Sufficiently humbled before the others, Gunner said, “Did you and Del talk, either before I came in here Friday or after I went home?”
“Yes. We talked after you left.”
“About what?”
“He asked me if I missed J.T.”
“J.T.?”
“Yeah. I don’t know how we got started—I think he just asked straight up, out of the blue: ‘Do you miss J.T.?’ And I said hell, yes, I miss him. Ain’t a day goes by I don’t think about that man.”
“He say why he asked?”
“No. All he said was, he didn’t know how I do it. Go on livin’ after somebody I’d been with all those years was gone. He said he’d never make it.”
“If something happened to Noelle, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you remember what he said, exactly?”
“Exactly?” Lilly braced her arms against the bar, let out a sigh befitting her considerable bulk. “I think he said somethin’ like, ‘I’d never make it alone, it was me.’ And I said, well, God willing, you ain’t never gonna have to. And then he just kind’a smiled and didn’t say nothin’ else.”
“He smiled?”
“Yeah. I remember thinkin’, ‘What’d I say was funny?’ I was gonna ask, but I got called away by somebody—” She turned to Gaines. “I think it might’a been you, Harold—so I never got the chance. He must’ve left soon after that.”
“Damn,” Harold said. “You don’t s’pose he was already thinkin’ about what he was gonna do?”
“We don’t know that he did anything, yet,” Gunner said. But he only said it because somebody here had to, lest his faint hope it was true melt away to nothing.
“But if he didn’t do it—” Howard said.
“I’ll find out who did. You can bank that.”
Gunner went around the room, giving everyone but Lilly, who had long ago committed his contact info to memory, a business card. “If you can think of anything that might help, anything you might have seen or heard that could explain what happened today, call me. Day or night. Understood?”
Five solemn nods told him it was. Gunner went back to his seat at the bar, and Howard and Jones returned to their table just as someone pushed the Deuce’s door open and stepped tentatively inside. Kelly DeCharme squinted in the smoky dark, found the man she was looking for, then eased her way forward to join Gunner at the bar, every eye in the house moving right along with her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said, barely above a whisper, signaling her intent to treat him with the utmost care. He’d given her the news about Del earlier in the day, so she understood how fragile he was likely to be.
She started to take the stool beside his, but he stood up and said, “Not here. Let’s get a booth.”
They took one in the far corner of the bar, where they wouldn’t be overheard and the curiosity the white woman still aroused here, even though she’d met Gunner at the Deuce several times before, would be easier to ignore. No sooner were they settled in than Lilly, as if tied to Gunner by a string, appeared to ask if Kelly would like something to drink. Kelly ordered a Rum and Coke, and Gunner asked for another Wild Turkey, wet.
“I still can’t tell if she likes me or not,” Kelly said as the barkeep walked away.
“Lilly? She likes you fine,” Gunner said. “If she didn’t, there’d be no doubt in your mind.”
Kelly reached out to put her hand in his. “Any news on Del’s daughter?”
“Not as of thirty minutes ago, when I last checked. She still hasn’t regained consciousness, and her doctors remain uncertain that she ever will.”
“And the police still think he did it?”
“Yes.”
“But why? Why would he do something so horrible?” Having met Del on a number of occasions, the idea of him shooting his wife and daughter, and then killing himself, seemed almost as preposterous to her as it did to Gunner.
“I don’t know. I wish to God I did. His office assistant says his business had been off for a while, but whose business hasn’t been? And as for things at home, she says the only trouble there that she’s aware of are some issues he and Noelle may have been having with Zina lately. Any of that sound like sufficient motive for a murder-suicide to you?”
“No. It doesn’t.” And then the lawyer in her added: “At least, not on the surface.”
But the surface was all Gunner had at this point. He had hoped someone at the Deuce might know something he didn’t, something to suggest there was an explanation for what had happened at Zina’s home that didn’t put the death of two people and the near-fatal shooting of another squarely at his cousin’s feet, but the exact opposite had occurred. Lilly had Del talking about his wife three days ago like Noelle was already dead, and if that didn’t suggest premeditation on his part, it at least pointed to the possibility of marital discord, which was almost just as damning. Had Noelle been about to leave him, Del would have hardly been the first man Gunner had heard of to decide his family would be better off dead than apart. Gunner still didn’t believe his cousin was capable of murder, but so far, what evidence he had scraped together was only giving him greater reason to accept that conclusion, not less.
“Have you heard back from his parents yet?” Kelly asked.
“They caught a 7:30 red-eye scheduled to arrive at LAX tomorrow morning at 9:45. I told his father I’d pick them up and take them wherever they want to go.” Anxious to change the subject, Gunner said, “But we didn’t call this meeting to talk about Del, we called it to talk about your client. You want to go first or should I?”
“You go,” Kelly said.
Gunner gave her the rundown of his interview with Tyrecee Abbott that afternoon, occasionally consulting the notes he had taken shortly afterward.
“Shit,” she said when he was done.
“Yeah. A tower of support for her man, she wasn’t.”
“And she can’t help us with an alibi.”
“Not personally. But she might know somebody who can.”
“Woods?”
“That would be my first guess. She insisted it was just her and Stowe at the apartment that night, but she was either lying to me or I’ve lost my capacity to judge such things.”
“And your second guess?”
“Her mother. I got the impression Ms. Abbott keeps Tyrecee on a very short leash and doesn’t miss much where her daughter and her friends are concerned. If I don’t get anything useful out of Woods tomorrow, she might be worth talking to next.”
Kelly 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