Cemetery Road (28 page)

‘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.’

‘Yeah, well, you can say that because neither of you niggas saw what that motherfucker did to the child that night. If you had seen her face, her little arms . . .’ He tried to shake the memory out of focus. ‘Just ’cause he didn’t kill her doesn’t mean he didn’t try.’

A single tear escaped from the corner of his right eye and slid down the side of his face. He let it be.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

‘What, you don’t know? Mr “Undercover Brother”? Why don’t you tell
me
what happened?’

I’d been trying to put it all together for days now and I still couldn’t do anything more than speculate. ‘You and R.J. were lying when you told Excel and the woman that the girl wasn’t in the house. She was either still in the bedroom where you’d found her, or hidden somewhere else, maybe out in R.J.’s car; Excel and I hadn’t stopped to look on our way in. McDonald came back from wherever he was after R.J. and I left—’

‘No,’ O’ said, his voice a jagged knife of irritation. ‘R.J. didn’t know anything about it. Up until about a year ago, he thought the girl was dead, too.’

‘Then you were alone when you found her?’

‘No. No! It wasn’t like that.’ He scrubbed his face dry with both hands, let out a long, heavy sigh. ‘McDonald and Sienna were gone, just like I said. I’d searched the place myself and the only sign of either one was all the blood on the bed where she’d been sleeping. I thought sure the child was dead.

‘But then McDonald came back to the house, just before I put a match to it, and he had her with him, all wrapped up in a sheet like a mummy. He’d gone out looking for either a hospital he couldn’t find, or a place to bury her like we thought, till he realized she was still breathing. I never talked to him, so I can only guess. But wherever he’d been, he brought her back. Alive.’

‘When the fire department showed up, they found him unconscious out in the yard, bleeding from a nasty knot on his head. You?’

‘I heard him coming in through the front door and caught him with the butt of my gun before he had time to hit the lights. When I saw what Sienna looked like, I almost killed the sonofabitch right then – but then I realized that would be a mistake. I couldn’t frame his ass for Excel and the woman, and the fire I was about to start, if the man was dead.’

‘So you dragged him outside, went back for Sienna, and then torched the house and split.’

‘Yeah.’

His voice had a tinge of disgust in it now, but I couldn’t tell for whom it was meant.

‘How long, O’? Did it come to you right away, or did it take a while?’

‘What?’

‘The idea that the girl could be worth a lot more to you dead than alive.’

He bristled at the accusation. ‘Go fuck yourself, Handy. I may not be the altar boy you’ve always thought yourself to be, but I’m not the calculating piece of shit you like to think I am, either. When I left the house that night, my only thought was of Sienna. I was gonna take her to the first hospital I could find and drop her off out front.

‘But then she came to in the car and started crying, and it freaked me the hell out. I figured I might have a shot of leaving an unconscious kid in a hospital carport without somebody seeing me, but a hysterical one? So I stayed on the freeway until I could calm her down and talk her back to sleep. It took a long time.’

‘And then?’

‘By then I realized something I hadn’t before: She wasn’t as bad off as I thought. She was bruised and in a lot of pain, but she wasn’t dying. It occurred to me that maybe a hospital was an unnecessary risk. Brenda was a nurse, and I could trust her to treat the girl without saying anything to the police.’

‘You still haven’t answered my original question,’ I said.

He let several seconds go by, just to keep me writhing on the hook. ‘It was a long ride back from Simi. I had a lot of time to think, to go over everything that had happened that night. I remembered how you and R.J. had been acting earlier, before we’d even driven out there to try and find Sienna. Both of you were already talking like her father’s money was tainted, like we’d all burn in hell for eternity if we touched so much as a penny of it. And now you thought the girl was dead for sure. There was no way you were gonna want to keep that bread.’

‘Unless we found out she was still alive.’

He nodded, clearly taking no pride in the memory. ‘The money was right there with me in the car, 140 grand, and the more I looked at it, the more ways I could think of to use it. I had plans for my life, things I wanted to accomplish, and it was all gonna take money to get done. Forty-six thousand would’ve been enough to get started, but 140 would’ve put me on a whole new timetable.

‘And hell, Handy, what were you and R.J. gonna do with forty-six Gs? You never wanted the money in the first place, and R.J. would’ve pissed his share away inside of six months, no matter what we told him about spending too much too soon.’

‘So you took Sienna to BeBe and asked her to take care of the girl for a while.’

‘Yes.’

‘And she ended up doing it for the next twenty years.’

‘More or less. She fell in love with the child. After a week, I couldn’t have taken Sienna from her if I’d wanted to.’

He told me the rest of it in fits and starts, how all the paper we’d burned that day in his mother’s garage was mostly prop money he’d bought off some brother who worked on the lot at Columbia Studios, mixed in with just enough real cash to sell the illusion. Then, after I was gone, he and his sister gave Excel’s little girl a new name and the phony papers to go with it. They cut her hair to change her appearance and sent her to schools out in the Valley where R.J. was unlikely to ever come across her, all the while raising her to believe that Brenda and her late husband Herman Evans were her biological parents.

‘She didn’t remember her real mother and father?’

‘She didn’t remember anything prior to that night in Simi. The traumatization of her kidnapping and beating had wiped out her memory completely.’

‘What about now?’

O’ got up from his seat, walked over to a bookcase to lift a photo from a shelf: a pre-teen Sienna/Iman in a green and white soccer uniform, beaming into the camera with a soccer ball as a prop. ‘As far as she knows, her name is Iman Evans. BeBe’s her moms and I’m her Uncle ’Neal. And you know what? She’s happy, Handy. We gave her a life she would’ve never had otherwise. Blow this thing up now, and you throw that all away.’

‘And her real mother? Excel’s woman? What kind of life did we give her, O’?’

‘Vicky Jackson? A drug dealer’s ho’ with two other kids, and from everything I ever heard about her, a crackhead to boot. With Excel around, she might’ve still found a way to be a good mother to Sienna, but without him, she would’ve been no better for her than McDonald himself. I wouldn’t waste a whole lot of time trying to raise my sympathies for her, Handy.’

‘OK. How about your sympathies for R.J., then? Not only did you cheat him out of his share of a hundred and forty grand, you let him go twenty-six years thinking he had the death of a four-year-old girl on his hands.’

‘I thought he could handle it. It was a mistake.’

‘But a mistake you were happy to live with until he found out Sienna was still alive. After that, I guess, all bets were off.’

‘I smell coffee. You want some coffee?’

I looked at him like he’d lost his mind, the thought only now occurring to me that that could in fact be the case.

‘Sure.’

He went out to the kitchen. I could hear him rummaging around in his sister’s cabinets, searching for clean cups. ‘How do you like it?’ he asked.

‘Lots of sugar, no cream,’ I called back.

He returned a few minutes later, two steaming mugs in hand. He passed one to me, then sat back down with the other, and somewhere in between, he found a blue-steel semi-automatic that he set down easy on the right armrest of his chair, nozzle turned more or less in my direction.

‘That isn’t really necessary, is it?’ I asked, blowing on my coffee to cool it down.

‘You just accused me of being a murderer, Handy, so your state of mind’s a little questionable. Let’s just say the hardware’s only there to discourage you from doing something we might both be sorry for later.’

‘You want to set my mind at ease, O’, try convincing me that what happened to R.J. wasn’t done on your orders.’

This time, judging from the mayor’s expression, I was the one who was crazy. He shook his head, said, ‘Jesus, man. Talk about leaving police work to the professionals. You’ve been pokin’ around this thing for what, almost a week now, and you’re just as ignorant today as when you started.

‘I didn’t kill R.J., Handy. Hell, I did everything in my power to keep him alive! I got him his job at Coughlin. I loaned him money when he said he was strapped. Ever since you tucked tail and hauled ass to Minnesota, I’ve been trying to keep that nigga from puttin’ a bullet in his head, or throwing himself in front of a goddamn train. But not for the reason you think. That’s something else you’re wrong about.’

He glanced at his coffee cup and gently set it down, hand shaking too much now to risk dropping it at his feet.

‘Sienna was foremost on his mind all that time, of course. But she wasn’t the only thing ridin’ him.’

He paused to see if I could go the rest of the way without him.

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, feeling the hairs at the back of my neck come alive with dread.

‘I’m talking about the second big mistake I made, after deciding to let that damn fool go on thinking Sienna was dead. I split the money with him. I didn’t think I had a choice.’ He finally looked away from me, affecting the mannerisms of a man squirming in the cramped confines of a confessional booth. ‘Burning up a pile of phony money was a trick I might’ve got R.J. to believe, but you?’ He shook his head. ‘You would’ve never bought it.’

I let my mind drift back to the day in question, sifting through the details. ‘Unless I saw somebody else check the cash first.’

He nodded.

All these years later, my memory of that day was as vague as a ghost, but there were some things I could still remember distinctly: the smell of tar from across the alley; the suspicion R.J. kept voicing that O’ was looking to run a game on us; the bundle of bills he tossed for me to look over personally while he inventoried the remainder of the bag, until I, like an idiot, called him off . . .

‘Goddamn,’ I said.

‘If it makes you feel any better, it took a while to talk him into it. For all the bitching he used to do about you, he really held you in high esteem. But once I reminded him that everything that had gone down and gone wrong had started with you, and the fucking, inexplicable hard-on you had for Excel Rucker, he came around to seeing the justice in it. You had the shit coming, Handy. If not for you, there would’ve been nothing for any of us to feel guilty about.’

I wanted to take his words and ram them down his throat. He was telling me that I had earned every sleepless night I’d ever endured, that all the tears I had cried and self-loathing I had suffered were nowhere near the actual punishment I deserved. Paris McDonald was in prison for life because of me. Linda Dole lived her days and nights in a wheelchair because of me. Excel Rucker and Noreen Phillips, Darrel Eastman and the three people Rucker had killed himself, they all were dead because of me.

R.J. Burrow was dead because of me.

I tried to move from my chair, to lift my hands or turn my head, but I couldn’t. I could only sit there and sink, farther and farther down into the empty hollows of my conscience.

‘I’m not completely blameless myself, of course,’ O’ said. ‘What we did, I allowed to happen, there’s no gettin’ around that. But while you were off in St Paul making a new life for yourself, I was here trying to make up for my part in what we did, spending damn near every minute of the last twenty-six years looking for ways to keep R.J.’s guilt from ruining us all. But it just wasn’t possible.’

O’s eyes flared, suddenly enraged. ‘It was like trying to save a drowning man who keeps taking you both farther and farther away from shore. First it was the armed robbery that landed him in the joint, then it was his goddamn crack habit. He went back to the safe house in Inglewood and made a project out of “saving” Linda Dole’s son, hangin’ out with the boy and counselin’ him like a parish priest or somethin’. There was nothin’ I could do to stop him, Handy. Talking was just a waste of time.

‘So I finally did something desperate. Something I thought would bring him down, but only made things a thousand times worse.’

For once, he didn’t have to wait for me to understand. ‘You introduced him to Iman Evans.’

‘I was a fool. He lost his mind. I didn’t know until you told me that he’d written to McDonald in prison, but I wasn’t surprised to hear it. He was that far gone. So, naturally—’