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When Last Seen Alive

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The photographs were good. Twenty-four black-and-white eight-by-tens, shot from a number of ideal perspectives, all exhibiting the same crisp focus and dramatic clarity. Los Angeles City Councilman Gil Everson and a beautiful blonde, caught red-handed wining, dining, and otherwise romancing the hell out of each other. The private investigator who had taken the photographs over the last ten days had no name for the blonde as of yet, but her name was hardly important. What was important was that she was not Everson's wife. Aaron Gunner figured his client would notice that little fact right away.

"This is the wrong woman," Connie Everson said, after cursorily flipping through the photos like a walk-on looking for her one appearance in a screenplay.

"I'm sorry?"

She splashed the eight-by-tens across the cluttered surface of the black man's desk, her disappointment all but overwhelming. "I know all about this woman," she said. "Gil's been seeing her for years."

Gunner could do nothing to disguise his confusion. "I don't—"

"Please, Mr. Gunner. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. The black city councilman without a white woman on the side hasn't been elected yet, they practically find one their first day on the job."

"Then who—"

"I don't know who. If I knew who, I wouldn't need you, would I?" Everson stood up and began smoothing the wrinkles from the skirt of her canary yellow dress, an obvious prelude to departing the premises. "You're just going to have to keep following him. Sooner or later you'll catch them together, it's just a matter of time."

Gunner watched the councilman's wife prep herself for the long limo ride back home to Ladera Heights and found himself wondering, not for the first time, if the forty-seven-year-old politician to whom she was married had rocks in his head, wooing other women when he could be wooing his wife. Connie Everson was closer to fifty than she was to twenty, but any man who would have held that against her would have had to be blind in both eyes. She was a dark-skinned, full-bodied, raven-eyed fox, Mrs. Everson, and there wasn't a muscle in her body she couldn't move in such a way as to make a grown man cry. Gunner was almost crying now, just watching her play with her skirt.

"You want me to catch him with one specific woman," he said, having completely missed this point eleven days earlier, when Everson had initially hired him.

"Precisely."

"But you don't know who this woman is. You don't have a name, or a description ..."

"Listen. It's really very simple. The woman I want you to catch him fucking around with will be a whore. A prostitute of some kind."

"A prostitute?"

"Yes. A prostitute. Or a porno star. One or the other, or maybe even both, I don't know. She'll be a woman who sells her body to men in one fashion or another, Mr. Gunner. Is that description sufficient for you, or do I need to go on?"

"That depends. Will any prostitute-slash-porno star do, or are we talking about one in particular?"

Everson grunted to dismiss the question, said, "We're talking about one in particular, of course. She'll be black, not white. Younger than myself, though she won't look it. She'll have a pronounced limp. And I suspect she'll be an addict of some sort. A crackhead at the very least, or maybe even a heroin junkie. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if it was heroin."

"I see." Gunner scribbled out a note, looked up at his client again. "You seem to know this woman quite well, after all."

"Know her? Why in God's name would I know her?"

"Well ..."

"I know my husband, Mr. Gunner. That's who I know. I know what he likes, and I know the kind of woman he likes it from. I'm his wife, remember?" She tucked her purse securely under her left arm and said, "Now. I'm leaving. Please don't call me down here again until you've taken the photographs I've paid you to take. Do you understand?"

It would have been polite of her to wait for him to answer, but the thought never occurred to her. She was gone before Gunner could complete the motion of standing up to see her out.

Mickey Moore, the barber in whose shop Gunner's office space was located, came back to see him immediately afterward, just as Gunner figured he would. Mickey could pounce on a potential piece of gossip faster than most people could wink their left eye.

"That was Gil Everson's wife, wasn't it? The councilman over in Inglewood," Mickey said.

"Is that right?"

"Look, just give me a simple yes or no. Was that her, or not?"

"Nice weather we've been having lately, isn't it?"

"Bet she's hiring you to follow that fool's sorry ass around, catch him dippin' his wick where it don't belong."

Gunner started scooping up the photographs on his desk, got them into a drawer before Mickey could get much more than a glimpse of one.

"You got pictures of him and that girl Chelsea, huh? The one used to be a secretary over at the courthouse?"

"Chelsea?"

Mickey nodded. "Chelsea Seymour. Ain't but twenty-two years old. You tellin' me Mrs. Everson didn't already know about her? Long as those two been messin' around?"

"Mickey, I'm not telling you anything. What happens back here is confidential, I've told you that a thousand times."

"Councilman likes to do some weird shit in the bedroom. She tell you that?"

Gunner looked at him incredulously, overwhelmed by the depth of the man's knowledge of all things pertinent to other people's business. Mickey wasn't just a barber, he was a minister of information.

"What kind of weird shit?" Gunner asked, trying not to sound as intrigued by the subject as he was.

But the bell over Mickey's front door rang before Mickey could answer him, followed by the sound of a woman's voice calling out for assistance.

"Hello? Anyone home?"

Mickey rushed out to see who it was, and Gunner fell in right behind him, curious.

The sister they found waiting for them in the company of Mickey's three empty barber chairs was tall and slender, just a shade under six feet, and was dressed in stone-washed jeans and a dark blue sweater. The jeans fit her like a Navy Seal's wetsuit. She had rich, walnut-colored skin, pitch-black eyes, and a little girl's upturned nose, and her dark-brown hair was arranged in tight circles that fell in gentle waves to the base of her neck. Gunner suspected she was somewhere in her mid-thirties.

The sight of her nearly stopped him dead in his tracks.

"I'm looking for Aaron Gunner," she said. "The private investigator?"

Mickey turned and pointed, said, "This is him. I'm Mickey Moore, his landlord." Mickey stuck out his hand for the woman to shake.

"His landlord?"

"That's right. I rent him some space in the back. He'll invite you in there soon as he closes his mouth and stops actin' like he's never seen a beautiful woman before." He looked over his shoulder at Gunner, said, "Won't you?"

"My mouth isn't open. Yours is," Gunner said. "Twenty-four-seven, around the clock." He stepped forward, shouldering Mickey out of his way, to take his turn at shaking their visitor's hand. "Come on back, Ms. ...?"

"McCreary. Yolanda McCreary."

Gunner led her past Mickey to the beaded curtain that passed for his office door, held it open for her as she somewhat cautiously stepped through it. Mickey started to follow, but Gunner shook his head at him, stopped him dead in his tracks. "Stay," he said firmly.

The investigator's office, such as it was, still wasn't much more than an empty space Mickey had no use for, but after seven years of conducting his business here, Gunner had at least finally gotten around to putting some W.H. Johnson prints up on the walls and investing in a few floor lamps that made viewing them possible. The secondhand desk, couch, and two chairs he had started with remained, looking as listless and forlorn as ever.

"Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, tea ...?" Gunner offered, sitting down behind his desk as McCreary took a seat opposite him.

"No. No, thank you."

She quickly produced a business card from her purse, slid it across the desk for his inspection. She had yet to show him anything vaguely resembling a smile. "I believe you gave this to a man named Elroy Covington," she said. "Do you remember him?"

Gunner took the card, recognized it immediately as one of his own. "Elroy Covington?" The name was vaguely familiar, but he couldn't place it. He shook his head and said, "Sorry, no."

"I'm not certain, but I think you met him at the Million Man March. In Washington, D.C., last October. You were there, weren't you?"

The very question brought a flood of memories down on Gunner, sights and sounds captured over three days' time he would take with him to his grave. He couldn't recall the scenario that involved a man named Elroy Covington, but he did remember now why Covington's name was familiar to him. "Covington's the missing person. The one the police here were asking about a month or so after the march."

"That's right. Then you do remember him."

Gunner shook his head. "Not really, no. I only remember the police asking me about him, showing me this card, just like you are now. He was from St. Louis, right?"

"Yes."

"But he disappeared here. In Los Angeles."

"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."

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Excerpted from When Last Seen Alive by Gar Anthony Haywood. Copyright © 1997 Gar Anthony Haywood. Excerpted by permission of MysteriousPress.com.
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