Cemetery Road (11 page)

‘Because our friend the mayor does, I think. We’ve always gotten along, don’t get me wrong, but I sometimes get the feeling that, if it weren’t for the occasional need, he wouldn’t choose to deal with my kind at all.’

I looked Fine straight in the eye and said, ‘I seriously doubt that’s true.’ Mildly surprised, because I would have thought O’s senseless hard-on for Jews would have proven itself too embarrassingly ignorant, and politically inexpedient, to hold on to all these years.

Fine took a seat at one of the stone dining tables in the area, and I joined him on the opposite side. The day had turned slightly overcast, so the shade we were sitting in was no draw for the park’s only other visible visitors, three toddlers and a pair of adults moving about a playground in the distance.

‘I understand you and the mayor go back a ways.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And Burrow too?’

I hesitated before answering, unsure of what O’ did or did not want this man to know. ‘R.J. was a good friend of mine as well, yeah,’ I said eventually.

‘So what do you wanna know?’

‘Whatever you can tell me about where Santa Monica PD’s investigation stands at the moment. Mayor Holden tells me you used to work out there.’

‘Four years. I left in ’02 to come to Bellwood.’

‘But you still have friends in the department?’

‘I still have friends everywhere. I’m that kind’a guy.’ He grinned in a way that had me envisioning a burning cross on my own front lawn. ‘Mind if I ask what your interest in the info is? This a professional matter to you, or a private one?’

‘Strictly private. I’m just a friend of the family checking status.’

‘The family can’t do that themselves?’

‘I think they’re concerned that your friends in Santa Monica are a little hesitant to tell them everything there is to know.’

‘Or that what they are telling them is total bullshit. That what you mean?’

‘You want to know where I’m coming from before you talk to me. OK. I’m not a cop, and I’m not an investigator, and nobody’s hired me to do anything. I’m just an old friend of the deceased who’s not going to sleep worth a damn if the police fuck this one up, accidentally or otherwise, so yeah, I’m sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong. Now, does that answer all your questions, or did I leave something out?’

Fine found a crumpled pack of cigarettes in a pocket of his uniform shirt, asked me if I had any objections to his lighting one up. I shook my head and watched him get one going, his first draw off it long and deep, as if it had been days since his last smoke.

‘I don’t have to tell you how disappointed I’d be, word got around I’d been talking to you,’ he said.

‘No. You don’t.’

‘Mayor Holden and I get along real well, his unfortunate anti-Semitism notwithstanding. He asked me to find out what I could about the Burrow investigation, and I was happy to do it. The man who signs all my checks, what am I gonna say, no?’

‘But I’m not the mayor.’

‘No. Not even close. So if somehow, some way, the wrong people find out about this—’

‘You’re going to take it up with me, and not His Honor. I get it. Anything else?’

He didn’t like being pushed, because pushing was always his job, but he could see from the look on my face that this was one dog who had jumped through his last hoop.

‘You’ve got fifteen minutes. First question.’

‘Suspects. Do they have any?’

The man in the blue uniform nodded, blowing a cloud of smoke up over both our heads. ‘One.’ He produced a small notepad, fanned through its pages until he found the one he needed. ‘Some user and abuser named Darrel Eastman, E-A-S-T-M-A-N. Black, twenty-five years of age, no distinguishing physical characteristics. They say he left a thumbprint on the dash of the car Burrow was found in.’

‘“User and abuser.” I take it that means he’s a crackhead?’

‘Crack, crank, heroin. You name the fruit of the tree, he’s had a taste of it.’

‘He ever do any dealing?’

‘A couple ounces here or there. Nothing major.’

‘Any history of violent crime prior to this?’

‘Just the thirty-one flavors of assault all junkies dabble in, includin’ a few involving a firearm. But no, no homicides, if that was gonna be your next question.’

‘What about ’jacking cars?’

‘He might’ve had an auto beef or two in his jacket. Why?’

‘I understand the car R.J. died in was stolen, and the police say he’s the one who stole it. But if this guy Eastman knew how to boost a ride, why couldn’t he have done it?’

Fine showed me a little shrug to cast the idea off. ‘Maybe ’cause he would’ve had to leave more than a thumbprint in the car if he had,’ he said.

I could have disputed that, but I let it go. ‘Speaking of which – your friends have anything besides the print to connect Eastman and R.J.?’

Fine checked his notes, shook his head. ‘Not that my guy mentioned.’

‘And the murder weapon?’

‘What about it?’

‘Have they found it yet?’

‘No.’

‘Then they can’t tie that to Eastman either.’

Fine shrugged again, took another hard drag off his cigarette.

‘Do they at least know what it was?’

‘Nine-millimeter semi-auto, possibly a Glock.’

I finally started taking notes of my own on a legal pad I’d brought along for the purpose. ‘Tell me about the car.’

He read from his notebook. ‘Ninety-eight Buick LeSabre four door, dark blue, license number 5TNC641. Registered owner one Irene Duffy, D-U-F-F-Y, of Los Angeles. You want the address?’

I jotted it down. ‘Where is that, exactly? Hollywood?’

‘Hollywood or Los Feliz. Sounds more like Los Feliz.’

‘And that’s where the car was stolen?’

‘According to the owner’s statement, yeah. What’s the problem?’

‘He stole a car in Los Feliz to make a drug connection twenty miles away in Santa Monica?’

Fine gave me a blank look, unmoved by the discrepancy.

‘Had Ms Duffy reported the car stolen prior to it being found out at the pier?’

‘No. She said she didn’t even know it was gone till the detectives called to question her about it.’

‘And did she know either R.J. or Eastman?’

‘Uh-uh.’ Fine shook his head, ground his spent cigarette into the stone surface of the picnic table, and expelled one last lungful of smoke through the side of his mouth.

‘Besides Eastman. Are they looking at anybody else?’

‘Like who?’

‘Like somebody with a motive other than the coke in the car. R.J. must have had an enemy or two somewhere. At work, at church . . .’

‘My guy said, according to everybody he and his partner talked to, your boy Burrow was a very nice man who got along well with everybody. Bein’ on the pipe was apparently the only vice he had worth mentioning.’

Fine turned his head to watch a young blonde in workout togs and running shoes do her pre-jog stretching nearby. He would have recalled I was still sitting there eventually, but I decided not to wait. I capped my pen and stood up.

‘You’ve been very helpful, Sergeant. I appreciate your time.’

He turned around to face me, gave me that poker liar’s grin I found so unsettling again. ‘Hey, no problem. Any friend of the mayor’s is a friend of mine.’

There were other questions I could have asked him, of course. Like how a uniformed cop could be in so good with the plain-clothes detectives of the Santa Monica PD, when the latter breed of policeman generally loathes having anything to do with the former. But I had a hunch I already knew the answer to that: Fine used to be one of the plain-clothes boys himself, before he’d either turned his detective’s badge in voluntarily, or had it taken away.

Which of the two it had been wasn’t all that hard to figure out, either.

TWELVE

E
xcel’s people in Inglewood had a thing for Chinese.

They ordered take-out from a local restaurant called the Jade Inn at least once a week, and it was always the same lanky Asian teenager who made the delivery. R.J., O’ and I saw him come and go on so many occasions, we eventually came to realize that only Excel Rucker himself came in contact with the safe house’s four occupants with greater regularity.

‘That’s our in,’ O’ said one day, referring to the delivery boy.

R.J. and I agreed immediately, and the three of us set about learning as much as we could about the kid and his place of employment. By following the little weather-beaten red Toyota he drove, we discovered that the Jade Inn was located on Manchester Boulevard, less than two miles from the home we intended to rob, and that he almost always took the same route there. A quiet, long-haired teenager with the stooped-back posture of an old woman, he never got beyond the apartment’s front porch, but he was sometimes left standing before the cracked front door while whoever had answered it for him disappeared inside to find his money.

It wasn’t much of an opening, but we knew it was more than any of us were likely to get. If we hijacked the kid on his next run to the apartment so that one of us could make the delivery in his place, nobody inside the house was going to buy it. In fact, we were reasonably certain that Excel’s people would respond to a black man showing up at their door, claiming to be an employee of a Chinese owned and operated eatery, with a bullet between the eyes, no questions asked.

That meant the kid would have to go up there himself, just as he always did. And then . . . what?

Our initial thought was that he’d go with the understanding that we had a man back at the restaurant who would kill every soul in the building, staff and customers alike, if he didn’t do exactly as we said. We’d tell him to talk his way into the apartment somehow, maybe by asking to use the phone or the bathroom, then leave a window or back door open for us to slip through later that night, when we’d have at least an outside chance of catching most or all of the occupants sleeping. We’d go in, take what we wanted, and get out without ever having had to fire a shot.

Such a plan might have worked, with a lot of luck and flawless execution, but it wasn’t foolproof enough for our tastes. It involved too many variables that could get somebody killed, starting with our delivery boy patsy, and for O’ and I, if not for R.J., this last was simply an unacceptable risk.

We needed another, less unpredictable way in, and so the three of us spent two days trying to devise one, tossing ideas back and forth at each other like bickering old women. When we eventually succeeded, we had pieced together a scheme that didn’t hinge on the kid’s ability to perform, and seemed to all but guarantee that we’d encounter no resistance upon entering the apartment.

It was a perfect plan that blew up in our faces, but not in a way that any of us could have possibly anticipated.

We were worried our first little trick hadn’t worked until O’ got a late night call from Frankie Chang, a classmate of his at UCLA, who said he’d just taken an order for some Peking dumplings and sweet and sour spare ribs from a woman named Linda Dole.

Dole was the hot-tempered female resident of Excel Rucker’s Inglewood safe house, and she’d called Frankie instead of the Jade Inn because we’d put a fake flyer in her mailbox the day before alerting her to the restaurant’s ‘new’ phone number. In order to intercept the restaurant’s delivery boy on his next trip to the apartment, we had to know exactly when that trip would be happening, so O’ was paying Frankie $50 a day to answer his second house line with the proper greeting and inflection of a Jade Inn employee, and alert us to any calls intended for the restaurant he might receive.

It was money well spent.

Frankie tipped O’ off just after nine on a Friday night, our third week of watching the Inglewood duplex, and as soon as O’ thanked him and hung up the phone, he and I left O’s apartment to tell R.J., who was out in Inglewood monitoring the place.

It was showtime.

How much thought either of my friends gave to calling the whole thing off, I will never know. It was the riskiest and most complicated job we had ever attempted, so they must have had their doubts. All I can say for certain is that, now that the moment had come to fish or cut bait, the idea of doing the latter crossed my own mind more than once. Suddenly I could see all the myriad ways this train could fly off its tracks and how high the body count could be if it did. Did I still need to hurt Excel Rucker that badly?

I did.

The three of us went over the game plan one last time, then O’ drove me to the Jade Inn, where I went in alone to place a food order identical to the one Linda Dole had given to Frankie Chang. I left with the food fifteen minutes later and O’ stayed behind in the car, where he waited for the kid in the red Toyota to attempt delivery of Dole’s original order, which R.J. had just called in on Dole’s behalf.

The route the kid always took to the safe house invariably led him south down a stretch of Tamarack Avenue that was as dark after ten p.m. as it was desolate, and when he arrived there, O’s Camaro riding close enough behind him to peel a sticker off his bumper, I was waiting, strolling along the sidewalk with the sack of Chinese food under my arm like an elderly local out for his evening exercise.

The kid heeded the stop sign at Kelso and O’ plowed right into him, hard enough to do some damage without causing injury. The kid got out of his car first, instinct taking over before common sense could kick in, and O’ joined him, the two men meeting at the point of collision to shower insults and accusations upon each other.

O’s size and theatrical outrage should have had the teenager paralyzed, but the kid was in his face right up until O’ showed him the gun. At that, his hands fell limp at his sides and he froze, peering so intently down the barrel of O’s Smith & Wesson, I feared he might see all the way into the nine’s empty magazine. But no – the gun had his attention and his respect, and when O’ used the nose of it to order a 180 degree turn, the kid came around to show me his back like a trained seal.