“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, unconvinced, 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.