When Last Seen Alive (7 page)

His arrival caused quite a stir. With an almost deafening boom, he fell on the edge of a large poker table, landing on his back, and sent two people sitting there sprawling amid a shower of cards, poker chips, and glass. A woman across the room had been screaming from the first, was still screaming now over the excited murmurs of the crowd. Gunner stood in the gaping hole of the shattered observation window, watched as a ring of people slowly formed around Frerotte’s motionless body and the ivory-handled straight razor still clutched in his right hand.

Then he sat down behind the big man’s desk and waited for Frerotte’s friends to descend upon him.

five

“Y
OU KNOW THIS GUY
?” D
ETECTIVE
F
RED
S
AUNDERS OF THE
Gardena Police Department asked Matt Poole, a homicide detective with the LAPD.

Poole was an old friend of Gunner’s, had been for many years, but today he looked at the black man seated before him as if the two had never met. “If this were a courtroom, I’d take the Fifth,” he finally said. “But since it ain’t … yeah, I know him, I guess.”

The three men were up in Johnny Frerotte’s disheveled office at the now nearly empty Royalty Club. Frerotte had been rushed to the hospital almost an hour before, looking more like a corpse than a man still clinging to life, and the club’s customers and most of its staff had been sent home shortly thereafter. Only a handful of Saunders’s GPD associates and the club’s entire security force—sans its leader, Frerotte, of course—roamed the floor below, cleaning up the mess Frerotte’s graceless skydive had left behind.

Gunner, meanwhile, had been answering every question Saunders and his partner, an older, indifferent white man named Clooney, could throw at him, trying to erase their suspicions that his attack on Frerotte had somehow been part of a botched attempt to rob the casino. They were a relatively polite and undemanding pair, as cops went, but after forty minutes in their company, Gunner felt no more in their good graces than he had when they arrived. That’s when he suggested they call Poole.

He hadn’t really expected the LAPD detective would show up at the scene; he thought he might agree to say a few words in Gunner’s defense over the phone and leave it at that, and then only that if he wasn’t too busy turning a
Playboy
vertical or something. Yet here Poole was, in the flesh: weary eyed, flabby cheeked, dressed like a man who’d stayed out in a hurricane too long.

It had to be a slow day for homicide down at Southwest, Gunner decided.

“You see?” he said to Saunders. “Didn’t I tell you we’re like brothers, this man and me?”

Saunders just frowned, said to Poole, “We were pretty much through with him when we called you, but we didn’t want to let him go until we were sure he hasn’t just been jerking us around. Frerotte’s pretty badly hurt, after all.”

“I hear you,” Poole said. They’d already told him what Gunner’s account of the day’s events was, and it all sounded just typical enough of Gunner to be true. He’d seen the investigator have similar misadventures before.

“So I’m free to go now?” Gunner asked, standing up.

“Yeah, you can go,” Saunders said. “But if we try to call you and the phone rings more than
once
…”

“I know, I know. You’ll have the dogs on me before I can blink. Or some other smart and witty threat to that effect.”

He started for the door, never turned once to see if Poole was following him or not.

“Boy, you got serious trouble,” Poole said a few minutes later, returning to his and Gunner’s table at the Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop on Rosecrans and Crenshaw from the parking lot outside. He’d just used the radio in his car to check on Johnny Frerotte’s condition, and the smile on his face said the news couldn’t have possibly been better. “Ol’ Barber Jack’s in critical condition over at Martin Luther King, his list of injuries is longer than the Old Testament.”

“If that means he’s not dead yet, I’m sorry to hear it,” Gunner said dryly.

Poole laughed, dug back into his cup of mint chocolate chip. A favor from Poole usually cost Gunner a full meal, but he was getting off light today. Ice cream was all the remuneration Poole desired.

“I thought you needed him alive,” the cop said.

“Actually, I do. Think you could get me in to talk to him?”

“Not a chance. This ain’t my party, Gunner.”

“Come on, Lieutenant. I need to talk to the son of a bitch.”

“And you think he’s gonna talk to you now? After your makin’ a human cannonball out of his ass?”

“He knows what happened to Covington, Poole, and he might be the only one who does.”

“Even if that were true, and I doubt it, he’s in no condition to help you. Or didn’t you just hear me say how fucked up he is?”

“But if he was the last one to see Covington alive—”

“Like I said. You ask me, he wasn’t. Jack’s a neighborhood head case with a violent temper, nothing more, and nothing less. He doesn’t make people disappear, he cuts ’em to ribbons and leaves the pieces all over the sidewalk.”

“Yeah, I know, but—”

“Forget the buts. You go over to see Jack at the hospital and he picks that moment to croak, our friends with the Gardena PD are gonna show you a
real
vanishin’ act. The next twenty-five years of your life,
poof!
, gone in sixty seconds. You don’t believe me, you’re outta your mind.”

But Gunner did believe him. The chance Poole was describing was very real.

“All right. So I can’t talk to him. But I can do the next best thing.”

“Show you what a sport I am, Gunner, I’m gonna act like I’m too stupid to know what that means,” Poole said.

He took his cup of ice cream and walked out, not wanting to be a party to whatever the investigator intended to do next.

• • •

Returning to his office at Mickey’s to make a few phone calls, Gunner walked into a full-blown discussion regarding his need to own a pet. Both Mickey Moore and Winnie Phifer had people in their chairs, and four other customers were waiting their turn, everybody talking and laughing like revelers at a New Year’s Eve party. Among the customers, only Drew Taylor and Joe Worthy had faces Gunner recognized, but that didn’t matter; the good will of the hour could not be undone by unfamiliarity.

“You could use a companion, seems to me,” Winnie told Gunner. “It ain’t healthy, bein’ all alone all the time.”

It seemed she had a ten-week-old Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy she was trying to find a home for, and the investigator was the only person left who hadn’t explained to her satisfaction why the dog would be miserable living with them.

“I’m not alone all the time,” Gunner said.

“What? So you bring some woman into the bedroom two or three times a month. What’s that do for you?”

All the men in the house started laughing.

“Shit, I’ll tell you what it does for ’im,” Mickey said. But before he could go on, Winnie swung her left arm out as if to slap him, missed on purpose.

“You know what I’m talkin’ “bout!” she said, chuckling despite herself. “I mean, what the hell good is somebody you only gonna see two or three times a month? All the rest of the time they ain’t around, you’re lonely?”

“I’m not lonely,” Gunner insisted.

“You alone six days out of every week, you’re lonely,” Winnie said.

“And you think a dog would solve that problem.”

“It could. A dog or a cat.
Somethin’.”

“Ain’t you ever had a pet?” Joe Worthy asked. It was his head Winnie was shearing down to the scalp on both sides, her clippers buzzing around his skull like an angry bee.

“I had a goldfish once,” Gunner admitted.

“A
goldfish?”
Mickey said, obviously unimpressed.

“Yeah. I called it Spike. Little Rocky Bythewood was selling ’em door-to-door for a dollar one day, so I bought one.”

“Rocky Bythewood? That boy used to live over on Fifty-fourth Street?” Drew Taylor asked.

Rocky Bythewood had been a pint-sized con man who could sell a Malcolm X T-shirt to the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. If he was alive somewhere today (and it was doubtful), it was only because his family had moved to Chicago before his legion of victims could band together to lynch him in the street.

“Yeah,” Gunner said. “You remember him?”

“I remember him. Man, I’ll bet that fish was dead in a week.”

“Try a
day.
That was the sickest damn goldfish I ever saw. I could’ve kicked Rocky’s narrow little ass.”

Taylor just shook his head.

“And that was the only pet you ever had?” Worthy asked.

“That was it,” Gunner said.

“You got your feelings hurt,” Winnie said.

“Hell, yes, I did. I couldn’t flush the toilet for a year without thinking about that fish.”

He tried to keep a straight face when he said it, but he couldn’t. One look at him, and everybody cracked up again. Worthy fell out of Winnie’s chair, he was laughing so hard.

Finally remembering what he was doing here, Gunner headed for his phone in the back, paused on his way to ask Mickey if he had any messages.

“Mrs. You-Know-Who’s called you twice,” Mickey said, a little smile on his face. “She wants to know what’s goin’ on.”

Gunner knew “Mrs. You-Know-Who” was code for Connie Everson and was sharp enough not to waste his landlord’s uncharacteristic use of discretion by speaking her name out loud. It had been almost two days now since her last visit to his office, and he hadn’t spoken to her since. Maybe a little impatience on her part was understandable at this point.

“Anybody named Sly call?” Gunner asked Mickey, hoping his new field assistant had something to report.

“Sly? Who’s that?”

“Kid I hired to do some work for me.”

“He ain’t out watchin’ the councilman, is he?”

So much for discretion, Gunner thought. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Did the boy call or not?”

Mickey shook his head, said the only calls Gunner had received were from the lady he’d already mentioned.

Gunner put a call in to Sly as soon as he reached the phone on his desk, but the boy’s mother said he wasn’t home, she hadn’t seen him all day. She sounded like the worrying type, the kind of mother who would disapprove of her son shadowing a city councilman for the sole purpose of capturing his adulterous activities on film, so Gunner just left his name and number and said a quick good-bye before she could grill him. He didn’t feel up to lying to anyone’s mother today.

His next call was a more painful one to make. He would have preferred to put Connie Everson off until he had something of substance to tell her, but he’d been doing that now for two days and she was obviously tired of being avoided. And since it wasn’t too late to stop payment on her last check …

“That’s impossible,” Everson said after he’d told her he was still waiting for her husband to hook up with the woman she wanted him found with.

“Impossible?”

“Yes, impossible. He was with her
yesterday
, Mr. Gunner. How could you not know that?”

“Yesterday? Where?”

“I have no idea where. But they were together, I assure you. And if you didn’t see them—”

Gunner didn’t know what to say. Why the hell hadn’t he heard from Sly Cribbs if what Everson was telling him was true?

“Believe me, Mrs. Everson, if they had been together yesterday, I’d know about it. You must be mistaken.”

“I am
not
mistaken. Although I may very well have been mistaken in hiring you for this job.”

“Mrs. Everson …”

“No more excuses, Mr. Gunner. I told you two weeks ago that I wanted this done quickly and efficiently, and you assured me then that you would handle it that way. Now, I don’t know if you were feeding me a line, or exaggerating your capabilities, but either way, you’re going to get me the photographs I require by this time tomorrow, or issue me a full and complete refund of my retainer. Do I make myself clear?”

“A refund? You—”

The line went dead with a loud click before he could accuse her of joking.

Which she hadn’t been, of course. Connie Everson wasn’t the kind of lady who went around making threats just to get a laugh. She was going to try and get her money back if Gunner couldn’t produce the desired results tomorrow, and a fight would ensue when Gunner told her he’d put two weeks into her husband’s surveillance and that amount of his time was going to cost her
something
, fruitful or not.

An ugly lawsuit seemed to loom on the horizon unless Sly Cribbs already had the pictures Gunner’s client was so anxious to get her hands on. But Gunner had hired Sly primarily because he seemed so responsible; surely the investigator would have heard from the kid by now if he had seen, let alone photographed, any tryst between Gil Everson and the strung-out, gimpy black prostitute his wife was somehow convinced he was seeing.

All the same, Gunner would have gone out looking for Sly personally had he not had more pressing matters to attend to. Like finding out what motive a character like Johnny Frerotte could have possibly had for kidnapping, and perhaps even murdering, Elroy Covington. Gunner already had an idea how this might be accomplished, just as his friend Poole had suspected, but he wanted to talk to someone first, give her a chance to address the question before he tried something illegal that could conceivably cost him his license.