‘Mr Allen couldn’t have possibly murdered Bobby,’ Nuňez said flatly. ‘He’s dead. He killed himself just weeks after we let him go.’
Having just learned that R.J. may have in fact known Darrel Eastman – the man the SMPD believed to be his murderer – pursuing Cleveland Allen as an alternate suspect in his killing would have been a questionable use of my time, at best. Still, I was disappointed to hear he was dead. Whether he’d had anything to do with R.J.’s murder or not, I’d been looking forward to asking Allen about the role he’d allegedly played in getting an ex-con hired on at Coughlin as a security guard. How could he and R.J. have hit it off at Lancaster that fabulously?
‘How are you for time?’ I asked Nuňez, checking my watch.
She shrugged. ‘I’m OK. I’m an old divorcee living in an empty nest these days, like I said, so there isn’t much point in rushing back home.’
She smiled, but all it did for either one of us was make our hearts a little heavier. She was smart and resilient, obviously, and pleasing to the eye, but loneliness was the cold, dark center beneath the sultry exterior. I wondered how much R.J. could have done to relieve that loneliness, and how much worse it had become now that he was gone.
‘Did R.J. ever mention a man named Excel Rucker?’ I asked.
It was the first time I’d dropped the dealer’s name to anyone since I’d returned to Los Angeles. I’d been determined not to bring Rucker into any conversation until someone gave me a reason to do so, but by admitting she was at least partially aware of our history with the dealer, Nuňez finally had.
‘X-L?’ Nuňez asked.
‘Ex-cel. Rucker.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Is that the man you robbed?’
‘No. What about Paris McDonald?’
‘No.’
‘Linda Dole?’
‘No. Wait.’
‘Linda Dole?’
She shook her head again. ‘McDonald. You said his first name was Paris? Like the city?’
I nodded.
‘Well, Bobby never talked about him, at least not with me, but he did do a lot of reading about a Paris McDonald.’
I felt my mouth go dry. ‘What kind of reading?’
‘Newspaper articles, mostly. And magazines, too. You’re talking about the ex-boxer who just became a minister in prison, right? They used to call him “the Tower”?’
I nodded again. ‘Why was R.J. reading about him?’
‘He said they’d met each other once out at Lancaster, when Bobby was doing time up there and McDonald was waiting for a transfer to Pelican Bay. Bobby saw a TV news report about him and was so amazed by the story – you know, convicted killer turns Jesus freak – he said he just had to know if it was for real or not. So—’
‘They met in prison?’
‘That’s what Bobby said.’
I couldn’t imagine it. If the two men had crossed paths for so much as an instant at Lancaster, one or both of them would surely have died there. The only thing I could think was that their meeting was a lie, something R.J. had to tell Nuňez to explain his interest in someone he otherwise had no business giving a damn about.
‘How long ago was this? When R.J. saw the news report and started doing all the reading?’
She thought it over, produced a little shrug. ‘I don’t know. A couple of months ago, maybe.’
In other words, not long before R.J. was murdered.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
I told her it was nothing, but she didn’t believe me. I didn’t care. I’d heard all I needed to hear and was ready to call it a day.
FOURTEEN
I had a visitor waiting for me when I returned to my motel room. He’d been sitting in his parked car in the lot, watching my door, and the minute I had my key card in the lock, he got out to approach me.
‘You Errol White?’
I spun like a weathervane, the face of my friend from Moody’s bar immediately coming to mind. But this wasn’t him. This was a twenty-something, clean-shaven white man wearing a blue dress shirt, tie, and black slacks. He could have been the top man in a mailroom somewhere, and maybe he was, but his buzz-cut hair and thick neck were suggestive of something slightly more sinister.
‘Package from Bellwood,’ he said, handing me a large, padded envelope that bore no mark of any kind.
Had his meaning been unclear, I would have had to seek understanding elsewhere, because he didn’t stick around to field any questions. He was back in his Saturn sedan, driving off the motel lot, in the time it took me to get all five fingers of one hand wrapped around the parcel he’d just delivered.
Inside my room, using a metal nail file for lack of a knife, I sawed through layers of packing tape to free the envelope’s contents, a thick cocoon of bubble-pack and cheesecloth with something black and heavy at its core: a Taurus PT-92. It was an old soldier of the streets, egregiously scarred and shorn of all identifying serial numbers, and its magazine was loaded with the maximum number of ten silver-tipped, 9 mm rounds.
Understandably, O’ had declined to send a card along with it.
What do you tell a motherless child about the woman who abandoned her? Do you speak the truth to protect yourself, or concoct a lie to protect the child?
As her father, you are doomed either way. No matter how you couch it, the truth will always leave you with blood on your hands, and a lie will inevitably expose you as a fraud. The day will come when you will have to answer all of her questions, and whether you defer that day for twenty-five minutes or twenty-five years, both her pain and your guilt will be just as unbearable.
My decision to tell Coral as little as possible about her mother was made from the moment I first brought her into my home. I was barely able to cope with the truth myself, so I naturally lacked the stomach to share the burden of it with her. I told her her mother was dead, thinking I was closing the door on any hope she might dare cultivate for an eventual reunion. For most of Coral’s life, she was willing to believe it, satisfied merely to be given more and more details about the woman I’d led her to believe was her mother. Ultimately, however, as she grew older and I was forced to add layer upon layer to the lie I had told her, she began to suspect her mother was not dead at all, and took to studying all the physical evidence of the woman’s existence I’d provided her over the years for clues to her mother’s whereabouts: a few pieces of cheap jewelry, a handwritten letter addressed to me, and finally, most damning of all, an old photograph.
In it, a tall, lovely black woman with fair skin and a heart-stopping smile, dressed in white linen blouse and skirt, kneels beside a chocolate Labrador retriever, laughing because the animal won’t keep still for the camera.
‘You kept that photograph?’ the woman asked me now, talking on the telephone from wherever it was in Minnesota Quincy had somehow managed to track her down.
‘Yes. I’m not sure why.’
‘You’ll forgive me if I’m stunned. You never showed that kind of sentimentality while we were together.’
‘No, I don’t suppose I did.’
‘What is it that you want, Handy? Your friend said you’re in serious trouble, and you need my help.’
I told her what I’d done. It helped that I couldn’t see her face, and that she couldn’t see mine, but only marginally. If I live another fifty years, I’ll never make a more shameful and deflating confession.
It took her a long time to respond.
‘My God. And now, what am I supposed to do?’
‘If she finds you? The only thing you can do. Tell her the truth. Just please, God, break it to her gently.’
‘Why don’t you tell her the truth?’
‘If I thought she’d believe it, I would,’ I said, ‘but nothing I tell her now means anything to her. She thinks everything I say is a lie.’
‘And isn’t it?’
I let that pass. She was giving me all the grief I had expected she would and I was in no position to deny her the privilege.
<
br /> ‘Susan, please. Listen to me. This isn’t about what you owe me. The mess I made of what we had together, you’d have every right to hate my sorry ass until the day I die. But what I’m asking for is for the girl. She’s OK now, but she wasn’t for a long time. If she comes to you and you say the wrong thing, or aren’t careful about how you say the right one, I could lose her all over again. Maybe for good this time.’
I was putting her in a box from which there was no noble escape. She would either agree to help me, or risk doing damage to a young woman she didn’t even know. Still, Susan Yancy didn’t have to believe the situation was as dire as I described. I had lied to her about much lesser things before.
‘Goddamn you, Handy,’ she said.
I had been lying on my back in the dark of my motel room, listening to the moonlit world outside murmur and moan for a full two hours, when I finally sat up and called Sylvia Nuňez. I’d asked for her home number before leaving her at the cafe in Westchester, using the excuse that I might have some reason to talk to her about R.J. again later, but I think we both knew what my real interest was. The only surprise was how quickly I’d found the need to call.
I talked my way into an invitation to her apartment in Culver City and that’s where I spent the night. My motel room was an echo chamber for the voices of Susan Yancy and my daughter Coral, and I simply lacked the courage to endure them without company until morning. As for Sylvia Nuňez, whatever reasons she had for taking me into her bed were left unsaid, though I had the sense they were no more complicated than mine. She was a smart and handsome woman without a partner, undeserving of the loneliness that fate had resigned her to, and I was someone she’d stumbled across and found oddly compelling. The space that R.J. had once occupied in her life was now empty, and for one night, at least, she could make do with me as his replacement.
Our lovemaking was a model of gentle efficiency. What it lacked in physical heat was more than made up for by its slow, meandering purity. Neither of us was a kid anymore, and sexual performance had long ago become a non-issue in the face of things like honesty and reciprocation.
When we were done, we lay in each other’s arms and took turns drifting in and out of sleep, filling the gaps with small talk that was less about ourselves than the only thing we really had in common: R.J. Burrow.
‘Do you ever miss him?’ she asked me eventually.
‘No.’
‘But you loved him.’
I tried to picture him as I remembered him, peeling the years back one by one until I could see the flash of his grin and feel the sting of his laughter, especially after he’d just made me the butt of a cruel joke.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘What about O’Neal Holden?’
‘What about him?’
‘Do you think he loved Bobby?’
It should have been an easy question to answer. O’ had been R.J.’s friend longer than I by several years, and there had always been a special bond between them that I could only envy. But the love O’ appeared to have for R.J., like everything else about Bellwood’s future mayor, could not be taken at face value. O’ was a man who believed that life was an endless series of trade-offs, and if he had thought affection was the price he had to pay to keep R.J. on the leash, he would have gladly paid it.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
FIFTEEN
O’ had been right about the Jade Inn’s delivery boy: He delivered Linda Dole’s order to Excel Rucker’s safe house just like the fender bender he’d had with O’ had never occurred.
From a safe distance, my friends and I watched him arrive at Dole’s duplex and leave, all of us sitting in the reefer cloud that was forever trapped inside R.J.’s old Dodge Monaco.
‘I thought I told you to lay off the smoke,’ O’ grumbled.
‘I been sittin’ in this car all damn day. What else was I gonna do to occupy myself?’
The obvious answer was, anything less likely to impede his ability to watch Rucker’s house or draw the attention of the police, but O’ was wise enough to know how little good it would have done to say as much.
‘Everybody home?’ he asked instead.
‘Yep. Three niggas, one woman. The fat boy went out for a while, but he came back ’bout fifteen minutes ago.’
We sat in R.J.’s car for well over an hour after the Jade Inn delivery boy departed before making any move to approach the house, committed to giving the chloral hydrate all the time it needed to render everyone inside unconscious. It was a long wait, and an unnerving one. R.J., especially, had a hard time dealing with the certainty that somebody somewhere was going to eventually notice us – three brothers sitting out on the street in a strange car reeking of Mary Jane – and call the cops. But a long wait was part of the plan, and we forced ourselves to endure it. O’ wasn’t going to fuck this thing up playing too close to the margins, and neither was I.
‘What do you think?’ O’ asked finally.
It was eleven thirty. All but a few houses on the block were fully dark, an ostensible indicator of sleeping occupants within, but yellow light still shone behind the blinds in the front windows of the dealer’s duplex apartment. This could have been a bad sign, except that our weeks of surveillance had established a consistent routine for the people who lived there, and it invariably involved their shifting the lights from the front to the back of the apartment by eleven o’clock each night. Their failure to do so by now was a strong suggestion, if not actual proof, that Linda Dole and her companions had fallen out in the living and dining rooms where they’d eaten the spiked Chinese food, before they could make their usual exodus to the bedrooms at the rear of the residence.
‘I think it’s time to make the call,’ I said, climbing out of the Dodge.
Dole had given O’s friend Frankie Chang her phone number when she’d called what she thought was the Jade Inn to place her food order, and I sprinted around the block now to dial the number from a payphone. It was a risky thing to do. We were taking a chance that the ringing phone wouldn’t rouse somebody who might have otherwise remained unconscious, but this was the only way we could think of to determine if someone in the house was still capable of meeting our impending invasion with force. I took a deep breath, dropped some coins into the phone, and made the call.
‘Well?’ R.J. asked when I got back to the car and jumped in.
‘We’re good to go.’
‘Nobody picked up?’
I shook my head. O’ asked how many times I’d let it ring, and I told him – ten – then asked, ‘Any movement inside?’
‘Nothing.’
Which gave us one more reason to believe the chloral hydrate had done its job. In evenings past, we’d always been able to catch an occasional flash of movement behind the apartment blinds when Dole and her friends were awake and ambulatory.
‘Let’s do this thing, then,’ I said.
We all got out of the car together, R.J. and I to start for the house, and O’ to go play lookout from inside his less conspicuous Camaro, which was parked on the other side of the street nearby.
‘You fools have got fifteen minutes, starting now,’ he said. ‘You’re not outta there in fifteen, I’m coming to get your asses.’
R.J.’s active role in the robbery was non-negotiable, because our plan had already called for him to spend hours in the Dodge alone and there was no way O’ and I could ask him to go on doing so. But who would enter the apartment with him had not been so easily decided. O’ and I were equally determined to be right on top of R.J. when the deal went down, close enough to prevent any high drama he might get it in his head to cause, and neither of us would settle for the position of a mere street observer without a fight.
‘You don’t know him like I do. You can’t control him like I can,’ O’ had said, outside of R.J.’s presence.
‘Maybe not. But I’m the one who wanted to do this thing, and I’m the one who’ll have to live with it if anything goes wrong.’
‘Ain’t
nothin’ gonna go wrong if you let me go in with him.’
In the end, unable to reach an agreement any other way, we drew straws to settle the matter, and I won out. Still, even now, O’ was hoping I’d change my mind.
‘You sure you wanna do this?’ he asked me one last time.
We both knew I wasn’t sure. I was scared and beleaguered by doubt, envisioning every possible misstep any one of us could take that could bring this night to a terrible end. But this was my show, a monster of my own creation, and I wasn’t going to stand off to one side while O’ and R.J. took the brunt of its considerable risks.
‘Doesn’t matter whether I’m sure or not,’ I said. ‘I’m going either way.’
With that, I walked off, not bothering to tell R.J. to follow. The clock was running now and I couldn’t put the next ten minutes behind me fast enough.
‘Yo, hold up!’ R.J. whispered.
He caught up to me quickly and the two of us marched in lockstep to the duplex’s driveway, time beginning to move with breakneck speed. Under a half-moon fighting to be seen past an endless parade of cloud cover, the entire street was deathly silent, save for two dogs barking in response to a bleating car alarm many blocks away. R.J. and I eased up the side of the house toward the backyard, barely glancing at the apartment’s windows as we went by. All was quiet and still within, but that hardly mattered at this point; nothing could stop the machine we had set into motion now.
We reached the apartment’s back door and I immediately went to work trying to breach it. Without asking for it, the job of opening locked doors for our crew had somewhere along the way fallen to me, and I’d learned to do it fairly well. A lock was just another mechanical device, after all, and finessing mechanical devices was my specialty, even back then. While my picking tools scratched away at the deadbolt’s tumblers like a mouse gnawing a hole in a wall, R.J. watched and listened intently for any sound of discovery on the other side of the wrought iron portal, his black .45 already in hand.
I popped the lock in just over a minute and eased the door open, its hinges issuing a tiny, unnerving squeak of complaint. R.J. pulled a nylon stocking over his head, and I did the same, then he nodded impatiently at the Beretta still jammed in the back pocket of my Levi’s: Take it. I shook the order off, entertaining the childish notion that I could guarantee not having to use it simply by leaving the weapon where it was, but R.J. wasn’t having it. He yanked the gun from my pocket himself and shoved it into my right hand.
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