Cemetery Road

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  We were sitting on a bench at Leimert Village Park, not far from her mother’s house, taking in the shade of a sycamore tree that was ringed by a handful of people sprawled out on the grass, dozing or chatting or sipping from a container sheathed in brown paper. I didn’t tell Toni, but the little park – really no more than a wedge-shaped island of grass stuck in the heart of a small but resilient patch of retail shops in the Crenshaw district – was the place where her father, O’ and I had said our final goodbyes more than twenty-five years before. At a few minutes after one on a Wednesday afternoon, the park and its environs looked completely different from the way I remembered them, and yet exactly the same. It was as if the names on all the signage had changed, but the buildings they were attached to had not. Unlike Fox Hills, developers had seen no need to change the face of the earth here, and their neglect was both a blessing and a curse that had left the area just as quaint, and economically anemic, as ever.

  I did not want to tell Toni Burrow the rest of my story. I was certain I had told her too much already. But O’s suggestion that I find out what was in the letter Paris McDonald had written to R.J. – if in fact such a letter did exist – had served no purpose other than to reinforce my own thinking in the matter. I would have liked to have learned more about Darrel Eastman first, but since I couldn’t imagine how I might go about it without involving the police, gaining access to McDonald’s letter was my next most logical move.

  Naturally, I had initially balked at Toni Burrow’s terms for showing me the letter; I had kept the secret she was demanding I share with her for more years than she’d been alive, for her father’s sake almost as much as my own. But I had also promised her the day before that I would not ask for her help again without explaining my reasons for needing it, and I knew she would hold me to my word.

  Up until now, as I had described her father’s complicity in a twenty-six-year-old armed robbery, she had reacted with little surprise or wringing of hands. She had allowed me to tell the tale my way, without interruption, as if she were listening to a man speak of things she had always understood to be true. But she had not heard the worst of it yet, not by a long shot, and even this far in, more than halfway into the telling, I was searching for some way to skirt around my story’s end to spare her the knowledge of it.

  She haggled over the letter for a while, hesitant to trust that I would go on talking once she’d given up the one thing she had to bargain with, but eventually, she reached into her purse and produced it.

  It was sheathed in a white, business-size envelope addressed to ‘Mr Robert Burrow’. The envelope was weathered and worn and folded vertically down the middle, like something R.J. might have been carrying around in a pocket or inside his wallet, and it bore the postmark – dated that September 11th – of Pelican Bay Penitentiary in Crescent City, California.

  Inside was a single sheet of lined, yellow paper, one side blank, the other scrawled upon in the small, delicate handwriting of a monk. The date at the top preceded the one on the postmark by three days, and this is how the letter read:

  Dear Brother Burrow:

  I thank you for your letter of Sept. 3. It was good to hear how much my story has encouraged you to make your own peace with God. Though your sins may be great, He will forgive them all, as He has forgiven mine, if you will only ask. But you are afraid, and that is understandable. Perhaps you would like to visit me here at the penitentiary sometime soon so that we can pray for you together? Let me know, and I will try to arrange it. No man is beyond redemption. If someone like me can be saved, so can you.

  Your Friend in Christ,

  Paris McDonald

  Toni Burrow let me read the letter several times without interruption before she found my silence unbearable.

  ‘Well?’

  I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It was reassuring on some fronts, ominous on others. It did seem to confirm that R.J. had reached out to McDonald first, voiding O’s concern that the reverse had been true because McDonald knew us all. But the letter also served to prove that my old friend had written McDonald out of some desperate need to seek forgiveness – forgiveness for something McDonald may have consequently heard R.J. confess to in person, up at Pelican Bay.

  ‘This was all you could find? There was no copy of R.J.’s letter to him?’

  ‘No. I’ve looked everywhere. What does it mean, Handy? What does that letter, or Paris McDonald, have to do with my father’s murder?’

  ‘If this was as far as their contact ever went, probably nothing.’

  ‘But it wasn’t. I’ve already told you, Daddy went up there to see him.’

  Much to my dismay, she’d found a credit card statement that indicated R.J. had bought a round-trip airline ticket to Crescent City for the twenty-seventh, twelve days after the date of McDonald’s letter and only three days before R.J.’s murder. The statement alone didn’t prove Toni’s father had actually made the trip, and neither the airlines nor the authorities at Pelican Bay would ever confirm such a thing without a court order, even to a private investigator, but Mike Owens at Coughlin had told her R.J. had called in sick that day and her mother had no memory of him being at home.

  ‘McDonald was this “Excel Rucker’s” cousin, you said. The dealer you all robbed. Daddy visited him for a reason, and that reason got him killed.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We had a deal, Handy. You promised to tell me everything.’

  ‘There’s no relevance to the rest of it. At least, not yet.’

  ‘We had a deal,’ she said again.

  And we did. That was the inescapable fact of the matter. She had held up her end of our bargain, and now it was my turn to hold up mine. It was either that, or prove myself a liar she could never trust again.

  ‘Do you remember what you told me yesterday about your mother? That she only thinks she wants to know the truth about your father, because she can’t believe the truth could be all that terrible?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Well, you were right. She really doesn’t want to know.’ I shook my head, issuing a final warning. ‘And neither do you.’

  I was trying to frighten her, and I did. I could see it in the way her gaze upon me softened up, and the little breath she had to take before she could speak. But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t the kind to let something go just because it scared the hell out of her.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  So I did.

  I’d come back to Los Angeles following R.J.’s funeral in pursuit of a pipe dream, the preposterous belief that I could involve myself in the fallout from my old friend’s murder just enough to keep the past in the past. But it couldn’t be done. I could see that now. Wheels had been set in motion that would eventually, inexorably bring what R.J., O’ and I had done twenty-six years ago to light, and I no longer had the hubris nor the energy to fight it.

  I could maybe reduce the damage the revelation would do, but that was all.

  I knew the news was bad the moment I heard O’s voice. Even over the phone, he always sounded as unflappable as a stone – but not today. Today, less than twenty-four hours after I’d last seen him down in R.J.’s basement, he sounded like somebody who’d just watched a mushroom cloud paint the far horizon red.

  ‘We’ve got real trouble, Handy,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘You were right about all those people at the club the other night being afraid. That’s exactly what they were. But not for reasons that have anything to do with us. At least, not directly.’

  I waited for the hammer to drop.

  ‘Somebody snatched his little girl,’ O’ said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘His daughter. He’s got a daughter somewhere and somebody grabbed her, late Saturday night. They think it might’ve been his cousin Paris, that big motherfucka he uses as a bodyguard sometimes.’

  ‘You talking about Excel?’

  ‘Man, who the fuck else would I be talking about? You’r
e goddamn right, Excel.’

  All the rest of it spilled out of him then, like bile he could no longer keep down. The little girl was four years old, her name was Sienna Jackson, and somebody who’d cut the screen off her bedroom window and stolen her from her mother’s house three nights ago was demanding a half-million dollars from Excel for her safe return. It would have been a difficult amount of scratch for the dealer to raise under the best of circumstances, but only days after a pair of thieves had taken him for over 200 grand, it had to be all but unattainable.

  ‘We have to give it back,’ I said. A stone was growing hard and cold at the pit of my stomach and my throat was as dry as dust.

  ‘The money?’

  ‘Everything. The money, the drugs . . .’

  ‘It’s too late for that. He had a deadline of midnight last night to pay up. The girl’s probably already dead.’

  ‘Fuck that. Man ain’t gonna kill his own niece,’ I said.

  ‘If this fool Paris is the one who did it, they say he could do that and a lot worse. Nigga’s crazy on his best day, and Excel put a bonfire under his ass, slapped him around last week in front of a house full’a women for giving him some attitude. He ain’t been seen or heard from since.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he snatched the girl.’

  ‘Let me ask you something, Handy: Did you know Excel had a daughter? I didn’t, and I bet R.J. doesn’t, either. Only the people closest to him know about it, most likely, and whoever took the girl not only knew who she was, they knew where she lived. It had to be the cousin.’

  ‘OK, so maybe it was. That doesn’t change anything. We still have to get that money and blow back to Excel.’

  ‘How? Go back to his crib in Inglewood and leave the shit on the porch? Ain’t nobody left alive back there, Handy. Excel’s killed everybody in the whole goddamn house.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘The man’s lost his mind. He can’t pay the ransom, and he’s jackin’ up anybody and everybody he thinks is responsible. That’s why it was so damn quiet at the club the other night – he’s going off in all directions, and nobody knows what the nigga’s gonna do next.’

  I told him it didn’t matter. We had to return Excel’s money, and fast. There was nothing we could do to help the people we had robbed in Inglewood, but God willing, we might still have time to save the girl.

  O’ and I hashed out a rough plan for dropping the drugs and money where Excel could retrieve them in a way that involved little risk of exposure, then tried to reach R.J. by phone to bring him into the discussion for the first time. O’ had waited until now to alert him to the situation, knowing how badly the news of the child’s kidnapping was going to mess with his head; already having some idea how we might reverse our tragic error when we talked to him would help diminish R.J.’s immediate impulse to do something reckless or self-destructive – or both.

  But R.J. was nowhere to be found.

  He was supposed to be sitting tight just like O’ and I had been, straying from his phone at home only to do those things that would most mimic his regular routine, but in the course of two hours, we called him four times without reaching him. We left two messages with his mother, who claimed total ignorance of his whereabouts, and hung up twice when his mumbling, black-hearted father answered the phone instead.

  ‘Goddamn that fool,’ O’ said, livid.

  We decided to make the drop without him. Time was too precious to waste, and in truth, neither of us believed R.J.’s opinion or approval was required for us to do what needed to be done.

  But when we arrived at O’s mother’s place, R.J. was there waiting for us, pacing the front porch like a junky in a bad way. He knew. His face was hard set in a scowl laced with fear and when he came down the walk to greet us, I had to wonder just how far over the edge his mind had slipped.

  ‘Man, where the fuck have you been?’ O’ snapped, before R.J. could get his mouth open to speak.

  ‘To hell with that. Have you—’

  ‘I asked you a question, nigga!’

  It never ceased to amaze me how O’ and O’ alone could use this tone with R.J. and make him snap to attention, rather than throw a punch that could break the cap off a fire hydrant. ‘I went out to get somethin’ to eat. Ain’t shit back home in the fridge. You fools heard what’s goin’ down? About Excel’s kid?’

  ‘We heard,’ I said.

  ‘Shit, what’re we gonna do? They say—’

  O’ raised his hand, said, ‘We can’t talk about it out here. Let’s get in the garage.’

  The garage facing a back alley was O’s exclusive sanctuary here. His older sister Marion had taken over his old bedroom when he’d moved out of the house five months before, so to maintain a place to chill at his mother’s, he’d taken over the garage. It was too cluttered with junk and storage boxes to actually accommodate a car, so his mother had never found much use for it. O’ had put padlocks on all the doors and furnished the interior with an old convertible couch, small-screen black-and-white TV, and a component stereo system notable only for its laughably mismatched speakers.

  ‘I wanna know what the hell we’re gonna do,’ R.J. said, the minute we all made it inside. He wasn’t crying now, but his eyes were ringed with fire, a sure sign that he’d been doing so earlier.

  ‘The only thing we can do,’ O’ said. ‘Give Excel his shit back and hope it ain’t too late.’

  ‘But it is too late!’

  ‘Says who? You know something we don’t?’ I asked.

  ‘I know the man had till last night to pay up, and he didn’t. He couldn’t. And the nigga who took the girl don’t play.’

  ‘His cousin?’

  ‘Word’s all over the street, I couldn’t go nowhere without hearin’ how crazy this motherfucka is.’

  ‘They know it was him for sure?’ O’ asked.

  R.J. nodded. ‘They say he came right out and admitted it the last call he made askin’ for the ransom.’ He shook his head from side to side, trying to find the sense in it. ‘That little girl’s dead, and we’re the ones who killed her. Am I right? We all clear on that? We’re the ones killed her.’

  He was looking directly at me.

  ‘Fuck that,’ O’ said angrily. ‘We haven’t killed anybody. Till somebody tells us otherwise, we’ve gotta assume the child’s still alive and operate accordingly. And that means stop all this fuckin’ around and get Excel’s shit back to him as fast as we can.’

  ‘Yeah? How?’

  O’ ran the plan he and I had come up with down for him: drop the money and drugs in a dumpster somewhere, then let Excel know where to find them as soon as we could get him on the phone personally.

  R.J. was shaking his head again before O’ could even finish, said, ‘There ain’t time for all that. We could be waitin’ hours just to get Excel on the phone!’

  ‘You have a better idea?’

  ‘No, but that shit ain’t gonna work. We gotta come up with somethin’ else.’

  ‘He’s right,’ I said. O’ turned, surprised. ‘The deadline’s come and gone and Excel knows now this man Paris is the kidnapper. With half the world out looking for him, Paris isn’t going to fuck around. He’s going to do whatever he’s going to do with the girl and jet.’

  ‘If he ain’t already,’ R.J. said.

  ‘The only prayer we have of saving the girl, if she’s still alive, is finding Paris ourselves and paying him off directly.’

  ‘What? That’s crazy,’ O’ said.

  ‘Maybe so. But I don’t see what else we can do. And we sure as hell can’t just sit around here and do nothing.’

  ‘Damn straight,’ R.J. said.

  ‘You’re both trippin’,’ O’ said. ‘Every nigga in the city’s out lookin’ for this fool Paris, you just said so yourself, Handy. Even if he was willing to deal with us, we’d never find him before Excel does.’

  ‘You’re the man with all the connections,’ I said. ‘Maybe the same people who tipped you to the kidnapping coul
d tell you where Paris is hiding.’

  ‘Ain’t no need for that. I think I know,’ R.J. said.

  O’ shot him a skeptical look. ‘Say what?’

  ‘This Paris – he’s the big brother with the beard and tiny eyes, right?’

  ‘The man Excel was always leaving outside the door everywhere they went, yeah. So?’

  ‘So I followed him once. One night when I was watchin’ Excel. I was thinkin’ about boostin’ his ride.’

  ‘His ride?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, you know – he’s the one drives that ’69 Riv with the gold wire rims. Emerald green, cherried to the max. I was thinkin’ about liftin’ it, so I followed him to the crib. Only, he didn’t go to the crib, ’less the nigga lives way the hell out in Simi Valley.’

  ‘Simi Valley?’ O’ repeated incredulously. In those days, over a decade before a jury there would set the cops who beat Rodney King free and, consequently, the heart of Los Angeles on fire, the Ventura County city R.J. was referring to was little more than a suburb in the making, all arid hills and model homes for housing tracts years away from completion. A place, in short, where black people like Paris McDonald were as scarce as thirty-story high-rises.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it, either,’ R.J. said. ‘I damn near turned around before he stopped. But after a while, I got curious – like, where the hell was homeboy goin’?’

  He didn’t bother to explain why O’ and I had never heard any of this before, and neither of us asked the question, because the answer was so painfully obvious: How could he tell us about a joyride he’d taken out to Simi Valley on a night he was supposed to have been watching Excel Rucker?

  ‘So where did he go?’ O’ asked, growing impatient now.

  ‘Some white girl’s house out there. Funky little place with a wagon wheel by the door and shit all over the yard. She was sittin’ out on the porch, smokin’ and waitin’ for him, when he showed up.’