“Ready? Shit. I hardly know his ass either.”
“Look. The Man’s looking for your girl Felicia because he thinks she may have murdered somebody, but not me. I’m thinking she could get whacked herself here pretty soon, if I or the cops don’t find her before somebody else does.”
“Aw, man, this is bullshit …”
“Don’t hang up! Listen to me! Five-oh’s already talked to you about this, right?”
Rocket grunted. “What do you think?”
“Then you already know the score. Sister’s in some deep shit. If she murdered her girl Antoinetta, she brought it on herself, but if she didn’t—”
“Felicia didn’t murder nobody. She ain’t like that. Never has been, never will be.”
“All right. So if she didn’t do it, she probably knows who did. And that’s what’s gonna put her in the morgue right next to Antoinetta if you don’t help me help her.”
“Help her? Help her how? By droppin’ a dime on her ass?”
“No. By seeing she doesn’t take the fall for something she didn’t do. Or worse. Guilty or innocent, at this point I don’t care. All I wanna do is talk to her. I’ll do it over the phone, if necessary.”
“Yeah, well, I’d like to help you, brother, but I can’t. Like I told Five-oh, I ain’t seen or heard from Felicia in almost a year.”
“Okay. Just do me one more favor then, huh? Give Ready a call. Tell him everything I’ve just told you, and see what he says. Considering Felicia’s medical problems, I’d say she’s got enough to worry about these days. Maybe together, you and I can do something to lighten the load for her a little.”
Twenty minutes later Gunner’s phone rang, but it wasn’t Felicia White calling. It was Carroll Smith of the FBI.
“I was wondering when I might hear from you boys,” Gunner said.
“Yeah. I would’ve called sooner, but I’ve been a little busy.” He sounded particularly unhappy.
“So I’ve heard. You’re calling to ask me to withdraw the troops, I imagine.”
“Not quite. I’m calling to find out where the hell the troops are with our surveillance subject. They both seem to have disappeared.”
“What?”
“Ms. Johnson left KTLK about thirty minutes ago, just before our people were scheduled to start watching her, and your man Mokes went with her. Nobody here’s seen or heard from either one of them since.”
“Johnson didn’t tell anybody where she was going?”
“No. Apparently, that would have run counter to her intentions. Her boss Browne says all the attention was driving her stir-crazy, he thinks she may have made herself scarce deliberately.”
“Shit.”
“I guess that means you don’t know where they are either.”
“No. Unless Jolly left a message for me I haven’t received yet …” He called Mickey into his office, asked him if he’d heard from the big man at all today. Mickey shook his head and said no.
“Don’t mean to be critical, Gunner, but this is what happens when you ask an amateur to do the work of a professional,” Smith said. “Our information is that Mokes is an ex-con who’s no more qualified to be watching Johnson than a twelve-year-old kid. What the hell were you using him on this detail for?”
“Don’t blame Jolly, Smith. If Johnson took a powder on you, and Jolly followed after her, he did what I would have wanted him to do.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Jolly’s okay. He’ll call in, don’t worry.”
“If he’s still breathing, you mean. If the Defenders go after Johnson and he gets in the way, it’s not gonna bother them at all to kill him too. In fact, they’ll probably take him out just for the hell of it.”
“You’re satisfied the Defenders are mixed up in this?”
“Reasonably so, yes. We’ve been talking to Johnson’s friend Nance for two days now, and he hasn’t changed a word of his story yet. If he’s lying about the Defenders setting him up, he put a lot of time in at rehearsal.”
Gunner asked Smith what he could do to help.
“Let us know as soon as you hear from Mokes, of course. And if you’ve got a description and license number of the car he’s driving, we wouldn’t mind having ’em on file.”
“I can help you with the first part, but not the second. He’s supposed to be driving a friend’s car—he never told me whose or what kind.”
“Fine. Just make the call then. The minute you hear from him, Gunner, don’t do anything else first. Are we clear on that?”
“We’re clear. Now how about you boys doing something for me?”
“Such as?”
“There’s a strange lady who’s been hanging around my local dive lately, showing more interest in me than you would think I deserve. Name’s Brenda Warren. Sound familiar?”
“Brenda Warren? No. Is there a reason that it should?”
“If she’s a known Defender collaborator, yeah. Otherwise, no.”
“You think she’s working with the Defenders?”
“Let’s just say the thought’s occurred to me. Can you run a check on her for me, make sure my concerns are unwarranted?”
Smith hesitated before answering, just in case Gunner was starting to take him for granted. “I guess I can do that. Sure.”
Rocket never called Gunner back, but Alred did. His flesh-peddling homie out in San Bernardino had done as Gunner asked and given him a call, seeking some assurance that the investigator could be trusted, and Alred wasn’t happy about it. Gunner let him vent for a while, figuring he was entitled, then came within seconds of hanging up on him before Alred finally arrived at the real point of his call.
“Rocket told me to give you a message,” he said.
The content of that message brought Gunner to the food court of the gargantuan Del Amo Mall in Torrance thirty minutes later, where a prelunch crowd was already starting to fill space like water gushing from a broken dam. Rocket’s instructions had demanded the investigator sit alone at a table near the ubiquitous Hot Dog on a Stick, the front page of the L.A. Times folded into quarters before him, and Gunner followed those instructions to the letter, doing what he could to look innocuous as the minutes slowly ticked by. First ten, then fifteen. Then twenty. He was reading a Times story on the latest MTA Metro Rail construction shutdown for what had to be the fifth time when a black woman in her early twenties pushed past the flow of foot traffic surrounding his table, stopping just out of his reach, and in a voice he could barely hear, asked, “Your name Gunner?”
“That’s right.”
Felicia White took a final look around, failed to see the makings of a trap, and sat down to join him. She had a green knit cap on her head that swallowed her hair whole, and her clothing was Wal-Mart-grade unprovocative, but other than that, she wore nothing whatsoever in the way of a disguise. In fact, had she not lost what Gunner guessed to be about fifteen pounds since, she would have looked just like she had in the mug shots Poole had shown him the night before: tiny, doll-faced—and scared as hell.
“First thing you gotta know, I didn’t kill nobody,” she said. Not asking him to believe it, but stating a known fact.
“Okay.”
“I didn’t even know Antoinetta was dead till I seen it on TV. She was onea my best friends, I wouldn’ta never done nothin’ to harm her.”
“All right. So who did?”
“I don’t know. I swear to God, I really don’t. But …”
Gunner raised an eyebrow to urge her on.
“I think it was 2DaddyLarge. The rapper. You know who he is?”
“I know.” Only four hours ago, Gunner might have been surprised to hear this, but not now. It was what he’d come here halfway expecting White to say. “What makes you think it was him?”
White checked her back briefly as someone passed behind her with a tray, then turned around again and said, “’Cause Antoinetta kept sayin’ he set us up. That me an’ her was gonna get blamed for what happened to the Digga, an’ it was all on accounta 2Daddy
.”
“How was that?”
White shook her head. “I don’t know. Antoinetta was always talkin’ some crazy shit, I thought she was just trippin’, same as usual. But then I started thinkin’ ‘bout all the money she gave me, an’ I realized she might be for real. Maybe 2Daddy did set us up.”
“What money was this?”
White lowered her eyes, finally hearing a question she wasn’t comfortable answering. “The money we got from the Digga,” she said, making it sound like a confession of some kind. “We was up in his hotel room the night he died. You knew that, right?”
Gunner nodded.
“Well. He gave us a thousand dollars afterward. Five hundred each. An’ Antoinetta let me have all of it. Just handed me the money in the elevator as we was leavin’, didn’t keep a dime of it for herself.”
“She say why?”
“She said she didn’t need it. Just bein’ with the Digga was enough, she said.”
“She was that big a fan?”
White shrugged. “I guess. I know she liked homeboy’s music.” She shook her head again. “But still. I shoulda known somethin’ was up. Girlfriend never did nobody without gettin’ paid somethin’. That’s why I figure maybe it was true what she said. About it bein’ 2Daddy what paid us to be up there.”
The ramifications of this suggestion moved Gunner to silence, but they appeared to have gone right over White’s head.
“And why do you think he would have wanted to do that?” Gunner asked her eventually. “He and the Digga couldn’t stand each other.”
“I know. That’s what I always thought too.”
She wouldn’t say any more than that.
“When you and the Digga were getting busy,” Gunner said, “was he wearing a hat?”
“Yes. Hell yes,” White said. Answering too fast to give it any semblance of truth. “I make everybody I get with wear a hat.”
“You mean since you’ve been diagnosed?”
White’s face collapsed. “Diagnosed? What—”
“I know about your medical problems, Felicia. So there’s no need to talk to me like I don’t.”
White stared at him, both eyes tearing up at once. She looked off to one side, said, “Who told you?”
“It doesn’t matter who told me. The point is, I know. And I sympathize, really. But if you went up to the Digga’s room that night with the specific intent of infecting him with AIDS—”
“No! I didn’t! I tried to make ’im wear somethin’, but he wouldn’t! Antoinetta said—”
She cut herself off abruptly.
“Antoinetta said what?” Gunner asked.
White evaded the question for several seconds, then: “She said it wasn’t necessary. That she couldn’t never feel nothin’ when a man had a rubber on, an’ they didn’t really do nothin’ anyhow.”
“And the Digga went along with that?”
She tilted her head to one side apologetically, said, “He was all set to go. Niggas don’t ever wanna put one on anyways, he sure as hell wasn’t gonna argue with her about it.”
“But if you’d told him about your condition …”
“Antoinetta said he already knew. She said he’d been with a lot of girls like me, he didn’t have no fear of gettin’ infected.”
Gunner started to ask if she had really believed that, but the answer was obvious: Absolutely.
“How did you end up going with her that night? Did she invite you along, or did someone else tell you to go?”
“She invited me. She called me up that mornin’ an’ asked if I needed a date, an’ I said yeah. I didn’t even know who it was with till we got to the hotel.”
“You ask her why she picked you? Over all her other girlfriends in the trade?”
“No. Why should I? She knew I been hurtin’ for work lately, she prob’ly—” She stopped, finally catching on to what he was getting at. “Oh. You mean why like that.”
“You should be retired, Felicia. You pose a health risk to everybody you get with, and Antoinetta would’ve known that. You didn’t think it was at all strange that she chose you to double-team the Digga with that night?”
“No. Antoinetta was my friend. If you’re tryin’ to say she—”
“When you two went up to the Digga’s room—did he act like he’d been expecting you? Or did he seem surprised?”
“Was he surprised?” She took a moment to think back, said, “I guess so. I remember when he come to the door he asked Antoinetta what we was doin’ there. But what—”
“Then he couldn’t have asked her over himself.”
White just responded with a small shrug.
“And someone did ask her over, because she knew he was there. Or was that just a guess?”
“A guess?”
“His room number, for instance. She have to ask somebody at the front desk for that, or did she already seem to know?”
“She didn’t ask nobody nothin’ at the desk. We just went straight up.”
Gunner looked away, feigning interest in the mass of people around them, so that White couldn’t see how disgusted he was by the picture she was slowly piecing together for him. Somebody had used her lethal viral condition as a murder weapon with the aid of Antoinette Aames, and she was either completely oblivious to the fact, or in some serious denial about it.
“Did you know Antoinetta’s friend Ray Crumley?” Gunner asked when he faced White again.
“Ray? You mean the one what worked at the hotel?”
“Yeah. That one. Did he see you two there the night you were with the Digga?”
“Did he see us?” White was playing stupid now. “No. But …”
“You saw him.”
She nodded.
“As you were coming in, or going out?”
“When we was goin’ out. Antoinetta saw ’im in the lobby an’ damn near died. I didn’t get what the big deal was, but seein’ homeboy there like to scared her to death.”
“Why was that?”
“’Cause she thought he’d seen us, and was gonna call the cops. I was like, so what if he does, the shit’s over with now, right? But she made us run outa there anyway, drove like a fool the whole way back to my crib. Girlfriend was trippin’.”
“You know Crumley’s dead now too, don’t you?”
White tried and failed again to appear nonplussed. “Yeah. They said on the news he got killed by somebody tryin’ to jack his crib or somethin’. That’s a damn shame.”
“In other words, you had nothing to do with it.”
“Say what?”
“The man who killed Crumley was in his apartment that night because Antoinetta sent him over there. You trying to say you didn’t know that?”
“No! I didn’t—”
“You want me to help you, Felicia, yet you’re sitting here jerking me around. Now, I’m gonna ask you just once more, before I walk out of here and leave you to save your tight little ass all by yourself. Did you know Antoinetta sent a guy named Marvin Felipe out to rob Ray Crumley’s place, or not?”
White stared him down, gauging his resolve, then slowly nodded her head again.
“Okay. Tell me why,” Gunner said.
“She thought he had some kinda tape. What showed me an’ her at the hotel. An’ Antoinetta thought he was gonna show it to somebody. Either the cops or the newspapers, one or the other.”
“So what if he had?”
“That’s what I kept askin’! Who cares if he shows it to somebody, we didn’t do nothin’. But Antoinetta just kept sayin’ we was both gonna be fucked if anybody found out we was with the Digga that night. Like it was our fault homeboy killed hisself, or somethin’.”
“Go on.”
“So she went over to Ray’s crib to talk to ’im. You know, to ask ’im not to say nothin’ ’bout us bein’ at the hotel.”
“She went to see him? When?”
“The next day. She was on a paranoid tip, like I said, wasn’t nothin’ I could tell her to make her b
elieve home-boy wasn’t gonna out us. So she looked ’im up, to see if they couldn’t work somethin’ out.”
“And?”
“And they did, of course. That nigga loved Antoinetta, he woulda done anything to get back with her.”
“Including borrow a hotel surveillance tape for a couple days so he could edit your faces out of it.”
“Yeah. That’s right. How’d you know?”
“I saw the outtakes. Only they weren’t on videocassette like Antoinetta thought. They were on his computer.”
“His computer? No shit?”
“No shit. He changed the tape just like he promised, but he kept a copy of the parts he cut out for himself. I suspect that was so he could blackmail you ladies with it later, but maybe I’m wrong.”
“Blackmail? Ray?” She shook her head. “No way. That’s what Antoinetta was afraid of, but Ray didn’t have nothin’ but love for her, like I said. She got that poor nigga killed for nothin’, sendin’ that fool you was talkin’ about before—Marvin—over to his crib to steal some tapes. Hell, he didn’t even know we been over at the hotel till she told ’im!”
And there it was: confirmation that Gunner’s view of Crumley had always been ass-backward, just as the video clip on the dead man’s computer had recently brought him to suspect.
“Okay, Felicia, I think I’ve heard enough for now,” Gunner said. “Would you like something to eat before we go, or are you ready to jet?”
White looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Jet? Jet where? Where’ve we gotta go?”
“To see Five-oh, of course. We’ll go in together, it’s gonna be all right.”
“What?” She started to push away from the table.
Gunner reached out to place a hand on her arm, said, “I told you I’d help you if you leveled with me, and I meant it. But I can’t do anything for you if you remain a fugitive. Most especially, keep you alive.”
“Let go of me!” Her head swiveled from side to side now as she sought some avenue of escape.
Gunner got to his own feet, tightened his grip On her carefully. “Listen up. You act like you don’t understand what went down, but I think you get it just fine. You’re an accessory to a murder attempt, Felicia. 2Daddy or somebody had Antoinetta use you to try and infect the Digga with AIDS, and now he or she is serving up everyone who knows about it.”
All the Lucky Ones Are Dead Page 20
