When Last Seen Alive (2 page)

“Two days after the march, yes.”

“And he’s still missing?”

“Yes. You really don’t remember him?”

“No. I wish I could say I do, but I don’t.”

“But you gave him your business card.”

“Where? You mean in D.C.?”

“Either out there, or here. Where else would he get it if you didn’t give it to him?”

“Ms. McCreary,” Gunner said, trying hard not to sound unhelpful, “I handed out a lot of these cards that weekend. To a lot of different people. Trading business cards and addresses with men you’d never met before was a constant habit at the march, as you might imagine. If your friend Covington got this card from me out
there—”

“You’d have a hard time remembering. I understand that. But maybe it would help if I described him for you. He was about your height, weighed around two hundred and thirty pounds—”

“Had dark skin and a mustache, wore glasses. Yes, I know, the police gave me a full description when they talked to me back in December.”

The detective out of the LAPD’s Missing Persons Bureau had been a tall, lean Latino man Gunner had never seen before. Gunner’s guess now was that his name had been Martinez. Like most cops who worked the Missing Persons detail, he had spoken to Gunner like somebody reciting a long grocery list; the redundancy of looking for people who, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, were in danger only of being found by the friends and loved ones from whom they’d deliberately fled, had rendered the cop an emotionless, uninspired drone. He had told Gunner the investigator’s business card had been among the few personal effects Covington had left behind in a motel room out in Hollywood back in October, two days after the Million Man March. Had Gunner seen or talked to Covington around that time or since, Martinez asked? Gunner said no, as hard pressed to remember Covington then as he was now.

“I take it the police have stopped looking for him,” Gunner said.

McCreary nodded. “They did that a long time ago. They think he just ran off on his own.”

“And you don’t buy that.”

“No. Tommy’s—I mean, Elroy’s wife does, but not me.”

“His wife? You mean …”

“Oh. Did you think Elroy was my …?” She shook her head, almost seemed to blush. “Oh, no. Elroy was my brother, Mr. Gunner. His wife’s name is Lydia, she’s back home in St. Louis with the kids.”

“I see.” It was a pleasant surprise that almost made him smile.

“You probably think it’s odd that I’m the one pursuing this, rather than Lydia,” McCreary said, clearly thinking it odd herself.

“A little,” Gunner admitted.

“Well, I don’t blame you. Lydia should be the one sitting here, not me. But it’s like I said. She thinks he ran away. They were having a lot of marital problems when Elroy disappeared, she just figures this is his way of avoiding a messy divorce.”

“Hundreds of men go that route every day.”

“Of course. But I don’t believe Elroy was one of them. I think something happened to him. Something beyond his control.”

“You mean you think he was murdered.”

He hadn’t intended the comment to take her aback, but it did; it was several seconds before she could find the words to respond to it. “Yes. Either that, or he was kidnapped. Taken and held somewhere against his will.”

“For the purposes of …?”

McCreary shook her head again, said, “I don’t know. Certainly not for money. At least, no one’s demanded any money yet.”

“Then—”

“If I had all the answers, Mr. Gunner, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be out there right now, trying to find Elroy myself.” She paused a moment, reined in the anger she hadn’t allowed him to see until now. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Gunner shrugged to show her no offense had been taken. In fact, he was still too busy admiring her beauty to feel any resentment toward her at all.

“It’s just that I’m frustrated. And afraid. And I seem to be the only one who knew Elroy who cares enough about him to be either.” She waited to see if Gunner was going to ask her to explain that, discovered he had no interest in doing so. “My brother isn’t a very likable man, Mr. Gunner. I may as well tell you that right now. But he is my brother, and the father of two young children, and somebody has to do something to find out what happened to him. So here I am.” She produced a little shrug of her own.

Again, Gunner remained silent.

“So? Are you available? Or can you recommend someone else who might be?”

“Excuse me?”

“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

E
MILIO
M
ARTINEZ HAD BEEN TRANSFERRED OUT OF
M
ISSING
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.”