All the Lucky Ones Are Dead

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  When he had finally reached her, she laughed and said, “They made you come, didn’t they?”

  She had a full, throaty laugh that Gunner found hard to resist. He chuckled himself and said, “It was that obvious, huh?”

  She nodded and held her right hand out for him to shake. “Brenda Warren.”

  “Aaron Gunner.” He shook her hand and sat down, conjuring up an image of Yolanda McCreary and affixing it to a corner of his mind, just to remind himself of his limitations. “Many thanks for the drink.”

  “It’s going to sound like a line from a really bad movie, but I don’t do this very often. Only under special circumstances.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s a self-defense mechanism. Whenever I come to a strange place like this, somewhere I’ve never been before, I’m almost always approached by somebody, and it’s usually somebody I’d just as soon not be bothered with. I’ve learned if I make a move first, pick somebody out who looks halfway interesting, before somebody else can step up to the plate …”

  “I get it. It’s a preemptive strike.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well. Lucky me,” Gunner said, tipping his glass to her again.

  “Not all that lucky. I’m only here for the conversation. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you.”

  Gunner was surprised to discover that it did. Maybe his intent to keep this meeting short and uneventful had been less genuine than he thought. “Frankly, that suits me just fine,” he said. “Only I’d be lying if I said my pride isn’t a little bit hurt.”

  “Please. Don’t take it personally. Conversation’s all I’m ever looking for lately.” She smiled, but her eyes did something altogether different.

  “I’m sure there’s a good reason for that,” Gunner said, stepping lightly.

  “Yes. There is.”

  “A husband back home, maybe? Or a boyfriend?”

  “A husband. But not at home. Almost never at home. We don’t need to mention his name.”

  “No. Let’s not.”

  “He’s a good man. When he’s around. I only do this to save my sanity in his constant absences, that’s all. I’m not looking to get laid, Mr. Gunner.”

  “I understand.”

  “You really do, don’t you? Damn. Now my pride’s a little hurt.” She laughed her throaty laugh for him again.

  “If you were thinking the thought never crossed my mind, forget about it,” Gunner said. “You’re all that, and more. Thing is, I’ve got reasons of my own to be good tonight. And we don’t need to mention her name either.”

  “Wife or girlfriend?”

  “Girlfriend. For now.”

  “For now, huh? Sounds serious.”

  “I think it is.” Gunner took a deep breath, braced himself for the monumental move he was about to make. “Which is why I’m going to stand up now, get the hell out of here before I do something stupid to screw it all up.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Because I would, given half a chance. Conversation’s a wonderful thing, Ms. Warren, but …”

  “Yes, I know. Sometimes, what you want from someone goes a little farther than that.”

  For the first time that night, she gave him a look fully intended to deliver a sexual message, and it was enough to make Gunner take a step back, fight to maintain his balance.

  “Thanks again for the drink,” he said. “I owe you one.”

  Then he proved himself a man of his word and went home.

  Leaving the Deuce that night, Gunner had the feeling he was being followed.

  He’d sensed the same thing earlier that day, during his long drive from Mickey’s out to Ray Crumley’s apartment, but he’d shaken it off as a by-product of the dread he was already feeling, knowing the scene of an ugly homicide awaited him. Now he had no such excuse.

  But neither did he have any evidence to support his suspicion. Nothing in his rearview mirror struck him as unusual, or particularly familiar. Just headlights and parking lamps moving north along Vermont Avenue, winking on and off as they went their own way.

  Still, to ease his mind, he played some of the tricks he knew to shake an unwanted tail out of hiding—making illogical turns to see who would follow, pausing at the curb to catch someone else abruptly doing likewise—but such efforts proved futile. No one appeared to take the bait; no one did anything even mildly incongruous.

  If there really was someone back there, Gunner finally decided, they had to be better at hiding than he was at flushing them into the open.

  s e v e n

  “SO? WHAT YOU GOT FOR ME?” BENNY ELBRIDGE ASKED Gunner the next morning. It was only a few minutes after seven, and the sound of the ringing phone had nearly fried the investigator’s brain waking him.

  “Nothing but a few questions,” Gunner said into the phone, willing himself up to a sitting position on the bed.

  “Questions? What kinda questions?”

  To start, Gunner asked Elbridge why he hadn’t told him about the alleged suicide note his son had left behind.

  “’Cause it wasn’t no suicide note, that’s why,” Elbridge said predictably, seemingly aggrieved by the very suggestion. “The police tried to say that, but that wasn’t nothin’ but some lyrics to a song the boy was writin’. Any fool coulda seen that.”

  “You saw the note yourself?”

  “I didn’t have to see it. Coretta saw it, and she told me what it was.”

  “You think Coretta might show this note to me, if you asked her?”

  Elbridge paused before answering, apparently taken aback by the request. “She might if you asked,” he said. “But if I ask, it’s for sure she won’t even talk to you. But what you wanna talk to her for, anyway? I already told you she don’t know anything.”

  “She was your son’s mother, Mr. Elbridge. I would think she knew some things about him no one else did, including yourself.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You have some problem with my talking to her?”

  “What?” Elbridge grew silent again, but Gunner could hear his mind grinding out a response even over the phone. “No, I don’t have no problem with it. It’s just… She don’t know I hired you, see, and if she finds out, I ain’t never gonna hear the end of it. ’Cause she’s gonna think this is all about money, ’stead of about the boy.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, and I sympathize. But if for no other reason than to get a look at that note, it would really help my cause here to talk to her.”

  “Do you have to tell her who you’re workin’ for?”

  “I don’t have to, no. But if she asks, and I refuse to say…”

  “She won’t wanna talk to you. Yeah, that’s right,” Elbridge admitted.

  “Tell you what. I’ll keep your name out of it if I can. But it won’t be easy. In the meantime, I’ve got another question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Your daughter-in-law Danee. She’s something of a hothead, isn’t she?”

  “How do you mean that, ‘hothead’?”

  “I mean she had a jealous streak a mile wide, and she liked to swing knives around when it flared up. Or didn’t you know that about her?”

  “Little girl has a temper, that’s true,” Elbridge said, somewhat reluctantly.

  “I guess that was something else you forgot to mention Monday. Carlton’s wife once trying to cleave him in half with a carving knife.”

  “I didn’t forget about it. I just knew it wasn’t important. So the girl got crazy on the boy once, so what?”

  “Was she trying to kill him, Mr. Elbridge?”

  “No! I mean …” The older man’s voice trailed off as he thought about it. “That ain’t what it sounded like to me. Carlton said she’d just had a little too much to drink that night, that’s all.”

  “How long ago did this happen? Recently, or …”

  “A month or two, maybe. Not much longer than that. But if you’re askin’ ’cause you think she had somethin’ to do with Carlton gettin’ killed …”
>
  “I’m just looking at all the possibilities, Mr. Elbridge. That’s what you’re paying me for, right?”

  Gunner’s client let him listen to another short stretch of silence, then said, “Yes. I guess it is.” Making the concession sound like something that hurt him to his very core.

  “One more thing before I let you go. The name Ray Crumley mean anything to you, by any chance?”

  “Ray Crumley? No. Who’s he?”

  “Nobody, really. Just another dead man. I’ll talk to you again tomorrow, Mr. Elbridge.”

  Without issuing a formal good-bye, Gunner hung up the phone.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Gunner, but I told you yesterday,” Bob Zemic said. “Unless you have a court order for me, I can’t allow you to see our surveillance tapes. It just isn’t going to happen.”

  He was sitting in his office at the Beverly Hills Westmore, hands clasped firmly together atop the blotter on his desk, striking the ultimate pose of a man who was never in a thousand years going to change his mind.

  “I understand your reluctance here, Mr. Zemic, and I admire your dedication to duty,” Gunner said, smiling in lieu of breaking the security man’s neck. “But I would think in light of Mr. Crumley’s murder—”

  “Please leave what happened to Ray out of this,” Zemic snapped. “It’s immaterial to this discussion.”

  “I think that remains to be seen. In fact, I feel just the opposite. That’s why I’m asking you again to let me see the tape you say he had. So I can establish with some certainty whether or not it had some bearing on Mr. Crumley’s death.”

  “That’s not for you to determine, Mr. Gunner. That’s for the police to determine. And as I already told you, the two detectives who were here earlier this morning had no interest in viewing the tape. At least, they didn’t ask to.”

  He was talking about La Porte and Chin, who had apparently been by to see him just over an hour ago.

  “They don’t know what I know,” Gunner said.

  “And that is?”

  “That Crumley may have been using a copy of the tape to blackmail somebody. Somebody who just might be responsible for both his murder and Mr. Elbridge’s.”

  “Except that Mr. Elbridge wasn’t murdered,” Zemic said. “He committed suicide.”

  “That is what everyone originally thought, yes. Even me. But it’s funny—the more I hear some people say it, the more I think they’re afraid to believe anything else.”

  Zemic sat up, readjusted the torque holding his hands together. “Was that an accusation of some kind?”

  “An accusation? No. It was a cry for help. I need your assistance here, Mr. Zemic. I have a job to do, same as you, and it’s got nothing to do with helping anybody sue the Beverly Hills Westmore for negligence. You’ve got to believe that.”

  “Do I?”

  “You do if you don’t like the idea of somebody getting away with murder. Possibly even two murders. And I suggest to you that that may be exactly what happens if you record over or otherwise destroy that tape before the police and I have had a chance to examine it.”

  “There is nothing on that tape to indicate Mr. Elbridge’s death was anything but a suicide,” Zemic said. “I reviewed it, remember? I know.”

  “I seem to recall you saying you only scanned through it. That it was basically four hours of an empty hallway, so why watch the whole thing?”

  Zemic flushed, having failed to anticipate this flaw in his own argument. “I think I saw enough of it to make a reasonable judgment of its contents,” he said firmly.

  “Okay. So what did Crumley want with it, then? He risked his job to take it home for two days, then lied about having it when you found it missing. Why? Why would he do all that over a tape with nothing on it?”

  “I didn’t say there was nothing on it,” Zemic said, becoming increasingly irritable. “I said there was nothing on it relevant to Mr. Elbridge’s suicide.”

  “Say again?”

  “What I’m trying to say is that there may indeed have been something on the tape Ray was interested in, but not because he was looking to blackmail anyone. I don’t think that was Ray’s intent at all.”

  “Then?”

  Zemic paused, obviously conflicted. “Ray was a bit of a voyeur, Mr. Gunner. From time to time, he—we—would see things on our surveillance monitors here that piqued his interest. I don’t have to explain what kinds of things I’m referring to, do I?”

  Gunner shook his head. The picture was fairly clear.

  “Guests here at the Westmore are generally very discreet people, but sometimes they forget themselves. If the tape we’re talking about happened to depict someone in a, shall we say, compromising position, it’s possible Ray may have found that worth a second look. I’m not saying that’s what happened, of course, but it is a possibility.”

  It was better than that, Gunner thought. It was as good an explanation for Crumley’s behavior as any, and almost twice as likely.

  “I can see that, sure,” Gunner said to Zemic, trying to sound infinitely reasonable. “Unfortunately, I can’t afford to simply assume that was the case. In order to be certain Ray’s motives for taking the tape had nothing to do with the events I’m investigating, I’ve got to know for a fact what those motives were or weren’t. So I’d like to suggest a compromise, if I may.”

  Zemic raised an eyebrow, instantly suspicious. “Compromise?”

  “Let’s forget about my viewing the tape for the moment. You view it again, instead. In its entirety this time. Then call me and let me know what you find. Can you do that for me, at least?”

  After a long pause, Zemic said, “I suppose.”

  “Good. Think you could get around to it this afternoon sometime?”

  “I can try. I’ll run it during my lunch hour.” He shook his head. “But it’s not going to do you any good. I’m not going to find anything to support the idea that your Mr. Elbridge was murdered.”

  Zemic smiled. Just in case Gunner was thinking he was turning soft, or something.

  Later, over a huge breakfast at Rae’s, a popular Santa Monica diner on Pico just west of the Santa Monica Freeway, Gunner decided to look up yet another old friend, Fetch Bennett. He had worked the Carlton Elbridge case for two days now, and it was time to answer a question he knew he should have addressed long ago: Had the “murder” of Carlton Elbridge even been humanly possible?

  The police had already decided that it wasn’t, as had Bob Zemic. Both Kevin Frick and Zemic seemed completely satisfied that Elbridge’s locked hotel room had ruled out any chance of foul play. And maybe they were right. Maybe there was no way for someone to enter a Westmore room, commit a murder made to look like suicide, then lock the door behind when exiting, all without being detected. But if it could be done—if the mechanics for such a convoluted act actually existed—Bill “Fetch” Bennett would know how to do it.

  Because Fetch was a thief par excellence. He’d been a retiree from the business now for almost ten years, but the big man still knew more about breaking and entering than half the people presently practicing the discipline. Whenever Gunner needed instruction in the methods of gaining entrance to places equipped to keep him out, Fetch was the first person he called.

  Standing a shoeless six-foot-seven and weighing almost twice what Gunner did at a whopping 375, Fetch was now a security troubleshooter for Sunrise Suites, a West Coast motel chain that catered primarily to the business trade, headquartered in a cylindrical glass office tower just off the 405 Freeway in Torrance.

  “Hell, man, that’s easy,” Fetch said after Gunner had run the setup out at the Westmore down for him. The white-haired giant had a small office on the third floor that barely allowed him to bend either arm at the elbow without punching a hole in the wall.

  “Okay. Tell me why,” Gunner said.

  “What you’re talkin’ about is what they call a swing bar tie-down. Door has to be closed to engage it, and you can only engage it from the inside.”

  �
��That’s right.”

  “Unless you’ve got some piano wire, or a long human hair. A hair would actually work best.”

  “A hair?”

  Fetch laughed and nodded. “You tie the end of it around the bar, step outside, and slowly close the door behind you. Then, just before the door latches shut, you pull the hair, swing the bar closed, and snap the hair off so nobody’ll find it. Piece of piano wire would work too, like I said, but you’d probably have to leave some of that behind.”

  Gunner stepped through it several times in his mind, realized it could have been done exactly that way. “Damn,” he said.

  Fetch just laughed again.

  “Could the dead bolt crank be rigged the same way?”

  “You mean to lock from the outside?”

  Gunner nodded.

  “Sure. Why not? That’ d just take a little more time and care, that’s all. Door would have to be all the way closed, and the clearance for the hair through the jamb would be tight. And you’d probably have to use a little piece of tape to keep the hair secured to the crank so it didn’t come off till you were ready for it to come off. But you could do it, sure.”

  “Would it take a pro, or could an amateur do it?”

  “An amateur like you, you mean? An amateur could do it, I guess, long as they knew what they were doin’.”

  Gunner asked Fetch how long he thought the process would take, once the person doing it was standing outside the closed door.

  “For a nonpro? Could take a minute, could take a little longer. But a pro like me could get it done inside of thirty seconds, easy.”

  Gunner fell silent, trying to picture Desmond Joy or Danee Elbridge standing outside the Digga’s hotel room door, following the course of action Fetch had just described. It was easier to see a smoothy like Joy exhibiting the patience for such a thing, but that didn’t mean the widow Elbridge was incapable; anybody could muster sixty seconds of calm and concentration, they felt the stakes were high enough.

  “What’s this all about, Gunner?” Fetch asked, too curious now to respect his friend’s code of discretion a moment longer.

  Gunner shook his head and smiled. “Sorry, Fetch, but I’m gonna have to keep the lid on this one for a while. Not that I think you’d spread it around, but if the wrong people hear I’m working it, they could make life fairly complicated for me.”