All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (20 page)

“Since eight o'clock this morning. How long do you think he's been doing it?”

“Hell, I didn't mean—”

“So how did you leave it with him, Mr. Browne? Is he out watching Ms. Johnson now, or did you send him home?”

“You mean you don't know?”

“No. Frankly, I don't. Like I told you last night, I've got another case to work—this is the first chance I've had to check in with either one of you.”

Browne fell silent for a moment, still unconvinced Gunner's judgment could be trusted in this matter. Eventually, however, he said, “Far as I know, he's on the job. I gave 'im all the info he asked for, Sparkle's itinerary and the like, and he left, I assumed to start watching the house before she came in to do her show this morning.”

“She went on the air today?”

“Please. Are you kidding? I begged her to take some time off till I was blue in the face, but I'd've had more luck asking an elephant to climb a tree.”

“She say anything about the attempt on her life yesterday?”

“What, on her show, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“She had to. How could she ignore it? But she didn't say a whole lot. Just a few words of reassurance about her condition, and about how she wasn't going to let the crazies in this world stop her from deliverin' the message. That sort of thing.”

“But nothing about Nance.”

“No, no. No way. Give the lady credit for havin' a little intelligence, Gunner.”

Gunner asked if either Browne or Johnson had received any word yet from the LAPD about Nance's status as a suspect, and Brown said he'd called downtown less than an hour ago, was told by one of the investigating officers that Johnson's old boyfriend was being held for questioning down at Parker Center at that very moment.

“You got this cop's name?” Gunner asked. “I'd like to call him or his partner later, see how Nance's Q-and-A turned out.”

“Sure. Hold on a minute.” Browne found the name and number, read them aloud for Gunner to take down. “What, you don't think they're gonna hold 'im? After everything Sparkle told us about him?”

“I don't know. They will if we're lucky. If they hold him, it probably means he's our man, and we can all relax, stop worrying about somebody else trying again. Whereas if they don't …”

He thought better of finishing the sentence.

“He's the guy. He's
gotta
be the guy,” Browne said. Trying as much to make himself believe it as Gunner.

“Yeah. Let's just hope he is,” Gunner said.

“Aw, hell,” Matthew Poole said, sounding over the phone like he was trying to talk with half a sub sandwich stuffed in his mouth. “I almost made it. Two weeks without any harassment from you.”

“You think this is easy for me? You're the fourth flat-foot I've had to talk to in four days. Talk about a root canal without Novocain…”

Poole was a veteran robbery/homicide detective with the LAPD, and Gunner's oldest and most reliable contact within the department. Their friendship was tenuous at best, but persevering, and was entirely held together by a near-constant exchange of favors. For two men who had absolutely nothing of consequence in common—Poole was a jowly white man who liked Sinatra, Gunner a younger black man who liked Turrentine—it was a surprisingly efficient relationship.

“Antoinetta Aames? What the hell kinda name is that?” Poole asked, after Gunner had requested he run a trace on Aames for him. It seemed safe to say now that Danee Elbridge wasn't going to be calling with the info on Aames he'd asked for, so the authorities were the investigator's next option. He had thought briefly about asking Kevin Frick to run the trace for him, then decided against it, as Frick had made it clear the last time they spoke that he didn't want to be bothered again with anything relating to the Elbridge case until Gunner could offer him something in the way of physical evidence.

“I don't make 'em up, Poole. I just write 'em down. Sister's name is Antoinetta Aames, what can I tell you?”

“So who is she, and why should I care?”

“She's a possible wit to a possible homicide. Or maybe even a murderer, I won't really know until I talk to her. Her or her girlfriend Felicia something, if you could maybe make that connection for me too.”

“I see. Got it. You wanna take a deep breath now, try to say that again in
English
?”

“Sure. You got a few minutes?”

“No. Forget about it. Gimme the exact spelling of her name, I'll run the goddamn trace.”

Shortly after hanging up with Poole, Gunner got a callback on the message he'd left earlier for Steven La Porte.

“Thought it might interest you to know, you're no longer a suspect in the Crumley case,” the detective said.

“I didn't know I
was
a suspect,” Gunner said.

“Well, I'll admit you weren't a great one, but we had you on our A-list all the same. Lucky for you we found somebody better.”

“Let me guess. It's a lady by the name of Antoinetta Aames.”

“Antoinetta Aames? Never heard of her. This guy's name is Melvin Felipe, the biggest shit-for-brains you'd ever wanna see.”

“Melvin Felipe?”

“He's a crackhead with three other aliases, but none of 'em are important. What's important is, his prints were all over Crumley's apartment, and we can't seem to locate 'im to ask 'im why. Looks like he's a runaway.”

“And his motive for doing Crumley?”

“You mean besides the fact Crumley caught 'im robbing his crib? He hasn't got one. You really think he's gonna need two?”

Gunner ignored the rhetorical question, asked the cop if he and his partner, Chin, had any physical evidence outside of Felipe's fingerprints to link him to Crumley's murder.

“Not yet,” La Porte said. “We traced 'im to his sister's place out in South Gate, but there was nothin' there to see by the time we came by to look for 'im. He hadn't been home since early Tuesday morning, the sister said, and he cleaned out his room when he left. I wonder why.”

“Then my tape didn't turn up over there, I guess.”

La Porte found that worth a chuckle. “You and your friggin' tape. Get over it already, will you? Crumley gettin' whacked had nothin' to do with your suicide case, this was a simple B and E gone bad.”

“We can't be sure of that yet, La Porte. Just because your suspect's a crackhead—”

“He's got two priors on similar beefs, Gunner. And the MO on those was the same as it was here—entry through a bedroom window, nothing but small items taken. Cash, jewelry, silverware, et cetera. Only difference this time was, he got caught with his hands in the cookie jar, had to hurt somebody to get away.”

It was a convincing argument. The BHPD's Kevin Frick had been saying all along that Crumley's murder and Carlton Elbridge's apparent suicide would turn out to be unrelated, and maybe he was right. As bad as Gunner wanted the two to connect, the pieces just wouldn't fit. A surveillance tape that couldn't be used to blackmail Elbridge's hypothetical killer; the lack of a second VCR in Crumley's apartment for making copies; now a murder suspect with a history of committing similar crimes entirely devoid of hidden subtext.

“You ask the sister if she ever saw Felipe with a tape?” Gunner asked, not one to let go of an unfeasible idea easily.

“No. But not because we didn't think of it. Lady seems to have the same appreciation for rock cocaine her brother does, we were lucky she could remember she had a brother at all. Hey listen, Gunner, is that about it? I'm being a good guy here, callin' to let you know you were off the hook. I'd've known you were gonna question me all fuckin' day about this shit …”

“Okay, okay. But do me one last favor, will you? Let me know when Felipe turns up. You're probably right about this being a dead horse I'm beating, but if I'm still working this case when you collar him …”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Assuming he's still breathing when we find 'im, you can have a few words with 'im soon as Pete and I have had ours. What the hell do I care?”

Gunner didn't know it until the dial tone sounded in his ear, but that was the man's way of saying good-bye.

Desmond Joy wanted to do a late lunch. He wouldn't discuss his reasons over the phone, just asked Gunner to meet him in an hour down at Coley's Kitchen on Crenshaw and Vernon in Leimert Park. Gunner had actually had other plans for his afternoon, but he found a way to change them so that both Joy's and his own needs were met.

He was walking out of his office to leave when Benny Elbridge met him at the door, a hangdog look on his face. He wasn't near tears, but Gunner had seen less remorseful-looking people begging for a judge's mercy down at the county courthouse.

“Well, well,” the investigator said. “Look who finally remembered I'm alive.”

“I come here to offer you an apology, Mr. Gurtner,” Elbridge said, man enough to meet Gunner's gaze without flinching. “I lied to you.”

“Yes. You did, didn't you?”

“But Mr. Trevor says you're still on the job. That you're gonna keep on lookin' for my boy's killer, even though you know now it's really Bume you been workin' for all this time.”

“That's right. At least, I'm not ready to give up yet.”

“Good. God bless you. I mean that.” He reached out to take Gunner's right hand, swallowed it up in both of his own.

“Forget it,” Gunner said, easing his hand away uncomfortably. “A fee's a fee, right? What difference does it make where it comes from?”

“If it's comin' from a man like Bume, it can make a lotta difference. I know me, I had a hard time doin' what he asked me to do, hire you with his money to find out what happened to Carlton. I'd've had just a few more dollars in my pocket when Mr. Trevor called …”

“Sure thing, Mr. Elbridge. I've been there myself, it's okay.”

“No. It ain't okay. Mr. Trevor said now that you know the truth, I don't really have to talk to you no more, that he can handle everything with you from now on. But I didn't wanna just go 'way and leave you thinkin' I only did what I done for the money. That Bume Webb cared more about Carlton than his own father did.”

“There's no need to explain, Mr. Elbridge.”

“Still.” Elbridge took his left thumb, smeared a tear across the breadth of his left cheek. “I just wanted you to know. I'd've had the money, I would've hired you myself, for real. I didn't need Bume Webb to tell me to do that.”

Gunner wasn't sure the old man deserved to be let off the hook so easily, but Elbridge's need for forgiveness was too great to deny. He took a bribe to front for Bume Webb, that was all; a dishonorable deceit, to be sure, but not a particularly destructive one. Surely there was nothing to be gained now by making him feel like the only client who had ever successfully run a game on Aaron Gunner.

“Far as I'm concerned, Mr. Elbridge, you're still my client,” Gunner said, patting the old man's left shoulder softly. “You're the man who hired me, and you're the man I intend to keep reporting to. That all right with you?”

Elbridge couldn't believe what he was hearing. “Sure, sure. But—”

“If Mr. Trevor has a problem with that, he can call me. He's got the number.”

Elbridge grinned, stuck his hand out to shake Gunner's with great enthusiasm. “All right then! You want I should call you, or …”

“I'll call you tonight, say around six, give you an update on what I've found out so far. Just make sure you're by the phone when I call this time, huh?”

“Oh, you got it. I'll be there, don't worry.”

It was another ten seconds before he stopped shaking Gunner's hand.

t h i r t e e n

A
T TWO-THIRTY THAT AFTERNOON
, G
UNNER FOUND
Desmond Joy sitting at a table in the middle of Coley's Kitchen's small main dining room, already digging into the restaurant's rich Jamaican fare like a man who'd last eaten a week ago. In less than three hours, a cluster of people waiting for tables would be making it impossible to enter Coley's through the front door, but this early in the day, Joy and Gunner practically had the place all to themselves.

“So what's up?” Gunner asked, as soon as he'd sat down and ordered the jerk chicken and a bottle of ginger beer from a waitress only too eager to please him.

“I understand you're still working for Mr. Elbridge,” Joy said, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with a napkin.

Gunner nodded. “That's right. Today makes three whole days. What, was I supposed to have lost interest by now?”

“That wouldn't have surprised me. But that's not the reason I ask.” He refilled his glass from his own bottle of ginger beer, said, “I ask because I'm about to do something it only makes sense to do if you're going to continue on with this thing. If you're close to wrapping it up, there's really no point in my saying anything.”