Free Fear of the Dark by Gar Anthony Haywood Page B

never caught up to the man to ask him. But he fit the bill, and was making himself hard to find for some reason.”
    “Was he?”
    “Yeah. He was.” Gunner had no trouble following Poole’s train of thought. “Like I said, I never caught up to the man.”
    Poole let the expression on his face say how much he believed that, but didn’t press the issue. “How’d you come to be looking for Townsend in the first place? You pick up his scent all by yourself, or did somebody steer you his way?”
    Guardedly, Gunner said, “I was steered.”
    “By who?”
    “I’d rather not say.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “Yeah.”
    Poole sipped his coffee, then asked, “Need a few days of peace and quiet to change your mind?”
    “Look, don’t give me that bullshit, Poole. It doesn’t make any difference who steered me his way, all right?”
    Poole watched Gunner squirm about in the hard wooden chair and laughed at his little joke. Poole was no good at playing the tough cop—the hardline dialogue fell off his tongue like a lead weight. He could fake it from time to time on a sucker new to the territory, but practicing on Gunner was an embarrassing mistake. The black man knew him too well.
    “Okay, okay,” the lieutenant said. “Let me rephrase the question. Anybody else looking for Townsend that you know of?”
    “Not for him specifically, no. But the streets have been crawling with people looking for the guy who killed Buddy Dorris, and maybe that’s the same thing, and maybe it isn’t. You think I’m the only one to notice Townsend had a bad left eye?”
    Poole shrugged. “Probably not. But you’re the only one I’ve got. And you know what they say—a bird in the hand …”
    He was a fair man, Poole, but not one gifted with a lot of perseverance when it came to breaking cases; any slob he could get the shoe to fit was all right by him, ninety percent of the time.
    “Kiss my ass, Lieutenant. You don’t have a bird in your hand.”
    Poole smiled at him.
    “Why would I want to kill the sonofabitch? All I had to do to earn my money was turn him over to you.”
    “Or just point your nose in his direction.”
    “ I don’t work like that anymore ,” Gunner said.
    “But you used to. All the time.”
    Gunner shook his head. “Not anymore.”
    “Not even for close personal friends? I hear you and the lady paying your bills are like this.” He pressed the first two fingers of his right hand together and held them up in the air.
    Gunner said, “You don’t hear anything, Poole. That’s your problem. You can’t get enough of your own voice, how’re you going to hear anyone else’s?”
    Poole laughed again and sat down, stretching out in the chair behind his desk luxuriously. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, popping a stick of gum into his mouth. “We don’t have to go through all this shit. I had the answers to my questions three hours before you got here. I’m just talking to you for the exercise.”
    He popped his gum for Gunner’s benefit, his teeth working industriously behind a John Doe smile. “Take the name of your client, for example. If I were to ask you who you’re working for, you’d say a fine young thing by the name of Verna Gail, Dorris’s big sister, because you haven’t exactly been making it a secret and you’d figure that’s something I already know. And then, if I were to wonder where you were between the hours of one and four P.M. Thursday, you’d tell me about the dynamite book you took all day to read, tucked between the sheets of your bed at home with no one around to interrupt. Right? Am I right?”
    Gunner was silent.
    Poole laughed again. “Uncanny, isn’t it, how a dumb-shit cop like me always seems to know these things?”
    “Uncanny,” Gunner agreed, dourly. “You ought to get yourself an agent, Lieutenant.”
    “An agent? Naw. An agent would want me to take my act out on the road. Do Vegas, Atlantic City—go on a world tour, maybe. And that’s not for me. I’m just