No surprises awaited Gunner in the late Darlene Evans’s office. It was exactly the kind of cramped, lifeless place he would have expected, overstuffed while barely furnished at the same time. A metal desk, file cabinet, and two chairs fought amongst themselves for some share of the limited real estate. It was like Del’s office only worse, the same magnitude of disarray jammed into two-thirds the space.
“Take a seat,” Rivera said, plopping himself down in one of the chairs. He couldn’t have appeared more at ease about Gunner’s visit had he been asleep.
Taking the other chair, Gunner said, “So this is where you found Darlene’s body.”
“That’s right. Room’s all cleaned up now, so you’d never know. But she was sitting right here in this chair, slumped over the desk. Dead.”
“And you think Harper killed her?”
“Me personally? No. But what do I know?”
“The district attorney says Harper’s emotionally imbalanced. That he murdered Darlene in a fit of rage for firing him the day before.”
“Maybe he did. The kid’s got problems, that much is obvious. But until that day, he and Dar got along great. Harp got along with everybody here. So he said he wanted to kill her. You know how many times I’ve threatened to kill somebody without actually doing it?” He chuckled at the thought. “You should’ve seen me in here yesterday.”
“So if Harper didn’t kill Darlene, who did?”
“Man, it could’ve been anybody. We get a robbery attempt in here every three weeks. All those lowlifes you saw hanging out in the parking lot when you came in? Most of ’em don’t go home at night; they’re right there when we open up in the morning. Any one of ’em could’ve jumped Dar at the door that day and forced her inside. After that….”
“Except that no money or stock from the store was reported missing. That would seem to rule out robbery as a motive, no?”
“I guess.” Rivera shrugged.
“I understand the store’s surveillance system wasn’t working that morning.”
“That’s right.”
“So no video was recorded inside or out.”
“Nope.”
“And that didn’t strike you as a little coincidental? The system being down that day of all days?”
“The system’s always down. Two, three times a month, rats chew holes in the wiring. You should see what it looks like in some places. Got more duct tape on it than insulation.”
Gunner glanced around the room, decided it took next to no imagination to visualize it.
“And that’s common knowledge to everyone here?” “How do you mean?”
“I mean, if someone on staff had wanted to kill the system the night Darlene was murdered, they would have known that’s all it takes? Just yank on the wiring somewhere to cause a short?”
Rivera was sharp enough to make note of Gunner’s choice of words—”someone on staff”—and how he himself fell under the umbrella of that description, but whatever offense he took was well guarded. “I guess. We’ve all taken turns fixing the system at one time or another. Ain’t no need to call an electrician to splice two wires together and wrap some tape around it, right?”
“Tell me about the new boss. Eric says he’s been very hands-off so far.”
“Sam? Oh.” He nodded, catching on. “The cops asked about him, too. You wanna know if he and Dar got along.”
“For one thing.”
“As far as I know.” He added another meaningless shrug.
“You see him around here much before she died?”
“Not much. He came around once, maybe twice a month, that’s about all.”
“And they were always cool with each other?”
“Cool? I don’t know about ‘cool.’ How about ‘civil.’ They were always civil with each other when I was around.”
“And when you weren’t around?”
“I think she couldn’t stand him, and he felt about the same for her. But they were keeping it together, hell if I could tell you why.”
“She never talked about their problems?”
“Not with me.”
“So you wouldn’t know if they were bad enough for him to want her dead.”
“That’s right. I wouldn’t know.”
“Would you know if Darlene kept a gun here in the office?”
“A gun?” Rivera hadn’t been expecting that question.
“You said she was warding off would-be muggers out in the parking lot every morning at opening. Surely she kept a gun on hand somewhere for self-defense?”
“None that I ever saw.”
“You’re the store manager. Wouldn’t you know if she did?”
“Not necessarily. I work here, I don’t live here.”
“So if she kept a weapon in a drawer in that desk there—”
“Her office. Her desk. I only come in here to use the phone and do paperwork.”
“And make repairs to the security system wiring.”
“Right.”
Gunner wasn’t sold, but he wasn’t going to call the man a liar on just his personal opinion.
“Does that go for all your employees, too?”
“What?”
“That they only come in here to use the phone and do paperwork.”
“They’re not really supposed to come in here at all. This was Dar’s office, like I keep saying. But the door’s always open, she never locked it, so….” He pulled off one more shrug.
“What can you tell me about”—Gunner consulted his notebook—“Bill Duffy? He’s a salesman Darlene’s husband says she once accused of sexual harassment.”
“Duff? He’s an asshole. And no, I never saw him put his hands on Dar, but I’m sure he did. Guys like that just can’t control themselves, their dick points the way wherever they go.”
“Samuel Evans says he vandalized Darlene’s car out there in the parking lot after she got him fired.”
“Sure did. Took out all her windows. But I wasn’t here at the time. This happened on a Monday, my day off, and I don’t think that was an accident. Fucker knew I would’ve kicked his teeth in, he’d have tried that shit while I was around.” He added: “Excuse my French.”
“You think he could have killed Darlene?”
“Duff? I can’t see him having the guts to kill anybody But who knows? Man’s in his mid-fifties and out of work. That was probably the last job he’ll ever get. It’s for sure he wasn’t ready to forgive and forget, after she had him arrested and filed suit to have him put all new glass in her ride.”
A young, plump Latina in an Empire Auto polo shirt stuck her head into the room through the partially closed door. “Excuse me, Johnny?”
Rivera turned.
“Louis needs help up front. Register one’s not taking his ID number again. I tried it, too, we don’t know what’s going on.”
“I’d better let you go,” Gunner said, standing. He shook Rivera’s hand and gave him a business card. “Thanks for all your help.”
“No problem. Tell Harper I said hang in there. Unless I’m wrong, and he really did kill Darlene. In which case, he can kiss my ass.”
Gunner’s guess hadn’t been that far off.
Yesterday, watching the ghetto and news birds circle high above it, he had placed the focus of their attention—a car thief’s apprehension after a citywide pursuit, as it would turn out—in the general vicinity of 118th Street and Compton Avenue. Zina’s house was in fact only a few blocks away, on a quiet stretch of Alabama Street just south of 117th Place. Gunner found it at the address Jeff Luckman had given him the day before, a tiny little one-bedroom sitting back from a perimeter wall that, in between sections of peeling black wrought iron, was as smothered in green stucco as the house itself.
Kelly DeCharme was waiting for him there when he parked Lilly Tennell’s SUV at the curb. It was well after 6 p.m. and the day was finally starting to cool, a bright yellow sun sinking into the horizon and taking the light out of the sky along with it. A few houses down
, an old Hispanic woman in a stained white apron swept dirt off her driveway while two small children rode bicycles in circles in her yard. None of them paid any attention as Kelly left her sedan to take a seat beside the black man in the gargantuan ebony Tahoe parked behind it.
She gave the car’s interior a look of amusement, said, “People really drive these things?”
“In the absence of a tank available with nineteen-inch rims and tinted glass.”
“Tell me again why I’m here?”
“To brighten my world for five minutes and hear about my day.”
“Break it to me gently, please.”
He told her about finding the gun in his cousin’s kitchen and his talk with Little Pete afterward. He described his interviews with Eric Woods, Samuel Evans, and Johnny Rivera, and what all three men had in common: none could provide Harper Stowe with an alibi for the time of Darlene Evans’s death, or explain how he could have handled the gun that killed her if he hadn’t done the shooting himself.
“Shit.”
“On the bright side, Evans admitted that his marriage to Darlene was in crisis. So despite his lack of opportunity and his denials to the contrary, he could have had a motive for murder-for-hire. It’s for sure he’s better off, financially anyway, with her out of the way. Three weeks ago he was a grocery store box boy; today he’s a successful small businessman. Murders have been committed for much less.”
“And Rivera?”
“He’s a hard one to figure. He talks like someone who believes Stowe to be innocent, but if we put him on the stand, I don’t think he’d bet on it. And I’m not convinced he’s never seen a gun in Evans’s office before, the way he claims.”
“You think he’s lying about it?”
“It’s possible. Though what his motive would be, besides the obvious, I couldn’t say.”
“What about this fat girl Woods is talking about?”
“I’m going to try to run her down tomorrow. She probably won’t know anything useful, but you never know. And I’m curious.”
“Curious?”
“To see what it is about her besides her weight that Woods finds so revolting. The way he talked about her, you’d think she had three heads and a tail.”
He heard a squeal behind them, turned in his seat to see one of the children in the old woman’s yard chasing a gray tabby, bike tossed to one side, laughing as if she’d already caught the animal by its tail.
“Why do you think Noelle bought the gun?” Kelly asked with care, shifting the conversation to Del and his wife.
“To protect herself. Just like she said.”
“From Del?”
“We’ll see.”
“You don’t—”
“No. I don’t think he was capable of hurting her. But then, I never thought he was capable of committing suicide, either.” Before she could pursue the matter any further, he said, “You still scheduled to see Stowe tomorrow?”
“Eleven thirty. Why?”
“I’d like to go with you. Think you can get me in on short notice?”
“I think so. What do you want to talk to Harper about?”
“We need to ask him again about the gun. He handled it at some point, and we’ve got no shot of getting him off if he can’t remember where or when.”
Conceding the point, Kelly nodded and said, “Okay.”
“That’s all I’ve got.” He leaned over to kiss her. “Now, get the hell out of here before the cops catch you trespassing on a crime scene.”
Kelly glanced at Zina Curry’s little green house. “I guess that is what this is, isn’t it? A crime scene.”
It didn’t really look like one. Nobody had bothered to screen it off with the customary yellow tape, or so Gunner thought until Kelly departed. Inside the gate, he found a strand of the tape skipping about the dry grass in the front yard, dancing on the wind that had torn it from whatever moorings the LAPD had used to carelessly secure it. He rolled the tape up, jammed it into a pocket, and climbed the porch steps to the front door, hoping to get inside the house before all daylight was gone.
But the door was locked.
He went around to the back, acting like somebody entitled to do so in case the little Hispanic woman with the broom, or any of Zina’s other neighbors, were watching, and found a windowed door there, standing off a small cement porch. That door, too, was locked.
As he came back down the steps, weighing the pluses and minuses of checking the windows for possible points of entry, his left foot kicked something off the porch. He glanced down to see a fragment of a small clay flower pot, the remains of which—along with the blue geraniums it had once held—lay in chunks on the walk below. Gunner studied the tableau, considering the possibilities, and made the calculated guess that someone had recently kicked the pot off the porch and neglected to clean up the mess afterward. Someone, perhaps, who’d come out the back door in too big a hurry to notice or care that the pot was there.
Gunner turned his attention next to Zina Curry’s backyard. It was just a weed-choked patch of earth alongside a tiny garage, sprinkled with red pavers that had been scattered there like birdseed. Behind the garage and the dead grass, a rusty chain-link fence separated Zina’s property from the alley that bordered it. Walking in a straight line, following the direct path he imagined someone would take in making a mad dash for it, Gunner approached the fence, eyes scanning the earth as he went.
The fence was a little over six feet high, warped in places but unbroken. There was a padlocked gate in the middle of it that looked like it hadn’t been opened in years. As a younger man, Gunner would have scaled the fence to get to the alley on the other side, the thought of tearing his clothes or his flesh on the chain links’ jagged upper edges no deterrent; but today he was more than content to settle for his view from the yard. The alley he saw was nothing unusual: just a narrow band of broken concrete running north and south, littered with old automobile tires and overstuffed trash bags, upended garbage cans, and discarded kitchen appliances. A stray dog prowled for food at one end, and a black cat dozed on a mattress at the other. The backyards on the opposite side of the alley within Gunner’s range of vision were little more than mirror images of the one he was standing in.
There was no sign of another living, cognizant human being anywhere.
Gunner took it all in, decided his chances of fleeing Zina’s home without being noticed, out the back and down the alley, would be pretty damn good, even in broad daylight.
But he wasn’t in broad daylight now. Far from it. Night was rapidly falling, making him look and feel more like a thief casing the property, begging to draw a 911 call, by the minute. He walked back out to the street. Unwilling to break into the house, he had no choice but to leave its interior unexplored, at least for now; his time here would be a total waste if he didn’t find some other way to make it pay off.
He scanned the street, first left, then right, and spotted a familiar car parked on the opposite side: Del’s 2002 Honda sedan. Silver Accords were as commonplace in Los Angeles as yoga mats, but this one stood out, its black-primered, driver’s-side rear door marking it as the property of Gunner’s cheapskate cousin, who’d had the door replaced after a small fender bender but never paid to have it painted. How it hadn’t occurred to him before now to look for the car, Gunner didn’t know, but he crossed the street toward it thankful it had come to his attention now.
Unlike Zina’s house, he found the car unlocked. It was a state Del would have never left it in, Gunner knew, unless he were in too great a hurry upon leaving it to give a damn whether it would be here or not when he got back. The Lakers baseball cap and ancient deodorizer Gunner had grown accustomed to seeing inside Del’s Honda—the first sitting on the shelf behind the rear window, the other dangling from the rearview mirror—immediately removed any doubt about the car’s ownership.
Gunner looked for a set of keys but, predictably, didn’t find any; rifling through the Honda’s glove compartment, center console,
and door pockets garnered him no greater reward than a case filled with CDs and several rolls of antacid tablets. Between the latter and all the similar medications Gunner had found in his home, it seemed Del had gone nowhere of late without having something he could take to settle a bad stomach.
Gunner popped the trunk and got out of the car to inspect it. Like the Honda’s interior, there was nothing to see here he would not have expected to find: road flares, a small tool kit, a set of jumper cables. A spare tire was where it was supposed to be, under the trunk’s floor panel, atop a jack.
He closed the trunk and surveyed the street again. Had Del and Noelle arrived here in the Honda together yesterday, or had Noelle driven herself separately? He saw what looked like Noelle’s car three houses down—a cobalt blue, late-model Buick Encore. He trotted over and tried all four doors: locked. A woman’s red leather purse sat on the passenger seat.
“Shit.”
He should have pocketed the spare set of keys he could now remember seeing hanging on a hook near the utility room door of the Currys’ home earlier that day. That he hadn’t was more proof yet that his usual attention to detail had suffered greatly in the wake of his cousin’s death.
He was headed back to his Cobra, resigned to having little to show for his visit here, when he noticed the old woman in the dingy apron two houses down, still wielding the broom in her driveway like a scythe. He turned and started toward her.
“Excuse me?”
It was only when he spoke that she gave him any clue that his presence had ever been felt. She looked up from her sweeping to face him, her expression neutral, giving him nothing. Her eyes were shiny brown pellets sunk deep into wrinkled, sun-baked flesh. The small boy and girl who’d been riding their bicycles and chasing cats in the yard earlier were no longer around.
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