When Last Seen Alive

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “You know what I’m talkin’ “bout!” she said, chuckling despite herself. “I mean, what the hell good is somebody you only gonna see two or three times a month? All the rest of the time they ain’t around, you’re lonely?”

  “I’m not lonely,” Gunner insisted.

  “You alone six days out of every week, you’re lonely,” Winnie said.

  “And you think a dog would solve that problem.”

  “It could. A dog or a cat. Somethin’.”

  “Ain’t you ever had a pet?” Joe Worthy asked. It was his head Winnie was shearing down to the scalp on both sides, her clippers buzzing around his skull like an angry bee.

  “I had a goldfish once,” Gunner admitted.

  “A goldfish?” Mickey said, obviously unimpressed.

  “Yeah. I called it Spike. Little Rocky Bythewood was selling ’em door-to-door for a dollar one day, so I bought one.”

  “Rocky Bythewood? That boy used to live over on Fifty-fourth Street?” Drew Taylor asked.

  Rocky Bythewood had been a pint-sized con man who could sell a Malcolm X T-shirt to the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. If he was alive somewhere today (and it was doubtful), it was only because his family had moved to Chicago before his legion of victims could band together to lynch him in the street.

  “Yeah,” Gunner said. “You remember him?”

  “I remember him. Man, I’ll bet that fish was dead in a week.”

  “Try a day. That was the sickest damn goldfish I ever saw. I could’ve kicked Rocky’s narrow little ass.”

  Taylor just shook his head.

  “And that was the only pet you ever had?” Worthy asked.

  “That was it,” Gunner said.

  “You got your feelings hurt,” Winnie said.

  “Hell, yes, I did. I couldn’t flush the toilet for a year without thinking about that fish.”

  He tried to keep a straight face when he said it, but he couldn’t. One look at him, and everybody cracked up again. Worthy fell out of Winnie’s chair, he was laughing so hard.

  Finally remembering what he was doing here, Gunner headed for his phone in the back, paused on his way to ask Mickey if he had any messages.

  “Mrs. You-Know-Who’s called you twice,” Mickey said, a little smile on his face. “She wants to know what’s goin’ on.”

  Gunner knew “Mrs. You-Know-Who” was code for Connie Everson and was sharp enough not to waste his landlord’s uncharacteristic use of discretion by speaking her name out loud. It had been almost two days now since her last visit to his office, and he hadn’t spoken to her since. Maybe a little impatience on her part was understandable at this point.

  “Anybody named Sly call?” Gunner asked Mickey, hoping his new field assistant had something to report.

  “Sly? Who’s that?”

  “Kid I hired to do some work for me.”

  “He ain’t out watchin’ the councilman, is he?”

  So much for discretion, Gunner thought. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Did the boy call or not?”

  Mickey shook his head, said the only calls Gunner had received were from the lady he’d already mentioned.

  Gunner put a call in to Sly as soon as he reached the phone on his desk, but the boy’s mother said he wasn’t home, she hadn’t seen him all day. She sounded like the worrying type, the kind of mother who would disapprove of her son shadowing a city councilman for the sole purpose of capturing his adulterous activities on film, so Gunner just left his name and number and said a quick good-bye before she could grill him. He didn’t feel up to lying to anyone’s mother today.

  His next call was a more painful one to make. He would have preferred to put Connie Everson off until he had something of substance to tell her, but he’d been doing that now for two days and she was obviously tired of being avoided. And since it wasn’t too late to stop payment on her last check …

  “That’s impossible,” Everson said after he’d told her he was still waiting for her husband to hook up with the woman she wanted him found with.

  “Impossible?”

  “Yes, impossible. He was with her yesterday, Mr. Gunner. How could you not know that?”

  “Yesterday? Where?”

  “I have no idea where. But they were together, I assure you. And if you didn’t see them—”

  Gunner didn’t know what to say. Why the hell hadn’t he heard from Sly Cribbs if what Everson was telling him was true?

  “Believe me, Mrs. Everson, if they had been together yesterday, I’d know about it. You must be mistaken.”

  “I am not mistaken. Although I may very well have been mistaken in hiring you for this job.”

  “Mrs. Everson …”

  “No more excuses, Mr. Gunner. I told you two weeks ago that I wanted this done quickly and efficiently, and you assured me then that you would handle it that way. Now, I don’t know if you were feeding me a line, or exaggerating your capabilities, but either way, you’re going to get me the photographs I require by this time tomorrow, or issue me a full and complete refund of my retainer. Do I make myself clear?”

  “A refund? You—”

  The line went dead with a loud click before he could accuse her of joking.

  Which she hadn’t been, of course. Connie Everson wasn’t the kind of lady who went around making threats just to get a laugh. She was going to try and get her money back if Gunner couldn’t produce the desired results tomorrow, and a fight would ensue when Gunner told her he’d put two weeks into her husband’s surveillance and that amount of his time was going to cost her something, fruitful or not.

  An ugly lawsuit seemed to loom on the horizon unless Sly Cribbs already had the pictures Gunner’s client was so anxious to get her hands on. But Gunner had hired Sly primarily because he seemed so responsible; surely the investigator would have heard from the kid by now if he had seen, let alone photographed, any tryst between Gil Everson and the strung-out, gimpy black prostitute his wife was somehow convinced he was seeing.

  All the same, Gunner would have gone out looking for Sly personally had he not had more pressing matters to attend to. Like finding out what motive a character like Johnny Frerotte could have possibly had for kidnapping, and perhaps even murdering, Elroy Covington. Gunner already had an idea how this might be accomplished, just as his friend Poole had suspected, but he wanted to talk to someone first, give her a chance to address the question before he tried something illegal that could conceivably cost him his license.

  And he wanted to see Yolanda McCreary again, in any case.

  They ended up eating a late lunch at a sports bar and restaurant called the Grand Slam, down in the lobby of the Airport Marriott where McCreary was staying. A midweek lunch hour crowd was waiting for them, creating a wall of sound that left them little to do but make small talk during their meal. Having to defer any meaningful conversation until they could retire to the hotel bar was an inconvenience Gunner hadn’t counted on, but he wasn’t really complaining. McCreary had come down from her room looking radiant and relaxed, even more alluring than when the investigator had last seen her, so the patience to put off the questions he had come here to ask was not particularly hard to find.

  She was something called a “LAN administrator.” Thirty-two years old, divorced, no children. Graduated from Michigan State with a BA in computer science in ’85. Liked to read Nikki Giovanni on rainy days, and never saw an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie in her life. She was dating someone back home in Chicago, a fireman named Ken, but the relationship didn’t seem to be going anywhere, she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say why. She laughed once in forty minutes, reacting to something Gunner said about the food, just to show him she knew how.

  He could feel himself being drawn to her like an infatuated schoolboy.

  When at last their meal was over and they had moved to the more quiet environs ofthe hotel bar, where Gunner nursed a Wild Turkey neat, and McCreary a 7&7, Gunner asked her if the name Johnny Frerotte meant anything t
o her.

  McCreary said it didn’t.

  “How about Barber Jack?”

  “Barber Jack? What kind of name is that?”

  Gunner gave her some background on Frerotte, asked her again if the name sounded familiar.

  “No. God, no,” McCreary said. “Why do you ask?”

  Cushioning the blow as best he could, Gunner said, “It’s beginning to look as if Frerotte might’ve had something to do with your brother’s disappearance. A witness saw him visit Elroy at his motel room, he was apparently the last person Elroy was with that night.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “But I wouldn’t read too much into that just yet. All we know right now is that they were together.”

  “But you said this man—”

  “Is dangerous. Yeah, I did. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Jack harmed him in any way.”

  McCreary nodded, not the least bit reassured.

  “You wouldn’t have any idea what Frerotte might’ve wanted with your brother?” Gunner asked.

  “Me?” She shook her head. “No. I couldn’t begin to guess.”

  “Because Jack’s not a thief by reputation. Snatching a tourist with a fat wallet and then making him disappear afterward doesn’t sound like his kind of action.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t think it was money that brought them together. At least, not Elroy’s money. Jack must’ve been after something else.”

  McCreary didn’t say anything, seemingly unaware that he was looking to her for some response.

  “But you don’t know what that something else could have been,” he finally said.

  McCreary looked up, drawn from a sudden reverie, and shook her head again. “No. I don’t. I’m sorry.”

  Gunner studied her face, remembering how Emilio Martinez had said he’d start his search for Covington with her, if he were Gunner. Not calling McCreary a liar, exactly, but reinforcing Gunner’s own odd sense that she wasn’t always saying everything there was to be said.

  “Who is Tommy?” Gunner asked directly.

  “Who?”

  “You called your brother Tommy once. In my office, when you first came to see me. Remember?”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah, you did. I meant to ask you about it earlier, but the thought slipped my mind.”

  McCreary avoided his gaze for a brief moment, said, “Tommy’s what we used to call Elroy when we were kids. We almost never use that name for him anymore, I’m surprised to hear I did.”

  “And you called him Tommy because?”

  “It’s a nickname, Mr. Gunner. We had an uncle named Tommy whom Elroy strongly resembled, one of our father’s older brothers, so Dad liked to call Elroy ‘Little Tommy.’ It’s what we all used to call him, right up until his senior year in high school.” She paused to let Gunner absorb this, then said, “Any more questions?”

  She was daring him to ask one more, strangely tired of a line of discussion less than five minutes old. He had every reason to believe she’d get up and return to her room if he refused to back off, but he was willing to take that chance. He was already jumping through hoops for one client, he wasn’t going to do it for another.

  “Look, Ms. McCreary,” he said. “What’s your problem, exactly? You wanna tell me now or wait until I figure it out on my own?”

  She looked stunned. “Pardon me?”

  “There’s more to your brother’s disappearance than you’re telling me, and I’d just as soon not get blindsided trying to find out what it is.”

  McCreary glared at him, said, “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t believe that. If Jack Frerotte had an interest in him, the odds are good your brother was involved in something deep, something outside the realm of the ordinary joe you’ve been describing.”

  “Something like what? What are you accusing Elroy of, Mr. Gunner?”

  “I’m not accusing him of anything. I’m only saying it doesn’t fit, a head case like Frerotte targeting a nobody out of St. Louis, Mo, for an impromptu kidnapping.”

  “A ‘nobody’?”

  “You know what I mean. Somebody with no discernible flaws or hang-ups. No fortune to demand as ransom, no enemies who might’ve wished him harm.”

  “But that’s who Elroy was. I don’t know what kind of business this Frerotte person could’ve had with Elroy any more than you do.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Of course I’m sure. You want to know what they were doing together, you should be talking to Frerotte, not me.”

  “I tried that.”

  “And?”

  “And I didn’t get a whole lot out of him, I’m afraid.”

  “You mean he wouldn’t talk to you?”

  “I mean he had an accident. Just as the subject of your brother was coming up, as a matter of fact.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I went to see him to ask him about Elroy this afternoon, and his reaction was to try cutting me up like a Christmas goose. Naturally, I objected.”

  “You killed him?”

  “No, not quite. But he’s in the hospital, in no condition to talk to anybody. Which is why I’m here, bothering you with all these silly questions I’d otherwise be asking him.”

  “I see.”

  “But if you don’t know anything, I’ve just been wasting my time. And yours.”

  McCreary held his accusatory gaze this time, aware that he was offering her one last chance to come clean with him, and said, “I wish I could help you more, Mr. Gunner, but I can’t. I’ve told you all I know, I’m sorry.”

  Gunner considered this a moment, then nodded his head and gave her a little smile, his willingness to alienate a woman he desperately wanted to know more intimately fully exhausted. Which was not to say his doubts about her honesty were gone, by any means; he simply understood that she had told him everything she was going to at this moment.

  And he would know soon enough if she was lying to him, in any case.

  Mickey was always complaining that his life lacked excitement, so Gunner gave him a little job to do to liven it up.

  Naturally, all his landlord did was try to beg off.

  “If it was anybody but Barber Jack, I wouldn’t mind,” he said. “But anything that’s got to do with that fool, I want no part of. I’m sorry.”

  “The man’s fucking comatose, Mickey,” Gunner said. “He won’t even know you’re in the room.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “It’ll take you five minutes. You sit by the bed, mumble a few words, then grab his keys and get out. Come on, man.”

  “That nigger’s crazy. I could be sure he was gonna die without ever gettin’ outta there, I might consider it, but since I ain’t …”

  It took Gunner almost thirty minutes to break him down, convince him he wouldn’t be risking his life to take the mission on. Gunner drove him out to Martin Luther King, the hospital in Inglewood where Johnny Frerotte was taking up space in the ICU, then sent him inside and waited for his return out in the parking lot, hoping and praying his landlord could handle the menial task he’d been assigned without messing something up, bringing the wrath of God down upon both their heads. Gunner wasn’t normally comfortable involving other people in his business, but this time it couldn’t be helped; he needed Frerotte’s house keys, and he couldn’t go get them himself. At least, not without daring the fates to make good on Matt Poole’s prediction that Frerotte would go flat-line on him the moment Gunner came calling. The investigator had seen worse luck than that before.

  Mickey was gone for nearly forty minutes. By the time he emerged from the hospital’s lobby again to approach Gunner’s car, Gunner was already choosing the words he would use on Ira “Ziggy” Zeigler to convince his lawyer to come bail the two of them out of jail. Mickey was sweating like he’d just run a marathon, but the smile on his face had been visible from over twenty yards away.

>   “I got ’em,” he said, getting in the car. He dropped a small ring of keys into Gunner’s open palm and grinned wider still, immensely proud of himself.

  “And the address?”

  “Fifteen-twenty-one Sixty-sixth Street. Got it right off his driver’s license, just like you said.”

  “What the hell took you so long?”

  Mickey frowned. “You said act like the man was a friend of mine, so I acted like he was a friend of mine. I said a prayer over ’im.”

  “A prayer?”

  “Wasn’t nothin’ fancy. Just a few words askin’ the Lord to ease the poor man’s sufferin’. Man looked like you run his ass over with a truck.”

  “Anybody see you take the keys?”

  Mickey shook his head. “I don’t think so. Nobody cares about no hospital full of black folks and Mexicans, man.” He laughed. “Hell, I probably could’ve stole a patient during a goddamn operation, I’d’a wanted to.”

  Gunner had to laugh at that himself. Sometimes, the truth hurt too much to be dealt with any other way.

  Johnny Frerotte’s place on 66th Street was a white, two-story frame house sitting on a short rise of grass between Normandie and Halldale Avenues. At just after 10:00 P.M., it looked like the home of a grandmother, clean and quiet and dark as the insides of a closed casket, but Gunner knew different. What it was was the hiding place of a monster, the inner sanctum of a knife-wielding sadist who might not ever darken its doors again.

  Gunner got out of the Cobra and walked briskly up to the front door.

  Over the years, he had learned to pick locks with some alacrity, but the practice still made him too uneasy to resort to it often. Every minute it took to solve the myriad puzzles of a lock felt like an hour to him, and the fear of getting caught, of having someone train a flashlight on his face before blowing him off their front porch with a hunting rifle, was always with him. So tonight he’d enlisted Mickey’s help in getting Frerotte’s keys, hoping to use and return them to Frerotte’s hospital room before anyone even realized they were gone.

  As far as Gunner knew, Frerotte was a single man who lived alone, but he rang the bell twice anyway before using Frerotte’s house key to slip quietly inside the big man’s lifeless house, behaving like somebody who had every right in the world to do so. Experience had taught him that bold straightforwardness often drew less attention than stealth; look both ways before climbing in a window, and neighbors would call out the National Guard to have you arrested, but do a cartwheel through a pane of broken glass without hesitation and they paid you no mind, reassured by your air of confidence that you were unworthy of their concern.