Cemetery Road Page 7

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean the coroner’s report says they found the drug in your father’s body, as well.’

  The woman seated across from me said nothing, though her eyes conveyed a host of conflicting messages all at once.

  ‘O’ also said R.J. had called him at least twice in the last fifteen years to ask for money. He loaned your father sixteen hundred in all, he said. Were you aware of that?’

  The wounded expression on her face was all the answer I needed, but she offered me one anyway: ‘No.’

  ‘The police didn’t tell your mother they found cocaine in R.J.’s system?’

  ‘They might have told her. But she didn’t tell me.’

  ‘What about the money?’

  ‘I didn’t know anything about that, either.’

  I let a moment pass before asking my next question. ‘Why do you suppose she didn’t tell you?’

  ‘I imagine because she knew what I would have said.’

  ‘“I told you so”?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Then R.J. and drugs were nothing new to you.’

  ‘No.’ She let out a deep breath, trying to keep her emotions in check. ‘He’d been a steady user for over fifteen months, just before he hired on with Coughlin Construction. But that was eighteen years ago. He couldn’t find work, he was an ex-con without a degree—’

  ‘Whoa, hold on,’ I said. ‘R.J. was an ex-con?’

  She nodded, face coloring with shame. ‘He served three years in the mid-eighties for armed robbery at Lancaster State Penitentiary. I was only a year old when he went away.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t do this. I have to go.’

  She tried to bolt from the booth, but I caught her wrist before she could fly past.

  ‘Wait!’

  ‘I’ll say it again, Mr White: This is none of your business. Go home.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just trying to make sense of it, that’s all. I need your help. Please.’

  She snatched her arm free but remained where she was, the black light of her gaze trying to bore right through me. Our waitress and several patrons had stopped what they were doing to watch, no doubt hoping for an ugly scene they could recreate for friends and family later, but Toni Burrow let them down. Instead of capping our little drama by storming out, she fooled us all by returning to the seat across from me.

  ‘You have no idea what he put Momma through,’ she said. ‘How hard he made things for her.’

  She backhanded a tear from her right eye, infuriated by her need to shed it, and paused as the big woman in the blue uniform set our plates down in front of us, scowling at me now like a sheepdog eyeing a wolf. The quarrel I’d just had with my dining companion had apparently left our waitress with an unflattering impression of me, and she didn’t leave Toni alone with me again until she was satisfied I was all through putting my hands on her.

  ‘He was a wonderful husband and father for the most part,’ R.J.’s daughter said when we were finally alone again, ‘but something inside him wasn’t right. He had everything a man could want – wife, family, career – and he was never at peace with any of it.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean he’d go months and months acting as if everything was fine, then out of nowhere, he’d disappear for a weekend without explanation. Or lock himself up in the bathroom at three in the morning just to cry himself to sleep. It was all typical behavior for a drug abuser, of course, but he swore to us that wasn’t it. Coke had only been a crutch for him when he couldn’t get work, and he’d given it up the minute he hired on at Coughlin. Or so he always said.’

  ‘You didn’t believe him?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to believe. All I knew was that he needed help, and he was too selfish and stubborn to ever get it, no matter how much his behavior hurt my mother.’

  ‘When you say he needed help – you’re talking about psychiatric help?’

  ‘Of course. Daddy was deeply disturbed. He was either doing coke again or, as Mother suspected, something else was slowly driving him insane. I always believed it was the former, and I still do. His story that he used for fifteen months, then quit cold turkey as soon as the Coughlin job came along, has never really flown with me. But Mother’s never doubted it for a minute. She thinks something happened to Daddy in prison, that he was haunted by something he saw or did there that his conscience wouldn’t allow him to forget.’

  It was not an unsound theory. R.J. had been as hard as nails, to be sure, but his heart was as soft as they came. If during his three years in lock-down he’d witnessed more than a few senseless acts of violence against people he considered friends, it would not have been unlike him to drag the memory around behind him like a burlap sack filled with lead.

  There was at least one other explanation for the depth of despondency in her father Toni Burrow was describing, however, and the fact that she made no allusion to it now could only mean that she was unaware of it. She doesn’t know, I thought, finally allowing myself to stop fearing otherwise, and my sense of relief was almost too overpowering to conceal.

  ‘What about his job?’ I asked. ‘Could whatever was troubling him have been connected to something he was dealing with at work?’

  ‘Well, we wondered about that, certainly. But whenever we’d ask him about it, he’d just say things at work were fine.’

  ‘Exactly what did he do for Coughlin?’

  ‘He was a security guard, primarily. But they had just made him a consultant about a year ago.’

  ‘A security consultant? With a criminal record?’

  ‘It does seem strange, I know. But the man who got him in the door there had some serious pull in personnel, the way it was always explained to me, and Daddy’s duties the first few years were too innocuous to make trusting him much of a concern. Watching the lobby in empty satellite offices, or the gate at small construction sites – he couldn’t have stolen anything worth stealing if he’d wanted to back then.’

  ‘So who was this man who got him the job?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never met him.’

  ‘You don’t have a name?’

  ‘I think his last name was Allen, but that’s just a guess. Mother would know for sure. All I ever heard about him is that he was a rep for the company Daddy met through a work training program Coughlin used to sponsor at the prison.’

  ‘Do you know if he still works there?’

  ‘It’s possible. There were several people from the company at the funeral, but as far as I know, he wasn’t one of them.’

  ‘Can I get you two anything else?’

  The waitress’s name was Rosie. I hadn’t seen it stenciled to the white plastic tag pinned to her blouse until now.

  I looked to Toni, who shook her head, and I did the same for Rosie. ‘We’re fine, thanks.’

  The big Latina laid the bill down in front of me, not quite smiling, and shuffled off again.

  ‘I seem to have given her a reason to dislike you,’ R.J.’s daughter said, almost smiling herself. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I shrugged and smiled back.

  ‘Look, Mr White—’

  ‘Handy.’

  ‘Handy. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. Really. But you were right to tell me yesterday we should leave Daddy’s murder to the authorities, and I’d like to give you the same advice. Before you just make matters worse.’

  ‘Worse? For whom?’

  ‘For my mother, mostly. And for me, as well. By doubling the efforts of the police like this, there’s a chance you could open a can of worms that nobody needs to know about.’

  ‘Maybe you’d like to explain that.’

  ‘I’m talking about drug abuse, for one thing. Infidelity. Homosexuality. Complicity in one form of felonious activity or another. Do I need to go on?’

  ‘You’re saying R.J. was guilty of all that?’

  ‘I’m saying he told my mother too many lies over the years n
ot to be guilty of something, and the less she knows about whatever it was, the better off she’s likely to be. The better off I’m likely to be.’

  ‘And if your mother wants to know anyway?’

  ‘She doesn’t. She only thinks she wants to know. You heard her yesterday. She thinks it’s all a frame-up, that Daddy was some innocent victim of an elaborate plot to discredit him. She only wants to know the truth because she can’t believe the truth will be all that terrible.’

  ‘And you? Don’t you want to know the truth?’

  ‘Honestly? Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. But mostly, I don’t.’

  ‘You’re afraid to know.’

  ‘Yes. I am afraid. If you could have seen what he was like, when whatever it was he was hiding from us had him acting like a frightened child . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve always had the feeling, if we ever found out what it was, it would change our view of him forever. And I don’t want that to happen. I just want his killer found and put away, that’s all. I don’t care about the reasons for it, and neither does my mother, whether she realizes it or not.’

  She had no idea how close the two of us were to wanting the exact same thing, if for totally different reasons. She was looking to minimize the damage all my questions might do to protect her memory of her father; I was only doing so to protect myself.

  ‘I understand how you feel,’ I said. ‘Nobody ever really wants to know just how dark the dark side is in people they care for deeply. But—’

  ‘You’re not going to stop asking all these questions.’

  ‘If I had the benefit of your recent perspective on R.J., maybe I could. It sounds like the man you knew in recent years could have been exactly what the police are saying he was, just one old coke addict who got wasted by another. But that’s not the R.J. I remember, and my memories of him are all I have to work with.’

  ‘But you said so yourself: He had cocaine in his system. He drove that car down to the beach, his prints were all over the steering wheel. Jesus, I don’t want to believe the police’s version of Daddy’s murder any more than you do, but when you do the math, what else can you believe?’

  ‘Maybe nothing. Maybe they’re right and all this second-guessing is just a waste of time and energy.’

  ‘Then leave it alone. You last knew Daddy thirty years ago. No matter what you owed him then, paying him back now can’t possibly serve any purpose. Can it?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ she said.

  I’d been lying to her since I met her, much like she said her father had been lying to her and her mother for years, and what she was asking me to tell her now lay dangerously close to the truth I could not speak. But if I was going to continue to insist upon inserting myself into her family’s private affairs, it was inevitable that I offer her some explanation, however diluted, as to why I felt the need to do so.

  ‘When we ran together, your father and I were young and not too smart. We did some things I’d be embarrassed to admit to. One of those things should have ended very badly for me, and the only reason it didn’t is because R.J. intervened. If I told you I’ve been looking for a chance to repay him ever since, I’d be lying through my teeth – but now that that chance has presented itself, I intend to take full advantage of it.’

  ‘You’re talking in riddles. Daddy intervened how? In what?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m afraid that’s one of those “cans of worms” you were talking about that I’ve got no business opening.’

  ‘I see. I’m supposed to answer all of your questions, but you’re not supposed to answer any of mine.’

  ‘Right now, I have no reason to believe the things you’re asking me about are in any way relevant to the discussion at hand. But if that should change—’

  ‘You’ll tell me everything. Whatever I want to know, without exception.’

  And there he was again, in the guise of his only child: my old friend R.J. Burrow, goading me into a corner from which he knew I could find no escape.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  She didn’t know what she was asking. The promise I’d just made – that I would tell her all there was to know about the secret that had apparently haunted her father to his grave, should I decide it had indeed had some bearing on his murder – was one she did not want me to keep.

  Because sometimes ignorance truly is bliss, and once it is gone, asking God to have it back is a wasted prayer.

  TEN

  There was a story people used to tell about Paris McDonald that none of us heard until it was too late to heed it as a warning.

  McDonald was a boxer out of the Hoover Gym on Hoover and 78th Street who was hammering his way through the local dregs of the middleweight division while R.J., O’ and I were in high school. A flat-faced black man with disproportionate eyes, he was a plodder with a solid jaw who could take whatever an opponent had to offer for nine rounds and still have a good right with which to counter in the tenth. Unfortunately, his right hand was the only one God had given him, his left barely up to the task of meekly tapping someone in the face two or three times a round, so by the mid-seventies, he had come as close to national attention as he was ever going to get.

  No one could make McDonald believe it, however.

  Even after Jimmy Ray Hill snapped the retina of his right eye loose in the sixth round of a 1976 fight Hill would eventually win on a TKO in the eighth, McDonald thought he was on the road to a shot at the title. An unranked pug had nearly blinded him, and still he soldiered on. No sooner had the doctors sewn his right eye back together than McDonald was back pounding the heavy bag in the gym, attached to a new trainer and manager who were far less vocal about his risk of re-injury than the two men they had replaced.

  By the time the California State Athletic Commission declared him fit to re-enter the ring eight months later, his right hand had become nearly as useless as his left. Three bouts into his ill-conceived comeback, the referee had to step in to stop a nineteen-year-old southpaw from Corpus Christi, Texas, named Ricky Torres from beating McDonald to death in two rounds, and that put an official end to the unremarkable career of Paris ‘the Tower’ McDonald.

  It didn’t, however, put an end to the McDonald legend.

  The way I’d heard the story, McDonald tracked down Luis Corrales at his home in Montebello six days after his license to fight in California was permanently revoked and broke the left arm of the forty-four-year-old father of two so badly, his doctors nearly amputated it above the elbow to save his life. Corrales emerged from six hours of surgery having no clue who had attacked him on his front doorstep, and it only added to his confusion to have the police tell him later that it had been McDonald, whom he could barely remember. Corrales was a boxing referee by profession, and to the best of his recollection, he had only worked a single fight involving the man who had nearly killed him.

  Had he known McDonald better, he would have understood that one fight was all McDonald ever needed to make a new enemy. Aside from being delusional about his limitations as a boxer, McDonald had a persecution complex second to none, and there was always someone he could hold responsible for his every failure and disappointment. In the case of his fight with Jimmy Ray Hill, that man was Luis Corrales. In McDonald’s estimation, Hill may have caused the eye injury that would ultimately make him such an easy target for Ricky Torres sixteen months later, but it was Corrales who had given Hill the chance. McDonald had knocked Hill down with a rare combination two rounds prior to his getting hurt, and McDonald felt that should have been the end of the fight right there. But no – Corrales’s count had been slow, any fool could see it, and Hill had made it back to his feet before the referee could reach a count of eight. The bell ending the round sounded shortly thereafter, Hill recouped, and McDonald’s eventual destruction was assured.

  As conspiracy theories went, it didn’t make sense. It wasn’t logical. But that was the way they say the man’s mind worked. Paris McDonald went th
rough life feeling cheated, and he never let a perceived slight pass without making somebody pay for it. No matter how tenuous their guilt, no matter how long he had to wait to exact payback.

  As our last days together in Los Angeles were drawing to a close, three weeks before Christmas, 1979, R.J., O’ and I knew nothing whatsoever about Paris McDonald. We’d never heard of him as a boxer, and were nearly as unaware of him as a bodyguard and limo driver, the two new careers he’d taken up upon doing his fifteen months for the Luis Corrales assault. And yet, when his paranoia inevitably struck again, turning him against the second cousin for whom he now worked, my friends and I were by some bizarre coincidence among the casualties of their ensuing blood feud.

  The only thing the four of us had in common was a desire to hurt the same man. But because that man was Excel Rucker, it was connection enough to stain all our lives forever.

  Unlike the last time I’d checked, there was a single phone message waiting for me when I returned to my motel room following my meeting with Toni Burrow. It was from a man who identified himself as Walt Fine.

  ‘A friend in Bellwood asked me to give you a ring,’ he said. ‘I tried you on your cell, but something happened, I dunno, I couldn’t leave a message. What a racket, cellphones, huh?’ He left a call-back number and hung up.

  I was calling him back on the landline phone in my room when my cellphone rang.

  ‘What’s going on, Quincy?’ I asked without preamble. He was watching over my business in my absence, but the assignment involved so little, I was certain he was only calling to check up on me, his lunatic business partner running loose in California only days after I’d nearly clubbed a teenage boy to death for reasons I’d been unable to adequately explain.

  ‘You just got a phone call, Handy. I thought you’d wanna know right away,’ he said.

  ‘From who?’

  ‘Your daughter. She asked me where you were, but I acted like I didn’t know. I hope that was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Coral? What did she want?’

  ‘She didn’t say. Just said she needed to speak to you about somethin’ important.’