All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (21 page)

Gunner shook his head. “Sorry. Way things look right now, I may not be done for a few more days, at least.” He made a gesture to indicate it was Joy's move. “So …”

“I've done some checking on you, Brother Gee. Trying to find out how legit you are. And the four-one-one I get is that you're all that and more. Your homie Slicky in particular assures me I can trust you with even the most sensitive info without worrying about where it might go from here.”

“Slicky's a good man.”

“As are you, apparently. Which is why I'm going to take a chance here and tell you something you really have no right to know, in the interest of helping you reach a quick and satisfactory conclusion to your investigation.”

Gunner smiled. “That's very generous of you, Brother Joy. A quick and satisfactory conclusion to my investigation would be quite welcome.”

“You joke, Brother Gee, but it isn't funny. If I'm wrong about you, the Digga's rep could be damaged beyond all repair, and his family would bear the brunt of that.”

“All right. This is serious business, I get it.”

Joy waited for their waitress to set Gunner's beer down in front of him, then disappear again, before continuing. “You asked me the other day what reasons the Digga could have had to take his own life, and I declined to give you an answer. Since you're still pursuing the possibility that he was murdered, I can only assume his wife and mother did likewise. Is that correct?”

“It is. I couldn't get either one of them to say two words on the subject.”

“Then neither of them told you what was in his note.”

“His suicide-slash-rap-lyrics note? No. Not hardly.”

Joy nodded, finally left with no choice but to say what he'd come to say. “About ten months ago, out in Philly, the Digga had a girl up in his room. Somebody he'd met at a club the night before, I don't even think he knew her name. Sad to say, but there was nothing unusual about it, that was just the Digga's way on the road. Anyway, the way he explained things afterward, they got down to business rather quickly. She gave him some head, asked him to give it to her from behind. So he did. Then, afterward—”

“He found out she wasn't a she,” Gunner said.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I've heard that story before. It always starts the same way. First some head, then some backdoor action.”

“Yeah. I'd heard it before myself. Unfortunately, the Digga hadn't. He didn't know the score until the damage had already been done.” He shrugged. “And of course, a young brother's ego being what it is, he didn't take the shock too well.” Joy looked around the room to make sure he wasn't being overheard, then said, “He almost killed the poor bastard. The only reason he didn't was because I happened to have the suite right next to his that night, broke in through the adjoining door to stop him.” He sipped his beer, watched as Gunner's plate was delivered. When they were alone again, he said, “As it was, the young ‘lady's' hospital bills came to a little over ten grand, and it cost us another fifty to buy his silence in the matter thereafter.”

“Sixty grand? He walked away for that?”

“Yeah, I know. We got off cheap. But the damn kid was a fan, what can I say? He actually blamed himself for what happened to him, not the Digga. Only thing he really asked for afterward was the reassurance that the Digga didn't hate him for the game he'd played on him.”

“And did he get it?”

“He was led to believe he did. That, and the monetary compensation we offered, was the best I could do for him, I'm afraid.”

“In other words, the Digga wasn't ready to kiss and make up.”

“No. Not even. He looked upon what the guy had done to him as rape. The idea that he'd had his jimmy inside a man's mouth and ass … It just wiped him out. Drove him crazy.”

“And that's why he wanted to kill himself? Because he'd once had sex with a man?”

“You telling me you find that surprising? That a straight, healthy young black man with a wife and two kids would have a hard time dealing with being tricked into getting jiggy with another man?”

Obviously, the answer was no. Gunner knew as well as anyone how pervasive homophobia was among young African-American males, and how lethal that homophobia could sometimes become. Raised as they generally were in fundamental Christian households, black men were conditioned from a very early age to consider homosexuality nothing less than an abomination in the eyes of God, and so rejected the practice with great prejudice. And aside from the moral aspects of the issue were the strictly practical ones. In a cultural setting where a young man's ability to meet any physical challenge was constantly being tested, no charge could bring him more grief than that he was somehow more a woman than a man. That was the kind of label that, on the street especially, could make one's daily existence a living nightmare.

“I can see how he might've taken it pretty hard, sure,” Gunner conceded. “It's just … This isn't just any young brother from the hood we're talking about, is it? It's C.E. Digga Jones. A media superstar who could've bought you and me, and all the people we'll happen to meet over the next five years, with what he earned on an average payday.”

“And if he was? What difference should that have made?”

“Maybe none at all. I'm only saying that, considering everything else he had going for him, you'd like to think the kid could've found a way to overlook the indignity of having had a single, inadvertent gay experience.”

“That's easy for you to say, Brother Gee. You aren't the one who had to live with it.”

“No. That's true, I'm not.”

“What you need to understand is that it wasn't just the guilt the boy had weighing on him. It was the fear as well. He was terrified the guy in Philly would go back on our deal and start talking, that sooner or later, the word would get out about what the two of them had done to each other in that hotel room together. But of course, word never did get out. The guy never opened his mouth, just as I always told the Digga he wouldn't. And that's the real tragedy in all this, you see. The Digga killed himself for nothing. That kid who played him back in Philly was
never
gonna talk.”

“But how could you have been so sure of that? You said yourself the money he took to go away was chump change. If somebody had gotten an inkling of what had happened that night and offered him big dollars for his story …”

“Nobody
knew
his story,” Joy said. “I told you. I fixed everything. I set it up so that no one would ever know what really happened out there but me, the Digga, and him. The cover story for his injuries I invented satisfied everybody who heard it—the police, the hotel, even the hospital where he was taken. Only way somebody else could have found out the truth about that night was if the kid said something, and I don't think he would've ever done that, like I said. I've got a sense for people, brother, and my sense was that this boy cared more about the Digga than he did himself. Sounds pitiful as hell, I know, but that's just the way some of these kids are today.”

“Still. I should probably talk to him, don't you think? Just in case he's driving around Pennsylvania in a brand-new Jaguar you don't know about?”

Joy shook his head, said, “Out of the question. The agreement we made was that he wouldn't out us, and we wouldn't out him. You wanna talk to him, Gee, you're gonna have to go find him on your own.”

“All right. Let's just assume he didn't talk, then. Word could have still gotten out some other way. Or am I mistaken in thinking the Digga's wife and mother also knew what happened to him that night?”

“You're not mistaken. Of course they knew. The kid had been half crazy with guilt ever since, it was inevitable that he'd tell his wife and mother what happened.”

“Then one of them could have leaked the story. If not deliberately, accidentally.”

“Right. Like they leaked it to you, you mean?”

Joy had Gunner there. The investigator had seen firsthand how protective both women were of the information in question; the likelihood that one of them had shared it with somebody else, even inadvertently, was remote to say the least.

“There was no leak, Brother Gee,” Joy said. “I would have heard about it if there had been, the Digga would've told me.”

“Even if he'd been instructed by a blackmailer not to?”

“Especially
then. I'd saved his ass once, he would've expected me to do it again. That was my job.”

Gunner ate in silence for a few moments, letting Joy's story take root in his mind. After he'd heard Joy order another ginger beer and ask that their check be brought with it, Gunner said, “What about the note? Both you and the kid's wife say it explained his reasons for contemplating suicide in some detail.”

“Depending on your ability to understand the language, yes. It did.”

“Was there any indication when it was written? That is, could he have actually written it sometime before his death, rather than immediately preceding it?”

Joy thought about it, shrugged. “I suppose it's possible. There was no date on the note as I recall. But it was lying right next to his body on the floor when we found him, so we just assumed he'd written it that same night. Why—”

“I'm wondering if someone could have read the note before that weekend, found out about his misadventure in Philly that way.”

Joy shook his head again. “I don't think so. The Digga guarded his music pretty carefully, it would've never been left around for somebody to see.” His beer and the check arrived at their table, and he sent the waitress on her way again with the check and what looked like a Platinum American Express card. “Face it, Gunner. The Digga committed suicide. His love for the ladies finally got him into something too heavy for his ego to handle, and it killed him. It happens to people that young sometimes.”

It was an oddly rational attitude for a man to take about the loss of a million-dollar meal ticket, but it wasn't entirely without merit. Gunner had been waiting three days for someone to provide him with the one thing missing from the ubiquitous C.E. Digga Jones suicide theory—a viable motive—and now he finally had one. Coupled with a complete lack of evidence to the contrary, it was the perfect excuse to go back to the Body Count home offices tomorrow, tell Raymont Trevor his boss's suspicions about the Digga being murdered were unfounded, if that was what Gunner wanted to do.

But …

“You make a good case for suicide, Brother Joy,” he admitted. “And I'll take what you've told me under advisement. But that's all I can promise you right now. I'm sorry if you were hoping for something more.”

“You're damn right I was. I told you I wanted to see you wrap this thing up, before it explodes in all our faces. We had an understanding, I thought.”

“I'm afraid we didn't. I'd like to put this case to bed just as quickly as you'd like me to do it, but there's a number of loose ends I need to clear up first. Starting with who killed Ray Crumley, and why.”

“Crumley? The security man out at the Westmore?”

“You remember him, huh? Yeah. That Crumley. I meant to mention it earlier, but I never got the chance. He was murdered Monday night sometime. The police think by a crackhead he caught jacking his apartment, but I suspect there was more to it than that.”

Joy set his beer glass back down on the table, his staid veneer showing a sudden hairline crack. “How's that?”

“Well, it's a long story, but the short version is, I think he was blackmailing somebody. He'd taken a surveillance tape shot at the hotel the night of the Digga's death home with him for a couple of days, then returned it, and I can't imagine why he would have done that other than to somehow use it for extortion purposes. Doesn't that make sense to you?”

“I don't know,” Joy said dully. “I imagine it would depend on what was on the tape.”

“What was on the tape was the hallway outside the Digga's door between the hours of four and eight p.m. the Saturday he died. I've never seen it personally, but among other things, I understand it shows everyone who came in or out of the kid's room throughout that length of time.”

“I don't understand. So it showed who his visitors were before eight. The cops say the Digga died around midnight, how could Crumley have used that tape to blackmail anybody?”

Gunner shook his head, said, “I don't know. The blackmail angle's just a guess, like I said. But it's one of the things I'd like to explore a little deeper before I stick a fork in this case and call it done. There's one or two more, but I won't bore you with them right now.”

Joy looked disappointed, opened his mouth to protest, when Gunner cut him off to say, “Excuse me,” waved somebody behind Joy over to their table.

“Desmond Joy, I'd like you to meet my cousin, Del Curry,” the investigator said when Del had reached them, apparently feeling a little sheepish about the interruption. “Hope you don't mind, but I asked Del to meet me here after we were through. We
were
through, weren't we?”

Joy shook Del's hand, not particularly happy, said, “Sure, sure.”

“I could sit out front if you two need another couple of minutes,” Del offered. “I'm actually a little early.”

“No, no. It's cool, it's cool.” Joy stood up, eyed Gunner with no small measure of ire. “I'm sorry you've decided to go ahead with this, Brother Gee. Danee and Ms. Trayburn have been through hell and back these last three weeks. It'd be a shame if your indifference to reality caused them to suffer even more.”

He met their waitress returning to their table, signed his bill and retrieved his credit card, and left. Del watched him go before taking his seat, asked, “Was it something I said?”