Cemetery Road (24 page)

But R.J. was a different animal.

While O’ and I stood there like lambs waiting for the slaughter, all of our smarts and superior wisdom as useless to us now as matches in a firestorm, R.J. did what he was wired to do, throwing himself at Excel Rucker before the dealer could turn his wrath, now fully blown, upon the three of us.

He had acted in the one split second Rucker gave him to do so, and still, he was almost too late. Distracted though he was, Excel saw him coming and whirled around to meet him, firing off a shot that caught R.J. in the side and damn near dropped him to his knees. In close quarters, R.J. could out-muscle any man, but now he was hurt; if he tried to disarm Excel by force, he would fail. When this realization dawned upon him, he did something O’ and I had almost never seen him do in the middle of a fight: he improvised.

Fending off Rucker’s revolver with his left hand, he reached into the waistband of the dealer’s pants with his right, got his finger on the trigger of one of the two semi-automatic handguns wedged there, and fired. The explosion blew a hole in Excel’s groin and bored through part of his right thigh, moving him to scream like something inhuman, his body stiffening, his eyes flying open in horror. He snatched hold of R.J.’s shirt, mouth agape but abruptly silent, and R.J. drew the nine all the way out of his pants to fire again, putting a merciful end to his misery.

Rucker’s body tumbled sideways to the floor to join the other one already waiting there, and R.J. soon threatened to follow, the left side of his shirt soaked with blood. O’ caught him on his way down and the two of us helped him over to the bed, where I pulled the shirt away from his skin to inspect his injury.

‘How bad is it?’ O’ asked.

‘It’s fuckin’ bad,’ R.J. said, grimacing with pain.

‘No,’ I said, tearing a long strip off the bed sheet to use as a tourniquet. ‘Maybe not. Looks like a hole in the front and back. Bullet went right through.’ I wrapped the tourniquet around R.J.’s torso and cinched it tight. ‘Long as it didn’t hit anything vital and we can stop this bleeding, he should be OK.’

O’ nodded.

‘We gotta get the fuck outta here,’ R.J. said, eyeing the two bodies on the floor. He tried to sit up on his own.

‘He’s right. McDonald or the cops’ll be here any minute,’ O’ agreed. ‘But we’ve gotta clean this place up first.’

‘Clean it up? Clean it up how?’ I asked.

‘So everything in here doesn’t lead right back to us, that’s how. Here—’ He peeled the key to his apartment in Playa del Rey off his keychain and forced it into my palm. ‘You and R.J. go on back to my crib and I’ll hook up with you later.’

‘What? Hell, no!’

‘We ain’t . . . goin’ nowhere without you,’ R.J. managed to say.

‘Both’a you fools shut the hell up and just do it. The longer we stand here arguing, the better our chances of getting hemmed up, or worse.’

‘And the girl?’ I asked.

He nodded in the direction of the woman on the floor, a shadow passing over his eyes. ‘You heard what the lady said. McDonald’s out hidin’ her body. Ain’t nothin’ we can do for her now.’

It wasn’t something I was ready to accept, but I knew it had to be true. The house suddenly felt ice cold to me, and I got out of there as soon as I could lift R.J. to his feet.

Early in the drive back into the city, laying across the back seat of the car behind me, R.J. asked between shallow breaths, ‘What’s he gonna do?’

I’d been wondering the very same thing, and I gave him the only answer I could come up with.

‘Start a fire,’ I said.

TWENTY-TWO

T
he homicide detectives from the LA County Sheriff’s Department who questioned me about the death of Darrel Eastman let me go on my own recognizance. They would have liked to have held me on suspicion of manslaughter, but they had no way to support such a charge. Both Chancellor and I claimed it was self-defense, Linda Dole was incapable of saying otherwise, and all the physical evidence at the scene seemed to corroborate our version of events.

Still, I was lucky. There were holes in the stories my brother and I told the detectives that bothered them, holes they could only imagine were created to make Eastman’s death look less like murder than it really was. In truth, the omissions we made were only intended to reduce all of his talk about something R.J. and I had done years ago to put his mother in a wheelchair down to the incoherent ramblings of a crazy man. I knew better, of course, but Chancellor did not. To him, Eastman’s accusations had made little or no sense, and so he was hard-pressed to clearly articulate them in his statements to the authorities.

In the end, and without colluding to do so, the two of us told the same essential story: Eastman had kidnapped my brother so that I might be forced to hear him plead innocent to the murder of my friend R.J. Burrow. He’d been following me around since the dead man’s funeral and arrived at the conclusion that mine might be a sympathetic ear to his assertion that R.J. had still been alive when he’d last seen him, seventeen days ago down at the Santa Monica Pier. He’d had no interest in killing me until I’d made a play for his knife and forced his hand.

It was a fabrication that clung just close enough to the truth to win my freedom, temporary though it might be. Still, they only let me go after I’d been asked to go over the circumstances surrounding Eastman’s death again and again for detectives Saunders and Rodriguez of the SMPD, who’d been notified of Eastman’s killing and requested I be held at the Sheriff’s station in Harbor City until they could talk to me themselves. My inability to leave R.J.’s murder alone, as I’d promised them I would only hours before, had somehow led me to kill their primary suspect, and neither man was terribly happy about it.

‘You’ve just made a very bad mistake, Mr White,’ Rodriguez said.

Much to his and his partner’s chagrin, however, it wasn’t a mistake they could easily put me behind bars for making. Eventually, like their peers with the Sheriff’s Department, they had to concede that Eastman was only dead because he had come looking for me, not the other way around. My meddling in their open homicide investigation had drawn Eastman’s interest, to be sure, and maybe if it hadn’t he would still be alive. But nobody could say that for sure, and trying to prove as much to the District Attorney’s office would have only served to extend a case Rodriguez and his partner now considered closed, despite my best efforts to convince them otherwise.

‘He said R.J. was alive when he left him,’ I told them more than once, referring to Eastman. ‘He didn’t do it.’

But Saunders wasn’t listening, and Rodriguez didn’t give a damn. ‘Get this guy, Harry,’ he said. ‘Even now, he’s playing detective.’

‘I’m only telling you what the man said with his last breath. Why would he lie with nothing more to gain?’

‘We would’ve loved to have been able to ask him that very question,’ Saunders said. ‘But it kind of looks like we missed our chance, doesn’t it?’

‘If you wanted all the answers to why he did what he did, you should’ve thought twice before sticking that knife in him,’ Rodriguez said.

‘Burrow tried to befriend the kid and got burned. Eastman was a bad egg he couldn’t reform and that disillusioned him all to hell, so he fell off the wagon and took the kid out for a party. They had words in the car and Eastman lost his temper. What’s so hard to understand?’

And so it went between us, around and around and around again, until two hours had passed and we’d all had enough of the ride. By the time they shoved me out the door, I was halfway convinced they were right and I was wrong. Everything I knew about Eastman and R.J. that I’d made sure the two cops didn’t only reinforced
their
opinion of his murder, not mine. R.J. had given Eastman every reason in the world to kill him – he’d gotten him high, told him he was an addict beyond redemption and then confessed to the crime that had pushed Excel Rucker to make a paraplegic of his mother – and the only excuse I had for believing Eastman hadn’t taken the bait was his word.

So why was I still unsure?

It was going on nine p.m. when Chancellor drove me back to Linda Dole’s place from the Sheriff’s office to retrieve my rental car. It was a longer ride than the miles involved would have indicated. He had as many questions for me as the four detectives who’d just finished grilling me combined, and his were by far the ones I feared the most.

‘What was he talking about, Errol? What did you have to do with Excel Rucker crippling Eastman’s mother?’

Lacking the will to evade, I told him everything I’d told Toni Burrow that afternoon, with the single exception that I left Olivia Gardner out of it. It was a story he thought he already knew, but not like this.

The sordid tale my brother was familiar with involved a vengeful cousin who had kidnapped Rucker’s daughter for ransom and, with the help of a female accomplice, held her out in a house in Simi. Rucker went on a killing spree when he couldn’t raise the ransom money, then tracked the cousin down to the Simi residence and tried to rescue the girl by force. The cousin – an ex-boxer who used to work for Rucker named Paris McDonald – killed Rucker and his female accomplice both, then set the house on fire in an effort to hide his tracks. It didn’t work; he was arrested two days later at a Sunland motel and charged with three counts of murder. Despite the arson, blood evidence in a back bedroom of the house that had served as her prison strongly suggested that Rucker’s little girl Sienna had been badly beaten, and prosecutors had had little trouble convincing a jury that McDonald had killed her before disposing of her body, which was never found.

As I turned this version of events inside out for my brother’s benefit, rearranging the pieces in a way that only someone with personal knowledge of their true configuration possibly could, he let me speak without interruption, his eyes only leaving the road every now and then to check my face, trying to convince himself it was really me talking and not some stranger he’d never met and didn’t want to know. When I was done, he pulled the car over to the curb and killed the engine, leaving us to sit there in the dark, each of us searching for the right words to say.

‘I knew it,’ he finally said.

‘What?’

‘I always knew you fools were into some kind of ignorant shit. You were never extravagant enough to draw attention to yourselves, but money for the little things was always too readily at hand, and a brother like R.J., at least, should have been broke every other month.’

‘So why didn’t you ask me what I was doing?’

‘Because I didn’t want to know. I was afraid you might be dealing drugs, and if you were . . .’

‘It was all just a game, Chance. We were thieves, not thugs. Until the Excel job happened, we never hurt a soul.’

‘So why fuck with Excel at all? What the hell made you target the one man who could make the game blow up in your faces?’

I had no answer for him. He studied me for several seconds, waiting, then suddenly understood.

‘Olivia,’ he said.

‘I didn’t plan for him to die, Chance. I just wanted him to hurt. She deserved that much from the sonofabitch at least.’

My brother was shaking his head from side to side, unable to speak.

‘And after what he did to you – laughed in your face when you went begging for his help – I couldn’t stand by and do nothing. I tried, so help me, but I couldn’t.’

‘She wasn’t your woman,’ Chancellor said, angry now.

‘No. But that didn’t stop me from loving her.’

And there it was, after more than a quarter of a century: the truth he had always suspected but had never challenged me to deny.

‘So that’s what this was all about? Six people and a little girl dead, and one woman crippled for life, because you were in love with Olivia Gardner?’

I couldn’t even bring myself to nod.

‘You stupid bastard. It was none of your business. She didn’t need you to defend her honor, and neither did I.’

‘I know that.’

‘The hell you do. What happened to Olivia was her own fault, not Excel Rucker’s or anyone else’s. She went to that party and snorted his coke of her own free will, and she knew the risks involved. It took me a long time to understand that, but I finally got wise and moved on.’

‘I’m happy for you. And I’m envious. Moving on is something I’ve been trying to do for over half my life now.’

Silence took over the car, flooding every inch of its interior like a noxious gas. When it became too much to bear, I said, ‘So what happens now?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You’re a newspaper man, aren’t you? I just gave you the biggest story you’ll ever live to write. Are you going to write it?’

‘Are you asking me to?’

‘No. I just want to know where we stand after this.’

‘We stand where we always have, Errol. I’m your brother, not your judge. You and your friends tried to play God and got a lot of innocent people hurt. Somewhere along the way, either in this life or the next one, you’re going to have to answer to somebody for that.’ He shook his head. ‘But not to me. I’ve got your back now, same as always.’

His loyalty deserved something more heartfelt than a small nod of thanks, but that was all I could muster without falling apart.

‘I’m not the one you should be worried about in any case,’ Chance said. ‘Seems to me the person with the most to lose in all this is O’. If any of what you’ve just told me became a matter of public record, his career in politics would be finished. Have you thought about that?’

‘Of course.’

‘And?’

‘And I’m not so sure anymore that he’d draw the line at killing R.J. to keep him quiet. Or me, for that matter.’

‘You?’

‘I take it the gun I asked you to hide before the ambulance came is here in the car somewhere? The one that failed to fire when I tried to stop Eastman with it?’

‘It’s in the trunk under the spare. Why?’