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ellwood, California, is a small and quiet incorporated city in the southern hemisphere of Los Angeles County that is roughly 11 square miles in size and serves a populace of just under 30,000 people, most of them black and Hispanic. It is primarily a stronghold of commerce, laden with business parks and corporate headquarters, and you tend to see its name in the papers only when the Bellwood Monarchs have further solidified the city’s long history of high school athletic supremacy.
    How O’Neal Holden had come to be the overseer of such a tiny and unimposing fiefdom, I couldn’t say, as disconnected to him and his fortunes as I had been for the last two-and-a-half decades. But from what little I had read and heard about him from time to time, he seemed to be enjoying the role. He was always smiling brightly when cameras were around, and the sound bites from his public appearances were consistently upbeat. If he was at all concerned about the accusations of misappropriation and malfeasance that were beginning to stir all about his office, it didn’t show in the face he had perpetually turned toward the public. O’ was a rock. As always, he had no time for fear, and no need to pretend otherwise.
    I knew it would not be a simple matter to receive an audience with such a man, even for me. The mayor of any city is invariably busy, beholden to obligations that make impromptu meetings difficult to arrange. But I went calling on O’ just the same. My digging into the mess that was R.J.’s murder was going to draw his attention sooner or later, and I decided it would be best to go knocking on his door first, rather than wait for him to come sniffing around mine.
    For a brief moment, I considered taking the conventional route of engagement, calling his office to see if he could see me on a moment’s notice. But then I imagined all the evasions that tact would afford him, should he feel the need to study his lines before we met, and I chose to take another, somewhat more direct approach.
    An ambush.
    ‘Goddamn, Handy. You haven’t missed a trick, I swear.’
    We were having lunch at an upscale Italian restaurant on the outskirts of Bellwood called Antonio Z’s. O’s name wasn’t on the booth in the back we were occupying, but I could tell it belonged to him just the same. The officious young hostess who’d greeted us out front led us to the spot without a word of instruction, and the staff as a whole was treating the mayor like the first Pope to wear a cream-colored suit and 300-dollar Stacy Adams shoes.
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘Hell, you know what I mean. Walking into a Council meeting in mid-session to take a front-row seat right under my nose. You couldn’t have made yourself more conspicuous if you’d been pulling an elephant along on a leash.’
    ‘It got your attention, didn’t it?’
    ‘If you wanted to see me, Handy, you could’ve just called my office for an appointment.’
    ‘And waited three weeks for you to clear a date on your calendar? I needed to see you today, O’.’
    I’d found Bellwood’s City Council chambers on the second floor of the City Hall building, in the heart of a two-block stretch of commercial real estate the locals ambitiously called ‘downtown’. Wood-paneled and brightly lit, the chamber room had held all of fifteen people upon my entrance, including the mayor and four members of his Council. I could have stood in the back by the door and still given O’ little choice but to eventually acknowledge my presence and deal with it.
    Which, to his credit, he did sooner rather than later. In the process of delivering an enthusiastic and highly persuasive argument in favor of a Main Street beautification project, Bellwood’s large and charismatic mayor noted my arrival and registered it with a wink and a smile, never missing a beat of his oratory. It was classic O’Neal Holden. When you pinned the big man into a corner from which there was no escape, he didn’t waste a whole lot