‘And?’
‘And what? They went inside and I left, soon as the lights went out.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it. I looked the Riv over a little first, to see what kind’a alarm he had on it, then I raised up. I bet he’s out there now, with Excel’s little girl.’
The garage fell still as O’ thought it over. Eventually, he turned to me and asked, ‘What do you think?’
‘I think if I was a brother looking for somewhere to hide, and a place to hold somebody hostage where she’d be hard as hell to find, a crib that far out in the boonies wouldn’t be a bad choice,’ I said. ‘It’s for damn sure the last place I would’ve thought to look for him.’
O’ nodded in agreement. ‘Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking, too.’ He looked over at R.J. ‘Can you find this place again?’
‘Absolutely,’ R.J. said.
We were all going to ride out to Simi together, until R.J.’s Dodge took four tries to start. With its engine idling like somebody had poured sand down the carburetor, O’ looked back at me from the front seat and said, ‘I don’t like it.’
He was right. If we went all the way out there to that white girl’s house and needed to leave in a hurry, and R.J.’s Monaco refused to turn over . . .
‘You want me to drive?’
‘Yeah. Hell, yes.’
He opened his door to get out and then I remembered. ‘Wait up.’
‘What?’
‘I’m low on gas. We’d have to stop first.’
‘Fuck!’
‘Hell, man! I wasn’t counting on driving to Simi goddamn Valley tonight.’
O’ blew out a deep sigh. The fools he had to put up with . . .
‘All right. If we could trust this piece of shit to get us there and back, we’d all go together, but we can’t. And we can’t wait around for you to gas up, neither, so me and R.J. are gonna go on ahead while you get gas, then follow us out.’ He looked to R.J. ‘Can you tell him how to get where we’re goin’?’
For a man who’d probably only seen the names of the streets and freeway exits involved one time in his life, R.J. did an admirable job of giving me directions. My chances of getting lost were better than I would have preferred but there was nothing to be done about it; we needed my car for backup, just as O’ had said, and we didn’t have time to waste pumping gas.
I climbed out of the Monaco without another word and my two friends took off. I crossed the street and started back down the block to where my Fairmont sedan was parked. It wasn’t until I was inside the car, about to pull the driver’s side door closed behind me, that I saw another living soul. A hand reached out of nowhere to grab my shoulder and the long barrel of a revolver met my gaze when I spun around.
‘I’m lookin’ for a nigga named O’Neal Holden,’ Excel Rucker said.
NINETEEN
If in fact, only three days before his death, R.J. had flown out to Pelican Bay Penitentiary to make his peace with Paris McDonald, he was not alone in wanting to do so. I had been playing with the idea myself for years.
There was no one else left to seek forgiveness from, and seeing McDonald to make a full confession promised the only form of closure I could ever hope to find. But how would such a meeting play out? What would it accomplish? These were questions I couldn’t answer, no more than R.J. could have, and it was the not knowing that kept me away, day after day, year after year, as shackled to my oath of silence as ever.
And then R.J. died. From the moment Frances Burrow called to inform me of his passing, I had taken the news as a sign that my own end was near, and that God or the devil – one or the other – had finally given me the excuse I’d been waiting for to unburden my soul before the one person who could save it, consequences be damned.
Thus I had opened a desk drawer in my home two days before R.J.’s funeral, withdrawn the letter from Pelican Bay Penitentiary I’d received and set aside months prior, and submitted my official request to visit an inmate there named Paris McDonald.
I didn’t give too much thought to what I would do if my request was granted. Maybe I’d go, and maybe I wouldn’t. I was only interested in having the option. I had a feeling my life was about to move in highly abrupt and unpredictable ways, and if I were somehow called to take a meeting with McDonald – if fate and circumstance left me no other alternative – I wanted to be capable.
Now, eleven days after I’d placed my visitation papers in the mail back in St Paul, I no longer had to wonder if there’d been any point. I had reason to believe that R.J. had already met with Paris McDonald himself, and I couldn’t help but suspect that the nature of their conversation held the key to R.J.’s murder. I could go on with my amateurish attempts at homicide investigation pretending otherwise, but I would only be fooling myself, seeking to avoid something as certain and inescapable as gravity.
What terrors might be waiting for me in the prison town of Crescent City, California, I couldn’t say. I only knew that, when and if I received clearance to visit Paris McDonald at Pelican Bay Penitentiary, it was a journey I would have little choice but to make.
I had no right to expect it, but Toni Burrow agreed to go on helping me in whatever ways she could. Knowing now what she did, she could not have been faulted for cutting me off without another word; I had taken what she had always believed about her father and turned it upside down, enlarging all the bad and reconstituting the good, so that the man she was left to remember must have felt like something she had only imagined. She was angry and hurt, as victims of great deceptions always are, and she made little effort to conceal how much of her rage was reserved for me.
But I was not the one she hated most.
Before we parted ways at Leimert Village Park, I asked her to get me a current address for Cleveland Allen’s survivors. Something her mother had said that morning was bothering me, and I couldn’t shake it loose.
Frances Burrow said the night Allen had come by the house to see R.J., he had seemed to believe her husband could get him his job back at Coughlin. ‘You can fix it’, she had quoted Allen as saying, over and over again. But Allen had been a VP and R.J.’s superior at Coughlin. What could have made him think R.J. had the power to reverse his termination?
It took Toni Burrow less than an hour to call me back with the information I had asked for. She had returned to her mother’s home immediately after our meeting and, apparently making better use of a laptop computer and Internet connection than I could have, found a Los Angeles-area phone number and address for one Estelle Allen, whom she assured me was Cleveland Allen’s widow.
I eschewed the phone number to drop in on her unannounced. She lived in a converted condominium complex out in Torrance that was clean and freshly painted, its two-story facade a picture postcard of green grass and geraniums. Its origins as a low-rent apartment building, however, were hard to miss, as was the security intercom out front. I had been hoping to take Estelle Allen by surprise, but it seemed that wasn’t to be.
‘Yes?’
The voice crackling over the intercom handset was shrill but vibrant, incongruent with the image of a bitter, middle-aged woman still trying to come to terms with the death of her husband.
‘Mrs Allen?’ I asked.
‘Yes? Who is it?’
‘My name is Errol White. I was friends with a man named R.J. Burrow, who worked for your late husband at Coughlin Construction. Would it be possible for me to come in for a moment to ask you a few questions?’
‘R.J. Burrow?’ She hadn’t been happy to hear the name. In the time it took her to find her voice again, I was able to watch a teenage boy across the street parallel park a green Honda like he was wearing a blindfold. ‘Are you with the police?’
‘No ma’am. But—’
‘Then I have nothing to say to you. Please go.’
The line went dead.
I started to redial her unit, then set the intercom handset back on its hook.
It would have been easy to leave.
She didn’t want to see me, and I wasn’t likely to change her mind by harassing her over the intercom. But something about the way she had dismissed me wouldn’t let me walk away. It wasn’t indignation I had heard in her voice, as I’d been expecting, but trepidation. She was afraid of something.
I stood around the building’s entrance with the intercom’s receiver back in my hand, waiting to do an act for someone either going in or coming out. I wasn’t sure how long I could loiter this way without drawing unwanted attention to myself, and I felt like an idiot, but it was either this or go home. I hung the receiver up, went through the motions of double-checking an entry in my cellphone, then picked the receiver up again and pretended to call a unit. Right on time, a heavy-set black woman with three small children – one in her arms, and the other two at her feet – labored to herd them out the door. I pulled the door open for her, did some play-acting with the intercom handset before hanging it up – ‘Hey, never mind, somebody’s coming out’ – and then squeezed in behind her.
She barely nodded thanks.
I found the door to Estelle Allen’s condo and paused a moment before knocking, having come this far without actually formulating a plan as to how I would proceed. In short order, I realized the only way to go was to play it by ear, and rapped on the door. Once, twice. And then:
‘Who is it?’
Angry now.
‘It’s Errol White, Mrs Allen. I just need a moment of your time, please.’
‘I told you I don’t want to talk to you. How did you get in here? Go away before I call the police!’
I took a shot in the dark: ‘Do you really want to do that?’
Silence.
‘R.J. was a close friend, Mrs Allen. If you want to call the police, go ahead, but I’m not going anywhere until I’ve spoken with you.’
I waited through another lengthy silence, imagining her standing there on the other side of the door’s peephole, trying to measure my resolve. Finally, there was the sound of the locks being thrown back, heatedly and in some haste, and the door was jerked open to reveal a white woman in her late fifties, early sixties; unnaturally slender, dressed for a non-existent party, thick eyelashes winking beneath a massive blond wig crawling with curls.
‘I don’t know anything,’ she said.
‘About what?’
‘Whatever it is you’re here to talk about. R.J. Burrow, Cleveland, Coughlin Construction – whatever.’
‘May I come in?’
‘No. Ask your questions and leave.’
She still had her left hand on the door, so anxious was she to get our business over with and send me on my way.
‘I’ve been told your husband’s death was a suicide. Is that so?’
‘That’s right. Last February. What of it?’
‘The people I’ve talked to say he was distraught over Coughlin’s letting him go, but they tell conflicting stories as to why that happened. Depending on who you ask, he was either defrauding the company or sexually harassing employees.’
She just stared at me.
‘Which was it, exactly?’
‘The sex thing. I thought you wanted to talk about your friend?’
‘R.J., right. I was also told your husband held him responsible.’
‘Responsible?’
‘For his firing. R.J.’s widow says, shortly before his death, your husband went out to their home one night to ask R.J. to get him his job back.’
She shook her head emphatically. ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’
Either telling her first lie, or her least convincing one.
‘Did you happen to know R.J. yourself, Mrs Allen?’
‘No. I mean, of course. Cleveland would mention his name from time to time. They worked together, why wouldn’t he?’
‘They only worked together? I thought they might be friends.’
‘Friends?’ She almost laughed out loud. ‘Why would they be friends? The only reason Cleveland ever hired that man was because—’
She stopped short, a hair’s breadth from finally betraying an unguarded thought.
‘Was because of what?’
Turning ashen as I watched, she swung the door toward my face, said, ‘I’m not answering any more questions!’
I put a hand out to block the door and took a step toward her. ‘Why did your husband think R.J. could undo his firing, Mrs Allen? What did R.J. know that could have given him that kind of power at Coughlin?’
‘Nothing! Leave me alone!’
She was leaning on the door with all her might now, struggling to force it closed, but for all she had to put behind it, she may as well have been trying to push a bulldozer up a steep embankment. I just let her go, wondering if she might scream.
‘What did he know?’ I asked again.
Breathless and livid, she gave the door one last, meaningless shove, then snapped, ‘It wasn’t what he knew. It was who he knew!’
My surprise must have been comical to see. ‘“Who?”’
‘He had another friend. Just like you. He was the one with the power and the connections. And he’s the reason Cleveland’s dead.’
‘Who are you talking about?’
‘I can’t give you his name. If he finds out I’ve been talking to you, he’ll cut me off. Go away!’
She took hold of the door again.
‘Just tell me yes or no: Are you talking about O’Neal Holden?’
A spark of recognition flickered in her eyes, then was gone.
‘You never heard that from me,’ she said, before finally closing the door.
My brother’s friend Jessie Scott, the reporter who worked for the local paper out in Bellwood, had called me Tuesday afternoon, but I’d only spoken to her long enough to get her number and promise to call her back. Though I was curious to hear what she might have to say about Bellwood’s mayor and the quality of his work for the city, I couldn’t find a reason to make talking to her at length a priority.
Until now.
I was lucky enough to find her at her desk when I placed the call, and we agreed to meet in an hour at the offices of her employer, the Bellwood Carrier, only blocks from Bellwood City Hall. Jessie Scott was a lovely young Vietnamese woman with a ready smile who came down to greet me in the building’s lobby, then escorted me up to the company cafeteria on the second floor, where we talked for the twenty minutes she said she had to spare.
‘You’re wondering where the name comes from,’ she said after some small talk was out of the way.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Scott. Doesn’t sound like something my family brought with them from Vietnam, does it?’
‘I assumed it was your married name,’ I said, though I hadn’t really given it much thought.
‘Actually, my adopted parents gave it to me. I’d give you the whole story of how they found my brother and me in a shelter down in Long Beach when I was six and he was only four, except that isn’t what you came here to ask me about, is it?’
‘Maybe I could hear about it some other time.’
‘Chance said Mayor Holden is a friend of yours.’
‘Since high school. It’s been years since I’ve seen him, though.’
‘Oh?’
‘I live in St Paul now. I only came back for a funeral.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah. Anyway, I was thinking about looking O’ up before I go back, but my brother tells me I may not like the man I find if I do. He says O’ might have his hands in some things down here I’d be better off not knowing about.’
Jessie Scott didn’t say anything.
I twirled a fork around in the fingers of both hands, said, ‘He tells me if anyone would know for sure, it’s you.’
She shrugged. ‘I might know a thing or two. Have you read my stories on the mayor?’
‘I can’t say that I have. What do they say?’
‘They say your old friend is an extremely popular servant of the people here who has a way of getting things don
e that sometimes borders on the unreal.’
‘You think he’s dirty?’
‘I think the numbers and his accomplishments don’t always add up. He’s a charming man, but charm alone can’t explain some of the deals he’s been able to broker.’
‘What kind of deals?’
‘Service agreements. Property acquisitions. Construction contracts.’
‘Construction contracts?’
I’d tried to make it sound like an innocent question.
‘Since the mayor’s been in office, Bellwood’s been experiencing quite a building boom. A new high school, two new industrial parks, and three blocks down the street—’
‘City Hall,’ I said.
‘Yes. You’ve seen it. Beautiful, right? It came in on time and on budget at twenty-two million – or at least, that was the advertised price.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do I, really. On the surface, everything looks legit. But like I said, the numbers just don’t add up. The building should have cost the city a million more, at least.’
‘More?’
‘We had an audit done. By our estimates, Bellwood – and, by extension, Mayor Holden – was billed twenty-two million for a complex that could have easily cost as much as twenty-six.’
She smiled. ‘Of course, we might have just gotten a great deal. There’s nothing to indicate any corners were cut in getting the building to come in at that price. But we think there might be another explanation.’
‘Which is?’
‘The builders are making up their losses on other projects for the city. They’ve done two for us since, with another one on the drawing board, and oddly enough, all the cost overruns they were able to avoid building City Hall have proven unavoidable for each. Again, we haven’t found any evidence of malfeasance yet, but we’re still looking.’
I nodded, my worst fears about O’ slowly taking shape.
Jessie Scott studied me closely, not sure what to make of me yet. ‘Does any of this tell you what you wanted to know?’
‘It might. Was Coughlin Construction one of the builders you’ve been talking about?’
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