You Can Die Trying Page 2
“Fetch Bennett. Pleased to meet you,” Bennett said as he shook Flowers’s hand, then opened the door to let himself out. “We still on for Thursday?” he asked Gunner.
“Same time, Thursday, yeah. Thanks for everything, Fetch.”
“Any time, partner. Nice meeting you, Mr. Flowers.”
Flowers dipped his head in reply and Bennett was gone.
“My piano teacher,” Gunner explained after closing the door, deciding to answer the question before Flowers could think to ask it. He showed the other man to a seat in the living room and found one for himself, then pretended not to notice as Flowers’s eyes wandered across the room, searching for a piano that wasn’t there.
“Can I get you a beer, Mr. Flowers?” Gunner asked, putting the finishing touches on the one he had started earlier.
Flowers shook his head. “No. Thank you.”
The doorbell rang again.
It was Bennett, the picture of embarrassment.
“Forgot my gun,” the big man said sheepishly, trying to tone his cannon-shot voice down to a whisper.
Gunner laughed, told him to hold on a minute, then left for the kitchen. He could feel Flowers watching him as he returned to the door with the revolver at his side, not wanting to make the weapon any more conspicuous by trying to hide it.
Bennett took the gun and said thanks, then disappeared again.
Gunner rejoined Flowers in the living room and said, “When Fetch tells you how he wants a piece played, he only tells you once.”
It was a lame joke, but it didn’t deserve the cold shoulder Flowers gave it. He looked at Gunner like someone had just told him his shoelace was untied.
“There somebody watching my office I don’t know about, Mr. Flowers?” Gunner asked him, writing off levity for the remainder of the night.
“Excuse me?”
“You said you didn’t think our meeting there in the morning would be such a good idea. I’m wondering why you think so.”
Flowers paused, choosing his words with care so as not to inflict any further injury upon his host. “Your office is a barbershop. Isn’t that right, Mr. Gunner?”
Gunner didn’t see the relevance of the question, but said, “That’s right. Mickey’s Trueblood barbershop. I lease a little space in the back. That a problem for you?”
“No, no. Please. Don’t misunderstand.” Flowers used both hands to wave off any unintended insult. “I’m sure it’s a fine place to conduct business, in general, but …”
“But?”
“But it’s a barbershop. A place where old men generally go to talk about everybody’s business but their own. You understand what I’m saying?”
Gunner did, of course, though he had never given the matter much thought until now. There might be other places of business besides a barbershop where a man’s secrets could take flight on the neighborhood gossip wires faster, but there weren’t many. For all the disparaging things men had to say about the way personal confidences were scattered to the far winds by the ladies seated under the dryers at any corner beauty shop, a men’s barbershop was usually just as bad, if not worse, and Mickey’s was no exception. If the barber’s bombastic crew of regular customers wouldn’t be able to report what, specifically, Gunner and Flowers had to say to each other behind closed doors, it would at least be within their power to make Flowers’s very presence in Gunner’s office a matter of public record, and maybe that alone was the kind of indiscretion Flowers was looking to avoid.
“Okay,” Gunner said, shrugging. “I guess you’ve got a point. If confidentiality’s critical, we could be better off here. So …” He looked at Flowers expectantly.
The older man shifted about on the cushions of his chair uneasily, buying time, and then said, “I want you to set something right for me, Mr. Gunner. Something I did—or something I didn’t do, actually—that I just can’t live with anymore.” He pulled in a deep breath and, without waiting for Gunner to urge him on, said, “One night last September, I saw a cop shoot a kid in an alley near my house. A bad cop, an evil one, a white man’s been busting black heads in our neighborhood for years. You know the kind I mean. This cop, he caught a pair of kids trying to rob a liquor store over on Vernon and Third Avenue, chased one of ’em for six blocks down into this alley, then shot him dead. Just a twelve-year-old kid, named Lendell Washington. Maybe you remember hearing about it.”
The name and the story did ring a faint bell with Gunner, but he chose not to say so, preferring for the moment to let Flowers’s story run its natural course.
“Anyway, the cop tried to say he’d shot the kid in self-defense. That’s what they always say, right? He said the kid had fired on him first. Only, three people came forward at the scene to say he was lying. They said he was the only one who had fired a weapon. Now, you and I both know, Mr. Gunner, that three people—three black people, especially—aren’t usually enough to get a cop slapped on the wrist for jaywalking, let alone murder. So everybody figured the cop was going to walk. Only, he didn’t. Not after the police came right out and admitted that all the evidence proved the cop was lying.”
“This cop you’re talking about. His name was McDonald, or McGovern.… Something like that?” Gunner finally asked.
Flowers nodded. “McGovern. Jack McGovern. Then you do remember.”
Gunner shrugged. “Vaguely. He was a real ball-buster, supposedly. The kind of foulmouthed, bigoted jackass that used to be all the rage in law enforcement twenty, twenty-five years ago.”
“That was him. Shocked the hell out of a lot of people how they handled his case, didn’t it? No excuses, no denials—just a quick board of rights hearing, then his immediate dismissal. A fast and dirty firing—something we don’t see a lot of where the police down here are concerned.
“Of course, most people were able to read between the lines. Chief Bowden had been in charge of the LAPD for less than a year, and the riots were still fresh in everyone’s mind. Crucifying McGovern was obviously just the chief’s way of trying to show the black community there was a new sheriff in town, one we could all count on to be sensitive to the community’s needs.”
Flowers paused, seemingly having trouble getting to the point.
“You see something wrong with that?” Gunner asked him.
Flowers picked restlessly at the foam stuffing peeking out of a hole in the left armrest of his chair as he considered the question. “I shouldn’t,” he said in time. “I have a wife and three kids to worry about, Mr. Gunner. I should be as happy as anyone to see that madman off the street.”
“But you’re not.”
“Not entirely, no.”
“Because?”
“Because McGovern didn’t murder Lendell Washington,” Flowers said simply. “I told you I was there the night the kid was shot, remember? I saw the whole thing. And McGovern was telling the truth when he said the kid had fired on him first. I saw and heard him do it. It all happened exactly the way McGovern said it did.”
“But you never went to the police to tell them as much.”
“No. I never told anybody I was there that night.” He smiled a halfhearted smile and shrugged, apparently not knowing what else to say.
“Any chance you’re simply mistaken? Your eyes can play funny tricks with you at times like that.”
“I know what I saw, Mr. Gunner. The Washington boy fired twice at McGovern before McGovern fired back. I’m sure of it.”
“You said there were other witnesses,” Gunner said.
Flowers nodded. “There were. A man and two women. They turned up near the alley that night, claiming they saw the kid get shot, and McGovern putting a gun in his hand afterward and firing it, but I don’t think any of them really did. The streets were deserted when I walked past that alley, I didn’t see anybody else around. I think those people just showed up afterward, saw a chance to make a cop look bad, and took it.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Because
you didn’t want to get involved.”
“Because I chose not to get involved.”
Seeing no way around it, Gunner braced himself to ask the obvious next question: “So why get involved now?”
Flowers just looked at him, stuck for a feasible answer.
“Your conscience is bothering you, is that it?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“This is going to sound rather cold, Mr. Flowers, but don’t you think you’re a little late? McGovern got his walking papers from the department eight months ago.”
“I understand that. I regret that I didn’t come forward sooner, of course, but I guess I just didn’t feel like I was responsible for what happened to him until now. You’d feel the same way if you were me, I’m sure.”
“Well, that’s certainly a possibility, Mr. Flowers, but it’s not very likely. Judging from what little I can recall having heard about the man, what happened to McGovern was very likely inevitable, especially under the aegis of the LAPD’s new regime. Even if he were only half the monster everyone says he was, the odds are good he would have made a career-ending mistake of one sort or another eventually, with or without your help.”
“So?”
“So my advice to you is, go back to forgetting about it, because you couldn’t get the man reinstated now, even if your sense of guilt were warranted. The department invested a lot of time and effort into dismissing him, as you pointed out, and I don’t think they’d be particularly anxious to admit, eight months later, that it was all just a big mistake.”
“Reinstated?”
“That’s right. Reinstated. Isn’t that what you were thinking? That you could maybe get him his job back if you came forward now?”
Flowers eyed him curiously, seeming to be at a loss for words. “You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
Flowers’s incredulous gaze turned into a glare. “That McGovern is dead. He committed suicide three days ago.”
He watched Gunner sit there like a dunce, having been made to feel like an uninformed idiot in the confines of his own home.
“The newspapers say he’d been working as a night watchman for the last few months, and was watching a stereo store out in Hollywood when he caught a man trying to rob the place early Friday morning. The man says McGovern caught him sneaking out the back door with his arms full of portable TVs, then just froze up. Turned his own gun on himself and blew his brains out, without ever having said so much as a word.”
He waited to see how Gunner would react to that, but Gunner had nothing to say.
“It sounds crazy, but I can see him doing it,” Flowers said. “Because I’ve seen the thief’s picture in the paper, and on TV, and he’s a black man not much bigger or taller than the Washington boy was when he died. A black man, Mr. Gunner. Do you follow what I’m saying?”
Now Gunner remembered. He had caught a few words of a television news report announcing McGovern’s death the day after it had happened, Friday, but not enough to identify McGovern as the pathologically violent cop the LAPD had so uncharacteristically raked over the coals back in early November. It would have been easy to miss this latest chapter of the ex-cop’s story entirely, as McGovern had picked the start of the Fourth of July weekend to reenter the headlines, and in competition with the usual glut of holiday car wrecks, spectacular fireworks displays, and drug-related homicides, coverage of his suicide had received the short shrift such poor timing deserved.
“The police are certain it was suicide?” Gunner asked Flowers.
Again, Flowers nodded. “They say they are. They say it was the would-be thief himself who called them to the scene, and they admit there’s no way he would have done something like that unless McGovern died just the way he says he did. Besides, they know what happened to McGovern eight months ago better than anybody. If I can picture him killing himself under those circumstances, I’m sure they can, too.”
Gunner nodded his head, thinking along the same lines. Other than his general build, the thief probably bore no more real resemblance to Lendell Washington than Flowers did—but it had likely been Washington’s face McGovern had thought he was seeing that night, all the same.
“I’m not going to try and tell you that I feel sorry for the man, Mr. Gunner. I think he got exactly what he deserved, when you get right down to it. Trouble is, he got it for all the wrong reasons, and I can’t help but feel like I’m to blame for that.”
Gunner shook his head and said, “Don’t flatter yourself. What you said about Chief Bowden earlier was right on the mark. He’s been looking for an opportunity to prove himself to the black community, and the Lendell Washington shooting was it. His boys would have probably treated you like someone reporting a UFO sighting had you approached them earlier in McGovern’s defense.”
“That’s beside the point,” Flowers said indignantly. “Whether or not I could have done McGovern any good isn’t what matters to me. What is is that I didn’t do what I knew was right, and only because I was ordered not to.”
Gunner raised an eyebrow, not sure he had heard this last correctly. “Ordered?”
Flowers reached behind his right hip for his wallet, drew a folded sheet of white paper from its billfold section, and, opening the note meticulously, handed it over to Gunner.
“Read this,” he said.
It had the distinctive look of a blackmail note. Somebody had clipped mismatching characters out of newspapers and magazines and pasted them haphazardly together to form a succinct and crude message:
DEAR UNCLE:
WHY DONT YOU SIDE WITH THE BROTHERS FOR ONCE. DONT
NOBODY BUT US KNOWS YOU WAS THERE. LET THE FUCKING
PIG BURN AND YOU WONT GET HURT.
“I found that in my mailbox two days after the Washington boy was shot. It came just like that: no envelope, no address, no postmark. I figured whoever it was must have just come by the house and dropped it in the box the night before.”
“Any idea who it could have been?”
“No. I never told anybody I was there, remember?”
“So it had to be someone who saw you near the alley that night.”
“Yes.”
“And knew who you were.”
“Yes.”
“This the only note you received?”
“The only note, yes. But I got a phone call a day later, in the evening, early. This man asked me if I’d gotten his message. The message he’d left in my mailbox, he said.”
“You didn’t recognize the voice?”
“No. I’d never heard it before.”
“Go on.”
“Man was brief and to the point. He said he knew who I was, and what I was. He kept calling me ‘Uncle.’ Uncle this, and Uncle that.” Flowers’s eyes narrowed with anger as the memory came back to him. “He said he knew where my daughter Kisha went to school. Martin Luther King Elementary School; room nine. He told me what color clothes she had on that day and how many braids were in her hair.” He was looking at Gunner, but seeing something beyond him that wasn’t really there; a what-might-have-been nightmare that had come too close to reality for comfort. “Maybe I would have kept quiet about what I saw that night anyway, I don’t know. Like I said, I was no friend of Jack McGovern’s. But I’m a conservative man, Mr. Gunner. Too conservative for some people. If I told you I could never see myself helping a policeman in trouble, I’d be lying to you. I think cops have a thankless job, a difficult job, and most of them are all right. I don’t think that opinion makes me a cop-lover, but to some people, it does. Apparently, this man is one of them.”
He breathed a deep sigh, resolutely pushing on, and said, “If they had let me make up my own mind about going or not going to the police, I wouldn’t have had to come here tonight. No matter what I’d decided to do, I would’ve been able to live with it, without any regrets. Only, I didn’t get to make up my own mind. Somebody followed my little girl to school one day and made up my mind for me. And that’s why I n
eed your help.”
Gunner waited for him to spell it out.
“I want you to undo the damage my cowardice has done, Mr. Gunner. I want you to find out what really happened in that alley the night Lendell Washington was killed, and I want you to tell the whole world about it.”
Gunner still didn’t say anything.
“The man who sent me that note obviously wanted McGovern to lose his badge over something he didn’t do,” Flowers went on, “and he used me to make that happen. He took advantage of my insecurities as a man and bought my silence—cheap. If I let him get away with that, now that it’s cost a man his life, I’ll be everything he accuses me of being—and worse.”
He gave Gunner a good look at the determination he’d brought into the house with him, and Gunner found himself suitably impressed. Appraising the older man with more professional interest than he had shown him to this point, it occurred to Gunner that Flowers fit the profile of a man who might have had to deal with being thought of as an Uncle Tom all of his adult life, and he knew what that yoke was like to bear. Being made to feel answerable to the whole of one’s own race was a burden few white men ever had to shoulder, yet it was a black man’s birthright from day one. To wander off too far from the beaten path of conformity, daring to expand upon what some people insisted were the unalterable parameters of “blackness,” was to purchase the guilt of treason, and for some that guilt could be so incessant as to be crippling. Gunner himself was no such victim, but he had felt the sting of the phenomenon more than once, enough to know its symptoms when he saw them, as he realized he was seeing them now.
Unfortunately, being able to commiserate with Flowers did not preclude Gunner from recognizing the absurdity of his request. One was always risking a broken neck playing cops with cops, no matter what you were trying to prove or who you were trying to vindicate, and only morons didn’t know it.
Gunner was no moron.
“Mr. Flowers,” he said, making his best effort to be delicate, “I’m afraid I can’t help you. I doubt that anyone could, frankly.”