You Can Die Trying (3 page)

“Well, that’s certainly a possibility, Mr. Flowers, but it’s not very likely. Judging from what little I can recall having heard about the man, what happened to McGovern was very likely inevitable, especially under the aegis of the LAPD’s new regime. Even if he were only
half
the monster everyone says he was, the odds are good he would have made a career-ending mistake of one sort or another eventually, with or without your help.”

“So?”

“So my advice to you is, go back to forgetting about it, because you couldn’t get the man reinstated now, even if your sense of guilt were warranted. The department invested a lot of time and effort into dismissing him, as you pointed out, and I don’t think they’d be particularly anxious to admit, eight months later, that it was all just a big mistake.”

“Reinstated?”

“That’s right. Reinstated. Isn’t that what you were thinking? That you could maybe get him his job back if you came forward now?”

Flowers eyed him curiously, seeming to be at a loss for words. “You don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

Flowers’s incredulous gaze turned into a glare. “That McGovern is
dead.
He committed suicide three days ago.”

He watched Gunner sit there like a dunce, having been made to feel like an uninformed idiot in the confines of his own home.

“The newspapers say he’d been working as a night watchman for the last few months, and was watching a stereo store out in Hollywood when he caught a man trying to rob the place early Friday morning. The man says McGovern caught him sneaking out the back door with his arms full of portable TVs, then just froze up. Turned his own gun on himself and blew his brains out, without ever having said so much as a word.”

He waited to see how Gunner would react to that, but Gunner had nothing to say.

“It sounds crazy, but I can see him doing it,” Flowers said. “Because I’ve seen the thief’s picture in the paper, and on TV, and he’s a black man not much bigger or taller than the Washington boy was when he died. A
black man
, Mr. Gunner. Do you follow what I’m saying?”

Now Gunner remembered. He had caught a few words of a television news report announcing McGovern’s death the day after it had happened, Friday, but not enough to identify McGovern as the pathologically violent cop the LAPD had so uncharacteristically raked over the coals back in early November. It would have been easy to miss this latest chapter of the ex-cop’s story entirely, as McGovern had picked the start of the Fourth of July weekend to reenter the headlines, and in competition with the usual glut of holiday car wrecks, spectacular fireworks displays, and drug-related homicides, coverage of his suicide had received the short shrift such poor timing deserved.

“The police are certain it was suicide?” Gunner asked Flowers.

Again, Flowers nodded. “They say they are. They say it was the would-be thief himself who called them to the scene, and they admit there’s no way he would have done something like that unless McGovern died just the way he says he did. Besides, they know what happened to McGovern eight months ago better than anybody. If I can picture him killing himself under those circumstances, I’m sure they can, too.”

Gunner nodded his head, thinking along the same lines. Other than his general build, the thief probably bore no more real resemblance to Lendell Washington than Flowers did—but it had likely been Washington’s face McGovern had thought he was seeing that night, all the same.

“I’m not going to try and tell you that I feel sorry for the man, Mr. Gunner. I think he got exactly what he deserved, when you get right down to it. Trouble is, he got it for all the wrong reasons, and I can’t help but feel like I’m to blame for that.”

Gunner shook his head and said, “Don’t flatter yourself. What you said about Chief Bowden earlier was right on the mark. He’s been looking for an opportunity to prove himself to the black community, and the Lendell Washington shooting was it. His boys would have probably treated you like someone reporting a UFO sighting had you approached them earlier in McGovern’s defense.”

“That’s beside the point,” Flowers said indignantly. “Whether or not I could have done McGovern any good isn’t what matters to me. What is is that I didn’t do what I knew was right, and only because I was ordered not to.”

Gunner raised an eyebrow, not sure he had heard this last correctly. “Ordered?”

Flowers reached behind his right hip for his wallet, drew a folded sheet of white paper from its billfold section, and, opening the note meticulously, handed it over to Gunner.

“Read this,” he said.

It had the distinctive look of a blackmail note. Somebody had clipped mismatching characters out of newspapers and magazines and pasted them haphazardly together to form a succinct and crude message:

DEAR UNCLE:

WHY DONT YOU SIDE WITH THE BROTHERS FOR ONCE. DONT

NOBODY BUT US KNOWS YOU WAS THERE. LET THE FUCKING

PIG BURN AND YOU WONT GET HURT.

“I found that in my mailbox two days after the Washington boy was shot. It came just like that: no envelope, no address, no postmark. I figured whoever it was must have just come by the house and dropped it in the box the night before.”

“Any idea who it could have been?”

“No. I never told anybody I was there, remember?”

“So it had to be someone who saw you near the alley that night.”

“Yes.”

“And knew who you were.”

“Yes.”

“This the only note you received?”

“The only note, yes. But I got a phone call a day later, in the evening, early. This man asked me if I’d gotten his message. The message he’d left in my mailbox, he said.”

“You didn’t recognize the voice?”

“No. I’d never heard it before.”

“Go on.”

“Man was brief and to the point. He said he knew who I was, and what I was. He kept calling me ‘Uncle.’ Uncle this, and Uncle that.” Flowers’s eyes narrowed with anger as the memory came back to him. “He said he knew where my daughter Kisha went to school. Martin Luther King Elementary School; room nine. He told me what color clothes she had on that day and how many braids were in her hair.” He was looking at Gunner, but seeing something beyond him that wasn’t really there; a what-might-have-been nightmare that had come too close to reality for comfort. “Maybe I would have kept quiet about what I saw that night anyway, I don’t know. Like I said, I was no friend of Jack McGovern’s. But I’m a conservative man, Mr. Gunner. Too conservative for some people. If I told you I could never see myself helping a policeman in trouble, I’d be lying to you. I think cops have a thankless job, a difficult job, and most of them are all right. I don’t think that opinion makes me a cop-lover, but to some people, it does. Apparently, this man is one of them.”

He breathed a deep sigh, resolutely pushing on, and said, “If they had let me make up my own mind about going or not going to the police, I wouldn’t have had to come here tonight. No matter what I’d decided to do, I would’ve been able to live with it, without any regrets. Only, I didn’t get to make up my own mind. Somebody followed my little girl to school one day and made up my mind for me. And that’s why I need your help.”

Gunner waited for him to spell it out.

“I want you to undo the damage my cowardice has done, Mr. Gunner. I want you to find out what really happened in that alley the night Lendell Washington was killed, and I want you to tell the whole world about it.”

Gunner still didn’t say anything.

“The man who sent me that note obviously wanted McGovern to lose his badge over something he didn’t do,” Flowers went on, “and he used me to make that happen. He took advantage of my insecurities as a man and bought my silence—
cheap.
If I let him get away with that, now that it’s cost a man his life, I’ll be everything he accuses me of being—and worse.”

He gave Gunner a good look at the determination he’d brought into the house with him, and Gunner found himself suitably impressed. Appraising the older man with more professional interest than he had shown him to this point, it occurred to Gunner that Flowers fit the profile of a man who might have had to deal with being thought of as an Uncle Tom all of his adult life, and he knew what that yoke was like to bear. Being made to feel answerable to the whole of one’s own race was a burden few white men ever had to shoulder, yet it was a black man’s birthright from day one. To wander off too far from the beaten path of conformity, daring to expand upon what some people insisted were the unalterable parameters of “blackness,” was to purchase the guilt of treason, and for some that guilt could be so incessant as to be crippling. Gunner himself was no such victim, but he had felt the sting of the phenomenon more than once, enough to know its symptoms when he saw them, as he realized he was seeing them now.

Unfortunately, being able to commiserate with Flowers did not preclude Gunner from recognizing the absurdity of his request. One was always risking a broken neck playing cops with cops, no matter what you were trying to prove or who you were trying to vindicate, and only morons didn’t know it.

Gunner was no moron.

“Mr. Flowers,” he said, making his best effort to be delicate, “I’m afraid I can’t help you. I doubt that anyone could, frankly.”

“I don’t understand,” Flowers said.

“Look. I can appreciate your motives in all this, but there really isn’t anything you can do. The book on Jack McGovern was closed a long time ago, and that’s probably just how the cops want to keep it.”

“So?”

“So that means the poor devil who takes your case isn’t going to have their cooperation. In fact, he’s likely to have them leaning on him every inch of the way. Hard.”

“I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life, Mr. Gunner. You don’t have to tell me how hostile the police can be toward private citizens looking into police affairs.”

“Then you must know that a man could get himself seriously hurt asking them the kinds of questions you want asked.”

“I know that, yes. But I understood that was the nature of your work. Taking risks, I mean.”

“Excuse me?”

“I was told you weren’t easily intimidated. That you’d taken cases like this before, and done well.”

“Told by whom?”

“I spoke to several different people. Ex-clients and the like. They all spoke very highly of you, Mr. Gunner.”

“My publicists always have glowing things to say about me when someone else is buying the drinks, Mr. Flowers.”

“Then you’re not interested in helping me. Is that what you’re saying?”

“This isn’t a matter of my being interested or disinterested. It’s a matter of my being
capable.”
The investigator shrugged. “To be perfectly honest with you, my present client list wouldn’t have three names on it if I added two. The timing of your offer, at least, couldn’t be better for me.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, I can’t guarantee you anything. Nobody could. Best effort is the most you can expect on a case like this, and you’d be insane not to understand that from the gate.”

“All right.”

Gunner paused, realizing with some dismay that he was sounding more and more like a man about to accept Flowers’s case, rather than one trying to politely decline it. “Granted, it should help that the intent here is to try and
clear
a cop of misconduct, for a change, but that’s only if I—that is, your investigator—can get anybody to believe for one minute that that’s the case. And that won’t be easy. Cops are a skeptical bunch by nature, anyway, but their antennae don’t really go up until they hear the words ‘I’m on your side’ uttered by a perfect stranger.”

Flowers just nodded, suddenly very agreeable. He was waiting for Gunner to get to the bottom line.

“What if I prove that the police are right, and you’re wrong? Have you thought about that?”

“I’ve thought about it. Naturally. But since I’m not wrong, it doesn’t worry me. I saw the kid fire on McGovern, Mr. Gunner. Twice. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

He was knocking down every wall Gunner was throwing up before him, determinedly refusing to withdraw his plea for help. Down to the last poisoned arrow in his quiver, Gunner went for broke and said, “All right. Let’s assume I agree to be your man. You want me to play twenty questions with the LAPD, you’re going to have to foot the bill for some upgraded health and dental insurance. You may as well understand that right now.”

“How much will you need?”

“A fifteen-hundred-dollar retainer up front, then a-hundred-and-fifty dollars a day after that. Plus expenses. You have that kind of money?”

“Yes.” Flowers never flinched, just nodded his head once more.

Gunner wanted to ask how Flowers could have come into that kind of wealth—he didn’t exactly look like someone a banker would race down the street to meet, deposit slip in hand—but the investigator couldn’t think of a way to phrase the question that any self-respecting adult wouldn’t find insulting. So instead, he merely asked, “You’re sure this thing means that much to you?”

Again, Flowers’s head inched up and down affirmatively. “I’ve had eight months and all weekend to think about it,” he said. “I’m not going to turn back now.”

He was giving Gunner one final chance to bow out gracefully, his eyes issuing a silent promise that he would bear no grudges if the investigator did. For a split second, Gunner almost had the sense that he really had a choice in the matter—but of course, that was only a hopeless delusion. What he had told Flowers about the sorry state of his client list had been no overstatement; he needed the work, and badly.

And so common sense lost yet another duel with practicality. The wide berth he was always so careful to give the police in Los Angeles was about to be dispensed with, and all because he didn’t know where his next meal was going to come from.

Chalk up another one for hunger, Gunner thought to himself. The great motivator.

“You’re going to have to tell me everything, starting at the very beginning,” he told Flowers, trying to sound optimistic. “But first, I’m going to need another beer.”

He stood up and headed for the kitchen.