When Last Seen Alive

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  So he rubbed his new puppy’s head on his way out the door and left, fully intending to do what Poole had just strongly suggested he do: get on with the business of determining what connection, if any, his work for Connie Everson could have possibly had to the near execution of a seventeen-year-old boy.

  After, that is, he made one little stop to visit an old friend.

  He was heavily sedated and strapped down to his bed like a madman in a psycho ward, but Barber Jack Frerotte was conscious when Gunner walked into his room at Martin Luther King Memorial Hospital.

  His left arm was bound to his torso in a heavy elastic sling, and a neck brace was fastened around his massive throat, making it all but impossible for him to turn his head. Gunner walked around to the foot of his bed where Frerotte couldn’t miss seeing him and showed him a warm smile.

  “How’re you feeling, Jack?” he asked.

  Frerotte blinked his eyes several times, not sure he could believe what he was seeing, and tried to make his mouth work. It was a long, arduous process.

  “You’re a dead man,” he finally said, his voice a barely audible expulsion of air.

  “Yeah. I knew you’d say that,” Gunner said. “But that’s okay. A little resentment’s only natural, I guess.”

  Frerotte tried to tell him to get out, didn’t do a very good job of it. Gunner moved closer, up on the left side of the bed near the big man’s head, and said, “But look. I can’t stay long, so I’d better get to the point. I want the name of the Defender of the Bloodline who hired you to kill Thomas Selmon.”

  Frerotte attempted to turn his head toward him, nearly blacked out when his injured vertebrae rebelled against the move.

  “Take it easy, brother,” Gunner told him. “It’s just you and me in here. No one has to know we had this little talk but us.”

  Frerotte felt around with his right hand, trying to find the electronic control pad dangling from its cord on the bed’s railing on that side, but Gunner took it, moved it out of his reach. “I saw the photograph, Jack. The one you took of Selmon’s body just before you buried it. It was taped to the bottom of the drawer in that rolltop desk in your dining room, the same drawer you keep your ledger book in.”

  “You been in my house?” the big man managed to rasp. He almost looked more frightened than anything else.

  “Yeah. I don’t suppose you’ve heard it burned down.”

  Frerotte’s lips moved, but he couldn’t speak.

  “I was down in the basement, looking over all those articles you had on the Selmon newspaper scandal, when somebody hit me from behind and set fire to the place. I’m afraid the crib’s a total loss, partner.”

  The big man’s eyes rolled around in his head, a sure sign of incredulity. “I don’t …”

  “Believe it. It’s true.” Gunner waited for a nurse passing by the open door of Frerotte’s room to disappear down the hall, then went on. “I don’t know who your friend with the match was, but I think I can guess. And I’ll bet you can, too.”

  Frerotte’s eyes were blinking back tears now. He wanted nothing more than to rise from the bed and disembowel Gunner with his bare hands, but all he could do was lie there playing captive audience, instead. It had to be frustrating as hell.

  “It’s all right there in your ledger book,” Gunner said. “Five grand from the DOB. Two to snatch Selmon, and three to murder him afterward. The photograph was your way of proving you’d done both.”

  Frerotte didn’t say anything, just went right on blinking at the white wall in front of him.

  “Now, you can lie there playing deaf, dumb, and blind if you want. That’s your prerogative. But if I were you, I’d talk to me. While you still have the chance.”

  “I ain’t … tellin’ you shit,” Frerotte said.

  “Come on, Jack. I’m giving you a chance to do yourself some good here. I’m gonna find Selmon’s body, and the man who put you up to killing him, with or without your help, but if you force me to do it without, the law’s gonna come down on you like a solid-gold Cadillac.”

  “Fuck you, Gunner.” The big man tried to call for a nurse, but he couldn’t make his broken voice reach that far.

  “Cooperation with the authorities always looks good to a jury, Jack. You sure that’s your final answer?”

  Frerotte’s eyes rolled toward him. “You … heard me, mother … fucker!”

  Gunner smiled, stepped back away from the bed. “Okay, champ. If that’s your call, that’s your call. But let me leave you with a little something to think about, huh? Your DOB homeboy tried to light me up like a fireplace log two nights ago, and I’m not happy about it. Anybody who gets in the way of my returning the favor is going to get hurt, and you just did.

  “So take your time getting well. Kick it in here as long as you can. Because there’s not gonna be anything waiting for you when you get out but a cellmate in San Quentin who’s just itchin’ to see what your fat ass looks like bent over at the waist. I promise you that.”

  He flipped Frerotte’s control pad onto his lap and walked out.

  “Councilman Everson’s office,” a matronly voice said after the phone had rung in Gunner’s ear three times.

  “I’d like to speak to the councilman, please. Is he in?”

  “No, sir, I’m afraid he isn’t. He’s in Sacramento today. May I take a message for him?”

  “Actually, it’s the councilman’s bodyguard I really need to speak with. Rafe …”

  “Rafe Sweeney?”

  “That’s it. Would he be around, by any chance?”

  “No. He’s in Sacramento, too, Mr ….”

  “Gunner. Aaron Gunner. When do you expect Mr. Sweeney to return?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to—”

  “I don’t need an exact time. I just need to know the day of the week. Will he be gone the entire weekend, or …?”

  “Mr. Sweeney and Councilman Everson should be back in their offices on Monday, Mr. Gunner. If you’d like to leave a message on Mr. Sweeney’s voice mail, I’d be happy to connect you.”

  “I’d appreciate that very much. Thank you.”

  Everson’s secretary transferred his call, and a taped greeting from Rafe Sweeney played on the line. Gunner doubted he’d ever heard a more succinct one.

  “This is Rafe Sweeney. Leave a message, and I’ll call you back,” it said.

  But Gunner declined the offer, just hung up the pay phone instead. He’d heard what he wanted to hear: Sweeney did sound like a black man.

  And if Poole would give him just a few more days to work with, Gunner would find out Monday if the bodyguard was the right one.

  Sometimes, what a person didn’t say was far more revealing than what they did.

  And Jack Frerotte had never said he didn’t know who the hell the Defenders of the Bloodline were. In fact, he hadn’t denied a thing. Which wasn’t exactly proof that all of the allegations Gunner had made in Frerotte’s hospital room less than thirty minutes ago were on the money, but it certainly seemed to reinforce the idea.

  Unfortunately, knowing the Defenders had hired Frerotte to murder Thomas Selmon and finding the actual Defender he’d been dealing with—or any Defender, for that matter—were two different things. The flyer Gunner had just picked off of the community announcements bulletin board over at Will Rogers Park, where Little Pete Thorogood had said Thursday night Gunner could find one, was no help in actually identifying the mysterious group at all. It was an ideological outcry, and little more, printed in plain block letters on yellow paper:

  This is to Serve Notice

  To the serpents among us. The liars and sinners in blackface who work in legion with the white Devil to shame our proud people. The defenders of the bloodline will purge you from the house of Africa until none of you remain. Some have already met the sword of righteousness. Many more will follow. Your hour is close at hand. Allah, the most merciful, is on our side.

  That was it. Short, spare, and completely uninformative. Gunne
r couldn’t decide which told him less: the text or the physical flyer itself. It could have been printed anywhere by anybody. But he held onto it nonetheless, afraid to discard anything that could prove useful to him later.

  With Rafe Sweeney and Gil Everson out of town until Monday, he had nothing else to do with his time but pursue the Thomas Selmon disappearance case again, once a single piece of Everson business had been dealt with. He left Will Rogers Park for a messenger service office in El Se-gundo, and sent the negatives and twenty-two of the last twenty-three photographs he had of Everson and his girlfriend to the councilman’s office as promised, keeping the most potentially damaging print of the set for his own protection. Everson had said he’d be waiting with bated breath for the photos to arrive at his office today, and he could do that just as easily from Sacramento as anywhere else. Gunner wasn’t so sure turning the photographs over to him was the smartest thing to do, but he’d struck a deal with Everson and the councilman had held up his end of it, as fruitless as this gesture had proven to be. Gunner had to follow suit now, or risk having word get out that he was a welsher, a reputation few private investigators could ever overcome.

  From the messenger service office, Gunner drove out to the Central Library downtown. The 105 Freeway, still relatively undiscovered at only two years of age, was its usual anomalous self—a Los Angeles thoroughfare that wasn’t clogged with traffic—but reality kicked back in as soon as he made the exchange to the northbound Harbor. The drive from there, even in the open-air Cobra, was an uninspiring crawl through an automotive morass. Only the sun on the investigator’s face kept him from going slightly insane.

  At the library, Gunner spent a good hour and seven dollars in change at a copying machine, copying every newspaper and magazine article he was able to find chronicling the Thomas Selmon/Chicago Press Examiner Pulitzer Prize scandal. By the time he was through, he had everything he’d seen down in Jack Frerotte’s basement, and more. He sat down to skim through the copies briefly, underlining the names of all the story’s principal players, then retreated to his office at Mickey’s.

  His landlord was sitting in one of his own waiting chairs, petting Gunner’s salivating dog, when the investigator walked in. Winnie Phifer was etching a part into a teenage boy’s hair with her clippers, being as meticulous about it as a safecracker trying to evade an alarm. Gunner tried to get past the trio without conversation, figuring he could ask Mickey for messages later, but it didn’t happen.

  “When you gonna give that dog a name?” Winnie demanded. She stopped what she was doing and turned her clippers off to face him.

  “A name? When I get around to it,” Gunner said.

  “Dog can’t be trained, it don’t have a name. And it’s goin’ on eleven weeks old. You gonna give it a name, or am I?”

  Gunner didn’t feel like being bothered, but this last gave him reason to pause. Winnie’s two grown children were named Beaumont and Celestine, and she had personally named them both; what kind of moniker the woman would come up with for a dog, he didn’t want to know.

  He looked at the muscular little Ridgeback in Mickey’s arms for a minute, became suddenly inspired. “Dillett. His name is Dillett,” Gunner said.

  “Dillett?” Winnie squinched her nose up. “What the hell kind’a name is Dillett?”

  “He’s a bodybuilder. Paul Dillett, a Canadian brother. Makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like a little girl.”

  “You must be kiddin’,” Mickey said.

  “No. The brother’s huge. Just like that dog’s gonna be, I can find a way to keep feeding him.”

  “Dillett,” Winnie said again, trying to warm up to the idea. She looked over at the puppy, said in her best mommy-to-baby voice, “That what you wanna be called, boy? You wanna be called Dillett? Huh?”

  The dog sat up in Mickey’s lap, started yapping and slobbering excitedly in her direction.

  “Guess that settles that,” Mickey said.

  “Can I go now?” Gunner asked.

  “Go ahead,” Winnie said, turning her clippers back on. She’d said it like her permission had really been necessary.

  Gunner went back to his desk, hit the power switch on the new $3000 IBM computer sitting there. He’d been getting by without a computer just fine up to now, but he decided two weeks ago to stop pressing his luck. As rapidly as the rest of the world was incorporating the machines into their everyday lives, both professional and personal, he knew he couldn’t afford to fall any further behind the learning curve than he already was. Information was at the heart of Gunner’s business, after all, and the way information was both distributed and assimilated today was via Pentium processors, 2-gig hard drives, and modems that could move data across normal telephone lines at 33.6 thousand bytes-per-second.

  At least, that was how the salesman who sold Gunner the machine had put it.

  While the computer booted up, Gunner reached for the phone and paged Little Pete. Pete was a hard man to track down, as mobile businessmen always were, but if you were privy to his pager number, you could usually reach him inside of an hour. Gunner couldn’t remember exactly when Pete had honored him with it, but he was glad to have the number now. Next, Gunner called Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, asked the nurse who answered the phone in the ICU if Sly Cribbs was receiving visitors yet. She said yes, but only from immediate members of his family. Gunner thanked her and hung up, thinking he’d call Charlotte Cribbs later, see if she’d care to take him along the next time she checked in on her son.

  Finally, Gunner turned to the black-skinned machine before him and powered his way onto the Internet.

  What he knew about the so-called Information Highway wouldn’t have filled the voice bubble in a comic strip, but that wasn’t much less than what he cared to know. After two weeks behind a keyboard, he was able to use search engines competently and could send e-mail to anyone with an address, and that probably made him as dangerous as he would ever need to be. In fact, the website he was tapping into now—the Law Professional’s National Resource Center—was where he expected to do all but a fraction of his future “net-surfing.”

  Originating from a server in Hartford, Connecticut, the LPNRC was a mammoth database intended for the exclusive use of licensed skip tracers and private investigators like Gunner, and there was little in the way of nongovernment classified information the site could not either provide itself or offer a dynamic link to. Once the site was satisfied with the validity of a visitor’s credentials, it was the closest thing to one-stop shopping a PI could ever hope to find.

  While most of the White Pages–like services on the Internet excluded individuals and/or companies not listed in already existing telephone directories, the LPNRC’s did not. Drawn from a vast array of disparate databases, from magazine subscriber listings to health club membership rolls, the LPNRC’s White Pages were the state of the art in skip-tracing mechanisms. Gunner had only experimented with the system once before, running searches on himself and Lilly Tennell just to see what would happen, but today marked the first time he would be using it in earnest.

  He spread the copies he had made at the Central Library out on his desk and, one by one, ran searches on the people whose names he had underlined:

  Sandra March, the Chicago Press Examiner senior editor who had distrusted Thomas Selmon from the first.

  Karen Whitlaw, the white feature writer for the Press Examiner with whom Selmon had been rumored to be having an affair.

  Martin Keene, the Press Examiner’s managing editor who, in the wake of Selmon’s fall from grace, was publicly ridiculed for having hired Selmon in the first place.

  Gregory “Zero” Gates, the sociopathic black drug dealer with the Mensa-grade intellect Selmon had admittedly manufactured for his Pulitzer Prize–winning “investigative report.”

  And Leonard Sloan, the whistle blower, a talking head in the Press Examiner’s legal department who had found all the holes in Selmon’s story, and then lobbied for a heavy Press Examiner lawsuit
against him.

  That the LPNRC’s White Pages were able to produce addresses and phone numbers for four of the five people Gunner had inquired about was not surprising; he had expected nothing less than this result. Zero Gates, of course, had been the one person for whom no data had been found, nonexistent as he allegedly was. But it wasn’t mere mailing addresses Gunner had been hoping to find here; rather, it was a specific kind of address. One Gunner could pay a visit to without putting much more than a handful of miles on the Cobra parked outside.

  Martin Keene had such an address.

  According to the LPNRC’s listing for him, Keene now lived in Los Angeles, at 2404 Hidalgo Avenue, out in Silver Lake. It didn’t seem logical that Selmon would have made his impulsive detour to L. A. last October just to see the one man in the world who, it could have been argued, had reason to despise him most, but it was certainly possible. And if Gunner could find some link between Keene and the Defenders of the Bloodline …

  He made a printout of Keene’s address, as well as those of the other three people he had run his search on, and terminated his Internet connection. Less than thirty seconds later, his phone began to ring.

  It was Little Pete.

  “Listen here, Gunner,” he said. “When you page somebody, you’re supposed to keep the line clear so they can call you back. Hasn’t anybody ever told you that?”

  “Sorry, Pete. I was on-line.”

  “On-line? You?”

  “I’m a man, brother. Not a stegosaurus. Given time, I can adapt.”

  Little Pete laughed, said, “Go ahead on then, black. What can I do for you?”

  Gunner asked him if he’d found a Defender of the Bloodline for him yet.

  “Not yet. But I’m workin’ on it. I have a partner out on the westside—he says he knows a friend who’s got a friend. That sort of thing.”