Free It's Not a Pretty Sight by Gar Anthony Haywood Page A

isn’t that creative when he’s telling a lie he hasn’t had time to think through, that’s all.”
    “I don’t follow you,” Mickey said.
    “What I’m saying is, it’s not the kind of name you’d expect him to come up with on the spur of the moment. Is it? Betty or Debra, maybe, but Goldy? Why would he say Goldy?”
    “You’re thinkin’ he was tellin’ the truth. Is that it?” Alonzo asked.
    “No, but—”
    “That nigger wasn’t with nobody named Goldy,” Winnie insisted, starting back to work on Alonzo’s hair. “I already told you.”
    “Okay. So he was lying. That’s what I think too, like I said. But—”
    “But what?”
    “But answer the question anyway. Just to humor me. Anybody here know somebody named Goldy?”
    The room fell silent as everyone gave the matter some thought.
    “I knew a brother whose name was Goldy, once,” Alonzo said. “That was ten, fifteen years ago, back when I was workin’ for GM, out in Van Nuys. He worked in the tool shop. They called him Goldy ’cause he had a gold front tooth, you could see it every time he opened his mouth. I never understood that, why somebody would want to put a gold tooth in their mouth like that, right up front where you can’t miss it, but—”
    “Alonzo, we supposed to be talkin’ ’bout a girl named Goldy,” Winnie said. “Remember?”
    “Oh, yeah. That’s right,” Alonzo said, embarrassed.
    “ I know a girl named Goldy,” Foley said, “but I don’t think it’s the one you got in mind. This is a white girl.”
    Everyone waited for him to explain.
    “She works in the car wash over on Manchester and Vermont. She’s the cashier there, been there forever.”
    “I know her,” Bingham said, nodding. “He’s right, her name is Goldy, now that I think about it. It’s on her name tag, ‘Goldy.’ But—”
    “She’s an older girl,” Foley said.
    “Yeah. That’s what I was about to say.”
    “How old is that?” Gunner asked. “Approximately?”
    Foley and Bingham looked at each other, neither wanting to be the first one to take a guess. Shrugging, Bingham said, “I don’t know. Forty-five or fifty, maybe.”
    “Yeah. That sounds right,” Foley said, nodding.
    “Forty-five or fifty?” Gunner asked.
    “That don’t sound like nobody that boy would’ve been with to me,” Mickey said.
    “Sure don’t,” Winnie said, laughing.
    “’Less he was fucked up even before he got shot,” Mickey added, laughing too. Alonzo and Bingham cracked up next, followed by Foley, leaving Gunner the only one in the shop not getting—or appreciating—the joke.
    Being the first to notice this, Mickey wiped a tear from his eye and said, “Come on, Gunner, man, you’re worryin’ about nothin’! Like Winnie said, that boy’s full of shit, there ain’t no Goldy. So he came up with an original name, so what? That’s what good liars do, tell lies don’t sound like lies. He’s a good liar, that’s all.”
    “Exactly,” Winnie said.
    Bingham and Alonzo both uttered various forms of concurrence, equally eager to set Gunner’s mind at ease on the subject.
    After a while, the investigator nodded and stood up, ready to go. “Yeah. I’m sure you’re right,” he said. His friends would have liked to see him smile, but they weren’t so rewarded; he looked a little less distracted than before, but that was all.
    When he started out the front door, Mickey said, “Where you gonna be, you get an important call? Or you just want me to hold your messages?”
    “Hold ’em,” Gunner said.
    “You better tell ’im to write ’em down,” Bingham said, trying to make a joke.
    But Gunner was already out on the sidewalk.

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