Just getting him to agree to this meeting at Leimert Park had been as arduous a task as falling up a hill.
“So how come you didn’t bring her in?” he asked Gunner now, swallowing the last of three fast-food breakfast sandwiches Gunner had bought for him. “She’s such a reliable witness, why didn’t you bring her here so I could talk to her?”
“You know the answer to that. She doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s afraid you’ll run her in.”
“Run her in? For what?”
“For practicing prostitution at the Nite Owl Motel with a John named Michael Pearson last Tuesday night, that’s what. Exactly what she’d be confessing to if she made Pearson’s alibi official.”
Poole shook his head, said, “Baloney. Any pro knows we’ll waive a chickenshit charge like that, they can help us work a felony case. She was feedin’ you a line.”
“No.”
“She was afraid of gettin’ busted, all right, but not for prostitution. She was afraid we’d throw her ass in jail for tryin’ to feed us the same bullshit she was feedin’ you. ”
“No!”
“If Pearson was her boyfriend, she’d be here. No matter what. Far as I’m concerned, Gunner, that’s the bottom line.”
He stood up from the table they were sharing, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, and dusted the crumbs off the front of his trousers. Preparing for the long drive back to the station.
“So you’re not going to look into it. Is that what you’re telling me?” Gunner asked him, not bothering to rise himself.
“In a word? No. Not at this time.”
“Because you still think Pearson’s your man.”
“At this very moment, yeah. I do.”
“I guess that means you found the murder weapon. That’s why you’re moving so slow on this thing, isn’t it? You’ve got a murder weapon.”
“We don’t have a weapon yet, Gunner, but we will. Soon. And as for your insulting insinuation that I’m draggin’ my ass on this one—not that it’s any of your fucking business—I got a dance card full of other cases in much greater need of my attention. So—”
“So you’re a busy man who could use my help. I volunteered it to you.”
“Forget about it, all right? I’m not givin’ you permission to involve yourself in an ongoing homicide investigation. You’re in enough trouble as it is.”
“But—”
“No more buts, cowboy. You wanna keep dicking around in this Nina Pearson case, you’re gonna have to do it behind my back, same way you do everything else.”
“What?”
“You heard me. You don’t give a damn for my authority, you’re gonna do what you wanna do no matter what I say, so why pretend otherwise? What’s the point?”
“Nobody’s asking for your blessings , Poole. I’m just asking for a little breathing room. A little stress-free space to operate in for a while, that’s all.”
The police detective shook his head again, said, “That ain’t mine to give, Gunner. Least, not officially.”
“Tell me what you can do for me unofficially, then.”
“Unofficially, best I can do for you is offer you some advice: Stay out of my field of vision. Make it as easy for me to ignore you as you possibly can. That clear enough for you, or do I have to draw you a picture?”
He’d keep his back turned as long as Gunner gave him no reason to turn around. That was basically what the cop was saying.
“It’s clear,” Gunner said.
“Good. Next time I hear from you, you’d better have something more to offer me than suspicions and theories. And soggy breakfast sandwiches with two ounces of fuckin’ meat in ‘em.”
Poole tossed his balled-up napkin at Gunner’s chest and walked away.
The Nite Owl Motel was a run-down eyesore on Inglewood and Magnolia Avenues that served more prostitutes nightly than all the hamburger joints in the city of Inglewood combined. The trio of tiny little bungalows was dirty and graffiti-infested, and there was only one thing worse man spending, an evening there: trying to hold a
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