‘Except R.J.’s the only one dead,’ I said, and then quickly added, ‘so far.’
‘Which is all the more reason to believe we’ve got nothing to worry about. You seen any more of your boy from the bar?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, there you go.’
‘Assuming he’s the one I need to be looking out for, and I’m not so sure that he is. Unless his name is Darrel Eastman.’
‘Darrel Eastman?’
I told him who Eastman was, and of the call Frances Burrow had said R.J. might have taken from him at the house one night, pausing every two dozen words or so to let a jet aircraft roar past.
‘How come I’m not surprised?’ O’ said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means this Eastman fits the cops’ theory and mine of R.J.’s murder to a T, and R.J. knew him. Brother drove out to the beach with a lowlife acquaintance to get high and got jacked. Damn, Handy, how much more evidence of that do you need?’
‘It’s a nice theory, O’, but it doesn’t explain everything. Like how it is he got himself killed within weeks of hooking up with the last man any of us should have ever wanted to see. You telling me that was just a coincidence?’
‘It’s not a very likely one, I’ll admit, but it’s possible. Is Eastman in custody yet?’
‘Not as of yesterday, but things could be different today. I was by to see the Burrow women this morning and the detectives working R.J.’s case came around just as I was leaving.’
‘Do we know what this Eastman looks like, at least?’
‘No.’
‘Then he and your friend from the bar could be one and the same.’
‘Could be. But how would Eastman have latched on to me, and why? Why target me before you?’
‘Maybe because I’ve been keeping my nose out of R.J.’s murder, and you haven’t?’
It was a small dig, but a deep one.
‘You still think I should be back home, waiting for them to come to me?’
‘What “them”? Right now, as far as we know, Eastman was a lone gunman, and even that hasn’t been proven yet.’
‘And McDonald?’
‘When you can tell me what was in this letter you say he wrote R.J., or connect him with either Eastman or whoever it was that spooked you so bad the other night, we can talk about McDonald. Until then, I don’t see any point in either of us losing sleep over the poor bastard.’ He checked his watch, just as he had the last time we’d seen each other and he’d grown tired of my company. ‘I’ve gotta be getting back. Anything else I should know about?’
If for no other reason than to be thorough, I told him about Cleveland Allen. He didn’t find much to get excited about in that line of discussion, either.
‘This guy Arlen blames R.J. for getting canned, so when he offs himself, his wife or somebody has R.J. whacked in retaliation?’ O’ shook his head. ‘That’s pretty damn weak, Handy.’
‘I never said it wasn’t. But you asked what I’ve been hearing and thinking, so I told you. And the man’s name was “Allen”, by the way.’
We hurried through what remained of our tour of the block and parted ways at the hotel entrance where we’d started.
‘Tell me something, O’,’ I said. ‘What color are the cruisers for the Bellwood PD?’
He looked at me quizzically. ‘Say what?’
‘Would they happen to be blue and white?’
‘They’re blue and white, yeah. But what about it?’
‘Your friend Walt Fine wouldn’t have any reason to be following me around, would he?’
‘Fine? Hell, no. Jesus, now you think Fine’s been following you?’
‘Just asking the question, O’. No need to get excited about it.’
He wanted to pursue the matter further, but he could see I would have left him to do so alone if he had.
‘Try to get hold of that letter, Handy,’ he said. ‘Whether it had anything to do with R.J.’s murder or not, you and I need to know what he and McDonald could have been writing to each other about. Don’t you think?’
Without waiting for an answer, he turned, the automatic lobby doors moving aside for him like servants before their master, and disappeared inside the hotel.
I hadn’t slept well Tuesday night. I’d been too worried about Coral. She still wasn’t answering her cellphone and, since yesterday morning, had not attempted to call my own. The only reason I wasn’t completely panic-stricken was that I hadn’t heard from Susan Yancy either, who had promised me she’d let me know if my daughter managed to contact her.
I had led Coral to believe that Susan was her mother, and that had been a lie. I had used Susan’s photograph as a prop, something to lend physical credence to the elaborate fable I had invented to slake my daughter’s thirst for knowledge of her past, never guessing that someday, Coral might prove resourceful enough to connect that photograph to the woman who’d posed for it almost thirty years before.
Now the bill for this foolish deceit was coming due, and 1,900 miles away from home, my only hope of controlling the damage was by proxy. It wasn’t a fair burden to keep placing on my friend Quincy, but there was no one else to ask.
He was having lunch at the shop when I called immediately after my meeting with O’. I could hear the big man chewing throughout our conversation.
‘Pizza from Captain Jack’s?’ I asked.
‘Turkey burger. No cheese. Doc says I’ve gotta lose ten pounds by the end of February.’ He paused to take a swallow of some kind of drink. ‘That lady call you yet? Ms Yancy?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘Good. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think she would. She really don’t like you, brother.’
‘No. That’s true enough. Was she hard to find?’
‘A little. She wasn’t at that address you gave me, and the people who were never heard of her. Information didn’t have nothin’ on her, either. But I got a friend works at the Post Office, you remember Dante Daniels? The one comes in here wearing all that silver?’
I told him I did. Daniels had more rings on his fingers than most people had teeth in their mouth.
‘Well, he got me another address for her, up in Linden Hills, and he gave me her married name too: It’s Pilgrim now. That’s how I finally found her number in the book.’
I was encouraged to hear all this, but unsure of how much I should be. It sounded as if finding Susan Pilgrim might prove too difficult a task for Coral herself to accomplish before I could get home to stop her, which was just the way I wanted it. But this was only a fair assumption to make if she had no greater informational resources at her disposal than Quincy, and that seemed highly doubtful. Coral had already found an old photograph of ‘Susan Yancy’ at the library, probably by using a computer to search the Internet, and for all I knew, another hour or two of similar computer work could link that photograph to ‘Susan Pilgrim’ a dozen different ways.
‘I can’t let Coral find her, Quincy,’ I said. ‘And I can’t come home until my business here is finished.’
‘What do you need me to do, Handy?’
I told him he had to go find Coral and get her to call me, even if he had to dial my number and put the phone up to her ear himself.
‘No problem. Where do you want me to look for her?’
I gave him all the contact info for Coral I had, and told him to try her first at work. The last time we spoke, she’d told me she had just started a new job without offering any details, but I figured someone at her old place of employment might have an idea where she’d gone.
‘They probably won’t want to talk to you, for security reasons and all that, but—’
‘Hold on, Handy,’ Quincy said abruptly.
‘What?’
‘You ain’t gonna believe this, but she just walked in.’
‘Coral?’
He didn’t answer. He wasn’t there. I called his name several times, pulse building, but all there was at the other end of
the line was silence. Then I heard muffled voices and another long stretch of nothing. Too long.
‘Hello?’
It was Coral. Sounding angry and distraught.
‘Coral! Girl, where the hell have you been?’
‘I didn’t come here to talk to you, Handy. I came here to talk to him.’
‘Quincy? What for?’
‘I want him to tell me where she is. I know he knows.’
‘No, he doesn’t. Leave Quincy out of this.’
‘You’re not going to stop me, Handy. You don’t have to help me if you don’t want to, but you’re not going to stop me.’
‘OK. OK,’ I said, convinced that to do anything else but give in to her at this point would just send her running off again. ‘You want the truth about your mother, I’ll tell you the truth. But not now. Not like this. When I get back home, we’ll sit down and talk, and anything you want to know, I’ll tell you.’
‘Is Susan Yancy my mother? You can at least tell me that much now.’
‘No. If I answer that question, I’ll end up answering fifty, and I don’t want to have this conversation over the phone.’
She mulled over my offer.
‘So when will you be back?’
‘Two, three days at the most. I’ll call you the minute I get back, I promise.’
There was another long pause as she decided how much this latest of all my promises to her was worth.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you three days. If I don’t hear from you by Sunday—’
‘Monday,’ I cut in.
‘Monday. Fine. If I don’t hear from you by then, I’m not ever going to ask you about this again. I’m just going to find out what I need to know on my own, no matter how long it takes. I’m serious, Handy.’
‘And in the meantime, you’re going to leave this thing alone. You aren’t going anywhere near Susan Yancy or anybody else to talk about this.’
‘Agreed,’ she said, if only after a while.
It was a bargain I regretted immediately. But it bought me four days.
Four days to focus on R.J.’s murder without the distraction of fearing for my daughter’s sobriety, if not her life, throughout, and four days to figure out what I was going to tell her when I got home. That I would have to tell her the truth was finally a given.
What wasn’t was how I could possibly speak it so that it didn’t leave her with a heart that would never heal.
EIGHTEEN
Being Excel Rucker’s second cousin, Paris McDonald knew a few things about him that O’, R.J. and I never figured out on our own, for all the time we followed the dealer around prior to ripping him off. Most of these things were of little import, but one proved to be anything but: Excel was a devoted family man.
Over the four weeks in which we had him under surveillance, we had seen him interact with women and children, of course, some of whom he’d even shown some serious affection for. But he was a player who lived alone, and he shared his bed with more than a few female partners, so the idea that he had a wife and children somewhere never really occurred to us.
Paris McDonald knew that Excel had both. Though the woman was his wife by common law alone, she was the mother of his only acknowledged offspring, two sons and a daughter, and she lived with all three in a tiny two-bedroom house out in Hollywood. The boys were in early adolescence but the girl was just a little thing, not even old enough for kindergarten.
I myself had seen them all at least once. I had trailed Excel to their home one night and watched from a distance as he came and went in the space of three hours. The woman – tall, busty and seriously Afroed – had come to the door alone upon his arrival, but all the kids had poured out of the house with her to send him off when he left, just before midnight. He gave each of the boys a long, soulful handshake, kissed the woman full on the mouth, and took the little girl up in his arms to bury his face in her throat, sending her into hysterics.
Her beauty took my breath away.
The scene was perfectly befitting a man bidding his family goodnight, yet I failed to make the connection that evening, and only made it days later after circumstances forced me to view everything I had seen the dealer say or do in a different light. Despite the puerile nature of his trade, Excel Rucker was a man with many lovers and friends, and few people he called upon while I or my friends were watching ever treated him with much more affection than the four he visited that night – and that night alone – in Hollywood.
Knowing who and what they were to Rucker would not have changed a thing for my friends and me, in any case. With family or without, he would have been the same target to us. The trouble we planned to cause him was not supposed to affect anyone but the man himself, and right up until the moment – two days after the Inglewood robbery – we discovered that someone else had chosen that same week to bring Excel Rucker to his knees, there was no way we could foresee how it could.
Our take from the Inglewood safe house heist was just over 140,000 dollars, and that was only the cash. We counted it four times to be certain. Going in, we had thought we might get sixty, maybe seventy grand at best, plus another twenty or thirty in coke. We were wrong on both counts.
O’ bought a second-hand scale at a flea market and we weighed the stolen blow at a kilo and a half. We figured that to be worth about seventy-five Gs on the street. To my surprise, none of us touched an ounce of it, nor suggested that we do so; our resolve to flush every gram, as near as I could tell, remained resolute.
For two days, while the money and coke sat hidden away in a locked storage bin in the back of O’s mother’s garage, the three of us vacillated between laugh-out-loud giddiness and abject terror, proud of ourselves one minute, frozen stiff with fear the next. We had put a serious hurt on Excel Rucker, to be sure, and it was both exhilarating and terrifying to try and predict how he would react to the insult.
The vengeance I’d been seeking on Olivia Gardner’s behalf had been exacted, and it felt good to know it, to warm my heart by the fire of the ridiculous notion that I had somehow made the world a more just place because of what I’d done. But I wasn’t satisfied. Satisfaction would only come later, after I had seen some concrete evidence of Excel’s suffering, and could rest assured that the scars we had left him with would not soon fade away.
That he would come looking for us had always been a given, so we had planned ahead to be ready. There was a club he liked to frequent on Century Boulevard called the Lazy Duck, where everyone knew his name and he was catered to like a visiting dignitary. Talk flowed freely in the joint, so we staked it out, thinking it was as good a place as any to listen out for word of the robbery and Excel’s response to it. O’ spent a few hours in there the night immediately following the Inglewood heist, and I went in the night after that.
O’s report held few surprises. The club that first night had been buzzing with exaggerated stories of ‘four’ niggas ripping Excel off to the tune of ‘a half-million’ even before the dealer himself stormed in to offer a 10,000 dollar reward to anyone who could tell him where to find the motherfuckas who’d jacked over his people and stolen his money. Both the reward and his level of outrage – which O’ later described as profound, if not particularly electric – were right in line with our expectations.
The following night, however, I saw a somewhat different Lazy Duck.
‘Something’s not right,’ I said when we all hooked up down in R.J.’s basement the next morning. We were determined to do everything in secret now, even to the point of taking all physical contact with each other underground.
‘Not right?’ R.J. asked, immediately agitated.
‘He didn’t come in the whole night, and nobody’s talking about the robbery anymore. At least, not so I could hear.’
‘So?’
‘So I should’ve been hearing more talk about it, not less. It was like something else was on everyone’s mind.’
‘Something like what? Spell it out, Handy,’ O’ said.
> I told them what I’d seen: a house full of people in a mood as black as death, not shouting to be heard over toned-down music but whispering conspiratorially beneath it, and then only in brief, isolated exchanges.
‘You think they were on to you?’ O’ asked.
I shook my head. ‘It wasn’t about me. It was about fear. I think they were all afraid.’
After a beat, R.J. said, ‘Maybe Excel’s been goin’ off. Talkin’ about killin’ niggas at random or somethin’ crazy like that if he don’t find the ones who ripped him off.’
‘If that were the case, he would’ve been in there saying so. Him, or one of his people.’
‘He’s right,’ O’ said. ‘Man comes in to raise hell one night, then doesn’t even send somebody around to do the same the next? It don’t add up. Till he finds us or his money, or both, he should be kicking down a hundred doors a day, personally.’
‘So what are we supposed to do?’ R.J. asked.
‘We don’t do anything. We just stick to the plan. Minimize all contact and stay away from anyplace Excel’s people might see us. Especially you two. In the meantime, I’ll do some checking around, see if I can’t find out what the fuck is going on.’
Neither R.J. nor I asked him how he intended to go about it. O’ knew a lot of people we didn’t, and he was as protective of their names and occupations as a narc of his prize snitches.
‘You better be careful who you talk to,’ R.J. told him, in a rare instance of his playing advisor to his old friend, rather than the other way around. ‘Wrong people find out you been askin’ questions ’bout Excel, it could get back to ’im.’
‘I think we all better be careful,’ I said. I hadn’t really given much thought to being afraid up to now, but the vibe at the Lazy Duck the night before had shaken me up, like a bad dream overrun by the living dead.
Something just wasn’t right.
‘What was it?’ Toni Burrow asked.
‘The letter first,’ I said.
It was the deal we had made over the phone: She’d let me see the letter Paris McDonald had written her father if I told her why I needed to read it. It was the second time in as many hours I’d been forced to grin and bear the short end of a woman’s hard bargain. First Coral, now Toni. Some days are just like that for a man, I guess.
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