Mickey gave Gunner a long look, questioning his sanity, and finally eased back out of the room. Jolly continued to just sit there, head turned down toward the floor. Gunner looked around, saw his Ruger in a distant corner where the big man had discarded it, and moved to retrieve it. Then he sat down at his desk and waited patiently for Jolly’s gaze to turn his way.
“It wasn’t my fault, Jolly,” he said.
“You could’ve stopped me,” Jolly said bitterly, eyes brimming with tears.
“It wasn’t my job to stop you.”
“She said she asked you for help! You were supposed to be my friend!”
“And if I’d talked to you for her, what then? What were you going to do? Stop beating her because I said so?”
“No! But—”
“She was your wife, Jolly. Not mine. I wasn’t going to waste my breath trying to make you respect a woman when you had no respect for yourself.”
It was a harsh thing to say, but it was true. And it shut Jolly up, which was Gunner’s intent. The big man was rubbing his nose in something the investigator had been trying for years to forget. Justifiably or not, he’d always held himself at least partially responsible for Grace Mokes’s death, and he didn’t like Jolly reinforcing those sentiments now. He had enough guilt to deal with.
“You’re right,” Jolly said, nodding his head slowly. “I didn’t have no respect for myself.”
“Didn’t?”
“That’s right. Didn’t. I know you ain’t gonna believe this, Gunner, but I’m a different man now. I’ve been saved.”
“Saved? You?”
“I found Jesus back in the joint, and he found me. I know now that it’s wrong for a man to lay his hands on a woman in anger, especially his wife. The Word says so, Ephesians chapter five, verse twenty-eight: ‘Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.’”
Gunner didn’t know what to say. The big man wasn’t just mouthing the words, he seemed to wholeheartedly believe them. “I’m happy for you, Jolly. Really. But if you came here looking for converts …”
“Converts? Naw, man. I ain’t lookin’ to convert nobody.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I’m lookin’ to make restitution. For what I did to Grace, and all the other folks I done wrong in the past.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Lord says I got some serious service to do here in the community. He even got me out early so I could get started. I could go work with a preacher, or one of them youth groups, but I’d rather work with you.”
“Me?”
“You ain’t a cop, I know, but you do the same kinda work, right?”
“No. I don’t—”
“I need a job, Gunner. Otherwise, they’re gonna send me back inside. When I asked the Lord where to find one, he told me to come see you. So here I am.”
The big man fixed his eyes on Gunner’s and defied his old friend to turn away. Gunner didn’t even try.
“The Lord tell you to try and kill me too?” he asked.
“No. That was on me. I really did use’ to blame you for what I done to Grace, man. ’Fore I was saved, I mean. I guess seein’ you again kinda brought it all back for me.” He shrugged, said, “I’m sorry.”
“Forget about it. I’m sorry too. Because I can’t help you, Jolly.”
“You can’t?”
“I don’t have any work for you. I don’t have any work for anybody. I run a one-man operation here, as you can see.”
“Maybe somethin’ will come up.”
“I don’t think so. At least, I wouldn’t count on it. I’m sorry.”
Jolly stared at him a moment longer, measuring Gunner’s words for falsehood, then lifted himself to his feet. He lumbered over to the investigator’s desk, stopped just in front of it. “Lemme have a pen and some paper,” he said.
Gunner found a pen in a desk drawer, handed it to Jolly along with a small notepad.
“I’m gonna leave you my address over at the apartment I got downtown,” the big man said, scrawling out the address. “I ain’t got a phone, but all you gotta do is come over, you decide you need me. I’ll be right there waitin’.”
“Jolly…”
“Anytime day or night, don’t matter. I’ll be there.” He handed the pad and pen back, took one more look at the determined expression on Gunner’s face. “Lord says you got work for me to do, Gunner, and the Lord never lies. You’ll see.”
Jolly turned and stalked away.
Gunner watched the beaded curtain in his office doorway sway to and fro in Jolly’s wake, didn’t realize his phone was ringing until it was almost too late to answer it.
It was a man who identified himself as an LAPD homicide cop named Steven La Porte, no one Gunner had ever heard of before.
“What can I do for you, Detective?”
“You’re Aaron Gunner. The private investigator, is that right?”
“That’s right. How can I help you?”
“I was wondering, Mr. Gunner, if you knew a man by the name of Ray Crumley?”
“Ray Crumley?” Gunner felt the stirrings of a queasy stomach fast approaching. “I don’t know him, no. But about forty minutes ago—”
“You left a message on his answering machine at home. Yeah, we know.”
“We?”
“My partner and I, plus a few of our friends from the division. We’re over at Ray’s place right now, tidying up a bit. You wouldn’t mind dropping by to give us a hand, would you?”
“I wouldn’t know the way. I never met Crumley, like I said. What the hell happened, Detective? You gonna clue me in, or what?”
“What happened is, ol’ Ray is dead. And he didn’t die of natural causes,” La Porte said. “But don’t take my word for it, Mr. Gunner. Why don’t you come on down and see what’s left of ’im for yourself?”
s i x
THE LATE RAY CRUMLEY HAD BEEN RENTING A CLEAN little one-bedroom apartment in the Mid-City area of Los Angeles, on Burnside Avenue just north of Olympic. Situated in the heart of a quiet, ethnically diverse neighborhood where trouble rarely reared its head, his apartment building was a two-story, white-with-yellow-trim number that looked like all the other such rental properties surrounding it, except for the buzzing police activity out front: squad cars and yellow tape, news crews and an ambulance, and a host of uniformed patrolmen with answers to nobody’s questions.
Gunner was out in the hallway beyond Crumley’s open apartment door when the familiar stench of a runaway bloodletting told him what he’d find inside. Actually seeing the crimson splatter someone had made in the dead man’s ransacked living room in the process of killing him proved almost anticlimactic.
“Looks like somebody had a real thing for red, don’t it?” Steven La Porte asked, grinning.
He was a tall reed of a blond, with an angular face beneath a mound of curly hair. His brown suit fit him like something he’d inherited from a larger uncle, and his smile was filled with the yellowed, unappealing teeth of a lifetime smoker.
“Aaron Gunner, right?”
Gunner nodded, still surveying the bloody, disheveled room. Oblivious to the two crime scene technicians flitting about it, a body lay under a sheet on the floor beside the couch, staining the white fabric red in several places.
“Detective Steven La Porte. This is my partner, Detective Chin.”
Gunner looked over, caught the nod of the stocky, grim-faced Korean La Porte was referring to.
“What happened?” Gunner asked.
“From the looks of things? Burglarus interruptus. Which is to say, Mr. Crumley walked in on somebody robbing his apartment, got his head bashed in for his trouble. Come on, take a look.” La Porte led Gunner over to the corpse on the floor, crouched down to lift the sheet away from its head. Or what remained of its head. Crumley had been beaten so badly only the left side of the black man’s skull was not a caved-in mass of bloody pulp and bone. “Had to be a dr
uggie. Nobody else would expend this much energy killin’ a guy, right? Just to get his wallet and the change in his pockets?”
Gunner nodded, taking the sheet out of the cop’s hand to cover Crumley’s face again. He hoped he didn’t look as sick as he was starting to feel.
“You okay, Gunner? You don’t look so good.”
“I’m fine. Showing a little respect for the dead, that’s all.”
He caught La Porte throwing a sideways glance at his partner, anticipated the cop’s next question.
“I didn’t know the man, La Porte,” Gunner said. “I called him once an hour ago, and left a message on his machine. That’s as close as I ever got to meeting him.”
“Yeah, we know. You told us that. But maybe we’d be more inclined to believe you, you told us what your reasons were for calling.”
Gunner gave them the general idea of the case he was working on, no more and no less. La Porte seemed to be satisfied.
“When did all this go down?” Gunner asked, surveying the room again.
“Late last night sometime,” Chin said, speaking for the first time. “Coroner’s first guess is ten, ten-thirty, and a couple of neighbors in the building seem to confirm that.”
“You’ve got wits?”
La Porte shook his head for his partner. “They just heard all the commotion. Nobody saw anything, or anybody.”
“What about a weapon?”
“Hasn’t turned up yet.”
“And the body? Who found it?”
“His girlfriend. One Lori Fields. She’s a stewardess for United who just got back from Chicago, she says. Came by to fix Crumley breakfast this morning, and got a little surprise.”
Gunner looked around, didn’t see anyone fitting the description. “So where is she?
“Hospital,” Chin said. The two cops were making like a tag team now. “She did a dead faint when she saw the body, banged her head on the coffee table over there when she fell. She was cut pretty bad, so we had the paramedics take her in for treatment.”
“You let her go?”
“We released her for medical reasons. She isn’t going anywhere. Besides, her story checks out. United says she worked the red-eye from Chicago last night, didn’t get into LAX until a few minutes shy of eleven a.m.”
“Mind if I ask a question?” La Porte cut in, talking to Gunner. “What was your interest in Crumley? What’d you think he could tell you about your rapper’s suicide you didn’t already know?”
“I wasn’t sure. Maybe nothing. But his supervisor over at the Westmore said something this morning I thought was a little odd, so I thought I’d ask Crumley about it.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like Crumley had told him he’d turned over one of the hotel’s surveillance tapes of the floor Elbridge’s suite was on the night he died to the Beverly Hills PD. Which he may indeed have done, except that the cop in charge of the investigation never mentioned having viewed such a tape to me.”
“And you think that means …”
“Either Crumley lied to his supervisor about turning the tape over, or the supervisor lied about Crumley having done so. One or the other.”
“Funny. I thought sure you were gonna say it was the cop who had to be lyin’.”
Gunner looked at La Porte evenly, taking the obvious dare, said, “There’s that possibility too, of course. But since I never asked him any direct questions about the tapes, it’d probably be more accurate to say he never volunteered any info about ’em, if in fact he actually had any to volunteer.”
“What exactly are you thinking this surveillance tape would’ve shown?” Chin asked, taking his turn at bat again.
“Visitors to Elbridge’s room several hours before his death. Beverly Hills PD says all the visitors he had that weekend came and went long before he died, but maybe this tape proves otherwise, somehow.” Gunner turned to look over the shambles of the room again. “Any idea what all is missing here, yet?”
Chin shook his head. “Nothing obvious is missing that we can see. TVs and such are all still here. Either our perp was only after the small stuff to begin with, or he panicked, took off after killing Crumley with only what he found on Crumley himself.”
Gunner saw a big-screen TV sitting on a maple stand nearby, only a cable box resting atop it; there was no VCR in sight. Without asking for permission, he left the living room, found a smaller television among the wreckage of Crumley’s bedroom, on top of the dead man’s dresser, facing the bed. A second cable box sat beside it, a black-faced VCR rested beneath it, and a host of assorted videotapes were scattered to all sides of the three.
Gunner was hitting the eject button on the VCR with the end of a rollerball pen when La Porte and Chin caught up to him, the white cop getting red all around his shirt collar.
“What the hell do you think you’re doin’?” he asked.
“Looking for the dupe of my tape,” Gunner said, using his pen now to lift the VCR’s cartridge door open manually. There was no cassette inside.
“You’re an invited guest here, Gunner. Not an investigating officer. Put your hands in your pockets and keep ’em there, or I’ll have my friend Pete here show you how his cuffs work.”
“Sure thing. Sorry.” Gunner put his pen away, faced the two cops directly. “This it for VCRs?”
“Unless he had one hidden in his pants,” Chin said.
“Look, Gunner,” La Porte said. “We’re just getting started here, Pete and me. And we appreciate your anxiousness to help. But I think maybe we should do the rest of our talking down at the station, if that’s all right with you. Away from all these distractions.”
Gunner frowned. “Come on, La Porte. I told you before, I’m not your man.”
“Of course you aren’t. But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask if you can prove that. You do have wits who can vouch for your whereabouts around ten, ten-thirty last night, right?”
Naturally, Gunner didn’t. He’d spent all of the night before at home, soaking in a hot tub while listening to Donald Byrd, then watching an old Jim Brown movie—Tick … Tick … Tick …—on cable from his bed. Alone, save for his faithful dog, Dillett. Who wasn’t at all the kind of company he would have preferred.
“I don’t need wits,” Gunner said angrily. “What the hell do I need with wits when I don’t have a motive?”
“Maybe this tape you’ve been talkin’ about is your motive.”
“What?”
“What my partner’s saying is that people try to run that game on us all the time,” Chin said. “Volunteering theories about the hows and whys of a homicide, acting like they’re talking about some third-party perp, when they’re really only talking about themselves.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“Do we look like we’re kidding?” La Porte asked.
“For Chrissake. I left a message on Crumley’s answering machine this morning, remember? What do you think, I killed him without leaving a clue to my identity, then called to leave my name and number on his machine the next day just to throw you geniuses off the scent?”
“We think there’s some chance of that, yeah. However remote. Clever guy like you just might’ve thought that’d make one hell of an argument for your innocence after the fact.”
“I’m neither that smart nor that stupid, La Porte.”
“Maybe. But Pete and I won’t know for sure until we get you in an interview room, see how you do on an IQ test, will we?”
“You mean the same one you flunked to get your badges?”
“Never mind the IQ test,” Chin said, angrily ripping the handcuffs from his belt. “You’ve just proven you’re an idiot.”
Gunner threw his hands up to ward the Korean off, said, “Okay, okay! That was uncalled for, my bad.” He looked at La Porte. “But fucking with me is just gonna be a waste of your time. Surely you know that.”
La Porte’s silence said that he did, but neither he nor his partner could bring themselves to admit
it.
Chin, his face hard enough to break, said, “I’ll tell you what we know, Gunner—that anything’s possible. Okay, so maybe we’ve got no reason to suspect you for this right now. But that could change. In a heartbeat.”
“Especially if you can’t prove where you were at the time our homicide took place,” La Porte added. “Which, judging by your lack of response to my question earlier, we have to assume you can’t.”
The two detectives waited as one for Gunner to say differently, but the black man just stared back at them instead. There was nothing else he could do.
“You’re free to go,” La Porte said. “We need to talk to you again, we’ll give you a call.”
He was lucky to be getting off so easy, all things considered, but the dismissal rankled Gunner all the same. “Thanks. You guys are two of the good ones,” he said.
On his way out the door, he glanced at Crumley’s bedroom one last time, saw something on the floor that made him stop and stare. When La Porte and Chin stepped forward to follow his gaze, he said, “Maybe one of you officers should make a note of that, huh?”
“What?” Chin asked, visibly agitated.
“Looks like all the tapes there are prerecorded. I don’t see any blanks.”
Before either man could ask him what the hell that suggested, he left them to figure it out on their own.
That night, Gunner met his cousin Del Curry at the Deuce, and together, excluding Lilly and Pharaoh Doubleday, the two men made up all of a third of the bar’s entire crowd. While Gunner and Del sat at one end of the bar keeping Lilly company, Howard Gaines and Beetle Edmunds played dominoes at the other, a nephew of Howard’s Gunner had only met once before—he believed the kid’s name was Justin something or other—watching at his uncle’s side. Pharaoh, meanwhile, was flitting back and forth between the bar and the Deuce’s only occupied table, servicing the needs of a good-looking black woman no one claimed to know or recognize.
“There. She’s doin’ it again,” Lilly said, referring to the stranger.
“You’re nuts,” Gunner said.
All the Lucky Ones Are Dead Page 6
