‘Who the hell is Doug Wilmore?’
‘Come on, O’. I dropped his name to get you over here, remember? He was gonna be your new boy at Coughlin, somebody who could keep an eye out for you for the next Cleveland Allen so the back-door construction deals you’d been cutting for the city of Bellwood wouldn’t have to stop just because Allen was no longer around.’
‘Is that what Wilmore told you?’
‘You bet on a horse that can’t run, O’. His crib’s a minefield of open whisky bottles and he’s in love with a woman R.J. was seeing on the side. Putting him to work tailing R.J. for you was no different from killing R.J. yourself.
‘Or maybe you already knew that,’ I added.
‘I never told that goddamn fool to tail anybody! He was supposed to watch R.J. at Coughlin, that’s all.’
If he was telling the truth – and I had the sense that he was – he’d given a sick man a job to do and Wilmore had run too far with it. Which still made O’ the reason Wilmore had been at the pier that night to see R.J. and Eastman get high – and to stumble upon the perfect opportunity to take R.J. out of Sylvia Nuňez’s life forever. The gun, the drugs, Darrel Eastman . . .
‘It doesn’t matter what you told him,’ I said. ‘What matters is that the man who murdered R.J. worked for you.’
O’ shook his head, grimacing. ‘I’m not gonna fuck around arguing with you, Handy. You wanna believe I’ve got a bullet comin’ to me, shoot my ass and get it over with. Bad as this leg hurts, you’ll be doin’ me a favor.’
I didn’t move.
‘Go on, nigga, shoot!’
I was trapped in a bad dream, the kind in which your only chance of survival is to run – and your feet won’t work. I tossed the gun to the floor where O’ would have no trouble reaching it.
‘I’m supposed to pick that up now, right? ’Cause all I gotta do is kill you to be in the clear.’ O’ threw his head back and laughed, the old back-in-the-day laugh of his that used to crack me up one minute and boil my blood the next. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? I’m not the bad guy in this thing, Handy. My hands are clean. Excel killed McDonald’s woman and the three brothers from the safe house. R.J. killed Excel. According to you, Doug Wilmore killed R.J. And you—’
‘I killed Darrel Eastman,’ I said, seeing the perfect symmetry of his argument for the first time, when it had always been sitting there, right in front of my face.
‘That’s right. Me? I haven’t killed anybody. I told some lies and made a few dollars. Took a little girl who would’ve either died or been raised by a crack dealer’s widow and gave her a loving home and a college education. And I turned a hick town named Bellwood into a city people can be proud to live in. But you wanna blow me up, put all our business in the street just so you can sleep at night, knowin’ I got my just deserts.
‘Well, fuck it. I’ve got lawyers, just like Doug Wilmore will get one. And you know what? We’ll probably both walk.’ He adjusted his position on the floor, grunting with grave discomfort, then chuckled.
‘How’s that for irony, Handy? You go through all this shit tryin’ to get justice for R.J., and only end up fixin’ things so that the man who actually whacked him goes free.’
He laid his head back, fading, and asked the ceiling, ‘Ain’t that a bitch?’
A few minutes later, during a lull in the winter storm a pewter sky promised to unleash anew, I drove my rental car around the block and jerked it into an empty space at the curb, pulling my shirt open like a man whose skin was crawling with leeches. Frantically, I stripped off the wide bands of medical tape glued to my skin, first to free the tiny voice recorder pinned just beneath my ribcage, then the microphone wire snaking up the side of my torso to the middle of my chest. I didn’t want the shit on me anymore.
As near as I could tell, neither the recorder nor the mic had suffered any ill effects from my brawl with O’Neal Holden. I’d gotten the setup and a lesson on how to use it from Toni Burrow earlier that day, having called her the night before from Crescent City to see if she could provide me with such specialized equipment on extremely short notice. Now that she had, all the questions I’d been able to put off last night regarding my intended use of the gear had come due. Assuming the conversation I’d just had with O’ had been successfully recorded, it wouldn’t be hard to satisfy her curiosity. All I had to do was hand the tiny recorder back to her and urge her to give its contents a listen.
Or not.
It may have been an easy decision for some to make. The difference between doing what is morally right and that which is simply less personally intolerable. But there was nothing easy about it for me. My choices seemed to be equally inadequate and unjust, mere bandages on a wound that ran bone-deep.
I was not God; judgment was not my purview. Yet I had made this trip to Los Angeles in search of nothing if not someone to hold accountable for the brutal murder of my friend R.J. Burrow. Exacting vengeance on only one of the two people responsible for the crime – either the man who’d actually committed it, or the one who’d set him up to do so – would be a sham. But that was the latest devil’s bargain I was left with.
O’ had been right. I could make him pay for all the evil he had done to me, or Doug Wilmore for having taken R.J. Burrow’s life. I could not do both.
‘If I pretend I don’t know what I know and go home right now – what happens to Wilmore?’ I’d asked O’, just before leaving his sister’s home.
‘What do you think? Now that you just told me he’s the one offed my boy?’ O’ asked, a small spark of rage igniting behind his eyes. It seems, in his way, he did love R.J., after all.
‘Fine?’
O’ smiled, looking ahead to the next assignment he would give his friend with the Bellwood City Police Department. ‘My pal Hymie can sometimes be a very good man to know.’
On my way out the door, I couldn’t get over it. Hell if Walt Fine didn’t know O’Neal Holden better than I ever had myself.
TWENTY-SIX
I never did fix the reel-to-reel tape recorder I found in Culver City. I ran out of time and motivation. The last time I saw it, it was waiting for the cleaning crew at my motel to discover its limitations and put it back in a trash bin somewhere. I guess some destinies can be deferred, but not completely avoided.
As for my own destiny, the Los Angeles authorities put me on a plane to St Paul this morning and told me to never come back. That’s not the way the order was worded, but that was the gist of it. It took every LA cop I crossed paths with last week the entire weekend, plus Monday, to decide they preferred me gone to still around.
My brother and Sly saw me off at the airport, the only people in the world who now know every secret I have to keep – save for one. I called Sylvia Nuňez ‘Sly’ today for the first time. Something is happening between us, we aren’t quite sure what. We only know we aren’t ready to pull the plug on it yet. We’ve made tentative plans for her to spend a few days with me up in Minnesota over the summer. That’ll be a big test. I’ve fucked up lesser chances at happiness before.
Doug Wilmore had an accident at a Coughlin construction site late Saturday afternoon. The site in Gardena had been shut down for the weekend and he was there alone, making a routine check for signs of vandalism. The stories in the paper said he was killed instantly when the brakes failed on a cement truck parked on a grade and he got pinned between the truck and a retaining wall. Nobody saw it happen, and the driver who’d parked the truck insisted he’d both set the brakes and wedged blocks in front of its wheels. Whether he had or not, company officials were still at a loss to explain how its first fatal accident in nineteen years could have occurred even as I was boarding my flight to St Paul two hours ago.
From what I understand, R.J.’s daughter Toni Burrow is scheduled to fly back to Seattle tomorrow night. We’re on speaking terms, but only barely. She thinks I’m holding out on her. She’d aided and abetted my every effort to determine the circumstances of her father’s murder, trustin
g I would be honest with her when the time came to issue a final report, and I had reneged on my promise to do so. My insistence that Darrel Eastman had killed R.J. for the very reasons the police had given his widow rang hollow to her, as did the feeble explanation I’d offered for failing to return the surveillance recorder she’d loaned me: I’d lost it in a fight with O’. A silly, childish, schoolyard fight that in the end, I said, had only served to prove that the mayor of Bellwood had had nothing to do with our mutual friend’s murder.
If Toni Burrow saw through my lie, it was the one true thing I told her afterward, and the genuine conviction I had brought to it, that seemed to dissuade her from ever pursuing the matter again: ‘The man who killed your father is dead. I swear it.’
Frances Burrow will never believe it, of course. Her illusions about R.J. are just too strong to accept the true tawdriness of the circumstances behind his demise, and the substantial role he himself played in it. But she, too, will let his murder go in time, because it is either that, or live with an open wound that will never heal.
I promised her there is nothing more to be done.
What little I know about O’Neal Holden since I last saw him at his sister’s house is only what I’ve seen in the news. The one-car auto accident that supposedly put him on crutches and tore up his face didn’t get a lot of media coverage, but to O’, I’m sure, any press is good press. I suspect he would feel differently if I ever decide to mail the little micro voice recorder packed away in my luggage to my brother’s friend Jessie Scott at the Bellwood Carrier, but I could be wrong. O’ is almost as hard a man to comprehend as he is to hate.
In any case, I’ve done all the worrying about O’Neal Holden I intend to do. My account with the past is closed for good, boarded up and shut down like an old, rotted storefront. I might give a thought to Paris McDonald now and then, unable to do otherwise, but that’s it. I have the future to be afraid of now, and it’s going to take everything I have to build one designed to last.
I will start with my daughter Coral.
I have promised her the truth about her mother, and I will keep my word. I will tell her how, not long after arriving in St Paul, I met and fell in love with a woman named Susan Yancy. We were engaged to be married. But Susan had a little sister, Denise, a wild and self-destructive siren who reminded me of someone else I once loved, someone who’d only recently died, and one night, like a fool, I drifted too close to her flame and she became pregnant with my child. Betrayed, my fiancée left me, and when Denise – shot full of heroin and wasting away – died nine months later, only weeks after giving birth to our daughter, I was left with nothing to do but raise the baby on my own, already determined to tell her nothing but lies about how she had come into the world.
It will be a terrible admission to make, but it will only be part of a much larger story. Coral will need to hear everything, and I will need to share it, in order to help her understand how her father – a man who has always made his living fixing things others cannot – could have ever made such a tragic mess of both our lives.
It is the story of a man who once took a girl who did not belong to him to a dance party and, in so doing, brought a world of hurt to a great number of people, not the least of all himself.
I pray Coral will find it in herself to forgive me.
Just as I pray I will someday learn to forgive myself.
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