accept. The draft was still sending eighteen-year-old kids into the heart of the conflict by the tens of thousands, and far too many were coming back in body bags.
Aaron Douglass Gunner was seventeen.
He could have waited to go until they came to get him. He could have run away to Canada or gone into hiding at college. He was in no hurry to make an enemy of the Viet Cong, nor to meet an untimely death in a foreign land he could barely find on a map. But college wasn’t in his plans, and the role of a draft dodger was too laden with cowardice to suit him. More to the point, he’d seen friends go off to Vietnam who were better men than he, some with wives and kids and careers on the rise, and he couldn’t see how their obligation to serve God and country had been any greater than his own. So one rainy day in March, he walked into an Army recruiter’s office on Florence Avenue and signed his life away, pride all puffed up with the sense he had done something brave and noble, denied the Man the satisfaction of putting him back in chains by reentering into bondage of his own free will. It took him hours to win her over, but eventually his sister Ruth, who’d become his legal guardian after their father’s passing just one year earlier, made the deal binding by putting her own name on the recruiting papers.
What neither Ruth nor Gunner could know was how idiotic his volunteer enlistment would appear in less than a year’s time.
He had thrown himself headlong into Vietnam thinking there would be no avoiding it, that despite all the demonstrations and sit-ins and speeches made against it, this was a war destined to have no end. But America’s patience for the conflict was in fact about to finally run out, pushed to the limit by the My Lai massacre and the senseless bloodbath of Hamburger Hill. Shamed into retreat by the fallout from his secret bombing of Cambodia, Nixon began pulling troops out of Vietnam as early as July, only four months after Gunner’s enlistment, and by year’s end the draft Gunner had been so certain would drag him overseas on its own terms was turned into a lottery, a game of chance he might have easily won.
It all made for a bitter pill to swallow, especially from the vantage point of a shallow foxhole on Hill 1000, Fire-base Ripcord in the A Shau Valley, in July 1970.
Unlike Gunner, Kelly DeCharme’s client had never been to Vietnam, but hell by any other name was still hell. Before his enlistment in the US Army, twenty-six-year-old Afghanistan War vet Harper Stowe III had been a sociology major at Cal State Dominguez Hills holding down two part-time jobs while earning a 3.5 grade point average. He had friends and family, the latter in the form of the father who’d raised him and one older brother. People who knew him described him as quiet but polite. He had a girlfriend with whom he occasionally discussed marriage and children.
Today, retired Specialist Harper Stowe III, Tenth Mountain Division’s Second Battalion, 87th Infantry, bore no obvious resemblance to the man he had once been. He had come back home eleven months ago, after thirty-eight months in southern Afghanistan, damaged goods. He was broken in all the ways war can break a man, short of tearing his limbs from his body or rendering him blind. His injuries were the kind you don’t see at first glance, the kind that live down deep beneath the surface of the skin. He had a bad back that pained him constantly and a left hand he could barely use, both reminders of a brush he’d had with a stray RPG in Kandahar, but his mind was where his real disabilities began.
Like so many other young men who’d fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, Stowe suffered from what doctors liked to call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a catchall diagnosis for a host of mental conditions that were often the consequences of time spent wandering the living nightmare that was war. In Stowe’s case, these conditions included sleeplessness and migraines, deep depression, and an inability to focus—and a tendency to fly off into a searing rage with little or no provocation. It was a state of being that wreaked havoc on his private life and rendered him all but unemployable. Veterans of America’s two most recent wars, in general, had a hard time getting a fair shake on the work front—employers tended to view them as one crazed and unreliable whole, rather than as individuals to be judged on a case-by-case basis—but those who suffered Harper Stowe’s volatile mix of symptoms received the shortest shrift of all. Stowe’s suffering left him with an almost permanent scowl on his face that people interpreted—correctly—as a warning to keep their distance, and the minute a prospective employer saw it, Stowe’s fate was sealed, his resume discarded.
If he’d been less of a good man to begin with, or even if he were more of a monster now, the war’s effects on him might have been less tragic. But Harper Stowe III had been a sweet kid going into the Afghanistan meat grinder, and that’s what he was coming out of it, all his war wounds aside. Underneath his pain and insomnia and the fog a host of prescription meds kept him in (when he found the discipline to take them)—Ambien, Percodan, Effexor—he was his father’s son, the one who still smiled at the sound of laughing children and held doors open for women, who said “Thank you” and “You’re welcome” and spoke as if the whole world were a library. You could see that man clearly when the clouds of his condition parted, but the shame of it was, that parting was too infrequent for most to notice.
What people noticed instead was a moody young black man who walked with a slight limp and grimaced just taking a deep breath, whose eyes lay dead in their sockets one minute, then flashed white with outrage the next. This was the Harper Stowe III who now stood accused of murder.
He was charged with killing a forty-one-year-old white woman named Darlene Evans, his employer at an Empire Auto Parts store in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Evans had been shot to death in the back room of her shop one morning before dawn three weeks ago, hours after firing Stowe for cause. He’d been late getting in the previous day, an offense he was prone to commit, and Evans had had enough. Eric Woods, a friend and co-worker of Stowe’s who witnessed their encounter, said Evans met Stowe at the door and proceeded to dress him down, unfazed to hear he’d been thrown off an MTA bus on his way to work for, according to the report the driver would file later, “creating a disturbance.” Enraged by his employer’s indifference to this excuse, Stowe became verbally abusive himself and was summarily terminated. Only after threatening Evans’s life at least twice did he leave the premises, Woods said.
The next morning, less than twenty-four hours later, the shop’s manager arrived to discover Evans’s lifeless body and the gun that killed her: a .38 Taurus semiautomatic, Stowe’s fingerprints all over its stock.
Now, Kelly DeCharme—and, by extension, Gunner, the investigator she’d hired to assist her—had the unenviable task of countering what police and LA prosecutors viewed as an open-and-shut case against Harper Stowe III. No witnesses to the crime had yet been found, and a faulty in-store security system had somehow failed to record it, but everything short of a confession seemed to point to Stowe being Darlene Evans’s killer. This included Stowe’s own memory, which he claimed could neither account for his whereabouts at the time of Evans’s death nor how his fingerprints could have ended up all over the handgun she was shot with.
In fact, according to Stowe, the combination of being tossed from the city bus and losing his job in the span of two hours had reduced the remainder of that day and part of the next to a drug- and alcohol-fueled haze, one that appeared to come and go inside his head like whispers on the wind. Kelly was looking to Gunner to put the pieces of Stowe’s tortured memory together just long enough to find an alibi that might save him, but Gunner had been at it for eleven days now and still had nothing to show for his efforts.
He was hoping that was finally about to change.
One of the few things Kelly’s client claimed to know for certain was that he’d spent the night prior to Darlene Evans’s murder at the home of Tyrecee Abbott, his nineteen-year-old on-again, off-again girlfriend of the last eight months. Abbott, whom Stowe liked to call Ty, had confirmed this was true in the course of the brief telephone
