Cemetery Road (19 page)

‘So what are we supposed to do?’ R.J. asked.

‘We don’t do anything. We just stick to the plan. Minimize all contact and stay away from anyplace Excel’s people might see us. Especially you two. In the meantime, I’ll do some checking around, see if I can’t find out what the fuck is going on.’

Neither R.J. nor I asked him how he intended to go about it. O’ knew a lot of people we didn’t, and he was as protective of their names and occupations as a narc of his prize snitches.

‘You better be careful who you talk to,’ R.J. told him, in a rare instance of his playing advisor to his old friend, rather than the other way around. ‘Wrong people find out you been askin’ questions ’bout Excel, it could get back to ’im.’

‘I think we all better be careful,’ I said. I hadn’t really given much thought to being afraid up to now, but the vibe at the Lazy Duck the night before had shaken me up, like a bad dream overrun by the living dead.

Something just wasn’t right.

‘What was it?’ Toni Burrow asked.

‘The letter first,’ I said.

It was the deal we had made over the phone: She’d let me see the letter Paris McDonald had written her father if I told her why I needed to read it. It was the second time in as many hours I’d been forced to grin and bear the short end of a woman’s hard bargain. First Coral, now Toni. Some days are just like that for a man, I guess.

We were sitting on a bench at Leimert Village Park, not far from her mother’s house, taking in the shade of a sycamore tree that was ringed by a handful of people sprawled out on the grass, dozing or chatting or sipping from a container sheathed in brown paper. I didn’t tell Toni, but the little park – really no more than a wedge-shaped island of grass stuck in the heart of a small but resilient patch of retail shops in the Crenshaw district – was the place where her father, O’ and I had said our final goodbyes more than twenty-five years before. At a few minutes after one on a Wednesday afternoon, the park and its environs looked completely different from the way I remembered them, and yet exactly the same. It was as if the names on all the signage had changed, but the buildings they were attached to had not. Unlike Fox Hills, developers had seen no need to change the face of the earth here, and their neglect was both a blessing and a curse that had left the area just as quaint, and economically anemic, as ever.

I did not want to tell Toni Burrow the rest of my story. I was certain I had told her too much already. But O’s suggestion that I find out what was in the letter Paris McDonald had written to R.J. – if in fact such a letter did exist – had served no purpose other than to reinforce my own thinking in the matter. I would have liked to have learned more about Darrel Eastman first, but since I couldn’t imagine how I might go about it without involving the police, gaining access to McDonald’s letter was my next most logical move.

Naturally, I had initially balked at Toni Burrow’s terms for showing me the letter; I had kept the secret she was demanding I share with her for more years than she’d been alive, for her father’s sake almost as much as my own. But I had also promised her the day before that I would not ask for her help again without explaining my reasons for needing it, and I knew she would hold me to my word.

Up until now, as I had described her father’s complicity in a twenty-six-year-old armed robbery, she had reacted with little surprise or wringing of hands. She had allowed me to tell the tale my way, without interruption, as if she were listening to a man speak of things she had always understood to be true. But she had not heard the worst of it yet, not by a long shot, and even this far in, more than halfway into the telling, I was searching for some way to skirt around my story’s end to spare her the knowledge of it.

She haggled over the letter for a while, hesitant to trust that I would go on talking once she’d given up the one thing she had to bargain with, but eventually, she reached into her purse and produced it.

It was sheathed in a white, business-size envelope addressed to ‘Mr Robert Burrow’. The envelope was weathered and worn and folded vertically down the middle, like something R.J. might have been carrying around in a pocket or inside his wallet, and it bore the postmark – dated that September 11th – of Pelican Bay Penitentiary in Crescent City, California.

Inside was a single sheet of lined, yellow paper, one side blank, the other scrawled upon in the small, delicate handwriting of a monk. The date at the top preceded the one on the postmark by three days, and this is how the letter read:

Toni Burrow let me read the letter several times without interruption before she found my silence unbearable.

‘Well?’

I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It was reassuring on some fronts, ominous on others. It did seem to confirm that R.J. had reached out to McDonald first, voiding O’s concern that the reverse had been true because McDonald knew us all. But the letter also served to prove that my old friend had written McDonald out of some desperate need to seek forgiveness – forgiveness for something McDonald may have consequently heard R.J. confess to in person, up at Pelican Bay.

‘This was all you could find? There was no copy of R.J.’s letter to him?’

‘No. I’ve looked everywhere. What does it mean, Handy? What does that letter, or Paris McDonald, have to do with my father’s murder?’

‘If this was as far as their contact ever went, probably nothing.’

‘But it wasn’t. I’ve already told you, Daddy went up there to see him.’

Much to my dismay, she’d found a credit card statement that indicated R.J. had bought a round-trip airline ticket to Crescent City for the twenty-seventh, twelve days after the date of McDonald’s letter and only three days before R.J.’s murder. The statement alone didn’t prove Toni’s father had actually made the trip, and neither the airlines nor the authorities at Pelican Bay would ever confirm such a thing without a court order, even to a private investigator, but Mike Owens at Coughlin had told her R.J. had called in sick that day and her mother had no memory of him being at home.

‘McDonald was this “Excel Rucker’s” cousin, you said. The dealer you all robbed. Daddy visited him for a reason, and that reason got him killed.’

‘No.’

‘We had a deal, Handy. You promised to tell me everything.’

‘There’s no relevance to the rest of it. At least, not yet.’

‘We had a deal,’ she said again.

And we did. That was the inescapable fact of the matter. She had held up her end of our bargain, and now it was my turn to hold up mine. It was either that, or prove myself a liar she could never trust again.

‘Do you remember what you told me yesterday about your mother? That she only
thinks
she wants to know the truth about your father, because she can’t believe the truth could be all that terrible?’

‘I remember.’

‘Well, you were right. She really doesn’t want to know.’ I shook my head, issuing a final warning. ‘And neither do you.’

I was trying to frighten her, and I did. I could see it in the way her gaze upon me softened up, and the little breath she had to take before she could speak. But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t the kind to let something go just because it scared the hell out of her.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

So I did.

I’d come back to Los Angeles following R.J.’s funeral in pursuit of a pipe dream, the preposterous belief that I could involve myself in the fallout from my old friend’s murder just enough to keep the past in the past. But it couldn’t be done. I could see that now. Wheels had been set in motion that would eventually, inexorably bring what R.J., O’ and I had done twenty-six years ago to light, and I no longer had the hubris nor the energy to fight it.

I could maybe reduce the damage the revelation would do, but that was all.

I knew the news was bad the moment I heard O’s voice. Even over the phone, he always sounded as unflappable as a stone – but not today. Today, less than twenty-four hours after I’d last seen him down in R.J.’s basement, he sounded like somebody who’d just watched a mushroom cloud paint the far horizon red.

‘We’ve got real trouble, Handy,’ he said.

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘You were right about all those people at the club the other night being afraid. That’s exactly what they were. But not for reasons that have anything to do with us. At least, not directly.’

I waited for the hammer to drop.

‘Somebody snatched his little girl,’ O’ said.

‘What?’

‘His daughter. He’s got a daughter somewhere and somebody grabbed her, late Saturday night. They think it might’ve been his cousin Paris, that big motherfucka he uses as a bodyguard sometimes.’

‘You talking about Excel?’

‘Man, who the fuck else would I be talking about? You’re goddamn right, Excel.’

All the rest of it spilled out of him then, like bile he could no longer keep down. The little girl was four years old, her name was Sienna Jackson, and somebody who’d cut the screen off her bedroom window and stolen her from her mother’s house three nights ago was demanding a half-million dollars from Excel for her safe return. It would have been a difficult amount of scratch for the dealer to raise under the best of circumstances, but only days after a pair of thieves had taken him for over 200 grand, it had to be all but unattainable.

‘We have to give it back,’ I said. A stone was growing hard and cold at the pit of my stomach and my throat was as dry as dust.

‘The money?’

‘Everything. The money, the drugs . . .’

‘It’s too late for that. He had a deadline of midnight last night to pay up. The girl’s probably already dead.’

‘Fuck that. Man ain’t gonna kill his own niece,’ I said.

‘If this fool Paris is the one who did it, they say he could do that and a lot worse. Nigga’s crazy on his best day, and Excel put a bonfire under his ass, slapped him around last week in front of a house full’a women for giving him some attitude. He ain’t been seen or heard from since.’

‘That doesn’t mean he snatched the girl.’

‘Let me ask you something, Handy: Did you know Excel had a daughter? I didn’t, and I bet R.J. doesn’t, either. Only the people closest to him know about it, most likely, and whoever took the girl not only knew who she was, they knew where she lived. It
had
to be the cousin.’

‘OK, so maybe it was. That doesn’t change anything. We still have to get that money and blow back to Excel.’

‘How? Go back to his crib in Inglewood and leave the shit on the porch? Ain’t nobody left alive back there, Handy. Excel’s killed everybody in the whole goddamn house.’

‘Say what?’

‘The man’s lost his mind. He can’t pay the ransom, and he’s jackin’ up anybody and everybody he thinks is responsible. That’s why it was so damn quiet at the club the other night – he’s going off in all directions, and nobody knows what the nigga’s gonna do next.’

I told him it didn’t matter. We had to return Excel’s money, and fast. There was nothing we could do to help the people we had robbed in Inglewood, but God willing, we might still have time to save the girl.

O’ and I hashed out a rough plan for dropping the drugs and money where Excel could retrieve them in a way that involved little risk of exposure, then tried to reach R.J. by phone to bring him into the discussion for the first time. O’ had waited until now to alert him to the situation, knowing how badly the news of the child’s kidnapping was going to mess with his head; already having some idea how we might reverse our tragic error when we talked to him would help diminish R.J.’s immediate impulse to do something reckless or self-destructive – or both.

But R.J. was nowhere to be found.

He was supposed to be sitting tight just like O’ and I had been, straying from his phone at home only to do those things that would most mimic his regular routine, but in the course of two hours, we called him four times without reaching him. We left two messages with his mother, who claimed total ignorance of his whereabouts, and hung up twice when his mumbling, black-hearted father answered the phone instead.

‘Goddamn that fool,’ O’ said, livid.

We decided to make the drop without him. Time was too precious to waste, and in truth, neither of us believed R.J.’s opinion or approval was required for us to do what needed to be done.

But when we arrived at O’s mother’s place, R.J. was there waiting for us, pacing the front porch like a junky in a bad way. He knew. His face was hard set in a scowl laced with fear and when he came down the walk to greet us, I had to wonder just how far over the edge his mind had slipped.

‘Man, where the fuck have you been?’ O’ snapped, before R.J. could get his mouth open to speak.

‘To hell with that. Have you—’

‘
I asked you a question, nigga!
’

It never ceased to amaze me how O’ and O’ alone could use this tone with R.J. and make him snap to attention, rather than throw a punch that could break the cap off a fire hydrant. ‘I went out to get somethin’ to eat. Ain’t shit back home in the fridge. You fools heard what’s goin’ down? About Excel’s kid?’

‘We heard,’ I said.

‘Shit, what’re we gonna do? They say—’

O’ raised his hand, said, ‘We can’t talk about it out here. Let’s get in the garage.’