Underbelly Read online

  Now it’s one thing to be a dictator. It’s another to rub the peasants’ noses in it, what with the Marcoses and Baby Doc being bounced from their respective homelands. But was Chambers inspired by these excesses? Magrady considered soberly.

  He mused on this as he closed and locked the kitchen window in preparation of leaving his friend’s homey digs. L.A. was where dreams were served along with your fresh-squeezed orange juice. There was desire and envy for the Hiltons and the Pitts. We built them up so they’d fall further when we kicked the stepladders out from under them—this the sport of kings and queens. No wonder nobody gave two shits about the homeless. What hopes and dreams could you project on those poor fucks? Maybe Chambers did get his the best way he could.

  Magrady exited through the back door, descending to a garden patch behind the apartment building containing raspberries, tomatoes and mustard greens. These were tended by an octogenarian tenant who’d once been a bookie. Heading north on Catalina, the Vietnam vet got to a bus stop on Wilshire and took one of the red and white Rapid buses into downtown.

  He sat next to a young man with his hair frizzed out at numerous uncombed angles. He was listening to his iPod while reading a Philip K. Dick novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The youngster wore a Free the Buses T-shirt, a fight back effort Magrady had belonged to several years ago.

  Back then with LRS and a couple of other public interest law firms committing to the cause, the grouping had legally challenged the transportation agency, the MTA. This was over the argument for more monies allocated for increasing clean buses on inner city routes. Magrady had been down with that. Though he found some of the enviros, as they were called, way too anal about the green thing. These diehards pushing in meetings for the suit to be a tactic toward abolishing buses in favor of rail, and thus more rail meant less cars.

  The theory had merit as Magrady could see a combination of the two. But certainly folks needed those buses to get to their jive jobs, and knowing too that the MTA was inclined to construct rail servicing the better-off suburbs. It came down to too many meetings and pre-meetings being consumed with who had the correct analysis, and not enough being in the face of the MTA. Magrady was among several who dropped out. At that time he’d maintained he was taking a principled stance. Or was he just a cut-and-runner full of rhetoric and rationalizations? Like dodging and ducking his responsibilities when his family had depended on him.

  Off the bus, walking along Flower toward the main library, an unmarked LAPD Crown Victoria passed him, the movement registering in the corner of his eye. The car double parked to a medley of horns honking and idled where he stood.

  “What’s happening, home folks?” Fuckin’ Stover. He was dressed in civvies.

  “What, I’m not walking fast enough for you? Gonna give me a ticket for loitering? Too bad I don’t have a milk crate with me you can confiscate.” The cops often took the shopping carts or milk crates of items from the homeless on the pretense they were stolen items. Only they rarely returned them to the stores, and dumped truckloads of the goods east of the L.A. River.

  “Man, you sure are Mister Grumpy this morning. Me, I feel great.” He grinned sterlingly. “Heard some of your mojado-running buddies got vamped on last night.”

  “I’m underwhelmed by your empathy.”

  The police captain laughed.

  “I don’t have time for your bullshit, Stover.” He started to walk away.

  “See you in court,” the cop said cheerily and drove off.

  What a giant A-1 asshole. Magrady walked up the steps of the Richard J. Riordan Central Library. In ’86, two consecutive arson fires by even bigger assholes resulted in some 350,000 books being burned up and 700,000 being damaged. He remembered they had to freeze dry the remaining books to preserve them. Under the then Tom Bradley administration, air rights were sold to a developer to build the Library Tower to help pay for the massive renovation.

  The seventy-three-story skyscraper looming over the main library was now called the U.S. Bank Tower. In 2001, the city’s Library Commission, its members appointed by Riordan, who succeeded Bradley, voted to rename the wonderfully redone complex for hizzoner. The commissioners cited his tireless efforts in the service of libraries. Bradley got a wing named after him.

  Magrady nodded to a couple of dudes he knew from the streets playing the Chinese game Go at a table in an alcove after he entered the facility. He had fond memories of coming here with his folks when he was a kid to look for the science fiction novels his old man liked to read. In those days there were massive statues of Egyptian gods built into the stair structure on the mezzanine level leading to the fiction section. He always saw them as the guardians of the magic found between those cracked covers by his pop’s favorites like H. G. Wells and Jack Williamson. There was also those Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars and A. E. van Vogt books his mom would check out and discuss with him as well.

  On a few sheets of unfolded paper, Magrady had a copy of various references for SubbaKhan culled from Lexis-Nexis. Bonilla had given him this as Urban Advocacy was always doing opposition research. She’d taken her laptop with her to the news conference and had no other computer at home. Using the printout as a basis, he looked through Google and microfiche files and found a year-old interview in the Downtown News with the regional VP of the entity, Wakefield Nakano, a Japanese-American local surfer boy from Gardena who made way good. A collector of modern art, he was the one overseeing the Emerald Shoals project. In the interview Nakano mentioned the policy project they’d just funded was located on the USC campus.

  Magrady rode public transportation over to the campus and strolled onto it. He didn’t much look like a student and he knew ’SC’s campus cops didn’t take no shit. But it was daytime and they were used to community people being there for this or that meeting, so he figured as long as he didn’t go crazy and dry hump the Tommy Trojan statue, everything should be copacetic.

  After stopping and asking several students and a janitor, he found the door to the Central City Reclaiming Initiative on the third floor of the business school. The project was spelled out in neat fourteen-point raised metal letters on the otherwise plain locked door. There was no response to his knocking. Retracing his steps, he’d noted a recessed metal door along the hallway. It was unmarked but had one of those electronic locks on it—the kind where you had to swipe a coded card through for entry.

  Like Ronald Coleman as Raffles, he looked both ways along the quiet hallway and tried the magnetic card he’d found among Floyd Chambers’ stuff. The red light on the lock turned green. Magrady let the light return to the closed setting. Once more he visually searched along the hallway for anyone coming or to see if he’d missed a security camera. Neither was in evidence. Nor could he detect any approaching footsteps, but how long would that last? Come on, do it he admonished himself. Man up, can’t be a pussy now.

  “Shit,” Magrady mumbled as he swiped the mag card again, and again the electronic lock cleared. Using his shirttail, he took hold of the latch and opened the side door into the research office. He’d half expected the space to be laid out swank, given it was underwritten by SubbaKhan. Rather, the area he stepped into was plain and functionally drab. It was a narrow passageway with its length taken up by doors leading into various suites. At the near end was a wall and at the other a short hook around to some sort of reception area where the front door was. There were no pictures or prints on the walls.

  He crooked his neck around to look for security cameras high up in the offices’ corners. There weren’t any, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be hidden. But fuck it, he told himself, he was already breaking and entering, so if he was going to go down for his crime, he might as well make it worth the effort.

  There were no names or suite numbers on any doors, and none of them, except one, was locked. Each office seemed to be a duplicate of the other, each containing a faux-woodgrain-topped metal desk, system-linked phones, computers with flat-screen m
onitors and, interestingly, no file cabinets. He fooled with the keyboard of one of the computers in rest mode but getting onto it was password protected. So much for unlocking the secrets of the Empire.

  In another office he found a small framed photo on a desk. The shot was of a pretty, dark-skinned black woman with curly hair leaning down with her arms draped around a smiling Floyd Chambers in his wheelchair. He assumed this was his sister. Magrady sat down. There were a couple of other photos on the desk, one of a smiling young man in a graduation shot and another of a baby. A grandchild? Magrady frowned at the photo with Chambers. It seemed to him it was fairly recent but he wasn’t sure about the age of the woman in it. And certainly there were cases of teenagers becoming mothers and then finding themselves as grandmothers in their late forties, so that could be the reason for the baby’s picture. But he didn’t think Chambers’ sister had any children.

  He looked through the drawers. It occurred to him as he sifted through yellow sticky pads, paper clips and staple containers, that playing detective made you feel entitled to invade other people’s shit. Because after all you were after the big secret, so you were entitled to do anything in pursuit of the truth. He smiled.

  In the bottom left-hand drawer on a stack of copier paper there was a set of keys. He was tempted to steal them but then that would only make him go off and search for the locks they fit. He could see himself then unlocking some other room somewhere else and inside that room would be a combination written on a piece of paper. That like some intricate set of Chinese puzzle boxes, one thing was inside the other, leading him on and on but no closer to Chambers and answers—if such were to be had.

  He checked the time and used the phone. What the hell, it was a local number, how likely would it be to raise a flag when whoever it was paid the phone bill?

  “How’d the strategy meeting go?” he asked Janis Bonilla when she answered.

  “Where are you? The number’s not coming up.”

  “I have my secrets.”

  “Be that way.” She filled him in, including a push the groups were making to have a meeting with the police chief. He was about law and order, but also about his media image. While it was the feds who’d conducted the raid, the LAPD cooperated, so the coalition would make the chief the target. The idea being to have him in turn put pressure on ICE to respond.

  “Oh, one of your honeys called,” she added.

  “You mean Halle’s forgiven me?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Big Pimpin’,” she cracked. “It was that Angie. Said she has news for you.” It seemed to him there was a leering quality to her voice.

  “How’d she get your number?”

  “I guess she’s got her secrets too. And your backward self needs to get a cell phone. I am hardly your damn answering service.” Nonetheless, she gave him the number Angie Baine had left. She didn’t ask if he’d be camping out at her place later and he didn’t bring it up. Things were getting comfortable awfully quick.

  Before making that call, feeling that time was tight, Magrady tried each key on the locked door but none of them fit. Back at the desk he assumed was Sally Prescott’s, he replaced the keys and noted a lump under the copier paper. He pulled the sheets aside and spotted an unmarked cassette tape. He picked it up, examining it. Probably just an old-fashioned mix tape, he figured. Still.

  Magrady was slipping the tape into his shirt pocket and actually gasped. The front door was being unlocked. Good thing the lights had been on when he’d entered. No sense crawling under the desk as his sorry black ass would stick out anyway. The door to the office he was in was only open a sliver as he’d unconsciously pushed it closed when he’d re-entered. He went stone and waited, breathing shallowly. Too many movies about life in the big house, including those episodes of Oz with their numerous anal rapes and other forms of male-on-male degradation, flickered rapidly inside his head. His one shining hope was that at his age, what booty bandit would want him? The real f’d up sociopaths of course. The Nazi Custom Chopper Brotherhood of Geranium Enthusiasts would pass him around like an unscented box of Kleenex.

  The footsteps from beyond the door went past his room, the person humming. He wasn’t sure but thought they stopped at the last room, the locked one. This was confirmed as Magrady heard a key turning in the lock and the door opening. A beat or two more, then a radio came on, an oldies station. Magrady started breathing again and eased the drawer closed, leaving the keys.

  As Percy Sledge prognosticated in that down home sweat-and-grits growl of his that “They gonna find us, they gonna find us,” Magrady tiptoed the office chair, which fortunately was on rollers, away from the desk. He leaned back to rise and the goddamn thing creaked. Did the twang of the guitars cover the noise? Magrady couldn’t remain in this half-crouch for long so he stood erect and came around the desk. The song concluding, he stepped out of the office. The door to, the last office was wide open. The side door he’d come through was in that direction and he’d been seen trying to get out that way. The front was his only option.

  Despite the natural inclination to bolt, he crept forward on the industrial carpet, doing his best to lift his feet straight up and put them straight down to eliminate undue drag or sound. He peeked into the room, his back flat against the wall, as if that made him hard to see. From the position of the desk in the room, this person sat in profile to the doorway, the desk at ninety degrees to the doorway. His head was down as he made a handwritten notation and then stood, closing a file folder.

  Magrady was pretty sure that was Wakefield Nakano, SubbaKhan’s regional VP in there. Nakano put the file away in a standing file cabinet and locked it back. He returned to his desk and Magrady knew he was pushing it to stay any longer. He scuttled away and got his hand on the front door’s knob when he could hear Nakano moving around again too. For sure the exec was also leaving. Worse, there were voices in the hallway beyond the door. Scared, but having no choice, Magrady stepped out as quickly as he could. He stood before the door, his back to it, closing it quietly.

  A male and female student were walking past, deep in their conversation about Romney’s versus Giuliani’s strengths and weaknesses and the mystery as to why neither of their candidacies took off. Magrady headed for the stairs. To his back he heard the main door to the office open and Nakano exit as well.

  Be cool, he reminded himself, making sure to proceed at a normal pace. Nakano’s footfalls were a hurried cadence behind him. If he was busted, wouldn’t the VP yell “halt” or “freeze” like they did on TV? The exec had a couple of decades on Magrady, so could be he was just going to tackle him and make him piss and drool while jamming a stun gun to his nuts.

  “Excuse me,” Nakano said, as he moved past Magrady, bumping him slightly on the shoulder.

  “No problem,” the vet replied.

  “Yes, of course,” SubbaKhan’s man said in a hushed voice. “I’m very interested in the Portinari.” Magrady watched Nakano descend, one of those Bluetooth gadgets stuck in his ear.

  He got to the bottom of the stairwell and dashed through the glass door of the business school, saying into the air, “That’s not going to be a problem. I’ll see to that.” With that Nakano was gone.

  Magrady also reached the ground floor berating himself for not having a car to tail the VP. What would Magnum or Mannix have to say about that? He also realized he hadn’t called Angie. But as this was a college campus, finding a pay phone wasn’t as hard as on the streets. He clinked his coins in and called the number Baine had given Bonilla.

  “Earl,” a man’s voice said.

  He was one of the bartenders at the King Eddy, a semi-dive, semi-hip bar in the King Edward Hotel on East 5th Street. Magrady knew all the watering holes in and orbiting Skid Row, and a fair amount between there and South Central. He’d certainly done his best to turn his kidneys into pâté in several of them. Years ago, before he too joined the “Am I a Murderer?” public guess-o-rama, Robert Blake filmed part of his TV cop show Baretta there as the su
pposed East Coast place where he lived. Magrady was a background extra—supernumerary bum was how it was described in the script—in a few episodes. A director told him he was a natural.

  Magrady identified himself and asked about Angie.

  “She said if you called, Sergeant Fury, to meet her at Hogarth’s at 6:30 tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I give a shit. Get a goddamn cell phone like everyone else.” The diplomatic Earl hung up.

  Hogarth’s wasn’t a bar. It was a coffee house located near the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center off of 1st Street and Alameda. Where the encroachers, the downtown small dog-walkin’, inner peace-seekin’, loft-living crowd hung, Magrady reflected wryly. Why the hell would she be having him there and at that time?

  Having several hours to fill, Magrady sought out a cassette recorder. He walked over to the Bethune Branch Library on Vermont. They did have one such model used for older versions of books-on-tape. Only it was on the fritz, though the librarian assured him that there was a laid off gentleman—a tinkerer as she put it—would be coming in to fix it this weekend. From there he walked over to Exposition Park and decided to take in an exhibit about ’30s-era jazz clubs at the California African American Museum. This included a recreated section of the Club Alabam.

  Standing in the tableau, a mellow croon by Billy Eckstine filled the space. When he was a kid, he had an uncle, husband of his mom’s sister, who’d lived out here and visited the family in Chicago in the summer. Uncle Calvin would sit around drinking Hamms and Pabst beer, playing dominoes with his father and his friends, telling stories about Central Avenue, the Stem, from back in the day. Later, eating his fries at a McDonald’s inside the Science Center, he watched a group of kids ohhing and ahhing on some kind of school outing. Time was tight indeed.