Fear of the Dark (10 page)

When Gunner finally found Verna Gail, she was knee-deep in a mess someone else had left behind, in an apartment too small for most men to share with the rodents that lived there, and her frame of mind was not to his liking. He had hoped to find her in high spirits, was counting on a strain or two of her patented acerbic laughter to take his rage up and over the top, to make what he wanted to do a little easier to justify, but the wilted rag doll who failed to greet him at the door wasn’t going to be much fun to knock around.

Somebody, it seemed, had tumble-dried the contents of Buddy’s apartment, turning everything upside down and bouncing it off the walls for good measure. They hadn’t had much furniture to toy with, but what there had been they’d done a good job on. All that was left of it was a shredded couch lying on its back and a few piles of refuse sitting in the middle of the living room, intermingled puzzles with too many missing pieces to count. Record albums, books, a cheap stereo, and a small television were mixed in with the wreckage, mangled fragments of plastic and metal, glass, and newsprint.

It all made for an interesting distraction, but it had nothing to do with why Gunner was here.

Verna was sitting on the skeletal carcass of the overturned couch when he invited himself in. She was staring at a wall that held nothing of interest to the naked eye but a discolored patch of plaster. Mascara was splashed across her face like war paint and her hair was a jumbled wreck. He tried to wait for her to come around, but it was like waiting for the heat to give up and go away.

“Hey,” he said, simply.

She looked up, startled. The orbs of her eyes flashed white in the darkness, lightning against a black summer sky.

“We need to talk,” Gunner said.

She looked at him with the same level of interest she had shown for the patch of plaster on the wall, but with considerably less respect. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “I never gave you this address.”

“It’s in the book. You’ve been here since Thursday night?”

“I’ve been in and out. What’s it to you?”

“You can’t guess?”

“I don’t want to guess. And I don’t want to talk. Or can’t you see I’m a little busy right now?”

He was on top of her before she had a chance to react, drawing her to her feet. The grip he held on her left bicep she wasn’t going to break in a lifetime. “This shit can wait. Our business can’t. I want to know who killed the white boy for you, Verna. And where I can find him.”.

“What?”

“You’ve only got ten seconds. Keep fucking around.” Standing only inches from her face, he pulled on her arm, hard.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“You told me to my face you’d kill the poor bastard, and like a moron I shrugged it off. You’d get your chance, you said. Maybe at the trial. Only you weren’t up to the wait, were you?”

“No! You’re crazy!”

“Crazy’s got nothing to do with it! What I am is scared shitless. I’ve never pulled a day in a state cage and I’m not going to pull any now. Tell me what I want to know, Verna.
Who killed the white boy for you?”

“Nobody! I didn’t even know he was dead!” She jerked away from him all at once, with everything she had, and he allowed her to slip from his grasp. His fingers had left an imprint on her skin, and she stood there working to erase it, her gaze trying to cut him in half.

“
I
wasn’t the only friend of Buddy’s looking for that white boy! Everybody and their mother was trying to find him. He could’ve been wasted by anybody!”

Gunner’s merciless glare was more than equal to hers. “‘Anybody’ didn’t hire me to take the fall for it.
You
did.”

She shook her head, still rubbing her arm. “I hired you to
find
the man, that’s all. Not to play you or anybody else for a fool. I’d’ve put a bullet in his head, given the chance, hell yes, but only if I could take the credit for it. Buddy was
my
brother, not yours.

“Only I never got the chance. You never
gave
me the chance. Because you let somebody else find him
first
—didn’t you?”

She laughed, finally, daring him to challenge her right to view him as a joke, and won out. Gunner didn’t move.

“But maybe I shouldn’t complain. You told me you were lousy, and I wouldn’t listen. I thought you were just being modest.”

“You’re full of shit,” Gunner said, reaching for her again.

She backed away, out of his range. “Believe what you want to believe. I’ve told you what I know, and that’s the best I can do for you. If the cops want to think you killed the white boy, that’s your problem, not mine.”

“Is that right.”

“Yeah. That’s right. That was you out there beatin’ the bushes for him, not me.”

“You’re confused, sister. And your memory’s failing you. I beat the bushes for the man, all right, but I didn’t have any motive to kill him. I didn’t give a shit about Buddy or the Brothers of Volition, I’m as apolitical as a guy can get. But I’ve come upon some lean times lately, that’s a matter of record, and when some broad with a great body and a fistful of money showed up in my kitchen a few days ago to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse …”

“What offer? I didn’t hire you to kill anybody!”

“Didn’t you?”

It was Gunner’s turn to laugh. He threw his head back as she came at him with her nails extended, and he caught her wrists, one in each hand, before she could get to his eyes. She thrust a knee up at his groin, but he blocked it with his thigh and shoved her aside, releasing her arms. She backpedaled a few steps and her right hand found the canvas back of a broken director’s chair sitting nearby. The chair was up over her head before he could stop her and the best he could do was shield his face with his left forearm as she brought it down on him, putting all her weight behind the blow.

He had been driving himself toward her when the chair disintegrated around his head, and he groped blindly for her throat as his momentum carried him forward, finding her face instead. His left hand held her head in a vise, its fingers splayed wide across her features, as his right looped up to hover, trembling, beside his ear, torqued into a fist coiled to strike.

Verna’s eyes shut tight as Gunner let it go.

A framed
Time
magazine cover of the Reverend Jesse Jackson exploded on the wall behind her, just over her left shoulder. She felt a spray of glass shards at the back of her neck and moved away, squinting, no longer bound by his left hand. The frame dropped to the floor like the blade of a guillotine and was still. Gunner’s right hand was covered in blood.

He was shaking. She watched him stand there, bleeding profusely, and grimaced. He let her look and said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally, shrugging.

He took a step toward her and brushed the knuckles of his right hand across the yellow front of her blouse, smearing it with blood.

“So am I,” he said.

She leaned forward and kissed him, hard. His response was immediate, surprising them both. He was erect when her hand found him, and his breathing was labored, short. He moved his mouth down the nape of her neck and peeled her ruined blouse open, slipping his right hand into the left cup of her bra to ease the full, heavy mound of her breast into the open. The dark flesh of the nipple was hard with arousal even before he brought his lips down around it.

The hand she was using to explore him paused in its vigorous work abruptly, as she lost herself in the playful teasing of his tongue and teeth, and she reached up to free her right breast for him, stroking the nipple to attention with her own hand until he was ready for it. Her breathing, too, had changed its rhythm, dramatically.

“The bedroom,” she said, forcefully, and she only had to say it once.

He took her up in his arms and followed her directions to Buddy’s bed.

Several hours later, they turned the couch up off its back onto the two legs it had left, retrieved its ravaged cushions from various parts of the room, and sat down to talk. Verna found some beer in the kitchen and brought them both an open bottle. There was no mention of a truce, but that, in effect, was what they were trying. It seemed like the thing to do.

“What happened here?” Gunner asked, surveying the wreckage of Buddy’s apartment. The fresh bandage on his right hand was growing damp with a crimson stain.

Verna sipped her beer and shook her head. “I don’t know. A break-in, I guess.”

“When?”

“I’m not sure. This is how I found it yesterday morning, the first I’d been here since the night before Buddy died. It could have happened Thursday, or Wednesday—or two weeks ago, for all I know.”

“You talk to any of the neighbors? Maybe somebody heard it go down.”

“No, I didn’t. But I could ask around, I guess.”

“Anything missing? Would you know it if there were?”

“You mean like valuables? Money, jewelry—things like that?”

Gunner shrugged. “Anything.”

She did a quick inventory of the room, said, “Not that I can tell. What you see is pretty much what he had. A few chairs, some records, a handful of books. That cheap-ass stereo.”

“Then they didn’t take anything.”

“No. I don’t think so. Does that mean something?”

Gunner shrugged again. “Probably not.”

“Then why all the questions?”

“Force of habit.”

“You don’t think this was a burglary, do you?”

“It may have started out as a burglary, sure. But thieves don’t usually trash a place like this unless …”

“Unless what?”

Gunner looked at her. The blood on her blouse had dried a dark brown. “Unless something goes wrong. Something happens to set them off and they take it out on the furniture.”

Verna shook her head. “You’re not making any sense,” she said.

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.”