It's Not a Pretty Sight Read online

  “Yeah. Thanks.” He tried to slink away.

  “Oh, no. I’m not finished with you yet.” She stepped to one side, barring his way.

  “Lilly, please. Not tonight …”

  “Oh, yes, tonight. You did it again. Started some shit in here after I told you I wasn’t havin’ any. Didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Jetta says you called her a ho. That true?”

  “A ‘ho’?” Gunner looked around, reminded of the woman he’d been brawling with only moments earlier, and found Jetta back at her table, entertaining what stragglers remained from the crowd that had gathered there to watch them go at each other. She appeared to have completely forgotten about him. “No. I did not call her a ho. I just told her I was getting a little weary of watching her come in here all the time, trying to catch flies between her thighs. That’s all.”

  He hadn’t really meant it as a joke, but Lilly took it that way all the same. She cracked up.

  “Get the hell out of here,” she said, using both hands to push him around to the other side of the bar where he belonged. “Go on, get!”

  It was a piece of advice he fully intended to take, until he heard a familiar voice call out after him just as he was walking out the door.

  Mean Sheila again.

  “Sheila, baby, I’ve got to go,” Gunner said, trying to be patient with her. “Lilly says—”

  “This is only gonna take a minute,” Sheila said.

  “Come see me at Mickey’s tomorrow.”

  “But Elvin said—”

  “Elvin said what?”

  Elvin was Elvin Hodge, the young taxi driver sitting in a booth over by the window. Gunner hardly knew him.

  “He said you said it was important. That you needed to know right away,” Sheila said.

  “Needed to know what right away? I don’t—”

  “He said you lookin’ for a girl name’ Goldy. You wouldn’t be talkin’ ’bout Goldy Cruz, would you?”

  He had almost been out the door. Too concerned with the life expectancy of Michael Pearson to remember what had brought him here in the first place: the nagging fear that Pearson’s friend Goldy was real, and not imaginary. If he had only started for the Deuce’s door five minutes earlier …

  He would not be so afraid now.

  The first thing Gunner learned was that her name had nothing to do with gold teeth.

  Nor the color of her hair, nor the kind of jewelry she liked to wear. It wasn’t a play on her last name, nor was it reflective of any resemblance she might have borne to Goldilocks, friend to the Three Bears.

  It was all about shoes.

  They called Carol Cruz “Goldy” because every pair of shoes the hooker owned was gold. Forty-three pair in all, she said, either bought gold or dyed gold later. It was just a habit she’d gotten into as a kid.

  “I like the way gold looks on my feet,” she told the investigator, dazzling him with her mental dexterity by shrugging, smoking, and chewing gum all at the same time. The pink wad in the black woman’s mouth had to be as big as a golf ball.

  Sheila had said they could find her working the Inglewood district, standing on the corner of Prairie and 112th Street like somebody waiting for a bus where no bus stop was apparent, and she’d been right on. There Goldy stood, just another working girl like Sheila, only younger and remotely more attractive; about thirty, wearing a tight white sweater that buttoned down the front, and a pair of tattered denim cutoffs with tassel-like threads ringing the hem of each leg. A braided mass of phony blond cornrows had been woven into her hair, clashing violently with her dark brown skin.

  When Gunner finally got around to asking her the only question that really mattered, it took her forever to tell him the truth.

  And even then, it came too soon.

  seven

  “YOU’RE PUSHING ME, GUNNER. I SWEAR TO GOD,” POOLE said the next morning.

  “She was telling the truth, Poole. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “Your life is already spoken for. If Pearson dies, it belongs to me. I told you that Sunday.”

  “But if he didn’t kill Nina—”

  “For Chrissake, we’re talking about a hooker here! Somebody he used to throw a little change at every time he needed a hand job!”

  “I realize that. But—”

  “Hookers do what they’re paid to do, Gunner. That’s the nature of their profession. If a John tells ’em to jump, they jump. And if he tells them to bark like a dog, or moo like a cow, or tell anybody who asks that he was with them on Christmas morning, between the hours of six and ten-fifteen …”

  “It wasn’t like that, Poole. She didn’t want to talk to me. I had to make her talk.”

  It was only a slight exaggeration. He hadn’t had to tie her to the rack, exactly, but he had been forced to bide his time with her before she stopped playing stupid.

  “You know a man named Michael Pearson?” Gunner had asked her, after all of Mean Sheila’s introductions were out of the way.

  “Michael who?”

  “Pearson. Michael Pearson.”

  The hooker thought about it. Too long.

  “Uh-uh. Don’t know nobody by that name,” she said, trying to mask the lie behind a nonchalant exhalation of cigarette smoke.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Don’t know the man.”

  “Because he said he was a john of yours. Last Tuesday night.”

  “He wasn’t no John of mine.”

  “Black man in his mid-thirties, light-skinned, handsome, with a square jaw and a thin mustache. Hair all greased back on the sides. You don’t remember being with anybody like that?”

  “No.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “What?”

  Taken aback, Sheila said, “Gunner, baby, what—”

  “I said you’re full of shit,” Gunner said to Goldy, while motioning for Sheila to hold her tongue. “I just described probably half the men you’ve ever been with, how the hell are you going to tell me you don’t remember being with a John like that?”

  “I said—”

  “I know what you said. And I know it’s bullshit. What I don’t know is why you’re lying. Are you trying to cover his ass, or yours? Or both?”

  He let his eyes lean on her for a while, then said, “Maybe you’d remember him better if I told you he was dying. He’s at County-USC right now. In a coma.”

  Her face changed, but not the way he thought it would: She smiled.

  “That’s too bad,” she said, taking another long drag from her cigarette. Southbound traffic on Prairie was blasting the trio with cold air regularly, but she seemed to be the only one not to notice. Or care.

  “Then you do know him.”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said it was too bad what happened to him, that’s all.”

  “Look. Maybe you don’t understand. I don’t give a damn for Pearson. If you don’t want to do him any favors, that makes two of us. But I’m the one who put him in the hospital, and I need to know how bad I should feel about that if and when he dies. Do you understand? If he was lying about being with you last Tuesday, I’ve got no reason to lose any sleep over him. But if he was telling me the truth—”

  “It don’t matter where he was last Tuesday. Puttin’ that motherfucker in the hospital ain’t nothin’ for nobody to feel sorry about. Believe me.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, Goldy,” Gunner said firmly. He wanted to get off the street before a patrol car inevitably cruised by and ended their little party.

  “He likes to hurt people. Bad.”

  “I know that.”

  “He’s a sick motherfucker. He treats you good, an’ then … then he …” She was rubbing her left arm now, trying to erase the memory of an injury that was no longer there—but perhaps had been, only six days before.

  “He was with you, wasn’t he?” Gunner asked her.

  After a long pause, she shrugged. Confessing.
r />   Gunner had known right then he’d have to see Poole in the morning. First thing.

  Sadly, he had also known how reluctant the policeman would be to hear anything he had to say. Just getting him to agree to this meeting at Leimert Park had been as arduous a task as falling up a hill.

  “So how come you didn’t bring her in?” he asked Gunner now, swallowing the last of three fast-food breakfast sandwiches Gunner had bought for him. “She’s such a reliable witness, why didn’t you bring her here so I could talk to her?”

  “You know the answer to that. She doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s afraid you’ll run her in.”

  “Run her in? For what?”

  “For practicing prostitution at the Nite Owl Motel with a John named Michael Pearson last Tuesday night, that’s what. Exactly what she’d be confessing to if she made Pearson’s alibi official.”

  Poole shook his head, said, “Baloney. Any pro knows we’ll waive a chickenshit charge like that, they can help us work a felony case. She was feedin’ you a line.”

  “No.”

  “She was afraid of gettin’ busted, all right, but not for prostitution. She was afraid we’d throw her ass in jail for tryin’ to feed us the same bullshit she was feedin’ you.”

  “No!”

  “If Pearson was her boyfriend, she’d be here. No matter what. Far as I’m concerned, Gunner, that’s the bottom line.”

  He stood up from the table they were sharing, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, and dusted the crumbs off the front of his trousers. Preparing for the long drive back to the station.

  “So you’re not going to look into it. Is that what you’re telling me?” Gunner asked him, not bothering to rise himself.

  “In a word? No. Not at this time.”

  “Because you still think Pearson’s your man.”

  “At this very moment, yeah. I do.”

  “I guess that means you found the murder weapon. That’s why you’re moving so slow on this thing, isn’t it? You’ve got a murder weapon.”

  “We don’t have a weapon yet, Gunner, but we will. Soon. And as for your insulting insinuation that I’m draggin’ my ass on this one—not that it’s any of your fucking business—I got a dance card full of other cases in much greater need of my attention. So—”

  “So you’re a busy man who could use my help. I volunteered it to you.”

  “Forget about it, all right? I’m not givin’ you permission to involve yourself in an ongoing homicide investigation. You’re in enough trouble as it is.”

  “But—”

  “No more buts, cowboy. You wanna keep dicking around in this Nina Pearson case, you’re gonna have to do it behind my back, same way you do everything else.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You don’t give a damn for my authority, you’re gonna do what you wanna do no matter what I say, so why pretend otherwise? What’s the point?”

  “Nobody’s asking for your blessings, Poole. I’m just asking for a little breathing room. A little stress-free space to operate in for a while, that’s all.”

  The police detective shook his head again, said, “That ain’t mine to give, Gunner. Least, not officially.”

  “Tell me what you can do for me unofficially, then.”

  “Unofficially, best I can do for you is offer you some advice: Stay out of my field of vision. Make it as easy for me to ignore you as you possibly can. That clear enough for you, or do I have to draw you a picture?”

  He’d keep his back turned as long as Gunner gave him no reason to turn around. That was basically what the cop was saying.

  “It’s clear,” Gunner said.

  “Good. Next time I hear from you, you’d better have something more to offer me than suspicions and theories. And soggy breakfast sandwiches with two ounces of fuckin’ meat in ‘em.”

  Poole tossed his balled-up napkin at Gunner’s chest and walked away.

  The Nite Owl Motel was a run-down eyesore on Inglewood and Magnolia Avenues that served more prostitutes nightly than all the hamburger joints in the city of Inglewood combined. The trio of tiny little bungalows was dirty and graffiti-infested, and there was only one thing worse man spending, an evening there: trying to hold a decent conversation with the desk clerk.

  He was a gaunt, middle-aged black man with a full head of unruly hair. Gunner found the clerk fighting a nap upon his arrival, and he was as full of information as a duck hunter’s decoy.

  “You know a working girl named Goldy?”

  “No.”

  “Last name Cruz. Goldy Cruz.”

  “Nope.”

  “A dark-skinned sister in her early thirties, average height, average weight, wears her hair in braids. Long, blond braids.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Always wearing gold shoes on her feet. That’s where the name comes from, Goldy.”

  “I don’t never look at nobody’s feet.”

  “But you look at their faces. Don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Were you looking at faces last Tuesday night?”

  “Maybe. Some, I guess.”

  “You were working last Tuesday night, right? Isn’t that what you said, that you were the one here on the desk last Tuesday?”

  “Yeah. I was here.”

  “But you don’t remember seeing a girl like the one I just described to you?”

  “No.”

  “She would’ve been with a man.”

  “Man, they all with a man.”

  “This one would’ve been a good-looking, light-skinned brother. An inch or two shorter than me, a few pounds lighter. Wears a mustache.”

  Gunner waited for a response.

  “You didn’t see him?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Mind if I see the motel register?”

  “The motel register?”

  “The book your guests sign when they rent a room. This.” Gunner tapped on the large ledger book sitting on the counter between them, then opened it without waiting for permission to do so.

  “You can look at it if you want,” the desk clerk said, “but don’t none of the girls work here use it. Their friends neither.”

  It was true; the book was almost empty. Gunner closed it back up and said, “You do understand that I’m not a cop, right? I’m a private investigator, working on an insurance fraud case.”

  “Yeah, you said that.”

  “So you have no reason to be afraid to tell me the truth. I’m not Vice, or anything.”

  “I am tellin’ you the truth.”

  “Sure you are. But—”

  “Maybe you got the wrong motel. Why you so sure they was here, these people you lookin’ for?”

  “Because Goldy said they were here. The Nite Owl Motel in Inglewood, she said.”

  The desk clerk paused a moment, thinking. “Maybe she was confused,” he said.

  “Or maybe she’s a friend of yours, and you think you’re helping her out, acting like you don’t know the lady. Maybe that’s it.”

  The desk clerk just stared at him.

  The time had come in this interrogation for Gunner to start thinking about offering the man a few dollars for his candor, but he didn’t know what the money would buy. He still couldn’t tell if the guy was a hard-nosed Goldy loyalist, or simply somebody who neither knew nor cared who Gunner had been talking about for the last twenty minutes.

  It took him about thirty seconds to decide what to do.

  Confident he’d be able to spend his money more wisely somewhere else, he handed the man one of his business cards and said good-bye.

  His next move was to buy a cup of coffee.

  It was a large cup of a West African blend called Safari Black at HiNotes, a neighborhood coffeehouse he liked to frequent on Central Avenue and 107th Street. He had to adulterate it with six packets of sugar to smooth out its rough edges, but it was good. Strong as aged oxen blood, but good.

  While Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo�
� escaped from the speakers above his head, and sports pages and assorted business journals were being studied by black men and women all around him, he reviewed what he had learned about Nina Pearson’s murder so far and came to a very disagreeable conclusion: He still didn’t believe her husband had killed her.

  Which was odd, considering his little Q and A with the dimwit desk clerk at the Nite Owl Motel seemed to only bolster Poole’s contention that Pearson’s alibi was bogus. The guy couldn’t remember Pearson or Goldy Cruz being there the night of Nina’s murder.

  Still, the investigator’s instincts told him Pearson was an innocent man. And that left him nothing else to believe but that Nina’s real killer was still out there somewhere, enjoying the freedom Gunner had inadvertently secured for him or her by providing the police with the perfect fall guy for Nina’s murder: a mute. A motionless lump in a hospital bed who could neither deflect nor deny the charges being made against him.

  Had he only been able to move Poole to see things his way this morning, and agree to start looking for other suspects in the case, Gunner would not be here at HiNotes struggling to accept the obvious fate that awaited him. But that was life. Always throwing work in your path that would neither pay you a dime nor make you feel any better about yourself afterward.

  He put a lid on his half-full cup of Safari Black and got on with it, this business of doing yet one more dirty job nobody else could see their way around to taking Off his hands.

  “I don’t believe it,” Mimi Hillman said.

  She was sitting in her living room again, Gunner sitting opposite her. She sounded just like Poole.

  He had known it would be a hard sell, getting her to believe that someone other than Nina’s husband might have killed her, but he had nowhere else to go with his suspicions. He certainly couldn’t go back to Poole. Not yet, anyway.

  “Who else would want to kill my baby?” Mimi asked him. “Who?”

  She had spent all of ten seconds reflecting on the news of Pearson’s grave physical condition. Heartbroken she obviously wasn’t.

  “If I knew that, Momma Hillman, I wouldn’t be here,” Gunner said.

  “Then what makes you think it wasn’t Michael? If nobody else could have done it—”