All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (2 page)

Driving back to his office a few minutes later, Gunner wondered if he'd just made a huge mistake.

As he had two days earlier, while making the trip out to Sparkle Johnson's Orange County townhouse for lunch. On that occasion, the potential mistake he'd been contemplating was his
acceptance
of Browne's work offer, rather than his ultimate rejection of it, and listening to a tape of Johnson's program in the car during the long drive south had only reinforced his sense of doubt. He had heard Johnson's shtick before, but that drive was the first time he'd endured her company for longer than fifteen minutes. Gunner was far from a political animal—his idea of political activism was endorsing at least one petition worthy of his signature annually—but the oxymoron that was black archconservatism had always been able to get a rise out of him. It was simply a concept he didn't get, African-Americans like himself sharing ideologies with the far right, to whom the desegregation of the South back in the early sixties represented little more than the first stirrings of political correctness.

But then, people had a right to believe whatever they wanted to believe, and no one was more willing to grant them the privilege than Gunner, with the single proviso that all their propagandizing be done outside the range of his faculties. Suffering the company of fools was something the investigator did best only from a distance, though this wasn't always possible. On occasion, pressed into a corner by financial straits, Gunner found it necessary to work for a wrongheaded blowhard like Sparkle Johnson in spite of his wishes to do otherwise. It wasn't easy, but he could manage.

So when Wally Browne approached him four days ago to look into a series of death threats his star radio personality had received over the last three weeks—more than a half-dozen phone call's, and twice as many typewritten letters, all from a man identifying himself only as “M”—Gunner had not rebuked him out of hand. For the kind of money Browne was offering, in fact, he figured there was nothing Johnson could say or do that would make working a case on her behalf anything more than a slight annoyance.

Then he actually met the lady.

They'd come together Saturday afternoon not far from Johnson's home, at a lushly foliated bistro near the Huntington Beach coastline, where the dress code was name-brand sports apparel and artificial tans, and designer sunglasses no one ever lifted above their eyes, even while indoors. It was a crowd the thirty-something Johnson fit right into. She was statuesque, with flawless brown skin, straight black hair, and cheeks that dimpled deeply when she smiled. A manufactured beauty, to be sure, but maybe as close to the best money could buy as Gunner had ever seen.

“Tell me, Mr. Gunner,” Johnson had said eventually, after putting away a Chinese chicken salad and two glasses of iced tea with extraordinary dispatch. “Do you ever listen to my show?”

“Your show?” It was one of several key questions he had sincerely hoped she'd never get around to asking. He shrugged and said, “Sure. I'm not a fan or anything, but—”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what do you think? About me, and the opinions I express? Do you generally agree with me, or …”

“I don't generally agree with you, no. But then, I could say that about a lot of people.” He smiled to be polite. “Why do you ask?”

Johnson smiled back, said, “Because of your vibe, Mr. Gunner. I picked up on it right away.”

“My
vibe
?”

“That's right. Hostility's coming off you in waves. I know, I get it from black folk like you all the time.”

“
Black folk
?”

“Come on, Mr. Gunner. Let's not play games. You don't like me. You think I'm a bootlicking Auntie Tom who doesn't know the first thing about being black, and the only reason you're here is because you see a fat, easy pay-check in all this. Isn't that right?”

Gunner almost laughed, until he realized Johnson was deadly serious, her accusation heartfelt. “Look. Let's try and leave our likes and dislikes at home, all right? If your life's in danger, I can help you, whether I think you're the spawn of Satan, or a girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad.”

“But my life
isn't
in danger,” Johnson said.

“No?”

“No. Hate mail and ugly phone calls are part of my everyday life, Mr. Gunner. And Wally knows that. You do what I do, the way I do it, pissing some idiots off just comes with the territory.”

“But Browne doesn't think this Mr. M of yours
is
just another idiot.”

“That's true. But you know what? That's Wally's problem, not mine. Because this guy is just another idiot. A little more articulate and well-read than the rest, maybe, but an idiot just the same.”

“And you know this because?”

“Because I do. I have a feel for people, like I said. If this person were really a threat to me, I'd be the first one to know about it. The
first
.”

Gunner studied her in silence for a moment, said, “You seem pretty certain about that.”

“I
am
certain.”

“Actually, I mean you seem to know it for
a fact
. Like it's more than just conjecture on your part.”

Johnson's face shifted briefly, betraying something that looked to Gunner like unease, then quickly reverted to the iron mask it had been. “I never said it was conjecture, Mr. Gunner. I said it was a sense I have. One is just a function of the mind. The other is a function of the spirit.”

And so it went. Gunner had never tried to sell ice to an Eskimo, but it seemed certain he would've had more luck at that than he did selling Johnson on the value of his assistance. The sister just wasn't interested. She was convinced Wally Browne was throwing his money away, paying Gunner to investigate something she had no doubt was benign, so she politely declined to answer any more of his questions, until the frustration finally broke him down, precipitating his unconditional surrender.

Now, almost forty-eight hours later, Gunner had made that surrender official, and he was left to wonder if he hadn't given up too easily. He didn't need Johnson's help to do what Browne wanted done. He had worked around uncooperative co-clients before. Why had he allowed Johnson to bully him out of a job he had no immediate replacement for?

In the end, he decided the answer was every bit as simple as Johnson had thought: He didn't like the lady. She was a loud, self-obsessed peddler of the rose-colored glasses that conservatives liked to turn on the failings of their nation, so as to better ignore all the little brown bodies that kept getting caught up in its internal mechanics, and money alone was insufficient incentive for Gunner to work a case for such a person when all he could expect in return was aggravation.

Had he been flat broke, rather than merely reluctant to live on his savings until his next gig, things might have been different. But he wasn't. For a few weeks, at least, he was solid. So he put Wally Browne behind him, pushed his burbling red Cobra north to South-Central along the California sun-soaked 405, and kissed Browne's retainer check good-bye, with only a modicum of lingering regret.

Unaware that he would remain gainfully unemployed for all of the next twenty-seven minutes.

t w o

“Y
OU GOT ANY PLANS TO COME IN TODAY
?” L
ILLY
T
ENNELL
asked.

Gunner hadn't been at his desk ten minutes when his favorite barkeep had called. “Who wants to know?”

“Pharaoh's got somebody he wants you to meet. He asked me to call, see when you'd be comin' by.”

“It's not even noon yet. I wasn't —”

“Get your ass over here and stop actin' like you wasn't comin', fool. This is important.”

The big black woman hung up.

Gunner knew he should be insulted, being treated like a nine-year-old at Lilly's beck and call, but all he could do was laugh.

At twelve-thirty on a Monday afternoon, Lilly's Acey Deuce bar was as black and silent as a bad dream. The only customer in the house—if someone drinking coffee could really be thought of as a “customer” in this place—was Gunner, sitting at a corner booth flipping through a battered copy of the
L.A. Weekly
. Pharaoh Doubleday, the tall, reed-thin part-timer Lilly had hired to help her tend bar, stood behind the counter drying beer mugs, making the only noise in the room as he stacked the glasses on a shelf behind him. Lilly herself was in the back office, supposedly going over the Deuce's books.

Pharaoh had told Gunner very little about the man he wanted Gunner to meet here, other than that he was a friend of a friend who was in the market for a private investigator. Gunner had tried to get him to elaborate, but Pharaoh demurred, saying he felt it would be best if his friend explained everything himself.

Twenty minutes into the
Weekly
, and halfway into his second cup of coffee, Gunner looked up, saw a short, narrow silhouette stepping into the bar's shadowy cool, moving with the unmistakable hesitancy of a man with brittle bones. The man approached Pharaoh at the bar, shook his hand, then followed the bartender over to Gunner's booth, like a patron being shown to his favorite table by an under-dressed maître d'.

“Aaron Gunner, this is my friend Benny Elbridge,” Pharaoh said when the pair reached the investigator. “Benny and I attend the same church. Benny, this is Aaron Gunner. The investigator I told you about.”

Gunner stood up to shake the older man's hand, examining him with undisguised professional curiosity. Elbridge was a wiry black man in his early fifties, who was dressed impeccably and most appropriately for a Saturday night on Central Avenue in 1946. He wore a gray sharkskin suit, a black silk shirt, and a thin red tie knotted tightly at the collar, and his black-and-white Oxfords were polished to an almost blinding sheen. His eyes were red and milky, like those of a sick dog, and his beard was full of coarse, unruly gray hair.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gunner,” he said, sounding tired and heartbroken.

“Same here,” Gunner agreed.

For several seconds, both Elbridge and Pharaoh Doubleday looked upon Gunner in silence, as if expecting him to say something they each considered inevitable.

“Can I get either of you gentlemen a drink?” Pharaoh finally asked, when Gunner failed to speak.

Gunner shook his head, and Elbridge did the same.

“Well then, I'll leave you two to talk business.” The bartender smiled and moved off, as Elbridge and Gunner sat down opposite each other in the booth.

“Tell me how I can help you, Mr. Elbridge,” Gunner said, anxious to find out what kind of trouble this man had in mind for him.

“I want to hire you to find out somethin' for me,” Elbridge said, and again he paused afterward, as if waiting for Gunner to offer him an obvious, specific response.

“Okay. What would you like me to find out?”

“I want you to find out who killed my boy. Carlton.”

“Carlton?”

“That was his real name, yeah. C-A-R-L-T-O-N, Carlton. But you probably only knew 'im as the Digga.” Elbridge gave Gunner yet another expectant look.

“The Digga?” Gunner appraised the older man more closely now, straining his eyes against the Deuce's dim light, and recognition finally kicked in. “You're Digga Jones's father? The rapper?”

Elbridge nodded again, betraying an almost unnoticeable trace of pride. “Yes sir. His mama don't want no one to know it, but his real name was Elbridge, same as mine. Carlton Elbridge. Jones was just somethin' them record people called 'im to make 'im sound more like a gangster or somethin'.”

Gunner didn't know much about C.E. Digga Jones under any name, other than that he was a gangsta rap superstar who'd allegedly committed suicide a little over a week earlier, sending his millions of fans—primarily young, inner-city kids—into a funk from which they were still struggling to extricate themselves. Gangsta rap wasn't Gunner's thing, and he only barely understood how it could be anyone else's. That he'd heard of “the Digga” at all was proof of the intensity with which the music industry bombarded his community and others like it with this particular form of angst-filled, obscenity-laced music; you lived in the hood, the hype was everywhere. A kid couldn't open a magazine or turn on a radio, walk past a construction-site fence plastered with posters, or watch five minutes of MTV without being sold the bill of goods its manufacturers liked to innocently call the “gangsta life.”

“I know the boy liked to play up to all that foolishness,” Elbridge said, “to act like he was as bad as they made 'im out to be, but Carlton wasn't really like that, Mr. Gunner. He was just playin' a role. Young man can't make it in the music business these days if he don't.”

“Sure,” Gunner said, completely unconvinced.