All the Lucky Ones Are Dead (26 page)

Mindful that a woman named Yolanda McCreary would want him to do precisely that.

All too often, like so many things in life, the reality of making love to a woman fell far short of a man's fantasies. The heat and energy, the kinetic power anticipated, never quite materialized; her flesh felt cool rather than warm to the touch, or his approach left her apathetic, gave her no reason to give more than she was getting.

On this night, it wasn't like that with Yolanda McCreary.

Tonight, her body was everything he had hoped it would be—full, smooth, exquisitely colored and balanced—and their pairing every bit as fervent and needful. They even made the right sounds together: deep sighs and urgent proddings, laughter in small, joyful doses.

Details of the room she and Gunner lay in were lost to him; her form was the only thing he could see in the darkness. The tiny mole on the outer rim of her navel; the soft white glow of her teeth against his skin; the pebbled texture of her dark, imperfectly round nipples—even cloaked in waves of shifting shadow, all these things filled his eyes and drew him to her, over and over again.

And then, suddenly, they were done, spent and satiated, and she was walking him to the door of her suburban Chicago townhouse. In the dead of night, they stepped out of her living room onto her front porch, where she threw her arms around him to kiss him one last time.

Only afterward, as Gunner was making his way across the damp lawn toward the Cobra improbably parked at the curb, did he see the car sitting in his woman's driveway: a silver Chrysler Le Baron with a bent and twisted front bumper.

He didn't know how he could have missed the car before, and he didn't much care. All he knew now was that he had to move, and quickly. He set himself, started to turn back around … and something hard and cold pierced his back, just below the left shoulder blade, instantly turning his legs to ice. His assailant forced the knife in as far as she could make it go, then stepped back to watch him fall, clutching at a wound he would never reach. He thought she would laugh as he lay there dying, unable to call for help for all the blood filling his lungs, but she didn't. All she did was gaze down upon him, no longer wearing the face of Yolanda McCreary, to study his suffering with the cool, detached interest of a moonlit automaton.

“Allah is on our side,” Brenda Warren said.

s e v e n t e e n

I
T HAD ONLY BEEN A DREAM, BUT IT HAD DEEP ROOTS IN
possibility.

Gunner awoke Friday morning realizing this fact immediately. Getting stabbed by Brenda Warren in the middle of Yolanda McCreary's front yard in Chicago may have been the stuff of pure fantasy, but Warren's role as the driver of the telltale Chrysler he was convinced had been following him lately was not. Her dogged interest in him was too flattering not to invite some suspicion, and the timing of her appearance at the Deuce coincided all too well with his first concerns about having someone on his tail. If the Defenders Of the Bloodline had indeed wanted him watched as a result of his work for Sparkle Johnson, as he had already begun to fear, who better to do it than a seductive beauty like Warren?

It was a question he had the option of asking Warren herself, as the business card she'd asked Lilly to give him Wednesday night seemed to provide him with all the means necessary to contact her, save for a home address. But confronting her directly would be complicated. First, because he couldn't imagine how to broach the subject without effectively accusing her of something she only
might
be guilty of, and second, because he didn't want to approach her at all if he could avoid it. Last night, on his way to the Deuce in search of her, he'd found the will to reverse his field and go home, his fidelity to Yolanda McCreary intact, but he didn't know if he could get close to Warren again and pull off a similar feat of resistance.

Besides, he had more important things to do with his time. He was long overdue to more personally supervise Jolly's efforts as a bodyguard for Sparkle Johnson, and his work for Benny Elbridge and Bume Webb remained unresolved. Less than twelve hours earlier, he'd been ready to call the Elbridge case a lost cause, but the light of a new day had given him a renewed determination to actively pursue a satisfactory conclusion to his investigation on his own, with or without Felicia White's help. There were only two ways of going about this he could think of, and neither seemed very promising, but both appealed more to his sense of duty than simply waiting around for White to show up and answer all the questions he needed answered in order to tell Benny Elbridge with a reasonable amount of certainty that yes, his son had indeed taken his own life twelve and a half days before.

But Jolly and Sparkle Johnson came first.

“Have the Feds contacted her yet?” Gunner asked Wally Browne around nine Friday morning, having reached the radio executive at his KTLK office.

“They're here talking to her now. Agents Smith and Leffman. They tell me they're old friends of yours.”

“We know each other, yeah.” Carroll Smith and Irv Leffman were the two FBI men Gunner had done business with during his first spate of trouble with the Defenders. Smith was black and almost human, but Leffman, his white partner, had all the warmth and sensitivity of a large, rotted tree stump. “Have they confirmed the Defenders' involvement yet? Or are they being tight-lipped about it?”

“They haven't confirmed it for me, no. But they've promised to have someone start watching Sparkle by early this afternoon, just like you said they would, and that tells me they're relatively certain the Defenders are involved. Otherwise, I can't see them bothering.”

“You're probably right. Do you know if they've had any conversations with Jolly?”

“Jolly? I saw one of 'em say a few words to him earlier, sure. Agent Smith. Why?”

“Feds have a way of spooking some people, that's all,” Gunner lied. “I was just wondering how Jolly was taking it.”

“Looked like he took it fine.”

“Good. Any objections to our backing out of this thing as soon as they have their people in place? I'm sure they'd prefer Jolly and I were out of the picture anyway. Makes for fewer bodies in their lines of sight.”

“At the rates you're chargin'? I'd have no objection to that at all.”

That left Gunner free to concentrate on the Elbridge case in full.

Over a fast-food breakfast at a restaurant near his home, he chose a course of action. He probably wasn't going to find a copy of the hotel surveillance tape he believed Ray Crumley had duplicated in either Crumley's apartment or that of Antoinetta Aames, but the time had come for Gunner to look for one all the same. Relying on the Westmore's Bob Zemic's description of the original tape's contents for him just wasn't going to cut it anymore. In order to finally determine what, if anything, the tape had to say about the demise of C.E. Digga Jones, Gunner was going to have to locate Crumley's copy and view it for himself, and the dead man's apartment—rather than the inaccessible crime scene Culver City PD had no doubt made of Aames's residence by now—was the only logical place to seek it out.

At least, that's what Gunner had thought back at the restaurant. A full hour into his search of Crumley's apartment, he was beginning to wonder if he hadn't picked the wrong horse. He'd had little trouble gaining access to the premises, as he had expected—the landlord of the building couldn't have been more impressed by his PI's license had it borne the official U.S. presidential seal—but unless Crumley had found a way to make a standard blank video-cassette look like something else, the one Gunner was after simply wasn't here.

Someone had already started the process of packing up Crumley's belongings, and Gunner went through each and every box and bag, painstakingly replacing every item just as he'd found it, never coming across a blank tape of any kind. He found eleven prerecorded videotapes, and popped each one in Crumley's still-connected bedroom VCR, but none of them was anything other than what its packaging specifically implied.

Then, finally, Gunner found something else to hold his interest.

It was a large photo album at the bottom of one box. Mounted on its pages were assorted color prints recording a number of episodes in Crumley's recent past, friends or relatives with and without the portly security man by theirside. All of them were strangers to Gunner save for one: Antoinetta Aames. Images of the woman whose corpse the investigator had seen only the night before were sprinkled throughout. She was a little younger and a little thinner here, but it was Aames without question, and her role in Crumley's life was equally obvious: she had once been his woman.

Now Gunner knew Crumley not only had had some connection to Aames, but may indeed have had reason to blackmail her as well. The photo album gave no clue, but if his relationship with Aames had ended poorly, he might have felt he owed the lady some small measure of grief, and blackmail would have been a fine way to deliver it.

But blackmail over
what?

Again, that seemed to be a question only a copy of Crumley's surveillance tape could answer.

Gunner toured the dead man's apartment one more time, then reluctantly conceded defeat. The tape wasn't here. He was moving through the front of Crumley's apartment on his way to the door, ready to leave, when something in the dining area caught his attention. It was a desktop computer sitting on a drawing table against one wall, a printer perched atop a stand just beside it. Gunner had already turned the machine on once, scanned through Crumley's files without finding anything relating to Aames, White, or blackmail, but now the thought occurred to him that the PC might have warranted a closer look. He walked over to it, noticed now that there was a small, blue slab of hardware extending off one of the computer's output ports in the back, onto which the printer's cable was installed. He examined the device closely, saw several open connectors that looked like video input and output jacks running along one side.

“Wait a minute,” Gunner said out loud, turning the machine on again.

He didn't have much experience with such things, but having a PC of his own at the office for nearly a year now had made him just computer-literate enough to be dangerous. Running certain types of programs was beyond him, but recognizing their general purpose was not; he was often able to tell what a program did just by looking at its name and icon alone. If the hunch he was playing was right, he would find an icon/program name on Crumley's Windows desktop that would relate to the curious blue box mounted to the computer's parallel port, and when he double-clicked on the icon to start its associated software …

“Thank you, Jesus,” Gunner said when the PC booted up.

The name of the video-editing program was the same one emblazoned on the piece of blue hardware that had no doubt come with it—“Zaplt”—and the contents of its home screen made the pair's function crystal-clear. Gunner had always wondered how Crumley could have copied the Westmore surveillance tape without two VCRs, and now he knew: by computer. It wouldn't have been the fastest way to do it, but it would have been the most state-of-the-art.

Gunner quickly checked the list of files under the Zaplt directory, thanked God again when he spotted the one Crumley had named simply “July 11”—the date of Carlton Elbridge's death at the Beverly Hills Westmore. The investigator was smart enough to know Crumley could never have saved the entire contents of a two-hour surveillance tape in one digitized computer file, but the brevity of this one surprised him all the same. In a video clip that lasted less than fifteen seconds, Antoinetta Aames and Felicia White stepped out of Carlton Elbridge's fifth-floor suite at the Beverly Hills Westmore, then moved down the hallway toward the camera, the behavior of both women perfectly innocent throughout. They appeared neither hurried nor particularly nervous, and Elbridge himself was never in view.

Gunner didn't get it. What would Crumley have wanted with this?

There were only seven other files in the computer's Zaplt directory, and Gunner proceeded to view them all. None of them had anything to do with the Westmore clip. They were just snippets of various porno movies Crumley had apparently found it necessary to save in digitized form.

Gunner went back to the original file, started playing it over and over, looking for whatever it was he was missing. He watched Aames and White leave Elbridge's room and traverse the corridor again and again, taking all of twenty-five steps between them, and still he remained puzzled. There was nothing incriminating here. Two ladies of the evening leaving an unseen john's hotel room, that was all the clip had to show. Gunner was at a loss to explain it.

Until he remembered one small detail he'd forgotten. He shouldn't have been able to see their faces.

Bob Zemic had told him two days ago that the surveillance tape he had viewed at the hotel that afternoon could not have been used by Crumley as an instrument for blackmail because the faces of Aames and White were never visible. And yet, here were the pair's faces: unobscured, turned to the camera, completely recognizable.