At the conclusion of this stirring bit of entertainment, Sylvia gave me a kiss, laughed and promptly went to sleep. I started to do the same, until the reel-to-reel tape recorder on the lone table in the room caught my eye and beckoned me to its side. On my way into Bellwood to see Jessie Scott, I’d stopped at an electronics supply shop and picked up a new drive pulley, a reel of tape and a cheap condenser microphone, and I’d been anxious to break them out of the bag ever since.
Twenty minutes in, working in meager light to avoid waking my guest, I had the Sony moving tape in all three modes – play, fast forward and reverse – but it wasn’t playing back sound. It recorded just fine – the needles of its VU meters did the proper dance when I whispered into the mic – but all I heard on playback was silence.
One step forward and two steps back. Repair or detective work, it seemed to be all the same.
I was going to pursue matters with the recorder further when the phone in my room rang, finally drawing my attention to the red message light flashing on the instrument. I still hadn’t turned my cellphone back on, and upon my return to my room, had been too preoccupied with taking Sylvia Nuňez to bed to even glance in the direction of this one. My first thought was that it might be Coral calling, having learned of my stabbing a man to death earlier in the day via the Internet or some national newscast back home, but it wasn’t my daughter on the other end of the line when I picked up.
It was Toni Burrow.
‘Thank God,’ she said upon hearing my voice.
She told me she and her mother had heard about Darrel Eastman’s death, and my significant role in it, late that afternoon, and like Sylvia Nuňez, Toni had been trying to reach me ever since. Not unexpectedly, and despite the late hour, she wanted a full report, certain that the story the media was disseminating was rife with false truths and inaccuracies. I gave her the shortest version possible, both tired of reliving a bad day and uncomfortable talking to R.J.’s daughter with a woman he’d been having a casual affair with lying naked right beside me, awake again now and listening in.
When I was done, I asked Toni Burrow if she had shared everything I had told her that morning with her mother, unable to ask the question in a way that would imply I had no great interest in her answer.
‘No. And right now, I doubt that I ever will,’ she said.
She sounded ashamed of the deception. I promised her I’d come see her and her mother in the morning to discuss Eastman’s death in greater detail, then begged her forgiveness for being too tired to say much more than goodbye, anxious to get off the phone.
‘But wait,’ she said, before I could hang up. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘Yes?’
‘I got an answer back from Pelican Bay this afternoon. Your request to visit Paris McDonald has been approved.’
TWENTY-THREE
O’ would never tell R.J. and me much about what he’d done in that house out in Simi Valley after we’d left him there. ‘The less you niggas know about it, the better,’ he kept saying, growing increasingly tired of being asked.
I’d been right about the fire, however, and once the story hit the news, everything else about O’s actions that night became painfully evident. Prior to torching the place, and after having stripped it of any trace of our presence in it, he had manipulated all the evidence in the bedroom – the bodies of Excel Rucker and Paris McDonald’s woman, the weapons that had killed them, etc. – to infer that McDonald had at least murdered one of them, if not both.
And the cops bought it.
From all indications, a four-year-old girl had been snatched from her home, brutally beaten and her body done away with, and nobody much cared to hear anything the man responsible had to say about being innocent of the three murders he was eventually charged with. They had found him unconscious and stinking of booze at the scene of the Simi Valley fire, sprawled out on the grass in the backyard like a fallen scarecrow, and swearing he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there didn’t dissuade anyone from thinking they already knew: He’d crawled out there after setting the house aflame, then passed out before he could finish off his escape. The man had a long record of criminal brutality, both in and outside the ring, and if that didn’t exactly prove he was a murderer, his lack of short-term memory almost certainly did.
As for the thieves who had allegedly made it impossible for the child’s father to meet McDonald’s ransom demands, we ultimately became little more than a distraction the police and the D.A.’s office chose to only half-heartedly pursue. If a couple of hoods – or three, depending on which unreliable witness was telling the story – had in fact complicated the girl’s kidnapping by ripping her father off only days before, this was judged at best an insignificant aside to the central issue of McDonald’s culpability in three homicides. Why worry about us when the only purpose that would serve would be to muddy the waters of an otherwise solid case against a suspect already in custody?
Not that we would have been easy to find had the police made a greater effort to look for us. For days after O’ put a match to the house of the dead woman we now knew had gone by the name of Noreen Phillips, we went back into the three shells we had created for ourselves immediately following the Inglewood safe house robbery. I stayed put in my crib while O’ and R.J., holed up together, did the same out at O’s, where they had been since the night Excel Rucker died. It was O’ who nursed R.J. back to health, following the instructions for treating a gunshot wound he found in a book he’d checked out from the library: apply pressure to stop the bleeding, clean the wound with hydrogen peroxide, then dress with a dry cloth and do the last two steps all over again, three times a day for at least a week. In the end, it worked, but none of us ever had any illusions about why: R.J. had been damn lucky. Another inch closer to his liver and the bullet that tore right through him would have left him with a hole too big for a layman like O’ to heal.
Unlike R.J., however, there was no putting our lives back together the way they had been before we ripped off Excel Rucker. That ill-fated decision had taken the world we knew and changed its shape forever, making it impossible for us to assume our old places in it. O’ and R.J. were slower than me to understand this, but I was convinced of it from the moment O’ returned to his apartment from Simi that night, three hours after we’d last seen him, and our collective guilt began to shred us to pieces.
‘What the hell’re we gonna do?’ R.J. kept asking, weeping like a widow at a funeral from where he lay on O’s living room couch. I’d gotten his bleeding to stop and redressed his wounds once already, but he was still in a lot of pain. ‘We killed that little girl.’
‘Shut the fuck up! We didn’t kill anybody!’ O’ snapped.
‘You know what he means,’ I said. ‘We may not have killed her ourselves, but we’re the reason she’s dead. There’s no way of getting around that, O’.’
‘Bullshit. For all we know, she’s been dead since the day McDonald snatched her. That ain’t on us, that’s on him.’ When I shook my head at the vacuity of his argument, he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and, snarling into my face, said, ‘Besides, nigga, you’re the last one who ought’a be cryin’ about what we’ve “done”, seein’ as how this whole thing was your goddamn idea in the first place. Or have you forgotten that?’
I broke his grip and threw him off me, wanting to do more to shut him up but knowing I had no right.
‘What’s done is done,’ O’ said. ‘It all turned to shit and, yeah, I feel bad about it, but there isn’t anything for us to do now except chill and wait for McDonald to take all the heat.’
‘It’s not that simple,’ I said.
‘He’s right,’ R.J. agreed.
‘We’ve got a man over there who might be dead tomorrow. But even if he pulls through, and McDonald does take all the heat, how the hell are we supposed to go on hanging together without somebody finally doing the math and connecting us to the robbery?’
‘They won’t,’ O’ said
. ‘Not if we play this thing the same way we’ve played every other job we ever pulled.’
‘Except we’ve never had a job go this wrong before. Until tonight, we’d never hurt anybody, and that’s all changed now. This is a whole new ball game, O’. We’ve killed one man and caused the death of at least two other people, including a little girl.’
‘We didn’t touch that little girl.’
‘Playing it smart and keeping a low profile isn’t going to cut it this time. We aren’t just thieves anymore, brother. If you haven’t figured that out yet, there’s no point in my even talking to you.’
‘All right. So what do you suggest? How do we make things right?’
I looked over at R.J., apologizing for what I knew he would take harder than any of us. ‘We’ve gotta go our separate ways. All three of us. After this thing winds down, assuming it ever does, we can’t ever be seen together again.’
‘Say what?’ R.J. said, breaking into a coughing jag.
O’ started to chuckle. ‘That’s wack.’
‘It’s not wack,’ I said. ‘It’s the way it’s gotta be. What we did tonight isn’t going to go away just because we don’t get hemmed up for it. Whether we get busted or not, we’re gonna carry this shit around for the rest of our lives, and it’s only gonna be that much harder to live with if we go on kicking it with each other.’
R.J. shook his head. ‘Naw . . .’
‘We’re a team, Handy. We’ve always been a team,’ O’ said.
‘Word. You brothers have been like family to me, and I’m not ever gonna forget it,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t change the fact that every time I look at you after tonight, and every time you look at me, we’re all gonna be thinking about the same thing.’ I glanced over at R.J. again. ‘Aren’t we?’
The look on his face said he knew I spoke the truth, but he wasn’t up to admitting it. ‘It don’t matter,’ he said, eyes finally beginning to flicker from exhaustion. ‘What O’ said . . . is for real. We’re a team, Handy. Without you niggas . . . I ain’t got nobody.’
And that was also true; we were all the poor bastard had. But my sympathies for him were not going to be enough to change my mind. Though it would be tough on all of us, separation – permanent separation – was the only way I could see us surviving the long-term nightmare we had bought for ourselves.
‘I don’t like it any better than you do,’ I said. ‘But this is it. We either split up right now, for good, or we’re fucked. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now, but somewhere down the road. It’s inevitable.’
‘Ain’t nothin’ inevitable,’ O’ said, still unconvinced. He was in that zone of his in which nothing you said to him was going to penetrate his intransigence.
‘You brothers can do what you wanna do. Me, I’m gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘I don’t know yet. Maybe Cleveland or somewhere down in Minnesota. It’s gonna take me a while to decide.’
‘Uh-huh. And let me guess: You’re gonna need a little taste of Excel’s dope for extra seed money.’
‘I don’t want anything that belonged to Excel. We’re gonna flush that coke just like we planned. Only thing different now is, we’re gonna burn the cash, too.’
He grinned at me like I was a circus clown who’d just challenged him to a fight. ‘Say again?’
‘You heard me. We’re gonna burn it. I don’t want a dime of that bread, and neither do you. It’s blood money.’
He shook his head, tickled, said, ‘R.J., are you listenin’ to this fool? Can you believe this shit?’
But R.J. wasn’t listening. He had dozed off, head cocked to one side, mouth open wide like a hatchling waiting to be fed.
‘We’re gonna have to watch him carefully,’ I told O’. ‘Make sure he doesn’t slip into a coma or something.’
‘Only person in a coma around here is you, Handy, if you think I’m gonna set fire to my share of a hundred and forty Gs.’
I glared at him, then moved over to the couch to check on R.J. He was sweating like a fat man in a sauna and his temperature felt a little higher to me than normal, but his breathing was even and his bandages gave no indication that his bleeding had started up again.
‘And what do you think he’s gonna say about it?’ I asked O’.
‘I suspect he’ll side with you for a change. Hard as homeboy is in some ways, he’s a soft-hearted fool in others. But I don’t give a shit. This ain’t no democracy, Handy, it don’t matter if the vote’s two or a thousand to one. I’m not burnin’ up forty-five grand just ’cause you and R.J. ain’t got the stomach to spend it.’
‘And you do?’
‘Goddamn right I do.’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘You don’t. You’ve got a conscience, same as us, and makin’ a profit off that little girl’s death would haunt you till the day you died.’
I’d finally said something he couldn’t dismiss out of hand.
‘We’ve got to walk away, and we’ve got to walk away clean,’ I said. ‘All three of us, together, the same way we’ve always done everything.’
I had him thinking now. He made no sound, but you could look in his eyes and see his mind working away behind them just the same.
‘I don’t know, Handy,’ he said at last. ‘Maybe there’s somethin’ we can work out . . .’ He tipped his head in the direction of R.J. ‘. . . just you and me.’
He waited for me to catch his drift. It wasn’t hard.
‘I don’t think so, O’,’ I said.
Three weeks later, we all stood around an old black barbecue drum in O’s mother’s garage and watched a pile of green paper burn down to nothing. R.J. had been against the idea initially, but as his injuries healed and his will grew stronger, so too did his guilt over the death of Sienna Jackson and his need to wash his hands of it. As for O’, all his talk about my opinion and R.J.’s holding no sway over him eventually dwindled down to nothing, R.J. having threatened to stick a foot up his ass if he continued to bitch about having to relinquish his share of Excel Rucker’s 140 grand.
Convincing both men that we needed to split up for good, on the other hand, continued to be a hard sell for me right up until the morning we actually did, two days after we put a match to the dead dealer’s money and flushed all his coke down the commode. My friends thought severing ties was an overreaction. Everything we were reading and hearing about the Paris McDonald murder investigation seemed to suggest it was going to begin and end with McDonald, just as O’ had planned. Why throw away four years of friendship with men I had loved like brothers when, by all indications, we were in the clear?
‘Because I want to stay in the clear,’ I said.
Whether or not R.J. and O’ ever completely bought into that argument, they ended up agreeing to terminate our limited partnership. For R.J., our every minute together had become a constant reminder of the nightmare he wanted desperately to put behind him, and O’ simply grew tired of trying to hold something together I was bound and determined to dismantle. By the time we all met that cold February morning in Leimert Village Park to say our final goodbyes, each of us was quietly resigned to a future that did not include the other two.
Unlike O’ and R.J., I wasn’t going to test my commitment to our dissolution agreement by remaining in Los Angeles. I needed more distance from what we had done, and from things I had done without them, than the mere length of a freeway could provide. So I had decided to run off to the Twin Cities of Minnesota, because I’d heard more good things than bad about that part of the country, and because that was as far as I thought my old Ford could carry me. I loaded the car up like a four-wheeled pack mule, bid my brother Chance a brief and somewhat cruel farewell, and then met R.J. and O’ at the park, not even bothering to kill the Fairmont’s engine.
‘You’re really goin’, huh?’ R.J. asked.
‘Yeah,’ I said, shaking first his hand, then O’s. ‘Any need to go over the deal again? Or do we all have it down?’
‘No more co
ntact after this. We get it, Handy,’ O’ said.
‘Guess that’s it then.’
I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and neither could they. O’ was having enough trouble just standing there without throwing a punch at somebody. I turned to get in the car.
Just before I could jump in, O’ called out, ‘You know it didn’t have to be like this, Handy. Running scared is for babies and old women.’
For years afterward, I would wonder why I didn’t answer him. He was out of line, and his final words to me should have been better chosen. But I let them pass without comment, just sat down in my car, pulled the driver’s side door closed behind me and drove away.
I couldn’t get to St Paul, Minnesota, fast enough.
TWENTY-FOUR
All throughout my flight from LA to Crescent City, I kept wanting to glance over my shoulder, certain that somebody seated behind me on the plane was eventually going to flash a badge and place me under arrest. It was a crazy thought, of course, but when you kill a man one day and ignore a police order not to travel the next, paranoia is both the fair and natural price of the ticket.
I would have avoided the trip given an alternative. I had no desire to test the patience of the law, and was not anxious to confront the man I was coming here to see. But I had run from Paris McDonald long enough. He was waiting for me now, Toni Burrow having moved my pending visitation request forward by lending it the authority of her private investigator’s license, and I could think of no one other than McDonald who might have the answers to the few open questions that remained about R.J.’s murder.
Situated just over twenty miles south of the Oregon border, Crescent City was a picturesque little jewel on the California coast that hardly resembled a fitting home for a state penitentiary. From the airport, where the Pacific spread out to the west like a sun-dappled sheet of blue ice, to the peaceful, bucolic heart of downtown, the prison city was a visual salve for the soul, as far removed from the bleak world inhabited by the convicts at Pelican Bay as heaven itself. And yet, as I soaked it all in from the back seat of a taxi early on a bright, clear Thursday morning, I could see nothing but a beautiful, ornate gateway to my doom. Even the trees standing along both sides of the highway leading out to the prison struck me as ominous, emerald sentries someone had placed there solely to ensure my arrival.
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