When Last Seen Alive Read online

“I want to hire you, Mr. Gunner. Don’t tell me you didn’t realize that.”

  He had in fact not realized it. Somehow, at some indeterminate point in their conversation, the idea that she may have come here not merely to talk, but to retain his services, had eluded him. Probably because the prospect of hunting her brother down excited him today, nine months after Covington’s disappearance, about as much as it had Detective Martinez way back in December, when the missing man’s trail would have been nowhere near as cold as it had to be now.

  “Actually, Ms. McCreary, I’m tied up at the moment,” Gunner said. Not because he was looking forward to renewing his surveillance of Gil Everson in the hope of catching him with a limping whore or a porno star, but because a paid gig was a paid gig, preposterous or not. “As for who else I could recommend to help you …”

  “If you’re concerned about money, Mr. Gunner …”

  “No, no. You didn’t hear what I said.”

  “Yes, I did. I heard you perfectly. You said you’re all tied up right now.”

  “That’s right. I’m in the middle of another case.”

  “Case, singular, or cases, plural?”

  Gunner stiffened, said, “Sorry, but I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”

  McCreary glowered at him, then reached over to take back the business card he was still holding in his hand. “You’re right, of course. Any fool could see you’re a very busy man, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Ms. McCreary …”

  “It ever occur to you that Elroy might’ve come out here to see you, Mr. Gunner? That you were the reason he was here in Los Angeles in the first place?”

  “Me? Why the hell would he want to see me?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe to hire you, same as I did.”

  “Except that I never met him.”

  “You mean you don’t remember meeting him. Same as you don’t remember giving him this card.”

  “You suggesting I’m lying about that?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just telling you it has to be more than just a coincidence, Elroy disappearing way out here, eight hundred miles from home, only days after you—or whoever—gave him your card. It has to be.”

  “He couldn’t have been visiting family in the area? Or a friend or business associate, maybe?”

  She shook her head vigorously. “We don’t have family out here. In fact, besides each other, we don’t have family, period. I’m Elroy’s only living relative, and he’s mine. And as for him visiting a business associate out here, his business never took him any farther west of St. Louis than Jefferson City.”

  “Jefferson City?”

  “In Missouri. Out in Cole County, about a hundred and fifteen miles west of Elroy’s office downtown.”

  Gunner nodded, fell silent again. Actually thinking now about where he might look for Covington first.

  “I need your help, Mr. Gunner,” McCreary said. “I want you to help me find my brother. I could hire someone else to do that, I know, but I’d feel better hiring you.”

  “Because you think I had something to do with his disappearance.”

  “In one way or another, yes. I do. You say you never met him, so I guess I have to believe that. But Elroy got your card somehow, from somebody, and he held onto it for a reason. Elroy never holds onto anything without a reason.”

  “It’s been nine months. If it was hard to find him then, it’s going to be harder now.”

  “I understand that.”

  He told her what his rates were, watched second thoughts cloud her eyes, then quickly evaporate. “At those prices, I can pay you for about a week,” she said.

  And naturally, she wanted him to start right away.

  two

  EMILIO MARTINEZ HAD BEEN TRANSFERRED OUT OF MISSING Persons three months ago and was now working out of Fugitive. Easiest damn job he ever had, he said.

  “First place you look, that’s where the idiots are. Watching TV at the old lady’s place, or playing fucking video games at their mother’s. Hell, most times you ring the bell, they’re the ones who answer the door, ask you to come right in.”

  He laughed, something Gunner would have thought him incapable of when last they’d met. He looked like a new man.

  Fugitive did keep him busy, though, so the LAPD detective had declined Gunner’s offer to feed him, suggested this meeting at the 7-Eleven on Sunset and Van Ness in Hollywood instead. A cop who only wanted coffee in return for a little information was something Gunner could easily get used to.

  “See, that’s the thing Joe Citizen doesn’t realize,” Martinez went on. “Same with the movies. Your average criminal is a moron. He isn’t smart, he isn’t dangerous, he’s just stupid. Knows how to run, but he ain’t got a clue how to hide.”

  They were standing out in the parking lot beside the cop’s unmarked Chevy, Martinez sipping gingerly at his coffee, Gunner munching on his breakfast, a Tiger’s Milk candy bar, the peanut butter and honey variety.

  “Funny thing, but something told me you might end up working that Covington trace,” Martinez said, seeing Gunner was ready to abandon all the small talk and get down to the business they’d actually come here to discuss.

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Because his sister wasn’t gonna let it go. Sooner or later, she was gonna pay some private ticket to pick things up where we left off, and who else would she go to but you?”

  “Because Covington had my card.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You didn’t tell her I couldn’t remember ever meeting him?”

  “I told her that, sure. But I guess she took that the same way I did.”

  “Which was?”

  Martinez shrugged. “You’ve got a short memory.” He drank some of his coffee, added, “Or a selective one.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Now?” The cop shook his head. “Naw. I’m not the skeptic I used to be, Gunner. I’ve got the time to be open-minded about people these days. Back then, I didn’t.”

  “And back then, you figured Covington for a runaway.”

  “That part hasn’t changed. I still figure Covington for a runaway.”

  “But if you had your suspicions about me—”

  “I had an idea you might’ve wanted to help him make his getaway, that’s all. You met ’im in D.C., took a liking to the guy, and decided to give ’im a hand with his little problem. Something like that.”

  “And his ‘little problem’ was the wife?”

  “I take it you haven’t talked to the lady yet. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be asking the question.”

  “She’s all that, huh?”

  Martinez nodded, said, “The hair on my ass has more personality. I’d’ve been Covington, I might’ve made my break twenty minutes into the honeymoon.”

  “So his old lady was a stiff. That the only reason he could’ve had for taking off?”

  “Near as I could tell. His life was a lot like she was, as I recall. Totally unremarkable. Lookin’ for somethin’ out of the ordinary in his profile was like lookin’ for a naked tit in a copy of Reader’s Digest.”

  “No major debt, no mistresses, no enemies …”

  “Nothin’ like that.”

  “You ever find out what brought him out to Los Angeles, specifically?”

  Martinez shook his head for the third time, said, “Nope. I spoke to everybody I could find who came in contact with ’im, both here and in D.C. The staff at his hotel, the taxi drivers who drove him around—even the flight attendants on the flight he took out here—and nobody could tell me jack. He was always alone and never said more than three words to anybody.”

  “What about phone calls?”

  “That was a washout, too. I forget the exact numbers right now, but he made two, maybe three calls from his hotel room in D.C., and at least one more credit card call from a pay phone back there, and each time, he was callin’ somebody back home in St. Louis. Either the missus
, or a friend on the job, somebody like that.”

  “And here?”

  “He made one call from the motel room where we found his effects. Went out to some literary agent in New York. Silverman, I think his name was.”

  “A literary agent? He was an architectural draftsman. What’d he want with a literary agent?”

  “I couldn’t tell you, and neither could Silverman. According to him, he wasn’t in when Covington called, had never even heard of the guy before then.”

  “Covington didn’t leave him a message?”

  “He did, but it wasn’t much. He had a dynamite idea for a book he wanted to write, Silverman said. Didn’t say what kind of a book, just that it would be dynamite. He left his number at the motel and asked Silverman to call him back, he was interested in hearing more.”

  “And Silverman never did?”

  “He said he didn’t, and phone records backed ’im up on that. Literary agents get calls like Covington’s all the time, he said, they just dismiss ’em out of hand.”

  “Any signs of this book at the motel?”

  “Nothin.’ All we found in his room was a garment bag, a matching carry-on, some clothes and shoes, and the address book your card was in. That was it.”

  “Any other L.A. names or places in the address book?”

  Martinez shook his head one more time, gulped down the last of his coffee.

  “And there was no sign of struggle in the room,” Gunner said.

  “No. Place was neat as a pin. From all indications, Covington stepped out for a breath of fresh air and never came back.”

  “Leaving no paper trail behind.”

  “No paper trail, no physical trail—no trail of any kind.”

  “So he would have had to live on cash from that point forward.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Last time he used a credit card was when?”

  “At the airport, afternoon he got in. Used his bank ATM card to make a withdrawal for the maximum two hundred. Which don’t sound like much, two hundred, until you consider he left St. Louis with a little over two grand. Way I remember the numbers, he could’ve had as much as seventeen hundred on ’im when he went away the next day.”

  “And you think he vanished into thin air on that? Seventeen hundred?”

  “Hey. All I can tell you is, it happens. I seen people disappear on a lot less, believe me.”

  Gunner almost commented that the cop’s attitude was shamefully cavalier, until he remembered he was talking to a man who used to work missing persons cases by the truckload, and often a dozen or so at a time. Martinez sure as hell didn’t need Gunner chiding him now for treating Covington’s case lightly.

  “Okay. One last question,” Gunner said, “then I’ll leave you to it.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Assuming Covington just went AWOL like you say, no other parties were involved.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You were me, where would you start looking for him? You given it any thought?”

  Martinez threw his empty coffee cup at a nearby trash can, missed its mouth by three feet. Gunner expected him to just let it lie there, but he picked it up, dropped it into the can before answering. “I can’t tell you where I’d start looking,” he said. “But I can tell you who I’d have another talk with first, get to know a little better.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Your client. The sister.”

  “Yolanda McCreary?”

  “She wants her brother back, don’t get me wrong. I never had any doubt about that. But listening to her talk about him sometimes was like listening to a stereo with one speaker missin’. You could tell you weren’t always hearin’ all the notes to the song.”

  It was funny, but now that Martinez mentioned it, that had been Gunner’s sense of McCreary as well. The way she had tripped up yesterday and referred once to her brother as “Tommy” was a case in point. He had let the slip go by at the time, intending to question her about it later, then had forgotten to do so. He was going to have to bring the subject up the next time they spoke for certain now.

  “Thanks for your time, Detective,” Gunner said, shaking Martinez’s hand warmly. “You’ve been a terrific help.”

  Martinez shrugged good-naturedly and opened the unmarked Chevy’s door. “Don’t mention it. I got a soft spot in my heart for anybody workin’ a skip trace, I’m glad to be of service.” He got in the car, started the engine, then said through the open window, “You need names and dates, stuff like that, gimme a call later, I’ll pull the file for you.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  Martinez pulled out of the parking lot and sped off.

  Moving to his own car afterward, Gunner made a mental note to himself: He came back in his next life as a cop, he was going to ask to work Fugitive.

  Easiest damn job he’d ever have.

  At seventeen, Sly Cribbs was one of the most talented photographers Gunner had ever seen, but the kid said he’d never put a tail on anyone in his life. This was going to be a new experience for him.

  Sly was short and tubby, with a dark, hairless face, eyes as wide and innocent as a China doll’s, and fingers so fat it was a wonder he could tie his shoes in the morning, let alone work the controls on a $600 Panaflex camera. He sat across from Gunner quietly at the Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles restaurant on Pico just off La Brea and watched Gunner look over his portfolio quietly, self-confident enough even at his early age to let his work speak for itself.

  “These are damn good,” Gunner said.

  In truth, his feelings for the photos were much stronger than that. The young man’s still lifes were haunting black-and-white images of people trapped in the prison of destitution, captured in striking, natural poses that said everything there was to say about their condition. Light and shadow were like surgical instruments to the man behind the camera; the cool, calculated precision with which he wielded them was evident in every shot.

  “Thanks,” Sly said.

  “Ms. Serrano told me you were the best student in her class, maybe the best she’s had for a long time, and I can see she wasn’t exaggerating. To tell you the truth, home’, you’re probably way too good for this gig, I’m almost embarrassed to offer it to you.”

  Trini Serrano was a world class photographer in her own right, a new friend Gunner had made a little over a year ago in the course of another investigation. Gunner didn’t know she taught part-time at West Los Angeles City College until he called to ask if she knew anybody good with a camera who might want to make a few dollars doing surveillance over the next few days. Connie Everson hadn’t called him for an update on her husband yet, but he had no doubt she would soon; putting her case on hold until his search for Elroy Covington was over was simply not an option. He had to put the Inglewood city councilman back under surveillance, and he had to do it fast.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” Sly said. “A job’s a job, and I can use one.”

  “You’ve got a car, right?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a car. Who you want me to follow?”

  “Later. Tell me how you’d do it, first. I told you to follow this girl working the cash register here, for instance. How would you go about it?”

  “Starting from here?”

  “Yeah. Starting from here.”

  Sly said he’d park his car over on Mansfield Avenue, where the most commonly used exit from the parking lot was, and park it northbound so he had a view of the restaurant’s back door, the one all the employees used. When the girl came out, he’d give her car a good look, take down the license plate number and any unique features of the vehicle, then let her go about half a block before starting after her. He’d try to stay in the middle lane as much as possible, so he could turn in either direction somewhat easily if she made any sudden moves, and—

  Gunner stopped him right there. He’d heard enough.

  “The job’s yours,” he said.

  Sly grinned. His full first name was Sylvester,
but Gunner knew now that this was why people called him Sly: the grin. “So who you want me to follow?”

  “You don’t wanna ask about the pay first?”

  “Anything’s better’n what I’m gettin’ now. But okay. What’s the pay?”

  Gunner told him it was thirty dollars a day, waited for him to push his plate of food to the middle of the table and storm out, insulted.

  “All right,” Sly said. “So who you want me to follow?”

  Gunner glanced around, in a low voice dropped Gil Everson’s name.

  “Gil Everson? The councilman? Man, that’s deep.”

  “You haven’t heard the deepest part yet.”

  “I gotta catch ’im with a woman, right?”

  “That’s part of it, yeah.”

  Sly’s face lit up, thinking he was about to become privy to some quality dirt. “You mean …?”

  Gunner put a palm up to urge him to lower his voice, told him the rest of it.

  He thought the kid was going to hurt himself, he laughed so hard.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” Lydia Covington said less than an hour later. Over the static-free, longdistance phone line, her bland, exceptionally uninspiring disposition was coming through loud and clear.

  “I’d just like you to answer a few questions, Mrs. Covington. To the best of your ability,” Gunner said.

  “But I don’t know anything. I never did. Yolanda knows that.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but—”

  “I don’t understand why she’s doing this. Throwing her money away to find somebody who doesn’t want to be found. It’s crazy.”

  “But if your husband didn’t run away—”

  “He did run away. She doesn’t want to believe that, but he did. I know it.”

  “And you know it because …?”

  “Because he was my husband, Mr. Gunner. That’s how. We were married for four years, had two children together. Nobody knew Elroy better than me. Nobody.”

  “You don’t think there’s any chance his disappearance involved foul play of some kind?”

  She didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, she said, “Not anymore I don’t. I used to think …” Her voice tailed off, left the thought unspoken.

  “What?”