You Can Die Trying (18 page)

Or, more to the point, nobody ever
reported
having found one.

For over an hour, Gunner vacillated between these two major propositions, police conspiracy or unknown second party, embracing one and then the other, unable to find complete satisfaction in either. And then he faced up to an ugly truth, the very same one he had tried in vain to impress upon Mitchell Flowers two days ago: No matter how Lendell Washington had died, Gunner was going to have to produce a weapon to prove it. And if a) the kid (or some unseen friend) had really had one; b) Gunner’s client really wasn’t going blind or losing his mind; and c) Gunner hadn’t spent the last six days spinning his wheels on a worthless case like a goddamn hamster on a treadmill—then it had to be out there somewhere. In the alley, or in someone’s backyard. It sure as hell hadn’t just
walked
away.

Or had it?

Gunner suddenly pulled himself erect in the Cobra’s driver seat.

He was watching a pair of derelicts rummage through the dumpster behind Davey’s Market, looking for scraps of food and clothing. It was a man and a woman—a couple, from the looks of it—and they were finding the pickings pretty thin.

Just as the man they reminded Gunner of had, only three days before.

“Mr. Gunner. This is Deanna Lugo.” The station house was a wall of ribald racket behind her. “I just got the message you called.”

It was a little after three in the afternoon; Gunner had been waiting since the lunch hour to hear from her.

“Officer Lugo. I have a question for you.”

“So soon?”

“It’s regarding the guy we saw rooting through the garbage cans last Friday afternoon. The guy in the alley, wearing the tuxedo. Remember?”

“Dancing Fred. Yeah, I remember.”

“You know him?”

“Dancing Fred? Sure. Fred’s a Southwest landmark, everybody knows him. Why? What’s up?”

“I need to know if he was anywhere on the scene the night Lendell Washington was killed. Do you remember seeing him there, at all?”

There was a short silence as Lugo thought about it. “I don’t think so.
I
don’t recall seeing him there, anyway. Why? You need to find him?”

“Yeah. I think I do.”

“No problem. I can think of a couple of places he might be.” She paused. “You want to look for him alone, or would you mind a little company?”

Gunner didn’t say anything.

“You want to go alone.”

He started to say yes, until he thought about the last phone message he’d received from Claudia Lovejoy, and the Dear John speech she had hit him with before that.

You’re free to do whatever you like
, she had told him then.

“No. I think I’d enjoy a little company, for a change,” Gunner said.

They agreed to meet at the station house in an hour.

Gunner was parked in the loading zone out in front of the building, watching uniformed patrolmen and plainclothes detectives file in and out, like ants in an ant farm. Every now and then, somebody would tell him to move, until he explained he was waiting for Lugo and they let him alone, taking him at his word. He had been there about fifteen minutes when a white man in a brown Christian Dior suit came down the steps and stopped, to smoke a cigarette and stare at him from the sidewalk. He had a ruddy face, a wire-brush mustache, and hair with more oil in it than a small-block V-8, but if, like the others, he wanted Gunner to move, he never said so.

All he did was stare.

When his cigarette was spent, he flipped the butt into the air like a punk in a bad bikers movie and walked away.

Deanna Lugo emerged from the building just in time to see him round the corner and disappear. She was dressed in a heavy blue cardigan sweater, a white, jewel-necked T-shirt, and pleated denim pants, and Gunner couldn’t have regretted his decision to bring her along less.

“Who’s laughing boy?” Gunner asked her as she stepped into the car, nodding in the direction of the corner.

“You’ll never guess,” Lugo said, using a smile to disguise her obvious distaste for the man. “That’s Maggie’s pal from IAD. Dick Jenner.”

Dancing Fred’s real name was Harold J. Fenton, Jr., and he had once been a TV repairman.

The way Lugo told the story, his shop used to be on the corner of Jefferson and Third Avenue, as recently as seven years ago. He was a tech school graduate who had built a good little business for himself by being fair to his customers and fast at his work, until the technology of television electronics and the growth of the home video industry started changing faster than he could keep up, and the repeat business he had always counted on for his survival gradually went away. He had had no secondary vocation to fall back on, and no family to turn to for help, so the rest of the house of cards that was his life came down around him in a matter of months. Some people could make the transition between self-reliant businessman and minimum-wage worker rather easily, Lugo said, but some people never could. Harold Fenton was one of the many who could not.

He had been bouncing from city shelter to city shelter, street corner to street corner, ever since, his mind slipping a little further off center with each passing day. At some point, he had picked up the tuxedo he always wore now—no one had ever found out where—and it was then that he became known by all his friends and acquaintances as Dancing Fred, after the late Fred Astaire.

“I’ve never had to bust him,” Lugo said, “but I’ve had to move him on his way a couple of times. That’s the only reason I know him.”

She and Gunner had been driving around now for a little less than an hour, trying to track the homeless man down, but they both felt like it had been longer than that. It was a depressing business, touring the haunts and hangouts of the city’s dispossessed, especially in the light of a fast-closing day. In alleys and old warehouses, along railroad ties and freeway off-ramps, Dancing Fred’s comrades clustered against the cold, trying to eke some dignity out of a beggar’s existence. White men in lifeless tweed sport jackets and soleless brown shoes; black women swathed in shawls and blankets three layers deep; children wearing clothing others had given up for rags—all of them made for a slow parade to nowhere that was difficult to take in.

“We’ll try just one more place,” Lugo said.

Gunner didn’t argue with her.

She had him drive to a gas station on Vernon at Normandie, a large, four-island Shell affair with a brightly lit minimarket at its center, and that was where they finally found him. He was standing on one of the islands between two pumps, a spray bottle of watered-down glass cleaner and a roll of paper towels in his hands, asking everyone who passed him if he could pump their gas or clean their windows for whatever loose change they could spare.

It was a common enterprise of the homeless, Gunner knew—and if he were lucky, one that might earn Dancing Fred a dollar and fifty cents before midnight.

Gunner pulled the Cobra into the lot and along the left side of the island where Dancing Fred stood. Neither he nor Lugo had a chance to get out of the car before the bristle-faced man went into his routine.

“Hey, brother. Lemme get those windows for you!”

He was already leaning over the Cobra’s windshield, his spray bottle at the ready.

“Later, Fred. We’d like to talk to you, first,” Lugo said, smiling. She still didn’t get out of the car.

Fred looked at her through the windshield, frowning. “Who …?” He straightened up suddenly, recognizing her. “You’re out of uniform! You’re out of uniform!”

He was pointing the roll of paper towels at her, making a scene. Several people drifted over from one of the other islands to get a better look at what was going on.

“Take it easy, Fred,” Lugo said, stepping out of the Cobra gingerly. Gunner was already moving around the front of the car toward him.

“I have permission to be here!” Dancing Fred cried, stepping backward off the island. “Just ask the manager! Go ask the manager!”

“We don’t need to do that. You don’t have to leave if you don’t want to,” Lugo assured him, continuing to close upon him.

“We just want to ask you a few questions, partner. That’s all,” Gunner said.

“What kind of questions?”

“We’re looking for something. And we thought you might be able to help us find it,” Lugo said.

The man in the tuxedo seemed to relax a little. “Find what?”

Gunner glanced at Lugo and dipped his head, motioning toward the handful of people who were now standing around them, watching and listening to every word of their conversation.

Lugo nodded slightly and said to Fred, “Let us buy you dinner, and we’ll tell you.”

Dancing Fred fell silent, mulling the offer over. “What kind of dinner? Can we go to McDonald’s? Or Popeye’s?”

“We can go anywhere you want,” Gunner told him.

After another moment’s hesitation, Fred nodded agreeably and said, “Popeye’s.”

Which was the signal for everyone watching to return to his or her own business, their curiosity unrewarded by bloodshed.

Out in the parking lot of the Popeye’s Fried Chicken stand on Western Avenue, just north of Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard, under a quarter moon which seemed to have the black night sky all to itself, Dancing Fred cleaned the meat off ten spicy-flavored chicken wings and told them about the gun.

It had all happened eight months ago, but apparently Fred’s memory was the one thing he had managed to salvage intact from his past life as a sane man. He knew too many details to be faking it. He said he had indeed found the gun in a garbage can out in the alley where Lendell Washington had been killed, only moments after the kid’s shooting and before the area had been secured, but he remembered the can being closer to the Gramercy Place end of the alley than the Van Ness Avenue end, which would have placed it more than fifteen yards away from where Washington’s body had been found. It was a revolver, he said, though Gunner had had to describe the difference between a revolver and an automatic for him before he had been able to make that distinction.

And he claimed to still have the gun in his possession.

“A man’s gotta have some protection,” he said, justifying his decision not to sell the weapon off. “’Cause it’s a cold world out there. A cold world. Just gettin’ over, man, that’s all a man can do, and you can die tryin’ just to do that. Hear what I’m sayin’?” He stared directly into Gunner’s face, like a dirty mirror he was trying to see his reflection in. “You can die tryin’.”

He nibbled on a chicken bone a while, then said, “So a man, he’s gotta have some protection.” He was nodding his head at his own wisdom, oblivious to the fact that he was repeating himself. “Somebody said so just the other day, he said, ‘Fred, women don’t even wanna talk to you no more, you ain’t got some kind of protection.’”

The gun was in his cart, Fred said. Over at the camp.

The “camp” turned out to be the open carport of a run-down apartment building over on the fifteen-hundred block of Forty-eighth Street, where a dozen or so homeless people like Fred had gathered for an extended stay. They were huddled in the shadows at the back of the carport, nearly invisible from the street; duffle bags and suitcases, shopping carts and trash bags filled with recyclable bottles and aluminum cans were in evidence all around them.

Gunner didn’t see the little man rooting through one of the shopping carts until Dancing Fred—who had been sitting up on the forward edge of the Cobra’s trunk lid, above and immediately behind the car’s two seats—bounded out of the car and started running.

“What are you doing?
What are you doing?”

The thief at the cart turned around just as Dancing Fred reached him, a shiny-skinned revolver in his right hand.

“Get away from me, man,” the little guy said, annoyed.

Gunner got there in time to make sure Fred followed the order, reaching out with both hands to grab him at the shoulders and pull him back a few steps. Lugo joined them soon after, hovering at Gunner’s right elbow.

“That’s mine, Sulley!” Dancing Fred said, pointing at the gun aimed at him frantically. “That’s my protection!”

“You don’t want it. You left it here,” Sulley argued. The group of people sitting in the oil and grease stains off to his right started inching slowly away from him, mumbling excitedly under their breath.

“Look. I’m a cop,” Lugo said, showing Sulley her badge. “Put the gun down and we’ll discuss this, all right?”

“He didn’t want it,” Sulley insisted, still pointing the gun at Fred. He looked to be far beyond the edge of reason.

“That’s not true! He’s lying! He’s lying!” Fred screamed.

“I know how to use it. You don’t,” Sulley said. “Wanna see?”

He pointed the gun at Gunner’s chest and fired.

A white flame lit up the carport as Sulley smiled proudly, his point made.

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