All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (5 page)

“But you think he did.”

“Lemme just put it to you like this, home. Most of these kids we been talkin' 'bout are like the Digga was—more rapper than gangsta.” Slicky shook his head. “But that ain't 2Daddy.”

The solemnity with which his friend had spoken made it clear to Gunner that nothing more needed to be said. If 2DaddyLarge hadn't murdered Benny Elbridge's son, it wasn't for lack of potential.

“I figure to start out by talking to the Digga's manager, Slicky,” Gunner said, standing up. “Man by the name of Desmond Joy. You know him?”

“Desmond? Sure.” Slicky stood up too.

“How forthcoming can I expect him to be, under the circumstances? Is he going to want to help me here?”

“If he trusts you? I don't see why not. But if he don't …”

“Then maybe it would help if he knew
you
trust me before I dropped in on him. Feel like calling ahead, letting him know I'll be coming by?”

“I can do that, yeah.” Slicky reached out, pounded Gunner's right fist with his own. “But only for one reason.”

“What's that?”

The smile on Slicky's face widened. “'Cause you didn't last no longer with Lindsey Waddell than
I
did.”

Gunner laughed at the painful truth in that, then showed his old friend to the door.

f o u r

D
ESPITE THE FACT HE
'
D TOLD
S
LICKY SOAMES OTHERWISE
, Gunner actually began his work on the Elbridge investigation with the police, not Desmond Joy.

He simply walked into the Beverly Hills Police Department's fancy new digs on Rexford Drive early Tuesday morning and told the desk sergeant out front he wanted to speak with the officer in charge of the C.E. Digga Jones suicide case. The sergeant hadn't given him much hope that his request would be granted—the uniform's reaction to the black man's credentials had been understated, to say the least—but the cop picked up the phone to call the homicide desk, and thirty seconds later, a plainclothes detective named Kevin Frick appeared.

A thin-lipped thirtyish redhead with freckles under both eyes and a crew cut you could use for a desktop in a pinch, Frick played the uninterested, I'm-too-busy-for-this-shit public servant for a while, then led Gunner back to a small conference room where, he said, they could talk in private.

“Actually, I'm not surprised to see somebody's on this,” Frick said as soon as the door had closed behind them, providing Gunner with his second mild surprise in less than twenty-four hours.

“Say again?”

“I said I'm not surprised you're on this. I'd've been related to the kid, I might've put somebody on it myself.”

“That right?”

“Not that it would change anything, necessarily. I still believe he did himself, don't get me wrong.” Frick followed Gunner's lead and sat down. “But I'm a curious kind of guy, and there were a few things about the kid's suicide a man could be curious about.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the number of people who might've wanted to see the victim dead, for one. He was a gangsta rapper with damn near as many enemies as he had fans, and his wife was a little on the jealous side. Meaning she once took a carving knife to him. And finally, if that's not enough, Elbridge was in business with Bume Webb. You know who Bume Webb is, don't you?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Apparently, the Digga's manager, a real smoothy named Joy, had been negotiating a deal for the kid with another label. A development that would've no doubt pissed Bume off to no end.”

“But Bume was in prison when the Digga died.”

“Right. He was. But I understand his connections are such that if he'd wanted the kid dealt with, he could've hired the work out, no sweat.”

Gunner let a moment pass, about to broach a sensitive subject, then said, “So how is it you didn't follow the homicide angle up, you had so many likely suspects?”

Frick never blinked. “Very simple. We didn't go homicide because all the physical evidence pointed to suicide. Our victim was found inside a locked hotel room, alone. Next to a suicide note written in his own handwriting. Holding the Glock nine that killed him, from which we were able to lift only one set of prints—his own. Do I need to go on, or are you getting the picture here?”

“The locked door was the only way in?”

“Right. Both the dead bolt and swing bar were engaged from the inside. Hotel security had to break the bar off the jamb to get in.”

“And they did that when?”

“Sunday morning around nine. Joy hadn't heard from the kid in over twelve hours, and he was worried about him, so he had them open up his room to check. We got the call out a few minutes after that.”

“Any chance the scene had been disturbed before you got there?”

“No. I don't think so. The security guy who let Joy in was with him the whole time, he said neither of them touched a thing.”

“Who was this?”

“You mean his name? I believe it was Crumley. Ray or Rod Crumley, something like that.”

“And Elbridge had been dead how long when they found him?”

“Almost ten hours. Coroner set time of death at eleven-thirty p.m. Saturday.”

“But the gunshot—”

“Nobody heard any gunshot. Round was fired through a bathroom towel wrapped around the Glock's muzzle.”

Gunner found his notebook, started scribbling some hasty notes. “So who was the last person to see the Digga alive?”

“His wife. Danee Elbridge. She visited him in his room shortly before nine Saturday night, stayed about thirty minutes.”

“She say what kind of mood he was in when she left?”

“She said he seemed fine. She, on the other hand, was a little pissed.”

“About?”

Frick grinned, said, “About the two women who'd apparently been in there to see her husband earlier.”

Gunner raised an eyebrow. “Two women? You saying he didn't just take that room to write, like his father says?”

“Not entirely.”

“She drop any names? Or didn't she know them?”

“She seemed to know at least one of 'em. I remember her referring to one by name. But who they were didn't really concern her as much as
what
they were. She said they were both ‘'ho's' of the highest order.”

“Professional, or amateur?”

“She didn't say, and we didn't ask. But since she knew one, we guessed the latter.”

“You ever talk to them?”

“Who, the ladies?” Frick shook his head. “Why would we? Both Mrs. Elbridge and Crumley agreed they'd come and gone long before the Digga died—what would we have wanted to talk to them about?”

Finding himself unable to answer that, Gunner shifted gears to ask the detective about the note he'd said Carlton Elbridge left behind.

“The note? There isn't much to say,” Frick said, “except it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Few of 'em ever do.”

“But it did make some mention of his intent to kill himself.”

Frick shrugged. “I guess.”

“You guess?”

“What I mean is, it all depends on your interpretation. Way my partner and I read it, the inference was there the kid was looking to off himself, yeah. But what do
we
know? We're just a couple of white-bread cops from Beverly Hills, and he was a gangsta rapper. The three of us barely spoke the same language.”

Gunner nodded, seeing his point. “How many people knew about this note's existence?”

“Its existence? Its existence was a matter of public record. It was its content we kept hush-hush. Until we closed the case out as a suicide, we withheld that info from everyone except the people who already had it, and they were instructed to keep it to themselves.”

“And who were those people?”

“Just Joy and Crumley. They both read the note when they discovered the body.”

Gunner was slightly annoyed. This alleged suicide note was something else Benny Elbridge had neglected to tell him about the day before.

“Any chance I could see this note now?”

“Not unless Ms. Trayburn, the kid's mother, wants to show it to you,” the detective said. “Once we ruled out homicide, it ceased to be evidence and became a personal effect, so it's been turned over to her.” He finally looked at his watch, a move Gunner had been expecting him to make for several minutes now. “Sorry to break this up, Gunner, but I'm afraid that's about all the time I can give you here. Duty calls, and all that.”

“Sure. No problem.” Gunner offered the cop his hand as they both stood up, and Frick took it, shook it warmly.

“You have any more questions later, give me a ring, I'll try to answer 'em for you if I can.”

“Will do. Thanks.” Gunner was looking at Frick like a yellow octopus he'd just seen crawl out of a UFO.

“Something wrong?”

“Not a thing. Just always throws me a little. Finding a cop I've never met so willing to treat me with a modicum of respect.”

Frick smiled and opened the conference room door. “Forget about it,” he said. “Far as I'm concerned, you're just another schmuck trying to keep his head above the slime, same as me. Bein' private doesn't change that.”

Amazing, Gunner thought. A real human being in Beverly Hills.

Gunner met with Desmond Joy at the Bad Rock Recording Studios in Hollywood shortly before noon, but only after a cute little sister in a bronze Lexus almost took the front end off his Cobra in the parking lot outside.

She was flying out of the driveway as Gunner was turning in, and she stood on her brakes just in time to avoid a collision that would have cut Gunner's sports car in half. The investigator gave her a hard look, trying to penetrate the black lenses of her sunglasses to reach her eyes, but he needn't have bothered; no sooner had the short-haired beauty brought the big GS400 to a halt than she was flooring the gas pedal again. The Lexus swerved around the Cobra, dropped off the edge of the curb, and squealed away north down Highland Avenue, doing what had to be fifty-plus in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone.

Gunner wondered what someone could have done to piss her off so completely.

Inside Bad Rock, he sat in a small reception area near the studio's front door and waited for Joy to join him, idly watching a recording session in progress on a closed-circuit TV. Joy had left word with Mickey earlier that he'd be here supervising a session featuring a kid named Dead-Ringa, and Gunner figured the stocky, bullet-headed young brother on the monitor overhead was probably him. Shouting into an oversized mic in an otherwise empty recording booth, a large pair of headphones draped across his gleaming head, the 'Ringa was dropping lyrics to a heavily sampled sound track that as near as Gunner could tell, told the story of a jealous girlfriend getting in the 'Ringa's face over a woman he'd just had sex with at a party. The rapper wasn't pleading innocent, exactly, but he
was
making the argument that he was only a man, and as such, there was no way he could be expected to decline a fine piece of ass if someone was going to offer it to him with no strings attached.

It was an argument Gunner had heard made many times before, though never with any positive effect.

Still, Joy's client emoted through two takes of the song before a disembodied voice called for a short break. Minutes later, a door opened to Gunner's left, and a middle-aged black man wearing white-on-white stuck his head into the room and said, “Come on back, Mr. Gunner.”

Desmond Joy shook Gunner's hand and introduced himself, then led the investigator down a narrow corridor to a large control room, where a black man Gunner assumed was a recording engineer sat alone before a massive bank of knobs and slide switches, a canned soft drink in one hand, half a sandwich in the other. The recording booth DeadRinga had occupied only moments before stood on the other side of a giant pane of glass, empty and silent.

“We're going to need a few minutes, Larry,” Joy said curtly.

The other man departed without comment. Joy closed the door behind him, then asked Gunner to take one of the three large swivel chairs in front of the console before taking one for himself. Between the white-on-white outfit and shoulder-length, dreadlocked hair, he looked like the kind of exaggerated character the comedian Eddie Murphy might have played on
Saturday Night Live
back in the early eighties.

“Well? What did you think?” Joy asked, his diction as pointedly perfect as a British magistrate's.

“About what?”

“About the 'Ringa. You were listening to those last couple of takes, weren't you?”

“Oh, that. Yeah, I guess I was.”

“So?”

“So the kid seems to be very talented.”

Joy laughed. “Shit. You don't have to jive me, brother. Only talent that boy's got is in his pants. He knows how to sample other people's shit, and rhyme ‘ill' with ‘chill.' That's it.”