“I think so,” Gunner said. Sitting down in a chair now because he wasn’t sure he could stand. “You could have been Del.”
“That’s right. I could’ve. And if I’d’a killed J.T. that night, what would that have made me? Somebody else? Somebody different? No. I would’ve been the same person I’ve always been. No better and no worse.”
She stood up. He didn’t.
“I got pushed. Taken somewhere I don’t ever wanna go again. And when that happens, you push back. Hard. Sometimes too hard. Del pushed back, Gunner. That’s all. It don’t change who he was.”
“No. But it doesn’t bring Noelle back, either,” Gunner said. “Does it?”
The big woman shook her head—why did she bother even trying?—and left him sitting there without taking the car she claimed she had come for.
Because it had no other choice, Monday eventually came, bringing Del and Noelle’s funeral along with it. The weather was mild, the sun in a pale blue sky bearing down on the earth with all the intent of a lit match. Still, Gunner squirmed around in his suit like it was a bear skin, necktie and closed shirt collar making him work for every inhaled breath. He sat at the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, for nearly an hour after he dressed, dredging up the energy for what lay ahead, but he never shed a tear. Tears would only come, he knew, when his pride could least afford the embarrassment.
When there was no more time left to avoid it, he and Kelly DeCharme picked Daniel and Corinne Curry up at their hotel and drove them out to Holy Cross Cemetery, where both the funeral service and internment would take place within minutes of each other. It was a relief not having to endure the joyless ritual of a funereal motorcade, but no one inside Lilly’s car seemed to feel relieved. Del’s parents, sitting together in the back seat, were as somber and silent as Gunner was numb.
The chapel at Holy Cross was already half-full when they arrived. Gunner had to guide Del’s parents past a gauntlet of mourners to get them to their seats at the front. Among those in attendance, Gunner saw his old friend and attorney, Ziggy Zeigler; Lilly and a host of Acey Deuce regulars; Mickey and his second-chair, Winnie Phifer; Noelle’s girlfriend Iris Miller; and Viola Gates and Glenn Hopp, situated conspicuously separate from each other, Hopp standing at the back as if he didn’t expect to be there for the entire service. Gunner gave him a small nod: I see you. I know what you’ve done. This is partly on you._There was no sign of Noelle’s brother Lavar Long, who would have been easy enough to spot, by way of his sheriff’s deputy escort, had he been granted release from Lancaster State Prison to attend his sister’s funeral. Gunner wondered if he’d even asked permission. Zina’s absence, understandable as it was, left a noticeable void in the room.
For the first time in Gunner’s recent memory, a eulogy was given by a man of the cloth who actually seemed acquainted with the deceased. Monsignor Frank Villanueva, Del and Noelle’s priest at St. Patrick’s Church, did the honors, and talked about the pair not simply as two good people who had died before their time, but as friends he knew more than superficially. It was a refreshing departure from the generic, one-size-fits-all dissertation that had become the norm for such speeches of late.
Not surprisingly, no mention was made of murder-suicide, nor any blame assessed to either the living or the dead. Instead, Villanueva spoke with eloquence and grace about the arbitrary nature of life, and how a man or a woman’s faith is not always up to the challenge of overcoming its most debilitating turns. Sometimes, he said, the darkness wins out and people are moved to do its bidding. Decent people, loving people, people who have simply grown too tired or too lonely to bear the weight of their pain a minute longer. So they break down and, on occasion, deliberately or otherwise, they take others down with them.
Asking God for reasons is pointless. God can only offer comfort to those left behind, not answers.
Withhold your judgment, the monsignor beseeched the congregation. Condemn the act, but neither the man nor the woman whose lives were lost as a result of it. Because they took their truth with them, Del and Noelle, and with it the right of others to say what they would have done differently, under the same circumstances.
It was a moving eulogy. Villanueva stepped down from the podium to the sound of women softly sobbing and men clearing their throats, the latter in a vain attempt to choke back tears of their own. But Gunner was not among them. Gunner felt only anger. Del could go to hell. None of this had to happen. He could have sought some other way out, or given Gunner the chance to help him find one.
Fuck Del.
It was only upon taking his cousin’s casket up in his hands, as one of six pallbearers tasked with removing Del to his final resting place, that Gunner finally broke down and cried.
Del and his wife were buried in adjacent plots, side by side as in life, on a rising slope of grass where headstones cast the only shade. The same band of mourners who had filled the cemetery chapel circled the gravesite to hear Villanueva bid the pair one final farewell, some cried out, others only now moved to weep in earnest. Gunner stood behind the two white folding chairs in which his aunt and uncle sat, at the limit of what he could quietly endure, and measured the faces around him. All were grim and ashen, but two, in particular, were unique. Viola Gates was glaring daggers at Glenn Hopp, who remained at the same remove out here he had established inside the chapel. It was a silent exchange similar to the one Hopp and Gunner had engaged in earlier, with one notable exception: this time, Hopp was glaring back.
“Amen.”
Villanueva’s closing jolted Gunner’s attention back to the ceremony. The funeral party repeated the priest’s call, and just like that, it was over. As the congregants kissed and hugged and dispersed to leave, pausing to shake Villanueva’s hand or hover around Del’s parents to pay their final respects, Gunner looked back to find Hopp again and saw that he was already gone, walking off in the distance among the parked cars lining the access road. He had stopped at the door of a burgundy sedan when Gunner’s attention was drawn away.
“We’re all going over to your place now. Right, G?”
Gunner turned to see Mickey standing at his elbow, bursting out of a blue suit that was the first Gunner could recall him ever wearing.
“That’s right. Everything’s already set up.” Lilly’s part-time bartender Pharaoh Doubleday had offered to organize the funeral repast and was waiting at Gunner’s crib now for their arrival.
As Mickey moved off, Kelly DeCharme approached, bringing Del’s parents along with her. The crowd had thinned, and the four of them were nearly the last people still at the gravesite.
“I think we’re ready to go,” Kelly said, and Gunner understood her meaning immediately. Daniel and Corinne Curry looked worn and tired, as if this day had wrung every ounce of life from their bones.
Gunner helped Kelly rush the pair to Lilly’s SUV, which stood at the curb close by, and gently closed the doors behind them. He drove them all out of the cemetery with great care, the black Tahoe joining a long line of cars flowing toward the exit, and passed Glenn Hopp’s burgundy Honda Accord on the way. Only it wasn’t Hopp’s Honda, at all. It belonged to Viola Gates, who sat behind the wheel now, weeping into both hands.
Either mourning the death of Del and Noelle Curry or the deep, meandering scar someone had carved all along the side of her car, from its nose to the very tip of its tail.
22
THE POST-FUNERAL REPAST for Del and Noelle’s mourners was uneventful. Neither Viola Gates nor Glenn Hopp attended. Gunner was not surprised.
He walked through his own house those three hours like an uninvited guest, taking part in conversations he had no interest in, looking past people as if they weren’t really there. Later, he knew he must have eaten something because he wasn’t hungry, but pressed to describe what he’d put on his plate, he wouldn’t have been able to recall.
The irony was, the event was precisely the kind of social affair Del would have helped him suffer through. Like spies on a mission, they would have come t
ogether again and again to trade jokes and observations, sotto voce, about everyone in attendance, laughing in secret one minute, openly and without shame the next. They would have had too much to drink and raised too many eyebrows. But Del was gone and he wouldn’t be coming back. The vital role he had played in Gunner’s life over the last twenty-six years—confidant, advisor, voice of reason—was vacant now and was likely to remain so until Gunner himself was laid to rest.
Near the end of the evening, when most of the guests were gone and Del’s parents, sitting next to each other on Gunner’s couch, could barely expend the effort it took to speak anymore, two late arrivals appeared at the door: Jeff Luckman and his partner Chris Yee.
“We don’t need to come in,” Luckman said when Gunner answered their knock. “We just wanted to offer the department’s final condolences to the Currys.”
“That’s a classy move. And I’m sure they’ll both appreciate it.” Gunner glanced over his shoulder at his aunt and uncle, saw the same cold, empty look on both their faces. “But maybe another time.”
“This was a mistake,” Yee said, giving Luckman a disapproving side-eye. “Our apologies.”
“It’s not like that. It’s just…” Gunner tipped his head toward the living room behind him. “It’s been a long day and I’m not sure seeing you guys would end it on the right note.”
Luckman nodded. “Sure.”
“But I meant what I said. It was good of you to come. And as long as you’re here… ” Gunner stepped out on the porch and closed the door behind him. “I may as well tell you something I was going to put off until all this was over.”
He told them about Zina and Glenn Hopp, and everything he believed he knew about their roles in the deaths of Del and Noelle. Luckman took it all in with a physician’s cool, but not so much Yee.
“So you were gonna tell us all this when?” he asked.
“As soon as I had the funeral behind me. Tomorrow, Wednesday at the latest. I had enough on my plate and didn’t see any point in rushing it.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. Why would I? Your case is closed, isn’t it?”
“Not officially. But even if it were, what difference would that make?”
“It would make a lot of difference if you’re not going to reopen it without sufficient cause. And I was guessing this info doesn’t qualify.” He turned his attention to Luckman. “Or maybe I was mistaken?”
When neither cop answered fast enough to suit him, Gunner said, “Of course not. You’re all about the physical evidence, you’ve been telling me that from day one, and knowing it was Zina who brought her father’s gun to the party wouldn’t have changed that evidence a whit.”
Yee started to protest. “Even so—”
“No. The man’s right,” Luckman said. “It would have been nice of him to share it, but it doesn’t change anything. We already knew the argument was over the girl. That they were arguing about Hopp, in particular, is barely relevant.”
“She lied to us, Jeff,” Yee said. “Why would she do that unless she were hiding something?”
“We just found out what she was hiding: she put the gun in her father’s hand. Which isn’t a prosecutable offense without intent, but it could be she’s unaware of that detail.”
“Still—”
Luckman looked to Gunner, all done quarreling with his partner. “It’s like this, Mr. Gunner: We could keep our investigation open another month, and two things would remain the same—Hopp wasn’t at the scene and our shooter was Mr. Curry. All we’d have to show for our efforts would be a better understanding of what led your cousin to do what he did, nothing more. But hey, we’re just servants of the people. If you want me and Chris to hold off another week to close our case, we’ll start it back up at the hospital tomorrow morning. Just say the word.”
It wasn’t a choice Gunner wanted to make. It was his uncle’s place to make such decisions, not his. But Gunner knew what Daniel Curry would decide, and he knew that Luckman was right: in the end, they’d all be right back where they started, and where they were right now: with the finding that Del had killed his wife and himself and narrowly missed killing Zina. Everything else was just noise.
The front door opened behind him. Kelly had noticed his conspicuous absence inside the house and come looking for him. She eyed the cops suspiciously.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. These are the detectives who’ve been looking into the shooting at Zina’s.” He briefly introduced them. “They just came by to offer their condolences and let me know they’re wrapping up their case this week.”
“Oh. I see.”
A meaningful glance passed between the three men, sealing a deal unspoken, and Kelly smartly pretended not to notice.
“We were just saying goodbye,” Luckman told her. “We just need another moment, if we could.”
“Of course.” She gave Gunner one more chance to escape, but he nodded to decline it and she left them alone again.
“Matt Poole says you and him go back a long ways,” Luckman said.
“That’s true.”
“He says you can be trusted, and we understand he didn’t say that about too many people when he was on the job,” Yee added.
Gunner just shrugged. Where was this going?
“We only found two phones in the house,” Luckman said. “Mr. Curry’s and his daughter’s. We can’t release them to you or anybody else until our investigation’s officially closed, tomorrow at the earliest.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and withdrew a folded sheath of paper. “But here’s the call logs and contact lists we pulled off both. I’m afraid that’s the best we can do.”
He held the lists out for Gunner to take and Gunner obliged.
“Thanks.”
“Forget about it. Please give our best to your aunt and uncle for us, will you?”
Without waiting for Gunner to answer, Luckman gave his partner a nod and the two cops went on their way.
23
GUNNER LANDED A NEW CLIENT Tuesday morning. Robin Kraft was a twenty-four-year-old adoptee from Portland who’d found her birth mother living on the streets in Compton one month ago, then promptly lost track of her again, after having searched for her for over a year. Homeless missing persons were a bear to trace and Gunner had tried to put Kraft off when she’d first approached him about the gig, but his caseload was wide open now that his work for Kelly DeCharme was essentially over and the lady was a referral. Referrals begat referrals. He had her in and out of his office at Mickey’s to sign his standard service agreement by 10 a.m.
Afterward, he spent the next two hours in a chair at the front of the shop, vaguely listening to Mickey parry and thrust with new customers and old as his clippers hummed away, hair piling up on the floor like falling snow. It had been over a week since he’d done this, a force of habit that almost always brought him peace and amusement. These were his people, his friends and his neighbors, and the things they filled the place with—stories true and false, laughter and tears, history lessons and heartfelt confessions—ordinarily warmed him to the core. But today, it was all just a din. A distraction from the melancholy he’d been engulfed in since the last guest at Del and Noelle’s repast had left his home the night before.
And yet, like a drug seeping into his bloodstream, the old, familiar ambiance at Mickey’s began to penetrate his mood. How could it not?
“Any nigga watches a show like that don’t deserve a damn TV,” his landlord was saying now, the “show” in question being a new cable channel, alternative history drama about a Confederacy that had won the Civil War. Three episodes had aired so far to critical acclaim, and Cal Ebbitt, a retired Marine who leaned further right than most of Mickey’s regulars, had just risked expulsion from the premises by daring to ask if anyone besides himself had given the show a look.
“How can you say that if you ain’t never watched it?” Cal asked.
“I don’t have to watch it. The South won the wa
r, didn’t it? And the slaves remained slaves, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Did Lincoln get shot?”
“Of course.”
“Then what the hell’s the ‘but’? Shit, man, that ain’t a TV show, that’s a Southern Republican’s wet dream!”
Hobie London, who was sitting under the edge of Mickey’s razor getting a shave, laughed and stomped his feet on the footrest of Mickey’s chair. Mickey laughed, too, and used his free hand to bump Hobie’s offered fist. It had taken a while, but the barber was finally coming out of the funk he had been in since Pete Burdzecki had taken him to the very edge of murder.
Cal Ebbitt was unmoved.
“I don’t know why I bother with these Negroes,” he said to Gunner. “They got minds as closed as a fireworks stand on the fifth of July.”
Gunner had just started to look over the printout of contacts and calls Jeff Luckman and Chris Yee had pulled off Del’s and Noelle’s phones for the first time, when Cal drew him into this latest Trueblood dialogue of the absurd.
“You liked the show, huh?” he asked Ebbitt, trying to examine the printout and come out of his shell at the same time.
“I don’t know if I’d say I liked it. I just think the idea’s kind of interestin’. I mean, ain’t you ever wondered about what your life would be like if the South had won the war and all of us were slaves today, just like our ancestors?”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“Hell, we’ve all thought about it,” Hobie piped in.
“You gotta be dead not to think about it,” Mickey added.
“And?”
“And I’m not so sure what we’ve got is all that different,” Gunner said.
“What? Man, be serious!”
“I couldn’t be more serious. Oh, whatever we are now, we aren’t slaves. Not by a long shot. But we aren’t freemen, either. We’re something in between. The poorest among us are trapped in a limbo state of perpetual poverty and institutionalized neglect, and you could almost make the argument that keeping them in bondage would have been more humane.”
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