Cemetery Road

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  ‘What? Hell, no!’

  ‘We ain’t . . . goin’ nowhere without you,’ R.J. managed to say.

  ‘Both’a you fools shut the hell up and just do it. The longer we stand here arguing, the better our chances of getting hemmed up, or worse.’

  ‘And the girl?’ I asked.

  He nodded in the direction of the woman on the floor, a shadow passing over his eyes. ‘You heard what the lady said. McDonald’s out hidin’ her body. Ain’t nothin’ we can do for her now.’

  It wasn’t something I was ready to accept, but I knew it had to be true. The house suddenly felt ice cold to me, and I got out of there as soon as I could lift R.J. to his feet.

  Early in the drive back into the city, laying across the back seat of the car behind me, R.J. asked between shallow breaths, ‘What’s he gonna do?’

  I’d been wondering the very same thing, and I gave him the only answer I could come up with.

  ‘Start a fire,’ I said.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The homicide detectives from the LA County Sheriff’s Department who questioned me about the death of Darrel Eastman let me go on my own recognizance. They would have liked to have held me on suspicion of manslaughter, but they had no way to support such a charge. Both Chancellor and I claimed it was self-defense, Linda Dole was incapable of saying otherwise, and all the physical evidence at the scene seemed to corroborate our version of events.

  Still, I was lucky. There were holes in the stories my brother and I told the detectives that bothered them, holes they could only imagine were created to make Eastman’s death look less like murder than it really was. In truth, the omissions we made were only intended to reduce all of his talk about something R.J. and I had done years ago to put his mother in a wheelchair down to the incoherent ramblings of a crazy man. I knew better, of course, but Chancellor did not. To him, Eastman’s accusations had made little or no sense, and so he was hard-pressed to clearly articulate them in his statements to the authorities.

  In the end, and without colluding to do so, the two of us told the same essential story: Eastman had kidnapped my brother so that I might be forced to hear him plead innocent to the murder of my friend R.J. Burrow. He’d been following me around since the dead man’s funeral and arrived at the conclusion that mine might be a sympathetic ear to his assertion that R.J. had still been alive when he’d last seen him, seventeen days ago down at the Santa Monica Pier. He’d had no interest in killing me until I’d made a play for his knife and forced his hand.

  It was a fabrication that clung just close enough to the truth to win my freedom, temporary though it might be. Still, they only let me go after I’d been asked to go over the circumstances surrounding Eastman’s death again and again for detectives Saunders and Rodriguez of the SMPD, who’d been notified of Eastman’s killing and requested I be held at the Sheriff’s station in Harbor City until they could talk to me themselves. My inability to leave R.J.’s murder alone, as I’d promised them I would only hours before, had somehow led me to kill their primary suspect, and neither man was terribly happy about it.

  ‘You’ve just made a very bad mistake, Mr White,’ Rodriguez said.

  Much to his and his partner’s chagrin, however, it wasn’t a mistake they could easily put me behind bars for making. Eventually, like their peers with the Sheriff’s Department, they had to concede that Eastman was only dead because he had come looking for me, not the other way around. My meddling in their open homicide investigation had drawn Eastman’s interest, to be sure, and maybe if it hadn’t he would still be alive. But nobody could say that for sure, and trying to prove as much to the District Attorney’s office would have only served to extend a case Rodriguez and his partner now considered closed, despite my best efforts to convince them otherwise.

  ‘He said R.J. was alive when he left him,’ I told them more than once, referring to Eastman. ‘He didn’t do it.’

  But Saunders wasn’t listening, and Rodriguez didn’t give a damn. ‘Get this guy, Harry,’ he said. ‘Even now, he’s playing detective.’

  ‘I’m only telling you what the man said with his last breath. Why would he lie with nothing more to gain?’

  ‘We would’ve loved to have been able to ask him that very question,’ Saunders said. ‘But it kind of looks like we missed our chance, doesn’t it?’

  ‘If you wanted all the answers to why he did what he did, you should’ve thought twice before sticking that knife in him,’ Rodriguez said.

  ‘Burrow tried to befriend the kid and got burned. Eastman was a bad egg he couldn’t reform and that disillusioned him all to hell, so he fell off the wagon and took the kid out for a party. They had words in the car and Eastman lost his temper. What’s so hard to understand?’

  And so it went between us, around and around and around again, until two hours had passed and we’d all had enough of the ride. By the time they shoved me out the door, I was halfway convinced they were right and I was wrong. Everything I knew about Eastman and R.J. that I’d made sure the two cops didn’t only reinforced their opinion of his murder, not mine. R.J. had given Eastman every reason in the world to kill him – he’d gotten him high, told him he was an addict beyond redemption and then confessed to the crime that had pushed Excel Rucker to make a paraplegic of his mother – and the only excuse I had for believing Eastman hadn’t taken the bait was his word.

  So why was I still unsure?

  It was going on nine p.m. when Chancellor drove me back to Linda Dole’s place from the Sheriff’s office to retrieve my rental car. It was a longer ride than the miles involved would have indicated. He had as many questions for me as the four detectives who’d just finished grilling me combined, and his were by far the ones I feared the most.

  ‘What was he talking about, Errol? What did you have to do with Excel Rucker crippling Eastman’s mother?’

  Lacking the will to evade, I told him everything I’d told Toni Burrow that afternoon, with the single exception that I left Olivia Gardner out of it. It was a story he thought he already knew, but not like this.

  The sordid tale my brother was familiar with involved a vengeful cousin who had kidnapped Rucker’s daughter for ransom and, with the help of a female accomplice, held her out in a house in Simi. Rucker went on a killing spree when he couldn’t raise the ransom money, then tracked the cousin down to the Simi residence and tried to rescue the girl by force. The cousin – an ex-boxer who used to work for Rucker named Paris McDonald – killed Rucker and his female accomplice both, then set the house on fire in an effort to hide his tracks. It didn’t work; he was arrested two days later at a Sunland motel and charged with three counts of murder. Despite the arson, blood evidence in a back bedroom of the house that had served as her prison strongly suggested that Rucker’s little girl Sienna had been badly beaten, and prosecutors had had little trouble convincing a jury that McDonald had killed her before disposing of her body, which was never found.

  As I turned this version of events inside out for my brother’s benefit, rearranging the pieces in a way that only someone with personal knowledge of their true configuration possibly could, he let me speak without interruption, his eyes only leaving the road every now and then to check my face, trying to convince himself it was really me talking and not some stranger he’d never met and didn’t want to know. When I was done, he pulled the car over to the curb and killed the engine, leaving us to sit there in the dark, each of us searching for the right words to say.

  ‘I knew it,’ he finally said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I always knew you fools were into some kind of ignorant shit. You were never extravagant enough to draw attention to yourselves, but money for the little things was always too readily at hand, and a brother like R.J., at least, should have been broke every other month.’

  ‘So why didn’t you ask me what I was doing?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to know. I was afraid you might be dealing drugs, and if you were . . .’

  �
��It was all just a game, Chance. We were thieves, not thugs. Until the Excel job happened, we never hurt a soul.’

  ‘So why fuck with Excel at all? What the hell made you target the one man who could make the game blow up in your faces?’

  I had no answer for him. He studied me for several seconds, waiting, then suddenly understood.

  ‘Olivia,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t plan for him to die, Chance. I just wanted him to hurt. She deserved that much from the sonofabitch at least.’

  My brother was shaking his head from side to side, unable to speak.

  ‘And after what he did to you – laughed in your face when you went begging for his help – I couldn’t stand by and do nothing. I tried, so help me, but I couldn’t.’

  ‘She wasn’t your woman,’ Chancellor said, angry now.

  ‘No. But that didn’t stop me from loving her.’

  And there it was, after more than a quarter of a century: the truth he had always suspected but had never challenged me to deny.

  ‘So that’s what this was all about? Six people and a little girl dead, and one woman crippled for life, because you were in love with Olivia Gardner?’

  I couldn’t even bring myself to nod.

  ‘You stupid bastard. It was none of your business. She didn’t need you to defend her honor, and neither did I.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘The hell you do. What happened to Olivia was her own fault, not Excel Rucker’s or anyone else’s. She went to that party and snorted his coke of her own free will, and she knew the risks involved. It took me a long time to understand that, but I finally got wise and moved on.’

  ‘I’m happy for you. And I’m envious. Moving on is something I’ve been trying to do for over half my life now.’

  Silence took over the car, flooding every inch of its interior like a noxious gas. When it became too much to bear, I said, ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You’re a newspaper man, aren’t you? I just gave you the biggest story you’ll ever live to write. Are you going to write it?’

  ‘Are you asking me to?’

  ‘No. I just want to know where we stand after this.’

  ‘We stand where we always have, Errol. I’m your brother, not your judge. You and your friends tried to play God and got a lot of innocent people hurt. Somewhere along the way, either in this life or the next one, you’re going to have to answer to somebody for that.’ He shook his head. ‘But not to me. I’ve got your back now, same as always.’

  His loyalty deserved something more heartfelt than a small nod of thanks, but that was all I could muster without falling apart.

  ‘I’m not the one you should be worried about in any case,’ Chance said. ‘Seems to me the person with the most to lose in all this is O’. If any of what you’ve just told me became a matter of public record, his career in politics would be finished. Have you thought about that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I’m not so sure anymore that he’d draw the line at killing R.J. to keep him quiet. Or me, for that matter.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I take it the gun I asked you to hide before the ambulance came is here in the car somewhere? The one that failed to fire when I tried to stop Eastman with it?’

  ‘It’s in the trunk under the spare. Why?’

  ‘O’s the one who gave it to me. And I’d be willing to bet that if I broke it down later, I’d find out the firing pin’s either been filed down or is missing altogether.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘It’s like you said: He had a lot to lose if R.J. ran his mouth off to the wrong people. And it seems obvious now that in the last few months of his life, R.J. was on the verge of doing exactly that. He went to see McDonald in prison, perhaps to make a full confession. He sought out Linda Dole and made a reclamation project out of her son. Clearly, whatever guilt he’d been living with since I left for Minnesota had taken on a whole new dimension recently. The thing I don’t understand yet is, why? Why after all these years did he suddenly feel the need to do penance?’

  My brother shrugged. ‘Maybe he’d just lived with it long enough. It was either do penance, or put a gun to his head.’

  Which was essentially what R.J. had ended up doing if what Eastman had claimed happened out at the Santa Monica Pier two-and-a-half weeks ago could be believed. He’d just gone about suicide in a more creative manner than some. Stealing the car would have been his idea of irony – once a thief, always a thief – and goading Eastman into pulling the trigger for him would have killed two birds with one stone: his punishment and Eastman’s right to revenge.

  The punishment, R.J. had indeed received, in spades – but whether Eastman had taken his revenge or refused it, leaving the job of killing R.J. that night to someone else who had come along after he had fled, was still an open – and increasingly distressing – question.

  Chance tried to talk me into spending the night at his place, convinced now that O’Neal Holden had essentially tried to kill me once and would eventually try again, but I refused the invitation. There was a part of me that still wanted to give O’ the benefit of the doubt for one thing, and I felt I had caused my brother enough grief for one day, for another. For the latter reason alone, I jumped into my rental car the minute we arrived at Linda Dole’s residence and quickly drove off.

  As there had been the day before, someone was waiting for me at my motel when I got there, only this time it was somebody I recognized.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my dropping in on you like this,’ a harried looking Sylvia Nuňez said, standing before the door to my room, ‘but I’ve been calling you for hours and you haven’t been answering your phone.’

  She was right. I’d turned my cellphone off at the request of the Sheriff’s detectives who had questioned me out in Carson, and I hadn’t given it a second thought since.

  ‘Sorry. I’ve had a rather rough day.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I was calling. You’ve been all over the news.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I guess I would have been, huh?’ I gave her a smile to show her that, if nothing else, the day’s events had not cost me my sense of humor.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. Physically, anyway. Would you like to come in?’ I started to put my key in the door.

  ‘Actually, I was hoping you’d let me take you out somewhere. Just for drinks, or even to eat if you like. Have you had dinner yet?’

  I hadn’t. In fact, it had been over six hours since my last meal and I was famished. She drove me out to Manhattan Beach, where we just beat closing time to do seafood on the pier and empty a bottle of fine Chardonnay, agreeing early on to avoid all conversation that would darken the mood of the evening. To fill the void, she talked about her two grown sons and the abusive ex-husband who had fathered them, and I talked about my daughter Coral, telling her nothing close to everything there was to say, but far more than I’d ever shared with another soul. Though the subject pained me more than I could hide, reminding me as it did of the devil’s bargain I had made with Coral the day before, Sylvia Nuňez didn’t push me for details. She just let me speak my piece and listened attentively, her occasional notes of commiseration genuine and unforced.

  Overall, the lady was a good listener who only laughed to suit herself, not me, and she knew when to let a subject drop and move on to something else. I liked her, which was no small thing for a misanthrope such as I, and in the flickering wash of candlelight at our table, her edgy, unconventional beauty was becoming more obvious to me by the minute.

  I paid our bill and we walked along the pier for a while, the churning water out beyond the pilings beneath us nearly as black as the starless sky above. We were alone, save for a handful of homeless people swaddled in multiple layers of old blankets, and young, paired-off lovers too enchanted with each other to notice anything else.

  ‘This is stupid, isn’t it?’ Sylvia Nuňez asked.
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  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What we’re doing. Seeing each other like this. We met two days ago. What am I doing here?’

  I’d been wondering the same thing myself, and had yet to come up with an answer that made sense from every angle.

  ‘You have someplace better to be?’

  She thought about it, then smiled and shook her head. ‘No. And that’s sad, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is what it is. We aren’t the first two lonely people to hook up without having good reason, and I’m sure we won’t be the last.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s the point? Why bother taking the chill off like this if it’s never for more than a night or two?’

  ‘You want me to tell you this is bigger than that? I can’t. I won’t.’ I reached out to stroke the side of her face, nudging a strand of hair away from her eyes. ‘So we’re acting like a couple of clueless kids. So what? Stupid and pointless as this may be, it feels good. Doesn’t it?’

  I had to ask her again to get an answer: ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It feels good.’

  ‘All right, then. It’s been a long time since I last found the need to stop all my self-pity and get close to somebody, anybody, for longer than five minutes. And for two nights running, I’ve done that for you. That may not make you the answer to all my problems, no, but it does make you somebody I’m happy as hell to have run into. For whatever that’s worth.’

  She tilted her head back, came up on her toes to give me a soft, generous kiss on the mouth. ‘It’s worth a lot.’

  We made love in my motel room in the dark, and afterward she insisted we turn on the TV to hunt for news coverage of my narrow escape from death in Harbor City. I tried to talk her out of it, only to realize I was curious enough about the way the news people would portray me to acquiesce.

  It was well after eleven and most of the late-night newscasts were deep into their lead stories, but we did manage to catch the tail end of one report that featured some video of Darrel Eastman’s body being removed from his mother’s house by people from the coroner’s office, and a pair of Linda Dole’s neighbors offering their observations of the mayhem that had occurred there. I was nowhere to be seen, though the perky young Asian woman filing the remote dropped my name at least twice, referring to me as the ‘suspect’ authorities had taken into custody and then released.