Cemetery Road (21 page)

She barely nodded thanks.

I found the door to Estelle Allen’s condo and paused a moment before knocking, having come this far without actually formulating a plan as to how I would proceed. In short order, I realized the only way to go was to play it by ear, and rapped on the door. Once, twice. And then:

‘Who is it?’

Angry now.

‘It’s Errol White, Mrs Allen. I just need a moment of your time, please.’

‘I told you I don’t want to talk to you. How did you get in here? Go away before I call the police!’

I took a shot in the dark: ‘Do you really want to do that?’

Silence.

‘R.J. was a close friend, Mrs Allen. If you want to call the police, go ahead, but I’m not going anywhere until I’ve spoken with you.’

I waited through another lengthy silence, imagining her standing there on the other side of the door’s peephole, trying to measure my resolve. Finally, there was the sound of the locks being thrown back, heatedly and in some haste, and the door was jerked open to reveal a white woman in her late fifties, early sixties; unnaturally slender, dressed for a non-existent party, thick eyelashes winking beneath a massive blond wig crawling with curls.

‘I don’t know anything,’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘Whatever it is you’re here to talk about. R.J. Burrow, Cleveland, Coughlin Construction – whatever.’

‘May I come in?’

‘No. Ask your questions and leave.’

She still had her left hand on the door, so anxious was she to get our business over with and send me on my way.

‘I’ve been told your husband’s death was a suicide. Is that so?’

‘That’s right. Last February. What of it?’

‘The people I’ve talked to say he was distraught over Coughlin’s letting him go, but they tell conflicting stories as to why that happened. Depending on who you ask, he was either defrauding the company or sexually harassing employees.’

She just stared at me.

‘Which was it, exactly?’

‘The sex thing. I thought you wanted to talk about your friend?’

‘R.J., right. I was also told your husband held him responsible.’

‘Responsible?’

‘For his firing. R.J.’s widow says, shortly before his death, your husband went out to their home one night to ask R.J. to get him his job back.’

She shook her head emphatically. ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’

Either telling her first lie, or her least convincing one.

‘Did you happen to know R.J. yourself, Mrs Allen?’

‘No. I mean, of course. Cleveland would mention his name from time to time. They worked together, why wouldn’t he?’

‘They only worked together? I thought they might be friends.’

‘Friends?’ She almost laughed out loud. ‘Why would they be friends? The only reason Cleveland ever hired that man was because—’

She stopped short, a hair’s breadth from finally betraying an unguarded thought.

‘Was because of what?’

Turning ashen as I watched, she swung the door toward my face, said, ‘I’m not answering any more questions!’

I put a hand out to block the door and took a step toward her. ‘Why did your husband think R.J. could undo his firing, Mrs Allen? What did R.J. know that could have given him that kind of power at Coughlin?’

‘Nothing! Leave me alone!’

She was leaning on the door with all her might now, struggling to force it closed, but for all she had to put behind it, she may as well have been trying to push a bulldozer up a steep embankment. I just let her go, wondering if she might scream.

‘What did he know?’ I asked again.

Breathless and livid, she gave the door one last, meaningless shove, then snapped, ‘It wasn’t
what
he knew. It was
who
he knew!’

My surprise must have been comical to see. ‘“Who?”’

‘He had another friend. Just like you. He was the one with the power and the connections. And he’s the reason Cleveland’s dead.’

‘Who are you talking about?’

‘I can’t give you his name. If he finds out I’ve been talking to you, he’ll cut me off. Go away!’

She took hold of the door again.

‘Just tell me yes or no: Are you talking about O’Neal Holden?’

A spark of recognition flickered in her eyes, then was gone.

‘You never heard that from me,’ she said, before finally closing the door.

My brother’s friend Jessie Scott, the reporter who worked for the local paper out in Bellwood, had called me Tuesday afternoon, but I’d only spoken to her long enough to get her number and promise to call her back. Though I was curious to hear what she might have to say about Bellwood’s mayor and the quality of his work for the city, I couldn’t find a reason to make talking to her at length a priority.

Until now.

I was lucky enough to find her at her desk when I placed the call, and we agreed to meet in an hour at the offices of her employer, the
Bellwood Carrier
, only blocks from Bellwood City Hall. Jessie Scott was a lovely young Vietnamese woman with a ready smile who came down to greet me in the building’s lobby, then escorted me up to the company cafeteria on the second floor, where we talked for the twenty minutes she said she had to spare.

‘You’re wondering where the name comes from,’ she said after some small talk was out of the way.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Scott. Doesn’t sound like something my family brought with them from Vietnam, does it?’

‘I assumed it was your married name,’ I said, though I hadn’t really given it much thought.

‘Actually, my adopted parents gave it to me. I’d give you the whole story of how they found my brother and me in a shelter down in Long Beach when I was six and he was only four, except that isn’t what you came here to ask me about, is it?’

‘Maybe I could hear about it some other time.’

‘Chance said Mayor Holden is a friend of yours.’

‘Since high school. It’s been years since I’ve seen him, though.’

‘Oh?’

‘I live in St Paul now. I only came back for a funeral.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah. Anyway, I was thinking about looking O’ up before I go back, but my brother tells me I may not like the man I find if I do. He says O’ might have his hands in some things down here I’d be better off not knowing about.’

Jessie Scott didn’t say anything.

I twirled a fork around in the fingers of both hands, said, ‘He tells me if anyone would know for sure, it’s you.’

She shrugged. ‘I might know a thing or two. Have you read my stories on the mayor?’

‘I can’t say that I have. What do they say?’

‘They say your old friend is an extremely popular servant of the people here who has a way of getting things done that sometimes borders on the unreal.’

‘You think he’s dirty?’

‘I think the numbers and his accomplishments don’t always add up. He’s a charming man, but charm alone can’t explain some of the deals he’s been able to broker.’

‘What kind of deals?’

‘Service agreements. Property acquisitions. Construction contracts.’

‘Construction contracts?’

I’d tried to make it sound like an innocent question.

‘Since the mayor’s been in office, Bellwood’s been experiencing quite a building boom. A new high school, two new industrial parks, and three blocks down the street—’

‘City Hall,’ I said.

‘Yes. You’ve seen it. Beautiful, right? It came in on time and on budget at twenty-two million – or at least, that was the advertised price.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Neither do I, really. On the surface, everything looks legit. But like I said, the numbers just don’t add up. The building should have cost the city a million more, at least.’

‘
More?
’

‘We had an audit done. By our estimates, Bellwood – and, by extension, Mayor Holden – was billed twenty-two million for a complex that could have easily cost as much as twenty-six.’

She smiled. ‘Of course, we might have just gotten a great deal. There’s nothing to indicate any corners were cut in getting the building to come in at that price. But we think there might be another explanation.’

‘Which is?’

‘The builders are making up their losses on other projects for the city. They’ve done two for us since, with another one on the drawing board, and oddly enough, all the cost overruns they were able to avoid building City Hall have proven unavoidable for each. Again, we haven’t found any evidence of malfeasance yet, but we’re still looking.’

I nodded, my worst fears about O’ slowly taking shape.

Jessie Scott studied me closely, not sure what to make of me yet. ‘Does any of this tell you what you wanted to know?’

‘It might. Was Coughlin Construction one of the builders you’ve been talking about?’

‘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.