Cemetery Road (7 page)

After a long pause, studying my face throughout, Chancellor said, ‘I see.’

I had put a lot of time and effort into developing a lie elaborate enough to fool him, and in the end, I could have saved myself the trouble. He took a swig from his canned soda, turned to eye the silent television, and, keeping his voice down for the sake of his wife, said, ‘What happened to R.J. is none of your business, Errol. Why do you feel the need to get involved?’

I went right on lying. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I think you do.’

And then I gave up. ‘We were friends, Chance, and I owe him. Those are the only reasons I’ve got.’

‘You don’t think the police can solve his murder without your help?’

‘Not if they’re unwilling to look beyond the obvious.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning you don’t shoot a man one year shy of his fiftieth birthday four times if all you want is his coke or his money.’

‘You think it was personal.’

‘At least in part. Yes.’ I took up my own water glass and drank, my throat suddenly dry. ‘O’ told me today the coroner found cocaine in R.J.’s system, so the blow can’t be completely ruled out as a motive. But there had to be more to his murder than that.’

‘Why? Because he was shot four times instead of two? People who deal in drugs don’t need a reason to be crueler than necessary, Errol. One bullet or twenty, guns get emptied into old men over drugs every day.’

‘That’s true enough,’ I said.

‘You want to do us both a favor? Keep your nose out of this thing and let the authorities handle it.’

‘I’m not planning on doing anything dangerous. I just want to cover some of the ground the cops might miss, before somebody else tries first and makes a complete mess of it.’

‘Somebody else? Like who?’

I told him about R.J.’s daughter Toni. ‘Apparently, she’s a private investigator back home in Seattle and her mother’s pushing hard for her to start an investigation of her own.’

‘So? Let her.’

‘She’s not that kind of PI, Chance. She pushes paper for an insurance company, the girl doesn’t know the first thing about criminal law.’

‘And you do?’

‘Let’s just say I like my chances better than hers of poking around in this thing without getting hurt.’

My brother fell silent again, weighing his need to protect me from myself against his almost nonexistent chances of success.

‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

I sensed, more so than saw, his wife appear in the kitchen doorway to one side of us, where she stood and waited to hear how I would answer her husband’s question.

‘The stories you write for the
Guardian
. Are any of them ever political?’

‘Political?’ He shrugged. ‘Some. Not many. Why?’

‘The picture I’ve been getting of O’ as a public servant isn’t all that attractive. Corruption, in particular, seems to come up a lot when people talk about him.’

‘You think O’ had something to do with R.J.’s murder?’

‘No. Not at all. But the business he’s in is the dirtiest one around, and if the man’s anywhere near as crooked as some people think he is, it’s at least conceivable that he might’ve got R.J. killed just by accident.’

Chancellor thought that over, said, ‘Bellwood isn’t my beat, so I can’t say I know for sure. But if I had to guess, I’d say the rumors about the mayor almost have to contain a fair amount of truth. He’s gotten a lot done in Bellwood in a short period of time, and it doesn’t seem logical he could have done it all without bending a law or two along the way.’

‘Bending or breaking?’

‘I can’t answer that, but I know a woman who probably could. Jessie Scott, she’s a writer on staff at the local paper down there. Would you like to talk to her?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘All right. I’ll call her tomorrow and give her your number. Anything else?’

‘Nothing else,’ his wife said, finally stepping into the room. ‘I don’t want you doing anything to get mixed up in all this murder business, and neither does your brother.’ She trained her steady gaze on me. ‘Do you, Errol?’

‘Andrea . . .’ Chance said.

‘No, she’s right,’ I said. ‘I don’t. One of us acting the fool is enough.’ I stood up. ‘Thank you both for dinner. Tell the boys I’ll catch up with ‘em at least once before I leave.’

I made it out to my car without either one of them trying to stop me.

Without much trouble, I talked myself into stopping for a drink somewhere between my brother’s home and my motel. I was staying at the Holiday Motor Court Inn, a ten-unit cluster of dirty white bungalows on Adams and Western, and I had yet to discover how being a guest there could accurately be described as a ‘holiday’. The motel was cheap and clean, and the big, mumbling Nigerian behind the front desk was the closest thing to a roach I’d seen since checking in, but my room was perpetually cold, its walls painted the color of sour milk, and I didn’t care to spend a minute longer on the premises than I had to.

It was just after eleven when I found a bar I remembered from the old days on the 2700 block of Western Avenue. The name it had gone by in my youth was no longer visible out front; a small, nearly illegible neon sign over the entrance now referred to the place as ‘Moody’s’. Almost thirty years had passed since I’d last dropped in, but it seemed little more than the bar’s name had changed. It was still small and pitch black inside, strewn with cheap round tables and listing chairs, and the only business it was doing was courtesy of a few lifeless scarecrows at the bar and one loud, toothless drunk at a distant table. The latter might have been Moody himself, I didn’t ask.

What I did do was plant myself on a stool at the bar and ask the tiny, dark-skinned girl standing behind it for a beer off the tap. I watched her draw it into a tall, clean glass and, while Marvin Gaye tried to make the best of a bad stereo, assessed my fellow patrons in the mirror, even as they did the same to me. A new face always requires some study, the more conspicuous the better, and not returning the favor can too easily be taken as a show of disrespect. What I saw was a woman and three men, all black and middle-aged like me, each of them just sober enough to keep their chins off their chests and their eyes halfway open. The woman was big and pretty, and her reflection smiled at me in the mirror. I just nodded back, not wanting either of the brothers flanking her to confuse simple courtesy with wanton desire.

I paid for my beer and took a long draw from it, looking for a mild state of inebriation in which to organize my thoughts. I was no closer to knowing why R.J. had been killed now than I had been at his funeral, but my long day of amateur police work had established one thing to my satisfaction, at least: O’Neal Holden knew more about it than he was telling. If he’d been loaning our old friend money from time to time as he claimed, it was for certain he knew precisely why R.J. needed it, because R.J. in financial straits would have instantly raised the mayor’s antenna for trouble, as it would have mine. Just as we’d admitted to each other over lunch, O’ and I had always expected that R.J. would be the one responsible if the lid ever came off the secret we had all once sworn to keep, so O’ would have responded to R.J.’s desperate loan requests with all the investigative powers at his disposal, needing to assure himself that R.J.’s problems weren’t somehow about to become his own.

Why Bellwood’s mayor had chosen to be less than forthcoming with me about the exact nature of our dead friend’s money troubles, I couldn’t say. I could only imagine that he had done so to protect his own interests, which were probably too varied and clandestine to list. The omission didn’t mean he had somehow been complicit in R.J.’s murder, but it did seem to reinforce the possibility.

Reflecting upon all this, it struck me that the light buzz from a domestic beer or two was not going to be anesthesia enough. I called the little bartender over and ordered something more debilitating: a J & B neat. The glass of amber liquid was barely in my hand when our party got bigger by a factor of one, a brother in paint-spattered work clothes and boots who entered the bar like a man who’d been given the wrong address. Younger than everyone else here but the bartender by at least a decade, he stood just inside the door and gave his narrow, wide-set eyes more time than they should have needed to adjust to the dark. He looked tired and angry, the victim of a day that had subjected him to more insult than he deserved.

‘Can I help you?’ the girl behind the bar asked.

By way of answer, he turned on his heel and vanished into the night again.

‘Know him?’ the bartender asked me.

‘No. You?’

She shook her head. I could see her trying to determine just how worried she should be.

‘He comes back and asks you to empty the cash register, don’t even stop to think about it. Just do it,’ I said, throwing back a long swig of scotch. ‘The money’s not yours, is it?’

‘No. But—’

‘You’ve got something back there for people like him and your orders are to use it. Yeah, I know. The thing is, if it goes down like that, he’s either gonna have to run, or you’re gonna have to kill him. Did he look like the kind who’ll run to you?’

‘No,’ the girl said, without hesitation. I had her thinking about playing it safe, but I could see she was still conflicted. She had a job to protect, and maybe even a couple of children to support, and women have their pride too. Just giving the man Moody’s money if he asked for it would be both a violation of her duties and a humiliating act of capitulation.

This was assuming, of course, that the man in the paint-spattered clothes had any intention of coming back just to order a drink, let alone jack the place. I didn’t know if the girl’s instincts about him were right or not, but I did know mine were questionable at best. I had been primed to sense trouble in every direction since I’d stepped off the plane at LAX this morning, and this was probably just the latest example of my finding it where none actually existed.

Still, for nearly an hour, I sat there at the bar waiting for the front door to reopen with the same degree of dread as the little bartender, until time and another two shots of scotch finally eased my mind. Maybe the brother with all the paint on his clothes was just biding his time, waiting for last call to reappear when the girl with the keys to the cash register might be the only one around to see him shove a gun in her face, but if so, I was no longer sober or paranoid enough to consider the possibility. I had enough real monsters to worry about; there wasn’t room in my head for any imaginary ones.

When at last I was feeling marginally less pain than a man about to get behind the wheel of a car probably should, I raised myself up off my bar stool and paid my tab, giving the bartender a clumsy nod as I tossed the bills down on the counter to let her know I wasn’t as wasted as I appeared. She didn’t buy it.

‘You gonna be OK?’

I treated the question like she’d thrown it at someone else and shuffled out on to the sidewalk, where the cold night air wrapped fingers of ice around my face. All was quiet as I found my rental car in the deserted parking lot and ran a hand through my trouser pocket for the keys. When I had them out, finger poised over the alarm button on the fob, a voice behind me said, ‘Open it up and get in.’

He’d found a gun somewhere; other than that, everything else was the same: the scowl, the paint-dappled pants, and the trouble he seemed to advertise like an odor he couldn’t scrub from his skin. I tried to play stupid.

‘Say what?’

‘I said open the goddamn car and get in. Back door, too, for me.’

My eyes couldn’t be completely trusted in the lot’s paltry light, inebriated as I was, but the gun in his hand looked like a short-barreled .38, weapon enough to put a hole in my gut he could put his fist through once the bullet was done tearing it open.

‘You want the car? Here . . .’

I tried to offer him the keys, but he stepped back, said, ‘I ain’t gonna ask you again, old man. Open the motherfuckin’ car!’

I hit the button on the key fob and the car doors came free with a loud chirp of the alarm, but I made no move to get in. Afraid as I was, there was a limit to how complicit I was willing to be in my own demise. I knew that if he wanted me to play driver while he sat in the back, pointing the snout of his piece at the nape of my neck, it wasn’t because he needed a ride somewhere and the buses had all stopped running. He had a destination for me in mind and, if I was fool enough to actually help him get me there, I’d probably pay for it with my life.

‘I’m not getting in the car, son,’ I said.

It was an insane thing to say, and he had to study me closely for several seconds before he could bring himself to believe I wasn’t joking. Incredulous as well as furious now, he shook his head and said, ‘I don’t wanna hurt you. But you ain’t givin’ me no choice. If you don’t get in that motherfucka right now—’

He stretched his right arm out to aim the .38 directly at the sweet spot between my eyes.

‘—you’re a dead man.’

Which, as far as I was concerned, I was doomed to be either way. I held my ground and said nothing.

‘Have it your way, then,’ he said.

I don’t know what I was thinking, other than that I didn’t have anything to lose, but I threw my left hand up to knock his arm to one side and ducked down low, throwing myself at him with all the controlled movement my intoxicated state would allow. His gun went off once only inches from my left ear and, after that, things played out exactly as I would have expected. He retreated a couple of steps, turned to one side as I came in, and then tossed me to the ground like an overcoat he’d just shaken off.

I lay there at his feet, breathing hard and heavy, and watched him swing the .38 around to finally get the job done right. I heard a loud bang and jumped, like a toddler at the sound of a popping balloon, and the back window of the car above me exploded into fragments, showering my head with glass.