All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (9 page)

Naturally, Gunner didn't. He'd spent all of the night before at home, soaking in a hot tub while listening to Donald Byrd, then watching an old Jim Brown movie—
Tick … Tick … Tick …
—on cable from his bed. Alone, save for his faithful dog, Dillett. Who wasn't at all the kind of company he would have preferred.

“I don't need wits,” Gunner said angrily. “What the hell do I need with wits when I don't have a motive?”

“Maybe this tape you've been talkin' about is your motive.”

“What?”

“What my partner's saying is that people try to run that game on us all the time,” Chin said. “Volunteering theories about the hows and whys of a homicide, acting like they're talking about some third-party perp, when they're really only talking about themselves.”

“You've gotta be kidding.”

“Do we look like we're kidding?” La Porte asked.

“For Chrissake. I left a message on Crumley's answering machine this morning, remember? What do you think, I killed him without leaving a clue to my identity, then called to leave my name and number on his machine the next day just to throw you geniuses off the scent?”

“We think there's some chance of that, yeah. However remote. Clever guy like you just might've thought that'd make one hell of an argument for your innocence after the fact.”

“I'm neither that smart nor that stupid, La Porte.”

“Maybe. But Pete and I won't know for sure until we get you in an interview room, see how you do on an IQ test, will we?”

“You mean the same one you flunked to get your badges?”

“Never mind the IQ test,” Chin said, angrily ripping the handcuffs from his belt. “You've just
proven
you're an idiot.”

Gunner threw his hands up to ward the Korean off, said, “Okay, okay! That was uncalled for, my bad.” He looked at La Porte. “But fucking with me is just gonna be a waste of your time. Surely you know that.”

La Porte's silence said that he did, but neither he nor his partner could bring themselves to admit it.

Chin, his face hard enough to break, said, “I'll tell you what we know, Gunner—that anything's possible. Okay, so maybe we've got no reason to suspect you for this right now. But that could change. In a heartbeat.”

“Especially if you can't prove where you were at the time our homicide took place,” La Porte added. “Which, judging by your lack of response to my question earlier, we have to assume you can't.”

The two detectives waited as one for Gunner to say differently, but the black man just stared back at them instead. There was nothing else he could do.

“You're free to go,” La Porte said. “We need to talk to you again, we'll give you a call.”

He was lucky to be getting off so easy, all things considered, but the dismissal rankled Gunner all the same. “Thanks. You guys are two of the good ones,” he said.

On his way out the door, he glanced at Crumley's bedroom one last time, saw something on the floor that made him stop and stare. When La Porte and Chin stepped forward to follow his gaze, he said, “Maybe one of you officers should make a note of that, huh?”

“What?” Chin asked, visibly agitated.

“Looks like all the tapes there are prerecorded. I don't see any blanks.”

Before either man could ask him what the hell that suggested, he left them to figure it out on their own.

That night, Gunner met his cousin Del Curry at the Deuce, and together, excluding Lilly and Pharaoh Doubleday, the two men made up all of a third of the bar's entire crowd. While Gunner and Del sat at one end of the bar keeping Lilly company, Howard Gaines and Beetle Edmunds played dominoes at the other, a nephew of Howard's Gunner had only met once before—he believed the kid's name was Justin something or other—watching at his uncle's side. Pharaoh, meanwhile, was flitting back and forth between the bar and the Deuce's only occupied table, servicing the needs of a good-looking black woman no one claimed to know or recognize.

“There. She's doin' it again,” Lilly said, referring to the stranger.

“You're nuts,” Gunner said.

Del looked over his own left shoulder, discretion be damned, and said, “She's right, Aaron. The lady
is
lookin' at you.”

Gunner raised his eyes to the mirror behind Lilly's bar, examined the woman's reflection in the glass just as his cousin could have, had he possessed the smarts. She was an unspectacular beauty in her early thirties, light-skinned and compact in both height and general shape; some men would never look twice at her, but many, like Gunner, would look once and have a hard time turning away. She was neither dressed for trouble nor posed in any way that might invite it—but she had a natural, unforced sex appeal that filled the room like a sound wave.

And yes, she did appear to be returning Gunner's gaze with something more significant than a smidgen of interest.

“Well?” Del said.

“Well, nothing. Only eight people in the whole house, who else is she gonna look at, you?”

“It's more than that, brother.”

“So it's more than that. I'm not interested.” Gunner picked up his glass, eased some more Turkey down his throat.

“He's bein' a good boy tonight,” Lilly said to Del, chuckling and winking simultaneously. “But it ain't gonna last.”

“How much do you wanna bet?”

“Shit. That lady of yours is what? Two thousand miles away? And you ain't seen her in how many months?”

“Weeks, Lilly. It's only been six weeks.”

“Yeah, but they been six loooong-ass weeks, haven't they?” The big bartender laughed heartily, and Del joined right in with her.

Nobody believed Gunner could make it work, this long-distance love affair he and Yolanda McCreary had been engaged in now for going on six months. Yolanda lived in Chicago, and the two only saw each other when their schedules and finances permitted, which so far meant about every five weeks. It would have been a difficult arrangement to pull off under the best of circumstances, but further complicating matters was the fact that Yolanda was a former client; Gunner really had no business seeing her at all.

Yet here they were, the PI and the LAN administrator, falling harder for each other every day.

They spoke on the phone nightly, and traded amorous e-mail messages laced with sexual innuendo on their computers, and on those weekends they actually managed to see each other—either Gunner flying east to Chicago, or Yolanda jetting west to L.A.—they came together like interlocking puzzle pieces, as physically and emotionally inseparable as a mother and her unborn child. What their sex together lacked in regularity, it more than made up for in intensity, and they had found no subject yet they could not discuss openly and honestly.

In short, despite the distance between them, theirs seemed a relationship teeming with promise.

Unfortunately, that distance did exist, and with it came pressures that did nothing but work against them, not the least of which were loneliness and sexual deprivation. Two things Gunner was having a harder time dealing with than Yolanda ever would.

And didn't both Lilly and Del know it.

“Never mind the lady,” Gunner said, pushing his empty glass across the counter for Lilly to see and refill. “We were talking about gangsta rap, remember?”

“You were talkin' about it. I wasn't,” Lilly said.

“Sure you were. You said it wasn't music.”

“It ain't. It's just a lotta noise and bad language. ‘Muthafucka' this, and ‘muthafucka' that, boom-boom-boom.” With this last, the big woman was trying to imitate a heavy bass line, lowering her voice to a deep rumble that nearly shook the stacked glasses behind her off their shelves.

“It isn't all like that, Lilly,” Del said.

“All that shit I ever heard is. You call that music?”

“But if it's socially relevant …” Gunner started to say, continuing to play devil's advocate.

“Socially relevant? What the hell is socially relevant ‘bout singin' songs about bitches and ‘ho's, and niggas can't do nothin' but smoke crack and kill each other? How the hell is that socially relevant?”

“If it's based on real-world observations, it's as relevant as any other form of art. At least, that's what some people will tell you. They'll say, just because the kids use the language of the street—”

“Damn right they use the language of the street,” Del said. “You play some of that mess too close to a dry weed, you're likely to start a brush fire.”

“It ain't good for children to be listenin' to all that shit, day after day after day,” Lilly said. “That don't do nothin' but mess with their minds.”

“And you see what it does to the rappers themselves,” Del added. “Another one's getting shot or killed every day. Take that boy Kaleel. Look what happened to him.”

Kaleel Takheem was a West Coast rapper who'd been murdered in the main parking lot at Disneyland several months earlier. The news stories Gunner had read said he'd been leaving the park with his manager when a lone assailant—described by witnesses as a black man in his early twenties, driving a late-model white Honda Accord—perforated the rapper's car with automatic gunfire, then sped off. Takheem's manager had managed to survive the attack, but the rapper himself was a DOA before the first 911 call could ever be made.

“They find his shooter yet?” Gunner asked, not having heard anything about an arrest in the case.

Del shook his head. “Hell no. And I bet they never will. Whoever killed that boy is going to get whacked himself before the cops ever come close to finding him. You watch.”

“It's one of them vicious circles,” Lilly said, splashing bourbon all over the bar as she refilled Gunner's glass. “East Coast child kills a West Coast child, some other West Coast child kills him. And so on and so forth.”

“And here you are now, jumping right in the middle of it all,” Del said to Gunner. “Just asking to catch a bullet by mistake.”

“Or maybe not by mistake,” Lilly said.

Gunner snorted to show them how seriously he was taking the threat. “Come on. It's not like that.”

“Yeah, it is. You're stickin' your nose into the Digga's murder, ain't you? Leavin' your business card all over town so the fools who killed 'im will know where to find you when they decide to shut you up?”

“Nobody said the Digga was murdered yet, Lilly.”

“Nobody has to say it. He worked for Bume, didn't he?”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“What's it got to do with anything? Lord have mercy, Gunner, Bume is a damn gangster, that's what! And I don't mean the kind that makes records. If he ain't out killin' somebody, somebody else is out tryin' to kill him.”

“Says who?”

“Says me. You ever known me to be wrong about somethin'?”

She only asked the question because she knew what his honest answer had to be—no—but all Gunner said was, “You mean today?”

Del started to laugh, but had to reconsider when Lilly caught him in the act. “This ain't funny, fool,” she said. “People who get too close to that big ugly nigga always end up dead. And it ain't never 'cause they wanted to kill themselves.”

She didn't know it, but all Lilly was doing was building a case for something Gunner was fast becoming certain of on his own. Because Kevin Frick of the Beverly Hills Police Department had returned his call late that afternoon to report that at no time had either he or his partner removed any surveillance tapes from the grounds of the Beverly Hills Westmore Hotel.

“Somebody said we did?” Frick had asked, clearly annoyed.

“Bob Zemic. The Westmore's security chief. He said the tape recorded on Elbridge's floor between four and eight o'clock the Saturday he died was turned over to you by his man Ray Crumley, and that you returned it to Crumley roughly seventy-two hours later.”

“Sorry. Mr. Zemic's mistaken. We neither asked for any tapes nor received any, from Crumley or anyone else.”

“That's what I thought you'd say.”

“It doesn't make any sense. Why would we only take one tape, and the wrong one at that?”

“I couldn't figure that out either. Only thing I could guess was that Crumley was lying.”

“Either him or Zemic, yeah.”

“I wouldn't blame Zemic. Unless I'm reading him wrong, he was only telling me what Crumley had told him.”

“In that case, it sounds like Lloyd and I should have a little talk with Mr. Crumley.”

“Not unless you believe in séances, you won't. Crumley's dead. Somebody hollowed out his skull at his apartment late last night, left his brains all over the furniture.”

After Gunner recounted what little he knew about Crumley's murder, Frick grew silent for a moment, then asked, “You're thinking Crumley took this tape himself to copy it, then somebody killed him to get the copy, is that it?”

“Evidence at the scene certainly seemed to support robbery as the motive, and nothing larger than a pack of cigarettes appeared to have been taken. Add to that the lack of blank tapes at the scene—”

“Come on. That's a nonissue. Lots of people don't own a blank tape, they only use their VCRs for playback.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Besides. You say Crumley returned the tape. If the reason he took it in the first place was to copy it, he would've needed two machines, right? And you said he only had one.”

“One was all we found, yeah. But that doesn't mean—”

“Come on, Gunner. You're grasping at straws here. Even if we assume Crumley had a way of copying it, that surveillance video as you describe it shouldn't have been worth
stealing
, let alone killing a man over. So it shows somebody entering Elbridge's room four hours before he died, so what? What's that supposed to prove?”