When Last Seen Alive

by Gar Anthony Haywood

Gunner didn’t even answer him, too busy watching his footing and looking for his missing keys simultaneously.

  He was expecting a brief search, and that was exactly what he got. In less than ten minutes, he spotted his keys with relative ease, approximately twenty feet down the hillside from the road above, and out of its direct line of view. Someone had set them at the center of a small, level clearing, then arranged a circle of seven stones around them. Creating a marker only an idiot could miss.

  “I think I found him!” Gunner shouted up to Del.

  “Hey, you down there! Get up here now!” someone above him barked with authority. It was somebody other than his cousin.

  Gunner stepped out to where he could see who the man was, though he already had a good idea. Squinting against the sun, he saw his cousin standing at the edge of the road where he had been earlier, joined now by a uniformed L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy. The deputy had his sidearm out and trained at Del’s waist as he tried to keep an eye on him and peer down the hill at Gunner at the same time.

  Debunking the old myth, the investigator thought, that you could never find a cop when you needed one.

  Six hours later, Yolanda McCreary was waiting for him when he got home.

  She was sitting in her rental car out front, flipping through the pages of a magazine she had no genuine interest in. She looked like she’d been there awhile. She got out of the car the minute he pulled the road-weary Cobra into his driveway and started toward him, giving him no chance to decide ahead of time how he would tell her the bad news. Not that a few more minutes would have made any difference; he’d been trying to solve that problem now since he’d left Castaic Lake and still he hadn’t found the right words to say.

  So he just came right out and said it: “We think we found your brother’s body.”

  In the worst-case scenario he had pictured of the moment, McCreary would crumble, fall to her knees at the sound of this declaration and refuse to rise, spilling tears on the earth like a steady rain. But nothing as dramatic as all that happened. His client surprised him. All she did was turn her eyes away, bringing a hand to her mouth, and cry in silence. Gunner watched the tears run down her face unabated and said nothing, granting her the right to grieve as she saw fit.

  After a while he broke down, said, “Come on inside, I’ll get you a drink.”

  They entered the house and settled in the living room, side by side on Gunner’s tattered couch. He offered her a beer, but she shook that off, asked if he had something stronger. He brought her some Crown Royal on ice and kept the beer for himself.

  “What happened?” she finally asked.

  He told her everything, omitting nothing but the agreement he’d made with the Defenders to win his release from their custody. He said they’d only snatched him to offer Frerotte on a silver platter, hoping the gesture would buy them some time, both with Gunner and the police. McCreary either believed that or never let on that she didn’t. All she seemed to care about was the body Gunner had watched a Sheriff’s Department anthropological forensics team unearth for the better part of the day.

  “Are you sure it was Tommy?”

  “We won’t be absolutely sure until the coroner’s office does a positive ID. But I’m pretty sure it was him, yeah. There was a wallet on the body full of your brother’s ID, and the clothes seemed to match the ones I saw in that photograph I told you about, the one I found in Jack Frerotte’s house Wednesday night.”

  McCreary nodded solemnly, bit her lip to keep from crying again. “How long will it take them to do an ID?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of days, at least. The body was pretty badly decomposed, dental records are all they’re gonna have to work with, I’m afraid.”

  She turned, looked in his eyes directly. “So what now? I mean, what do you plan to do in the meantime?”

  Gunner hesitated, disappointed that she’d found it necessary to raise the question now, so soon. Sitting this close to her, confronted yet again with the smoothness of her skin and the fine lines of her body, saying the words he was about to say was the last thing in the world he wanted to do, knowing as he did where it would lead.

  “I don’t have any plans for the meantime. My job is done,” he said.

  She gave a little laugh, thinking he must be joking. “What?”

  “I’ve done what you paid me to do, Ms. McCreary. The rest is out of my hands.”

  She shook her head, said, “No.”

  “You hired me to find out what happened to your brother, and I’ve done that. You know he’s dead, and you know who killed him. Beyond that—”

  “That’s not enough!”

  “It’s gonna have to be. I’m a private investigator, not a superhero. One crazy like Jack Frerotte I can handle, but a band of psychos like the Defenders is something else.”

  “They had my brother murdered, Mr. Gunner!”

  “So let the police deal with them. They’ve reopened your brother’s case, as soon as they get Frerotte in custody—”

  “To hell with the police! They didn’t find Tommy, you did!” She threw her glass across the room, shattered it against a distant wall, whisky and ice spraying everywhere.

  “Now, wait a minute—” Gunner said.

  “No, you wait a minute,” McCreary said, leaping to her feet. “I want those bastards brought down! I don’t care what it takes, or how much it costs. And if you don’t have the guts to do it for me …”

  Gunner stood up, took her by the wrist and said, “This isn’t about guts, sister. It’s about brainpower. How many fucking attempts on my life do you think your money pays for?”

  McCreary tore her wrist free, glowered at him with open contempt. “You’re a coward,” she said.

  Gunner was cut to the quick but refused to show it. “Call me what you will. But I’m not going to die for you, I’m sorry.”

  His client stood there a moment longer, saw in his face it was true, then took off running for the door.

  Later that night, she returned.

  Gunner had fallen asleep on the couch, depression having given way to exhaustion. He didn’t know how many times the doorbell had rung when he finally heard it, opened his eyes onto the ceiling of his dark living room. She stood on the porch when he opened the door and said nothing for a long while. Then:

  “May I come in?”

  Gunner turned a light on in the living room and pointed her toward the couch, but this time he didn’t join her there. He took a seat across from her instead. The clock on his VCR said it was a few minutes past eight, over two hours after she had fled the room earlier.

  “I came to apologize,” she said. Sounding reluctant, yes, but not altogether insincere.

  “Forget it. I’m a big boy.”

  “No. I was wrong. Technically speaking, the work I hired you to do is finished. You don’t owe me a thing.”

  Gunner didn’t argue with her, just waited for her to go on.

  “But I meant what I said. This isn’t over for me. Until the people who put this man Frerotte up to murdering my brother are caught and brought to justice, it never will be.”

  “Listen,” Gunner said. “There’s something I haven’t told you yet. Something I was hoping I’d never have to tell you.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s not just my life on the line here. Yours is too. They made that very clear to me. They want us both to walk away. Find some comfort in the fact that the man who actually committed your brother’s murder will eventually stand trial for it, and leave it at that.”

  “I can’t do that,” McCreary said.

  “Sure you can. If I can do it, you can.”

  “Tommy wasn’t your brother, Mr. Gunner.”

  “No. But I’m the one his killers have been stomping on for the last four days. Leaving in burning buildings to die, and poking with needles filled with God knows what. If anybody owes them, Ms. McCreary, it’s me, not you.”

  “And yet you aren’t going to do anything about it. You’re jus
t going to sit here and pretend none of it ever happened.”

  “I’m going to leave the apprehension of Frerotte’s associates to the proper law enforcement agencies, and trust they’re up to the task. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I don’t believe you’re that kind of man. That you’re in the habit of letting other people fight your battles for you.”

  “You don’t know me, Ms. McCreary,” Gunner said.

  “I know what I see. What I feel.” She stood up, came over to where he was sitting to hover over him. “I read you better than you think, Mr. Gunner.”

  Gunner looked up at her, tried not to let her proximity derail him. “Yeah?”

  “You’ve wanted to be with me since the day we first met. Haven’t you?”

  Gunner didn’t say anything.

  “It hasn’t been hard to detect. You’re cool, but you’re not complicated. I’ve been picking up your vibe from the start.”

  “Pardon my French, but that’s bullshit.”

  “You saying it isn’t true?”

  “I’m saying the question’s irrelevant.”

  “And if the feeling’s mutual? Is it irrelevant then?”

  Gunner looked up at her, searching her face for hidden motives. “You don’t want to play this game with me,” he said angrily.

  “It’s not a game. It’s the truth,” McCreary said. “Kiss me and you’ll see.”

  Gunner stood up, gave her a long, hard look. “And if I did? You think it’d change anything?” He shook his head. “It’d only make things harder. For both of us.”

  But McCreary was undeterred. “Show me,” she said.

  And because she’d made it sound less like an order than a request, like something she needed as badly as he did, Gunner lost interest in arguing with her and did as he was told.

  Praying every minute that he wasn’t making the mistake of a lifetime.

  Embracing the contours of a woman’s body with his hands—the narrow corridor along the center of her back, the rounded underside of her breasts and buttocks, the tender hollow at the base of her throat—had always been a major part of Gunner’s bedroom repertoire, but with Yolanda McCreary, these movements became more about his own pleasure than hers.

  He had had more prolific sex before, sex that both energized and healed him simultaneously, but his experience with McCreary seemed to fill a spiritual void no one had ever touched in him before. He had been in love once, with a woman no longer alive, and the love they had made to each other before their inevitable parting had been warm, fulfilling, and remarkable in its own, unique way—but this went beyond that. This was more powerful and indelible. Almost life affirming.

  And the feeling did seem to be mutual.

  Of course, when their union was over, their world had changed, despite Gunner’s promises to the contrary. Their relationship suddenly had strings attached, new and fragile though they were: invisible lines of emotion and sensitivity that had not encumbered them before. So while they still wanted the same things—McCreary Gunner’s help in bringing her brother’s murderers to justice, and Gunner the freedom to respectfully withhold it from her—neither could refuse the other quite as easily as they had only hours ago. Life had just become more complicated than that.

  One of them was going to have to lose. To surrender his or her position for the sake of keeping the peace between them.

  It was either that or the seed they’d just planted was doomed to die before its ultimate potential could ever be known.

  fourteen

  “WE GOT A CALL FROM A GUY FRIDAY NIGHT AROUND EIGHT o’clock, he says he witnessed a shooting,” Poole said at exactly 9:17 Sunday morning. “A kid in a car at the intersection of Exposition and Vermont, late Wednesday.”

  “I’m listening,” Gunner said.

  “This caller says he knows who the shooter was. Not his name, actually, but what the guy looked like, and what kind of car he was driving.”

  “What kind of car he was driving? I thought—”

  “Hold on a minute and I’ll explain,” Poole said, making sounds similar to that of a man moving a telephone handset over to his other ear. “This caller tells us the shooter rear-ended him about fifteen minutes before Cribbs was shot, going southbound on Hoover near Twenty-fifth Street. He tried to make a last-minute lane change and didn’t pull it off, slammed right into the caller’s brand-new Mazda.

  “So the caller, he jumps out to check the damage, sees this black giant in a blue sweatsuit step out of a silver Beemer, looking like he wants to rip the caller’s head off for gettin’ in his way. He says the guy had to be six-two, six-three, two-hundred and forty pounds, easy. Medium to dark complexion, flat-topped haircut, shoulders wider than a fuckin’ movie screen.”

  This caller should have been a cop, Gunner thought to himself. Only a camera could have captured Rafe Sweeney more accurately.

  “Anyway, they argue for a while, the caller demandin’ to see the big guy’s ID, the big guy orderin’ the caller to get his fuckin’ Mazda out of the Beemer’s way, ’til the big guy finally says fuck it, he grabs the caller by the throat and forces him to move his car.”

  “And then takes off.”

  “You got it.”

  “Naturally, the caller decides to follow …”

  “And sees the guy put the hit on Cribbs. Yeah. All he wanted to do was keep the guy in sight until a black-and-white could turn up, and the poor bastard witnesses a carjacking instead.”

  Poole said the caller watched Sweeney cruise around a while, acting like he was lost, until he reached Jefferson Boulevard and the University Mall, where he suddenly seemed to get his bearings back. Gunner suspected this was merely where Sweeney had caught up to the car he’d been following before his accident—Sly Cribbs’s Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera—and started tailing it again. Unaware, apparently, that Cribbs had been in the mall at the One Hour Foto-Stop shop, dropping off the roll of film Sweeney was no doubt hoping to retrieve.

  Had Gil Everson’s bodyguard known the film was no longer in Sly’s possession, none of what followed would have ever transpired. According to Poole’s call-in witness, the big man in the freshly dented BMW had eventually parked his car fifty yards shy of Vermont on Exposition, slipped a ski mask over his head, then scurried on foot over to Sly’s Oldsmobile as the kid calmly waited for the light to change. He ordered Sly out of the car, but the teenager wouldn’t comply, so he shot him twice at close range before fleeing north along Vermont, still on foot, Sly’s camera bag clutched tightly beneath one arm.

  Not surprisingly, the man who had witnessed all of this from what he hoped was a safe distance fled the scene himself soon afterward.

  “Is that a wild fuckin’ story, or what?” Poole asked when he was through recounting it for Gunner.

  “Yeah. Wild,” Gunner said. “I assume you’ve run a check on the Beemer by now.”

  “Sure have. You wanna guess who it belongs to?”

  “Rafe Sweeney. Inglewood City Councilman Gil Everson’s personal bodyguard.”

  “Right again. You really are an investigator, aren’t you, partner?”

  “I know you won’t believe this, Poole, but I really was going to hand him to you. I just needed a little more time to check him out, make sure he was the guy.”

  “Of course, of course. It’s not like you’ve ever held out on me before, right?”

  “Poole—”

  “Save it, cowboy. I ain’t been callin’ you all weekend just to hear the usual string of lame excuses. All I want from you is the rest of the story. I wanna know what kind of pictures Cribbs was shooting for you, and I wanna know now.”

  He thought he was demanding something of Gunner the investigator would be loath to surrender, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Gunner was happy to oblige him, now that he could do so feeling relatively certain that Rafe Sweeney deserved the LAPD’s attention.

  Poo
le listened quietly to his account of the Everson case, only expressed displeasure of any kind at its conclusion, when Gunner voiced some doubt that Sweeney’s attack on Sly Cribbs had been committed at Gil Everson’s behest.

  “What the fuck do you mean, you don’t know?” Poole said.

  “I mean I don’t know. Something about that doesn’t quite jibe with me.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because the pictures don’t seem to be worth that kind of trouble, for one thing. All they show is him and what appears to be a cheap whore doing the nasty. Why the hell would he turn Sweeney loose on Sly over something as innocuous as that?”

  “Hard as this may be for you to believe, Gunner, some people still find that kind of shit scandalous. And if some of ’em are registered voters in Everson’s district …”

  “So he’d lose the Bible thumpers’ vote. So what? That’s fifteen percent of his constituency, tops.”

  “So maybe his reasons weren’t professional.”

  “Meaning they were personal instead.”

  “He’s a married man, ain’t he?”

  “By definition he is, yeah. Though you’d never know it to watch him. Because the lady we’re talking about isn’t his only diversion. He’s got a steady girlfriend, too, and he doesn’t seem to care who knows it. In fact, if Mickey’s any indication, the two of them have been a matter of public record for years.”

  “And that proves what, exactly?”

  “That he doesn’t act like a man who fears his wife. What she knows or doesn’t know about his extramarital affairs doesn’t matter to him.”

  Poole grew quiet, then took another tack. “Okay. Then maybe he was trying to protect the lady. The prostitute, not the girlfriend. You’re sure that’s all you can tell me about her? Her first name was Shelby?”

  “That and the fact she struck me as somewhat familiar, yeah. I’m not sure why.”

  “You think Cribbs might know who she is?”

  Gunner told him it was certainly possible. Getting Everson’s girlfriend’s name hadn’t been part of his assignment, but Sly was just full of initiative. It wouldn’t have been surprising if he’d compiled a mini-dossier on her and Everson both.