That R.J. was the one who predicted otherwise still haunts me to this day.
‘Excel Rucker? Man, are you crazy?’
‘No. What’s crazy about it?’
From the other end of the couch I was slouched across, R.J. took a long, expansive drag on the blunt pinched between his thumb and forefinger, his face taking on a scowl of deep concentration. ‘That’s some dangerous shit, that’s what. Jackin’ dope dealers.’
‘It ain’t dangerous if we do it right,’ I said.
I stole a furtive glance at O’, fishing for his reaction, but all he did was sink even deeper into the red leather beanbag chair he was sitting in and stare further yet into space, happy for now just to smoke a joint of his own and listen in.
We were all hanging at O’s crib, our official base of operations in those days. It was a one-bedroom bachelor pad way out in Playa del Rey, big and clean and architecturally futuristic, and it sat just close enough to the beach that we could smoke dope and talk strategy with the illusion that we were doing so in style.
‘What you mean, “right”?’ R.J. asked.
‘I mean we find one of his safe houses and watch it for a while. See who goes in and out, and when.’
‘And then?’
‘And then we figure out a way to take it down without anybody getting hurt. Same as we always do.’
‘’Cept we ain’t always rippin’ off drug dealers. Drug dealers got guns, nigga!’ He passed me the joint, holding a lungful of smoke down tight. ‘And what about the dope? We don’t know nothin’ ’bout sellin’ cocaine, how we gonna move it without Excel findin’ out?’
‘We wouldn’t try to move it. We’d flush it. The only thing we’d keep is the bread.’
‘Say what?’
‘He’ll be looking for the drugs to show up on the street, but they never will. So all he’ll be able to figure is that it had to be another dealer who ripped him off and just rolled the product into his own inventory. ’Cause nobody else would boost the shit and not even try to sell it, right?’
R.J. thought about it, looked over at the man in the beanbag chair. ‘You hearin’ all this, O’? What’s this fool talkin’ about?’
O’ turned, glassy-eyed, and smiled. ‘He’s talkin’ about payback,’ he said.
‘Huh?’
‘Man’s got a good idea, but it ain’t about the money and it ain’t about the drugs. It’s about Olivia Gardner. Ain’t that right, Handy?’
I took a good long while to answer him because his insight into minds not his own always galled me. ‘Yeah, that’s right. It’s about Olivia,’ I said.
She was my brother’s girl, not mine. Like Chancellor, Olivia Gardner was five years younger than me, almost a child at seventeen when I last saw her alive. She had almond-colored skin and big brown eyes, and a small, girlish body that was not ordinarily to my taste. I don’t think I was ever in love with her, but she had my attention from the first time Chancellor brought her around the house.
She was the poorest person I knew. Her family lived in a little two-bedroom house just outside the northern perimeter of the Jordan Downs housing projects, and every meal they ever ate there had been scraped together with Welfare money. It was Olivia, two brothers, one sister, and their mother, all getting by on fumes and, in her mother’s case, alcohol. One look at the dirt yard out front and you knew all the dresser drawers inside were filled with clothes even the second-hand stores didn’t want, and the bathroom had a toilet that only flushed when it was willing.
Still, Olivia was a girl with the potential to escape it all. She was smarter than my brother by any form of assessment, and she had the will to fight, to make any sacrifice necessary to rise above the conditions she’d been born into. Left to her own devices, she was destined for greater things.
But lives as tenuous as Olivia Gardner’s can all too often be derailed by a single mistake. The margin for error is just too small to tolerate the kind of miscues the rest of us survive routinely without suffering any ill effect. All she did was go to a party and do a little blow, the first she ever tried, and when she left, it was in the back of a red ambulance that killed its sirens halfway to the hospital because it wasn’t worth diverting traffic for a dead girl.
It wasn’t Excel Rucker’s party, but the coke it was running on was. He was in the house himself that night, passing the shit out like a servant with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. People said later it was Excel personally who laid the white line down on the mirror in front of Olivia, but this, in my opinion, was a pointless accusation. Olivia did the blow of her own free will; she made a choice to duck her head down toward the man’s white powder and take it into her body, and the consequences of that decision were hers alone to bear.
No one would have thought to play on Excel’s conscience regarding her death until it became obvious that her family couldn’t afford to bury her. Interred in a mass grave provided by the county morgue, with not so much as three words said by a man of God to recognize her passing, wasn’t how anyone who knew her wanted to say goodbye; something had to be done. Somebody had to step forward and buy her a decent plot somewhere, and put the money up for a funeral, and my brother Chancellor got it in his head that this somebody should be Excel Rucker.
Unlike myself, Chancellor knew exactly how he felt about Olivia. He was madly in love with her, and when she died, he was wracked with guilt for not having been there to see it. Without consulting me first, he sought Rucker out to formally request that he honor the dead girl’s memory with the price of a decent burial. None of Olivia’s survivors would go in his place. My brother was careful to avoid any suggestion of culpability on Excel’s part; he simply stated the fact that it had been Excel’s cocaine that had caused her heart to seize up in her chest, and no one else had the means to spare her the indignity of having the county dispose of her remains.
According to Chancellor, Excel laughed in his face upon hearing this argument and had him forcibly shown to the door.
My brother took the rebuff badly, but I took it worse. A kinder and more sensitive man than I, Chancellor had humbled himself before God and man to solicit the dealer’s aid, to respectfully ask for something that should have been freely given, and Excel had answered him with a playful kick in the teeth. Up until then, I’d been willing to hold the dealer blameless for Olivia’s death, preferring to chalk the tragedy up to the precariousness of youth, but now I could see how unworthy he was of my absolution.
If he didn’t want to spend a few thousand dollars to clean up one of the countless messes his business made, that was his prerogative. Liability coverage is never part of the deal anyone makes with a purveyor of illicit narcotics. But Excel was not within his rights to be cheerfully indifferent to the untimely death of someone as beautiful and vibrant as Olivia Gardner. If she didn’t warrant his sympathy, she at the very least deserved his respect, and one way or another, she was going to get it.
I was going to see to it.
FIVE
R.J.’s widow Frances owned a nice home up in Ladera Heights. It was a white, single-level number with a pseudo-Asian motif that seemed to scream its 1960s origins out loud, and the clean, quiet street to which it was anchored had nary a parked car upon it when I arrived, back in LA less than a full week after R.J.’s funeral.
I was left to stand on the porch for a long time before somebody answered my persistent knocking. I had never been formally introduced to the young woman who eventually came to the door, but I recognized her as R.J.’s daughter nonetheless. She was the same bronze-haired beauty I’d seen glued to the side of Frances Burrow throughout the funeral, the product of a mixed race union that had blessed her with the smooth, oval face of her Latina mother and the brown-sugar flesh tones of her African-American father. There was no genetic explanation for the large brown eyes, however; those were all her own.
‘Yes?’
‘I apologize for just dropping in on you like this. But my name is Errol White. I was an old friend of your father’
s.’
‘Of course. I remember seeing you at the funeral.’
She waited for me to explain myself.
‘If I’ve caught you at a bad time . . .’
‘No, no. Please, come in.’
She pulled the door open for me and I stepped inside. The house was all white walls and ancient furniture: antique lamps and mirrors, velvet upholstery and Indian throw rugs. It was a decor that created a sense of time travel back to the days of six-digit telephone numbers and Packard automobiles. Over five days had come and gone since the repast, but I would have sworn I could still smell all the plates piled high with sliced ham and potato salad those who had attended had no doubt carried from room to room. I was almost sorry now I hadn’t come.
At the young woman’s insistence, I took a seat upon the embroidered rose petals of a heavily cushioned couch, then watched as she lowered herself into a matching armchair directly opposite. There was no sign of her mother.
‘You’re the one Daddy called “Handy”,’ R.J.’s daughter said, smiling.
‘Yes. And I believe your name is Toni.’
‘With an “i”.’ She nodded. ‘Mr Holden said you missed the repast because you had urgent business back home. You didn’t go?’
‘I did go, yes.’ I told the lie I’d been rehearsing all morning: ‘But I had to come back to see your mother. To offer her the personal condolences I should have offered her – and you – last week.’
She smiled again, surprised. ‘That really wasn’t necessary.’
‘I think it was. Business or no business, as close as R.J. and I once were, it was wrong of me to run off the way I did, without paying my proper respects, and it seems I won’t rest easy until I do. Is your mother in, by any chance?’
She hesitated. ‘She is, but I’m afraid she isn’t up to seeing visitors. Daddy’s death has hit her quite hard, as I’m sure you can imagine, and she spends most of her time these days in bed. I’m sorry.’
‘I understand,’ I said, nodding as if I did. ‘The way R.J. died, from what I heard at the funeral, it all must have come as a great shock to her.’
‘It did.’ She was biting her lower lip to steady herself.
‘Do you mind if I ask a question?’
‘Not at all.’
‘How did you and your mother find me? I haven’t talked or written to your father in almost 30 years, and all my contact info’s unlisted.’
‘Oh. I’m afraid I took the liberty of looking you up on a few private databases I have access to at work. I wouldn’t have done it, but you and Daddy had once been so close, mother was convinced you’d want to know about his passing.’
‘What kind of databases?’
‘The kind the police use,’ someone behind me said.
Toni and I turned to see Frances Burrow standing in the archway between alcove and living room, a faded yellow bathrobe tied loosely around her waist. She was a powerfully built, steel-eyed Latina who had mourned at R.J.’s funeral with a dignity that approached surrealism, but only a fraction of that dignity was in evidence today. Today, she just looked tired and angry, braced by R.J.’s sudden death for years of potential loneliness.
‘This is Errol White, Momma. Daddy’s old friend from high school,’ Toni said, both of us quickly rising to our feet.
‘Handy White?’ R.J.’s widow shuffled into the room to get a better look. ‘We were told you went back home to Minnesota.’
‘I did. But—’
‘You’re curious too. Of course you are. Bobby didn’t die the way they say, and we all know it.’ She smiled at her daughter. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’
‘Mother . . .’
‘My daughter actually believes there could be some truth to what the police say about what happened to her father, Mr White. That he stole a car and drove it down to that beach to make some kind of drug deal that “went wrong”. Can you imagine?’
‘I never said I believed it, Mother. I only said it’s doubtful that the whole thing is a lie.’ Toni turned to me. ‘He was shot two times in the back, and twice more in the head, and his fingerprints and cocaine residue were found all over the car’s interior. What does that sound like to you, Mr White?’
I hadn’t seen much of R.J.’s spirit in her up to now, but this was it all over: Her glare could have sliced cast iron into ribbons.
‘Well,’ I said, feeling like a man about to step on to a minefield, ‘it sounds like a drug-related homicide, I suppose. But that could be only because somebody wanted it to look that way.’
‘Exactly!’ Frances Burrow said. She took a seat at the end of the couch I’d been sitting on and gestured for Toni and me to return to our own. ‘Toni, have you offered our guest something to drink? What can we get you, Mr White?’
I told her I wanted for nothing, and it was just as well that I did, because Toni Burrow didn’t look like she had any interest in serving me anything. I’d been drafted by her mother as an ally into whatever feud it was they were engaged in, and the young woman now clearly viewed me as a member of the enemy camp.
‘Toni is a licensed private investigator up in Seattle where she lives now,’ Frances Burrow said. ‘And she’s going to stay down here and talk to people until she gets some answers.’
I turned to Toni, who only looked back at me with the burning resentment of an indentured servant.
‘I’m not sure that would be a very good idea,’ I said.
‘No? And why is that?’
‘Because the police aren’t going to like it, Mother. I’ve explained that to you,’ Toni said.
‘I don’t care what they like or don’t like, and neither should you. They think your father was a common drug dealer, and as long as they have that ridiculous idea, they’re never going to find the animal who killed him. Never!’
R.J.’s widow set her jaw and waited for her daughter’s rebuttal, but Toni Burrow didn’t offer one. I gathered my nerve and spoke in her stead, again about to tread on dangerous ground.
‘I hope both of you will forgive me for asking this, because I’m certain you’ll find it a ridiculous question. But it’s been over twenty-five years since I last saw R.J., like I said, so I don’t know.’
‘Yes?’
‘Is there any way he could have died the way they say? That is, is it possible—’
‘No.’
‘If things weren’t going well for him lately, or if he was in some kind of serious money trouble—’
‘No! He wasn’t out on that beach making any drug deal!’ Frances Burrow was livid, her eyes tearing up now. ‘You didn’t know him. How far he’d come, how hard he’d worked to change.’ She looked over at Toni. ‘Neither one of you knows.’
‘That isn’t fair, Momma.’
‘What isn’t fair is what they did to him. He didn’t deserve to die like that, I don’t care what he was doing that night!’
She finally broke down, sobbing into her hands, body heaving. Her daughter went to comfort her, but was waved away.
‘I’m going back up to my room,’ Frances Burrow said, rising on unsteady legs. ‘I’m tired.’ I stood up again and watched as she slowly made her way to the door. ‘Goodbye, Mr White. Bobby always spoke very highly of you, and it was kind of you to come by.’
I opened my mouth to apologize but she was gone before I could get the words out. Toni Burrow and I endured an awkward silence for a moment, then she put us out of our misery. ‘I’ll walk you to the door,’ she said.
Back out on the porch, in lieu of a simple goodbye, I said, ‘She’s a very headstrong woman and she obviously loved your father a great deal. But I don’t think your mother understands how much trouble you could get yourself into, trying to find out who killed R.J. on your own.’
‘No. She doesn’t.’
‘At the very least, I expect the LAPD would threaten to arrest you for interfering in an ongoing investigation.’
‘Actually, it’s Santa Monica PD, but your point is well taken.’
‘You really a priv
ate investigator up in Seattle like she said?’
‘Yes. But not the kind she thinks. I work for a law firm up there, Hubble and Kleinman. The majority of what I do is conduct interviews and collect evidence in paternity cases.’
‘Then homicide investigations aren’t a big part of your practice.’
‘They aren’t any part of my practice. But trying to tell that to Mother is pointless. She thinks my license to operate in Washington State is as good as a detective’s badge anywhere in the world.’
‘Well, you can’t really blame her, can you? Convinced as she is that the police are all wrong about R.J. and the way he died, what else would she do but expect his daughter to set them straight?’
If she heard the question, she didn’t answer it.
‘Or maybe you don’t think they need to be set straight,’ I said, probing.
‘It was good of you to come back and see us, Mr White,’ Toni Burrow said. ‘I hope you have a pleasant trip back home.’
It was all the farewell she was going to leave me with before closing her mother’s front door.
SIX
Bellwood, California, is a small and quiet incorporated city in the southern hemisphere of Los Angeles County that is roughly 11 square miles in size and serves a populace of just under 30,000 people, most of them black and Hispanic. It is primarily a stronghold of commerce, laden with business parks and corporate headquarters, and you tend to see its name in the papers only when the Bellwood Monarchs have further solidified the city’s long history of high school athletic supremacy.
How O’Neal Holden had come to be the overseer of such a tiny and unimposing fiefdom, I couldn’t say, as disconnected to him and his fortunes as I had been for the last two-and-a-half decades. But from what little I had read and heard about him from time to time, he seemed to be enjoying the role. He was always smiling brightly when cameras were around, and the sound bites from his public appearances were consistently upbeat. If he was at all concerned about the accusations of misappropriation and malfeasance that were beginning to stir all about his office, it didn’t show in the face he had perpetually turned toward the public. O’ was a rock. As always, he had no time for fear, and no need to pretend otherwise.
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