Unpaid Dues (20 page)

Asia had stuck her thumb in her mouth, something
Munch hadn't seen her do in years. She lifted the little girl up and
held her in her arms. Asia wrapped her legs around Munch's waist and
Munch felt a sudden pang of sadness. Soon Asia would be too big to
carry

"I want to go see your grandma, Nathan."

"
Why?"

"I'm helping your mom get you Social Security
benefits. They'll keep paying if you go back to school. I know you
don't think more school is for you, but that option is open. You
don't have to decide this minute or this day just don't be quick to
say no to a possible good thing."

"I told my grandma you wanted to meet her."

"What did she say?"

He shrugged. "She said, 'Sure, why not?' "

Munch set Asia on her feet and brushed a stray curl
behind the little girl's ear. Nathan righted the overturned table and
picked up his lighter. A quarter fell from his pocket. Asia picked it
up.

"
You keep it," he said. "Put it in
your piggy bank."

Munch smiled at her daughter's retreating back.

"That was nice of you."

"No biggie."

Later that afternoon, Munch gathered the Sunday
newspaper to take it out to the recycling box in the garage. In all
the day's drama she hadn't had a chance to look through it. As she
stood now in the kitchen doorway a headline jumped out at her.

MURDERERS GO TO PRISON. There was a picture of a
young Asian man in a prison jumpsuit, shackles around his ankles and
wrists. Lately she'd been reading every article about murder and/or
robbery. The suspects were always young, eighteen to twenty on
average. This one was no different. He was holding a packet of
paperwork—his useless defense, no doubt.

"
Killer sentenced to 25 years to life" was
the caption. She scanned the article for the circumstances of the
crime. The young man had stabbed a woman with a ten-inch kitchen
knife and stolen her purse. Two men were arrested for the homicide.
The second, described by police as the lookout, also was convicted of
murder. Under California's "felony murder rule," the
article stated, if the murder occurred during the commission of a
felony—in this case an armed robbery—everyone involved in the
felony was culpable for the murder. The lookout guy was to be
sentenced the following month.

"
I'm screwed," she said, horror drying her
throat.

Tortilla Flats, 1975

Munch checks the rearview mirror for the
thousandth time. She is hunched down in the seat of Thor's Chrysler
and parked in front of a project apartment building on Vernon.
Sleaze, Thor, and New York Jane have been gone forever and she feels
like a target.

Three black kids on bicycles ride by and hoot at
her through the window. They circle the car like little hungry crows.

"Junkie bitch, " they taunt, pegging her
right. She sinks lower, checks the doors to make sure they're locked.
She wants to start the engine, but the gas gauge is already on empty,
and no telling how much longer they'll be.

She feels the dampness on her face and back, an
oily sweat that only has one cure.

"
C'mon," she hums under her breath, her
foot tapping uselessly on the brake pedal.  She watches the
doorway where the three of them disappeared minutes ago, maybe
twenty. An eternity for a dope-sick white girl in the wrong part of
town. At least she hasn't seen a cop car. Just the kids on their
rusty Schwinns, who have correctly assessed her mission in their
world.

Thor promised they wouldn't come back
empty-handed. They all went together. Trust goes as far as the door
in their world. You save yourself first and make up excuses later.
The last time Thor had gone to cop dope by himself he returned an
hour later, scratching his nose and saying he had no choice but to
swallow the dope, the pigs were on him, and he had to get rid of the
stash.

'This is the first time Munch has gotten strung
out. She's played with dope for months, and now she's gotten serious.
In a perverse way, being strung out has made the dope much better.
The difference of feelings between being dope-sick and being loaded
has increased and this contrast has improved the high.

They were short on the money, but Thor promised.
He said he knew this guy was holding. It is Munch's special day.
She's turning nineteen and wants to get loaded.

The thick steel security gate at the bottom of the
stairwell is open. Some of the other buildings hire a guard to stand
there, but not this one. Here the lowlifes are welcome.  She
sees a movement. "Please, let it be them, " she says. She
doesn't ask God. He's not a part of this equation. There is just the
need and the dope, only one altar to worship at. Sleaze appears
first. His head is down. Munch leans across the seat and unlocks the
door He's not smiling, she realizes, heart sinking. They didn't get
it. Thor said they wouldn't come back without it, but Sleaze won't
even look at here Jane is next. Thor holds her arm and hustles her in
front of him. The three of them get in the car.

"Drive," he orders.

"
Did you get it?" Munch asks as she
pulls away.

Thor stares at her hard, his expression angry,
even accusatory.

Sleaze slumps in the backseat and moans. It
doesn't sound like him. She looks back once and sees a smear of
something dark on the brown cloth of the seat, bright red drops on
the vinyl door panel. Jane is humming.

"Shut up," Thor yells.

"Did you get it? " Munch asks again.
It's all she can think to say. Thor has blood on his Army jacket.
Jane is rocking now, but the humming has stopped.

When she stops at the traffic light, Thor puts a
knife to her throat. The blade feels warm. "Did you say
something?" he asks. His eyes are alert. He wants her to argue,
she senses. He wants a reason.

"
No," Munch mumbles, hating herself for
cowering, for being a chump. She lives in a world where how bad you
are, how crazy you are, defines who you are, but she is no match for
Thor.

He sticks his knife back in its scabbard.

She drives them all back to the Flats. Tortilla
Flats is a loose compound of apartments on Rose Avenue, where the
barrio meets the ghetto—a land of No-tell Motels, Mexican mercados,
Laundromats, and liquor stores. Even though it is late in the
afternoon, the smell of baking bread rises from the Pioneer Bakery
factory.

They park on the dirt lot off the alley and file
through the hole in the oleander hedge. Munch goes first. The other
three follow in the same order they used to exit the apartment
building in Ghost Town.

Munch unlocks the door and they all head for the
kitchen. Sleaze goes to the sink and throws up. He runs the water;
then fills a glass and brings it to the kitchen table. The spoons are
already there. Jane sits, her mouth is open, her expression blank.

"You going to be useless all day?" Thor
asks.

"
What do you want me to do?"

"Get a bag, one of those big plastic garbage
bags, and a magazine."

Jane walks over to the pantry and tears of a bag
from the roll on the shelf and shakes it open. Thor reaches into the
pocket of his Army jacket and pulls out a quart-size Baggie. It's
filled with glittery white powder He tosses it to the center of the
table and it lands with a thunk.

"
Happy Birthday, " he says, looking only
at Munch. She has never seen so much coke in one lump. She's seen
mounds of brown heroin, but coke is more of a rich man's drug.

Thor reaches behind him; his long arms find the
radio on the windowsill. He switches it on and tunes it to an A.M.
station. Traffic and news, updates every fifteen minutes. He opens
the bag of coke. The air fills with a bleachy smell. Thor dips the
corner of a playing card into the bag. It's a three of hearts, not
that it matters to him. He is not a superstitious man.

He dips the corner of the card into the white
powder and dumps it into the waiting spoon.

First things first.

There is only one outfit, so they take their
turns. Thor goes first, then Jane, then Sleaze. Munch ties off while
Thor sheds his clothes and throws them in the garbage bag. He tells
Jane to do the same. Sleaze doesn't have to be asked. Jane goes into
the bedroom and gets them other clothes.

"News on the hour" the radio says. They
stop and stare at the radio speaker. The announcer 's voice is tinny,
there is a sound like typing in the background. "Here are the
headlines making the news: American troops evacuating Saigon as North
Vietnamese swarm in, President Ford declares that the war in
Indochina is over as far as America is concerned, American and Soviet
astronauts dock in space."

Thor, dressed only in jeans and socks, starts
tearing pages from the magazine.

"And locally—"

All activity in the kitchen hangs suspended.

"Chief Davis says that Jim Hardy, general
manager of the Sports Arena, is 'sort of a baby!'. Hardy has accused
the Los Angeles Police Department of using excessive force during the
five-night peformance of the English rock group Pink Floyd. Police
arrested five hundred and eleven persons on charges ranging from
possession of marijuana to assault with a deadly weapon, sex
perversion, disturbing the peace, and ticket scalping. Stay tuned for
traffic and weather."

Thor stops working and stands. Jane rubs cocaine
on her gums.

The two men pace, working their dry mouths and not
looking at each other but not leaving each other's sight. Jane
renders herself catatonic with the coke, slamming hit after hit.

"Watch it," Munch says. "You're
going to have a heart attack."

Jane draws up more water with the syringe, shakes
more coke into the spoon, barely waits for it to dissolve before she
sucks it back into the works. The needle glistens with body fluids
and narcotics. She doesn't bother to mop the drops of her own blood
rolling down her wrist.

"This is getting sickening," Munch says.
"You're just wasting it."

Thor is quiet as he spoons quarter teaspoons of
the cocaine onto squares of glossy magazine paper They don't own a
scale, so he estimates. Sleaze folds the squares into bindles.

They don't leave the Flats for two days, except
for one beer run when they buy a newspaper

Munch doesn't ask any other questions, not even
when Sleaze reads the newspaper cover to cover. She looks up her
horoscope. "Taurus: Study new ideas, but wait for a better day
before putting them in operation."

She doesn't ask about the one-half column report
in the Metro section of a triple homicide in the Oakwood Projects
section of Venice Beach. She doesn't want to know any more details
about the three men found with their throats slashed at the house
where she had parked, and served as the "wheelman."
 

Chapter 18

Monday morning, St. John checked in at work, picked
up his copies of Cyrill McCarthy' s court transcripts, and then
headed over to meet with Art Becker at the Pacific station.

Becker greeted St. John in the lobby "You should
be talking to Chac6n."

"
Oh?"

"
He's fresher on the facts."

"
I'd like to just start with the evidence,"
St. John said. "No offense to your boy but the last thing I want
to hear are theories from some wannabe Dick Tracy."

"
This guy kick one of your dogs or something'?"
Becker asked.

"
No, I just have my own way of doing things."

Becker brought St. John over to his desk, which was
crowded with framed photographs. St. John sat down in the wooden
chair beside the desk and the two men exchanged reading material. The
murder book was a large, blue three-ring binder. It began with the
initial incident report recorded by patrol cops, followed by the
homicide investigators narrative. St. John scrolled down to the name
of the lead detective: Chris Yanney—a notorious rummy who had been
a dinosaur when St. John was a rookie. Yanney had died two months
after retiring. As yet there were no addendums from Chacón.

St. John turned the page and studied the forensics
reports, autopsy findings, and witness statements, leaving the
photographs of the death scene for last. The bodies of three black
men were sprawled throughout the shotgun flat. There was one victim
in the kitchen, and one in the bedroom, where—judging by the blood
on the carpet and walls—most of the killing had occurred. The third
victim was in the hallway which was also thinly carpeted. The dying
man had apparently crawled across the length of the narrow egress,
his path traced clearly in blood and tissue. Judging from the
condition of his clothes and the positioning of his limbs, he hadn't
been dragged.

The Scientific Investigation Division had recovered
many fingerprints from the crime scene, and most of those
fingerprints could be matched to individuals with criminal records.
None of those individuals questioned knew anything about the murders,
of course. Most of them denied ever having been in the house on
Vernon.