Underbelly Read online

  They’d halted on Wilshire, near the busy intersection of Westwood Boulevard. A group of young women walked by, one in tight sweatpants with “Juicy” in pink Gothic letters arched over her bouncy butt. Two of them had ear buds in leading to their iPods they thumbed selections on, and simultaneously maintained a conversation with the others. He found it hard to believe that Boo and Elmore had chased Chambers all over town just to shake him down for what? A few hundred dollars at the most? Sure those two were swap meet special gangstas, but were they that hard up?

  Magrady asked, “What did you mean that you don’t think they killed Savoirfaire?”

  Chambers squinted up at him. “Your good buddy Boo was talkin’ too much like he does and was saying to Elmore he figured you for Savoirfaire’s killer. Yeah, they took advantage of a good situation from their viewpoint, but it sounded like they were as surprised as anyone else when he got done in.”

  Magrady considered this and said, “We gotta come to an understanding, Floyd.”

  The paraplegic rolled his chair a few feet forward then back, his version of pacing. “You give me the tape back and I tell you about what was dug up.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that, Em.”

  “I guess that means you’ll talk this over with your sister.”

  Chambers nodded.

  Magrady had already calculated that it didn’t seem like it had been cash or jewels from some long ago robbery that had been recovered, as even a child would know such was valuable and would not have turned the swag over to anyone else. He assumed it was a construction worker on the Emerald Shoals project who initially unearthed this thing. Too, the dingus may not have been in the brother’s and sister’s possession from the way Chambers was acting. Or it had been but wasn’t now. The tape was possibly some clue to getting it back? And from whom? This detective business could make a man weary, he sighed inwardly.

  “I don’t hear from you in two days, Floyd, then maybe I have to make other arrangements.”

  Chambers’ muscular upper body stiffened. “Jesus, Magrady, why you got to be such a stiff prick about this?”

  He pointed at him. “Because you’re playing me and the Sunshine Boys for chumps, Floyd. Now them that’s fine, but we’ve been through some shit. I don’t deserve this.” He was surprised at the emotion in his words.

  Chambers held up a hand. “Look, man. Just let me talk to sis and we’ll get straight on this. Just don’t mess up that tape.”

  “You better get back to me.”

  “Where can I catch you?”

  Magrady told him to leave a message at the Urban Advocacy offices. Chambers rolled west and Magrady walked east. He found a pristine pay phone—figures on this side of town he reflected—and made a call to Gordon Walters, the mouthpiece assigned to his case at Legal Resources and Services of Greater Los Angeles.

  “Yo, Gordy,” he said after amenities, “you know any particulars about how Savoirfaire was killed, aside from him getting his head beat in?”

  “Not that I can recollect, but let me go through my notes. The deputy D.A. on this case is not fast-tracking this, which can be good. But that also might mean they’re looking to gather enough to make the charge stick against you. Anyway, why all of a sudden you have such a keen interest in this? When Janis and I bailed you out, you certainly didn’t seem to give a damn,” he said in his evenly modulated tone. As long as Magrady had known the man, he could count on one hand when he’d heard him raise his voice. Nonetheless, he was forceful and compelling when he needed to be before a jury.

  “It means something to me now. Do you know if there was, what do the cops call it, signs of a forced entry?”

  “No, not that I remember. Seems Mr. Savoirfaire believed in his security. He had bars on his windows and subscribed to an alarm service. Whoever did the deed had been invited in, as I understand from my initial round of give and take with Stover. That’s why he liked you for the deed, as he assumed you and the late street entrepreneur had business together.”

  That was somewhat different than what Stover had barked at him, but that just meant he was trying out a few theories to see which case jacket he could snugly fit on him, the motherfucker, Magrady groused. “If you can, Gordon, please check your notes today. That would be most useful.”

  “I will. But I must warn you not to interfere with an ongoing investigation et cetera, et cetera. You know the consequences for messing around in the LAPD’s sandbox.”

  “I got that, counselor.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said without much conviction.

  Magrady added, to put him at ease, “How the waves treating you?” Walters was in his fifties yet had still continued to pursue his avocation of surfing since his days as a teen growing up in Gardena—one of a select group of the Southland’s black surfers. He had plenty of stories to tell of incidents where the mantra of ’locals only’ being spouted at him by the stereotypical blue-eyed, blond-haired beach boys had double and triple meanings when he showed up to shred.

  “Going to Tobago for this tourney next month.”

  “You ever run into Wakefield Nakano at these events?”

  “Funny you should ask, I have a time or two. He’s not a bad shredder.”

  “You two hang?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “Can’t find out the answers if I don’t ask.”

  He chuckled deep in his throat. “Talk to you.”

  “Righteous.” By the time he got back downtown, an orange glow tinged the bottom edge of the sky to the southeast. He and several other pedestrians gazed at this. Was it a fire or some new form of mutant smog?

  ”Que lástima,” a heavyset woman balancing a plastic basket of freshly dried clothes on her head intoned, “y no tengo carne para asar …” They exchanged wan smiles and he walked on.

  Passing by a corner liquor store, he heard on the radio newscast from inside that an as of yet unidentified aircraft had crashed in the Cleveland National Forest. The 130-mile swath of nature preserve created by President Teddy Roosevelt butted up against Riverside County with the bulk of its land covering the San Diego area. The exploding plane had ignited a spreading fire that several fire departments from the respective counties were responding to with all urgency. Magrady had a fond memory of being totally ripped on blow and beer while fishing at the reservoir there with some army buddies years ago.

  At Urban Advocacy, Bonilla eyed him with a bemused look on her face as he entered. “You look worn out. Maybe you better take a nap, grandpa.”

  “I’m the one the Energizer Bunny comes to when he needs a boost.”

  “Look here,” she said, indicating a desk with a cassette tape machine on it. “Ain’t I good to you? It was in a desk we’d put in a back room. Carl had remembered seeing it there.”

  He was already over at the player and inserting the cassette tape he’d swiped from Chambers’ sister. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He depressed the play button and bent to listen. Bonilla came over too.

  First there was a female voice saying, “Test, test,” then she blew into the microphone. This was followed by a measure of silence on the tape when finally a male voice said, “It’s quite remarkable, actually.” Wind buffeted the mic.

  The woman asked, “So who was Talmock, Professor Langston?”

  “Well, you see,” he began, clearing his throat. “The Chumash had what we might call a sect of craftsmen. These were men who passed on their skills at making and waterproofing the canoes, the various uses of whale blubber, preserving hides and so forth to their sons and so on. But they kept their methods close to the vest as it were.”

  “Meaning they didn’t share their knowledge with the rest of the tribe?”

  “Correct. Obviously a way to control the flow of information and to exalt their positions. Therefore their skills would always be in demand because not everyone had purchase of same. Which as we know is unusual for American Indians. More like Old World gui
ld members,” he noted. “Also the Chumash had female chiefs.”

  “How advanced for them,” the woman said, and you could tell she was smiling.

  Magrady clicked the tape off. “Great, a history lesson.”

  “Quiet. Let’s keep listening.” Bonilla put the machine back on.

  More was said about the lifestyles of the Chumash, the Indian tribe that once inhabited the California coast, inland to a degree, and out into the Channel Islands. The Q&A wound back to Talmock.

  “He was quite something,” Professor Langston was saying, “both shaman and chief. He was said to have led a village of some five thousand people, a town really. Very unusual, for at the most their villages were no more than one thousand people and even that is something when you think about it. He seems to have openly had a wife and several concubines as well.”

  “The Mayor Villaraigosa of his day,” Magrady cracked.

  Bonilla shushed him.

  There was more conversation. The woman said at one point, “So finding Talmock’s mummified head is remarkable as you pointed out.”

  “Indeed, as the Chumash did not practice mummification of their dead, though we know the Aztecs did.”

  “Bolstering the speculation that Talmock possessed knowledge from other regions,” the woman added. “Lending support to the thesis he was both chief and shaman.”

  Langston made a contemplative sound. “And of course there’s the symbolism of Talmock’s head. That is to say, there are those who would ascribe such properties.”

  “How do you mean?” the woman asked.

  “Well, say like the Centurion Longinus’ spear, said to have pierced Jesus’ side at his crucifixion.”

  “The Spear of Destiny,” the woman said.

  “Yes. Or Poseidon’s trident. Objects that imbue certain power and beliefs. In some cases faith, and in some cases magic I guess we’d have to say. And when it’s a hand or head of a magical being, you can imagine how some can get quite excited.” He chuckled dryly.

  Magrady and Bonilla exchanged quizzical looks.

  “So Floyd wants the head back because it will cure him,” Bonilla opined, stopping the tape.

  Magrady remained stonefaced.

  “That was a joke, son.”

  “Maybe it ain’t to Floyd.” He flashbacked to moaning and bleeding soldiers, their wounds superglued together, taking drags on heroin-laced cigarettes and mumbling prayers for evac in the aftermath of VC Bouncing Betties exploding, severing limbs and ligaments. These were mines that when triggered shot up about three or four feet in the air then went off, their payload of screaming shrapnel ripping through bodies like buckshot through tissue paper. Too many times this was not due to a patrol not finding the mine, but to improperly crimping the thing. That meant squeezing the blasting cap and the fuse together just so as you disarmed the device. But invariably some junior officer fresh from asshole school was barking from a safe distance away about hurrying up, like defusing a bomb was as easy as ordering a pizza.

  “He might truly see this as a way to walk again, Janis,” he said seriously. Chambers had been crippled in an industrial accident, not the war, but the desire to walk again, to be whole physically was as much as the drive to be whole psychologically, Magrady concluded.

  Momentarily she looked chagrined for belittling what might be their friend’s goal but then brightened. “Or he wants to sell the head for money.” A selfish reason was okay to deride.

  “To who?”

  She lifted a shoulder. “Talmock’s head’s gotta be worth something to a university or a collector. These kind of people pay big money for a baseball card with Ted Williams picking his nose on it so there must be a market for something like this artifact.”

  Magrady wondered if his head would ever become an artifact … when he croaked homeless crack zombies would use a rusty hacksaw to remove it from his body and place it in a clear plastic box with a light inside of his hollowed out skull. They’d use his noggin as a nightlight to find discarded crack pipes containing minute residues of the enslaving rock. “His sister’s office is over at USC, that policy project of SubbaKhan’s.” He stopped himself before admitting to her it was from that office he’d swiped the cassette tape. He didn’t think she would object but if she didn’t ask, he didn’t have to tell.

  Bonilla said, “She takes this gig to snatch the head back?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “Okay, so where’s the head now?” She then added before he could respond, “Savoirfaire gets killed ’cause he had it?”

  “What the hell would he have been doing with it, Janis? He wouldn’t know it was valuable.”

  “What if he was holding it for ransom?”

  Magrady considered this. “But Floyd came to me to get that clown to back off.”

  “Because Floyd had borrowed money from him. At least that’s what he made it seem to us.”

  “Yeah …”

  “But what if it wasn’t?” Bonilla countered. “He put you against Savoirfaire to put him on you. Maybe he was going to slip it to him where to find you after you locked horns as he came after you, Floyd would burglarize his house to get the head back.”

  “I’m pretty sure being a paraplegic cuts down on your breaking and entering opportunities, Janis.”

  “He had help, butthead.” She playfully socked him. “His sis.”

  “Come on, she’s got this square job.”

  “But she could be working on the inside.” She snapped her fingers, getting animated. “What if SubbaKhan has the head?” She stood up, pacing about. “Nakano has a private art gallery up in Malibu. Invitation only. We should go up there and see if the head is on display.”

  Magrady chuckled. “They ain’t hardly going to let you in there, Mother Jones.”

  “How about your sorry self? Shit.”

  “Here’s what I think,” not deigning to acknowledge her dig, “Floyd needed me to get Savoirfaire off his ass ’cause he was going after the head and knew if homeboy was on him he might mess that up or take it from him once he stole it back.”

  She held up an index finger. “You’re saying Floyd is after someone else who has the head?”

  “Yeah, the guy who found it. Assuming it was a construction worker or laborer on the Emerald Shoals site. When did it break ground?”

  “Two and a half years ago,” she answered. “But you don’t know who that is. And if he had it once, then say he turned it in to SubbaKhan, how’d he get it back?”

  “What if he didn’t turn it in? Could be he kept it and showed it to Floyd.” Then it occurred to him. “He could be the sister’s boyfriend. Only he’d said ’they’ didn’t know what they had.”

  “It could still mean he was referring to the sister and the boyfriend or maybe the boyfriend and a buddy.”

  A charge surged through Magrady. He felt as if the door was finally creaking open, if only a sliver. “I need to find the sister. Let me use the phone, will you?”

  Bonilla checked her watch. “Go ahead, McGarrett. I need to get going anyway.” She went to her desk to retrieve her messenger bag. As she slung it over her shoulder she asked, “You crashing at my crib tonight? Or are you and one of your GILFs shacking up?”

  “It better be your place if you don’t mind.”

  “Okay, playboy.” She tossed him a key. “I had this cut just in case.” She shook her index finger at him. “But don’t you be bringing your ninety-year-old hoochies over there. I run a respectable house.”

  “Thanks, Janis. You’re, you know …” he let it end there, suddenly self-conscious that they were in a public space.

  She grinned. “Yeah, whatever.” She left and he played more of the tape.

  “Well, there’s little evidence of that,” the professor said hesitantly after the interviewer asked would Talmock have encouraged human sacrifice. “There’s certainly no lore of the Chumash practicing such,” he went on. “Though I’ll grant you, if he was Aztec, he might well have tried to introduce this not
ion among the craft sect. But I’m sure he wouldn’t have found converts given what we know of the ways of these coastal American Indians.”

  This speculation was dropped and there was further discussion about Talmock, who was said to have lived a long life, and to have taken several times what could be called spirit journeys into what is now San Bernardino County. Magrady listened awhile longer then turned the interview off. He then made a few calls on Bonilla’s office phone, including leaving a message for Shane Redding at LRS, who was supposed to talk with Floyd’s sister Sally. He was certain she’d want a meeting with him, given she knew he had the tape and had to figure he’d have played it by now.

  Sitting at Bonilla’s desk, he finally took the letter out from his ex-wife Claudelia. He looked at it for a few moments, knowing once he read it he couldn’t ignore its message. He prayed it wasn’t about their daughter or son, the latter he hadn’t seen or heard from in more than seven years. He opened it and unfolded the single lined sheet. The letter was in that neat and precise handwriting of hers and informed him, after hoping this found him in good spirits, that she was undergoing chemo treatments for thyroid cancer. Her prognosis was good but she wanted him to know in case her treatment didn’t go as expected.

  He re-read the letter then folded it up and slipped it back into the envelope. She hadn’t included a phone number to contact her but Magrady had expected she wouldn’t. She hadn’t sent this so he would come see her. This was about him reconnecting with the other members of his family.

  Magrady folded the whole of it in half again and put it in his pocket. He did have his daughter’s phone number and it seemed this was the time to call her. He tried dialing her number from memory but screwed up the sequence. He got his wallet out and found the slip of paper he’d written it on and tried again.

  “Hi, this is the home of Evelyn, Cass, and Esther,” a girl’s voice said cheerily on the phone’s recording. She giggled and he heard the whisper of an adult urging her on. “We’re not here right now but please leave your message. Okay?” The beep followed and he spoke.