When Last Seen Alive

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “Kid took two hits from a forty-five at close range,” Poole said before Gunner could ask, standing outside the observation window looking onto Sly’s room. “One was a through-and-through that entered his right shoulder, went clean out his back. The other shattered his left collarbone on its way to a kidney. Doctors had to go in and get that one soon as they brought ’im in.”

  “When was that?”

  “Just after eleven P.M.”

  “So what happened? Who the hell did this?”

  “Looks like a carjacker. Over on Exposition and Vermont, less than six blocks from his home.”

  “A carjacker?”

  Poole nodded. “Perp fled the scene on foot, he’s still at large.”

  “Anybody get a description?”

  “He was a big guy with a ski mask on his head. The one witness we’ve got thinks he was black, but he says he can’t be sure.”

  Gunner turned away for a moment, suppressing the need to curse aloud, then regarded Poole again and asked, “How bad is it? They expect him to make it?”

  The cop shrugged, said, “Doctors say his chances are a little better than fifty-fifty. He lost a shitload of blood, apparently.”

  Gunner nodded solemnly, fell silent for a moment. “You say the ’jacker left without his car? After shooting him twice?”

  “Yeah. Seems kind of ass-backwards, doesn’t it? But it happens.”

  “Cribbs’s car have a stick shift in it?”

  “Yeah. A ’ninety-four Olds Ciera with a manual five, gotta be the first I’ve ever seen. You know about these assholes and sticks, huh?”

  Gunner nodded again to say that he did. As a general rule, professional car thieves could drive anything with four wheels, but not every carjacker was so versatile. More than a few of them only knew automatics; they were lost behind the wheel of anything with a manual transmission. And time and again these idiots would make a move on a car, pop a cap in its driver if the driver complained, and only then see the five-speed stick rising up between the seats, rendering the car all but useless to them.

  “I guess by now you must be wondering why I asked you down here,” Poole said.

  “Come on, Lieutenant. Don’t even go there, all right?”

  “Take it easy, cowboy. I know you didn’t do this. But seein’ as how Cribbs has been under your employ for the last few days, I thought you might have an interest in his condition. Maybe I was wrong.”

  “Under my employ? Where’d you get that?”

  “From his mother. Remember? She’s been with him ever since they brought ’im in, she should be back from the cafeteria any minute now.” He fixed his eyes on Gunner’s own and left them there, waiting.

  “Okay. The kid’s been working for me, sure,” Gunner admitted.

  “On the Covington case?”

  “No. This is something entirely different.”

  “Any chance what he was doin’ for you had somethin’ to do with this?”

  “No. No way.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what he was doing, just for the record.”

  “Surveillance. A simple tail-and-shoot, nothing fancy, nothing dangerous.”

  “A tail-and-shoot on who?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “How the hell would I know? You and I aren’t psychically connected, right?”

  “Then you didn’t find any photographs in his car.”

  “No. We didn’t find any photographs in his car. And we didn’t find a camera, either, in case you were wonderin’. It was a tail-and-shoot on who, Gunner?”

  Gunner looked around, suddenly aware of all the hospital personnel moving busily about them, and waited to satisfy the cop’s curiosity until no one was within easy earshot. “A local politician with a jealous wife,” he said, his voice just above a whisper.

  “Yeah? Which one?”

  “I tell you what, Poole. The minute I find out that question’s relevant to this, I’ll answer it for you. Gladly. But right now, I don’t see a connection.”

  “Look, Gunner—”

  “Give me a break, Lieutenant. You want my client’s name, I have to give it to you. We both know that. But if the job I had Sly doing landed him in here, I’ll bring you the people responsible myself, inside of forty-eight hours. You’ve got my word on that.”

  Poole pondered the offer, said, “You don’t trust me to be discreet? Is that what I hear you sayin’?”

  “Don’t take it personal, Poole. But no, I don’t. Not in this case, anyway.”

  The cop took a long time to grin. “It’s that juicy, huh?”

  “Like a mango fresh off the tree, yeah.”

  Poole started to laugh, then his expression changed, his eyes catching sight of something at Gunner’s back. Gunner turned around, saw a diminutive black woman in blue sweatpants and a matching hooded pullover inching slowly toward them, a lidded Styrofoam cup in her left hand, a leather-bound Bible in her right. Her eyes were as red as her skin was dark and smooth.

  “Mrs. Cribbs,” Poole whispered to Gunner. “And maybe I should’ve warned you, but—”

  “Are you Mr. Gunner?” the black woman asked, stepping right up to glower at the investigator from point-blank range.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Gunner said, saving his apologies for later.

  “You tryin’ to get my child killed? Is that what you’re doing?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t think this—”

  “Sylvester told me he’s been workin’ for you. Takin’ pictures of some kind. You got no business usin’ a boy his age to do your dirty work, Mr. Gunner! That child ain’t but seventeen years old!”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know he is. But Sly—”

  “He should’ve been at home with me. Instead’ve out in the street, where all them crazy fools are!”

  Poole stepped forward to put a hand on her shoulder, said, “Come on now, Mrs. Cribbs. Don’t go gettin’ yourself all worked up again, huh?”

  “That’s my only baby in there! He’s all I’ve got! If that boy dies…” She burst into tears, offered no resistance as Poole gently guided her away, past a doctor and a pair of nurses who had been moving forward to silence her.

  Poole glanced over his shoulder, said, “You’ve got forty-eight hours, Gunner. We don’t have a shooter by then, I’m gonna need your client’s name.”

  Gunner nodded, sealing the deal, then stole one final look at Sly Cribbs’s body before making his way over to the elevators.

  So now he had two cases to work.

  With Sly Cribbs laid up in the hospital with only a fifty-fifty chance of pulling through, it seemed logical to pursue the Everson case first, but Gunner had a more personal and immediate interest in the Elroy Covington/Thomas Selmon affair. It had been that piece of business, after all, that had almost cost him his own life at about the same time that someone had been trying to put an end to Sly’s.

  But he’d given Poole his word he’d make Sly’s shooting a priority, and that was what he intended to do. He was far less ready to accept the blame for the kid’s fate than Sly’s mother was to brand him with it, but he had to admit the timing was curious: Sly leaves him a message saying he’s got the pictures Gunner hired him to take, then gets himself shot full of holes by a carjacker who jets without taking his car. And the photos Sly had been so excited about taking earlier were missing, along with the camera with which he had taken them.

  Still, the photographs in question hardly seemed the stuff homicides were made of, providing they had been of the nature Connie Everson had insisted they would be. Councilman Gil Everson and a lady of the night. Was that a tableau Everson would have killed to keep secret? Gunner was certain that it wasn’t—except for one small detail: the councilman’s bodyguard. A giant black hulk Gunner had watched follow Everson around for ten days before handing the councilman’s surveillance over to Sly Cribbs. Sly’s assailant had been a big man in a ski mask, Poole had said. Give Everson’s bodyguard such a mask, and he would have fit that description just fine.
/>
  It was a stretch, and a big one at that, but Gunner had no choice but to look into it. He had to find out what happened to Sly, and he had to do it inside of forty-eight hours.

  He started by paying Connie Everson a little visit.

  Ladera Heights wasn’t Inglewood, but Everson and her councilman husband could see Inglewood just fine from there. Their spacious home at the pinnacle of the Heights had a spectacular southbound view of Inglewood and the communities beyond, and Gunner figured the Eversons probably felt that was as close to actually residing in Inglewood as any fair-minded person could expect them to get.

  Ladera Heights was the little Bel Air of Los Angeles’s black upper-middle class, a hillside haven just west of Baldwin Hills and north of Inglewood that was populated by degreed professionals and public servants like Gil Everson who either lacked the wealth to escape the ’hood altogether or were content to exist only on the distant fringes of it. There were Benzes and Lexuses in every other driveway, and no home seemed complete if a pair of stone lions perched upon brick pedestals wasn’t guarding its front entrance.

  It wasn’t Beverly Hills, but as wannabes went, it wasn’t bad.

  Gunner parked the Cobra in the Eversons’ circular driveway, just behind a pearl white, late-model BMW with personalized license plates that read CON E E, and rang the bell at the front door. An Hispanic maid wearing an apron and everyday clothes appeared to greet him, no surprise there whatsoever, and looked him over like someone had sent the pool man to the house wearing the wrong uniform.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m here to see Mrs. Everson. The name’s Aaron Gunner.”

  “Señora Everson es no’ home. You wan’ to leave a message?”

  Her face was a mask of fear and guilt, and she couldn’t keep her feet still beneath her. Gunner thought it was nice to see there were still some people in the world who couldn’t tell a bald-faced lie in comfort.

  “Sure,” the investigator said. “I would like to leave a message. Tell Señora Everson that if she doesn’t bring her fine ass to this door in five minutes, she’s gonna be the top story in the Metro section of the Times tomorrow. You got that? Go give her that message now, por favor.”

  Everson’s maid blinked at him, engaged in the exhausting process of assimilating what she’d just been told, then went to go get her employer. The councilman’s wife didn’t take the whole five minutes Gunner had given her to appear, but it was close. And when she reached the door, she looked Gunner over like something she couldn’t trust to be real.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said, looking like something less than the cool, unflappable beauty Gunner had come to know and love. Her clothes seemed haphazardly thrown on, and her face was amazingly ordinary, devoid of all the makeup she generally used to such striking effect.

  “I would have called, but I had a feeling you wouldn’t have been in,” Gunner said.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Gunner, but my decision is final. I’ll pay you for time invested, but that’s all.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Everson studied him, confused. “You didn’t get my message?”

  “No. What message is that?”

  “I don’t want my husband followed anymore, Mr. Gunner. I want you to stop the surveillance you’re doing on him immediately.”

  “What?”

  “I mean it. I don’t want you following Gil around anymore. Just send me a bill for whatever I owe you, and I’ll mail you a check. Now, if you’ll excuse me …”

  She tried to close the door in his face, but he put a hand out to stop her, said, “Wait a minute. What the hell are you talking about? Twenty-four hours ago, you were riding my ass because I couldn’t follow your husband fast enough. Now you want me to stop?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “I don’t get it. Did you hire another investigator?”

  Everson shook her head emphatically, said, “No! I don’t need another investigator. Gil explained everything to me. I should have never hired you in the first place.”

  “But the photos you said you wanted. I thought—”

  “I don’t care about the photos, Mr. Gunner. You aren’t hearing what I’m saying. This was all a big mistake, there was never anything to take photos of.”

  “That’s bullshit. The photographs have already been taken, they were shot yesterday evening.”

  Everson’s surprise was beyond her abilities to disguise. “What?”

  “You heard me. The pictures you were so hot to get your hands on were taken yesterday, by a seventeen-year-old kid named Sly Cribbs. He’s been working the surveillance on your husband for the last two days, not me.”

  Everson started to speak, decided to hold her tongue instead.

  “He’s out at Daniel Freeman. Somebody shot him twice and left him in his car to die around eleven o’clock last night, over on Exposition and Vermont. Doctors say his chances of making it aren’t good.”

  Finally finding her voice, Everson said, “That’s terrible.”

  “Yeah. It is. Especially if you and I are responsible.”

  “Me? How could I—”

  “We put Sly up to taking those photos of your husband and his girlfriend, Mrs. Everson. You and me. And now he’s close to death, and the photos he took are missing. What the hell do you make of that?”

  Everson worked her mouth around nervously for a minute, then said, “I don’t make anything of it. Whatever happened to your friend had nothing to do with me.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’m very sure. And that’s all I have to say about the matter. I want you to leave, Mr. Gunner. Right now. Before Gil comes home and finds you here.”

  “Yeah? I think I’d like that. It’d save me a trip down to City Hall.”

  “You stay away from City Hall, you hear me? Leave my husband out of this!”

  She was snarling now, finally exhibiting the firebrand spirit she had always shown Gunner in the past.

  “My, my,” the investigator said. “Look who’s got her claws back.”

  Unamused, Everson said, “Get out of here, Mr. Gunner. I don’t ever want to see you again. If you ever come back here, or attempt to talk to my husband, for any reason whatsoever, I will sue you for every dime you could ever hope to make. Do you understand me?”

  For a long time, Gunner didn’t say anything. Then, just before she seemed ready to repeat the threat, he said, “Perfectly.”

  And finally, Everson closed the door on him.

  eight

  “YOU GOT A MESSAGE,” MICKEY SAID THE MINUTE GUNNER walked through the barber’s front door. He picked up a notepad nearby, read his own writing aloud. “Yolanda McCreary called. Said she talked to Lydia and Irene, and neither one of ’em knows anything about no ‘DOB.’ What’s a DOB?”

  “Never mind that,” Gunner said, eyeing the little brown puppy trotting in circles around Mickey’s feet. “What the hell is that?”

  “That’s your dog,” Mickey said.

  “Shit. I thought I told you guys I didn’t need a dog.”

  “I heard you say that, yeah, but I guess you weren’t too convincin’.”

  The little male Ridgeback scurried around to Gunner’s end of the floor, started sniffing playfully at the cuffs of his pants. He had paws the size of a grown man’s fists and a long patch of hair along his upper spine that ran counter to the rest of his short coat, creating the “ridge” his breed was known for. “So where’s Winnie? She’s gotta take him back.”

  “Winnie’s off for the day. He’s all yours.”

  Gunner reached down, picked the animal up with one hand. “Damn, Mickey,” he said.

  “I know. You got enough trouble just tryin’ to feed yourself.”

  It was Mickey’s late lunch hour, the closed sign was facing the window, and the two men were alone in the shop. Gunner lowered himself into a chair and patted the little dog’s head as his landlord cleaned some scissors and clipper blades in a big bowl of alcohol.

/>   “So? What’s a DOB?” Mickey asked again.

  It was all the excuse Gunner needed to unload. He told Mickey everything, from his near immolation in Jack Frerotte’s basement to the conversation he’d just had with Connie Everson. He didn’t much give a damn about the ethics of sharing his clients’ business with his landlord; what he needed most now was someone to bounce ideas off, to ask questions he might neglect to ask himself, and Mickey was always happy to fill that role.

  “So you think it was this DOB who hit you upside the head and set fire to Jack’s house?”

  “For lack of a better suspect, yeah. I do. Still doesn’t ring any bells for you, huh?”

  “No. I know a D-A-B—Darren Allen Baker, he’s one of Coretta Baker’s boys—but no D-O-Bs. You sure it was D-O-B?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re sure Selmon’s dead?”

  “I’m not sure about anything, really. But the body in the photo looked like Selmon’s, and there’s no other reason for Jack to have a photo like that except to prove that the man in it was dead.”

  “You told his sister that yet?”

  “More or less.”

  “And she’s still payin’ you?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other, now.”

  Mickey grunted and shook his head, vigorously drying a pair of scissors with a white towel.

  “You think I should just drop it, huh? After damn near being flambéed last night?” Gunner asked.

  “Let’s just say, if it wasn’t for that, I’d find somethin’ else to do with my time, I was you. I sure as hell wouldn’t bust a gut worryin’ about where Jack buried that asshole’s body, or how many pieces he cut it up in beforehand. That much I know.”

  “That’s kind of harsh, don’t you think?”

  “It was meant to be harsh. What that boy Selmon did was dead wrong, Gunner. He hurt a lot of people.”

  “So if he was kidnapped and murdered, no one should give a damn.”