sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Have you ever seen him with a gun?”
“No. Never. I don’t like guns, and he knows it.” She’d been shifting her weight from foot to foot, arms crossed, and now she stopped. “Look, mister, I gotta get ready for school. And I’ve told you all I know.”
“Sure. I’ve taken up enough of your time.”
“Yeah. If you talk to Harp—”
“Who was here with you and Harper the night before the murder?”
He’d let her think he hadn’t noticed her hesitation the first time he’d posed the question, but now it was time to revisit the subject.
“What?”
“I know you told me you were alone, but I got the sense that may not be entirely true.”
“You’re callin’ me a liar?”
“I’m not calling you anything. I’m just telling you your boyfriend—assuming you still think of Harper as your boyfriend—is in a world of hurt if we can’t prove he was somewhere else, other than Empire Auto Parts, the morning Darlene Evans was killed. A good start would be to determine what time he left here that day and who he was with, if he didn’t leave alone.”
Try as she might, she still couldn’t answer the question without taking a few seconds first to consider it. “Wasn’t nobody else here that night but Harp and me. Okay?”
“Okay,” Gunner said. It was either that, or invite her to go on lying to his face. “Anything you’d like me to tell Harper, the next time I see him?”
“No. Anything I got to tell Harp, I can tell him myself. But thanks.”
She went inside and closed the door.
Just before Gunner turned to walk away, he caught a brief glimpse of the girl’s mother, yanking the curtain closed behind her at a side window.
4
GUNNER HAD MADE ARRANGEMENTS to meet with Viola Gates, Del’s part-time office assistant, at his cousin’s office at 5 p.m., but he showed up a half-hour early to look the place over before her arrival. Del had given him a set of keys years ago, when Gunner had succumbed to all of Del’s badgering and agreed to work for him as an electrician’s apprentice. The career change hadn’t lasted longer than a month.
The office now was as it had been then, just a small, two-room suite on the ground floor of what had once been a bank building on Vermont and Slauson. The building was the kind of place small businesses went to die, a dimly lit shell abandoned by its original tenant like a snake’s shed skin. The uppermost floors were vacant, and the offices below, when they weren’t equally empty, were home to a revolving door of disparate business professionals who came and went at the whim of their ability to pay rent: insurance salesmen, dentists, attorneys at law. The economy of late hadn’t driven everyone away, but as he unlocked the door to Del’s suite to let himself in, Gunner couldn’t help feeling like a man trespassing on a movie set long after production had shut down for good.
Del had only really used the office as a place to greet customers and do paperwork, and it showed. You could almost count the pieces of furniture in both rooms on one hand: an old metal desk and wooden rolling chair in each, a filing cabinet, printer cart, and hard-backed chair for visitors to sit on out in the front. Both rooms were choked with stacks of magazines and catalogs, the desktops littered with open and unopened mail, order forms, and writing instruments. But the laptop computer on the desk and the coffee machine atop the filing cabinet were evidence enough that the anteroom was Viola’s domain, the room directly behind it, Del’s.
Gunner hit the overhead fluorescents, washing the suite in a light both yellow and sickening, and started poking around.
He began with Viola’s desk. It was strewn with phone messages torn from a pink pad, handwritten notes to and from Viola and her employer, loose sheaths of printed invoices and written estimates. A paperback romance novel lay face down, open to chapter fourteen. Alongside the computer’s mouse, an emery board sat next to two bottles of garish pink nail polish.
In lightly perusing the paperwork, Gunner thought he detected a theme running throughout, that of creeping disorganization and customer dissatisfaction. He found a few “please remit” and “cancellation of services” notices, and saw enough phone messages from the same two or three people demanding a call back to suggest that Del had in recent weeks been in some state of avoidance, as men with money troubles often were. It seemed, too, that Viola had been losing patience with Del, as her written conveyance of these messages to him were growing increasingly curt and imploring:
Please call Ms. Esposito back!!! She’s called three times today!
Two things, in particular, caught Gunner’s eye. One was a series of printed reviews someone had posted online trashing DC Electrical Services, the formal name of Del’s company. Written by someone who identified themselves as A. Fuentes, all three reviews were onestar, scathing indictments of DC Electrical and its owner. Fuentes described an experience with Del’s company that involved everything from shoddy workmanship to outright fraud, one that left readers little choice but to conclude that Gunner’s cousin was both a liar and a thief.
The other thing of note Gunner found on Viola’s desk was the draft of a termination notice for Glenn Hopp, Del’s only full-time employee, effective three weeks prior. Gunner didn’t know much about Hopp, a tech school grad in his early twenties he had never actually met, but his understanding had been that Del was happy with his work. At least, in the twelve months or so since his hiring, Del had issued no word of complaint about the man in Gunner’s presence. If he’d been fired for cause, his letter of termination made no mention of it; it simply stated Hopp’s services would no longer be required.
Gunner did a cursory inspection of all the drawers in Viola’s desk, finding nothing of interest in any of them, then moved on to Del’s room in the back. He had to pause a moment after sitting down in the man’s chair, feeling Del’s presence here despite his best efforts to suppress all emotion. Del is dead, he thought, once more remembering something he’d almost managed to forget. Never again would his cousin rock back in this chair with a phone at his ear, yell out orders at Viola, or fall asleep with an open newspaper in his lap, as Gunner had seen him do on numerous occasions. He was gone and this empty office was as close as Gunner would ever come, in this life, to being in his company again.
Gunner drew himself out of the descent he was drifting toward and began to subject Del’s desk to the same examination he’d just given Viola’s. Predictably, the papered chaos here was much the same, only worse: things were in piles sliding this way and that, like a moat surrounding his computer monitor and keyboard, no effort made to arrangement according to content. Invoices and notes from Viola were jumbled with receipts from fast-food restaurants and open magazines, rough sketches of electrical schematics, and direct-mail ads from suppliers. Gunner tried to recall if it had always been thus and found himself doubting it; Del had never been much for neatness, but this seemed to be a new level of disarray, even for him. Did it mean he’d had too much work to handle recently, or nowhere near enough? Gunner couldn’t decide.
He picked up a framed photo from the desk, studied the three smiling people frozen in time behind the glass: Del, Noelle, and Zina. They were posing alongside some poor bastard wearing a Goofy costume, the unmistakable trappings of a Disney amusement
