It's Not a Pretty Sight (9 page)

six

H
E HAD BILLS TO PAY, SO HE WENT OUT AND PAID THEM.
H
E
had the money, for a change, so he figured what the hell. His cable service had been lousy lately, so he paid the cable company last, hoping the wait would bring them to the brink of bankruptcy and change the way they handled customer service forever.

That killed about two hours.

When his last check had been written, he found a pay phone and called his cousin Del. Poole had suggested he might have to go back to work for the electrician soon, if Pearson didn’t make it and Gunner’s PI license got yanked out from under him, and maybe the cop had something there. Gunner had worked for Del before, and almost learned to like it, so his doing so again was not completely out of the question.

Of course, there was no guarantee that Del wanted to be bothered with him again. In fact, it was sometimes all his cousin could do just to talk to him over the phone.

“What do you want?” Del asked him today, the minute he realized who was calling. Not to be rude, but merely time-efficient. Gunner had a reason for calling, he always did, so there wasn’t any point in either of them pretending otherwise.

“I need to talk to you, Del. Five, ten minutes, that’s all I need.”

“When? Now?”

“Right now, yeah. Can you meet me somewhere?”

“No. I’m busy.”

“Del—”

“I’m goin’ over to Mother’s in about a half hour, you want to meet me over there. What’s this all about?”

“Mother’s?
Big
Mother’s? When the hell did you start going to Mother’s?”

Del had tripped on a treadmill the first time he’d visited the popular South-Central gym as Gunner’s guest, nearly two years ago, and the humiliation of the experience had been so severe he’d sworn never to return again.

“I’ve been a member for almost a year,” Del said. “What’s the big deal?”

“Nothing. I just thought you said—”

“Look, you wanna meet me there or not? I’ve got work to do here, I’ve gotta get going.”

“Sure, sure. I’ll see you in a half hour.”

“And you’re gonna have my money, right?”

“Your money?”

“Don’t bother comin’ without my money, Aaron. Save yourself a trip.”

He was talking about the seventy-five dollars Gunner had borrowed from him eight weeks before. Somehow, Del never asked for a loan to be repaid until Gunner actually had the money. Which, of course, he did in this case, thanks to Roman Goody. It was as if the man had a direct line to Gunner’s bank account.

“That was fifty bucks, right?” Gunner asked.

Talking to no one but a dial tone.

The answer to the question everyone always asked was yes, there really
was
a Big Mother.

His name was Ozzie Bledsoe, and he was as big as a weight lifter could get without bursting out of his skin like an overcooked hot dog. Gunner didn’t know his exact age, but he figured the former Mr. California to be somewhere in his late forties to early fifties, though he looked much younger than that. There were lines beneath his eyes and his hair was turning gray almost as fast as it was falling out, but other than that, the goateed black man seemed completely unaffected by age.

According to Ozzie himself, he had picked up the Big Mother name in the county joint, back in the mid-seventies when he was still more interested in pulling armed robberies than pumping iron. Some kid in the next cell over had just started in calling him “Big Mother,” yelling it out at the top of his lungs every time he addressed him, and pretty soon, everyone was doing it. Even the guards. What else could you call a black man who was six four, 265 pounds, with a back as wide as a four-lane highway and biceps as big as beer kegs?

In any case, the name came in handy when, in the fall of ’91, he decided to open a gym of his own. He’d been a retired felony offender for over ten years at that point, and had made a few dollars doing bodyguard work for various people in the entertainment industry. He bought an old gas station with a large service bay to start, stayed there for a couple of years, then found a warehouse building near the Compton airport and converted that. Big Mother’s Gym had been there ever since.

He saw Gunner walk in the door and immediately started shaking his head. The teacher confronted by his most unproductive student.

“Uh-uh-uh,” he said. “Look at you. Just
look
at you!”

“Come on, Mother. I’m a sick man, have a heart.”

“I’ll say you’re sick. Look at what you’ve done to yourself! Man, Gunner, was a time you were in here every other day. Had arms as big as me an’ a stomach you could iron clothes on. And look at you now. Just look!” He appraised Gunner’s waistline critically. “All that muscle gone to waste …”

“It’s called getting old, brother. Some people do that, you know.”

“Yeah, well, that don’t mean you have to get fat an’ ugly, too. You’d bring your behind in here more often than two, three times a year—”

Gunner waved him off and said, “Never mind all that. My cousin make it in here yet?”

“You mean the one—”

“Yeah, him. Del.”

Mother jabbed a thumb at the room behind him, chuckling, and said, “You can usually find ‘im over at the abdominal station, harassin’ the females. I haven’t seen ‘im today, but if he’s here, that’s probably where he’s at.”

“You haven’t been giving him a hard time, I hope.”

“Who? Me?”

“About his accident, I mean.”

“Oh. That.” Mother started chuckling again. “Last time we talked about it was the day he came in here to sign up. I told him we were happy to have ‘im, under one condition: He wants to use the treadmills, he’s gotta wear a
helmet.
”

Mother fell out, laughing like Gunner had just told
him
a joke, and not the other way around. Heads turned throughout the gym, reacting to the sudden blast of sound. When Mother laughed, he laughed for the world to hear; it was a deep, booming laugh that shattered silences and made a shambles of conversations taking place zip codes away. Only an air raid siren could be more conspicuous.

Gunner shook the big man’s hand and went to find Del.

It was a brief search. He wasn’t in the first place Gunner looked for him, at the gym’s abdominal station as Mother had suggested, but he did turn up in the second: the free-weight area, where he was actually engaged in doing incline bench presses. He was huffing and puffing, pushing a relatively light amount of weight, but other than that, he appeared to be as comfortable doing physical exercise as anyone else on the premises. Gunner was amazed.

“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” he said.

Del glanced up at him, surprised. “Ha-ha,” he said, in midrep. “So what’s so important?”

“I’m fine, cuz. Thanks for asking. And you?”

“I thought you were in a hurry. But if you wanna make small talk—”

“You’re right. I
am
in a hurry.”

“So what’s goin’ on?”

Gunner told him. He talked and Del listened, both men moving from weight station to weight station as Del doggedly continued his workout, until Gunner finally fell silent and waited, looking to his cousin for some kind of reaction.

“So? What’s the question?” Del asked. He was seated at a preacher bench now, both arms busy doing barbell curls.

“Question is, are you going to be where I can find you if the shit hits the fan? Or should I make other plans?”

“Say that again? I don’t understand.”

“Look. This isn’t just the usual bailout I’m talking about here, Del. The kind of trouble I’m in this time can’t be fixed with just a few dollars for meal money and a place to crash for the night. I’m going to need more help than that.”

“You talking about a job?”

Gunner shrugged. “Only if I can’t find something else. And only if you can really use me.”

“Use you? Man, I can
always
use you,” Del said. “You know that. I just wish—”

“Yeah, I know. You wish I’d make it permanent this time.”

This was an old refrain of Del’s, and Gunner had known he’d have to hear it sooner or later, the topic of discussion being what it was.

“Listen. I’m tired of bein’ just any port in a storm for you, Aaron, okay? You’ve gotta grow up, man, and growin’ up starts with havin’ a job. A
real
job.”

“I’ve
got
a real job.”

“No, what you’ve got is
trouble.
That’s what you’ve got. That’s all you’re ever gonna have, line of work you’re in. When are you gonna figure that out?”

“Del—”

“Okay, okay. Forget I said anything. We’ve been through this enough times, I oughta know by now how pointless it is.”

Angry now, both men spent the next several minutes not speaking to each other, acting as if the silence didn’t bother them in the least. Gunner could feel another headache coming on, resulting from the clang of iron weights being dropped throughout the gym.

Finally, Del said, “Maybe he won’t die. This guy you shot.”

Gunner shrugged. “Maybe he won’t. I’ve been lucky before.”

“But even if he does, you’re covered, right? Because Foley was there—”

“Yeah, he was there.”

“And he told them what happened.”

“Yeah, he told them.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is Poole, and how badly he wants to burn me this time. He told me to stay away from Pearson, and in his mind, I ignored him. Cops take that kind of shit personally, Del. If Pearson lives, Poole might get over it, but if he doesn’t … I’m in for a career change, like he said, whether I want one or not.”

Del nodded, resting between sets. “So when are you supposed to hear from Ziggy?”

Gunner shook his head. “He didn’t say. But I’m going to call him soon as I get out of here, see if he’s found out anything yet.”

“And then?”

“Then I’m going to ask around some more, find out if anybody’s ever heard of this Goldy person Pearson talked about. The girl he said he was with the night Nina was killed.”

Del nodded again, rather than give voice to his true opinion: that he wouldn’t waste a minute of
his
time looking for some nonexistent Goldy woman, if he were in Gunner’s shoes.

Instead, he asked about Claudia.

“There is no Claudia anymore,” Gunner said.

“Oh.”

“Don’t look so broken up. It’s for the best.”

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

“Anyway, no one can pin this one on me. I was ready to go the distance, she wasn’t. It happens.”

Del shrugged. “Yeah. It does.”

Gunner stood up and reached into his pocket, Suddenly in a hurry to leave. “Before I forget, here’s your money.”

Two months Del had been waiting to get his seventy-five dollars back, and now he felt like a heel for taking it.

Nobody at the Deuce had heard of Goldy either.

Gunner had made two complete passes through the bar in three hours, hitting every table, booth, and stool, and now he was tired of asking. Watching people shake their heads and say no, the name wasn’t familiar, sorry. Everybody polite, trying to be helpful, but no one having anything to offer him but apologies.

He gave up about twenty minutes after nine.

By that time, the Deuce was in full swing, women laughing and men shouting, Boyz II Men on the stereo, tables and chairs scraping across the floor to suit some new arrangement, ice cubes and drink glasses and bottles of booze clinking, clanking,
crashing
together …

A typical Monday night at Lilly’s.

Except that Gunner had traded his customary seat at the bar for one at a table, trying to put some distance between himself and Lilly’s liquor. This was one of those rare occasions when his problems were too monumental to be dulled by good bourbon, even when consumed in massive doses.

He still had no idea how Michael Pearson was doing. He hadn’t been able to catch up with Ziggy until almost six o’clock, and his lawyer had had nothing to report at that time.

“Guy I’m talking to, he was supposed to get back to me, but he never called,” Ziggy had said. “So I’ve got to call him at home, try to reach him there. Where can I find you later, I finally hear from him?”

Gunner told him he’d be at the Deuce anytime after seven, and Ziggy recited the number, having used it enough times in the past to commit it to memory.

And so Gunner was here, hours later, waiting for Ziggy’s call. Sharing a table with Jetta Brown, who was talking up a storm, not at all minding that Gunner’s thoughts were elsewhere. Jetta never needed you to actually
listen
to what she was saying, she just wanted you around to bounce her voice off of, so that she herself might hear it better. She had a cute face and a body built for action, but her runaway mouth kept most men out of range like an electrified fence.

Of course, her husband, Ollie, did too, when he was around, but that was a different story.

“I asked you a question,” Jetta said.

She had been silent for several seconds, having finally gotten around to involving him in the conversation, and Gunner had failed to notice.

“What?”

“I asked you a question. You didn’t hear me?”

“I heard you. I just …” He tried to think.
What the hell has she been talking about
? “You were saying something about Ollie going back home. To Tennessee.”

“For?”

“For a funeral. His brother’s, or his stepbrother’s.”

“His stepbrother’s. Lincoln. Go on.”

“And he’ll be gone for a week. So you were wondering …” He stopped, enlighteried; not really
remembering
what she had asked, just figuring it out, knowing her as well as he did. “… if we were going to get together sometime.”

“That’s right.” Jetta smiled. She never used to have time for Gunner, but lately she’d been flirting with him with serious intent.

“I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” Gunner said.

“Why not?”

“Because Ollie would object, he ever knew. And make dog food out of us both.”

“Shoot,” Jetta said, swatting the very thought out of the air with an open palm, “Ollie ain’t even
thinkin’
about you.”

“Exactly what I like about him best. He never thinks about me.”