When Last Seen Alive (21 page)

“That’s not enough!”

“It’s gonna have to be. I’m a private investigator, not a superhero. One crazy like Jack Frerotte I can handle, but a band of psychos like the Defenders is something else.”

“They had my brother murdered, Mr. Gunner!”

“So let the police deal with them. They’ve reopened your brother’s case, as soon as they get Frerotte in custody—”

“To hell with the police!
They
didn’t find Tommy,
you
did!” She threw her glass across the room, shattered it against a distant wall, whisky and ice spraying everywhere.

“Now, wait a minute—” Gunner said.

“No,
you
wait a minute,” McCreary said, leaping to her feet. “I want those bastards brought down! I don’t care what it takes, or how much it costs. And if you don’t have the guts to do it for me …”

Gunner stood up, took her by the wrist and said, “This isn’t about
guts
, sister. It’s about
brainpower.
How many fucking attempts on my life do you think your money
pays
for?”

McCreary tore her wrist free, glowered at him with open contempt. “You’re a coward,” she said.

Gunner was cut to the quick but refused to show it. “Call me what you will. But I’m not going to die for you, I’m sorry.”

His client stood there a moment longer, saw in his face it was true, then took off running for the door.

Later that night, she returned.

Gunner had fallen asleep on the couch, depression having given way to exhaustion. He didn’t know how many times the doorbell had rung when he finally heard it, opened his eyes onto the ceiling of his dark living room. She stood on the porch when he opened the door and said nothing for a long while. Then:

“May I come in?”

Gunner turned a light on in the living room and pointed her toward the couch, but this time he didn’t join her there. He took a seat across from her instead. The clock on his VCR said it was a few minutes past eight, over two hours after she had fled the room earlier.

“I came to apologize,” she said. Sounding reluctant, yes, but not altogether insincere.

“Forget it. I’m a big boy.”

“No. I was wrong. Technically speaking, the work I hired you to do
is
finished. You don’t owe me a thing.”

Gunner didn’t argue with her, just waited for her to go on.

“But I meant what I said. This isn’t over for me. Until the people who put this man Frerotte up to murdering my brother are caught and brought to justice, it never will be.”

“Listen,” Gunner said. “There’s something I haven’t told you yet. Something I was hoping I’d never
have
to tell you.”

“Yes?”

“It’s not just
my
life on the line here. Yours is too. They made that very clear to me. They want us
both
to walk away. Find some comfort in the fact that the man who actually committed your brother’s murder will eventually stand trial for it, and leave it at that.”

“I can’t do that,” McCreary said.

“Sure you can. If I can do it, you can.”

“Tommy wasn’t your brother, Mr. Gunner.”

“No. But I’m the one his killers have been stomping on for the last four days. Leaving in burning buildings to die, and poking with needles filled with God knows what. If anybody owes them, Ms. McCreary, it’s me, not you.”

“And yet you aren’t going to do anything about it. You’re just going to sit here and pretend none of it ever happened.”

“I’m going to leave the apprehension of Frerotte’s associates to the proper law enforcement agencies, and trust they’re up to the task. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t
believe
me?”

“I don’t believe you’re that kind of man. That you’re in the habit of letting other people fight your battles for you.”

“You don’t
know
me, Ms. McCreary,” Gunner said.

“I know what I see. What I
feel.”
She stood up, came over to where he was sitting to hover over him. “I read you better than you think, Mr. Gunner.”

Gunner looked up at her, tried not to let her proximity derail him. “Yeah?”

“You’ve wanted to be with me since the day we first met. Haven’t you?”

Gunner didn’t say anything.

“It hasn’t been hard to detect. You’re cool, but you’re not complicated. I’ve been picking up your vibe from the start.”

“Pardon my French, but that’s bullshit.”

“You saying it isn’t true?”

“I’m saying the question’s irrelevant.”

“And if the feeling’s mutual? Is it irrelevant then?”

Gunner looked up at her, searching her face for hidden motives. “You don’t want to play this game with me,” he said angrily.

“It’s not a game. It’s the truth,” McCreary said. “Kiss me and you’ll see.”

Gunner stood up, gave her a long, hard look. “And if I did? You think it’d change anything?” He shook his head. “It’d only make things harder. For both of us.”

But McCreary was undeterred. “Show me,” she said.

And because she’d made it sound less like an order than a request, like something she needed as badly as he did, Gunner lost interest in arguing with her and did as he was told.

Praying every minute that he wasn’t making the mistake of a lifetime.

Embracing the contours of a woman’s body with his hands—the narrow corridor along the center of her back, the rounded underside of her breasts and buttocks, the tender hollow at the base of her throat—had always been a major part of Gunner’s bedroom repertoire, but with Yolanda McCreary, these movements became more about his own pleasure than hers.

He had had more prolific sex before, sex that both energized and healed him simultaneously, but his experience with McCreary seemed to fill a spiritual void no one had ever touched in him before. He had been in love once, with a woman no longer alive, and the love they had made to each other before their inevitable parting had been warm, fulfilling, and remarkable in its own, unique way—but this went beyond that. This was more powerful and indelible. Almost life affirming.

And the feeling
did
seem to be mutual.

Of course, when their union was over, their world
had
changed, despite Gunner’s promises to the contrary. Their relationship suddenly had strings attached, new and fragile though they were: invisible lines of emotion and sensitivity that had not encumbered them before. So while they still wanted the same things—McCreary Gunner’s help in bringing her brother’s murderers to justice, and Gunner the freedom to respectfully withhold it from her—neither could refuse the other quite as easily as they had only hours ago. Life had just become more complicated than that.

One of them was going to have to lose. To surrender his or her position for the sake of keeping the peace between them.

It was either that or the seed they’d just planted was doomed to die before its ultimate potential could ever be known.

fourteen

“W
E GOT A CALL FROM A GUY
F
RIDAY NIGHT AROUND EIGHT
o’clock, he says he witnessed a shooting,” Poole said at exactly 9:17 Sunday morning. “A kid in a car at the intersection of Exposition and Vermont, late Wednesday.”

“I’m listening,” Gunner said.

“This caller says he knows who the shooter was. Not his name, actually, but what the guy looked like, and what kind of car he was driving.”

“What kind of car he was driving? I thought—”

“Hold on a minute and I’ll explain,” Poole said, making sounds similar to that of a man moving a telephone handset over to his other ear. “This caller tells us the shooter rear-ended him about fifteen minutes before Cribbs was shot, going southbound on Hoover near Twenty-fifth Street. He tried to make a last-minute lane change and didn’t pull it off, slammed right into the caller’s brand-new Mazda.

“So the caller, he jumps out to check the damage, sees this black giant in a blue sweatsuit step out of a silver Beemer, looking like he wants to rip the caller’s head off for gettin’ in his way. He says the guy had to be six-two, six-three, two-hundred and forty pounds, easy. Medium to dark complexion, flat-topped haircut, shoulders wider than a fuckin’ movie screen.”

This caller should have been a cop
, Gunner thought to himself. Only a camera could have captured Rafe Sweeney more accurately.

“Anyway, they argue for a while, the caller demandin’ to see the big guy’s ID, the big guy orderin’ the caller to get his fuckin’ Mazda out of the Beemer’s way, ’til the big guy finally says
fuck it
, he grabs the caller by the throat and
forces
him to move his car.”

“And then takes off.”

“You got it.”

“Naturally, the caller decides to follow …”

“And sees the guy put the hit on Cribbs. Yeah. All he wanted to do was keep the guy in sight until a black-and-white could turn up, and the poor bastard witnesses a carjacking instead.”

Poole said the caller watched Sweeney cruise around a while, acting like he was lost, until he reached Jefferson Boulevard and the University Mall, where he suddenly seemed to get his bearings back. Gunner suspected this was merely where Sweeney had caught up to the car he’d been following before his accident—Sly Cribbs’s Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera—and started tailing it again. Unaware, apparently, that Cribbs had been in the mall at the One Hour Foto-Stop shop, dropping off the roll of film Sweeney was no doubt hoping to retrieve.

Had Gil Everson’s bodyguard known the film was no longer in Sly’s possession, none of what followed would have ever transpired. According to Poole’s call-in witness, the big man in the freshly dented BMW had eventually parked his car fifty yards shy of Vermont on Exposition, slipped a ski mask over his head, then scurried on foot over to Sly’s Oldsmobile as the kid calmly waited for the light to change. He ordered Sly out of the car, but the teenager wouldn’t comply, so he shot him twice at close range before fleeing north along Vermont, still on foot, Sly’s camera bag clutched tightly beneath one arm.

Not surprisingly, the man who had witnessed all of this from what he hoped was a safe distance fled the scene himself soon afterward.

“Is that a wild fuckin’ story, or what?” Poole asked when he was through recounting it for Gunner.

“Yeah. Wild,” Gunner said. “I assume you’ve run a check on the Beemer by now.”

“Sure have. You wanna guess who it belongs to?”

“Rafe Sweeney. Inglewood City Councilman Gil Everson’s personal bodyguard.”

“Right again. You really
are
an investigator, aren’t you, partner?”

“I know you won’t believe this, Poole, but I really was going to hand him to you. I just needed a little more time to check him out, make sure he was the guy.”

“Of course, of course. It’s not like you’ve ever held out on me before, right?”

“Poole—”

“Save it, cowboy. I ain’t been callin’ you all weekend just to hear the usual string of lame excuses. All I want from you is the rest of the story. I wanna know what kind of pictures Cribbs was shooting for you, and I wanna know
now.”

He thought he was demanding something of Gunner the investigator would be loath to surrender, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Gunner was happy to oblige him, now that he could do so feeling relatively certain that Rafe Sweeney deserved the LAPD’s attention.

Poole listened quietly to his account of the Everson case, only expressed displeasure of any kind at its conclusion, when Gunner voiced some doubt that Sweeney’s attack on Sly Cribbs had been committed at Gil Everson’s behest.

“What the fuck do you mean, you don’t know?” Poole said.

“I mean I
don’t know.
Something about that doesn’t quite jibe with me.”

“No? Why not?”

“Because the pictures don’t seem to be worth that kind of trouble, for one thing. All they show is him and what appears to be a cheap whore doing the nasty. Why the hell would he turn Sweeney loose on Sly over something as innocuous as that?”

“Hard as this may be for you to believe, Gunner, some people still find that kind of shit scandalous. And if some of ’em are registered voters in Everson’s district …”

“So he’d lose the Bible thumpers’ vote. So what? That’s fifteen percent of his constituency, tops.”

“So maybe his reasons weren’t professional.”

“Meaning they were personal instead.”

“He’s a married man, ain’t he?”

“By definition he is, yeah. Though you’d never know it to watch him. Because the lady we’re talking about isn’t his only diversion. He’s got a steady girlfriend, too, and he doesn’t seem to care who knows it. In fact, if Mickey’s any indication, the two of them have been a matter of public record for years.”

“And that proves what, exactly?”

“That he doesn’t act like a man who fears his wife. What she knows or doesn’t know about his extramarital affairs doesn’t matter to him.”

Poole grew quiet, then took another tack. “Okay. Then maybe he was trying to protect the lady. The prostitute, not the girlfriend. You’re sure that’s all you can tell me about her? Her first name was Shelby?”

“That and the fact she struck me as somewhat familiar, yeah. I’m not sure why.”