When Last Seen Alive (6 page)

Gunner had done everything in his power to avoid the big man, and Frerotte had never come looking for him, at least to the investigator’s knowledge. Gunner didn’t know why, and he didn’t much care; he was just glad to see Jack had lost interest. Cowens, meanwhile, left Los Angeles for good not long after his mutilation, some said for Atlanta, others Memphis, taking his girlfriend and a badly reattached nose with him. Gunner saw him once before his departure, pumping gas into a Lincoln at a station on Hawthorne Boulevard, and had a hard time not staring at the misaligned mass of flesh and bone Frerotte’s butchery had left him to live with. Neither one of them said a word about Barber Jack.

After years of not doing so, it would have suited Gunner just fine to never speak the man’s name again, but now that was impossible. A janitor named Blue had seen to that.

“What the hell you wanna ask me about him for?” Lilly Tennell asked Gunner, spilling Wild Turkey all over the Acey Deuce’s bar as she tried to pour him a shot and scold him at the same time. The big woman with the red smear of a mouth hadn’t been there the night her late husband had banned Frerotte from the premises, but it was a move she had always been strongly in favor of. She despised Frerotte with a passion and had been riding J.T. to close the Deuce’s doors to him from the moment she first laid eyes on him.

“I need to talk to him, Lilly,” Gunner said. “For a case I’m working on.”

“Ain’t a case in the world that important. Do yourself a favor and leave that motherfucker alone. You’ll live longer.”

“I hear what you’re saying, and I feel the same way. But I don’t have a choice, I really have to talk to him.”

“And you think I know where you can find him?”

“I was hoping you might’ve heard something about that, yeah.”

“His name don’t come up around here, Gunner. You know that.”

“Doesn’t mean he hasn’t dropped in at least once since J.T. passed, just to see if he could get away with it.”

Lilly laughed at the very thought. “Shit. I wish to God he had. He’d’ve lost more than his goddamn nose, he’d’ve tried comin’ in here.”

“Then you
don’t
know where I can find him. That what you’re saying?”

J.T.’s widow stared at him, two massive, meaty arms crossed in front of her chest, trying to decide if he was man enough to handle the information he was asking her to divulge. Gunner just let her look, knowing from experience how useless it was to press her when she was determined to be deliberate about such things.

“Man came in here a while ago, said he an’ Jack was in the joint together once,” Lilly said eventually, her tone full of disdain and disapproval. “Talked about the time they did together like it was a vacation on the Riviera, or somethin’.”

“And?”

“And he said he just run into Jack a couple days before that, first time since he got out, over at one of them casinos over on Normandie. Jack’s a security man there, he said, you can believe that shit.”

“Which casino was this?”

“The Royalty Club, I think it was. I’m not sure.”

“The one across the street from the Queen of Hearts.”

“Yeah. But I could be wrong, like I said. Man was talkin’ to Benny Abbott that night, not me, so I’m only tellin’ you what I overheard.”

“Sure. How long ago did this happen?”

Lilly thought about it, said, “Two, three months ago. Maybe a little longer.”

Gunner asked her if that was it, and Lilly nodded her head, said she’d told him everything there was to tell.

“I guess you goin’ out there now, huh?” she asked, as Gunner slipped off his stool and pushed a ten-dollar bill toward her side of the counter.

“Yeah. You wanna tell me to be careful?”

“I wanna tell you to bring somethin’ for his ass this time. That’s what I wanna tell you. You go messin’ with that fool again without a gun in your pocket, you
askin’
to get cut up.”

“I hear you, Lilly.”

“Don’t hear me, Gunner. Just do what I’m tellin’ you, all right?”

The giant black woman snatched the ten off the bar, shoved it into an apron pocket, and left him to take care of another customer.

“Well, well, well,” Johnny Frerotte said. “Ain’t this somethin’.”

He’d gained a few pounds in nine years, and the only hair left on his head was growing long and unmanageable in the back, but other than that, he was the same smooth, fearsome character Gunner remembered. He had an office overlooking the gaming tables up on the Royalty Club’s second floor, and Gunner had been shown to it only after a guard downstairs had called ahead to announce his arrival. What the hell the Gardena card casino called itself doing, hiring a sociopath like Frerotte to head its security staff, Gunner couldn’t imagine, but there the big man sat: feet up on his desk, a drink in his right hand and a TV remote control in his left, eschewing the huge observation window at his back for a talk show playing on a television set just off to his right.

“What’s up, Jack,” Gunner said, making a herculean effort to be polite.

Frerotte sat up in his chair, used the remote control to turn the television off. “Aaron Gunner. Man, I thought I’d never see your tired ass again.” He smiled.

“Yeah, I know. I was beginning to think the same thing about you.”

“Been what? Ten years since we last saw each other?”

“Nine or ten. Something like that.”

Frerotte laughed, said, “That was the night I cut that boy’s nose off, huh? Over at the Deuce.”

“Yeah, it was. Look, Jack—”

“What was that fool’s name again? Somethin’ with a C …”

“Cowens,” Gunner said.

“Yeah, that was it. Cowens. I heard the doctors put his shit back on. You hear that?”

Gunner just nodded his head, finally realizing his host wasn’t going to hear anything he had to say until he was all done reminiscing.

“Somebody seen him after, I don’t remember who, told me they fucked it up. Boy’s nose was all crooked an’ shit. My man said he’d’a been better off leavin’ the fuckin’ thing on the floor where he found it.” He laughed again.

Gunner watched him and waited.

When Gunner’s silence became too much for him, Frerotte said, “So. What you want with me after all these years? You ain’t lookin’ for a job, are you?”

Gunner shook his head, said, “I’ve already got one, thanks. As a matter of fact, that’s what brings me here today.”

“Oh, wait a minute. You were some kind’a investigator, right? A private investigator?”

“Yeah. You remember.”

“Yeah, I remember. I remember a lot of things.” He showed Gunner his teeth again.

“That’s good. Maybe you remember a brother named Elroy Covington, then.”

The grin froze on Frerotte’s wide face, betraying an effort on the big man’s part to project unfamiliarity. “Who?”

“Elroy Covington. He disappeared from a Hollywood motel last October. I’ve been hired to find out what happened to him.”

“Covington?” Frerotte shook his head. “Never heard of nobody named Covington.”

“Maybe it would help if I told you the name of the motel. The Stage Door. It’s on Sunset, just west of Vine, the south side of the street.”

“Don’t know it. Somebody said I been there?”

“At least a couple of people, yeah,” Gunner lied. “They both said you were the last person to see Covington the night he disappeared. You were in his room, they said.”

“Bullshit. I don’t hang in Hollywood.”

“Maybe you did back then. Just this once.”

“You ain’t hearin’ me, Gunner. I said I don’t know the man, an’ I don’t know the place.”

“Then these people I talked to were lying, I guess.”

“I guess they were. People are funny like that.”

“Sorry, Jack, but I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I think you’re the one doing the lying. Question is, why?”

Frerotte pushed himself to his feet, reached behind him with his right hand to withdraw the eight-inch straight razor with the ivory handle, his eyes never leaving Gunner’s own.

“I wondered when I’d see that,” the investigator said.

“You tax a man’s patience, motherfucker,” Frerotte said. “Same as always.”

“Let’s not do this again, Jack. Please.”

Frerotte grinned. “What? You don’t wanna dance with me, Gunner? Just ’cause J.T. ain’t around this time to save your sorry ass?”

“I didn’t come here to dance with you, Jack. I just want some answers, that’s all.”

“You should’a left well enough alone. I gave you a break once, lettin’ you slide for gettin’ in my shit that night at the Deuce. But I guess you don’t know how lucky that was, do you?”

He opened the knife, gave Gunner a good look at its gleaming silver blade.

“Put it away,” Gunner said simply.

“Fuck you,” Frerotte said. Certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that Gunner had the same problem now that he’d had nine years ago at the Deuce: He was unarmed. Frerotte’s people wouldn’t have let him up here, otherwise.

“Suit yourself,” Gunner said. He picked up the heavy upholstered chair in front of Frerotte’s desk and rushed the big man with it.

Frerotte hadn’t expected this, was too slow of foot to get out of the way before Gunner had him pinned between the chair and the giant window behind him. Grunting like a stuck pig, he tried to wave the razor in his right hand at the other man’s throat, but for naught; his right arm was trapped directly beneath a chair leg and the window frame, limiting its range of motion severely.

“Somebody needs to remind you you’re a very fat man, Jack,” Gunner said. “Your hands may be fast as hell, but you can’t move your feet worth a damn.”

Frerotte tried to say “fuck you” again, but he couldn’t find the breath to do so; Gunner was pressing the chair into his chest like somebody trying to push a car up a steep hill.

“All right. Listen up. I can’t hold you like this for long, so we’re gonna have to make this fast. I want you to drop that knife and answer some questions for me. Otherwise, I’m gonna lean on this chair a little more, see how much pressure that glass behind you can take. Understand?”

Frerotte opened his mouth to shout something, but Gunner hunched over, leaned harder into the chair to cut the big man’s air off before he could make a sound.

“Make up your mind, Jack,” Gunner said. “You wanna fly, or you wanna talk to me?”

Frerotte strained to turn his head sideways, trying to peer out the full-height window Gunner was threatening to force him out of. On the other side of the one-way glass rendering them all but oblivious to his plight, the hundred or so people down below looked to be a long way off; the fall might not kill him, Frerotte knew, but it could easily leave him a cripple for life.

He dropped the razor in his right hand to the floor.

“Good. First question,” Gunner said. “You were at the Stage Door Motel the night Covington disappeared, weren’t you?”

“I can’t …” Frerotte said, too short of breath to finish the thought. He was sweating profusely now, and looked like he might lose consciousness any minute. Gunner couldn’t have been happier.

“Don’t try to speak. Just move your head to indicate yes or no,” the investigator said: “Were you at the Stage Door with Covington, or not?”

Frerotte shook his head.

Gunner put his back into the chair again. “Come on, Jack …”

Frerotte changed his tune, showed Gunner a feeble nod.

“All right. Next question. Is he still alive?”

The big man paused a moment, then shook his head a second time.

Gunner absorbed this, tried not to let Frerotte see his disappointment. He had expected to learn that Covington was dead from the moment the man named Blue dropped Barber Jack’s name; it was, after all, the logical result of someone as ordinary as an architectural draftsman from St. Louis mixing with a big city predator like Johnny Frerotte. But now that his suspicions about Covington had actually been confirmed …

His mind had been off Frerotte for all of a tenth of a second, but that was all the time the big man needed to make his move.

Gunner heard him scream like a madman in an asylum, his gaping mouth spraying the air with strands of saliva, then the chair and Frerotte both were coming at him like a brakeless Peterbilt charging downhill. Gunner was flat on his ass before he knew it.

Frerotte could have killed him right there, brought the heavy chair down on his head and then done with him whatever he wanted, but that wasn’t the way Barber Jack had built his reputation. Frerotte wanted his razor, so all he did with the chair was throw it down at Gunner’s head before turning around to find it.

Gunner caught the brunt of the chair on his right shoulder, heaved it off of him just as Frerotte was bending over to pick his beloved knife up off the floor. The investigator scrambled to his feet, watched as the man mountain before him straightened up and started lumbering toward him, the razor held out in front of him like a beacon lighting his way. The door was only ten feet from Gunner’s back, but he knew that wasn’t close enough. Not by a long shot.

He had maybe two seconds to scan the room, find something, anything, with which to slow Frerotte down.

A black floor lamp stood to his left, but was too far out of reach; on his right was a coffee table, long and low. Parts of a newspaper were scattered upon the latter, along with an empty coffee cup, a sugar bowl, and a spoon. Gunner reached out quickly with his right hand, snatched up the larger of the two porcelain objects—the coffee cup—and slung it sidearm at Frerotte’s head as hard as he could, hoping there was still enough distance between them to make the toss effective. There was. Frerotte tried to duck, even as he continued his advance, but the heavy cup glanced off his left eyebrow with a solid thud and stopped him in his tracks. As Frerotte backpedaled once, eyes blinking frantically to fight back tears, Gunner went to the floorlamp on his left, ripped its cord out of the wall and proceeded to use its body like a lance to drive the giant backward, his legs churning for all they were worth. By the time Frerotte recognized his intentions, it was too late: His massive frame was already crashing through the observation window behind him, leaving him nowhere to go but down to the gaming room below.