Cemetery Road

by Gar Anthony Haywood

‘Mother, what are you saying?’ Toni asked, apparently hearing all this for the first time.

  Her mother turned to her, said, ‘I’m saying that being with your father all these years involved all kinds of compromises you know nothing about, and leaving him be to spend a few meaningless nights with women like Sylvia Nuňez was one of them.’ She looked back at me. ‘He had only one wife, Mr White, and that was me. I’m the one who knows what he was and wasn’t doing, not Sylvia Nuňez.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. But regarding what she said about Darrel Eastman—’

  ‘Bobby wasn’t acting as a surrogate father to anyone. He had no interest in that sort of thing, and even if he had, he certainly wouldn’t have started with someone like Darrel Eastman, if he’s half the criminal you say he is.’

  ‘Mother . . .’ Toni said, seeing the corner R.J.’s widow was painting herself into.

  ‘What? Your father couldn’t be near people like that and he knew it. Troubled young drug addicts and street thugs. Even if he thought he could help them, he would have never taken the chance.’

  ‘Then do you understand what you’re saying? If Daddy didn’t know Eastman from Coughlin, and he didn’t know him from some kind of volunteer work he was doing – what else does that leave?’

  Frances Burrow surprised me. I was expecting outrage and drama; utensils clashing with china, a harried dash from the room. But all my hostess did was turn to stone.

  ‘No,’ she said simply.

  I cut Toni off before she could answer. ‘All right. Why don’t we forget about Eastman for a moment and talk about Cleveland Allen instead.’

  Both women looked at me expectantly.

  ‘I understand he was the director of sales at Coughlin when R.J. was the chief of security for that division. R.J.’s supervisor didn’t want to talk about him, but Nuňez told me Allen was fired ten months ago for violating the company’s sexual harassment policy.’

  ‘That isn’t true. He was fired for stealing,’ Frances said.

  ‘Stealing?’

  She nodded her head. ‘They told everyone that sexual harassment story just so he could avoid prosecution, but they fired him for embezzlement. He was skimming money off the top of some of his biggest accounts.’

  ‘R.J. told you that?’

  ‘Yes. He felt horrible about it. Mr Allen was the one who got him his first job at Coughlin. If it hadn’t been for him, Bobby might never have gotten work after . . . after he went away,’ she said, almost forgetting for a moment that I wasn’t supposed to know about R.J.’s more recent criminal history.

  ‘Did R.J. have anything to do with his termination?’

  ‘No, but Mr Allen thought so. He came to the house once in tears. Drunk. Bobby wouldn’t let him in, but they talked out on the porch for almost an hour. Even from the bedroom upstairs, I could hear him begging Bobby to fix it. “You can fix it,” he kept saying, over and over. “You can fix it.” But there was nothing Bobby could do. He didn’t have the power to “fix” anything at Coughlin.’

  ‘Why all these questions about Allen?’ Toni asked.

  ‘Yes. I was wondering the same thing,’ her mother said.

  ‘Allen committed suicide shortly after his firing. I admit it’s a bit of a stretch, but if he blamed R.J. for losing his job – and it sounds like he did – someone he left behind might have held R.J. equally responsible for his death.’ I turned to face Frances again. ‘What do we know about Allen’s family? Did he have adult children?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say. Bobby almost never talked about him, and the only time I ever saw Mr Allen was that one time here at the house.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,’ Toni said. ‘If this Darrel Eastman killed Daddy, why should we care if Allen’s family blamed him for Allen’s suicide?’

  ‘If Eastman did kill R.J. and nobody put him up to it? You probably shouldn’t care,’ I said. ‘But until he’s in custody and we know those things for certain, we might be wise to consider the possibility that Allen hired him to kill your father.’

  Only marginally convinced, R.J.’s daughter nodded in assent.

  ‘I’m not a professional investigator like yourself, so I’m probably paying more attention to some things than they deserve,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want to overlook anything. Or anybody. Take Paris McDonald, for example.’

  ‘Who?’ Frances asked.

  ‘Paris McDonald. He’s a former boxer doing life up at Pelican Bay who’s apparently just become an ordained minister. Sylvia Nuňez says R.J. was following the press on him fairly closely just before he died.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s what I was hoping either you or your daughter could tell me this morning. What could R.J.’s interest have been in a man like McDonald?’

  ‘They were friends,’ Toni said, matter-of-factly.

  I’d heard her perfectly well, but I needed to hear it again to be sure. ‘Friends?’

  ‘They were corresponding with each other. I found a letter from McDonald among Daddy’s papers the other day, responding to one Daddy had apparently sent to him. It was an invitation to come visit McDonald up at the prison, and I think Daddy may have actually gone. I assumed he was just someone Daddy met and befriended during his time away.’

  Her mother shot her a look, seeking to end her loose talk then and there, but Toni said, ‘He knows Daddy was once incarcerated, Mother. I told him yesterday.’

  Frances Burrow seemed poised to make good on all the fiery histrionics I’d been expecting from her earlier when the doorbell rang. It stopped R.J.’s widow cold, but I barely heard it. The thought of R.J. and Paris McDonald meeting up at Pelican Bay, for any reason whatsoever, would not allow me to focus on anything else.

  On the bell’s second ring, Toni said, ‘I’ll go get it,’ and rose to leave the room. Frances glowered in my direction for a brief second – I, the overly curious snoop who had somehow weaseled his way into the darkest corners of the Burrow family closet – then hurried off to follow her daughter.

  By the time I joined the pair in the living room, Toni was closing the front door behind two men she had just let in: one of them black, one Hispanic, both sporting the weary vigilance and off-the-rack dress-uniform of all plain-clothes detectives everywhere.

  Seeing me, the black man, older and larger than his partner, said to Frances Burrow, ‘You’ve got company. Perhaps we should come back later.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ She turned to me. ‘Handy, these are the policemen working on Bobby’s case for us. Detective Saunders’ – she nodded toward the black man – ‘and Detective Rodriguez. Did I get that right?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ both cops murmured in unison.

  ‘This is Handy White, detectives. He’s an old family friend of Bobby’s from Minnesota who’s been trying to help Toni and me get through this very difficult time.’

  Saunders just nodded his head, but Rodriguez showed more initiative. ‘Trying to help how?’ he asked.

  ‘Any way I can,’ I said.

  ‘So we hear. You were out trying to help at Coughlin Construction yesterday, weren’t you?’

  I didn’t have to ask how they knew; it would have turned my opinion of Mike Owens upside down if he hadn’t ratted me out by week’s end.

  ‘That’s right. I thought somebody there might remember something useful.’

  Saunders, whose refusal to accept the onset of baldness had left his head divided into four separate, feuding islands of gray-speckled hair, decided he didn’t want Rodriguez playing cop alone. ‘Useful? How do you mean?’

  ‘He means useful to us,’ Toni said, moving around the room to set herself squarely between the detectives and me. ‘Those of us who’d like to see the person or persons who murdered my father put away for good.’

  ‘And you don’t think we’re trying hard enough to make that happen. Is that it?’ Rodriguez asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘All the lady’s trying to say is that we all want the same thing here.’
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br />   ‘I’m sure we do, sir,’ Saunders said. ‘The thing is, my partner and I are the only ones whose job it is to get it done.’

  If he’d been trying to nail the door on the subject shut, he couldn’t have done a better job. I had no counter for his argument, and for a long moment, at least, neither did either of the Burrows.

  ‘My daughter and I didn’t ask for Mr White’s help so he could make your job more difficult, detectives,’ Frances said in time. ‘But we were concerned that some of the conclusions you seem to have reached about my husband might cause you to take too narrow a view of his murder.’

  The two detectives exchanged a glance. Saunders spoke before Rodriguez could: ‘We base our views in every case on the evidence at hand, Mrs Burrow. Nothing more.’ He directed his attention to me. ‘We would appreciate it, Mr White – most especially since you have no legal license to do so – if you would put off any future efforts to play policeman until my partner and I have officially closed our investigation into Mr Burrow’s death. That way, it won’t be necessary for us to arrest you on the charge of interfering in police business which, I’m sure, would only make these fine ladies feel worse than they already do.’

  ‘The only thing that could make us feel worse, detective, is another day going by without knowing who killed my husband,’ R.J.’s widow said.

  ‘It just so happens, ma’am, that we’ve come here this morning to tell you that we think we may have found that individual,’ Rodriguez said, mustache twitching. ‘But I’m afraid that’s something we’ll have to insist upon discussing with you in private.’

  He trained a disdainful gaze upon me, but that wasn’t the reason for my sudden unease, nor Toni Burrow’s. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that she, too, was waiting to hear what her mother would say next, and whether it would seal my fate by including some mention of Darrel Eastman’s name.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Frances said. ‘I’ve told you, Mr White is a very dear friend. Anything you have to say to me or my daughter about Bobby’s murder you can say to him, as well.’

  ‘Mrs Burrow . . .’ Saunders started to protest.

  ‘The detectives are right, Frances,’ I said. ‘This is a private matter between you and them, and in any case, I was just on my way out.’ I turned to Saunders and Rodriguez. ‘I’d like to thank you two gentlemen for showing me so much patience. You can rest assured I’ll be doing everything I can from here on out to make this meeting our last.’

  Rodriguez looked as if he wanted to respond, but he let me go without bothering.

  SEVENTEEN

  For all the things I’d found different about Los Angeles since I’d left it for St Paul, one thing, at least, had apparently not changed: You still couldn’t get to LAX without a fight.

  Maybe this wasn’t the case back in 1929 when the city fathers turned a wheat field in Westchester into Los Angeles International Airport. Housing in the area had yet to boom and the 405 freeway was over thirty years in the future. But at some point in time, after the airport had become ‘freeway close’, it also became unreachable, a far island surrounded by motor vehicles that you could neither quickly nor easily approach, day or night. It was that way during all my years as an LA resident, it had been that way two Mondays ago when I’d dropped in for R.J.’s funeral, and that’s how it was today, twenty-six years and millions of dollars in obvious attempts to rush traffic along later.

  I would not have been making the trip at all had O’ not insisted. I would have preferred to be doing almost anything else. But when you called the mayor of Bellwood to insist upon an unscheduled meeting, you had to go wherever his itinerary made it convenient for him to see you. O’ had said he was attending a business conference at a hotel outside the airport, and he could give me ten minutes if I could show up in fifteen, so I headed west down Slauson Avenue only minutes after I’d left Frances and Toni Burrow in the hands of the SMPD to see how fast my rented econobox could make the trip.

  As I drove, I was struck again by how foreign some parts of the city were to me now. Fox Hills, in particular, had shape-shifted in my absence from little more than a shopping mall to a sprawling mass of industrial and residential complexes. Land nobody used to want had at some point in the last twenty-plus years turned to gold, and seemingly uncontained development had ensued.

  I turned south on Sepulveda Boulevard and kept right on rubbernecking, taking in this brave new world with all the slack-jawed wonder of a farm boy who’d never seen a Burger King before. Somewhere just past Centinela, I got careless and drifted out of my lane; I awoke in time to avoid sideswiping a black pickup truck twice my rental car’s size, but too late, I was sure, to satisfy one observer: the driver of a distant patrol car reflected in my rear-view mirror.

  The car was hanging too far back for me to make out its markings, but the telltale halftone paint job and rooftop light bar were unmistakable.

  Men of color like myself, children of urban environments in which the police do not always put justice ahead of the compulsion to mete it out, learn early on to be afraid at moments like this. Our fear is almost never a rational one, but we feel it just the same. We have seen too many men and women in uniform abuse the power they have been given by turning a simple traffic violation into cause for search, seizure and public humiliation – or worse. One minute you’re handing over your license and registration, and the next you’re lying nose-down in the street, in the rain, waiting for the cops who pulled you over to become convinced they’ve mistaken you for someone who actually deserves their interest, let alone their contempt. Thus, we see a car with white doors and colored fenders coming and grow stock still, and hope against hope it will reveal itself to be not a police car at all, but a mere imitation, just a squad car lookalike driven by a rent-a-cop from one private security firm or another.

  I couldn’t yet tell what this one was.

  The 9 mm Taurus O’s delivery boy had given me the night before was in the rental’s glove box. It was a foolish place to keep it, but then, I hadn’t asked for a gun just to regret not having it if the need arose to use it. If I got pulled over and the car was searched, I’d spend the night in jail and be sent home, at best. At worst, I’d do some serious time and give R.J.’s widow and daughter one more thing to lose sleep over. In either case, my days as the great defender of R.J.’s memory would be over here and now.

  The blue-and-white patrol car, still a half-dozen car lengths back, finally edged out of my lane into the next. I waited for the single occupant – a nebulous uniform shielded behind the glare of the windshield – to hit the lights or the siren, but he did neither. He just kept coming, seemingly content to keep pace with me and nothing more.

  If I’d been holding out any last hope to this point that the cop and I would never meet, getting rear-ended at the next major intersection relieved me of this notion entirely. The collision wasn’t much more than a tap, but it had been just hard and noisy enough to make ignoring it unrealistic. I looked up into my rear-view and saw a middle-aged Asian in a loud checkered shirt cursing his own stupidity as he got out of his car to check the damage. I didn’t want to, but I pushed my own door open to join him.

  He was chattering something about spilling a drink as we came together at the point of impact. He was apologizing profusely, seeking both my mercy and full attention, but I gave him neither. I was too busy watching the blue-and-white cruiser behind him complete an abrupt U-turn in the middle of the street and race off into the distance.

  It wasn’t something I’d never seen a cop do before; uniforms in patrol cars often changed direction without warning, lights and siren off, like a kid on a new tricycle. Still, I had to wonder.

  Was it the hassle of taking an accident report that had sent this policeman running, or me?

  ‘You don’t have that thing on you right now, do you?’

  O’ was looking me over carefully.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘That thing you asked me to find for you yesterday.’ />
  We were less than a mile from LAX, walking around the block along Century Boulevard after I’d drawn him away from the conference he was attending at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, and he wanted to make sure he wasn’t running the risk of being caught fraternizing with a man who had a 9 mm semi-automatic in his pocket.

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head.

  ‘I’d give you hell about being late, except for the fact you’re doing me a favor, getting me away from that bore-fest back in there. Forty-five public servants sitting around a banquet room talking about “Controlling the IT Costs of the Modern Municipal Infrastructure”. Can you believe that shit?’

  I told him about the small fender-bender that had held me up.

  ‘You OK? Nobody got hurt?’

  ‘Everybody’s fine. The cars, too.’

  ‘This shit must be pretty important. You call my private number less than twenty-four hours after I give it to you, then damn near kill yourself trying to make a meeting. What’s going on?’

  I stopped walking so he’d be forced to deal with the news head-on.

  ‘He was talking to Paris McDonald, O’,’ I said.

  ‘R.J.?’

  ‘His daughter said they were exchanging letters. He might have even visited McDonald in prison.’

  ‘Bullshit. Why the hell would he do that?’

  ‘Because McDonald invited him up.’

  ‘McDonald didn’t even know him.’

  ‘He wasn’t supposed to. But maybe something happened to change that.’

  We were standing directly under the airport’s incoming flight patterns, and monstrous jets were scraping the sky just over our heads every few minutes, howling loud enough to unseat teeth. O’ waited for the latest one to go by, then said, ‘Let’s keep moving,’ and started walking again.

  ‘Have you seen these letters they allegedly wrote to each other?’

  ‘There’s only supposed to be one. But no, not yet.’

  ‘Then we don’t know who contacted who first.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Of course it matters. If R.J. made first contact, it’s possible he never told McDonald anything. But if McDonald found him first, that can only mean McDonald knows the works. About R.J., about us – everything.’