You Can Die Trying (20 page)

She fell silent, kneading the corner of a pillow aimlessly. Gunner didn’t say a word.

“Where will I be able to reach you when the lab work comes in tomorrow? Your office?”

Gunner looked at her. “That should work, sure. I may have one or two errands to run, so I’ll be in and out. But you can always leave a message with Mickey if you miss me.”

“Mickey?”

“My landlord.”

“Your landlord?”

“And my barber. Yes.”

Rather than ask him to explain that, Lugo said, “These errands you’re talking about. They have anything to do with Maggie? Or the gun?”

“Possibly.” He had said it so his resentment for the question would show through. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I just wondered.”

“Well, don’t. You’re into this thing with me deep enough already.”

“So?”

“So the less apparent that is to your fellow officers, the better. All right?”

“I can take care of myself,” Lugo said.

“Yeah, I know. You’re a cop.”

He waited for her to roll over and turn her back on him before closing his own eyes and trying for sleep.

12

The minute Lilly Tennell caught sight of Little Pete Thorogood, Gunner knew he was going to hear about it.

“Look. Why you always have to conduct your business with this man in
my
place?” she demanded, talking about the neighborhood hot weapons dealer like he wasn’t even there. “Haven’t you got somewhere else you two fools can go?”

She was a businesswoman above all else, Lilly, and she was only thinking about the reputation of her establishment. As if the Acey Deuce weren’t known throughout the free world as one of the raunchiest and most unspectacular bars in existence.

“You’re very lucky I’m not a sensitive man, Lilly,” Little Pete said. But of course, looking as he did—like a thirteen-year-old beggar boy with a peach-fuzz beard growing on his face—that was precisely what he
did
resemble: a sensitive man.

Lilly wiped the counter in front of him with relish, just to show him how thick and massive her right arm—her fighting arm—still was. “I suppose you’re gonna want a drink,” the giant bartender said.

“Please.” Little Pete smiled at her, climbing up onto his stool the way a toddler would climb up and into a high chair.

Lilly edged off to the other end of the bar and got busy with his drink.

It was only a little after ten on a Tuesday morning, so they pretty much had the place to themselves. The only other patron in the building was an old homeless man named Mr. Cecil, who was over in a corner booth drinking coffee and working a crossword puzzle. Lilly’s coffee and the morning paper was Mr. Cecil’s daily reward for sweeping the Deuce’s floor at closing time the previous night, whenever he could find the time in his busy schedule to show up.

Gunner let Pete throw down a few swallows of his drink before he explained what he needed. The little man’s face didn’t betray much recognition as the story was being told, but when it was over he seemed to know more about it than Gunner did.

“I recall the product you’re talking about. Sure,” he said, nodding his head. “It was one semiauto rifle and four pistols. The semi was a big AR-seventy, I believe, and the pistols were all forty-fives. No. Scratch that. It was three forty-fives and a thirty-eight. Yeah.” He nodded his head again.

“It’s the thirty-eight I’m interested in,” Gunner said.

“Okay. I have to warn you right now, though—I didn’t handle any of the merchandise myself. And I’m not going to say who did. But anything I can tell you about the rest of it, I will. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,”

“Okay, then. Shoot.”

“Well, I think maybe we should make sure we’re talking about the right gun before we do anything else. What do you think?”

“I think, yeah. That makes sense to me. The piece I’m talking about was supposed to be a Ruger or a Rossi—something like that. Definitely not an S-and-W. Maybe an SP-one-oh-one, or an Eighty-fifty-one. Four-inch barrel, stainless steel. That sound like the one you had in mind?”

Gunner nodded. “Yeah. That’s it.” Dancing Fred’s revolver had been a modified Ruger SP-101. “But you can’t tell me who moved it. Is that right?”

“No.”

“But you do know who it was.”

“Yeah. I know. The individuals who actually lifted the product brought it around to me first, of course, but you know, I had to tell ’em to take it down the street. Because these fools tried to tell me the shit was genuine. Like I wouldn’t know a cap pistol when I saw one, right? So it got a little ugly, and they made some noise before leaving. You know, tellin’ me where they were gonna take the stuff, and how much they were gonna get for it. I just laughed.”

“And that’s where the stuff ended up? With this other buyer they mentioned?”

“That’s my information. Yeah.”

“Can you tell me what kind of business this individual runs? I mean, like who his customers are, what neighborhood he works out of—that sort of thing?”

“I can tell you he doesn’t cater to the kiddies. Man doesn’t believe in it.”

“No kids?”

“That’s right. No kids. He’s like me, in that respect: he’s scrupled. Both of us work to a strictly adult crowd. No minors allowed.”

“He couldn’t have made an exception in this case?”

“He could have. Yeah. But I don’t think so.” Little Pete shook his head.

“Then my boy must have gotten it secondhand,” Gunner said, more for his own benefit than Pete’s.
Yet another complication
, he thought to himself. To Pete, he said, “Listen. Any chance this guy would remember who the buyer was, you think? Is he that sharp? Or that conscientious?”

Little Pete shrugged. “Man, that’s hard to say. Only way I could know that would be to ask him.”

Gunner pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet and pinned it beneath the little man’s glass.

“Then go ask him,” he said. “Please.”

Little Pete lifted his glass just one more time before leaving.

An hour later, Lugo called Gunner at Mickey’s.

“The news isn’t good,” she said. He could hear heavy traffic roaring past the phone booth she was using.

Gunner grimaced, saying a silent prayer. “Washington’s prints aren’t on the gun,” he said.

“No. They aren’t. They found a few latents on it, all right—Dancing Fred’s and that maniac Sulky’s, of course, plus a few others they couldn’t identify—but that was about it. How did you know?”

“Just a lucky guess.” He sighed. “It would’ve been too much like getting a break, having the kid’s prints turn up on the gun.”

“Yeah. I guess it would have, huh?”

Gunner didn’t answer her.

“Helluva coincidence, though. Having somebody dump that gun in the same alley where Maggie shot Washington.”

“Coincidence?”

“Yeah. Coincidence. What else would you call it? I mean, we’ve proven it wasn’t his, right?”

“So it wasn’t his. That doesn’t mean somebody else didn’t use it that night.”

“Somebody else? What somebody else?”

“I don’t know. Another kid, maybe. Or one of those crack dealers you talked about the other day, the ones you say are always hanging around over there. How should I know who it was?”

“But there
was
no other kid. All Maggie and I ever saw were Washington and Ford. And a dealer—” She left the sentence incomplete.

“What?”

“Well, if there’d been a dealer there, somebody would have seen him. Either Dancing Fred, or one of the other witnesses. Right?”

“Dancing Fred? Dancing Fred wouldn’t have seen shit. He didn’t arrive on the scene until just before you did, well after the fact of Washington’s shooting. Remember? He told us that. And as for the other witnesses …”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to clue you in on a little secret: I don’t think any of
them
saw shit, either. All their colorful testimony to the contrary.”

“You’re saying they were all lying?”

“Not exactly. I’m just saying I wouldn’t bet a dime that any of them were telling the truth.”

“I don’t know. It sounds like you’re reaching, to me.”

“Okay. So I’m reaching.”

“I mean, hey, nobody wants to believe your client’s story more than me, but if Washington didn’t touch the gun, he didn’t touch the gun. Why start making wild assumptions about someone else being there to use the gun that night just because you can’t place it in Washington’s hands?”

“Because I don’t believe in coincidences that big. That’s why. There’s no way somebody living on that block just happened to toss a piece filled with blanks into the garbage the same week Washington was shot. No way.”

“Why not? Stranger things have happened. I mean, I admit the timing’s a little weird, but so what? Could be the person who owned the piece had just that week found out what it was—a theatrical prop gun just a little more dangerous than a toy—and decided to chuck it out with their regular trash. People do that sort of thing all the time, we find broken and dysfunctional weapons in people’s garbage every day.”

Gunner didn’t say anything.

“But, hey, it’s your case, right? You pursue it the way you want to pursue it,” Lugo said.

“Thanks. I will.”

“So. Where do you go from here, you don’t mind my asking?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to have to get back to you on that.” He wanted to get off the phone.

“I’d appreciate it if you would,” Lugo said. “Because none of this is any of my business, I know, but now that I’ve sort of been drawn into it … Well, I’d just kind of like to stay informed of your progress, that’s all.”

“Sure. No problem.”

Lugo fell silent for a moment. “You talk to your lady friend, yet?”

The sudden change of subject threw Gunner off balance a little. “No. Why would I? To confess I bored another woman to tears last night?”

“No. I just thought … you might have wanted to check in with her. So to speak.”

“I suppose you’d like to stay informed about that, too.”

It was a lousy thing to say, but Lugo didn’t bother to tell him so.

She just said a quick “fuck you” and hung up in his face.

Gunner caught up to Charlene Woodberry at the laundromat. He’d found her Dalton Avenue address in the phone book and paid the manager of her apartment building five dollars to suggest a few places where she might be when no one came to her door. He really couldn’t blame her for not wanting to be home; her apartment building was a smoke-and roach-filled firetrap and her landlord was a tipsy old snoop with sour breath.

As luck would have it, though, the old snoop had given Gunner his money’s worth; the laundromat had been the first place she’d told Gunner to look. It was over on Normandie and Forty-fifth Street, and like all the inner-city laundromats he had ever known, was as warm as a brick oven and as crowded as a rush-hour bus. The sound of heavy dryers and overloaded washing machines at work was overpowering.

Most of the people in attendance here were Hispanics, but among them were three middle-aged black women who seemed to fit the vague description of Woodberry Gunner’s fiver had also purchased from her landlord. For a brief moment, he thought about standing on a chair and shouting out her name, just to see if such a shortcut would work, but the din ringing in his ears quickly ruled that out. So he did things the hard way instead, and approached each woman one at a time, bracing himself for attack should any one of them misunderstand his intentions.

The first woman he tried the name on shook it off with a smile, but the second one nodded her head in recognition, with all the reluctance of an embezzler admitting her crime to the boss. She was a tiny, oddly constructed woman, full in the hips but thin as baling wire everywhere else, and she looked like she’d withstood all the bad news her heart could take.

Gunner noticed this last right away, and so made his introductions as light and easy going as possible, handing her his ID to inspect up close, rather than just flashing it from a distance, and endeavoring to smile at the end of every sentence.

“You’re the one called me,” Woodberry said, handing the investigator his wallet back.

“Yes. You remember.”

Woodberry nodded and went back to the business of folding a basketful of clothes, keeping her eyes on him all the while. “You was out there at the prison talkin’ to Noah the day he died.”

“Actually, no. That’s not quite true. I never did get to see Noah that day.”

“Harriet’s lawyer says I shouldn’t talk to you.”

“That’s because Mr. Wiley is confused about who I represent in this matter, and why. He thinks I’m working for the police, but I’m not. Believe me.”

She turned her eyes away from his in order to reach for some more clothes, and to give herself a moment to decide how much she
wanted
to believe him. “So what you want with me?”

Gunner grabbed a handful of bath towels from her basket and surprised her by starting to fold them. “I want to know if anyone else was with Noah the night he and Lendell robbed that liquor store last September. Were they alone that night, or did they have someone else along for the ride?”

Woodberry shook her head at the question rapidly, as if to say he’d been crazy to think she could help him with it. “I don’t know that,” she said. “I don’t know nothin’ about what those boys did that night.”