It's Not a Pretty Sight Read online

  “Who should I ask for?”

  “Lieutenant Matt Poole and Detective John Gruber,” Finch said, anxious now to get in on the glory he could see his buddy Tripplehorn setting himself up for.

  “Matt Poole? This is his case?”

  “That’s right. You know him?”

  Gunner nodded, somewhat relieved. “Yeah.”

  “Well, you wanna talk to him, like Mike here suggested, we’re going in right now, soon as we lock up. You want, you can follow us.”

  Another clever young man.

  Gunner just nodded and told him he had a deal.

  “So what’s your interest?” Matt Poole asked. Looking as always like a fully dressed mannequin that had fallen off the back of a truck and onto the Santa Monica Freeway. During rush hour.

  “I think the lady was a friend of mine,” Gunner said: Poole put his coffee cup down slowly and eyed the black man in earnest, his eyes filling up with something that strongly resembled sympathy. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  He was sitting and Gunner was standing in the former’s new cubicle at the LAPD’s Southwest station, where Poole stood out like a Packard in a Ferrari showroom. His old digs at the department’s now defunct Seventy-seventh Street station had suited him better than these, Gunner thought; old paint and scarred linoleum made the detective look almost human. But against a backdrop of walls without plaster patches and bright, almost cheery overhead lighting, well … he looked sick.

  “Her name’s Hillman,” Gunner said. “Nina Hillman.”

  “Hillman?”

  “Sorry. Pearson. Nina Pearson. I keep forgetting, Hillman was her maiden name.”

  Poole hesitated again, delicacy requiring the effort that it did with him. “We don’t have a positive ID yet, but that’s who we believe the deceased is, yeah. Mrs. Nina Pearson.”

  Gunner’s jaw tightened up for a moment, then relaxed. He was only vaguely aware that his right hand had curled up into a fist as hard as a mallet’s head. “What happened?”

  “Domestic homicide. At least, that’s the way it looks right now. The ex-husband’s been abusing her for years, apparently we’ve been out there to pull him off her three times in the last ten months alone. And he’s turned up missing. What’s that add up to to you?”

  “How did he do it?” Gunner asked.

  “He did it. What’s the difference how?”

  “Come on, Poole. Don’t play with me, man.”

  Again Poole hesitated, trying to decide how much Gunner did and did not need to know. He glanced around the squad room briefly, then said, “It was a shotgun. There were casings all over the kitchen where the body was found.”

  “Jesus,” Gunner said. He was fighting back tears.

  “Like I said, I’m sorry.”

  Gunner nodded to say thanks.

  “I take it she wasn’t just any friend.”

  The black man lowered himself into the chair in front of the policeman’s desk and shook his head. “No.”

  Poole just stood there and waited, letting him elaborate when it suited him.

  “We were engaged once. Eleven years ago,” Gunner finally said.

  “I see.”

  But of course he didn’t. Poole and Gunner didn’t go that far back.

  So Gunner told him the story, hard as it was to tell.

  He had met her on a bus.

  The 204 line, southbound on Vermont between South-Central and Hollywood. He was on his way to a football game, USG versus Arizona State, and she was on her way to work. An angel-faced sister in her late twenties or early thirties, sitting in the back reading a book. He had to pass fifteen empty seats to take the one next to her.

  “That’s a classic,” he said.

  She looked at him, curiosity and annoyance in perfect balance. Giving him the benefit of the doubt before telling him to get lost.

  “What?”

  “Childhood’s End. Some people think it’s one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written.”

  She was the only black woman he’d ever seen reading Arthur C. Clarke.

  “Really.” She smiled. Not because his line deserved it, but because she wanted to.

  Jumping into the breach before his luck could change, he introduced himself hurriedly, and things progressed nicely from there. He stayed on the bus until she got off at Olympic, a dozen stops past the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and his football game, but by that time he knew where she worked and what she did—she was a clerical assistant in the admissions department at Orthopedic Hospital—and her phone number was on an old transfer slip in his pocket.

  He thought he had made an easy catch.

  Six weeks and eight phone calls later, however, he was still waiting for her to agree to see him again. Because once the introductions were over, Nina made things easy for no man. She was a woman who put a price on everything she had to give, and you either gave her the respect she demanded or you took your act down the street. Putting Gunner off as long as she did had simply been her way of preparing him for this reality, so that when they actually did start dating, he was ready for the hard work to come.

  Not that work was what he was looking for. He was just looking for a few good times. He hadn’t counted on one good time with Nina leading to another, and another after that, until she was the only woman he could make any time for. It just worked out that way. Nina was beautiful and smart, smarter than anyone he had ever been with, and she loved him with an open, unapologetic zeal that he could not help but find addicting. She was ambitious and independent, two things he rarely found in the same woman, and her laugh could bring a smile to his face no matter how dark his mood. In short, life with Nina was good, and eventually it became so good that he actually found himself wondering if life with her as his wife wouldn’t be even better.

  So he proposed.

  How the wheels of their relationship came off after that was not easily explained, save to say that Gunner called their wedding off with three months to spare. Cold feet, people called it, and Gunner could only agree, not knowing what else to say. That he loved Nina was never in doubt; he was more certain of that than he was of her feelings for him. But he was afraid. Afraid and finally, after eighteen months of unprecedented monogamy, just a little bit bored. Nina was too much of a good thing, if that was possible, and too much of anything could only hold Gunner’s interest for so long. He was thirty-one years old, closer to a young man than an old one, and he thought he’d be losing more than he would gain if he conceded to the permanence of matrimony now, no matter who he chose to share his vows with.

  He was wrong.

  What he gained by setting Nina adrift was very little, and what he lost turned out to be much of what made life worth living. Love; friendship; family. Eleven years of transient, unfulfilling relationships later, he was still waiting for these things to come his way again, secretly convinced that they never would.

  Nina, meanwhile, had declined to wait. Less than eleven months after Gunner left her, she became another man’s wife. Her mother told Gunner she’d met Michael Pearson at the hospital one day and was dating him the next. He was a dispatcher for one of those package delivery services, Mimi Hillman said, she couldn’t remember which one.

  And he was bad news.

  Maybe he was, and maybe he wasn’t; Gunner didn’t know the man, and had no desire to. To start worrying about Nina now would have been the height of hypocrisy, he decided, so he left the question of her husband’s moral character—and Nina herself—alone. That day in the car, driving past her raucous new home with his invitation to her wedding going to waste on the seat beside him, was the last time he gave any thought to seeing her again. He’d written himself out of Nina’s life, and she deserved to have him stay out of it, for better or for worse.

  So he did.

  He started treating Nina like a memory, and hoped that she would treat him similarly. He never heard the stories about Pearson’s dark side, and she never tried to tell him any. In his mind,
Nina was happy, and would be happy all the rest of her days, and he didn’t want to know anything that might threaten that idea.

  His ignorance was bliss. At least, until now.

  “She have any kids?” Gunner asked Poole, when he was done poring over his regrettable past.

  “Kids? No, no kids. None that we’re aware of, anyway.” Poole was still eyeing the other detectives in the squad room, watching to see how much attention he and Gunner were getting. He was no collaborator, Poole, and he wanted no misunderstanding about that.

  “Does her mother know?”

  “Her mother?”

  “Nina’s mother. Mimi Hillman. Come on, Poole, get with the program. Has anybody told her mother yet?”

  Poole nodded. “We sent a car out to her house about an hour ago. They’re taking her downtown now.”

  “Downtown? For what?”

  “I told you. We still need an ID on the body. Look, Gunner, it’s been fun, but—”

  “I’ll ID the body. No point in putting her through that shit.”

  “You? You haven’t seen the woman in twelve years, how the hell are you gonna ID her?”

  “I can ID her. Believe me.”

  “I don’t think you understand. There isn’t—” He stopped himself, reconsidering his choice of words. “She doesn’t look anything like she used to, all right? I think her mother’s gonna have a hard enough time recognizing her as it is.”

  “All the more reason to spare her the grief.”

  “Goddamnit, Gunner, I’m trying to tell you she’s a mess! She took a head shot from a sawed-off twelve-gauge at point-blank range, how the hell are you gonna know if it’s her or not?”

  “We shared the same bed for a year and a half, Poole. I could ID her body in the dark.”

  “After twelve years?”

  “Twelve, fifteen, twenty-five—makes no difference. If it’s her, I’ll know it.”

  “Yeah, well, I think I’m gonna decline the offer all the same. Thanks anyway.”

  “What?”

  “I said you’re not IDing the body, and that’s final.”

  “Poole—”

  “Look. It’s like this. I let you down there and you go ape on me, I’m gonna be kicking myself in the ass for a month. Because any fool can see what’s on your mind. Even a fool as big as me.”

  “Yeah? And what’s that?”

  “Shit. You want the husband. What man wouldn’t, under the circumstances?”

  Gunner didn’t say a word.

  “But it’s not gonna happen, partner. Not on my watch. So you can forget about it right now. The mother’s gonna view the body, as planned.”

  “All right, all right.” The black man threw up his hands, begging the cop off. “So maybe I was thinking about going after the husband. I confess, the thought did enter my mind. But no more. You want me out of the picture, I’m out of the picture. Just don’t ask Mimi to do the ID, Poole. As a personal favor to me, let me do it instead. Please.”

  “Gunner …”

  “You want to lock me up afterward, that’ll make you feel better, do it. I don’t give a damn. Just don’t let that woman find out Nina’s dead like that. I’m begging you.”

  He could see Mimi now, bravely following Poole down to the morgue, mouthing a mantra of prayers with every faltering step until a coroner’s assistant pulls the sheet off a headless corpse she cannot help but place immediately …

  Poole let out a heavy sigh. “Jesus Christ. You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”

  Gunner nodded, in no position to argue. “I know.”

  “You’re gonna ID the body, then you’re gonna get the hell out of my face.”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re gonna keep your fucking nose out of this investigation after that. You get in the way on this one, Gunner, and I’ll have your license revoked before the sun goes down. You hear what I’m sayin’?”

  “I hear you.” Gunner nodded again and waited.

  “You know, the mother’s gonna see that body anyway, sooner or later,” Poole said. “You really don’t have to do this.”

  “I’m a big boy, Lieutenant. I think I can handle it.”

  Poole shrugged. “Okay. Just thought I’d give you one more chance to back out. Before …”

  He gave the investigator one more hard look, trying to say with his eyes what he obviously couldn’t—or wouldn’t—articulate verbally, then finally got out of his chair.

  It took them twenty-five minutes to drive down to the county coroner’s office.

  Gunner could have sworn it was twenty-five years.

  three

  MlMI HILLMAN WAS A ROCK. ALWAYS HAD BEEN, ALWAYS would be.

  The devil took his chisel to her more than he did to most, targeting her health here, her family there, and all she ever did to retaliate was survive. Shed a tear and push on, suffering no loss of momentum by looking back to bemoan her fate or wonder what might have been. Her faith in God and all the Catholic saints was a fuel she fed on perpetually, and it never left her feeling down or dejected about anything much longer than a day.

  The lady was impenetrable.

  So it was hard for Gunner to see this squat, wide-bodied giant of a woman hurting so profoundly, crying now instead of weeping, railing rather than suffering in dignified silence. Reaching with both arms for the comfort of an embrace she had never before required no matter how dire her circumstances. Gunner had known Nina’s death would cut her to the quick, but he had not expected this. The mountain no earthly object could move, collapsing in shards like a shattered crystal vase.

  Nina had been her last living child, and now she was gone. Mimi had seen the proof with her own two eyes. Poole had told Gunner his word would not be good enough for her, and he was right. Mimi had insisted upon viewing the body for herself, buying in the process one final memory of Nina she would never be able to forget. Just as Gunner never would.

  She offered no resistance when he offered to drive her home. She just nodded her head and let him lead her away, not speaking again until they had entered the house and he had locked the door behind them.

  For Gunner, it was like passing through a portal in time. The house was exactly as he remembered it. Overstuffed Victorian-style furniture dressed in burgundy velour, red wooden legs and arms buffed and polished to an almost obscene perfection. Throw rugs in huge ovals arranged over a glistening bare wood floor. The smell of fresh flowers everywhere. Photographs of Mimi’s three children crowding each other out up on the mantel above her fireplace: Teresa, her oldest, who had died at the age of eighteen after a long battle with leukemia; Charles, Mimi’s only son, who was killed in a car accident during Gunner and Nina’s courtship; and Nina herself, the baby. Even the arrangement of all the gold and silver frames seemed unchanged.

  Mimi asked Gunner if he wanted coffee, actually intending to play the polite hostess, but he cut her off before she could reach the kitchen and steered her into a living room chair, ordering her to remain there while he put the coffee on himself. He didn’t have to tell her twice.

  Later, when there were no more amenities to use as a means of avoidance, they sat in Mimi’s living room and talked, unable to sustain the silence to which they’d both been clinging another moment longer.

  “You have somebody you can call who can stay with you tonight?” Gunner asked gently. “Or would you like me to?”

  Mimi shook her head. “I don’t need anybody to stay with me. I’m fine.”

  “You really shouldn’t be alone tonight, Momma.” At some point during his time with Nina, he had started calling Mimi “Momma Hillman,” and he’d been doing it ever since.

  “Why not? I killed that girl. I deserve to be alone.”

  “Momma, don’t,” Gunner said, reaching out to pat her hand.

  “It’s true. I killed her. It’s nobody’s fault she’s dead but mine.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s not ridiculous! I should have gotten that child some
help! I should have bought myself a gun and killed that man a long time ago!”

  Without knowing it, she’d all but answered the question Gunner had been working his way up to asking. “You mean Michael?”

  “He’s sick. There’s something … wrong with that man. I thought …” She shook her head and turned away. “I thought he could change. I thought if we both prayed for him, if we just kept praying for him …”

  Her voice trailed off, her eyes fixed on the floor.

  Gunner waited a moment, then said, “You’re convinced he’s the one who killed her?”

  She looked up to face him again slowly, clearly dumb-founded by the absurdity of the question.

  “Momma. Listen. I know you don’t want to talk about this right now, but … I have to know for sure. It’s important. If there’s any chance it was somebody else, any chance at all—”

  “It was him,” Mimi said, making sure he understood her this time. “It was Michael. He told her he was going to kill her, and he did. He was the only one could’ve done that—” She stopped abruptly, suddenly remembering the butchery she was referring to, and had to pause a moment to gather herself before going on. “He was the only one could’ve hated my baby that much.”

  Gunner nodded, anxious to get her mind—and his—off the subject of Nina’s remains. “In that case,” he said, “I only have one more question to ask. I need to know where can I find him. If you have any ideas—”

  “Find him?” The big woman glared at him. “What do you want to find him for?”

  Gunner didn’t say anything.

  “Aaron, no. Don’t even think about it, you hear? Nina is dead. The time to help her is past. There is nothing you or I can do for her now except pray for her soul in heaven. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “I’m not going to hurt him, Momma. I just want to help the police bring him in.”

  “The police don’t need your help. And neither does Nina. What are you doing here, anyway? Who told you Nina was dead?”

  Gunner shrugged. “A friend. Someone who happened by the house while all the police were there and heard what happened.”