downed the last of her drink in one gulp and nodded, endorsing Gunner’s logic.
He had already spoken to Eric Woods once, over lunch four days ago, but he was anxious now to have Stowe’s boy explain the discrepancies between his account of how Stowe had spent the hours before Darlene Evans’s death and the one Tyrecee Abbott had given him this morning.
“Cheer up,” Gunner said, noting Kelly’s despondency. “Little Tyrecee wasn’t a total bust. Her shocking lack of affection for him aside, she at least stated without reservation that she’s never seen your client with a gun.”
Kelly nodded again, cheered not a whit.
“Of course….”
“Of course, we might have been better off if she’d said just the opposite.”
“Well, sooner or later, we are going to have to put the murder weapon in Stowe’s hands to explain his prints on it, and do it in a way that doesn’t somehow prove he used it to shoot the deceased.”
It was easily the most daunting aspect of their defense efforts. Stowe had no recollection of ever seeing the unregistered Taurus used to murder Evans, let alone handling it, and no one Gunner had yet spoken to could venture a guess as to how or when he might have come in contact with it. If Gunner and Kelly couldn’t offer a jury an innocent explanation for his fingerprints being on the gun, even an alibi placing Stowe miles from Empire Auto Parts when Evans was killed might not be enough to win him an acquittal.
“I’m visiting Harper again Wednesday,” Kelly said. “Hopefully, he’ll have remembered a thing or two that will be useful to us since the last time we talked. His memory of those two days has to come back to him eventually.”
“If it hasn’t already, you mean.”
She shot him a wary side-eye. “Excuse me?”
“Well, there is a chance he remembers more about all of it than he’s been telling us, isn’t there? I mean, if we’re being honest about it?”
“No.”
“I’m just saying.”
“No, Aaron. Positively not. But if that’s what you think—”
“I didn’t say that’s what I think. I’m just saying we’d be wise to consider the possibility that he hasn’t been entirely truthful with us. Either because he did in fact commit the crime himself, or is protecting someone else who did.”
“Harper didn’t kill Darlene Evans, Aaron. And he’s told us everything he knows or can remember about her murder. If I didn’t believe that, I would have never taken his case in the first place.” Gunner started to respond, but she pushed on: “You haven’t spoken to him yet. I have. He’s been telling us the truth. I know it and his father knows it.”
Stowe’s father was Harper Stowe Jr., the man who had actually retained the services of Kelly’s firm. He was a sixty-six-year-old retired mechanical engineer who cast a brown bear’s shadow and spoke like every word was a dollar out of his pocket, and both his bearing and physical appearance—from his well-tailored clothes to his trim white goatee—were unapologetically imperious. Gunner had met him only once, at a brief meeting with Kelly in her office ten days ago, but once had been enough to be suitably antagonized.
“Okay. I’m convinced,” Gunner said.
“No. You’re not. But that’s okay. I didn’t hire you to drink the Kool-Aid. I hired you to find out the truth.”
“And if I find out your client’s guilty?”
“Then Harper Junior is going to be one very unhappy man. When was the last time you called Samuel Evans?”
“He doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“Of course he doesn’t. Nobody on our interview list does. But since when is that an excuse to stop trying?”
“Who said I was going to stop trying?”
“You’ll call him again tomorrow, then.”
“I already had plans to.”
Gunner had been trying to question Darlene Evans’s widower for days now, and only Tyrecee Abbott had proven more reluctant to cooperate. His reasons for wanting to talk to Samuel Evans were all too obvious, and being a likely suspect in his wife’s murder, as the spouse of a homicide victim always was, helping Gunner along probably did not sit particularly well with the man.
“I’d like another,” Kelly said, gesturing with her empty glass. Gunner waved Lilly over and ordered them both a refill, the bartender for once coming and going without her and Gunner exchanging any of their customary extraneous banter.
In Lilly’s absence, Gunner and Kelly sat there in silence for a moment, each gripping the other’s hand as if for the last time. Kelly studied Gunner’s face in the bar’s muted light, and asked, “Are you going to be okay?”
“No,” he said, lacking any incentive to lie. “I don’t think I’m going to be okay for quite a while.”
He wanted to go on talking, to tell her everything he knew about Del Curry and everything he remembered about him. All the fights they’d had over things big and small, the laughter they’d shared first at one man’s expense, then the other’s, over and over, round and round, even when the target of all the levity had every right to be crying instead. He wanted to count for Kelly all the times Del had saved his ass, either by setting his head on straight when it was about to spin off or by having his back, both literally and figuratively, when Gunner was up against something or someone he couldn’t take on alone. There were a thousand stories to tell, a thousand things to say about his dead cousin that Gunner wanted, needed to… say But he couldn’t bring himself to say them now. He was afraid of what might happen if he tried.
So he just held on tight to Kelly’s hand and cried, instead.
6
AFTER A LONG, RESTLESS NIGHT, Gunner started the next day with a 7 a.m. phone call to Harbor UCLA to check on Zina Curry. He was due to pick up the girl’s grandparents from the airport in a little over two hours and was praying he could greet them with the news she was still alive.
The nurse who answered the phone put him on hold for several minutes, a stretch of deadly silence he used to brace himself for the worst, but the word he ultimately received was all good. Zina had indeed survived the night. She had yet to regain consciousness but had suffered no setbacks, and her vital signs—for now, at least—were stable.
Encouraged, Gunner next placed a call to Jeff Luckman, seeking status of the LAPD’s investigation into the murder-suicide his cousin had allegedly committed. This time, precisely what he thought might happen did: he was forced to leave Luckman a message when his call went straight through to voicemail. He knew Daniel Curry wouldn’t like it, his having nothing new to report from the police, but Gunner figured that was soon to be Luckman’s problem, not his.
