Fear of the Dark Page 5

  “I’ve been goin’ crazy in here,” she said, to anyone listening.

  “Where do you know the white boy from, Sheila?”

  “I’ve been in this house since the night it happened, waitin’ for that crazy sonofabitch to come get me! Ain’t been out to work, to party, to play—nothin’. He saw my face, he knows who I am!”

  “You don’t know that,” Hollins said, making a valiant stab at manly reassurance. “Just ’cause you recognized him, that don’t mean he recognized you.”

  “Where do you know him from?” Gunner asked again, exasperated.

  The hooker poured herself another drink and tugged at the fabric of the cheap kimono she was wearing, making an effort to pull herself together. “He works at a gas station me and Ruth used to stop in at back when Ruth was drivin’ her old man’s Benz,” she said, nursing the Scotch this time. “You remember Ruth—the big girl with the scars where a john cut her up for buyin’ a dog? It’s an ARCO station, I think. On Figueroa, out by the Coliseum.”

  “Next to a hamburger stand.”

  “Yeah. That’s the one. We used to go in there after workin’ the crowd at Raider games on Sundays, and it used to kill that boy to see us in that Mercedes. He didn’t talk much, but you could tell he was a nigger-hater just by the way he pumped your gas. We used to make him wash the windows just to piss him off.”

  “You get his name?”

  “It was on his shirt, but I never paid it any attention. He got mine, though. First name, last name, and middle initial.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Last time I seen him there—last December, I think it was—we had an argument. Ruth had him fill the tank, then couldn’t pay him. She didn’t have any cash. I had a credit card, but he wouldn’t take it. He said we’d have to come up with the cash or he was gonna go get a hose and siphon Ruth’s tank. I said bullshit, he was gonna take my card or kiss his gas good-bye. A perfectly good Visa card, took me two years to get one, and he wouldn’t honor it! Took it out of my hand and threw it across the lot, laughin’ like it was funny or somethin’.

  “Well, you know me. I started to go off on the fool, but Ruth wouldn’t let me out the car. She says, ‘Sheila, baby, this white boy’s crazy,’ and when I looked at him again, good, I could see she was right. He wanted me to try somethin’. So we just split. Left the card and everything. Got the gas, though.”

  She smiled, thankful for small victories.

  “The night he came into the Deuce, I didn’t recognize him right away, ’til all the shootin’ was over and he looked straight at me.” She drew imaginary circles around her left eye with an index finger. “Ain’t but so many people with an eye like he’s got,” she said. “That, and his voice, gave him away. When he said, ‘The Brothers of Volition can go fuck themselves,’ man, that was it. I knew it was him.”

  “Was that all he said?”

  “Just before he ran out, yeah. Right, baby?”

  She looked at Hollins. Totally uninterested, he nodded his head.

  “Did he come specifically to kill Buddy, do you think? Or was he just trying to rob the place, and got jumpy?”

  “He never asked for no money,” Sheila said, shaking her head. “He just came in, told Buddy he was lookin’ for him, and blew him away. He could’ve sat anywhere that night, but he sat next to Buddy. He didn’t want no money, you ask me.”

  “It was cold-blooded,” Hollins said, his eyes suddenly filled with the memory.

  “Lilly seems to think he was after J.T.,” Gunner said, just for the hell of it.

  Sheila laughed. The two women found each other pretty funny, apparently.

  “She would,” Sheila said, filling her glass again. “She probably don’t wanna believe it was an accident, her losin’ the only man brave enough to climb up on her ass two nights a week.”

  Gunner stood up and laughed along with her. Hollins joined them not long after.

  Mean Sheila could be as mean as the next lady, when she wanted to be.

  riginally, a middle-aged white man in a three-piece suit, eating an Egg McMuffin while reading the back page of the Wall Street Journal, had been sitting at the McDonald’s booth to Gunner’s right, minding his own business. But then the giant black kid wearing corduroy pants and a football jersey with the sleeves torn off asked him to move. In so many words.

  “Get your white motherfuckin’ ass out the way,” he said, looking down over his tray at the poor fellow in pinstripes.

  The white man looked to Gunner for help. Gunner pretended not to notice, and the white man retreated without further delay. Gunner wondered if the morning’s edition of the Journal had run a few lines on the four Caucasian gentlemen who had been beaten close to death on a crowded bus in Pittsburgh, late Wednesday.

  “You like that, brother?” the kid asked Gunner, grinning as he eased into his new seat.

  “Not much,” Gunner said, impassive, finishing off his coffee.

  “I’m ready for the war, see. That’s what I am. You ready for the war, Home?”

  The kid lifted the front of his jersey up to expose the taped and retaped hilt of an old handgun, jammed down into the waistband of his pants. His grin was electric, if not altogether whole.

  “I’ve already had my war,” Gunner said, standing up.

  “Yeah,” the kid said, covering the gun up again. “But this one gonna be ours, Home. This one gonna be ours …”

  He laughed and watched Gunner race a brace of giggling high schoolers to the nearest door.

  The ARCO gas station on the corner of Figueroa and 41st Place was owned by a middle-aged Armenian refugee named Boulos Kasparian. He was a short little man with dark hair and skinny arms, bushy eyebrows, and a beard that seemed stunted in its growth. He had dirt under his fingernails and grease stains on his clothes, sure signs of a man with a solid work ethic, but the frailty of his body made him look as if his muscles had never been tested by labor of any kind.

  Wednesday night, only minutes after leaving Mean Sheila in the incapable hands of Ray Hollins, Gunner had come to Kasparian’s place of business looking for a man allegedly under his employ, a man who was either a murderer or a murderer’s near twin, but an articulate black teenage girl manning the gas pumps had denied any knowledge of such an individual, professionally or otherwise, and had recommended Gunner speak with the boss. Kasparian was off on Wednesdays, she said, try early Thursday.

  Early Thursday by Gunner’s standards was a few minutes past eleven the next day, and not long after his encounter with the black urban guerrilla at McDonald’s and the worst fast-food breakfast he had ever scraped off a Styrofoam plate, he pulled his car onto the lot, beyond the empty service islands up to the open garage bay door, feeling like he had risen with the sun. The girl in the clean blue uniform he had spoken to previously was again on duty, stocking a wavering metal rack with cans of oil in front of the station’s office window, but Kasparian himself walked out of the garage to assist him, wiping grime from his hands with a rag as he approached.

  “Nice car,” he said.

  Gunner had just stepped out of a fire engine red Ford Shelby Cobra, circa 1965, an aluminum-bodied, two-passenger missile that could dismantle virtually anything the state of California allowed on public streets. It was a nice car.

  “Thanks,” Gunner said.

  “You want to sell?”

  “No.”

  “I give you good price. I have brother-in-law in restoration business. He would pay very good money for car like this.”

  “I bet he would. Mr. Kasparian?”

  Kasparian nodded warily, fearing an unsolicited sales pitch. Gunner offered the smaller man his hand and introduced himself. He opened his wallet to show Kasparian his faded license and the Armenian glanced at it just to be polite.

  “Very nice,” Kasparian said.

  Gunner described the man he was looking for, stressing the point of a bad eye with a zigzagging finger aimed at one of his own, and asked Kasparian if the description fit any
one he knew. Walking around the Cobra like a lion circling its next meal, inspecting detail, Kasparian wasn’t listening. Like most people, he couldn’t see a hard-luck black man like Gunner coming by the car’s pink slip legitimately.

  “You have car long?” he asked.

  “Seventeen years. It was a gift.”

  An inheritance is what it was. Some reckless red-neck kid fresh off the sands of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, had willed it to him almost gladly—but he had had to step on a fragmentation mine in Da Nang before he felt so inclined.

  The car was all Gunner had left to remind him of Duke all in one piece.

  With some annoyance, Gunner put the question to Kasparian again, less cordially—did he know a white man with a jittery left eye?—and this time, Kasparian answered it.

  “I know who you are looking for,” he said, nodding. He walked back around to the detective’s side of the car and stayed put. “You are looking for Denny. Denny Townsend. He work here on weekends and Wednesdays, until I fire him three months ago, almost. A crazy man. Good for trouble, only.”

  Gunner pulled the notebook and Lilly’s pen from his pocket. “Spell that last name,” he said.

  “Townsend. T-O-W-N-S-E-N-D, Townsend. He is sick in the head, I think. He has problem with people.” He looked at Gunner sheepishly. “Black people. And I figure, this is wrong neighborhood for that kind of problem, right? Somebody with that kind of problem here, in this neighborhood, is going to get hurt one day, or hurt somebody else, right? Is unevitable, I figure.”

  “Inevitable,” Gunner said.

  “Inevitable, yeah. So I fire him, three months ago. What did he do? He kill somebody, I bet?”

  Gunner didn’t see any point in lying about it. “Somebody who looked like him did. You wouldn’t happen to have his address?”

  Kasparian nodded, and Gunner sent him off to the office to look for it. The detective watched the black girl working the islands wash the windshield of an old green Volkswagen Beetle while waiting for the station owner’s return. She was carefully scraping a mosquito carcass off the glass with a long fingernail, under the guidance of a shirt less, tanned beach bum behind the wheel. The hamburger stand next door was filling the air hovering over the block with the distinct odors of grease and mayonnaise, and Gunner turned toward it; a bronze BMW with an odd combination of wheels—three gleaming Enkei mags and one stock rim—was sitting beside a drive-through window, its driver impossible to see beyond the car’s darkly tinted glass.

  Later, pressing the Cobra north on Rossmore Avenue toward nine famous white letters sitting on the face of a dungy Hollywood hill, a pink slip of paper with Kasparian’s handwriting on it tucked between the pages of the notebook in his pocket, he would think the BMW unimportant.

  And fail to see it in his rearview mirror.

  Two thousand fifty-four Argyle Avenue was a dump.

  It was a dilapidated two-story apartment building near the end of Argyle’s steep but truncated climb into the Hollywood Hills, just east of Vine Street and north of Franklin Avenue, above Hollywood Boulevard. Low-cost, multi-unit dwellings were the rage along this stretch of real estate, packed to and beyond their limit with illegal aliens and others in their general tax bracket. Cars of all sizes and shapes, mutilated, discolored, and leaning, lined both sides of the street like wrecks in a junkyard, their grilles—those that had grilles—pointing in a hundred different directions. The apartment buildings themselves were in no better shape. Screens dangled from broken windows by a single nail and stuccoed walls suffered the indignities of cracks and sun-bleached paint; tiny front yards settled for dirt in the absence of grass and gathered more than their fair share of trash.

  It wasn’t the Hollywood of picture postcards.

  Gunner declined to look for a curbside parking space he knew wasn’t there and pulled directly into 2054’s sub-level lot instead, where the Cobra would be conspicuous but relatively safe from thieves. He drove well to the rear and took a space labeled 206. The slot for apartment 202 was also vacant, several rows away in close proximity to the garage entrance, but it belonged to Denny Townsend, according to Kasparian’s note, and Gunner wasn’t reckless enough to take it. A fire engine red convertible might not remind Townsend of the law, but it would certainly get his attention were he to stumble upon it, and any change in the local scenery would likely scare him off for good.

  If he wasn’t gone already.

  In the building’s lobby, Gunner scrutinized the mailboxes spanning its southern wall and discovered Townsend’s name, scribbled almost indecipherably, on a paper label affixed to the box for apartment 202. A good sign. If Townsend had picked up and moved out, he would have done so weeks ago, not just in the last few days, and by now a warm body would have claimed his apartment and the mailbox that went with it. Units like these didn’t sit around empty for long, being as they were the closest thing to affordable housing Los Angeles knew how to provide.

  A large woman in an overstuffed bathing suit was spread out on a patio chair in the courtyard, dividing her attention between a Harlequin Romance and three children jumping in and out of the putrid water filling the swimming pool. Gunner gave paying a visit to the resident manager some serious thought before taking the stairs up to the second floor and Townsend’s apartment. A key to 202 would have been nice to have along, but landlords, judging by his experience, were difficult to bullshit and expensive to buy.

  He reached Townsend’s door and slipped the .357 Smith & Wesson Police Special inside his coat from its tattered holster under his left arm, resting its weight against his thigh furtively, out of view of the group at the pool downstairs. It was a heavy thing, a black metal relic scarred with age and slowed by abuse, but the holes it tended to put in people were of the debilitating variety, and Gunner liked such a characteristic in a weapon. He wasn’t much of a marksman, and reducing return-fire to a minimum was his favorite gunfight tactic.

  He peeked furtively in Townsend’s window, but there wasn’t much to see. The curtains were cracked, but the room beyond was dark and silent. He stepped away from the door and punched the doorbell once with his thumb, waiting. Nothing happened. He thought to ring the bell again, but decided not to; he didn’t think Townsend was home. If Sheila’s memory for faces could be trusted, the gas station attendant had killed two people and made a few thousand enemies because of it, and no one in his position was going to wait for a black man he didn’t know to ring his doorbell twice before making some attempt to defend himself.

  Still, Gunner kept the .357 unholstered and tried the door on a whim, remembering how easily Mean Sheila’s had flown open in his hand the day before. It was locked. There was no give in it worth noting, which meant he was up against a dead-bolt mechanism.

  And that meant he was out of luck.

  He was marginally efficient at slipping conventional locks with a credit card or thin strip of celluloid, but dead-bolts were dead ends for novice burglars with bad hands, and playing with this one would just be a waste of his time. Understanding that the giant revolver on his hip could go unnoticed by Townsend’s neighbors for only so long, he was about to head downstairs to squeeze the landlord for a key when inspiration embraced him and he returned to the window instead, clutching at straws. It turned out to be a good move.

  The frame of Townsend’s window was the same one Gunner had seen a million times before, an engineering marvel of function and frugality unparalleled in its almost total disregard for security. At either end of a fixed pane, a pair of glass rectangles ran along common rails above and below, sliding east and west to open and close. They were closed now, but the aluminum clamps that should have been fastened to the upper rail to obstruct their movement were missing, replaced by a typical, insufficient alternative: a long wooden dowel sitting snugly between the guides of the bottom rail. It was Gunner’s experience that the dowel did its job fairly well when it was the proper diameter and cut to an appropriate length, but when it was an inch too short and a quarter of an inch
too fat for the width of the lower rail to fully accommodate …

  Gunner slapped the window’s fixed pane with an open hand once, near the bottom rail, and the dowel disappeared, rolling over the edge of the inner sill, down to the floor below.

  Gunner grinned.

  He pulled the small screen closest to the door away from the window frame overpowering the stripped threads of two short screws, threw the screen into the apartment, and slipped through the window after it, looking back over his shoulder to see whether anyone was watching. No one was.

  Obviously, Townsend’s apartment building was a crime wave waiting to happen.

  Gunner set the screen behind a couch bleeding white stuffing, closed the window behind him, and moved directly to the apartment’s bedroom, showing the small and impersonal living room only rudimentary interest as he navigated his way through it. A psychologist adept at interpreting trash might have been able to read something of importance into the furnishings, but to Gunner they were just a testimonial to Townsend’s fondness for Coors in cans and the Los Angeles Times funny pages.

  The bedroom, on the other hand, was nothing less than an inanimate extension of the man himself. Who he was and how he lived was here an open book, a mystery revealed like the workings of a pocket watch exposed to the naked eye. Whereas the living room was nondescript, devoid of decoration, this room was flamboyant, a prime example of interior graphics run amok. A water bed bearing a single, shocking-pink sheet sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded on three sides by an uncoordinated mix of poster art Scotch-taped to the walls. The posters covered a wide variety of subjects, from women in compromising modes of undress to soldiers at war, but viewed as a whole they could be seen to adhere to a common theme of ultra-conservative politics and dedication to all things white, people most especially.

  Townsend didn’t know it, but he was being redundant, for the huge Confederate flag engulfing the far wall opposite the bedroom door was all the delineation his sympathies required. Gunner could recite the values Old Glory tended to stand for from memory, and like most men with ancestral ties to the casualties of slavery, he didn’t share many of them.