When Last Seen Alive (18 page)

Roaming through the ruins in broad daylight was asking to be mistaken for a thief, Gunner knew, but that couldn’t be helped. He wanted another look around the place before Frerotte could get out of the hospital and clean things up, and he had no desire to do so at night. He had tried that tack once before, with disastrous results, and tempting the fates had never been one of the investigator’s favorite pastimes.

It was the basement he wanted to see, of course, but the basement was all but impossible to reach. Because the fire had started there, everything above it had collapsed upon it, reducing it to a caved-in bomb shelter that could barely be seen, let alone visited. The best Gunner could do in the way of investigating its remains was stand at the edge of a gaping hole in the faltering floor above it and look down, an approach that garnered him little more than a glimpse of the room he had only two nights ago been left to die in. The washing machine and the dryer, that was all of the basement he could really see, save for the toilet in its small water closet. That, too, was clearly visible, though the typewriter stand Gunner had thought he had seen standing just before it was not. It was either buried under the mound of blackened wood and waterlogged plasterboard that now stood in its place, or it was missing altogether—Gunner wasn’t sure which. Maybe it had never been there at all.

He didn’t know what he had come here hoping to find, exactly, but he knew this wasn’t it. Whatever clues Frerotte’s home still held to the man or woman who had chosen this place to try and murder him less than two days earlier, they were far beyond his mortal reach now, and that should have been obvious to him before he’d even parked his car out front.

He would have to find the Defenders of the Bloodline some other way.

Gunner called Mickey’s from a pay phone on Normandie and Florence to check for messages, and Mickey told him that Little Pete had come through for him. Sort of.

The number he had left for Gunner was an unfamiliar one, but he answered the phone himself when Gunner dialed it.

“Sorry, Gunner, man, but this was the best I could do,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“This ain’t no Defender, it’s just the guy who’s been printing up all their flyers for ’em. He wouldn’t talk to me, but he might talk to you.”

“Who?”

“Man’s name is Pritchard. Clive Pritchard. He works over at a printing shop called Empowerment Printing. You ever hear of it?”

Gunner said that he hadn’t, told Pete to hold on while he got out his pen and notepad. When he was ready, Pete said, “It’s supposed to be over on Hoover and Seventy-sixth Street. Seven-Seven-Oh-Five Hoover. I’ve never been there myself, but they tell me it’s where all the community activist types go to get their printing done cheap. They’re one of those nonprofit operations.”

“I know the kind,” Gunner said.

“Word I hear is that he’s doin’ the Defenders’ shit on the side, at night, without his boss’s knowledge. Man might be more inclined to talk to you if you let him know you know that right up front.”

“Yeah. He might at that. What do I owe you, Pete?”

Pete tried to go the humble route, declining payment on the grounds that he hadn’t delivered the information Gunner had actually requested, but he was just being polite. Like any smart businessman, he never did a damn thing for nothing, and Gunner understood that about him completely.

“How about I get back to you later, let you know how things turn out,” Gunner said. “You can tell me what I owe you then.”

“That’ll work,” Pete said, satisfied.

Because he, like Gunner, had a strange feeling things out at Empowerment Printing were going to turn out just fine.

twelve

C
LIVE
P
RITCHARD LOOKED LIKE A BLACK GARGOYLE
. H
E WAS
short and broad shouldered, with a ratty gray beard and small, rodentlike eyes. He came out of Empowerment Printing’s back room wearing an ink-smeared blue apron over a substantial beer belly, an expression of grave impatience on his battle-scarred face, but he didn’t really make Gunner feel unwelcome until he heard what the investigator wanted with him.

“You got the wrong place,” he said, turning to go back to work.

“That’s not what I was told,” Gunner said.

Pritchard stopped, turned around to face him again. “I’m supposed to give a fuck what you been told?”

“You’re not supposed to do anything. I just thought you might want to talk to me before I talk to your boss, that’s all. What time do you think he’ll be in?”

Pritchard glared at him without moving, unsure of himself now. “Mr. Angelo don’t come in until late,” he said.

“So I’ll go get a cup of coffee and come back. What time is late?”

Pritchard remained motionless for a few seconds longer, slow to concede that his visitor had him by the short hairs. Finally, he walked back to his original place behind the order counter, directly in front of Gunner, and said, “You a cop or somethin’?”

Gunner showed him his license without comment.

“So what you wanna know about the flyers for?”

“I’m looking for the people behind them. The notorious DOB. Any idea how I could get in contact with them?”

“No.”

“You’re the one running the flyers, aren’t you? At night, when Mr. Angelo isn’t around?”

“Who the hell told you that?”

“I’ve got spies everywhere. Costs me a small fortune. Where can I find the Defenders?”

“I told you, man. I don’t know.”

“Explain to me how that’s possible.”

“It’s possible ’cause I don’t
wanna
know. All right? I know what I need to know to get paid, and that’s all.”

“So how do you get paid?”

“Look. I don’t think you understand. You don’t wanna fuck with these particular brothers, man. They’re some of the most pissed-off niggers you ever wanna see. They find out I been talkin’ to you—”

“They won’t. Tell me how you get paid, Clive.”

Pritchard kept looking at the shop’s front door, terrified that someone would step through it any minute. Finally, able to see no escape from the corner he’d been backed into, he sighed and said, “I get paid through the mail. A money order every month, along with an original for the flyer. I run two hundred copies, ship ’em to a post office box, and wait for the next money order to come in. That’s all I know.”

“Whose name is on the money order?”

“‘The Burghardt Institute.’ Same as the name on the P.O. box. I think it’s somethin’ they just made up.”

“B-U-R-G-H-A-R-D-T?”

“Yeah. That’s it. What kind of fuckin’ name is that, Burghardt?”

Gunner had to grin at the small joke. To Pritchard, he said, “That’s what the B in W.E.B. DuBois stood for Burghardt. It’s Dutch, I believe.”

Pritchard didn’t seem to give a damn what the name was.

“So how’d you get the gig in the first place?” Gunner asked him.

“A man comes into the shop one day, says he’s got some flyers he wants printed up, two hundred a month. Only nobody can know about it but me. He don’t want no receipts written up, no order forms filled out, nothin’. He tells me about the money orders and the P.O. box, asks me if I want the job. I say yeah, why not? I could use a little somethin’ extra every month, right?”

“How long ago was this?”

“About a year ago, maybe. Could be longer, I don’t know.”

“And you never got this brother’s name?”

“No. He didn’t give it to me, and I never asked him for it.”

“Describe him.”

“Describe him? Man, I just told you. I seen the brother
once
, a year ago. How the hell am, I supposed to describe him?”

“It’s simple. Start with his age, and go on from there. Was he young, or old? Fat, or skinny? Light skinned, or dark skinned?”

“He was young. In his twenties, maybe. Not fat, but not skinny, either. Boy was buffed. Looked like he hits the weights. And … what was that other one?”

“His skin coloring.”

“Oh, yeah. His skin was dark. Maybe darker’n you and me put together. I guess now you gonna wanna know how tall the nigger was.”

Gunner nodded, though by now the man’s height wasn’t really in doubt. Gunner already thought he knew who Pritchard was talking about.

“He was about your height. Or maybe a little taller,” Pritchard said.

“And his hair was cut close to the scalp.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

Gunner nodded again, searching his wallet for a couple of business cards. Finding them, he handed the pair to the other man and said, “One of these you can keep. The other I want back, after you’ve written the address of the P.O. box you mentioned on the back of it. I’ve got a pen if you need one.”

“I can’t do that, man. I’ve done too fuckin’ much for you already.”

“And I appreciate it. But I need the address, anyway.”

“I can’t do it. I
told
you. These niggers ain’t nobody to fuck with.”

“How do you know that? If the only contact you’ve ever had with them is this brother who initially hired you—”

“I know it ’cause I know a crazy-ass motherfucker when I see one, that’s how. And if the rest of ’em is anything like
that
boy …” He shook his head. “Then the whole fuckin’ world needs to be afraid of ’em. Includin’ you and me.”

Maybe the fear in his eyes had been there all along, Gunner didn’t know.

He only knew that he was beginning to feel it, too.

Unless the label on his mailbox was wrong, the full name of Gunner’s old friend at the Stage Door Motel—the muscular, angry young black man he had previously known only as “Blue”—was Byron Scales. He had found Scales’s place of residence—a two-story apartment building on Stocker Avenue, between La Brea and Crenshaw Boulevards on the southern slope of Windsor Hills—thanks to Scales’s co-worker, the fat man at the motel’s front desk Gunner had first met Tuesday afternoon. All the big man had volunteered today about Scales/a.k.a. Blue was that he was off on Fridays, thinking Gunner would compensate him to elaborate, but Gunner had managed to weasel a full name and home address out of him for free. All he’d had to do was say “or else.”

“Or else? Or else
what
?” the big man had asked him, almost laughing.

“Or else I’ll find him on my own. And tell him when I do that you sold his ass out for ten bucks. Or maybe five, whichever I think will piss him off more.”

Five seconds later, Gunner was holding a sheet of Stage Door stationery with the name
BYRON SCALES
and the Stocker Avenue address scribbled on it.

By any name, Scales had just become the key to Gunner’s search for Thomas Selmon. Gunner was kicking himself now for having needed to hear Clive Pritchard’s inadvertent description of him—a muscular, dark-skinned young brother you didn’t want to fuck with—to see that the janitor was worth a second look. It had been Scales, after all, who had connected Selmon to Johnny Frerotte. He’d portrayed himself as nothing more than a witness to the pair’s meeting, when in fact he’d probably orchestrated it. Somebody somewhere had turned Frerotte and the Defenders onto Thomas. Why couldn’t it have been Scales?

Scales lived on the first floor of the Stocker Avenue building, apartment number six, way in the back at the end of the courtyard. Gunner should have had to ring his unit on the phone out front to get past the security gate, but the return spring on the gate was shot so that it was ajar when Gunner tried it. The door and blinded window of Scales’s apartment sat in the shade of a short, overgrown palm tree, shrouding them in darkness so complete, the marker on the door was damn near impossible to read. He stood beneath the umbrella of giant leaves and withdrew the Ruger from its holster with his right hand. He held the gun down and just behind his right thigh, then rang the tinny bell on the door, making no attempt to avoid the door’s peephole. He wanted Scales to know who was calling.

“Who is it?” the voice of the man formerly known as Blue called out from the apartment’s interior.

“Aaron Gunner. You remember me. We need to talk, Brother Blue.”

He stepped up closer to the door, anxious now, and waited as Scales decided what to do. After a few seconds, the deadlock was thrown open and the door soon followed, Scales standing just behind it. He had tan trousers on, but no shirt and no shoes. His black chest looked like something cut from granite, and his abdominals were the most clearly defined Gunner had ever seen. He wasn’t rubbing sleep from his eyes, but he resembled a man who’d just rolled out of bed, nonetheless.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, showing Gunner the same foul attitude he’d displayed at the Stage Door three days ago.

Gunner didn’t bother answering, just forced his way into the apartment, bringing the gun in his hand out from behind his back for Scales to see. Or that was the plan, until somebody standing to the side of the open door put a vise grip on his arm to wrench the weapon from his grasp. Gunner tried to turn, but a second man took him from the other side, his left, and wrapped an arm around his own, up high near the shoulder, so that between the pair, Gunner couldn’t move an inch in either direction. Both men were wearing white hockey masks, and both were as strong as oxen.