You Can Die Trying (11 page)

“And you don’t want to.”

“No. As a matter of fact, I don’t. We closed the books on McGovern months ago, and as I’m sure you already know, he closed the book on himself over the weekend. Permanently. What’s the point in second-guessing the fucker’s dismissal now?”

“If he was guilty? Not much. But if he was innocent—if he killed the Washington kid in self-defense, the way he always said …”

“He didn’t. Believe me.”

“I want you to hear my client’s version of things, Danny. Before you make any final judgments.”

“Forget it.”

“It’ll only take five minutes of your time.”

“I said forget it. Aren’t you listening?”

“Okay. See you in the morning, huh?”

Gunner hung up the phone.

He had to wait a solid hour for Kubo to call back, but call back Kubo did. And this time, he was ready to name a time and a place.

They ended up at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, the jolly blue and green giant of Los Angeles landmarks that blotted out the sun at the corner of Melrose and San Vicente. Resembling a seven-story construct of giant blue and green building blocks, the center was a glorified shopping mall for licensed interior decorators, where everything from George II mahogany writing desks to wall-sized, marble-encased aquariums could be found at preposterous prices. Million-dollar homes and offices required million-dollar appointments to make their extravagance complete, and there was no better place in Los Angeles to look for such appointments than here, the Neiman-Marcus of the
Architectural Digest
set.

“I suppose you come here often,” Gunner said after he had finished filling Kubo in, offering him a brief and sketchy outline of his work for Mitchell Flowers to date. The two men were wandering from floor to floor, peering through all the display windows from a safe distance, trying not to laugh at the unbelievable decadence of it all.

“Every chance I get,” Kubo said, examining a two-foot-tall ceramic flamingo that had a four-figure price tag dangling from one of its spindly legs. “But I figure I’m the only cop in town who does, so we shouldn’t have to worry about bumping into anyone I know.”

It had been twenty-two years since he and Gunner had been wet-nosed recruits of the LAPD, the scourges of the cadet academy up in the Dodger Blue hills of Elysian Park, yet Kubo didn’t wear the time at all noticeably. He was a smooth-skinned Japanese-American with the face of a kid and the energy to match, and his body still looked like something out of a male wish-fulfillment catalog. Habitually dressed like a commodities broker out to impress the boss, his only discernible flaw was a segmented and misaligned right eyebrow, a souvenir from the day back at the academy that a maniac cop and martial arts instructor named Phillip Adler split his forehead open with the heel of his left foot. Deliberately. Adler had let his peculiar dislike for Orientals get the better of him that day, and was well on his way to seriously maiming one … until Gunner stepped out from the crowd of terrified cadets watching the scene to shatter Adler’s jaw with a solid right hand.

They gave Gunner his walking papers two days later.

“You think I’m being paranoid, but I’m not,” Kubo said. “Word gets around I’ve been talking to you, I’m never going to hear the end of it. Whether I actually tell you anything or not.”

“Word’s not going to get around,” Gunner said.

“Yeah, right. Like it didn’t get around that you had a black linebacker in a go-go dress leave flowers for Harry Kupchak with the desk sergeant at Southwest yesterday.”

Gunner started to grin, but Kubo wasn’t having any.

“You think it’s funny, making a cop look like an ass in front of his fellow officers, but I’ve got news for you. You’re playing with his life. Once a cop loses the respect of the men he works with, he’s finished. Dead and buried.”

“If I could have gotten the man to talk to me any other way, I would have,” Gunner said.

“Maybe he had more important things to do than talk to you. You ever think of that?”

“I didn’t ask him to do it for me. I asked him to do it for his friend McGovern.”

“It doesn’t matter who you asked him to do it for. You were wasting the man’s time—just like you’re wasting mine now. Because you’re never going to prove what you’re trying to prove. What your client says he saw never happened.”

“Says who?”

“Says
me.
We took that alley and the yards on either side of it apart. If the Washington kid had lost a gun that night, we would’ve found it. Either that, or some slugs.”

“Depending on how long you looked, you mean.”

“We looked until we were satisfied,” Kubo said.

“Satisfied of what?”

“That we weren’t going to find anything.”

“And that took what? Two hours, three hours …?”

Kubo frowned, realizing he had already said more than he had planned to. “It’s none of your business how long it took. I’m telling you Washington was clean, and that’s all I intend to say about it. Now, or ever.”

“Shit. Are you starting that again?”

“I’m not starting anything. I’m just telling you how it is. You’re chasing your own tail with this McGovern business, and I’m not going to risk my career trying to help you. What does it take to get that through your head?”

He was visibly angry, which was not a common state for Kubo. Unflappability was as much a Kubo trademark as the latest and greatest in menswear.

“McGovern shot that kid without provocation,” Kubo said. “The little bastard made him run six blocks and was about to lose him for good, so McGovern put a bullet in him to keep him from getting away. That’s just how the sonofabitch was.”

Gunner was shaking his head. “That’s not how my client says it happened, Danny.”

“Then your client must be crazy. Or blind. Or both.”

“I don’t think so.”

Kubo looked at him like he was dense. “You don’t think so?”

“No. I don’t. There’s probably more to his story than he’s been telling me—like what his interest in all this really is, for instance—but I believe he’s telling the truth about the gunshots. Or whatever it was he saw in that alley the night Lendell Washington was killed.”

“He didn’t see anything. I told you.”

“Yeah. I remember.”

“But you don’t believe me.”

Gunner shrugged. “You haven’t given me any reason to believe you—yet.”

“If you read the papers eight months ago, you should have all the reasons you need.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the fact McGovern tried to plant a gun at the scene, number one. And he tried to lift some of the money Washington took from the liquor store, number two. Do I need to go on?”

“Only if you think you owe it to me,” Gunner said.

He fixed his eyes on Kubo’s and kept them there, waiting for an answer. It was an unfair twist of the knife, but it got the job done.

“I’ll give you five minutes. Take it or leave it,” Kubo said.

Without missing a beat, Gunner said, “You said McGovern tried to take some of the money Washington had stolen from the liquor store?”

“That’s right.”

“What made you think so?”

“What made us think so? Some of the money was missing, Sherlock. What else? The counterman at the liquor store said Washington and Ford got away with in excess of two hundred bucks, but we only recovered a little over a hundred at the scene.”

“And you figured McGovern had pocketed the rest.”

“Yeah. Assholes like him do that kind of shit all the time.”

“Washington couldn’t have just dropped the money in the street? While he was running?”

“You mean, like McGovern said he did?”

“Yeah.”

“He could have. Sure. But he didn’t.”

The way Kubo had said it didn’t invite any further discussion of the subject, so Gunner decided to move on, at least for now. “All right. We’ll have it your way. We’ll assume for the moment that my client’s eyes are bad, and he didn’t really see what he thinks he did. Okay?”

Kubo just stood there.

“Okay. So explain what he
heard
, then. Five shots in all, two distinct firing patterns. Two shots first, three shots afterward.”

“You mean three shots first, and two shots afterward. The three McGovern fired at Washington, and then the two he fired into the ground with his drop gun.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Goddamnit, Danny, the man heard—”

“I told you what he heard. If he thinks he heard something different, it was only because of the echo effect. The echo effect confuses people like that all the time.”

“The
‘echo effect’
?”

“That’s right. The acoustics in that alley were perfect for that sort of thing, those five rounds would’ve sounded like a hundred in there.”

“Except my client didn’t hear a hundred. He just heard five.”

“Five, ten, fifteen, twenty—it makes no difference. The principle’s the same. What your client thinks he heard didn’t happen. It was three shots, then two. Not the other way around. Trust me.”

He had a curious look on his face that Gunner wasn’t sure how to interpret. It was either a sign of supreme confidence in what he was saying—or supreme indifference toward it. One or the other.

“What about your other witnesses? They hear this ‘echo effect,’ too?”

Kubo shrugged. “A few did. Naturally. I told you, it’s a common phenomenon.”

“And what did they say they heard?”

“Off the top of my head? Beats the hell out of me.”

“Try to remember, Danny.”

“Hell. One lady said four shots, then two, another said three and three. Something like that.”

“But nobody said two and three.”

“No. Nobody said two and three. But we had a half-a-dozen people say three and two. No ifs, ands, or buts.”

“What about Officer Lugo?”

“What about her?”

“What kind of firing pattern did she say she heard?”

“Officer Lugo was away from the scene at the time of the shooting,” Kubo said stiffly.

“I know she was. But she was what, four or five blocks away? She must have heard something.”

“She was twelve blocks away. And she did hear something. She heard gunfire.” He shrugged again, seemingly commiserating. “She just couldn’t say how much. She was too far away to make an accurate assessment, she said.”

“Too far away?”

“That’s right. That’s what she said.”

“What about how many weapons had been fired? Was she able to ascertain that?”

“No. She said the shots were all clumped together, that there was no way to distinguish one from the other from where she was when the shooting occurred.”

“Jesus.”

“You asked what the lady said, I’m telling you. What’s your problem?”

“Me? I don’t have a problem,” Gunner said. “But I bet poor McGovern sure did. You guys had him by the short hairs, and all his partner did to help was take a walk on him.”

“She didn’t take a walk on anybody. She told the truth. Cops do that sometimes,” Kubo said.

“Sure they do. The same way Siamese twins go to the can. In pairs.”

“Look. Lugo’s a good cop. McGovern wasn’t. If I’d been in her shoes, I probably would’ve let the bastard sleep in the bed he’d made, too.”

A uniformed security guard with a freckled face and a flaming red crew cut sauntered past them at a snail’s pace, ignoring the squawking two-way radio clipped to his belt to openly look them over like the riffraff they were. They had forgotten to keep walking at some point and were just standing in the middle of the second floor landing, making their complete lack of interest in the wares surrounding them obvious to everyone. Kubo could have easily made the kid disappear with a flash of his badge, but he wasn’t going to do that. Instead, he just let the kid look, until looking wasn’t fun anymore and the kid decided to take his suspicions elsewhere.

“I think your five minutes are about up,” Kubo said to Gunner when they were alone again, eyeing his watch critically.

Gunner nodded without argument and said, “After we talk about Noah Ford.”

“Noah Ford? What’s he got to do with anything?”

“I understand it was his contention that Washington was the one armed that night, not him. And that he was in fact clean when Lugo took him into custody.”

“So?”

“So what happened to
his
weapon? If he was lying about not having one, it should have turned up somewhere, right?”

“It should have, yeah. But—”

“But it didn’t.”

“No. It didn’t. Ford ran Lugo a lot farther than Washington ran McGovern, we had a lot more ground to cover searching for his weapon than for Washington’s.”

Gunner nodded his head thoughtfully and said, “Sure.”

Kubo glared at him. “You don’t believe we could’ve missed it, is that it?”

“On the contrary. I think you could’ve missed it very easily. The same way you could’ve missed Washington’s.”

Kubo didn’t say anything.

“Providing, of course, you were trying just as hard to find one gun as you were the other.”

“You trying to say we weren’t?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just saying your explanation of things seems a little odd to me, that’s all. You don’t find one gun, and you say it’s because it never existed; you don’t find another, and you say it’s because you had too much ground to cover. It makes a person wonder, Danny.”

“It makes a person wonder what?”

Gunner jumped in with both feet. “How motivated you were to get McGovern off,” he said.

Kubo’s eyes went cold and his face hardened, instantly divesting itself of all its boyish charm. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“For lack of a better word? A lynching.”

“You mean a fix.”

“Like I said. For lack of a better word.”

“I think you’ve been talking to too many idiots like Harry Kupchak, partner.”

“It adds up, Danny. Even I can see that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Jack McGovern was a bigot and a bully, a wrongful-death suit waiting to happen, and apparently that was news to nobody. He’d worn out his welcome with the department even under the old boys-will-be-boys administration; with Chief Bowden at the helm, he couldn’t have been a bigger embarrassment to you if he’d worn a clown suit to work every day.”