All the Lucky Ones Are Dead

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “Antoinetta Aames? What the hell kinda name is that?” Poole asked, after Gunner had requested he run a trace on Aames for him. It seemed safe to say now that Danee Elbridge wasn’t going to be calling with the info on Aames he’d asked for, so the authorities were the investigator’s next option. He had thought briefly about asking Kevin Frick to run the trace for him, then decided against it, as Frick had made it clear the last time they spoke that he didn’t want to be bothered again with anything relating to the Elbridge case until Gunner could offer him something in the way of physical evidence.

  “I don’t make ’em up, Poole. I just write ’em down. Sister’s name is Antoinetta Aames, what can I tell you?”

  “So who is she, and why should I care?”

  “She’s a possible wit to a possible homicide. Or maybe even a murderer, I won’t really know until I talk to her. Her or her girlfriend Felicia something, if you could maybe make that connection for me too.”

  “I see. Got it. You wanna take a deep breath now, try to say that again in English?”

  “Sure. You got a few minutes?”

  “No. Forget about it. Gimme the exact spelling of her name, I’ll run the goddamn trace.”

  Shortly after hanging up with Poole, Gunner got a callback on the message he’d left earlier for Steven La Porte.

  “Thought it might interest you to know, you’re no longer a suspect in the Crumley case,” the detective said.

  “I didn’t know I was a suspect,” Gunner said.

  “Well, I’ll admit you weren’t a great one, but we had you on our A-list all the same. Lucky for you we found somebody better.”

  “Let me guess. It’s a lady by the name of Antoinetta Aames.”

  “Antoinetta Aames? Never heard of her. This guy’s name is Melvin Felipe, the biggest shit-for-brains you’d ever wanna see.”

  “Melvin Felipe?”

  “He’s a crackhead with three other aliases, but none of ’em are important. What’s important is, his prints were all over Crumley’s apartment, and we can’t seem to locate ’im to ask ’im why. Looks like he’s a runaway.”

  “And his motive for doing Crumley?”

  “You mean besides the fact Crumley caught ’im robbing his crib? He hasn’t got one. You really think he’s gonna need two?”

  Gunner ignored the rhetorical question, asked the cop if he and his partner, Chin, had any physical evidence outside of Felipe’s fingerprints to link him to Crumley’s murder.

  “Not yet,” La Porte said. “We traced ’im to his sister’s place out in South Gate, but there was nothin’ there to see by the time we came by to look for ’im. He hadn’t been home since early Tuesday morning, the sister said, and he cleaned out his room when he left. I wonder why.”

  “Then my tape didn’t turn up over there, I guess.”

  La Porte found that worth a chuckle. “You and your friggin’ tape. Get over it already, will you? Crumley gettin’ whacked had nothin’ to do with your suicide case, this was a simple B and E gone bad.”

  “We can’t be sure of that yet, La Porte. Just because your suspect’s a crackhead—”

  “He’s got two priors on similar beefs, Gunner. And the MO on those was the same as it was here—entry through a bedroom window, nothing but small items taken. Cash, jewelry, silverware, et cetera. Only difference this time was, he got caught with his hands in the cookie jar, had to hurt somebody to get away.”

  It was a convincing argument. The BHPD’s Kevin Frick had been saying all along that Crumley’s murder and Carlton Elbridge’s apparent suicide would turn out to be unrelated, and maybe he was right. As bad as Gunner wanted the two to connect, the pieces just wouldn’t fit. A surveillance tape that couldn’t be used to blackmail Elbridge’s hypothetical killer; the lack of a second VCR in Crumley’s apartment for making copies; now a murder suspect with a history of committing similar crimes entirely devoid of hidden subtext.

  “You ask the sister if she ever saw Felipe with a tape?” Gunner asked, not one to let go of an unfeasible idea easily.

  “No. But not because we didn’t think of it. Lady seems to have the same appreciation for rock cocaine her brother does, we were lucky she could remember she had a brother at all. Hey listen, Gunner, is that about it? I’m being a good guy here, callin’ to let you know you were off the hook. I’d’ve known you were gonna question me all fuckin’ day about this shit …”

  “Okay, okay. But do me one last favor, will you? Let me know when Felipe turns up. You’re probably right about this being a dead horse I’m beating, but if I’m still working this case when you collar him …”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay. Assuming he’s still breathing when we find ’im, you can have a few words with ’im soon as Pete and I have had ours. What the hell do I care?”

  Gunner didn’t know it until the dial tone sounded in his ear, but that was the man’s way of saying good-bye.

  Desmond Joy wanted to do a late lunch. He wouldn’t discuss his reasons over the phone, just asked Gunner to meet him in an hour down at Coley’s Kitchen on Crenshaw and Vernon in Leimert Park. Gunner had actually had other plans for his afternoon, but he found a way to change them so that both Joy’s and his own needs were met.

  He was walking out of his office to leave when Benny Elbridge met him at the door, a hangdog look on his face. He wasn’t near tears, but Gunner had seen less remorseful-looking people begging for a judge’s mercy down at the county courthouse.

  “Well, well,” the investigator said. “Look who finally remembered I’m alive.”

  “I come here to offer you an apology, Mr. Gurtner,” Elbridge said, man enough to meet Gunner’s gaze without flinching. “I lied to you.”

  “Yes. You did, didn’t you?”

  “But Mr. Trevor says you’re still on the job. That you’re gonna keep on lookin’ for my boy’s killer, even though you know now it’s really Bume you been workin’ for all this time.”

  “That’s right. At least, I’m not ready to give up yet.”

  “Good. God bless you. I mean that.” He reached out to take Gunner’s right hand, swallowed it up in both of his own.

  “Forget it,” Gunner said, easing his hand away uncomfortably. “A fee’s a fee, right? What difference does it make where it comes from?”

  “If it’s comin’ from a man like Bume, it can make a lotta difference. I know me, I had a hard time doin’ what he asked me to do, hire you with his money to find out what happened to Carlton. I’d’ve had just a few more dollars in my pocket when Mr. Trevor called …”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Elbridge. I’ve been there myself, it’s okay.”

  “No. It ain’t okay. Mr. Trevor said now that you know the truth, I don’t really have to talk to you no more, that he can handle everything with you from now on. But I didn’t wanna just go ’way and leave you thinkin’ I only did what I done for the money. That Bume Webb cared more about Carlton than his own father did.”

  “There’s no need to explain, Mr. Elbridge.”

  “Still.” Elbridge took his left thumb, smeared a tear across the breadth of his left cheek. “I just wanted you to know. I’d’ve had the money, I would’ve hired you myself, for real. I didn’t need Bume Webb to tell me to do that.”

  Gunner wasn’t sure the old man deserved to be let off the hook so easily, but Elbridge’s need for forgiveness was too great to deny. He took a bribe to front for Bume Webb, that was all; a dishonorable deceit, to be sure, but not a particularly destructive one. Surely there was nothing to be gained now by making him feel like the only client who had ever successfully run a game on Aaron Gunner.

  “Far as I’m concerned, Mr. Elbridge, you’re still my client,” Gunner said, patting the old man’s left shoulder softly. “You’re the man who hired me, and you’re the man I intend to keep reporting to. That all right with you?”

  Elbridge couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Sure, sure. But—”

  “If Mr. Trevor has a problem with that, he can call me. He’s
got the number.”

  Elbridge grinned, stuck his hand out to shake Gunner’s with great enthusiasm. “All right then! You want I should call you, or …”

  “I’ll call you tonight, say around six, give you an update on what I’ve found out so far. Just make sure you’re by the phone when I call this time, huh?”

  “Oh, you got it. I’ll be there, don’t worry.”

  It was another ten seconds before he stopped shaking Gunner’s hand.

  t h i r t e e n

  AT TWO-THIRTY THAT AFTERNOON, GUNNER FOUND Desmond Joy sitting at a table in the middle of Coley’s Kitchen’s small main dining room, already digging into the restaurant’s rich Jamaican fare like a man who’d last eaten a week ago. In less than three hours, a cluster of people waiting for tables would be making it impossible to enter Coley’s through the front door, but this early in the day, Joy and Gunner practically had the place all to themselves.

  “So what’s up?” Gunner asked, as soon as he’d sat down and ordered the jerk chicken and a bottle of ginger beer from a waitress only too eager to please him.

  “I understand you’re still working for Mr. Elbridge,” Joy said, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with a napkin.

  Gunner nodded. “That’s right. Today makes three whole days. What, was I supposed to have lost interest by now?”

  “That wouldn’t have surprised me. But that’s not the reason I ask.” He refilled his glass from his own bottle of ginger beer, said, “I ask because I’m about to do something it only makes sense to do if you’re going to continue on with this thing. If you’re close to wrapping it up, there’s really no point in my saying anything.”

  Gunner shook his head. “Sorry. Way things look right now, I may not be done for a few more days, at least.” He made a gesture to indicate it was Joy’s move. “So …”

  “I’ve done some checking on you, Brother Gee. Trying to find out how legit you are. And the four-one-one I get is that you’re all that and more. Your homie Slicky in particular assures me I can trust you with even the most sensitive info without worrying about where it might go from here.”

  “Slicky’s a good man.”

  “As are you, apparently. Which is why I’m going to take a chance here and tell you something you really have no right to know, in the interest of helping you reach a quick and satisfactory conclusion to your investigation.”

  Gunner smiled. “That’s very generous of you, Brother Joy. A quick and satisfactory conclusion to my investigation would be quite welcome.”

  “You joke, Brother Gee, but it isn’t funny. If I’m wrong about you, the Digga’s rep could be damaged beyond all repair, and his family would bear the brunt of that.”

  “All right. This is serious business, I get it.”

  Joy waited for their waitress to set Gunner’s beer down in front of him, then disappear again, before continuing. “You asked me the other day what reasons the Digga could have had to take his own life, and I declined to give you an answer. Since you’re still pursuing the possibility that he was murdered, I can only assume his wife and mother did likewise. Is that correct?”

  “It is. I couldn’t get either one of them to say two words on the subject.”

  “Then neither of them told you what was in his note.”

  “His suicide-slash-rap-lyrics note? No. Not hardly.”

  Joy nodded, finally left with no choice but to say what he’d come to say. “About ten months ago, out in Philly, the Digga had a girl up in his room. Somebody he’d met at a club the night before, I don’t even think he knew her name. Sad to say, but there was nothing unusual about it, that was just the Digga’s way on the road. Anyway, the way he explained things afterward, they got down to business rather quickly. She gave him some head, asked him to give it to her from behind. So he did. Then, afterward—”

  “He found out she wasn’t a she,” Gunner said.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I’ve heard that story before. It always starts the same way. First some head, then some backdoor action.”

  “Yeah. I’d heard it before myself. Unfortunately, the Digga hadn’t. He didn’t know the score until the damage had already been done.” He shrugged. “And of course, a young brother’s ego being what it is, he didn’t take the shock too well.” Joy looked around the room to make sure he wasn’t being overheard, then said, “He almost killed the poor bastard. The only reason he didn’t was because I happened to have the suite right next to his that night, broke in through the adjoining door to stop him.” He sipped his beer, watched as Gunner’s plate was delivered. When they were alone again, he said, “As it was, the young ‘lady’s’ hospital bills came to a little over ten grand, and it cost us another fifty to buy his silence in the matter thereafter.”

  “Sixty grand? He walked away for that?”

  “Yeah, I know. We got off cheap. But the damn kid was a fan, what can I say? He actually blamed himself for what happened to him, not the Digga. Only thing he really asked for afterward was the reassurance that the Digga didn’t hate him for the game he’d played on him.”

  “And did he get it?”

  “He was led to believe he did. That, and the monetary compensation we offered, was the best I could do for him, I’m afraid.”

  “In other words, the Digga wasn’t ready to kiss and make up.”

  “No. Not even. He looked upon what the guy had done to him as rape. The idea that he’d had his jimmy inside a man’s mouth and ass … It just wiped him out. Drove him crazy.”

  “And that’s why he wanted to kill himself? Because he’d once had sex with a man?”

  “You telling me you find that surprising? That a straight, healthy young black man with a wife and two kids would have a hard time dealing with being tricked into getting jiggy with another man?”

  Obviously, the answer was no. Gunner knew as well as anyone how pervasive homophobia was among young African-American males, and how lethal that homophobia could sometimes become. Raised as they generally were in fundamental Christian households, black men were conditioned from a very early age to consider homosexuality nothing less than an abomination in the eyes of God, and so rejected the practice with great prejudice. And aside from the moral aspects of the issue were the strictly practical ones. In a cultural setting where a young man’s ability to meet any physical challenge was constantly being tested, no charge could bring him more grief than that he was somehow more a woman than a man. That was the kind of label that, on the street especially, could make one’s daily existence a living nightmare.

  “I can see how he might’ve taken it pretty hard, sure,” Gunner conceded. “It’s just … This isn’t just any young brother from the hood we’re talking about, is it? It’s C.E. Digga Jones. A media superstar who could’ve bought you and me, and all the people we’ll happen to meet over the next five years, with what he earned on an average payday.”

  “And if he was? What difference should that have made?”

  “Maybe none at all. I’m only saying that, considering everything else he had going for him, you’d like to think the kid could’ve found a way to overlook the indignity of having had a single, inadvertent gay experience.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, Brother Gee. You aren’t the one who had to live with it.”

  “No. That’s true, I’m not.”

  “What you need to understand is that it wasn’t just the guilt the boy had weighing on him. It was the fear as well. He was terrified the guy in Philly would go back on our deal and start talking, that sooner or later, the word would get out about what the two of them had done to each other in that hotel room together. But of course, word never did get out. The guy never opened his mouth, just as I always told the Digga he wouldn’t. And that’s the real tragedy in all this, you see. The Digga killed himself for nothing. That kid who played him back in Philly was never gonna talk.”

  “But how could you have been so sure of that? You said yourself the money he took to go away was chump
change. If somebody had gotten an inkling of what had happened that night and offered him big dollars for his story …”

  “Nobody knew his story,” Joy said. “I told you. I fixed everything. I set it up so that no one would ever know what really happened out there but me, the Digga, and him. The cover story for his injuries I invented satisfied everybody who heard it—the police, the hotel, even the hospital where he was taken. Only way somebody else could have found out the truth about that night was if the kid said something, and I don’t think he would’ve ever done that, like I said. I’ve got a sense for people, brother, and my sense was that this boy cared more about the Digga than he did himself. Sounds pitiful as hell, I know, but that’s just the way some of these kids are today.”

  “Still. I should probably talk to him, don’t you think? Just in case he’s driving around Pennsylvania in a brand-new Jaguar you don’t know about?”

  Joy shook his head, said, “Out of the question. The agreement we made was that he wouldn’t out us, and we wouldn’t out him. You wanna talk to him, Gee, you’re gonna have to go find him on your own.”

  “All right. Let’s just assume he didn’t talk, then. Word could have still gotten out some other way. Or am I mistaken in thinking the Digga’s wife and mother also knew what happened to him that night?”

  “You’re not mistaken. Of course they knew. The kid had been half crazy with guilt ever since, it was inevitable that he’d tell his wife and mother what happened.”

  “Then one of them could have leaked the story. If not deliberately, accidentally.”

  “Right. Like they leaked it to you, you mean?”

  Joy had Gunner there. The investigator had seen firsthand how protective both women were of the information in question; the likelihood that one of them had shared it with somebody else, even inadvertently, was remote to say the least.