When Last Seen Alive

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  He considered the question quietly for a while, finally had to admit to himself that he was hoping for the former.

  No messages had been waiting for him from either Poole or Denny Loiacano, so it seemed safe to assume that both Frerotte and Rafe Sweeney were still at large, but Gunner placed a call to Poole at Southwest just the same, just in case Sweeney had in fact been picked up and the cop was simply too busy to let Gunner know about it.

  “Not a chance,” Poole said, after he’d heard how Gunner’s work for the Feds had ended.

  “Everson’s story still the same?”

  “Yeah. Why shouldn’t it be? He’s in the clear as long as Sweeney’s not around to point the finger at ’im. And his old lady’s suicide still looks like a suicide.”

  “What about his girlfriend? The working girl?”

  “We’re still tryin’ to find her. The people at the Marina Pacific remember seein’ her, all right, but that’s it. They say she wasn’t a guest there, and they never saw her and Everson together. If she stayed overnight, they say it had to be in one of the two suites Sweeney registered in earlier that day.”

  “Sweeney?”

  “Yeah. It was his name and credit card on the books, not Everson’s. The councilman’s got a reputation to protect, remember?”

  Gunner fell silent.

  “Bottom line is, we need Sweeney to put it all together for us,” Poole said. “Without him—”

  “So what are you doing talking to me? Get out there and find his ass, already,” Gunner said.

  “What, you worried he might hold a grudge or somethin’?”

  “Let’s just say I’d feel better walking the dog tonight if you had him under lock and key.”

  “Dog? You got a dog, Gunner?”

  “It was just a figure of speech, Poole. But yeah, I’ve got a dog.”

  “What, an attack dog? Tell me you got an attack dog.”

  “Close. It’s a Rhodesian Ridgeback.”

  “A Rhodesian Ridgeback? Does it know how to fire a Tec-Nine?” He laughed. “’Cause if you were thinkin’ of siccin’ it on Sweeney without one …”

  Gunner hung up the phone on the would-be stand-up comedian and went to find his dog.

  Johnny Frerotte was sitting on the living room couch when Gunner walked in.

  Dillett was the first to notice him. The little dog scurried into the house and immediately went to the couch, where Yolanda McCreary was sitting on the floor between the big man’s legs, a large kitchen knife being held to her throat. Its blade was actually drawing blood.

  “Get that … fucking dog … out of here,” Frerotte said, referring to the animal now standing in McCreary’s lap, excitedly yapping at his legs.

  As he had out at Martin Luther King Memorial Hospital four days ago, Frerotte still sounded like an emphysema victim with a plastic bag over his head, and he was still wearing the shoulder harness and neck brace his doctors had fitted him with. Left arm bound uselessly to his chest, his field of vision seriously limited by the neck brace, the big man sported a two-day growth of stubble on his face, uncombed hair, disheveled clothing—and a stench not unlike that which might have emanated from a sun-ripened lump of roadkill.

  “You don’t look so good, Jack,” Gunner said.

  “I said put … put this … goddamn dog away!” Frerotte tried to bark. He brought the knife up higher on Mc Creary’s throat, forced her to tilt her head back and eye the ceiling to avoid being cut.

  “Aaron …” McCreary moaned, tears rolling down her face.

  Gunner called the dog by name, followed the command with a whistle, silently ruing the absence of men who had only hours ago been standing guard outside, waiting to protect him from just such an ambush as this. If only Carroll Smith had been good enough to extend the FBI’s surveillance on him for the remainder of the day …

  Dillett turned at the sound of his name, started trotting back over to his master. Gunner was amazed. He held the door to the closet behind him open, shooed the little Ridgeback in with his foot, and closed the door again. Predictably, the dog began to bark incessantly in response to this indignity.

  “Now,” Frerotte said, “get your … piece out and … and toss it over here to … the girl. Easy.”

  No surprise there. He was going to need a gun eventually, otherwise he was in no shape to kill Gunner and McCreary both.

  Gunner slid the Ruger out of its holster with his right hand, slowly, so that Frerotte might see he had no intention of using it. It didn’t take a genius to see that there was nothing he could do with the gun from here that could keep Frerotte from cutting McCreary’s throat, even if only as a dying man’s final reflex action.

  He tossed the weapon underhand to McCreary, who caught it clumsily with both hands.

  “Better tell her … what’ll happen if … she tries to use that … thing on me,” Frerotte suggested.

  And Gunner shook his head at her, having had the same thought as Frerotte. “Don’t try anything,” he said sternly. “He’d only need a split second. I’d never get to you in time.”

  “Damn straight,” Frerotte said.

  Dillett’s barking was becoming harder and harder to ignore.

  “Put the gun … down on the couch be … beside me,” Frerotte told McCreary. “Over on my … right side.”

  McCreary did as she was told, reaching back behind her to lay the Ruger flat on the cushion next to the fat man’s thigh.

  “Now, get up real … slow, and don’t … turn around. Just start walkin’. You turn around I’ll … I’ll put this fuckin’ knife … in your back!”

  Again, McCreary complied, rising carefully to her feet, barely breathing as the knife slid down and away from her throat, first between her shoulder blades, then on to the small of her back. All the while, Frerotte’s eyes were pinned to Gunner, daring him to make a move. Wisely, Gunner never did.

  “Go,” Frerotte said.

  McCreary eased forward now, toward Gunner, and Frerotte quickly exchanged the knife in his hand for Gunner’s gun, using the woman’s body as a shield for the maneuver, executing it flawlessly before the investigator could even think about stopping him. McCreary reached Gunner and turned around, found Frerotte grinning, training the Ruger at their faces with unabashed malice.

  “Let her go, Jack,” Gunner said. “You’ve got nothing to gain by killing her.”

  “Bullshit. Wouldn’t none of us … be here … if it wasn’t for her,” Frerotte said.

  “You cut her brother’s throat and buried him in a hole out in the Angeles National Forest. She wasn’t supposed to care about that?”

  Frerotte frowned, unpleasantly surprised. “Who the hell—”

  “The Defenders gave you up, Jack. They led me to the grave site in exchange for a little breathing room. I get Selmon’s body, and they get a head start out of Dodge.”

  After a long pause: “You’re lying.”

  Gunner shook his head. “You were a hired gun. Not a dues-paying member of the club. How much loyalty from those crazies did you expect?”

  The big man ignored the question, asked one of his own, instead. “Where’s the … body now?”

  “With the county coroner. Where else would it be?”

  Frerotte just stared at him, his already grim countenance darkening rapidly. “You stupid … motherfucker,” he said.

  “Don’t blame me. Blame your boys.”

  “I blame you! You’ve fucked up … everything! And you’re too damn … ignorant to know it!”

  The little Ridgeback in the closet was mixing whimpers and howls in with all the yapping now, just for the sake of variety.

  “Biggest payday I was … ever gonna have,” Frerotte lamented. Sounding like somebody who had just watched a mugger run off with his winning lottery ticket.

  “What are you talking about, Jack?” Gunner asked.

  “I’m talking about … a hundred and fifty … grand, goddamnit!” He turned toward the closet, said, “Tell that … fucking dog to �
� shut the fuck up!”

  “A hundred and fifty grand? How? For what?”

  “Doesn’t matter now. It’s … over.” He lifted the Ruger, pointed it directly at Gunner’s head. “And so are you.”

  He pulled the trigger as McCreary began to scream.

  When nothing happened, the big man panicked, uncomprehending. His confusion lasted all of three seconds, but that was enough to ruin him. Perhaps if he’d had a clearer head, had the room been silent, and not filled with the continual, nerve-jarring cries of an eleven-week-old puppy, he would have recognized what was wrong immediately, and recovered in time to save himself. But he didn’t.

  He tried to fire the gun again, once more failing miserably, giving Gunner the chance to reach behind his back and withdraw the .45 caliber Para-Ordinance P10 that had been resting against his spine, in the waistband of his pants, for most of the last two days. Eschewing preamble of any kind, Gunner put three rounds in Frerotte’s upper body as fast as he could get them off, then braced himself to fire three more, if needed.

  Frerotte fell back, bleeding all over the couch, before sliding to the floor and collapsing on his face. He died with Gunner’s 9-millimeter automatic still clutched in his right hand. Fully loaded and fully functional, but useless to him, all the same.

  As it would have been to anyone, Gunner mused, who’d forgotten to take its safety off.

  seventeen

  “POOLE SAYS THIS IS A REGULAR THING WITH YOU,” DENNY Loiacano said, hanging up Gunner’s phone.

  “That’s a gross exaggeration.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think so. This makes two bodies in four days, Gunner. Fatality rates don’t come much higher than that.”

  Gunner kept waiting for the cop to smile, but Loiacano wasn’t trying to be amusing. He and his laughing boy partner Moreno had wanted Jack Frerotte alive, and conversant, and here Gunner had gone and drilled three holes in him, pretty much ruining any chance they might have had of hearing what had happened to Thomas Selmon in Frerotte’s own words. Their disappointment was such, in fact, that had Yolanda McCreary not been here to verify Gunner’s version of Frerotte’s shooting, the cops might have been inclined to slap a pair of cuffs on the investigator and run him out to Hollywood for a good, old-fashioned Q & A party.

  “I didn’t want the fat bastard dead any more than you did, Loiacano,” Gunner said, watching the boys from the coroner’s office carry Frerotte’s body away.

  “I can see that. That’s why you only put three bullets in him, instead of four.”

  “He was armed. I’d’ve been a member of your union, that would have earned him a full clip, I believe.”

  Loiacano looked over at Moreno, who was still questioning McCreary in the kitchen, and said, “That a dig at the LAPD, Gunner? ’Cause if it was, this ain’t the time.”

  “Sorry. My bad.”

  “Better tell me again how the deceased was too stupid to know you’ve gotta take an auto’s safety off before you can shoot somebody with it. I think I missed something the first time around.”

  He meant the first two times around, but Gunner didn’t correct him; he understood that Loiacano was entitled to his skepticism. For the kind of luck that had saved Gunner’s and McCreary’s lives did not come around every day. Because first and foremost, they’d been fortunate that Jack Frerotte was a knife man, someone who had probably held a gun in his hands about as often as he did a full house; and secondly, that Frerotte had picked today to come looking for Gunner, and not sometime sooner, before his work as bait in an FBI trap had moved the investigator to start carrying the Para-Ordinance around as a backup to the Ruger. Had either of these things not been true—had the fat man not taken three seconds to remember the Ruger’s safety, or had Gunner not had ready access to the Para-Ordinance—two homicides would have almost certainly occurred in Gunner’s home this afternoon, rather than just the one.

  “I don’t know, Gunner,” Loiacano said after Gunner had described yet again the circumstances of Frerotte’s death. “I’d say it sounds pretty fishy, except …”

  “Except you know it happens.”

  The cop nodded. “Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of guys more gun-friendly than Frerotte pull the trigger on a nine without flipping the safety off first. None of ’em were geniuses, of course, but they did it.”

  “Then you believe me.”

  “I believe you, sure. Doesn’t mean I’m happy with you. Armed or otherwise, we needed Frerotte alive. You could’ve shot the fucker once, just to put him down, then let him have the other two if necessary.”

  “If I’d been alone, I might have tried that. But I had the lady’s safety to consider, as well as my own.”

  “Sure, sure. I’m just wondering how the hell we’re gonna make sense of this mess now, that’s all.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Take this hundred and fifty grand you say Frerotte mentioned. What the hell could that’ve been about? You said he’d already been paid for Selmon’s murder, right?”

  “He had. Five thousand dollars in two installments.”

  “So what the hell was this hundred and fifty grand? A bonus?”

  “I don’t know. I asked Jack that question myself, and he wouldn’t answer me.”

  “You know if Selmon was heavily insured?”

  “He had a modest life insurance policy through his job, from what I understand, but nothing that would have made killing him worthwhile. You were thinking maybe the wife and Frerotte knocked him off for the insurance money?”

  “It was a thought.”

  Gunner shook his head. “Benefit was just fifty thousand. Even if you gave Frerotte all of that, it wouldn’t add up to a hundred and fifty.”

  “No. It wouldn’t.”

  “There could be another possibility, though. I’ve been thinking about it ever since Jack went down.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “It’s gonna sound a little far out. But it fits in a weird kind of way.”

  “What?”

  Gunner paused, doubting the wisdom of continuing, and said, “I’ve been told Selmon was thinking about writing a book. A memoir. He had a title for it, and everything, from what I understand.”

  Loiacano got tired of waiting for him to elaborate, said, “The Covington missing persons report mentioned he called an agent in New York before he disappeared, yeah. So he was writing a book. What’s that got to do with Frerotte?”

  “Probably nothing. Except that Selmon had the idea the book could be worth a few dollars, and chances are good, he was right. The Press Examiner scandal was pretty big news once, and a book about it, written by the scandal’s central figure, might have caused a few heads to turn in New York.”

  Loiacano looked at him quizzically. “What? To the tune of a hundred and fifty Gs?”

  “Or more, yeah. Happens every day.”

  “And you’re suggesting Frerotte had this book, is that it?”

  “I’m suggesting that’s the only way I can see Thomas Selmon being worth a hundred and fifty thousand to Jack, dead or alive.”

  “So where is this book now, Gunner?”

  The investigator shook his head, said, “I don’t know. It could’ve been lost in Jack’s house fire, or …”

  “Or?”

  “Or it may never have existed at all.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Near as I was ever able to determine, Detective, the book was all in Selmon’s head. No one ever saw him writing it, and not a word of it has ever been found.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I know what I just said. And it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, either. Unless—”

  Loiacano watched Gunner grow pensive, tried to guess what was on his mind. “Unless Frerotte was thinking about writing the book himself.”

  “Yes. I know that sounds far-fetched, but Jack had a stack of research material on Selmon down in his basement before someone torched the place. And almost every book he owned was of the true crime/inside
story variety, exactly the kind of sensational, kiss-and-tell book Selmon’s would have been had he written it. I had a look at Jack’s bookshelves just before the fire, that’s all he ever read, apparently.”

  “And that proves what? Because he liked to read the stuff, he must’ve been able to write it?”

  “No. Reading it and writing it are two different things, obviously. But think about it, Loiacano. Jack and the Defenders were the only ones who knew Selmon was dead. Everyone else believes he’s still in hiding, just as he had been for the last five years. If Jack had approached a publisher or agent in New York claiming to represent Selmon, manuscript in hand …”

  “They might’ve gone for it.”

  Gunner nodded.

  “Sure. Why not? The dumbshits have done it before.”

  And they had. The Howard Hughes “autobiography” of 1972; the Hitler “diaries” in 1983 …

  “Of course, Selmon turning up dead would have soured the whole deal,” Gunner said. “Jack would’ve had a tough enough time convincing somebody the manuscript was genuine as it was. If it came out Selmon had been murdered, the level of scrutiny he’d have had to deal with would’ve been too much to overcome.”

  “Right.”

  “When he told me I’d messed up the biggest payday he was ever gonna have, I wasn’t sure I knew what he meant. But in this particular context …”

  “It does kind’a fit, like you said. Assuming Frerotte could write as well as he could read, that is.”

  “Yeah. Assuming that.”

  The two men fell silent, until Loiacano said, “Too bad none of this has anything to do with Selmon’s murder.”

  Gunner eyed him, said, “What’s that?”

  “I mean, it’s all very interesting, but it’s all after the fact, right? It’s not relevant to our case.”

  “So I’m supposed to pursue it, is that it?”

  “That’s up to you. All I know is, I’m not gonna. Why the hell should I?”