Cemetery Road (20 page)

The garage facing a back alley was O’s exclusive sanctuary here. His older sister Marion had taken over his old bedroom when he’d moved out of the house five months before, so to maintain a place to chill at his mother’s, he’d taken over the garage. It was too cluttered with junk and storage boxes to actually accommodate a car, so his mother had never found much use for it. O’ had put padlocks on all the doors and furnished the interior with an old convertible couch, small-screen black-and-white TV, and a component stereo system notable only for its laughably mismatched speakers.

‘I wanna know what the hell we’re gonna do,’ R.J. said, the minute we all made it inside. He wasn’t crying now, but his eyes were ringed with fire, a sure sign that he’d been doing so earlier.

‘The only thing we can do,’ O’ said. ‘Give Excel his shit back and hope it ain’t too late.’

‘But it
is
too late!’

‘Says who? You know something we don’t?’ I asked.

‘I know the man had till last night to pay up, and he didn’t. He couldn’t. And the nigga who took the girl don’t play.’

‘His cousin?’

‘Word’s all over the street, I couldn’t go nowhere without hearin’ how crazy this motherfucka is.’

‘They know it was him for sure?’ O’ asked.

R.J. nodded. ‘They say he came right out and admitted it the last call he made askin’ for the ransom.’ He shook his head from side to side, trying to find the sense in it. ‘That little girl’s dead, and we’re the ones who killed her. Am I right? We all clear on that? We’re the ones killed her.’

He was looking directly at me.

‘Fuck that,’ O’ said angrily. ‘We haven’t killed anybody. Till somebody tells us otherwise, we’ve gotta assume the child’s still alive and operate accordingly. And that means stop all this fuckin’ around and get Excel’s shit back to him as fast as we can.’

‘Yeah? How?’

O’ ran the plan he and I had come up with down for him: drop the money and drugs in a dumpster somewhere, then let Excel know where to find them as soon as we could get him on the phone personally.

R.J. was shaking his head again before O’ could even finish, said, ‘There ain’t time for all that. We could be waitin’ hours just to get Excel on the phone!’

‘You have a better idea?’

‘No, but that shit ain’t gonna work. We gotta come up with somethin’ else.’

‘He’s right,’ I said. O’ turned, surprised. ‘The deadline’s come and gone and Excel knows now this man Paris is the kidnapper. With half the world out looking for him, Paris isn’t going to fuck around. He’s going to do whatever he’s going to do with the girl and jet.’

‘If he ain’t already,’ R.J. said.

‘The only prayer we have of saving the girl, if she’s still alive, is finding Paris ourselves and paying him off directly.’

‘What? That’s crazy,’ O’ said.

‘Maybe so. But I don’t see what else we can do. And we sure as hell can’t just sit around here and do nothing.’

‘Damn straight,’ R.J. said.

‘You’re both trippin’,’ O’ said. ‘Every nigga in the city’s out lookin’ for this fool Paris, you just said so yourself, Handy. Even if he was willing to deal with us, we’d never find him before Excel does.’

‘You’re the man with all the connections,’ I said. ‘Maybe the same people who tipped you to the kidnapping could tell you where Paris is hiding.’

‘Ain’t no need for that. I think I know,’ R.J. said.

O’ shot him a skeptical look. ‘Say what?’

‘This Paris – he’s the big brother with the beard and tiny eyes, right?’

‘The man Excel was always leaving outside the door everywhere they went, yeah. So?’

‘So I followed him once. One night when I was watchin’ Excel. I was thinkin’ about boostin’ his ride.’

‘His ride?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, you know – he’s the one drives that ’69 Riv with the gold wire rims. Emerald green, cherried to the max. I was thinkin’ about liftin’ it, so I followed him to the crib. Only, he didn’t go to the crib, ’less the nigga lives way the hell out in Simi Valley.’

‘Simi Valley?’ O’ repeated incredulously. In those days, over a decade before a jury there would set the cops who beat Rodney King free and, consequently, the heart of Los Angeles on fire, the Ventura County city R.J. was referring to was little more than a suburb in the making, all arid hills and model homes for housing tracts years away from completion. A place, in short, where black people like Paris McDonald were as scarce as thirty-story high-rises.

‘I couldn’t believe it, either,’ R.J. said. ‘I damn near turned around before he stopped. But after a while, I got curious – like, where the hell was homeboy goin’?’

He didn’t bother to explain why O’ and I had never heard any of this before, and neither of us asked the question, because the answer was so painfully obvious: How could he tell us about a joyride he’d taken out to Simi Valley on a night he was supposed to have been watching Excel Rucker?

‘So where
did
he go?’ O’ asked, growing impatient now.

‘Some white girl’s house out there. Funky little place with a wagon wheel by the door and shit all over the yard. She was sittin’ out on the porch, smokin’ and waitin’ for him, when he showed up.’

‘And?’

‘And what? They went inside and I left, soon as the lights went out.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it. I looked the Riv over a little first, to see what kind’a alarm he had on it, then I raised up. I bet he’s out there now, with Excel’s little girl.’

The garage fell still as O’ thought it over. Eventually, he turned to me and asked, ‘What do you think?’

‘I think if I was a brother looking for somewhere to hide, and a place to hold somebody hostage where she’d be hard as hell to find, a crib that far out in the boonies wouldn’t be a bad choice,’ I said. ‘It’s for damn sure the last place I would’ve thought to look for him.’

O’ nodded in agreement. ‘Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking, too.’ He looked over at R.J. ‘Can you find this place again?’

‘Absolutely,’ R.J. said.

We were all going to ride out to Simi together, until R.J.’s Dodge took four tries to start. With its engine idling like somebody had poured sand down the carburetor, O’ looked back at me from the front seat and said, ‘I don’t like it.’

He was right. If we went all the way out there to that white girl’s house and needed to leave in a hurry, and R.J.’s Monaco refused to turn over . . .

‘You want me to drive?’

‘Yeah. Hell, yes.’

He opened his door to get out and then I remembered. ‘Wait up.’

‘What?’

‘I’m low on gas. We’d have to stop first.’

‘Fuck!’

‘Hell, man! I wasn’t counting on driving to Simi goddamn Valley tonight.’

O’ blew out a deep sigh. The fools he had to put up with . . .

‘All right. If we could trust this piece of shit to get us there and back, we’d all go together, but we can’t. And we can’t wait around for you to gas up, neither, so me and R.J. are gonna go on ahead while you get gas, then follow us out.’ He looked to R.J. ‘Can you tell him how to get where we’re goin’?’

For a man who’d probably only seen the names of the streets and freeway exits involved one time in his life, R.J. did an admirable job of giving me directions. My chances of getting lost were better than I would have preferred but there was nothing to be done about it; we needed my car for backup, just as O’ had said, and we didn’t have time to waste pumping gas.

I climbed out of the Monaco without another word and my two friends took off. I crossed the street and started back down the block to where my Fairmont sedan was parked. It wasn’t until I was inside the car, about to pull the driver’s side door closed behind me, that I saw another living soul. A hand reached out of nowhere to grab my shoulder and the long barrel of a revolver met my gaze when I spun around.

‘I’m lookin’ for a nigga named O’Neal Holden,’ Excel Rucker said.

NINETEEN

I
f in fact, only three days before his death, R.J. had flown out to Pelican Bay Penitentiary to make his peace with Paris McDonald, he was not alone in wanting to do so. I had been playing with the idea myself for years.

There was no one else left to seek forgiveness from, and seeing McDonald to make a full confession promised the only form of closure I could ever hope to find. But how would such a meeting play out? What would it accomplish? These were questions I couldn’t answer, no more than R.J. could have, and it was the not knowing that kept me away, day after day, year after year, as shackled to my oath of silence as ever.

And then R.J. died. From the moment Frances Burrow called to inform me of his passing, I had taken the news as a sign that my own end was near, and that God or the devil – one or the other – had finally given me the excuse I’d been waiting for to unburden my soul before the one person who could save it, consequences be damned.

Thus I had opened a desk drawer in my home two days before R.J.’s funeral, withdrawn the letter from Pelican Bay Penitentiary I’d received and set aside months prior, and submitted my official request to visit an inmate there named Paris McDonald.

I didn’t give too much thought to what I would do if my request was granted. Maybe I’d go, and maybe I wouldn’t. I was only interested in having the option. I had a feeling my life was about to move in highly abrupt and unpredictable ways, and if I were somehow called to take a meeting with McDonald – if fate and circumstance left me no other alternative – I wanted to be capable.

Now, eleven days after I’d placed my visitation papers in the mail back in St Paul, I no longer had to wonder if there’d been any point. I had reason to believe that R.J. had already met with Paris McDonald himself, and I couldn’t help but suspect that the nature of their conversation held the key to R.J.’s murder. I could go on with my amateurish attempts at homicide investigation pretending otherwise, but I would only be fooling myself, seeking to avoid something as certain and inescapable as gravity.

What terrors might be waiting for me in the prison town of Crescent City, California, I couldn’t say. I only knew that, when and if I received clearance to visit Paris McDonald at Pelican Bay Penitentiary, it was a journey I would have little choice but to make.

I had no right to expect it, but Toni Burrow agreed to go on helping me in whatever ways she could. Knowing now what she did, she could not have been faulted for cutting me off without another word; I had taken what she had always believed about her father and turned it upside down, enlarging all the bad and reconstituting the good, so that the man she was left to remember must have felt like something she had only imagined. She was angry and hurt, as victims of great deceptions always are, and she made little effort to conceal how much of her rage was reserved for me.

But I was not the one she hated most.

Before we parted ways at Leimert Village Park, I asked her to get me a current address for Cleveland Allen’s survivors. Something her mother had said that morning was bothering me, and I couldn’t shake it loose.

Frances Burrow said the night Allen had come by the house to see R.J., he had seemed to believe her husband could get him his job back at Coughlin. ‘You can fix it’, she had quoted Allen as saying, over and over again. But Allen had been a VP and R.J.’s superior at Coughlin. What could have made him think R.J. had the power to reverse his termination?

It took Toni Burrow less than an hour to call me back with the information I had asked for. She had returned to her mother’s home immediately after our meeting and, apparently making better use of a laptop computer and Internet connection than I could have, found a Los Angeles-area phone number and address for one Estelle Allen, whom she assured me was Cleveland Allen’s widow.

I eschewed the phone number to drop in on her unannounced. She lived in a converted condominium complex out in Torrance that was clean and freshly painted, its two-story facade a picture postcard of green grass and geraniums. Its origins as a low-rent apartment building, however, were hard to miss, as was the security intercom out front. I had been hoping to take Estelle Allen by surprise, but it seemed that wasn’t to be.

‘Yes?’

The voice crackling over the intercom handset was shrill but vibrant, incongruent with the image of a bitter, middle-aged woman still trying to come to terms with the death of her husband.

‘Mrs Allen?’ I asked.

‘Yes? Who is it?’

‘My name is Errol White. I was friends with a man named R.J. Burrow, who worked for your late husband at Coughlin Construction. Would it be possible for me to come in for a moment to ask you a few questions?’

‘R.J. Burrow?’ She hadn’t been happy to hear the name. In the time it took her to find her voice again, I was able to watch a teenage boy across the street parallel park a green Honda like he was wearing a blindfold. ‘Are you with the police?’

‘No ma’am. But—’

‘Then I have nothing to say to you. Please go.’

The line went dead.

I started to redial her unit, then set the intercom handset back on its hook.

It would have been easy to leave. She didn’t want to see me, and I wasn’t likely to change her mind by harassing her over the intercom. But something about the way she had dismissed me wouldn’t let me walk away. It wasn’t indignation I had heard in her voice, as I’d been expecting, but trepidation. She was afraid of something.

I stood around the building’s entrance with the intercom’s receiver back in my hand, waiting to do an act for someone either going in or coming out. I wasn’t sure how long I could loiter this way without drawing unwanted attention to myself, and I felt like an idiot, but it was either this or go home. I hung the receiver up, went through the motions of double-checking an entry in my cellphone, then picked the receiver up again and pretended to call a unit. Right on time, a heavy-set black woman with three small children – one in her arms, and the other two at her feet – labored to herd them out the door. I pulled the door open for her, did some play-acting with the intercom handset before hanging it up – ‘Hey, never mind, somebody’s coming out’ – and then squeezed in behind her.