When Last Seen Alive (4 page)

three

“O
CTOBER
? M
AN, THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO
,”
THE DESK
clerk at the Stage Door Motel said, shaking his shiny head. Gunner had seen Cadillacs roll off the showroom floor with less reflective sheens.

Emilio Martinez had said the Stage Door was a fine place to get blown in Hollywood, but you wouldn’t want to actually get laid there, and he hadn’t been far off the mark. The motel on Sunset just three blocks west of Vine was a relic, a two-story, inverted U that looked like something a film crew had started to erect, then lost interest in halfway through the process. Tourist friendly it wasn’t. If Elroy Covington hadn’t come here for the express purpose of having sex with one of the few desperate whores who still lingered about its entrance, Gunner couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking, choosing the Stage Door over all his other options.

“I was hoping you’d have a good memory,” Gunner said, squinting into the glare coming off the obese, hairy-armed desk clerk’s bald pate. Charm was hard to come by in the face of so much unattractiveness, but he was giving it his best shot.

“My memory ain’t the problem, mister. I can remember last October like it was yesterday. Trouble is, I wasn’t here back then. I only been here since March.”

“And the clerk who was here back then? He’s not still around?”

The clerk shook his head. “Never met ’im. Understand he was a nice guy, though.”

Gunner cursed his luck, then said, “The manager around? Or the owner, maybe?”

“You’re lookin’ at the manager. The owner never comes in here. Paydays only.”

“I was wondering if there might not be a file somewhere with this guy’s name and address. That possible?”

“It’s possible. Sure.” His massive shoulders went up, fell back down. A giant’s idea of a shrug.

Gunner waited.

And waited.

“You wanna cut to the chase, save us both a little time?” Gunner finally asked. “How much are you looking to make here? Give me a number.”

“Going rate for names and addresses today is twenty-five,” the clerk said, without hesitation.

“That’s all I needed to know. Have a nice day.” Gunner turned to walk out.

“Hey, what’s your hurry? We’re negotiating!”

Gunner never turned around, just stepped out of the office and started moving toward his car, the red Cobra convertible parked right outside the door. He was behind the Cobra’s wheel, backing the car up, when the big man wobbled out to stop him, red-faced from exertion and embarrassment.

“Come on, pal! Take it easy,” he said, standing in the Cobra’s path like a human roadblock. “I can be reasonable.”

“Yeah? Reasonable is ten dollars. Take it or leave it.”

“Ten dollars?”

“You heard me. You think that’s an insult, step aside, and I’ll take it somewhere else.”

He punched the Cobra’s gas, revved the engine, hoping to bully the clerk into a quick decision.

The fat man’s head was all but blinding in the sun. He released a long, disgruntled sigh, said, “Wait here.”

He went back inside, leaving Gunner to slip the Cobra into neutral and throw on the parking brake, content to let the car idle right where it was. Blocking access to the parking lot was no problem; the motel was as dead as a firecracker stand on the fifth of July. At least it was until Gunner heard a door close, looked up to see a teenage boy retreat from a room up on the second floor, bare chested, alabaster skinned, his torso plastered with tattoos. He came down the stairs stuffing something deep into a pants pocket and passed Gunner’s side of the car on his way out to the street. Gunner tried to count the number of silver and gold rings he had dangling from various body parts, only got as far as eight before the kid disappeared from view.

The ponderous clerk returned a few seconds later, holding a half page of lined paper torn from a yellow notepad. He handed it to Gunner and said, “The guy’s name was Cong Pham. A Vietnamese guy, looks like. I didn’t know he was Vietnamese ’til just now, the owner always calls him Rocky. Pretty unusual name for a slope, huh? Rocky?”

Gunner let the racist remark go, just looked the note over briefly, then folded it up and tossed it onto the passenger seat beside him. He removed two fives from his wallet, stuffed them into the pocket of the clerk’s greasy white T-shirt and said, “Many thanks.”

Then he made the Stage Door Motel a distant memory.

Cong Pham was indeed Vietnamese. He lived in a tiny cottage apartment on Hudson Avenue in Hollywood, less than three miles from his former place of employment, but he wasn’t home when Gunner came looking for him. His wife said he was at work; he parked cars now at a professional building down in Mid-Wilshire. She had large, yellowed teeth and a cranelike neck, but she deferred to Gunner’s photostatic license like it was something divinely issued, gave him the professional building’s address without hesitation.

While his wife’s English had merely been bent, Cong Pham’s was broken through and through. He was a bone-thin man in his early forties, with an enormous Adam’s apple and shoulders so square they almost touched his ears on either side. He used his hands a great deal when he spoke, and Gunner kept waiting for his watch to spin off his arm and take flight, so loosely did its band fit his left wrist.

He did a lot of nodding and shaking his head, and every now and then said “yeah” or “no” in response to a question, but beyond that, he had nothing to tell Gunner the investigator didn’t already know. He hadn’t seen anything, he hadn’t heard anything, he didn’t remember anything about Elroy Covington’s last night at the Stage Door Motel. That was his story, at least, and he was sticking to it.

But he was lying.

Gunner wasn’t sure what was driving him to do so; all the hand gestures and head bobbing made it difficult to get a fix on the man’s eyes. But he was avoiding the truth about something, masking over it with a false blanket of ignorance, and this was usually a tactic born of fear.

“I don’t believe you,” Gunner told him.

“Huh?”

“I don’t think you’re telling me the truth, Mr. Cong. I think you know something you’re not telling me.”

Cong shook his head violently, like he was trying to dislodge something stuck in the space between his ears.

“Yes, you do,” Gunner insisted. “You act as if you’re afraid of something. Or someone.”

“No, no. I tell you everything,” Cong said.

“Maybe it would help if I came back with a policeman. Would you rather talk to a policeman?”

“No, no, please.
Please,”
Cong said, glancing about to make sure this last had not been overheard by any of his co-workers. He was getting highly distressed.

Gunner crossed his arms for show, said, “Okay. So tell me the truth. What happened at the motel the night Covington disappeared?”

Cong hedged a moment longer, finally said, “I don’t know. I not see
anything.
I …”

Gunner was starting to lose patience with this guy. “Yes?”

Cong studied the black man’s face for an interminable minute, trying to decide whether or not it belonged to a man he could trust. When he’d reached an apparently satisfactory conclusion, he said, “I not
at
motel that night. I stay for two hours, that’s all.”

“Two hours?”

Cong’s head bobbed up and down. “First two hours of shift, then I go.”

“Go? Go where?”

“School. I go to school, at night. Hollywood High School, I have English class.”

“You were going to night school?”

“Yes.” He nodded again.

“So who was watching the desk at the motel?”

Cong was loath to say the name, but he managed to spit it out nonetheless. “Blue. He always watch desk for me when I go to school.”

“Blue? Who is Blue?”

“Blue.”
Cong nodded his head emphatically, unaware that the gesture in and of itself would not answer Gunner’s question. “He the cleaning man. The …” He made tight little circles with his right hand, his mind busily searching for the proper descriptive term.

“Janitor?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cong said. “He the
janitor.”

“And he was at the desk the night Covington disappeared. Not you.”

“Yeah, yeah. It was Blue.”

“This Blue have a last name, do you know?”

Cong shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “I don’t know,” he said. “I only know ‘Blue.’”

Gunner started to ask why Cong had never mentioned any of this to Emilio Martinez, but quickly realized how foolish such a question would have been. Relying on a janitor to watch the front desk on nights when Cong had English class could not have been something he was doing with the motel owner’s blessing.

“He still work at the motel?” Gunner asked instead.

“I don’t know. I think maybe,” Cong said.

He was still sweating bullets, unsure of Gunner’s satisfaction with his answers. The investigator couldn’t remember the last time he had seen someone so unnerved by the threat of a policeman’s visit to his or her place of employment.

Figuring the poor bastard had suffered enough, though, he thanked Cong for his time and left.

The janitor named Blue, it turned out, was a finely muscled black man in his early twenties, and he was indeed still employed at the Stage Door Motel. Gunner found him on his hands and knees, buffing a brown stain out of the avocado green carpet in room twenty-one, after the investigator had decided to bypass the fat man at the front desk to look for Blue on his own.

The young man didn’t strike Gunner as someone who would have warmed up to Cong, or anyone else for that matter, easily—his eyes were narrow slits of perpetual suspicion, and the corners of his mouth rarely turned up or down to create either a smile or a frown—yet he spoke of the Vietnamese man with open respect, if not actual affection. This respect aside, however, he was not happy to learn that his former co-worker had made Gunner privy to the lies they had told Emilio Martinez immediately following Elroy Covington’s disappearance.

He wasn’t happy at all.

“Cong is a goddamn lie,” he said, speaking in a low, even tone filled with unmistakable menace.

“I don’t think so,” Gunner said.

Blue eyed him, trying to decide how much good it would do to continue taking Gunner for a fool.

“I call myself doing you a favor,” Gunner said. “Asking you these questions myself, instead of having the police to do it for me. I personally don’t give a damn that you and Cong lied to them last October, but the
cops …”

“Okay. You made your point.”

He wasn’t going to say another word until Gunner forced him to.

“You were at the desk the night Covington disappeared?”

“Yeah. But I didn’t see anything.”

“You check him in, or did Cong?”

“Cong did. He was already checked in when I took over.”

“Did you see him at all that night?”

Blue shrugged. “Couple times, I guess. Not for long, though.”

“Tell me about it.”

“He came in the office once to borrow a phone book. About an hour after that, I saw him outside his room, looked like he was going back in.”

“And he was alone both times?”

“Yeah.”

“This phone book he wanted to borrow. What kind are we talking about? The Yellow Pages, the White Pages …?”

“White Pages. There’s a Yellow Pages in every room here.”

“Any chance that book’s still around?”

Blue shook his head. “We get new books in here every three months. That book’s long gone.”

“He say anything to you other than to ask for the White Pages?”

“He asked me where he could get something to eat—that was it.”

“How about visitors?”

The man named Blue paused for a fraction of a second, said, “He didn’t have any visitors.”

“And you know this because …?”

“Because I didn’t see any.”

Gunner didn’t say anything, waiting to see if a little silence would change the man’s mind.

It didn’t.

“You never saw him with anyone else that night?” the investigator finally asked.

“No.”

“I think you’re full of shit, Brother Blue.”

The younger man’s eyes lit up, the muscles in his shoulders visibly flexing, but he made no attempt to move. “If that’s how you feel,” he said, “you won’t mind if I go back to work now. Will you?”

“The man had a family back in St. Louis,” Gunner said. “A wife and two kids. Did I neglect to mention that?”

“I’m all through talking to you, Mr. Gunner. Step off.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Unless you want me to help you.”

Gunner opened his arms wide, invited him to do just that.

Blue laughed as if Gunner had to be kidding, didn’t see the right hand the other man was throwing until it hit him just below his left eye. The blow threw him backwards like someone falling off a cliff, sent him crashing into a wobbly-legged coffee table that exploded under his weight. He recovered instantly, rolled over and was ready to return the favor when a sudden change of heart overcame him. Gunner suspected the 9-millimeter Ruger in his right hand had a good deal to do with that.

“You’re thinking I won’t kill you, you’re probably right,” Gunner said, aiming the gun’s snout in the general direction of the space between the janitor’s eyes. “But I’ll kneecap your ass without a second thought, that’s how you want to play it.”

Blue remained motionless, legs coiled up beneath him like a cobra about to strike, then slowly came to his feet again. “You’re a lucky man,” he said, his gaze entirely focused on the Ruger.

“You mean because I brought this?” Gunner asked, grinning. “That isn’t luck. It’s intelligence. Hardheads like you make this sort of thing a necessity in my business.”

“It’s not going to change the fact I’ve got nothing else to tell you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Your friend Cong will be, too. Like I said before, he was hoping I could get the information I require without involving the police in any of this.”

“Man, fuck the police. Fuck Cong. And fuck you.”

“Damn. That’s a real hostility problem you’ve got there, Mr. Blue. I come here to ask you a few questions, and you start throwing ‘fuck yous’ around. Where the hell is all this anger coming from, man?”