It's Not a Pretty Sight Page 6

  Poole thought about taking offense at that, but chose to let it pass. “I don’t have to tell you you really stepped in it this time. Do I?”

  “After what you and laughing boy have just put me through? No, Lieutenant, you don’t. I’m knee-deep in the brown stuff, I understand that.”

  “Then why—”

  “I’ve already” told you why. Why, what, when, where, and how. As God is my witness, Poole, the man tried to do me before I did him. It’s that simple. I mean, hell—what kind of moron would I have to be to shoot him without provocation, and then call you to come get him before he was dead? You ever ask yourself that?”

  “Sure I have. And the answer I come up with is that you got cold feet. Chickened out at the last minute and tried to cut your losses.”

  Gunner shook his head again. “No. No! You know me better than that, Poole. I know you do!”

  “All right. All right! So it all happened just the way you say. Why the hell didn’t you call me before you went out to Mickey’s? If you knew Pearson was there waiting for you—”

  “I never said I knew he was there. I said I suspected he might be. There’s a difference.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Besides. I wake your ass up in the middle of the night to tell you where I think Pearson might be, only thing you’re going to do about it is rip the phone cord out of the wall and go back to sleep. You know it, and I know it.”

  Again, he had rendered Poole speechless. A state of being cops looked upon with the same fear and dread as paraplegia.

  “Listen, Lieutenant,” Gunner said, trying his best to sound conciliatory, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m tired, and I’m not well. You’ve seen that for yourself. Another ten minutes of this shit and I’m going to have a stroke, I swear to God.”

  “My heart bleeds,” Poole said.

  “Okay. Your heart bleeds. So read me my rights and stop fucking around. Right now, let’s go.” When Poole failed to respond to that, he said, “Shit. You’re not going to charge me, and we both know it. Gruber might be too thick to know the truth when he hears it, but not you. You’ve been around too long. Pearson got shot tonight exactly the way I’ve been saying he did, and you’ve known that from the start.”

  Poole still refused to speak.

  “You told me what would happen if I went after Pearson on my own, and you meant it,” Gunner said. “So since you’ve made no effort yet to put your foot in my ass—”

  “All right, smart guy. So maybe I do think you’re telling the truth. Today, right now. Pearson’s shooting isn’t a homicide, yet—I can afford to be charitable. But tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that … when and if the man dies…” The cop shook his head. “It’s not gonna be so easy to believe you. Not for me—and not for the DA. You remember the DA, don’t you?”

  Gunner had never actually met the woman, but he knew more than a few of her assistants. None of them cared for him very much.

  “Go on home, Gunner. I’m tired of this shit too. We wanna see you again, we’ll know where to find you.”

  Gunner didn’t move. He thought Poole was putting him on.

  “I said, get the hell out of here! What do I have to do, put it in writing?”

  The black man got up from the table and said, “What about your pal Gruber? This going to be okay with him?”

  “You let me worry about Gruber, Gunner. You wanna worry about somebody, worry about Pearson. Maybe even say a prayer for him while you’re at it. I know I would, I was you.”

  There was nothing Gunner could say to that but amen, and he knew it. “Thanks, Poole. You’re a stand-up guy.”

  On his way to the door, he blew a kiss at his reflection in the one-way glass of the room’s observation window, just on the outside chance John Gruber was standing on the other side.

  Ira “Ziggy” Zeigler was eating grapes today.

  He was always eating some kind of fruit, Ziggy. Apples, oranges, peaches, pears—Gunner had seen the seventy-something lawyer eat them all. The stuff was like candy to him.

  Today, Monday, he was eating grapes.

  Gunner only knew this because that was the first thing he’d asked when Ziggy answered the phone, what kind of fruit was it today?

  “You know, you could do worse than try to eat a little fruit yourself, sometimes,” the old man said, after he’d answered Gunner’s opening question. “Or maybe you don’t want to live to be my age. Maybe forty-five, fifty years of living is enough for you.”

  It was the last lighthearted thing he had to say. Once Gunner told him how he’d spent the better part of his Saturday night and Sunday morning, Ziggy had no interest in anything but ripping his client’s lungs out.

  And Gunner had thought it would help, waiting until Monday morning to break the news to him.

  “Kid, you’re killing me,” he said, his voice rising. “I tell you every time I talk to you, so help me God. Call me first, I say. Before you do anything else, before you say a single word to anybody. Call me first!”

  “Ziggy—”

  “I don’t want to hear any excuses! We’ve gone over this a million times, you and me, I shouldn’t have to be telling you this anymore. You pay me good money to watch out for you, Aaron, why the hell won’t you let me earn it every once in a while?”

  “Ziggy, they couldn’t hold me. Okay? I knew they couldn’t hold me. I had a witness.”

  “It doesn’t matter that you had a witness. I don’t care if you had a thousand witnesses, you talk to me before you talk to the cops! Always! What kind of licensed professional are you, you don’t understand that yet?”

  As many times as they’d had the same argument, Gunner had never won it. He fell silent.

  “So what’s his present condition? This guy you shot?” Ziggy asked, finally ready to change the subject.

  “I’ve got no idea.”

  “You didn’t check on his condition yesterday?”

  “I was back in the bed all day yesterday. Recovering. I told you that.”

  “What’s his name again? Peterson?”

  “Pearson. Michael Pearson.”

  “P-E-A-R-S-O-N?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you say he’s at County?”

  “That’s what they said, yeah. You going to send him a card?”

  “A card wouldn’t be a bad idea, I’ll tell you that. Especially if it’ll pull him through. But what I had in mind was calling down there to see how he’s doing. Find out if the worst is over, or just beginning.”

  “He’s in the jail ward, Ziggy. They’re not going to tell you anything down there.”

  “Not officially, no. But off the record, as a favor to a friend … I might know somebody works there who’d answer a question or two, I asked politely.”

  That Ziggy knew at least a dozen people fitting that description, Gunner had no doubt. He was the most well-connected man the investigator had ever met.

  “And I better talk to your friend Foley, too. Just to hear his side of things. Think you could have him call me this afternoon?”

  “Sure. Just do me a favor and go easy on the poor guy, huh? Pearson roughed him up pretty good Saturday night, like I said, and he might not be feeling so hot himself.”

  Ziggy said he’d treat him like a newborn baby.

  “And you get any more requests to do a Q and A downtown, I’m going to be the first to know about it. Correct?”

  “Correct,” Gunner said. “You have my word on it.”

  “Your word. Terrific. I’ve got the price of a cup of coffee, my life is complete.”

  Fresh fruit and one-liners. That was Ziggy.

  Mickey said, “Next time you two wanna fight a war with somebody, fight it somewhere else, all right? This is a barbershop, man, not Madison Square Garden.”

  “Madison Square Garden? You mean Caesar’s Palace. They ain’t had a big fight in Madison Square Garden in thirty years,” Winnie Phifer said, cutting Alonzo Moe’s hair at the next chair over. She’d just
started working for Mickey three weeks ago, but she had never been the least bit uncomfortable about correcting him in front of his friends.

  “He thinks it’s our fault,” Foley said to Gunner, still looking as hurt and tired as he had the last time the investigator had seen him, stepping into the backseat of the taxi Gunner had called for him outside the LAPD’s Southwest station more than thirty-two hours earlier. “Like it was us tried to jack the boy up in here, ’stead of the other way around. Ain’t that a bitch?”

  “You didn’t have to let ‘im in,” Mickey said. “What the hell you let ‘im in for?”

  “’Cause he looked like he needed help! I told you that! Man come knockin’ on the door, holdin’ his arm all funny an’ shit, an’ said he just been jacked up, could he please use the phone. What was I s’posed to do, say no?”

  “Yes. Yes! Just say, ‘I’m sorry, brother, but the boss ain’t here, I can’t let you in. You’re gonna have to use the pay phone down the street.’”

  “Man, that’s cold,” Morris Bingham said.

  “Sure is,” Winnie agreed.

  “Cold? I’ll tell you two what’s cold,” Mickey said, stopping his work on Bingham’s almond-shaped head to more directly confront his detractors. “Cold is comin’ in here this mornin’ and findin’ blood all on the floor, that’s what’s cold. On the floor, on the walls, in my chairs—”

  “All right, Mickey, we get the point,” Gunner said, finally entering the conversation outright. “We fucked up the place. We’re sorry.” He was sitting in a chair against the wall, four chairs removed from Foley and everyone else, acting like the magazine he had open in front of his face was actually holding his interest. No one was fooled. Both his silence and the distance he had placed between himself and the others had been a clear indication to everyone that his mind was elsewhere, and he wanted it to stay that way.

  But Mickey wouldn’t allow it.

  “‘Sorry’? You can be sorry if you want to,” Foley said, “but not me. I almost got killed Saturday night, I’m just happy to be alive.”

  “Amen to that, brother,” Alonzo said.

  “Besides—who the hell you think cleaned the place up this mornin’, ’fore all the rest of you got here? Him?” Foley pointed at Mickey. “Hell, no! It was me, that’s who. He didn’t even have to say a word, I just come in here an’ did it. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?”

  He was talking to Mickey, but Mickey wasn’t listening. He was studying Gunner instead. He turned his clippers off, dropped them to his side, and said, “Hey, Gunner, man, don’t be like that. I’m just messin’ with you guys, that’s all. You know that.”

  “Forget it,” Gunner said. He still had the magazine open in his hands.

  “It’s just, I walk in here this mornin’ and see blood all over the place, man, I didn’t know what to think. ’Cause you guys didn’t call me to tell me what happened, so I thought—”

  “Anybody know a girl named Goldy?” Gunner asked, tossing the magazine back onto its pile on the table beside him.

  Everybody stopped what they were doing to look at him, surprised by the question.

  “Goldy?” Bingham asked.

  “Like Goldie Hawn, the actress?” Winnie asked.

  “I guess so. I’m not sure,” Gunner said.

  “Who the hell is Goldy?” Mickey asked.

  Gunner shook his head. “Probably nobody. Pearson said he’d been with a girl named Goldy at the time of Nina’s murder. I’m sure it was just bullshit, but …” He shrugged. “You never know.”

  “Yes you do. That nigger’s full of shit,” Winnie said. “He killed that girl, an’ he knows it. Only girl named Goldy he knows is the one in that fairy tale, ‘Goldilocks an’ the Three Damn Bears.’”

  “I heard that,” Alonzo said.

  Gunner nodded his head, agreeing. “That’s what I think too. It just bothers me a little, I guess. Him picking a name like that out of the hat, I mean. ‘Goldy.’”

  “What’s wrong with ‘Goldy’?” Bingham asked.

  “Nothing. Except that a man usually isn’t that creative when he’s telling a lie he hasn’t had time to think through, that’s all.”

  “I don’t follow you,” Mickey said.

  “What I’m saying is, it’s not the kind of name you’d expect him to come up with on the spur of the moment. Is it? Betty or Debra, maybe, but Goldy? Why would he say Goldy?”

  “You’re thinkin’ he was tellin’ the truth. Is that it?” Alonzo asked.

  “No, but—”

  “That nigger wasn’t with nobody named Goldy,” Winnie insisted, starting back to work on Alonzo’s hair. “I already told you.”

  “Okay. So he was lying. That’s what I think too, like I said. But—”

  “But what?”

  “But answer the question anyway. Just to humor me. Anybody here know somebody named Goldy?”

  The room fell silent as everyone gave the matter some thought.

  “I knew a brother whose name was Goldy, once,” Alonzo said. “That was ten, fifteen years ago, back when I was workin’ for GM, out in Van Nuys. He worked in the tool shop. They called him Goldy ’cause he had a gold front tooth, you could see it every time he opened his mouth. I never understood that, why somebody would want to put a gold tooth in their mouth like that, right up front where you can’t miss it, but—”

  “Alonzo, we supposed to be talkin’ ’bout a girl named Goldy,” Winnie said. “Remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right,” Alonzo said, embarrassed.

  “I know a girl named Goldy,” Foley said, “but I don’t think it’s the one you got in mind. This is a white girl.”

  Everyone waited for him to explain.

  “She works in the car wash over on Manchester and Vermont. She’s the cashier there, been there forever.”

  “I know her,” Bingham said, nodding. “He’s right, her name is Goldy, now that I think about it. It’s on her name tag, ‘Goldy.’ But—”

  “She’s an older girl,” Foley said.

  “Yeah. That’s what I was about to say.”

  “How old is that?” Gunner asked. “Approximately?”

  Foley and Bingham looked at each other, neither wanting to be the first one to take a guess. Shrugging, Bingham said, “I don’t know. Forty-five or fifty, maybe.”

  “Yeah. That sounds right,” Foley said, nodding.

  “Forty-five or fifty?” Gunner asked.

  “That don’t sound like nobody that boy would’ve been with to me,” Mickey said.

  “Sure don’t,” Winnie said, laughing.

  “’Less he was fucked up even before he got shot,” Mickey added, laughing too. Alonzo and Bingham cracked up next, followed by Foley, leaving Gunner the only one in the shop not getting—or appreciating—the joke.

  Being the first to notice this, Mickey wiped a tear from his eye and said, “Come on, Gunner, man, you’re worryin’ about nothin’! Like Winnie said, that boy’s full of shit, there ain’t no Goldy. So he came up with an original name, so what? That’s what good liars do, tell lies don’t sound like lies. He’s a good liar, that’s all.”

  “Exactly,” Winnie said.

  Bingham and Alonzo both uttered various forms of concurrence, equally eager to set Gunner’s mind at ease on the subject.

  After a while, the investigator nodded and stood up, ready to go. “Yeah. I’m sure you’re right,” he said. His friends would have liked to see him smile, but they weren’t so rewarded; he looked a little less distracted than before, but that was all.

  When he started out the front door, Mickey said, “Where you gonna be, you get an important call? Or you just want me to hold your messages?”

  “Hold ’em,” Gunner said.

  “You better tell ’im to write ’em down,” Bingham said, trying to make a joke.

  But Gunner was already out on the sidewalk.

  six

  HE HAD BILLS TO PAY, SO HE WENT OUT AND PAID THEM. HE had the money, for a change, so he figured wha
t the hell. His cable service had been lousy lately, so he paid the cable company last, hoping the wait would bring them to the brink of bankruptcy and change the way they handled customer service forever.

  That killed about two hours.

  When his last check had been written, he found a pay phone and called his cousin Del. Poole had suggested he might have to go back to work for the electrician soon, if Pearson didn’t make it and Gunner’s PI license got yanked out from under him, and maybe the cop had something there. Gunner had worked for Del before, and almost learned to like it, so his doing so again was not completely out of the question.

  Of course, there was no guarantee that Del wanted to be bothered with him again. In fact, it was sometimes all his cousin could do just to talk to him over the phone.

  “What do you want?” Del asked him today, the minute he realized who was calling. Not to be rude, but merely time-efficient. Gunner had a reason for calling, he always did, so there wasn’t any point in either of them pretending otherwise.

  “I need to talk to you, Del. Five, ten minutes, that’s all I need.”

  “When? Now?”

  “Right now, yeah. Can you meet me somewhere?”

  “No. I’m busy.”

  “Del—”

  “I’m goin’ over to Mother’s in about a half hour, you want to meet me over there. What’s this all about?”

  “Mother’s? Big Mother’s? When the hell did you start going to Mother’s?”

  Del had tripped on a treadmill the first time he’d visited the popular South-Central gym as Gunner’s guest, nearly two years ago, and the humiliation of the experience had been so severe he’d sworn never to return again.

  “I’ve been a member for almost a year,” Del said. “What’s the big deal?”

  “Nothing. I just thought you said—”

  “Look, you wanna meet me there or not? I’ve got work to do here, I’ve gotta get going.”

  “Sure, sure. I’ll see you in a half hour.”

  “And you’re gonna have my money, right?”

  “Your money?”

  “Don’t bother comin’ without my money, Aaron. Save yourself a trip.”

  He was talking about the seventy-five dollars Gunner had borrowed from him eight weeks before. Somehow, Del never asked for a loan to be repaid until Gunner actually had the money. Which, of course, he did in this case, thanks to Roman Goody. It was as if the man had a direct line to Gunner’s bank account.