“Say again?”
“I said I’m not surprised you’re on this. I’d’ve been related to the kid, I might’ve put somebody on it myself.”
“That right?”
“Not that it would change anything, necessarily. I still believe he did himself, don’t get me wrong.” Frick followed Gunner’s lead and sat down. “But I’m a curious kind of guy, and there were a few things about the kid’s suicide a man could be curious about.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the number of people who might’ve wanted to see the victim dead, for one. He was a gangsta rapper with damn near as many enemies as he had fans, and his wife was a little on the jealous side. Meaning she once took a carving knife to him. And finally, if that’s not enough, Elbridge was in business with Bume Webb. You know who Bume Webb is, don’t you?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Apparently, the Digga’s manager, a real smoothy named Joy, had been negotiating a deal for the kid with another label. A development that would’ve no doubt pissed Bume off to no end.”
“But Bume was in prison when the Digga died.”
“Right. He was. But I understand his connections are such that if he’d wanted the kid dealt with, he could’ve hired the work out, no sweat.”
Gunner let a moment pass, about to broach a sensitive subject, then said, “So how is it you didn’t follow the homicide angle up, you had so many likely suspects?”
Frick never blinked. “Very simple. We didn’t go homicide because all the physical evidence pointed to suicide. Our victim was found inside a locked hotel room, alone. Next to a suicide note written in his own handwriting. Holding the Glock nine that killed him, from which we were able to lift only one set of prints—his own. Do I need to go on, or are you getting the picture here?”
“The locked door was the only way in?”
“Right. Both the dead bolt and swing bar were engaged from the inside. Hotel security had to break the bar off the jamb to get in.”
“And they did that when?”
“Sunday morning around nine. Joy hadn’t heard from the kid in over twelve hours, and he was worried about him, so he had them open up his room to check. We got the call out a few minutes after that.”
“Any chance the scene had been disturbed before you got there?”
“No. I don’t think so. The security guy who let Joy in was with him the whole time, he said neither of them touched a thing.”
“Who was this?”
“You mean his name? I believe it was Crumley. Ray or Rod Crumley, something like that.”
“And Elbridge had been dead how long when they found him?”
“Almost ten hours. Coroner set time of death at eleven-thirty p.m. Saturday.”
“But the gunshot—”
“Nobody heard any gunshot. Round was fired through a bathroom towel wrapped around the Glock’s muzzle.”
Gunner found his notebook, started scribbling some hasty notes. “So who was the last person to see the Digga alive?”
“His wife. Danee Elbridge. She visited him in his room shortly before nine Saturday night, stayed about thirty minutes.”
“She say what kind of mood he was in when she left?”
“She said he seemed fine. She, on the other hand, was a little pissed.”
“About?”
Frick grinned, said, “About the two women who’d apparently been in there to see her husband earlier.”
Gunner raised an eyebrow. “Two women? You saying he didn’t just take that room to write, like his father says?”
“Not entirely.”
“She drop any names? Or didn’t she know them?”
“She seemed to know at least one of ’em. I remember her referring to one by name. But who they were didn’t really concern her as much as what they were. She said they were both ‘’ho’s’ of the highest order.”
“Professional, or amateur?”
“She didn’t say, and we didn’t ask. But since she knew one, we guessed the latter.”
“You ever talk to them?”
“Who, the ladies?” Frick shook his head. “Why would we? Both Mrs. Elbridge and Crumley agreed they’d come and gone long before the Digga died—what would we have wanted to talk to them about?”
Finding himself unable to answer that, Gunner shifted gears to ask the detective about the note he’d said Carlton Elbridge left behind.
“The note? There isn’t much to say,” Frick said, “except it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Few of ’em ever do.”
“But it did make some mention of his intent to kill himself.”
Frick shrugged. “I guess.”
“You guess?”
“What I mean is, it all depends on your interpretation. Way my partner and I read it, the inference was there the kid was looking to off himself, yeah. But what do we know? We’re just a couple of white-bread cops from Beverly Hills, and he was a gangsta rapper. The three of us barely spoke the same language.”
Gunner nodded, seeing his point. “How many people knew about this note’s existence?”
“Its existence? Its existence was a matter of public record. It was its content we kept hush-hush. Until we closed the case out as a suicide, we withheld that info from everyone except the people who already had it, and they were instructed to keep it to themselves.”
“And who were those people?”
“Just Joy and Crumley. They both read the note when they discovered the body.”
Gunner was slightly annoyed. This alleged suicide note was something else Benny Elbridge had neglected to tell him about the day before.
“Any chance I could see this note now?”
“Not unless Ms. Trayburn, the kid’s mother, wants to show it to you,” the detective said. “Once we ruled out homicide, it ceased to be evidence and became a personal effect, so it’s been turned over to her.” He finally looked at his watch, a move Gunner had been expecting him to make for several minutes now. “Sorry to break this up, Gunner, but I’m afraid that’s about all the time I can give you here. Duty calls, and all that.”
“Sure. No problem.” Gunner offered the cop his hand as they both stood up, and Frick took it, shook it warmly.
“You have any more questions later, give me a ring, I’ll try to answer ’em for you if I can.”
“Will do. Thanks.” Gunner was looking at Frick like a yellow octopus he’d just seen crawl out of a UFO.
“Something wrong?”
“Not a thing. Just always throws me a little. Finding a cop I’ve never met so willing to treat me with a modicum of respect.”
Frick smiled and opened the conference room door. “Forget about it,” he said. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re just another schmuck trying to keep his head above the slime, same as me. Bein’ private doesn’t change that.”
Amazing, Gunner thought. A real human being in Beverly Hills.
Gunner met with Desmond Joy at the Bad Rock Recording Studios in Hollywood shortly before noon, but only after a cute little sister in a bronze Lexus almost took the front end off his Cobra in the parking lot outside.
She was flying out of the driveway as Gunner was turning in, and she stood on her brakes just in time to avoid a collision that would have cut Gunner’s sports car in half. The investigator gave her a hard look, trying to penetrate the black lenses of her sunglasses to reach her eyes, but he needn’t have bothered; no sooner had the short-haired beauty brought the big GS400 to a halt than she was flooring the gas pedal again. The Lexus swerved around the Cobra, dropped off the edge of the curb, and squealed away north down Highland Avenue, doing what had to be fifty-plus in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone.
Gunner wondered what someone could have done to piss her off so completely.
Inside Bad Rock, he sat in a small reception area near the studio’s front door and waited for Joy to join him, idly watching a recording session in progress on a closed-circuit TV. Joy had left word with Mickey earlier that he’d be here supervis
ing a session featuring a kid named Dead-Ringa, and Gunner figured the stocky, bullet-headed young brother on the monitor overhead was probably him. Shouting into an oversized mic in an otherwise empty recording booth, a large pair of headphones draped across his gleaming head, the ’Ringa was dropping lyrics to a heavily sampled sound track that as near as Gunner could tell, told the story of a jealous girlfriend getting in the ’Ringa’s face over a woman he’d just had sex with at a party. The rapper wasn’t pleading innocent, exactly, but he was making the argument that he was only a man, and as such, there was no way he could be expected to decline a fine piece of ass if someone was going to offer it to him with no strings attached.
It was an argument Gunner had heard made many times before, though never with any positive effect.
Still, Joy’s client emoted through two takes of the song before a disembodied voice called for a short break. Minutes later, a door opened to Gunner’s left, and a middle-aged black man wearing white-on-white stuck his head into the room and said, “Come on back, Mr. Gunner.”
Desmond Joy shook Gunner’s hand and introduced himself, then led the investigator down a narrow corridor to a large control room, where a black man Gunner assumed was a recording engineer sat alone before a massive bank of knobs and slide switches, a canned soft drink in one hand, half a sandwich in the other. The recording booth DeadRinga had occupied only moments before stood on the other side of a giant pane of glass, empty and silent.
“We’re going to need a few minutes, Larry,” Joy said curtly.
The other man departed without comment. Joy closed the door behind him, then asked Gunner to take one of the three large swivel chairs in front of the console before taking one for himself. Between the white-on-white outfit and shoulder-length, dreadlocked hair, he looked like the kind of exaggerated character the comedian Eddie Murphy might have played on Saturday Night Live back in the early eighties.
“Well? What did you think?” Joy asked, his diction as pointedly perfect as a British magistrate’s.
“About what?”
“About the ’Ringa. You were listening to those last couple of takes, weren’t you?”
“Oh, that. Yeah, I guess I was.”
“So?”
“So the kid seems to be very talented.”
Joy laughed. “Shit. You don’t have to jive me, brother. Only talent that boy’s got is in his pants. He knows how to sample other people’s shit, and rhyme ‘ill’ with ‘chill.’ That’s it.”
“If you say so,” Gunner said.
“Refresh my memory for me. You’re working for Mr. Elbridge, right?”
“I don’t believe I mentioned who my client was.”
“But it is Mr. Elbridge, correct?”
As Benny Elbridge had given Gunner permission to disclose this information at his discretion, the investigator nodded his head.
“I knew it. He just can’t let it go,” Joy said.
“What’s that?”
“Come on, man. You know what. He thinks the Digga was murdered.”
“And you don’t?”
“No. Hell no.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because it isn’t possible, that’s why. He was in that hotel room alone the night he died. He locked the door himself, from the inside.”
“Or somebody made it appear that way, you mean.”
Joy shook his head.
“Then the Digga had been entertaining ideas of suicide just before his death.”
“In his way he was, yeah.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s like this. Killing himself was never very far from the Digga’s mind. I never really thought he’d do it, but the possibility was always there.”
“Why?”
“Why? You mean—”
“What reasons could he have had for being that despondent, yeah.”
Joy smiled and shook his head. “Sorry, Brother Gee, but I’m afraid I can’t say.”
“You can’t?”
Joy shook his head a second time.
“Would it help me to read the alleged suicide note he left behind?”
“Oh. You know about that, huh?”
“The note’s common knowledge. What isn’t is what it said. Or, for that matter, whether it was really a suicide note, or just the latest flava the Digga was getting ready to drop on his fans.”
“You’re talking about song lyrics, right?”
Gunner nodded.
“Yeah. That’s what the cops thought it was too, at first. But no.” Joy paused for emphasis. “It was a suicide note.”
“You’re sure about that.”
“As sure as I need to be. I mean, the note might’ve looked like some lyrics, yeah. All it was was some lines on a sheet of paper, no punctuation or caps, same way the Digga always laid his lines down. But if you concentrated on what the note was saying, instead of what it looked like …”
Gunner looked at him expectantly, hoping he’d go on on his own without being prodded.
But Joy recognized the ploy, said, “I’m sorry, Brother Gee. But that’s as much as I can say. You asked me if the boy could have been considered suicidal before his death, and I said yes. What his reasons might have been for bein’ that down are, in my opinion, private and immaterial.”
“Not if they involved a second party who may have murdered him they aren’t.”
“They didn’t. You can take my word for that.”
“I’d like to. It’d make for a shorter work week. But that isn’t what Mr. Elbridge is paying me for, is it?”
“I already told you. I don’t know what Mr. Elbridge is paying you for.”
“You don’t think the Digga was murdered. No problem. Every man’s entitled to his opinion. But I think we both owe it to the kid’s father to at least consider the possibility for a few minutes, don’t you?”
After a long pause, Joy shrugged and said, “All right. Why not? You want to know names, right? People who might have wanted to kill the Digga?”
“As many as you can think of.”
“Bume Webb,” Joy said, without hesitation.
“But Bume Webb is in prison.”
“Raymont Trevor isn’t.”
“Who’s Raymont Trevor?”
“Raymont Trevor’s the brother who’s been running things for Bume since Bume went away. He’s kind of a full-service second-in-command—bodyguard, errand boy, hatchet man. Whatever Bume needs, Raymont is.”
“And his motive for killing the Digga would have been?”
“Damage control. What else?”
“What kind of damage control?”
Joy glanced at his watch impatiently, said, “Have you been following the troubles of Bume’s label lately?”
“You mean Body Count? Sure.”
“Then you know it’s a sinking ship about to go down.”
“I know it’s suffered one hell of a talent drain since they took Bume away, yeah.”
“And do I have to tell you why that is?”
“Bume’s a tyrant. Now that he’s gone, his subjects are going over the wall as fast as they can scale it.”
“Exactly.”
“So?”
“So the Digga was the last name rapper Bume had left, and he was halfway out the door. We only owed Body Count one more record, and we delivered it a month ago. In another two weeks, I was going to move the Digga to another label. We had a deal all ready and waiting to be signed.”
“Only the Digga died before that could happen.”
“Yes. Which makes him just as unavailable to Body Count as he would have been otherwise, of course, except for one thing. This way, Bume saves some face. Better to lose his last bankable act to an unforeseen tragedy than watch him become yet another defector.”
“And this Raymont Trevor would have done the job for him if Bume had wanted the Digga killed?”
“Raymont? Oh, yeah.” Joy shrugged again and smiled. “But this is all speculation, remember? I’m not actu
ally accusing Raymont of doing anything.”
“What about 2DaddyLarge?”
“2Daddy? What about him?”
“Mr. Elbridge seems to like him for the Digga’s murder even more than you like Bume. And frankly, so do I.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Two reasons, really. This East Coast-West Coast rivalry they had going on, and the little matter of the Digga’s wife.”
Joy raised an eyebrow. “Danee? What’s she got to do with anything?”
“I understand the Digga wasn’t the first rapper she’s spent quality time with. Before him, there was 2Daddy.”
“Who told you that?”
“Not my client, if that’s what’s worrying you. I don’t think he even knows.”
Joy had thought he had his displeasure in check, but was unsettled now to learn that Gunner had noted it. Checking his watch again in a fully ineffective attempt at misdirection, he said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to wrap this up, Brother Gee. Lunchtime in here is almost over.”
“Sure. But why don’t you finish telling me what you think about 2Daddy murdering the Digga, first,” Gunner said.
Joy started to object, then changed his mind and said, “I don’t see it. 2Daddy might have had motive to kill the Digga, sure. He may have even had the opportunity.” He shook his head from side to side. “But he doesn’t have the smarts to do it the way it would’ve had to be done. Aim and shoot, that’s the only way that fool could ever kill anybody.”
“You’re saying he’s a dummy.”
“With a capital D. Lays all his lyrics down in crayon.”
“But you say he may have had the opportunity to commit the crime, if nothing else?”
“That’s right. He was here in L.A. the night the Digga died. He’d been on the Coast for three weeks, shooting a video, I believe.”
“Then he’s back in New York now.”
“As far as I know.”
Gunner nodded, then asked Joy if the Digga had really been staying at the Beverly Hills Westmore to write, as Benny Elbridge believed.
“For the most part, yes,” Joy said.
“And the other part?”
“He was there to chill out. Do some reading, swim in the pool …”
“Get jiggy with a couple of ladyfriends other than his wife?”
All the Lucky Ones Are Dead Page 4