Fear of the Dark Page 4

  “Sweet Lou?”

  Lilly nodded. He had been afraid she would.

  “I didn’t think they knew each other,” he said.

  “They didn’t. J. wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with Lou, everybody knows that.”

  “So why should Lou want to kill him?”

  Lilly lifted her huge shoulders up in a ponderous shrug, then let them drop. “I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is J. got a call from that college boy pimp who works for Lou a few days before he died. You know the one I mean?”

  “Price,” Gaines said, if only to speed things along.

  “Price, right. The fashion plate lawyer with the fancy mouth and pretty car. He called J. here at the club and got him all hot and heavy, had him talkin’ about killin’ people, and shit. J. took the call back in the office, and closed the door so I wouldn’t hear what he was sayin’, but he raised enough hell that I got the gist of it anyway, even out here workin’ the bar. It had somethin’ to do with Lou wanting a piece of the Deuce, I think. J. must’ve said, ‘Stay the fuck away from my place’ about fifty times before he hung up.”

  “You ask him about it afterward?” Gunner asked.

  “Of course. And I still got the marks to prove it.”

  “He wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “No. He said it was just Deuce business, nothin’ for me to worry about. He was gonna handle it, he said.”

  “You ever actually hear him mention Sweet Lou by name?”

  “No.”

  “Or Price?”

  “No. But I was the one answered the phone. The boy says, ‘Let me speak to J.T.,’ right to the point, no hello or nothin’. I asked him, ‘Who should I say is callin’?’ and he just says, ‘Tell him it’s in regards to our recent dialogue at the Kitchen.’ Now how many niggers you know use the word ‘dialogue’ like that?”

  It was Gunner’s turn to shrug. “A few. You read something other than Jet once a month, that’ll happen to you.”

  “Not to nobody callin’ here, it don’t.”

  “Okay. So it was Lou’s man Price on the phone. Go on.”

  The big woman stared at him. “Go on, what?”

  Gunner stared back. “So where does Sweet Lou come in?”

  “He don’t,” Gaines said, shaking his head skeptically.

  Lilly glared at him and said, “Who owns the Kitchen, Howard? And who else around here works hand-in-hand with white people every day?”

  “Lilly, I keep tellin’ you, the boy that shot J.T. and Buddy didn’t work for Sweet Lou! He was poor white trash, probably a bigger ‘literate than anybody you know, and that ain’t Sweet Lou’s speed. Lou uses class people, white, black, and otherwise, and nothin’ else but. Ain’t that right, Gunner?”

  “So they say.”

  “He could’ve worked for Sweet Lou,” Lilly insisted stubbornly.

  “Not the man I saw,” Gaines argued, his patience wearing thin. “The man I saw, Lou wouldn’t’ve hired to change a flat.”

  “Describe the guy,” Gunner said, pulling a small notebook from his shirt pocket. He borrowed a pen from Lilly and turned to one side to use the backrest of the booth for support as he took notes. Gaines painted a surprisingly complete portrait of someone he had seen only once for a man whose own vocabulary was nothing to brag about.

  “You ever see him before?” Gunner asked, almost rhetorically. “Or since?”

  “No,” Gaines said, “but …” He had a pained expression on his face.

  “But what?”

  “This ain’t gonna help you any, ’cause it don’t exactly come from a reliable source. But Sheila said she had. Seen him before, that is.” His eyes were on Lilly, expecting the news to get a rise out of her.

  Lilly only laughed.

  “Like I said. It don’t come from a reliable source,” Gaines said.

  Gunner wasn’t laughing. “She say where she thought she’d seen him before?”

  Gaines shook his head. “Not to me. And I heard what she told the cops that night, and she didn’t tell them shit. She played dumb and went home soon as they let us all go. I seen her a few days after that, in Ralph’s market, and that’s when she told me. She was all messed up about it, scared to be seen anywhere. She figured the boy had recognized her, too, and was lookin’ to shut her up. You should’ve seen her rushin’ to get in and out of that market.”

  “Have you spoken to her since?”

  “No.”

  “Who else knows about this? Anybody?”

  “Nobody. Who’m I gonna tell that believes anything Sheila’s got to say? I don’t believe it myself.”

  “You don’t.”

  “No. But I believe she believes it. Ain’t that what those shrinks on TV always say?”

  Gunner looked at Lilly. She said, “Hey, I told you, she ain’t been in here. And if she had, she’d have known better than to tell me she’d seen that funny-eyed motherfucker before. I’d have found out where, or killed her tryin’.”

  Gunner asked Gaines if he knew the full name of Sheila’s partner the night of J.T. and Buddy’s murder.

  “Ray Hollins,” Gaines said. “Said he was a fighter out of Detroit, Golden Glove just turned pro in the featherweight division, but he didn’t look like no fighter to me.” He winked at Lilly and the two of them had a good laugh.

  Gunner asked what Hollins did look like, and Gaines told him, sketching yet another vivid picture of a perfect stranger.

  “Sheila likes those skinny ones, I think,” he said, chuckling.

  Gunner was putting his notebook away. He put Lilly’s pen in his pocket, too, and got away with it.

  Gaines asked, “You gonna go see her, huh?”

  Gunner nodded. “Why not?”

  “Hey, if you got to, you got to. Maybe she’s tellin’ the truth for once in her life, who knows? But I tell you what—you go over there, you better step light.” He took the detective’s hand again and said, “ ’Cause that girl was crazy to begin with. Now she’s all wound up, she could be dangerous. Downright dangerous.”

  “I hear you, Howard,” Gunner said.

  “Besides, you know what she always says: ‘Just ’cause I’m paranoid …’”

  “‘… that don’t mean they ain’t out to get me.’ Yeah, I remember.”

  Gunner made it to his feet and winked at his friends, grinning.

  “I say it all the time myself,” he said, and walked out before it could dawn on Lilly that he was starting up a new tab, after all.

  he name on her California driver’s license—which had expired more than two years ago—was Sheila Denise Pulliam, but everybody called her Mean Sheila. Those who were unaware of the story behind the nickname could not understand how she could have possibly earned it, for in truth she was a pussycat, warm and outgoing and generous to a fault. They didn’t know about the four-year stretch she had pulled at the Georgia Rehabilitation Center for Women in the late seventies, or the boyfriend-turned-pimp she had murdered to get there.

  Back in the late spring of ‘83, Sheila had come west following her early release from prison with the vague hope that she could make the kind of money on her back in Los Angeles no whore could aspire to in Athens, Georgia. She fully expected something less than the paradise propaganda consistently promised, but the overcrowded world of has-beens and losers she came to find dealt her a devastating blow nevertheless. The City of Angels’s reputation as the motherlode of opportunity turned out to be one it deserved, to her mild surprise, but her advisers in Georgia had failed to acquaint her with a fact simple mathematics could have easily pointed out: where opportunity knocks, desperate people rush en masse to answer its call. Hookers like Sheila, pouring forth in daily waves from the terminals at LAX and boarding platforms at Grand Central Station, were as rare in California as a good tan, and just as valuable.

  And there was only so much Solid Gold to go around.

  So Sheila had settled into impoverished mediocrity without a great deal of struggle and made L.A. her home.
At thirty-three she was too tired to do anything else. She worked the Inglewood district for two years under the guidance of a rookie flesh peddler named Pee Wee, then went independent and moved her wares thirteen miles south to Compton, where she enjoyed a fair amount of prosperity. Independence would have cost most working girls some teeth, but Sheila wasn’t the youngest piece in Pee Wee’s stable and he was constantly having to apologize for her refusal to perform a good third of the day’s most popular acts of perversion. He let her go almost gladly. She played around in Hollywood for a while, but the fierce competition and high risk of arrest drove her back to the inner city. She bought a tiny house that sat behind a larger one on the 2200 block of 153rd and let a trickle of steady neighborhood business supplement the wages of welfare.

  Gunner had known Sheila for well over two years, but had never made the trip to her place of residence until now. She was hot for his body, always had been, and he disliked his chances of fending her off on her own turf, convinced as he was that any sexual contact between them would do irreparable harm to both their friendship and his appreciation of sex with living partners.

  On this day, however, standing on the balding patch of lawn that served as both the backyard of the large home facing the street and the front yard of Sheila’s smaller unit to the rear, Gunner assumed that seduction would be the last thing on Sheila’s mind. Howard Gaines and Lilly had described her as a petrified recluse, a woman of already questionable courage afraid for her life, and if he was at all uneasy about being here—and there was no point in denying that he was—it was strictly due to his ignorance of the devices she had on hand to protect herself with. Devices he had no doubt the slightest provocation would lead her to use, no questions asked.

  Gingerly, then, he checked the windows of the tiny four-room cottage she lived in for indications of life, but the curtains were drawn and too thick with dust to see through. Rather than press his nose to the glass to get a better look—the blazing afternoon sun would make him all too easy to see from inside as it was—he moved on to the door of the little house and rang a bell that didn’t appear to be working. He left the bell alone and started to knock politely on the door. A dog somewhere behind him used the racket as an excuse to make some noise of its own, and he turned around to watch a good-sized Doberman claw at the screen door of the main house’s back porch, acting like an animal that hadn’t seen red meat in months.

  Made to feel like an open-face sandwich, Gunner sped his business along and tried the door, which he expected to find locked. Leaning slightly forward to set his weight against it, he sprawled unceremoniously into the dark house when someone inside jerked the door wide open and stepped aside, into the shadows.

  Gunner caught his balance before hitting the floor and ducked a poor right hand his unseen host threw at the back of his head, but took a left hook with better aim flush on the chin. He staggered backward, farther into the blackness of the room, and a straight right tried to follow the left, but this one he sensed coming and let go by, countering with two sharp rights of his own, throwing them where he judged a kidney to be and hitting pay dirt. What felt like a lightweight body doubled up around his hand, and the narrow face of a young black man with the ghost of a mustache dropped clearly into view, bathed in a tight wedge of sunlight the open front door was welcoming into the house.

  Gunner launched a hard left at the nose above the mustache and the sound of bone meeting bone rang sharply through the air. The stranger took a short flight back into obscurity and came to rest Gunner knew not where, making enough noise to strongly suggest that he would be there for a while.

  Gunner braved a few seconds to catch his breath before fumbling around for, and finding, a light switch. In the well-diffused glow of two ceramic table lamps at opposite ends of Sheila’s front room, their bulbs unguarded by shades, the wiry man on the floor beside the couch was everything Gaines had said he would be: of medium height, slim, and no fighter. Ray Hollins, Sheila’s friend from the Motor City, was out cold.

  Sheila herself was nowhere in sight. Gunner frisked Hollins quickly for weapons and scanned the floor for one the purported pugilist might have lost in the heat of their modest scuffle. Finding nothing, he cast but a casual glance over the mundane decor of the place and set out to find the lady of the house.

  There was a bedroom to his left and a kitchen to his right, with a small bathroom in between. He rolled his eyes around in the bathroom for a while, then advanced to the kitchen. It was full of smells he didn’t like, smells that had little or nothing to do with cooking. He was reaching for the light switch when someone made a clumsy attempt to sneak up behind him, running without stealth and knocking things over along the way. He needed no clairvoyance to guess who it was, but played it safe and spun around to throw a right hand with something on it, anyway.

  Sheila dropped like a stone, a knife the size of a small machete leaving her hand as she fell.

  Two women, two right hands. He understood the occasional necessity of the practice, but slapping women around was still nothing he wanted to become proficient at.

  Annoyed, he tossed Sheila’s knife into the safety of the kitchen and dragged the hooker’s limp form across the carpet to the couch, where he parked her parallel to Hollins, who was just now starting to come around. Gunner took a seat on the arm of an overstuffed easy chair and watched him blink a few times, recall where he was and who he was with, and then make a shaky move to get up.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Gunner said, smiling the smile of a new friend.

  Hollins took his advice and relaxed, until catching sight of Sheila for the first time. She had turned to one side, away from him, and her resemblance to a corpse was a strong one.

  Hollins started to cry.

  “Shit, man,” he said, his lips barely moving. “You killed her!”

  Sheila belched in her sleep. She rolled over toward him and opened her eyes, showing him all the white around her irises.

  “How’re you doing, Sheila?” Gunner said.

  The sound of his voice drove her, backpedaling, up against Hollins and the base of the couch. She stared at the detective blankly, failing to recognize him right away.

  “Aaron?”

  “Yeah. Long time no see, huh?”

  She kept her guard up, refusing to relax, and rubbed her left cheek, saying nothing.

  “You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” Gunner said, smiling again.

  “You the one that hit me?”

  “Yeah. You were the one with the knife, right?”

  She tried to remember, did, and nodded. “I didn’t know it was you. I thought it was somebody else.”

  “I figured as much.”

  She sat up, struck with a sudden thought. “What are you doing here?” she asked, reaching for Hollins’s hand.

  Gunner said, “I thought maybe you could use a few dollars. In exchange for a small favor.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Hollins demanded. He had been taking in their exchange with exemplary patience up to now.

  Gunner tossed him a glance of unmistakable disrespect. “An old friend.”

  “He’s okay, honey,” Sheila said, squeezing the young man’s hand, watching the tears dry to salty streaks on his face. “This is Aaron. Aaron Gunner. He’s an old drinkin’ buddy of mine. We got what you call a ‘plutonic relationship.’”

  “Strictly,” Gunner agreed, nodding.

  Hollins didn’t say anything. Sheila turned to Gunner and said, “What kind of favor you want? Not the usual kind, I know.”

  Gunner smiled weakly and shook his head, hoping she wasn’t warming up to another big come-on, Hollins or no Hollins. “I need to ask you a few questions, Sheila. About the man who killed J.T. and Buddy Dorris at the Deuce.”

  A long pause. “Why?”

  “Because I’m working again. For Buddy’s sister, Verna. You know Verna?”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “That’s all right. It’s not important.”<
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  “I thought you gave that shit up, private detectin’. You were supposed to be workin’ in construction with your cousin, I thought.”

  She was on guard again. A private investigator was, after all, a man other people paid to do their dirty work.

  “I was. I am. But this came up a few days ago, and I thought I’d give it one more try. For old times’ sake.”

  “You lookin’ for the white boy?”

  “Yeah.” He came right out with it. “And Howard Gaines says you might be able to tell me where to find him.”

  Sheila released her grip on Hollins’s hand.

  “Howard needs to shut the fuck up,” Hollins said.

  Gunner glowered at him, but made no move from his chair. He didn’t want to see the Motown Wonder cry again. He turned to Sheila and asked, “Can you help me, Sheila?”

  “Why would I know where you can find him?”

  Gunner shrugged. “Maybe because you’re a popular girl. One who’s been known to go through the phone book looking for tricks, when times are rough. A girl meets a lot of interesting people that way. Black people, white people—you know.”

  “I don’t do much white business,” she said.

  “So maybe you know him from somewhere else.”

  Sheila was silent.

  Gunner sighed. Whatever Del was doing right now at a fifteen-dollar-an-hour-clip, it couldn’t be as difficult as this. “You think he sent me, is that it?”

  Sheila remained silent.

  “You think he called me out of retirement so I could come over here to hold a rap session in your living room. Lay you out, prop you up against the sofa, and wait for you and your boyfriend to come around before knocking you off. That what you think?”

  Sheila stared at him, saying nothing. She was holding Hollins’s hand again.

  “I don’t know what to think,” she said finally. “I’m too damn scared to think!”

  She scrambled to her feet and followed her nose to a decanter of what Gunner figured to be cheap Scotch sitting along with several short glasses on a table nearby. She poured herself a drink and slammed it down her throat like a dose of castor oil she was afraid to get a good taste of.