The Dying Ground (7 page)

I squeezed back. “Just tell her if she needs me—”

She closed the door before I could finish the sentence.

S
earching for Felicia, looking for clues that would lead to Billy’s murderer, served to keep my grief at bay. I felt heartache and despair at the inside of my eyelids and nipping at the heels of my feet. The search was also an extension of the neighborhood back-and-forth I’d done as a little boy for mothers and fathers looking for their kids.

“Maceo? You seen Gary? He was suppose to be back here over an hour ago.” The words were always posed as a question, but they really meant “Find my kid.” And off I’d go after whoever was missing. In Gary’s case I knew, from whispers on the street, that he was spending most of his free time in the company of Mr. Donovan, a shellacked and reclusive man who lived three blocks away. The kids knew, long before the adults, that Mr. Donovan was the first in a long line of older men who’d succeed in turning Gary out.

“Maceo?” Another voice, this time female, this time with more worry than the last call. “Maceo, Karen said she was
spending the night with your Aunt Cissy and she ain’t made it home yet. She there?”

Karen was nowhere near Dover Street, and her mother knew it just as I did, but she’d rather have my eyes see the results of her worry, so I would go find her daughter and spare her what we both already knew. Anybody who’d seen Patrick Selig, a two-time tenth grader, hanging around the junior high five lunch periods in a row knew Karen was hot on his heels.

And so it went until I became a crossroads of information for the lost and found, the secret-keeper of the well hidden and the ones on their way to being lost.

Information on Felicia’s whereabouts and the how and whys of her disappearance would come to me in due time, but I felt a need to keep moving toward my own conclusion. I wanted to learn for myself the answers to Billy’s death.

Once I left Mrs. Johnson’s I turned onto Market Street, then into an alley in search of Holly. He lived close to Mrs. Johnson in a ramshackle lean-to in the back of a warehouse. The warehouse itself was occupied by a group of hippie artists who maintained a love/hate relationship with Holly. The result was that he didn’t ask about their activities and they didn’t ask about his.

I circled the surrounding blocks looking for his car. He never parked in front of his own home. He was cautious to the point of paranoia, but it served him well.

While Billy had moved into the more traditional avenues of the drug game, Holly found his niche as a specialist, a cooker: the man to call if you needed drugs cut into multiples for the biggest profit. In leaner times, dealers would learn to do it themselves or teach an underling, but in the free-flowing eighties only true hustlers at the top of their game could afford Holly’s prices and expertise. It became a symbol of prosperity to have your drugs cut by him.

In addition to buying his chemistry services, you also bought his discretion and a patna to ride on enemies after a single phone call. His profit margin ran so high Holly never saw a day of hand-to-hand sales, and he’d become accustomed to flying first-class with his doctor’s bag of tools in his lap to service clientele as far away as D.C.

Holly’s success was mythmaking at its finest. There were many rumors, each more elaborate than the next, but they basically meant the same thing. Holly was a genius. Holly was a magician. Holly was worth every fucking penny of his fee: a cool one thousand per unit of cocaine.

His secret: multiplication.

With the impossible-to-obtain procaine, a medicinal anesthetic under lock and key in all hospitals, he was able to up product one hundred percent and still produce excellent results.

It was simple. A dealer brought him fifty units; Holly gave him back a hundred with the purity to power a space shuttle and collected $50,000 for his trouble. Where he got the procaine was a detail he’d take to the grave.

A self-taught ghetto chemist, Holly enrolled without fail every semester under the name Roberto Marley in any chemistry course offered through UC’s extension program. He astonished his professors with his knowledge and continually refused all job offers. The mythology of Holly took on a life of its own with each criminal success he experienced.

It all started or ended with John Claire, depending on how you viewed the facts. Either way it added fuel to the fire. John Claire was Holly’s personal whipping boy while we were in middle school together. He died mysteriously, with only Holly present, and no one had ever been sure it wasn’t Holly’s kill. He maintained, vehemently, that Claire simply suffered a fatal seizure and hit his head when he fell. Many people believed that
the events happened in the opposite order. They believed that the open gash that exposed the grayish matter beneath Claire’s skull came first, after a hit by Holly, and the seizure came second.

What initiated the doubt was Holly’s relationship to Claire. Holly could not abide his presence. He was not normally a bully by nature, but he used John Claire to exorcise all the demons in his own life. The schoolyard battles between meek defenseless Claire and the ferocious Holly were as common as the Chef’s Surprise in our school lunch.

On the day of the incident, Holly was alone with Claire behind the gymnasium while the rest of us were in class. Holly had kept Claire behind to “talk” to him, “talk” being a euphemism for a beating.

It was October, I remember because of the decorations. I noticed Holly’s empty seat when we sat down for social studies, and almost immediately afterward a woman’s anxious wail pierced the classroom. It was Mrs. Ashefani, Holly’s favorite teacher, a bohemian Black student from San Francisco State University.

We all rushed to the window, our teacher included, to see Holly pressed silently against the wall while Mrs. Ashefani screamed at a horror we could not see. The principal rushed out to calm her, and his hand immediately went to his mouth as he dropped to his knees and called out for an ambulance.

Ten minutes later we all watched as John Claire was wheeled away with bright red blood caked in the nappy hair behind his ear. More of it pooled in the corners of his mouth like pink drool. Holly was led away in cuffs, none of us sure of his role in Claire’s condition.

He was released that afternoon for lack of evidence, and he defended himself to me only once.

“He just shook and fell, Maceo. He hit the steps. That’s it.” I took his word on the surface, but a small doubt remained. Billy,
on the other hand, thought Holly was telling an outright lie. He remembered a little more clearly, as did many others, the systematic way Holly tortured Claire simply for being weak. His silence about the issue, after that first week, only compounded his mystique, but the whispers and doubts dogged him from the schoolyard into adulthood.

And now that adult, with possibly one kill to his name, was richer than Croesus, though he lived like a pauper, stacking his money for the rainy day guaranteed to come. He was always open to one more big score, another way to add to his Midas pile. And it was that greed that led him back to Billy.

A job cutting for some Mexicans out of San Jose gave him a pipeline to a windfall he couldn’t ignore. The Mexicans were looking to move into the East Bay market and needed a trustworthy connection. Holly knew just the person.

Billy.

Besides, the middleman fee would guarantee early retirement, and a score big enough to impress Billy. Despite being self-assured and self-sufficient, the competitive side of Holly burned to beat Billy at his own game. He suggested a partnership, but Billy wouldn’t agree to terms that favored Holly. The deal died within twenty-four hours, the Mexicans went underground, and Holly was left with a stinging, bitter taste at the sound of Billy’s name.

I thought about this as I searched the streets for his rusted-out blue Nova.

Three blocks from my starting point I found it in the driveway of an abandoned house. I doubled back to his cottage. In the three years Holly lived there he’d done nothing to make it livable. The grounds were concrete, the warehouse itself an industrial gray. A cracked clay wheel stood between the two properties, as well as an old stone oven that was home to a feline family.

The lean-to itself was a peeling white structure that I called the bat cave. Inside, it was spare and clean: spit-shined wood floors, heavy drapes, a twin mattress on a wooden frame, a big-screen television, and a first-rate collection of bootleg kung fu tapes. At a separate storage facility he kept two thousand comic books in custom-made boxes. He refused to pay utilities, frugal to the end, so he heated his rooms with the fireplace. He used a counterfeit cell phone, bricks as they were called in the Bay because of their cumbersome size. The electricity was provided by long cords from the warehouse.

His roommates, two pit bulls named Krueger and Carlos, waited patiently on the porch. They barked to let Holly know he had a visitor. I’d known them since they were puppies, yet they never displayed even the slightest sign of welcome.

Before I could call out, Holly hastily exited his front door. He fastened the buckle of his belt and closed the door firmly behind him. I was surprised.

“Did I catch you at a bad time?” I knew there was a girl behind the door.

He looked back at his house. “It’s cool. What’s up?”

“I just came from Mrs. Johnson’s house. Flea’s been over there to see her.”

“Man, you still on that?”

“I got to find her. If Billy’s boys don’t kill her, the police gonna have her hemmed up behind this.”

“Maceo—”

I held up a hand. “Remember Noone?”

“That square-ass cop?”

“Yeah. He’s working the case. Fool’s a detective now.”

Holly shook his head, recalling several unpleasant run-ins. “You spoke to him?”

“He was trying to intimidate Regina when I got to the house.”

A noise from inside the cottage startled us both. Holly looked back quickly and pulled the door even tighter.

“Why you out here?” I asked.

“I heard you honk.” Both of us knew I hadn’t honked, so I held his gaze for a moment. He was the first to look away. I stepped off the porch.

He made a motion to come with me. “You need me to ride somewhere?”

“I was gonna run up to Telegraph.”

“Okay. Give me a minute and I’ll meet you at the car.”

I turned to go but couldn’t resist a last dig. I lifted my chin toward his closed door. “She cute?”

He flinched slightly before answering. “Don’t even trip.”

H
alf an hour later I maneuvered the Cougar up Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue while Holly rode shotgun. Given the choice, Holly always picked me to drive. His license had been suspended for over a year and even when he had it, legally, the harassment he suffered from local cops barely made it worthwhile. My role as chauffeur meant we saw each other at least once a day. I was used to his “Ride me up the street” requests—up the street meaning anything from a mere two blocks away to longer rides to San Jose or even Los Angeles.

On the busy avenue the usual menagerie of homeless people, street kids, and students filled the sidewalks not taken up by vendors. Halfway down the block we spotted a group of guys standing in front of Rasputin Records.

“There’s Black Jeff.” Holly nodded toward a dreadlocked youth balancing on his skateboard. His ratty clothes hid that he was one of the most successful skateboarders on the West Coast and one of the only Blacks in the sport. He had flipped the race
card by registering for all his events as Black Jeff, the derogatory name his competitors used when discussing him. His use of it earned him a bit of respectful notoriety and forced them to say it to his face.

Whenever he was in town, Black Jeff made the sidewalk in front of Rasputin’s his home. At his side was his usual misfit crew: Mike Crowley, a neighborhood kid who conversed in obscure rap lyrics, and Off-Beat, a White kid with a predilection for Black culture. Holly grimaced when he saw Off-Beat.

“Man, I can’t stand that trick.”

“Easy, player, the man just confused.” I rolled to a stop at the curb and waited for Black Jeff to approach the car.