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?”
Gunner gave it up. “Did your wife keep a gun in her office, Mr. Evans?”
“A gun? Not that I’m aware of. But if she had, what of it? Her store’s damn near on skid row. She had crazies walking in on her there all the time. What was she supposed to scare them off with, a broom?”
“So the gun she was shot with might have been her own.”
“I never said that.”
“But it’s possible.”
“I never said that, either.”
Not in so many words, Gunner thought.
“Why were you and Darlene talking about divorce?”
Evans showed him a wry smile. “So. We finally get to it.”
Gunner just stared back at him.
“Well, you’re getting paid to investigate, aren’t you? To ‘detect’? Why don’t you tell me?”
“If I had to guess? I’d say money was involved.”
“Bravo. Nicely done.”
“So—”
“No elaboration should be necessary. The facts speak for themselves. Dar ran a successful retail store, while her husband bags groceries dressed in a Hawaiian clown suit every day.” His eyes were suddenly rimmed in red, his voice quavering. He’d been angry since Gunner’s first knock on the door, but now he was enraged.
“I haven’t held a decent job in four years and Dar deserved better. I couldn’t take her carrying me anymore, so yeah, we were talking about divorce.” He stormed to his feet. “And now that you’ve got what you came here for, you can get the fuck out of my house.”
“I wasn’t quite done.”
“But I’m afraid you are. Leave.”
He couldn’t have been less inclined to show Gunner out had his feet been nailed to the floor.
Out in Lilly’s SUV, Gunner started the engine just to get some air flowing through the car and called Lester Irving again. This time he got a live body.
“Hello?”
He told Irving who he was and what he wanted.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know anyone by that name. Curry, was it?”
“Yes. Noelle Curry. She had your number on her refrigerator under an assumed name. Are you sure—”
“I’m quite sure. Maybe she intended to call but never did. Or called and didn’t leave a message. That’s quite common in my business, you know.”
“Excuse me?”
“Admitting your marriage needs the help of a professional. It’s one thing to have the number for one, and another to find the courage to use it.”
Gunner conceded the point and let the man go.
Lilly Tennell had a problem with Little Pete Thorogood. Little Pete was the man you went to see in the Deuce’s corner of the hood when you needed to buy a gun fast and on the cheap, with no questions asked, and Lilly didn’t like him conducting his seedy business in her establishment. It didn’t matter that he never really did—Pete only came in to the Deuce to drink and socialize, like everyone else. But just the sight of Pete set Lilly off. Illegal firearms were a chief contributor to the malaise of violence and fear she and her fellow residents of Central Los Angeles had been forced to endure for generations, so Pete’s line of work alone was enough to earn him a sneer every time he chose to darken the barkeeper’s door.
It was for this reason Gunner asked Pete to meet him in his office at Mickey’s for a change. Lilly’s grousing every time the two men hooked up at the Deuce never seemed to bother Pete very much, but Gunner was tired of hearing it. The little man’s chosen profession ran just as counter to Gunner’s sensibilities as it did Lilly’s, but Gunner accepted it as a facet of inner-city commerce that wasn’t going to change in his lifetime, and he had come to know Little Pete Thorogood as a man far less callous and without scruples than his profession might have suggested.
Gunner was sitting in the front of the shop waiting for him when Little Pete arrived. He’d been sitting there idly listening to Mickey, occupying the throne of his own barber chair, debate the superiority of Sam Cooke’s singing voice to that of D’Angelo with one of his newest and youngest regular customers, an overweight college kid with an overbearing vocabulary Gunner knew only as Robbie. Little Pete entered the shop just as Mickey was telling the boy for the umpteenth time that D’Angelo was perfectly fine as crooners of his generation went, but Sam Cooke was a vocalist for the ages, a man who could turn a song into honey pouring from a pot. “I’ll tell you what the difference ’tween the two is right now,” Mickey said. “You want a woman to kiss you goodnight at the door, you play her some D’Angelo. You want her to let you in the damn door, you play her some Sam Cooke!”
That got a big laugh out of the barber and Robbie both, and even a small grin from Pete Thorogood, who’d caught the joke completely out of context. But Gunner was unmoved. It seemed no distraction was great enough to shift his thoughts away from Del for long.
He stood up from his chair. Mickey watched him and Pete pound fists and said, “Oh, no. Ain’t nothin’ I can do with that head!”
Unlike Lilly Tennell, Mickey had no qualms about welcoming the illegal arms dealer into his place of business. He had discovered many years ago that the barber who tried to be selective about whose head he would and would not cut was soon to starve, and where would one begin to draw the line, in any case? Pimps, shysters, drug dealers, and crooked preachers—brothers of every criminal stripe walked through Mickey’s door. Who was he to say, Mickey wondered, that one was less deserving of a simple haircut than another?
“I ain’t here to see you, you damn butcher,” Little Pete told him. “I’m here to see G.”
“Butcher? Who you callin’ a butcher?”
“You, that’s who. Last time I had you cut my head, I walked out of here looking like an old toothbrush.”
Robbie threw his head back and laughed again. Mickey opened his mouth to defend himself, but Gunner chopped a hand in the air to silence him. “Save it, old man,” he said. “Pete and I have business to discuss.”
He rushed Little Pete out of the room and into the back before his landlord could stop them.
They sat on opposite sides of Gunner’s desk, drinking from two glasses Gunner filled from a fifth of Wild Turkey he always kept on hand. They were silent for a long stretch.
“Really sorry to hear about Del, G,” Little Pete finally said.
Only now did Gunner study him with anything approaching a professional eye. Pete looked the same as always—short and slight, with high-yellow skin and the facial hair of an adolescent—but the cool, quiet composure he was known for was noticeably absent. There was something on the man’s mind today that had him resembling someone who, unlike himself ordinarily, was susceptible to the vagaries of emotion.
“Thanks, Pete,” Gunner said.
“Any idea yet what set him off? You don’t mind my asking?”
“I’m not convinced he did go off.”
Pete raised an eyebrow. “Say what?”
“Let’s just say I’m exploring all possibilities, including that someone other than Del was the shooter.”
The idea seemed to shake Thorogood a little. “You mean like his wife or his daughter?”
Gunner answered the question with a simple gesture—removing the gun he’d found in Noelle Curry’s kitchen from a drawer and laying it on its side atop his desk—and Little Pete all but fell from his chair onto his knees.
“Aw, Jesus,” he said, staring at the little Colt like the body of a lifeless child. “That’s not the one she used, is it?”
Gunner shook his head. “No.”
Little Pete didn’t say anything, but his relief was palpable.
“You sold this to Noelle.”
“Me? No. But I almost did.”
That wasn’t the answer Gunner had been expecting. “Say again?”
“She came to me lookin’ for a piece. ’Bout three weeks ago. But I told her no. I’ve never seen that gun before.”
“So where did she get it?”
“I’ve got no idea. I told her if she needed a piece, she should ask Del to get one for her.”
“He knew about this?”
“I don’t know if he did or not. But I didn’t tell him. She made me promise not to.”
“Tell me what happened, Pete. Everything.”
Thorogood’s gaze moved to the Colt again. He took a deep breath and held it. “Cecil found me in the park one day. Said Del’s wife wanted to talk to me.”
The park was Enterprise Park in Rosewood, where Pete liked to conduct the majority of his daylight business; Gunner only knew one Cecil.
“Cecil? You mean Mr. Cecil?”
Mr. Cecil was a fixture at the Acey Deuce, an old homeless man Lilly had been paying to clean the bar’s bathrooms and sweep its floors for as long as Gunner could remember.
“Yeah.”
“Why would Noelle use him to find you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe ’cause she thought he was the only one she could trust to keep quiet about it.”
It made sense. What little Del might have mentioned to his wife about Little Pete and his services over the years was unlikely to have included how to reach him or where he could be found. Seeking this info from some mutual friend of her husband, the illegal arms merchant would have been Noelle’s most logical recourse. But whom could she ask that wasn’t almost certain to pepper her with questions or run straight to Del? Certainly not Lilly Tennell or Mickey Moore, and certainly not Del’s first cousin Aaron Gunner. But kindly old Mr. Cecil, the Deuce’s unofficial caretaker who knew every man or woman who’d ever stepped through the bar’s doors—he might be willing to get word to Pete that Noelle had a need to speak with him, and do so with the promise to keep her interest in Thorogood a secret.
“Go on,” Gunner said.
“I called her at the number Cecil gave me. Thinking this had to be a personal matter, ’cause I couldn’t imagine she wanted to discuss business with me. Right? What would Del’s wife want with a gun? But that was exactly what the girlfriend wanted. She said she needed something cheap and easy to use to carry around for protection. Man, I couldn’t believe it.”
“Protection from what?”
“She never really said. She just said she didn’t feel safe anymore and wanted something that could help her feel safe again.”
“So why didn’t she ask Del to get her something she could register legally?”
“That was my first question. ‘Why don’t you ask Del to get you something on the real?’ And my second question was, ‘Why isn’t Del talking to me about this instead of you?’ “
“And?”
“She said he’d only tell her no. That he’d worry about her getting hurt, carrying a piece around. So this was something she had to do on her own, without his knowledge. She made me swear not to tell him anything about it.”
“And you didn’t.”
The implied accusation wasn’t missed on Thorogood. The downcast look he’d taken on when Gunner first set Noelle’s handgun on the desktop between them returned to his face. “No. I never did. But I didn’t sell her a piece, either. I told her if she was gonna get one on the street, she was gonna have to get it from somebody else, not me.”
“Why? What made you say no?”
Pete shook his head. “It just didn’t feel right. Somethin’ was off about it, so….”
“You thought she wanted the gun to use on Del.”
“No! It wasn’t like that, exactly. But—hell, man, the thought had to enter my mind, right? Woman comes to me shopping for a piece and doesn’t want me to say a word about it to her husband? What would you think?”
“I would’ve thought Del needed to know. Motherfuck what I promised his wife.”
Gunner had checked himself as long as he could. If he was telling the truth, Little Pete hadn’t put Noelle’s gun in her hands nor Del’s in his, but he carried some blame for their deaths just the same. At this moment, for the first time since they’d known each other, all Gunner could see in Thorogood was a petty criminal who pushed illegal firearms to their friends and neighbors for fun and profit.
“Come on, Gunner,” Pete said. “I wanted to tell him. I was gonna tell him. Hell, man, I was gonna tell you. But when nothing happened the next day, or the day after that, or the next week….” He shrugged. “I just figured she’d done what I told her and forgot the whole thing.”
“So you did the same.”
“Yeah.”
Gunner fell silent, so deep in thought that Little Pete was left to wonder if his host still recognized his presence in the room.
“G?”
“You sure that was all she said? About why she needed a gun?”
Thorogood took a long time to think about it. “Yeah. ‘I don’t feel safe anymore,’ she said. ‘And I want to feel safe again.’ ” He paused, drawing the memory into focus. “Thing is, though—and thinking back on it now, I realize this is what put me off—she didn’t sound afraid. She sounded….”
He couldn’t put his finger on it.
“What, Pete?”
“It’s kind’a hard to describe, man. But I guess the best word for it would be ‘calm.’ She sounded calm, like she’d made up her mind about something and was set on doing it.”
Gunner wanted the man out of his office, now, before he could give his old friend something more to depart with than a well-deserved guilty conscience.
“Thanks for coming in, Pete,” he said. “I appreciate the help and the kind words about Del.”
Thorogood got up from his chair. “Sure, brother, sure. No problem.” His eyes went to Noelle’s little handgun again. “Sorry ass little Colt Mustang. The kind’a pocket piece I don’t even try to sell anymore. Brothers take one look at a gun like that and just laugh.” He met Gunner’s gaze again. “But not the police. Policemen can’t get enough of the little fuckers.”
“The police?”
“To plant on a nigga when he’s dead and inconveniently unarmed. Ain’t no need to waste a real weapon under circumstances like that, right?”
Gunner mulled it over.
“Lady didn’t have to get that one from a cop, but in my professional opinion—”
“I’ll check it out, Pete. Thanks.”
It took him a moment, but eventually Little Pete figured out he’d just been told goodbye.