Today, retired Specialist Harper Stowe III, Tenth Mountain Division’s Second Battalion, 87th Infantry, bore no obvious resemblance to the man he had once been. He had come back home eleven months ago, after thirty-eight months in southern Afghanistan, damaged goods. He was broken in all the ways war can break a man, short of tearing his limbs from his body or rendering him blind. His injuries were the kind you don’t see at first glance, the kind that live down deep beneath the surface of the skin. He had a bad back that pained him constantly and a left hand he could barely use, both reminders of a brush he’d had with a stray RPG in Kandahar, but his mind was where his real disabilities began.
Like so many other young men who’d fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, Stowe suffered from what doctors liked to call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a catchall diagnosis for a host of mental conditions that were often the consequences of time spent wandering the living nightmare that was war. In Stowe’s case, these conditions included sleeplessness and migraines, deep depression, and an inability to focus—and a tendency to fly off into a searing rage with little or no provocation. It was a state of being that wreaked havoc on his private life and rendered him all but unemployable. Veterans of America’s two most recent wars, in general, had a hard time getting a fair shake on the work front—employers tended to view them as one crazed and unreliable whole, rather than as individuals to be judged on a case-by-case basis—but those who suffered Harper Stowe’s volatile mix of symptoms received the shortest shrift of all. Stowe’s suffering left him with an almost permanent scowl on his face that people interpreted—correctly—as a warning to keep their distance, and the minute a prospective employer saw it, Stowe’s fate was sealed, his resume discarded.
If he’d been less of a good man to begin with, or even if he were more of a monster now, the war’s effects on him might have been less tragic. But Harper Stowe III had been a sweet kid going into the Afghanistan meat grinder, and that’s what he was coming out of it, all his war wounds aside. Underneath his pain and insomnia and the fog a host of prescription meds kept him in (when he found the discipline to take them)—Ambien, Percodan, Effexor—he was his father’s son, the one who still smiled at the sound of laughing children and held doors open for women, who said “Thank you” and “You’re welcome” and spoke as if the whole world were a library. You could see that man clearly when the clouds of his condition parted, but the shame of it was, that parting was too infrequent for most to notice.
What people noticed instead was a moody young black man who walked with a slight limp and grimaced just taking a deep breath, whose eyes lay dead in their sockets one minute, then flashed white with outrage the next. This was the Harper Stowe III who now stood accused of murder.
He was charged with killing a forty-one-year-old white woman named Darlene Evans, his employer at an Empire Auto Parts store in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Evans had been shot to death in the back room of her shop one morning before dawn three weeks ago, hours after firing Stowe for cause. He’d been late getting in the previous day, an offense he was prone to commit, and Evans had had enough. Eric Woods, a friend and co-worker of Stowe’s who witnessed their encounter, said Evans met Stowe at the door and proceeded to dress him down, unfazed to hear he’d been thrown off an MTA bus on his way to work for, according to the report the driver would file later, “creating a disturbance.” Enraged by his employer’s indifference to this excuse, Stowe became verbally abusive himself and was summarily terminated. Only after threatening Evans’s life at least twice did he leave the premises, Woods said.
The next morning, less than twenty-four hours later, the shop’s manager arrived to discover Evans’s lifeless body and the gun that killed her: a .38 Taurus semiautomatic, Stowe’s fingerprints all over its stock.
Now, Kelly DeCharme—and, by extension, Gunner, the investigator she’d hired to assist her—had the unenviable task of countering what police and LA prosecutors viewed as an open-and-shut case against Harper Stowe III. No witnesses to the crime had yet been found, and a faulty in-store security system had somehow failed to record it, but everything short of a confession seemed to point to Stowe being Darlene Evans’s killer. This included Stowe’s own memory, which he claimed could neither account for his whereabouts at the time of Evans’s death nor how his fingerprints could have ended up all over the handgun she was shot with.
In fact, according to Stowe, the combination of being tossed from the city bus and losing his job in the span of two hours had reduced the remainder of that day and part of the next to a drug- and alcohol-fueled haze, one that appeared to come and go inside his head like whispers on the wind. Kelly was looking to Gunner to put the pieces of Stowe’s tortured memory together just long enough to find an alibi that might save him, but Gunner had been at it for eleven days now and still had nothing to show for his efforts.
He was hoping that was finally about to change.
One of the few things Kelly’s client claimed to know for certain was that he’d spent the night prior to Darlene Evans’s murder at the home of Tyrecee Abbott, his nineteen-year-old on-again, off-again girlfriend of the last eight months. Abbott, whom Stowe liked to call Ty, had confirmed this was true in the course of the brief telephone conversations Gunner had managed to elicit from her, but the girl hadn’t offered up much more aid to her boyfriend’s cause than that. Trying to pin her down for a face-to-face, Gunner had been playing phone tag with Abbott for days, and he was finally all done. What she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—grant him out of the goodness of her heart, he had decided he was just going to have to force upon her.
“What you want Tyrecee for?”
“I’d just like to talk to her for a minute. Regarding her friend Harper Stowe.”
“She didn’t have nothin’ to do with him killin’ that woman.”
“I’m sure she didn’t. In fact, I don’t think Harper had anything to do with it, either.”
Tyrecee Abbott’s mother stood in the doorway to their Panorama City apartment, measuring Gunner with the unabashed distrust of a jaded parole officer. She was a big woman with unruly brown hair and glassy eyes, dressed either for bed or a trip to the nearest Walmart, and if Gunner had been of a mind to try and bull his way past her into her apartment, it would have likely cost him the loss of a limb.
“You got a warrant?”
“No. I’m not a cop.” He gave no thought to mentioning that a cop wouldn’t have needed a warrant just to talk to her daughter, even if he’d been one. “I’m a private investigator. I’m working for Harper’s lawyer and I think Ty can help us with his defense.”
“How’s she gonna do that?”
Before Gunner could answer, somebody behind the woman said, “Momma, who you talking to?”
Tyrecee Abbott stepped into view alongside her mother. Gunner had never seen the girl before, but he’d recognized the voice; her particular brand of pouty sensuality was hard to forget.
“Who’s this?” She regarded Gunner as if he were an unmarked package someone had dumped on their doorstep.
“Nobody you need to talk to. Go back inside.” Her mother tried to guide her back into the apartment.
“Aaron Gunner. The investigator working for Harper’s attorney,” he said. “We spoke over the phone a few days ago.”
Holding her ground in the doorway, Tyrecee said, “So? I already told you all I know.” She tore her mother’s hand from her arm and, with a glare, dared her to lay it upon her again. Her mother huffed, disgusted, and with a final glance in Gunner’s direction, left the two of them to do what they would to each other.
“I’m just following up,” Gunner said. “In case you might have forgotten something.”
“Like what?”
She looked like a “Real Housewife of” dressed down for a day off. Gunner wondered if the department store bling and makeup ever left her body, even for sleep.
“Like what time Harper left here the morning after he got fired.”
Stowe had said he cou
ldn’t recall when he’d left, or where he’d gone afterward.
“I don’t know when he left. He was gone when I woke up.”
“And what time was that?”
“What?”
“When you woke up.” Gunner took a wild guess without stating it openly: 10 a.m.
“I don’t know. ’Bout 10:30, something like that.” “And he was already gone?”
“Yeah.”
“How about your mother? Maybe she was awake when he left?”
“Momma?” She glanced over her shoulder, checking for witnesses, and chuckled. “She wasn’t home that night.”
“So it was just the two of you here?”
It seemed like a simple question, but she had to pause before answering it. “Yeah.”
“What about Eric?”
“What about him?”
“Eric says he was the one who dropped Harper off, somewhere around 10 or 11 p.m.” In fact, Eric Woods claimed to have spent most of the evening beforehand with Stowe, trying to talk him down from the raging resentment he was continuing to harbor for Darlene Evans. “He didn’t hang around a while afterwards?” “No”
“Not even for a minute or two?”
“No.”
“Okay. Getting back to Harper. You don’t know where he might have gone that morning?”
“No. I told you—”
“You weren’t awake when he left. I got that. But maybe he mentioned where he was going before he took off. Or has told you where he went since. You have spoken to him since that night, haven’t you?”
“Once. On the phone.”
“The phone? When?”
“A few days ago. Last week, I think. Why?”
“Well, he was arrested three weeks ago. I thought you might’ve gone down to the jail to see him by now.”
“No. Not yet.” If she felt at all guilty about it, she was hiding it well. “Any more questions?”
“Just a few. You said Harper never told you where he went after leaving here that morning.”
“That’s right. He says he can’t remember.”
“And you believe him?”
“Harper forgets all kinds of shit. He can’t help it. Why wouldn’t I believe him?”
“No reason. What did you two talk about the night before? Did he talk about his firing?”
“Of course. That’s all he did talk about.”
“So what did he say?”
“He said it was all that fuckin’ bus driver’s fault. If she hadn’t thrown him off the bus, he woulda never been late and gotten fired in the first place.”
“The bus driver? What about his boss? Didn’t he blame her, too?”
“Darlene? Oh, yeah. He was pissed at her, too, hell yes. But it was that bitch on the bus he wanted to kill.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t neither. But Harp was like, Darlene only did what she had to do. ’Cause his bein’ late all the time, he put her in that position, right? It was just business. But that driver, kickin’ him off the bus for no reason like that—he took that shit personal.”
What the girl was saying seemed to turn Eric Woods’s testimony on its head. The Harper Stowe he had described both to Gunner and the authorities would hardly have developed such a forgiving attitude toward Darlene Evans so soon after his termination.
“Did Harper have a gun that night?”
“A gun? No.” She shook her head to drive the point home.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Have you ever seen him with a gun?”
“No. Never. I don’t like guns, and he knows it.” She’d been shifting her weight from foot to foot, arms crossed, and now she stopped. “Look, mister, I gotta get ready for school. And I’ve told you all I know.”
“Sure. I’ve taken up enough of your time.”
“Yeah. If you talk to Harp—”
“Who was here with you and Harper the night before the murder?”
He’d let her think he hadn’t noticed her hesitation the first time he’d posed the question, but now it was time to revisit the subject.
“What?”
“I know you told me you were alone, but I got the sense that may not be entirely true.”
“You’re callin’ me a liar?”
“I’m not calling you anything. I’m just telling you your boyfriend—assuming you still think of Harper as your boyfriend—is in a world of hurt if we can’t prove he was somewhere else, other than Empire Auto Parts, the morning Darlene Evans was killed. A good start would be to determine what time he left here that day and who he was with, if he didn’t leave alone.”
Try as she might, she still couldn’t answer the question without taking a few seconds first to consider it. “Wasn’t nobody else here that night but Harp and me. Okay?”
“Okay,” Gunner said. It was either that, or invite her to go on lying to his face. “Anything you’d like me to tell Harper, the next time I see him?”
“No. Anything I got to tell Harp, I can tell him myself. But thanks.”
She went inside and closed the door.
Just before Gunner turned to walk away, he caught a brief glimpse of the girl’s mother, yanking the curtain closed behind her at a side window.
4
GUNNER HAD MADE ARRANGEMENTS to meet with Viola Gates, Del’s part-time office assistant, at his cousin’s office at 5 p.m., but he showed up a half-hour early to look the place over before her arrival. Del had given him a set of keys years ago, when Gunner had succumbed to all of Del’s badgering and agreed to work for him as an electrician’s apprentice. The career change hadn’t lasted longer than a month.
The office now was as it had been then, just a small, two-room suite on the ground floor of what had once been a bank building on Vermont and Slauson. The building was the kind of place small businesses went to die, a dimly lit shell abandoned by its original tenant like a snake’s shed skin. The uppermost floors were vacant, and the offices below, when they weren’t equally empty, were home to a revolving door of disparate business professionals who came and went at the whim of their ability to pay rent: insurance salesmen, dentists, attorneys at law. The economy of late hadn’t driven everyone away, but as he unlocked the door to Del’s suite to let himself in, Gunner couldn’t help feeling like a man trespassing on a movie set long after production had shut down for good.
Del had only really used the office as a place to greet customers and do paperwork, and it showed. You could almost count the pieces of furniture in both rooms on one hand: an old metal desk and wooden rolling chair in each, a filing cabinet, printer cart, and hard-backed chair for visitors to sit on out in the front. Both rooms were choked with stacks of magazines and catalogs, the desktops littered with open and unopened mail, order forms, and writing instruments. But the laptop computer on the desk and the coffee machine atop the filing cabinet were evidence enough that the anteroom was Viola’s domain, the room directly behind it, Del’s.
Gunner hit the overhead fluorescents, washing the suite in a light both yellow and sickening, and started poking around.
He began with Viola’s desk. It was strewn with phone messages torn from a pink pad, handwritten notes to and from Viola and her employer, loose sheaths of printed invoices and written estimates. A paperback romance novel lay face down, open to chapter fourteen. Alongside the computer’s mouse, an emery board sat next to two bottles of garish pink nail polish.
In lightly perusing the paperwork, Gunner thought he detected a theme running throughout, that of creeping disorganization and customer dissatisfaction. He found a few “please remit” and “cancellation of services” notices, and saw enough phone messages from the same two or three people demanding a call back to suggest that Del had in recent weeks been in some state of avoidance, as men with money troubles often were. It seemed, too, that Viola had been losing patience with Del, as her written conveyance of these messages to him were growing increasingly curt and imploring:
Two things, in particular, caught Gunner’s eye. One was a series of printed reviews someone had posted online trashing DC Electrical Services, the formal name of Del’s company. Written by someone who identified themselves as A. Fuentes, all three reviews were onestar, scathing indictments of DC Electrical and its owner. Fuentes described an experience with Del’s company that involved everything from shoddy workmanship to outright fraud, one that left readers little choice but to conclude that Gunner’s cousin was both a liar and a thief.
The other thing of note Gunner found on Viola’s desk was the draft of a termination notice for Glenn Hopp, Del’s only full-time employee, effective three weeks prior. Gunner didn’t know much about Hopp, a tech school grad in his early twenties he had never actually met, but his understanding had been that Del was happy with his work. At least, in the twelve months or so since his hiring, Del had issued no word of complaint about the man in Gunner’s presence. If he’d been fired for cause, his letter of termination made no mention of it; it simply stated Hopp’s services would no longer be required.
Gunner did a cursory inspection of all the drawers in Viola’s desk, finding nothing of interest in any of them, then moved on to Del’s room in the back. He had to pause a moment after sitting down in the man’s chair, feeling Del’s presence here despite his best efforts to suppress all emotion. Del is dead, he thought, once more remembering something he’d almost managed to forget. Never again would his cousin rock back in this chair with a phone at his ear, yell out orders at Viola, or fall asleep with an open newspaper in his lap, as Gunner had seen him do on numerous occasions. He was gone and this empty office was as close as Gunner would ever come, in this life, to being in his company again.
Gunner drew himself out of the descent he was drifting toward and began to subject Del’s desk to the same examination he’d just given Viola’s. Predictably, the papered chaos here was much the same, only worse: things were in piles sliding this way and that, like a moat surrounding his computer monitor and keyboard, no effort made to arrangement according to content. Invoices and notes from Viola were jumbled with receipts from fast-food restaurants and open magazines, rough sketches of electrical schematics, and direct-mail ads from suppliers. Gunner tried to recall if it had always been thus and found himself doubting it; Del had never been much for neatness, but this seemed to be a new level of disarray, even for him. Did it mean he’d had too much work to handle recently, or nowhere near enough? Gunner couldn’t decide.
Good Man Gone Bad Page 3
