“Most likely, not at all. But I still want the phone.”
“I get it. This guy’s to blame for your cousin going off the rails, so you’d like to find him to convey your thanks. Forget about it, Gunner. Not gonna happen.”
“It’s not about that, Poole.”
“No? Then what’s it about?”
Gunner had known the question was coming because he’d been wrestling with it himself for hours now. The truth was, his interest in his cousin’s death had long ago ceased to be rooted in the possibility that someone else had killed him, and what was left of his doubt that Del had also shot his wife and daughter was rapidly diminishing.
“Answers. I just want answers,” he told Poole.
A sparse crowd of the usual do-it-yourself garage monkeys was spattered around the parking lot at Empire Auto when Gunner showed up around 7 a.m. As he’d hoped, Pete Burdzecki’s green Camaro was already there, but it was sans any obvious signs of its owner. Gunner eased Lilly’s Tahoe into a space alongside and got out, then went hunting for the man he’d come here to snare.
He found him hidden at the back of the lot, well around the rear corner of the store, engaged in conversation with two other men. One was a black man of indeterminate age, dressed in the oversized, incongruous clothing of the dispossessed, and the other was a teenage white kid with a skateboard under his arm and a cigarette pressed between his lips. Neither man resembled anyone with the slightest interest whatsoever in auto parts.
Yesterday, Gunner might have paid the trio little mind, but now that Johnny Rivera had shown him the light, he could see the true nature of Burdzecki’s business here. The tightly packed huddle he and his mismatched friends were forming, as if to deflect the cold, was the same one buyers and sellers always used to shield an exchange of money for little packets from the prying eyes of strangers.
Gunner ducked out of sight before Burdzecki could take note of him and went straight back to the green Camaro, drawing the Buck knife he always carried from one of his pockets. He snapped the six-inch blade open, waited until he was sure no one was watching, then hunkered down in the space between Burdzecki’s car and Lilly’s SUV to slice a giant gash in the sidewall of the Camaro’s left-rear tire. As the tire silently went flat, he placed a note he had prepared earlier on Burdzecki’s windshield, got in the black Chevy Tahoe, and drove off.
Del’s office hadn’t noticeably changed in the two days since Gunner had last seen it. He had come here halfway expecting his key would no longer fit in the door, so unwelcome had Viola Gates found his last visit, but he got inside without any problem and went straight back to the PC on his cousin’s desk. He had promised his uncle he would help Corinne Curry assemble a guest list for their son’s funeral, and the contact list on Del’s office computer seemed like an obvious place to start.
Of course, Gunner now had his own reasons to acquire a list of Del’s contacts, and the info on one lady in particular: Viola Gates.
Had Del been the kind of man to value such things, a more than rudimentary password on his PC might have stopped Gunner cold, but Del had always treated computer security like a chore. Once when Gunner was still working for him, Del had sent him to the bank with his ATM card to withdraw some emergency cash, and Gunner had entered his PIN number, 0987, wondering how long it would be before somebody robbed his cousin blind. Today, 0987 didn’t do the trick—but 5432 did.
Pete Burdzecki was already blowing up his phone, but he let all the dealer’s calls go straight to voicemail, focused only on opening up the appropriate software on Del’s PC and printing out two copies of Del’s contact list, one for Corinne and one for himself. When he was done, he closed up Del’s office and drove out to the address given for Viola Gates, who apparently lived in a ground-floor unit of a two-story apartment building in West LA, where script on the face read Sandbar Estates above a gold star-burst that had lost two of its pointed tines.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said when Gates opened the door on his second knock. If she’d found other employment since Del’s death, her relaxed mode of dress did not betray it, and only a bible salesman could have drawn a more withering look from her.
“Yes?”
“Del’s funeral is Monday. Holy Cross Cemetery, eleven o’clock. I’d like to ask you a few more questions if I could.”
“You already asked me some questions.”
“These questions are different. They’re about you and Glenn.”
She hadn’t thought he’d be so direct.
“I haven’t said anything about you two to the police yet, but then, neither of you has done anything to this point to make me think I should. Can I come in?”
She made him wait to save face, then beckoned him inside, her expression as firm as bedrock. She walked him into the living room but didn’t offer him a seat or take one for herself, giving him no excuse to assume he had more than a few minutes to speak his piece and get out.
“Look. I don’t know what Glenn told you, but our relationship has nothing to do with what happened to Mr. Curry and his family.”
“Your relationship? Describe that for me, exactly.”
“It’s none of your business, but if you must know, we’re friends. Very good friends.”
“Lovers?”
He wasn’t sure: Was that a smile? “Yes. Something wrong with that?”
“Not particularly.”
“Not particularly? Say what you mean, Mr. Gunner. You think he’s too young for me. A big, strong buck like Glenn’s got no business foolin’ around with an old heifer like me.”
“Actually, if I had a problem with it, it would have more to do with ethics than age. Or haven’t you ever heard the old adage, ‘Don’t shit where you sleep’?”
“Things happen. Sometimes, two people are just drawn to each other. You said you wanted to ask me some questions.” She crossed her arms, a reminder he was on the clock.
“Where were you when Del died?”
“Monday? I was here. It was my day off.”
“Were you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Glenn wasn’t with you?”
“No.”
Gunner thought he knew why she didn’t ask if it was Hopp who’d told him they’d been together: she had already heard Hopp’s account of his conversation with Gunner at Mega Buy yesterday.
“You didn’t see him at all that day?”
“No. But I didn’t have to be with him to know he didn’t kill Mr. Curry and his wife. Glenn could never do anything like that.”
“Maybe it wasn’t Del and Noelle he was really after. Maybe they only died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Zina. She’s the reason Del let him go, not any downturn in Del’s business. He was doing her at the same time he was doing you. Don’t tell me you didn’t know?”
“I know that Glenn did everything he could to put that little bitch off him before she finally broke him down. I know that. She waved her ass in his face until he had to fuck her just to make her stop.”
“Only, she didn’t stop.”
“No. Hell, no! She just kept coming, even after she cost the poor man his job.”
Her rage was like a stoked furnace, blowing heat in waves that Gunner could practically feel on his face. She hadn’t killed Del or his wife, that was a possibility too remote to ever add up, but if she had nothing else, she most definitely had the temperament for murder, providing Zina was her intended target.
“So maybe that’s why he tried to kill her,” Gunner said, referring to Del’s daughter. “And her parents just got in the way.”
“No. He didn’t!”
“Did Del know about you and Hopp?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Because you knew he wouldn’t approve.” “He would have felt the same way about us you do. We’ve got no business being together. So we were discreet. But Mr. Curry wouldn’t have known the differ
ence even if we hadn’t been.”
“No?”
“No. He was too deep into his own problems to see anything else. He thought his precious—”
She drew up short, her anger having taken her to the very edge of saying something that would have clearly pained her later.
End of interview. Gunner knew it. And for once, having been ordered out of enough homes over the past twenty-four hours to last him a lifetime, he walked out of this one on his own terms.
From the parking lot of the Westfield Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks, where he hoped to catch up with Tyrecee Abbott’s best girl Roxanne Niles, Gunner finally made the call back to Pete Burdzecki the dealer had been begging for for well over an hour.
“Hello?” It was only one word, but Burdzecki made it sound as bitter as strychnine.
“Is this Pete?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Who’s this?”
“I’m the guy who left the note on your windshield at Empire Auto. Sorry about the tire, man, I was loading up the ride and dropped a—”
“Never mind being sorry. I’ve been calling your ass all morning. You gonna buy me a new tire, or what?”
“Of course. Why else would I have left the note?”
“All right. So when are you coming back?”
“Back to Empire Auto? I won’t be back that way at all today. But I can meet you somewhere out here around noon if you want.”
“Out here? Where the fuck is ‘out here’?”
“Watts. I’m getting my hair cut at twelve; why don’t you meet me at the shop? I’ll have your money then. Say, a hundred even?”
“Nah, fuck that. I ain’t drivin’ out to Watts to meet you at no goddamn barbershop.”
“Well, it’s either that or wait ’til next week, when I get back from Spokane. My flight leaves at four and I won’t have another free minute until then.”
“Shit! This is bullshit!”
“Hey, partner, I’m just trying to do the right thing here. I didn’t have to leave you a note at all, I could’ve just driven off and kept my hard-earned money.”
“Okay, okay. Fuck it. Where’s this barbershop at?”
Gunner gave Burdzecki the name and address of Mickey’s shop, working to keep the grin on his face from showing in his voice, and promised to meet him there in a little over an hour.
The stars were all aligned to make Roxanne Niles easy to find. The early morning hour, the encroaching death of the shopping mall as the great American meeting place, and the young woman’s supposed girth. How hard could she be to spot in such a sparse crowd if she were as big as Eric Woods described her? But, in the end, Gunner’s eye would have been drawn to Tyrecee Abbott’s girlfriend had she been sixty pounds lighter and seated in the loge at a sold-out Dodgers game.
It was her hair.
Gunner had seen blond black women before. And he had even seen a few redheads. But this was the first time in his life he had seen a black woman who was both, and in equal measure. The wig Niles wore—and he would not allow himself to believe it was anything but a wig—was divided front-to-back right down the middle of her head, platinum blonde hair to the west, lipstick red hair to the east, with nary a curl to be found in either region. Sitting on a stool beside the cell phone accessory kiosk he had been told to look out for, tipping the scales at two-and-a-quarter easy if Gunner’s talent for measuring such things without a scale could still be trusted, she was the human equivalent of a white flare against a midnight sky, as impossible to ignore as a penguin in a lion’s den. But it was the yin-yang hair that most did the trick.
“Are you Roxanne?”
She raised her eyes from her phone to look at him with the rapid-fire reflexes of a dying house cat. He realized with some surprise that she was pretty beneath the wig and glittering eyeshadow.
“Yes. Who are you?”
“Tyrecee’s mother told me where to find you. Can I ask you a few questions?” He showed her his license, but he may as well have put a Chinese bill of lading under her gaze.
“So you’re a cop?”
“Of a sort.” She was flashing a level of intelligence her appearance completely belied, demanding he alter the approach he’d planned to take with her. This lady was no dummy. “It’s about Harper. I’m working with his attorney and we think you might be able to help us.”
“Me? How can I help?”
“You were with Harper at Tyrecee’s the night before he was arrested. Remember?”
“What if I was?”
“The woman he’s accused of murdering was killed the next morning. We’re hoping to prove he was somewhere else at the time. With you, maybe.”
“Did Harper tell you that?”
“No. Between the time he went to sleep that night to late the next afternoon, his memory’s a total zero. He doesn’t know where he was or who he was with. That’s why I’m here, talking to you.”
She glanced about the mall, searching for an excuse to send Gunner on his way. “I’m working right now.”
“I realize that, so I’ll make it quick. Were you with Harper that morning or not?”
She turned her gaze back in his direction to study him, measuring his worth as a confidant and taking her sweet time about it.
“Yeah, I was with him.”
“You two left the apartment together?”
“That’s right. He asked for a ride so I gave him one.”
Gunner took a deep breath. One huge hurdle down. “What time would that have been, do you think? When you left the apartment?”
Where someone else might have shrugged, Roxanne Niles thought about it. The coroner had placed Darlene Evans’s time of death in the area of 4 to 7 a.m., and Johnny Rivera had reported finding her body at 6:45. If Niles and Stowe had been together at Tyrecee Abbott’s crib as late as 6:30, it was game over, the case against Stowe all but eviscerated.
“Around five. Everyone else was asleep.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t later than that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I set my alarm to wake me at 4:50 and we left right after. Harper couldn’t sleep and I didn’t want Ms. Abbott to know I’d slept over. She’s got a problem with me.” She smiled with pride.
She had a car and she had a job, and what was far more impressive to Gunner than either, she had a real head on her shoulders. Whatever Laticia Abbott’s “problem” with Roxanne was, it had nothing to do with her being homeless or beneath Tyrecee Abbott’s level. Maybe she was just too damn smart for Laticia’s tastes?
“So where’d you guys go after you left Tyrecee’s?”
“We didn’t go anywhere. I dropped him off at his crib. Or a bus stop near his crib, really.”
“A bus stop?”
“He said he wanted to talk to the driver who threw him off the bus the day before and got him fired. He was loaded and pissed and said he wanted her to know how she’d fucked him up.”
Stowe lived with his father somewhere in the Mid-Wilshire district, approximately sixteen miles from Empire Auto. No one had seen the need to do the math prior to this, but Gunner estimated now the bus ride one way was probably around twenty minutes, traffic permitting.
“So what time did you drop him off?”
“I don’t know. About 5:20, 5:30?”
“And that was the last time you saw him?”
“Yes, sir.”
Gunner saw no reason to hide his disappointment. He and Kelly had the alibi witness they’d been hoping for, except that she wasn’t. She’d parted ways with Stowe too early to do them any good.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“Wrong, no. Just unfortunate. But thanks for your help.” He handed her a business card, strictly out of habit. “If you can think of anything else that might be helpful to Harper’s case, please give me a call.”
She looked the card over, like a tip for services rendered she found insulting. “I don’t have to call you. I can think of something right now.”
“You can?”
“Well, I
don’t know if it’ll help. But I think I know where he got the gun. The one that woman was shot with.”
“You saw Harper with a gun?”
“Not Harper. His boy. Eric. I saw Eric with a gun, that night before we left.”
“I’m listening.” Damn right he was listening.
“It was late. I fell asleep on Ty’s bed but everyone else crashed in the living room, watching a movie. I got up to go to the bathroom and saw Eric putting it down his pants. Ty and Harper were on the couch, still asleep. I’m the only one who saw him.”
“But I was told Ty’s mother threw him out of the apartment that night.”
“She did. But once she bounced, he came back.”
“Okay. You saw him with a gun. Did he see you?”
“No.”
“Then you never asked him about it?”
“What, so he could shoot me, too?”
“You thought he was going to shoot Harper and Ty?”
“Not Ty. Just him. Harper.”
“Because he wants girlfriend for himself.”
“And girlfriend wants him back. Yeah. You know about that, huh?”
“I heard rumors to that effect. You said he was putting the gun in his pants when you saw it. How do you mean? Like he was putting it back?”
“Yeah. Like, he had it out and he was putting it back.”
“And Harper was asleep? You’re sure?”
“He looked asleep to me.”
Gunner nodded, satisfied. “Your phone have an internet connection?”
She couldn’t help but smile, so ludicrous was the question. “Of course.”
“Do me a favor and search for an image. Taurus PT-Three-Eight-S.”
He thought he’d have to spell it out for her, but she found a decent photo just fine without any help.
“Is that the gun you saw?”
“I guess.” She took a closer look. “Yeah, I think so.”
“But you never saw Harper with it. Just Eric.”
“Right.”
“You’ve been a great deal of help, Ms. Niles. Is there a number I could call you at, in case I need to reach you later?”
“Sure.” She recited it for him and he wrote it down in his little notebook, leaving her to find the outdated practice quaint as opposed to pathetic. “Next time you see Harper? Tell him I said hey.”
Good Man Gone Bad Page 16
