When Last Seen Alive (16 page)

That was it. Short, spare, and completely uninformative. Gunner couldn’t decide which told him less: the text or the physical flyer itself. It could have been printed anywhere by anybody. But he held onto it nonetheless, afraid to discard anything that could prove useful to him later.

With Rafe Sweeney and Gil Everson out of town until Monday, he had nothing else to do with his time but pursue the Thomas Selmon disappearance case again, once a single piece of Everson business had been dealt with. He left Will Rogers Park for a messenger service office in El Se-gundo, and sent the negatives and twenty-two of the last twenty-three photographs he had of Everson and his girlfriend to the councilman’s office as promised, keeping the most potentially damaging print of the set for his own protection. Everson had said he’d be waiting with bated breath for the photos to arrive at his office today, and he could do that just as easily from Sacramento as anywhere else. Gunner wasn’t so sure turning the photographs over to him was the smartest thing to do, but he’d struck a deal with Everson and the councilman had held up his end of it, as fruitless as this gesture had proven to be. Gunner had to follow suit now, or risk having word get out that he was a welsher, a reputation few private investigators could ever overcome.

From the messenger service office, Gunner drove out to the Central Library downtown. The 105 Freeway, still relatively undiscovered at only two years of age, was its usual anomalous self—a Los Angeles thoroughfare that wasn’t clogged with traffic—but reality kicked back in as soon as he made the exchange to the northbound Harbor. The drive from there, even in the open-air Cobra, was an uninspiring crawl through an automotive morass. Only the sun on the investigator’s face kept him from going slightly insane.

At the library, Gunner spent a good hour and seven dollars in change at a copying machine, copying every newspaper and magazine article he was able to find chronicling the Thomas
Selmon/Chicago Press Examiner
Pulitzer Prize scandal. By the time he was through, he had everything he’d seen down in Jack Frerotte’s basement, and more. He sat down to skim through the copies briefly, underlining the names of all the story’s principal players, then retreated to his office at Mickey’s.

His landlord was sitting in one of his own waiting chairs, petting Gunner’s salivating dog, when the investigator walked in. Winnie Phifer was etching a part into a teenage boy’s hair with her clippers, being as meticulous about it as a safecracker trying to evade an alarm. Gunner tried to get past the trio without conversation, figuring he could ask Mickey for messages later, but it didn’t happen.

“When you gonna give that dog a name?” Winnie demanded. She stopped what she was doing and turned her clippers off to face him.

“A name? When I get around to it,” Gunner said.

“Dog can’t be trained, it don’t have a name. And it’s goin’ on eleven weeks old. You gonna give it a name, or am I?”

Gunner didn’t feel like being bothered, but this last gave him reason to pause. Winnie’s two grown children were named Beaumont and Celestine, and she had personally named them both; what kind of moniker the woman would come up with for a dog, he didn’t want to know.

He looked at the muscular little Ridgeback in Mickey’s arms for a minute, became suddenly inspired. “Dillett. His name is Dillett,” Gunner said.

“Dillett?” Winnie squinched her nose up. “What the hell kind’a name is
Dillett?”

“He’s a bodybuilder. Paul Dillett, a Canadian brother. Makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like a little girl.”

“You must be kiddin’,” Mickey said.

“No. The brother’s huge. Just like that dog’s gonna be, I can find a way to keep feeding him.”

“Dillett,” Winnie said again, trying to warm up to the idea. She looked over at the puppy, said in her best mommy-to-baby voice, “That what you wanna be called, boy? You wanna be called Dillett? Huh?”

The dog sat up in Mickey’s lap, started yapping and slobbering excitedly in her direction.

“Guess that settles that,” Mickey said.

“Can I go now?” Gunner asked.

“Go ahead,” Winnie said, turning her clippers back on. She’d said it like her permission had really been necessary.

Gunner went back to his desk, hit the power switch on the new $3000 IBM computer sitting there. He’d been getting by without a computer just fine up to now, but he decided two weeks ago to stop pressing his luck. As rapidly as the rest of the world was incorporating the machines into their everyday lives, both professional and personal, he knew he couldn’t afford to fall any further behind the learning curve than he already was. Information was at the heart of Gunner’s business, after all, and the way information was both distributed and assimilated today was via Pentium processors, 2-gig hard drives, and modems that could move data across normal telephone lines at 33.6 thousand bytes-per-second.

At least, that was how the salesman who sold Gunner the machine had put it.

While the computer booted up, Gunner reached for the phone and paged Little Pete. Pete was a hard man to track down, as mobile businessmen always were, but if you were privy to his pager number, you could usually reach him inside of an hour. Gunner couldn’t remember exactly when Pete had honored him with it, but he was glad to have the number now. Next, Gunner called Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, asked the nurse who answered the phone in the ICU if Sly Cribbs was receiving visitors yet. She said yes, but only from immediate members of his family. Gunner thanked her and hung up, thinking he’d call Charlotte Cribbs later, see if she’d care to take him along the next time she checked in on her son.

Finally, Gunner turned to the black-skinned machine before him and powered his way onto the Internet.

What he knew about the so-called Information Highway wouldn’t have filled the voice bubble in a comic strip, but that wasn’t much less than what he cared to know. After two weeks behind a keyboard, he was able to use search engines competently and could send e-mail to anyone with an address, and that probably made him as dangerous as he would ever need to be. In fact, the website he was tapping into now—the Law Professional’s National Resource Center—was where he expected to do all but a fraction of his future “net-surfing.”

Originating from a server in Hartford, Connecticut, the LPNRC was a mammoth database intended for the exclusive use of licensed skip tracers and private investigators like Gunner, and there was little in the way of nongovernment classified information the site could not either provide itself or offer a dynamic link to. Once the site was satisfied with the validity of a visitor’s credentials, it was the closest thing to one-stop shopping a PI could ever hope to find.

While most of the White Pages–like services on the Internet excluded individuals and/or companies not listed in already existing telephone directories, the LPNRC’s did not. Drawn from a vast array of disparate databases, from magazine subscriber listings to health club membership rolls, the LPNRC’s White Pages were the state of the art in skip-tracing mechanisms. Gunner had only experimented with the system once before, running searches on himself and Lilly Tennell just to see what would happen, but today marked the first time he would be using it in earnest.

He spread the copies he had made at the Central Library out on his desk and, one by one, ran searches on the people whose names he had underlined:

Sandra March
, the
Chicago Press Examiner
senior editor who had distrusted Thomas Selmon from the first.

Karen Whitlaw
, the white feature writer for the
Press Examiner
with whom Selmon had been rumored to be having an affair.

Martin Keene
, the
Press Examiner
’s managing editor who, in the wake of Selmon’s fall from grace, was publicly ridiculed for having hired Selmon in the first place.

Gregory “Zero” Gates
, the sociopathic black drug dealer with the Mensa-grade intellect Selmon had admittedly manufactured for his Pulitzer Prize–winning “investigative report.”

And
Leonard Sloan
, the whistle blower, a talking head in the
Press Examiner
’s legal department who had found all the holes in Selmon’s story, and then lobbied for a heavy
Press Examiner
lawsuit against him.

That the LPNRC’s White Pages were able to produce addresses and phone numbers for four of the five people Gunner had inquired about was not surprising; he had expected nothing less than this result. Zero Gates, of course, had been the one person for whom no data had been found, nonexistent as he allegedly was. But it wasn’t mere mailing addresses Gunner had been hoping to find here; rather, it was a specific
kind
of address. One Gunner could pay a visit to without putting much more than a handful of miles on the Cobra parked outside.

Martin Keene had such an address.

According to the LPNRC’s listing for him, Keene now lived in Los Angeles, at 2404 Hidalgo Avenue, out in Silver Lake. It didn’t seem logical that Selmon would have made his impulsive detour to L. A. last October just to see the one man in the world who, it could have been argued, had reason to despise him most, but it was certainly possible. And if Gunner could find some link between Keene and the Defenders of the Bloodline …

He made a printout of Keene’s address, as well as those of the other three people he had run his search on, and terminated his Internet connection. Less than thirty seconds later, his phone began to ring.

It was Little Pete.

“Listen here, Gunner,” he said. “When you page somebody, you’re supposed to keep the line clear so they can call you back. Hasn’t anybody ever told you that?”

“Sorry, Pete. I was on-line.”

“On-line?
You
?”

“I’m a man, brother. Not a stegosaurus. Given time, I can adapt.”

Little Pete laughed, said, “Go ahead on then, black. What can I do for you?”

Gunner asked him if he’d found a Defender of the Bloodline for him yet.

“Not yet. But I’m workin’ on it. I have a partner out on the westside—he says he knows a friend who’s got a friend. That sort of thing.”

“Okay. Let me know as soon as you hear something, huh?”

“Sure. But, hey,” Pete said, before Gunner could hang up the phone. “I think you ought to know that it hasn’t been easy. In fact, it’s been a bitch.”

“Nobody wants to talk to you, huh?”

“Oh, they talk. But they don’t really say anything. Few people who say they’ve heard of the Defenders talk about ’em like they’re ghosts, or somethin’.”

“Ghosts?”

“You know. Supernatural. Able to walk through walls and shit.”

“You’re not serious?”

“Man, I’m just tellin’ you what I’m hearing. I never thought the boys were for real, but I had one brother tell me this mornin’ he knows of at least two people the Defenders have killed already, and more are on the way.”

“What two people were these?”

“He didn’t mention any names. He just said they were Oreo cookies back east somewhere. A radio DJ and someone else, he couldn’t remember who.”

“How about a newspaper reporter?”

“A newspaper reporter? That might’ve been it, I guess. But the man couldn’t remember the second person, like I said. He only remembered the DJ.”

“Maybe I should talk to this guy, Pete,” Gunner said, pencil and notepad at the ready.

“You can if you insist. But I just told you everything he knows. We’ve been ‘boys a long time, this brother and me. If he knew a Defender, or where we could find one, he would’ve told me, I think.”

Gunner thought that over, decided Pete was probably right. And questioning his friend’s judgment in such matters was never good for business in any case.

“Okay, partner. Whatever you say.”

He thanked Little Pete and hung up.

eleven

S
ILVER
L
AKE WAS THE
L
OS
A
NGELES CAPITAL OF
Schizophrenia.

It was Caucasian and Hispanic, gay and straight, young and old. It was picturesque, and it was garish; quaint and charming here, plastic and phony there. It had outdoor cafés and 7-Elevens; health food stores and porn shops; three-story Tudor houses that dated back to 1911, and two-story towers of glass and steel that weren’t yet a year old. In short, Silver Lake was a multilingual, multicultural, architecturally diverse community that offered a little something for everybody. Including the dumb and the dumber.

Much of the community stood on a hill overlooking the city reservoir for which it was named, but no one had a better view of this glistening pool of blue than Martin Keene. His single-story, redwood-sheathed home halfway up Hidalgo Avenue’s steep climb into the hills sat on the west side of the street, where its perspective on the reservoir below and the Hollywood Hills beyond was completely unobstructed. Gunner could see that much just from the carport, a white, gable-roofed addition to the house that was functional, perhaps, but wholly unaesthetic.

He had thought about calling ahead, but decided to just drop in on Keene instead. Sometimes it was better to make a wasted trip than be rejected outright over the phone, or worse, talk to somebody who’d had time to rehearse all their answers to his questions. But it looked like this particular trip hadn’t been wasted; the two cars in the carport—a late-model Ford Taurus and an eighty-something Jeep Cherokee—suggested Keene was home.