When Last Seen Alive

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  “What the hell do the Feds want with me?”

  “They didn’t say. They just said to have you give ’em a call as soon as I heard from you. You want the number?”

  Gunner said no, he’d get it from him later. Whatever Leffman and Smith wanted, it would have to wait. Gunner’s dance card was all full.

  “The Feds, huh?” Poole asked when Gunner hung up the phone. “How nice.” He grinned and threw himself back in his chair, more at ease being an asshole here at his Southwest Division digs than he was almost anywhere else.

  “Connie Everson didn’t kill herself, Poole,” Gunner said, trying to restart the conversation he and the cop had been having before he’d paused to call Mickey.

  “Are we back on that again?”

  “She was an unhappily married woman. Not a manic depressive. She didn’t fit the profile.”

  “Gimme a break. Women like Mrs. Everson commit suicide every day. You think you’d wanna live being married to a prince like the councilman?”

  “So her husband was a philanderer who liked to play john every now and then. By all appearances, she’d known that for a long time. Why the urgency to end it all now?”

  “Embarrassment. Humiliation. Guilt. She was, in a way, responsible for all those holes Sweeney put in Cribbs’s chest Wednesday night, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And she’d just suffered one hell of a setback. If you and Cribbs had come through with those pictures for her, she might’ve been able to divorce the good councilman and keep her account open at Neiman-Marcus, too. That prenup she signed be damned.”

  “What do you mean, the prenup be damned? If it wasn’t invalidated by adultery—”

  “Who said anything about it being invalidated? I’m talkin’ about it bein’ torn up. Rolled into a little ball and run through Gil Everson’s shredder by Everson himself, no less.”

  “You just lost me, Poole.”

  “The word is ‘blackmail,’ Gunner. It’s usually committed for money, but not always. Sometimes the person holding all the dirty pictures is after something else. Like a fair and equitable divorce settlement, for instance.”

  Gunner thought that over for a minute, then shook his head. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Look. I’m not sayin’ that’s what happened, but the lady had to’ve had some reason for wantin’ those photographs taken, right? Otherwise, it was all for nothin’, which it ended up bein’ anyway. So …” Poole pantomimed the act of pouring something down his throat.

  “I hear what you’re saying, Lieutenant, and I can’t say it doesn’t make a little sense,” Gunner said. “But …”

  “Something doesn’t ‘jibe’ again.”

  “That’s right. Something doesn’t.”

  Poole watched him scribble aimlessly on a corner of the blotter on his desk, finally sighed and said, “Okay, ‘Marlowe.’ What is it, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Gunner said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I can’t figure it. Not yet. But I will. Give me time.”

  “Time, huh?” Poole sat up in his chair, lowered his voice curiously. “Well, don’t look now, pal, but I think you just ran outta all yours.” He nodded his head once, urging Gunner to turn around.

  Two men in blue suits were walking leisurely toward the detective’s desk, one black, one white. They were physically dissimilar in every way, but their faces bore the same unmistakable stamp of humorlessness all civil servants succumbed to sooner or later.

  There would be much rejoicing in the hallowed halls of the FBI this evening, Gunner thought. Agents Smith and Leffman had found their man.

  Carroll Smith looked like a baby, fresh out of training; skin as smooth and brown as kid leather, eyes round and unblinking, a voice like that of a nine-year-old trying to play grown-up. If he was a day over twenty-seven, it didn’t show. Irv Leffman, on the other hand, was growing old fast. Heavyset, pink skinned, and full of nervous twitches, he could have passed for someone forty-five to fifty without an ounce of effort. The hair was all but gone on his toaster-shaped head, and his face was a road map of worry. He was nobody’s grandfather, but he would have made a fine stand-in for one in a pinch.

  Poole had found an empty office at Southwest, somewhere for the two Federal agents and Gunner to retire to, showing more kindness to the Feds than Gunner had ever seen him express before. The space was better than an interrogation room, at least from Gunner’s perspective, but one of the fluorescent lamps overhead kept blinking on and off intermittently, something Gunner found almost as annoying as having a strobe light trained on his face.

  “Now that we all know each other, Mr. Gunner,” Smith said, after all the IDs had been flashed and names exchanged, “we’ll get right down to the reason we’re here today.”

  “Please do.”

  “Tell us what you know about the Defenders of the Bloodline.”

  Gunner hadn’t really needed him to make the formal request—it had dawned on him that this was what they wanted the minute he’d seen the pair marching through the station house toward Poole’s desk.

  “The Defenders of the Bloodline?”

  “We have it on good authority you’ve recently had an encounter with some people who refer to themselves by that name. That isn’t true?”

  Gunner shrugged. “I guess it’s true enough. But I didn’t think they rated this kind of interest.”

  “They didn’t present themselves as a nationwide band of political assassins?”

  “Actually, they did.”

  “But you didn’t believe them.”

  “I wasn’t convinced all their talk was for real, no.”

  “I see. Well. Just for the record, Mr. Gunner, the Defenders of the Bloodline have murdered two people that we know of for certain so far, and a man named Thomas Selmon may yet make three. Is that ‘real’ enough for you?”

  Gunner didn’t say anything.

  “We’d like to hear the details of your experience with them,” Leffman said. Mickey had been right about Smith being the talker between these two, but Smith’s partner liked to speak up every now and then, just to prove he wasn’t mute.

  “Tell me who your good authority is, first,” Gunner said.

  “Our what?” Smith asked.

  “You said you had it on good authority I’d had an encounter with the Defenders.”

  “I did?”

  “I’d like to know who it was.”

  “Is that important?”

  “It is to me. I’m curious that way.”

  “You understand we’re under no obligation to tell you?”

  “Sure. Same way you understand I’m under no obligation not to get up and walk the hell out of here.”

  Smith conceded the point by way of actually smiling. “We’ve asked local authorities from coast to coast to keep an eye and an ear out for any cases that may relate to the Defenders. Since the group is considered by most of these authorities to be a joke and little else, few take our request seriously. No one claiming to be a Defender has ever been identified, after all. Still, there’s a few law officers out there who listen when the FBI speaks. Some of them work here in Los Angeles. Out of any number of divisions. Southwest, Rampart—”

  “Hollywood,” Gunner offered.

  “Exactly. Does that answer your question, Mr. Gunner?”

  “I think so.” Gunner tried to decide which of the two Hollywood Division detectives he’d talked to Saturday out at the Thomas Selmon grave site—Denny Loiacano, or Loiacano’s affable partner, Sal Moreno—he could see most easily running home afterward to call the local FBI office with a hot tip, and settled on Moreno. Not because Loiacano wouldn’t do such a thing, but because, now that Gunner stopped to think about it, Moreno might not have been “affable” at all—just eager to please. Some cops were like that.

  “Good,” Smith said. “Let’s talk.”

  They kept him there for over an hour. He told them the story of his Friday kidnapping once, twi
ce, then answered all the questions they could think of that back-to-back re-countings of the event had somehow left for them. He held nothing back, all too aware that there would be no point—he was part of the manhunt for the Defenders now, whether he wanted to be or not.

  “You cut a deal with them for your release?” Smith asked.

  “In a way, yeah,” Gunner said. “But I don’t think that was the only reason they let me go.”

  “No? What other reason was there?”

  “If the man I spoke to can be believed, they don’t think of themselves as simple murderers. The people they reserve for killing fit a very specific profile, and they’re reluctant to expand beyond it, apparently.”

  “But they would have killed you anyway if you hadn’t promised to back off,” Leffman said, his disapproval evident.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I guess I should have tested them to see, huh?”

  “But you were bluffing,” Smith said.

  “Insofar as I had no intention of just looking the other way. I thought for once in my life, I’d just hand the cops the ball and let them run with it.”

  “And if we require you to do more than that now? Can we count on you to cooperate?”

  “Cooperate how?”

  “We need a worm on a hook,” Leffman said straightforwardly. “You’re the first person we’ve seen get this close to them and live to tell about it. They must like you for some reason.”

  “Hey, I’m a likable guy. What of it?”

  “We think they’ll approach you again,” Smith said. “Either to court you for membership, or kill you for lying to them. We want to be there when they do.”

  “Lying to them? Who says I lied to them? If they’ve been paying attention, I haven’t moved a muscle on the Selmon case. Every cop I’ve been with since Friday has come to me, not the other way around.”

  “True. But I think you’ll admit that’s a very fine distinction. It’s possible they’ll fail to recognize it, and if they do—”

  “Hold it, hold it. They aren’t gonna ‘fail to recognize it’ unless somebody helps them to. And who the hell would do a fucked-up thing like that?”

  Smith fell silent, and so did Leffman.

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought,” Gunner said.

  “With or without our assistance, we believe they’ll decide that you’ve broken the deal you made with them, and can no longer be thought of as a neutral party,” Smith said. “If not today, then tomorrow. Or three weeks from now. Paranoia’s going to set in eventually, and they’re going to come after you when it does. Wouldn’t you be better off letting us accelerate the process so that somebody’s watching your back when they make their move?”

  “If I could trust you to watch my back? Maybe. But I can’t. I don’t know you guys that well, I’m sorry.”

  “But you don’t—”

  “Look. What the hell do you need with me? I gave you all the leads you could possibly want. Scales and Pritchard, right? The brother over at Empowerment Printing? Why don’t you go talk to him, see if he wants to be your goddamn ‘worm on a hook’?”

  “We’ve already determined that Mr. Pritchard can’t help us. We questioned him this morning, his only link to the Defenders is apparently Scales, for whom he had a phone number and nothing else.”

  “So concentrate on Scales, then. He’s bound to turn up eventually.”

  “Somebody’s already told you he’s gone missing?”

  “Guess I’ve got friends in Hollywood, too.”

  The two Federal officers shared a glance, made a joint mental note to find out who the leak was in their otherwise airtight ship.

  “We could wait for Scales to reappear, sure,” Leffman said. “But that could take time. And these people are murderers, Gunner, no matter how you slice it. Being discriminating in their choice of targets doesn’t change that.”

  “So what do you want from me? Just spell it out, boys, I won’t laugh.”

  “We want you to work the case again,” Smith said. “Rather than lie back like you’ve been doing, let them see you at least going through the motions of trying to hunt them down, Scales in particular.”

  “You’ll be under surveillance twenty-four-seven,” Leffman added. “You’ll be in no danger whatsoever.”

  “Now there’s a comforting thought.”

  “You’ll be at some risk, of course,” Smith said. “But we’re convinced you would be, regardless. This way, at least, you won’t have to worry about having eyes in the back of your head. We’ll be those eyes for you.”

  “And if I don’t feel like playing along? If I say you’re free to watch me as long as you want, but I’ve got better things to do with my time than pretend to be working a case?”

  Smith smiled again and shook his head. “Come on, Gunner. We’re the dreaded ‘Feds.’ You don’t really think you have that alternative, do you?”

  Leffman first chuckled, then began to laugh outright, unable to contain himself. Smith joined in right after him. The FBI wasn’t known for its sense of humor, but these two would have made a good start to a great party.

  And Gunner had to give them credit for one other thing: They knew how to tell it like it was.

  sixteen

  FOR THE NEXT DAY AND A HALF, GUNNER WENT ALONG WITH the program.

  He went back to Byron Scales’s empty apartment in Windsor Hills and made a show of peering through its windows, as if he didn’t know Scales had abandoned the premises long ago. He revisited the Stage Door Motel to hassle the fat man at the counter, demanding to know where Scales, a.k.a. Blue, was presently holed up. He even made a second run to Empowerment Printing, looking for Clive Pritchard, and acted like he was disappointed when someone he’d never seen before told him Pritchard didn’t work there anymore. Gunner did everything possible to portray a man bound and determined to turn Scales up, driving his red Cobra from one end of the city to the next, and he did it all knowing he had more to fear than just Scales and the Defenders of the Bloodline.

  For Jack Frerotte and Rafe Sweeney could have just as easily been watching him as the Defenders, and both had their own reasons to wish the investigator harm. Despite the unmarked FBI sedan that was diligently following his every move, its drivers so good at doing surveillance, he himself could hardly tell they were there, Gunner was uncomfortable enough playing clay pigeon to three separate, hostile parties that he found it necessary to make his own preparations for disaster; little tricks of the trade he had learned to fall back on in anticipation of worst case scenarios.

  And it was all for nothing.

  Because by 4 o’clock Tuesday afternoon, no one had made a move toward Gunner. Either because they were too smart to take the bait, or because their vow to watch him had been empty, Scales and the Defenders of the Bloodline never once showed themselves, and neither did Frerotte nor Sweeney. Smith and Leffman’s “worm on the hook” had failed to get a bite, and Gunner wanted off the line. Had Smith not greeted him with good news when he checked in with the FBI man shortly before 5 o’clock, he would have said anything he had to to get the Feds out of his life again.

  The pay phone connection wasn’t the best, so Smith had to repeat himself before Gunner was sure he’d heard him correctly the first time.

  “We’ve got ’im,” Smith said again.

  “Scales?”

  “He turned up at an aunt’s place in Plainview, Texas. Alone. He’ll fly back tonight for questioning in the morning.”

  “And the others?”

  “No word on any others yet. As you might imagine, Scales isn’t saying much. We’re hoping that’ll change.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “If you’re asking whether or not we’re prepared to continue our surveillance of you indefinitely, Gunner, the answer is no. We’re not. The objective was to get our hands on a Defender. That objective has been met. On behalf of Agent Leffman and the entire bureau, I’d like to thank you for your cooperation and wish you a pleasant day.”

  Gunner
didn’t think it was funny, being used and discarded like a disposable diaper, but he had to make light of it or take serious offense, go see Smith in person to loosen a few of his teeth.

  “You forgot something, didn’t you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “My hearty handshake.”

  The FBI man hung up.

  Gunner left the pay phone he was using and went straight in to Mickey’s, both to unwind and pick up his dog, the latter something his landlord and Winnie had been on him about since Saturday. Winnie had the crazy idea little Dillett could help protect him somehow in this time of imminent danger; Mickey just wanted the animal out of his shop. Somewhere around Imperial Highway and Avalon, less than five miles from his office at Mickey’s, Gunner saw the ubiquitous unmarked sedan peel off behind him, never to be seen again. Those relentless watchdogs of the American taxpayer’s money, Smith and Leffman, apparently worked fast.

  Gunner put a call in to Yolanda McCreary as soon as he reached his desk, not having seen her now for over twenty-four hours. They’d been together nonstop from Saturday evening to Monday morning, when he’d left the house to meet Gil Everson’s plane at LAX with Matt Poole, but once he’d started work trying to draw the Defenders’ fire for the FBI, he’d deliberately steered clear of her. He sent her back to her hotel room and told her to stay put, hold onto the key to his home he’d given her sometime Sunday until he gave her the okay to use it. They had spoken over the phone two or three times since then, but that was all.

  Now, he couldn’t even reach her that way. No one answered his call when he rang her hotel room.

  His heart sank. He slouched back in his chair, riding himself for calling at the exact moment she’d left her room to eat, or something—and then stopped, suddenly realizing what he was doing. He’d known McCreary for all of eight days—and he’d given her a key to his home! What the hell had he been thinking? Being alone had been wearing thin on him lately, it was true—his last long-term relationship with a woman had crashed and burned more than fourteen months ago—but that could hardly excuse a fall of this magnitude. McCreary had blindsided him, no less so than Byron Scales had down in Johnny Frerotte’s basement—assuming that had been Scales—and now he was left to wonder whether her effect on him would prove permanent or merely temporary.