When Last Seen Alive

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  So Connie Charles found a way to make these options anathema to him.

  “Christ. Is that one for the books, or what?” Poole said, after he and Gunner had stepped outside to leave Shelby Charles alone, having heard what they felt would forever remain the most relevant part of her testimony.

  “I’ve heard of a lot of weird clauses to prenuptial agreements,” Gunner said, “but yeah, that was a new one on me.”

  “It was smart, though. Damn smart. She turned the agreement around on his ass. He didn’t want her hand in his cookie jar, he was gonna have to keep his off her little sister.”

  “Otherwise, the agreement was null and void.”

  “Right.”

  “Odd how Everson never mentioned that, isn’t it? All he said was, adultery didn’t invalidate the agreement.”

  “As opposed to adultery with a specific lady.”

  Gunner nodded.

  “I bet Everson damn near had a cardiac when she wanted that clause put in. But she probably wouldn’t sign it any other way.”

  “And I’m sure he thought it wouldn’t matter, in any case. At least in the beginning.” Gunner grinned. “Because we all like to think that way, don’t we, Poole? That no one woman’s got our number? We wanna stay away, we can stay away, no problem?”

  “Yeah, right,” Poole said, laughing. “Still, you gotta give the fucker credit. He held out for longer than either of us could, I’ll bet. Damn near thirteen years.”

  Shelby Charles had said it had been that long before Everson showed up at her home in D.C. eleven months ago, talked her out of tricking and into a detox center, in preparation for spending quality time with him again.

  “So I guess if the good councilman didn’t have a motive for sending Sweeney after Sly before,” Gunner said, “he’s got one now, huh?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’d say so.”

  “So when do you bring him in again?”

  Poole thought about it, shook his head. “I don’t know, Gunner. This ought’a shake him up pretty good, but …”

  “You still need Sweeney.”

  “Yeah. Sweeney was the triggerman. Havin’ a solid motive for Everson’s nice, but it ain’t worth bubkes if we can’t connect it to Cribbs’s shooting. And right now, nobody can do that for us but Sweeney.”

  Gunner nodded, sat down at the empty desk behind him. Poole found a second chair nearby and did likewise.

  “So where is he?” Gunner asked after a short silence.

  “Beats the hell out of me. We should’ve found ’im by now.”

  “You think Everson sent him underground?”

  “That’s certainly possible. Except … somethin’ about that doesn’t jibe with me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Sounds odd, I know, but I really think the councilman was on the level about Sweeney being fired. Either that, or he’s a helluva better actor than he is a politician.”

  “You think Sweeney and Connie Everson were really getting it on?”

  “Yeah. I do. Everson seemed genuinely pissed when he talked about it. He never said they were gettin’ it on in so many words, actually, but he sure as hell implied it.”

  “What did he say, exactly?”

  “You expect me to remember that now? Shit, I don’t know. He just basically said he couldn’t trust Sweeney anymore. Not professionally, but personally.”

  “And you took that to mean Sweeney had been doing the nasty with his wife?”

  “Yeah. I did. It was just somethin’ about the way he was actin’. Like Sweeney had hit ’im where it hurts a guy most, at home, with his old lady.” He spun in the chair he was sitting in, just like a kid, only made it turn one half a revolution. “Funny thing is, I never knew he gave a—”

  “Wait a second,” Gunner said, waving a hand at Poole’s face to get his attention. “Run that by me again. Slow.”

  “Run what by you again?”

  “That bit about Sweeney hitting Everson where it hurts a guy most. At home, with his old lady.”

  “What about it?”

  “I just had a thought. You said Everson never said it was his wife Sweeney was fucking around with, right?”

  “Right. He just implied it.”

  “You mean he implied that Sweeney was fucking around with his old lady.”

  “Yeah. What—”

  “What if it wasn’t his wife he was talking about, Poole? What if it was somebody else? Somebody he might’ve felt just as possessive of, if not more so?”

  “Like who? What the hell are you talkin’ about, Gunner? Spit it out.”

  “I’m talking about a platinum blonde with a dynamite figure,” the investigator said, scanning the squadroom for a free phone. “Looked to me to be somewhere in her early twenties. I don’t know her name, but Mickey does. Don’t ask me why.” He got up, walked over to the telephone on the desk at his right and started punching in Mickey’s number.

  “Give me a second, Poole, and I’ll get it for you,” he said.

  Rafe Sweeney was arrested without incident at the Westchester condominium of Chelsea Seymour a few minutes past three that afternoon. He was hiding in the blonde’s bedroom when Poole, accompanied by a pair of backup uniforms, called on Seymour to see if Gunner’s theory that she and Sweeney were backdooring Gil Everson was viable. One of the uniforms outside spotted the giant black man through a bedroom window, and Poole subsequently managed to talk him into surrendering without attempting to blast his way out of the condo first. Or maybe Seymour’s impassioned pleas that Sweeney give himself up had moved him to do so, it was hard for Poole to tell which.

  In any case, Sweeney was in lockup by eight that evening, and the circumstances surrounding his assault on Sly Cribbs were no longer a mystery. Which was not to say that Sweeney himself had confessed to anything, because he hadn’t; in fact, he hadn’t said three words to the police since his arrest. It was his girlfriend Seymour who had been doing all the talking, and there seemed to be no end to her cooperation with authorities. Knowing a tight spot when she was in one, Seymour had jumped at the chance to appease the LAPD and the DA’s office by answering every question they put to her, and the result was a noose around Sweeney’s neck he would never be able to shake off.

  In short, Sweeney had attacked Sly Cribbs in order to keep his girlfriend living in the manner to which she (and he) had become accustomed. Chelsea Seymour was a kept woman, and Councilman Gil Everson was the man who’d been keeping her for the last six years, and neither she nor Sweeney had any interest in seeing what life would be like for her if Everson’s pockets were to suddenly go dry. Which, of course, would have been the likely outcome had Connie Everson been able to prove in divorce court that her husband had been seeing her sister Shelby again. Seymour knew about this loophole in the prenuptial agreement her sugar daddy shared with his wife because Everson had been fool enough to tell her about it once, and naturally, she in turn had mentioned it to Sweeney. It was no wonder, then, that both were gravely concerned when Everson began flying Shelby Charles into Los Angeles three or four times a month for two- and three-day romantic rendezvous.

  Sweeney was so concerned, in fact, that after he’d spotted Sly Cribbs photo-documenting a tryst between the pair at the Marina Pacific Hotel eight days ago, he had required no instruction, from either Everson or Seymour (by Seymour’s account, anyway), to first relieve Cribbs of his camera and film by whatever means were necessary, then issue a strongly worded Cease and Desist order to the kid’s suspected employer, Connie Everson, the following day. An order, it now seemed clear, the councilman’s wife had taken very much to heart.

  If Gil Everson had only proven to be as gullible as Sweeney believed him to be, and accepted the bodyguard’s claim that he had acted as he had for Everson’s sake alone, Sweeney might never have been forced to make the incriminating move of running for the cover of Seymour’s condominium. But Everson was no dummy. As the councilman himself thought it might be wise to explain only hours after Sweeney’s arrest Thursday
night, Everson had known his security man had not gone after Sly Cribbs and his wife with such calamitous zeal strictly to protect his employer. Despite what Everson had told Poole earlier, Sweeney was not that devoted to duty. He could only have taken the action he had, therefore, in the interests of one person—the only person Everson could think of who might have feared the financial consequences of Cribbs’s photographs nearly as much as he: Chelsea Seymour.

  Saturday night in Sacramento, when Everson had put this accusation to Sweeney directly, the bodyguard failed so miserably to plead innocent that Everson felt compelled to cut him adrift without a moment’s hesitation, both to punish the bodyguard for betraying him, and to separate himself from the fallout he knew was most certainly to come.

  In light of all this, this convoluted medley of cross-infidelity and greed, aggravated assault and duplicity, it was actually possible, Gunner realized, to see Gil Everson as a victim, the unwitting centerpiece to Sly Cribbs’s shooting and Connie Everson’s suicide, respectively. He had no claim to actual “innocence,” to be sure, as the days of intense media scrutiny awaiting him would prove, but he wasn’t the story’s key villain, he was only one of several, so it could have been argued that he was nearly as deserving of his constituents’ pity as he was their contempt.

  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

  GUNNER 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 c
utting 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?”