You Can Die Trying (21 page)

“You don’t know who else they might have been with?”

“No.”

“Noah didn’t have any other friends who might have gone in for such a thing? Or Lendell, maybe?”

“No. I didn’t
know
none of Noah’s ‘friends.’ I didn’t
like
none of Noah’s friends. Lendell was the only child I ever wanted Noah runnin’ with, an’ I didn’t know none of his friends, neither. You wanna know about Lendell’s friends, you gonna have to ask Harriet about that, not me.”

Gunner shook his head. “I tried that. I called her at home just before I came over here, but her lawyer friend Wiley’s convinced her not to talk to me.”

“Well, look. That ain’t my problem, is it?”

“Mrs. Woodberry—”

“Look, I’m tellin’ you: I don’t know nothin’ about what you’re askin’ me. I didn’t know none of Noah’s friends, ’cause I didn’t
wanna
know none of ’em. I didn’t wanna know their names, their faces … nothin’. ’Cause all them little fools he liked to hang with, couldn’t none of’em do a damn thing right but die. Or lie, or steal, or kill innocent—”

She stopped, suddenly aware that she was furious. Looking away from Gunner once more, she pretended to watch as her trembling hands smoothed out the wrinkles on a freshly folded bed sheet sitting atop a pile of warm clothes beside her.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gunner,” she said. “But I can’t help you. My son was a stranger to me, see, and I was a stranger to him. I was his mother, I know, but I made up my mind a long time ago to mind my own business where Noah was concerned. You understand?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Good.”

“And I can’t say that I blame you for feeling that way. I’m sure it must have been very hard for you, trying to raise a boy the right way, only to see others come along and lead him down a wayward path.”

“Yes. It
was
very hard.”

“And now he’s dead. They talked him into all the trouble they could, and then they killed him.”

“Who?”

“His friends. His homies. All the kids you say you know nothing about.”

“Noah wasn’t killed by one of his ‘homies.’ Noah didn’t even know that boy!”

“Maybe not him, no. But I’ll bet he knew whoever it was that put that kid up to killing him.”

“What?”

“I’m talking about murder for hire, Mrs. Woodberry. A contract hit. I don’t think that kid killed your son just to get in good with his friends. I think he was told to do it. I think Noah was murdered because somebody he knew didn’t like the idea of him talking to me about the night his cousin Lendell died.”

Woodberry was just staring at him, trying to understand what all this was leading up to.

“Lendell didn’t shoot at that cop from that alley that night,” Gunner said. “But somebody else did. I’ve found the gun they used; I know. What I don’t know is who this person was. That’s why I’m here, talking to you.”

“But I
told
you—”

“I know what you told me. You didn’t know any of Noah’s friends.”

“That’s right.”

“But you must have seen a few of them around from time to time. And heard their names mentioned on occasion.”

Woodberry didn’t say anything.

“All I’m asking you to do is give the subject a little more thought, Mrs. Woodberry. That’s all. You’re the only one I can talk to about this, like I said. If you don’t want to do it for my sake, fine. But at least do it for Noah’s. Please.”

Woodberry stared at him a brief moment longer, then nodded her head, her eyes telling him that, even as she did so, she fully expected to be betrayed.

“All right. Think,” Gunner told her. “On the day of the robbery itself. Who was Noah hanging around with, and what were they talking about? It was a long time ago, I know, but try to remember.”

Noah Ford’s mother looked off into space, her gaze directed at one of the impotent ceiling fans moving cigarette smoke and hot air around above their heads, and started folding clothes again, trying to see details in her mind’s eye that were obscured by ten months’ worth of random memory and minutiae.

“Noah came home from school late that day,” she said in time. “And he didn’t have nobody with him. ’Least, he didn’t bring nobody inside.”

It took Gunner a moment to figure out she was finished. “And then?”

She was staring at him again.

“After he came home from school. What did he do then? Did he stay in most of the night, or go out and come back again? What?”

“Oh. He stayed home. He was home all night, with me, ’til Lendell called him. Then he went out.”

“Lendell called him?”

“Yes.”

“What time was this?”

“I don’t know. ’Bout ten or eleven, I guess.”

“You know for certain it was Lendell?”

“Yes.” She nodded her head. “It was him.”

“How do you know? Did you speak to him?”

“Yes. I was the one answered the phone. And I heard Noah use his name a couple times, while they was talkin’.”

“Then you heard their conversation.”

“I heard some of it. Yeah. I wasn’t tryin’ to listen to ’em, or nothin’, but Noah was on the phone in the kitchen, ’cause the phone in the bedroom was broke ’round that time, and I could hear ’im from the livin’ room where I was sittin’. A little bit, anyways.”

“And they were talking about the robbery?”

“I didn’t know what they was talkin’ about. All I could tell was, Noah was tryin’ to talk Lendell into doin’ somethin’ he didn’t wanna do. That’s all.”

“Did he mention any other names besides Lendell’s that you can recall?” Gunner asked.

Woodberry thought about it for a minute, then shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“Try, Mrs. Woodberry. Please. This could be the kid I’m looking for.”

The black woman nodded and entered her contemplative state again, letting her eyes wander about the laundromat as she folded clothes unconsciously, yet flawlessly.

“Ben,” she said eventually.

Ben?

“Yes. That was it. Ben. Don’t ask me what he said ’bout this Ben, though, ’cause all I caught was the name. Ben.”

Gunner quickly scratched the name down in his notebook. “Did Noah know a kid named Ben? Or you?”

Woodberry shook her head again. “I don’t. And if he did, that was the first I ever heard of it.”

“Could it be a nickname for somebody you
do
know? Is that possible?”

“I don’t know. It could be, I guess. People be havin’ all kinds of nicknames these days, especially kids. But ‘Ben’? What kind of nickname would that be, ‘Ben’? Ben’s just short for Benjamin, right?”

“Generally speaking, yeah.”

Woodberry shook her head again. “I don’t know no Benjamin,” she said.

“Maybe it was somebody Noah’d just met. You know, a friend of a friend, or something.”

Woodberry shrugged once more. “Maybe.”

“How could I find out about that, do you think? Who could I ask?”

He was trying to be clever, asking her in a roundabout way for the names of Noah’s other friends when she’d already told him she didn’t know any. But he got away with it.

“There’s an older boy, used to come ’round the house,” Woodberry said, the flatness of her tone informing Gunner that she was playing along with his game, rather than succumbing to it. “Noah called him Duck. Maybe he could help you.”

Again, Gunner recorded the name in his notebook, nodding. “Duck,” he said out loud. “You wouldn’t happen to know—”

“No,” Woodberry snapped. “I wouldn’t.”

Gunner looked up at her, and immediately became aware that he had pushed her as far as she was ready and willing to go. He put his pen and notebook away and said, “That’s okay. I’ll ask around the neighborhood for him. Maybe even go down to the schools.”

Woodberry didn’t even pretend to care.

Gunner offered her a hurried thank you and stayed around just long enough to help carry her laundry out to her car.

He never did find Duck.

He spent all of what was left of the day trying, dropping the kid’s name from one end of town to the next, but no one big or small ever offered him a hint of recognition for his trouble. The closest he came to a “Duck” was an overweight nine-year-old named “Quack,” who’d earned his unenviable nickname more for the way he walked than the way he talked. When his feet got going beneath him, the poor kid waddled from side to side like a toy tugboat lilting on a choppy sea.

It was around seven in the evening when Gunner finally gave it up and went home, to shower, take the load off his feet, and eat dinner, in no particular order.

He ended up eating dinner last, a fast-food pseudo-Mexican affair that he wolfed down lukewarm as he watched one of those tabloid news shows on television. The program gave him all the suggestive sex and violence he could have asked for to hold his attention, but all he really did was aim his gaze in the screen’s direction and watch the images projected upon it move and change shape as he thought about the case he was working, instead.

It had taken him longer than it should have to embrace the idea, he knew, but he was finally convinced that someone other than Lendell Washington had fired the shots at Jack McGovern his client claimed to have seen the night of Washington’s death. It was the one theory that seemed to pull all the little odds and ends of the case together. Like the evasive answer Noah Ford had given him when he’d asked the kid whose idea the liquor store holdup had been:
“I don’t know whose idea it was.…’Cause, like, it wasn’t his idea, an’ it wasn’t my idea. Right? We just did it.”

And it also seemed to put a different spin on what Washington could have meant when, upon seeing his cousin Ford take off from the liquor store in a direction opposite the alley behind Forty-second Street, he had allegedly screamed, “You’re goin’ the wrong way!” Deanna Lugo had assumed the kid had had his and Ford’s homes in mind at the time, but if he’d been thinking about the alley, instead—where a shy or frightened third party to the pair’s little late night holdup was patiently awaiting their return in the dark.…

More and more, it seemed obvious that that was how it had all gone down. It explained everything—even the missing portion of the liquor store cash McGovern had been accused of lifting from Washington’s body.

So now Gunner felt he knew the likely
how
of it; he just didn’t know the
who.
He had a probable name to work with—
Ben
—and a possible acquaintance in somebody named
Duck
—but that was all. No sex, no age, no height or weight. Finding this kid armed with a profile like that was going to be like searching for a marshmallow in a snowstorm. At least, that was the way things looked to Gunner before the phone rang a little after ten o’clock.

And Little Pete Thorogood said hello.

It only took ten hours of surveillance the next day, Wednesday, for Gunner to know he was following the right man.

“My man tells me the person you’re lookin’ for is a young, junior executive-type brother,” Little Pete had said the night before. “You know, a Buppie. Nice hair, nice shoes; wearing a C-and-R suit that fits like a second skin. You know the kind I mean.”

Gunner did.

“This Buppie, he told my man he wanted something just for show. Something he could flash if he got in a tight pinch, to discourage anybody who might mistake him for an easy mark. He said he wasn’t looking to hurt anybody with it, and my man says he knew that was for real, because the Buppie didn’t look like he could’ve pulled the trigger on you if you had one hand on his balls and the other on his throat. He was harmless.

“So what my man does is, he tells the guy, I have just the piece for you.’ Right? And he sells him the thirty-eight, the cap gun, without ever tellin’ him it’s not for real. You know, as a gag. Tryin’ to be funny. He says he even opened the chamber and rolled the cylinder around so the guy could see the shells, to make him think he was getting a full load, on the house. And the guy bought it. Can you believe that shit?”

Gunner could.

He had only once seen the man he was now following, and then very briefly, but his quarry couldn’t have fit the description little Pete had given him for the original owner of Dancing Fred’s revolver better if Pete had been standing right beside him with a magnifying glass. Still, Gunner might not have made the connection had he not already known the name Noah Ford had apparently pinned on this individual, no doubt because the irreverent little bastard thought it was funny and disrespectful both at the same time: Ben.

As in
Uncle
Ben, the instant-rice king.

Or Uncle Pervis, as his better behaved nephew Lendell Washington had probably referred to him.

Gunner had traded his Cobra for his cousin Del’s inconspicuous Hyundai early Wednesday morning, then driven directly to Harriet Washington’s place. Pervis Hilton had emerged from the house about an hour later, just a few minutes past nine, and Gunner had been with him ever since. Driving an old Chevrolet Corvette, its orange fiberglass body lined with cracks and bad patches, Hilton had gone immediately to the Fox Hills Mall in Ladera Heights, where he disappeared through a rear door marked Employees Only. Gunner had had to wait until the mall opened up for customers at ten to pick him up again, but he found him easily enough, selling suits and slacks and overpriced silk handkerchiefs at Zeidler & Zeidler, the men’s clothing store. Gunner had caught a quick glimpse of Hilton within, then taken the escalator up to the mall’s second level, out of Hilton’s frame of view, to watch the store’s entrance from there.

There wasn’t anything to see until Hilton broke for lunch three hours later.

He had come out of the store and gone directly out to the parking lot and his car, stopping only at a women’s shoe store along the way to exchange double entendres with a gorgeous black salesgirl working within. Hollywood Park in Inglewood had just opened its gates an hour or so earlier, and Hilton and Gunner both made it there in time for the second race. Gunner followed Hilton’s lead in paying for general admission and then watched him go directly to a pari-mutuel window to lay down several bets, barely eyeing the track itself as he walked by. The investigator couldn’t see the denomination of the bills Hilton was handing the clerk from where he was standing, but he could tell Hilton wasn’t just wagering his lunch money, because he was keeping a close eye on the players in line behind him, as if he were worried somebody might see more of his transaction than it would be safe to allow them to see.