All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (28 page)

“No. Antoinetta was my friend. If you're tryin' to say she—”

“When you two went up to the Digga's room—did he act like he'd been expecting you? Or did he seem surprised?”

“Was he surprised?” She took a moment to think back, said, “I guess so. I remember when he come to the door he asked Antoinetta what we was doin' there. But what—”

“Then he couldn't have asked her over himself.”

White just responded with a small shrug.

“And someone did ask her over, because she knew he was there. Or was that just a guess?”

“A guess?”

“His room number, for instance. She have to ask somebody at the front desk for that, or did she already seem to know?”

“She didn't ask nobody nothin' at the desk. We just went straight up.”

Gunner looked away, feigning interest in the mass of people around them, so that White couldn't see how disgusted he was by the picture she was slowly piecing together for him. Somebody had used her lethal viral condition as a murder weapon with the aid of Antoinette Aames, and she was either completely oblivious to the fact, or in some serious denial about it.

“Did you know Antoinetta's friend Ray Crumley?” Gunner asked when he faced White again.

“Ray? You mean the one what worked at the hotel?”

“Yeah. That one. Did he see you two there the night you were with the Digga?”

“Did he see us?” White was playing stupid now. “No. But …”

“You saw him.”

She nodded.

“As you were coming in, or going out?”

“When we was goin' out. Antoinetta saw 'im in the lobby an' damn near died. I didn't get what the big deal was, but seein' homeboy there like to scared her to death.”

“Why was that?”

“'Cause she thought he'd seen us, and was gonna call the cops. I was like, so what if he does, the shit's over with now, right? But she made us run outa there anyway, drove like a fool the whole way back to my crib. Girlfriend was
trippin'
.”

“You know Crumley's dead now too, don't you?”

White tried and failed again to appear nonplussed. “Yeah. They said on the news he got killed by somebody tryin' to jack his crib or somethin'. That's a damn shame.”

“In other words, you had nothing to do with it.”

“Say what?”

“The man who killed Crumley was in his apartment that night because Antoinetta sent him over there. You trying to say you didn't know that?”

“No! I didn't—”

“You want me to help you, Felicia, yet you're sitting here jerking me around. Now, I'm gonna ask you just once more, before I walk out of here and leave you to save your tight little ass all by yourself. Did you know Antoinetta sent a guy named Marvin Felipe out to rob Ray Crumley's place, or not?”

White stared him down, gauging his resolve, then slowly nodded her head again.

“Okay. Tell me why,” Gunner said.

“She thought he had some kinda tape. What showed me an' her at the hotel. An' Antoinetta thought he was gonna show it to somebody. Either the cops or the newspapers, one or the other.”

“So what if he had?”

“That's what I kept askin'! Who cares if he shows it to somebody, we didn't do nothin'. But Antoinetta just kept sayin' we was both gonna be fucked if anybody found out we was with the Digga that night. Like it was
our
fault homeboy killed hisself, or somethin'.”

“Go on.”

“So she went over to Ray's crib to talk to 'im. You know, to ask 'im not to say nothin' 'bout us bein' at the hotel.”

“She went to see
him?
When?”

“The next day. She was on a paranoid tip, like I said, wasn't nothin' I could tell her to make her believe home-boy wasn't gonna out us. So she looked 'im up, to see if they couldn't work somethin' out.”

“And?”

“And they did, of course. That nigga loved Antoinetta, he woulda done anything to get back with her.”

“Including borrow a hotel surveillance tape for a couple days so he could edit your faces out of it.”

“Yeah. That's right. How'd you know?”

“I saw the outtakes. Only they weren't on videocassette like Antoinetta thought. They were on his computer.”

“His computer? No shit?”

“No shit. He changed the tape just like he promised, but he kept a copy of the parts he cut out for himself. I suspect that was so he could blackmail you ladies with it later, but maybe I'm wrong.”

“Blackmail? Ray?” She shook her head. “No way. That's what Antoinetta was afraid of, but Ray didn't have nothin' but love for her, like I said. She got that poor nigga killed for nothin', sendin' that fool you was talkin' about before—Marvin—over to his crib to steal some tapes. Hell, he didn't even know we been over at the hotel till she told 'im!”

And there it was: confirmation that Gunner's view of Crumley had always been ass-backward, just as the video clip on the dead man's computer had recently brought him to suspect.

“Okay, Felicia, I think I've heard enough for now,” Gunner said. “Would you like something to eat before we go, or are you ready to jet?”

White looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. “Jet? Jet
where
? Where've
we
gotta go?”

“To see Five-oh, of course. We'll go in together, it's gonna be all right.”

“What?” She started to push away from the table.

Gunner reached out to place a hand on her arm, said, “I told you I'd help you if you leveled with me, and I meant it. But I can't do anything for you if you remain a fugitive. Most especially, keep you alive.”

“Let go of me!” Her head swiveled from side to side now as she sought some avenue of escape.

Gunner got to his own feet, tightened his grip On her carefully. “Listen up. You act like you don't understand what went down, but I think you get it just fine. You're an accessory to a murder attempt, Felicia. 2Daddy or somebody had Antoinetta use you to try and infect the Digga with AIDS, and now he or she is serving up everyone who knows about it.”

“No!”

“Antoinetta was first, and you'll be next if you walk out of here without me. You can take that to the bank. Is that what you want?”

It took her a few seconds to admit it, but eventually she realized it wasn't. She'd come here because she already knew that what he'd just told her was true, and she didn't have the strength to go on running from the fact anymore.

Living with AIDS was as close to death as Felicia White ever wanted to come.

e i g h t e e n

T
HEY HAD TO THROW A FEW
You've gotta be fuckin' kiddin' me's
and
I
don't fuckin' believe it's
around beforehand, but the Culver City PD detectives working the Antoinetta Aames homicide case eventually came around to buying the story Gunner and Felicia White had to tell them. White was a cooperative witness, and her testimony was generally consistent, and it soon became obvious that she wasn't the murdering kind, just as her former pimp, Rocket, had assured Gunner earlier that day.

Still, like Gunner, the detectives were initially loath to believe that one man would try to kill another by using an unsuspecting AIDS sufferer as a murder weapon. It just didn't seem possible that anyone could be that twisted.

Gunner had been allowed to observe White's interrogation, and was greatly relieved to hear her tell the authorities exactly what she'd told him, except in greater detail. White was by no means a complete innocent, but the way Aames—and whoever had put her up to it—had attempted to use White like a disposable syringe had moved Gunner to pity her, and he hadn't wanted to see her say or do anything now to prove him a sucker for feeling that way.

Afterward, the cops had looked to Gunner to make sense of it all, and the investigator was only of marginal help; his own account of things was in its own way as incomplete as White's. He was, however, able to clarify one point for them that was of critical importance to their case: 2DaddyLarge was probably not the man they were looking for.

If anyone could have had a motive to commission Antoinetta Aames to make the bizarre attempt on C.E. Digga Jones's life that Gunner and White were alleging she had, it was 2Daddy; Gunner had heard enough people say it over the last five days to know that the rapper had indeed hated his chief rival and desired his woman. Furthermore, had he used Aames in this manner, it also followed that 2Daddy might have preferred to see her dead than capable of someday testifying against him in a conspiracy-to-commit-murder trial.

But Wednesday afternoon, back at his hotel room at the Century City Marriott, 2Daddy had admitted to Gunner that Aames had been with the Digga the night he died. Surely he would never have volunteered this information knowing she would only turn the investigator's attentions back around to him, providing Gunner could find her. He could have been planning to silence Aames first, but that didn't add up either, because Aames had not been killed until Thursday evening, in her own apartment, and 2Daddy would not have waited over twenty-four hours to deal with her.

Luckily, though, Gunner thought he knew who might have.

He asked the Culver City PD detectives if they knew yet what kind of weapon had been used on Aames, and when he heard their answer, his hunch was confirmed: they weren't sure, the cops said, but they thought it had been a 45 auto of some kind.

The very handgun of choice of 2Daddy's not so bright errand boy, Teepee.

As Gunner explained it to his interrogators, the pair's relationship was such that anyone 2Daddy hated, Teepee almost certainly hated as well. They were both East Coast to the bone, and as hardened by the streets as young black men could become. It wasn't much of a stretch to envision the gangsta rapper's loyal yet dim-witted handyman not only sharing his jealousy of the Digga but possessing the initiative to try and murder him on 2Daddy's behalf. Gunner felt relatively confident that Teepee was both that stupid
and
that bold.

Predictably, neither 2Daddy nor his henchman could be found at the Century City Marriott when the Culver City PD called asking for them. According to the hotel staff, both men had returned to New York that morning, just in time to escape any fallout from Aames's murder. Neither Gunner nor the cops took this to be a coincidence.

The at-large status of Teepee notwithstanding, then, Ray Crumley's homicide was now a closed book, and Gunner no longer had to wonder if Crumley's death had somehow been connected to that of Carlton Elbridge. It hadn't. The individual orbits of the security man's murder and the rapper's suicide had merely intersected, they weren't one and the same.

Gunner was finally free to get off the Elbridge case merry-go-round.

As soon as the Culver City PD released him, he called Benny Elbridge and asked for an early-evening meeting at the Deuce, in lieu of the telephone call he'd promised but never made the day before. Next, Gunner called Mickey to ask if he'd received any calls from Jolly, and was happy to have his pessimism shattered when Mickey said yes, he had.

“So where are they?” Gunner asked his landlord.

“He didn't say,” Mickey said.

“But I told you—”

“I know what you told me. But the man wouldn't answer me. He only wanted to talk to you.”

“What about the Feds? You tell him to call them like I said?”

“I told 'im.”

“And?”

“He acted like he took the number down, but he didn't say if he was gonna call or not. He just grunted, said to tell you he'd call back again in an hour, then hung up.”

“Damn! How long ago was this, Mick?”

“'Bout fifteen minutes ago. Right after your boy from the FBI called. Agent Smith.”

This last meant that Smith, and probably Wally Browne as well, still didn't know where Jolly and Sparkle Johnson were, unless Jolly had done as Mickey instructed and called Smith at FBI headquarters. Gunner glanced at his watch, saw that it was well past two o'clock. If Jolly hadn't made the call to Smith, both the federal agent and Browne would have to be foaming at the mouth with worry by this point.

“Listen to me, Mickey. I'm coming in now, but if he calls back before I get there, don't let him hang up without getting at least a phone number from him. Do you understand? I've
got
to find out where he is.”

“I hear you. But if he don't wanna tell me …”

Gunner made the drive from Culver City to his office in South Central—one which normally took thirty minutes—in a little over fifteen, shunning the unpredictable flow of freeway traffic for the less stressful access of the surface streets. Mickey had the TV on when he arrived at the shop, tuned as usual in the afternoon hours during the week to the Classic Sports channel, and Mickey, Winnie, and a small group of customers were cheering Muhammad Ali on like they didn't know the butt-whipping they were watching him lay on Joe Frazier was on tape. It was all Gunner could do to hear his own voice as he asked the barber if Jolly had called back yet. Mickey just shook his head, went right back to encouraging the champ to victory.