Cemetery Road (29 page)

‘Get up.’

He’d been too preoccupied with his confession to notice that I’d left my chair. I stood over him, rocking on the balls of my feet, unable to see anything else in the room but the man seated before me.

‘Oh, what – you’re gonna kick my ass now?’

His right hand made a move for the gun on the armrest and I kicked him in the face with the heel of my right foot, sending chair and occupant both tumbling backwards to the floor. He tried to roll to his feet before I could get there, the semi-auto in his fist, but I surprised us both by reaching him in time to kick the weapon from his grasp. As it clattered off to some unknown corner of his sister’s living room, he barreled into me waist-high, reducing the left I threw at his face to a mere gesture of a punch. Legs churning, head down, he drove me backward into a credenza against one wall, then hit me with a right hand across the bridge of my nose that instantly flooded my eyes with tears.

Amid the spray of knick-knacks and mementos flying off the credenza shelves behind me, something heavy tumbled down my right arm and, half-blind and spitting blood, I instinctively snatched it out of the air to swing it at O’s face. The crystal swan lost part of a wing as it slammed against O’s left eyebrow, stunning him just enough to stagger him momentarily. I tried to follow up with what was left of the glass bird in my hand, but he threw up his left forearm to block the attempt and swung another anvil-like right that landed just under my jaw. I stumbled backward, feet flailing away for balance, left arm reaching behind me for something to latch on to that might keep me upright – a wall, a floor lamp, anything.

But O’ wouldn’t wait for me to find it. As I glanced off the armchair I’d been sitting in only moments before, he launched himself toward me to hit me again, this time with a left that seemed to cave in the whole right side of my face. I went down like an old woman, taking an end table and everything on it to the floor with me, and all at once I could see us reverting to form. This was how it had always been when I was foolish enough to try O’Neal Holden. The superior athlete versus the more righteously indignant. It was like trying to stop a moving forklift with willpower alone.

I came up on my hands and knees, dog-like, and tried to catch my breath, staring down at the carpet I was staining forever with blotches of dark red. O’ kicked me under my right arm and rolled me over again, then stood there watching as I tried to gather the nerve to go on fighting. The crystal swan had opened a deep cut over his left eye, which was half-closed and bathed in blood, but compared to me, he looked as fresh as a daisy.

I could have easily quit right then. Pressing on seemed to hold no other promise but more of the same – humiliation and pain. Left alone to decide, I think I would have just closed my eyes and let O’ do as he pleased, unable to recall what motivation I could have possibly had to ever care this much about R.J. Burrow.

But then O’ put a sharp, needless spear into my side: ‘Get up, you stupid old fool.’

So I did. I came up quick, caught his right foot with both hands when he tried to kick me down again and torqued it to the left, hard, like a frozen water valve I was trying to force open. O’ let loose a scream and went down without any further help, clutching at his leg as if I’d snapped it in half and tossed him the pieces.

I got to my feet, prepared to do the man more damage if he required it, but I could have been a painting on the wall for all the attention he was paying to me now. He was in that much pain.

‘Manual versus Dorsey, homecoming game our senior year,’ I said, spitting a wad of blood on to the floor near his head. ‘You ran for a hundred and eleven yards in the first two quarters, then tore up your right knee just before half-time. Doctors weren’t sure you’d ever walk again. Funny, the shit an “old man” remembers, isn’t it?’

‘
Goddamn you, Handy!
’ He had to pause before going on, sweat rolling down his face in wide rivulets from all the effort it was taking just to remain conscious. ‘I need a doctor,’ he said, anger slowly dying to a mere ember, because anger, too, required energy he no longer had to burn.

I looked around for the gun he’d lost and found it on the carpet a few feet away. I brought it back to where he lay, loaded a round into the chamber and aimed at the center of his face. ‘How much you want to bet this one will work when I pull the trigger?’

‘I did that for your own protection, you dumb-ass. I didn’t want you shooting somebody who meant you no harm.’

I laughed. ‘That right?’

‘I’m talking about Fine, not Eastman! I had him watchin’ you, just like you thought. But only to have your back, not to kill you.’

‘Just like Doug Wilmore was supposed to have R.J.’s back. Is that what you mean?’

Wilmore hadn’t confessed to anything when I’d visited his home that morning, but in his clumsy, liquor-impaired refusals, he had said all I’d ever need to know about his relationship with O’Neal Holden, and the feelings of resentment he had toward Sylvia Nu
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ez and the co-worker she’d chosen over him to have an affair with.

‘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 Nu
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ez’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 Nu
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ez ‘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, trusting 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.