You Can Die Trying (10 page)

“Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Washington. It was a gracious thing to do.”

Washington shook his hand, wearing the least convincing smile she had shown him all day, and said, “You’re quite welcome, Mr. Gunner. Even if you are all wrong about Lendell.”

The three of them went to the door together. Wiley moved to open it for Gunner just as someone out on the steps wiggled a key in the lock and stepped into the house, nearly knocking Wiley over in the process.

“Pervis,” Washington said to the new arrival, sounding a bit uneasy, “this is Mr. Gunner.” She waited for Pervis to comment, but all he did was stand there. “He’s a private investigator who came to ask me a few questions about Lendell’s shooting.”

Pervis didn’t appear to approve. He was a slender young black man in a gray silk suit, with an angular, clean-shaven face and a diamond in his left ear. He turned the same disapproving stare toward Wiley he had shown to Gunner, then stepped right past both men without saying a word to either.

Washington was appalled.

“Pervis!”

The young man stopped and turned around. “So another clown’s joined the circus. What is that to me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Washington said.

“Yes you do. You know exactly what I mean.” His eyes turned soft as he looked at her. “Do yourself a favor and give it up, Sis. The boy’s dead.” He waved his hand before him, gesturing toward Gunner and Wiley, and suddenly his gaze was ice cold again. “None of this shit is going to bring him back.”

He turned and disappeared into the rear of the house.

6

The next morning, after learning from the California Department of Corrections that Noah Ford was presently serving a two-year term out at Central Juvenile Hall in East Los Angeles for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, Gunner got in his car and drove out to see him. Or, at least, to make an attempt to see him.

He hadn’t called ahead to tell anyone he was coming, and Ford wouldn’t have known who he was if he had. This wasn’t the way an organized professional was supposed to operate, but he couldn’t think of anything better to do with his time. He had wanted to talk with Danny Kubo before he tried talking with Ford, but Kubo still hadn’t returned the phone message Gunner had left for him the day before. Nor had he been around to answer his phone this morning when Gunner had tried to reach him again, only to be greeted by a tinny voice-mail message that had sounded even less reassuring than Kubo’s office-mate Fowler.

Gunner wondered what was going on.

Central Juvenile Hall was a sprawling collection of brick bungalows and dormitories that dated back to the 1940s, situated along a meandering stretch of Eastlake Avenue near the County/ USC Medical Center. Its exterior was so nondescript one could pass right by it and never recognize it as the largest youth correctional facility in the country, housing as it did more than six hundred inmates daily.

Gunner had to engage in some more minor misrepresentation before the guards would grant him entrance to the facility, but other than that things couldn’t have gone more smoothly. He told them he was an investigator under the employ of Ford’s “newly hired” attorney—an attorney whose name had probably not been reported to them, yet—and rather than go to all the time and trouble of proving him a liar, they just opened the gate and let him in. A young, all-business correctional officer named Bevins escorted him through a metal detector and onto the grounds, making small talk as they walked.

Bevins unlocked one of two doors in the massive, wrought-iron fence that separated the inmates from the free world beyond, and Gunner soon found himself facing what looked like a school playground at recess time. Scattered across several giant fields of lifeless grass, teenage boys in bright orange uniforms were playing ball games of every kind, looking for all the world like kids at a church picnic. Almost all were black or Hispanic. The only hint that these were in fact underage thieves and rapists, extortionists and murderers, was the sad austerity of the dormitory buildings surrounding them, and the steely-eyed observation of the correctional officers, like Bevins, who wandered among them, waiting to extinguish the first ember of discord or defiance.

“Rec time,” Bevins said dispassionately. “Looks like we’re going to have to find him.”

Gunner nodded, already scanning the yard for kids who looked the right age. In the process, he stumbled upon a familiar face.

Playing in the outfield in one of the two softball games presently in progress was a gangbanger Gunner had met the year before named Donnell Henderson, an eighteen-year-old pretty boy with pale skin and a full head of hair. Gunner had dealt with Henderson only briefly, in the course of working the same case that had introduced him to Claudia Lovejoy, but he’d nevertheless been impressed enough with the kid’s intelligence to hope that he would never end up in a place like this, despite his gang affiliations.

To see him here now was a genuine disappointment.

“Somebody you know?” Bevins asked.

Gunner shook his head. “I thought so at first. But no. That’s not him.”

Bevins didn’t believe him, but he looked off in the direction of a crowded basketball court to their left and said, “I think that’s Ford over there. See him?”

Of course, Gunner didn’t, but that mattered little, because Bevins didn’t really want an answer. He was already moving toward the court, taking it for granted that Gunner had enough sense to follow. As Gunner watched from the edge of the court, Bevins pulled Noah Ford from the game, chose a substitute for him from a group of kids sitting on a bench nearby, then marched Ford to Gunner’s side, all with the efficiency and brusqueness of a USMC drill sergeant.

“You want him inside in an interview room, or you gonna talk to him out here?” Bevins asked.

“Out here will be fine.”

“Okay. I’ll be right over there if you need me.” He started backpedaling toward the basketball court. “You want back in this game, Ford, you better act right. I’ll be watching you, understand?”

Ford never even turned around.

Looking him over, Gunner realized he wasn’t at all what Gunner had expected. All the fourteen-year-old sociopaths he had known in the past had looked like thirty-year-old sociopaths reduced to scale, exact replicas of the larger models right down to the scowls on their faces and the threat in their walk. You saw them coming and you knew the trouble you were inviting, not getting the hell out of their way. But Ford just looked like a fourteen-year-old kid. He was baby-faced and scarless, dwarfed by the prison uniform that engulfed him, and his eyes were all but devoid of resentment.

“Mr. Bevins says you wanna see me,” he said to Gunner, with seemingly benign curiosity.

“I do if your name’s Noah Ford.”

“How come you know me, but I don’t know you?”

Gunner answered that by explaining who he was and why he was here, simplifying the details wherever possible. Ford listened attentively, but showed little sign of understanding, let alone actually giving a damn.

“So?”

“So I want to talk to you. About what happened to Lendell.”

Ford shrugged. “Cops shot him, man. That’s what happened.” The basketball game behind him was getting noisy now, and he was having a difficult time ignoring it.

“That’s what I want to talk about. How Lendell got shot,” Gunner said.

“My lawyer said I ain’t gotta talk about that no more. He said that’s all over with.”

“He’s right. It is. I just need to ask you a few questions about it, that’s all.”

“Questions? What questions?”

He turned his body toward the court, ever so slightly.

Gunner said, “I need to know if Lendell had a gun on him that night, Noah. And if he did, whether or not he fired it at the cop who killed him.”

Ford didn’t say anything.

“Noah. Listen up.”

Ford stopped trying to sneak a peek at the game and turned all the way around again.

“You told the police he had a gun. Remember?”

“I did?”

“Yeah. You did. You told them he was the one who wanted to do the liquor store, and he was the one carrying the gun. Now, was that true, or not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, man. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know
what?”

“I don’t know whose idea it was. To do the liquor store. ’Cause, like, it wasn’t his idea, an’ it wasn’t my idea. Right? We just”—he shrugged—
”did
it.”

“And the gun?”

Ford glanced over at the basketball court yet again, unable to help himself, and said, “Man, I gotta go.”

“Just tell me about the gun, Noah,” Gunner said forcefully.

Ford looked at him, surprised by the sudden shift in his tone, and laughed, sounding just like the little boy he was.

“Fuck you, man. I gotta go,” he said.

And then he turned around and sprinted off, answering the call of a child’s game the way children so often did.

Gunner cursed his poor planning all the way to Mickey’s.

Trying to get Ford to talk to him without giving the kid some time to get used to the idea had been dumb. He’d had the
fuck you
Ford laid on him coming. What he should have done was get a phone number for the kid’s mother from Harriet Washington when he’d had the chance, and arrange a visit through her. Getting past both her and Ford’s lawyer would probably have required the same kind of effort and patience he’d had to expend on Harriet Washington herself, but it would have been worth it if it had meant coming away from Central with a few straight answers to his questions, rather than the handful of nothing he had now.

He called Information to get the number of a Charlene Ford as soon as he arrived at his office, but there was no listing for anyone by that name. He hadn’t really thought there would be—childbirth out of wedlock being as tragically endemic as it presently was—but he’d taken a stab at it, anyway, hoping against hope he could avoid asking Harriet Washington for any more favors. Putting off calling her even further, he left yet another voice-mail message for Danny Kubo before trying to reach Claudia Lovejoy at home, only to learn she was still making herself as scarce as Kubo was. She didn’t even have her answering machine on anymore.

When Gunner finally did call Washington, she refused to give him her sister’s number, though she did agree to call her in his stead to leave his number with her. She didn’t know what the chances were that Charlene, last name Woodberry, would want to talk to him, she said, but she’d make the call, anyway.

Gunner hung up, made a fresh pot of coffee for himself and Mickey, and waited around for the phone to ring.

Nearly an hour later, it did.

“I had a feeling I’d be hearing from you,” Danny Kubo said.

“Yeah? How intuitive.”

“Intuition’s got nothing to do with it. I’m just not stupid. I see things, I hear things, I put two and two together. It’s really not that complicated.”

He sounded irritated, but that was to be expected. He was calling under duress. When Gunner had left his third message in two days on Kubo’s voice-mail an hour ago, it hadn’t been just to say yet again that he would appreciate a call back. This time, Kubo’s old friend had issued a thinly disguised threat, in the form of a cheerful announcement: Gunner would be coming to visit him tomorrow. Downtown. He was going to walk into Parker Center, drop Kubo’s name with every high-ranking officer he stumbled into, and generally roam the halls of the LAPD’s inner sanctum in search of Kubo’s office like a tourist traipsing about Disneyland.

Kubo knew better than to think he was bluffing.

“So how are things?” Gunner asked him.

“Things are things. You want to talk small talk, or do you want to talk business?”

“I think you already know the answer to that. Otherwise, you’d have called me before now.”

“Hey. I was busy.”

“Yeah. I can imagine.”

Both men fell silent, listening to the phone line click and hum as they waited for someone to get to the point.

“Look, Aaron. I’ll tell you up front,” Kubo said finally. “I’m not going to be able to help you. It’s just not possible.”

“You don’t think you should maybe hear what kind of help I need before you tell me that?”

“I don’t need to hear. It’s just like you said. I already know. Word is, you’re digging around in the Jack McGovern case, trying to prove he got a raw deal from the department. Isn’t that right?”

“I’m trying to prove the department may have made a mistake when they dismissed him, yes.”

“For the sake of some guy off the street who claims to have witnessed the Lendell Washington shooting.”

“Yes.”

“Eight months after the fact.”

Gunner left that one alone.

“And this guy says the kid fired on McGovern first?”

“Yes.”

“So you figured you’d look me up to ask if I’d care to compare notes, right?”

“Somebody said you were one of the IAD guys who investigated the case. Why shouldn’t I ask you about it?”

“Because I can’t tell you anything, that’s why. The work I do is strictly interdepartmental, I couldn’t talk to you about it if I wanted to.”