All the Lucky Ones Are Dead Read online

  In the end, he decided the answer was every bit as simple as Johnson had thought: He didn’t like the lady. She was a loud, self-obsessed peddler of the rose-colored glasses that conservatives liked to turn on the failings of their nation, so as to better ignore all the little brown bodies that kept getting caught up in its internal mechanics, and money alone was insufficient incentive for Gunner to work a case for such a person when all he could expect in return was aggravation.

  Had he been flat broke, rather than merely reluctant to live on his savings until his next gig, things might have been different. But he wasn’t. For a few weeks, at least, he was solid. So he put Wally Browne behind him, pushed his burbling red Cobra north to South-Central along the California sun-soaked 405, and kissed Browne’s retainer check good-bye, with only a modicum of lingering regret.

  Unaware that he would remain gainfully unemployed for all of the next twenty-seven minutes.

  t w o

  “YOU GOT ANY PLANS TO COME IN TODAY?” LILLY TENNELL asked.

  Gunner hadn’t been at his desk ten minutes when his favorite barkeep had called. “Who wants to know?”

  “Pharaoh’s got somebody he wants you to meet. He asked me to call, see when you’d be comin’ by.”

  “It’s not even noon yet. I wasn’t —”

  “Get your ass over here and stop actin’ like you wasn’t comin’, fool. This is important.”

  The big black woman hung up.

  Gunner knew he should be insulted, being treated like a nine-year-old at Lilly’s beck and call, but all he could do was laugh.

  At twelve-thirty on a Monday afternoon, Lilly’s Acey Deuce bar was as black and silent as a bad dream. The only customer in the house—if someone drinking coffee could really be thought of as a “customer” in this place—was Gunner, sitting at a corner booth flipping through a battered copy of the L.A. Weekly. Pharaoh Doubleday, the tall, reed-thin part-timer Lilly had hired to help her tend bar, stood behind the counter drying beer mugs, making the only noise in the room as he stacked the glasses on a shelf behind him. Lilly herself was in the back office, supposedly going over the Deuce’s books.

  Pharaoh had told Gunner very little about the man he wanted Gunner to meet here, other than that he was a friend of a friend who was in the market for a private investigator. Gunner had tried to get him to elaborate, but Pharaoh demurred, saying he felt it would be best if his friend explained everything himself.

  Twenty minutes into the Weekly, and halfway into his second cup of coffee, Gunner looked up, saw a short, narrow silhouette stepping into the bar’s shadowy cool, moving with the unmistakable hesitancy of a man with brittle bones. The man approached Pharaoh at the bar, shook his hand, then followed the bartender over to Gunner’s booth, like a patron being shown to his favorite table by an under-dressed maître d’.

  “Aaron Gunner, this is my friend Benny Elbridge,” Pharaoh said when the pair reached the investigator. “Benny and I attend the same church. Benny, this is Aaron Gunner. The investigator I told you about.”

  Gunner stood up to shake the older man’s hand, examining him with undisguised professional curiosity. Elbridge was a wiry black man in his early fifties, who was dressed impeccably and most appropriately for a Saturday night on Central Avenue in 1946. He wore a gray sharkskin suit, a black silk shirt, and a thin red tie knotted tightly at the collar, and his black-and-white Oxfords were polished to an almost blinding sheen. His eyes were red and milky, like those of a sick dog, and his beard was full of coarse, unruly gray hair.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gunner,” he said, sounding tired and heartbroken.

  “Same here,” Gunner agreed.

  For several seconds, both Elbridge and Pharaoh Doubleday looked upon Gunner in silence, as if expecting him to say something they each considered inevitable.

  “Can I get either of you gentlemen a drink?” Pharaoh finally asked, when Gunner failed to speak.

  Gunner shook his head, and Elbridge did the same.

  “Well then, I’ll leave you two to talk business.” The bartender smiled and moved off, as Elbridge and Gunner sat down opposite each other in the booth.

  “Tell me how I can help you, Mr. Elbridge,” Gunner said, anxious to find out what kind of trouble this man had in mind for him.

  “I want to hire you to find out somethin’ for me,” Elbridge said, and again he paused afterward, as if waiting for Gunner to offer him an obvious, specific response.

  “Okay. What would you like me to find out?”

  “I want you to find out who killed my boy. Carlton.”

  “Carlton?”

  “That was his real name, yeah. C-A-R-L-T-O-N, Carlton. But you probably only knew ’im as the Digga.” Elbridge gave Gunner yet another expectant look.

  “The Digga?” Gunner appraised the older man more closely now, straining his eyes against the Deuce’s dim light, and recognition finally kicked in. “You’re Digga Jones’s father? The rapper?”

  Elbridge nodded again, betraying an almost unnoticeable trace of pride. “Yes sir. His mama don’t want no one to know it, but his real name was Elbridge, same as mine. Carlton Elbridge. Jones was just somethin’ them record people called ’im to make ’im sound more like a gangster or somethin’.”

  Gunner didn’t know much about C.E. Digga Jones under any name, other than that he was a gangsta rap superstar who’d allegedly committed suicide a little over a week earlier, sending his millions of fans—primarily young, inner-city kids—into a funk from which they were still struggling to extricate themselves. Gangsta rap wasn’t Gunner’s thing, and he only barely understood how it could be anyone else’s. That he’d heard of “the Digga” at all was proof of the intensity with which the music industry bombarded his community and others like it with this particular form of angst-filled, obscenity-laced music; you lived in the hood, the hype was everywhere. A kid couldn’t open a magazine or turn on a radio, walk past a construction-site fence plastered with posters, or watch five minutes of MTV without being sold the bill of goods its manufacturers liked to innocently call the “gangsta life.”

  “I know the boy liked to play up to all that foolishness,” Elbridge said, “to act like he was as bad as they made ’im out to be, but Carlton wasn’t really like that, Mr. Gunner. He was just playin’ a role. Young man can’t make it in the music business these days if he don’t.”

  “Sure,” Gunner said, completely unconvinced.

  “Them other fools, most of them are the real thing. They just as soon shoot you in the head as make another record. Which is why they killed Carlton, see. ’Cause he wasn’t like the rest of ’em, and they knew it. He was—”

  “Hold it, hold it. I thought your son committed suicide.”

  Elbridge shook his head angrily, said, “That’s a lie. That’s just what they set it up to look like, suicide. Carlton didn’t have no reason to kill himself, he was happy as a young man could be.”

  “I’m sure that’s true, Mr. Elbridge, but—”

  “My son was murdered, Mr. Gunner. I don’t give a damn what the police or nobody else says. That’s why I’m here, talkin’ to you. I want you to find out who killed Carlton, and see to it they get what’s comin’ to ’em. All you gotta do is tell me how much you need t’get started.”

  He reached into his pocket, took out a wad of bills that had the well-worn look of a man’s life savings, and started peeling back fifties one by one. Waiting for Gunner to say when.

  “Hold on a minute, Mr. Elbridge,” Gunner said, holding a palm up to ward Elbridge off.

  “What? You don’t want the job?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said hold on a minute.”

  “I’m in a hurry here, Mr. Gunner. You ain’t the man I should be talkin’ to, just say so.”

  “Look. We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here, that’s all. Before we can start talking about my fee, I need to hear a little more about what you’re asking me to do for it.”

  “You wanna ask questions?
Fine. Ask me anything you wanna know, I’ll tell you,” Elbridge said. He put his money away and leaned forward in his seat, crossed his hands atop the table like a kid on the first day of school.

  Gunner let him sit that way for a long while, trying to decide what to do. He’d already heard enough to know the work the older man was offering him was the kind he often regretted accepting later. The cast of characters he’d have to rub elbows with in order to look into the circumstances of a gangsta rapper’s death was obvious: thugs who knew how to sample and rhyme, so-called security men eight days out of San Quentin, and power-mongering record execs who spent more time cutting lines of coke than they did distribution deals.

  But Gunner was not the overly discriminating judge of prospective cases he used to be. Whereas the thought of having to deal with such an unsavory group might once have sent him running for cover, even if nothing awaited him there but a mountain of unpaid bills and a half-empty carton of oatmeal, today it merely caused him to proceed with caution. Over time, and with experience, he had learned to appreciate the challenges that sometimes came with an otherwise undesirable work assignment. And since he had already turned his nose up at one job offer today …

  “All right,” Gunner said. “Let’s start off with an easy one. You have any actual evidence your son’s death was something other than suicide? Any witnesses, any letters or documents …”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No sir. I don’t have nothin’ like that.”

  Gunner took in a deep breath, held it for a moment. “His body was discovered in a hotel room, I believe.”

  “That’s right. Over at the Beverly Hills Westmore. Real nice place.”

  “And he was there because?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why was he staying in a hotel room? He lived here in Los Angeles, didn’t he?”

  “Oh. Yeah, that’s right. He did. But the boy liked to go to the Westmore to write sometimes. You know, just for a coupla days or so, to get away from the wife and kids.”

  “He was there alone, then?”

  “Alone? Sure, he was alone. Who—”

  “So there was no one else in the room with him when he died.”

  “No. I mean—”

  “I don’t understand, Mr. Elbridge. If there were no witnesses to his death, and no evidence to suggest foul play, what exactly are your suspicions based upon?”

  Elbridge took umbrage at the very question, said, “They’re based on what I feel right here”—he pounded his chest with a fist—“and what I know right here!” Now he poked his right temple with an index finger. “That’s what they’re based upon!”

  With considerable effort, Gunner suppressed the impulse to sigh. “I see.”

  “You’re a detective, ain’t you? An investigator?”

  “Yes sir, I am, but—”

  “Then what do I need with evidence? You’re supposed to find me the evidence!”

  “Technically, Mr. Elbridge, that’s correct. But without reason to believe such evidence exists—”

  “If my money ain’t good enough for you, Mr. Gunner, all you got to do is say so.”

  “This isn’t about money,” Gunner said, starting to get angry himself now. “If you’d just hold up a minute—”

  “Whatever you heard the boy’s mother say about me is a lie. Ain’t a word of truth in nothin’ her and all them newspapers been sayin’ about me, not one damn word!” He was shaking with rage now, and Gunner could see there were tears in his eyes as well. “Coretta thinks a man can’t love his son just ’cause he wasn’t there when the boy was growin’ up,” Elbridge went on, wiping his eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief he’d removed from his left trouser pocket. “So she goes around tellin’ everybody I was only after the boy’s money, comin’ around ’im now that he’s grown and makin’ millions.

  “But you don’t see her here, do you? Offerin’ to spend her own goddamn money to find out what happened to him? Hell no! Why should she? He left practically half of everything he had to that woman, she couldn’t care less how he really died!”

  As Elbridge spoke, fragmented memories of the news reports that had made him vaguely familiar came back to Gunner, all portraying the man before him as the quintessential whipping boy of the African-American community: the absentee father. A man who’d conceived a child in his youth, abandoned its mother soon after the child’s birth, and only returned to the scene of the crime long after all the hard work of parenthood had been done. Gunner was now even able to recall how Carlton Elbridge’s mother—a tall, gangly woman with a fierce, unsettling scowl that never seemed to leave her face—had been accusing her former lover of all these offenses and more, to any reporter who might ask, ever since their son’s body had been discovered in that hotel room eight days before.

  Did Elbridge deserve to have his character so assassinated? Gunner couldn’t say just by watching the man cry, and he didn’t know how much it should matter to him if he did. Working for people who had done less than right by their immediate family was, after all, about as rare in the private investigation racket as wearing laced shoes.

  “Maybe the boy’s mother just doesn’t share your belief that he was murdered,” Gunner said.

  Again, Elbridge became outraged. “The hell she doesn’t! Every time she opens her mouth, she’s tellin’ somebody how Carlton was killed! She knows as well as I do he never would’ve taken his own life like that!”

  “Maybe. Or else she could just be in denial about it. Most mothers would be in her position, right?”

  “Coretta ain’t in no denial, Mr. Gunner. She knows the truth, same as me. Only difference is, all she wants to do is talk about it.”

  “All right. So what is this ‘truth’? If Carlton was murdered, who murdered him?”

  Elbridge shook his head, said, “I don’t know. I wish to God I did.”

  “You don’t have any ideas?”

  “Ideas? Hell yes, I got ideas. But—”

  “Let me hear one, Mr. Elbridge. Please.”

  Elbridge glanced over at Pharaoh at the bar, acting like he was suddenly in need of a drink, then turned back to Gunner and said, “Me, I think it was probably 2DaddyLarge.”

  “2Daddy who?”

  “2DaddyLarge. The East Coast rapper. You know about all that, right? East Coast, West Coast?”

  Gunner did, but only vaguely. According to his limited understanding, there were two separate and distinct planets in the gangsta rap universe—East Coast and West Coast, New York versus “Cali”—and rarely did the twain ever meet. At least, not without some exchange of trash talk and/or, on some occasions, automatic gunfire.

  “And you suspect this 2Daddy because what? He was East Coast, Carlton was West Coast?”

  “That’s all it was. These kids today don’t need no other excuse to start shootin’ each other.”

  “There wasn’t something personal between Carlton and 2Daddy?”

  “Personal? Not for Carlton there wasn’t. All that East Coast/West Coast foolishness didn’t mean nothin’ to him. But 2Daddy and his crew—they take it serious as a heart attack. 2Daddy hated Carlton, Carlton used to say the boy couldn’t do an interview with nobody without talkin’ ‘bout how he was gonna serve Carlton up at least once.”

  Gunner started jotting down notes on a large legal pad, said, “Any chance this 2Daddy—Large, was it?—could’ve had more reason for hating Carlton than that? This East Coast/West Coast business?”

  “More reason? I don’t—”

  Keeping his eyes turned down to the legal pad, Gunner asked, “Is 2Daddy a gangbanger, for instance?”

  The question caught Elbridge off guard. “A gang-banger?”

  “Yes sir. Representing the wrong coast isn’t the only thing can get a kid thrown down on these days. His colors can get him killed just as easily.”

  “That might be right. But I wouldn’t know.”

  “What about Carlton?”

  “He wouldn’t’a known n
either.”

  “He had no gang affiliation?”

  “No. Carlton didn’t mess with no gangs.”

  “And you can say that with such certainty because …”

  “Because I was his father. That’s how.”

  Gunner smiled to take the edge off, said, “I hope you’ll forgive me for pressing what’s clearly a delicate point with you, Mr. Elbridge, but where exactly did your son grow up? Here in Los Angeles, or—”

  “That’s right. Los Angeles. He grew up less than ten blocks from where we’re sittin’ right now, his mama’s old house is over on Ninety-seventh and Beach. But what’s—”

  Gunner cut him off. “Not to say it isn’t done, sir, but that must have been pretty tough for him, don’t you think? Living here in the heart of the hood without ever messing with gangs?”

  Elbridge glowered at him, furious. “You tryin’ to say he did?”

  “I’m trying to say not every rapper’s fronting when he drops lyrics about ’banging. A lot of these kids are the genuine article, Crips and Bloods through and through.”

  “Maybe they are. I don’t know, like I said. All I know is, Carlton wasn’t like that.”

  “He never even played to that perception?”

  “No. If you mean did he ever claim to be a Crip or a Blood, the answer’s no.”

  “And the lyrics to his music—I guess they never referred to gangbanging either?”

  “Look—there was a lot of violence in the boy’s music, sure. Talk about guns, and women, and jackin’ people up, and such. But none of that mess was real, Mr. Gunner. The boy was just givin’ his fans and his record company what they wanted. It was business, that’s all.”

  And Gunner knew it could easily have been just that. In the gangsta rap arena, the image of a hard-core “killa” was an invaluable marketing asset; you couldn’t sell the anger and venom in the music with the reputation of a Boy Scout, after all. If Carlton Elbridge had been a harmless kid wearing the face of a thug like C.E. Digga Jones strictly for the purposes of commerce, he wouldn’t have been the first gangsta rapper to do it. And he certainly wouldn’t be the last.