When Last Seen Alive (9 page)

It was a plain white envelope, sealed closed and taped to the drawer’s bottom. Even before opening it, Gunner could see that it contained a single photograph. He opened a pocket knife, gripping the penlight between his teeth, and slit the envelope open. Inside was a Polaroid snapshot someone had taken at night: a large man’s lifeless body laid out on its back in some heavy, moonlit underbrush. His throat was apparently cut, blood painting the front of his white shirt a dark crimson. The black man’s head was turned to one side, removing his face from the somewhat distant camera’s view, but his size and shape made him a good bet for only one man.

Elroy Covington.

Gunner felt a brief pang of empathy for his client, then put the snapshot and the envelope into his jacket pocket and closed the desk drawer. He went out into the foyer, intending to check the second floor …

… and heard something.

What it was, or where it was coming from, was not immediately clear. An arrhythmic clicking of some sort, like the chattering of a windup pair of false teeth, the sound was too faint and intermittent to get a good fix on. And it was gone as soon as he took note of it. He waited at the staircase landing to hear it again, but he never did, leaving him to wonder how real it had been.

He had taken two steps up the stairs when he caught sight of a cellar door’s reflection in a wall mirror and stopped.

It was just a six-foot, three-inch slab of white-painted pine set into the wallpapered side of the staircase. Nothing about it was worthy of his attention, but he was drawn to it all the same. Its wooden face was cold against his ear as he listened to a dead silence standing on the other side, then gingerly tried the knob with his right hand. It turned freely, unlocked. He swung the door open and aimed the narrow beam of his penlight down a steep set of stairs, into the black pit below, able to see nothing but an icy concrete floor and the lower third of a washing machine.

Gunner slipped the 9-millimeter Ruger from its holster under his arm and started slowly down the stairs.

It was a small room with unfinished walls and high windows that afforded it a ground-level view of the outside world. A naked light bulb in a simple fixture dangled from the ceiling like a spider on a strand of web, but nothing happened when Gunner tried to turn it on. With only his pen-light to defend against the darkness, he examined his surroundings as best he could, generally catching only glimpses of objects before moving on to the next: the washing machine he had seen from above and the twin dryer sitting openmouthed beside it; a file cabinet missing the bottommost of four drawers, and a mop handle protruding from a paint-stained metal bucket; a wicker basket full of dirty clothes, a rust-encrusted bicycle standing on two flats, and a giant oil painting unsuitable for framing propped up against a mound of cardboard boxes.

And against one wall, near the open door of a tiny water closet, a small cot covered by a pair of green army blankets.

Gunner moved in for a closer look, saw a lozenge-shaped, flowery throw pillow lay at one end of the cot, a collection of newspaper clippings and open magazines at the other, all of the latter splayed out on top of each other like bodies engaged in an orgy. Gunner sifted through the pile, held a few pieces up close to his face where the pen-light made reading possible. He recognized immediately that the subject of each article was the same: the rise and fall of a black newspaper reporter out of Chicago, Illinois, named Thomas Selmon. Selmon’s story was old news, a scandal that dated back at least five years, but Gunner remembered it well.

“Jesus,” he said under his breath.

All the pictures of Selmon accompanying the articles were those of a dark-skinned black man in his early thirties, standing approximately six feet tall and weighing around two hundred pounds. He wore glasses, but no mustache. Gunner recognized him anyway.

Nine months earlier, he’d been sitting two stools down from Gunner at a crowded hotel bar in Washington, D.C., on the most peripheral edge of a conversation Gunner was having with the bartender and two other black men drinking there. He hadn’t said more than three words the entire evening, so it wasn’t really surprising that Gunner had had no recollection of him until this moment—but now Gunner remembered him clearly, reaching across the bar to take one of the business cards the investigator was dishing out to anyone who would have one …

Gunner looked up from the last magazine on the cot, pointed the needle of light emerging from the instrument in his right hand into the little bathroom off to his left. Both the seat and the lid on the toilet were down, and something stood just before the bowl he couldn’t quite see from this angle. He circled closer, saw the penlight’s flash reflect off a shiny, rectangular surface hovering just above the legs of a typewriter stand …

… and then he felt something hit the back of his skull like a frozen wrecking ball.

Everything after that was just a thick soup of dulled sensation. Pain. Dizziness. Nausea.

And finally, the ice cold embrace of unwanted sleep.

six

H
E CAME TO COUGHING, HIS THROAT AND LUNGS BURNING
like he’d swallowed a lit road flare.

He opened his eyes, discovered that they, too, were burning, but he kept them open stubbornly, blinking back tears to focus on the pair of blurred ovals that were floating back and forth before him. Faces. Two men he didn’t recognize, one white, one black, both serving as foreground to a starry night sky streaked with smoke. The white man spoke first.

“Take it easy there, buddy. You’re gonna be okay.”

He was a paramedic. He was wearing the yellow turnout gear of a fireman, sans helmet, and the clear plastic mask of an oxygen tank was gripped tightly in his right hand. His similarly attired partner stood behind him. The black man on Gunner’s opposite side appeared to be just a fireman, though the orange helmet atop his head carried a clear suggestion of authority. To this man’s right was a fourth, yet another fireman, this one older than the rest, wearing a white helmet and a grim, inimical expression on his face.

All four men were looking down at Gunner as if he were a baby in a bassinet.

The investigator realized now that he was on his back, lying on the damp bed of Johnny Frerotte’s front lawn. He turned his head to one side and tried to sit up, saw Frerotte’s house engulfed in flames, the smoke escaping from its blackened roof turning slowly gray as a company of firemen poured water into the heart of the inferno.

Instinctively, Gunner reached into his right-hand jacket pocket, felt around inside … but the Polaroid snapshot he’d placed there only minutes ago was gone.

“Shit,” he said, only to start up coughing again.

“You’d better lie back down awhile,” the first paramedic told him, “have another taste of this.”

Gunner shook his head to decline the proffered oxygen, looked around to see that a number of Frerotte’s neighbors had come out of their own houses to watch Frerotte’s burn down, their faces aglow from the colored lights winking on the roofs of the four Los Angeles County Fire Department vehicles parked at conflicting angles in the street. A few people began to point in Gunner’s direction as he continued to stir.

“What happened?” Gunner asked.

“You’re a very lucky man, that’s what happened,” the man in the orange helmet said. “This fellow here saved your life.”

He was referring to a black man standing sheepishly off to one side on Gunner’s right. Potbellied and fortyish, he was wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt and an oversized pair of green sweat pants, and he was standing on Frerotte’s wet grass in bare feet.

“You got me out of there?” Gunner asked him.

The other man just nodded his head.

“Thanks. I owe you one.”

“You don’t owe me nothin’. I seen smoke an’ come runnin’, that’s all. You just lucky I seen you down there.”

“He says he found you in the basement,” the black fireman said. “Where it looks like the fire started.”

He waited for Gunner to confirm or deny this, looking more like a cop now than a fireman. Gunner could see now that the silver badge on his helmet was that of a captain, while the one on his grim-faced friend’s was that of a chief.

“I couldn’t tell you,” Gunner told them both, becoming more and more aware of a throbbing pain at the back of his head. “I was out when the fire started.”

“Out?”

“Somebody coldcocked me.”

“They what?”

“I was struck from behind and knocked unconscious.”

“By whom?”

“I have no idea. But I’d imagine it was the same person who torched the place afterward, wouldn’t you?”

The black fireman watched Gunner massage the base of his skull with one hand for a while, then said, “Mr. Martin here says you’re not the owner of the house. That he’s never seen you around here before.”

“That would be right. He probably hasn’t.”

“So what were you doing in there, Mr.…” Having finally spoken, the man in the white helmet consulted an open wallet that Gunner instantly recognized as his own. “… Gunner?”

“I wasn’t playing with matches, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m a private investigator working a missing persons case. You want a look at my license before handing the wallet back, be my guest.”

The chief accepted his offer, examined the license carefully before closing the wallet and passing it down to his subordinate, who in turn placed it in the palm of Gunner’s extended right hand. “All right,” the chief said, asserting himself fully now. “So you’re a private investigator. That still doesn’t explain what you were doing in the house.” When Gunner started to respond to that, he said, “I tell you what. Hold your answer to that for a moment. I’m sure these guys are gonna wanna hear it as much as I do.”

Gunner turned, following his gaze, watched as two uniformed police officers stepped out of a cruiser to begin moving slowly toward them.

The uniforms ended up detaining him for forty-five minutes. His explanation for his presence in Frerotte’s home was woefully slight—he told them the front door had been ajar upon his arrival, and a loud noise had lured him down to the basement—but all the evidence at the scene seemed to corroborate his assertion that the arsonist they were looking for was someone other than Gunner himself. The paramedics had to admit he did indeed have a nasty bump on the back of his head, and the position of his body when Frerotte’s neighbor found him had been inconsistent with that of a pyromaniac who’d stumbled and hit his head trying to flee the scene.

Still, the two cops had grilled him long and hard before sending him on his way, asking all the questions he had been asking himself ever since he’d regained consciousness on Johnny Frerotte’s front lawn: Who would have wanted to knock Gunner cold in Frerotte’s basement and then set fire to the entire house? A burglar who liked to cover his tracks with arson? Or an arsonist who liked to mix a little murder with his fires from time to time? And why would either man take a photograph of a dead man out of Gunner’s pocket before fleeing the scene?

Gunner didn’t know. There was no logical explanation for a burglar being down in Frerotte’s basement looking for something worth stealing, nor for an arsonist choosing to make Frerotte’s humble home the site of his next bonfire.

So Gunner was left to believe only one thing: He owed his present headache to neither a burglar, nor an arsonist, but to someone who merely wanted him dead. Someone he’d spooked into committing an impromptu arson by connecting Frerotte to the central figure in an all but forgotten newspaper scandal that was now half a decade old.

He didn’t have a name for this someone yet, but he had a pretty good idea who might. And just as soon as the uniforms became comfortable enough with his flimsy explanations to release him on his own recognizance, he angrily fired his red Cobra up to go have a little talk with her.

• • •

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yolanda McCreary said for the second time.

“Don’t say that again,” Gunner warned her.

“It’s the truth.”

“It’s a goddamn lie. You don’t slip and call your brother Tommy every now and then because he resembled some dead uncle of yours as a kid. You call him Tommy because that was his
name
once, Tommy. Tommy
Selmon.”

McCreary shook her head. “No.”

“Before the hounds on his heels forced him to start a new life in Missouri as a mild-mannered family man named Elroy Covington.”

“No!”

She tried to edge past him to the door of her hotel room, no doubt intending to order him out, but he caught her by the arm, pinned her to the spot. “Look,” he said, “the game is
over.
I know who your brother was, and what he was running from, so stop playing stupid and start leveling with me for a change.”

She ripped her arm out of his grasp, went to the door, and opened it for him. “Get out of here, Mr. Gunner,” she said, closing the baby blue terry cloth robe she was wearing even tighter around her waist. “You’re fired. I don’t want your help anymore.”

Gunner stayed where he was, said, “It’s too late for that now. I’m in too deep. There’s no going back.”