All the Lucky Ones Are Dead Read online

  All the Lucky Ones Are Dead

  Gar Anthony Haywood

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  For Damon

  My brother. Always was. Always will be.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH, LESS THAN THREE MONTHS shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, Carlton William Elbridge had a personal net worth of twenty-eight million dollars. He owned two large homes in Los Angeles, a spacious Tribeca loft in New York, and three luxury condominiums, two in Las Vegas, one in Palm Springs. In the garage of his primary residence, an eight-bedroom Tudor hidden behind a wall of Italian spruce trees high in the Hollywood Hills, two Porsches, one Ferrari, a Lexus, and a classic 1961 Harley-Davidson panhead motorcycle sat in constant readiness.

  His face had graced the cover of Time magazine, as well as the covers of other national and international publications too numerous to count. The Wall Street Journal had published an extensive front-page profile of Elbridge in the summer of his twenty-third year, detailing his uncanny business acumen with open admiration. The mantel over his mother’s fireplace (in the new three-bedroom home he had bought her in Northridge) was overflowing with his many awards and trophies, a collection he began to amass when he was only seventeen.

  On the day of his funeral in Los Angeles, people lined the streets to watch the procession as if it were the motorcade of a President. The vast majority of these people were teenagers, but some were even younger than that: eight-and nine-year-old boys and girls gripping lit candles, their faces either gnarled by anger or stained with tears. For many of these children, Elbridge had been the center of their universe, the single voice in the wilderness they could not only hear but comprehend. While parents pleaded and teachers lectured, preachers prayed and law enforcement officers coerced—Elbridge just spoke the truth to these young people. That this truth was often devoid of hope or optimism mattered little. What mattered was that it came from one of their own, someone the streets had qualified to make bold pronouncements about their present and their future. And—not inconsequentially—in spreading this truth, Elbridge had made himself filthy rich, beating the very odds against achieving economic self-sufficiency they themselves faced daily.

  He wasn’t the Second Coming, but for most of his countless followers, Elbridge was close enough.

  Weeks after his interment, newsstands around the country were lined with magazines paying tribute to Carlton Elbridge, either in cover stories lamenting his death, or in special issues wholly devoted to the telling of his brief life story. All raised questions about his motives for suicide, and discussed at length who might have stood to profit most from his decision to commit such a desperate and unexpected act. Conspiracy theories abounded.

  In short, as incredible as it seemed, Carlton William Elbridge—or C.E. Digga Jones, as he was most commonly known—received even more ink in death than he had ever received in life.

  But then, such was often the fate of the premier gangsta rapper in all the land.

  o n e

  THE CALLER IDENTIFIED HIMSELF AS “MIKE FROM GARDENA,” and he said he wanted to talk about Proposition 199, the California state ballot measure that would limit mobile home rent control.

  “Go ahead,” Sparkle Johnson said.

  “I don’t think you realize what effect this bill would have on mobile home owners if it’s passed,” Mike said.

  “I think it would have very little effect on them, actually.”

  There was a brief pause as the caller recoiled from the blatant indifference of Johnson’s tone. “But the people who live in these homes are, by and large, older people on fixed incomes. People who—”

  “So they’re older people. So what? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “But we’re talking about people who have no other place to live. And if their rent were to suddenly go up by as little as fifteen percent—”

  “Oh, please. Spare me. These property owners you’re talking about are businesspeople, they rent their spaces out to make money. What do you think they’re gonna do, raise their rents so high they’ll drive all their tenants away? That would be stupid.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Look, if somebody’s dumb enough to do that, let his tenants all get together and move out. I mean, what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is, if all the other park owners raise their rents at the same time—”

  “Hey, I’m sorry, but those people should be free to rent their property for whatever, and to whomever, they damn well please. This is America, Mike. Government’s got no business telling people what they can or cannot do with their own property.”

  Stammering with exasperation now, the caller said, “But how about as that applies to racial discrimination? What about all the restaurant owners in the South who only wanted to serve white people before segregation was outlawed?”

  Sparkle Johnson almost chuckled. “Let me tell you something, Mike—you don’t want to ask me that question, okay? You don’t want to ask me that question because you’re not going to like my answer to it. You take me there, and I’m gonna have to tell you that those people should have been left alone too. They should have been free to serve whomever they wanted to serve.

  “Now I know, because I’m black, you think I should feel differently about the subject. But I don’t. The Constitution is very clear on the subject, it’s not a racial issue …”

  And that was it for Mike from Gardena. Having served his purpose as a detonator for one of Johnson’s trademark tirades against big government, his call to her radio talk show was terminated without further ado. He wasn’t told good-bye, he wasn’t offered thanks, he was just hung up on under cover of Johnson’s latest diatribe, freed to go back to whatever rock the liberal Democrat had crawled out from under in order to turn on his radio and use the phone. This was how all callers voicing disagreement with the vivacious and outspoken Ms. Sparkle were treated. Anyone calling her show expecting to enter into an actual debate with the lady was in for a big disappointment.

  Aaron Gunner figured he could stomach another five minutes of this bullshit, then he was gone.

  He had a nine a.m. appointment to see Wally Browne, 720/KTLK’s general manager and the man who was ultimately responsible for putting Sparkle Johnson on the Los Angeles airwaves, but Gunner had been waiting for Browne to show himself in the station’s reception area for over thirty minutes now. Even having nothing better to do with his time was not reason enough for the private investigator to subject himself to this, a half hour of sitting on his ass pretending the live broadcast of Johnson’s program playing over the station’s sound system wasn’t driving him to distraction. Especially when what he had to tell Browne he could just as easily have said over the phone as to the man’s face.

  When Browne finally did appear, moving rapidly toward Gunner with his right arm extended to shake hands, he was beaming, the poor bastard, clearly anticipating something other than the bad news he was about to receive.

  “Mr. Gunner. So sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said, offering only the shortest of apologies.

  He led Gunner upstairs to the runaway opulence of his private office for the second time in a week, and the two men sat d
own to talk, Browne behind the airport landing strip disguised as his desk, Gunner in one of the two chairs directly facing it. Just as he had four days ago, Browne offered Gunner a cigar, and Gunner shook his head to decline it. They were both getting pretty good at the routine.

  “Well?” Browne asked anxiously. “How did it go?” He was an overweight man with unruly brown hair whose puffy face was naturally ruddy, but apparently, nervous apprehension could redden it further still.

  “She didn’t tell you?” Gunner asked.

  “She won’t talk about it. I assumed she was still upset that I hired you in the first place.”

  “Oh, she is that.”

  “But?”

  “But I can’t help you.” Gunner shrugged, doing the best he could do to create the illusion of grave disappointment.

  “What do you mean, you can’t help me?”

  “I mean that this was a mistake. She thinks you’re wasting your money hiring a private investigator, and at this point, I’m inclined to agree with her.”

  “But—”

  “Maybe the answer is another operator, I don’t know. All I know for sure is that I don’t want the job, and she doesn’t want me on it. It’s that simple.”

  “You’re saying she didn’t like you,” Browne said.

  Gunner almost laughed at that. The lunch he’d shared with Johnson two days earlier had not been bloody, exactly, but it had been ugly. Johnson had come already convinced that Gunner would despise her, and he had been unable to disguise the fact that he very nearly did. Combined with Johnson’s insistence that Browne had hired Gunner in error, their complete and instantaneous dislike for one another seemed reason enough to end Gunner’s work on her behalf before it could even begin.

  Of course, Gunner had one additional incentive to walk away from the Johnson case, but this was something he could barely admit to himself, let alone to Browne.

  “Whether she liked me or not is immaterial,” the investigator told Browne now. “What counts is that she can’t see the point of going any further with this, and I can’t see the point of arguing with her about it.”

  “Let me talk to her again,” Browne suggested.

  Gunner shook his head and stood up. “No. Thanks, but don’t bother.”

  Browne raced around his desk in a panic, said, “Listen, she’s just being stubborn. She gets threats of one kind or another all the time, she thinks they’re all the same. But these are different. She doesn’t want to admit that, but they are.”

  “Different how?”

  Browne swallowed hard, about to broach a subject he knew he should have mentioned four days ago, and asked, “You ever hear of a group calling itself the Defenders of the Bloodline?”

  Gunner almost winced. His unspoken incentive for walking away was no longer unspoken. “Unless there’s something you haven’t told me yet, there’s no evidence they’re involved in this, Mr. Browne.”

  “No, that’s true. There isn’t. But—”

  “Maybe she’s right. Maybe these threats are like all the others. You ever think of that?”

  The question gave Browne pause. “Of course. But this guy who’s been calling—”

  “The Defenders don’t mess around with pseudonyms, Mr. Browne. They hate you, they want you dead, they tell you straight up, no phony names required.” He went on before Browne could interject. “And they don’t generally threaten your life more than five or six times before trying to make good. Something your caller has yet to actually do, correct?”

  “Correct. But I still—”

  Gunner shook his head again. “Like I said, I’m sorry. But it’s not going to happen. Right or wrong, the lady doesn’t share your concern for her safety, and she doesn’t intend to be a cooperative surveillance subject until she does. Which, quite frankly, gives me all the excuse I need to find something less aggravating to do with my time. Have a good day.”

  Browne opened his mouth to protest further, but Gunner’s back was already turned to him for good.

  Driving back to his office a few minutes later, Gunner wondered if he’d just made a huge mistake.

  As he had two days earlier, while making the trip out to Sparkle Johnson’s Orange County townhouse for lunch. On that occasion, the potential mistake he’d been contemplating was his acceptance of Browne’s work offer, rather than his ultimate rejection of it, and listening to a tape of Johnson’s program in the car during the long drive south had only reinforced his sense of doubt. He had heard Johnson’s shtick before, but that drive was the first time he’d endured her company for longer than fifteen minutes. Gunner was far from a political animal—his idea of political activism was endorsing at least one petition worthy of his signature annually—but the oxymoron that was black archconservatism had always been able to get a rise out of him. It was simply a concept he didn’t get, African-Americans like himself sharing ideologies with the far right, to whom the desegregation of the South back in the early sixties represented little more than the first stirrings of political correctness.

  But then, people had a right to believe whatever they wanted to believe, and no one was more willing to grant them the privilege than Gunner, with the single proviso that all their propagandizing be done outside the range of his faculties. Suffering the company of fools was something the investigator did best only from a distance, though this wasn’t always possible. On occasion, pressed into a corner by financial straits, Gunner found it necessary to work for a wrongheaded blowhard like Sparkle Johnson in spite of his wishes to do otherwise. It wasn’t easy, but he could manage.

  So when Wally Browne approached him four days ago to look into a series of death threats his star radio personality had received over the last three weeks—more than a half-dozen phone call’s, and twice as many typewritten letters, all from a man identifying himself only as “M”—Gunner had not rebuked him out of hand. For the kind of money Browne was offering, in fact, he figured there was nothing Johnson could say or do that would make working a case on her behalf anything more than a slight annoyance.

  Then he actually met the lady.

  They’d come together Saturday afternoon not far from Johnson’s home, at a lushly foliated bistro near the Huntington Beach coastline, where the dress code was name-brand sports apparel and artificial tans, and designer sunglasses no one ever lifted above their eyes, even while indoors. It was a crowd the thirty-something Johnson fit right into. She was statuesque, with flawless brown skin, straight black hair, and cheeks that dimpled deeply when she smiled. A manufactured beauty, to be sure, but maybe as close to the best money could buy as Gunner had ever seen.

  “Tell me, Mr. Gunner,” Johnson had said eventually, after putting away a Chinese chicken salad and two glasses of iced tea with extraordinary dispatch. “Do you ever listen to my show?”

  “Your show?” It was one of several key questions he had sincerely hoped she’d never get around to asking. He shrugged and said, “Sure. I’m not a fan or anything, but—”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And what do you think? About me, and the opinions I express? Do you generally agree with me, or …”

  “I don’t generally agree with you, no. But then, I could say that about a lot of people.” He smiled to be polite. “Why do you ask?”

  Johnson smiled back, said, “Because of your vibe, Mr. Gunner. I picked up on it right away.”

  “My vibe?”

  “That’s right. Hostility’s coming off you in waves. I know, I get it from black folk like you all the time.”

  “Black folk?”

  “Come on, Mr. Gunner. Let’s not play games. You don’t like me. You think I’m a bootlicking Auntie Tom who doesn’t know the first thing about being black, and the only reason you’re here is because you see a fat, easy pay-check in all this. Isn’t that right?”

  Gunner almost laughed, until he realized Johnson was deadly serious, her accusation heartfelt. “Look. Let’s try and leave our likes and dislikes at home,
all right? If your life’s in danger, I can help you, whether I think you’re the spawn of Satan, or a girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad.”

  “But my life isn’t in danger,” Johnson said.

  “No?”

  “No. Hate mail and ugly phone calls are part of my everyday life, Mr. Gunner. And Wally knows that. You do what I do, the way I do it, pissing some idiots off just comes with the territory.”

  “But Browne doesn’t think this Mr. M of yours is just another idiot.”

  “That’s true. But you know what? That’s Wally’s problem, not mine. Because this guy is just another idiot. A little more articulate and well-read than the rest, maybe, but an idiot just the same.”

  “And you know this because?”

  “Because I do. I have a feel for people, like I said. If this person were really a threat to me, I’d be the first one to know about it. The first.”

  Gunner studied her in silence for a moment, said, “You seem pretty certain about that.”

  “I am certain.”

  “Actually, I mean you seem to know it for a fact. Like it’s more than just conjecture on your part.”

  Johnson’s face shifted briefly, betraying something that looked to Gunner like unease, then quickly reverted to the iron mask it had been. “I never said it was conjecture, Mr. Gunner. I said it was a sense I have. One is just a function of the mind. The other is a function of the spirit.”

  And so it went. Gunner had never tried to sell ice to an Eskimo, but it seemed certain he would’ve had more luck at that than he did selling Johnson on the value of his assistance. The sister just wasn’t interested. She was convinced Wally Browne was throwing his money away, paying Gunner to investigate something she had no doubt was benign, so she politely declined to answer any more of his questions, until the frustration finally broke him down, precipitating his unconditional surrender.

  Now, almost forty-eight hours later, Gunner had made that surrender official, and he was left to wonder if he hadn’t given up too easily. He didn’t need Johnson’s help to do what Browne wanted done. He had worked around uncooperative co-clients before. Why had he allowed Johnson to bully him out of a job he had no immediate replacement for?