Good Man Gone Bad Read online

  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 park in the background. Zina appeared to be in her midteens, making the photo at least five years old. Everyone seemed to be genuinely happy, though Zina’s grin could have been viewed as more artificial than the two her parents were wearing; it didn’t have the look of being forced, just halfhearted. Or maybe that was just his imagination, Gunner thought, looking as he was for signs of Del’s discontent everywhere.

  He was rummaging through his cousin’s desk drawers, discovering treasures no more meaningful than old coffee mugs and packs of gum, when the office door opened and Viola Gates walked in, a jangling keychain in her right hand and a look of surprise on her face. And it was surprise, not fear, Gunner noted; in fact, he got the impression she could have found him robbing her own home and not been more personally insulted.

  “How did you get in here?” she demanded.

  Gunner had met her at least twice before, long after he’d left Del’s employ, but he took fresh stock of her now. What he saw was a middle-aged black woman of medium height, 140 to 150 pounds arranged in the shape of a teardrop vase, and a face chiseled in smooth brown marble beneath a Rasta’s mane of beaded dreadlocks. A black mole the size of a small diamond drew attention to her left cheek, just beside her flat nose, like a lighthouse calls out to stray ships in the night.

  “I have my own keys.”

  “I thought you said 5 o’clock.”

  “I did. You’re right on time.” With his right hand, he slid closed the desk drawer he’d been rooting about in, not wasting the effort to be discreet about it.

  Viola’s eyes drifted over to her desk, seeking signs of invasion, as Gunner stood up to join her in the anteroom. “Is it really true?” she asked, and up close he was able to see her eyes were rimmed in red. “Mr. Curry’s really dead? And he killed Noelle and shot Zina?”

  “They were all shot, and Del and Noelle are dead, yes,” Gunner said. “But we’re still trying to find out how and why.”

  “We?”

  Gunner ignored the bitter skepticism in her voice and said, “The police and I. Their investigation into what happened this morning is still open, and I’m just doing my part to help them with it. You don’t have any objection to that, do you?”

  Viola pushed past him to take her seat behind the desk, leaving him with the other so that he’d have no confusion about the pecking order in this room. “So why haven’t the police called me yet? Shouldn’t I talk to them first?”

  Gunner sat down in the hard-backed chair across from her, accepting her terms of fealty without complaint. “To be frank? I doubt you’ll ever hear from them. The detectives in charge of the case seem pretty satisfied that things went down exactly the way you just said they did—Del shot Noelle and Zina, then turned the gun on himself—so it’s unlikely they’ll look very hard for a reason to change their minds.”

  “What about Zina? What does she say happened?”

  “She’s in no condition to say. She hasn’t regained consciousness yet.”

  Gunner waited for her to respond. Tears slowly pooled in her eyes and her head began to swivel from side to side, almost imperceptibly. “I can’t believe it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “He wouldn’t do such a thing. He couldn’t have!”

  Gunner didn’t push; he knew she’d get around to explaining herself eventually.

  Viola yanked a tissue from the box on her desk and dabbed her eyes with it, expelling a deep sigh. “Things were bad. He was having a rough time. I could see how he might’ve wanted to kill himself just to put an end to his troubles, but killing his family, too? No.” She shook her head more emphatically. “No.”

  Gunner let a moment pass, determined to tread softly. “How bad were things? Exactly?”

  Del’s assistant appraised him carefully. “I’m not sure I should answer that.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t mean to be rude. But I barely know you. Why should I tell you all of Mr. Curry’s business?”

  “Because—”

  “I know what you said your motives are. But that doesn’t explain everything.” She pulled herself upright in her chair, becoming Del’s fire-breathing, outraged protector again. “Like why you broke in here before I showed up so you could go through this office, instead of waiting for me to let you in. Mr. Curry hasn’t been dead a full day yet and already he’s got relatives sniffing around his things, looking for their piece of what little the poor man didn’t take with him.”

  “It’s not like that,” Gunner said, though he fully understood how she might have thought otherwise. He’d seen it himself too many times, the dead’s so-called “family” picking over whatever riches had been left behind, desperate to be the first in order to get the best. No amount of wealth was ever too big or too small to fight over like hyenas over a carcass.

  “No?” Viola said. “Then tell me how it is.”

  It incensed Gunner to be questioned like this, when he had more right to his pain than she had to hers. But he gave in and said, “Del was my first cousin. And the closest thing I have, I guess, to a best friend. I loved him. And it pisses me the hell off that I’m so goddamned clueless about what happened to him today. I’m the only family he had out here, and family’s supposed to know when the world’s turned so far upside down for somebody that they’re thinking about picking up a gun and using it. So that’s what I’m doing here, snooping around his office and talking to you.” Gunner forced himself to stop and take a breath, before the train that was his guilt could accelerate beyond his control. “His parents are going to arrive from Atlanta tomorrow or the next day for his services, and when they get here, they’re going to ask me to explain why their son and daughter-in-law are dead, and their only grandchild is the next thing to it. Assuming Zina’s even still alive by then. I want to have answers for them when they ask their questions, Viola. And you can help me do that.”

  She took a long time deciding whether or not she wanted to help him. “How?”

  “I asked you how bad things had gotten for him, and in what ways.”

  “I don’t know everything. I only know what I’ve seen and heard in here, and I’m only here Monday through Thursday.”

  “Okay.”

  She sighed. “He had money problems. Business was down and he couldn’t pay his bills on time. I think he was tapped out on all his credit cards.”

  “And you know this because?”

  “Because I was taking the calls from people demanding payment. Banks, suppliers, utilities. We had the electricity cut off in here at least once.”

  “How long had this been going on?”

  “I don’t know. Three, four months, maybe.”

  Gunner couldn’t believe it. Four months in debt and Del had never once asked him for a dime.

  “How deep in the hole do you think he was?” he asked Viola.

  She shook her head. “I really couldn’t say.”

  “You weren’t responsible for his books?”

  “His books? Oh, no. I could have done them, if he’d let me, but Mr. Curry did his own books. All I do—” She immediately corrected herself: “All I did around here was answer phones and do paperwork.” She picked up on Gunner’s hesitation and read it perfectly. “I know. That’s the kind of work any girl out of high school could do. What’s a grown woman like me want with a job like this?” She smiled at an old wound, the twisted knife still in her back. “If that paper I got from Morehouse was still worth anything, I wouldn’t be here. But it’s not, and I’ve got to eat, so here I am.”

  Gunner could only nod, sorry for whatever he’d done to make her think such a painful admission had been necessary.

  “When you say business was down, exactly how far down was it?”

  “Way down. He still had wor
k coming in, but nowhere near what he used to have. New business was down, especially. Somebody was spreading lies about him online, driving folks away.”

  “A. Fuentes?”

  “Yes. At least, that’s the name they used. How did you know?”

  “I saw a few of his—or her?—reviews on your desk. What’s the story?”

  “There is no story. I never heard of any A. Fuentes and neither did Mr. Curry. The name, the call, the things they said Mr. Curry did—it was all BS. Every word of it.”

  The subject seemed to have touched a nerve with her.

  “So who did Del think was writing these fake reviews?”

  “He didn’t have any idea.”

  The twist she’d put on the word “he” was an open invitation to a follow-up question.

  “But you did,” Gunner said, obliging.

  “It was just a feeling I had.”

  Gunner waited.

  “I think it was Zina.”

  “Zina?” Gunner couldn’t hide his surprise. “Why Zina?”

  “How well do you know her?”

  “Not very.”

  “Kids, they throw this word around way too much, but sometimes it’s appropriate: she’s a little bitch. I’m sorry, I know I should have more consideration for her than that, considering her condition, but that’s the word that fits. Poor Mr. Curry was on the phone with either her or his wife every day, trying to keep them from killing each other. That’s why—”

  She checked herself.

  “What?”

  “No. I’m not going to say it.”

  Gunner took a stab in the dark: “That’s why you thought Zina had done the shooting.”

  “When I first heard about it—my mother called to tell me to turn on the TV—that was my first thought. That Zina must have killed her mother and Mr. Curry, then turned the gun on herself. I couldn’t imagine it happening any other way. Kids these days are so crazy. But that’s not possible, is it?”

  “It wouldn’t appear to be, no,” Gunner said. “But that could change.”

  Viola’s eyes welled up with tears again. The tissue was still balled up in her right hand, but she just sat there and let the tears come. “I hope it does. I hope to God it does. Because Mr. Curry didn’t deserve what she did to him. He was a good father and a good husband, and just because he wouldn’t let her have everything she wanted….”

  “Like what?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I can’t.”

  “I just need a few more minutes of your time.”

  “No. Please.”

  “Glenn Hopp. I saw Del had to let him go a few weeks ago.”

  Gates eyed him suspiciously. “That’s right.”

  “Can you tell me why? Was his termination for cause?”

  “No. Mr. Curry just couldn’t afford to pay him anymore. Glenn didn’t do anything to get fired. But what if he had? What difference would that make?”

  “People who get laid off for financial reasons don’t usually take it personally. But getting canned for reasons related to work performance sometimes bends folks out of shape, especially if they think the reasons given are bogus.”

  “Work performance had nothing to do with Glenn’s termination. The money just wasn’t there to pay him anymore. If you’re thinking he blamed Mr. Curry for that, you’re wrong.” She stood up. “Now, I’d like to go, and I’d prefer to lock up behind me. Are you done in here?”

  “I think so,” Gunner said. Gates seemed awfully anxious to stop talking about Hopp for some reason, but asking her why now was likely to prove fruitless.

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  5

  “IT SHOULD BE DEUCY, with a Y,” the stranger said again, because nobody had acknowledged him the first time.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The name of the bar. It should be The Acey Deucy, with a Y at the end. Not The Acey Deuce.”

  He was a newcomer here, everyone could see that, so his ignorance was forgivable. But Lilly Tennell, who had been the Central Los Angeles bar’s sole owner and operator since her husband J.T. had been murdered in it going on twenty years ago, did not always have patience for those who made this observation about its name. It was a slow and somber night at the Deuce as it was, owner and regular patrons alike dealing with the death of one of their own, and Lilly didn’t need any added incentive to be uncivil.

  “We lost the Y in a fire,” she said, her mouth an angry red line against the inky black of her face. “Summer of ’73. Some fool use’ to rent the building next door burned up his top two floors and part of our roof, settin’ an old space heater too close to a pile’a clothes, and the fire took the Y in our sign up there with it. ’Course, we didn’t have no insurance, took us eight months to raise the six hundred the man said it would cost to put the damn Y back, and by that time, people were already callin’ the place the Deuce and likin’ the sound of it too much to change. Okay?”

  Sitting at the bar two stools off the stranger’s left elbow, Gunner had heard Lilly tell the story at least a half dozen times before, but never with such open resentment. Tonight, with all who knew him grieving for Del and the family he’d allegedly laid to waste, things the barkeep usually found only mildly annoying got a real rise out of her instead. She didn’t know this chunky, red-haired brother in the Sears delivery truck uniform and had no reason to dislike him, but in choosing this moment in time to suggest she’d misspelled the name of her own establishment, he’d yanked on the proverbial tiger’s tail.

  To his credit, and to the relief of Gunner and the four other customers in the bar, the man recognized his mistake and just said, “Okay.” Lilly’s piercing gaze dared him to do otherwise.

  The house fell back into quiet, sans the sound of Roberta Flack’s voice floating at the outer edges of everyone’s consciousness, until the stranger finished his drink and walked out. Then, amazingly, the bar grew quieter still. Lilly stood behind the counter of the bar just off to Gunner’s right, drying a glass with a towel like somebody wringing a chicken’s neck.

  “It’s called the Deuce ’cause I wanna call it the Deuce,” she said under her breath, no more aware she was speaking out loud than she was of the glass she was torturing. “I gotta explain to one more motherfucka why there ain’t no Y in the goddamn name, I’ll lose my mind, I swear to God…”

  “Lilly,” Gunner said.

  “This is my place. I’ll call it whatever the fuck I wanna call it.”

  “Lilly,” Gunner said, more forcefully this time. The big woman swung her fat head around to face him, almost too fast for the wig she always wore to follow. “What?”

  “Never mind him. I need to ask you some questions.” He turned on his stool to regard the other four patrons in the bar, all people he knew as regular customers here: Howard Gaines, Eggy Jones, Jackie Scarborough, and Aubrey Coleman. “That goes for all of you.”

  “What kind of questions?” Jackie asked from the booth she was sharing with Aubrey. She was small and compact, a single mother of three with a pretty face and a dancer’s body who worked as an RN out at Kaiser Hospital downtown, and she always came into the Deuce suspicious of everyone’s intentions.

  “You know what kind of questions,” Gunner said with some irritation. “I want to talk to you about Del.”

  “If you’re thinkin’ we know something about what happened today…” Lilly started to say.

  “Man, we just as much in the dark as you are,” Howard completed the thought for her as he and Eggy Jones left their table in the corner to join Gunner at the bar. Aubrey and Jackie, having no such compunction, stayed in the booth where they were.

  “Maybe so,” Gunner said. “But I’m going to ask my questions anyway, and you’re going to answer them.”

  He looked directly at Aubrey, he of the post-doctoral education and professorial manner, the one person in the house most likely to object to being bullied in this way, and waited to hear a complaint. Aubrey offered none
.

  “Okay. Go ahead,” Lilly said. She stepped right up to Gunner’s position at the bar and set the glass she’d been polishing down on the countertop in front of him, like a dare.

  “You’ve all heard the news. You know what they say he did. They say he killed his wife and tried to kill his daughter, then shot himself to death.” Gunner turned this way and that to regard each person in turn. “They say it couldn’t have happened any other way, but I can’t believe it. Maybe I’m a fool. Maybe one of you knows something, anything, that I don’t know that could help me to believe it. Could Del have really done such a thing? Is it possible?”

  “Anything’s possible,” Eggy Jones said. His Coke-bottle eyeglasses reflected neon light from the illuminated beer signs hanging at Lilly’s back behind the bar.

  “With all due respect, that’s bullshit,” Gunner said. “We all have our limits and Del had his. The Del I thought I knew could never have hurt anyone, least of all Noelle and Zina. But maybe he’d changed without my noticing. I’ve been thinking about it a lot today and I realize it’s been a long time since he and I last talked—really talked—about anything.”

  “And you think he would’a talked to us instead?” Howard asked. The career custodian was the oldest man in the room and the most visibly weary, and what he lacked in intellect he more than made up for in heart.

  “I don’t know,” Gunner said. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. When was the last time any of you saw him?”