When Last Seen Alive

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “Sure. How long ago did this happen?”

  Lilly thought about it, said, “Two, three months ago. Maybe a little longer.”

  Gunner asked her if that was it, and Lilly nodded her head, said she’d told him everything there was to tell.

  “I guess you goin’ out there now, huh?” she asked, as Gunner slipped off his stool and pushed a ten-dollar bill toward her side of the counter.

  “Yeah. You wanna tell me to be careful?”

  “I wanna tell you to bring somethin’ for his ass this time. That’s what I wanna tell you. You go messin’ with that fool again without a gun in your pocket, you askin’ to get cut up.”

  “I hear you, Lilly.”

  “Don’t hear me, Gunner. Just do what I’m tellin’ you, all right?”

  The giant black woman snatched the ten off the bar, shoved it into an apron pocket, and left him to take care of another customer.

  “Well, well, well,” Johnny Frerotte said. “Ain’t this somethin’.”

  He’d gained a few pounds in nine years, and the only hair left on his head was growing long and unmanageable in the back, but other than that, he was the same smooth, fearsome character Gunner remembered. He had an office overlooking the gaming tables up on the Royalty Club’s second floor, and Gunner had been shown to it only after a guard downstairs had called ahead to announce his arrival. What the hell the Gardena card casino called itself doing, hiring a sociopath like Frerotte to head its security staff, Gunner couldn’t imagine, but there the big man sat: feet up on his desk, a drink in his right hand and a TV remote control in his left, eschewing the huge observation window at his back for a talk show playing on a television set just off to his right.

  “What’s up, Jack,” Gunner said, making a herculean effort to be polite.

  Frerotte sat up in his chair, used the remote control to turn the television off. “Aaron Gunner. Man, I thought I’d never see your tired ass again.” He smiled.

  “Yeah, I know. I was beginning to think the same thing about you.”

  “Been what? Ten years since we last saw each other?”

  “Nine or ten. Something like that.”

  Frerotte laughed, said, “That was the night I cut that boy’s nose off, huh? Over at the Deuce.”

  “Yeah, it was. Look, Jack—”

  “What was that fool’s name again? Somethin’ with a C …”

  “Cowens,” Gunner said.

  “Yeah, that was it. Cowens. I heard the doctors put his shit back on. You hear that?”

  Gunner just nodded his head, finally realizing his host wasn’t going to hear anything he had to say until he was all done reminiscing.

  “Somebody seen him after, I don’t remember who, told me they fucked it up. Boy’s nose was all crooked an’ shit. My man said he’d’a been better off leavin’ the fuckin’ thing on the floor where he found it.” He laughed again.

  Gunner watched him and waited.

  When Gunner’s silence became too much for him, Frerotte said, “So. What you want with me after all these years? You ain’t lookin’ for a job, are you?”

  Gunner shook his head, said, “I’ve already got one, thanks. As a matter of fact, that’s what brings me here today.”

  “Oh, wait a minute. You were some kind’a investigator, right? A private investigator?”

  “Yeah. You remember.”

  “Yeah, I remember. I remember a lot of things.” He showed Gunner his teeth again.

  “That’s good. Maybe you remember a brother named Elroy Covington, then.”

  The grin froze on Frerotte’s wide face, betraying an effort on the big man’s part to project unfamiliarity. “Who?”

  “Elroy Covington. He disappeared from a Hollywood motel last October. I’ve been hired to find out what happened to him.”

  “Covington?” Frerotte shook his head. “Never heard of nobody named Covington.”

  “Maybe it would help if I told you the name of the motel. The Stage Door. It’s on Sunset, just west of Vine, the south side of the street.”

  “Don’t know it. Somebody said I been there?”

  “At least a couple of people, yeah,” Gunner lied. “They both said you were the last person to see Covington the night he disappeared. You were in his room, they said.”

  “Bullshit. I don’t hang in Hollywood.”

  “Maybe you did back then. Just this once.”

  “You ain’t hearin’ me, Gunner. I said I don’t know the man, an’ I don’t know the place.”

  “Then these people I talked to were lying, I guess.”

  “I guess they were. People are funny like that.”

  “Sorry, Jack, but I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I think you’re the one doing the lying. Question is, why?”

  Frerotte pushed himself to his feet, reached behind him with his right hand to withdraw the eight-inch straight razor with the ivory handle, his eyes never leaving Gunner’s own.

  “I wondered when I’d see that,” the investigator said.

  “You tax a man’s patience, motherfucker,” Frerotte said. “Same as always.”

  “Let’s not do this again, Jack. Please.”

  Frerotte grinned. “What? You don’t wanna dance with me, Gunner? Just ’cause J.T. ain’t around this time to save your sorry ass?”

  “I didn’t come here to dance with you, Jack. I just want some answers, that’s all.”

  “You should’a left well enough alone. I gave you a break once, lettin’ you slide for gettin’ in my shit that night at the Deuce. But I guess you don’t know how lucky that was, do you?”

  He opened the knife, gave Gunner a good look at its gleaming silver blade.

  “Put it away,” Gunner said simply.

  “Fuck you,” Frerotte said. Certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that Gunner had the same problem now that he’d had nine years ago at the Deuce: He was unarmed. Frerotte’s people wouldn’t have let him up here, otherwise.

  “Suit yourself,” Gunner said. He picked up the heavy upholstered chair in front of Frerotte’s desk and rushed the big man with it.

  Frerotte hadn’t expected this, was too slow of foot to get out of the way before Gunner had him pinned between the chair and the giant window behind him. Grunting like a stuck pig, he tried to wave the razor in his right hand at the other man’s throat, but for naught; his right arm was trapped directly beneath a chair leg and the window frame, limiting its range of motion severely.

  “Somebody needs to remind you you’re a very fat man, Jack,” Gunner said. “Your hands may be fast as hell, but you can’t move your feet worth a damn.”

  Frerotte tried to say “fuck you” again, but he couldn’t find the breath to do so; Gunner was pressing the chair into his chest like somebody trying to push a car up a steep hill.

  “All right. Listen up. I can’t hold you like this for long, so we’re gonna have to make this fast. I want you to drop that knife and answer some questions for me. Otherwise, I’m gonna lean on this chair a little more, see how much pressure that glass behind you can take. Understand?”

  Frerotte opened his mouth to shout something, but Gunner hunched over, leaned harder into the chair to cut the big man’s air off before he could make a sound.

  “Make up your mind, Jack,” Gunner said. “You wanna fly, or you wanna talk to me?”

  Frerotte strained to turn his head sideways, trying to peer out the full-height window Gunner was threatening to force him out of. On the other side of the one-way glass rendering them all but oblivious to his plight, the hundred or so people down below looked to be a long way off; the fall might not kill him, Frerotte knew, but it could easily leave him a cripple for life.

  He dropped the razor in his right hand to the floor.

  “Good. First question,” Gunner said. “You were at the Stage Door Motel the night Covington disappeared, weren’t you?”

  “I can’t …” Frerotte said, too short of breath to finish the tho
ught. He was sweating profusely now, and looked like he might lose consciousness any minute. Gunner couldn’t have been happier.

  “Don’t try to speak. Just move your head to indicate yes or no,” the investigator said: “Were you at the Stage Door with Covington, or not?”

  Frerotte shook his head.

  Gunner put his back into the chair again. “Come on, Jack …”

  Frerotte changed his tune, showed Gunner a feeble nod.

  “All right. Next question. Is he still alive?”

  The big man paused a moment, then shook his head a second time.

  Gunner absorbed this, tried not to let Frerotte see his disappointment. He had expected to learn that Covington was dead from the moment the man named Blue dropped Barber Jack’s name; it was, after all, the logical result of someone as ordinary as an architectural draftsman from St. Louis mixing with a big city predator like Johnny Frerotte. But now that his suspicions about Covington had actually been confirmed …

  His mind had been off Frerotte for all of a tenth of a second, but that was all the time the big man needed to make his move.

  Gunner heard him scream like a madman in an asylum, his gaping mouth spraying the air with strands of saliva, then the chair and Frerotte both were coming at him like a brakeless Peterbilt charging downhill. Gunner was flat on his ass before he knew it.

  Frerotte could have killed him right there, brought the heavy chair down on his head and then done with him whatever he wanted, but that wasn’t the way Barber Jack had built his reputation. Frerotte wanted his razor, so all he did with the chair was throw it down at Gunner’s head before turning around to find it.

  Gunner caught the brunt of the chair on his right shoulder, heaved it off of him just as Frerotte was bending over to pick his beloved knife up off the floor. The investigator scrambled to his feet, watched as the man mountain before him straightened up and started lumbering toward him, the razor held out in front of him like a beacon lighting his way. The door was only ten feet from Gunner’s back, but he knew that wasn’t close enough. Not by a long shot.

  He had maybe two seconds to scan the room, find something, anything, with which to slow Frerotte down.

  A black floor lamp stood to his left, but was too far out of reach; on his right was a coffee table, long and low. Parts of a newspaper were scattered upon the latter, along with an empty coffee cup, a sugar bowl, and a spoon. Gunner reached out quickly with his right hand, snatched up the larger of the two porcelain objects—the coffee cup—and slung it sidearm at Frerotte’s head as hard as he could, hoping there was still enough distance between them to make the toss effective. There was. Frerotte tried to duck, even as he continued his advance, but the heavy cup glanced off his left eyebrow with a solid thud and stopped him in his tracks. As Frerotte backpedaled once, eyes blinking frantically to fight back tears, Gunner went to the floorlamp on his left, ripped its cord out of the wall and proceeded to use its body like a lance to drive the giant backward, his legs churning for all they were worth. By the time Frerotte recognized his intentions, it was too late: His massive frame was already crashing through the observation window behind him, leaving him nowhere to go but down to the gaming room below.

  His arrival caused quite a stir. With an almost deafening boom, he fell on the edge of a large poker table, landing on his back, and sent two people sitting there sprawling amid a shower of cards, poker chips, and glass. A woman across the room had been screaming from the first, was still screaming now over the excited murmurs of the crowd. Gunner stood in the gaping hole of the shattered observation window, watched as a ring of people slowly formed around Frerotte’s motionless body and the ivory-handled straight razor still clutched in his right hand.

  Then he sat down behind the big man’s desk and waited for Frerotte’s friends to descend upon him.

  five

  “YOU KNOW THIS GUY?” DETECTIVE FRED SAUNDERS OF THE Gardena Police Department asked Matt Poole, a homicide detective with the LAPD.

  Poole was an old friend of Gunner’s, had been for many years, but today he looked at the black man seated before him as if the two had never met. “If this were a courtroom, I’d take the Fifth,” he finally said. “But since it ain’t … yeah, I know him, I guess.”

  The three men were up in Johnny Frerotte’s disheveled office at the now nearly empty Royalty Club. Frerotte had been rushed to the hospital almost an hour before, looking more like a corpse than a man still clinging to life, and the club’s customers and most of its staff had been sent home shortly thereafter. Only a handful of Saunders’s GPD associates and the club’s entire security force—sans its leader, Frerotte, of course—roamed the floor below, cleaning up the mess Frerotte’s graceless skydive had left behind.

  Gunner, meanwhile, had been answering every question Saunders and his partner, an older, indifferent white man named Clooney, could throw at him, trying to erase their suspicions that his attack on Frerotte had somehow been part of a botched attempt to rob the casino. They were a relatively polite and undemanding pair, as cops went, but after forty minutes in their company, Gunner felt no more in their good graces than he had when they arrived. That’s when he suggested they call Poole.

  He hadn’t really expected the LAPD detective would show up at the scene; he thought he might agree to say a few words in Gunner’s defense over the phone and leave it at that, and then only that if he wasn’t too busy turning a Playboy vertical or something. Yet here Poole was, in the flesh: weary eyed, flabby cheeked, dressed like a man who’d stayed out in a hurricane too long.

  It had to be a slow day for homicide down at Southwest, Gunner decided.

  “You see?” he said to Saunders. “Didn’t I tell you we’re like brothers, this man and me?”

  Saunders just frowned, said to Poole, “We were pretty much through with him when we called you, but we didn’t want to let him go until we were sure he hasn’t just been jerking us around. Frerotte’s pretty badly hurt, after all.”

  “I hear you,” Poole said. They’d already told him what Gunner’s account of the day’s events was, and it all sounded just typical enough of Gunner to be true. He’d seen the investigator have similar misadventures before.

  “So I’m free to go now?” Gunner asked, standing up.

  “Yeah, you can go,” Saunders said. “But if we try to call you and the phone rings more than once …”

  “I know, I know. You’ll have the dogs on me before I can blink. Or some other smart and witty threat to that effect.”

  He started for the door, never turned once to see if Poole was following him or not.

  “Boy, you got serious trouble,” Poole said a few minutes later, returning to his and Gunner’s table at the Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop on Rosecrans and Crenshaw from the parking lot outside. He’d just used the radio in his car to check on Johnny Frerotte’s condition, and the smile on his face said the news couldn’t have possibly been better. “Ol’ Barber Jack’s in critical condition over at Martin Luther King, his list of injuries is longer than the Old Testament.”

  “If that means he’s not dead yet, I’m sorry to hear it,” Gunner said dryly.

  Poole laughed, dug back into his cup of mint chocolate chip. A favor from Poole usually cost Gunner a full meal, but he was getting off light today. Ice cream was all the remuneration Poole desired.

  “I thought you needed him alive,” the cop said.

  “Actually, I do. Think you could get me in to talk to him?”

  “Not a chance. This ain’t my party, Gunner.”

  “Come on, Lieutenant. I need to talk to the son of a bitch.”

  “And you think he’s gonna talk to you now? After your makin’ a human cannonball out of his ass?”

  “He knows what happened to Covington, Poole, and he might be the only one who does.”

  “Even if that were true, and I doubt it, he’s in no condition to help you. Or didn’t you just hear me say how fucked up he is?”

  “But if he was the last on
e to see Covington alive—”

  “Like I said. You ask me, he wasn’t. Jack’s a neighborhood head case with a violent temper, nothing more, and nothing less. He doesn’t make people disappear, he cuts ’em to ribbons and leaves the pieces all over the sidewalk.”

  “Yeah, I know, but—”

  “Forget the buts. You go over to see Jack at the hospital and he picks that moment to croak, our friends with the Gardena PD are gonna show you a real vanishin’ act. The next twenty-five years of your life, poof!, gone in sixty seconds. You don’t believe me, you’re outta your mind.”

  But Gunner did believe him. The chance Poole was describing was very real.

  “All right. So I can’t talk to him. But I can do the next best thing.”

  “Show you what a sport I am, Gunner, I’m gonna act like I’m too stupid to know what that means,” Poole said.

  He took his cup of ice cream and walked out, not wanting to be a party to whatever the investigator intended to do next.

  • • •

  Returning to his office at Mickey’s to make a few phone calls, Gunner walked into a full-blown discussion regarding his need to own a pet. Both Mickey Moore and Winnie Phifer had people in their chairs, and four other customers were waiting their turn, everybody talking and laughing like revelers at a New Year’s Eve party. Among the customers, only Drew Taylor and Joe Worthy had faces Gunner recognized, but that didn’t matter; the good will of the hour could not be undone by unfamiliarity.

  “You could use a companion, seems to me,” Winnie told Gunner. “It ain’t healthy, bein’ all alone all the time.”

  It seemed she had a ten-week-old Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy she was trying to find a home for, and the investigator was the only person left who hadn’t explained to her satisfaction why the dog would be miserable living with them.

  “I’m not alone all the time,” Gunner said.

  “What? So you bring some woman into the bedroom two or three times a month. What’s that do for you?”

  All the men in the house started laughing.

  “Shit, I’ll tell you what it does for ’im,” Mickey said. But before he could go on, Winnie swung her left arm out as if to slap him, missed on purpose.