All the Lucky Ones Are Dead

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “You’re jumping to false conclusions, Mrs. Elbridge,” Gunner said, getting to his own feet. “I’m not a reporter.”

  “Bullshit!” She stepped up to him, pushed him full in the chest with both hands. “Get out!”

  “Take it easy!”

  “I said get out!” She pushed him again.

  “Look—how about if I told you who my client is? Would you believe I’m who I say I am then?”

  “No! Get out!”

  “I’m working for your father-in-law. Benny Elbridge,” Gunner said.

  Sometimes, given no other choice, you had to give a little love to get some.

  “Say what?” Danee Elbridge asked, stunned.

  “My client’s Benny Elbridge. What, did I stutter the first time?”

  “Cee’s father? That’s who you workin’ for?”

  “Yes. I don’t—”

  “Oh no. Now I know you’ lyin’.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That old man ain’t got a dime to his name! How the hell’s he gonna hire somebody like you to do anything?”

  Gunner didn’t immediately know how to answer that. “I had the impression he was spending savings of some kind,” he said.

  “Savings?” Danee Elbridge laughed openly. “He ain’t got no savings! Savings from what? Mr. Elbridge ain’t held a job longer’n three weeks his whole life.”

  “What?”

  “Aw, damn. You really are workin’ for ’im, ain’t you? Only you just now findin’ out it’s for free!” She was laughing in earnest now, indifferent to the possibility that Gunner might take offense.

  But there was no way that he could, of course. He deserved to be ridiculed. For while he was actually innocent of the crime she believed him guilty of—taking a destitute man’s case without seeing some money first—he had waited until now to wonder where else the five-hundred-dollar cash retainer Benny Elbridge had paid him two days ago could have come from, other than Elbridge’s own pocket. It was an incredible example of shortsightedness that suddenly left him feeling quite stupid.

  “Free or otherwise,” he said, working hard to keep his embarrassment beneath the surface, “my services are being provided here at Mr. Elbridge’s request. So does that buy me a little trust from you or not?”

  Once again, she made him wait to hear her answer. “Depends on what you ask me.”

  “You mean you still won’t talk about the note.”

  “No.”

  “Even if it might indicate that your husband didn’t commit suicide?”

  “It don’t matter what it indicates. Gee wrote that note for me and his mama. Nobody else. What it says is personal, and that’s how we gonna keep it. Personal.”

  Gunner wasn’t satisfied with that answer—there was definitely something wrong about Danee Elbridge and Coretta Trayburn being equally protective of the note’s contents, while completely at odds over what those contents said about Carlton Elbridge’s death—but he could see the Digga’s widow was not going to discuss the matter any further. So …

  “And Antoinetta?”

  “She ain’t no friend of mine, and she wasn’t none of Cee’s. Only reason we even knew her is ’cause she likes to hang with some of the folks we party with. She’s always lookin’ for stars like Cee to get busy with so she can talk about bein’ with ’em afterward.”

  “And the girl who was with her that night at the Westmore? You’d really never seen her before?”

  “No. That was the first time.”

  “And Carlton never mentioned her name?”

  She thought about it a moment before answering, said, “He mighta said her name once. I think he said it was Felicia. Felicia or Phyllis, somethin’ like that.”

  Gunner gave her one of his business cards, said, “It would help me a great deal to talk to these ladies if I could find them. Maybe you could make a call or two for me, see if somebody knows their last names, or possibly where one of them lives.”

  Danee Elbridge took the card, showed him the courtesy of glancing at it briefly. “Why? They ain’t gonna know nothin’.”

  “Still. I’d like to talk to them. You never know what they might have seen or heard that night that could be helpful.”

  “Helpful how? Cee killed himself, Mr. Gunner. Why the hell can’t people just accept that and leave it alone?”

  Gunner eased her gun out of the front of his pants and tossed it on the couch. “Only one reason, really, Mrs. Elbridge,” he said. “Because it might not be true.”

  On his way out, Gunner stopped the Cobra just beyond the Elbridge estate’s still-open gate, left the car parked in the driveway there to see if he could figure out why the gate wasn’t closing. He was trying to pry open the system’s control box just inside the grounds when a car horn began bleating incessantly out on the street, forcing him to come around to see who was making all the racket.

  “Yo, man! Get the fuckin’ car out the way!”

  It was a young, needle-thin brother in a black-on-black Cadillac Eldorado, trying to turn up into Danee Elbridge’s driveway. He was yelling through the car’s open side windows from behind the wheel, giving Gunner a limited view of him, but even through the sun-dappled windshield Gunner could see he was bald, bony, and nowhere close to California’s legal drinking age of twenty-one.

  Gunner walked slowly over to the Cadillac’s driver’s-side window, peered down at the scowling kid inside. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. 2Daddy sent you,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s right. And I’m late. So do like I tol’ you and move the goddamn car!” He leaned on his horn again, hard, to prove how serious he was.

  Gunner just looked at him.

  “Look. You gonna move the muthafucka, or do I gotta move it for you?” the kid asked, throwing the Cadillac into gear.

  “You don’t wanna even think about that, June bug,” Gunner said.

  “June bug?”

  The teenager leapt out of the car, moved to stand within an inch of Gunner’s face. He was wearing a giant, fire engine-red DKNY jersey, baggy denim shorts that reached nearly to his ankles, and a gold neck chain he could have used to lock his bicycle to a lamppost. He pulled the hemline of the red jersey up high with his left hand, gave Gunner an unobstructed view of the black-skinned .45 automatic hanging loosely out of the waistband of his pants.

  “You must be lookin’ to get served, old man,” he snarled.

  Gunner turned his head to one side and smiled—Damn, these baby hoodlums could be stupid!—then yanked the .45 out of the kid’s pants, aimed it point-blank at his forehead before the kid even had a chance to blink.

  “Oops,” Gunner said.

  2Daddy’s errand boy was frozen stiff.

  “You were standing too close,” Gunner said. “And the piece was practically falling out of your pants. You wanna show somebody you’re strapping, youngblood, show ’em. Don’t beg ’em to take your shit away from you.”

  The kid opened his mouth to speak, but the investigator shook his head, warned him against it.

  “What’s happening? Who—” Danee Elbridge asked. She’d apparently heard all the horn honking and come out to see what it meant. She was standing now beside Gunner’s car, holding her robe closed tightly around her, absorbing the face-off going down in the street just outside her front gate. “Oh. It’s you.”

  Without taking his eyes off 2Daddy’s friend, Gunner said, “Looks like your ride to 2Daddy’s finally showed up. Maybe you recognize him.”

  “Yeah, I recognize ’im. That’s Teepee. He ain’t for shit.”

  “You better watch your mouth, bitch!” the kid screamed furiously.

  “Hey, hey,” Gunner said, tapping the nose of the .45 on the flat of the younger man’s forehead. “Show the lady a little respect, huh?”

  “Respect my ass! You muthafuckas’re fuckin’ with the wrong man! Dee say he wants the bitch brung to his crib, and that—”

  Gunner slammed the butt of the .45 off the crown of his head, hard, dropped
him semiconscious to the pavement like a spineless crash-test dummy. While the kid blinked up at the sky and bled, groaning softly, Gunner looked over at Danee Elbridge wryly and said, “I was getting kind of tired of all those ‘fucks’ and ‘bitches.’ Weren’t you?”

  n i n e

  “WHO THE FUCK IS THIS?” 2DADDYLARGE SAID.

  The would-be gangster named Teepee shrugged, eyes avoiding the other, slightly older man’s at all costs. “He say his name is Gunner. Aaron Gunner.”

  “Didn’t nobody ask you what the fuck his name is. I asked you who the fuck he is.”

  The three men were standing alone in the front room of the gangsta rapper’s large, tenth-floor suite at the Century City Marriott, awash in the sunlight pouring through a full-height window to the north.

  “Maybe if you tried asking me the question,” Gunner said, sounding for all the world as if he were just looking to be helpful, “you’d get a more satisfactory answer.”

  2DaddyLarge—a dreadlocked, broad-shouldered, dragon-nostriled young brother wearing a pair of white, loose-fitting, monogrammed silk pajamas—finally looked at his unwanted guest directly, red eyes open wide with mad dog venom. “Say what?”

  “I said, why don’t you try asking me who I am. I should know better than him, right?”

  2Daddy rolled a thick tongue over a mouth full of gold-covered teeth, demonstrating an uncanny range of self-control. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “So who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m a private investigator. Local. Name’s Aaron Gunner, like the man said. I’ve been hired by somebody close to C.E. Digga Jones to take a closer look at his suicide, see if maybe there’s some chance he was actually murdered. I was out visiting the Digga’s wife this afternoon when your boy showed up, offered to bring me around to say hello.”

  “That’s fuckin’ bullshit!” Teepee cried. “I didn’t offer to do a goddamn thing! He tol’ me—”

  But 2Daddy turned on him, snapped, “Shut the fuck up, fool! Let the man talk!” He looked back at Gunner, said, “Go ahead, Gee. Hurry up an’ get to the part what explains why I’m talkin’ to you, ’steada the bitch I sent this nigga here to bring me.”

  “That happened because the lady didn’t want to come,” Gunner said. “And I did. And since you’d already sent a car …”

  2Daddy looked down at the floor and shook his head, seemingly amused. “Shit,” he said, laughing.

  It was a sucker move Gunner had seen far too many times to ever fall for. When the big right uppercut came, its target was long gone; Gunner pivoted left to sidestep it, then threw a straight right of his own at the rapper’s head, filling the hollow of the younger man’s left cheek with the full weight of his fist. Teepee moved in from the side as 2Daddy reeled backward, but Gunner had the kid’s .45 out from behind his back before he could take two steps. By the time 2Daddy looked up, ready to charge, Gunner was already using the gun to wave his boy Teepee over to his side of the room.

  “You have any doubt I won’t empty this bad boy in both of your asses, either of you tries me, I’d advise you to lose it now,” Gunner said, holding the automatic straight out in front of him so that it couldn’t be mistaken for a mere prop.

  “Bitch, you done fucked up big-time, now,” 2Daddy said, using his tongue to count all the teeth on the left side of his jaw. His face was a mask of unadulterated rage, but he stayed right where he was, impressed enough by Gunner’s promise to shoot him that he wasn’t up to testing it. Yet.

  “Do yourself a favor,” Gunner said tersely. “Find something else to call me besides bitch.”

  “Nigga, I’ll call you any goddamn thing I wanna call you! Who the fuck—”

  Gunner turned the nose of the black .45 downward, shot him in the outside of his left thigh, planning it so that the bullet would graze his flesh and die in the body of the large, overstuffed couch behind him. 2Daddy dropped to the floor and howled, clutching his wound with both hands to try and stem the blood flowing freely from it.

  “Sorry. But it was either that or wash your mouth out with soap,” Gunner said casually. He really had heard all the four-letter vitriol he could stand in one afternoon.

  “Fuck!”

  “Ordinarily, I’d be concerned about the noise, but what the hell. You’re the loud rapper in room ten-seventeen, I’m sure the front desk gets calls about you all the time.” Gunner turned now to the stunned kid named Teepee, said, “There’s a movie called The Maltese Falcon. Ever hear of it?”

  Teepee looked at him, the very model of infantile shock and confusion. “What?”

  “The Maltese Falcon. It’s an old classic, you’re gonna love it. I want you to go get me a copy of it. Right now.”

  The kid was completely befuddled. “What?” he asked again.

  “Teepee, you ain’t goin’ fuckin’ nowhere!” 2Daddy cried, tears of anger streaming down both of his dark cheeks.

  “He either goes or I put the next one in your goddamn ear,” Gunner told him. “And then he can explain to all your fans and homies how somebody as badass as him let it happen.”

  He turned to Teepee, waited for him to make up his mind.

  “The Mall Tease Falcon,” the kid finally said.

  “Right. I’ll give you twenty minutes. You aren’t back with the tape by then—or if the cops show up first, by some strange coincidence—no more 2Daddy. Next flava with his name on it’s gonna have to be one of those ‘In Loving Memory’ greatest-hits packages.”

  Teepee looked at 2Daddy sadly, said, “Sorry, Dee, but this nigga’s crazy.”

  “Stay where the fuck you are, Teepee!” 2Daddy screamed.

  “I gotta go! I’ll go get the muthafuckin’ tape and be back, I promise!” He raced to the door before the rapper could offer any further protest, pointed a bony finger at Gunner before leaving. “It’s gonna be on if you touch Dee again, muthafucka. I mean it. You touch ’im again ’fore I get back, you’re dead.”

  He slammed the door behind him to bolster the empty threat, turning a deaf ear to 2Daddy’s repeated demands that he return.

  Knowing he had precious little time to work with, no matter what play the kid decided to make now, Gunner went straight to the nearby closet, came back with the spare pillow he found on a shelf there. 2Daddy watched him pull the pillowcase off, the rapper’s leg continuing to leak blood through his hands onto the shag carpet beneath him, and said, “What the fuck’s that for?” Sounding somewhat less imperious already.

  Gunner threw the pillow aside, started tearing the case into narrow strips. “Tourniquet. To slow the bleeding. You do know what a tourniquet is, don’t you?” He knotted three of the strips together to make one long one, tossed it over to the man on the floor.

  2Daddy quickly wrapped the tourniquet around his left thigh, high above his wound, said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” as he yanked it tight, then knotted it. It was clear to both of them that the injury wasn’t serious, but for him, this was immaterial; what real damage had been done was psychological, not physical. Having a cap popped in him in his own crib, in front of a member of his crew, by an old man he didn’t even know … For a player off the streets, humiliation didn’t come any more devastating.

  “Man, what the fuck is this about?” he barked, all but pleading for a straight answer.

  “I told you. C.E. Digga Jones.”

  “Yeah, so the little bitch is dead, so what? What’s that gotta do with me?”

  “You were here in L.A. when he died, weren’t you?”

  “Man, I don’t know. Maybe. I’m out here all the time.”

  “I was told you were here shooting a video that week.”

  “And if I was? What’s that suppose’ to prove?”

  “There’s an expression in legal circles called ‘opportunity to commit.’ Maybe you’re familiar with it.”

  “‘Opportunity to commit’? Commit what?”

  “You put a gun in a man’s mouth and pull the trigger, 2Daddy, it’s called murder. Opportunity to commit murder.”
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  “Murder? Man, stop trippin’! Homeboy served hisself, I didn’t have nothin’ to do with that shit!”

  “Sure you did. You used to talk about serving him up all the time.”

  “Nigga, that’s bullshit. Him an’ me liked to wolf all the time, yeah, but it wasn’t nothin’ personal. It was bus’ness.”

  “Business?”

  “That’s right, bus’ness! I was talkin’ ‘bout servin’ his little West Coast ass up saleswise, man, not literal, like. We was competitors.”

  “Oh … you were competitors.” Gunner smiled. “And the fact that he was slappin’ skin with an ex-girlfriend of yours every night, that never really bothered you.”

  2Daddy’s eyes suddenly came alive again. “You don’t wanna go there, muthafucka.”

  “Too late. I already went. And it looks like your beef with the Digga wasn’t all that businesslike, after all.”

  “Nigga stole my bitch! What, you think I shoulda been all right with that?”

  “Danee was never your ‘bitch.’ Why’s that so hard for you to understand?”

  “’Cause she was my bitch, nigga! You don’t know!”

  “I know what she says about it. And she says you’ve got your nose all opened up over nothing. A couple of nights out together back in the day, that’s all you ever had.”

  “That’s a fuckin’ lie! We was in love! Mad love!”

  “Yeah, well, the Digga’s widow doesn’t see it that way, and neither did he. You thought things might be different with him out of the picture, but you were wrong. Hate to be the one to break it to you, ‘Dee,’ but you killed a man over a woman you’re never gonna have.”

  “Bullshit! I didn’t kill nobody!”

  “Or maybe it was just his colors you didn’t like. Him being a Crip, and you a Blood …”

  “Man, fuck you! Homeboy served hisself, even his own people said so!”

  “I don’t care what his own people say,” Gunner said, deciding it was time to throw the wounded rapper a little curve, just to see how he would handle it. “They haven’t seen the tape. I have.”

  2Daddy scrunched his face up in a show of abject cynicism, said, “Tape? What tape?”