Fear of the Dark (4 page)

“Don’t tell me,” Del said.

“Something came up. A one-shot deal. Ought to take me a week to handle at the most.”

“Uh-huh. A one-shot deal.” He instigated a silence of his own. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Ever hear that?”

“A few days, Del. I’ll be back to work in a few days.”

“I’ll hold my breath,” Del said, and hung up.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon at the Acey Deuce, and Gunner couldn’t find a seat at the bar. He hadn’t been around to look for one in over a year, but his recollection of Wednesdays at the Deuce was clear, and they had been nothing like this, at any time of the day.

Bobbing in and out of an expansive storm cloud of cigarette smoke that lent total obscurity to the far reaches of the room, black people milled about the establishment in varied states of inebriation, controlling every seat in the house save for one booth by the door, where a table leg reached up from the floor into thin air, in search of a missing tabletop. The dress code was liberal, a perfect indicator of the oppressive heat on the street; homemade cut-offs and K-Mart tanktops were the order of the day. It was a lively group, boisterous and uninhibited, but laughter was in short supply, a curiosity Gunner was quick to notice.

He peered over the rolling wave of heads lining the bar, offering himself up to the welcome embrace of the Deuce’s air conditioning, and spotted Lilly pouring a drink on the other side of the counter. She was bigger than he remembered her; the apron around her waist looked like a bed sheet and her throat was one great balloon of fat, a cushion upon which to rest her massive head. Her face was the kind a smart woman drew as little attention to as possible, but she still hadn’t figured that out: her trademark smear of blood-red lipstick made her lips stand out in the darkness like a flare marking the night.

Gunner was hoping her heart had grown in direct proportion to her girth since they last had met, but he knew that wasn’t likely. Lilly’s good nature had never been the most fully developed aspect of her character, and J.T.’s violent death could not have done much to improve it. Unless her late husband—love struck fool that he was—had left her more in the way of an estate than the Acey Deuce represented, the odds were good she would greet Gunner’s return to the premises with all the warmth of a cold fried egg.

Finding a tiny gap between two occupied stools at the bar and wedging his body into it, Gunner leaned on the counter with his left elbow and waited to catch Lilly’s eye. She kept him waiting, perhaps deliberately, perhaps not, moving to the far end of the bar to serve another customer and add some color to an otherwise dying argument being waged there. He watched her for a while and then surveyed the place, looking for a familiar face, but the only one that rang any bells belonged to Howard Gaines, who was sharing a bowl of mixed nuts with two young men at a table in the center of the room. They were washing the nuts down with beer—Colt 45 in bottles—and were using their hands extensively while they talked.

When Gunner again turned his head to find Lilly he was nearly perversely kissed: she was standing directly in front of him, bracing herself against the bar with both hands like a Bekins man moving a piano.

“What do you want, nigger?” she asked matter-of-factly, as soft and personable as ever.

“Lilly,” Gunner grinned, liking her style. “What’s happening?”

“What’s happenin’ is news. News is in the newspaper. This is a bar. You want somethin’ to drink?”

“That would be nice.”

“Let me see a U.S. president.” She held her hand out, palm up, and waited. “Jackson, Lincoln, Hamilton—anybody but Washington. Only thing Washington’s good for in here is change for the phone.”

Gunner pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his trouser pocket and displayed its face for her inspection. “How about Ben Franklin? He was never president, but he flew a mean kite.”

Lilly frowned at the bill and put a clean shot glass on the bar in front of him. “Turkey and water, I suppose?”

Gunner’s head rocked up and down affirmatively. She was murder on names, but the woman could remember a man’s drink like it was written on his forehead, even when it was dependent upon the nature of his luck at the moment. Most people drank the same thing religiously, rain or shine, but Lilly, like J.T. before her, had long ago learned that Gunner preferred name-brand rotgut—Ten High, Kessler, Lord Calvert—when the rattle of loose change followed his every step, and Wild Turkey, and Wild Turkey alone, on the rare occasions when bills of high denomination came with his usual dose of jive.

“Sorry to hear about J.T.,” he said as she worked on his drink, meaning it more than his voice had conveyed.

The big woman looked him straight in the eye and said, “Bullshit. He called in your marker and you ain’t been back since. Now he’s dead, you wanna drop in to run up a new tab. Now tell me that ain’t right.”

“It ain’t right.”

“Bullshit.”

Four stools down to Gunner’s right, a short man in a greasy Midas Muffler uniform was calling Lilly’s name for the third time, waving an empty beer bottle over his head like a pennant at a football game, but the Deuce’s new owner wouldn’t dignify his efforts with so much as a glance. She was looking forward to telling Gunner off, and putting pleasure before business had always been her modus operandi.

“You’re a poor judge of character, Lilly,” Gunner told her, shaking his head before sampling the firewater in his glass. He held the warm liquid in his mouth for a long beat, then passed it down his throat slowly, patiently, relishing the experience. It was beginning to look like a good week for renewing old friendships with life’s simple pleasures.

“Uh-huh. I got you all wrong, Gunner. It’s just coincidence, you showin’ up today. Now that the man of the house ain’t around to kick your lyin’ ass out.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s not a coincidence, exactly. If J.T. were still alive, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Okay, Lilly. Enough with the amenities. Buddy Dorris’s big sister’s hired me to find the guy who killed Buddy and J.T. The white man with the dynamite baby blues. Now you’d like to see me pull that off, wouldn’t you?”

She chuckled at the thought. “I ain’t gonna live that long,” she said.

“Okay, so the lady’s reckless with her bread. I tried to tell her that myself, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She seems to like my chances of finding the guy, at least better than the Man’s. Slim is better than none, right?”

Lilly remained silent. The thirsty Midas employee down the bar was getting belligerent.

“Or do you think the cops are busting their behinds on the case?”

“Hmph. They ain’t doin’ jack shit.”

“There you go.” Gunner picked up his glass and stood up, nodding his head toward the open booth with the missing counter top. “Come on over here and talk to me for a minute. Just to answer a few questions. Take a break.”

She didn’t move right away. A break sounded good to her but she wasn’t at all sure Gunner could make reliving her husband’s death for the ten-thousandth time worthwhile.

“Lilly,” Gunner prodded. “The boy will be a million miles gone if somebody doesn’t start looking for him soon. Either you give me a hand or he’ll walk, free and clear. That what you want?”

It was a supposition he only half-believed himself, but he knew it was the last thing Lilly wanted to hear. She seemed on the brink of making a decision when her friend in the unkempt Midas uniform finally managed to get her attention. Stretched out diagonally across the bar, his diminutive legs flailing about, unhindered by the floor, he was trying to pull a fresh Budweiser from the open ice bay behind the counter, making quite a mess. An amused audience was cheering him on, hoping he would lose his balance and fall. They got their wish, but only because Lilly rushed over to protect her merchandise and shoved him with both hands back out of her territory, cursing expansively. A valid swell of laughter erupted throughout the club for the first time since Gunner’s arrival, and it was a welcome if momentary return to the Deuce of old.

When Lilly had made peace with all the neglected souls at the bar, she waddled around it to join Gunner again, untying her apron strings as she walked.

“Bar’s closed!” she shouted, throwing the apron over her shoulder stylishly. “I’m takin’ twenty minutes!”

There was a light rumble of dissent, but she ignored it. “Let’s talk,” she said to Gunner, and headed for the crippled booth by the door.

“I was asleep in the back when it happened. Never did see the sonofabitch.”

“Yeah?”

“The newspapers left that out, didn’t they? Everybody thinks I saw the whole thing, but I missed it completely. By the time I came around and ran up front, the white boy was out the door, and J. and Buddy were dead.”

She was sucking on a narrow, dark-skinned Sherman cigarette for all it was worth, keeping her eyes on the cash register all the while.

“I never seen so much blood in all my life. On the floor, the stools. I had to have a guy come in to replace the tiles behind the bar and a whole section of wall panelin’ at the end there. You can see the difference if you look hard enough.” She pointed to a spot on the far wall where the plastic woodgrain’s fraudulence was more distinguishable than at any other point in the room. “That’s where Buddy got it. J. was over by the sink. He’d made it to the piece we keep under the bar, but they say he never got off a shot. That man was slow, Lord knows.”

Gunner watched her eyes lose their focus and asked who besides Buddy had been there that night. He had to keep things moving at a fast clip if he wanted to hold her attention and keep depression at bay.

She blew more smoke into the air and said, “Just Howard and Sheila, that’s all. Our air conditionin’ was out that week and business had been lousy for days. Turned out it was cold as hell that night, but that afternoon had been a bitch like all the others, and I guess nobody had the strength to drop by. I would’ve stayed away myself, if J. hadn’t made me come in to take inventory.”

“Sheila was alone?”

“Oh, I forgot. She had some sweetpea from back East with her. A cousin from Detroit, or somethin’ like that. He was a sissy, a stone sissy. Hid under a table at one of the booths and wouldn’t come out. The police talked to him for fifteen minutes, but he just stayed down there, cryin’. I told Sheila if she didn’t get him out from under there, I was gonna do it myself. I guess he heard me.”

“He still in town?”

“I don’t think so. Ask Sheila.”

“You get his name?”

Lilly shrugged. “Ray or Roy, somethin’ like that. I was in the back when they came in, so we were never properly introduced.”

Gunner looked out over the crowd again, absently playing with the ice cubes in his otherwise empty glass. The bartender’s respite had sent a few customers packing, but breathing space at the Deuce was still conspicuously missing.

“I don’t see Sheila around today,” Gunner said.

Lilly shook her head. “She hasn’t been in for weeks. It really shook her up, seein’ J. and Buddy get killed like that. She don’t go out much of anywhere anymore, from what I hear. But Howard’s around. See him over there at that middle table? Sittin’ with Frank and Ricky Lott?”

She waved her apron in Gaines’s direction, but Gunner didn’t bother to look. “I saw him when I came in,” he said.

“You gonna talk to him?”

“That would seem the logical thing to do.”

“Want me to go get him?”

“If you feel up to it, yeah. I don’t know the Lotts and they don’t know me, and the fewer people who know I’m working on this, the better.”

Lilly nodded and pushed herself up from the booth, looking like a dirigible low on helium fighting for lift-off. She forced her way through a crush of bodies to Gaines’s table and whispered something in his ear, smiling. He looked up to spot Gunner across the room and his head bobbed up and down in a generous nod. He bid the Lott brothers a quick but congenial farewell and stood up, then followed the path Lilly made for him over to Gunner’s booth.

“Hey, Gunner. Where you been keepin’ yourself, man?”

Gaines smothered the investigator’s fist in both hands, lovingly, up among the clouds after a six-pack lunch. He was one of Gunner’s favorite people, despite the annoying fact that getting tipsy only made him more gushingly affectionate than he was ordinarily.

“Lilly tells me you’re workin’ for Buddy’s sister,” he said, sitting down beside the bartender.

Gunner nodded. “You know her?”

“I met her once or twice. At them rallies Buddy was always talkin’ me into goin’ to. Her name’s Verna, right?”

“Verna Gail, yeah.”

“Yeah, Verna Gail. She’s got you lookin’ for the fool that killed Buddy and J.T.?”

Gunner nodded again.

“Man, good luck. As hot as we’ve made it for white folks around here, that boy might never show his face in daylight again. Not here, not anywhere.”

Suddenly, the bar’s dark mood made sense. “Is that what all these people are doing? Waiting for him to come back?”

“It’s as good a place to look for him as any.”

“Shit,” Lilly said gruffly, “that man ain’t comin’ back here. He got what he came for the last time.” She grinned. “But don’t expect me to tell no payin’ customer that.”

Her grin broke into laughter, as she bubbled with admiration for her own keen business sense.

“You mean Buddy,” Gunner said.

Gaines nodded feverishly, but Lilly snapped, “No! That ain’t what I mean! That’s what everybody thinks, but that’s a lie.”

“Shit,” Gaines said.

“I don’t care what anybody says. It was J. that white boy was after, I know it.”

“You weren’t even in here,” Gaines argued, turning a narrowed eye upon her. “How the hell would you know?”

He looked at Gunner and said, “The man came in and said he was lookin’ for somebody. Just like that, bold as you please, a white man lookin’ for somebody at the Deuce, with people as hot and things as crazy as they been right now. Buddy asked him who he was lookin’ for, and the white man said, ‘You.’ Next thing you know, he’s got a gun in his hand, and Buddy’s the first to get it. If J.T. hadn’t grabbed that piece from under the bar, he might never’ve got shot at all.”