You Can Die Trying (15 page)

When she had left the two men alone again, Gunner said, “The other possibility is, there was another kid besides Washington and Ford involved in the holdup. Somebody McGovern and his partner never saw, and Ford never talked about. Maybe a lookout who spotted the law coming before anyone else and took off without ever being noticed.”

“And then what? Washington followed him into the alley?”

“Presumably. Yes.”

Flowers shook his head. “But I didn’t see anyone else,” he said.

“From what you told me, you might not have. You said the first you saw of Washington, he was just turning into the alley, with McGovern half a block behind. If that’s true, and assuming Washington had been following someone with any kind of lead at all …”

Flowers shook his head again and said, “I don’t know, Mr. Gunner. It all sounds reasonable enough, I suppose, but …” He shrugged to terminate the thought, in essence admitting he had no faith in Gunner’s logic.

“You don’t think there could have been someone else in the alley with Washington, is that it?”

“No. I didn’t say that. It’s just … Well, I think it’s jumping to conclusions, assuming there was someone else there just because I didn’t see the gun in Washington’s hand. You understand what I’m saying? I mean, if someone else had been there, I’m sure I would have noticed somehow. I would have heard them, at least, even if I didn’t see them. Right?” He waited for Gunner to agree with him, but the investigator passed on the offer. “Besides. Even if there had been someone else there—a drug dealer, or another kid, or whatever—what difference would it make? McGovern was still fired upon first, and that’s all that really matters here, isn’t it?”

“Technically speaking, yes. But I think you’re missing my point.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. The point I’ve been trying to make here, Mr. Flowers, is that an already difficult job has just become even more so, now that I have to worry about the possibility of three people having been in that alley, instead of just two.”

“And?”

“And, frankly, I don’t know if I’m up to the challenge.”

“I see. You’re telling me your fee is insufficient, that you’re going to require some more money. Is that it?”

“No. That’s
not
it. The money’s got nothing to do with it!” Gunner heard the tremulous rise in his voice and stopped, giving himself a moment to think things over before Flowers’s density could incense him completely. “It’s not a matter of money. It’s a matter of what it’s likely to buy you. And right now, that’s nothing.”

“Lendell Washington fired that gun, Mr. Gunner, and the police are just trying to cover the whole thing up. Don’t you see that?”

“Frankly speaking, I don’t. But even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to prove it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The only piece of evidence that could lend any credence to your version of things is the gun you insist Washington fired that night—and I can’t produce it. Nobody can, apparently.”

“Nobody else has really tried,” Flowers said.

“Maybe so. I don’t know. In any case, the gun hasn’t turned up, and without it, like I say, you don’t have a case.
We
don’t have a case.”

“So you think I should just drop it. Just like that.”

“I think you should give that option some serious thought, yes. I mean, hell, I’ll take your money for as long as you want to spend it, but I feel like you ought to know at this point how little you’re likely to get for it.”

“And if I take your advice and just let the whole thing go—what happens to the people who threatened my little girl? Nothing, right?”

Gunner didn’t quite know how to answer that one. “Unless you went to the police with the note they sent you—”

“I don’t want to go to the police. That’s why I hired you, remember? I
want you
to find out who sent me that note, without involving the police.”

Gunner shook his head.

“Mr. Gunner, please. Listen to me. These people made me do something I may regret for the rest of my life, and you’re the only hope I have of ever putting that fact behind me. Don’t you understand?”

“Mr. Flowers—”

“You said you’d take my money for as long as I cared to spend it. Well, I still care to spend it. For at least another week or so, anyway.” He leaned forward in his chair and held his hand out for Gunner to shake. “Stick with me on this, I beg of you. Please.”

He pushed his hand further forward and waited, defying Gunner to ignore the gesture forever.

Gunner shook his hand.

“Thank you,” Flowers said, gushing and grinning like a game show contestant as both men rose to their feet. “One more week. That’s all I’m asking for.”

Gunner was about to tell him where he could stick his one more week when a fight broke out in the kitchen behind them.

“I’ll open the goddamn refrigerator any time I want!” a male voice shouted.

“I said close that door, Sonny,” Flowers’s wife ordered.

“Bullshit. I’m hungry.”

“You don’t spend a cent for the food in this house, you’ve got no right to be hungry!”

The smile on Flowers’s face disappeared like something that had been drawn on it with invisible ink. He looked at Gunner sheepishly and said, “I’m sorry. My brother Sonny …” He let a shrug of abject helplessness end the sentence for him.

Moments later, a black man wearing high-water pajama bottoms and a sleeveless white T-shirt left the kitchen to join them, a bowl of cold breakfast cereal cupped in one hand. He had a black patch over his right eye and a San Francisco Giants baseball cap turned rearward atop his head, and he walked with a discernible limp that seemed to favor his left side. He looked to be about ten years his brother’s junior, which would have put him somewhere in his early thirties.

“Yo. We got company,” he said when he caught sight of Gunner, before digging into the cereal while still on his feet.

“Sonny, this is Aaron Gunner. A friend of mine. We used to bowl league together,” Mitchell Flowers said.

“League? Man, you didn’t never bowl no league.”

“It was while you were away. I guess I never told you.” His eyes darted to the kitchen for a moment, then came back. “In any case, Mr. Gunner was just leaving.”

“Yeah. I really have to run,” Gunner said, trying to help out.

“Later, then,” Sonny Flowers said, loading another spoonful of cereal into his mouth. He was spilling milk all over the living room floor.

Out on the porch, his brother found it necessary to offer Gunner a second apology. “Maybe now you understand why I was hesitant to have you over,” he said. “He’s been staying with us now for almost a month, and he and the wife still haven’t learned to get along. It’s a constant battle between those two.”

Gunner shrugged. “In-laws can be like that.”

Flowers shook his head. “No. There’s more to it than that, I’m afraid. It’s Sonny, not Wanda. He’s just nothing but bad news. All you have to do is look at him to know that.”

“You mean the eye?”

“The eye and the limp, both,” Flowers said. “See them together, and you know all you need to know about the kind of people he associates with, and the kind of trouble he likes to get into. This time, it was supposed to be a woman with a pool cue and an angry boyfriend that nearly killed him. The woman put his eye out, and the boyfriend broke his hip. He’s been recuperating here with us ever since.”

Gunner shrugged and smiled. “It sounds like he’s lucky to have you for a brother.”

“Yes. He is.”

Flowers watched Gunner get all the way to his car, then turned and walked slowly back into the house.

When Gunner called for his messages fifteen minutes later, Mickey surprised him with two.

“But you’re not gonna like one of ’em,” the barber said.

“Just give it to me anyway, Mickey.”

“Okay. Your friend Claudia called.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. She said she was calling to ask you not to call her anymore. Is that just like a woman, or what?”

Gunner almost laughed out loud, thinking about how much he’d had that coming. He had tried her number at home again this morning, and let the phone ring a full eight minutes in a pitiful effort to harass her into responding to the call. He knew now that she had been there during the attempt, and had simply waited him out. He couldn’t have felt more like a fool if she’d explained this all to Mickey in intricate detail.

“Give me the next one, Mickey.”

“Somebody named Charlene Woodberry called you, too. She said she spoke to Noah and it’s okay to go see him again, if you want. I asked her if you’d know what that’s supposed to mean, and she said yeah, you would.”

“She was right. I do. Thanks a lot, Mickey.”

He hung up without saying good-bye.

Finding a parking space at Central Juvenile Hall on a Saturday afternoon turned out to be a different proposition from finding one on a Friday morning. Gunner had to cruise the entire length of the lot before he came across a spot for the Cobra that wasn’t reserved for nonvisitors.

And one look at the crowd milling about the visitors’ entrance explained why. Mothers and sisters, wives and girlfriends, baby sons and baby daughters—they were all here, waiting to see one inmate or another. Gunner had to bob and weave his way around a group of teenagers sitting at the curb just to reach the guard’s window.

“Who’re you here to see?” the officer behind the security glass asked, yawning.

When Gunner told him, a funny look came slowly over the guard’s face.

“D’you say Ford?”

“Yeah. Noah Ford. There a problem?”

The guy just blinked at him. “Hold on a minute,” he said, and then got up to disappear down a hallway behind him, without bothering to explain what the hell was going on.

He was back in five minutes, the same strange expression on his face.

“Sir, I need to ask you what your relationship is to inmate Ford,” he said politely.

Gunner told the same lie he had told the last time, and it went over just as big.

“I see. I guess it’d be all right to tell you, then.”

“Tell me what?” Gunner asked.

The guard shrugged, making a gesture of unmistakable condolence out of it. “Well, that your client’s dead,” he said. “They just told us he expired over at County about twenty minutes ago.”

9

“Hello, Donnell,” Gunner said.

Donnell Henderson just looked at him, waiting for the small talk to end. They were sitting alone in a soundproof visitation room, inside the green bungalow Henderson’s group of inmates called home. The senior officer in charge of Henderson’s unit stood watching their lips move from the hallway outside, through the expansive windows that lined the wall facing him. He hadn’t appeared to blink once.

“I want to know what happened to Noah Ford, Donnell,” Gunner said, deciding to come right out with it.

“Who?”

“Noah Ford. You heard me the first time.”

“I don’t know anybody named Noah Ford,” Henderson said.

“I think you do.”

“Why? Why should I? You think everybody knows everybody in here?”

“No. But I’ll tell you what I do think. I think secrets don’t last five seconds in a place like this. I think a kid would have to be just as dead as Ford is not to have heard what happened to him by now. And why.”

“How’d you know I was here, man? Who told you I was in here?”

“Nobody told me. I was here yesterday, during rec time. I saw you drop a few fly balls out in left field.”

“Bullshit. I didn’t drop any fly balls,” Henderson said.

“That was just a joke, Donnell.”

“Yeah? Well, go joke somewhere else, all right? Leave me the fuck alone.”

“I’d be glad to. Just as soon as you tell me what I want to know.”

“I don’t know anything, man. I told you.”

“Yeah, you told me. Trouble is, you don’t lie any better now than you did when we first met.”

“I’m not lyin’, Mr. Gunner.”

“Bullshit, Donnell.”

Gunner slid back in his chair, stretching his legs out in front of him to show the kid he was ready to spend the rest of the day here, if that was how long Henderson wanted to fool around.

Henderson stared at him, gradually getting the message.

“Somebody shanked ’im, all right? He got
shanked.”

“Shanked? With what?”

“With a fork, man. At breakfast. What else?”

“You mean a plastic fork?”

“That’s right. Plastic. That’s all they give us in here, plastic.” He shrugged. “But that doesn’t stop some homeboys from usin’ the shit, anyway. All you have to do is put a knife or a fork in a cat’s throat, and …” He shrugged again. “You know. Like that.”

“That what happened to Ford?”

“Yeah.” He nodded.

“They know who did it?”

“Shit. I told you, man. Homeboy was whacked at breakfast. Of course they know who did it. Their senior was standin’ right there, right?”

“So? Who did it? What’s the kid’s name?”

“I don’t know his name.”

“Say what?”

“I’m tellin’ you, I didn’t know him. Homeboy was new, and we were in different units.”

“And you don’t know his name.”

“No. All I know is what they called him. You know. His slob.”

“His
slob
?”