You Can Die Trying (6 page)

“Yes.”

“And they told you it all happened just the way Maggie said, that the Washington kid had a gun?”

“Yes.”

“They see the gun?”

“No. My client never got that close. But they saw Washington fire two shots at McGovern, from the back of the alley, before McGovern fired back.”

“Two shots, or three shots? Maggie said there’d been three.”

“No. That’s not what ‘Maggie’ said. He said there’d only been two shots, and my client says likewise. Quit trying to trip me up, Kupchak, I’m giving it to you straight.”

The patrolman let Gunner hear a few more brief snatches of the drunken horseplay going on around him, and then said, “I’d like to believe you, Gunner, but I don’t. Not about what you’re after, anyway. Sorry I can’t help you.”

He hung up again.

Gunner said some unkind things about the men and women in local law enforcement and then rushed home to a cold, unfriendly bed.

It was like flushing seven hours down the toilet.

That was how long he grappled with the expectation of sleep before he was ready to accept the fact that he was never going to get any. He was dog-tired physically, but his mind simply refused to shut down for the night; an army of scantily clad Claudia Lovejoys was at the controls, and they had all of his sensory inputs cranked over to the redline. By six o’clock Thursday morning, he was sick enough of staring at the back of his eyelids and the lifeless black profiles of his bedroom furniture to throw himself into an ice-cold shower and go back to work for Mitchell Flowers.

When he left the house a good fifteen minutes before seven, he knew exactly where he was going and what he was going to do, which for him was an all-too-infrequent departure from the norm. He hadn’t lain awake all night just to form a single idea, but he had a funny feeling this one could make all the lost hours pining over Claudia Lovejoy almost seem worthwhile.

Through a damp gray mist that was all Los Angeles could do to remind the native San Franciscans in its midst of the impenetrable black fog back home, Gunner led the pre-rush-hour charge along the northbound Harbor Freeway toward Hollywood, pushing the ’65 Ford Cobra convertible he was driving like a man with two speeding tickets already to his credit this year intent on collecting his third. Every now and then, the black man grew weary of treating the loud, red Cobra like an urban wimp-mobile and dared to open it up. This was one of those times.

He had been making good time up to now, but heavy traffic finally made a legitimate bid to collapse upon him as he reached the rolling parking lot where the Harbor and Hollywood freeways unloaded on one another. Some deft maneuvering and a brief, all-out sprint, however, got him past the congealing interchange and safely onto the northbound Hollywood, where he again assumed the role of point man for the onrushing mass of nine-to-fivers behind him. In short order he was in Hollywood proper, and he didn’t have to read the exit signs to know it. Here, in the dry and dusty shadow of the Hollywood Hills, there was nothing so innocuous as fog to blame for the poor visibility ahead. Only three hours after daybreak, smog had assumed its daily post in the heavens; it blotted out the sun and the true colors of the sky like a burnt orange veil of smoke, difficult to breathe and even harder to stomach.

Gunner turned on the radio and tried to remember what the wind had felt like on his face only ten miles back.

He eventually left the freeway at Highland and made his way to Fountain, where a florist shop called Arturo’s was located. He parked the car out front, totally ignoring the parking meter standing there, and went inside. Five minutes later, he was moving south on La Brea again, a dozen long-stemmed, red roses in a fancy gold lamé gift box sitting on the passenger seat beside him. It was almost eight o’clock.

He had to cruise along the northbound side of Santa Monica Boulevard, heading west, then reverse his field to La Cienega to peruse the southbound side of the streets before he found exactly what he was looking for. Half the citizens of Los Angeles had yet to peel their first eye open, yet the Santa Monica Strip skin trade was already open for business, and in earnest; there was an eclectic crush of male hustlers striking suggestive poses all along the boulevard, some dressed as men, some dressed as women, some only barely dressed at all. Still, for all the willing and able bodies from which he had to choose, Gunner knew the one he wanted the moment he set eyes on the sweet young thing.

She was a giant. The three-inch spiked heels she was wearing had nothing to do with it. She could have walked out into the street and stood in a pothole four inches deep, and she still would have passed for someone six foot two. She was as black as India ink and her ensemble was designed to match: black fishnet stockings, black shoes and handbag, black leather skirt and bustier. She filled out the last two with what appeared to be two parts flesh, one part foam padding, but her legs were the real thing.

She was lighting a thin gray cigarette with unassailable flair out in front of a XXX-rated movie theater when Gunner and the Cobra rolled to a stop at the curb. The car caught her attention immediately, but she didn’t start toward it until she was fully satisfied that the look on Gunner’s face was meant to be an invitation of some sort. Even then, she took her time coming over; the cigarette in her hand was half spent when she finally took her first step, grinning from ear to ear.

“Ummmm, ummmm, ummmm. That is the most beautiful car I have ever seen!”

She reached her free hand out to touch the paint, gingerly stroking the aluminum flesh of the door with five long-nailed fingers too squared off at the ends to be a woman’s. Gunner noticed it right away. Her voice was a giveaway, too, but only marginally; the hard, masculine edge to it, almost totally obscured by a smooth, mellifluous layer of camouflage, was an oddity you had to be listening for to catch.

“Were you going to offer me a ride?” the giant asked, finally redirecting her gaze, and the overplayed lust that came with it, from the car to the man who was driving it.

“That was going to be part of the deal, yeah,” Gunner said. “Are you free?”

The dense, coarse mass of fake black hair she was wearing swiveled on her head as she shook it from side to side. “Free, no. But reasonable. Very reasonable. What did you have in mind?”

“I thought we might discuss that on the way.”

The wig spun about atop her head again. “You thought wrong, honey. If I look that stupid to you, maybe you need to go home and get your glasses. Peaches don’t get in nobody’s car ’til she knows where she’s goin’, and what she’s gotta do when she gets there. That’s how I make a ‘deal.’” She flicked her cigarette into the street with some annoyance and, for the first time stopped grinning. “Now. Just what is it you want me to do for my …?” She waited for Gunner to fill in the blank, like any streetwalker with a full day’s experience on the job would have been careful to do.

“Twenty-five dollars,” Gunner obliged.

“Shit. It almost sounded like you said twenty-five dollars. Ain’t that ridiculous?”

“Okay. We’ll make it thirty.”

“Thirty. Thirty dollars. Now, what in the world could you be expectin’ me to do for that kind of money?”

Gunner opened the box sitting on the seat beside him and showed Peaches the roses. The buds were deep red and in full bloom, the water they had been sprayed with only moments ago still shining brilliantly on their open petals.

“I want you to give a man some flowers,” he said, smiling like a cat with a mouthful of the proverbial canary.

And thinking she could read his wicked little mind, Peaches smiled again, too.

4

Legend had it the kid’s name was Pokey, and that Pokey had been a sixteen-year-old high school dropout who was trying to get jumped into a neighborhood Crip set known as the Down Nines. The idea was to do something bold and audacious to impress his friends with his courage, but all he did in the end was make a name for himself as the dumbest little shithead in the ’hood. What else could you say about a kid who had tried to rob the one taco stand in the city that had an LAPD station house sitting right next door?

The taco stand was a Taco Bell situated on the southwest corner of Martin Luther King and La Salle, and the station house, home to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southwest Division, occupied the southeast corner. Both faced Martin Luther King. Supposedly, this kid named Pokey had sauntered up Martin Luther King from the east and gone around back to the employees’ entrance of the restaurant, where he knocked quietly on the door, standing off to the side and away from the peephole. He was planning to force his way inside, clean out the cash registers, and then race back out again before anyone even knew a robbery had taken place, but he may as well have just stepped up to the order window and demanded the cash from there, because several of the many uniformed patrolmen eating lunch under the pale and rusted patio umbrellas out front had seen him coming and recognized his intentions immediately. They let him knock on the door a second time and get the Saturday night special halfway out of his back pocket before a small group of them fell on him like a 747 and removed him to the station house across the way, the sarcastic applause of the officers who stayed behind ringing in his ears.

Gunner didn’t frequent the taco stand often, but it seemed like every time he did, one cop or another was relating the story of Pokey’s Folly to his or her partner, raucous laughter punctuating every line. Today, a pair of black patrolmen were sitting off to Gunner’s left, damn near having a party at Pokey’s expense, when a red-faced cop with silver gray hair and three stripes on his sleeve appeared over Gunner’s shoulder to ask, with obvious irritation, “Your name Gunner?”

He was wearing a name tag, but Gunner didn’t bother to look at it; Kupchak’s voice was unmistakable, as easy on the ears as a garbage disposal feeding on a bag of pennies.

“I guess you think that was pretty funny. Sending your girlfriend over to the station with the flowers.”

He wasn’t smiling.

“Pleased to meet you, Sergeant,” Gunner said, setting down a half-eaten taco.

“Fuck you, wise guy. I ought to kick your face in for humiliating me like that.”

“If I embarrassed you, Kupchak, I apologize. But begging you nicely didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere, did it?”

Roughly three hours ago, following Gunner’s instructions to the letter, Peaches the transvestite had left the investigator’s long-stemmed roses with the desk sergeant across the street, along with orders that they be given to Kupchak as soon as he came in. She was supposed to act as if she hadn’t seen “Harry Baby” for a long time, and was having a tough time getting by. Gunner had affixed the gift card to the outside of the box, out in the open where the desk sergeant was sure to read it, and in his most effeminate, anguished hand, written the following:

My Darling Harry,

Why are you avoiding me? You sound so cruel over the

phone. Please talk to me. For Maggie’s sake. Lunch

cross the street at eleven? Please?

Love,
A.G
.

Gunner didn’t figure Kupchak would see the whimsy in it, but he didn’t think the cop would be able to ignore it, either. Gunner’s proxy, Peaches, had just made certain that Kupchak would be the most talked-about uniform in the whole Southwest Division for the next several days, and Kupchak wasn’t likely to appreciate the honor. Once he spotted Gunner’s hand in the joke, he was bound to come running. The only question was, would he come to talk, or just to kick some ass?

“I’m not talking to you, Gunner. Get it through your head.”

His voice said his blood pressure was dropping, but his face still looked like an overly ripe tomato. The bushy white caterpillars over his eyes were all bunched up together and the veins in his flat, off-centered nose were aglow with blood. Gunner had the feeling that were he to stick a hatpin in either of Kupchak’s cheeks, the cop’s head would take off in a rush of hot air like a runaway model rocket.

“Tell me something, Kupchak,” Gunner said. “You one of those guys with a hard-on for all private tickets, or is there something about me in particular that bothers you? McGovern used to be one of your boys. You talk about him like he was a friend. Seems to me you ought to be busting your ass to help me clear his name, rather than giving me all this shit.”

“You’ve got no interest in clearing Maggie’s name. You don’t give a rat’s ass about him, and you know it!”

“I don’t remember ever saying I did. All I said was, I’m being paid to prove he shot the Washington kid in self-defense.”

“Bullshit.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I said, ‘bullshit.’ You’re being paid by Harriet Washington to prove her case against the department. Who the fuck do you think you’re kidding?”

So that was it. The family of Lendell Washington had brought suit against the LAPD, as all of the Western world had known they would the minute the news broke of Lendell’s death, and Kupchak had assumed—perhaps understandably—that Gunner was on their payroll.