Cemetery Road (10 page)

Unlike the last time I’d checked, there was a single phone message waiting for me when I returned to my motel room following my meeting with Toni Burrow. It was from a man who identified himself as Walt Fine.

‘A friend in Bellwood asked me to give you a ring,’ he said. ‘I tried you on your cell, but something happened, I dunno, I couldn’t leave a message. What a racket, cellphones, huh?’ He left a call-back number and hung up.

I was calling him back on the landline phone in my room when my cellphone rang.

‘What’s going on, Quincy?’ I asked without preamble. He was watching over my business in my absence, but the assignment involved so little, I was certain he was only calling to check up on me, his lunatic business partner running loose in California only days after I’d nearly clubbed a teenage boy to death for reasons I’d been unable to adequately explain.

‘You just got a phone call, Handy. I thought you’d wanna know right away,’ he said.

‘From who?’

‘Your daughter. She asked me where you were, but I acted like I didn’t know. I hope that was the right thing to do.’

‘Coral? What did she want?’

‘She didn’t say. Just said she needed to speak to you about somethin’ important.’

I closed my eyes, digging deep to find the courage to ask my next question. The only one that really mattered.

‘How did she sound, Quincy?’

He answered right away, but it felt to me as if he’d counted to ten first. ‘She sounded good, Handy. Real good.’

I was sure that Quincy was smiling.

No matter how it comes upon you, no man is ever adequately prepared for fatherhood. It is too inexact a science.

I don’t speak from any particular wealth of experience. I have only one child, and much to my regret, I have not always been the active parent to her I strive to be today. Still, I have played the role of teacher and care-giver to the little girl turned young woman named Coral White long and well enough to have learned that it is not a job for everyone. The amount of sacrifice and restraint it requires is beyond the powers of many. Those who look for shortcuts in its greatest demands – lectures in lieu of conversation, money instead of affection – would often be better suited abandoning a child altogether than attempting to care for it at all.

The damage I have done to Coral is something I am still attempting to fully assess. She never knew her mother, just as I barely knew the woman myself, so the burden of raising her to adulthood was all on me. To say that I wasn’t ready to take on that kind of responsibility at the time it was thrust upon me would be an understatement; I was still learning the names of streets in St Paul and it was everything I could do to keep from running back to LA, a bigger coward then than when I’d left. In those early years, if Coral needed more than a nursemaid and disciplinarian, she didn’t get it; that was all I knew how to be. It wasn’t until she entered her teens that I evolved into something approaching a real parent – loving, committed,
connected
– and by then, the die of her unhappiness had been cast.

At some point in late adolescence, she discovered solace in self-destruction. From mindless suitors I despised to illegal substances I’d never heard of, she bounced from one poison pill to another, looking for something I had either failed to give her, or had been too slow to offer up. Whether these things were cries for help or simply shows of acting out, I reacted to all her antics with the same self-righteous condemnation, unable to fathom how all my years of nudging and prodding could result in such ingratitude. She had no idea how much I’d given up for her, all the excuses I could have made to go my own way and let her fend for herself.

Six weeks after her nineteenth birthday, she left home for good, and I only caught glimpses of her over the next three years. What I saw and heard during that time gave me no reason to think she would outlive me. She had taken the sorrow of a motherless child and made a funeral blanket out of it, a shroud she could curl up in to retreat from all the warmth and light of the world. I lived every minute waiting for the phone call that would officially mark the end to her suffering, but I never gave her up for dead. I continued to hope she could turn things around and return to the living, lured by the turn I had finally taken toward a more forgiving model of fatherhood. I had learned from my previous mistakes that it wasn’t judgment she needed from me, but empathy, and I left my door open for her offering only that.

It took a long time, but one day she decided we had both suffered enough, and she came back home to St Paul.

Our relationship remains far from ideal. Her recovery is a fragile thing, and my fear of its ephemeral nature hangs over us like a cloud. But we love each other without apology now, and speak on the phone with reassuring regularity. Sometimes, we even go so far as to chat in the flesh, over lunch or dinner.

We are finally at peace with one another, save for one last, perhaps eternal point of contention.

‘Handy, where are you?’ Coral asked, using the only name for me she has ever felt comfortable with. ‘I need to see you.’

Quincy had been right on two counts: She did in fact call me within minutes of talking to him, and she did sound good.

‘I’m out in California. What’s going on?’

‘California? You mean LA? What are you doing out there?’

‘An old friend died. I’m helping the family make arrangements. Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine. In fact, I have great news.’

‘You got a new job?’

Last I’d heard, she was working in telemarketing and hating every minute of it.

‘No. I mean, yes, but that’s not why I need to talk to you.’ For a long moment, she left me with nothing to listen to but the air passing in and out of her lungs. ‘God, I don’t like doing this over the phone. I wanted to tell you in person.’

‘Tell me what, Coral?’

‘Please don’t get mad at me. But . . . I think I found my mother.’

Now I was the one to fall silent. Both of my hands clenched up into fists without my conscious knowledge. ‘No,’ I said flatly. ‘You didn’t.’

‘Yes. I did. I found her picture in an old newspaper at the library. Her name is Susan Yancy, she was a radio dispatcher for the MPD.’

She waited for me to say something.

‘Hello? I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘No. Goddamnit, girl, how many times do we have to go through this?’

‘You’re shouting at me, Handy.’

‘Your mother is dead. She died three weeks after you were born. You have to let this go.’

‘No! Why do you keep telling me that? Her picture in the paper matches the one you gave me of her exactly. It’s the same woman, Handy. It’s my mother. I’ve finally found my mother.’

There was nothing I could say to dissuade her. She had heard all my pronouncements on the subject before, a thousand times, and in light of the hard evidence to the contrary she was convinced she had just discovered, she was more determined than ever to reject them.

‘Coral, baby, listen to me. Don’t do anything more until I come home. Please.’

‘I want to meet her. I want to talk to her. She still lives here in the city, I’ve already found a listing for her.’

‘Coral, please. Don’t do this. Promise me.’

‘I can’t, Handy. She’s my mother. I’ve waited all my life for this.’

‘Yes, yes, I know, but—’

She was gone.

I called every number I had for her and never got an answer. I sat in total darkness, save for a single sliver of light seeping past the curtains of my motel room’s only window, and worked the keypad on the phone until the futility of the effort sank in too deep to ignore.

I had to stop her. She didn’t know what kind of heartache she was about to buy for herself. I had never involved Quincy in my personal affairs before, but now I had no choice. I was half a continent away, and I couldn’t do what needed to be done over the phone.

‘I’ll do my best, Handy,’ Quincy said when I’d called back to tell him what I wanted him to do. His voice was leaden with the burden I’d just placed upon him.

His best was all I could ask for. I prayed that would be good enough.

ELEVEN

I
have a small leather tool bag I always carry. I would no more go somewhere without it than my right shoe.

Its contents aren’t much – a soldering iron and some solder, a screwdriver with multiple tips, wire cutters, needle-nosed pliers, a tiny voltmeter and leads – but they get me by. They’re usually just enough to let me peel a project’s skin open and root around inside, maybe even nudge it into performing the function for which it was designed.

People not in the repair trade see a complexity to machines that is generally more imaginary than real. Pared down to their bare essence, objects as diverse as clothes dryers and computers, VCRs and grandfather clocks all operate as a consequence of one simple principle: movement. Electrons, gears, levers and cables – these are the things that shift position or change state to create a desired effect, allowing a telephone to transmit sound or a lawnmower to cut grass. When this movement does not occur, or does so too soon or too late or with the wrong degree of force, critical sequences break down and mechanical failures ensue. The end result may give the appearance that the entire machine is gone forever, when in fact it is merely the victim of a single, perhaps even easily corrected malfunction.

The reel-to-reel tape recorder I’d found in Culver City was but the latest example of this principle. On the surface, it was inoperative, a thing that just sat there staring at you when you turned it on and asked it to move tape. But once I’d set my modest little tool kit loose upon it, it soon became apparent that it was salvageable. A broken drive belt; a pulley with stripped teeth; tension rollers that needed a good cleaning. These were all things I could fix, given a part or two.

It would take a little time and accomplish almost nothing. One more ancient tape recorder on the shelf of whatever second-hand store I decided to donate it to was not going to change the world in any discernible fashion, for better or for worse. The only point in bringing such a relic back to life would be the exercise itself. The exercise was what defined me, as it probably always will. I take things apart and put them back together again, all for the sake of learning the answer to a single, unrelenting question:

Why?

‘Somebody tried to kill you?’

‘That’s not exactly what I said. I said somebody almost did.’

I gave O’ a rough sketch of my almost fatal visit to Moody’s bar the night before.

‘Jesus. Sounds like you were lucky as hell.’

‘Yeah. You could say that.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘I’m still trying to figure out what I think. He didn’t just want my car, O’. He wanted me, too.’

‘Either that, or your bank card. ’Jackers do that shit all the time. Make a driver take ’em to the nearest ATM just to make a withdrawal. You probably weren’t in any real danger, Handy, till you started fucking with the man.’

There was a part of me that believed him. His explanation for what had happened to me was perfectly reasonable. But the part of me that was still shaken up, the part that couldn’t stop seeing the nose of that brother’s gun staring me in the face going on twelve hours later, was not so easily convinced. The mood I’d been in lately, the role of random victim did not seem to suit me.

‘Maybe,’ was all I said to O’.

‘Did my friend Mr Fine call you?’

‘Yeah, this morning, but I was out. I’m going to call him back as soon as I hang up with you.’

Walt Fine was O’s contact with the Santa Monica PD, and his was the second call I’d missed while I was out having breakfast with Toni Burrow.

‘So. Is that it? You just called to tell me you almost got whacked last night?’

‘Actually, I was calling to ask another favor. Just in case.’

‘Just in case what?’

‘Just in case I see that boy from the bar again.’

The irksome chuckle I thought he’d respond with never came. ‘Man, didn’t I just tell you what that was?’

‘Yeah, I know. I’m losing it. All the same, if you could hook me up with somebody with some hardware to sell, I’d rest a little easier.’

‘You could rest easy now if you’d knock all this shit off and go home. God, man, can’t you hear what you sound like?’

‘Hey, you’re right, this was stupid. Forget I called, huh?’

I started to hang up, but he called my name until I brought the receiver back to my ear.

‘Handy, you still there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Shit. I can’t promise you anything about “hardware”, all right? I’m the mayor of Bellwood, my street nigga suit ain’t been out of the closet for a long time.’ He sighed deeply. ‘But if I can think of somebody who might know somebody, I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Thanks. I’d appreciate it.’

‘A piece of advice, Handy? All those people you see in the rear-view mirror of your rental car? None of them is trying to kill you either.’

O’Neal Holden’s friend Walt Fine was a sergeant for the Bellwood City Police Department. He was a pot-bellied, stoop-shouldered redhead who had the look of a long-time law enforcement veteran, somebody who should have made detective somewhere ages ago, but he was wearing uniform blues when we met Tuesday afternoon in the covered picnic area of a public park out in Gardena, just as he’d requested.

‘Let me just ask you, right off: You have a problem with people of the Jewish persuasion?’

It was the first thing he said to me upon my arrival, and it knocked me off stride before I’d ever said a word. I was already wondering what business I had to be here, and how big a mess I could make of things working so far outside the realm of my expertise, and now I had no doubt. Against a pro like Fine, I was bound to botch the job of interrogation.

‘Me? No. Why would I?’