Fear of the Dark Read online

  Gunner’s eyes left the gun to meet hers. “The Acey Deuce.”

  “The Acey Deuce, right. He got the bartender there, too. A fat man named J.T. Tennell. You read about it, I guess.”

  The black man nodded, his mind wandering for a moment. It was a small world. Up until a year ago, the Deuce had been Gunner’s primary hideout, and there was no reason to think his patronage would not have continued had his case load not begun the disappearing act that eventually prompted J.T. to pull the plug on his credit. To Lilly’s great chagrin, J.T. had carried Gunner for four months, an astonishing length of time to be owed money for a bartender who, as his customers liked to say, poured a mean glass of water.

  “Your brother was Dorris? Buddy Dorris?”

  The girl nodded, bowing her head but once. “He was only twenty-two. Just a kid. Not much to brag about, maybe—he was shit to be around, really—but he didn’t deserve to go like that. Splattered all over that wino’s hole in the wall …”

  She fell silent for a moment, resisting the urge to explode, then smiled a strange, jagged smile of remorse. “The mortician asked for three grand to put his head back together, but I didn’t have it. So he put Buddy in the ground with a Baggie full of pieces tucked neatly under his pillow. Funny, huh?”

  Gunner shuddered, involuntarily. He was gradually edging his body between the refrigerator and its open door, and the cold breath of the box was cutting through the pores of his robe to chill his back.

  “That’s rough,” he said, meaning it.

  “Yeah. Not a very popular guy, Buddy.”

  “The papers say the cops are looking for a Klansman.”

  The girl shrugged. “I guess that’s a halfway logical place to start. Buddy was an outspoken individual. What you might call active in community affairs. That may have gotten him in trouble with some people, I suppose.”

  “‘Some’ people? Or just white people?”

  “White people, primarily, sure. Hell, Buddy was a racist, why deny it? He started rallies and made big speeches long before that sort of behavior made its big comeback. Distributed pamphlets, the whole bit.”

  “For the Brothers of Volition.”

  “Yeah. That may not mean much today, but it would have eventually. Remember the Panthers? The Brothers were going to be bigger. Buddy was going to see to it.”

  Gunner didn’t bother to refute that, just said, “Maybe they still will be. They’ve still got Roland Mayes.”

  “Roland Mayes, yeah.” She laughed, seemingly more at Gunner than the thought. “He’s the founder of the Brothers, and all that—their charismatic leader and focal point of what little press they get—but it was Buddy who made it all work, who supplied them with their drive and energy. I’d imagine that’s why he was killed. The white boy probably understood—although Roland would never admit it—that Buddy’s death will likely close the Brothers down sooner or later, and change the course of millions of lives in the process.”

  Gunner took a moment to bite his cynical tongue, then said, “That sounds like something a Sister of Volition might say.”

  She smiled. “It does, doesn’t it? Must be indoctrination by osmosis. I’ve dropped in on the boys from time to time to hear what they have to say, of course, but that’s as far as it goes. That political activism bit demands a certain level of commitment I haven’t been able to attach to anything. So far.”

  Gunner turned a shoulder toward the gun in her hand and said, “You look pretty goddamned committed to me.”

  She shrugged again. “I need help. The police are working on Buddy’s case the way you’d expect them to for a troublesome nigger. They’re fucking around. So for some semblance of satisfaction, I thought I might turn to the private sector. Heroes for hire, mercenaries, whatever you want to call them. People like you. People with a price.”

  He watched her rub some imaginary bills between the thumb and forefinger of her free hand, the pistol listing slightly in the other, its muzzle never leaving the barrel of his chest for long. He was getting more acclimated to the kitchen’s darkness, and the light pouring out of the refrigerator didn’t hurt, but trying to make out the weapon’s caliber was still about as easy as reading the sports page lining his garbage can several yards away. It was either a .22 or a long-nose .38, that much was safe to assume; she could graze his cheek with a slug from the latter and put him away with the concussion alone, but she’d have to find a major artery with the toy-like pellets of the former to do any real damage before he could reach out to wring her neck. Unless she went head-hunting at the last second …

  Decisions, decisions.

  “Look sister, I don’t have a price for what you want. You could’ve rolled in here in a Brinks truck and I’d have had to tell you the same thing: I’m retired. Finished. No longer active in the investigative field.”

  “That’s bullshit. You want to haggle about your fee, haggle. Whatever you think your time is worth, I’ll pay. But don’t try to tell me four days later I’ve come to see the wrong man.”

  “You want the Gospel truth? I couldn’t find the guy who killed your brother if he were standing under a lampshade in my living room. Butt naked.”

  He was looking at the woman before him hard, only now seeing her clearly for the first time. She was smooth and brown, a living masterpiece of balanced angles and curves that stirred the wrong emotions in a man lately accustomed, and grimly resigned to, a celibate existence. Beauty was a relative commodity, a gift of the flesh often difficult to measure, but hers was the kind you could see just fine in the dark, at close or distant quarters.

  “I mean, for Chrissake, look around! Does this look like the home of a winner to you?”

  He poked his jaw at the shambles of his estate, trying to take his mind off the erection growing rapidly beneath his robe.

  The girl with the gun put her teeth on display in a slanted grin and laughed again. “It looks like the home of a man who could use the gig,” she said.

  Gunner’s left hand dove over the refrigerator door and grabbed her right wrist, pinching the nerves there in a vise.

  The gun went off once, harmlessly; the .22-caliber bullet hit the thick wall of the old refrigerator’s door at an awkward angle and bounced off in the direction of some grease stains on the wall above the stove. Staying behind the door in relative safety, Gunner threw a straight right hand at the girl’s jaw and didn’t miss. Her gun reached the linoleum floor before she did, but it was a close race down.

  Gunner took possession of the revolver, dropped its shells into the pocket of his robe, and watched the woman at his feet sleep. He had been afraid that, once the time came to make his move, he would instinctively pull his punch, succumbing to his incurable flair for chivalry despite the lady’s hostile posture, but her crack about his living quarters had made throwing a loaded right hand something to look forward to. He wasn’t coping with the quality of his life very well these days.

  Pulling a beer out of the refrigerator at last, he kicked a kitchen chair to the center of the room and sat down to wait for the late Buddy Dorris’s pushy sister to come around. What he should have done was dump her body at the curb out front, to make a point and reach a quick decision, but he let her stretch out on his kitchen floor instead, and took the next few minutes to reconsider his retirement, to question his judgment, just one more time.

  Introspection, as always, was a walk down the road to nowhere.

  The problem was, he was lousy.

  He had been lousy at the beginning, and was lousy in the end. He gave private investigation everything he had, but it had always been, and always would be, a compromise profession.

  When the LAPD booted him out of its cadet academy for rearranging the face of an overzealous self-defense instructor in October of 1974, going into private practice seemed like the only logical alternative. It lacked the glamour and drama of legitimate police work, but a badge and an ironclad gun permit came with the territory and that made it the next best thing.

 
Why he cared to be involved in law enforcement at all was a mystery he could explain to no one’s satisfaction. He had no hang-up regarding power of the life-and-death variety; by the first month of a year-long stint in Vietnam almost seventeen years ago, he had killed enough people in the interests of “duty” to grow tired of the thrill forever. And as for the law itself, he was less than enamored by its credibility. Crime and punishment was a fine concept, perhaps, but in the real world he had never seen it work indiscriminately, which was to say he had never seen it work at all.

  But something about wearing a badge and attaching himself to the things it represented seemed ideal, once his days in the service had come to an end, and only after months of living with it was he able to recognize the attraction for what it was: a need to belong. Freshly removed from the cut-and-dried order of war, where everything functioned in a beautifully simplistic either/or system, black or white, Us or Them, he was desperate to align himself with a cause and its following, preferably one diametrically opposed to another. His hunger was not for camaraderie, but for a sense of identity, some specific role to play in the free-for-all chaos that was civilian life.

  It would have been convenient to have more than one bipartisan conflict suited to his needs to choose from, but Gunner wasn’t that lucky. He was living in an age in which conviction to causes was out of vogue and apathy was often confused with open-mindedness. If people took up sides at all, they didn’t talk about it, an abstention that left the world virtually impossible to dissect into finite philosophical factions. The only line drawn between men that remained indelible was the law. Corruption was blurring that line more every day—money did talk, and everyone, it so often appeared, was listening—but the illusion of just men waging war against the forces of darkness was still intact in the realm of law enforcement, and for Gunner the lost lamb, an illusion seemed good enough.

  He took his rude rejection by the LAPD badly, but moved quickly on to a junior college education spread out over two short years and four different schools that eventually earned him a private investigator’s license, a cheap piece of paper that entitled him to play a few grown-up games with the state of California’s blessings. He set to work enthusiastically, as motivated as he could hope to be toward a trade that only emulated the real thing, but it was a lost cause almost immediately. He had no feel for the work, no natural aptitude for its nuances. His delusions of self-worth and identification with something tangible were short-lived.

  He didn’t have to spend many nights in motel parking lots, waiting for one client or another’s stray spouse to cut an incriminating pose for his Polaroid, to understand what he had become and where he was headed: nothing and nowhere, respectively. His authority had no teeth; he could quote the law but not defend it. He was just a man with a dime store ID card in his wallet, a cardboard “pig” you could use for a target range without fear of repercussions, a Peeping Tom who had the right to ask questions no one had to answer. Even when business was good, and it was never good for long, it was bad; his successes were devoid of accomplishment and his failures only confirmed his growing sense of impotence. Efficiency was hard to come by on the heels of perpetual insecurity.

  And yet it had taken Al Dobey to make Gunner quit.

  Dobey had shown up at Gunner’s door at a bad time, the height of a famine that had seen the detective pour his meals from a cornflakes box for nineteen days and nights. Dobey was a pimp with a weight problem, a coke-head and compulsive liar. But any man with a proposition was someone Gunner had to hear out, like it or not, and Dobey seemed genuinely desperate to pay for the investigator’s services. He had a fourteen-year-old daughter who had taken off without warning, left for school one day and never come back, and he wanted Gunner to find her. She was his only link to decency, he said, and to illustrate his fatherly grief, he dried his eyes with the palms of his hands like an old woman at a funeral.

  It was a performance Gunner didn’t buy for one minute, knowing Dobey’s well-earned reputation as a prince among scumbags, but he thought about his last bowl of cornflakes and took the pimp’s retainer anyway.

  Audra Dobey was supposed to be a wild and rebellious kid, too much like her father for her own good, but when Gunner turned her up six days later, he couldn’t see the family resemblance. She was a cute, frail little thing hiding out in a duplex on Wilton near Slauson with a girlfriend and the girl’s older brother. If she needed a good reason for running away, she had the best: she was four months pregnant and showing from every angle. It would have been smart to ask her how she got that way, but Gunner was feeling more hungry than smart at the time; he kept out of sight and tipped Dobey to her whereabouts by phone.

  Two weeks later he was back on the streets all over again, this time looking for Dobey and his fee. The pimp’s was suddenly a cold trail, save for a single newsflash that eventually made the rounds to the angry black man he had left behind like a bloodhound off the scent: Audra was dead. Her father had forced her into a discount abortion and somebody’s hand had slipped. There were cops combing the neighborhood in Gunner’s wake suggesting she had been carrying Dobey’s child. It wasn’t such a far-fetched idea.

  Gunner managed to live with the guilt for four days. Parked across the street in the wee hours of a Thursday morning, he was watching the assistant manager of an ABC market on Vernon and Vermont load a few frozen turkeys into the trunk of his car when the futility of Gunner’s existence finally touched the wrong nerve and the detective knew he had had enough.

  In eleven years he had learned to wade through the pus of humanity for money, to pocket a few dollars and scrape the earth for garbage his clients weren’t willing to touch, but he had never once done it for free. He let the turkey thief go about his business and drove home, where he finished off the last remnant of Dobey’s forty-five-dollar retainer—a fifth of Wild Turkey—in record time.

  He had been an electrician ever since.

  His cousin Del had been offering to take him on as an apprentice for years and had welcomed Gunner aboard with open arms. There wasn’t much excitement in running wire through a maze of conduits, twisting one’s body to fit into cramped crawlspaces where mice often kept you company, but regular meals were part of the deal and the work took no toll on the human spirit. Gunner’s days of waiting for something to happen were over. The false expectations and unrealized drama of private investigating were behind him, and the lies of time-honored pulp novels were now for other fools to believe.

  So the lady on the floor of his kitchen was flat out of luck. No matter what his friends had told her—they just couldn’t see him as an electrician for long—he was through beating holes in his shoes playing shadow to unfaithful wives and larcenous employees, runaway adolescents and killers of left-wing militants, and he wasn’t going back for anybody or anything. It made no difference what she did to his libido, what she was willing to spend, or how far she was prepared to go to hire him. He wasn’t interested. He wasn’t tempted.

  Much.

  Signs of life—a shifting of the left arm, the rearrangement of feet—began to appear before Gunner’s eyes.

  The beauty on his kitchen floor, the sister the press apparently didn’t know Buddy Dorris had, came around at last and sat up, testing the joint of her jaw for function. Gunner gulped down the last of his third beer and tossed the empty can across the room to get her attention.

  “You got a name?” he asked.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “Hurts pretty bad, huh?”

  “If you broke it, I’ll kill you. I swear it.” She started looking around on the floor for her gun.

  “It’s over here,” Gunner said.

  He let her see the .22, the same end she’d offered him to view only minutes ago. Its threat was clearer since he’d parted the curtains on the little kitchen window, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “You made your point, all right? You don’t need my business.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t your business I objected t
o. Maybe it was the fucked-up way you went about presenting it.”

  Silence.

  “You got a name?” he asked again.

  Her hands fell away from her jaw, slowly. “Verna.”

  “Verna what?”

  “Verna Gail. G-A-I-L, Gail. Are you going to help me, or what?”

  “That your married name, ‘Gail’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is Mister Gail right now?”

  “Safe from the demands of alimony. Meaning he’s dead. You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Gunner.”

  Gunner made her wait a long time for an answer; she had done all the interrogating she was going to do in his house. “I don’t remember ever hearing that Buddy Dorris had a sister,” he said.

  “Who have you been talking to?”

  “No one, yet. But it bears looking into, don’t you think? I mean, one wouldn’t necessarily have to be related to Buddy Dorris to want a piece of the man who killed him. Would one?”

  “I told you. Buddy was my brother. Biologically. Would you take my case if I could prove that?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly. I haven’t heard what happens to the white man once I find him, yet. You haven’t gone to all this trouble just to get him off the street.”

  “No.” Her eyes were suddenly cold, fixed on a target only she could see. “I haven’t.”

  “You intend to kill him, or just bust him up real good?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind, yet.”

  “You have somebody lined up to take care of that end? Or were you counting on me to do it?”

  “Would you?”

  “Hell, I don’t see why not. Accessory to murder, murder, it’s all the same thing to the D.A. What’s another life sentence tacked on to the first?”

  He laughed at her blank reaction to that, the mute surprise of a spiteful little girl with a serpent’s eyes and an angel’s face. He watched her bite her lower lip, waiting for him to go on, until it became apparent that he wasn’t going to oblige.

  “You think I should just let the police have him. Is that it?”