Fear of the Dark by Gar Anthony Haywood

Quiet as …”
    “He get along all right with Buddy?”
    “As far as I know. They weren’t close or anything, but I think they liked each other. Why?”
    “I was wondering if maybe Mouse would have cared any more to even the score for Buddy than Roland had.”
    Verna gave it some thought, then said, “I don’t think he’s capable of caring for anything more than Roland. Or less.”
    “Anybody else know your plans, besides Roland and Mouse?”
    “What, to hire a private investigator?”
    He nodded.
    “Not until I actually started asking around for one. But once I did, I imagine quite a few people heard about it, one way or another. Although nobody knew exactly who I was going to hire, except maybe Too Sweet, who gave me your name to begin with.”
    Gunner thought that was pretty funny. Nobody knew except Too Sweet. All one had to do to hear the man’s unabridged life story was sit two stools down from him at the bar, any night of the week—but nobody knew except him.
    “Have you seen Too Sweet since? Does he know for a fact that you hired me?”
    “No. I only saw him that one time, in Will Rogers park. But …”
    “But what?”
    “But would it matter? Whether he knows it ‘in fact’ or not? Wouldn’t he just assume I did?”
    “If he could remember talking to you at all. Yeah.”
    He left his seat on the couch to cross the room and fished a small plastic trash can out of the rubble on the floor. He set it upright at his feet and dropped his empty beer bottle into it, following its descent as if it were a stone he had fed to a bottomless well.
    “So that makes three who knew,” he said, still appraising the depths of the little can pensively. “Only three.”
    “Yes.”
    “You told no one else?”
    “No.”
    “No girl friends, no relatives, no friends of Buddy outside the Brothers’ ranks?”
    “No. Buddy was all the family I had left, and I don’t trust my business to friends. But you —what about you ? You spent three days looking for Townsell, right?”
    “Two days. It was two days. And the white boy’s name was Townsend, not Townsell.”
    “Townsend, Townsell, whatever. How many people did you talk to in two days’ time? A dozen? Two dozen?”
    It had only been five, but she was making a valid point. He could just as easily be looking for one of his friends as one of hers. With a gun in his hand, for instance, Sheila’s beau Ray Hollins didn’t have to be quite the wimp he was without one.
    “Who I talked to’s my business,” Gunner said, trying to cover his doubt with belligerence. “And who you talked to is yours. Time’s running out, Verna. I’ve got a lousy forty hours to come up with something, and I may not have that if a certain cop has a sudden change of heart. If you don’t know who set me up for the white boy’s murder, you can guess.”
    She shook her head and faced him squarely, letting him see a glimmer of sincerity behind her eyes. “Ask Roland,” she said. “Maybe he did do it. I don’t know.”
    Gunner studied her face for a moment. “Where’s this clubhouse you were talking about? The Brothers’ hangout. On Vermont and what?”
    She stood away from the couch and told him, following him over to the apartment’s front door. Standing in the hallway, he asked her if her name would be good enough to get him an interview with Mayes.
    “If Roland’s in a talkative mood,” she said.
    The hallway was empty, a long garbage chute as devoid of sound as an echo chamber. She watched him stand there from the other side of the open door and said, “About this place. And what they did to it.”
    “Yeah?”
    “You were leading up to something earlier. Like maybe you knew why they wrecked things the way they did.”
    “It was just a thought,” Gunner said.
    “Still, I’d like to hear it.”
    She wasn’t going to leave it alone. Gunner took a moment to glance at the ruins of Buddy’s apartment one final time. “They were looking for something,” he said.