Fear of the Dark Read online

  “No can do, ’Ron. Sorry.”

  Gunner upped the ante of his bribe to an even fifty, baiting Brush with the sight of yet another twenty-dollar bill. “Gimme a break, Brush,” he said wearily.

  “It ain’t the money, man. I’d do it for nothin’ if I could, but I can’t. I shouldn’t’a done it the last time, you wanna know the truth.”

  Brush was a thirty-one-year-old Senior Clerk for the California Department of Motor Vehicles Gunner had once shadowed for three weeks at the behest of a jealous wife. Most jealous wives would have been relieved to hear that Gunner had found Brush to be nothing if not a monogamous, happily married man, but it happened that Gunner’s client was someone else’s jealous wife, not Brush’s, and so the news had a somewhat atypical affect on the lady. In all likelihood, she would have succeeded in parting her old flame’s hair with a carving knife had Gunner not made the unethical decision to warn Brush she might be coming, and Gunner had been exploiting the man’s gratitude ever since.

  “All I need is a name and an address, Brush. It’s an easy fifty bucks, man.”

  Brush shook his head again. From the neck up, he did look like a Fuller brush. “They watchin’ the database like a hawk, ‘Ron. They catch me at a terminal lookin’ up shit for you, I’m dead. You gonna take care of my family while I look for another job? Huh?”

  “Then just get me a name. I’ll get the address myself.”

  “Forget it, man. I told you. No can do. Sorry.”

  He closed the door without saying good-bye. Gunner stood on the porch for a moment, staring the door to the little house down, before putting his fifty dollars back in his pocket and retreating, thinking, hoping that maybe the fat man in the retired Postal Service jeep wasn’t worth talking to, anyway.

  Favoring his tender ribs, Gunner lowered himself gingerly into the Cobra and checked his watch. It was a good twenty minutes after six. The street lamps in Carson were already glowing and all the kids in Brush’s neighborhood had been reeled in for the night. So much for Gunner’s Sunday. Better luck Monday.

  However the hell he was going to spend it.

  Late the next morning, Gunner slapped two slices of white toast around a hard fried egg and, still chasing the tandem down with a cup of strong coffee, caught up with Mean Sheila as she made her renewed rounds of the newly redeveloped storefronts along Compton Boulevard just east of Santa Fe, back in the hunt now that Denny Townsend was safely out of her hair. Word of the white boy’s death had not yet been made public, but Gunner understood that Sheila had news sources of her own, fast and reliable. He asked her how Muhammad Ali was doing, referring to Ray Hollins with all due respect, and she told him with no noticeable sense of loss that Hollins was back in Motown, had been since last Friday despite the police department’s recommendation that he remain in California until further notice. Sheila said he had been with her all of Thursday afternoon, and somehow Gunner believed her enough to leave it at that. His questions didn’t seem to bother her anymore so it figured there weren’t any recent murder conspiracies in her past.

  Having convinced himself all over again that time spent with Sheila was time poorly spent, Gunner was finally left with but a single “lead” to pursue, if one chose to use the term loosely. From a pay phone not far from Sheila’s hunting grounds, he silenced the prerecorded voice of an operator with forty-five cents in change and dialed the number someone had scrawled on the back of the “Henshaw for Congress” flyer he had lifted from Denny Townsend’s apartment four days ago. The line rang in his ear a long ten seconds before a cheery female voice said, “Henshaw’s the Right Man, Larry Stewart’s desk,” disdaining any form of hello altogether.

  It seemed Gunner had called Henshaw’s west L.A. campaign headquarters in Brentwood. That in itself wasn’t too surprising—Henshaw would have been the “right man” for Townsend, to be sure—but the particular phone Gunner had set to ringing there was.

  Because Larry Stewart was no volunteer flunky screening calls at Henshaw’s base of operations between tours of duty at the Xerox machine, but was, in fact, the would-be Congressman’s campaign manager. The kind of upper-echelon cog in the candidate’s political machine who could be expected to take calls on his private line from Oscar-winning actors and famous labor leaders, magazine editors and political pollsters and forecasters—but not from psychotic, uneducated low-lifes like Denny Townsend.

  And yet Townsend had somehow come upon Stewart’s phone number.

  A minor enigma, perhaps, but Gunner decided to explore it just the same, having little else to do with his time. If all Townsend had been was one man with a plan, just another nut looking to get his name read aloud on the evening news, then Gunner had already seen the people who would have most wanted him dead, and there wasn’t much left for him to do except wait around for one of them to make a mistake. But if, by chance, Townsend had been something more—like a front man for one or more crazies of his demented persuasion, as his generosity toward his fat friend in the windbreaker seemed to suggest—then it was possible his death had come at the hands of people Gunner had not yet been introduced to, but would have to acquaint himself with soon.

  Very soon.

  So he told one big Black Lie over the phone and got himself in the door of Lewis Henshaw’s campaign headquarters on Wilshire and Yale, where Brentwood and Santa Monica came effortlessly together. A failed auto parts store had been stripped to its bare walls to make room for a small army of Henshaw’s faithful and enough second-hand furniture and ringing telephones to keep them feeling relatively at home. They were a diverse group, Henshaw’s people—short and white, tall and white, fat and white. It appeared the forty-six-year-old Chicago cop-turned-novelist/film consultant/politician was still unwilling to concede that the white vote alone was not going to get him over in the multi-ethnic wonderland that was west Los Angeles.

  And that was just as well, Gunner mused, as he integrated the aspiring Congressman’s camp with his arrival, because with Henshaw’s record as a pig-headed, prejudicial applicator of the law in Illinois, the white vote was all he was likely to get, whether he liked it or not.

  “Where would I find Larry Stewart?” Gunner asked a young man filling a paper cup at the water cooler near the door. The face that turned his way looked like an acne sampler, red and roughly textured.

  The man caught his cup before it could hit the floor, closed his slack jaw, and pointed to a pair of half-height glass and fiberboard partitions arranged around one corner of the floor space in the rear.

  For an executive of Stewart’s stature, it wasn’t much of an office, but the cold young beauty manning his desk inside seemed to take the responsibility of guarding it for him quite seriously.

  “You didn’t sound black over the phone,” she said, her eyes taking Gunner in with open skepticism, not the least bit afraid to insult him. The solid gray business suit she wore didn’t have a crease in it, and she did as much for it as it did for her.

  Gunner smiled agreeably and sat down.

  “So I’ve been told,” he said. “Must be all those big words I use. Like who, what, and where.”

  She either didn’t understand him, or didn’t particularly care to. Without changing expression she introduced herself as someone named Terry Allison, Larry Stewart’s personal secretary and chief liaison with the volunteers under his command, and she was far more attractive than her voice, transmitted over an ambiance-filled telephone line, could have possibly made clear. She was an intoxicating distillation of southern California Dreamgirl prerequisites, a cliché come to life: moist blue eyes offset by skin the color of bronze, tanned to perfection and glowing; sandy blond hair giving off light like the sun, cut with a surgeon’s eye to the precise length of her shoulders.

  And people liked to say they had been drawn to California by the weather.

  “Larry’s in San Francisco,” she said when she was good and ready, and not a moment before. “With Lew. I’m afraid he won’t be back in Los Angeles until Thursday
morning sometime.”

  She meant Gunner to take the news as a dismissal; she put a Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You smile on her face and fell silent.

  “He been there long?” Gunner asked, pretending to miss her point entirely.

  “Since Friday evening. Lew was a guest speaker at the Bay Area Veterans’ Association conference over the weekend, and asked Larry to tag along. Why?”

  Gunner shrugged. “Just curious.”

  “Exactly what kind of story is it you’re writing, Mr.…”

  “Gunner.”

  “That’s right. Mr. Gunner. What’s the slant of your piece, Mr. Gunner? What’s the angle?”

  “Angle?”

  “The angle, yes. You do know what an angle is, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure. What’s a newspaper story without an angle?”

  “I thought you said you were with Newsweek. The magazine.”

  Gunner shrugged again. “I don’t recall exactly what I said, frankly. Newsweek or the Daily News, one or the other. Does it matter?”

  Her eyes left him for a moment, perhaps searching the crowded floor beyond Stewart’s quarters for a worker ant big enough to bounce Gunner out on his ear. He had made quite a stir out there among them earlier, as totally out of place as he was, and the novelty of his presence had not worn off yet. With the attention he was continuing to draw, help was just a raised voice away if the lady decided to ask for it.

  “You’re not a reporter, then?”

  “No.” Gunner dropped his wallet on Stewart’s desk where she could see it, open to his license in its yellowing plastic window. She read it right down to the fine print on the back, and more than once.

  “You’re a private detective,” she said, pushing the wallet back across the desk at him, making the job sound like something she came across every day. It was beginning to look as if nothing Gunner had to offer was going to particularly move her one way or the other. “And you want to see Larry because …?”

  “Because I’m in deep shit,” Gunner said, letting some of his irritation with her condescending manner show through, “and his phone number was burning a hole in my pocket. I found it among the personal effects of a friend of his and I was hoping he could tell me how it got there.”

  “A friend of Larry’s?” More blatant skepticism. “Who?”

  “His name was Denny Townsend. He was a white man, medium height, in his early thirties. Had a psyche only a mother could love and a left eye with more moves than a good game of chess. Sound familiar?”

  Her face said it did, losing its well-defined implacability all at once. Gunner suddenly had her full attention, if not her total respect. “We have a worker,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “A volunteer, who comes in now and then to run errands for the staff. He’s not on our regular rolls, so I can’t look it up, but his name could be Denny. And I suppose he does have an eye similar to what you describe.” She was trying to remember him in detail, creating a stubborn silence. “You say he had Larry’s private number? The one you used earlier?”

  Gunner nodded and showed her the flyer, without actually handing it to her. “These errands you say he ran. He run many of them for Stewart personally?”

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “But this is Stewart’s handwriting?”

  She gave the flyer a second, closer look. “It could be. But I don’t see how. If the man you’re referring to is the one I have in mind, Larry could not have intended this for him. Because Larry’s had no use for this fellow; he’s unfit for most things. In fact …”

  She didn’t go on.

  Gunner waited.

  Allison shrugged and said, “I was just going to say that it wouldn’t really surprise me if your being here has something to do with his landing in some kind of trouble with the law. He’s that type, I think.”

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded. “I haven’t had much contact with him myself, actually, but what I’ve had sort of leads me to believe he could be dangerous to some people, under the wrong circumstances. Exactly what kind of trouble is he in?”

  Gunner smiled wryly. “The worst possible. Somebody caught him ‘under the wrong circumstances’ and put a hole in his pelvic region too big to sew up. He’s dead.”

  Stewart’s phone rang abruptly. Allison seemed too preoccupied to answer it at first, but picked it up on the third ring and made short work of the call, slightly flustered and embarrassed to be so. When she turned to Gunner again, she had the look of someone who had lost her place in time and needed some help getting resynchronized with the universe.

  “He was murdered,” Gunner said simply, anxious to move along. “Two and a half weeks after knocking off Buddy Dorris of the Brothers of Volition and a bartender too slow to stop him.”

  Allison sat up in her chair. If she wasn’t genuinely surprised, she had some talent for pretending to be.

  “How’s that again?”

  “Buddy Dorris. Your boy Townsend was the hero who put the hit on him. You did know Buddy Dorris?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you weren’t aware that Townsend had killed him?”

  Her contempt for the question was such that she declined to answer it.

  “What do you want, Mr. Gunner? Spell it out, please.”

  Gunner eagerly complied. “I want to talk to Stewart,” he said. “I want to ask him where Townsend got the idea to blow Dorris’s head off, and whether he got it before Stewart gave him his number, or after. What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve made a big mistake,– that’s what I think. I think you’re looking for the wrong man.”

  “Meaning who? Townsend or Stewart?”

  “Take your pick. I don’t believe our man killed anybody, in the first place. And in the second, I’m certain no one here knew anything about it if he did. Larry most especially.”

  She was back in the saddle again, chin held high and proud. Gunner glared at her renewed infuriating smugness and said, “Somebody somewhere did.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. Really. Townsend didn’t have the brainpower to tie his shoes without help, even you’d have to admit that. So he sure as hell didn’t do such a smash-up job taking Dorris out working all by his lonesome. He got assistance. Direction. Probably from the same party or parties trying to frame a good friend of mine for his murder.”

  “And you think Larry is involved somehow?”

  “I’ve never met Larry. You tell me. Why would a man in his position lay his private number on a fruitcake like Denny Townsend? Just to have his own certified psycho fetch his lunch from time to time?”

  “I’m sure his reasons were more substantial than that,” Allison said, “but exactly what they were, I wouldn’t know. I certainly never considered using him for anything.”

  “But if he had been working under Stewart for the campaign, performing legitimate duties of some kind, you’d have known about it?”

  Allison shrugged. “In most cases, yes. Generally, Larry and I run this office together, in tandem, but we occasionally run our own little projects on the side. Is that a crime?”

  Gunner shook his head. “Not unless Stewart’s idea of a little project is vastly different from mine.”

  “Then you won’t be needing to talk to him after all. Will you?”

  She was trying to nudge the black man out the door again. Either she didn’t care for the nature of his business, or she was very uncomfortable around people more darkly tanned than she. Exactly which of the two was the case, Gunner couldn’t say.

  “If it’s all the same to you,” he said, firmly and with no great emotion, mastering his ebbing patience well, “I’d prefer to, regardless.”

  “He’ll only repeat what I’ve already told you.”

  “Somehow, I don’t doubt that. But I have to give it a shot just the same. He may not be up to admitting guilt of any kind, but he just might give me some insight into the way Townsend’s mind worked. Who t
he man’s friends were and where they hung out. Maybe even what they planned to do about the nationwide nigger problem your man Henshaw’s so concerned about.”

  The liquid blue eyes lost their gleam. He had finally said something the blond could not deflect with moderate ease. “Lew Henshaw is not that kind of man,” she said angrily.

  Gunner had to laugh. “How do you mean that, exactly? That he’s not the kind of man who likes to think of us black folk in those terms? Or rather that he’s never been dumb enough to publicly refer to us quite so disparagingly?”

  “I mean that he’s not the racist, red-necked anachronism the press makes him out to be. Lew is a good man, Mr. Gunner. A fair man. And he doesn’t think of you people—of anyone—in that way.”

  There. She had clarified it. Gunner was one of Them.

  A colored boy by any other name …

  He wanted to laugh again, but found that he could not. Stupidity and raw beauty, especially in one so young, was no laughable mix. “You think he’s just talking about law and order, I guess. All that shit about ‘returning the streets to our children,’ and ‘raising justice from the dead.’”

  “Lew wants an America we can all be proud of. All of us. You see something sinister in that?”

  “He’s looking for war, lady. Not justice or freedom or any of those other flag-waving catch phrases his kind likes to throw around. He’s looking for war, in the streets. Between the white hats and the black hats, the good guys and the bad. You and me, Ms. Allison. One-on-one.”

  The blond shook her head at him, the way she probably had at her mother as a little girl. “You’re wrong. You don’t know Lew. That isn’t what he wants at all.”

  She had lost a step somewhere, and the difference in her countenance was startling. She had taken up Henshaw’s defense before, Gunner realized, to fend off other arguments along the same vein, other foes with similar angles of attack, and the wear and tear on her convictions was beginning to show through. It was a difficult business, obviously, believing in the dormant goodness of a basically parasitic man.

  She got to her feet behind Stewart’s desk and gave Gunner one more glimpse of the armor-clad exterior she had shown before. School was out.