Underbelly (3 page)

That had just been a tactic to get the developer back to the bargaining table to up the percentage of local hires in the community benefits agreement. There was no holding back the tsunami of corporate terra-forming remaking downtown Los Angeles and its environs.

“As Gordon would say,” Bonilla had opined to Magrady at lunch, “ride the wave until you crest or wipe out.”

“Huh, I'll be,” the vet mumbled as he stood before a large electronic billboard fronting one side of the site. The images on it dissolved from one computer-generated artist rendering to another proclaiming the wonders to come, including a music club called the Thrush Lounge and a high-end steak house. In between, the developer's logo flashed. On the card that Magrady was looking at was the stylized SK of SubbaKhan, just like the one that flashed in between the illustrations he was staring at.

How the hell did Floyd Chambers get a hold of the card, and what does it open he wondered. Feeling purposeful, Magrady spent the next day crisscrossing Skid Row and adjacent areas trying to get a bead on Chambers, initially with little luck. He talked with several homeless men and women who, even without permanent roofs over their heads, could be found at regular haunts, down to specific sections of sidewalk on specific street blocks. He finally went to bed that night with a lead, a bar in Inglewood. He slept free of the night sweats.

T
HE NEXT MORNING THERE WAS
a tap at the garage door and he opened it to the dour face of his host.

“I'm sorry, Em, but I'm going to need the space back sooner than I figured.” Jason Spencer looked past him and tossed the channel lock pliers and screwdriver into his toolbox. Yesterday evening he'd replaced the float valve in the secondary bathroom off the back porch. In the service he'd been a machine gunner in Magrady's squad.

“But I'm paying you, Red. It ain't like I'm freeloading.” The sun was barely up as the hands of Magrady's wind-up clock crept past 6:30 a.m. The digital clock part of his clock-radio had stopped functioning some time ago. It was frozen at 3:12 p.m.

“I know, but it's complicated, all right?”

The stocky vet was in his skivvies and ragged T-shirt. The fading letters on it read:
If Paris Hilton Isn't Free, Then None of Us is Free.
Magrady sat on the couch that was his bed in the makeshift living area in his friend's garage. This had been a sweet spot to lay his head, and he had hoped to make it permanent. It damn sure beat having to hustle a bed at a shelter and put up with all manner of knuckleheads and those who direly needed psychiatric care, representing an undertow of the dumped and discarded.

The detached garage allowed him to come and go without bothering the occupants in the main house. There was a mini-fridge, electricity for his clock-radio purchased at the now defunct Sav-On chain, his hot plate and tensor lamp. All this luxury in the rear of a modest Craftsman located on 37th Street east of Budlong, not far from the Coliseum. Magrady still termed this area South Central or South L.A. despite the new-speak promulgated at nearby USC referring to this part of town as “downtown adjacent.”

“Like I said, I'm real sorry.” Spencer started to walk away but turned back to glare at the man who was once his non-com in a time and place lost to fog and fear square on. “I can't front on you. Fuckin' Stover is the reason. He had Southwest send a black and white by yesterday when you were out,” he recalled morosely. Southwest Division of the LAPD covered this neighborhood.
“Said they was gonna give me six kinds of grief for operating a business without a license if they had to come back.”

Spencer, nicknamed Red because of his now-greying light brown hair, ran a bootleg body and fender concern out of his back yard. The garage was stocked with pry bars, dent pullers and the like. Spencer certainly didn't make a windfall, but it was enough to keep the widower going, especially since he'd moved in with his elderly mother here on 37th Street.

“Look, you know, if it was just me,” Spencer began, making futile gestures with his hand to punctuate his rationalization.

“Fuck it then.” Magrady said, the anger he wanted to direct at his comrade not being worth the effort to summon. He wasn't so sure that if the situation was reversed, he wouldn't have done the same. He was back on Stover's radar and the cop was going to work double time to ensure he messed with him every which way he could.

“If it helps, you can store your gear here, okay? I can do that.”

Magrady looked at the old fashioned Gladstone suitcase he'd copped years ago at the Goodwill and the small soft-sided equipment bag—the two items of luggage that contained his entire wardrobe. He then regarded the other man and said through tightly held lips, “It does, Red. It does.”

He got dressed and was allowed to use the facilities off the back porch before he left.

On the 204 bus on Vermont heading toward the Urban Advocacy offices, Magrady considered where he might stay tonight. Seemed a little early in their renewed canoodling to shack up with Baine, but that would also mean her having to move out of the Chesapeake and he doubted she was so crazy for him she'd do that—both of them on the hustle for a place together. Again, like the old days.

They'd taken up together a couple of times over the years so it'd be best to let their, whatever it was, simmer. Now he probably could bag a couple of nights off of Janis Bonilla, but that just seemed touchy. Not that he'd ever had any, what was the word … untoward fantasies about a woman younger than his own estranged daughter. Frankly, he wasn't sure Janis swung that
way, as he only had ill-defined inklings about her social life and sexual leanings. Plus, bunking with her would mean she'd be able to needle him about working for her rabble rousing nonprofit.

He figured he could make a go at doing what she did, essentially getting people together, but he'd still have to learn from her. Not that having a woman as his boss bothered him so much as it was a woman a few decades younger than him that stuck in his craw. Damn, he realized, and not for the first time while getting off the bus, he was getting old and set in his ways. To underscore that, his leg favored him with a twinge as he walked along.

“Janis around?” he asked an earnest-looking young man he didn't recognize when he entered the community organization's offices.

The kid stared at him, then answered with, “I'm afraid we don't do shelter vouchers here. I can give you the address of the agency that does.”

“Look, man, I'm not—” but he didn't finish it because he was homeless again but he'd be damned if he let this numb-nuts know that. “She here or is she off somewhere dealing with SubbaKhan madness?”

That got him a nod. “Yeah, she's meeting with some tenants.” He frowned. “So you're in one of her buildings?”

“Would you mind checking her mailbox for me? There should be a check in there.” The office used cubby slots to separate their staff's mail. He gave him his name and he went to the copy room where the mail slots were. Magrady nodded to a twenty-something girl with stylish eyeglasses he'd seen at Urban Advocacy events as she walked by. Grace? Amy? What the hell was her name? Shortly the younger man returned with an envelope.

“My bad, man. I didn't know who you were.” He pointed a thumb toward the back, adding, “I asked.” He handed Magrady his monthly disability check from the VA. Bonilla let her friend get his mail here—what little there was of it.

“No sweat. Thanks, huh?”

“Have you seen your friend Floyd Chambers?”

“No. Fact I've been asking around about him.”

“I was the one assigned to help him secure a unit with this Section 8 voucher. And, well, you know he didn't come in for it last week.”

Magrady stuck out his hand. “What's your name?”

“Carl. Carl Fjeldstrom. I'm interning here from the public policy program over at UCLA.”

“Does Floyd have a brother or sister you tried?” Despite knowing the missing man for more than seven years, Magrady was unfamiliar with much of Chambers' personal history. Such was the closed-book existence many of those down and out maintained.

Fjeldstrom said, “I didn't have an address but there was a number for a sister that I called, but it was disconnected. And I got nothing from Google or information.”

“What's her name?”

“Sally, Sally Prescott,” he answered after consulting a slim folder he plucked off of a nearby desk. “The number was an Inglewood one,” he muttered, re-reading something in the file.

Magrady wondered what else might be in Chambers' file but decided not to push it with the intern. He would ask Bonilla later to have a look. “I'll ask around about her. If the number was funky, then Floyd probably hasn't seen her for a while.”

The younger man frowned. “Most of this, and as you can see it isn't much, is from an intake done a few years ago by someone who doesn't work here anymore. I only met with Floyd one time. When I asked him to update his information he took a quick look, said it was cool, and that was that.”

Magrady asked, “What changed that you'd get on his case now? I mean, I know they have to keep you busy, but why was Floyd all of a sudden in the running for an apartment?”

“SubbaKhan,” Fjeldstrom said tersely.

Magrady waited.

“The fallout from negotiating with them has had a positive ripple effect with some of the other developers along or near the Figueroa Corridor. This particular landlord who has several buildings around here,” he indicated the streets beyond the walls, “and near the 'SC campus has been salivating to go condo.”

Magrady nodded. The Corridor was the term organizer types used to describe the stretch of Figueroa Street from the
northern end where SubbaKhan's Emerald Shoals complex was under construction heading south into the predominantly Latino and black areas where even there, land speculation fever had blossomed. Before and particularly after World War II, South Central had been populated with black migrants from the Southwest and Deep South. Then you could get a house with a down payment from your GI Bill or maybe the check you pulled down working for the city's gas company or the railroad. Magrady, whose folks came from the Mississippi Delta, settled in Chicago, where he grew up running with the Blackstone Rangers.

“What with Emerald Shoals having more bling than this guy can muster, thus already enticing the upscalers he hoped to seduce, he decided it was worth his while to have his buildings remain apartments, and agreed to some low-income set-asides to fill vacancies.”

The vet, who consistently had to put up with this sort of inside baseball minutiae from Bonilla, had tuned the sincere young man out without letting on. “I guess Floyd came up in the rotation,” he said to prevent Fjeldstrom from going on.

“Exactly.”

“Thanks for your time, Carl, I appreciate it,” he added quickly.

They shook hands again. He still didn't have a solid lead on a roof for tonight but was juiced trying to figure out where Floyd was and what that had to do with the murder of Jeff Curray, the pissant gangsta who'd gone by the tag Savoirfaire. At the TransPacific Bank on Olympic, Magrady cashed his monthly $719.32 veteran's disability check. Through a pilot program partnered with the bank and Legal Resources and Services, their homeless veterans rep had helped him set up a bank account. He deposited twenty bucks and got some quarters for a five.

Two bus rides and an hour and eighteen minutes later, he walked into the Hornet's Hive on Manchester near Cimarron. Somewhere in the haze that occupied part of his brain, Magrady had the impression he'd been here before, but when was lost to pickled memory. Local radio station KJLH was tuned in over the speakers.

“Gimme a club soda,” he requested of the woman bartender. She took an anemic swipe with her rag as he sat before her at the bar. A few patrons, including a pensioner with a metal walking cane, also inhabited the gloomy dive, but none sat together and chatted. The Hornet was where you came to drink and mope and hope for another day. It was also where Savoirfaire was known to conduct his shady business, Magrady had learned.

“Here you go, trooper,” she said, placing his glass on a coaster. “That'll be one-fifty.”

Magrady forked over a couple of ones and asked, “Any of Savoirfaire's associates roll through here lately?”

The bartender was a dark-skinned, large framed, worldly-looking woman with more muscle on her arms than flab. She wore an Angels baseball cap and pendulum earrings.

“Why?”

His response was a noncommittal shrug. “Need to tighten up with him, you know.”

“He something to you?”

Magrady slowly sipped his seltzer. “What difference does that make? We both know he's gone to the happy hunting grounds.”

She chuckled. “You don't sound too upset about that.”

“Are you?”

The old timer in a worn heavy work shirt with the metal cane leaning against his stool spoke up, clearing phlegm and settled smoke from his voice box. “Hit me like you mean it, Gladys.” He shook his glass.