Underbelly (17 page)

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 …”

“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.

This got doors opened and heads at windows. The Camry Chambers had come in was down the block, as El Cid had parked near them. As everyone was in stop frame trying to figure out who was getting murdered, he was able to creep along, down low behind the cars at the curb on the street side. He got to their car. Using the point of one of his keys, he pressed it into the end of the valve stem and depressed the inner mechanism to deflate the tire. He was going to do a second one but figured they would know they were being purposely delayed.

By the time Floyd Chambers and his sister changed the tire, neither being particularly mechanically inclined, Magrady was halfway back to town and transferred to yet another freeway. Thereafter the siblings were heading to the stadium trailed by El Cid. When the brother and sister got to the stadium, they had to wait more than a half-hour in their car. Eventually a darkly gleaming Mercedes pulled up and the two vets spied Nakano getting out and letting Chambers and his sister inside a side entrance, which locked back into place.

“No time for half-stepping,” Magrady mumbled.

“Damn right,” El Cid agreed.

Magrady trotted down the remaining length of the tunnel. There would be no cheers from a crowd or replay on the Jumbotron. He paused to light a ball of bunched up newspapers as he approached the end of the tunnel. He and El Cid assumed the other three were up in Nakano's private box concluding their business. Given how El Cid dressed and having gotten a hold of a rake, he'd blended in with the mostly Latino grounds crew walking in and out of the then open outer security gates. El Cid had hunkered inside when the workers had departed and let Magrady in via a thick metal service door, the kind with a crash bar on the inside and a keyed lock, no handle, on the outside.

Magrady tossed the ball out onto the grass and as it flared up he stepped close to his personal bonfire, knowing he could be seen in the gloomy arena. He cupped his hands to the side of his mouth and yelled, “Hey, you rapscallions, where's my cut?”

For several moments the only sound was the crackling of his quickly diminishing fireball. Then a light high up came on,
and over the PA Wakefield Nakano's voice echoed through the pall. “Why don't you come on up, Mr. Magrady?”

“Don't mind if I do,” he said. He ascended the steps toward the luxury boxes and arrived at a door partially left open for him. Stepping through, Sally Chambers waited just inside. She leveled an efficient-looking .22 Beretta on his belly.

“Don't think I don't know how to use this, chump. This way,” she jerked her head indicating a hallway behind her.

Magrady did as ordered. She clicked the door back into place and even if El Cid in spirit had his back, there was no way he was getting in. Magrady was on his own. So be it. Gun at his back, he pushed open an ajar door to the executive boxes. They passed through a suite Magrady assumed must belong to an exec, as it was clearly a working office. On a wall among framed awards and certificates, was a picture of a handsome woman in her forties and what he took to be her grown daughter. They wore matching stylish glasses. He stared at it as light spilled into the room from an open door at the far end.

“Losing your nerve there, Sergeant Saunders?” Sally Chambers taunted. She poked him in the back to get going. They went through the open door and through another doorway.

“Pretty swank, Floyd. You've done well for yourself.” Magrady took in the luxury suite with its built-in marble wet bar, widescreen plasma TV, plush chairs, matching couches and Agra throw rugs. The disabled man had a drink in his hand and a burning cigar in the other.

“Live like Snoop,” he answered, saluting him with the drink. He took a long puff and let out a stream.

Magrady tried not to interpret the smoke as his future blowing away. He came further into the suite. “As you've always wanted.” Talmock's head was again in a clear case and rested on a desk where Wakefield Nakano, dressed in slacks and knit shirt, leaned against it with arms folded.

“We need to do something about him,” Sally Chambers said, moving away from him but still keeping her piece steady on the uninvited guest.

“Like you did Savoirfaire?” Magrady drilled her with a look.

She snickered. “We had nothing to do with that.”

Nakano unfolded his arms and said, “I'm sure you're a rational man, Mr. Magrady.”

“I like to think I am.”

The sister looked from Nakano to her brother. “What? Pay him off?”

Nakano massaged his hands together though it was pleasantly warm in the suite. “It's the rational thing to do.”

“But he knows about us,” she protested.

“He's gonna be cool,” her brother said. He'd placed the drink on an end table and worked the cigar between two fingers and thumb. “What it gonna take, Em? Five, ten thousand, sound good?”

“Shit yeah,” Magrady enthused.

With the seven hundred and some odd dollars he got a month from the VA and what he made under the table doing odd jobs like being a bouncer at a backyard
Quinceañera
keeping drunks from throwing up on the birthday girl's pretty dress or fixing the brakes on an Urban Advocacy organizer's car, any amount with a comma in it sounded about right.

“But,” he added, “it's not you two stealing the head on orders from Nakano here that's the issue, is it?”

“How's that?” Sally Chambers grinned sideways.

“Somebody killed Savoirfaire and made me the goat for it. Is that why you came to me, Floyd? Played on our friendship to put me against him so that when you took him out, the spotlight was on me while y'all planned your little caper?”

“It wasn't like that, Em. You know me better than that.”

“Savoirfaire got wind of you and this damn head.” The mummified shaman regarded Magrady impassively. “Bet you were high, huh, Floyd. I know how you like to get your buzz on.”

Chambers looked contrite.

“No, it was Boo Boo,” Magrady corrected, remembering the thug's stoplight eyes when he first encountered him in the Hornet's Hive bar. “You two were sparkin' up and you got to braggin', didn't you, Floyd? You caught yourself when you were with me and Janis, but you let it slip with your boy.”

“You tellin' it.” Floyd Chambers placed the cigar in an ashtray and then interlaced his fingers on his lap.

“So that puts the Gold Dust Twins on your ass and why you went gopher.”

Chambers snorted and his sister said irritably, “See?” Sally Chambers shook the gun at Magrady. “He's going to be a problem.”

“And you know how to deal with problems, don't you, Sally?”

“You're talking nonsense.” She moved closer to Nakano who smiled thinly at her.

“Yeah, well, somebody caved in homeboy's noggin.” As Magrady talked, he shifted his position, angling himself between the two at the desk and Chambers in his wheelchair.

Magrady hooked a thumb at his friend, “I still don't see Floyd being that devious, but you are.” He pointed at the sister. “You'd already chilled your old man for tippin' out on you on the down low. I suppose that insulted your sense of womanhood.”