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.
As I brought a hand up to shield my eyes, I turned to see Moody’s little bartender standing nearby, pumping another shell into the chamber of a shotgun that looked like a cannon in her doll-like hands.
Whether her second shot would have been any better than her first, I never found out, because it quickly became unnecessary. When I turned to find him again my friend in the paint-spattered clothes was gone, having decided against testing the girl’s aim or resolve more than once. From the look on her face, I had to believe he’d made the right move.
‘I knew that asshole would be back,’ she said.
NINE
I spent the better part of the next morning alone, learning my native city all over again. I’d almost been shot to death the night before and I needed some time in the enclosed space of a car to turn the experience around in my head, looking for proof that it was a chance occurrence and not something I had brought upon myself by being too curious about R.J. Burrow’s murder.
A great number of things had changed since I’d last made Los Angeles my home, and the most glaringly obvious was the seismic shift in the kinds of people who had taken my place. Neighborhoods that had once been all white or all black were now either diluted or overwhelmed by Asians or Hispanics of one geographic origin or another: Koreans and Vietnamese, Guatemalans and Salvadorans. Mexican-Americans in particular seemed to have made inroads everywhere.
The freeways I remembered from the old days were wider yet more intractable, and a few new ones had been added to distribute the city’s trademark gridlock across a broader area. Los Angeles even claimed a light-rail transit system today, though I never saw a line that seemed to be going anywhere I would have wanted or needed to go.
Some positives: The air was cleaner and the cuisine more diverse. Either dished out on wax paper by street vendors in Compton, or served with soup and salad by celebrity-owned restaurants in Century City, culinary delights from all around the world were on the menu: Cuban, Thai, Jamaican, East Indian. Chicken alone came in dozens of variations, most with a distinctly Latin flavor.
The once diminutive downtown skyline, too, had changed, maturing into something less laughable when compared to those of New York and Chicago. Business had finally decided to put down roots in the heart of the city, rather than at its outer reaches. Thick clusters of commercial high-rises had sprung up in my absence like sunflower fields, and people were now actually living among them, making their homes not on the Westside or out in the Valley, but in downtown apartments and loft complexes that until only recently had not existed.
And then there were the gangs. ’Banging had been a disease threatening to expand beyond the economically depressed shores of South Central and East Los Angeles long before I ran off to Minnesota, but now it was a beast grown as wild and unstoppable as a Santa Ana-fed brushfire. Gone were the simple affiliations of Crip and Blood, black and brown, eastside and westside. The homeboys and the vatos had seen their monopoly on tribal warfare crashed by young thugs of every color and nationality, from Armenian crews in Glendale to Cambodian ones in Long Beach. Tagging that had once been the exclusive eyesore of places such as Watts and Monterey Park now seemed to adorn every corner of the city, blooming on walls and bus benches, traffic signs and billboards, in rich and poor neighborhoods alike. If the messages were just as illegible as before, it was not without good reason: They were written in a host of different languages.
All Tuesday morning, as the memory of my near-death experience at Moody’s bar the night before continued to unnerve me, I drove my faceless blue rental car from one end of my abandoned home to the other, making note of all the things twenty-six years had either altered, erased, or built completely from scratch. Theaters, shopping malls, schools, parking lots, even whole city blocks – nothing was exactly as I remembered it, and yet everything was exactly the same.
Beneath the skin, it was all still Los Angeles. Benzes and Caddies ruled the roads like locusts and all but a few of the people who drove them – more international in origin or not – were too beautiful to be real. Los Angeles has always been a metropolis fueled by a single dream – becoming the Next Big Thing – and the weight of that wonderful, desperate hope looms over every inhabitant of the city like a pending death sentence. White, brown, rich, poor; musicians, actors, busboys, attorneys – no one is immune to the Dream. Outsiders often describe LA’s collective mood as ‘laid back’, but what it really is is a form of shock, a seemingly lifeless state the mind retreats to when the pain of wealth and fame deferred has become too great to bear.
My exile to Minnesota had inured me to all these things, but they were fresh in my mind now. I had taken this self-guided tour of my old city believing it would better equip me for the job I’d come here to do, but I felt no smarter at the end of it than I had at the beginning.
I was just happier to know I had someplace else to call home.
While I was cruising the streets of Los Angeles that Tuesday morning, I succumbed to a lifelong obsession. Most people would think of it as no more than dumpster diving, rooting around among the discards of strangers to pull something out of a trash bin before the sanitation department can rightfully dispose of it. But this is a woefully short-sighted view of what I do. In my mind, the exercises I engage in are rescue operations, mercy missions intended to save imperfect but salvageable objects from a premature, and therefore wasteful, death.
It is not an easy thing to do well. Separating those things that can and should be saved from those that are not worth the trouble requires a keen eye and years of experience. Sometimes I make mistakes. I snatch an old sewing machine or electric typewriter from the clutches of the gallows, get it home and open it up, only to discover internal organs no surgeon would dare touch. It happens. But these are the exceptions to the rule. I choose the subjects of my charity too carefully to err in this way very often, so usually what I gather to my breast as a prize to polish up and return to a purposeful existence proves itself deserving of my effort.
Today, my find was an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Sony-made portable with only one empty reel on its right spindle, that somebody in Culver City had set atop a garbage can out in front of their home. Its fake woodgrain case was battered and scratched, and the lens cover on one of its VU meters was cracked like the shell of an egg, but at first glance, I could see no reason why it shouldn’t function as it had originally.
I wound the machine’s power cord into a neat bundle, deposited it into the trunk of my car and drove off, feeling the way I always did on these occasions: like a kid who’d just plucked the hubcaps from the wheels of a neighbor’s car.
You might wonder why I bothered. Surely the complicated business of playing detective should have superseded any need to tinker with a new toy. But tinkering clears my head; it is what I do to make space for my best thinking. When I would find the time to work on the recorder over the next few days, I didn’t know.
I just had a feeling I’d find a use for the distraction.
By ten a.m., my cellphone had yet to ring, and the desk clerk at my motel said the same was true about the phone in my room. I was disappointed but not surprised. I had called Toni Burrow at her mother’s home just before embarking upon my impromptu tour of the ‘new’ Los Angeles, and Frances Burrow had told me she wasn’t in. She promised I’d get a call-back as soon as Toni returned to the house, but I hadn’t really believed I’d get one. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, I had sent the elder Lady Burrow scurrying back up to bed in tears and prompted the younger one to all but slam her mother’s front door in my face, so I had little reason to expect either woman would place much importance on my need to speak with Toni again.
I tried her a second time anyway.
‘Hello?’
I’d gotten lucky. This time, it was Toni herself who answered the phone.
‘Toni, this is Handy White. I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.’
A brief silence, then: ‘What can I do for you, Mr White?’
‘I’d like to talk to you. Over lunch. Do you think you could meet me in about an hour or so?’
‘I’m afraid not. What exactly did you want to talk about?’
‘The same thing we talked about yesterday, only a little more directly: Who killed your father, and why.’
‘I don’t see where that’s any of your business, Mr White.’
‘Frankly, I’m not sure I do, either. But whether it is or it isn’t, I’m going to do whatever I can to try and answer those two questions.’
‘You? You’re no more a criminal investigator than I am.’
‘That’s true. If I could go home right now and forget the whole thing, I would, believe me. But I tried that once and it didn’t work, so . . .’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s like this: For reasons I won’t get into right now, I owe him. Too much to simply assume the cops will get this one right on their own.’
‘So what do you propose to do?’
‘Talk to people who knew R.J. Try to find out if somebody other than a buyer or seller of cocaine could have wanted him dead. And I was hoping to start with you.’
I was left to count the seconds before Toni Burrow spoke again. ‘Tell me where you want me to be, and when,’ she said.
It was my idea to have a late breakfast at a place called Pann’s. Unlike the Ship’s coffee shop in Culver City, my first choice
among the handful of space-age style pancake houses I loved to frequent in the old days, I’d found Pann’s that morning still standing where I’d last seen it, on the south-west corner of La Cienega and La Tijera, in the lowlands of Ladera Heights. A thickly landscaped, glass-predominant enclosure capped by a triangular, tortoiseshell roof, it was the only building in the area I truly recognized; everything else – bistros, shopping malls, drive-thru restaurants – either bore new names and facades, or had sprung up out of the ground during my absence. Sometimes, it was hard to tell which.
R.J.’s daughter was already sitting at a booth when I arrived around ten thirty. She was wearing a sleeveless, white cotton blouse and cream-colored slacks, and her hair was pulled back in a simple French braid behind her head. She looked anxious, as if she had some reason to dread what was coming, but she raised a small smile from somewhere within as I sat down to join her.
‘You haven’t been waiting long, I hope,’ I said.
‘No. I just sat down. Mr White—’
‘Call me Handy, please.’ I took up my menu and opened it. ‘Have you ordered yet?’
I made her wait to make conversation until a broad-shouldered Latina waitress had taken our identical orders of ham and eggs, sloshed some coffee into our cups, and disappeared.
‘I don’t understand the point of this,’ Toni said. ‘You told me yourself only yesterday I should leave investigating Daddy’s murder to the police.’
‘I know. I did. But that was before O’Neal Holden told me the car in which R.J. died wasn’t the only place the police found traces of cocaine.’
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