Fear of the Dark Read online

  He tasted his beer and let his eyes rest on the bottle’s label, thinking in silence. “I know,” he said shortly. “I’m not, am I?”

  He downed the bottle in one long, extended swallow and said, “So what do you say we change the subject? To something a little more relevant to our immediate well-being.”

  She didn’t have to be told what, specifically, he had in mind. “The white boy really is dead, huh?”

  “Dead. Really. And we’re ‘as good as’ if we don’t find out who killed him, providing you or one of your friends didn’t.”

  “Look, how many times do I have to say it? I don’t know who killed him. I don’t know anybody that crazy, or that devoted to Buddy. A few Brothers, maybe, but none of the ones I ever met.”

  “That include Roland Mayes?”

  “Roland? Shit. That goes double for Roland.”

  “I always thought they were pretty close.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  She smiled bitterly and lowered her head. She was rolling her own cold beer bottle around in her hands like a sculptor kneading clay, and began to peer reflectively down its narrow throat.

  “They weren’t the best of friends?” Gunner asked, pressing.

  “Friends? Sure,” she said, her head still down. “They were friends. But only barely. And Roland wouldn’t kill anybody over a friend. An enemy, maybe. But not a friend.”

  The subject apparently rubbed her the wrong way; she was getting warmed up again. Her beer was only half-empty, but she flipped the bottle to the cluttered floor anyway, watching it roll to a stop about twenty feet away.

  “You get that from Roland himself?” Gunner asked.

  She seemed not to have heard the question, until she said, “In so many words. I talked to him for about thirty minutes, almost a week before I finally caught up with you. A Wednesday, I think it was, over at that sorry little storefront clubhouse the Brothers have on Vermont, near the USC campus. I wanted to see if they were going to put up any money for a reward, to encourage the community to join in on the hunt for Buddy’s murderer. He’d been one of their own; I thought surely they’d have to do something along those lines to save face, to let people know they weren’t going to just sit idly by and let a Brother’s murder ride.

  “But Roland said a reward would be impractical, that their money would be better spent kicking the White Man’s ass in Buddy’s undying memory. He told me I was being too emotional about it, that the guy who killed Buddy was of more use to the movement as a whole on the loose than he would be dead or in custody, because as long as he was free they could use him as an example of the Man’s ineffectual handling of violent crimes against blacks, of our inability to receive fair treatment under the law.”

  “Not a bad argument,” Gunner said, deferentially.

  “It was lip service. Bullshit. Those weren’t his real reasons for turning me down, and I knew it. He didn’t want the Brothers involved in any search for the white boy because that would have been acknowledging the importance of Buddy’s death to the movement. He wanted Buddy forgotten, as quickly as possible, and he wasn’t about to do anything that would draw more attention to his death than it had already received.”

  Gunner set his empty beer bottle on the floor between his feet. “That when you suggested hiring somebody like me?”

  She brought her head around to face him again, no longer avoiding the weight of his eyes. “Who said I did?”

  He shrugged. “If you thought he might put up a few dollars for a reward, you could’ve also thought he’d cover my fee. Want another beer?”

  “No.”

  Gunner cut a zigzag course through the mine field of the dining room to the kitchen, pulled a fresh beer out of the refrigerator, and quickly returned, twisting the cap off the bottle as he sat back down. He drank some, gave Verna a disapproving look, and drank a little more.

  “I guess he didn’t think his money would be too well spent, paying a P.I. to look for Townsend.”

  “He thought it was stupid. He called me an idiot for even suggesting it.” She was glaring at him now, her resistance to the memory discarded. “He told me to go home and forget it, because the Brothers weren’t going to get off a damn cent for rewards or private cops or anything else I thought the Brothers should finance for Buddy’s sake.

  “So I told him fine, I’d hire somebody; I didn’t need his money or his permission to do something for Buddy. I was Buddy’s sister, we were one in flesh and blood. But the real bond should have been between Buddy and Roland; they were the ones so attuned to the needs of the people, so hung up on the same, identical revolutionary trip. They had done more and shared more together in the last several years than Buddy and I had our entire lives, but Roland felt no obligation whatsoever to react more forcefully to Buddy’s murder. He was content to just let nature take its course, to let the white boy go free so he could make a few more dynamite speeches about the inequities of the legal system and its indifference to black American concerns.”

  “He had no objection to your hiring a private investigator?”

  “No.”

  “Or warn you off the idea, make threats of any kind?”

  She shook her head. “He couldn’t take me that seriously. He said I could do what I wanted, just as long as I left his and the Brothers’ names out of it. I started looking around the next day, and you know the rest.”

  “Was Roland alone when you talked to him? Or were there other Brothers around at the time?”

  “We were alone. Except for Mouse, of course.”

  Gunner tilted his head curiously to one side.

  “Roland’s shadow,” Verna said. “His bodyguard. At least, that’s what I think Mouse is supposed to be.” She grinned, picturing him. “He’s not big or anything, like most bodyguards you see, but he’s crazy. Strange. Never says more than two words to anybody, and he sticks to Roland like glue. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one without the other.”

  “And he was there in the room when you talked to Roland.”

  “Yes. Roland, Mouse, and me. That was it.”

  “This Mouse have anything to say about your hiring a private cop? Do you remember?”

  “Mouse didn’t have anything to say about anything. He never does. He just stands there flexing his tight little muscles, hard and skinny and fuzz-headed nigger that he is, and watches. Just watches. That’s why they call him Mouse. Quiet as …”

  “He get along all right with Buddy?”

  “As far as I know. They weren’t close or anything, but I think they liked each other. Why?”

  “I was wondering if maybe Mouse would have cared any more to even the score for Buddy than Roland had.”

  Verna gave it some thought, then said, “I don’t think he’s capable of caring for anything more than Roland. Or less.”

  “Anybody else know your plans, besides Roland and Mouse?”

  “What, to hire a private investigator?”

  He nodded.

  “Not until I actually started asking around for one. But once I did, I imagine quite a few people heard about it, one way or another. Although nobody knew exactly who I was going to hire, except maybe Too Sweet, who gave me your name to begin with.”

  Gunner thought that was pretty funny. Nobody knew except Too Sweet. All one had to do to hear the man’s unabridged life story was sit two stools down from him at the bar, any night of the week—but nobody knew except him.

  “Have you seen Too Sweet since? Does he know for a fact that you hired me?”

  “No. I only saw him that one time, in Will Rogers park. But …”

  “But what?”

  “But would it matter? Whether he knows it ‘in fact’ or not? Wouldn’t he just assume I did?”

  “If he could remember talking to you at all. Yeah.”

  He left his seat on the couch to cross the room and fished a small plastic trash can out of the rubble on the floor. He set it upright at his feet and dropped his empty beer bottle into it, following
its descent as if it were a stone he had fed to a bottomless well.

  “So that makes three who knew,” he said, still appraising the depths of the little can pensively. “Only three.”

  “Yes.”

  “You told no one else?”

  “No.”

  “No girl friends, no relatives, no friends of Buddy outside the Brothers’ ranks?”

  “No. Buddy was all the family I had left, and I don’t trust my business to friends. But you—what about you? You spent three days looking for Townsell, right?”

  “Two days. It was two days. And the white boy’s name was Townsend, not Townsell.”

  “Townsend, Townsell, whatever. How many people did you talk to in two days’ time? A dozen? Two dozen?”

  It had only been five, but she was making a valid point. He could just as easily be looking for one of his friends as one of hers. With a gun in his hand, for instance, Sheila’s beau Ray Hollins didn’t have to be quite the wimp he was without one.

  “Who I talked to’s my business,” Gunner said, trying to cover his doubt with belligerence. “And who you talked to is yours. Time’s running out, Verna. I’ve got a lousy forty hours to come up with something, and I may not have that if a certain cop has a sudden change of heart. If you don’t know who set me up for the white boy’s murder, you can guess.”

  She shook her head and faced him squarely, letting him see a glimmer of sincerity behind her eyes. “Ask Roland,” she said. “Maybe he did do it. I don’t know.”

  Gunner studied her face for a moment. “Where’s this clubhouse you were talking about? The Brothers’ hangout. On Vermont and what?”

  She stood away from the couch and told him, following him over to the apartment’s front door. Standing in the hallway, he asked her if her name would be good enough to get him an interview with Mayes.

  “If Roland’s in a talkative mood,” she said.

  The hallway was empty, a long garbage chute as devoid of sound as an echo chamber. She watched him stand there from the other side of the open door and said, “About this place. And what they did to it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You were leading up to something earlier. Like maybe you knew why they wrecked things the way they did.”

  “It was just a thought,” Gunner said.

  “Still, I’d like to hear it.”

  She wasn’t going to leave it alone. Gunner took a moment to glance at the ruins of Buddy’s apartment one final time. “They were looking for something,” he said. “And they didn’t find it.”

  Without waiting to see her reaction, he turned and disappeared down the hall.

  unday morning’s Los Angeles Times was a bad news extravaganza. Temperatures were expected to reach the high nineties for the fourth consecutive day in October, a new record for the city, and no rain was in the forecast. One of two Caucasian policemen responding to a phony rape call had lost an eye to a sniper with a pellet gun in Encino. Weapon sales throughout the L.A. basin were up thirty-five percent from the previous year. And the UCLA Bruins had blown their Pac-10 opener at home to the Washington Huskies Saturday afternoon, 33-14. A junior tailback named Clarence McDaniel had waltzed through the Bruin defense for 141 yards and three touchdowns.

  “You want to know how I’m doing,” Gunner said.

  Del looked up from the business-section of the paper and set it aside, for good. “Yeah, I would,” he said, signaling their waitress for more coffee.

  Del Curry was a good looking little man in his early forties who was hard to lie to, face-to-face. His skin was light brown and his full head of hair was an almost golden yellow. He had a well-groomed mustache and the eyes of a stuffed bird on a taxidermist’s shelf, black and unwavering gems of glass.

  “I’m doing fine,” Gunner said, plastering a slice of white toast with grape jelly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You get your money up front like I told you?”

  “I got enough to work with.”

  “And the rest?”

  “The rest comes later. When I’m done.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s working out this time, Del. Really.” He braved a short glance Del’s way. “It’s not the same worthless shit as before.”

  Del’s gaze was unyielding. “This is different worthless shit,” he said.

  Gunner just lowered his head and resumed eating.

  The bulletin board at the converted corner market the Brothers of Volition called home was uninspiring reading, but it was all the diversion the barren anteroom offered to visitors killing time there.

  Posted on the board’s cork face were bits and pieces of the propaganda upon which the Brothers based their sometimes contradictory socialist/black nationalist code: photocopied newspaper clippings from various left-wing periodicals, excerpts from the writings of Karl Marx and Malcolm X, and a colorful collection of inflammatory quotations made by white Americans of considerable political influence, from members of the L.A. School Board to Secretaries of State, both past and present. A hand-lettered banner at the top of the board read, in wavering capitals, WAKE UP, BROTHERS AND SISTERS! WAKE UP!

  Gunner gave the board one final, lingering look and took a seat on one of the hard plastic chairs arranged beside it. Not far away, the round-faced kid with the outdated, balloon-like Afro whose job it was to watch the door was still taking him in, glassy-eyed, propped up behind a painted metal desk like a mannequin with an attitude problem. Decked out in the Brothers’ standard uniform of green dungaree shirt and blue denim pants, he had assured Gunner that the detective was welcome to wait around for Brother Mayes to return from the Black Student Union rally he was addressing on the campus of Cal State Long Beach, but he had neglected to mention how severely Gunner would be scrutinized if he chose to do so. Working for Verna Gail may have earned him the right to cool his heels on the premises until Mayes could dismiss him personally, but it obviously didn’t make him a friend of the family.

  Gunner spent the next two hours under the microscope of the kid’s undivided attention, melting in the sweltering heat of the room, and was back up at the bulletin board, about to call it quits, when Mayes and his requisite tour party of a half-dozen or so compatriots finally made their entrance.

  Wearing the Brothers’ colors to a man, they were in good spirits, chatting among themselves like a band of GI’s returning from battle. One, a lean, pale-skinned man in his early thirties, was training a VCR camcorder on the others, recording the moment for posterity.

  Gunner went unnoticed until his friend at the door pulled Mayes aside to point him out, making a brief, indiscernible comment as he did so. Mayes came forward and Gunner let him, as seven pairs of eyes looked him over like an unmarked parcel making ticking sounds on their doorstep.

  “So you’re Gunner. Verna’s private cop.” Mayes appraised him with open amusement, chuckling briefly, expending little energy. “Something told me I’d be hearing from you, sooner or later.”

  He was a smooth, heavy man with muscles, dark skinned and imposing. His hair cut down to a mere shadow on his scalp, he had large, almond-shaped eyes and an impeccable complexion, and his handshake was firm, unyielding. Gunner had read somewhere that he was closing in on forty, but he didn’t look it; there was a vibrancy about him that seldom reared its head beyond a man’s early twenties.

  He had been followed over to Gunner’s side of the room by a short, spindly block of granite with a stone wall’s disposition, a cool little youngblood whose clothes fit his body like a thin coat of paint, and he watched Gunner square off with Mayes the way guards at the Louvre watch patrons admire the Mona Lisa.

  “Mouse” was a damn good name for him.

  “I’m predictable like that,” Gunner said, his eyes on Mouse. “Seems like something’s always telling somebody where I’m going, or what I’m about to do next. Sometimes even why.”

  “‘Why’ is a given. You’re a cop. And cops pick brains. You’re here to pick mine.”r />
  Mayes smiled. Gunner wasn’t fond of his choice of words, but was disinclined to mention it. “If you want to look at it that way,” he said.

  “I’d rather not look at it at all, you want to know the truth. It’s been a long day.” Mayes looked over his shoulder at Mouse. “Hasn’t it, Brother M.?”

  Mouse kept his eyes on Gunner and nodded, his tiny head moving obliquely.

  Mayes grinned and turned around again. “Forgive my manners. This is Brother Stokes, our captain of the guard. Some of the Brothers have been known to call him Mouse on occasion, but not to his face. Never to his face. He’s a sensitive man, Brother M.”

  “I’ll only need five minutes,” Gunner said, getting edgy.

  Mayes stopped smiling. “I’m sorry, Cop. But I’m afraid I can’t see where talking to you would accomplish anything. In fact, I doubt it ever does.” He turned away to leave.

  Gunner grabbed him just above the right elbow and spun him around, glowering. “Five minutes, Mayes,” he said, drawing Mayes to him, as Mouse and the others converged upon him in a concerted swarm.

  The largest two Brothers in the group, the bouquet-headed kid at the door and another, leaner man, took him from behind, pulling him away from Mayes, and secured his arms, holding him for Mouse. As Mayes stepped clear, Mouse closed in, but not fast enough: Gunner broke his right hand loose and jarred the little man with it, hammering Mouse’s cheekbone just below the left eye. The doorman’s friend to Gunner’s right drove a fist like a jackhammer into the investigator’s rib cage once, twice, and doubled him up, giving Mouse a moment to recover. In short order Mouse retaliated with an overhand left, then straightened the detective up again with a knee under Gunner’s chin.

  He tried to follow with a looping overhand right, but Mayes stepped in to intercede.

  “The man obviously takes his work more seriously than I,” he said, watching Gunner crumple to the floor as the giants behind him released him. “He’s deluded. Not dangerous.”

  On his knees, Gunner held his insides in place with an open hand and raised his head, licking blood and perspiration from one corner of his mouth. The Brother with the VCR camcorder was still rolling tape, aiming the instrument’s large convex eye squarely on him, crouching from a short distance for an intimate close-up. Mayes was now as solemn as Mouse, apparently unfazed by this latest of small victories for his Brothers of Volition.