All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (18 page)

Johnson nodded, said, “I all but left him standing at the altar. I thought I was in love with him, but I wasn't.”

“When was this?”

“Last January. I walked away as much for his sake as mine, but of course …”

“He didn't quite see it that way.”

“No. Would you?”

Gunner let the barbed remark slip by, asked, “So that brings us back to the question Browne asked earlier. Why wait until now to tell us he was the one harassing you? Even if you thought he was harmless—”

“I
did
think he was harmless.”

“Then why didn't you shut him down yourself before now? Or let me do it for you with Browne's blessings?”

“I
did
. I
did
try to shut him down myself.”

“And?”

“He wouldn't listen. He just pretended not to know what I was talking about. And I knew if I pushed him, he—”

She stopped herself cold, like someone who'd nearly tumbled over the jagged edge of a high precipice.

“He'd what?” Gunner asked calmly.

“He'd do something crazy,” Johnson said, after much deliberation. Improvising.

“But if you didn't think he was dangerous …”

“Look. I felt I owed the man, all right? I was just trying to give him every possible chance to go away on his own before siccing somebody like you or the police on him. I can see now that was a mistake, of course, but—”

“Forget it. You're bullshitting me. Let's do this some other time,” Gunner said tersely.

The comment caught Johnson off guard. She opened her mouth to offer some retort, but Browne rejoined them before she could speak, and Gunner stood to leave.

“It's all set,” Browne said. “They're sending a couple of detectives over now.”

“Good,” Gunner said. He looked down at Johnson, added, “Maybe you'll feel a little more comfortable talking to them.”

“I don't—” she started to protest.

But Gunner turned to Browne again, said, “You might want to talk to her about the importance of being honest with your friendly neighborhood policeman before the two you just called for show up. Cops can smell a half-truth a mile away, and they aren't nearly as tolerant of them as I.”

Browne didn't understand. “What's he talking about?” he asked Johnson.

“I expect you'll want somebody to watch her for a while,” Gunner said. “At least until her friend Nance is in custody?”

“Yes. Of course. But—”

Johnson leapt to her feet, said, “Wally, that isn't—”

“Save your breath, Sparkle. Mr.Gunner's watchin' you, and that's that.”

“Actually, it won't be me,” Gunner said. “But I've got a good man I can probably put in place by tomorrow morning, if that'd be acceptable to you. I'll give you a call around ten, let you know who, where, and when.”

“Wait a minute. A ‘good man'? You don't think you oughta handle this yourself?”

“Much as I'd love to, I can't. Previous obligation. If you don't want my man …”

“We don't,” Johnson said.

“Right. That's what you said last time,” Browne reminded her. He rolled his eyes at Gunner, said simply, “We'll take him.”

e l e v e n

“B
UT
I
DON
'
T KNOW NOTHIN
' '
BOUT
‘
SURVEILLANCE
,'” Jolly Mokes said early the next morning, not surprising Gunner in the least.

“Sure you do. Surveillance is just another word for reconnaissance. And you know how to do recon, don't you?”

“That was a long time ago, Gunner.”

“I know it was. But some things you never forget. Big as your ass is, Jolly, I never saw a man hide in some bush like you could. You can do this job with your eyes closed—I wouldn't ask you if I didn't think you could.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Look. Two days ago you said the Lord told you I'd have some kind of work for you, right? Well, the Lord's paid off. What the hell are you balking now for?”

Jolly got up off his bed, walked around the oversized birdcage that was his one-room downtown apartment, bare feet clearing a path through all the newspaper and candy wrappers on the floor as he paced. “I ain't balkin',” he said, wearing only a pair of striped boxer shorts and a stained white cotton T-shirt. “It's just … I guess I was hopin' you'd give me somethin' a little easier to do, that's all. Somethin' I can't mess up.”

“You aren't gonna mess this up. I told you.”

“Somebody already tried to kill this lady once, right? What if they try again, and I don't stop 'em? Who's gonna be responsible then?”

“I will. I'm the one the client hired to protect her, not you. If something goes wrong, the heat's all mine.”

Jolly just shook his head and went right on pacing.

Finally irked, Gunner pulled the wooden chair he'd been sitting on backward out from under himself, shoved it back over near the small dinette table where he'd found it. “For Chrissake, Jolly, I'm a private investigator! What kind of work did you think I could give you, polishing the chrome on the Bentley?”

“No, but—”

“The situation is this. The lady needs somebody to watch her back, and I can't do it. I've got other obligations. Do you want the job or not?”

Jolly stopped pacing, said, “Hell yes, I want the job.”

“Excellent. You have a car?”

“A car? Three weeks outa lockdown?”

“Shit, that's right. I forgot you just got out.”

“I gotta have a car?”

“Yeah. You don't think you could maybe borrow one somewhere?”

“Borrow one?” The big man thought about it, shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. This brother down in Pedro I know got some extra wheels, he might lend 'em to me for a couple days if I asked.”

“How about some decent clothes?”

“Clothes?”

“You're gonna have to do some of this surveillance on foot, indoors, and our girl likes to go places where you could feel like a hobo wearing Calvin Klein. You at least have a dress shirt, some slacks …”

Jolly shook his head.

“No. Okay.” Gunner reached into his pocket, fished out the last of Benny Elbridge's cash retainer, and peeled off five twenties. Hoping instruments of the Lord like himself were reimbursed for all expenses, somewhere down the road.

He had told Raymont Trevor his work for Benny Elbridge was done until he knew exactly where the fee Elbridge was paying him was coming from, and he was prepared to make good on that promise if necessary, but privately, Gunner wasn't looking forward to doing so.

By now, he'd been on the Carlton Elbridge suicide case for three days, going on four, and in that time he'd come across enough duplicity, jealousy, and unyielding secrecy to more than hold his interest for days to come. None of it had convinced him yet that C.E. Digga Jones had been murdered, but it certainly had him wondering. Wondering enough that he wasn't ready to walk away. There was a threshold beyond which an investigation became more about his own hunger for the truth than his client's, and somewhere over the last forty-eight hours, Gunner had stepped across it.

Still, only an idiot did a puppet's bidding without knowing who was pulling its strings. Gunner had to know who the money man—or woman—behind Benny Elbridge was, or he'd be forced to quit his employ, the restless soul of Carlton Elbridge—not to mention Ray Crumley—be damned.

Having decided this question would never be answered by phone, however, as calls to Benny Elbridge's number were going as unheeded today as they had been yesterday, Gunner left Jolly Mokes only a few minutes after nine a.m. to try and visit Elbridge personally. The address his client had given him three days ago led the investigator to a tiny shack in the rear yard of an almost equally tiny house in Willowbrook, where dry, uncut grass and one weather-beaten coat of cheap white latex seemed to be the architectural dress code of the day. The roofs of both structures were shedding shingles like corpses shedding skin, and neither seemed to be standing at anything approaching a right angle; the smaller one, especially, resembled something a child might have drawn freehand.

“Yo, big man.”

Gunner had almost reached the porch of the quiet little shack when the voice came, caused him to spin around with obvious surprise. Two young black men wearing business attire and Gargoyle sunglasses had apparently followed him up the driveway of the front house without him hearing, and now stood there side by side like hip-hop FBI men.

“Mr. El ain't home.”

The smaller of the two was the one talking. And smiling. Both men were dark-skinned and big, but not gargantuan; more like linebackers than defensive ends. The silent one had a black Kangol hat on his head and attitude to spare; the other one just had all the white teeth he was flashing.

“Mr. L?” Gunner asked, pretending not to understand.

“Mr. Elbridge.” He widened the smile, appreciating the investigator's attempt at ignorance. “Ain't that who you came to see, Mr. Gunner?”

So they knew him. Did that just make a bad situation worse, or better?

“You brothers know me?”

“Uh-huh. But you don't know us. You don't
need
to know us.”

Gunner was looking for a way past or around the pair, hadn't found one yet that wouldn't in all probability land him in the morgue. Each man had some hardware wrinkling the inner fabric of his coat, and the one with the hat, at least, seemed to have the temperament to use it.

“Okay, boys,” Gunner said, showing the two men the palms of his hands to inform them of his pacifist nature. “Clue me in. What the fuck's about to go down here?”

“Ain't nothin' goin' down. We just gonna take you for a ride, that's all. Come on, let's go.” He gestured with one hand for Gunner to start moving down the driveway, out toward the street.

“A ride?” Despite the risks, Gunner couldn't help but laugh. “Shit. I'm not going for any
ride
!”

The smaller man's smile finally went away, metamorphosed into the same grim expression his partner wore. “You wanna bet?”

Christ
, Gunner thought,
they're serious
.

“Look. It's nice to see a couple of kids who don't change the channel just 'cause the movie's in black-and-white, but you're confused. Taking people for rides only worked for Warner Brothers back in 1946, it's as fictional an occurrence today as Santa coming down the chimney.”

The two brothers eyed him in stony silence for a long minute; then the smaller one sighed and told his partner, “Fuck it. Pop a cap in his leg, we'll
drag
his ass out to the ride.”

Nine-thirty in the morning, the guy next door scanning the headlines of the
Times
out on his front lawn in clear view, and big man eases a SIG 9 out of its holster under his arm and points it at Gunner's left knee. Still not saying a word.

Not surprisingly, Gunner found a way to make his pulling the trigger completely unnecessary.

The California Institution for Men looked all wrong for a prison. Prisons were supposed to be unsightly fortresses of concrete and steel, giant monolithic blights on the landscape that blocked out the sun and squelched even the slightest thought of entry or exit. Instead, the CIM was a nondescript collection of cinder-block buildings spread out across a 2,500-acre parcel of land in Chino, a quiet San Bernardino County suburb forty miles east of Los Angeles. If you took away all the razor wire and guard towers, in fact, the four-facility complex could have passed for a large, if woefully unattractive, college campus.

This was where Gunner ended up at the behest of his two new friends in the nicely tailored suits, Brother Kangol and Brother Kangol-Not. Back at Benny Elbridge's place, he had thought the car they'd lead him to would be the silver Chrysler with the askew front bumper, but instead it was a brand-new pearl-white Lincoln Town Car. When he asked about the Chrysler, he didn't get an answer, though the impression their silence left him with was that neither man knew what the hell he was talking about.