Free Cemetery Road by Gar Anthony Haywood Page A

tape recorder, a Sony-made portable with only one empty reel on its right spindle, that somebody in Culver City had set atop a garbage can out in front of their home. Its fake woodgrain case was battered and scratched, and the lens cover on one of its VU meters was cracked like the shell of an egg, but at first glance, I could see no reason why it shouldn’t function as it had originally.
    I wound the machine’s power cord into a neat bundle, deposited it into the trunk of my car and drove off, feeling the way I always did on these occasions: like a kid who’d just plucked the hubcaps from the wheels of a neighbor’s car.
    You might wonder why I bothered. Surely the complicated business of playing detective should have superseded any need to tinker with a new toy. But tinkering clears my head; it is what I do to make space for my best thinking. When I would find the time to work on the recorder over the next few days, I didn’t know.
    I just had a feeling I’d find a use for the distraction.
    By ten a.m., my cellphone had yet to ring, and the desk clerk at my motel said the same was true about the phone in my room. I was disappointed but not surprised. I had called Toni Burrow at her mother’s home just before embarking upon my impromptu tour of the ‘new’ Los Angeles, and Frances Burrow had told me she wasn’t in. She promised I’d get a call-back as soon as Toni returned to the house, but I hadn’t really believed I’d get one. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, I had sent the elder Lady Burrow scurrying back up to bed in tears and prompted the younger one to all but slam her mother’s front door in my face, so I had little reason to expect either woman would place much importance on my need to speak with Toni again.
    I tried her a second time anyway.
    ‘Hello?’
    I’d gotten lucky. This time, it was Toni herself who answered the phone.
    ‘Toni, this is Handy White. I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.’
    A brief silence, then: ‘What can I do for you, Mr White?’
    ‘I’d like to talk to you. Over lunch. Do you think you could meet me in about an hour or so?’
    ‘I’m afraid not. What exactly did you want to talk about?’
    ‘The same thing we talked about yesterday, only a little more directly: Who killed your father, and why.’
    ‘I don’t see where that’s any of your business, Mr White.’
    ‘Frankly, I’m not sure I do, either. But whether it is or it isn’t, I’m going to do whatever I can to try and answer those two questions.’
    ‘You? You’re no more a criminal investigator than I am.’
    ‘That’s true. If I could go home right now and forget the whole thing, I would, believe me. But I tried that once and it didn’t work, so . . .’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘It’s like this: For reasons I won’t get into right now, I owe him. Too much to simply assume the cops will get this one right on their own.’
    ‘So what do you propose to do?’
    ‘Talk to people who knew R.J. Try to find out if somebody other than a buyer or seller of cocaine could have wanted him dead. And I was hoping to start with you.’
    I was left to count the seconds before Toni Burrow spoke again. ‘Tell me where you want me to be, and when,’ she said.
    It was my idea to have a late breakfast at a place called Pann’s. Unlike the Ship’s coffee shop in Culver City, my first choice among the handful of space-age style pancake houses I loved to frequent in the old days, I’d found Pann’s that morning still standing where I’d last seen it, on the south-west corner of La Cienega and La Tijera, in the lowlands of Ladera Heights. A thickly landscaped, glass-predominant enclosure capped by a triangular, tortoiseshell roof, it was the only building in the area I truly recognized; everything else – bistros, shopping malls, drive-thru restaurants – either bore new names and facades, or had sprung up out of the ground during my absence. Sometimes, it was hard to tell