Underbelly (6 page)

“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 funded 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.

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.