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 piec
e, 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.
9
“I WAS JUST CALLING TO THANK YOU,” Jeff Luckman said. “And to make a small request.”
“Thank me for what?”
“For giving my number to your friend Curry’s father, Daniel. My message inbox might never be empty again; the man’s called me four times just since lunch.”
“You’ve got my condolences, detective,” Gunner said, adjusting the wireless headset in his ear as he drove. “But Del was his only son, and his daughter is his only grandchild. Not knowing what happened yesterday is making him and his wife a little anxious, as I’m sure you can understand.”
“He already knows what happened, same as you do, Mister Gunner. It’s a difficult thing to accept, I know, but it is what it is.”
“In other words, nothing’s changed since yesterday. You still think Del shot the two women and then killed himself.”
“It’s not simply what I think, it’s what the evidence supports. Three people in the house, all shot with the same gun. Mister Curry’s gun. There was an argument, a struggle for the weapon ensued, and the women were shot before Mister Curry took his own life. We’ve done the math, Gunner, trust me.”
“There was a struggle for the gun?”
“All three people had traces of GSR on their hands and clothing, Mister Curry most of all by a wide margin, and both his prints and his daughter’s were on the murder weapon. How else would you interpret that?”
Stuck for an immediate answer, Gunner said, “You’re sure there couldn’t have been someone else in the house? Someone who could have done the shooting and then fled before the uniforms arrived?”
“Someone like who?”
“Noelle’s brother. The one with the drug habit I told yo
u about. Have you located him yet?”
“Lavar Long. Yeah, we’ve located him. He’s out at LAC, serving a ten-year stretch for assault on a police officer. And before you ask about the father, he passed away two years ago.”
“So that rules them out as the fourth party. But—”
“Like I told you yesterday, Gunner, none of the neighbors we’ve talked to have reported seeing such a person. And even if they had, a fourth party in the house might explain the injuries to the two females, but not those of Mister Curry, as his were most definitely self-inflicted. It says so right here in the coroner’s preliminary report.” Before Gunner could respond, Luckman added, “One might also wonder why, if someone else were in fact responsible for shooting his wife and daughter, Curry would call you instead of 911 before killing himself. Wouldn’t one?”
Gunner had wondered about that but saw no point in admitting it.
“I know you’d like to think we’re just mailing this one in,” Luckman said, “but the truth of the matter is, we aren’t. We won’t really know for sure what happened in that house until the daughter regains consciousness and starts talking, but until then, we’re going to do what we always do and base our conclusions on the evidence at hand. You have yourself a great day.”
“Hold on a minute. You said something about a small request?”
“Oh, yeah. Tell your uncle to give it a rest. As soon as we have something new to report, we’ll report it.” And with that, Luckman hung up.
Gunner arrived at Empire Auto Parts shortly after 4 p.m. This time he’d called ahead to see if Johnny Rivera—the store’s manager and the man who had discovered Darlene Evans’s body following her murder—was in, and Rivera himself had answered the phone. He hadn’t sounded happy to take the call, but he’d agreed to talk to Gunner just the same.
Eric Woods was conspicuously missing among the other employees in the store when Rivera walked Gunner to the back office for their meeting. Gunner sized him up on the way, seeing a short, dark-skinned Latino in his mid-forties who filled out his uniform shirt with thick, tattooed arms and a broad chest, all more likely built on a prison yard than a padded gym floor. His slow, deliberate gait was that of a seasoned O.G. who never followed anyone anywhere. He either led the way or didn’t go at all.
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