Underbelly Read online

  “Yes,” Nakano nodded solemnly at the seated Talmock. “I understand.”

  SATURDAY NIGHT AND FLOYD Chambers wheeled up to a plate glass window of the Middle Eye Gallery and looked in on the reception for the early California exhibit. The show had been up for more than a week, but this was the first time Professor Cyrus Langston had been able to attend. Prior to that the older gentleman, who got around well for a man in his late seventies, had been on an excavation in Kenya.

  Tall women with legs that made Chambers lightheaded and dudes in black on black flitted about, laughing and talking and nibbling little cheeses from offered trays. Some stood before paintings or pieces of crumbling pots on pedestals pointing at them and nodding their heads at each other.

  His sister casually looked from the mummified head on display in the gallery, and toward her brother. She betrayed nothing and moved on, sipping her champagne from a plastic flute like Tyra Banks regarding the skanks at a fashion review, Chambers imagined. He got set to do his part to steal Talmock’s head.

  Floyd Chambers wheeled into the Middle Eye Gallery and earned a nod from a hottie in low-risers displaying plenty of skin between her jeans and tight ribbed tank top. She turned to talk to one of the metrosexual men languishing about, and he got a squint at the elaborate tattoo on her lower back, its tendrils descended to her barely covered crack. Chambers was mightily tempted to compliment her on her tramp stamp but got his head right. His sister would kill him if he f’d this up.

  Mind on my money, he admonished himself. Anyway, the honeys would be taking numbers to get with him once they pulled this off. Given this was a gathering of the cool and trendy, there was no security guard. Besides, what self-respecting stick-up artist would go for any of this stuff? It’s not like a Chumash woven basket or the photos of the trolley car storage yard had street value. Chambers couldn’t help but grin. Chumps.

  His sister had moved to the other side of the space, faking like she was interested in a desk and chair setup said to have belonged to socialist muckraking lawyer Job Harriman. He had once come close to being the mayor of Los Angeles in the early part of the last century. That is until, some argued, his campaign was torpedoed by a conspiracy or at least a collusion of interests with the bombing of the L. A. Times building at its center.

  A Chicano bristling with stout upper arms sidled over to her. He was definitely not rocking that in-between gender vibe. The vato was on the prowl for some of that artistic poon tang, Chambers reflected. The two exchanged nods and low modulated words. Maybe he should be concerned about Sally staying on point.

  Chambers wheeled behind Professor Cyrus Langston who was talking to a man and woman about Talmock’s head.

  “It is rather amazing that the head turned up where it did.” Langston sipped some of his white wine from a clear plastic cup. “But how fortunate that Wakefield Nakano brought this amazing find to our department at USC.”

  The older man was lanky with bowed legs, half glasses on a chain around his neck, and one of those Ahab kind of beards that had Chambers giggling when his sister had first shown him the archeologist’s picture.

  “How did you identify the head, professor?” the man asked. He was the studious type with a thin, gaunt face.

  He explained there had been the vestiges of a headband on the mummified head and that corresponded with a known drawing of the shaman. Carbon 14 dating confirmed the time period, Langston went on.

  Chambers reached around to the pouch draped on the backside of his chair. It wasn’t time yet, but he needed the reassurance.

  “Oh yes,” Langston continued, “prior to the Emerald Shoals project that’s there now, there was a building dating back to the early part of the twentieth century. I mean, even then you would have assumed the digging that went on when that structure was erected would have turned up the head or some other artifact.”

  “None had been found in that area before?” the woman asked in an accent Chambers couldn’t place. She touched a heavy necklace around her neck as if invoking, or warding off, ancient ghosts.

  Langston inclined his head. “As far as my research has yielded, there has not been any such Chumash or any other American Indian remains or items culled from that part of downtown Los Angeles. Though mind you,” he added, brightening, “the former Produce Exchange Building that was there had quite a history, including murder.”

  “That’s very interesting,” the woman said, regarding her smiling companion then turning back to the academic. “What’s the story, Professor Langston?”

  Langston began. Seems there had been an orange grove speculator whose wife came to his office one late hot afternoon to find him involved in more than a professional way with his pretty Filipina secretary. Chambers tuned him out. His sister got into position and he casually retrieved the three oblong, hand-fashioned smoke bombs from his pouch. Using a recipe obtained online, Chambers had made the little wonders on the kitchen stove using easily obtained chemicals. He wheeled toward the restroom located along a short hallway.

  The gallery owner, a handsome, running back sized woman in a flowing peasant dress with an explosion of black hair, raised her glass for attention.

  “I want to thank you for coming out tonight,” she began. “And I’m so pleased that Cyrus could finally be present,” she indicated Langston who bowed slightly. Chambers finished counting to sixty and lit the short fuses on his smoke bombs. He prayed in case the good Lord could see fit to protect their criminal enterprise.

  “IT WAS SURE GOOD SEEING you, Esther,” Magrady told his daughter.

  “Same here, Pop.” She touched his hand, frowning slightly.

  He nodded, understanding. Was this for real this time, or just a long set up to get money out of her? They sat at the dining table, a coffee cup before him and a wine glass before her. “Amazing how they grow,” he added, referring to his sleeping grandkids Evelyn and Cass, short for Casina. The girls were twelve and ten, respectively. The last time they’d seen him, they’d been in their Hello Kitty PJs scared and fascinated at the mumbling drunk grandpa who fell down in their kitchen. This time they were naturally standoffish at this serious-looking old man who knew he shouldn’t try too hard to gain their affection—at least on this visit.

  He’d brought them an assortment of novels for young adults. That earned him a point or two right off with his wary daughter. He would have brought toys but Magrady had no idea what kind girls their age liked. Janis Bonilla had suggested the books. These gifts showed he was concerned about them broadening their minds, as Esther was a big reader, even if they didn’t dig the selections. When Esther had called him back, and after they’d discussed her mother’s illness, she’d asked him to come out for dinner tonight, Saturday. It wasn’t lost on Magrady that it was a way for her to size up her pops without having to worry about him taking the girls to a movie or amusement park. She was willing to see him, but she didn’t trust him.

  Well, Magrady fondly assessed, he and Claudelia had raised their daughter right to be no one’s fool, especially when a family member was involved. A comfortable silence ebbed between them. He eventually asked, “Say, you mind if I look through some of those boxes I left you before I get going?”

  “You could spend the night, you know. We have the spare room.”

  “For sure next time.”

  She zeroed him with a look. “This big case of yours you have to solve.”

  He spread his arms.

  “Come on.” Unnecessarily she led the way through her townhouse in the now aging, but comfortable, subdivision. Newer, shinier ones had bloomed around her. It had been some time, but he did know the way as the attached garage was accessible through a side door off the kitchen.

  At twenty-three, Esther had married one of those enterprising brothers who’d attended Howard, did the stomp pledge for Alpha Phi Alpha, and attended grad school at Stanford. Rod Delaney started and sold off various successful businesses from a limo service specializing in ferrying pro athletes to several chain sa
ndwich shops placed strategically in two malls out here in Diamond Bar and other parts of San Bernardino. Early on he’d made a deal with a developer of those malls before the entity was swallowed by SubbaKhan, closing some of his stores in the process. But by then his hard-charging son-in-law had invested in new enterprises.

  Though he was conscious of his diet and worked out on his stationary bike, Delaney’s total workaholic drive silently ate at his insides, and four years ago he’d had a fatal heart attack at thirty-nine. Esther Delaney Magrady, (the name’s rhythmic cadence a song her children liked to sing,) sold off most of the investments. Thereafter she made studied and conservative stock market investments toward the girls’ college fund while maintaining her career as a clothes buyer for the Tilson department store chain. She’d been well poised to ride out the economic downturn when it hit.

  “Need any help?” she asked from the top step as her father sifted through the stacked, and mostly unmarked, cardboard boxes. Now they were all on one side of the two-car space, once having been pushed to the rear. But Esther only needed the sole family van these days.

  “I’m okay, Chongo.”

  He used to call her that goofy name when she was a kid. It used to make her wince as a teen when he did it in front of her friends and he’d been weaned off doing it by enough “Daddy, please” pleadings. Now it made her nostalgic. She left him to his digging.

  He’d opened a rectangular box that contained the tool belt he wore as a cable installer, along with wires, alligator clips, voltage regulator and so on that he’d used back then as well as when he was doing security systems installations. He’d also worked as a beer truck driver and tire and tune up mechanic at Pep Boys. Fingering an old work shirt with his nametag sewn on it, Magrady revisited the jobs he’d had, most of them punching the man’s clock.

  But there was a period in the late ’80s with a couple of buddies from the service when he’d been his own boss. Together they’d started a magazine and paperback distribution business. The partners had put their money together and bought a two and a half-ton cargo truck used in ’Nam. They rebuilt the engine and swapped out the differential. One of the buddies knew a local writer who churned out crime potboilers for a mass-market division operated by a skin mag king. Because the publisher didn’t like the percentage cut he was getting from his mainstream distributor, he gave the virgin operation a shot. And given Magrady had contacts with liquor stores in South Central, Watts, and Compton due to his beer delivery days, this opened up new territory for the girlie mags and paperbacks.

  Things were going so good at one point the partnership was able to purchase two newer vans. But it turned out the nudie magnate managed cash flow situations via a three-hundred-acre pot farm outside of Arcata near the Oregon border. His bust led to the dissolution of his company and their lucrative business. Magrady didn’t exactly rebound from that setback. Rather, given he’d been introduced to the wonders of powdered cocaine at a few Topanga Canyon parties the paperback writer had invited them to, he figured to seek answers in an enlightened state. How shocking the blow didn’t make him wiser, only more broke and more pitiful to his wife and kids.

  There in a small box containing amongst other items his Distinguished Service medal and Combat Infantryman’s badge, he found his disassembled army-issued .45 wrapped in a square of cotton over an oil cloth. He rewrapped the handgun, and along with some other personal flotsam, put everything in a paper shopping bag he’d taken from the kitchen. He wanted to take this small clay bear his son had made for him in first grade. But it wasn’t like he was going to have an office anytime soon where he could use it for a paperweight as he did back in the distribution days. Certainly moving about as he always had to do, it would get broken. Carefully, he packed the bear away again.

  “All set,” he said to Esther as he re-entered the living room carrying his grocery bag like it was an oversized lunch. She was reclining on the couch, her head back with a contented look on her face. The pre-paid cell phone he’d bought vibrated in his pocket. That had to be the call from Sid Ramos. The robbery must have gone down. Outside was a rented car Angie Baine had obtained for him. That was one solid chick.

  “Heard your brother is in New York City. Know anything about that?”

  “A little.”

  “Yes?”

  She worried her lower lip. “This is all kind of vague, okay, Pop? But I got the impression it was some kind of Madoff jive.”

  Early on, his son had demonstrated a facility for math. He’d gone on to be in several mathematic decathlons in school. Funny how both his kids had a facility for numbers—definitely from their mother. “Wonderful, stock swindles or some such?”

  She gave him a feeble look.

  “Anything you can find out, you know.”

  “Yeah,” she let the rest go unsaid. She and her brother had lost touch with each other as well.

  “If nothing else, I want to tell him about Mom.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  “Good.”

  He kissed her on the forehead as she gave his arm a squeeze. They remained embraced for several moments and when each let go, they smiled at each other, their eyes teary. He got going, promising to call her next week. In the car, Magrady hoped he wouldn’t screw it up this time. He had learned, more than once, there was no blueprint for life, that relationships required attention and constant adjustments, not retreat. Driving on the freeway, he phoned El Cid.

  “You should have seen it, man,” his fellow vet said, happily. “It was like one of those caper flicks. I’m hunkered down outside like we planned. These artsy and pinhead types are gabbing inside and genuflecting over this or that in the exhibit. Though let me tell you there were some fine heinas up in there, Em. Damn.

  “So anyway, the dragon puffs and smoke fills the gallery. I hear a woman’s voice, probably Floyd’s sister, yelling fire. Naturally these candy-ass civilians hurry their rarified selves to the sidewalk. Then from this side street as a fire truck approaches, I spot a Camry light out.”

  “How’d you know it was them?”

  “First off, if it was you that just ran out, would you book? No. You’d hang around and see the show.”

  “Good point.”

  “Uh-huh. Plus I’m using night binocs and couldn’t miss Floyd’s big head in the car.”

  They both laughed.

  “They came back to an apartment near Midway Hospital.” He gave him the location on Curson in Mid-City Los Angeles.

  “I’m on my way,” Magrady said.

  “Hold on,” El Cid said, “they’re coming back out.”

  “Shit.”

  “Get to steppin’, brother …”

  VIII

  “You SURE YOU DON’T WANT me to take the stroll with you?” El Cid asked Magrady. Cold air condensed around his mouth as he spoke.

  The vets stood inside a tunnel leading to the stands and field of SubbaKhan’s Bixby Stadium in Long Beach, past two in the morning. There had been a night crew prepping the grounds but they’d left about an hour ago. Cold air visibly billowed from their mouths as the two talked in low voices in the tunnel. Outside, a fog was coming in off the ocean, enveloping the open -air structure in heavy layers.

  Magrady stared beyond the end of the passageway. “I can’t lay that on you, home.”

  “You and me ain’t no virgins,” his friend answered. “We’ve both been guests in the Greybar Hotel.”

  “I’ll be all right. Nakano came alone. And you reconned the perimeter, so what’s to worry?”

  “I’m older than you, Em, that’s the worry. I damn sure might have missed something. Eyes and senses are going quick. And this situation feels … ghoulish. What’s he want that goddamn head for? And why the fuck meet here?”

  Magrady cinched his coat tighter. “I’ll ask him, big dog.” He clapped him on the arm. “Go on, get some breakfast.” He offered a folded twenty.

  El Cid ignored the gesture and clamping his teeth, grunted, “Tell
you what, I’ll hang here. I hear commotion, the cops come rolling up on silent, something like that, I’ll signal you.”

  He didn’t want to get his friend in trouble but if he argued with him to leave, he’d be insulted. El Cid needed purpose just as Magrady did. “Cool.”

  When the former Lurp had called Magrady on his way back from Diamond Bar and his reunion with his daughter, Chambers and his sister were on the move from what both assumed was her apartment in Mid-City.

  “Can you delay them?” Magrady had asked El Cid over the cell phone.

  “What, like ram their car?”

  “That’s a bit more drastic than I had in mind. How about letting the air out of one of their tires?”

  “But they’re already outside.”

  Magrady shot back, “You can’t create a diversion? You’re deep in country, soldier, improvise.”

  “Fuck.” He hung up, got out of his car, and, ducking behind some shrubbery, let out a mighty scream. He wasn’t much of a movie fan, but he’d had an uncle who’d come to L.A. from El Paso in ’49. His Uncle Rafael had designs on being an actor, but the one casting director he did manage to get in to see had groused, “We already have a Mexican on our roster.” The racist notion being that one Mexican was like any other when it came to parts in the realm of make believe. Whites had individuality, everybody else was just a type.

  But Uncle Rafael did wrangle a job as the aging Bela Lugosi’s driver, picking him up at his modest home in the Leimert Park section and taking him around to auditions for Grade C films, and sometimes having to score the old man’s dope. So that’s why El Cid had bothered to rent the biopic about Ed Wood. He was able to call up the scene with Martin Landau as the strung-out Lugosi screaming like a man afire as he’s attacked by a rubber octopus. The torment expressed in his character’s threadbare existence inhabited the yell. It was a cry that resonated with El Cid in an inarticulate but down-in-his-bones way. All that shit he still carried with him from the nightmare of ’Nam was in his scream in the bushes.