When Last Seen Alive (13 page)

“You mean—”

“They could still be there, yeah. Wherever, or to whomever, he took them to be developed.”

He stood up, scanned the room for the dog he’d allowed to hop from his lap only moments before, but didn’t see the little guy anywhere.

“So how you gonna find out where that is?” Mickey asked.

“Talk to his mother, I guess. See if she might know who usually does his photo developing.”

“But you said—”

“She blames me for what happened to her son. Yeah, she does. I’m gonna have to try and talk to her anyway.” He went to the door and opened it. “In the meantime, Mick, I think you’d better go get a paper towel or something. Looks like
my
dog just took a shit on
your
floor.”

Mickey turned, started cursing as Gunner gleefully fled the scene.

“You’ve got a lotta nerve, comin’ here,” Charlotte Cribbs said.

“Yes, ma’am. I know that,” Gunner agreed. He was standing on the porch of the Cribbses’ clean but tiny duplex apartment on Leighton Avenue near Exposition Park, wondering if he was ever going to be invited inside. “I called the hospital before I came over. They told me you were probably here. They say it looks like Sly’s turned the corner, he’s going to be all right.”

“Yes, thank the Lord Jesus. And no thanks to you.”

“No, ma’am. No thanks to me.”

“What do you want, Mr. Gunner? Say it and leave, I’m very tired.”

Gunner told her, leaving the Everson name out of the telling, and describing the subject matter of the photographs he was after in very general terms. He knew if he told her too much about the work her son had been doing for him, he’d be in even more hot water with her than he already was.

“You want to know where Sylvester gets his pictures developed?”

“Yes, ma’am. If you happen to know.”

“After what happened to my boy, you’re still worried about that? About those fool pictures you had him taking?”

“Yes, ma’am, I am. You see …” Gunner paused, hoping he wasn’t about to make a huge mistake. “I don’t know if the police told you this or not but … there’s an
outside
chance what happened to Sly last night had something to do with his work for me. That it wasn’t just a carjacker who shot him.”

Charlotte Cribbs stared at him, not knowing what to say.

“And if that’s the case—if Sly was shot because of something I had him doing, and not just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time—then it’s my job to find out who shot him, and why. His blood is on my hands, and no one else’s.”

“You’re damn right it is,” Sly’s mother said, her eyes now aglow with the anger Gunner had been dreading he might see.

Still, he stood there and absorbed her wrath contritely, waiting for her to decide how worthy—or unworthy—he was of her help.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gunner, but I can’t help you,” she said finally. “I don’t know where Sylvester goes to get his pictures developed.”

“Is it possible he has a receipt lying around somewhere that could tell us? Say, in his room, maybe?”

“He might. But I don’t like to go into my son’s room when he ain’t here, if that’s what you was about to ask me to do.”

“I’m sure you don’t, Mrs. Cribbs, and I admire you for that. But I think Sly would forgive you just this once, under the circumstances, don’t you?”

Charlotte Cribbs considered this briefly, then said, “All right. I’ll go look. You wait right here.”

She disappeared inside the apartment, left Gunner to fidget on the other side of her screen door for several interminable minutes. When she returned, she stepped outside to join him on the porch, a large yellow receipt in one hand.

“Sylvester had quite a few of these, so I guess this is where he usually goes, I don’t know.”

Gunner took the receipt when she offered it to him, saw that it had come from a One Hour Foto-Stop franchise on Jefferson and Hoover, in the University Mall complex across from USC.

“Sly didn’t happen to have a receipt like this on him when they brought him into the hospital, did he?” Gunner asked.

“I couldn’t say. Why? You can’t use that one?”

“No, it’s not that. I just thought if I had the actual receipt Sly received last night, they might be more inclined to cooperate with me over there, that’s all.” He gestured with the receipt. “But this will do just fine. Many thanks.”

“Only thanks I want from you is you keepin’ your word, Mr. Gunner. Whoever shot my boy is an animal don’t need to be out on the street. You find him and see he don’t never shoot nobody again, hear?”

“Yes, ma’am. I hear you.”

She didn’t look like she believed him, but she allowed him to leave her porch without questioning him any further.

The manager at the One Hour Foto-Stop shop in the University Mall was a skeptical, mop-topped brunette named Jenny Palmer, and she gave Gunner the runaround for nearly thirty minutes before letting him have the developed prints Sly Cribbs had indeed brought in the night before.

“I don’t mean to be difficult,” she kept saying, “but I could lose my job here. Because you don’t have a receipt, number one, and we’re really not supposed to turn over a customer’s prints to anyone but the person who brought them in, number two, unless of course we receive instructions to do so beforehand.”

Gunner’s photostatic license had impressed her, and she seemed to have nothing but respect for his authority, but it was only after he resorted to a little exaggeration—he told her the life of a bullet-riddled Sly Cribbs literally hung in the balance of her decision to assist him—that the overly conscientious shop manager abandoned her hard-line stance to find Sly’s prints and turn them over to him. With the fear of God on her face all the while, like she just knew she’d been tricked into doing something that could only get her fired later.

Gunner waited until he was out in the parking lot, behind the Cobra’s wheel, before sliding the prints out of their envelope to look them over.

There were twenty-four in all. Gunner’s usual success rate for surveillance photos was about seventy percent—meaning three out of every ten shots he took turned out to be useless—but Sly, beginner that he was, had batted a thousand here. Every one of the twenty-four color prints in Gunner’s hands had captured the desired goods: Inglewood City Councilman Gil Everson and a thin, provocatively dressed black woman, sharing a particularly hot and graphic sexual interlude. The woman didn’t have to be either a prostitute or a porno star, as Connie Everson had insisted she would be, but she definitely had the look of both: the cheap, titillating clothes, the detached expression of a professional making love by rote. And if she wasn’t addicted to one drug or another, as Everson had also suggested, her appearance again did little to indicate it; she had the telltale scrawny build of someone who was often too strung out to eat.

Taken from a bird’s-eye view at night, suggesting Sly had either stood on a balcony, or perched on a rooftop to take them, each photo depicted Everson and friend making love on a garden patio somewhere, either at someone’s home, or perhaps a luxury hotel, the apparent conclusion to a candlelight dinner they had just enjoyed outdoors. Amid a mess of dirty dishes cluttering a patio table, they moved from heavy petting to industrial-strength foreplay, foreplay to all-out intercourse, in a broad array of colorful and explicit steps, before Everson finally lifted the nude woman into his arms and took her inside, past a pair of open patio doors where a bedroom presumably awaited them.

Gunner went over the prints three times, studying each carefully and patiently. But in the end, he was looking for something that wasn’t there. The photos were exactly what Connie Everson had said she wanted, physical and indisputable proof of an illicit affair her husband was having with a younger woman, very possibly a prostitute—but that was all they were. A perfect
EXHIBIT A
in just another celebrity divorce, as unusual in the City of Angels as capped teeth.

It didn’t seem possible that Sly Cribbs had been gunned down to suppress this.

Connie Everson had warned him to keep his distance, but Gunner decided to approach her husband anyway. He couldn’t see where he had any other choice.

Though he never actually saw the councilman himself; he just saw the man’s car. It took a little surreptitious maneuvering to get into the private, underground parking lot beneath Inglewood City Hall where all city employees like Everson parked their cars, but he managed to do so with alarming ease. He found Everson’s marked space in the lot, slipped a heavily sealed manila envelope under the left wiper blade of the gold-tone Jaguar XJ6 sitting there, and got out, making a blip on the radar screens of the building’s security systems that apparently no one noticed, or cared enough about to investigate.

Gunner had to know whether or not Everson had been the driving force behind the brutal assault on Sly Cribbs the night before, and this seemed to be the only way to find out. If all went according to plan, his client’s name would never enter the mix, but if he had to sell Connie Everson out to nail the gunman he was after, he would do so, however reluctantly. Such trade-offs were part of the job.

Of course, it helped to know that Connie Everson would feel the same way about him, were their situations reversed.

nine

“H
IS NAME IS
P
HARAOH
D
OUBLEDAY
,” Little Pete Thorogood said. “Pharaoh, like the Egyptians. Doubleday, like in baseball. Ain’t that some shit?”

He cracked up laughing, his head turned toward the man pouring Eggy Jones a drink down at the far end of the Acey Deuce’s bar. Lilly Tennell was off at a table somewhere, scolding somebody for spilling a beer. The bartender to whom Little Pete was referring was a tall, delicate black man with fair skin and a freckled face, whose every move was made with slow, deliberate grace, like he was afraid he might break something if he moved too fast. As far as Gunner could remember, he was the first person Lilly had hired to help her at the Deuce since J.T.’s death eight years ago.

“Gay?” Gunner asked Little Pete.

“Oh, yeah. Doesn’t make any bones about it, either. Why? You have a problem with that?”

“Me?” Gunner shook his head. “But some of the knuckleheads who come in here …”

“Yeah. I hear that. They say Lilly had to set one of ’em straight already.” He grinned.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess: Baxter Peale.”

“That’s the one. I guess he’s a regular in here, huh?”

“We call him Bonehead Baxter. Lilly has to throw him out on his ass more often than she does you.”

Little Pete chuckled, taking no offense at the remark. The diminutive black man with the baby face was the neighborhood’s most notorious street corner arms merchant, and Lilly had never much cared to have him around her place of business. In actual truth, she had never formally asked him to leave, but her treatment of him on those rare occasions when he dropped by generally had the same effect. Either ignored like a fly on the wall, or badgered unmercifully from the moment of his arrival, Pete invariably felt compelled to flee the Deuce hours before he was ready. That he was mildly amused by this, and continued to look upon Lilly with genuine affection, was as inexplicable to Gunner as lottery winners who refused to quit their day jobs at the refinery.

Inevitably, the conversation between the two men turned to other matters, and Little Pete got around to asking Gunner what he was working on these days. Having hoped the subject would come up, Gunner told him in the broadest terms possible, then asked him the question he’d been spreading elsewhere around the bar since he’d entered it two hours ago.

“You must be talking about the Defenders of the Bloodline,” Little Pete said. Like Gunner couldn’t have asked him about anything more glaringly obvious.

“The what?”

“The Defenders of the Bloodline. DOB. You’ve never heard of ’em?”

“No. What the hell is a ‘Defender of the Bloodline’?”

“A crazy nigger who likes to trash-talk Uncle Toms, I guess. I’ve never met one myself, but I see their flyers around all the time.”

“What do you mean, they like to trash-talk Uncle Toms?”

“I mean that’s what they say they’re all about: ridding the black race of all Uncle Toms. Brothers and sisters who have backstabbed their own people. Defenders of the Bloodline, get it?”

“And so, what? The Defenders advocate the killing of these people?”

“They don’t just advocate it, man. They say they’ve been
doin’
it. But personally, I don’t think they’ve been doin’
shit.
I think it’s all just a lot of talk.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I ain’t never met a Defender, number one, like I said. And number two, I’ve never heard of anyone they’re supposed to’ve whacked. Have you?”

Gunner thought about it, said, “I may have. On both counts.”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t tell you who the victim might’ve been. But I think the Defender was Johnny Frerotte.”

“Johnny Frerotte? You mean Barber Jack? Is that right?”

“Somebody with the initials DOB paid Jack five thousand dollars to commit a kidnapping, and possibly a murder afterward, last October,” Gunner said. “And the victim would have met a lot of people’s criteria for a so-called Uncle Tom.”