Cemetery Road

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  This time, I didn’t complain.

  It had been agreed that I would lead the way into the house, but R.J. started in without me. I put a hand out to grab him and turn him around, and even in the darkness of the porch, behind the nylon mesh of his mask, I could see the wild grin on his face.

  In the five years I’d known him, I’d seen R.J. Burrow do damage to a lot of people. I’d seen him uproot teeth and break bones, snap limbs from their sockets and pound a man’s skull with his fists like a safe he was trying to crack barehanded. But I had never seen R.J. kill anyone, and I had always been of the belief that he couldn’t, that his capacity for violence flirted with that limit only to stop just short of it. Now I realized how little reason I had to believe such a thing. The man on that back porch with me seemed not only capable of murder, but braced for it, as if it were something he’d been waiting his whole life to experience.

  Not for the first time over the last several days, I wondered if seeing Excel Rucker pay for his disrespect of Olivia Gardner could really be worth all this – and coming to the same, unrelenting conclusion, I pushed past R.J. into the dealer’s safe house to exact my revenge.

  The utility pantry we stepped into was dark and tomb-like, as was the small, filthy kitchen beyond, but from somewhere in one of the lighted rooms past them both, the murmur of a television could be heard. We entered the kitchen and paused to listen for live voices, R.J. hovering close behind me; I turned to look at him, and he shook his head in reply: Nothing.

  I crept to the open door leading to the dimly lit dining room and peered in. A man I recognized as one of Excel’s soldiers-in-residence sat at a garish, glass-topped table cluttered with newspaper, slumped over at the waist, his head turned sideways on the plate of Chinese food he’d been eating when he had apparently collapsed.

  R.J. nudged my arm and nodded, confidence soaring, and moved past me and the dozing soldier to push farther into the apartment alone. He curled around the edge of the living room archway and, without warning, threw his gun hand up, as if about to fire into the room . . .

  But he was only making ready for something that wasn’t there. Coming up behind him, I spied the figures of two more, seemingly unconscious people: Linda Dole, lying to one side on an old, tattered couch, her eyes closed and her mouth open, feet still grazing the floor; and the second soldier, the larger of the two, down on the living room carpet, drooling spit, limbs all akimbo. A small TV chattered and blinked from a faux-wood stand situated between them, and several open Jade Inn cartons littered their surroundings with noodles and fried rice.

  R.J. showed me three fingers, satisfied, and the two of us turned simultaneously toward the hallway behind us, where the fourth and final member of Excel Rucker’s worker bees had to be waiting. Tired of taking R.J.’s lead, I moved first this time and, gesturing for him to stay put, edged into the black hallway toward the three doorways it opened on to. Two of the doors were closed and dark, but the first was standing open, leaking a pale, shimmering light into the hall. I slipped up to the door frame, the Beretta a heavy stone in my hand, and in the muted glow of an old table lamp, saw a disheveled bedroom in which Linda Dole’s overweight partner lay asleep on a single bed against one wall. He was on his back atop the unmade bed, fully clothed and snoring soundly. One leg was hanging over the side of the mattress, his left arm thrown over his eyes.

  I looked back over my shoulder at R.J. and nodded an all-clear.

  He came up beside me, took a brief look at the man in the bedroom himself, then whispered, ‘OK. You stay out here and keep an eye on everybody, and I’ll go find the goods.’

  That hadn’t been the plan, and he knew it, but I didn’t argue with him. I could see it was an improvisation worth trying. R.J. couldn’t do much damage looking for the drugs and money, but left in charge of watching Excel’s people, there was no telling how he might react – or overreact – to one of them showing signs of life.

  I watched him gingerly open the next door down the hall and quickly close it again, no doubt finding a bathroom on the other side. He moved on to the door at the end of the hall, threw this one open like a DEA agent making a bust and, when nothing happened, reached in to turn on the lights. I couldn’t see much of the room from where I was standing, but it looked like a second bedroom, larger than the first. R.J. disappeared inside for several seconds, then stepped out again to report his findings.

  ‘We got it,’ he said, too excited now to bother with keeping his voice down.

  He went back into the room to secure the take and, resisting the temptation to follow, I returned to my business as guard dog. I gave Linda Dole’s partner one more glance, saw he hadn’t moved an inch since the last time I’d seen him, and went back out to the front of the apartment to check on the others. All three seemed just as frozen in time as their friend in the bedroom.

  I took a position in the living room, just outside the hallway, where I could see Linda Dole and the two soldiers, and the doorway to the front bedroom. It was the closest I could come to having a clear view of all four of Excel’s people at once. I checked my watch and saw that R.J. and I had been in the apartment for fourteen minutes now. O’ would be crashing the party any second if we didn’t get the hell out.

  I was about to go move R.J. along when the man in the dining room let out a small groan. The sound brought my heart to a stop. I forced myself to approach the table where he sat to get a closer look, gathering my nerve for what I might have to do should he begin to stir in earnest . . . but he didn’t. He never moved, and he never made another sound. He just continued to sit there, slumped over the table, breathing with the ragged rhythm of a man far closer to death than consciousness.

  As I stood there watching him, fear abating, my gaze drifted aimlessly across the layers of newspaper scattered across the tabletop around his head. I hadn’t seen a newspaper in days. The only news I’d had any interest in had been relative to this apartment and the people in it, and all the curiosity I normally had about the world had been shoved to one side. Without thinking, I lifted the stocking up over my eyes and stuck a hand out to sift through several sections of the Los Angeles Times, perusing headlines and photographs, skimming over the details of the previous night’s Lakers game and the latest incredible performance by the team’s rookie point guard, a kid named Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson. In moving things around, I unearthed something on the table I hadn’t noticed before: a half-eaten hamburger and an empty French fries bag, the latter bearing the unmistakable double-arches of the McDonald’s logo.

  I understood the implications of my discovery immediately.

  I opened my mouth to call out to R.J., body poised to turn and go get him, and felt something hard and cold nose into the back of my neck. I didn’t have to see him to know the man standing behind me was the fat one I’d last seen asleep in the front bedroom, or that the object he had pointed at the top of my spine was a gun.

  ‘Put it down, motherfucka,’ R.J. said.

  I dared a sideways glance, even as Linda Dole’s lover did the same. Standing in the living room, R.J. had the Colt pointed directly at the fat man’s head.

  ‘I ain’t gonna say it twice, all right?’

  Sweat was sluicing off my back like rainwater down a drainpipe, but Excel Rucker’s man had it even worse; the stench he was giving off was overpowering. Still, he kept the gun pressed against my neck. Not because he wasn’t terrified, but because he hadn’t yet decided which was the lesser of two evils: having R.J. kill him now, or waiting for Rucker to do it later.

  I thought about what I would do in his place, and lost all hope.

  He finally made up his mind, and the revolver dropped first to his side, then out of his hand and down to the floor.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, his voice breaking.

  I started to pick up his gun, but R.J. stopped me cold. ‘Cover your face, nigga!’

  He was right. I’d forgotten the nylon stocking I’d lifted up and away from my eyes in order to scan the newsp
aper, and I’d almost made the unforgivable mistake of showing the other man my face. I jerked the stocking back down over my chin, burning with embarrassment, and snatched his gun up off the floor before shoving it into the front of my pants.

  The fat man started to weep. Tears slid down both sides of his face, and his body shook like a wind-up toy. ‘We can make a deal,’ he said to me. ‘You ain’t gotta do this.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I told him.

  He caught the finality in my voice and set himself to scream, but I slammed a fist across his jaw before R.J. could move in to save me the trouble. The big man fell like a stone, eyes rolling up in his head, and for a while I stood over his unconscious form, unappeased, face warm with rage and vision blurred.

  ‘He’s out,’ R.J. said, putting a vise-grip on my shoulder. ‘Leave ’im be and let’s get the fuck outta here.’

  Only now did I see the heavy bundle in his hand, a baby blue bed sheet tied into a makeshift, bulging sack.

  ‘Is that—?’

  ‘Yeah. Let’s go!’

  We ran out the same way we’d come in, both of us laughing like idiots, and almost didn’t see O’ in the driveway, coming the other way with his own head sheathed in nylon, until we’d trampled him underfoot.

  ‘Hey, what—’

  We didn’t stop. We just sped right past, saying nothing, taking it for granted the man we thought of as our leader would show the good sense to follow soon enough.

  SIXTEEN

  What I had told O’ about my dietary limitations at R.J.’s funeral a week ago had been true. I couldn’t eat the way I used to. High blood pressure had trimmed all the fat and most of the flavor from my daily menu years ago, so that things like sausages and buttered bread were former delicacies of choice I could now only look upon from afar. I’ve learned to live with the constant deprivation, but there are times I want to break a chair over a waiter’s head just to feel a little better about it.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t join us?’ Frances Burrow asked me again.

  I had made the mistake of coming around the house Wednesday morning just as R.J.’s widow and daughter were sitting down to breakfast, and Frances Burrow seemed intent upon sharing their aromatic wealth of bacon, fried eggs and toast with me.

  ‘I’m quite sure, thank you.’

  She looked considerably better today than she had two days earlier. Her face was still clouded by grief and you could barely hear her when she spoke, but the robe she’d been wearing into the noon hour on Monday had already been exchanged for real clothes and she was no longer moving like every step could be her last.

  We were all sitting at the dining room table. Frances was at one end, with Toni and I on opposing sides of her. Toni was silent and uneasy, watching me warily. All I could do was guess, but I imagined she was fearful of the news I might have come here to deliver, and resentful of the fact I had not shared it with her first, outside her mother’s presence.

  ‘You found out something,’ Frances Burrow said.

  It wasn’t so much a question as an expression of thanks for an answered prayer.

  ‘I’ve learned a thing or two that could be important, but I can’t say how much until you and your daughter answer a few questions for me.’

  ‘Of course. Anything.’

  She and I both waited for Toni to offer a similar note of encouragement, but all she said was, ‘What kind of questions?’

  In truth, I was anxious to ask only one, the one I’d been carrying around in my head ever since my meeting the day before with Sylvia Nuňez. But rather than ask this question now, looking to satisfy nothing as much as my own gnawing curiosity, I put it off to broach another, more germane subject.

  ‘It’s my understanding the police have identified a suspect in R.J.’s murder. Were either of you aware of that?’

  Both women said they weren’t, Frances Burrow with some degree of outrage.

  ‘Who is it?’ she demanded. ‘Has he been arrested yet?’

  ‘Not as of yesterday afternoon. And I can give you his name, but only if you ladies can promise me this conversation will remain strictly between the three of us, at least for the time being. The person who gave me the information made it quite clear that he didn’t want the police to find out he’d been talking to me.’

  ‘We understand.’

  ‘No, wait. We don’t understand anything,’ Toni said. ‘How—’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Frances Burrow said, cutting her daughter a look that carried more force than a slap in the face. ‘If he says we have to keep quiet about it, then we’ll just have to keep quiet about it.’ She turned to me again. ‘You have our word, Mr White. Please go on.’

  I looked at Toni, hoping she’d give me some small sign that her mother did indeed speak for both of them – but there was nothing on her face to see but embarrassment.

  ‘His name is Darrel Eastman.’ I found the notebook I’d been making notes in and opened it up. I’d decided to start mapping out all my questions for people beforehand, rather than try to remember them as I went along. ‘He’s supposed to be an habitual drug abuser with a long arrest record that R.J. was mentoring somehow. Have either of you ever heard of him?’

  Toni Burrow shook her head, but R.J.’s widow hesitated.

  ‘Did you say “Darrel”?’

  ‘That’s right. Last name Eastman. You know him?’

  ‘No.’ She paused to think, mind reaching backward in time to draw a piece of memory closer to view. ‘But I remember Bobby got a call from somebody named Darrel once. He told me it was somebody from work.’

  ‘At Coughlin?’

  She nodded. Like me, her daughter was watching her intently now, all interest in being sullen forgotten.

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘Two, three weeks ago, maybe. I was the one who answered the phone. It was just after dinner. Is he a young man?’

  ‘I was told he’s twenty-five.’

  ‘Then it must have been him. He asked to speak with Bobby and told me his name was Darrel. Before I could ask what his call was regarding, Bobby walked in, took the phone from my hand, and asked to be left alone.’

  ‘Then you don’t know what they talked about.’

  ‘No. I only know the call made my husband very angry. He never got calls from work here at home and he didn’t care for the imposition.’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ Toni Burrow said, addressing me. ‘Are you saying somebody at Coughlin did murder Daddy?’

  ‘No. At least, I don’t think so. I was out at Coughlin yesterday, and nobody I spoke to could connect Eastman to Coughlin in any way.’

  ‘Then someone had to be lying to you,’ Frances said. Meaning, of course, that R.J.’s word that Eastman’s call had been work-related was unassailable in her eyes.

  I glanced at Toni, saw a small, wry smile cross her face: Go ahead, it said. Challenge her delusions and see how far you get.

  ‘Did you ask R.J. about the call afterward?’

  ‘Yes, but he wouldn’t talk about it. He just said he had to go into the office, and left.’

  ‘Did that happen often? His having to go in after hours?’

  ‘Up until recently, almost never. But in the last year or so, it was happening three or four times a month. That was why he was so angry that night. It was the third time in a week he’d had to work late.’

  I hadn’t asked Mike Owens or Sylvia Nuňez about R.J.’s general work schedule, so I didn’t know if overtime was unusual for him or not.

  ‘But you say he didn’t usually receive calls at home from work.’

  ‘He didn’t. Usually, he either already knew he had to go in and left right after dinner, or worked straight through without ever coming home.’

  I paused for a moment, on the threshold of taking R.J.’s widow somewhere I knew she would not care to go. ‘Is there any chance he was somewhere other than at Coughlin on any of those occasions?’

  She looked at me like I was crazy, and her daughter did likewise, but
I’d put this line of questioning off long enough. There were things I had to know if I wanted an accurate picture of R.J.’s life just before he died, and I’d never come to know them if I continued to tiptoe around his widow like a dozing bear I was afraid to stir.

  ‘Of course not,’ Frances Burrow said, smiling at the absurdity of my question. ‘Where else would he have been?’

  ‘Well, like I said, I was told Eastman was somebody R.J. was working with outside of Coughlin. That he was a troubled young man R.J. was trying to help stay straight in some way.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Toni added.

  ‘What I’m suggesting is that R.J. was acting as some sort of surrogate father to Eastman. Perhaps as part of a volunteer program he was involved in or something, I don’t know. Would that have been possible?’

  ‘Not without my knowledge,’ Frances said.

  ‘But if he was spending more and more time away from home—’

  ‘Who have you been talking to, Mr White, that believes they knew my husband better than I did?’

  I chose to answer the question directly. ‘One of his co-workers. A woman named Sylvia Nuňez.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I know all about Sylvia.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Certainly. She’s harmless. She was a distraction for Bobby and nothing more.’

  I waited for her to explain.

  ‘Their relationship was casual at best. Perhaps even sexual on occasion. But my husband loved me and I loved him, and that’s all there is to it. Anything Sylvia Nuňez has to say about Bobby is strictly conjecture.’