All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (27 page)

At first, Gunner could think of only two explanations for the discrepancy: either Zemic had lied about what he'd seen on the tape, or Crumley had created his own abbreviated version of it here, pasting the faces of Aames and White into a sequence that otherwise did not reveal them, before transferring the doctored scene to another cassette. But there was a third explanation as well, simpler and more feasible than the others—and as he continued to think about it, examining it from every angle, he could see there was really only one thing wrong with it, one reason alone not to embrace it wholeheartedly.

It turned his view of two murders entirely upside down.

“Brother, I don't even know you,” the falsetto-voiced pimp named Rocket said. “Why the fuck should I tell you anything?”

The minute he'd walked into Mickey's, Gunner had called his number for the fourth time since Alred gave it to him, and finally, Felicia White's former pimp had picked up the line. “Because Ready Lewis says you can.”

“Ready? Shit. I hardly know his ass either.”

“Look. The Man's looking for your girl Felicia because he thinks she may have murdered somebody, but not me. I'm thinking she could get whacked herself here pretty soon, if I or the cops don't find her before somebody else does.”

“Aw, man, this is bullshit …”

“Don't hang up!
Listen
to me! Five-oh's already talked to you about this, right?”

Rocket grunted. “What do
you
think?”

“Then you already know the score. Sister's in some deep shit. If she murdered her girl Antoinetta, she brought it on herself, but if she didn't—”

“Felicia didn't murder nobody. She ain't like that. Never has been, never will be.”

“All right. So if she didn't do it, she probably knows who did. And that's what's gonna put her in the morgue right next to Antoinetta if you don't help
me
help
her
.”

“Help
her? Help her how? By droppin' a dime on her ass?”

“No. By seeing she doesn't take the fall for something she didn't do. Or worse. Guilty or innocent, at this point I don't care. All I wanna do is talk to her. I'll do it over the phone, if necessary.”

“Yeah, well, I'd like to help you, brother, but I can't. Like I told Five-oh, I ain't seen or heard from Felicia in almost a year.”

“Okay. Just do me one more favor then, huh? Give Ready a call. Tell him everything I've just told you, and see what he says. Considering Felicia's medical problems, I'd say she's got enough to worry about these days. Maybe together, you and I can do something to lighten the load for her a little.”

Twenty minutes later Gunner's phone rang, but it wasn't Felicia White calling. It was Carroll Smith of the FBI.

“I was wondering when I might hear from you boys,” Gunner said.

“Yeah. I would've called sooner, but I've been a little busy.” He sounded particularly unhappy.

“So I've heard. You're calling to ask me to withdraw the troops, I imagine.”

“Not quite. I'm calling to find out where the hell the troops are with our surveillance subject. They both seem to have disappeared.”

“What?”

“Ms. Johnson left KTLK about thirty minutes ago, just before our people were scheduled to start watching her, and your man Mokes went with her. Nobody here's seen or heard from either one of them since.”

“Johnson didn't tell anybody where she was going?”

“No. Apparently, that would have run counter to her intentions. Her boss Browne says all the attention was driving her stir-crazy, he thinks she may have made herself scarce deliberately.”

“Shit.”

“I guess that means you don't know where they are either.”

“No. Unless Jolly left a message for me I haven't received yet …” He called Mickey into his office, asked him if he'd heard from the big man at all today. Mickey shook his head and said no.

“Don't mean to be critical, Gunner, but this is what happens when you ask an amateur to do the work of a professional,” Smith said. “Our information is that Mokes is an ex-con who's no more qualified to be watching Johnson than a twelve-year-old kid. What the hell were you using him on this detail for?”

“Don't blame Jolly, Smith. If Johnson took a powder on you, and Jolly followed after her, he did what I would have wanted him to do.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Jolly's okay. He'll call in, don't worry.”

“If he's still breathing, you mean. If the Defenders go after Johnson and he gets in the way, it's not gonna bother them at all to kill him too. In fact, they'll probably take him out just for the hell of it.”

“You're satisfied the Defenders are mixed up in this?”

“Reasonably so, yes. We've been talking to Johnson's friend Nance for two days now, and he hasn't changed a word of his story yet. If he's lying about the Defenders setting him up, he put a lot of time in at rehearsal.”

Gunner asked Smith what he could do to help.

“Let us know as soon as you hear from Mokes, of course. And if you've got a description and license number of the car he's driving, we wouldn't mind having 'em on file.”

“I can help you with the first part, but not the second. He's supposed to be driving a friend's car—he never told me whose or what kind.”

“Fine. Just make the call then. The minute you hear from him, Gunner, don't do anything else first. Are we clear on that?”

“We're clear. Now how about you boys doing something for me?”

“Such as?”

“There's a strange lady who's been hanging around my local dive lately, showing more interest in me than you would think I deserve. Name's Brenda Warren. Sound familiar?”

“Brenda Warren? No. Is there a reason that it should?”

“If she's a known Defender collaborator, yeah. Otherwise, no.”

“You think she's working with the Defenders?”

“Let's just say the thought's occurred to me. Can you run a check on her for me, make sure my concerns are unwarranted?”

Smith hesitated before answering, just in case Gunner was starting to take him for granted. “I guess I can do that. Sure.”

Rocket never called Gunner back, but Alred did. His flesh-peddling homie out in San Bernardino had done as Gunner asked and given him a call, seeking some assurance that the investigator could be trusted, and Alred wasn't happy about it. Gunner let him vent for a while, figuring he was entitled, then came within seconds of hanging up on him before Alred finally arrived at the real point of his call.

“Rocket told me to give you a message,” he said.

The content of that message brought Gunner to the food court of the gargantuan Del Amo Mall in Torrance thirty minutes later, where a prelunch crowd was already starting to fill space like water gushing from a broken dam. Rocket's instructions had demanded the investigator sit alone at a table near the ubiquitous Hot Dog on a Stick, the front page of the
L.A. Times
folded into quarters before him, and Gunner followed those instructions to the letter, doing what he could to look innocuous as the minutes slowly ticked by. First ten, then fifteen. Then twenty. He was reading a
Times
story on the latest MTA Metro Rail construction shutdown for what had to be the fifth time when a black woman in her early twenties pushed past the flow of foot traffic surrounding his table, stopping just out of his reach, and in a voice he could barely hear, asked, “Your name Gunner?”

“That's right.”

Felicia White took a final look around, failed to see the makings of a trap, and sat down to join him. She had a green knit cap on her head that swallowed her hair whole, and her clothing was Wal-Mart-grade unprovocative, but other than that, she wore nothing whatsoever in the way of a disguise. In fact, had she not lost what Gunner guessed to be about fifteen pounds since, she would have looked just like she had in the mug shots Poole had shown him the night before: tiny, doll-faced—and scared as hell.

“First thing you gotta know, I didn't kill nobody,” she said. Not asking him to believe it, but stating a known fact.

“Okay.”

“I didn't even know Antoinetta was dead till I seen it on TV. She was onea my best friends, I wouldn'ta never done nothin' to harm her.”

“All right. So who did?”

“I don't know. I swear to God, I really don't. But …”

Gunner raised an eyebrow to urge her on.

“I think it was 2DaddyLarge. The rapper. You know who he is?”

“I know.” Only four hours ago, Gunner might have been surprised to hear this, but not now. It was what he'd come here halfway expecting White to say. “What makes you think it was him?”

White checked her back briefly as someone passed behind her with a tray, then turned around again and said, “'Cause Antoinetta kept sayin' he set us up. That me an' her was gonna get blamed for what happened to the Digga, an' it was all on accounta 2Daddy.”

“How was that?”

White shook her head. “I don't know. Antoinetta was always talkin' some crazy shit, I thought she was just trippin', same as usual. But then I started thinkin' ‘bout all the money she gave me, an' I realized she might be for real. Maybe 2Daddy
did
set us up.”

“What money was this?”

White lowered her eyes, finally hearing a question she wasn't comfortable answering. “The money we got from the Digga,” she said, making it sound like a confession of some kind. “We was up in his hotel room the night he died. You knew that, right?”

Gunner nodded.

“Well. He gave us a thousand dollars afterward. Five hundred each. An' Antoinetta let me have all of it. Just handed me the money in the elevator as we was leavin', didn't keep a dime of it for herself.”

“She say why?”

“She said she didn't need it. Just bein' with the Digga was enough, she said.”

“She was that big a fan?”

White shrugged. “I guess. I know she liked homeboy's music.” She shook her head again. “But still. I shoulda known somethin' was up. Girlfriend never did nobody without gettin' paid
somethin'
. That's why I figure maybe it was true what she said. About it bein' 2Daddy what paid us to be up there.”

The ramifications of this suggestion moved Gunner to silence, but they appeared to have gone right over White's head.

“And why do you think he would have wanted to do that?” Gunner asked her eventually. “He and the Digga couldn't stand each other.”

“I know. That's what I always thought too.”

She wouldn't say any more than that.

“When you and the Digga were getting busy,” Gunner said, “was he wearing a hat?”

“Yes. Hell yes,” White said. Answering too fast to give it any semblance of truth. “I make everybody I get with wear a hat.”

“You mean since you've been diagnosed?”

White's face collapsed. “Diagnosed? What—”

“I know about your medical problems, Felicia. So there's no need to talk to me like I don't.”

White stared at him, both eyes tearing up at once. She looked off to one side, said, “Who told you?”

“It doesn't matter who told me. The point is, I know. And I sympathize, really. But if you went up to the Digga's room that night with the specific intent of infecting him with AIDS—”

“No! I didn't! I
tried
to make 'im wear somethin', but he wouldn't! Antoinetta said—”

She cut herself off abruptly.

“Antoinetta said what?” Gunner asked.

White evaded the question for several seconds, then: “She said it wasn't necessary. That she couldn't never feel nothin' when a man had a rubber on, an' they didn't really do nothin' anyhow.”

“And the Digga went along with that?”

She tilted her head to one side apologetically, said, “He was all set to go. Niggas don't ever wanna put one on anyways, he sure as hell wasn't gonna argue with her about it.”

“But if you'd told him about your condition …”

“Antoinetta said he already knew. She said he'd been with a lot of girls like me, he didn't have no fear of gettin' infected.”

Gunner started to ask if she had really believed that, but the answer was obvious: Absolutely.

“How did you end up going with her that night? Did she invite you along, or did someone else tell you to go?”

“She invited me. She called me up that mornin' an' asked if I needed a date, an' I said yeah. I didn't even know who it was with till we got to the hotel.”

“You ask her why she picked you? Over all her other girlfriends in the trade?”

“No. Why should I? She knew I been hurtin' for work lately, she prob'ly—” She stopped, finally catching on to what he was getting at. “Oh. You mean why like
that
.”

“You should be retired, Felicia. You pose a health risk to everybody you get with, and Antoinetta would've known that. You didn't think it was at all strange that she chose you to double-team the Digga with that night?”