When Last Seen Alive (28 page)

Sadly, if Everson had been expecting such arguments to save his seat on the Inglewood City Council, he was setting himself up for yet another huge disappointment.

Less than three hours before the stroke of midnight could officially bring Thursday to a close, a weary Aaron Gunner finally got around to checking his day’s mail. It was in this seemingly innocent manner that the second case he had been embroiled in now for the last eleven days—the Thomas Selmon missing persons case—took its own hard turn toward a conclusion.

Of course, Gunner had thought the case had already made that turn with the death of “Barber Jack” Frerotte two days ago, but that was before he’d slipped open the manila envelope he’d received Thursday morning from the Karen Fielder Literary Agency and read the book proposal inside. Or, perhaps more to the point, the tentative title its author had therein suggested for the book he intended to write:

The Devil’s Byline
The Thomas Selmon Story

“So?” Yolanda McCreary asked when Gunner brought the title to her attention, the two of them sitting on Gunner’s bed with a pile of partially opened mail and Dillett, who lay fast asleep in the crook of McCreary’s lap. “Why is that important?”

“Because Jack Frerotte’s not the one who came up with that title,” Gunner said. “Your brother is.”

“My brother?”

“His old pal Martin Keene told me that was the title Tommy had for the book when he was trying to recruit Keene to co-author it: ‘The Devil’s Byline.’ ”

“So …”

“So how the hell could Jack have known that? The
precise title
your brother had in mind for a book he hadn’t even written yet?”

McCreary shook her head, unable to answer the question.

“It’s possible Jack got it from your brother before he actually killed him, sure, but …” He shook his own head. “I can’t see it. How would the subject have even come up between them?”

“Maybe this isn’t Jack’s proposal,” McCreary suggested. “Maybe it’s Tommy’s. Maybe this is something Jack stole from my brother before he … before Tommy was killed.”

“That would fit, except for a couple of things,” Gunner said. “No one’s ever found a shred of evidence to indicate Tommy wrote a word about this book before he died. Not a word. No notes, no outlines—not even an instrument he could have been using to write the book
with.
Like a typewriter, or a computer …”

“And?”

“And he never made a physical submission of any kind to anyone, either. His only attempt to sell the book that we know of was the one phone call he made to a New York agent from his motel room the night he disappeared. An agent, by the way, different from Ms. Fielder here. If Tommy had already written a proposal, why would he have bothered making phone calls, when he could have just started mailing proposals out instead?”

“I don’t know,” McCreary said.

“I tell you what. Let’s you and I read this thing, see what it sounds like,” Gunner said, before starting to read the proposal out loud, McCreary scanning the pages over his shoulder as he did so.

Eight minutes later, they were finished. And afterward, each was equally convinced that, whoever had written this outline for “The Devil’s Byline,” he had known “The Thomas Selmon Story” damn near as well as Selmon had himself.

nineteen

G
UNNER HAD NEVER LEARNED ANYTHING BY GOING THROUGH
someone’s trash, so this was a first.

Garbology, as the study of garbage was scientifically known, was supposed to be the mainstay of the private investigator’s craft, a simple and cost-effective method of collecting information about people, but all Gunner had ever gleaned from the practice was how grossly some individuals liked to feed themselves, and to what level of debt they could allow themselves to plummet. It was a great way to ruin good clothing and attach foul smells to yourself for hours on end, but beyond that, as far as Gunner was concerned, trash digging was a fairly pointless exercise.

And yet, Friday morning at eight, Gunner dug a hand through some of Martin Keene’s garbage anyway, as Friday was collection day in Silver Lake and the bins were all sitting right there on the street, openly inviting the investigator’s scrutiny. Like his neighbors, Keene had been provided with three separate containers by the city of Los Angeles, all of them pretty much identical. Narrow, three-foot-tall plastic bins on wheels, the green one was for yard trimmings, the black for miscellaneous, and the blue was for recyclables, this last divided into two parts: paper goods to the left; plastic, glass, and aluminum to the right.

Gunner started with the paper side of the blue bin, never had to open any of the others.

About fifteen minutes later, he rang Keene’s bell, and this time Martin Keene himself came to the door, looking very much like he’d been on his way out to play yet another round of golf.

“Mr. Gunner,” Keene said, smiling. Covering it well if the sight of the black man unnerved him in any way.

“Hope you don’t mind that I came by so early,” Gunner said. “But I wanted to make sure I’d catch you at home. Is this a bad time?”

“For me? Not at all. I have a tennis game at ten, but that’s over an hour away. Come in, please.”

Gunner stepped into the cool air of the foyer, declined his host’s offer of a drink. When Keene asked him where he would prefer to sit down, inside or out, Gunner chose the former, not wanting either of them to be distracted this morning by the beauty of the lake beyond Keene’s veranda. They settled down instead in the house’s dark living room, Keene sinking into the cushions of an off-white couch, Gunner doing likewise in a matching, equally comfortable chair. If Mrs. Keene was home, she was either still asleep, or maintaining the silence of a church mouse somewhere out of Gunner’s view.

“Well?” Keene asked, still smiling. “How can I help you today?”

“You can tell me where Thomas Selmon is,” Gunner said.

Keene almost laughed. “What?”

“I know we’re all supposed to think he’s dead, but he’s not. He’s alive, and I think you’re hiding him somewhere.”

“And why would I want to do that?”

“To get a piece of the book he’s writing, I imagine. You remember the one: ‘The Devil’s Byline, the Thomas Selmon Story’? Either that, or you’re actually helping him write it, like he asked you to earlier.”

Keene’s smile did a slow, painful fade. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Gunner.”

“Sure you do. But I’ll run it down for you anyway, in case he’s only told you half the story. Selmon came here last October looking for a co-author to lend the big money autobiography he wanted to write some credibility, but you turned him down. So he ended up cutting a deal with someone else, a man named Jack Frerotte.”

“I don’t know anybody named Jack Frerotte.”

“No, you probably don’t. But then, neither did Selmon. Frerotte had been hired by the Defenders of the Bloodline to assassinate Selmon after one of them recognized him out at his Hollywood motel, only Frerotte never did the job. He just faked it, instead. The coroner’s office will be announcing any day now that the body Jack buried out in the Angeles National Forest last October, strictly for the benefit of the Defenders, is that of someone other than Thomas Selmon.”

“You’re not making any sense, Mr. Gunner,” Keene said.

“Hold on. This is where the tale gets interesting. Either because he got the idea on his own, or because Selmon gave it to him in the course of begging for his life, Frerotte let Selmon live in exchange for a big slice of Selmon’s book. He hid Selmon away in his basement to write and waited for him to produce something Jack could sell to New York. And by mid-December, Selmon had: a six-page proposal that Jack submitted to an agent named Karen Fielder, who’s been watching her mailbox for the finished manuscript ever since.”

“Look. What the hell has any of this got to do with
me?”
Keene demanded.

“Nothing. Not a thing,” Gunner admitted.

“Then why the hell are you here?”

“Because I inadvertently spooked Selmon out of hiding two Wednesdays ago, and it’s my guess he landed here. He would’ve had nowhere else to go, Mr. Keene.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I was having a look around Jack’s basement, and he blindsided me. Burned the house down to cover his tracks, and left me inside to go up with it. I thought it had been a Defender, but I was wrong. I realize that now.”

“I haven’t seen Tommy Selmon since last October. That was true when we spoke last week, and it’s still true today!”

“Really? Then how do you explain this?” Gunner eased a folded sheet of white paper from his jacket pocket, opened it up, and began to read the printed text on its face: “ ‘The pressure Sandra was exerting against me daily had finally become too intense to ignore. Her demands for a feature story “with teeth” would not go away, so that it eventually became clear to me I was going to have to come through with something, anything, to appease her, and quickly. Martin had suggested months ago that I do a story about Chicago’s inner-city drug culture, thinking because I was black, I could write such a story with real substance, since I, unlike my white contemporaries, could just go down there and interview every crackhead in sight without fear of repercussions. Naturally, I kept putting that idea off.’” Gunner stopped reading, looked up to face Keene again. “I don’t have to tell you what this is, do I?”

Keene put his hand out, his face having suddenly grown ashen, and said, “Let me see that.”

He looked the printed page over carefully, reading and rereading its contents in silence, and Gunner just let him, knowing he’d ask the obvious question sooner or later.

“Where did you get this?”

“Outside. In your trash,” Gunner said.

Real or fabricated, Keene’s incredulity looked genuine. “What?”

“Looked like just the first hundred or so pages of the manuscript, but there could’ve been more. I would’ve had to dump the whole bin out in the street to know for sure.”

“You’re lying. What you’re saying is
impossible!”

“No, Martin,” Pat Keene said. “It isn’t.”

Her voice had been almost too hushed for either man to hear. She had entered the room from the back of the house without making a sound of warning, and now stood at its outer perimeter stock still, looking down upon them with sad, lifeless eyes.

“I should have thrown it away last week. Or burned it,” she said. “But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I don’t know why.”

Keene sat frozen on the couch, waited a long time before speaking. “Pat. What are you saying?”

“I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to come back. After everything he’d done to you. To us.” A tear rolled slowly down her left cheek. “You weren’t home. I tried to make him leave, but he wouldn’t go. He pushed past me into the house and … and sat down. Right there where you’re sitting now. He told me he wasn’t going anywhere until he talked to you. So …”

Keene stood up, said, “Stop. Don’t say another word. It isn’t—”

She shook her head, determined to go on before she lost the nerve. “I went and got your gun out of the bedroom drawer. I pointed it at him, trying to scare him away, but he … he just laughed at me. He
laughed!”

“Pat! Please!” Keene pleaded, going to her now.

But she put a hand out to keep him away, sobbing uncontrollably, and said, “He was an evil man! He had no
right …
to come here like that. To force his way back into our lives after all we’d done to put what happened in Chicago behind us!”

“Pat …”

“Where is he now, Mrs. Keene?” Gunner asked, before her husband could inevitably silence her.

“Don’t answer that,” Keene said firmly, taking his wife into his arms, stroking her brow with his right hand lovingly. “Don’t say another word until we talk to Steven.”

“But I
want
to answer it,” Pat Keene said, the words coming out as a long, heavy sigh. “Please, Martin. I have to tell him.” She turned her eyes up to him, showing him the weight she’d been carrying around for over a week without his knowledge. “I can’t live with this another minute.”

Poor Keene, Gunner thought. His position was completely untenable. She was asking him to step aside while she cut her own throat, to choose between protecting her and easing her pain. No-win propositions didn’t come any worse than that.

When Keene finally nodded his head and looked away, freeing her to do as she wished, Gunner had to wonder if it wasn’t the bravest thing he’d ever seen a man do for the sake of the woman he loved.