Del looked over his own left shoulder, discretion be damned, and said, “She’s right, Aaron. The lady is lookin’ at you.”
Gunner raised his eyes to the mirror behind Lilly’s bar, examined the woman’s reflection in the glass just as his cousin could have, had he possessed the smarts. She was an unspectacular beauty in her early thirties, light-skinned and compact in both height and general shape; some men would never look twice at her, but many, like Gunner, would look once and have a hard time turning away. She was neither dressed for trouble nor posed in any way that might invite it—but she had a natural, unforced sex appeal that filled the room like a sound wave.
And yes, she did appear to be returning Gunner’s gaze with something more significant than a smidgen of interest.
“Well?” Del said.
“Well, nothing. Only eight people in the whole house, who else is she gonna look at, you?”
“It’s more than that, brother.”
“So it’s more than that. I’m not interested.” Gunner picked up his glass, eased some more Turkey down his throat.
“He’s bein’ a good boy tonight,” Lilly said to Del, chuckling and winking simultaneously. “But it ain’t gonna last.”
“How much do you wanna bet?”
“Shit. That lady of yours is what? Two thousand miles away? And you ain’t seen her in how many months?”
“Weeks, Lilly. It’s only been six weeks.”
“Yeah, but they been six loooong-ass weeks, haven’t they?” The big bartender laughed heartily, and Del joined right in with her.
Nobody believed Gunner could make it work, this long-distance love affair he and Yolanda McCreary had been engaged in now for going on six months. Yolanda lived in Chicago, and the two only saw each other when their schedules and finances permitted, which so far meant about every five weeks. It would have been a difficult arrangement to pull off under the best of circumstances, but further complicating matters was the fact that Yolanda was a former client; Gunner really had no business seeing her at all.
Yet here they were, the PI and the LAN administrator, falling harder for each other every day.
They spoke on the phone nightly, and traded amorous e-mail messages laced with sexual innuendo on their computers, and on those weekends they actually managed to see each other—either Gunner flying east to Chicago, or Yolanda jetting west to L.A.—they came together like interlocking puzzle pieces, as physically and emotionally inseparable as a mother and her unborn child. What their sex together lacked in regularity, it more than made up for in intensity, and they had found no subject yet they could not discuss openly and honestly.
In short, despite the distance between them, theirs seemed a relationship teeming with promise.
Unfortunately, that distance did exist, and with it came pressures that did nothing but work against them, not the least of which were loneliness and sexual deprivation. Two things Gunner was having a harder time dealing with than Yolanda ever would.
And didn’t both Lilly and Del know it.
“Never mind the lady,” Gunner said, pushing his empty glass across the counter for Lilly to see and refill. “We were talking about gangsta rap, remember?”
“You were talkin’ about it. I wasn’t,” Lilly said.
“Sure you were. You said it wasn’t music.”
“It ain’t. It’s just a lotta noise and bad language. ‘Muthafucka’ this, and ‘muthafucka’ that, boom-boom-boom.” With this last, the big woman was trying to imitate a heavy bass line, lowering her voice to a deep rumble that nearly shook the stacked glasses behind her off their shelves.
“It isn’t all like that, Lilly,” Del said.
“All that shit I ever heard is. You call that music?”
“But if it’s socially relevant …” Gunner started to say, continuing to play devil’s advocate.
“Socially relevant? What the hell is socially relevant ‘bout singin’ songs about bitches and ‘ho’s, and niggas can’t do nothin’ but smoke crack and kill each other? How the hell is that socially relevant?”
“If it’s based on real-world observations, it’s as relevant as any other form of art. At least, that’s what some people will tell you. They’ll say, just because the kids use the language of the street—”
“Damn right they use the language of the street,” Del said. “You play some of that mess too close to a dry weed, you’re likely to start a brush fire.”
“It ain’t good for children to be listenin’ to all that shit, day after day after day,” Lilly said. “That don’t do nothin’ but mess with their minds.”
“And you see what it does to the rappers themselves,” Del added. “Another one’s getting shot or killed every day. Take that boy Kaleel. Look what happened to him.”
Kaleel Takheem was a West Coast rapper who’d been murdered in the main parking lot at Disneyland several months earlier. The news stories Gunner had read said he’d been leaving the park with his manager when a lone assailant—described by witnesses as a black man in his early twenties, driving a late-model white Honda Accord—perforated the rapper’s car with automatic gunfire, then sped off. Takheem’s manager had managed to survive the attack, but the rapper himself was a DOA before the first 911 call could ever be made.
“They find his shooter yet?” Gunner asked, not having heard anything about an arrest in the case.
Del shook his head. “Hell no. And I bet they never will. Whoever killed that boy is going to get whacked himself before the cops ever come close to finding him. You watch.”
“It’s one of them vicious circles,” Lilly said, splashing bourbon all over the bar as she refilled Gunner’s glass. “East Coast child kills a West Coast child, some other West Coast child kills him. And so on and so forth.”
“And here you are now, jumping right in the middle of it all,” Del said to Gunner. “Just asking to catch a bullet by mistake.”
“Or maybe not by mistake,” Lilly said.
Gunner snorted to show them how seriously he was taking the threat. “Come on. It’s not like that.”
“Yeah, it is. You’re stickin’ your nose into the Digga’s murder, ain’t you? Leavin’ your business card all over town so the fools who killed ’im will know where to find you when they decide to shut you up?”
“Nobody said the Digga was murdered yet, Lilly.”
“Nobody has to say it. He worked for Bume, didn’t he?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“What’s it got to do with anything? Lord have mercy, Gunner, Bume is a damn gangster, that’s what! And I don’t mean the kind that makes records. If he ain’t out killin’ somebody, somebody else is out tryin’ to kill him.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. You ever known me to be wrong about somethin’?”
She only asked the question because she knew what his honest answer had to be—no—but all Gunner said was, “You mean today?”
Del started to laugh, but had to reconsider when Lilly caught him in the act. “This ain’t funny, fool,” she said. “People who get too close to that big ugly nigga always end up dead. And it ain’t never ’cause they wanted to kill themselves.”
She didn’t know it, but all Lilly was doing was building a case for something Gunner was fast becoming certain of on his own. Because Kevin Frick of the Beverly Hills Police Department had returned his call late that afternoon to report that at no time had either he or his partner removed any surveillance tapes from the grounds of the Beverly Hills Westmore Hotel.
“Somebody said we did?” Frick had asked, clearly annoyed.
“Bob Zemic. The Westmore’s security chief. He said the tape recorded on Elbridge’s floor between four and eight o’clock the Saturday he died was turned over to you by his man Ray Crumley, and that you returned it to Crumley roughly seventy-two hours later.”
“Sorry. Mr. Zemic’s mistaken. We neither asked for any tapes nor received any, from Crumley or anyone else.”
&nbs
p; “That’s what I thought you’d say.”
“It doesn’t make any sense. Why would we only take one tape, and the wrong one at that?”
“I couldn’t figure that out either. Only thing I could guess was that Crumley was lying.”
“Either him or Zemic, yeah.”
“I wouldn’t blame Zemic. Unless I’m reading him wrong, he was only telling me what Crumley had told him.”
“In that case, it sounds like Lloyd and I should have a little talk with Mr. Crumley.”
“Not unless you believe in séances, you won’t. Crumley’s dead. Somebody hollowed out his skull at his apartment late last night, left his brains all over the furniture.”
After Gunner recounted what little he knew about Crumley’s murder, Frick grew silent for a moment, then asked, “You’re thinking Crumley took this tape himself to copy it, then somebody killed him to get the copy, is that it?”
“Evidence at the scene certainly seemed to support robbery as the motive, and nothing larger than a pack of cigarettes appeared to have been taken. Add to that the lack of blank tapes at the scene—”
“Come on. That’s a nonissue. Lots of people don’t own a blank tape, they only use their VCRs for playback.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Besides. You say Crumley returned the tape. If the reason he took it in the first place was to copy it, he would’ve needed two machines, right? And you said he only had one.”
“One was all we found, yeah. But that doesn’t mean—”
“Come on, Gunner. You’re grasping at straws here. Even if we assume Crumley had a way of copying it, that surveillance video as you describe it shouldn’t have been worth stealing, let alone killing a man over. So it shows somebody entering Elbridge’s room four hours before he died, so what? What’s that supposed to prove?”
“Maybe it doesn’t prove anything. Maybe the tape he took wasn’t the one Zemic said it was at all, but the one that was recorded during the actual time of Elbridge’s death. That one could have been worth killing for, right?”
“You’re saying Zemic lied about which tape it was?”
“Either that, or he was misled. He sounded too certain to be simply mistaken. All Crumley would have had to do was swap or replace the labels on two tapes to make Zemic think the one you borrowed was for the earlier time period.”
“That’s true, sure. Only—”
“Why would he do that? Yeah, that’s a good question.”
“Sounds like he was gonna be in hot water if Zemic found out the tape was missing, no matter which one it was, right? Why go to all the trouble of changing labels?”
“Because Zemic would have been unduly suspicious otherwise?”
Frick paused to think that over, said, “Possibly. But I still think that’s a stretch.”
Gunner’s silence said he agreed. “All right. Let’s consider another option then. One we haven’t even mentioned yet.”
“You wanna know if there’s any chance my partner got the tape from Crumley without my knowing about it.”
“Yes.”
“The answer’s no. But thanks for taking so long to ask.”
“You understand I’m not accusing either one of you of anything. I’m just wondering—”
“You don’t have to wonder. I just told you. It didn’t happen. You wanna leave it at that, or get on my bad side?”
“Sorry, Detective. I didn’t mean any offense. I’m just trying to find a scenario here that follows some kind of logic, that’s all.”
“Yeah? Well, how’s this one? Zemic’s the head man over there, right? Put yourself in his shoes for a minute. Some private ticket you’ve never seen before comes around asking to see something you don’t particularly feel like showing him—a series of hotel surveillance tapes the ticket might be looking to use in a wrongful death lawsuit against your employers—what are you going to tell him? The cops have already seen them. They had one down at the station for three days, didn’t see a damn thing on it.”
“That’s a fine theory, Frick, except for two things. Zemic brought Ray Crumley into the mix on his own, number one, and he gave me more detail than I asked for, number two. If all he’d wanted was for me to go away, he’d have told me he personally gave you guys every tape in the sequence, not just one, and left Crumley completely out of it.”
“If he could think that fast on his feet, you mean. Not everybody can.”
And that was true. Most lies were told on the fly, without the benefit of premeditation, so it wasn’t unusual for a string of them to add up to something that, when viewed as a whole, made little or no sense. Caught off guard by Gunner’s request to see the Westmore’s surveillance tapes, and determined to dissuade him from doing so, a panicked Zemic could indeed have concocted an argument against the investigator’s need to view the tapes that included the very gaps in logic Gunner had just mentioned. And yet …
“I just don’t think he was lying,” Gunner said. A gut feeling that returned him and Frick right back to square one: Why would Ray Crumley take the tape Zemic claimed had been missing if it couldn’t prove someone besides Carlton Elbridge had been inside his room at the time of his death?
“The hell if I know,” Frick said.
“Then you agree there’s something here worth investigating.”
“For you? Oh, yeah.”
“Wait a minute, Frick …”
“No, Gunner, you wait a minute. Our investigation is closed, remember? We’ve already decided what happened to Elbridge. He committed suicide.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Okay, so maybe it’s a little funny, Crumley lying to Zemic about us having that tape, then getting his head bashed in ten days later. If I could drop what I’m doing now to help you solve that little conundrum, I probably would, I’m that curious about it myself. But I can’t. My plate’s too full. You had some concrete evidence to support your theories, maybe it’d be different, but you don’t. Do you?”
“Assuming Crumley’s corpse doesn’t count? No. I don’t.”
“Crumley’s corpse doesn’t count. Why the hell should it? All his murder’s proof of right now is that somebody wanted him dead, not Elbridge.”
“But if he was murdered over the tape—”
“A, we don’t know that he was, yet, and B, what of it if he was? There could’ve been a million things on that tape somebody might have wanted to kill him over, Gunner. It didn’t have to relate to Elbridge’s suicide at all.”
“No, but—”
“Listen. The Elbridge kid wasn’t the only guest staying on the Westmore’s fifth floor that night. As I recall, there were eleven others, and I bet you more than a couple of ’em had been walking the halls all weekend with people other than their husbands and wives. If Crumley was the blackmailing type, as you suspect, he could’ve used that tape against any number of people, and if he was unfortunate enough to choose the wrong one …”
Frick couldn’t see it, but Gunner was nodding his head, conceding the fact that the cop’s suggestion was a sound one. For the moment at least, they had no reason to believe that Ray Crumley’s homicide was related to the death of Carlton Elbridge, short of Gunner’s questionable sense of instinct, and profound lack of faith in coincidence. Two things, for all Gunner knew, the LAPD’s Steven La Porte and Pete Chin would prove completely invalid tomorrow.
“I hear you talking, Detective. But. I still wish to God Zemic would let me see that tape,” Gunner said forlornly.
“So go ask him to see it again. Nicely, this time.”
“To hell with that. I’ll just tell him you sent me. That ought to scare a little cooperation out of his ass.”
“Tell him anything you like. Just don’t mention me by name,” Frick said.
That had been over four hours ago.
Now Gunner was here at the Deuce with Lilly and Del, allowing all their impassioned admonishments to feed his nagging fear that, despite all of Frick’s rationalizing to the contrary, Ray Crumley’s murder
not only was connected to the case he was working, but was somehow indicative of the far-reaching power of Bume Webb.
“All right,” Gunner finally said to Lilly with great impatience. “So there are safer things to do than play in Bume’s sandbox. I get that. But you’re the one who got me involved in this mess in the first place, remember? If something happens to me, it’s not gonna be my fault, it’s gonna be yours.”
“My fault? What the hell did I do?”
“You were the one who called me down here to talk to Pharaoh’s friend Benny Elbridge yesterday, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what?”
“But Pharaoh never told me what they was gonna ask you to do. All he told me was he had a friend from church needed a private investigator.”
“So you recommended me.”
“You needed the job, didn’t you?”
“That’s beside the point, Lilly.”
“Shit. Not if you wanna keep comin’ in here drinkin’ my liquor, it ain’t.” She broke out laughing, and Del followed suit, both of them finding endless amusement in the disgruntled look on Gunner’s face.
“From the lady,” Pharaoh said, suddenly appearing among the trio to slide a fresh drink under Gunner’s nose. He was grinning like somebody who’d just heard the punch line to a very ribald joke.
“Aw, shit,” Lilly said to Gunner playfully. “What’d we tell you?”
Gunner was the last to look over, see the strange beauty behind him waiting patiently for his reaction to her offering. He lifted the glass of bourbon for her to see, nodded thanks, and she returned a nod of her own, smiling pleasantly.
“Is that all you’re gonna do?” Del demanded when he and his cousin had turned around again.
“You don’t at least go over there to say hello, she’s gonna think you’re very rude,” Lilly said, her red lips turned up in a smile filled with wicked satisfaction. Even Pharaoh was still standing there, watching to see what Gunner was going to do in the face of such an enviable gift.
Gunner frowned at them all, threw back a long swallow of Wild Turkey, and started over to the lady’s table, taking his drink along with him.
All the Lucky Ones Are Dead Page 7