called the Deuce ’cause I wanna call it the Deuce,” she said under her breath, no more aware she was speaking out loud than she was of the glass she was torturing. “I gotta explain to one more motherfucka why there ain’t no Y in the goddamn name, I’ll lose my mind, I swear to God…”
“Lilly,” Gunner said.
“This is my place. I’ll call it whatever the fuck I wanna call it.”
“Lilly,” Gunner said, more forcefully this time. The big woman swung her fat head around to face him, almost too fast for the wig she always wore to follow. “What?”
“Never mind him. I need to ask you some questions.” He turned on his stool to regard the other four patrons in the bar, all people he knew as regular customers here: Howard Gaines, Eggy Jones, Jackie Scarborough, and Aubrey Coleman. “That goes for all of you.”
“What kind of questions?” Jackie asked from the booth she was sharing with Aubrey. She was small and compact, a single mother of three with a pretty face and a dancer’s body who worked as an RN out at Kaiser Hospital downtown, and she always came into the Deuce suspicious of everyone’s intentions.
“You know what kind of questions,” Gunner said with some irritation. “I want to talk to you about Del.”
“If you’re thinkin’ we know something about what happened today…” Lilly started to say.
“Man, we just as much in the dark as you are,” Howard completed the thought for her as he and Eggy Jones left their table in the corner to join Gunner at the bar. Aubrey and Jackie, having no such compunction, stayed in the booth where they were.
“Maybe so,” Gunner said. “But I’m going to ask my questions anyway, and you’re going to answer them.”
He looked directly at Aubrey, he of the post-doctoral education and professorial manner, the one person in the house most likely to object to being bullied in this way, and waited to hear a complaint. Aubrey offered none.
“Okay. Go ahead,” Lilly said. She stepped right up to Gunner’s position at the bar and set the glass she’d been polishing down on the countertop in front of him, like a dare.
“You’ve all heard the news. You know what they say he did. They say he killed his wife and tried to kill his daughter, then shot himself to death.” Gunner turned this way and that to regard each person in turn. “They say it couldn’t have happened any other way, but I can’t believe it. Maybe I’m a fool. Maybe one of you knows something, anything, that I don’t know that could help me to believe it. Could Del have really done such a thing? Is it possible?”
“Anything’s possible,” Eggy Jones said. His Coke-bottle eyeglasses reflected neon light from the illuminated beer signs hanging at Lilly’s back behind the bar.
“With all due respect, that’s bullshit,” Gunner said. “We all have our limits and Del had his. The Del I thought I knew could never have hurt anyone, least of all Noelle and Zina. But maybe he’d changed without my noticing. I’ve been thinking about it a lot today and I realize it’s been a long time since he and I last talked—really talked—about anything.”
“And you think he would’a talked to us instead?” Howard asked. The career custodian was the oldest man in the room and the most visibly weary, and what he lacked in intellect he more than made up for in heart.
“I don’t know,” Gunner said. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. When was the last time any of you saw him?”
When no one spoke up, he turned to Lilly.
“He was in here just the other night. You was here, you know,” the barkeep said.
“You hadn’t seen him since?”
“No.”
Gunner looked to the others. “And you?”
“I saw him in here that night, too,” Jackie said. “But we didn’t talk.”
“I hadn’t seen him in over a week,” Aubrey said. “And the last time wasn’t here. I saw him pumping gas near the house. We said hello, and that was about it.”
“I don’t remember the last time I seen ’im,” Howard said.
“Before the other night in here, you mean?” Lilly asked.
“Huh?”
“You was here Friday night, too, same as Gunner and Jackie.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Howard said, nodding his head. “I was, huh?” Here at the Deuce, the man was always feeling the effects of a drink or two just short of his limit, so straight answers to even the simplest of questions were rarely expected of him.
“Did you talk to him?” Gunner asked, when Howard made no attempt to elaborate. He hadn’t seen the two men together that night, but he’d left while they were both still here, leaving the possibility open they’d connected after he was gone.
“Did we talk? Yeah, I guess we did.” Howard shrugged. “We must’ve talked. Me an’ Del always got somethin’ to say to each other.”
“So what did you talk about, Howard?”
“I dunno. Just the usual. The Lakers. Movies. That boy got knifed to death at Home Warehouse. You hear about that? The security guard?”
Gunner had, though he couldn’t see the story’s relevance to the present discussion. The teenage guard had caught a thirty-eight-year-old day laborer trying to sneak a set of drill bits out of the hardware chain’s Van Nuys location and died when the would-be thief attacked him with a box cutter. According to the news reports Gunner had seen, the guard’s rate of pay was $9 an hour, while the cost of the drill bits was $13 and change.
“I heard about it. What else?”
“What else?”
“What else did you and Del talk about? Anything?”
Howard shook his head. “No. ’Least, I can’t think of nothin’ else.”
Gunner finally turned to Jones. “What about you, Eggy? When did you last see Del?”
“I been trying to remember, exactly. But I can’t. It’s been a long time, Gunner, I can tell you that.” His sorrowful expression was all but a plea that Gunner not press him on the matter.
Acquiescing, Gunner brought his questioning full circle and said to Lilly, “Okay. Here on Friday was the last time you saw him. What did you talk about? He must’ve said something to you.”
“’Course he said something to me. You was sittin’ right next to him, you heard what he said just as clear as me.”
“I’m not talking about while I was here. That was nothing, just the usual bullshit. I’m talking about before I arrived or after I left. What, does all conversation fucking cease in here when I’m not around?”
Lilly’s eyes flared in the dark. “Say again?”
Gunner had let his impatience
