it. The little jerk ran me halfway across town, I couldn’t keep him in my sight every moment.”