“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.
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—”
“That wasn’t what I said. What I said was I don’t know of anyone else who could have. But
you
—you’re a different story. You knew Nina’s friends, her enemies …”
Nina’s mother shook her head. “That child didn’t
have
any enemies. Only enemy she ever had in this world was Michael. Nobody else ever even looked at Nina sideways. Nobody.”
“You’re sure about that.”
“Of course I’m sure. You just don’t know Michael, that’s all. You don’t know how he beat on Nina, and cheated on her, and lied to her …”
“I don’t think he was lying about this.”
“Why? Why don’t you think he was lying?”
“Because it didn’t
sound
like a lie to me when he said it. That’s why. I know that sounds silly to you, but …” He shrugged. “I can’t explain it any other way. I’ve been in this business almost twenty years, and I still don’t always know a lie when I hear one. But the
truth
—sometimes the truth makes a sound all its own.”
“And you think he was telling you the truth. About his being with this other woman when Nina was killed.”
“Yes. I do. Just like I believe the woman was telling me the truth when she told me where and when they’d spent the night together. My instincts aren’t much, Momma Hillman, I’d be the first to admit that. But they’re all I’ve got. And what they’re telling me now is that Michael’s not the man the police really want. Someone else is.”
“Someone like
who
? Everybody else loved Nina!”
“I’m sure it appeared that way to you. Nina was an easy person to love, after all. But people don’t always show you their true feelings. Sometimes all the hugs and kisses and kind words are just for show.”
Mimi shook her head again, said, “I don’t believe that. Nina’s friends are good people.”
“I’m not saying they aren’t. I’m just saying I’d like to talk to a few of them to find out for myself what kind of people they are. That’s all.”
“But why? Why? If the police are satisfied that Michael killed Nina—”
“We’re not talking about the police. We’re talking about
me.
And I don’t want to wake up some morning five, ten, fifteen years down the road to learn that somebody other than Michael killed Nina and
walked
. Do you understand? The time to see that justice is done for Nina is
now
, Momma Hillman. Not later. Later might be too late.”
“Seeing that justice is done for Nina is not your job, Aaron. It’s God’s job. Let God and the police handle justice.”
“I
am
letting them handle it. I’m just giving them a little help, that’s all.”
“Aaron—”
“Look. I don’t want to argue with you. That’s not what I came here for. If you’re satisfied that Michael killed Nina, fine. I envy you that. The information I’d hoped to get from you today I can get somewhere else, no problem. But I’m going to do this. One way or another. Whether you think I have the right to get so personally involved or not.”
He moved to kiss her good-bye.
“Aaron, don’t. Don’t leave,” Mimi pleaded with him.
“I have to. I’m sorry. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He started for the door.
“Sisterhood House,” Mimi said, all but blurting the words out.
He looked back at her. “What?”
“She was staying at Sisterhood House. It’s a home for battered women. That’s where her friends were. At least, all the ones I knew.”
He walked back into the living room but didn’t sit down. “Where would I find this Sisterhood House?”