Underbelly (13 page)

“How you feelin', champ?” Magrady said to bother Elmore. He was a few feet from him, his head down and breathing shallowly.

“Shut up,” the cop, a youngish Asian man with planed shoulders, commanded.

A lanky bicycle cop peddled up. “Need a hand?” he asked.

“Sure, Dave, thanks,” the other one replied. The two separated the prisoners and interrogated them briefly. Magrady coughed up blood at one point.

“Hope you drown, bitch,” Elmore Jinks snickered.

The two officers were conferring when a cruiser came on the scene piloted by a sergeant. After parking, she talked to her officers then walked over to Magrady.

“You said you want a doctor?” she asked. Her dark green eyes probed his face and form. She looked closely at his scalp. There was a crimson wetness in his hair.

“I'm hurt,” he said, meeting her gaze. He shifted uncomfortably.

There had been several recent incidents of hospitals dumping indigent patients on Skid Row, a couple of times caught on cell phone video—once with an LAPD patrol car going past. Added to that, a homeless woman had bled out three weeks ago after being stabbed and somehow getting into the secure lobby of a converted loft but being unable to summon anyone even though she buzzed several apartments. This story made the local news, and a guest op-ed in the
L.A. Times
by a homeless advocate posed the obvious question: would this woman have been ignored if she wore Uggs and had been accosted walking her Chihuahua?

The sergeant had no desire to be in a position to explain to the brass why an AARPer had died from an untreated head
injury or sepsis under her watch. Magrady was transported to the thirteenth floor of County USC, the jail ward where, the lore goes, Magrady recalled, in the '50s junkie jazz saxman Stan Getz was cooling on the thirteenth floor while his wife gave birth right below him. Getz had been arrested for attempting to heist a pharmacy to get his morphine fix.

The jail ward was still housed in the old structure off Mission Road. The facility was now partly empty due to the newer county hospital opening nearby. Though this was also the grounds of the coroner where the bodies were kept and if need be, dissected. For prisoners, there was the tradition of iron beds and leg shackles. A doctor had seen to him briefly. Into the room came a tall female nurse with serious calves, veined forearms and her blonde hair in a long braid, who sternly and competently tended to the aching Magrady.

“Rest,” she commanded and made a once around the room to check on the others under her charge. Everyone was silent, there was no sound save the quiet scuff of her rubber soled orthopedics across the worn linoleum. That changed as soon as uber-Heidi stepped out through the secured door.

“Fly me to the moon,” a tatted and buffed
vato
in the bed on one side of Magrady suddenly crooned in a pretty fair imitation of Sinatra. He actually wasn't too bad, especially as he helped drown out the sounds of the man in the bed on the other side of him.

This one, bald but also in his twenties, had a leg and arm in casts and groaned and moaned. “Please help me,” he pleaded, “I can't go back in there. He's gonna have his way with me. Oh, please Great Umagoomah, I just can't go.”

In a bed set closer to the door, an older, heavier man with curly grey and white hair lay. He talked to himself, doing his multiplication tables. He kept going higher in value, not once making a mistake as far as Magrady could tell. The fifth bed's occupant, this one under the barred window, lay still on his stomach, snoring.

The nurse had poked Magrady with an IV drip of some sort of painkiller that mellowed him out like when he used to indulge and float away on Hendrix's “Purple Haze” and Funkadelic's
“Maggot Brain.” He put an arm across his eyes and dozed, the looping cacophony of his fellow inmates an infirmary lullaby.

“Dreaming of me?” a harsh voice said, disrupting his reverie.

“Always, captain.” Magrady was loath to remove his arm but did so. The real world had to be confronted. Stover hovered near him, enjoying the sight of the former non-com laid up.

“So what's the deal with you and Elmore Jinks?” the cop asked, standing over the vet.

Magrady considered lying but he figured he'd get more joy out of telling him the truth, as it demonstrated his defiance. He used the control to raise the top half of the bed. “I was looking for Floyd Chambers and those two jacked me in a bar in Inglewood.”

“Thought you said you didn't know Savoirfaire.”

“Still didn't, except for the time we had our tête-à-tête.”

“You find Chambers?”

“Yeah, but lost him again.” That was more or less accurate.

Stover chuckled. “I guess this Peter Gunn thing ain't your bag, Magrady.”

“Seems that way.”

“Why'd Jinks try to park his car on your chest?”

“What he say?”

Stover examined him. “He didn't.”

Magrady told him about his run-in with Elmore Jinks' partner Boo Boo, and him being with Chambers.

“Why you all so hot and bothered to find Chambers?”

“Do you think he killed Savoirfaire?”

Stover smiled thinly. “We got you for that, homey.”

“You honestly believe the DA will press that case against me?”

“I know you to be capable of fatal indiscretions, Magrady.”

“You gotta get off that merry-go-round, Stover.”

He pointed at him. “Or you got away with something belonging to Savoirfaire after you iced him and the Rover Boys want it. Maybe Chambers was in on it with you, set Savoirfaire up for you to bash his head in.”

“Believe what you like, Captain. But Jinks came at me and you need to do your job and put his ass away.”

“Don't you worry about how I do my job, sport.”

Stover departed and Magrady was treated to a rendition of “Danke Schoen” from the Singing Vato. There was a TV playing mutely high up in one corner of the room. On it was a newscast about the fire that had consumed several thousand acres in Cleveland National Forest. On screen at one point was an artist's rendition of a space-age-looking jet that, the crawl informed Magrady, was rumored to have gone down in the forest.

Their dinners arrived, pushed in by an athletically-built light-skinned African American orderly named Rekon according to his name tag.

“They call you that because you were in the service?” Magrady asked him, pointing at his pin. The orderly pushed his plate of roast beef and cream corn into place. The knuckles on the orderly's hands were misshaped from repeated impact.

“It's my fighting name,” he said in a surprisingly gentle voice. “Short for Rekonso.”

Magrady frowned. “You're not a boxer. The bruises on your hands are wrong for that. You don't get that from wearing the heavy gloves.”

Rekon raised an eyebrow, nodding. “Mixed martial arts, old school.”

“Brutal,” Magrady lamented.

“Me and my old lady are pursuing it. She's got a bout down in Maywood this Saturday.”

“I guess that keeps the arguments to a minimum at home.”

He laughed. “So you try and rob somebody?”

“Just trying to help a friend.”

“Right, right,” the other one said, having heard all manner of inmates' excuses for winding up in the hospital jail ward. He finished his chore and departed.

After sunset the Asgardian nurse returned and Magrady asked her about making a phone call.

“You're being sent to central booking tomorrow and you can make it there,” she said tersely as she changed his IV.

“I need to talk to my lawyer. He doesn't know I'm here.”

“He will,” she said, giving him a pat on the arm as she moved off.

Magrady was inclined to take his frustration out on her but knew she was practiced in the art of deflection when it came to hard luck prisoners. Certainly if he really got insistent, Rekon would be summoned double-quick and show him why his knuckles looked like they did. But he felt adrift, deprived of his freedom and prevented from carrying out his duties. Duties? To whom? To himself, the eternal search for the greater truth? Bullshit. Maybe to the magical mummified head of Talmock. Sure, why not?

The sound was now up on the TV and another news report was on about the fire. It was now nearly forty percent contained. Switching from a live feed with a fire captain at the scene, the report then played a previously taped snippet with an Air Force spokesman from their PR office who would neither confirm nor deny the persistent rumors that an experimental aircraft, the Serpent's Wing, had crashed in the forest.

“I can't speculate on that at this juncture,” the tense-jawed spokesmen said in answer to a reporter's question that, if the plane did go down, was terrorism suspected.

That night in the dark, Magrady lay in bed on his back, imagining some miscreant had used Talmock's head to bring down the experimental jet and that Boo Boo and Elmore Jinks wanted it to fix horse races and mesmerize large-breasted women to do their lascivious bidding. Around two in the morning he awoke and removed the intravenous drip from his arm. Pain would keep him more on edge. He felt he was going to need all his resources soon.

M
AGRADY'S LEG IRON CLANKED
as he walked from the bathroom back to his bed. Before he could climb back in, the lock turned and two Sheriff's deputies entered. One was what you'd expect of a sumabitch that had to corral the Southland's often querulous inmate population. He was big, muscularly wide in the upper
body and at least six-five. The eyes in that flat bronze Olmec face turned this way and that, partially lit by the pale fluorescents in the hallway behind him. He absorbed data, assessing the bullshit quotient and possible threat the hospitalized prisoners in the room might have posed—if the rest had been awake. The sun wouldn't be up for another twenty minutes or so, but a man closer to collecting Social Security than he liked to admit had a prostate operating on its own clock.

“Aravilla,” the considerable one said over the sounds of slumber. He didn't wait for an answer and then announced, “Magrady.” He again seemed disinterested in a response as he stepped back and his more normal proportioned companion came forward.

This one had red hair going grey at the sides and freckles along his forearms. “This ain't
American Idol
, ladies. No sense being coy, it won't earn you more points. Let's go. You're keeping me from my breakfast burrito,” he cracked.

“Magrady, Aravilla, up and ready.” The ancient-faced one turned on the lights amid throat clearing and farting. His partner tossed a folded up jailhouse orange overall to Magrady who'd held up his hand.

“Lemme see your tag,” The redhead demanded, indicating with his fingers for the vet to come toward him. He did and showed him the plastic ID bracelet around his wrist. He then unshackled Magrady, tossing the ankle collar onto the older man's hospital bed. The chain attached to the collar had its other end fastened to a welded ring in the floor, the length of which allowed the wearer movement about the room.

“We going to Central?” the Singing Vato asked, sitting up, blinking and yawning.

“You Aravilla?”

“Yeah.”

The deputy pitched the crooner the other coverall and checked to make sure he was the intended. Aravilla got into his getup after getting free of his leg chain as Magrady fastened his coveralls. Then the two were handcuffed with a thinner chain reattached to both ankles and their wrists, then linked to each other. In this way Magrady and the Singing Vato were marched
out in line, the red haired deputy in front and the larger one behind them. His knobby, veined hand rested casually on the butt of his pistol. All through this preparation, the other prisoners had watched them go save the one who'd been doing his multiplication tables. He remained in bed, seemingly asleep and oblivious.

The two were taken down in an elevator to a prisoner transport van at a loading dock, and driven out onto Mission Road.

Magrady and Aravilla exchanged a look. The van wasn't heading south toward downtown and the central jail. The van took the ramp onto the 10 freeway, west.

“Where we headed, chief?” Aravilla asked the back of the deputies' heads through the heavy wire mesh between them and the front of the van. There was no answer, and no other prisoners were in the back. “Motherfuck,” Aravilla swore, impotently jerking his chains in frustration. The two were sitting opposite one another, secured to a steel loop bolted to the floor.

Magrady sat back and tried not to fixate on the drama. Stover was having him buried in the system. Their paperwork would go missing, purposely misfiled and not in the proper computer files. So friends or relatives searching for them among the arrestees at Central or the Twin Towers wouldn't find them too easily.

“Who'd you piss off?” Magrady asked Aravilla.

“This punk ass over at Rampart. A real prick sergeant who's been bangin' my cousin.”

“I'm guessing you've made your displeasure known to him.”

“Indeed,” the other man said, sighing. “They're gonna stick us somewhere out in the boonies where no one can find us.” He jerked on his chains again. “Man, I had an audition to get to tomorrow. This is really fucked up.”

It turned out that Aravilla was part of a talent agency geared toward helping ex-gangbangers get roles in TV shows and movies. He'd been up for a part in a cable three-parter in which the criminals and cops sang pop tunes and social commentary numbers à la Brecht and Weill or Springsteen, reflecting on their deeds. He was looking forward to playing the part of a mercurial character nicknamed the Chairman, hence his getting the Sinatra imitation down. But he had a run-in with the sergeant
at a neighborhood eatery in Boyle Heights. The cop was off duty and, according to Flores, had goaded him about banging the shit out of his favorite aunt's youngest daughter.