Fear of the Dark Read online

  The black man went over the room quickly, not using his hands when his eyes alone would do. A small library of pornographic magazines lay on the floor beside the bed, the kind that made no effort to be anything more than smut. Soiled underwear was tossed about freely, like seeds Townsend had sown to the wind and was expecting to take root in the carpet. Empty beer cans were again in abundant supply, but in an assortment of brands, Coors being predominant. A drab J.C. Penney wardrobe took up very little space in an open closet, a few pieces of denim and corduroy dangling from misshapen wire hangers over two pairs of athletic shoes.

  Some generic toiletries stood atop a tiny dresser in one corner, assembled in disarray around a cheap watch, a dirty ceramic ashtray, and a cardboard box filled with “Henshaw for Congress” campaign buttons. Lew Henshaw was Townsend’s type of people, to be sure: he was a former Chicago cop running on a law-and-order platform that appealed to every God-fearing paranoid schizophrenic in the district armed with the right to vote. Mixed in with the buttons was a green Henshaw flyer with a phone number scribbled across the back; no name or address to go with it, just a number.

  Without knowing why, Gunner slipped the flyer into his pocket and was sifting through a drawer stuffed with dirty socks when a key started working on the lock of the apartment door.

  He nudged the dresser drawer closed and scanned the room for points of exit. There were two doors and a window, but the window didn’t count, leading as it did to nothing but air thirty feet off the ground. The doors led to the bathroom and the living room, respectively, which left him with a choice that was no choice at all, between confrontation and retreat. Confrontation was acceptable if Townsend was out there alone, but if he had company a tête-à-tête would be messy. Gunner went with retreat and made fast tracks for the bathroom.

  The apartment door opened and closed out in the living room as the black man stepped into the bathtub to hide, the primitive .357 once more filling his hand. Having left but a crack of an opening at the bathroom door, he stood behind the camouflage of darkness and the mildewed glass of the tub’s shower partition and hoped he was harder to see from the bedroom than he felt.

  A vaguely human shape appeared at the bedroom doorway and only then did Gunner wonder what, if anything, he had done with the screen to the living room window.

  The figure at the door came hesitantly forward. Specifics were indiscernible but generalities were not difficult to make out. It was a man, dark-haired and clean-shaven, fat in all the wrong places for a man and too short to disguise it, wearing something yellow that made him look like a giant egg yolk. Splinters of light kept bouncing off of something in his hand. There was a chance it was Townsend underneath all the mass he seemed to be carrying, but it wasn’t a good one; his walk was a fat man’s walk, slow and indignant, a gait few men of moderate weight could mimic, and his mannerisms were those of a stranger to his surroundings. The big man poked his head into the closet for a moment, then continued on, toward the bathroom and the detective in it. He stopped short of the door and peered in, giving the room a long, hard look. The thing in his hand was a gun.

  Abruptly, the bathroom lost his interest and he turned away from the door, stepping out of Gunner’s sight. He started to ransack the dresser, and Gunner didn’t have to see him to know it; he was making noise now, satisfied that he had Townsend’s apartment to himself. When he had pulled the last of six drawers open and picked through its contents thoroughly, he took up a new occupation, one not easily identified by sound alone. He was rattling something. The box of campaign buttons. Grabbing a handful.

  Or searching for something among them.

  He made a mess of the toiletries atop the dresser, sounding frustrated, and returned to Gunner’s field of vision, dropping a small pile of clothes upon Townsend’s bed. He snatched two pairs of pants and a shirt from the closet and added them to his collection, then pulled the case from the bed’s lone pillow and began to stuff the clothes into it.

  He was packing an overnight bag.

  The big man tied a hasty knot in the pillowcase and ran out, into the living room. The apartment door closed behind him and Gunner scrambled out of the bathroom to follow him, the Police Special still in his closed right fist.

  Down on the street, Townsend’s portly friend got into an old converted U.S. Postal Service jeep parked across a driveway and started it up on the fourth try. He turned the jeep away from the curb and Gunner’s red Cobra slid furtively out of shadow into light from the parking lot of Townsend’s building, coasting patiently down Argyle in the jeep’s wake, letting it take a lead it had no prayer of keeping if push came to shove.

  And high on top of the hill, far above them both, a bronze BMW with one oddball wheel fell quietly into line behind them.

  It wasn’t much of a chase, as it developed. The fat man in the jeep treated Gunner to a short tour of Hollywood Boulevard before finding a place to park near the Hollywood YMCA on Hudson and Selma, a mere mile from Townsend’s apartment. Gunner parked the Cobra one block farther east on Selma and pretended not to notice Townsend’s courier heave a stuffed pillowcase over one shoulder, mount the short stairs to the Y, and disappear inside.

  Gunner was at least casually familiar with several other local chapters of the YMCA and found them all pretty much alike, but the Hollywood club was unique in ways he was able to sense from the front desk, where a sinewy young man with an expensive coiffeur charged him six dollars for use of the facilities. The air was buried in the customary stench of sweat, and far-off weight machines clanked their accompaniment to the squeal of tennis shoes dueling on a basketball court, but there was an inoffensive flavor to it all that had no place in such surroundings. The Y was supposed to be an arena where men went to wage war in the civilized guise of sportsmen, but there were no real battles being fought here, only polite skirmishes drawing no blood, full of raised voices woefully lacking conviction. Gunner recognized the feel of the place as that of Hollywood’s less infamous persona, the flip side to its overblown image as the Black Kingdom of homicide and vice. This was Tinseltown under the harsh light of truth, unflattering and not very sensational.

  Neutered. Harmless. Tame.

  Three doors surrounded the Y’s service desk, leading into various parts of the club, and Gunner had no choice but to pick one at random, as the man toting Townsend’s goods, a giant in a yellow windbreaker that would have made him stand out in the sea of fans at a World Series game, was nowhere in sight. Gunner chose the door closest to the desk, off the long hallway he had traversed to get here, and the attendant toed a button on the floor to buzz him in.

  Climbing a long flight of stairs immediately on his right, the detective came upon the door to a weight room and peered in. Four men who seemed to have cornered the market on muscle tissue were pumping iron for the edification of their reflections in various mirrored walls, while a Hispanic teenager in shorts three sizes too large for his spindly frame tried to figure out how to work a Nautilus leg machine. None of them even remotely resembled the fat man in the windbreaker.

  He moved well for a big man, apparently.

  Gunner gave the rest of the second floor a cursory inspection, pausing to look over the diverse inhabitants of two basketball courts, four handball courts, an aerobics room, and two additional free-weight stations, but at tour’s end only found himself with yet another difficult decision to make: what to do now? He could either go back down the stairs to try the other two doors off the service desk, or proceed onward and upward, to the third floor and, if possible, whatever points lay beyond.

  He stood at the landing of the staircase leading skyward and studied its ascent. It looked like a steep climb he didn’t want to make, and that, he decided, was probably how the fat man would have felt about it, too. He retraced his steps and tried a new door on the first floor below.

  Bingo.

  Townsend’s heavy friend was in the locker room, spinning the dial of a combination padlock securing one of the lockers in the back, s
truggling to perform a task too delicate for his meaty fingers to pull off with any grace. The sounds of male horseplay betrayed the presence of two other men in the room with him, but they were off in a distant corner and he was ignoring them accordingly.

  Gunner’s arrival, however, he found distracting. At the sound of the door ringing open, he looked up from the lock to watch the black man come in, by all appearances just another jock looking for a place to change. The detective turned into the bathroom nearby, groping for the fly of his pants, and disappeared inside. The fat man took a deep breath and went back to work.

  The jaws of the lock popped free. He snatched the locker door open, exchanged a bulky envelope inside for the loaded pillowcase, then secured the locker again, spinning the padlock’s dial to make sure it was closed for good. He peeled the envelope open for a brief instant—lifting a few crisp bills out for a close look—and smiled.

  Standing at a urinal in the bathroom, going through the motions of relieving himself, Gunner used the full-length mirror in the other room to watch the big man shove the envelope into his windbreaker’s left-hand pocket and leave, glancing half-heartedly from side to side to look for a witness he didn’t want to see.

  Gunner was tempted to follow, but not much.

  Waiting for Townsend to come get his clothes was no sure thing, but unless the white boy had more between his ears than the thin air people gave him credit for, it was a risk worth taking. Townsend had paid someone good money to assemble a CARE package and drop it here at the Y, and sooner or later, either in person or by yet another proxy, he was going to show up to retrieve it.

  Gunner found an empty locker along the same row as Townsend’s and slipped quickly out of his coat and shoulder holster. He didn’t want to be standing around twiddling his thumbs when the white man made his entrance, and taking his shirt and shoes on and off before a vacant locker seemed like a clever way to, look busy at any given moment.

  He tossed his coat into the locker atop the holster, followed that with his shirt, and bent down to untie a shoe. The same pair of male voices he had heard earlier wandered toward the door, and Gunner glanced up just long enough to watch two middle-aged white men in matching raquetball togs and headbands leave the room. He turned his head before the door closed behind them, pulled his left shoe off and threw it in with the rest, then went to work on the right.

  The laces never came loose in his hands.

  Something very unforgiving collided with the base of his skull and he hit the concrete floor with his face, meeting the black wall of unconsciousness, head-on, without resistance.

  He was sitting on a hard toilet seat when he next opened his eyes. Somebody had propped him up in the far, stall where he wouldn’t easily be discovered, still naked from the waist up. He blinked twice, hard, and forced himself upright and mobile. He stumbled into a short, naked man on his way to the urinals, bounced off him into the locker room and came to a halt on wavering legs in front of Townsend’s locker. The lock on the door was open; the pillowcase full of clothes was still inside. A half-dozen lockers down, his shoulder holster lay empty atop his shirt and coat.

  Gunner fell twice trying to run to his car outside. He felt sick all the way there, and worse when he finally made it. A man with filthy blond hair sat slumped over in the Cobra’s passenger seat, his head resting awkwardly against the dashboard. He could have been asleep, but he wasn’t; there was a hole in him somewhere, Gunner knew, and a .357 Police Special had most likely made it.

  Mean Sheila had nothing more to fear from the white boy with the funny left eye.

  And neither would anyone else, ever again.

  etective Lieutenant Matthew Poole of the Los Angeles Police Department, Homicide Division, blew the steam from a cup of hot coffee and said, “You’re never gonna guess who we found dead yesterday.”

  He tried the coffee and watched Gunner’s face project indifference. It wasn’t the best blank mug he had ever seen, but it deserved an honorable mention.

  “Yeah?”

  “White guy by the name of Denny Townsend. The Denny Townsend.”

  “The Denny Townsend.”

  “Yeah. The one you’ve been lookin’ for for the last few days. That Denny Townsend.”

  “Oh, right, right. That Denny Townsend.” Gunner nodded his head, seeming to remember something long forgotten. “He’s dead, huh?”

  Poole nodded, dropping another cube of sugar into his cup. “Somebody shot him in the midsection with a high-caliber handgun and left his body in a dumpster behind the Newberry’s on Western and Venice. He got it somewhere between the hours of one and four P.M. Thursday, the coroner figures.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I said.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  Poole shook his head. “Uh-uh.”

  He drank some more coffee and dropped a good spot of it on the solid green tie he was wearing. The stain it created wasn’t going to be lonely there: it was but the latest addition to an already expansive collection, mementos of culinary exploits past.

  But then, stains went well with Poole. He was a slow man in his late forties whose body looked like a suit he had slept in; it was a loose jumble of flesh and bone, of formidable dimension but completely unintimidating. He had a basset hound’s swaying jowls and more straight black hair than he knew how to comb.

  Perhaps to compensate, he kept a fairly clean, upbeat cubicle in the otherwise decadent 77th Street Station building near Broadway. The city had actually coughed up a few dollars for partitions to block off one detective’s floor space from another’s, and Poole was cornered at the far end of the squad room where the window blinds were open to the sun’s advances and the walls were patched and freshly painted. There was even a potted Boston fern hanging from the ceiling, in good health and thriving.

  “Why aren’t you surprised?” Poole asked Gunner, mopping his tie with a coat sleeve. “Don’t tell me you already knew?”

  “Day-old news is old news, Lieutenant. You want to surprise people, do card tricks.”

  “Bet your client’s all messed up about it, huh?”

  “Actually, I haven’t seen her since I heard, so I can’t say. But I imagine she’s taking it pretty well.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d know who did the dirty deed?”

  Gunner didn’t like the chair he was sitting in; it was hard and uncomfortable, designed to make interrogations a miserable experience. “Like any good citizen, I would have come forward if I did.”

  “You could make an educated guess,” Poole said.

  “You dragged me in here to make an educated guess? Okay. How’s this: it was somebody black. Sympathetic to the Brothers of Volition and pissed about what happened to Buddy Dorris. Does that narrow the field down any for you?”

  “You think Townsend killed Buddy Dorris?”

  “I didn’t say that. I don’t know if he did or not; I never caught up to the man to ask him. But he fit the bill, and was making himself hard to find for some reason.”

  “Was he?”

  “Yeah. He was.” Gunner had no trouble following Poole’s train of thought. “Like I said, I never caught up to the man.”

  Poole let the expression on his face say how much he believed that, but didn’t press the issue. “How’d you come to be looking for Townsend in the first place? You pick up his scent all by yourself, or did somebody steer you his way?”

  Guardedly, Gunner said, “I was steered.”

  “By who?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Poole sipped his coffee, then asked, “Need a few days of peace and quiet to change your mind?”

  “Look, don’t give me that bullshit, Poole. It doesn’t make any difference who steered me his way, all right?”

  Poole watched Gunner squirm about in the hard wooden chair and laughed at his little joke. Poole was no good at playing the tough cop—the hardline dialogue fell off his tongu
e like a lead weight. He could fake it from time to time on a sucker new to the territory, but practicing on Gunner was an embarrassing mistake. The black man knew him too well.

  “Okay, okay,” the lieutenant said. “Let me rephrase the question. Anybody else looking for Townsend that you know of?”

  “Not for him specifically, no. But the streets have been crawling with people looking for the guy who killed Buddy Dorris, and maybe that’s the same thing, and maybe it isn’t. You think I’m the only one to notice Townsend had a bad left eye?”

  Poole shrugged. “Probably not. But you’re the only one I’ve got. And you know what they say—a bird in the hand …”

  He was a fair man, Poole, but not one gifted with a lot of perseverance when it came to breaking cases; any slob he could get the shoe to fit was all right by him, ninety percent of the time.

  “Kiss my ass, Lieutenant. You don’t have a bird in your hand.”

  Poole smiled at him.

  “Why would I want to kill the sonofabitch? All I had to do to earn my money was turn him over to you.”

  “Or just point your nose in his direction.”

  “I don’t work like that anymore,” Gunner said.

  “But you used to. All the time.”

  Gunner shook his head. “Not anymore.”

  “Not even for close personal friends? I hear you and the lady paying your bills are like this.” He pressed the first two fingers of his right hand together and held them up in the air.

  Gunner said, “You don’t hear anything, Poole. That’s your problem. You can’t get enough of your own voice, how’re you going to hear anyone else’s?”

  Poole laughed again and sat down, stretching out in the chair behind his desk luxuriously. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, popping a stick of gum into his mouth. “We don’t have to go through all this shit. I had the answers to my questions three hours before you got here. I’m just talking to you for the exercise.”