Free Cemetery Road by Gar Anthony Haywood Page B

which.
    R.J.’s daughter was already sitting at a booth when I arrived around ten thirty. She was wearing a sleeveless, white cotton blouse and cream-colored slacks, and her hair was pulled back in a simple French braid behind her head. She looked anxious, as if she had some reason to dread what was coming, but she raised a small smile from somewhere within as I sat down to join her.
    ‘You haven’t been waiting long, I hope,’ I said.
    ‘No. I just sat down. Mr White—’
    ‘Call me Handy, please.’ I took up my menu and opened it. ‘Have you ordered yet?’
    I made her wait to make conversation until a broad-shouldered Latina waitress had taken our identical orders of ham and eggs, sloshed some coffee into our cups, and disappeared.
    ‘I don’t understand the point of this,’ Toni said. ‘You told me yourself only yesterday I should leave investigating Daddy’s murder to the police.’
    ‘I know. I did. But that was before O’Neal Holden told me the car in which R.J. died wasn’t the only place the police found traces of cocaine.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I mean the coroner’s report says they found the drug in your father’s body, as well.’
    The woman seated across from me said nothing, though her eyes conveyed a host of conflicting messages all at once.
    ‘O’ also said R.J. had called him at least twice in the last fifteen years to ask for money. He loaned your father sixteen hundred in all, he said. Were you aware of that?’
    The wounded expression on her face was all the answer I needed, but she offered me one anyway: ‘No.’
    ‘The police didn’t tell your mother they found cocaine in R.J.’s system?’
    ‘They might have told her . But she didn’t tell me.’
    ‘What about the money?’
    ‘I didn’t know anything about that, either.’
    I let a moment pass before asking my next question. ‘Why do you suppose she didn’t tell you?’
    ‘I imagine because she knew what I would have said.’
    ‘“I told you so”?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    ‘Then R.J. and drugs were nothing new to you.’
    ‘No.’ She let out a deep breath, trying to keep her emotions in check. ‘He’d been a steady user for over fifteen months, just before he hired on with Coughlin Construction. But that was eighteen years ago. He couldn’t find work, he was an ex-con without a degree—’
    ‘Whoa, hold on,’ I said. ‘R.J. was an ex-con?’
    She nodded, face coloring with shame. ‘He served three years in the mid-eighties for armed robbery at Lancaster State Penitentiary. I was only a year old when he went away.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t do this. I have to go.’
    She tried to bolt from the booth, but I caught her wrist before she could fly past.
    ‘Wait!’
    ‘I’ll say it again, Mr White: This is none of your business. Go home.’
    ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just trying to make sense of it, that’s all. I need your help. Please.’
    She snatched her arm free but remained where she was, the black light of her gaze trying to bore right through me. Our waitress and several patrons had stopped what they were doing to watch, no doubt hoping for an ugly scene they could recreate for friends and family later, but Toni Burrow let them down. Instead of capping our little drama by storming out, she fooled us all by returning to the seat across from me.
    ‘You have no idea what he put Momma through,’ she said. ‘How hard he made things for her.’
    She backhanded a tear from her right eye, infuriated by her need to shed it, and paused as the big woman in the blue uniform set our plates down in front of us, scowling at me now like a sheepdog eyeing a wolf. The quarrel I’d just had with my dining companion had apparently left our waitress with an unflattering impression of me, and she didn’t leave Toni alone with me again until she was satisfied I was all through putting my hands on her.
    ‘He was a wonderful husband and father for the most part,’