Now out of reach of Danee Elbridge’s vision, he moved immediately to the front door, tried to push it open. But it was locked. He could hear her footsteps pounding along the floor above him as she ran, no doubt hoping to race downstairs and catch him breaking in. Which of course, he had no intention of doing. Just as he had no intention of fleeing, the prospect of getting shot in the back being as real here as it had been down in the carport, if she decided to come out after him. And he had no doubt she would. She wasn’t running down those stairs inside to escape; she was coming to get him, looking to put a permanent end to whatever threat she thought he represented.
Gunner had all of four seconds to think of something to do with her when she got there.
He eventually stood directly in front of the door, and waited. It was a solid slab of white, ornately paneled but windowless, so he couldn’t be seen standing there from within, except through the narrow decorative windows on both sides. If she chose to peer out through one or the other before exiting …
But she didn’t. The gun and her eagerness to use it made her careless, encouraged her to go straight to the door and yank it open. The second it cleared the jamb, Gunner shoved on it with both hands, drove its weight into the face of the unprepared woman behind it. Wood and bone met with a loud bang, and Danee Elbridge hit the white tile floor on her back as if struck by a speeding Peterbilt, the automatic in her left hand spitting one final round into a nearby wall. Gunner stepped forward quickly, snatched the gun from her listless grasp before it could go off again. The Digga’s widow never even knew he was there.
He released the clip of the lady’s weapon—a .45 caliber Smith & Wesson, he noted—and put it in his left-hand trouser pocket before stuffing the body of the gun into the front of his waistband, taking a good long look at the woman fighting unconsciousness at his feet as he did so. She was the same short-haired, caramel-colored beauty he’d seen flying out of the Bad Rock recording studio parking lot the day before, only now she was marred by a growing lump on her forehead, and her wardrobe was far more casual. She was wearing a peach baby doll negligee as transparent as water, and there was nothing whatsoever beneath it but the skin she’d been born in. Had she not been trying to kill him, he might have noticed this last about her right away.
Bravely refusing the opportunity to pass out, the widow Elbridge eventually brought a hand to her head, moaned an unladylike curse, and gazed up at the black man standing over her like someone trying to read a newspaper through a dirty screen door.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asked, fighting to get the words out.
“I would’ve thought you knew. Or do you try to kill just anybody who dares to drop in on you unannounced?”
“I asked you a question.”
“My name’s Aaron Gunner. I’m a private investigator.” He got his wallet out, turned it open to his license, and handed it down to her. He glanced around the house as she studied it, said, “No kids around today?”
“They’re at my mother’s. Not that it’s any of your bus’ness.” She looked his credentials over the way she might an advertisement for toothpaste, pushed his wallet right back at him. “Bullshit,” she said.
“Bullshit?”
“You heard me. Bullshit. What the hell would a private investigator want with me?” She finally saw how much trouble he was having keeping his eyes trained on her face, tucked her legs up underneath her and covered her breasts with her arms. Accomplishing very little, actually, other than to draw more attention to herself.
Gunner smiled as he put his wallet away, said, “I’ve been hired by a friend of your late husband to look into the circumstances of his death. Either to confirm it really was a suicide, or to produce evidence it was a homicide.”
“Homicide? You mean murder?”
Gunner nodded. “You don’t think that’s possible?”
She didn’t answer the question, just let her eyes bore into his for a long, painful moment. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
“I can see that. But maybe if we got you up off the floor, found some ice for your head, you’d be a little more inclined to.”
“I don’t need any fuckin’ ice.”
“I respectfully disagree. That bump’s changing colors by the minute. Come on, let’s get up, find our way to the kitchen.”
He extended his hand, let her take all the time she wanted to think the offer over, accept it in the spirit given. When at last she did, she stopped at a hallway closet to grab a powder-blue silk housecoat, tossed it on over her immodest dress before leading her guest past an elaborately furnished dining room into the largest kitchen he had ever seen. It was all iceberg-white with marble trim, and a small yacht could have been parked within it without marring any of the cabinet doors. Only the island in the center of the Mexican-tiled floor bearing a six-burner stove and a giant butcher-block surface would have had to be moved to accomplish the feat, and that with nothing less than a fifty-foot crane.
With Gunner’s hand on her left arm to keep her steady, Danee Elbridge went straight to the brushed-aluminum refrigerator, reached for the handle on its freezer door. But Gunner stepped in to stop her, said, “Here. I think you’d better let me.”
Shortly thereafter, the two of them sat in the Elbridge living room to talk, she holding a damp dish towel filled with ice cubes to her head, he holding the same to the wound on his left calf.
“If this leaves a mark, I’ll kill you,” she said, grimacing.
“You already tried that. Twice. Maybe you should try to kill somebody else for a change.”
“What do you mean, twice? I ain’t never seen you before in my life.”
“Actually, you have. First time was yesterday, out at Bad Rock. I was pulling in, you were pulling out, somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy miles an hour, as I recall. You don’t remember?”
She studied him more closely, smiled through her pain. “That was you?”
“That was me. Desmond say something to insult you?”
“Desmond? What’s Des—” She stopped, getting a sudden thought. “Oh. I get it. That’s the friend of Cee’s you was talkin’ about workin’ for a minute ago. Desmond.”
“Tell you what. Let’s leave who I’m working for for later, talk right now about who you thought I was when I first arrived. That okay with you?”
The Digga’s widow moved the makeshift ice pack around on her forehead, said, “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“Come on. You were layin’ down ground fire out there like a Huey tryin’ to take out a bridge. People don’t throw ammo around like that unless they’ve got a specific target in mind.”
“You were trespassin’ on my property! I don’t have a right to protect myself?”
“Sure you do. Only, if that’s all you’d been interested in, protecting yourself, you’d have given me some chance to escape. Told me to get my black ass back in my car and get the hell out of here, rather than shoot at me like somebody you needed dead, not gone.” When she acted as if he had to be talking to himself, Gunner went on: “You were expecting somebody else, Mrs. Elbridge. Somebody who either scares the living hell out of you, or makes you see some serious red. One or the other.”
Still, Danee Elbridge refused to speak.
“If you’re in trouble, I might be able to help. You never know.”
“Help? Why should you wanna help me?”
“Call it a hobby of mine. Sticking my neck out for beautiful, half-dressed women in distress. And you are in distress, aren’t you?”
The Digga’s widow teetered on the brink of lying, decided to nod her head instead, tears pooling up in her eyes.
“Why don’t you tell me what kind?”
“I got a nigga tryin’ to get in my pants don’t wanna take no for an answer. All right?”
“You mean 2DaddyLarge?”
Danee Elbridge blinked at him incredulously. “How did you know?”
“I haven’t had a conversation in three days in whic
h his name hasn’t been mentioned at some point. And you two were a couple at one time, right? Before Carlton came along?”
“We weren’t never a couple. We weren’t anything. I went out with his ugly ass a couple times, that’s all. He wants to make a thing outa that, that’s his problem.”
“Only he doesn’t see it that way.”
“No. Nigga’s hardheaded.” She started crying. “I tell ’im I don’t wanna be with ’im, that it ain’t nothin’ personal, but he don’t listen. He says we’re gonna be together whether I like it or not.”
Gunner watched her find a tissue in one of the pockets of her robe and blow her nose gracelessly into it. “Is 2Daddy here now? In Los Angeles?”
She nodded. “He’s waitin’ for me at some hotel somewhere. He said the name, but I don’t remember it.”
“You talked to him today?”
“He got my cellular number somehow, called me in the car on my way home from the gym, said he was gonna send one of his boys over to pick me up, take me to see ’im. I told ’im I wouldn’t go, but he just laughed.”
“So that’s who you thought I was. His boy.”
“Hell, what would you think? Strange nigga comes crashin’ through your front gate …”
“Actually, the gate was open. You didn’t leave it that way?”
She shook her head, re-creating her arrival in her mind. “No. But then, it ain’t been workin’ right lately. It’s supposed to close automatically when you pull in, but sometimes it don’t. I shoulda looked back to check it, but I was so crazy…”
“Hello?” a voice called out from the direction of the front door.
Gunner and Danee Elbridge turned to see a pair of LAPD uniforms step tentatively into the room, sidearms drawn, faces fixed with nervous concentration. The lead man, a red-nosed white man older than his black partner by at least ten years, studied the pair before him, said, “A neighbor reported shots being fired at this address. And there’s a car out front all full of holes.”
“That’s my car,” Danee Elbridge said. “It was all a mistake. I thought—”
“You the owner of the house, ma’am?”
“Yes. This man—”
He cut her off again, still holding his weapon at the ready, said, “And you, sir? Who are you?”
Gunner told him, kicking off what turned out to be a thirty-minute break in his conversation with the Digga’s widow. The story he and she offered the two officers was disjointed and incomplete, but in the end, the uniforms didn’t have much choice but to buy it and retreat. They were able to confirm that Danee Elbridge was indeed the owner of the home, and that the gun she had allegedly used to do all the shooting was registered in her name. And she was insistent no harm had been done, the ugly bump on her head notwithstanding.
When they were at last alone again to pick up where they’d left off, Danee Elbridge and her guest resumed their original positions on her living room couch, sans the makeshift ice packs, and decided after some consideration that their last subject of discussion had been 2DaddyLarge, and the man he had promised was on his way to bring Danee to him. By force, if necessary.
“Funny thing is, I almost gave my shit up,” she confessed, opening the collar of her bathrobe slightly to draw Gunner’s eyes to the negligee beneath it. “I mean, I thought maybe if I finally let the nigga have a taste, didn’t do nothin’ to make it special or anything, he’d see it wasn’t workin’ and lose int’rest. I was all dressed and ready to go … and then I saw your car comin’ up the driveway. An’ I said uh-uh, fuck that. I done held that motherfucker off this long, I ain’t gonna just bend over for ’im now.”
“Sounds like maybe someone should have a little talk with him,” Gunner said. “See if they can’t encourage him to look for companionship elsewhere.”
“You mean you? Man, why should he listen to you? He never listened to Cee, and Cee was my husband.”
“True. But maybe Cee never managed to catch him alone. I hear 2Daddy’s a lot more agreeable when his homies aren’t around than when they are.”
The Digga’s widow laughed. “Ain’t that the truth.”
“Your mother-in-law, in fact, seems to believe he’s completely harmless.”
“Coretta? She said that?”
“In so many words. I asked her if she thought 2Daddy could’ve had anything to do with Carlton’s death, and she all but laughed in my face at the thought.”
Danee Elbridge’s expression darkened, told him he’d struck a chord with this last.
“What do you think about that idea?”
“What idea?”
“That 2Daddy may have been involved in your husband’s death somehow.”
“I think it’s crazy. Cee committed suicide.”
“You sound quite sure about that.”
“I am.”
“Mind if I ask why?”
“Why? Because that’s all it coulda been, suicide. All these people sayin’ Cee was murdered don’t know what the hell they talkin’ about.”
“Because?”
“Because they wasn’t there, that’s why.”
“You mean at the hotel. To see the note he left behind.”
The Digga’s widow tipped her head slightly to one side, the better to view him with renewed distrust. “Coretta told you about Cee’s note?”
“No. Joy did.”
“But he didn’t tell you what it said, right?”
Gunner almost had to laugh. “No. And neither did your mother-in-law, if that was going to be your next question. Would you like to be the first to clue me in?”
Danee Elbridge just shook her head. Greatly relieved.
“No. I didn’t think you would,” Gunner said.
“Hey, I’m sorry, Mr…. what’d you say your name was?”
“Gunner. Aaron Gunner.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gunner, but that’s just how it is. Wasn’t nothin’ in that note you or anybody else needs to know about.”
“No, apparently not. At least, that’s what everyone who’s ever seen it keeps telling me, aside from Ray Crumley, of course. Did you know poor Ray?”
If she did, her face never showed it. “Who?”
“Ray Crumley. He was the security man at the Beverly Hills Westmore who discovered Carlton’s body along with Joy. You never met him?”
She shook her head again, said, “No. I mighta seen ’im at the hotel that day, but … we didn’t talk or anything. Least, I don’t remember talkin’ to ’im. Why? What’s he gotta do with me?”
“It’s beginning to look like he took home a hotel surveillance tape that may have shown someone entering or exiting your husband’s room the night he died, kept it a couple of days, maybe even made a copy before returning it. I’d tell you why he’d want to do something like that, except I never got the chance to ask him. He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“As in murdered in his apartment last night, yeah. Somebody broke in and trashed the place, then beat him to death when he discovered them there.”
A short, painful silence ensued as he waited for the Digga’s widow to offer some response.
“So? I already told you I didn’t know the man. Why you tellin’ me all this?”
She was either telling the truth, or faking it better than almost anyone Gunner had ever seen. “Because I was hoping you could tell me what it all means,” the investigator said. “Crumley’s supervisor says the surveillance tape he took was recorded between four and eight o’clock p.m. that Saturday, more than four hours before your husband was determined to have died. It should have been worthless in terms of proving he was murdered, and therefore useless as a means for blackmail, yet it’s my guess somebody killed Crumley trying to retrieve the tape and keep its contents secret. The question is, why?”
“I don’t know,” Danee Elbridge said.
“Beverly Hills PD tells me you visited your husband’s room that night. Around what time was that?”
“I don’t remember.”
�
��You don’t remember if it was between the hours of four and eight p.m.?”
“It coulda been. I told you, I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember if Carlton had any other visitors around that time besides yourself?”
A full five seconds went by, then: “No. I was only over there for a few minutes, I didn’t see who else came by.”
“That isn’t quite true, Mrs. Elbridge. Your husband had at least two other visitors that night the police say you were aware of. Both of them were female.”
“Okay. So he had a couple bitches in his room ’fore I came by. What about it?”
“Could they have been there between the hours of four and eight that evening?”
She held on to her answer like it was something he was unworthy of, finally mumbled, “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“The police say you knew one of the ladies by name.”
Another long, angry pause. “Yeah.”
“And that name was?”
“Antoinetta.”
“Antoinetta. Antoinetta what?”
“I don’t know the bitch’s last name.”
“How about the other young lady?”
The Digga’s widow shook her head. “I didn’t know her. That was the first time I ever seen her.”
“But you knew Antoinetta.”
“Yes.”
“In what way? She a personal friend, or …”
Danee Elbridge laughed bitterly, shook her head. “See? I knew it. You ain’t no goddamn investigator! Look at these questions you askin’!”
“She was in your husband’s hotel room the night he died. She might know something—”
“Get outa my house, Mr. Gunner. Now!” She stood up, pointed a long-nailed finger at the door. “Take your ass back to whatever newspaper, or magazine, or TV show you workin’ for, and don’t ever come back around here!”
All the Lucky Ones Are Dead Page 10
