When Last Seen Alive (23 page)

(Everson does not respond.)

POOLE: Did you suddenly begin to doubt his abilities to protect you as a security man? Was that it?

EVERSON: No. It wasn’t … it didn’t have anything to do with that. His professional duties.

POOLE: Then what
did
it have to do with?

(Everson does not respond.)

POOLE: It wouldn’t have had anything to do with a woman, would it?

EVERSON: I told you. I’d rather not say.

POOLE: Was he shtupping your wife, maybe? Could that’ve been it?

GOLDBLUM: All right, Detective. Enough, already. I believe the question you’ve been trying to get to here is whether or not Mr. Sweeney’s firing had anything to do with the photographs you allege he assaulted Mr. Cribbs to retrieve, and the answer is no. Let’s move on, please.

POOLE: After your client gives me a simple yes or no answer to one question, Counselor. (To Everson:) Were Mr. Sweeney and your wife having an affair?

(a beat)

EVERSON: Don’t ask me. Ask her.

POOLE: I think we’ll do that, Councilman. Thanks for the tip.

The transcript came to an end shortly thereafter.

Poole learned almost immediately following his interrogation of Gil Everson that Rafe Sweeney had indeed returned to Los Angeles from Sacramento Sunday afternoon. He’d been booked on an American Airlines flight that had touched down at Burbank Airport in the San Fernando Valley just a few minutes after its scheduled arrival time of 2:45. Only Sweeney had not gone home. Poole and Gunner went looking for him at his Studio City apartment and found it unoccupied, his banged-up BMW missing from its parking space.

When they decided to ask Connie Everson if she and Sweeney had been lovers, as her husband had suggested Poole should, they discovered that she, too, was not home. But unlike Sweeney, her whereabouts were not exactly unknown.

For a few minutes past 12:30 that afternoon, toward the end of Poole’s vigorous questioning of her husband downtown, Gil Everson’s wife had been found dead at the foot of her bed by the family housekeeper, the victim of an apparent drug overdose. A later autopsy would reveal that she had consumed a deadly cocktail of phenobarbital and vodka over eleven hours earlier, a recipe for suicide she could have mistaken for nothing else.

No note explaining her motives was ever found.

fifteen

T
HE
LAPD
WASN
’
T CRAZY ABOUT REACQUIRING THE
Thomas Selmon missing-person-turned-homicide case, but they had taken it off the Sheriff’s Department’s hands in deference to proper protocol. The two Hollywood Division detectives assigned to the case were named Moreno and Loiacano. Gunner had spoken to them both out on San Francisquito Canyon Road late Saturday afternoon. He didn’t know Moreno, but he and Loiacano had met once before, when Loiacano’s partner had been a far less likable man than Moreno appeared to be. Perhaps this was why Loiacano took the time to call Gunner at Mickey’s Monday afternoon to leave him a brief message.

“He said he just thought you’d like to know,” Mickey said when Gunner used the phone on Matt Poole’s desk to check in. “Barber Jack’s on the loose. And so is somebody named Byron Scales.”

“What?”

“He said they went out to the hospital for Jack yesterday morning and he wasn’t there. He checked himself out Saturday night without anybody knowing, they don’t know where he is.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. And when they went to get this guy Scales, whoever he is, they found his apartment cleaned out. He’s missin’, too.”

Gunner ran a hand across the top of his scalp, said, “Great. Just great.”

“Scales I don’t know about, but Jack I know is trouble. I hope the fool’s smart enough to know, he comes over here lookin’ for
me
, I’m gonna take my bat and bust his fuckin’ head open first, ask him if he’d like a little cream in his coffee later.”

“If he shows up over there, Mickey, it won’t be to see you,” Gunner said. “But do me a favor: Bust his shit open anyway, will you? Just to give me one less thing to worry about for a while?”

“Wish I could tell you that’s all the bad news I’ve got for you, man, but there’s one more thing.”

“Damn.”

“You also had a couple of visitors this mornin’. One white and one black, both of ’em wearin’ suits and ties. I’ll let you guess what company they work for.”

“Don’t tell me they were Feds.”

“They left their business cards. I’m lookin’ at ’em now. ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation,’ agents Leffman and Smith. Smith was the black one, he did all the talkin’.”

“What the hell do the Feds want with
me
?”

“They didn’t say. They just said to have you give ’em a call as soon as I heard from you. You want the number?”

Gunner said no, he’d get it from him later. Whatever Leffman and Smith wanted, it would have to wait. Gunner’s dance card was all full.

“The Feds, huh?” Poole asked when Gunner hung up the phone. “How nice.” He grinned and threw himself back in his chair, more at ease being an asshole here at his Southwest Division digs than he was almost anywhere else.

“Connie Everson didn’t kill herself, Poole,” Gunner said, trying to restart the conversation he and the cop had been having before he’d paused to call Mickey.

“Are we back on that again?”

“She was an unhappily married woman. Not a manic depressive. She didn’t fit the profile.”

“Gimme a break. Women like Mrs. Everson commit suicide every day. You think
you’d
wanna live being married to a prince like the councilman?”

“So her husband was a philanderer who liked to play john every now and then. By all appearances, she’d known that for a long time. Why the urgency to end it all now?”

“Embarrassment. Humiliation. Guilt. She was, in a way, responsible for all those holes Sweeney put in Cribbs’s chest Wednesday night, right?”

“Yeah, but—”

“And she’d just suffered one hell of a setback. If you and Cribbs had come through with those pictures for her, she might’ve been able to divorce the good councilman and keep her account open at Neiman-Marcus, too. That prenup she signed be damned.”

“What do you mean, the prenup be damned? If it wasn’t invalidated by adultery—”

“Who said anything about it being invalidated? I’m talkin’ about it bein’ torn up. Rolled into a little ball and run through Gil Everson’s shredder by Everson himself, no less.”

“You just lost me, Poole.”

“The word is ‘blackmail,’ Gunner. It’s usually committed for money, but not always. Sometimes the person holding all the dirty pictures is after something else. Like a fair and equitable divorce settlement, for instance.”

Gunner thought that over for a minute, then shook his head. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Look. I’m not sayin’ that’s what happened, but the lady had to’ve had
some
reason for wantin’ those photographs taken, right? Otherwise, it was all for nothin’, which it ended up bein’ anyway. So …” Poole pantomimed the act of pouring something down his throat.

“I hear what you’re saying, Lieutenant, and I can’t say it doesn’t make a little sense,” Gunner said. “But …”

“Something doesn’t ‘jibe’ again.”

“That’s right. Something doesn’t.”

Poole watched him scribble aimlessly on a corner of the blotter on his desk, finally sighed and said, “Okay, ‘Marlowe.’ What is it, then?”

“I don’t know,” Gunner said.

“You don’t
know?”

“I can’t figure it. Not yet. But I will. Give me time.”

“Time, huh?” Poole sat up in his chair, lowered his voice curiously. “Well, don’t look now, pal, but I think you just ran outta all yours.” He nodded his head once, urging Gunner to turn around.

Two men in blue suits were walking leisurely toward the detective’s desk, one black, one white. They were physically dissimilar in every way, but their faces bore the same unmistakable stamp of humorlessness all civil servants succumbed to sooner or later.

There would be much rejoicing in the hallowed halls of the FBI this evening, Gunner thought. Agents Smith and Leffman had found their man.

Carroll Smith looked like a baby, fresh out of training; skin as smooth and brown as kid leather, eyes round and unblinking, a voice like that of a nine-year-old trying to play grown-up. If he was a day over twenty-seven, it didn’t show. Irv Leffman, on the other hand, was growing old fast. Heavyset, pink skinned, and full of nervous twitches, he could have passed for someone forty-five to fifty without an ounce of effort. The hair was all but gone on his toaster-shaped head, and his face was a road map of worry. He was nobody’s grandfather, but he would have made a fine stand-in for one in a pinch.

Poole had found an empty office at Southwest, somewhere for the two Federal agents and Gunner to retire to, showing more kindness to the Feds than Gunner had ever seen him express before. The space was better than an interrogation room, at least from Gunner’s perspective, but one of the fluorescent lamps overhead kept blinking on and off intermittently, something Gunner found almost as annoying as having a strobe light trained on his face.

“Now that we all know each other, Mr. Gunner,” Smith said, after all the IDs had been flashed and names exchanged, “we’ll get right down to the reason we’re here today.”

“Please do.”

“Tell us what you know about the Defenders of the Bloodline.”

Gunner hadn’t really needed him to make the formal request—it had dawned on him that this was what they wanted the minute he’d seen the pair marching through the station house toward Poole’s desk.

“The Defenders of the Bloodline?”

“We have it on good authority you’ve recently had an encounter with some people who refer to themselves by that name. That isn’t true?”

Gunner shrugged. “I guess it’s true enough. But I didn’t think they rated this kind of interest.”

“They didn’t present themselves as a nationwide band of political assassins?”

“Actually, they did.”

“But you didn’t believe them.”

“I wasn’t convinced all their talk was for real, no.”

“I see. Well. Just for the record, Mr. Gunner, the Defenders of the Bloodline have murdered two people that we know of for certain so far, and a man named Thomas Selmon may yet make three. Is that ‘real’ enough for you?”

Gunner didn’t say anything.

“We’d like to hear the details of your experience with them,” Leffman said. Mickey had been right about Smith being the talker between these two, but Smith’s partner liked to speak up every now and then, just to prove he wasn’t mute.

“Tell me who your good authority is, first,” Gunner said.

“Our what?” Smith asked.

“You said you had it on good authority I’d had an encounter with the Defenders.”

“I did?”

“I’d like to know who it was.”

“Is that important?”

“It is to me. I’m curious that way.”

“You understand we’re under no obligation to tell you?”

“Sure. Same way you understand I’m under no obligation not to get up and walk the hell out of here.”

Smith conceded the point by way of actually smiling. “We’ve asked local authorities from coast to coast to keep an eye and an ear out for any cases that may relate to the Defenders. Since the group is considered by most of these authorities to be a joke and little else, few take our request seriously. No one claiming to be a Defender has ever been identified, after all. Still, there’s a few law officers out there who listen when the FBI speaks. Some of them work here in Los Angeles. Out of any number of divisions. Southwest, Rampart—”

“Hollywood,” Gunner offered.

“Exactly. Does that answer your question, Mr. Gunner?”

“I think so.” Gunner tried to decide which of the two Hollywood Division detectives he’d talked to Saturday out at the Thomas Selmon grave site—Denny Loiacano, or Loiacano’s affable partner, Sal Moreno—he could see most easily running home afterward to call the local FBI office with a hot tip, and settled on Moreno. Not because Loiacano wouldn’t do such a thing, but because, now that Gunner stopped to think about it, Moreno might not have been “affable” at all—just eager to please. Some cops were like that.

“Good,” Smith said. “Let’s talk.”

They kept him there for over an hour. He told them the story of his Friday kidnapping once, twice, then answered all the questions they could think of that back-to-back re-countings of the event had somehow left for them. He held nothing back, all too aware that there would be no point—he was part of the manhunt for the Defenders now, whether he wanted to be or not.

“You cut a deal with them for your release?” Smith asked.

“In a way, yeah,” Gunner said. “But I don’t think that was the only reason they let me go.”

“No? What other reason was there?”

“If the man I spoke to can be believed, they don’t think of themselves as simple murderers. The people they reserve for killing fit a very specific profile, and they’re reluctant to expand beyond it, apparently.”

“But they would have killed you anyway if you hadn’t promised to back off,” Leffman said, his disapproval evident.