Not Long for This World Read online

  She tried to wait him out, but he wouldn’t let her steady gaze pry anything in the way of further explanation out of him. “I’ll give you fifty in trade for this,” Holiday said, referring to the Smith & Wesson, “but on one condition: You hold on to it for me.”

  “Say what?”

  “You heard me. Keep it for me. Put it in a safe place. I ever have a buyer for it, I’ll let you know.”

  The terms sounded suspect to Gunner, but he shrugged, accepting the harmless compromise. “I can do that,” he said.

  Holiday nodded and took his money, then went off to get the requisite paperwork—state and federal forms in duplicate and triplicate—needed to complete their transaction. In many states of the Union, the paperwork would not have been necessary at this, the point of sale, but here in California, the law prevented Gunner from taking possession of the Ruger, or any handgun, until the proper agencies could be officially notified of its purchase, a process that in most cases took somewhere in the neighborhood of two weeks.

  It was an attempt to make the acquisition of lethal weapons a more complex and troublesome proposition for the criminal element, one that would have been worth a mild round of the taxpayers’ applause, if not a raucous standing ovation, were it not for the fact that rifles were wholly excluded from the ordinance’s demands.

  Perhaps it was this judicial oversight that accounted, at least partially, for Holiday’s perpetually booming business. As he rewrapped his revolver, Gunner took a look around to survey the customary crush of customers milling about the store. Kids too young to shave were grinning at their reflections in the blades of huge hunting knives and men with tired faces were holding shotguns in their arms like new fathers cradling infants in a nursery. An old man standing at the end of the store’s main display case was handling an American-made copy of the AK-47 assault rifle under the watchful eye of one of Holiday’s expert salespersons. He looked to be in his early fifties, slow and easygoing; somebody’s innocuous grandfather out treating himself to a new rod and reel. Only the thing in his hand was not for fishing. It was for killing, and on a grandiose scale.

  Holiday reappeared and caught Gunner inspecting her clientele, his face clouded by a mild revulsion for the scene.

  “It’s crazy, isn’t it?” she asked him, watching with Gunner as the old man at the counter, satisfied, began to lay his money down for the pseudo-AK-47.

  Gunner turned around and said, “They’re just looking for an edge, Dee. Same as you and me.”

  Holiday nodded, her mood having taken an obvious turn for the worse.

  “When you’re up against the devil, I guess you’ve gotta have something,” she said.

  Gunner caught the vacant look in her eyes and left her without saying much more than goodbye, certain that the smile that could lighten any man’s load, no matter how despondent, was out of service for the day.

  The Hyundai was a dog.

  Gunner’s cousin Del had picked up the payments on the car as a favor to an old flame’s irresponsible son, a party-hopping college dropout who had neither the means nor the will to ever make them himself. Del was a man of simple tastes, an electrician by trade, who thought the silver and black Korean-made four-door would make an ideal company vehicle, but he soon developed a reluctance to drive it that made loaning it out to Gunner for a month or so no great personal sacrifice.

  It had only taken a few days of unrelenting commuter boredom for Gunner to dislike the car as much as Del did, but the Hyundai’s lack of power and panache was wholly outweighed by its suitability to his purpose. Gunner had finally conceded the fact that his own car—a classic, eye-catching red 1965 Ford Shelby Cobra convertible—was a surveillance vehicle of dubious merit, which, when combined with a black driver behind the wheel, often amounted to nothing less conspicuous than a large neon sign advertising his presence on the street. The Hyundai, on the other hand, was almost chameleonlike in its ability to blend seamlessly into any background. Advertising hype claimed there were more than a half-million of the boxy little cars on the American road, so its appearance in the rearview mirror of someone Gunner was trying to tail was almost guaranteed to go unnoticed—as Del’s had during its first tour of duty under Gunner: the Lionel Compton surveillance.

  All of which served to explain why it was the Hyundai and not the Cobra that Gunner edged up to the curb in front of Ted’s Tires, the discount tire store Teddy Davidson owned and operated on Main and 137th, less than thirty minutes after his visit to Dee Holiday’s gun shop Saturday morning. Kelly DeCharme had supplied the detective with a wealth of information with which to do his job, including the names and present addresses of all the principal players involved in Toby Mills’s case, so hunting Davidson down had not been the difficult process of phone-book scanning it ordinarily might have been.

  Rookie’s older brother had converted an old gas station into an off-brand tire supermarket, plastered the architecture with bright paint and exuberant sale signs, and in so doing had apparently found the formula for success, because the place was teeming with people and cars as Gunner approached the service desk. A short Jamaican with lidded eyes and too many teeth stood behind the counter there, taking orders and fielding complaints with equal panache, and Gunner had to brave the sneers and brush-back blocks of the horde before him to ask whether Teddy Davidson was in. The Jamaican nodded his head and made a faint gesture with his right hand to indicate the service bay, never looking up for a moment from the catalogue he was studying.

  There were three men laboring heavily out in the crowded service bay when Gunner entered, each wearing identical blue overalls that lacked the customary breastpocket name tags Gunner was hoping to see, but one of the three was giving all the orders and the other two were taking them, so Davidson was nevertheless easy to identify. He was circling a late-model Pontiac up on one of the bay’s four racks, pounding the hubcaps back onto its freshly refitted rims, when Gunner came up behind him. He turned once at the intrusion, then returned his full attention to his work.

  “You’re not allowed back here, sir,” he said simply.

  He was a clean-shaven man in his early thirties, expertly groomed and mannered; the grease on his hands and face clashed with his gentlemanly presence, like white socks paired with a brown suit.

  “I’m looking for Teddy,” Gunner said, staying put.

  “I’m Teddy, but any questions you have, you’ll have to ask me in the office. Not out here.”

  “I’ll ask them wherever you want,” Gunner conceded, stepping around the elevated Pontiac to show Davidson his investigator’s license.

  Davidson didn’t give the license much of his time; he saw the wallet come up in Gunner’s hand and got the gist of things right away, letting the mallet he was using on the Pontiac’s hubcaps drop to his side as if he had suddenly lost the strength to wield it.

  “Jesus Christ. Not another one.” He looked thoroughly disgusted. “You guys never quit, do you?”

  “Read the fine print. I’m private,” Gunner said.

  Davidson glanced at the license again and shrugged. “Okay, so you’re private. What difference does that make? You’re still going to ask the same ten thousand questions about Rookie the cops did, right?”

  “I don’t have the stamina to ask ten thousand questions. Even on my best days, five hundred’s my limit.”

  Davidson didn’t much care for the joke. He had a booming business to run and Gunner was keeping him from it. Still, experience had taught him about the persistence of these people; if he didn’t comply with the detective’s demands now, he’d only have to do it later, perhaps at an even less convenient moment than this.

  “I’ll give you ten minutes,” he said.

  He barked some hurried orders to one of the two men working in the bay and led Gunner off to a tiny office in the rear of the building. It was sparsely furnished but classically decorated, with a small metal desk and a calendar featuring naked women hanging on the wall behind it. Gunner took a seat in a wobb
ly wooden chair opposite the calendar and, flipping through its pages, tried to find a nude-of-the-month to his liking. He couldn’t. It looked as if most of the girls would have been better suited to working for Joe Lanier’s Transmissions than posing for its calendar.

  “You say you’re a private cop?” Davidson asked Gunner, taking his seat behind the desk like the CEO of Texaco sitting down for a board meeting.

  Gunner nodded. “I’m working for an attorney named Kelly DeCharme. Toby Mills’s court-appointed lawyer. I’ve been hired to find out who was riding in the car with Rookie the night he rolled on Darrel Lovejoy, if it wasn’t Mills.”

  “And if it was Rookie who did the driving.”

  “Yes. If.”

  “But Mills says it was Rookie, I imagine.”

  Gunner nodded again. “He can’t seem to see anyone else doing it.”

  “But he can’t prove that Rookie did, can he?”

  “No. He can’t prove anything.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. He knows it was Rookie who was driving the car, but he can’t say who Rookie was with. I love it.” He forced himself to grin. “They call themselves honorable, these kids. One for all and all for one, and all that brotherhood crap. A Blue would never rat on another Blue, they tell you. But let one of ’em mess up, find himself squarely behind the eight ball, and you see what happens. They get religion. They finally feel the need to confess … to someone else’s sins, of course.”

  “You obviously don’t think your brother had anything to do with Lovejoy’s murder,” Gunner said.

  “What should be obvious is that I don’t have much faith in what Rookie’s friends have to say about anything,” Davidson said. “They’re nothing but infantile thieves and liars, and murderers of women and children, when the mood moves them. As for what I think about Rookie rolling on Lovejoy, the truth is, I don’t know whether he did or not, and I consider myself lucky that way. The less I know about his business, the better.”

  “He lives with you periodically, doesn’t he?”

  “Whenever he and the King decide they need a vacation from one another, yeah. He’s my little brother, I love him, and it’d be un-Christian of me to turn him away. But the King is his legal guardian; he’s the man you people should be harassing, not me.”

  “I just came from his place. Nobody’s home. I expect I’ll catch up with him sooner or later, but I’ve been told not to expect much help from him. I thought in the meantime I’d talk to you. But if asking a few questions is your idea of harassment …”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said that Rookie lives with the King, not me. The only reason Rookie stays with me at all is because life with that man is no picnic; the kid’s got to get away from the drunken idiot sometime. And where else is he going to go?”

  “Was he staying with you at the time of Lovejoy’s murder?”

  “No. Last time I put him up was back in February.”

  “But you have seen him since then?”

  “A couple times, yeah. But not since the murder.” He saw how his anticipation of Gunner’s next question had surprised the detective, and said, “I’ve been through this line of questioning before, remember? I’ve got the routine down.”

  “So where do we go from here?” Gunner asked him.

  “If we stick to the script, you ask me where else I think Rookie could be hiding. And I tell you I don’t have any idea. I’m his brother, not his bodyguard. Then you ask if I’m aware of any grudge Rookie or the Mills kid may have held against Lovejoy, and again, I say no, I’m afraid not.”

  “It sounds like if we stick to the script, you’re not going to be of much help to me yourself.”

  Davidson shrugged. “I don’t think I did the police much good, either.”

  He didn’t laugh when he said it, but the thought seemed to please him all the same. He had a serene look on his face that begged to be slapped off.

  Gunner ignored that temptation and said, “They catch you harboring a fugitive, you’re gonna have to run this place from a jail cell. I assume you know that.”

  “The police have promised me that would be the case, yes. But I’m sure, with God’s help, I’d manage somehow.”

  “No. You wouldn’t. You’d lose your shirt, and the pants that go with it. And for a man who looks like he’s worked hard for what he’s got, that’s a hell of a lot to risk for an ‘infantile thief and liar,’ and sometime ‘murderer of women and children.’ Or does that description only apply to Rookie’s friends?”

  “It applies to any gangbanger. Anybody stupid enough to fall into that lifestyle and ignorant enough to stay in it. Rookie’s no exception.

  “These kids have choices, Mr. Gunner, despite what they and others would have you believe. I stand as evidence of that. I’ve lived in this part of the city all of my thirty-one years; I had the same obstacles of peer pressure and environmental deficiencies to overcome as Rookie, and you see how I’ve turned out, what I’ve managed to accomplish. Rookie should be encouraged by my success; he should see it as proof of his own potential, but instead he merely finds it laughable. He’s a quitter and a fool, and I pity him for that.

  “However, while the boy may be guilty by association of murder, he himself has never actually killed anyone before. And this is not just me talking; this is a matter of record. He’s never even been accused of murder before. So I wonder, why is everyone so eager to believe he’s committed one now? Because another Blue says he did?”

  “There’s the matter of his car. The blue Maverick,” Gunner said. “And the witness who’s placed both Mills and Rookie inside it.”

  “Yeah, the witness. I’d forgotten about her. She’s something else to think about, isn’t she?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean that she’s a real bolt out of the blue. A rare find. Most people I know see a man killed in a drive-by, they don’t rush out to make it a matter of public record. They go home and try to forget about it, pretend it never happened.”

  “You trying to say she’s lying?”

  “I’m trying to say that maybe she’s confused,” Davidson said. “With a man like Lovejoy getting killed and all, maybe she saw an opportunity to be a star and jumped on it. All the police would’ve had to do was coax her a little bit. Convince her it was a Maverick she saw, and not a Pinto or a Comet. You know how things like that can happen.”

  Gunner did but chose not to say so.

  “Or maybe she’s just saying what she was told to say,” Davidson continued. “Maybe the Blues are being fingered for Lovejoy’s murder because it’s so easy to see them doing it.”

  “You’re talking about a frame.”

  “That’s right. And why not? Where is it written that all of Lovejoy’s enemies had to be gangbangers, that no one else could have wanted to see the man dead?”

  Davidson was asking better questions than Gunner was, and the role reversal made the detective uncomfortable.

  “I were you, I’d look at all the possibilities,” Davidson suggested.

  “Thanks. I intend to.”

  Gunner took a business card from his wallet and passed it across the desk.

  “I’m getting paid to clear Mills of Lovejoy’s murder, if I can manage it,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t do the same for Rookie if the opportunity presents itself. All I’m after is the truth; I don’t care who it condemns or vindicates. If you hear from Rookie, tell him that for me. Give him my number; tell him I just want to talk.”

  “Sure,” Davidson said, pocketing the card without even looking at it, like a street flyer he intended to trash at his earliest convenience.

  “You love the kid like you say, you’ll let me help him,” Gunner said, standing up. “Because I don’t think there’s anyone else out there who even cares enough to try.”

  He waited for Davidson to nod before showing himself to the door.

  chapter four

  Harold ain’t home,” the little boy at the door said.

&
nbsp; “How about your mother? Can I talk to her?”

  The boy shook his dusty head from side to side. “Momma’s at work.”

  There were five kids in all that Gunner could see from where he was standing outside the decrepit two-bedroom apartment in Willowbrook in which Harold “Smalltime” Seivers lived: the boy at the door, who looked about five; two younger boys and a slightly older girl watching television on the floor; and a toddler of indeterminate sex dressed in blue, pulling on the curtains of a window on the far side of the room. The girl and one of the boys on the floor were playing tug-of-war with a pair of pliers, fighting for the right to change the channel on their knobless and archaic rotary-tuned television set.

  “Isn’t someone watching you?” Gunner asked the boy at the door.

  “Gwen’s watchin’ us,” the boy said.

  “Gwen?”

  Her tiny charge was nodding his head when Gwen finally appeared, rushing into the living room from somewhere off in the back. She was a nine- or maybe ten-year-old, with a round face and uncombed hair, dressed in the same Pick ’n Save coordinates as the other children, only in sizes best suited for the not-so-pleasingly plump.

  “Who you talkin’ to, Byron?” she demanded, reaching the apartment door to yank the boy standing there behind her, shielding him from Gunner with her body like a huffy mother hen.

  “I was looking for Harold,” Gunner said, as if that explained everything.

  “Harold ain’t home,” Gwen said.

  “Are you his sister?”

  She nodded.

  “You know when Harold might be back?”

  She shook her head. She wasn’t going to elaborate, either. “What you want him for?”

  “I want to talk to him. Regarding some friends of his. Toby Mills and Rookie Davidson. You know Toby and Rookie?”

  She shook her head again. “I don’t know none of Harold’s friends. Momma says to stay away from ’em. You a policeman?”

  “I’m a private investigator. That’s like a policeman, only different.”