The same could be said for the contents of the pair’s joint dresser. Gunner sifted through every drawer and met with not a single surprise. Clothes and underwear, socks and stockings, a box of jewelry for her, one for tie pins and cuff links for him. Every item could have been paid for with a pauper’s credit card.
He went to Zina’s old bedroom next.
The girl had moved out of the house three years ago, by Gunner’s estimation, but it could have been ten from the looks of the room in which she used to sleep. From the paint on the walls to the pillows on the bed, no obvious trace of Del’s daughter was evident. This was a guest room/home office now, plain and simple, moderately inviting but totally gender neutral; and if anything in it dated back to the days when Zina lived here, Gunner was at a loss to recognize it.
It all had the look of a cleansing, as if Zina were a bad memory her parents had gone to great lengths to erase. And yet, she was far from forgotten these days, to hear Viola Gates tell it. Zina had been fighting with her mother constantly, Gates said. But over what? Knuckleheaded boyfriends, some weed once discovered in the pocket of a backpack, school grades that rose and fell like the Dow Jones—all of Zina’s sins that Del had ever mentioned while she was still at home were of the standard variety, things that every child or young woman her age who wasn’t living in a cave went through as a rite of passage. What could she have been doing now, years after leaving home for college at Cal State Northridge, that would lead her and Noelle to such a state of discord?
Nothing here presented an answer.
Only the desk in the corner of the room, in fact, promised anything of interest. Gunner left it for last and made quick work of everything else, a closet stacked with boxes of what resembled garage sale junk, and three pieces of matching furniture: a pair of nightstands and a dresser. The drawer in every piece was filled with things only a pack rat would consider valuable: clothes catalogs and old greeting cards, used wrapping paper and ribbon.
The desk was a different story.
A glance was all it took to see that this was where the Curry household bills were paid. The checkbook for Del and Noelle’s joint account was sitting right on top, along with a wooden inbox that held a few loose invoices and some unopened mail. Gunner flipped through the checkbook register, and the tale it had to tell was immediately apparent—and all too painfully familiar. Over the last eight months, Del and Noelle had had more money going out than coming in, and by a wider margin every week. Much of the outgoing had gone to Zina.
As of the ledger’s last entry, which was four days old, Del and Noelle were in the hole to the tune of $8,000 and change.
It didn’t sound like an insurmountable figure, except that the trend line the couple’s finances seemed to be following would have offered them little hope of having such a sum in hand any time soon. Del’s bimonthly deposits to the account had simply been getting smaller and smaller as their debt load remained static, bringing them to a point at which only a major reversal in fortune would have put them back in the black before the roof fell in.
Of course, Del and, to an even greater extent, Noelle, were the kind of people who believed in major reversals of fortune. They were optimists by nature and good, if imperfect, Christians by choice, and both liked to talk about miracles wrought by God as if there were no debate to be had about their existence. While some men would have panicked, Del might have viewed his mounting financial troubles as a mere test of faith that would eventually be resolved by divine intervention.
But that was assuming his troubles were only as vast as the state of his and Noelle’s personal checking account would suggest, and Gunner already knew that wasn’t the case. Viola Gates had told him the day before that Del’s business was also in the red. By how much, she hadn’t been able to say, but the picture she had painted was certainly no cause for optimism. Beneath the weight of mounting debt on both personal and professional fronts, Del’s usual imperviousness to alarm could have failed him. The only question was, to what extent? Enough to leave him thinking death was his only way out, for not just himself but his entire family?
If Gunner still couldn’t believe it, he was beginning to accept the remote possibility.
He went down the hall to the home’s only bathroom and poked through the medicine cabinet above the sink and the storage cabinet below it. The medicine cabinet was stocked primarily with deodorant, toothpaste and brushes, mouthwash, hand razors, and shaving cream; the other held rolls of toilet paper, tissue boxes, cleaning supplies, and a plunger. The two drawers in the same cabinet revealed some unused bar soap, a first aid kit, and assorted feminine hygiene products. Gunner had yet to come across any medications in the entire house that weren’t of the over-the-counter variety.
He returned to the kitchen with the specific goal of searching for prescription drugs. People over the age of thirty usually had a bottle or two of something prescribed by their doctor in their home, and Del and Noelle should have been no exception, especially if one or both of them had been dealing with a serious medical condition Gunner knew nothing about. Cancer, for example, would have compounded Del’s financial woes exponentially and served to further justify the crime it appeared to everyone but his cousin that he had committed.
When Gunner found what he was looking for, however—four plastic bottles hiding in plain sight on a crowded patch of countertop beside the stove—it proved to be evidence of nothing quite so ominous as cancer. Three of the bottles bore Noelle’s name and were for medications Gunner recognized as common treatments for high blood pressure; the other, written for Del, was for something called pantoprazole. This last was a little white, forty-milligram pill that, according to the label, Del was supposed to have been taking twice a day.
Gunner called the pharmacy that had filled the prescription and, after several minutes on hold, told the pharmacist who answered, “My damn wife’s moved all my prescriptions and I can’t find the one I’m supposed to take for my headaches. Is it the pantoprazole?”
“Pantoprazole? No sir. That would be prescribed for an ulcer or gastric reflux. If you’d give me your name—”
“Oh, wait, here it is. I found it. Thank you very much for your help.”
He hung up.
It seemed to make sense. Among the nonprescription drugs he’d seen in the bathroom medicine cabinet had been various antacids in liquid and lozenge-like forms. So Del had likely been suffering from an ulcer or some other gastrointestinal or esophageal ailment. Yet another indicator he’d been under significant stress prior to his death.
While he still had his phone in hand, Gunner pulled the Post-it note he’d taken off Noelle’s refrigerator from his pocket and dialed the number on it for Lucy. He got a voicemail message. A man’s voicemail message:
“Hello, you’ve reached the offices of Lester Irving, family and marital counseling. I’m not available to take your call right now….”
Gunner hung up without leaving a message. Whether Del was concerned about their marriage or not, it was now apparent that his wife was.
Gunner had been in Del’s house now for almost an hour, and his tolerance for its uncharacteristic silence was at an end. He had seen enough for the moment and wanted out, before his cousin’s memory could bring him once more to the edge of tears. He was almost out the door when one last backward glance to check for something amiss alerted him to the fact he’d left a kitchen drawer ajar. It really shouldn’t have mattered; there was no one around to care anymore. But such imprecision in Noelle’s kitchen was as incongruous as a bloodstain on a wedding dress, and Gunner couldn’t let it go.
He walked back to the drawer and tried to close it, only to find it wouldn’t give. Something inside was holding it fast. He pulled the drawer all the way open and removed the stack of cloth napkins he’d halfheartedly flipped through earlier, thinking they needed to be refolded…
…and caught a glimpse of silver gunmetal.
The weapon had been pushed to the very back of the drawer where the
napkins and a pair of pot holders could form a shroud around it. It was an old .380 Colt Mustang, so small and lightweight it almost felt like a toy in Gunner’s hands. Its grips were worn smooth and its slide was heavily scarred, signs of a lifetime on the streets. There was a round in the chamber and six more in the clip.
Gunner studied the little gun as his mind began to whir, putting the pieces together. This wasn’t likely to be Del’s weapon because he already had one, the legally registered 9mm Glock he—or someone—had used to do all the shooting at Zina’s home the day before. Since then, it had been all Gunner could do to wrap his head around the idea of his cousin owning one firearm, let alone two. And Del wouldn’t have hidden another gun, unlocked and fully loaded, in the kitchen where Noelle could accidentally stumble upon it, in any case. He hadn’t been that stupid.
The Colt must have been Noelle’s.
It was the kind of gun a woman who hated guns would want, something light and compact she could fit in her purse or in the glove compartment of her car. It wasn’t what Del would have given his wife for self-protection, however. Rather than a store-bought piece like Del’s own, this was a Saturday Night Special, a chipped and scratched timeworn relic that had no doubt passed through many hands before reaching Noelle’s. Del would have been loath to entrust his wife’s safety to a firearm so inclined toward failure.
That left only one conclusion for Gunner to draw: Noelle had secured the gun herself, for herself.
He didn’t know why, but he thought he might be able to guess how.
8
IF HARPER STOWE III HAD NO ALIBI for the murder of Darlene Evans, her husband Samuel Evans had the best. Multiple people had placed him 270 miles away at the time of his wife’s murder, taking a persistent losing streak at the poker tables from one off-Strip Las Vegas casino to another, and any doubt his presence there was imaginary could be quickly dispelled by the mountain of receipts—airline, hotel, dining, etc.—he’d brought home with him.
Still, as the dead woman’s spouse, Evans automatically qualified as a likely suspect in his wife’s killing, his lack of opportunity notwithstanding. All he needed was a motive.
The police had obvious reasons to wonder if he had one, but Gunner’s reasons were even more glaring. Establishing a motive for Evans to have conspired with someone else to kill his wife would go a long way toward undermining the prosecution’s case against Harper Stowe III. It came as no surprise to the investigator, then, that Evans had so far flatly declined to talk to him, either by phone or in person. Gunner had hoped to catch him at Empire Auto Parts this morning, keeping the promise he’d made to Kelly DeCharme last night that he’d put an end to all of Evans’s evasions, but it hadn’t happened. So he was left to run him to ground, as he had Tyrecee Abbott the day before.
It was just after 2 p.m. when Gunner parked Lilly Tennell’s SUV in front of Evans’s two-story mid-century modern house in Northridge. This wasn’t usually the best time to try catching someone at home during the week, but it was Gunner’s information that Darlene Evans’s widower was only a part-time cashier at a local Trader Joe’s market, and the sudden inheritance of a thriving small business might have soured him on the idea of going in to work today, or any day ever again.
What sounded like an angry dog of little stature barked behind a side gate to the backyard when Gunner rang the bell. He took note of the weeds choking the grass out front and the telltale tilt of a broken garage door as he rang the bell again and waited for someone to acknowledge it. There were three yellowed newspapers taking up space on the porch, old deliveries gone ignored judging from the week-old date on one of them, and the porch light above Gunner’s head was on for no discernible reason.
He had his finger on the doorbell, about to ring it a third time, when somebody on the other side of the door said, “Yeah? Who is it?” in a man’s voice as full of sleep as it was hostility.
Gunner leaned in close. “My name’s Aaron Gunner, Mr. Evans. I’m a private investigator looking into your wife’s murder on behalf of the attorney for Harper Stowe.” Silence. “I’ve left you several phone messages but you haven’t returned them.”
“Yeah, that’s right. I haven’t returned ’em because I don’t have anything to say to you. Get the hell off my porch!”
“I understand your reluctance to speak with me, sir, but I only have a few questions that’ll take you no more than ten, fifteen minutes to answer. At the most.”
“I said get the hell off my porch or I’ll call the police!”
Gunner stood his ground. He’d fought through the dense iron thicket that was the 405 freeway post–lunch hour to get here, and hell if he was going to leave without at least getting a look at Samuel Evans’s face.
“I tell you what,” he said. “I’ll call them for you.” He took out his cell phone so that Evans, on the chance he was watching through the door’s peephole, could see that he was serious. “What should I tell them? That I’m trespassing? Harassing you? You’re going to have to explain things when they get here, not me, so you may as well choose your story now.”
The man on the other side of the door fell silent, no doubt weighing the relative inconvenience of talking to Gunner against that of talking to two inquisitive patrolmen from the LAPD, their squad car in his driveway instantly making him the center of his neighbors’ attention. “Shit,” he said with vibrant disgust, loud enough for Gunner to hear, before throwing the deadbolt on the door and yanking it open.
Samuel Evans was thus revealed to be a middle-aged white man with a double chin and a head sprouting unruly brown hair along the sides. He was fully dressed, but his feet were bare and his clothes looked slept in. His blue slacks were wrinkled, and the white dress shirt he wore was unbuttoned to the crest of his ample gut. There were food stains on the shirt’s breast pocket.
“You’re working for that asshole’s lawyer. Trying to get him off. Why the hell should I talk to you?”
“Maybe because the asshole, as you call him, is innocent, and you might know something that could lead me and the police to your wife’s actual killer,” Gunner said.
“Bullshit. That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Well, how about this: You should talk to me to relieve me of the notion you’re afraid to talk to me. Because you’re not afraid to talk to me, are you?”
Evans glared at him, wavering between spitting in his eye and slamming the door in his face. “Ten minutes, you said. Starting now.”
Gunner glanced about, as if he gave a damn who might be watching. “Would it be possible to talk inside?”
He was pressing his luck but Evans let it pass. He allowed Gunner in and led him into the living room, a cool, dark cavern dominated by a giant flat-screen TV and a sectional set that screamed outlet store. Gunner had thought he’d see dishes and beer bottles everywhere, dirty clothes in piles, and drink glasses encrusted with dried milk; but much to his surprise, nothing in Evans’s home matched the man’s own physical level of disarray.
“I’m gonna tell you right now you’re wasting your time,” Evans said, taking a seat on the sofa without offering his guest a seat of his own.
“That’s all right. Wasting time’s part of the job description.” Gunner lowered himself onto the leather recliner nearby.
“So ask your questions. Or better yet, let me just answer ’em for you, since I already know what they are.”
“You do?”
“Of course. They’re the same damn questions the police have asked me a dozen times already. You want to know where I was when Darlene got killed, and if the two of us were getting along before she died. That kind of crap.”
“And what have you been telling the police?”
“I’ve been telling them the truth. That as a matter of fact, Darlene and I had been talking about divorce lately, and the morning she was shot, I was in Vegas.”
“Proving you couldn’t have possibly killed her. Personally, anyway.”
Evans’s eyes flared. “I didn’
t do it, period,” he said.
“Which leads me to my next question. Maybe you can guess what that one is, too.”
“Who else could have killed Darlene?”
“That’s it.”
“Nobody. Other than that dope fiend animal you work for, that is.”
“You’re telling me you and he are the only ones she didn’t get along with.”
“I loved Darlene. We got along fine. Stop twisting my words.”
“Then there were others besides Harper Stowe who might have wanted to hurt her.”
“She was a businesswoman. She didn’t take any shit from her customers or her employees. Of course she got on the wrong side of people from time to time.”
“People like who?”
“You want names?”
“Humor me.”
Evans glared at him. “Bill Duffy. A salesman for one of her suppliers. Until she got him canned, anyway.”
“For what reason?”
“For having more interest in her parts than the ones he was supposed to be selling. Asshole couldn’t keep his hands to himself.”
“He was harassing her?”
“That’s the legal term for it.”
Gunner began taking notes. “What was the name of the supplier?”
“I don’t remember.”
“How about the line?”
Evans treated the question like a razor blade he was being forced to swallow. “Transmissions.”
“And they fired him when Darlene complained about how he was treating her?”
“Yes.”
“And that made him angry enough to want to kill her.”
“Why not? It made him angry enough to show up at the store shortly afterwards and break all the windows in her damn car.”
“Okay. Bill Duffy. Who else?”
“Who else what?”
“Who else had Darlene gotten on the wrong side of before she was killed?”
“Our psycho neighbor across the street. Julian Fischer. One of his fucking dogs went after me in our driveway last year, and Darlene reported it to Animal Control. He lost his mind. She made some enemies at church. A couple ladies who didn’t care for the way she ran the white elephant sale at the carnival. You want their names too?”
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