Cemetery Road (25 page)

‘O’s the one who gave it to me. And I’d be willing to bet that if I broke it down later, I’d find out the firing pin’s either been filed down or is missing altogether.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It’s like you said: He had a lot to lose if R.J. ran his mouth off to the wrong people. And it seems obvious now that in the last few months of his life, R.J. was on the verge of doing exactly that. He went to see McDonald in prison, perhaps to make a full confession. He sought out Linda Dole and made a reclamation project out of her son. Clearly, whatever guilt he’d been living with since I left for Minnesota had taken on a whole new dimension recently. The thing I don’t understand yet is, why? Why after all these years did he suddenly feel the need to do penance?’

My brother shrugged. ‘Maybe he’d just lived with it long enough. It was either do penance, or put a gun to his head.’

Which was essentially what R.J. had ended up doing if what Eastman had claimed happened out at the Santa Monica Pier two-and-a-half weeks ago could be believed. He’d just gone about suicide in a more creative manner than some. Stealing the car would have been his idea of irony – once a thief, always a thief – and goading Eastman into pulling the trigger for him would have killed two birds with one stone: his punishment and Eastman’s right to revenge.

The punishment, R.J. had indeed received, in spades – but whether Eastman had taken his revenge or refused it, leaving the job of killing R.J. that night to someone else who had come along after he had fled, was still an open – and increasingly distressing – question.

Chance tried to talk me into spending the night at his place, convinced now that O’Neal Holden had essentially tried to kill me once and would eventually try again, but I refused the invitation. There was a part of me that still wanted to give O’ the benefit of the doubt for one thing, and I felt I had caused my brother enough grief for one day, for another. For the latter reason alone, I jumped into my rental car the minute we arrived at Linda Dole’s residence and quickly drove off.

As there had been the day before, someone was waiting for me at my motel when I got there, only this time it was somebody I recognized.

‘I hope you don’t mind my dropping in on you like this,’ a harried looking Sylvia Nu
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ez said, standing before the door to my room, ‘but I’ve been calling you for hours and you haven’t been answering your phone.’

She was right. I’d turned my cellphone off at the request of the Sheriff’s detectives who had questioned me out in Carson, and I hadn’t given it a second thought since.

‘Sorry. I’ve had a rather rough day.’

‘I know. That’s why I was calling. You’ve been all over the news.’

‘Ah, yes. I guess I would have been, huh?’ I gave her a smile to show her that, if nothing else, the day’s events had not cost me my sense of humor.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine. Physically, anyway. Would you like to come in?’ I started to put my key in the door.

‘Actually, I was hoping you’d let me take you out somewhere. Just for drinks, or even to eat if you like. Have you had dinner yet?’

I hadn’t. In fact, it had been over six hours since my last meal and I was famished. She drove me out to Manhattan Beach, where we just beat closing time to do seafood on the pier and empty a bottle of fine Chardonnay, agreeing early on to avoid all conversation that would darken the mood of the evening. To fill the void, she talked about her two grown sons and the abusive ex-husband who had fathered them, and I talked about my daughter Coral, telling her nothing close to everything there was to say, but far more than I’d ever shared with another soul. Though the subject pained me more than I could hide, reminding me as it did of the devil’s bargain I had made with Coral the day before, Sylvia Nu
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ez didn’t push me for details. She just let me speak my piece and listened attentively, her occasional notes of commiseration genuine and unforced.

Overall, the lady was a good listener who only laughed to suit herself, not me, and she knew when to let a subject drop and move on to something else. I liked her, which was no small thing for a misanthrope such as I, and in the flickering wash of candlelight at our table, her edgy, unconventional beauty was becoming more obvious to me by the minute.

I paid our bill and we walked along the pier for a while, the churning water out beyond the pilings beneath us nearly as black as the starless sky above. We were alone, save for a handful of homeless people swaddled in multiple layers of old blankets, and young, paired-off lovers too enchanted with each other to notice anything else.

‘This is stupid, isn’t it?’ Sylvia Nu
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ez asked.

‘What’s that?’

‘What we’re doing. Seeing each other like this. We met two days ago. What am I doing here?’

I’d been wondering the same thing myself, and had yet to come up with an answer that made sense from every angle.

‘You have someplace better to be?’

She thought about it, then smiled and shook her head. ‘No. And that’s sad, isn’t it?’

‘It is what it is. We aren’t the first two lonely people to hook up without having good reason, and I’m sure we won’t be the last.’

‘Yes, but what’s the point? Why bother taking the chill off like this if it’s never for more than a night or two?’

‘You want me to tell you this is bigger than that? I can’t. I won’t.’ I reached out to stroke the side of her face, nudging a strand of hair away from her eyes. ‘So we’re acting like a couple of clueless kids. So what? Stupid and pointless as this may be, it feels good. Doesn’t it?’

I had to ask her again to get an answer: ‘Doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. It feels good.’

‘All right, then. It’s been a long time since I last found the need to stop all my self-pity and get close to somebody, anybody, for longer than five minutes. And for two nights running, I’ve done that for you. That may not make you the answer to all my problems, no, but it does make you somebody I’m happy as hell to have run into. For whatever that’s worth.’

She tilted her head back, came up on her toes to give me a soft, generous kiss on the mouth. ‘It’s worth a lot.’

We made love in my motel room in the dark, and afterward she insisted we turn on the TV to hunt for news coverage of my narrow escape from death in Harbor City. I tried to talk her out of it, only to realize I was curious enough about the way the news people would portray me to acquiesce.

It was well after eleven and most of the late-night newscasts were deep into their lead stories, but we did manage to catch the tail end of one report that featured some video of Darrel Eastman’s body being removed from his mother’s house by people from the coroner’s office, and a pair of Linda Dole’s neighbors offering their observations of the mayhem that had occurred there. I was nowhere to be seen, though the perky young Asian woman filing the remote dropped my name at least twice, referring to me as the ‘suspect’ authorities had taken into custody and then released.

At the conclusion of this stirring bit of entertainment, Sylvia gave me a kiss, laughed and promptly went to sleep. I started to do the same, until the reel-to-reel tape recorder on the lone table in the room caught my eye and beckoned me to its side. On my way into Bellwood to see Jessie Scott, I’d stopped at an electronics supply shop and picked up a new drive pulley, a reel of tape and a cheap condenser microphone, and I’d been anxious to break them out of the bag ever since.

Twenty minutes in, working in meager light to avoid waking my guest, I had the Sony moving tape in all three modes – play, fast forward and reverse – but it wasn’t playing back sound. It recorded just fine – the needles of its VU meters did the proper dance when I whispered into the mic – but all I heard on playback was silence.

One step forward and two steps back. Repair or detective work, it seemed to be all the same.

I was going to pursue matters with the recorder further when the phone in my room rang, finally drawing my attention to the red message light flashing on the instrument. I still hadn’t turned my cellphone back on, and upon my return to my room, had been too preoccupied with taking Sylvia Nu
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ez to bed to even glance in the direction of this one. My first thought was that it might be Coral calling, having learned of my stabbing a man to death earlier in the day via the Internet or some national newscast back home, but it wasn’t my daughter on the other end of the line when I picked up.

It was Toni Burrow.

‘Thank God,’ she said upon hearing my voice.

She told me she and her mother had heard about Darrel Eastman’s death, and my significant role in it, late that afternoon, and like Sylvia Nu
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ez, Toni had been trying to reach me ever since. Not unexpectedly, and despite the late hour, she wanted a full report, certain that the story the media was disseminating was rife with false truths and inaccuracies. I gave her the shortest version possible, both tired of reliving a bad day and uncomfortable talking to R.J.’s daughter with a woman he’d been having a casual affair with lying naked right beside me, awake again now and listening in.

When I was done, I asked Toni Burrow if she had shared everything I had told her that morning with her mother, unable to ask the question in a way that would imply I had no great interest in her answer.

‘No. And right now, I doubt that I ever will,’ she said.

She sounded ashamed of the deception. I promised her I’d come see her and her mother in the morning to discuss Eastman’s death in greater detail, then begged her forgiveness for being too tired to say much more than goodbye, anxious to get off the phone.

‘But wait,’ she said, before I could hang up. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

‘Yes?’

‘I got an answer back from Pelican Bay this afternoon. Your request to visit Paris McDonald has been approved.’

TWENTY-THREE

O
’ would never tell R.J. and me much about what he’d done in that house out in Simi Valley after we’d left him there. ‘The less you niggas know about it, the better,’ he kept saying, growing increasingly tired of being asked.

I’d been right about the fire, however, and once the story hit the news, everything else about O’s actions that night became painfully evident. Prior to torching the place, and after having stripped it of any trace of our presence in it, he had manipulated all the evidence in the bedroom – the bodies of Excel Rucker and Paris McDonald’s woman, the weapons that had killed them, etc. – to infer that McDonald had at least murdered one of them, if not both.

And the cops bought it.

From all indications, a four-year-old girl had been snatched from her home, brutally beaten and her body done away with, and nobody much cared to hear anything the man responsible had to say about being innocent of the three murders he was eventually charged with. They had found him unconscious and stinking of booze at the scene of the Simi Valley fire, sprawled out on the grass in the backyard like a fallen scarecrow, and swearing he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there didn’t dissuade anyone from thinking they already knew: He’d crawled out there after setting the house aflame, then passed out before he could finish off his escape. The man had a long record of criminal brutality, both in and outside the ring, and if that didn’t exactly prove he was a murderer, his lack of short-term memory almost certainly did.

As for the thieves who had allegedly made it impossible for the child’s father to meet McDonald’s ransom demands, we ultimately became little more than a distraction the police and the D.A.’s office chose to only half-heartedly pursue. If a couple of hoods – or three, depending on which unreliable witness was telling the story – had in fact complicated the girl’s kidnapping by ripping her father off only days before, this was judged at best an insignificant aside to the central issue of McDonald’s culpability in three homicides. Why worry about us when the only purpose that would serve would be to muddy the waters of an otherwise solid case against a suspect already in custody?

Not that we would have been easy to find had the police made a greater effort to look for us. For days after O’ put a match to the house of the dead woman we now knew had gone by the name of Noreen Phillips, we went back into the three shells we had created for ourselves immediately following the Inglewood safe house robbery. I stayed put in my crib while O’ and R.J., holed up together, did the same out at O’s, where they had been since the night Excel Rucker died. It was O’ who nursed R.J. back to health, following the instructions for treating a gunshot wound he found in a book he’d checked out from the library: apply pressure to stop the bleeding, clean the wound with hydrogen peroxide, then dress with a dry cloth and do the last two steps all over again, three times a day for at least a week. In the end, it worked, but none of us ever had any illusions about why: R.J. had been damn lucky. Another inch closer to his liver and the bullet that tore right through him would have left him with a hole too big for a layman like O’ to heal.

Unlike R.J., however, there was no putting our lives back together the way they had been before we ripped off Excel Rucker. That ill-fated decision had taken the world we knew and changed its shape forever, making it impossible for us to assume our old places in it. O’ and R.J. were slower than me to understand this, but I was convinced of it from the moment O’ returned to his apartment from Simi that night, three hours after we’d last seen him, and our collective guilt began to shred us to pieces.

‘What the hell’re we gonna do?’ R.J. kept asking, weeping like a widow at a funeral from where he lay on O’s living room couch. I’d gotten his bleeding to stop and redressed his wounds once already, but he was still in a lot of pain. ‘We killed that little girl.’

‘Shut the fuck up! We didn’t kill anybody!’ O’ snapped.

‘You know what he means,’ I said. ‘We may not have killed her ourselves, but we’re the reason she’s dead. There’s no way of getting around that, O’.’