When Last Seen Alive (8 page)

And he wanted to see Yolanda McCreary again, in any case.

They ended up eating a late lunch at a sports bar and restaurant called the Grand Slam, down in the lobby of the Airport Marriott where McCreary was staying. A midweek lunch hour crowd was waiting for them, creating a wall of sound that left them little to do but make small talk during their meal. Having to defer any meaningful conversation until they could retire to the hotel bar was an inconvenience Gunner hadn’t counted on, but he wasn’t really complaining. McCreary had come down from her room looking radiant and relaxed, even more alluring than when the investigator had last seen her, so the patience to put off the questions he had come here to ask was not particularly hard to find.

She was something called a “LAN administrator.” Thirty-two years old, divorced, no children. Graduated from Michigan State with a BA in computer science in ’85. Liked to read Nikki Giovanni on rainy days, and never saw an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie in her life. She was dating someone back home in Chicago, a fireman named Ken, but the relationship didn’t seem to be going anywhere, she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say why. She laughed once in forty minutes, reacting to something Gunner said about the food, just to show him she knew how.

He could feel himself being drawn to her like an infatuated schoolboy.

When at last their meal was over and they had moved to the more quiet environs ofthe hotel bar, where Gunner nursed a Wild Turkey neat, and McCreary a 7&7, Gunner asked her if the name Johnny Frerotte meant anything to her.

McCreary said it didn’t.

“How about Barber Jack?”

“Barber Jack? What kind of name is that?”

Gunner gave her some background on Frerotte, asked her again if the name sounded familiar.

“No. God, no,” McCreary said. “Why do you ask?”

Cushioning the blow as best he could, Gunner said, “It’s beginning to look as if Frerotte might’ve had something to do with your brother’s disappearance. A witness saw him visit Elroy at his motel room, he was apparently the last person Elroy was with that night.”

“Oh, my God.”

“But I wouldn’t read too much into that just yet. All we know right now is that they were together.”

“But you said this man—”

“Is dangerous. Yeah, I did. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Jack harmed him in any way.”

McCreary nodded, not the least bit reassured.

“You wouldn’t have any idea what Frerotte might’ve wanted with your brother?” Gunner asked.

“Me?” She shook her head. “No. I couldn’t begin to guess.”

“Because Jack’s not a thief by reputation. Snatching a tourist with a fat wallet and then making him disappear afterward doesn’t sound like his kind of action.”

“So?”

“So I don’t think it was money that brought them together. At least, not Elroy’s money. Jack must’ve been after something else.”

McCreary didn’t say anything, seemingly unaware that he was looking to her for some response.

“But you don’t know what that something else could have been,” he finally said.

McCreary looked up, drawn from a sudden reverie, and shook her head again. “No. I don’t. I’m sorry.”

Gunner studied her face, remembering how Emilio Martinez had said he’d start his search for Covington with her, if he were Gunner. Not calling McCreary a liar, exactly, but reinforcing Gunner’s own odd sense that she wasn’t always saying everything there was to be said.

“Who is Tommy?” Gunner asked directly.

“Who?”

“You called your brother Tommy once. In my office, when you first came to see me. Remember?”

“I did?”

“Yeah, you did. I meant to ask you about it earlier, but the thought slipped my mind.”

McCreary avoided his gaze for a brief moment, said, “Tommy’s what we used to call Elroy when we were kids. We almost never use that name for him anymore, I’m surprised to hear I did.”

“And you called him Tommy because?”

“It’s a nickname, Mr. Gunner. We had an uncle named Tommy whom Elroy strongly resembled, one of our father’s older brothers, so Dad liked to call Elroy ‘Little Tommy.’ It’s what we all used to call him, right up until his senior year in high school.” She paused to let Gunner absorb this, then said, “Any more questions?”

She was daring him to ask one more, strangely tired of a line of discussion less than five minutes old. He had every reason to believe she’d get up and return to her room if he refused to back off, but he was willing to take that chance. He was already jumping through hoops for one client, he wasn’t going to do it for another.

“Look, Ms. McCreary,” he said. “What’s your problem, exactly? You wanna tell me now or wait until I figure it out on my own?”

She looked stunned. “Pardon me?”

“There’s more to your brother’s disappearance than you’re telling me, and I’d just as soon not get blindsided trying to find out what it is.”

McCreary glared at him, said, “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sorry, but I don’t believe that. If Jack Frerotte had an interest in him, the odds are good your brother was involved in something deep, something outside the realm of the ordinary joe you’ve been describing.”

“Something like what? What are you accusing Elroy of, Mr. Gunner?”

“I’m not accusing him of anything. I’m only saying it doesn’t fit, a head case like Frerotte targeting a nobody out of St. Louis, Mo, for an impromptu kidnapping.”

“A
‘nobody’?”

“You know what I mean. Somebody with no discernible flaws or hang-ups. No fortune to demand as ransom, no enemies who might’ve wished him harm.”

“But that’s who Elroy
was.
I don’t know what kind of business this Frerotte person could’ve had with Elroy any more than
you
do.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Of course I’m sure. You want to know what they were doing together, you should be talking to Frerotte, not me.”

“I tried that.”

“And?”

“And I didn’t get a whole lot out of him, I’m afraid.”

“You mean he wouldn’t talk to you?”

“I mean he had an accident. Just as the subject of your brother was coming up, as a matter of fact.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I went to see him to ask him about Elroy this afternoon, and his reaction was to try cutting me up like a Christmas goose. Naturally, I objected.”

“You killed him?”

“No, not quite. But he’s in the hospital, in no condition to talk to anybody. Which is why I’m here, bothering you with all these silly questions I’d otherwise be asking him.”

“I see.”

“But if you don’t know anything, I’ve just been wasting my time.
And
yours.”

McCreary held his accusatory gaze this time, aware that he was offering her one last chance to come clean with him, and said, “I wish I could help you more, Mr. Gunner, but I can’t. I’ve told you all I know, I’m sorry.”

Gunner considered this a moment, then nodded his head and gave her a little smile, his willingness to alienate a woman he desperately wanted to know more intimately fully exhausted. Which was not to say his doubts about her honesty were gone, by any means; he simply understood that she had told him everything she was going to at this moment.

And he would know soon enough if she was lying to him, in any case.

Mickey was always complaining that his life lacked excitement, so Gunner gave him a little job to do to liven it up.

Naturally, all his landlord did was try to beg off.

“If it was anybody but Barber Jack, I wouldn’t mind,” he said. “But anything that’s got to do with that fool, I want no part of. I’m sorry.”

“The man’s fucking comatose, Mickey,” Gunner said. “He won’t even know you’re in the room.”

“That’s what
you
say.”

“It’ll take you five minutes. You sit by the bed, mumble a few words, then grab his keys and get out. Come on, man.”

“That nigger’s crazy. I could be sure he was gonna die without ever gettin’ outta there, I might consider it, but since I ain’t …”

It took Gunner almost thirty minutes to break him down, convince him he wouldn’t be risking his life to take the mission on. Gunner drove him out to Martin Luther King, the hospital in Inglewood where Johnny Frerotte was taking up space in the ICU, then sent him inside and waited for his return out in the parking lot, hoping and praying his landlord could handle the menial task he’d been assigned without messing something up, bringing the wrath of God down upon both their heads. Gunner wasn’t normally comfortable involving other people in his business, but this time it couldn’t be helped; he needed Frerotte’s house keys, and he couldn’t go get them himself. At least, not without daring the fates to make good on Matt Poole’s prediction that Frerotte would go flat-line on him the moment Gunner came calling. The investigator had seen worse luck than that before.

Mickey was gone for nearly forty minutes. By the time he emerged from the hospital’s lobby again to approach Gunner’s car, Gunner was already choosing the words he would use on Ira “Ziggy” Zeigler to convince his lawyer to come bail the two of them out of jail. Mickey was sweating like he’d just run a marathon, but the smile on his face had been visible from over twenty yards away.

“I got ’em,” he said, getting in the car. He dropped a small ring of keys into Gunner’s open palm and grinned wider still, immensely proud of himself.

“And the address?”

“Fifteen-twenty-one Sixty-sixth Street. Got it right off his driver’s license, just like you said.”

“What the hell took you so long?”

Mickey frowned. “You said act like the man was a friend of mine, so I acted like he was a friend of mine. I said a prayer over ’im.”

“A prayer?”

“Wasn’t nothin’ fancy. Just a few words askin’ the Lord to ease the poor man’s sufferin’. Man looked like you run his ass over with a truck.”

“Anybody see you take the keys?”

Mickey shook his head. “I don’t think so. Nobody cares about no hospital full of black folks and Mexicans, man.” He laughed. “Hell, I probably could’ve stole a patient during a goddamn operation, I’d’a wanted to.”

Gunner had to laugh at that himself. Sometimes, the truth hurt too much to be dealt with any other way.

Johnny Frerotte’s place on 66th Street was a white, two-story frame house sitting on a short rise of grass between Normandie and Halldale Avenues. At just after 10:00
P.M.,
it looked like the home of a grandmother, clean and quiet and dark as the insides of a closed casket, but Gunner knew different. What it was was the hiding place of a monster, the inner sanctum of a knife-wielding sadist who might not ever darken its doors again.

Gunner got out of the Cobra and walked briskly up to the front door.

Over the years, he had learned to pick locks with some alacrity, but the practice still made him too uneasy to resort to it often. Every minute it took to solve the myriad puzzles of a lock felt like an hour to him, and the fear of getting caught, of having someone train a flashlight on his face before blowing him off their front porch with a hunting rifle, was always with him. So tonight he’d enlisted Mickey’s help in getting Frerotte’s keys, hoping to use and return them to Frerotte’s hospital room before anyone even realized they were gone.

As far as Gunner knew, Frerotte was a single man who lived alone, but he rang the bell twice anyway before using Frerotte’s house key to slip quietly inside the big man’s lifeless house, behaving like somebody who had every right in the world to do so. Experience had taught him that bold straightforwardness often drew less attention than stealth; look both ways before climbing in a window, and neighbors would call out the National Guard to have you arrested, but do a cartwheel through a pane of broken glass without hesitation and they paid you no mind, reassured by your air of confidence that you were unworthy of their concern.

Gunner stood motionless in the foyer of the big house and listened to a long, hard silence that never broke. Not a single footstep did he hear; no water running in sink or tub, no stereo nor television blaring. He was either alone or in the company of someone who liked to bed down early. His instincts told him it was the former.

Nevertheless, he proceeded to creep through the dark house like a mine sweeper, using his penlight selectively, making as little sound as possible. He went through the living room, examining the titles on a wall of bookshelves, fanning through the pages of assorted magazines atop a coffee table, slipping his hands under the cushions of a matching couch and chair. He found nothing. Moving on to the kitchen, he scanned the contents of cupboards and drawers, checked the underside of a kitchen table and its two chairs for objects that may have been taped there, but weren’t. He noticed that there was enough food in the room to feed three men, but that was hardly unexpected; Frerotte hadn’t become the behemoth that he was by eating light.

Gunner inspected the dining room next, made quick work of the scarred wooden table and four chairs at its center, and a tall china cabinet with beveled glass doors set against one wall. Again, he came across nothing out of the ordinary. In the drawer of a rolltop desk, however, he discovered a cloth-bound ledger book and an envelope filled with receipts and canceled checks. He examined both carefully, hoping to find something he could connect to Elroy Covington, but he saw no mention of Covington’s name anywhere. The only thing that caught his eye at all was a pair of entries Frerotte had made in the ledger just before, and then right after, Covington’s disappearance. Recordings of cash monies received from a “DOB”; first $2000, then an additional $3000.

Frerotte’s price for making Covington go away?

Nowhere else in the ledger, nor on any of the documents contained in the envelope, were the initials DOB inscribed. Gunner sat before the desk for a moment, trying in vain to fit the three letters to a name, then returned the ledger and envelope to their original places and closed the drawer. He was turning away from the desk when he remembered something, withdrew the drawer again and used his right hand to feel around its underbelly.

This time he found something.