Based upon everything I had read about the man in recent years, McDonald was no longer the short-tempered, brutal thug I remembered. At some point during his incarceration, he had turned his life over to Jesus Christ and declared himself born again, taking his redemption so far as to become an ordained minister. If the reporters who wrote about him were in the habit of portraying him accurately, he was something just short of a harmless, soft-spoken teddy bear now, quick to warm up to strangers and next to impossible to ruffle. I had never heard him speak, but as in the letter he had written to R.J., whenever he was quoted directly, he sounded surprisingly articulate and kind.
Still, he scared the hell out of me.
I had been rehearsing what I would say to him for years and yet, even as my taxi pulled up to the prison’s outer gates, I had no idea where to start. My friends and I had framed this man for two murders he did not commit, and arguably, by way of our interference in Excel Rucker’s affairs, positioned him to commit a third. How could I look the man in the eye, let alone ask for his help in putting R.J.’s murder to rest?
Security check-in was just a blur to me; I answered questions and filled out paperwork without conscious thought. My head cleared only after I’d taken my seat in the visitation room of the PBSP Security Housing Unit and McDonald entered the cubicle opposite me. Wearing the same full-length, long-sleeved white jumper as the other inmates here, he sat down on the other side of the glass and nodded in greeting, smiling as if he were certain that only good things could possibly come from my visit. His body had gone soft since the last time I saw him, and his hair had turned to a mere wisp of white fuzz growing on the back and both sides of his head, but in size and overall mass, he was still an imposing giant worthy of the nickname ‘the Tower’.
He picked up his telephone handset and waited for me to do the same.
‘Errol White?’
I nodded. ‘Thanks for agreeing to see me.’
‘Not a problem. My door is always open – so to speak.’ He grinned, casting a sideways glance at one of the guards stationed nearby. Then he added: ‘Especially for friends of Brother Burrow.’
‘Excuse me?’
Both my visitation request, and the follow-up telephone call Toni Burrow had made to the Department of Corrections to try and move it along, had indicated I was a freelance reporter seeking an interview for a profile piece, that was all.
‘I’ve become a very popular man up here at the Bay,’ McDonald said. ‘Seems like I meet a new reporter wantin’ to write about me every week. So I kind’a know one when I see one now. And you?’ He shook his head.
‘And that makes me a friend of “Brother Burrow”?’
‘It does if the Lord has graced you with clarity of vision, as he has me. I look at you and what do I see? A man roughly the same age as Brother Burrow, with the same sad, hangdog look in his eyes. Could be just a coincidence, but I don’t think so.’
We both sat there staring at each other.
‘Tell me what I can do for you, Brother White,’ he finally said.
There was no point in continuing to be coy. ‘You can tell me who might have killed him. You did know he was dead?’
‘I read about it in the newspaper. I was very sorry to hear.’
‘Do you have any idea what happened?’
He produced a small shrug, said, ‘I imagine he just lost faith. Coming correct with the Lord can be a frightening thing for some people; they can’t believe their sins will really be forgiven, so they just give up and go back to doing all the unrighteous things they did before. I see it happen in here all the time.’
‘And what sins was R.J. hoping to have forgiven?’
‘There were quite a few, as I’m sure you know. He said he was a thief and a drug user, just for starters. But what seemed to bother him most was what he said you and he, and another brother he didn’t name, did to me. Or “for” me, depending on your point of view.’
He smiled.
‘I don’t understand,’ I lied, the telephone handset feeling like an enormous lead weight growing larger in my hand by the moment.
‘Well, he talked in riddles, of course. But as near as I could understand, he said you were all responsible for the murders I’ve been accused of committing. It was your fault my cousin couldn’t pay me the ransom I wanted for his daughter, so you were also to blame for everything else that followed.’
There was no animus whatsoever in the tone of his voice. The expression on his face was completely devoid of anger and ill-will. I had made this trip to Crescent City half-wondering if McDonald’s conversion in Christ was genuine, or simply a show of some kind intended to draw the sympathies of an ever-gullible public – and now I thought I knew. He was the real deal.
‘He was right,’ I said. A maelstrom of diverse emotions was threatening to send me stumbling out of the room like a wounded drunk, and it was all I could do to remain in my chair.
‘He wanted to tell me how sorry he was,’ McDonald said, ‘and to ask my forgiveness. But I told him the same thing I’m about to tell you: You don’t need my forgiveness because you already have it. Mine and the Lord’s.’
I shook my head in disbelief. ‘No. We’re talking about almost thirty years of your life here. You telling me you were willing to just let that go?’
‘Yes, I am. I’m telling you I can let it go because whatever you brothers did or didn’t do, it was all part of God’s plan for me. Before they put me in this place, I was a disciple of Satan. An animal full of rage and hate. I was capable of any act of evil, including murder, and what I did to that little girl should be proof enough that I would have done much worse if I hadn’t been stopped. But I was stopped. By the grace of Brother Burrow’s and your intervention – accidental or not – my soul was saved. The only thing I owe all of you, if I owe you anything, is my thanks.’
‘Your thanks?’
‘I know it sounds crazy to you. It did to Brother Burrow, as well. But I promise you, I mean what I say. The only person you and Brother Burrow’s friend have to make peace with now is the Lord Jesus Christ. Not me.’
‘What about getting out of here? If I went to the police now—’
‘No,’ he said sharply, cutting me off. ‘The time for all that has passed. Even if I thought I could get a new trial, I wouldn’t want one. Because this is my home now. It’s where I’m meant to be, where I need to be to do the work the Lord wants me to do. And I’m not ever gonna do anything to interfere with His designs on my life again. Never.’
It didn’t seem possible, this measure of mercy and self-sacrifice. But it was. The harder I tried to spot some crack in his veneer, some suggestion, no matter how small, that what I was seeing was all just an elaborate front for a bitter, vengeful liar, the more convinced I became that his words were genuine. I had seen renewed faith make profound changes in people before, but this was something well beyond my experience. This was one of those rarities in life men pray to see, then claim do not exist when we look right past them: a minor miracle.
Having been discouraged from any more talk about helping him win his freedom, and with time winding down on my visit, I asked him if R.J. had ever said anything to him about a man named Darrel Eastman.
‘No. Not that I recall.’
‘What about Cleveland Allen?’
‘No. Brother Burrow was only here for a short time, I’m afraid, and he didn’t say much more than I’ve already told you. Except for the good news he brought me about the little girl, of course.’
Somewhere off in the distance, I heard a voice that sounded much like my own ask, ‘What little girl?’
‘Excel’s daughter. Sienna.’ McDonald beamed, his euphoria impossible to contain. ‘It was a great blessing for me to learn she’s still alive.’
On the taxi ride back into Crescent City, my only thoughts were of my daughter.
‘Coral’ was not the name her mother gave her. That was something I came up with to satisfy my own selfish needs. Specifically, I was tryin
g to give the two of us a fresh start, a life together separate from the one she might have had with the woman who gave birth to her, and it seemed to me a new name was the only place to start. Like every other critical judgment of mine at the time, it was a decision only a deaf, dumb and blind man could have made.
My excuse? I was desperate to do something right, to perform some heroic act of self-sacrifice that might make up for all the lives to which I’d laid waste. Assuming the role of single parent to a child who had already been dealt a terrible hand was my way of trying to turn back the clock, to return to a point in time in my life when my first sensation upon waking every morning was something other than shame.
I had been a good father to the girl. I had made mistakes, both of omission and commission, and there were things I could have done differently that might have spared her some of the suffering she eventually came to bring upon herself. But I had given her all that I had to give. She was my masterpiece, the recipient of everything I knew about love and repair and reclamation – and it wasn’t going to be enough. I could see that now. For some, the past is an unstoppable force, a shaft of burning light that can only be imprisoned in the dark for so long.
It was coming for Coral and me both.
TWENTY-FIVE
The next flight out of Crescent City to Los Angeles wasn’t until Friday morning, so after I left Paris McDonald at Pelican Bay, I checked in to my motel room and waited several hours before calling Sylvia Nuňez at home to ask her a few questions about Doug Wilmore. I’d been trying to put all the pieces of R.J.’s murder together since McDonald had dropped his bomb on me about R.J. and Sienna Jackson, and the man Mike Owens had said was R.J.’s best friend at Coughlin Construction was the one person my attention kept coming back around to.
‘I seem to recall you telling me something about him having trouble with women who told him no. Were you speaking from personal experience?’
‘Sure. Doug used to hit on me all the time, early on.’
‘Early on, meaning before you and R.J. started seeing each other?’
‘Yes. Way before that. But once I set him straight, he was fine.’
‘Describe “fine”.’
‘Well, he sulked for a while, of course. In fact, now that I think about it, he didn’t speak to me for months afterward. But you don’t think—’
‘Is he married?’
‘No. He’s divorced.’
‘Kids?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You happen to know if he’s scheduled to work tomorrow?’
‘He isn’t. Fridays are his day off. Handy, where are you? Why are we having this conversation over the phone?’
‘I’ll explain all that to you later,’ I said. ‘Right now, I need you to tell me everything else you know about Wilmore. Starting with where I might be able to find him in the morning.’
It rained all day Friday, a hard rain that dropped out of a cold black sky like a wall of three-penny nails. It reduced busy intersections to wading pools and drenched pedestrians from head to foot, regardless of what they used – umbrellas, newspaper, jackets pulled up over their heads – to fend it off. You could turn on the wipers in your car full blast and still see nothing but gray in front of you; the blades just beat ineffectively against the torrent like a pair of frantic, over-wound metronomes.
It was all a perfect match for my mood.
‘It was a terrible thing, what happened to R.J.’
‘Yes, it was.’
Silence.
‘But that man you killed the other day, I forget his name – he was the one done it, right?’
‘Darrel Eastman. He’s the one the police think did it, yes. Me, I’m not so sure.’
‘You’re not?’ O’s sister Brenda gave me a surprised look. ‘How come?’
I shrugged. ‘Just a feeling I get.’
For someone who hadn’t seen me in over twenty-five years, she was treating me with unexpected hospitality. I’d shown up at the door of her West Adams home completely unannounced, Toni Burrow having traced her to this address for me only hours earlier, and she’d asked me in out of the rain with only a small measure of noticeable discomfort. R.J. and I had shared enough meals at her mother’s table to develop a certain affection for her, and it was good to see that time had not been unkind to her. She was a big, heavy woman now, as her build back in the day had always foretold, but beyond the extra weight and a little gray in her hair, she looked like the same gentle soul I remembered.
‘Are you still a registered nurse?’ I asked. ‘Or did you finally become a doctor?’
‘No, I’m still a nurse. I work the night shift over at Queen of Angels.’
I walked over to the fireplace in her living room, drawn to a photo displayed prominently on the mantel.
‘This is your daughter Iman, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ She moved quickly across the room to join me, as if I’d just reached out to touch something she was afraid I might break.
The photo was a full-color wedding portrait. The groom was a stranger to me, but the radiant bride was the aide I’d seen O’ confer with in Bellwood City Council chambers Monday morning. There’d been more curls in her hair on her wedding day than there were now, and the portrait left no doubt about her most striking feature, something I’d been too far away from her to notice four days ago: Her eyes were the color of molten gold.
‘O’ tells me she’s really your stepdaughter. Your first husband’s child, I think he said.’
‘No. She’s Herman’s daughter. My second husband.’ She hadn’t raised her voice to make the correction, but the distinction was clearly one she thought important. ‘Would you like some coffee, Handy? I was just about to make some coffee.’
‘Coffee would be nice,’ I said.
O’s sister smiled and quickly headed for the kitchen.
‘And Brenda, if I could ask a favor,’ I said, before she could vanish from sight.
She stopped, turned. ‘Yes?’
‘When you talk to O’, could you tell him something for me? Tell him that before I came over here to see you this morning, I went to see a man named Doug Wilmore, and we had a very interesting little talk.’
‘Doug Wilmore?’
‘The name doesn’t mean anything to you, I know. But O’ will understand.’
She stared at me, thoroughly unsure of herself now. ‘You want me to call ’Neal?’
Seeing no point in embarrassing her further, I just said, ‘If you could. I’m sure he’d appreciate it if you did.’
Whatever Bellwood city business he had to bring to an utter standstill to do it, it took O’ all of thirty minutes to drive to his sister’s home, shortly before noon.
For both Brenda and me, it had been a long, awkward wait, a charade of calm and small talk in the face of mounting fear and foreboding. I didn’t ask her any more questions about Iman, and she didn’t volunteer any more answers. The young woman was there in the house all around us, in the form of graduation photos, sports trophies and notices of academic achievement, yet both her adopted mother and I treated her like the proverbial elephant in the room we could not see.
‘What the hell are you doing, Handy?’ O’ asked, after Brenda had gone to the door to usher him in. He was wearing a long black overcoat on top of his expensive blue suit, but he must have walked from his car to the house through the still-raging downpour without bothering with an umbrella, because he glistened with rainwater from the crown of his head to the tips of his shoes. He had his anger in check for now, but his control of it looked tentative at best.
‘Getting to know you better, O’,’ I said, without getting up from the armchair I was sitting in.
He didn’t ask me for an explanation; my meaning was clear to him. He turned to look at his sister. ‘Handy and I are gonna need to be alone for a while, BeBe.’
It wasn’t a question, and she didn’t treat it like one. ‘OK. How long—’
‘I’ll call to let you know when it’s al
l right to come back.’
Brenda nodded. She retreated to a back bedroom, returned with a coat and umbrella of her own. We watched her throw the coat on hurriedly and go to the door.
‘I didn’t tell ’im nothin’,’ she said softly, by way of offering an apology, then she disappeared without waiting to hear how her brother would respond.
In her wake, the house fell deathly silent, save for the sound of the rain shaking the nails loose from every shingle on the roof. O’ glared at me for a long minute, wanting to make sure his sister had time to get in her car and drive away, before he sat down in the chair opposite mine, giving no thought to removing his coat first.
‘You always were a pain in the fucking ass,’ he said.
‘Yeah. That’s what R.J. always thought, too.’
‘I didn’t think you’d gotten that good a look at the girl. What, you go back to see her again at the office or something, before I got her the hell out of Dodge?’
‘No.’ I told him about my visit with Paris McDonald on Thursday, and what McDonald had said R.J. told him about Sienna Jackson still being alive.
O’ lowered his head, shook it from side to side. ‘Fuck. That goddamn fool . . .’
‘He only knows the girl didn’t die that night out in Simi. R.J. didn’t tell him anything else.’
O’s head snapped upright again, his eyes damp and on fire. ‘That was enough! And for what? What good could it have possibly done McDonald to know after all these years?’
‘The poor bastard never killed anybody, O’, least of all Sienna Jackson. If finding that out twenty-six years after the fact did nothing but ease R.J.’s conscience a bit, that was reason enough to tell him, seems to me.’
Cemetery Road Page 21
