Cemetery Road Page 4

  I knew it would not be a simple matter to receive an audience with such a man, even for me. The mayor of any city is invariably busy, beholden to obligations that make impromptu meetings difficult to arrange. But I went calling on O’ just the same. My digging into the mess that was R.J.’s murder was going to draw his attention sooner or later, and I decided it would be best to go knocking on his door first, rather than wait for him to come sniffing around mine.

  For a brief moment, I considered taking the conventional route of engagement, calling his office to see if he could see me on a moment’s notice. But then I imagined all the evasions that tact would afford him, should he feel the need to study his lines before we met, and I chose to take another, somewhat more direct approach.

  An ambush.

  ‘Goddamn, Handy. You haven’t missed a trick, I swear.’

  We were having lunch at an upscale Italian restaurant on the outskirts of Bellwood called Antonio Z’s. O’s name wasn’t on the booth in the back we were occupying, but I could tell it belonged to him just the same. The officious young hostess who’d greeted us out front led us to the spot without a word of instruction, and the staff as a whole was treating the mayor like the first Pope to wear a cream-colored suit and 300-dollar Stacy Adams shoes.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Hell, you know what I mean. Walking into a Council meeting in mid-session to take a front-row seat right under my nose. You couldn’t have made yourself more conspicuous if you’d been pulling an elephant along on a leash.’

  ‘It got your attention, didn’t it?’

  ‘If you wanted to see me, Handy, you could’ve just called my office for an appointment.’

  ‘And waited three weeks for you to clear a date on your calendar? I needed to see you today, O’.’

  I’d found Bellwood’s City Council chambers on the second floor of the City Hall building, in the heart of a two-block stretch of commercial real estate the locals ambitiously called ‘downtown’. Wood-paneled and brightly lit, the chamber room had held all of fifteen people upon my entrance, including the mayor and four members of his Council. I could have stood in the back by the door and still given O’ little choice but to eventually acknowledge my presence and deal with it.

  Which, to his credit, he did sooner rather than later. In the process of delivering an enthusiastic and highly persuasive argument in favor of a Main Street beautification project, Bellwood’s large and charismatic mayor noted my arrival and registered it with a wink and a smile, never missing a beat of his oratory. It was classic O’Neal Holden. When you pinned the big man into a corner from which there was no escape, he didn’t waste a whole lot of time resenting you for it. He simply resigned himself to the space you’d hemmed him up in and commended you for having had the foresight to corner him first.

  ‘I knew you’d come back,’ he said to me now, ivory smile beaming with self-satisfaction. ‘I just didn’t think it’d be so soon.’

  ‘What can I say? Guess I’m still the fool you’ve always said I am.’

  ‘Not a fool. Just an alarmist. We’ve got nothing to be afraid of, Handy. R.J.’s murder had nothing to do with us.’

  ‘And you know that how?’

  ‘I know it because I’ve talked to people familiar with the case who’ve told me so, that’s how. Have you?’

  He paused for me to answer him, forged ahead when I didn’t. ‘Look, I can’t be getting involved in this thing, all right? I stuck my neck out farther than I should have just by going to homeboy’s funeral. The press ever puts me and R.J. together, they’re gonna go back to where the three of us began and start digging. And I think you and I both know where that could lead.’

  I didn’t have to tell him that I did.

  A waiter came around to ask for our order, and we used the interruption to get all the unavoidable small talk out of the way. We asked each other about wives and kids, O’ confessed to having one of the former and two of the latter, and I told him what little there was to tell about Coral. He took the info in without much visible reaction, but I was certain the story saddened him all the same, because it saddened me just to relate it. A forty-nine-year-old man who’d never married but had a grown daughter he rarely saw and barely knew, turning screws on broken toasters and washing machines just to eat . . . The only thing that could have made my life more disheartening to describe was its belonging to someone who deserved better.

  ‘So when was the last time you’d seen him?’ I asked, forcibly steering our conversation back toward the business that had brought me here.

  ‘R.J.? Brother, I was gonna ask you that. I hadn’t seen R.J. in a hundred years.’

  ‘That right?’

  ‘Come on, Handy. I just told you: I couldn’t get anywhere near R.J. Burrow. And even if I could have—’

  ‘We had an agreement. Sure we did. But what if R.J. tried to reach you all the same? Twenty-six years is a long time to stay away from people you used to look upon as family, O’.’

  Bellwood’s mayor shook his head. ‘Didn’t happen,’ he said.

  ‘But if it had. What would you have done?’

  ‘I’d have taken his call, same as I would have taken yours. Hell, what are you getting at here? You don’t think I had something to do with his murder?’

  ‘If one of us was ever going to talk out of turn, it would have been him,’ I said. ‘I think you and I have always known that. Nobody had a harder time dealing with what we did than R.J.’

  ‘We didn’t “do” anything,’ O’ said tersely.

  ‘You really still believe that?’

  ‘You’re goddamn right I do.’

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I had thought his sense of denial on the subject would wear down after twenty-six years. Instead, its edge seemed as keen as ever.

  ‘OK, how’s this,’ I said. ‘Nobody took what “happened” to us harder than R.J., and maybe after wrestling with his conscience all this time, he found the need to vent.’

  Just as I sometimes do myself, I thought, but did not say.

  ‘Vent to whom? The police?’

  ‘There wouldn’t have been much point, but the impulse would have been a natural one just the same. Only, R.J. wouldn’t have wanted to go to them alone. He’d have wanted one or both of us to go with him.’

  ‘And you’re suggesting that, if he’d come to me, I would have killed him to keep him quiet. Shot his ass full of holes and left him in that car to die down by the pier.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  O’ shook his head at the ceiling and chuckled, deriding the absurdity of my thinking. He leaned hard across the table toward me, said, ‘Listen to me, Handy. I’m going to tell you the same thing I told you two fools twenty-six years ago, and the same thing I would have told either one of you if you’d asked me about it since, but didn’t: We made a mistake. We made a play that turned bad, and some innocent people got hurt. It was fucked up, but that’s how it goes sometimes.’

  Our server chose this moment to deliver our meals, and O’ seemed to find some relief in his timing. He was starting to lose his cool, and the respite gave him a chance to regenerate before any real damage could be done.

  ‘Tell me something, O’,’ I said. ‘Has R.J.’s daughter been around to see you yet?’

  ‘Toni? No. Why should she?’

  ‘Because she’s a private investigator by profession up in Seattle, and she and her mother aren’t going to take R.J.’s murder lying down. I was just up by R.J.’s place to see them and they’re both frothing at the mouth over all the rocks she’s going to turn over searching for his killer on her own.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you’re going to have to talk to the young lady eventually, brother, and lies aren’t going to fly with her. You want to hand me some line about it being twenty-six years since you last spoke to R.J., fine, but if you try that shit on her—’

  ‘OK, OK. Take it easy, Jesus.’ I’d deliberately let my voice rise above that of me
re civil conversation and he took the bait, finally betraying some aggravation for all the effort I’d been putting into provoking it. ‘R.J. called me once or twice over the years, sure. The Times runs a picture of me on the City Hall steps every other month, and he’s three months behind on his mortgage – who else was he going to ask for help? You?’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t afford any contact with the man.’

  ‘I can’t, and I’ve never had any. The two times I loaned him a few dollars, there were two people between me and the bagman who actually handed him the money.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘The last time? Two, maybe three years ago, I’m not sure.’

  ‘And how much was a “few dollars”?’

  ‘Ten bills the last time, and six before that, about fifteen years ago. Look, Handy, this is ridiculous. Why in the hell should you, or R.J.’s daughter, or anyone else be trying to connect his murder to people he last knew almost thirty years ago? R.J. was always a magnet for trouble, and he’d had a hell of lot of time to find more since we all said our goodbyes to each other. Even if he didn’t die exactly the way the police think he did, it’s sure as hell safe to say one thing about their theory of the crime is dead-on: However all that blow got in that car that night, some of it went up homeboy’s nose. That sound like a man who wasn’t asking for what happened to him to you?’

  ‘Waitaminute. You’re saying he was loaded when he died?’

  ‘Damn straight.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s in the coroner’s report. I’ve got a man close to the investigation. You’re making me repeat everything I tell you twice, Handy, damn.’

  Neither R.J.’s widow nor his daughter had said anything to me that morning about cocaine being found in R.J.’s system, only that traces of the drug had been discovered in the car in which he died.

  ‘Don’t look so damn surprised,’ O’ said. ‘You said it yourself: The man always took what happened back in the day harder than us. If somewhere down the line he got in the habit of doing a little blow to help him forget now and then, it wouldn’t have been entirely unlike him. And R.J. under the influence of an illegal narcotic, well . . . If that’s not a formula for disaster, I don’t know what is.’

  He was right. I couldn’t envision any scenario in which a combination of R.J. and blow would not have eventually resulted in either his death or incarceration, no matter how much he might have mellowed over the years.

  ‘I want to talk to him,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your man “close to the investigation”. I want you to set up a meeting.’

  ‘Forget it. He’d never talk to you. You’re a Maytag repairman, Handy, not a cop.’

  ‘If you made it worth his while, he’d take the meeting. I’m asking you to make it worth his while.’

  My old friend shook his head again, preparing to hand me another line of excuses, but before he could open his mouth, I said, ‘It’s bullshit, O’. Fifty-year-old man steals a car, fills it up with cocaine, then drives it out to the beach to try and sell it? You can buy that if you want, but not me.’

  ‘Handy . . .’

  ‘I’m not going back home until I’m sure this time, all right? I’ve been running for twenty-six years, just like you said back at the cemetery, and I’m tired of it. If I’m next on somebody’s shit list, they’re going to have to do me right here, right now, before I find a way to do them first.’

  ‘That’s crazy talk,’ O’ said.

  ‘Maybe. But if I’m not crazy, it might be in your best interests to give me all the help you can. If you follow my drift.’

  He did. The math was too simple to ignore. There once had been three of us to hold accountable for the decades-old crime we had committed, and now there were only two. Unless that was a mere coincidence, O’s life was just as much at risk now as mine.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said irritably, waving our waiter over to collect the bill. He drew a platinum credit card from his wallet and laid it down in the tray. ‘Where can my man reach you?’

  I gave him my mobile phone number and the name of my motel, and he input the info into a cellphone that probably cost more than the rental car I was driving.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Just one. Allow me to pay for lunch today. From what I heard at that meeting this morning, you don’t need to give Councilwoman Madera any more quote-unquote “business” expenses to put under her little microscope.’

  O’ snorted. ‘Angie? Please. I’ve left her on the short end of too many Council votes for her liking lately, and that was her idea of payback, making a big show of sniffing around my every move for some sign of impropriety.’

  For the sixty-plus minutes I’d spent in chambers waiting for the mayor to get free, I’d thought nothing would ever raise the dialogue above a tepid drone until Madera – a short, stern-faced Latina I figured to be in her early forties – tried to enter an item to the floor that was not on the day’s agenda. As near as I could tell, it had something to do with a trip to San Francisco the mayor and an aide had taken the previous month on the city’s dime, which Madera failed to see as relevant to the business affairs of Bellwood.

  ‘This aide you took up to San Francisco – it wouldn’t be that pretty young thing you were talking to after the meeting?’

  She’d been a stunner, late twenties or early thirties, caramel complexion, wearing a tailored brown business suit that looked tight enough to leave imprints of its stitches on her skin. Just the sort of younger woman to whom a man like O’ might assign the duties of a mistress. She’d conferred with O’ for a quick minute, delivering some papers for him to sign, then he’d sent her on her way, post-haste, as if he knew I’d be asking him the very question I’d just asked about her now.

  ‘Get your mind out of the gutter, Handy,’ O’ said, either miffed, uncomfortable, or some combination of the two. ‘That was Brenda’s daughter Iman. She works for me.’

  ‘Your sister Brenda?’

  ‘Iman was her second husband’s oldest daughter. And for the record, no – she wasn’t the aide who went up north with me. That was Gerald Coker. You wanna make something dirty out of that?’

  ‘No, but I bet Angie Madera sure would.’

  ‘Yeah, well, she’s out of luck. Same as always. Take this little conference you and I just had, for instance.’ He flashed me a grin and winked his right eye. ‘You’re an old dog of mine, Handy. If the lady wants to find the money for your lunch where I plan to hide it, her fat ass is welcome to try.’

  And with that, he threw his head back and laughed, the way he used to in the old days whenever he’d sold a lie to somebody just for the thrill of proving he could.

  SEVEN

  It all went down exactly the way we planned it. That was the greatest irony of all. No one was supposed to get hurt, and technically, no one did. Our intended victim was Excel Rucker, and we were only after his money, not his soul.

  We took our time putting everything together. We were in no hurry to act. For four weeks, R.J., O’ and I took turns shadowing Rucker until his routine made his safe houses evident, and then we watched the safe houses themselves. We did our own census of occupants and visitors, tracking every movement and habit, and compiled careful records of the hours in which lights went dim in windows and doors were dead-bolted shut. We knew who and how many, what they drove and, in some cases, how well they were armed, and eventually, we knew exactly where we wanted to take Excel down.

  It was an ordinary little duplex apartment out in Inglewood, several miles west of the dealer’s normal scope of operations. The apartment was home to a woman and three men, a quartet we broke down to a supervisor, his wife, and a pair of male soldiers. The supervisor was obese and non-threatening, and the soldiers were typical of the breed in their interminable projection of menace, but it was the woman who may have spooked us the most. She was a wild-haired crazy who flew into spontaneous rages, the kind of rages that
precipitate many a prison yard killing, and in partnership with the enforcers who catered to her every whim, she was arguably the most intimidating of all the guard dogs under Excel Rucker’s employ.

  More than the people who occupied it, however, it was the Inglewood apartment itself that made the site ideal for our purposes. Excel’s three other safe houses were either apartments in large complexes or single-family homes crawling with children. They were all crowded and cramped, in buildings that seemed to be separated from their neighbors by the breadth of a chalk line, and none of them offered easy entrance nor exit to a thief. Conversely, the Inglewood duplex sat on a short, quiet block outside the chaos of the ’hood proper, with room to breathe on all sides, and there was rarely very much in the way of vehicular or foot traffic around to disturb it. Though it had bars on all its windows, and a pair of relative innocents lived in the unit adjacent to Excel’s, these were minor drawbacks easily trumped by the additional access of an alley out back and an uncomplicated, single-story layout its exterior made all but obvious.

  We watched the place for twenty-two days. During that time, it was Rucker’s routine to visit twice a week, on Monday and Thursday nights, and always around ten thirty p.m. We were never able to determine which night was for deposits and which was for withdrawals, nor what, exactly, was the currency involved – dope or cash? – but based upon what few clues the dealer and his crew gave us, we eventually concluded that our biggest take awaited us immediately after one of his Thursday night appearances.

  The plan, as I’ve said, was to enter, grab the cash and dope, and get out, without bloodshed of any kind. We had no experience in gunplay and did not intend to resort to any now. But Excel Rucker was not our typical mark, and certain concessions had to be made. If something went wrong and we weren’t prepared to deal with it, we could all wind up dead, and even I wasn’t ready to take that risk.