Underbelly Read online

  He hummed “Joe Hill” as he’d heard Paul Robeson singing it on the 78 platter his mother used to play when he was a kid. Another round of shouting started up, only this was orders given from command to the grunts. The flashback wore itself out and some gendarmes roughly got Magrady on his feet. He, along with the other members and staff of several community-based organizations, were culled together on the lawn of the raided Lutheran church.

  “The fuck, man?” Janis Bonilla demanded of the cops en masse. “We don’t need a permit to be on private property. We’re going to sue the shit out of your donut-eatin’ asses.”

  “Take a chill pill, Ms. Bonilla.” A stout LAPD captain addressed her, separating himself from the grouping of cops but not actually moving closer to her. “This was about the illegals at this meeting.”

  Bonilla and several others glared at him openmouthed.

  Armed men and women emerged from inside and around the corner of the building. Stenciled on the back of the new arrivals’ jackets was the word ICE in big yellow cap letters, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security. Accompanying them were unfortunates in plastic restraints—members of the assembled community organizations.

  “This is bullshit,” somebody said, and there was loud agreement from the gathered. It was the young woman with the glasses Magrady had seen at the UA offices. Amy, that was her name.

  The captain smiled knowingly. “This is a new day of joint cooperation. If it bothers you, take your concerns up with your do-nothings in Congress.” He walked off.

  Bonilla muttered “tea bagger,” and began making calls.

  Ill

  HOURS LATER BONILLA STILL SEETHED, swirling diet soda in a can. The police and ICE had departed with their undocumented arrestees along with four citizens detained on charges ranging from a bench warrant on a jaywalking beef to overdue child support payments. Naturally the community groups held an emergency meeting after the round up. There would be a formal response involving public interest allies like Legal Resources and Services, and a press conference at UA’s offices was planned for the next morning at 10 a.m.—in time to be broadcast on the afternoon news. Already, an e-blast had gone out to political and advocacy blogs about the action, and buzz was building.

  “You gonna mention SubbaKhan tomorrow?” Magrady asked.

  “I should,” she answered, taking a long pull on her drink. It was already past one in the morning. “But yeah, I know that would be irresponsible, wouldn’t it?” Bonilla had already had this discussion with her executive director. There was, at this moment, no evidence indicating the blitzkrieg originated within the Stygian inner sanctum of the all-consuming kraken that as far as Bonilla was concerned, was headed by the tentacled triumvirate of Dick Cheney, William Kristol, and the truly scary eviscerating automaton, Ann Coulter.

  “Plus you’d get fired,” Magrady offered. “You’d be breaking the detente. Y’all gotta be lining up for your free drinks at the Emerald Shoals opening like the other community partners and unions.”

  “But it can’t just be coincidence,” she insisted, glaring at him.

  “Look, my boy Stover could have alerted his buddies to keep their antennas tuned to your doings.”

  She said, “He does have a fierce hard-on about you, that’s for sure. I mean, it wasn’t your fault about what went down in ’Nam.”

  “There’s that,” he said, gesturing with his hand in an effort to halt her from going into painful history. One service-related and guilt-wracked visit to the past was all he could take for an evening. “The other thing to consider is that you have a snitch in your midst.”

  “What, like a police spy? Like back in the day of Chief Gates and his Public Disorder Intelligence Division?”

  PDID undercover cops had infiltrated community groups as agent provocateurs. Bonilla was a student of L.A.’s activist archives. She’d spent hours reading through such files and articles from the ’70s and ’80s down at a place in South Central called the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, a repository of that kind of material. Magrady had accompanied her on more than one outing there to read through old papers from such now defunct groups like the Coalition Against Police Abuse, CAPA.

  “I was wondering if it wasn’t some turncoat secretly on the payroll of your arch enemies,” he opined.

  Bonilla didn’t say anything.

  “Maybe I’m being paranoid, but if I were the head of SubbaKhan, kicked back at my desk puffing on my Arturo Fuente maduro, I’d be figuring out how to stay one step ahead of you Hugo Chavez-quotin’ subversives.”

  “That would be illegal,” she remarked.

  “I’m not sure it is. And even if that were so, how would you prove it?”

  “It worries me the way your mind works.”

  He smiled broadly. “Me, too.”

  Bonilla, who’d been pacing, sat down. They were in the small kitchen of her apartment in a 1920s-era building, replete with Zig-Zag Moderne touches on the façade. It was situated on Catalina in a blended area of Koreatown and Pico-Union. Where one could spot carnicerías with life-sized plastic bulls on their roofs next door to Korean wedding gown shops, whose display windows contained ice beauty mannequins with thousand mile stares looking out past the neon Hangul onto the changing city.

  “That would be some shady shit, ya know?” Bonilla stated.

  “I ain’t saying you gotta go all black-ops and start waterboardin’ fools to talk, but you do have low-income and poor folk you’re working with.”

  “That’s bourgeois thinking, Magrady,” she groused. “I’ll have to send your monkey ass to the re-education camp.”

  He chuckled. “Or am I being the real Stalinist here? You got people who are barely getting by, Janis. Maybe they have a medical condition or their kid is in trouble with the law yet again. It’s not hard to find out who has what problems. If it’s legal entanglement, a lot of that’s public records, right?

  “So one day a swell-dressed man or, better yet, smart-looking woman shows up on my dilapidated doorstep and says ’Hey, we’re not asking you to be a sell out or anything like that.’”

  “Oh, no,” Bonilla snarked.

  He continued in character. “We’re not asking you to put the finger on anyone, but just let us know, you know, in a general way what they say at those meetings you go to. Now don’t draw attention to yourself, don’t be asking a bunch of questions.” Magrady spread his arms wide and slumped in his seat. “Sit and listen and every now and then we’ll call to ask a few harmless questions and in exchange, a few hundreds in nice, crisp twenties will find their way into your house fund or maybe junior gets community service rather than jail.”

  “Then why bust us for our undocumented members? If I was a spy, I’d want to wait until I had something more juicy.”

  He wiggled his fingers on both hands. “One branch doesn’t know what the other is up to. If the spy is on the private ticket, there wouldn’t necessarily be coordination with the popo. Anyway, this is just early morning after we got our ass kicked speculation. Like I said, y’all are easily targets of opportunity, or this went down simply because those self-absorbed, Lhasa Apsoowning loft-dwellers you despise have been complaining, and this is how the cops respond.”

  Bonilla rubbed the back of her neck. “We have been trying to recruit some of those latte liberals as allies. It’s not like they shouldn’t have a place to live. But they also can’t act like their shit, and that of their boutique pooches, don’t stink. Their attitude is it’s them bringing up the neighborhood while the poor get booted out.”

  “How’s that working out? Getting them to see you have some common interests?”

  “Don’t be cute. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “I take your point, subcomandante.”

  She was reflective, then. “You think that’s what Floyd was doing? Why he was hinting about how he was about to get over?”

  “Except it seems he had the goods on someone, doe
sn’t it? And there is that SubbaKhan magnetic swipe card he had.”

  Bonilla pointed at Magrady. “He saw the CEO try to rape this woman. She resisted and when they fought, he accidentally bashed her head in and Floyd, who’d been hired on a disabled program, was in the office late and decided to blackmail the dude.”

  “Amusing. I saw that movie too. Only that guy was a professional thief.”

  “Just trying to be as devious as you are, champ. So what if Floyd stole that card from a SubbaKhan employee?”

  “Could be. Of course that raises the question of where the hell Floyd could have been with the employee.”

  “You’re the one playing peeper.”

  Magrady grunted. “Playing is right.” He yawned. “I keep getting vamped on but no further along in figuring this out.”

  She yawned and playfully slapped his knee. “The case is young yet, you’ll get onto something.”

  He stood and stretched, “Yeah, blisters on my feet from hoofing it all over Creation and a couple of knots upside my head.”

  “Tough guy.” She also stood and nodded toward her front room and the couch where she’d given him a blanket and a pillow. “You gonna be okay?”

  “This is great, Janis, I really appreciate it.” He touched her shoulder.

  She covered his hand with hers and let it linger. “I told you it wasn’t a problem. I’ll ask around if anyone knows of someplace for you to rent out like a room or something.”

  “Cool.”

  “Good night,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. He flushed and was glad she couldn’t tell. At least he hoped she couldn’t tell. Damn young women.

  He slept unperturbed, as if wrapped in a cocoon of black velour and awoke to the smell of coffee. For the briefest of moments, he allowed himself to fantasize he was back in his house with his wife and children as they got ready for school. But to believe such was cruel and a lie, and certainly not therapeutic. For he’d also have to remember why he’d derailed the Father Knows Best bit with the drinking and the drugs and the erratic behavior, and why it was he didn’t have a home any more or any communication with his distanced family. Why maybe he didn’t deserve to have those or any such comforts.

  “Hey,” Bonilla said as they shared coffee at the kitchen table, “Carl texted me a message about Floyd’s sister.”

  “When?”

  “’Round seven.” It was now 7:40 a.m. “He had to be in early to help prep for the press conference.”

  “Y’all work your interns worse than green recruits,” Magrady commented. He’d asked his friend to ask the intern he’d encountered at Urban Advocacy to see if there was any other pertinent information in the thin file they had on Floyd Chambers.

  “Wait, when did you send him your message?”

  “On our way home. Carl’s a video game fiend so I knew he’d be up killing aliens with his geek buddies online plugged in from who knows where. He lives on those energy drinks.”

  Magrady suppressed a shudder. “Can you let a brother know?”

  She told him and he was somewhat surprised it wasn’t an Inglewood address. It was in Altadena in the San Gabriel Valley. He didn’t know how many bus transfers that was, though he knew the Metro Rail’s Gold Line could take him to Pasadena at least.

  Maybe he ought to invest in a motorcycle. But the old TV ad of the elderly lady on the floor saying “I’ve fallen and can’t get up” occurred to him. Where even the remote clapper—“clap on, clap off”—wouldn’t be able to levitate him to a seat. This and the number of careening SUVs that populated Southland roadways dissuaded him from getting his brittle butt back on a bike after some thirty years.

  “Before we get on our respective horses, Carl had mentioned someone who used to work at UA had taken the information for Floyd’s file. Do you know who that was?”

  “Sure,” Bonilla answered, “that was Shane.”

  “Alan Ladd?”

  “Shane Redding, a woman. In fact she’s a paralegal over at Legal Resources now. I’ll hook you up.”

  A little past nine, Magrady talked with Redding on the phone after Bonilla had left her a message vouching for him.

  “Sure I know who she is,” Redding said after he’d asked her about the sister. “We helped her on a tenant-landlord matter not too long ago. She came to us because we’ve stayed in touch.” She paused. “Because you know Janis, I could try and contact her for you.”

  “She’s in Altadena?”

  “No, here in L.A. last I knew”

  “I’d appreciate anything you can do on this,” Magrady said.

  Redding agreed to let Janis Bonilla know if she connected with the sister. Problem was that also meant she would know he was looking for her brother and she could tip him to stay hid. If he was hiding, and if she had any part in helping him do so. That’s why he didn’t ask Redding if she knew anything about the sister’s dead husband. No sense having her mention this to the sister and possibly drive her away. Still he was worried that all this was nothing but the unhinged view of a man in search of a mission when really his best years, if he had any, were behind him.

  Sitting in the tidy breakfast nook of the organizer’s apartment, enjoying his morning coffee in stoneware instead of Styrofoam, it occurred to Magrady maybe Bonilla was just humoring him. Sharp young chicks like her knew the best way to handle addled oldsters like his rootless self. She dealt with all sorts of barely hanging on tenants, folk who should be receiving outpatient psychiatric services or would do better institutionalized.

  He’d watched her soothing the agitated without being condescending. She’d coax their stories of neglect and mistreatment out of them with the precision patience of a mohel about to do the cut in a bouncing rickshaw. Dealing with individuals who kidded themselves they were okay and went off their meds or who’d been booted or fallen out of the system due to the infinite and unknowing regulations of the great and grand bureaucracy. Bonilla working herself raw to cobble together a membership of undocumented busboys and brothers Magrady’s age pissed off ’cause they figured it was those mojados who took away the decent jobs.

  But Jeff Curray was still dead, and those two chuckleheads, Boo Boo the discount store psycho and the slicker Elmore Jinks were on the prowl. They were the rocks in his bed as the old song went. Something had gone down and signs indicated Floyd Chambers was all up in the shit—for there was the SubbaKhan magnetic swipe card.

  Magrady had placed it on the kitchen table as he sipped his coffee, glancing at it occasionally as if he’d get a flash of insight. Too bad that unlike the classic reoccurring bit Johnny Carson did, Karnak, he couldn’t slap the card to his forehead and get a clue.

  He stretched and yawned and scratched his crotch. That’s not something Dick Tracy or the Lone Wolf ever did in those ’40s B-reelers he still got a kick out of watching. Could be he was off his nut, but he’d proceed as if he were on point. Circling back to the Hornet’s Hive later today was useless at this time even if the old fella, Sanford, did find an address for the sister. Of course the way things were going, he glumly concluded, it would probably turn out to be yet another far off location.

  Given his luck, it would be out in San Bernardino or some damn other county that might as well be Pluto as far as his means to get there were concerned. Plus he wanted to be ready should he have to do the cha-cha with the two thugs again. He’d been considering retrieving his service sidearm. But that meant a reunion with his daughter and, well, that required more cojones than he could swing at the moment.

  This left him with the SubbaKhan magnetic swipe card as his most immediate lead—and the most obtuse. It wasn’t like he could go over to the SubbaKhan offices in their high-rise in Century City and test it out to see which door the thing opened. He knew from Bonilla there was serious security to contend with in the lobby.

  In Long Beach, SubbaKhan owned Bixby Stadium where pro soccer games and, of all things, polo matches were played. Seems some wheel at SubbaKhan had a jones for the horsey sport and fu
nded an amateur polo league. Magrady snickered imagining Bonilla and her comrades discussing a polo field for the at-risk youth of South Central as part of the community benefits agreement. Indeed, horses galloping and mallets a-swinging down Western Avenue. Though there was street polo played on bicycles so who knew? She’d also told him about a research effort the conglomerate had funded, but she wasn’t sure where.

  He showered and decided to go the library and find out more about SubbaKhan. It beat sitting around waiting for Redding’s call. Indulging himself, he used some of Bonilla’s fru-fru shampoo on his bristly short hair. Lathering the scented goo into his scalp, he felt the spot on the top of the back of his head. Was the hair getting thinner there? Alas, one more advancing age symptom to fret about.

  Dried off and in his boxers, he laid across the bed staring at one of her posters, a silkscreened print of a solemn Nelson Mandela. Yet political stirrings weren’t energizing him as they should, and he got out of the bedroom before he sunk to sniffing through her underwear drawer. He shaved in the kitchen listening to KNX, the news station.

  Done, Magrady stepped into clean jeans—he’d been able to wash his gear in her laundry room—and a buttoned-down shirt Bonilla had given him before she left this morning. She hadn’t explained whose shirt it had belonged to previously. Magrady, a 2XLer, was pleased that it fit and wasn’t snug. Now what did that say about her taste in men? Or big women?

  He felt almost felt like a square on his way to his slave. Only it was after 9:30 a.m., and it was more like the leisurely pace those young punks on that show, Entourage, maintained. Each episode their days were consumed with chasing tail and scoring weed. He’d seen three or four of the half hours on DVD at the James Wood Center in the common area. In fact, he’d watched them with Floyd Chambers, among others. They’d been amused and incensed by those pampered dudes and their antics.

  Magrady had riffed then, was the show telling them what the down and out should aspire to? Chambers had added that like Baby Doc’s wife Michelle, the downtown visionaries would start hoisting caged TVs up on street lamps. They’d loop vids of mink coats four deep in walk-in closets and racks of trendy shoes to make Imelda Marcos and Condie Rice jealous. The message being that if you applied yourself, all this could be yours, too.