Underbelly Read online

  GARY PHILLIPS

  Winner of the Chester Himes award

  “Gary Phillips is my kind of crime writer.”

  —Sara Paretsky, author of Writing in an Age of Silence

  “Honesty, distinctive characters, absurdity and good writing—are here in Phillips’s work.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Firmly rooted in the hard-boiled tradition.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “And quite frankly it is a rhythm that we don’t often hear in crime fiction; the rhythm of black men.”

  —BSC Review

  “The Underbelly is a swift, hard punch to the gut. An attention getter and definitely meaningful. Phillips is a writer who can keep you nailed to the page.”

  —Edgar winner John Lutz

  “… a first-rate example of contemporary noir fiction.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph, London

  “Gary Phillips writes tough and gritty parables about life and death on the mean streets…”

  —Michael Connelly, bestselling author of the Harry Bosch mysteries

  PM PRESS OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS SERIES

  1. The Left Left Behind

  Terry Bisson

  2. The Lucky Strike

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  3. The Underbelly

  Gary Phillips

  4. Mammoths of the Great Plains

  Eleanor Arnason

  5. Modern Times 2.0

  Michael Moorcock

  Copyright © 2010 Gary Phillips

  This edition © 2010 PM Press

  Photos © 2010 Robin Doyno

  Illustrations © 2010 Spartacous Cacao and Manoel Magalhães

  A version of The Underbelly was a first serialized story on fourstory.org

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-206-5

  LCCN: 2009912463

  PM Press

  P.O. Box 23912

  Oakland, CA 94623

  PMPress.org

  Printed in the USA on recycled paper.

  Cover: John Yates/Stealworks.com

  Inside design: Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Introduction

  The Underbelly

  “But I’m Gonna Put a Cat on You”Denise Hamilton Interviews Gary Phillips

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

  When fellow mystery writer Nathan Walpow asked me to try my hand at an online serialized mystery on www.fourstory.org, a site he edits and I now contribute to regularly, I didn’t expect that I could complete one in that form—let alone The Underbelly would see second life as a printed novella. Imagine… print as second life. In just the short span of years since I undertook The Underbelly, the traditional publishing world is in something of a freefall. Not to mention the careers of those of us who still love the tactile feel of the printed book in our hands—the hard evidence of our labors at the keyboard.

  Kindles, iPads, downloading e-books off the net, reading chapters on your iPhone, social media marketing, it’s all in a whirl as ways in which facts and news and entertainment are delivered to readers and viewers. Yet what remains is the human need for order in a chaotic universe, and so our love of stories doesn’t cease. Indeed all these, and so many other forms of stimulating certain portions of our brains and hearts, seem to demand more stories, more ways in which narratives tell us of the rise and fall of heroes, scheming dentists and sacrificing single mothers.

  Maybe, finally, it’ll be a mash-up of you twittering your fifteen minutes of fame via live video streaming and your actions deconstructed by online and cable pundits as part of the never-ending 24/7 news cycle.

  Meanwhile, I hope to still have avenues to tell my tales, so much thanks to Nathan, PM Press, and particularly my comrade, the erudite editor Andrea Gibbons, for shepherding The Underbelly to print. While I’m down for the aforementioned forms of delivering content, the printed word will always hold the mystery and awe that first gripped me those decades ago as a kid negotiating the aisles of the library at 61st Street Elementary School.

  THE UNDERBELLY

  “WHO YOU SUPPOSED TO BE, old school?” Savoirfaire taunted, flexing his shoulders and shifting his weight onto his back foot.“Captain America don’t live here no more.”

  “I’m telling you it’s through,” Magrady repeated calmly, eyes moving from the man’s hands to his face, locking onto the faux-designer shades the discount desperado wore. “You and Floyd are done.”

  “You his father, older brother, somethin’ like that?”

  “You’re missing the point, Flavor Flav,” Magrady said. “My message is what you should be focusing on. Floyd Chambers is no longer on your loan list. No more vig off his SSI checks.”

  The two men stood on Wall, smack in the womb of L.A.’s Skid Row. Unlike the street’s more notorious incarnation in Manhattan, the West Coast version didn’t boast of edifices as testament to giddy capitalism. The bailout around here was of the cheap whiskey and crack rock variety, the meltdown a daily occurrence.

  “Oh, uh-huh.” The bottom-feeder nodded his head. “You lookin’ to take over some of my territory, that it? Don’t seem to me like you got enough weight between your legs to be doin’ that, nephew. Don’t appear to me you got enough left to run this block.”

  Several homeless people had stopped to watch the show. Both men were about the same height, roughly the same build. But where Magrady’s face was lined and his whiskers grey, Savoirfaire’s decades-younger features were untroubled and unblemished—the mask of the uncaring sociopath.

  “We’re done,” Magrady said, beginning to step back and away from where the other man stood outside the open door of his Cadillac Escalade. A vehicle with twenty-two-inch gold spinners for rims. Incongruously, Sam Cooke played softly on the vehicle’s sound system.

  The thug was butter-smooth in whipping out his pruning knife. The blade was vectoring toward Magrady’s neck by the time the Vietnam vet reacted, forearm up. The sharp crescent sunk into his sleeved arm.

  “What you got to say now, negro?” Savoirfaire gritted his teeth, expecting to easily pull his weapon free while ripping flesh and sinew. But, having been forewarned by Chambers, Magrady had wrapped several layers of cardboard around his arms under his oversized flannel shirt. The knife was stuck.

  As Savoirfaire tugged the blade loose, Magrady drove the heel of his work boot into the hoodlum’s knee, eliciting a decisive crack. The asshole teetered and Magrady landed a straight left to his jaw. He plopped down heavily on the contoured seat of his ostentatious ’Lade, his sunglasses askew. Magrady swiftly slammed the door three times on Savoirfaire’s shins, causing him to drop his knife.

  Over the yelping, Magrady repeated, “It’s done.” He then sliced the hook knife into one of the Escalade’s expensive sport tires. Magrady walked quickly away as it hissed flat and Savoirfaire screamed profanities but didn’t come after the older man. There seemed to be a collective disappointment that eddied through the small crowd. The dustup over, the aimless now had to return to the crushing dreariness of surviving.

  Making sure to move through the back routes, Magrady eventually made his way west on 6th Street. He hadn’t been stupid enough to expect a rational discussion with the punk, yet had hoped it wouldn’t come to violence. But really, why else had Chambers come to him seeking his help? He passed one of the specialty lunch trucks that were the fad these days in trendy areas. This one was called Goro-Ga and featured Korean-style bar-be-que beef tacos and chili dogs made from smoked andouille sausages, and those of other meats including rattlesnake. The truck would twitter when it was coming to a specific location. The aroma surrounding the mobile eatery was intoxicating but the line was too long, so Magrady pushed past. His friend was in the off
ices of Urban Advocacy near Union at 8th as had been arranged.

  “How’d it go?” Floyd Chambers asked cheerily. His strong arms propelled him forward in his ergonomically designed wheelchair with its slanted-in wheels. A residual smell of some pungent marijuana was evident on the disabled man’s clothes. Mr. Chambers did enjoy his weed.

  “Just peachy.”

  “Great,” Chambers bubbled.

  “Cut it out,” Janis Bonilla chided. Urban Advocacy’s lead community organizer was twenty-eight, medium height, and honey-skinned, with several tats and piercings.

  Magrady put his hands up. “It went like it went. You just stay off the Nickel for a few days and that chump’s radar and everything’s gravy, dig?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Chambers said. “If things work out like it’s lining up, I’m on the ones and twos, homey.” He popped a wheelie and spun in a tight circle on the coffee-stained carpet.

  Magrady and Bonilla exchanged wan smiles. A month didn’t go by when Chambers didn’t hint at this or that scheme that was going to earn dividends.

  Bonilla’s cell chimed “Sambita” by the band Kinky. She answered. “Gotta bounce,” she said after a quick back and forth over the phone. “We’ve got a big turnout happening in City Hall over the Emerald Shoals bullshit. Goddamn gala is in less than two weeks.”

  “The war goes on,” Magrady said dryly.

  “The offer’s still good, champ,” Bonilla said, packing files into her messenger bag. She’d asked him recently to consider being an organizer with UA. He’d been sober this time for eight months going.

  “I’ll sleep on it.”

  “Sure you will.” To Chambers she added, “See you, Floyd.”

  “You tellin’ it,” Chambers replied enthusiastically. The three went their separate ways.

  PAST ONE A.M. IN the flop he’d scored in his army buddy, Red Spencer’s garage for the last few weeks, Magrady awoke with the night sweats, his heart thrumming in his ears. He reached for a bottle of whiskey that wasn’t there. The jungle had gone hot and yellow in his head again. Booze. Coke. The meds. The group sessions off and on at various VA facilities. All of it had helped and hindered, but none of it stopped the gnawing from returning. He lay on his back on the couch unable to sleep. He clicked on the portable clock-radio nearby and listened to Art Laboe’s oldies show.

  He once again read through the homemade comic book on stapled and folded lined paper his son Luke had written and drawn when he was ten. It was the tale of Lionhead Mose, a black jet pilot ace who crash-landed in the African jungle, found the secret Ruby Eye stone, and gained super powers. He fought several villains in the thirty-page epic, aided by his sidekick Roy Boy. Magrady, who hadn’t seen the comic book in decades, was surprised to find it in the box of stuff he was storing in the garage.

  After enjoying the titanic climactic battle Lionhead has atop the Mountain of the Moon against Cobra Fang, he closed his eyes and tried to drift away, suspended between his nightmares and songs by the likes of Thee Midniters and Bloodstone on the radio. An imitation of sleep finally returned as William DeVaughn sang “Just Be Thankful for What You Got.”

  “I’d be thankful if I had any shit,” Magrady mumbled as calmness descended on him and his mind went blank.

  Two days later, a black and white jumped the curb in front of Magrady, and the uniform on the passenger side beckoned him over with a motion of his T-handled baton. The cops ferried him to what had been the Greyhound bus station on 5th and Los Angeles Streets. Inside, amongst the luggage and electronic gadget shops, the LAPD had encamped their Skid Row detail. The cops and the denizens called them the Nickel Squad, as 5th bisected Skid Row.

  “How you doin’, sarge?” Captain Loren Stover had the haunch of his lanky frame resting on an industrial desk, gym-pumped arms folded. His hair had long since departed the top of his head. His office had no windows and the only adornment was a large map of Oregon displaying old bus routes in faded red on one wall.

  Irritably Magrady said, “Surely you must have something better to do with your oh-so-valuable time.” When he’d last seen Stover, Magrady had been lying on the sidewalk in front of the Watchtower bar. The side of his head was soggy from where it had contacted the concrete after being chucked out of the dive. And there was the captain, all grins and eyes shiny like he was high on the Buddha, the tip of his spit-shined shoes poking the wasted one-time non-com.

  The police captain pleasantly asked, “Why’d you do it, sarge, why’d you kill Jeff Curray?”

  It took Magrady a beat to realize Curray was Savoirfaire. “I didn’t kill him. I defended myself.”

  “Yeah?” Stover began, getting off his desk. “Well somebody broke his arm in two places, caved in his sternum, then pounded his skull flat like a landing strip at his crib in Ladera Heights. Coroner figures it was a heavy-duty pry bar that some bughouse butthead wielded on the unfortunate.” No matter who the deceased was, a pious nun or pederast, Stover referred to those dead by homicide as “unfortunates.”

  “Bit out of your jurisdiction, isn’t it?”

  “Savoirfaire had his loan shark and dope hustle on from Inglewood to here. But you’re my person of interest.” Stover grinned and poked a finger at Magrady. “My theory is after your public altercation, you went away to toast your victory and holed up with some crack ho skank. Sexed up and blitzed out, you got the bright idea you’d better do Curray before he did you.”

  Magrady was inclined not to argue. What good would it do? He knew Stover was going to remand him to central booking, if for no other reason than because he wouldn’t let go of the past.

  “When the hell are you going to get over it, Stover?” Magrady said anyway. “It’s been so many miserable decades ago, man. We were all just a bunch of scared kids, for God’s sake. Kids playing GI Joe.”

  For a brief moment, glaring at each other, they were transported back to that bubble of time, seconds before that hellacious firefight in that no-name village off the banks of the Drang River. Magrady the green sergeant, Stover the corporal, and his hometown buddy Mike Niles among the other privates in the recon. Mike who Magrady ordered on point that day, and who caught the first VC round, the high-caliber burst turning his brains to spray.

  But that flushed away like pissed-out cheap gin as Stover leaned a sneering face into his. “Have a good time in lock-up, sarge. Too bad you screwed up your life and don’t have a family or your business partners anymore, huh? Can’t hold your liquor. Can’t hold onto your woman or the respect of your children.”

  “Kiss my black ass,” Magrady said, getting closer, teeth clenched.

  “Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty where you’re going who’ll do that for you, honey.”

  Both breathed hard, each ready to lash out at the other. The door opened. “Get him out of here,” Stover seethed to the patrolman, “Get him the hell away from me.”

  Sixteen hours later, Bonilla arranged for Gordon Walters, a public interest lawyer from Legal Resources and Services of Greater Los Angeles who knew Magrady, to spring him from the Twin Towers jail facility.

  “Thanks, Gordy,” Magrady said shaking his friend’s hand, the large envelope with his possessions tucked under one arm. They stood in front of the facility on the ten acres of the jail grounds, as tatted vatos and pretty girls in low-rise jeans with eyeliner on thick as spackle handed out color postcards advertising the various bail bond services located nearby on Cesar Chavez or Vignes to the steady stream of mostly women and children coming in and out for visits.

  “So far there is no physical evidence and no eyewitness connecting you to Savoirfaire’s murder, but of course the investigation is ongoing,” Walters informed Magrady.

  “Spoken like a true lawyer.”

  Walters, a handsome walnut-hued man who stood two inches taller than Magrady smiled. “I’m not suggesting you did it, Em.”

  “But you wouldn’t be surprised if I did.”

  The lawyer clapped him on his bicep. “I’m suppos
ed to run you over to the UA office. Janis wants to see you.”

  Walters dropped him off, and Magrady and Bonilla went to lunch.

  “Floyd’s gone missing,” Bonilla said, as she and Magrady shared lunch at the Bent Clock on San Pedro after he’d taken the downtown Dash bus to the location.

  “You think he’s on the run?” Magrady munched on his couscous. If there was any benefit to the gentrification of downtown, where sweatshops converted to lofts and General Relief recipients and the working poor were being squeezed out, at least the caliber of eateries had improved.

  She hunched a shoulder. “The day after your run-in with Savoirfaire, Floyd’s Section 8 apartment came through. I reached him on his cell and he was, like, nonchalant.”

  “Still hinting about his big deal?”

  “I guess. Anyway I kinda got angry. We’d managed to help him get the damn voucher in less than two years.” They both knew of people waiting more than eight years to obtain the designation considering the obtuse Soviet-style bureaucracy of the housing department. Bonilla added, “So he never came in to get the paperwork, and now his cell is disconnected.”

  He chewed some more as he considered this. “It’s not like Floyd could get the drop on Savoirfaire.”

  “Because he’s in a wheelchair?”

  “I know I’m not being all PC and whatnot, Janis, but come on, that mufu wasn’t no pushover.”

  She swallowed some of her smoked salmon and eggs and observed, “A would-be player like Savoirfaire might let his guard down around a handicapped man.”

  “Stover said Curray’s head was bashed in. That would mean he’d have leaned down and let Floyd wail on him.”

  “He could have sucker-punched him in the gut and when he doubled over, bip,” she brought her fist down fast like she was holding a club.