“What about him?”
“Eric says he was the one who dropped Harper off, somewhere around 10 or 11 p.m.” In fact, Eric Woods claimed to have spent most of the evening beforehand with Stowe, trying to talk him down from the raging resentment he was continuing to harbor for Darlene Evans. “He didn’t hang around a while afterwards?” “No”
“Not even for a minute or two?”
“No.”
“Okay. Getting back to Harper. You don’t know where he might have gone that morning?”
“No. I told you—”
“You weren’t awake when he left. I got that. But maybe he mentioned where he was going before he took off. Or has told you where he went since. You have spoken to him since that night, haven’t you?”
“Once. On the phone.”
“The phone? When?”
“A few days ago. Last week, I think. Why?”
“Well, he was arrested three weeks ago. I thought you might’ve gone down to the jail to see him by now.”
“No. Not yet.” If she felt at all guilty about it, she was hiding it well. “Any more questions?”
“Just a few. You said Harper never told you where he went after leaving here that morning.”
“That’s right. He says he can’t remember.”
“And you believe him?”
“Harper forgets all kinds of shit. He can’t help it. Why wouldn’t I believe him?”
“No reason. What did you two talk about the night before? Did he talk about his firing?”
“Of course. That’s all he did talk about.”
“So what did he say?”
“He said it was all that fuckin’ bus driver’s fault. If she hadn’t thrown him off the bus, he woulda never been late and gotten fired in the first place.”
“The bus driver? What about his boss? Didn’t he blame her, too?”
“Darlene? Oh, yeah. He was pissed at her, too, hell yes. But it was that bitch on the bus he wanted to kill.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t neither. But Harp was like, Darlene only did what she had to do. ’Cause his bein’ late all the time, he put her in that position, right? It was just business. But that driver, kickin’ him off the bus for no reason like that—he took that shit personal.”
What the girl was saying seemed to turn Eric Woods’s testimony on its head. The Harper Stowe he had described both to Gunner and the authorities would hardly have developed such a forgiving attitude toward Darlene Evans so soon after his termination.
“Did Harper have a gun that night?”
“A gun? No.” She shook her head to drive the point home.
“Are you 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