It's Not a Pretty Sight Page 14

  “Do what I tell you, nigga, or I’m gonna show you what about the gun. All right?”

  Gunner did as he was told and sat down, pinning his hands palm down beneath his buttocks.

  “Now. What you wanna know ’bout Nina?” Felker asked.

  “You’re still holding the shotgun,” Gunner said.

  “That’s right. An’ I’m gonna keep on holdin’ it.”

  “How about if you just take your finger off the trigger? Can you do that, at least?”

  “No.”

  “Look. You want to keep it pointed at my face, fine, that makes you feel more comfortable. But take your finger off the trigger for a minute. So the goddamn thing doesn’t go off by accident. You want to shoot me by accident?”

  After some consideration, she decided she didn’t. She pulled her finger out of the shotgun’s trigger guard, but otherwise kept the weapon right where it was, aimed roughly at his nose.

  “Okay. My finger ain’t on the trigger. Now answer my goddamn question.”

  “I’m talking to people who knew Nina to see if I can get a line on who killed her,” Gunner said.

  “Who killed her? Somebody killed Nina?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Know? Man, how’m I s’posed to know? I ain’t seen that bitch in two months!”

  She didn’ t seem disturbed to hear the news, just somewhat surprised by it. As if Nina were the last person on earth she would have thought would come to such a terrible end.

  “I can see you two were very close,” Gunner said.

  Felker grunted. “Who? Nina an’ me? Shit.”

  “What exactly was your problem with her, you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I ain’t got no problem with her now, what you say is true. Her old man finally got her ass, huh?”

  “It looks that way to the police. But me, I’m not so sure. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Shit. He killed her. Her nigga got her, same as my nigga’s tryin’ to get me. Same goddamn diff’rence.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “What makes me so sure? You all alike, that’s what. Every goddamn one of you!”

  She had her finger back on the shotgun’s trigger, dark eyes suddenly rekindled with rage.

  “Okay, okay! You’re right, you’re right,” Gunner said, trying to appease her. Thinking the gang down at Sisterhood hadn’t prepared him for her enough, simply describing her as “crazy.” Crazy didn’t even begin to do this fruitcake justice.

  “I don’t believe it, what you’re tellin’ me,” Felker said. “I think you’re makin’ it all up.”

  “I wish I was. Believe me.”

  “So what you say your name was again? Gunner?”

  “That’s right. Aaron Gunner.”

  “Gunner. Uh-huh. So who you workin’ for, then, Mr. Gunner, you ain’t workin’ for Miss Singer? Somebody gotta be payin’ you, right?”

  “Nobody’s paying me. I’m doing this for myself.”

  “For yourself?”

  “That’s right. Look, you’ve got your finger on that trigger again, and I can’t think straight when you do that. Could you please …”

  Felker put her finger back where it had been, outside the shotgun’s trigger guard.

  “Thank you,” Gunner said.

  “You was sayin’ you’re doin’ this for yourself,” Felker said, reminding him where he had left off.

  “Yes. Nina was a friend of mine, I owed her.”

  “You ain’t workin’ for that nigga’s lawyer, or somethin’? Tryin’ to get ‘im off?”

  “No. I told you, I’m not working for anybody.”

  “Then what you tryin’ to prove? I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want the cops to make a mistake on this one. That’s all. I don’t want them to lay Nina’s murder on her husband just because the shoe fits.”

  “No? Then who you think they should lay it on? Hell, that nigga was the only one in the goddamn world didn’t treat that bitch like gold. Like a angel sent from heaven, or somethin’. Them fools over Miss Singer’s house, they like to wet their pants every time she—”

  She never finished the thought. Something came snapping into focus for her and stopped her cold, leaving her jaw swinging open like a barnyard gate.

  “Oh. Uh-huh,” she said. “Now I understand.”

  “You understand what?”

  “I understand what the fuck you doin’ here. That’s what. You think I killed the bitch. Just ’cause I was the only one wouldn’t let her tell me what to do, or how to act.”

  “And how did she want you to act?”

  “She wanted me to act white. That’s how. White, just like her.”

  “White?”

  “That’s right. White. She didn’t like to hear a black woman talk like a black woman. Every time I opened my mouth, she’d be in my face, right in front of everybody, tellin’ me she didn’t like my language. My language, like it wasn’t her fuckin’ language too! Like I was some kinda embarrassment to her, or somethin’!”

  “I heard it was just one word in particular that she objected to,” Gunner said.

  “What, ‘nigga’? What the fuck’s wrong with that? That’s what we are, ain’t we? Ain’t we all niggas?”

  Gunner treated the question like something he hadn’t heard.

  “Shit. You don’t think so neither, that it? You think you’re somethin’ more’n that, same way she did. Don’t you?”

  “Let’s just say if I had my pick of words to throw out of the English dictionary, that would be my first choice,” Gunner said. “Hands down.”

  “You don’t never call nobody a nigga?”

  “No. Not if I can help it.”

  Felker shook her head, amazed. “I don’t understand that,” she said.

  And Gunner knew she never would. Black men and women who threw the n-word around like she did were too short on brain cells to appreciate how they were embracing one of the most powerful and dehumanizing weapons ever used against their own people. They liked to say that the twist they put on the way it was spelled and pronounced made something harmless out of it, but the truth was, it just made them feel better for having bought into the white man’s contention that it was a perfectly suitable name for them.

  Funny, Gunner thought, but the Japanese never did take to “Jap” that well. Nor the Jews to “kike.” Nor …

  “Let’s get back to Nina,” Gunner said.

  “I ain’t got nothin’ more to say ’bout Nina. It was on account’a her I got kicked outta Miss Singer’s place, I don’t give a shit about her no more.”

  “Where were you last Tuesday night? Say, between the hours of seven and twelve midnight?”

  “Last Tuesday night? What, that when she got killed? Last Tuesday?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was here. With Otha. Watchin’ TV. Not that it’s any of your goddamn bus’ness.”

  “Was anyone else here with you?”

  “No. Ain’t never anyone else here with us. Otha don’t like me havin’ no company in here.”

  “Even when he’s around?”

  “Even when he’s around. He gets jealous. That’s his problem. Anybody comes aroun’ me, he starts actin’ a fool.” Tears were welling in her eyes as she thought about it. “I tell ‘im I love ‘im, an’ he tells me he loves me. But when he gets mad… he don’t hear nothin’ I say. He just … He just starts beatin’ on me. An’ beatin’ on me. Like … like I’m …”

  She was crying in earnest now, the shotgun roiling around in her unsteady hands like a dinghy on choppy waters. Gunner would have felt sorry for her if he weren’t so afraid of dying.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Trying to lead up slowly to saying good-bye.

  The apology brought her back to reality. Suddenly aware of what she’d just done—cried like a baby in front of a strange man who, in all probability, thought what she’d told him was funny—she rubbed at her eyes with the back of one free hand and said, “Sh
it. What do you know ’bout bein’ sorry? You don’t know shit ’bout bein’ sorry!”

  “Look. I’ve caught you at a bad time. Maybe—”

  “Oh. You wanna leave now, huh? I thought you wanted to talk about Nina.”

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “Hell, I ain’t got nothin’ to hide. What you wanna know? Go ahead an’ ask me somethin’.”

  Gunner didn’t say anything, afraid that if he did, she might never let him leave.

  “I told you to ask me a question, nigga,” Felker said, the shotgun relatively steady in her hands again.

  Gunner gave it some thought, said, “Okay. One more before I go.” Laying down the terms of his own surrender.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Who else could have wanted Nina dead besides her husband? Anyone come to mind?”

  He watched the tiny black woman’s face change as she thought about it, concentrating for all she was worth. Finally, she shook her head and said, “I don’t know nobody would wanna kill her. Didn’t nobody ever get that mad at her, hardly. But … there was one girl I know was, once. I don’t know if she was pissed off enough to kill anybody, but she was pissed off enough to put some serious foot in Nina’s ass. That’s for damn sure.” The memory brought a toothy grin to her face.

  “Who was this?”

  “Girl up at Miss Singer’s place name’ Shirley. Coldest bitch stay up there, you ask me.”

  “Shirley Causwell?”

  “Yeah. That’s her. Shirley Causwell.”

  “She was pissed off at Nina? For what?”

  Felker shook her head again, grinning anew, and said, “Ain’t my bus’ness to tell you that. You wanna know that, you gotta ask her. Or Trini. Trini knows.”

  “The photographer?”

  “Yeah. The photographer. White girl always up there takin’ pictures of everybody, an’ shit. Her. She knows.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “You say you only gonna ask one question. An’ you asked it. I think you better raise on up outta here, now. Get the hell outta my face.”

  “I think you’re right,” Gunner said.

  Without either of them saying another word, he edged his way out of the apartment and started for the stairs, never looking back. His sense of relief was so intense he could barely walk.

  Outside on the sidewalk, a bearded black man with a dorag on his head and a cigarette pinched between his teeth stormed past him, heading into Felker’s building as Gunner was going out. Forty, maybe forty-five, he was wearing a grungy old pair of overalls, the kind auto mechanics always wore, and both of his hands were rolled into fists that looked to Gunner’s eye like something a man could use to pound tent stakes into the ground.

  Otha. It had to be.

  Gunner went to his car and jumped in, praying to God he could get out of there before Agnes Felker’s shotgun could go off—or worse,, be turned meekly over to her old man the way it likely always was.

  A peace offering that never seemed to buy her a thing.

  eleven

  THE PERSONNEL DIRECTOR AT BOWERS, BAIN AND LYLE wouldn’t tell him squat.

  She was a courteous but stiff young woman named Olivia Ishimura, and she sat behind the desk in her office like a Marine private dressed for full inspection, offering Gunner nothing but vague inferences and sweeping generalizations regarding Nina Pearson’s employment history at the firm. Not because she didn’t want to be helpful, she said, but because so much of the information contained in Nina’s file—or any employee’s file, for that matter, past or present, alive or dead—was confidential.

  “You understand, I’m sure,” she said.

  Nothing Gunner tried would make her more conversant. Neither overplaying the “official” nature of his inquiry, nor appealing to her sympathies as a former co-worker of a brutally murdered young woman. She had one thing to tell him, and one thing only: that Nina’s work had been substandard, her reviews steadily declining, and therefore the head of her department had been forced to let her go. That was all there was to it.

  Her termination couldn’t possibly have been racially motivated? Gunner asked her.

  Ishimura’s answer was a flat and emphatic no. Then she really clammed up.

  Gunner thanked her for her time and left.

  He didn’t realize the receptionist out front was not the same one he’d seen coming in until he reached the main lobby of the building downstairs. He stepped off the elevator and there she was, the original Bowers, Bain and Lyle receptionist, standing around watching all the elevator doors like somebody waiting for a lunch date. A tall, very prim and proper black woman in her late forties, if appearances weren’t deceiving, she closed on Gunner quickly and said, “Mr. Gunner, hello. May we talk? Please?”

  She took his arm, leading him around the corner, and said, “I’m Allie. The receptionist who signed you in upstairs. Remember?”

  “Sure,” Gunner said. “What—”

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t talk here. If I’m seen, I’ll lose my job for sure. Is your car parked downstairs?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “I’ll walk you down. This won’t take long.”

  They rode the parking elevators down to Gunner’s level and found the red Cobra where he had parked it. They’d had to share the elevator car with two other people, so the ride down had been a silent one, even though Gunner was quite obviously the only one in the car the receptionist had ever seen before.

  “Oh, my. It’s a convertible,” she said, eyeing the topless, two-seater Cobra with unabashed disappointment. Apparently, a panel van with tinted glass would have been much more to her liking.

  “I think we’re safe down here,” Gunner told her, in a hurry to hear what she had to say.

  She had to survey the four corners of the entire parking level before she could bring herself to agree with him. Then she said, “You’re a lawyer, right? Somebody Nina’s family hired?”

  “Actually, I’m a private investigator. But—”

  “I was taking somebody a note and passed by Olivia’s office and heard you talking. It sounded like you were trying to find out why she was fired.”

  “That’s right. I was.”

  “But Olivia wouldn’t tell you anything. Would she?”

  “She told me Nina had been a substandard worker. Beyond that, no. She wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “And you believe that? That Nina was a substandard worker?”

  “Can you think of any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “Yes. I can.” She studied his face intently, looking for some form of proof that he could be trusted. “Nina got fired for blowing the whistle on Mr. Stanhouse. Her boss.”

  “Let me guess: Because he was a racist.”

  “A racist?”

  “I’d heard somewhere her firing may have had something to do with her being black.”

  The receptionist shook her head, said, “No. It didn’t have anything to do with that. Nina got fired for claiming Mr. Stanhouse was sexually harassing her. He kept coming on to her, so she reported him to Mr. Bowers. But instead of firing him, they fired her. It was very, very unfair.”

  “Stanhouse was sexually harassing her? How?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Nina never talked to me about it, directly. But what I heard is that he’d follow her home sometimes, and call her there after hours. Things like that. It wasn’t the physical kind of harassment. It was just … well, an obsession with him, I guess. He liked her, and he wanted her to like him. Only Nina wasn’t interested.”

  “And she told him so.”

  “Of course. Many times. But he wouldn’t get the message, so she went to Mr. Bowers. And that’s when she got fired. It didn’t have anything to do with her work performance. It was just office politics. Sexual politics.”

  “Is this Mr. Stanhouse in today, by any chance?” Gunner asked.

  “Yes. But you’re not—”

  “Going back up there to see him? No. I’m not. But
if you can tell me what kind of car he drives, and what level employee parking’s on in this building …”

  Allie said she could do that, no problem.

  And she did.

  Stanhouse drove a late-model Acura. The muscular 3.2TL four-door sedan, in jade green with gleaming chrome wheels and gold accents. It suited him perfectly. Like the car, the thirtyish black man exuded style and refinement, yet was somehow physically unextraordinary. His designer suit was impeccably tailored, and the shine of his shoes was almost mirrorlike, but his hair was wiry and uncooperative on the sides, and his face was that of a favorite uncle, round and soft and wholly without menace. Exactly what the receptionist at Bowers, Bain and Lyle had told Gunner he would be: a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

  Gunner watched him get off the elevator at the employee parking level, then followed him over to the Acura, the car all but proving without question that he’d latched on to the right man. Stanhouse’s approach to the Acura was cautious, as if he’d been expecting to find another vehicle in his parking place in its stead. Frowning, he stood away from the car and thumbed a key chain control three times. Testing his car alarm.

  He had opened the driver’s-side door to take a look inside when Gunner finally made his presence felt.

  “The car’s okay,” he said, walking up to where the attorney could easily see him.

  Stanhouse turned around, only slightly startled, and said, “What’s that?”

  “I said the car’s okay. No need to be concerned.”

  Stanhouse pulled his head up and out of the car to stand up and face him directly. “I got a call upstairs that the alarm was going off,” he said. “One of the attendants here—”

  “Yeah, I know. That was me,” Gunner said, stepping forward with his ID open in his right hand, holding it out so the other man could get a good, clear look at it.

  “I don’t understand,” Stanhouse said.

  Gunner explained it to him, leaving Allie the receptionist out of the picture, as he had promised he would.

  “Her mother sent you over here, didn’t she?” the attorney asked afterward, clearly agitated.

  “Who, Mimi?”

  “I think that was her name. This was her idea, wasn’t it? Dredging all this crap up again, even after Nina’s death.”