Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 11/01/10 Page 7

  “You run into a cold spell, that’s all. We all do, don’t matter what line we’re in. You just gotta wait it out.”

  He made it sound so simple. Wait it out. Keep my shingle up in the heart of the ’hood, where few people have a dollar to spend on something other than the barest of necessities, and hope somebody one day would walk through my door and offer me something to do with my time that both paid well and would be worth talking about afterward, without any soul-crushing embarrassment.

  Sure.

  I fixed my eyes on my landlord until he, too, fled the room, and then I resigned myself to taking his advice and doing what I always do when I arrive at this pathetically redundant crossroads in my “career”—Nothing.

  Jolly Mokes and his late wife Grace had once been the polar opposites of Ollie and Jetta Brown. The only playing around on Jolly Grace ever did was all in her husband’s head, and unlike Ollie, Jolly had no problem directing his jealous rages at the woman he loved, rather than the men he imagined she was sleeping with. A convenient excuse for his abuse was the nightmare we both had endured over a nineteen-month span in the jungles of Long Binh, as Jolly took the carnage we witnessed there harder than most, but the truth was that Jolly didn’t need any excuse to be a bully; he’d been a big, insecure little boy when he arrived in Vietnam, and that was what he was when he got out.

  He killed Grace two years after we came home. Her death was unintentional. He meant only to slap her around to the point of tears as usual, but ever since he beat her to death instead, he’s had to live with the crime as if he’d put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger all the same. On the surface, it wouldn’t appear that he deserved anybody’s sympathy, and I never thought he’d get an ounce of mine. Then he came to see me at Mickey’s one day after they let him out of Corcoran State Prison, begging for some kind of work, and the guilt-wracked shell of the giant I remembered demanded my pity in spite of my best efforts to withhold it. He had found God in prison, and part of the deal he had made with his Savior was to carry his wife’s murder around on his back like a ton of iron chain mail, for every minute of every day he had left to live.

  It’s a hard penance to watch, and an even harder one to ignore.

  So I found a way to give him a job, and I’ve been doing the same as my workload and finances allow ever since. It’s no great sacrifice. I only assign him things I have no wish to do myself, and I pay him next to nothing for the privilege.

  When neither my own conscience nor Mickey’s needling would allow me to forget Deirdre Innes after three days of trying, I finally got the idea to let Jolly watch her back for me. It was a task tailor-made for him.

  “All you have to do is watch her crib for a while, let me know if you see this boy Stills anywhere,” I told him.

  “And if I do?”

  “You call me immediately. He sounds like a real piece of work, I don’t want you trying to deal with him alone. You got that?”

  Jolly said he did. But Deirdre Innes wasn’t exactly grateful when I took him over to her place to introduce them.

  “Uh-uh, Mr. Gunner. I want you to look after me, not him. I need a professional!”

  “Jolly is a professional,” I said.

  “Has he got a gun?”

  “He doesn’t need a gun. What, you can’t see how big this man is?”

  “Samuel don’t give a damn about big. If he comes over here lookin’ for me, only thing gonna stop ’im from killin’ me is a bullet. I told you that.”

  I gave her an easy choice to make: Jolly or nothing.

  She took Jolly.

  The next day, I finally picked up some work of my own. A well-to-do sister in the technical writing trade named Seneca Latimore was about to marry David Fields, her fiancé of ten months, and before she went down the aisle with him, she wanted me to do a thorough background check on him, just in case he’d left any embarrassing details out of the life story he’d offered her. She was a careful woman, Ms. Latimore, and it was a good thing she was because over the course of the next two weeks, I would discover that “David Fields” was only the latest of many false identities her betrothed had seen fit to invent in recent years. Fields was actually an ex-con out of Louisiana whose real surname was Spencer, and if the treatment he’d given the three women he’d married previously was any indication, the post-honeymoon plans he had for Seneca Latimore were not going to be of the happily-ever-after variety. I had seen armed bank robbers hit and run without leaving as much emotional carnage behind.

  I was only two days into the task of documenting the full breadth of the David Fields iceberg when Jolly called me away.

  “I seen Samuel Stills,” he said.

  He was calling from a ramshackle eyesore known as the Red Owl Motel, ten shoebox rooms slathered in crumbling white stucco that made the blight of Van Ness and Gage complete. He met me across the street where I parked my car and we walked back over together.

  “He still here?”

  “Yeah. Room 4. I followed him over from Ms. Innes’s place. She was out when he came around. I figured you might wanna know where he’s stayin’.”

  “You figured right. What’d he do over at Ms. Innes’s place?”

  “He didn’t do anything. Just walked past the house a couple times, like he was tryin’ to make up his mind ’bout goin’ to the door. But he never did.”

  We were moving past the motel office now, no one visible behind the dust-caked screen door, and I could see Room 4 waiting for us less than fifteen yards away.

  “What’re we gonna do?” Jolly asked.

  “I’m not sure yet. Let’s just see how it goes.”

  “Okay. But we better watch this boy close, G. He looks like the wrong end of trouble to me.”

  I knocked on the door and waited as Jolly loomed behind me, both of us aware that we were taking a chance that Stills wouldn’t make any assumptions about who was calling and put a few bullet holes in the door before opening it. It was the risk you always took when you dropped in on bad people unexpectedly.

  But Stills just flung the door open without a word and snapped, “What you want?” No more concerned about us being a danger to him than the line of red ants snaking across the dusty motel porch at our feet.

  “Samuel Stills?” I asked.

  California cons don’t have access to weight rooms anymore, but Stills had been doing some kind of heavy lifting while he’d been inside. Shirtless and barefoot, his arms were massive slabs of chiseled muscle and his waist was narrow and hard, abs rippling beneath his gleaming black skin like a tightly coiled serpent.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “My name’s Gunner, his is Mokes. We’re friends of Deirdre’s. May we come in?”

  “No. Deirdre who?”

  “Deirdre Innes. You were just by her place. She’s asked us to come by and find out what you want with her. Do we really have to do this out here?”

  He didn’t say anything, just let a long spell go by while deciding what move to make. In the space of that moment, I came to understand why Innes was so terrified of him. Even motionless, he exuded the threat of sudden violence. Jolly was right: Stills was the wrong end of trouble.

  “Come on in,” he said at last, and stepped away from the door so we could enter.

  He sat on a corner of his bed and interlocked the fingers of both hands between his legs, a grin appearing out of nowhere on his face. I scanned the room quickly for a weapon within his reach but saw nothing of the kind, a warning that he was confident enough of his chances against us without one.

  “So. Deirdre sent you over here, huh?”

  “That’s right. She wants to be left alone,” I said.

  “Alone? She tol’ you that?”

  “Yeah. And she wanted us to tell you.”

  “That’s bull. I love Dee.”

  “Apparently, that’s not the impression you left her with back at your trial. Or don’t you remember threatening to kill her?”

  He laughed. “Now I know this
is bull,” he said.

  And then he came off the bed.

  He plowed into me first and the two of us together drove Jolly to the floor. The big man went down beneath us like a poleaxed buffalo and struck the back of his head on a dresser against the wall, damn near knocking the faceboard off one of its drawers. From the sound the air made leaving his lungs, I could tell he wasn’t going to be of much help to me for a while.

  I’d brought my Ruger 9 into the room with me along with Jolly, but Stills was keeping me too busy fending off blows to find it. He had a knee in my chest as he threw punches at my face, working like hell to put my lights out before Jolly could shake the cobwebs off. One of his right hands connected solidly with the bridge of my nose and I heard bone snap, felt my nostrils cloud with warm blood. Something shrill kept ringing in my ear, and I finally realized Stills had yet to stop laughing.

  I reared up and bucked him off, but somewhere in the process my Ruger slipped its holster and slid under the table behind me, well out of reach. Meanwhile, Stills was demanding my ongoing attention. He was faster and stronger than I, and the punches I threw at him kept meeting thin air. I caught him once with a good left under the right eye, but he took it like a bitch-slap from an old woman with rheumatism. All it did was stop the laughter; it didn’t stop him.

  Our fight had been a fair one up to now, and that was the problem with it. I was overmatched. I reached out for an equalizer and found one in the only chair in the room, an armless, straight-backed piece of old kindling no homeless person would have brought back to the shanty. I swung it in a sideways arc Stills couldn’t duck and broke it across his left shoulder, legs and seat flying in all directions. He charged me in response, enraged and hurt now, and I used the chair back still in my hand to counter. My blow caught him flush on the left side of his lowered head and sent him sprawling to the floor, grasping for me in vain. He was climbing back to his feet in seconds, going for the gun under the table, but his time had run out: Jolly was back in action. The big man kicked him under the jaw with the size fourteen on his right foot and Stills went down for good, blinking at the ceiling and gasping for breath.

  I retrieved my sidearm and moved in close so Stills would have no choice but to hear me clearly.

  “Leave the lady be, Sammy. You scare her, and she doesn’t like being scared. If my boy and I have to come back here again, it won’t be to ask for the same favor with sugar on top.”

  Stills propped himself up on his elbows, teeth painted crimson. “Go to hell, punk! Me an’ Dee got mad love for each other! Ain’t nothin’—or nobody—gonna keep us apart!”

  He was laughing again, spitting blood, too tickled by the weightlessness of my threat to contain himself.

  “You know he ain’t gonna listen, right?” Jolly asked me later, when we had returned to my car across the street.

  “I know. That’s why you’re gonna forget all about Ms. Innes for now and start following him. And the first step he takes in her direction—”

  “I call you. Got it. But—”

  “I don’t know what we’ll do after that, Jolly. Guess we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was the only one I had to offer.

  Late the next day, a man came to see me at Mickey’s. I didn’t know him, but I knew the type. Shaved-head white men in short-sleeved dress shirts and eyesore neckties aren’t always agents of the law, but a foul mood thrown into the mix makes it all but an absolute certainty.

  He flashed the badge as soon as Mickey showed him to my desk and I’d nodded at the sound of my name. “Larry Milton, Mr. Gunner. Department of Corrections. I understand you’ve been harassing one of my parolees.”

  I didn’t follow fast enough to suit him.

  “Samuel Stills. You and a friend went by his place yesterday and roughed him up. Maybe you’d like to tell me why.”

  “Sure. But first, a salient correction: Stills was the one who started the heavy horseplay, not us. My associate and I only went there to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “My client, Deirdre Innes. She’s worried Stills intends to do her harm, and hired me to make sure that he doesn’t.”

  “Deirdre Innes?” Milton scrunched his face up in what appeared to be minor confusion. “Why would Stills want to hurt Deirdre Innes?”

  “You don’t know? She’s the reason he is a parolee. It was her testimony that put him away eight years ago. What, you didn’t read the man’s file?”

  “I wrote the man’s file. What the hell are you talking about?”

  I began to feel uneasy. “The guy Stills shot at the bar. She testified at his trial she saw it happen. Are you trying to say she didn’t?”

  He smirked and shook his head, as if I’d just finished telling a bad joke he’d heard a million times before. “Christ, you make-believe policemen. How stupid can you get? Innes never testified against Stills and neither did anyone else. The man made a full confession, his case never even went to trial.”

  My mouth inched open and something came out, but it wasn’t anything either of us could understand.

  I asked Milton politely to have a seat and set myself for the jarring impact of a long, humiliating fall from grace.

  The downside to having a man like Jolly Mokes do your dirty work is how rarely you can reach him when you desperately need to. It’s all Jolly can do to keep peanut butter on his bread, so a telephone, even one of those pay-as-you-go cellular numbers, is well beyond his reach. That means the only time I ever talk to him during a case is when he sees fit to either call me from a pay phone or visit me in the office. Our lines of communication are entirely one sided.

  I waited three hours after Larry Milton left me for Jolly to make contact, then went out to find him. I drove to the Red Owl Motel first, hoping both Jolly and Samuel Stills would be there, but neither man was in evidence. I tried to sit in the car and wait for one or the other to show up, not wanting to give in to the dread that was trying its damnedest to take hold of me, but fifteen minutes was all the waiting I could do. My calls to Deirdre Innes’s home were still going unanswered and my mind was working overtime inventing reasons for her absence. It was just after 7 P.M. now, and night had set its full weight down upon the city of black angels.

  A single light burned in the front window of my client’s little tool shack of a house on Third Avenue when I pulled up at the curb. The place was quiet, too, like a prison cell just before the bulls slam the door on you for the first time. No one answered the door when I knocked or called out Innes’s name. None of this added up to anything more ominous than an empty house, but my nerves were on edge just the same.

  I slid around the side of the house and knocked on the back door with the same result. Every window at the rear was dark. I tried the knob and the door came open in my hand like a well-oiled stage prop. I called Innes’s name one more time, received no answer, then drew my gun and started in. Slowly.

  Somebody grabbed my shoulder from behind, and I spun around on my heels, put the gun in a big man’s face, and damn near pulled the trigger.

  “Dammit, Jolly! Where the hell’s Stills?”

  “I’m sorry, G. I lost ’im. He went up in this mall and . . . There were so many people. I looked and I looked, but—”

  “Forget it. Come on.”

  I led the way into the house. We crept down a narrow hallway past three open doors—a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen—only to be greeted by shadows and more silence. The burning light in the living room beckoned. With Jolly’s breathing booming like thunder in my ears, we finally reached the front of the house, and that was where we found them: Innes sitting motionless on the edge of a sofa, Samuel Stills laying on one side of his face at her feet, the carpet beneath his torso drenched in blood.

  “Damn,” Jolly said.

  The gun she had used was still in Innes’s left hand. Her eyes were fixed on a meaningless spot on the floor, unblinking, and it looked like they had bee
n for a while now. I slipped the revolver from her grasp, then checked Stills’s body for a pulse, just to make sure.

  “Call 911,” I told Jolly, before bearing down on Innes, my voice quavering with rage.

  “What the hell happened?”

  She didn’t answer, oblivious to the question. I hunkered down to make direct eye contact and tried again, a little more forcefully.

  “What the hell happened!”

  This time my voice registered. Her eyes fluttered to life and refocused. Her mouth changed shape, she gave out a small moan. “Where were you?” she asked. She looked over at Jolly, who was hanging up the phone. “Where the hell was he?”

  “Never mind that. There’s a dead man on the floor and the Man’s on his way over here to ask us both how he got there.”

  “How he got there?” Her eyes flared as white as a camera flash. “How the hell you think he got there? He broke into my crib an’ I shot ’im, that’s how!”

  “That you shot him is obvious. What isn’t is why. And don’t give me any more of that crap about Stills wanting revenge for your having testified at his trial eight years ago because we both know that’s a lie.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I had a little talk with his parole officer today. Stills gave the cops a full confession, Deirdre, his case never even went to trial.”

  Now her eyes went cold again, the telltale sign of a liar being forced without warning to regroup. “So? I still had to tell the cops what I seen! What difference does it make that there wasn’t no trial?”

  “It doesn’t make any difference. Unless Stills wasn’t the one who actually pulled the trigger that night.”

  It was just a hunch, but that was the scenario I’d kept coming around to, ever since Larry Milton left my office. Innes tried hard not to give me anything back in the way of a response, but her silence alone was response enough.

  “His P.O. says he took the rap on a charge he might’ve beaten if he’d only cared to try. Two brothers wrestling over a gun in a dark parking lot, only one witness there to see the gun go off. People walk in cases like that all the time. Only Stills showed no interest in walking. The only thing he seemed to have any interest in was you.”