You Can Die Trying (2 page)

“You were too damn noisy,” the big man said, twisting the cap from his bottle. He was still grinning.

“I couldn’t see a fucking thing out there. I told you I needed a light.”

“You’re not always going to be able to use a light. Besides, you’re going to need two hands free to do most of the locks you’re going to find out there.”

Gunner nodded his head in silence, his mouth full of beer.

The private investigator was paying Bennett thirty-five dollars a lesson to tutor him in the fine art of breaking and entering, and every time the big man opened his mouth, Gunner became more convinced that he had picked the perfect man for the job. Bennett’s given name was Bill, but everyone on the street called him Fetch, because his was the sterling reputation of a good hunting dog. There wasn’t anything you could send him off to get that he couldn’t retrieve, once he had the scent. As near as anyone could tell, he had been out of the burglary business for years—his last stint in the joint had ended back in ’85—but everyone who knew him had no doubt that he still had the touch, and would probably use it again if the right set of temptations ever came along.

“You notice I never turned on any lights? That’s because most people won’t. They’re smart enough to know better. What you want to do is listen up when you’re working on a door. Worry about what you’re
hearing
inside a house, not what you’re
seeing.
You wait around for somebody to turn on a light before deciding to take off, you’re going to get caught with your pants down around your fucking ankles, just like you did tonight.”

“You didn’t give me enough time, Fetch,” Gunner complained halfheartedly.

“For that sorry-ass lock you got on that back door? A minute and a half should’ve been plenty.”

“Another twenty seconds and I would have had it,” Gunner said.

Bennett shook his head, suddenly very serious. “You don’t learn to do a lock quieter than that, you’re not gonna get half the time I gave you. There’s a lot of light sleepers out there, man, and one out of every ten’s got a loaded twelve-gauge waiting in the closet, or under the bed.” He used the index finger of his left hand to point to a spot on his right arm where a huge chunk of flesh appeared to have been removed from his biceps with an ice cream scooper. “Take it from me.”

Gunner took another swallow of beer and nodded his head, slightly taken aback by the big man’s mood swing.

“That the doorbell?” Bennett asked shortly, reacting to a muffled buzz emanating from the front of the house.

“Sounds like it, doesn’t it?” Gunner looked at his watch. It was twelve-thirty in the morning. “Somebody must’ve got the wrong address.”

“Maybe it’s a lady friend,” Bennett said. “Lookin’ for a little late-night action.” The thought made him grin again.

Gunner got up from the table, taking his beer with him, and said, “Maybe you’ve had too much to drink.”

As the doorbell rang again, he entered the living room of his little duplex and squinted into the peephole on his front door, cursing himself for being disappointed when he found a man he didn’t recognize standing on his front porch, appearing to stare right back at him. Bennett’s comment about a lady friend had been made entirely in jest, but Gunner had allowed it to get his hopes up all the same. The fact that Claudia Lovejoy had been making herself scarce around his home lately didn’t seem to matter. Some small, sadistically optimistic part of him had sold him on the idea that this midnight caller might be her, looking to renew their suddenly stagnant affair, and now he was slightly devastated to learn that an idea was all it was.

Stupid.

Gunner opened his front door abruptly and the middle-aged black man standing beyond it froze, caught in the yellow glow of Gunner’s porch light as he was reaching for the doorbell one more time.

“Can I help you?” Gunner asked.

The man put his outstretched arm down and straightened up, trying to make a good first impression. He was a black Joe Average: medium height, medium build; conservatively dressed and groomed. The hair just above both ears was Christmas-card white, but that was about all anybody would be able to remember about him if he ever took to robbing banks. Gunner guessed he was an ex-navy man with a wife and four kids and a garage full of Chevys who did all of his shopping at Sears.

“I’m looking for the Aaron Gunner residence,” the man on the porch said.

Gunner looked at him for a long moment before saying anything. “I’m Aaron Gunner.”

“Mr. Gunner, we spoke on the phone this morning. We were supposed to meet in your office tomorrow afternoon, but I’ve decided that might not be such a good idea. Discussing what I have to discuss with you over there, I mean.”

“Your name is Flowers?”

“Mitchell Flowers. Yes.” He held out his hand for Gunner to shake, and his grip was something to be proud of. “I know it’s late, but I’m afraid this was the earliest I could get over here. I had to pull some overtime out at the plant and I only got off about an hour ago. You mind if I come in?”

Gunner was ushering him inside when Fetch Bennett appeared from the kitchen, his sizable curiosity apparently aroused by his host’s extended absence. Flowers appeared to be unnerved by the sight of him.

“You have company. Maybe we should do this some other time.” He started to back toward the door.

“Hey, no, no, no,” Bennett said, heading the smaller man off. “I was just leaving, brother, really.”

“Fetch, this is Mitchell Flowers,” Gunner said, trying to ease the three of them out of the sudden awkwardness of the moment. “Mr. Flowers is thinking about hiring me to do some work for him.”

“Fetch Bennett. Pleased to meet you,” Bennett said as he shook Flowers’s hand, then opened the door to let himself out. “We still on for Thursday?” he asked Gunner.

“Same time, Thursday, yeah. Thanks for everything, Fetch.”

“Any time, partner. Nice meeting you, Mr. Flowers.”

Flowers dipped his head in reply and Bennett was gone.

“My piano teacher,” Gunner explained after closing the door, deciding to answer the question before Flowers could think to ask it. He showed the other man to a seat in the living room and found one for himself, then pretended not to notice as Flowers’s eyes wandered across the room, searching for a piano that wasn’t there.

“Can I get you a beer, Mr. Flowers?” Gunner asked, putting the finishing touches on the one he had started earlier.

Flowers shook his head. “No. Thank you.”

The doorbell rang again.

It was Bennett, the picture of embarrassment.

“Forgot my gun,” the big man said sheepishly, trying to tone his cannon-shot voice down to a whisper.

Gunner laughed, told him to hold on a minute, then left for the kitchen. He could feel Flowers watching him as he returned to the door with the revolver at his side, not wanting to make the weapon any more conspicuous by trying to hide it.

Bennett took the gun and said thanks, then disappeared again.

Gunner rejoined Flowers in the living room and said, “When Fetch tells you how he wants a piece played, he only tells you
once.”

It was a lame joke, but it didn’t deserve the cold shoulder Flowers gave it. He looked at Gunner like someone had just told him his shoelace was untied.

“There somebody watching my office I don’t know about, Mr. Flowers?” Gunner asked him, writing off levity for the remainder of the night.

“Excuse me?”

“You said you didn’t think our meeting there in the morning would be such a good idea. I’m wondering why you think so.”

Flowers paused, choosing his words with care so as not to inflict any further injury upon his host. “Your office is a barbershop. Isn’t that right, Mr. Gunner?”

Gunner didn’t see the relevance of the question, but said, “That’s right. Mickey’s Trueblood barbershop. I lease a little space in the back. That a problem for you?”

“No, no. Please. Don’t misunderstand.” Flowers used both hands to wave off any unintended insult. “I’m sure it’s a fine place to conduct business, in general, but …”

“But?”

“But it’s a
barbershop.
A place where old men generally go to talk about everybody’s business but their own. You understand what I’m saying?”

Gunner did, of course, though he had never given the matter much thought until now. There might be other places of business besides a barbershop where a man’s secrets could take flight on the neighborhood gossip wires faster, but there weren’t many. For all the disparaging things men had to say about the way personal confidences were scattered to the far winds by the ladies seated under the dryers at any corner beauty shop, a men’s barbershop was usually just as bad, if not worse, and Mickey’s was no exception. If the barber’s bombastic crew of regular customers wouldn’t be able to report what, specifically, Gunner and Flowers had to say to each other behind closed doors, it would at least be within their power to make Flowers’s very presence in Gunner’s office a matter of public record, and maybe that alone was the kind of indiscretion Flowers was looking to avoid.

“Okay,” Gunner said, shrugging. “I guess you’ve got a point. If confidentiality’s critical, we could be better off here. So …” He looked at Flowers expectantly.

The older man shifted about on the cushions of his chair uneasily, buying time, and then said, “I want you to set something right for me, Mr. Gunner. Something I did—or something I
didn’t
do, actually—that I just can’t live with anymore.” He pulled in a deep breath and, without waiting for Gunner to urge him on, said, “One night last September, I saw a cop shoot a kid in an alley near my house. A bad cop, an evil one, a white man’s been busting black heads in our neighborhood for years. You know the kind I mean. This cop, he caught a pair of kids trying to rob a liquor store over on Vernon and Third Avenue, chased one of ’em for six blocks down into this alley, then shot him dead. Just a twelve-year-old kid, named Lendell Washington. Maybe you remember hearing about it.”

The name and the story did ring a faint bell with Gunner, but he chose not to say so, preferring for the moment to let Flowers’s story run its natural course.

“Anyway, the cop tried to say he’d shot the kid in self-defense. That’s what they always say, right? He said the kid had fired on him first. Only, three people came forward at the scene to say he was lying. They said he was the only one who had fired a weapon. Now, you and I both know, Mr. Gunner, that three people—three
black
people, especially—aren’t usually enough to get a cop slapped on the wrist for jaywalking, let alone murder. So everybody figured the cop was going to walk. Only, he didn’t. Not after the police came right out and admitted that all the evidence proved the cop was lying.”

“This cop you’re talking about. His name was McDonald, or McGovern.… Something like that?” Gunner finally asked.

Flowers nodded. “McGovern. Jack McGovern. Then you do remember.”

Gunner shrugged. “Vaguely. He was a real ball-buster, supposedly. The kind of foulmouthed, bigoted jackass that used to be all the rage in law enforcement twenty, twenty-five years ago.”

“That was him. Shocked the hell out of a lot of people how they handled his case, didn’t it? No excuses, no denials—just a quick board of rights hearing, then his immediate dismissal. A fast and dirty firing—something we don’t see a lot of where the police down here are concerned.

“Of course, most people were able to read between the lines. Chief Bowden had been in charge of the LAPD for less than a year, and the riots were still fresh in everyone’s mind. Crucifying McGovern was obviously just the chief’s way of trying to show the black community there was a new sheriff in town, one we could all count on to be sensitive to the community’s needs.”

Flowers paused, seemingly having trouble getting to the point.

“You see something wrong with that?” Gunner asked him.

Flowers picked restlessly at the foam stuffing peeking out of a hole in the left armrest of his chair as he considered the question. “I shouldn’t,” he said in time. “I have a wife and three kids to worry about, Mr. Gunner. I should be as happy as anyone to see that madman off the street.”

“But you’re not.”

“Not entirely, no.”

“Because?”

“Because McGovern didn’t murder Lendell Washington,” Flowers said simply. “I told you I was there the night the kid was shot, remember? I saw the whole thing. And McGovern was telling the truth when he said the kid had fired on him first. I saw and heard him do it. It all happened exactly the way McGovern said it did.”

“But you never went to the police to tell them as much.”

“No. I never told anybody I was there that night.” He smiled a halfhearted smile and shrugged, apparently not knowing what else to say.

“Any chance you’re simply mistaken? Your eyes can play funny tricks with you at times like that.”

“I know what I saw, Mr. Gunner. The Washington boy fired twice at McGovern before McGovern fired back. I’m sure of it.”

“You said there were other witnesses,” Gunner said.

Flowers nodded. “There were. A man and two women. They turned up near the alley that night, claiming they saw the kid get shot, and McGovern putting a gun in his hand afterward and firing it, but I don’t think any of them really did. The streets were deserted when I walked past that alley, I didn’t see anybody else around. I think those people just showed up afterward, saw a chance to make a cop look bad, and took it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Because you didn’t want to get involved.”

“Because I
chose
not to get involved.”

Seeing no way around it, Gunner braced himself to ask the obvious next question: “So why get involved now?”

Flowers just looked at him, stuck for a feasible answer.

“Your conscience is bothering you, is that it?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“This is going to sound rather cold, Mr. Flowers, but don’t you think you’re a little late? McGovern got his walking papers from the department eight months ago.”

“I understand that. I regret that I didn’t come forward sooner, of course, but I guess I just didn’t feel like I was responsible for what happened to him until now. You’d feel the same way if you were me, I’m sure.”