Cemetery Road

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  ‘Actually, they’re the builder I’ve been talking about. How did you guess?’

  ‘I heard a rumor that the mayor might have once had connections there.’

  ‘What kind of connections?’

  ‘Off the record?’

  I wasn’t ready to throw O’ to the wolves just yet.

  ‘If that’s the way you want it,’ Jessie Scott said, making a concession that clearly ran against the grain.

  ‘A former employee named Cleveland Allen. He was a VP in sales there until they let him go late last year, either for embezzlement or sexual harassment, no one seems to know for sure.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he’s dead. They say he committed suicide shortly after they let him go.’

  ‘They “say”?’

  ‘I’ll put it to you the way you’ve been putting it to me, Ms Scott: “There’s no evidence to indicate” it wasn’t a suicide. The timing and neatness of his passing just run counter to my ideas of random happenstance, that’s all.’

  ‘As a good reporter, I’m obliged to ask what you mean by that.’

  ‘What I mean is that I don’t believe O’ is capable of murder. The man I knew a long time ago didn’t have it in him. But a lot of years have passed, and people change. The game he’s in is as cut-throat as they come. You want to know what I came here to find out? I came here to find out if you think twenty-six years could have changed him that much.’

  She gave the question a fair amount of thought, murmured voices mixing with the clatter of dishes and silverware to provide us with the usual cafeteria ambiance.

  ‘I don’t really believe the mayor’s capable of murder, no,’ she said at last. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure he’s capable of the things I suspect him of. But you said it best yourself: Politics is a rough trade, and O’Neal Holden is only in it to win. If the stakes were high enough, and he felt this Cleveland Allen was a threat to him in some way . . . Who knows?’

  It wasn’t the definitive ‘no’ I’d been hoping she’d answer the question with, but it wasn’t an unqualified ‘yes’ either. Pared down to its bare essence, her opinion on the subject pretty much mirrored my own: O’ was a decent, if ambitious man who was willing to do any number of things to get ahead short of taking another man’s life – unless that man put him in a position where no other alternative seemed possible.

  ‘I want to thank you for your time, Ms Scott,’ I said.

  ‘Wait. That’s it?’

  My cellphone began to ring.

  ‘How about answering a few of my questions? On the record this time?’

  I gently waved her off to take the call, seeing it was from my brother. ‘What’s up, Chance?’

  ‘I need to see you, Handy. Right now,’ he said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’ll explain it all when you get here. Get a pencil and write down this address.’

  I fumbled around in my pockets for the pen I’d been carrying and took down the address he gave me in my notebook. ‘I’ve got it. What’s—’

  ‘Make it fast, brother.’

  The line went dead.

  I tried to remember the last time I’d heard him sound so uneasy, and couldn’t. Even when he’d been under the wheels of addiction, it had always been near impossible to sense any anxiety in him.

  ‘I’m sorry, I have to go,’ I told Jessie Scott, standing up.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ I shook her hand to discourage any more questions, thanked her again for her help, and left.

  The address my brother had given me did not strike me as familiar. It led me to a tiny little house in Harbor City that looked like the people who owned it had long ago left this earth. Even in the fading light of dusk its dilapidation was unsettling: tattered roof, unkempt lawn, a gap-toothed porch railing that dangled from its moorings as if from a single nail. A small SUV I had seen in Chancellor’s driveway two nights ago was now parked at the curb here, turned at an angle that was only noticeably askew if you viewed it with a paranoid’s eye.

  The ride over from Bellwood had taken twenty minutes, and I’d spent every one compiling a list of possible reasons for my brother’s unsettling call. They were all bad. He wasn’t answering his cellphone but I tried it one more time just to make sure I really had no choice but to get out of the car. I got his voicemail again and hung up.

  I went to the door and rang the bell. The windows were dark to either side of me, gray drapes pulled closed to hide anything that may be have been stirring behind them. I listened for the sound of voices and heard nothing. I rang the bell again and opened my mouth to call out, the greatest part of my fear settling now around the idea that Chancellor was already dead and I was walking into a trap to no purpose.

  ‘Come on in!’ somebody inside ordered. I didn’t recognize the voice.

  I drew the Taurus from the waistband of my pants behind me and tried the door; the knob turned easily in my hand. I entered the house and stopped just inside the door, peering into an interior as dark and bleak as the exterior. My heart sank, having seen homes like this before: dusty mausoleums reeking with the smell of bacon grease, every room too small for all the cheap and broken furniture packed into it. This was how the poor often lived, in dark, confining spaces overcrowded with the meager possessions that were as close to ‘wealth’ as they would ever come.

  Off to my right, in the home’s tiny living room, Chancellor sat at one end of a tattered, faux-leather couch, bound and gagged with duct tape. The young brother who’d come close to killing me at Moody’s bar stood behind him, holding the blade of a knife tight against his throat.

  I was too far away to be sure, but it looked as if Chance was blinking at me frantically, offering an apology the only way he could.

  TWENTY

  ‘’bout fuckin’ time,’ the man looming above my brother said.

  The forty-plus hours since I’d last seen him had not been good to him. He was covered from head to foot in soot and grime, like a vagrant who hadn’t seen a shelter in weeks, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  ‘Let my brother go. You wanted me, you’ve got me, you don’t need him anymore.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up and get in here! You ain’t runnin’ this show, I am!’

  He took hold of Chance’s hair and yanked his head back, hard, to better expose his throat to the threat of the knife.

  I did as I was told and came into the room.

  ‘Now throw me the gun. Easy.’

  I tossed the Taurus on to the couch and watched him reach down to pick it up with his free hand.

  ‘Your name Darrel Eastman?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He put the knife away in a back pocket. ‘But I told you to shut the fuck up.’

  I ignored him. He didn’t want to kill anyone yet. If he had, Chancellor and I would have already been dead. ‘Why’d you try to kill me the other night?’

  ‘I didn’t try to kill nobody. I only wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About my moms. Get down on your knees. Hands behind your head, now, or this motherfucka’s dead. I mean it.’

  This time I followed orders. He had the Taurus pointed at Chancellor’s head now and could fire a round into his skull just by accident if I aggravated him enough.

  ‘Your moms?’ He’d said the word as if I should know exactly what it meant.

  ‘You heard me. That’s her over there.’ He nodded his head to direct my attention to a black woman I hadn’t even noticed before, so lifelessly had she occupied the room behind him. She was sitting in a wheelchair at the dining room table, hunched over a bowl, spooning something into her mouth with the slow, unsteady motions of someone who was barely capable of the act. ‘What, you don’t recognize her? Maybe you need a closer look.’

  He eased his way back to the table, keeping the gun trained on the back of Chance’s head all the while. As my brother used his eyes to ask me the obvious question �
�� What the hell is going on? – Eastman wheeled the white-haired woman into the room to join us, parking her alongside the couch where I could easily see her face.

  It was sad and misshapen, one side crushed in like a broken eggshell, and her body was all folded in on itself. Her left arm sat in her lap at an unnatural angle and her gaze was as black and empty as that of a grazing cow. It was clear that she no more knew what was going on around her than did the chair she was sitting in.

  ‘Dear Jesus,’ I heard myself say.

  It was Linda Dole.

  We had never seen her with children, but that proved nothing. If she’d had a child somewhere, it was unlikely she would have attempted to raise it in the safe house of a crack dealer.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Eastman said. ‘She ain’t gonna hurt you. She can’t hurt nobody no more.’

  ‘I don’t understand. We thought—’

  ‘She was dead. Yeah, I know. That’s what R.J. said he used to think, too.’

  ‘R.J.? You don’t think he did this to her?’

  ‘R.J.? Hell, no! But he’s the reason it happened to her, and so are you. You and some other nigga. Ain’t that right?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘R.J. said there was three of you. That you were the ones the man was after when he put momma in that wheelchair.’

  ‘Excel Rucker.’

  ‘Damn right, Excel Rucker. He wasn’t already dead, I’d’a killed the motherfucka a long time ago.’

  ‘Like you killed R.J.?’

  ‘I didn’t kill nobody. He wanted me to kill ’im, but I didn’t. I just ran off. When I left, he was still alive.’

  ‘What do you mean, he wanted you to kill him?’

  ‘I mean he drove me out to the beach and told me what you niggas did, then put a gun in my hand and begged me to shoot. I didn’t even know who he was till that night. I thought . . .’ He stopped, a look of childlike melancholy drifting over his face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That he was my friend. Just some kind’a Big Brother who only wanted to help me get straight. But that was bullshit. He was just usin’ me to make himself feel better ’bout what you all did to moms.’

  He was starting to get worked up, his voice taking on a serrated edge that promised only worse things to come. My brother noticed it too; his eyes were full of fear and he was becoming more animated on the couch. Down on my knees with both hands clasped behind my head, however, my only weapon gone, there was nothing I could do to help either of us but keep Eastman talking, pray he’d give me an opening sooner or later I could use to make a move on him.

  ‘How did he find you?’ I asked.

  ‘Find me? How you mean, find me?’

  ‘You say R.J. knew who you were. How did he know?’

  He shrugged to say he didn’t know. ‘He used to hang at this liquor store near my crib, and one day we just started talkin’. He was all right. I liked him.’ The admission stuck in his throat like a sharp bone. ‘Next thing you know, we was friends. Least, that’s what I thought.’

  ‘Where’s your crib?’

  ‘You know where it is. It’s my mom’s old crib in Inglewood, same one you niggas jacked.’

  It figured. Had R.J.’s nagging guilt ever moved him to revisit the place, and he’d seen Eastman and his mother there together, he would have quickly understood the nature of their relationship and how much of their joint suffering was a result of our doing.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you think I’m gonna do? I’m gonna do to you what I should’a done to R.J.’ He shoved Chancellor’s head to one side with the nose of the Taurus, just to remind me he was still holding it. ‘Soon as you give me that other nigga’s name.’

  Now I was confused. Why would R.J. give me up and not O’? ‘Don’t you have his name?’

  ‘R.J. never mentioned no names. All he said was there was three of you jacked Excel.’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘I started watchin’ his house to see who showed up, and one day, there you were. I could tell just by lookin’ at you that you was one of his ’boys. You were the right age and you had the same, sad look on your face as him. Like somebody’d just run over your dog, or somethin’.’

  He came around the couch to stand in front of me and pressed the nose of the Taurus against my forehead. ‘’Cept it wasn’t no dog that got run over, was it?’

  His tone made it clear that he was all done talking, his need for O’s name notwithstanding. I closed my eyes and waited for the sound of the shot, but I never heard it. What I heard instead was a dry cackle, as deep and ragged as a fat man’s cough. I opened my eyes and saw Linda Dole shaking with laughter from the wheelchair, her left cheek streaked with tears.

  The cold metal kiss of the gun slid away from my forehead and I looked up to see Eastman staring at his mother, mouth hanging open in amazement. It must have been the first time he’d heard her make a sound in years.

  I came up off my knees like a stumbling bull and took hold of the Taurus with both hands. Eastman and I crashed to the floor as one, a mass of flailing arms and legs, and I made a point of being on top, looking to use every last ounce of my weight to crush the air out of him. He was stunned just enough to lose his grip on the gun and I wrestled it from his grasp. I’d danced this dance with him before and I knew I’d only get this one chance to end it before he did, so I turned the business end of the Taurus toward his face without thinking twice and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  Like a fool I let Eastman get over our mutual surprise first and he was on me in an instant, raining hammer-like blows down upon my face in a flurry I could barely see. One right hand hit me flush above my left eye like a steel-toed boot and the lights in the room started to fade, a blur of color and motion dimming to a solid black.

  I don’t remember how I got his knife in my hand. By now I was operating on the only self-defensive mechanism I had left – desperation – and conscious thought played no part in my actions. One minute Eastman’s blows were continuing unabated, and the next they had stopped, like an electrical current I’d abruptly thrown a switch to kill. I blinked through a field of sparks to see the man above me frozen in time, a balled fist suspended in the air beside his head, eyes agape with shock. I felt my left hand grow warm and damp and followed Eastman’s gaze down to his right side just below the armpit, where I’d plunged the knife he’d lost in our scuffle into his flesh to the hilt.

  I pushed him off me and he rolled to one side without complaint. Fighting for breath, I struggled to my feet and went to my brother, who had listed sideways on the couch in a brave but hopeless attempt to join in the fray. I eased the tape from his mouth and used Eastman’s knife to cut the tape from his wrists and ankles, then asked if he was OK.

  ‘Yeah. Is he dead?’

  I looked back at Eastman and shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘He was waiting for me at my car in the parking lot at work. He said he’d taken one of the boys and would kill him if I didn’t come with him. But—’

  ‘That was a lie. I get the picture. And you can apologize to me later. After you find a phone and call nine-one-one.’

  Chance stood up from the couch and glanced over at Linda Dole, who from all appearances had gone back to being the disengaged catatonic she’d been when Eastman first rolled her into the room.

  ‘Errol—’

  ‘I can’t explain anything to you now. Just do what I say. Eastman needs an ambulance and I’ve got a few more questions for him before it gets here.’

  He was far from convinced it was the right thing to do, but Chance did as I asked anyway. As soon as he was gone, I moved in close to see if Eastman was still breathing. He was, but it was clear from the amount of blood he had already lost that neither of us had much time. His eyes held as much life in them as his mother’s and his mouth was blowing crimson bubbles, lips trembling.

  ‘Who killed R.J.?’ I asked.


  It took a while for the question to register. He shook his head with what little power he had left, but I couldn’t tell what the gesture meant. Was he answering the question or telling me to go fuck myself?

  ‘The police think you killed him and they aren’t interested in alternate theories. Nobody cares what you have to say but me. If you’re straight with me I might be able to keep you from taking the blame for a murder you didn’t commit.’

  It took him a long time to respond, drawing short breaths into his flooded lungs and then coughing them up on the exhale. His eyes filled with tears as I watched. ‘He was always tellin’ me to do the right thing. Like the pops I never had. But . . . I kept fuckin’ up, so . . .’ He paused, losing focus, then started in again. ‘. . . so he quit on me. Drove me out to the beach and said fuck it, let’s just get high together.’

  ‘And that’s when he told you what we did to your mother.’

  He tried to nod with only limited success. ‘He gave me the gun and said he wanted to die. But I couldn’t . . .’ A smile formed on his lips, as small and sad as his entire life had no doubt been up until now. ‘I just ran away. Like a little . . . bitch.’

  He took one more long, labored breath and then grew still. His gaze turned black and cold and I finally had to look away. I could feel my brother watching us, having silently returned to the room. I knelt down in front of Linda Dole and peered deep into her blank and twisted face, vaguely aware of a siren building strength somewhere in the distance.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  Eastman’s mother only sat there, oblivious, waiting for her own turn to die.

  TWENTY-ONE

  My paternal grandfather, Lionel White, used to say that there were many paths a man could take during his time on earth, but sooner or later, they all brought him down the same one: cemetery road. There was no running from it, there was no hiding from it.

  Driving out to Simi Valley late one Tuesday night in 1979, Excel Rucker in the back seat behind me, gun in hand, I knew that my turn on that fateful road had come. The only thing yet to be determined was whose death, exactly, awaited me at journey’s end.