You Can Die Trying (5 page)

3

“Aaron, I don’t think I want to see you again for a while,” Claudia Lovejoy said, flat out.

“I’ve been getting that impression.”

“I just think we’ve been moving too fast. I need some time alone. To decide if this is really what I want or not. Please.”

“Would have been a nice gesture on your part to tell me as much over the phone, don’t you think? I’ve been trying to call you for two weeks,” Gunner said. “It shouldn’t have been necessary for me to stake your place out like a goddamn process server just to hear you say good-bye.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I just didn’t want to be talked out of doing this anymore.”

“May I come in, at least?”

She stayed where she was, blocking the front door to her Lynwood home like a diminutive sentry, and shook her head with authority, her mind made up. “No. That wouldn’t be a good idea.”

It was the third day in a week that he had come knocking at her door, but only the first time she had rewarded him with an answer. Now that he had officially started in on the Mitchell Flowers case, he had better things to do with his time, but after leaving Matthew Poole in the restaurant parking lot fifteen minutes ago, he had found himself drawn here like a moth to a flame, despising his inability to wait her out all the while.

It only made things worse that, as always, she was beautiful, maybe the most beautiful black woman he had ever been fortunate enough to know. Black hair combed straight back on her head, scattering light like a clear-water lake in the sun, and with eyes as green and piercing as backlit emeralds, she should have been the easiest woman in the world to say yes to, but Gunner wasn’t going to go away just because she issued the command. He was in too deep to be that obliging.

They had been seeing each other now for almost a year, and up until two weeks ago, when she had suddenly stopped taking his phone calls, Gunner had thought they were leading up to something substantive, not just killing time. It had mattered little to him that killing time was all she had ever claimed she could offer him; she had some wild ideas about the nature of his work and the broad scope of temptations it made available to him, and he figured her reluctance to acknowledge the long-term possibilities of their relationship was a simple matter of mistrust and nothing more. She was a devout Christian and he was a pitifully dormant excuse for one, and it was true that that occasionally worked against them, but he considered this, too, a negligible thing upon which to base a breakup. To hear him tell it, in fact, her cautionary approach toward him was wholly unjustified—though he knew that was a lie.

Now he was paying the price for not accepting the fact earlier.

Claudia had been less than a month into widowhood when the two first met, just a fair-skinned, thirty-two-year-old beauty in black whose husband had been murdered in a drive-by shooting Gunner’s gangbanging client at the time had been accused of committing, and from the start, Gunner had spent nearly as much time and energy wooing her as he had proving someone other than his client had killed her husband. Without granting her a moment to think about it, like an obnoxious insurance salesman too dense to realize he’s shown up at a bad time, Gunner had wedged his foot in Claudia’s door and invited himself into her life knowing full well he was taking advantage of a woman too disoriented to fend him off. Had he been a smarter man—or at least, one less romantically deprived—he might have understood that, sooner or later, Claudia was going to realize that he had moved in on her while her judgment had been seriously impaired, well before her descent from grief could reach its own natural conclusion, and that she would consequently lay down some nasty skidmarks applying the brakes to their affair. But Gunner had never come to any such understanding. He had been too consumed with the false optimism of a lonely man on the brink of successful monogamy for that.

“Aaron, please. Try to understand. This isn’t your fault. You haven’t done anything wrong. This is just something I feel I have to do.”

He chuckled in spite of himself, seething.

“I should have never agreed to start seeing you in the first place. I must have been insane,” she said, angered by his obvious intention to make what she was doing feel as cold and inhumane as possible.

“Forget it. I’m the jackass who wouldn’t take no for an answer. If anybody’s to blame for this, I am.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, you said that already. You’ve been sorry ever since you came to the door.”

“I want some time to think. That’s all. If you want to make your own assumptions about how I’ll feel about you afterward, that’s your business.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re giving up too easily. You’re acting like I’ve told you I don’t love you, when that’s not what I’ve been trying to say at all. What I am trying to say is that I think I
am
in love with you—and I’m not so sure I
want
to be. Maybe what we’ve had together up to now is real, I don’t know. It
feels
real enough. But you caught me right after Darrel’s death, before I ever had a chance to really come to grips with being alone, and I can’t help but wonder why I’m as inclined to stay with you now as I am. Because being with you is right—or because it’s
safe
?”

“It makes no difference to me either way,” Gunner lied. Poorly.

“Maybe not today, no,” Claudia said. “But I think in time, it would make a difference. To both of us.”

Gunner didn’t say anything. He knew she was right.

“All I’m doing is testing my instincts. That’s all. I’m just trying to convince myself that what they’re telling me about you, about us, can be trusted. And I’ve decided I don’t want to go on sleeping in your bed until I know, one way or the other. I’ve done that too long already.” She started to say she was sorry again, but her lips had barely parted when she caught herself. She let a little shrug pass for another apology instead.

They stood there on her front porch and passed a moment frozen in time silently, painfully. “And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” Gunner finally asked her, making the question sound almost rhetorical. “Take three cold showers a day and wait for the phone to ring?”

Claudia shook her head. “You’re free to do whatever you like. I can’t very well make demands on your behavior when I can’t promise you anything in return.”

“No. You can’t.”

“But I’d like to think, if I were to call, at some time in the future …” She shrugged again, not really wanting to finish the thought. “It’d be nice to catch you at home.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And it wouldn’t hurt if you were alone.” She tried to smile.

Gunner thought about it, never letting his eyes leave her face, then nodded solemnly and said, “Sure.” He leaned down to kiss her softly on the mouth, his left hand bracing her chin, and then pulled away before she could beat him to it. “Take all the time you need, Claudia. I’m not going anywhere.”

He turned away and started down the walk toward his car, wondering if she was fool enough to believe he’d really meant that.

The next morning, whoever the cop was working the phones for the LAPD’s Southwest Division made a liar out of Matthew Poole. He answered Gunner’s questions like somebody trying to win twenty-five thousand dollars and a new Buick Le Sabre on a TV game show, and asked precious few questions of his own. Gunner just told him he was a private license working a case and the man opened up like he’d spoken the secret password. A uniform with three stripes on his sleeve by the name of Harry Kupchak was the officer Gunner was looking for, the congenial cop said, but Kupchak was out in the field and could not be reached by phone. Gunner left a brief message for Kupchak to call him at Mickey’s, then recited the number and said thanks, actually sorry that there was no way to pass the remarkably friendly desk sergeant a fiver for his kindness.

Kupchak himself, as it turned out, was another story.

He never picked up the phone to call. Gunner wasted half the day watching Mickey Moore cut hair before he figured out that his phone wasn’t going to ring. He tried to reach Kupchak again at the Southwest station a few minutes after four, and this time the patrolman was in.

He had a voice like marbles passing through a meat grinder, and his disposition was worse.

“Yeah?”

“This Harry Kupchak?”

“I came to the phone, didn’t I? Who the hell is this?”

“My name is Aaron Gunner. I’m a private investigator. Local. Didn’t you get my message?”

“Gee, I’m sorry. My secretary must’ve misplaced it. What the hell’s a private ticket want with me?”

“I understand Jack McGovern was under your command before his dismissal from the force last November. Is that right?”

Kupchak let the silent phone line echo in Gunner’s ear before answering. “Jack McGovern? Never heard of ’im.”

“That’s not what I’ve been told,” Gunner said.

“Fuck what you’ve been told. Cut the bullshit, pal, all right? You’re no private license, you’re a goddamn reporter. Who’re you trying to kid?”

He hung up.

Gunner sat there at his desk, holding the phone’s receiver away from his face like something that had just bit him and spit in his eye for good measure.

Maybe Poole knew what he was talking about, after all.

Fifteen minutes later, Poole was on the phone.

“I don’t think that did you a whole lot of good,” he said, “you wanna know the truth.”

“You talked to him?”

“Yeah. I talked to him. He wanted to know what kind of lubricant we use. K-Y or somethin’ more exotic.”

“Sticks and stones, lieutenant.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Question is, did he believe you? About me, I mean.”

“I think so. Who knows? The guy doesn’t know me from Adam, for all he knows I’m the media’s resident pimp down here.”

“If he’s worried about that, he’ll ask around about you. Sooner or later he’ll figure out you’re okay. Right?”

“Depending on who he talks to,” Poole said pessimistically.

Gunner said thanks and good-bye before Poole could hear him crack up at that.

“All right. So you’re a private ticket, so what?”

Kupchak’s voice hadn’t changed much in five hours. Maybe it was only the phone, Gunner thought, but he still sounded like a handsaw attacking the hull of a battleship. He also sounded like he was calling from a bar, and not merely because the ambiance of the place appealed to him. He’d obviously had a few drinks before calling.

“I was about to give up on you,” Gunner said, and it was true. He had had the barbershop all to himself for three hours now, since Mickey had locked up just after six, and he was getting tired of walking around the little shop’s dark confines like a ghost.

“Your pal Poole says you’re out to prove that Maggie got fucked over by the department, that he killed that kid in self-defense, just like he always said.”

“Maggie? You mean McGovern?”

“That’s what we all called Jack. Maggie. Don’t change the goddamn subject, Mr. Gunner. You want me to hang up again?”

“Poole told you right. Sort of. My client’s hired me to take another look at the Washington kid’s shooting, to see if maybe McGovern was telling the truth about how it went down. That’s not the same as being hired to prove McGovern got screwed by the department, but I guess it’s fairly close.”

“So who’s your client?”

The investigator had prepared himself for the question while waiting for Kupchak to call. Without a moment’s hesitation, he said, “A local citizen with a guilty conscience. Somebody who was there the night Washington died and saw the whole thing, but never came forward to issue a statement.”

Kupchak fell silent. In the relative hush his grating voice left behind, Gunner could hear someone in the background curse a jukebox loudly, followed by the sounds of a chair tipping over and glass breaking. Gunner could almost smell the spilt beer flowing across the hardwood floor. “This client of yours wouldn’t be an Afro-American like yourself, would he?” Kupchak asked at last.

“That make some kind of difference?”

“To me? No way. Just thought I’d ask, is all.” Incredibly, Kupchak’s laugh was harder to take than his speaking voice. “Okay, so maybe it don’t matter what color your client happens to be. I’ve got an open mind. You say this person was there the night Maggie shot that kid, is that right?”