Cemetery Road Read online

  The day R.J. showed O’ and me the three guns he had secured for our use, the three of us all sitting around O’s dining room table, I was given my first clue that what we were about to do could only end badly.

  ‘This one here,’ R.J. said, bouncing a black, .45 caliber Colt around in his right hand like a kid with a new baseball, ‘will take a motherfucker’s head off from across the room. This right here is mine.’

  O’ and I looked over the two weapons remaining – a 9 mm Smith & Wesson semi-auto, and an old, badly scarred .38 caliber Beretta revolver – with equal disinterest.

  ‘Do you care?’ O’ asked.

  ‘No. Why should I? They’re only going to be for show.’

  ‘Shee-it,’ R.J. said, laughing.

  I turned to face him directly. ‘I say something funny?’

  R.J. looked first to O’ – ‘“For show”, the man says.’ – then back at me. ‘You think that’s all we might have to do? Show them niggas a gun?’ He shook his head at the sheer stupidity of the idea. ‘You need to stop trippin’, Handy.’

  ‘Trippin’? Who’s trippin’?’ I could feel my face burning red.

  ‘Take it easy, Handy,’ O’ said.

  ‘No, no, fuck that. We’ve already had this conversation. We aren’t firing a goddamn shot that we don’t have to fire. This fool here doesn’t like that, we can forget this whole thing right now.’

  R.J. frowned as if amused. ‘Who you callin’ a fool?’

  ‘Nobody. He’s not callin’ anybody a fool. Both of you niggas chill out,’ O’ said.

  ‘Only fool around here is you,’ R.J. said, maddogging me, ‘if you think we gonna go in there and take Excel’s shit without fuckin’ somebody up or gettin’ fucked up ourselves. It’s a drug dealer’s safe house, dumb-ass, not a furniture warehouse! We’re in the big leagues now.’

  He was grinning from ear to ear. I turned to O’, demanding his intervention.

  ‘Put the gun down, R.J.,’ he said.

  ‘What? This?’

  ‘Yeah, that. Put it down.’

  R.J. did as he was told, but the grin stayed where it was.

  ‘Homeboy’s right. Ain’t nobody here gonna be pulling the trigger on any of these pieces. And I’m gonna tell you why, just as soon as you wipe that ignorant-ass smile off your face.’

  This time, it took R.J. a little longer to comply.

  ‘Because if we do, it means somebody fucked up. Forgot what the plan was, or did something stupid. And ain’t none of us are gonna do that, are we?’

  ‘O’, all I’m sayin’—’

  ‘I said, none of us are gonna do that, are we?’

  R.J. sat there for a long minute, burning. No one had the influence over him O’ did, but sometimes, even O’ could push him too far. One day they were going to throw down on each other and R.J. would have O’s neck in two pieces before he remembered who he was sparring with.

  ‘No. We ain’t,’ R.J. said.

  It was O’ who had asked the question, but R.J.’s sneer was directed at me.

  I tried to make peace with him later that evening, as we walked out to our cars to drive home. He’d had little to say to either of us after O’ called him out, and I didn’t want his foul mood to carry over into the critical days ahead.

  ‘Look, brother,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry about getting in your face about the guns. But you were freaking me out. Talking like you’re actually hopin’ to shoot somebody, or something.’

  R.J. looked at me in a way that left no doubt that he found my naivety pathetic. ‘I ain’t gotta hope,’ he said.

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘It means jackin’ Excel Rucker was your idea, nigga, not mine or O’s. You the one got the hard-on for him, not us.’

  ‘So?’

  He got right up in my face, nose-to-nose. ‘So I ain’t gonna let neither one of us get killed tryin’ to do this shit your way, Handy. I told you from the get-go, fuckin’ with a playa like Excel ain’t no joke. You wanna go up in his house and rip him off, you gotta be ready to lay a motherfucker out.’ He stuck a finger in my chest. ‘And that’s exactly what I’m gonna be.’

  He gave me one last jab to cast me aside and walked away. I thought about going after him, but I couldn’t see any point.

  I had a chance right then to call the Excel Rucker job off and I didn’t take it. The memory of Olivia Gardner was still a call for revenge too powerful for me to ignore. To put myself at ease, I told myself we had devised a plan that even R.J.’s volatility could not impair. All we had to do was follow it to the letter, avoid all improvisation and error, and our success would be assured.

  What I failed to understand is that no plan is ever impervious to chance. No matter how scrupulously rehearsed or executed, the designs of mortal men will always be as prone to the unexpected as cloud patterns in the sky.

  It was a lesson I was doomed to learn the hard way.

  EIGHT

  My brother Chancellor was the only family I left behind when I fled Los Angeles for good in the winter of 1979. Our mother had died of ovarian cancer three years earlier and our father had disappeared six years before that, allegedly with a fat woman who had money. We were our parents’ only offspring, and as far as my brother and I knew, we had no other living relatives west of the Mississippi.

  I cannot say we parted on the best of terms. Olivia Gardner’s death had shaken Chancellor badly, and he was already on the downward spiral that would not bottom out for many years when I told him I was leaving. My reasons were all hollow and fabricated, and he knew it, but all he did to let on was accept them in silence, as if they weren’t even worth the breath it would take to discount them. Like our mother, he had never cared for R.J. and O’, and had always been able to see the trouble my association with them would bring me, so there was nothing about my sudden need to put some distance between us he could find particularly surprising.

  My leaving hurt him nonetheless.

  We kept in contact for the first year or so strictly by telephone, calling each other after months of avoiding it just to keep the illusion of interest alive. Then we just stopped. Chancellor’s descent into alcoholism became too pronounced for him to disguise anymore, and I couldn’t keep the ring of pity out of my voice. I had never before seen the loss of a woman drag a man that far down into despair, and in my ignorance of the phenomenon, I decided it would be better to abandon my brother altogether than to bear witness to his resounding weakness.

  I have no actual knowledge, then, of the depths he eventually reached. I only know that the woman who answered his phone late one night in 1989 could not stop weeping long enough to properly explain his absence, and that was the last time the number I had for him worked at all. I had given him up for dead until he resurfaced four years later, ending our estrangement not with a phone call but a letter, written from a hospital bed. It was an invitation to resume contact and little else, sprinkled with allusions to his recovery from a personal nightmare he would not name.

  Whatever had prompted his disappearance, he came out of it a new man, equally laconic, perhaps, but stronger and less self-absorbed. Gradually, and with considerable caution, we returned to our routine of intermittent phone calls, and in the course of our reconciliation, Chancellor went back to school and married the weepy woman who’d answered his phone that night in 1989. He earned a degree in Journalism from Cal State Dominguez Hills and eventually parlayed it into the steady job he continued to hold today, staff writer for the Los Angeles Guardian, the oldest black-owned newspaper in the city.

  I hadn’t bothered to look my brother up when I’d come out for R.J.’s funeral, having only planned to be in town less than a day, but now that I’d returned with the idea of staying for a while, I couldn’t see my way around to not getting in touch. He invited me to dinner at his home in Carson early Monday night, and I accepted, anxious to see how much of his rehabilitation was of my own invention, and how much was real.

  Like O’Neal Holden had a w
eek before, Chancellor lied and told me I looked good, but he was the one who showed marked improvement from the last time we had met. Gone was the little brother who had always been smaller and less muscular than me; the only physical advantage I held over my sibling today was in height, and that by only the merest of margins. He was hard and chiseled from head to toe, and his every movement transmitted a message of power and vitality that belied his age. Now he had smarts and good looks, and I couldn’t help but envy his incredible transformation.

  ‘You could have stayed with us, you know,’ he said after dinner, as his wife Andrea did the dishes in the kitchen and he and I sat in the quiet of his living room, absently watching a muted television. ‘We have plenty of room.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’d be too much of a nuisance. Coming and going at all hours of the night. I’m better off at a motel.’

  I had told him I was here on a rare parts search for a repair job I’d taken on back home, and if he had any doubts about this explanation, he had yet to let on.

  ‘I think you forget we have two teenage boys,’ he said, laughing. ‘People come and go in this house twenty-four-seven.’

  His wife chuckled from the kitchen, having overheard the joke. Andrea was a tall, big-boned Filipina with the face of a child’s doll, and I could picture her standing at the sink, her whole body trembling with genuine mirth. She too had made a transformation of sorts, in that I imagined the crying, grief-stricken woman I first met over the phone sixteen years earlier was also a thing of the past.

  ‘Where are the boys now?’ I asked. I had seen photos of my nephews but we had never actually met, and I’d been looking forward to finding out how their individual personalities meshed with the stoic, almost surly countenance they had in common.

  ‘In the street. Where else?’

  ‘It’s after ten. They don’t have curfew?’

  ‘Eleven o’clock, same as the one Momma gave us. But it’s flexible. Byron’s sixteen and Garrett’ll be fifteen in three weeks. Their mother and I figure as long as they keep bringing As and Bs home from school, it doesn’t much matter what time they get in.

  ‘So tell me again what you’re doing out here,’ my brother said, seemingly eager to dispense with all the small talk. ‘You said you’re looking for parts of some kind?’

  ‘Pieces to a set of lamps I’m refurbishing,’ I said, repeating the story I’d concocted on the drive over. ‘A company called Modeline made ‘em back in the sixties, and most of the few lamps still in existence are out here in LA where they were originally manufactured.’

  ‘The company’s no longer around?’

  ‘They went out of business years ago.’

  ‘You try looking on the Internet?’

  ‘I’ve tried everything. The things are all wood and brass with canvas shades, so units in any kind of decent shape are rare as hell. Hollywood seems to have a fondness for the brand as movie props, though, and if I’m lucky, I might be able to find one or two in shops that cater to that kind of business.’

  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.