When Last Seen Alive

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “Okay. Let me know as soon as you hear something, huh?”

  “Sure. But, hey,” Pete said, before Gunner could hang up the phone. “I think you ought to know that it hasn’t been easy. In fact, it’s been a bitch.”

  “Nobody wants to talk to you, huh?”

  “Oh, they talk. But they don’t really say anything. Few people who say they’ve heard of the Defenders talk about ’em like they’re ghosts, or somethin’.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “You know. Supernatural. Able to walk through walls and shit.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Man, I’m just tellin’ you what I’m hearing. I never thought the boys were for real, but I had one brother tell me this mornin’ he knows of at least two people the Defenders have killed already, and more are on the way.”

  “What two people were these?”

  “He didn’t mention any names. He just said they were Oreo cookies back east somewhere. A radio DJ and someone else, he couldn’t remember who.”

  “How about a newspaper reporter?”

  “A newspaper reporter? That might’ve been it, I guess. But the man couldn’t remember the second person, like I said. He only remembered the DJ.”

  “Maybe I should talk to this guy, Pete,” Gunner said, pencil and notepad at the ready.

  “You can if you insist. But I just told you everything he knows. We’ve been ‘boys a long time, this brother and me. If he knew a Defender, or where we could find one, he would’ve told me, I think.”

  Gunner thought that over, decided Pete was probably right. And questioning his friend’s judgment in such matters was never good for business in any case.

  “Okay, partner. Whatever you say.”

  He thanked Little Pete and hung up.

  eleven

  SILVER LAKE WAS THE LOS ANGELES CAPITAL OF Schizophrenia.

  It was Caucasian and Hispanic, gay and straight, young and old. It was picturesque, and it was garish; quaint and charming here, plastic and phony there. It had outdoor cafés and 7-Elevens; health food stores and porn shops; three-story Tudor houses that dated back to 1911, and two-story towers of glass and steel that weren’t yet a year old. In short, Silver Lake was a multilingual, multicultural, architecturally diverse community that offered a little something for everybody. Including the dumb and the dumber.

  Much of the community stood on a hill overlooking the city reservoir for which it was named, but no one had a better view of this glistening pool of blue than Martin Keene. His single-story, redwood-sheathed home halfway up Hidalgo Avenue’s steep climb into the hills sat on the west side of the street, where its perspective on the reservoir below and the Hollywood Hills beyond was completely unobstructed. Gunner could see that much just from the carport, a white, gable-roofed addition to the house that was functional, perhaps, but wholly unaesthetic.

  He had thought about calling ahead, but decided to just drop in on Keene instead. Sometimes it was better to make a wasted trip than be rejected outright over the phone, or worse, talk to somebody who’d had time to rehearse all their answers to his questions. But it looked like this particular trip hadn’t been wasted; the two cars in the carport—a late-model Ford Taurus and an eighty-something Jeep Cherokee—suggested Keene was home.

  A handsome-looking woman in her early forties answered the doorbell the first time Gunner rang it. A fine-boned redhead with a freckled complexion and dignified demeanor, she opened the door wide, unafraid, and smiled at him like she’d known he was coining all along.

  “Yes?”

  “Is this the Martin Keene residence?” Gunner asked.

  “Yes. Mr. Keene is my husband. How can I help you?”

  Gunner showed her the photostatic license in his wallet, said, “My name is Aaron Gunner, Mrs. Keene. I’m a private investigator here in Los Angeles, working a missing persons case. Your husband wouldn’t be around this afternoon, would he?”

  Her smile lost something, never quite regained it. “He’s out back, on the patio. What’s this all about, Mr. Gunner?”

  “Nothing serious, really. Someone your husband used to work with a few years ago has turned up missing, and the family’s hired me to find him. I was hoping Mr. Keene might be able to give me a lead or two.”

  “Who is this person you’re looking for?”

  “Actually, Mrs. Keene, I’d rather not say. If Mr. Keene would care to share that information with you later, I’d have no objection to that. But right now I think it would be best if I left that decision up to him.”

  “I see. This is about Thomas Selmon, then.”

  It wasn’t often that Gunner was caught flat-footed, but this was one of those rare occasions. Suddenly, Keene’s wife didn’t look so friendly, after all.

  “That’s right,” Gunner said. Unable to see how lying now would do him any good. “But—”

  “My husband has no interest in talking about that man ever again, Mr. Gunner. If your name really is Gunner. That’s a part of Martin’s past the two of us would just as soon forget. Now, if you’ll excuse me …”

  “Please, Mrs. Keene,” Gunner pleaded, as she started to close the door. “I didn’t come here to upset either you or your husband. But Selmon disappeared here, in Los Angeles, nine months ago, and no one seems to have any idea how or why.”

  “And you think Martin does?”

  “I think I owe it to my client to ask him about it. As near as I’ve been able to determine, your husband’s the only reason Selmon could have had for coming out here to L.A. in the first place.”

  “Well, that may very well be, but—”

  “He left a wife and two small children behind in St. Louis, Mrs. Keene. I’m really here on their behalf, not Selmon’s.”

  He would have thrown Selmon’s “heartbroken” sister into the appeal for good measure, but he feared that might be overkill. As it was, the pitch led Martin Keene’s wife to hesitate indecisively, if nothing else.

  “Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking for,” Gunner said.

  The redhead studied his face, his eyes in particular, looking for something there that might tell her what to do. “I’ll ask him if he wants to see you. Forgive me if I don’t ask you in.”

  She closed the door on him and locked it.

  She returned more than five minutes later, looking somewhat tired and worn out, like she’d just lost a grueling test of wills. “He wants me to make sure you’re not a reporter,” she said.

  Gunner shook his head and smiled. “I’m not a reporter. I’m a private investigator. If he wants to see my license himself …” He started to reach for his wallet again.

  “That won’t be necessary. Please, come in.” She opened the door wider for him, closed it when he stepped inside. He was saddened to see the inside of the house was every bit as outmoded and incongruous as the outside: chrome floor lamps and wrought-iron bookcases, white leather beanbag chairs and a glass-topped, cable spool coffee table.

  She walked him straight through the living room and past the kitchen to the wood deck patio out back. Martin Keene was sitting there in one of two blue-and-white deck chairs, watching sunlight shimmer off the water in the reservoir below, a narrow glass of ice tea in his left hand. He was a healthy-looking man in his early fifties, with a head of thinning gray hair combed back on his visible scalp, and he was dressed like he had either just finished putting, or was about to tee off.

  “This is Mr. Gunner, Martin,” his wife said.

  Keene looked up, made no move to rise. He had slate-gray eyes that shone with fire, but little else. “Thank you, Pat. Would you care for some iced tea, Mr. Gunner?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Keene’s gaze turned to his wife.

  “I’ll leave you two alone, then,” she said, going back through the sliding screen door to disappear into the house. Gunner couldn’t help but feel badly for her.

  “Sit down, Mr. Gunner, please,” Keene said. Unlike his wife, he had yet to find the need to smile.

>   Gunner positioned the open deck chair to his liking and did as he was told. The umbrella stemming from the patio table between them held the sun at bay over their heads as they talked.

  “So Tommy Selmon’s disappeared again, eh?” Keene asked.

  “Again?”

  “That is to say, he’s fallen out of view again. Gone into hiding. Choose whatever euphemism for making himself hard to find that you like, Mr. Gunner.”

  “I suppose ‘disappeared’ is as good as any. Last time anyone saw or heard from him was last October, here in Los Angeles. I don’t suppose you saw him back then?”

  “As a matter of fact I did. Yes.”

  Gunner was taken aback. The Keenes were just full of surprising proclamations today.

  “You did?”

  “Certainly. First in Washington, D.C., then here in Los Angeles. I think he followed me here from the Million Man March, but I’m not sure.”

  “You were at the Million Man March?”

  “Yes. I did a story on it for Harper’s. One white man’s take on the event, the subtitle might have been.”

  “And you saw Selmon there.”

  Keene sipped his iced tea and nodded. “I was having dinner out in Dupont Circle. It was Sunday evening, the end of a long weekend. I just looked up and there he was, standing before my table.”

  “And?”

  “He asked if he could sit down. He seemed genuinely happy to see me. If I hadn’t been in such a state of shock, I would have told him to go fuck himself. But I must have just nodded feebly, instead.”

  “He approached you?”

  “Yes. Do you think I would have approached him?”

  “What did he want?”

  “To talk about old times, of course. At the paper in Chicago, before the roof caved in. I assume that requires no explanation, Mr. Gunner, or else you wouldn’t be here.”

  Gunner nodded.

  “We spoke for all of fifteen minutes. As you might imagine, I didn’t have much to say to the man. After about his third straight apology, I paid my bill and left. I didn’t see him again until he showed up here at my home two days later.”

  “He came here?”

  “Yes. Unannounced and uninvited, much like you just did.”

  “You gave him your address in D.C.?”

  “No. He got my address from the hotel, he said. He wouldn’t say how, exactly, but I suspect he called the reservations desk pretending to be me, got the clerk there to ‘verify’ my mailing address. It’s an old reporter’s trick, Mr. Gunner. I used to use it all the time myself.”

  “But how did he know what hotel you were staying at in Washington?”

  “I would assume he called around and asked for me. Isn’t that what you would have done?”

  Gunner ignored the rhetorical question, said, “So he shows up here at the house two days later.”

  “Yes.”

  “To offer more apologies?”

  Keene hesitated for the first time, uncomfortable with the question. “No. He had a business proposition for me,” he said.

  “Involving a book he wanted to write.”

  “Yes. ‘The Devil’s Byline: The Thomas Selmon Story.’ You know about that?”

  “He made a call to a New York literary agent from his motel room here in town before he disappeared, said he had this great idea for a book. What else could it have been but ‘The Thomas Selmon Story’?”

  “He wanted me to co-author it with him. He said it wouldn’t work any other way. No one would touch the autobiography of a world-renowned liar, he said, but if someone else were to write it, someone an editor could trust to be totally objective …”

  “You’d have a best-seller on your hands.”

  Keene nodded. “Yes. That was his theory, anyway.”

  “You didn’t think so?”

  “On the contrary. I was certain he was right. But I wasn’t going to help him write his goddamn book.” He poured himself a fresh glass of iced tea from a pitcher on the table, then went on. “Tommy Selmon ruined me as a newspaper man, Mr. Gunner. Forever. Twenty-seven years in the business, and it was all gone after one story. How he thought I could ever forget that is beyond me.”

  “You haven’t been able to get work since?”

  “Work? Oh, I can get all the work I want. But as a writer, not an editor. People took the Press Examiner scandal as proof I can’t be trusted to oversee a newspaper story, not that I can’t write one. Which is pretty fortunate for me, wouldn’t you say?”

  “So you told him you weren’t interested in his offer.”

  “Yes. He wasn’t happy with that answer, of course, but my answer was final, and I told him so. When he finally decided to believe me, he left.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “He left me a number at the motel you mentioned, I believe. But I never used it.”

  “And you didn’t see him again after that?”

  “No. That was the last I ever saw or heard from Tommy.”

  Gunner looked out over the blue water before him, said, “I wonder if the subject of his family ever came up?”

  “His family? Oh.” Keene smiled. “You mean the one in St. Louis you told Pat about at the door.” He shook his head. “No. We never talked about that at all.”

  “You didn’t ask him where he’d been keeping himself all these years?”

  “That would have suggested an interest in such matters I didn’t have then, and do not have now, Mr. Gunner.”

  “What about Elroy Covington? That name ever come up in conversation?”

  “Elroy Covington? No.” Keene shook his head again. “Who is he?”

  “That’s the name Selmon’s been using in St. Louis for the last few years. Elroy Covington. In fact, he was registered under that name at his motel in town. You don’t remember?”

  Keene’s expression was as blank as a crash test dummy’s. “Remember?”

  “If he left you his number at the motel, he must have told you what name to ask for at the desk. Otherwise, the clerk there wouldn’t have known how to direct your call.”

  Keene smiled again, commending Gunner on his perceptiveness. “Ah. I see your point.”

  “Do you?”

  Keene stopped smiling, said, “Tommy may have mentioned something about changing his name, but I don’t remember now if he did or not. Like I said before, I wasn’t really hearing what he had to say. I was just letting him talk.” He glanced at his watch, showing an interest in time he hadn’t exhibited before now. “Forgive me, Mr. Gunner, but are we about done? Despite all appearances to the contrary, I really do have some work to do this afternoon.”

  “Of course. I’m down to my last question.”

  “Good.”

  “What can you tell me about the DOB?”

  “The DOB?” Keene thought about it for a moment, then said, “Oh. You don’t mean that group of crazies that was supposed to be murdering black conservatives out in New Hampshire a few years ago? ‘The Defenders of the Brotherhood,’ was it?”

  “Actually, it was ‘Bloodline.’ But those are the crazies I mean, yeah.”

  “What about them?”

  “Did Selmon ever mention them when you talked to him? Either here, or back in D.C.?”

  “The Defenders of the Bloodline? No. Why—” He stopped himself short, having the answer to his question before he could even ask it. “Oh. You think they had something to do with Tommy’s disappearance, is that it?”

  “If they really exist, I think it’s possible, yes. You say they murdered some black conservatives in New Hampshire?”

  “Allegedly. I don’t remember all the details now, but the way I remember it, they took responsibility for a pair of homicides back in ninety-four that were never solved. A few arrests were made, but that was it.”

  “Was one of the victims a DJ?”

  “A DJ? No. He was a radio talk show host. The other victim was a political columnist, I believe. A woman named Eddie Orville.” He watched as Gun
ner jotted the name down in a little notebook. “But I’m not sure I understand. Tommy was politically conservative, that’s true, but not so anyone would really notice. Why would the DOB target him?”

  “The way I understand it, the DOB aren’t just after political conservatives. They’re after anyone they believe has betrayed the African-American community in some form or fashion. For lack of a better term, Mr. Keene, I guess I’m talking about Uncle Toms.”

  “And they see Tommy as an Uncle Tom?”

  “They wouldn’t be alone in that opinion if they did. His colleagues at the Press Examiner weren’t the only people he humiliated five years ago, after all.”

  Keene nodded, following his reasoning.

  “But again, I’m not even sure the Defenders are for real. The only evidence I’ve been able to find of them out here are some flyers someone’s been posting around town bearing their name.”

  “So what makes you think they killed Tommy?”

  “It’s a long story. And I seem to recall I was on my way out when this subject came up. Maybe I’ll bore you with it some other time.”

  Keene didn’t like that, Gunner being evasive with him in his own backyard, but he didn’t make an issue of it. He simply stood up when Gunner did and shook the black man’s proffered hand.

  “In the meantime, I’d like to thank you for your time today, Mr. Keene. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Have I? I can’t imagine how.”

  Gunner smiled and said, “You’re too modest. I think you’d be surprised how much I learned here today.”

  He let Keene see the smile a full three seconds longer, then left him to guard the Silver Lake reservoir alone.

  Gunner went back to Johnny Frerotte’s house next.

  The fire he had escaped two nights before hadn’t burned the home to the ground, but it had gutted it like a fish, leaving only the charred remains of its basic two-story frame behind. Everything within—furniture and clothing and electronic appliances—was soot covered and disfigured, drowned in water and buried by debris. Had anyone else but Frerotte lived here, Gunner would have found the wreckage a sad sight to behold.

  Roaming through the ruins in broad daylight was asking to be mistaken for a thief, Gunner knew, but that couldn’t be helped. He wanted another look around the place before Frerotte could get out of the hospital and clean things up, and he had no desire to do so at night. He had tried that tack once before, with disastrous results, and tempting the fates had never been one of the investigator’s favorite pastimes.