Rivera didn’t flinch but Hector and Joe both looked at him at once, each conveying the same unequivocal message: Gunner had crossed the line. Which of course had been his intent. There was nothing else to call a liar but a “liar,” and he couldn’t do his job and worry about Rivera’s honor at the same time.
“Look here, home—” the fat man with the goatee started to say.
“Joe. Go get some more chips for the table,” Rivera said, cutting him off. “And bring me another brew.” Joe didn’t move, so Rivera added, “Do it.”
The fat man finally went, disappearing into the kitchen, but not until he’d held his glare on Gunner as long as he could without walking into a wall.
Rivera put his cards down flat on the table. “That was very rude, Mr. Gunner. Come into a man’s house and insult him in front of his friends. You could get hurt doing that kind of shit.”
“My apologies. But I’m not getting paid to show off my people skills. I’m getting paid to keep Harper out of prison, possibly for the rest of his life. If there was a gun in Darlene’s office before she was murdered and you flashed it once at Burdzecki, I owe it to Harper to ask why you played dumb when I asked you about it yesterday.”
“Maybe I played dumb because I didn’t want you jumping to any false conclusions. Like, if Johnny knew about the gun and liked to wave it around at people, he must’ve been the one who shot Darlene with it.”
“You saying that’s a reach?”
“I’m saying it’s bullshit. I had no reason to hurt Darlene. Harper’s the one who threatened to kill her, not me.”
Gunner was beginning to wonder what was taking Rivera’s large friend Joe so long to get chips and beer from the kitchen.
“So if you had no reason to kill her, why bother to lie to me about the gun? What the hell do you care what I think?”
Rivera didn’t have a ready answer. He and the man named Hector just sat there, trying to see who could glare a hole between Gunner’s eyes first. And there was still no sign of Joe.
“It wasn’t Darlene’s gun,” Gunner said, because no other explanation would come to mind. Rivera’s silence held.
“Admitting you handled the gun that killed Darlene would have been one thing. But copping to it being yours would have been something else entirely.”
“Okay, so the piece is mine. What does that prove? Darlene was getting jammed up by some crazy fuck in the shop every day, so I brought something in for her to defend herself with. Fuck me. I risked getting violated to help the lady out, and this is the thanks I get. Chingado!”
Rivera and Hector addressed each other in a rapid burst of Spanish. What little Gunner could understand was clear enough: What should we do with this black motherfucker?
He tried to remember the last time he’d seen a full kitchen with only one way in or out and came up empty. If Joe eased up behind him now to put a knife to this throat, having slipped out the kitchen by an unseen door, Gunner wouldn’t spend the last moments of his life being surprised.
“You didn’t have to admit the gun was yours. All you had to do was tell the police Darlene kept it in the office. They’ve been trying to pin its ownership on Harper from the get-go and it would’ve done wonders for his case for them to know it wasn’t his.”
“Fuck Harper’s case. I did what I had to do. I tell the cops the truth about the gun, I become suspect number one, and everything I’ve worked for for the last nine years goes to shit.”
“Not necessarily.”
Rivera jumped to his feet, kicked his chair to one side. “Bullshit!”
Gunner watched Rivera’s ese Hector to see how far south things were about to go. If the bald man with all the muscles followed Rivera’s lead and got to his feet, the Ruger pressing against the small of Gunner’s back would have to come out. He usually fought the urge to carry the weapon, but tonight he’d gone with it, still feeling the aftereffects of his unnerving encounter with Zina Curry’s neighbor Gordito the day before. What would happen now, if he had to flash the Ruger for these two men to see, would be anyone’s guess.
Hector remained seated at the table but there was still no sign of Joe. Gunner wasn’t going to wait any longer for him to show. He started to reach for the Ruger…
…and heard a distant toilet flush. He left the gun where it was.
“I think I’ll ask one or two more questions and then go, before somebody loses their head,” he said.
“That would be a good idea,” Rivera agreed. “Ask your questions and get the fuck out of here.”
“Burdzecki. Why did you draw down on him that day at the store?”
The fat man named Joe finally reappeared, entering the dining room the same way he’d left it, a beer bottle in one hand and a bag of potato chips in the other. Rivera paid him no mind. “Because he’s crazy as fuck, that’s why. And I don’t like him doing business in my store. He can do whatever he likes out in the lot, but not inside. I’m a parolee, I can’t be around that bullshit.”
“What kind of bullshit?”
“Drugs, man. What do you think? Pete’s a fuckin’ dope peddler. He’s been slinging shit out of Darlene’s shop for years.” He saw the look of surprise come over Gunner’s face but put it to rest before it could lead to anything: “Happy now? You asked your question and I answered it. Now get the hell out of my house.”
He sat back down at the table and picked up his hand. “Joe, where the fuck is my beer?”
17
“YOUR HANDS ARE SHAKING,” Lilly said. “Your hands don’t ever shake.”
Gunner just nodded and sipped his drink. He hadn’t really wanted to end one of the longest days of his life here at the Deuce, knowing how conversation would be pressed upon him, but family obligations made Kelly DeCharme unavailable to him and he wasn’t yet up to spending his last waking hours alone.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. Leave me be, Lilly.”
“Last time I checked the news, Zina was still alive. She didn’t pass, did she?”
“No. Step off.”
The bartender held her ground, looming over him from her side of the bar like a grizzly that had learned to cross its arms. Gunner was only one of four customers in the house tonight, so it wasn’t like she had other things to do. Purdee Abellard and her latest girlfriend were lost in each other at a table, and a somnolent white man in a plumber’s uniform, whom Gunner knew only as Owen, sat to his left at the bar. Were Lilly to walk out the door and not come back until morning, none of them would have noticed her absence in the least. Even the music Lilly usually had going during business hours had given way to a disinterested silence.
“You had a mother or a wife, I’d let their asses worry about you,” Lilly said. “But since you ain’t got either, it’s left to me. So you’re gonna talk to me or get your behind off that stool right now.”
Gunner drew the Ruger from his pants and slapped it down hard on the countertop of the bar, drawing a sideways glance from Owen and a flinch from Lilly, who usually reacted to things that startled others exactly as a glacier might.
“I almost drew this on three men tonight. And if I had, there’s a good chance I would have used it, whether I had a choice or not. Three men.” He faced Lilly directly. “You get it?”
“I get it.”
“A man wakes up one morning just a man, goes to bed that night a murderer. Three lives on his conscience forever. And what the fuck for?” He slammed the rest of his drink down, shoved the empty glass toward the bartender. “Because somebody got insulted. One man didn’t show another the respect we all think we deserve, and he did it in the presence of other men. Men who would remember who got punked and who got served, and would judge the other two accordingly.”
He watched Lilly refill his glass. “My hands are shaking because there’s a part of me that wishes I’d emptied that gun in all three of those motherfuckers.”
“But you didn’t. That’s what’s important.”
Gunner nodded, unc
onvinced, and took the shot glass up in his hands again.
“You’re in a bad way, Gunner. What happened to Del’s got you all shook up. Hell, I’m a mess, myself.”
“It’s not just what happened to him. It’s everything I’ve found out about him and Noelle since.”
She wasn’t his therapist or his priest, but she was the closest thing he had to either. And she wasn’t going to let him out the door now without hearing the rest of what he had to say. So he told her. All of it.
“The great detective,” he said when he was done, mocking himself. “My own cousin, my best goddamn friend, and I didn’t have a clue about any of it. His finances, his marriage. All the shit he and Noelle were going through with Zina. I thought the sonofabitch was good.”
“That’s what we all thought. That’s all we could think. That’s how he wanted it.”
“But why? Why carry all that shit around alone if he didn’t have to?”
“’Cause that’s what you dumb asses do. Carry your troubles around all by yourself, like ‘I got this, I’m good.’” She snorted. “Men. You would’ve done the same damn thing.”
She gave Gunner space to offer a rebuttal but he offered none.
“So you think what Zina says is true?” Gunner said. “It was Noelle shot her and Del?”
“No. Not a chance.”
“Why not?”
“Because Del killed himself. I’ve been trying for two days now to prove he didn’t, but I can’t. Whoever else may have shot Noelle and Zina, Del’s death was a suicide.”
“Why’s the girl tryin’ to blame her mother, then?”
“She’s protecting somebody. Hopp, most likely. He had a legitimate motive to harm Del, and maybe even Noelle. Del fired him and Noelle was trying to keep him away from their daughter. Hopp was at the center of all their family drama. But he wasn’t the one who did the shooting. Zina’s covering up for him for some other reason.”
“Why can’t he be the shooter? If he had a motive—”
“Nobody saw him go in or out of the house that day, Lilly, and Del never said a word about him when he called me on the phone. Del put everything on himself, the same way Zina’s putting it all on Noelle, and it’s for damn sure he didn’t do it for the same reason: to protect Glenn Hopp.”
He sounded convinced but was anything but. Hopp had a hand in the deaths of Gunner’s cousin and Noelle, and Zina’s shooting, in one form or fashion. He was too integral to the crossfire of emotions that had sparked the violence not to have played some vital role in it. But what, exactly, that role had been, Gunner could not fathom. Because there was no way to reconcile the presence of a fourth person in Zina’s house that day with Del’s failure—or refusal—to mention it. The same question that had presented itself in the immediate aftermath of Monday’s unthinkable tragedy remained, two days later, as unanswerable as ever: why would Del take the blame for shooting his wife and daughter if he hadn’t in fact been responsible?
His glass empty again, Gunner offered it forward until Lilly poured him another shot.
“Tell me about Noelle,” he said.
“Noelle? What do I know about Noelle?”
“She was seeing somebody. A man named Buddy, her girlfriend said. I’m thinking Del finding out about it is what set all this shit in motion.”
“So?”
“So he might not have told me about it, but he could have told you. Friday night, when the two of you were in here reminiscing about J.T. Remember?”
“I already told you what he said that night. He didn’t say nothin’ about no man named Buddy.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. My middle name is Sure.”
“Fuck the comedy tonight, Lilly. I don’t have the time or the patience. I need you to think about it again, hard: Are you sure Del didn’t say anything to you about Noelle having an affair?”
It was the second time in three nights he had dared to get in the big woman’s grille, in her own place, with others around to hear it. By rights, he deserved to be tossed out on his ass, after she’d wasted what was left of the bourbon he’d been draining by breaking the bottle across the side of his face. But Lilly’s capacity to forgive the reckless blathering of fools, thrown off course by liquor and personal crisis, was a vastly underrated aspect of her character, and tonight she was of a mind to let Gunner’s effrontery pass. If barely.
When she was sure he understood his good fortune, receiving the benefit of her mercy, she said, “He asked me about J.T. Did I ever miss him? He said he didn’t know how I do it, go on livin’ without him. And then he said he’d never make it without Noelle.” She paused to find his exact words, as she had the night before. “‘I’d never make it, it was me,’ he said. And then I said—”
“God willing, he’d never have to.”
“Yeah. But he said somethin’ right after that, before he gave me that funny smile.” She let it come to her. “I remember now. He said, ‘We’ll see.’”
“‘We’ll see’?”
“Yeah. That’s all. ‘We’ll see.’ And then he smiled.” She pieced it together, grew cold with the sudden dawning. “Oh, Lord.”
Del’s insinuation was clear: Noelle’s absence in his life was already a fait accompli. He either viewed his wife’s leaving as an inevitability, or had made up his mind to make her go away.
Gunner dug some bills out of his pocket and scraped them across the bar, climbing from his stool onto legs that felt like strands of putty. “I need to find this asshole Buddy that Noelle was fucking around with. Get the word out. I want to know who he is, and where I can find him.”
Lilly took the money up in her hand and watched him push away, a drunk doing a yeoman’s job of walking like he hadn’t had a drink in days.
“You try her cell phone?”
Gunner interrupted his retreat to take one last look at her. “What?”
“A woman’s sleepin’ with a man, his name and number’s usually in her cell phone.”
He nodded, sufficiently impressed with the barkeep’s head for police work, then turned to complete his exit from the bar.
The great detective.
18
GUNNER CALLED KELLY DECHARME before bedding down for the night to inform her of his visit to Johnny Rivera’s crib, and of Rivera’s admission that the gun that had killed Darlene Evans was his.
“Wow. That’s fantastic.”
“I don’t know about fantastic. But it is big.”
“It’s a game changer. He’s the owner of the murder weapon and he lied about it to the authorities. Assuming he’s got no alibi for the time of Evans’s death, he’s now just as viable a suspect as our client.”
“Or he would be if he had a motive, you mean.”
But Kelly would have none of Gunner’s guarded pessimism, nor his sympathy for Rivera who, if innocent, was about to get violated for what amounted to the crime of chivalry. Kelly vowed to alert the D.A.’s office of this latest development first thing in the morning and made Gunner promise to check in with her by noon, at the latest.
He lay in bed for six hours afterwards, but nothing he did could have accurately been described as “sleep.” Sleep was out of his reach. As the minutes ticked slowly away, inching toward dawn the way a shadow crawls from one side of the earth to the other, he peered into the dark reaches of his bedroom, closed his eyes, and drifted off into a fevered dream, then awoke to start the cycle all over again, exhaustion and anxiety mounting in equal measure. He had much to do the next day and he could barely imagine where to start.
As it happened, Matthew Poole made the decision for him.
Gunner was making coffee in the kitchen, barefoot and only half-dressed, when his phone rang. Poole’s name was in the caller ID window.
“You awake?” he asked.
“It’s damn near six. What kind of fool would still be in bed before dawn?”
“I’ll take a shot: the kind with a life?” “State your business, Poole.”
&
nbsp; “No need to worry about Detectives Luckman and Yee, Gunner. They’re both straight shooters doing a righteous job on your cousin’s case. Which, by the way, is all but a formality at this point.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning sometimes, what looks like a duck and quacks like a duck turns out to be exactly that: a fucking duck. Del had a gun, there was a struggle for it, and his wife and daughter got shot. You know what happened after that.”
Poole waited for Gunner to say something.
“I know this wasn’t what you were hoping to hear. Del was a good guy, and you loved him. But there’s no mistake here. He was the lone shooter; there wasn’t any other.”
“There couldn’t have been anyone else in the house?”
“They can’t rule that possibility out completely. There’s always a chance somebody chose the exact moment they could slip in and out without being seen. But they found no evidence of such a person, in or out of the house, and the daughter makes no mention of anyone else being there.”
“She also suggests her mother did all the shooting. If she’s lying about that, she could be lying about a fourth person being in the house.”
“Again, there is that chance, but it’s slim at best. Did you have somebody in mind?”
Gunner told him what he’d learned the day before about Glenn Hopp, and his romantic relations with both Del’s daughter Zina and his assistant, Viola Gates.
“Sounds like quite the Romeo,” Poole said, “and asshole, to boot. But unless he can turn invisible and leave no trace of himself behind wherever he goes, I wouldn’t count on him being anything more than that.”
“Neither would I. I’m just reserving judgment on his innocence until after I’ve spoken to Gates again.”
“Suit yourself. If there’s anything else I can do—”
“Noelle’s cell phone. I want it.”
“Say again? Her cell phone?”
“She had a one-night stand with somebody and I think Del may have found out about it. I want to see if his name and number’s in her phone.”
“And if it is? How does that change anything?”
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