Cemetery Road (16 page)

‘Are you sure you won’t join us?’ Frances Burrow asked me again.

I had made the mistake of coming around the house Wednesday morning just as R.J.’s widow and daughter were sitting down to breakfast, and Frances Burrow seemed intent upon sharing their aromatic wealth of bacon, fried eggs and toast with me.

‘I’m quite sure, thank you.’

She looked considerably better today than she had two days earlier. Her face was still clouded by grief and you could barely hear her when she spoke, but the robe she’d been wearing into the noon hour on Monday had already been exchanged for real clothes and she was no longer moving like every step could be her last.

We were all sitting at the dining room table. Frances was at one end, with Toni and I on opposing sides of her. Toni was silent and uneasy, watching me warily. All I could do was guess, but I imagined she was fearful of the news I might have come here to deliver, and resentful of the fact I had not shared it with her first, outside her mother’s presence.

‘You found out something,’ Frances Burrow said.

It wasn’t so much a question as an expression of thanks for an answered prayer.

‘I’ve learned a thing or two that could be important, but I can’t say how much until you and your daughter answer a few questions for me.’

‘Of course. Anything.’

She and I both waited for Toni to offer a similar note of encouragement, but all she said was, ‘What kind of questions?’

In truth, I was anxious to ask only one, the one I’d been carrying around in my head ever since my meeting the day before with Sylvia Nu
ň
ez. But rather than ask this question now, looking to satisfy nothing as much as my own gnawing curiosity, I put it off to broach another, more germane subject.

‘It’s my understanding the police have identified a suspect in R.J.’s murder. Were either of you aware of that?’

Both women said they weren’t, Frances Burrow with some degree of outrage.

‘Who is it?’ she demanded. ‘Has he been arrested yet?’

‘Not as of yesterday afternoon. And I can give you his name, but only if you ladies can promise me this conversation will remain strictly between the three of us, at least for the time being. The person who gave me the information made it quite clear that he didn’t want the police to find out he’d been talking to me.’

‘We understand.’

‘No, wait. We don’t understand anything,’ Toni said. ‘How—’

‘That’s enough,’ Frances Burrow said, cutting her daughter a look that carried more force than a slap in the face. ‘If he says we have to keep quiet about it, then we’ll just have to keep quiet about it.’ She turned to me again. ‘You have our word, Mr White. Please go on.’

I looked at Toni, hoping she’d give me some small sign that her mother did indeed speak for both of them – but there was nothing on her face to see but embarrassment.

‘His name is Darrel Eastman.’ I found the notebook I’d been making notes in and opened it up. I’d decided to start mapping out all my questions for people beforehand, rather than try to remember them as I went along. ‘He’s supposed to be an habitual drug abuser with a long arrest record that R.J. was mentoring somehow. Have either of you ever heard of him?’

Toni Burrow shook her head, but R.J.’s widow hesitated.

‘Did you say “Darrel”?’

‘That’s right. Last name Eastman. You know him?’

‘No.’ She paused to think, mind reaching backward in time to draw a piece of memory closer to view. ‘But I remember Bobby got a call from somebody named Darrel once. He told me it was somebody from work.’

‘At Coughlin?’

She nodded. Like me, her daughter was watching her intently now, all interest in being sullen forgotten.

‘How long ago was this?’

‘Two, three weeks ago, maybe. I was the one who answered the phone. It was just after dinner. Is he a young man?’

‘I was told he’s twenty-five.’

‘Then it must have been him. He asked to speak with Bobby and told me his name was Darrel. Before I could ask what his call was regarding, Bobby walked in, took the phone from my hand, and asked to be left alone.’

‘Then you don’t know what they talked about.’

‘No. I only know the call made my husband very angry. He never got calls from work here at home and he didn’t care for the imposition.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ Toni Burrow said, addressing me. ‘Are you saying somebody at Coughlin
did
murder Daddy?’

‘No. At least, I don’t think so. I was out at Coughlin yesterday, and nobody I spoke to could connect Eastman to Coughlin in any way.’

‘Then someone had to be lying to you,’ Frances said. Meaning, of course, that R.J.’s word that Eastman’s call had been work-related was unassailable in her eyes.

I glanced at Toni, saw a small, wry smile cross her face: Go ahead, it said. Challenge her delusions and see how far you get.

‘Did you ask R.J. about the call afterward?’

‘Yes, but he wouldn’t talk about it. He just said he had to go into the office, and left.’

‘Did that happen often? His having to go in after hours?’

‘Up until recently, almost never. But in the last year or so, it was happening three or four times a month. That was why he was so angry that night. It was the third time in a week he’d had to work late.’

I hadn’t asked Mike Owens or Sylvia Nu
ň
ez about R.J.’s general work schedule, so I didn’t know if overtime was unusual for him or not.

‘But you say he didn’t usually receive calls at home from work.’

‘He didn’t. Usually, he either already knew he had to go in and left right after dinner, or worked straight through without ever coming home.’

I paused for a moment, on the threshold of taking R.J.’s widow somewhere I knew she would not care to go. ‘Is there any chance he was somewhere other than at Coughlin on any of those occasions?’

She looked at me like I was crazy, and her daughter did likewise, but I’d put this line of questioning off long enough. There were things I had to know if I wanted an accurate picture of R.J.’s life just before he died, and I’d never come to know them if I continued to tiptoe around his widow like a dozing bear I was afraid to stir.

‘Of course not,’ Frances Burrow said, smiling at the absurdity of my question. ‘Where else would he have been?’

‘Well, like I said, I was told Eastman was somebody R.J. was working with outside of Coughlin. That he was a troubled young man R.J. was trying to help stay straight in some way.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Neither do I,’ Toni added.

‘What I’m suggesting is that R.J. was acting as some sort of surrogate father to Eastman. Perhaps as part of a volunteer program he was involved in or something, I don’t know. Would that have been possible?’

‘Not without my knowledge,’ Frances said.

‘But if he was spending more and more time away from home—’

‘Who have you been talking to, Mr White, that believes they knew my husband better than I did?’

I chose to answer the question directly. ‘One of his co-workers. A woman named Sylvia Nu
ň
ez.’

‘Oh, yes. I know all about Sylvia.’

‘You do?’

‘Certainly. She’s harmless. She was a distraction for Bobby and nothing more.’

I waited for her to explain.

‘Their relationship was casual at best. Perhaps even sexual on occasion. But my husband loved me and I loved him, and that’s all there is to it. Anything Sylvia Nu
ň
ez has to say about Bobby is strictly conjecture.’

‘Mother, what are you saying?’ Toni asked, apparently hearing all this for the first time.

Her mother turned to her, said, ‘I’m saying that being with your father all these years involved all kinds of compromises you know nothing about, and leaving him be to spend a few meaningless nights with women like Sylvia Nu
ň
ez was one of them.’ She looked back at me. ‘He had only one wife, Mr White, and that was me. I’m the one who knows what he was and wasn’t doing, not Sylvia Nu
ň
ez.’

‘Yes, ma’am. But regarding what she said about Darrel Eastman—’

‘Bobby wasn’t acting as a surrogate father to anyone. He had no interest in that sort of thing, and even if he had, he certainly wouldn’t have started with someone like Darrel Eastman, if he’s half the criminal you say he is.’

‘Mother . . .’ Toni said, seeing the corner R.J.’s widow was painting herself into.

‘What? Your father couldn’t be near people like that and he knew it. Troubled young drug addicts and street thugs. Even if he thought he could help them, he would have never taken the chance.’

‘Then do you understand what you’re saying? If Daddy didn’t know Eastman from Coughlin, and he didn’t know him from some kind of volunteer work he was doing – what else does that leave?’

Frances Burrow surprised me. I was expecting outrage and drama; utensils clashing with china, a harried dash from the room. But all my hostess did was turn to stone.

‘No,’ she said simply.

I cut Toni off before she could answer. ‘All right. Why don’t we forget about Eastman for a moment and talk about Cleveland Allen instead.’

Both women looked at me expectantly.

‘I understand he was the director of sales at Coughlin when R.J. was the chief of security for that division. R.J.’s supervisor didn’t want to talk about him, but Nu
ň
ez told me Allen was fired ten months ago for violating the company’s sexual harassment policy.’

‘That isn’t true. He was fired for stealing,’ Frances said.

‘Stealing?’

She nodded her head. ‘They told everyone that sexual harassment story just so he could avoid prosecution, but they fired him for embezzlement. He was skimming money off the top of some of his biggest accounts.’

‘R.J. told you that?’

‘Yes. He felt horrible about it. Mr Allen was the one who got him his first job at Coughlin. If it hadn’t been for him, Bobby might never have gotten work after . . . after he went away,’ she said, almost forgetting for a moment that I wasn’t supposed to know about R.J.’s more recent criminal history.

‘Did R.J. have anything to do with his termination?’

‘No, but Mr Allen thought so. He came to the house once in tears. Drunk. Bobby wouldn’t let him in, but they talked out on the porch for almost an hour. Even from the bedroom upstairs, I could hear him begging Bobby to fix it. “You can fix it,” he kept saying, over and over. “You can fix it.” But there was nothing Bobby could do. He didn’t have the power to “fix” anything at Coughlin.’

‘Why all these questions about Allen?’ Toni asked.

‘Yes. I was wondering the same thing,’ her mother said.

‘Allen committed suicide shortly after his firing. I admit it’s a bit of a stretch, but if he blamed R.J. for losing his job – and it sounds like he did – someone he left behind might have held R.J. equally responsible for his death.’ I turned to face Frances again. ‘What do we know about Allen’s family? Did he have adult children?’

‘I really couldn’t say. Bobby almost never talked about him, and the only time I ever saw Mr Allen was that one time here at the house.’

‘I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,’ Toni said. ‘If this Darrel Eastman killed Daddy, why should we care if Allen’s family blamed him for Allen’s suicide?’

‘If Eastman did kill R.J. and nobody put him up to it? You probably shouldn’t care,’ I said. ‘But until he’s in custody and we know those things for certain, we might be wise to consider the possibility that Allen hired him to kill your father.’

Only marginally convinced, R.J.’s daughter nodded in assent.

‘I’m not a professional investigator like yourself, so I’m probably paying more attention to some things than they deserve,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want to overlook anything. Or anybody. Take Paris McDonald, for example.’

‘Who?’ Frances asked.

‘Paris McDonald. He’s a former boxer doing life up at Pelican Bay who’s apparently just become an ordained minister. Sylvia Nu
ň
ez says R.J. was following the press on him fairly closely just before he died.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s what I was hoping either you or your daughter could tell me this morning. What could R.J.’s interest have been in a man like McDonald?’

‘They were friends,’ Toni said, matter-of-factly.

I’d heard her perfectly well, but I needed to hear it again to be sure. ‘Friends?’

‘They were corresponding with each other. I found a letter from McDonald among Daddy’s papers the other day, responding to one Daddy had apparently sent to him. It was an invitation to come visit McDonald up at the prison, and I think Daddy may have actually gone. I assumed he was just someone Daddy met and befriended during his time away.’

Her mother shot her a look, seeking to end her loose talk then and there, but Toni said, ‘He knows Daddy was once incarcerated, Mother. I told him yesterday.’

Frances Burrow seemed poised to make good on all the fiery histrionics I’d been expecting from her earlier when the doorbell rang. It stopped R.J.’s widow cold, but I barely heard it. The thought of R.J. and Paris McDonald meeting up at Pelican Bay, for any reason whatsoever, would not allow me to focus on anything else.

On the bell’s second ring, Toni said, ‘I’ll go get it,’ and rose to leave the room. Frances glowered in my direction for a brief second – I, the overly curious snoop who had somehow weaseled his way into the darkest corners of the Burrow family closet – then hurried off to follow her daughter.

By the time I joined the pair in the living room, Toni was closing the front door behind two men she had just let in: one of them black, one Hispanic, both sporting the weary vigilance and off-the-rack dress-uniform of all plain-clothes detectives everywhere.

Seeing me, the black man, older and larger than his partner, said to Frances Burrow, ‘You’ve got company. Perhaps we should come back later.’