Underbelly (16 page)

Why the hell did Reagan bring down the Berlin Wall if not to symbolize the triumph of the free market Nakano groused inwardly. The historic televised speech of the Gipper at the Brandenburg Gate challenging Gorbachev had determined his course when Nakano was a kid. Wasn't it bad enough he had to learn Chinese for the sake of business? America had to hold on and he was for damn sure doing his part to get her back on her feet post the meltdown. He refocused.

“Just set it in motion, Alicia. It's all about good faith, isn't it?”

“Fine, fine,” she drawled and hung up.

Nakano headed Harbinger back to the horse trailer hitched to his Range Rover. He couldn't help picturing himself as the laconic Gary Cooperesque cowpoke on his way to face down the owlhoots. After securing his horse, he looked out into the empty stands and saw a headless man in cotton pants and faded floral shirt and moccasins. He had one leg crossed over the other, arms folded, waiting.

“Yes,” Nakano nodded solemnly at the seated Talmock. “I understand.”

S
ATURDAY NIGHT AND
F
LOYD
Chambers wheeled up to a plate glass window of the Middle Eye Gallery and looked in on
the reception for the early California exhibit. The show had been up for more than a week, but this was the first time Professor Cyrus Langston had been able to attend. Prior to that the older gentleman, who got around well for a man in his late seventies, had been on an excavation in Kenya.

Tall women with legs that made Chambers lightheaded and dudes in black on black flitted about, laughing and talking and nibbling little cheeses from offered trays. Some stood before paintings or pieces of crumbling pots on pedestals pointing at them and nodding their heads at each other.

His sister casually looked from the mummified head on display in the gallery, and toward her brother. She betrayed nothing and moved on, sipping her champagne from a plastic flute like Tyra Banks regarding the skanks at a fashion review, Chambers imagined. He got set to do his part to steal Talmock's head.

Floyd Chambers wheeled into the Middle Eye Gallery and earned a nod from a hottie in low-risers displaying plenty of skin between her jeans and tight ribbed tank top. She turned to talk to one of the metrosexual men languishing about, and he got a squint at the elaborate tattoo on her lower back, its tendrils descended to her barely covered crack. Chambers was mightily tempted to compliment her on her tramp stamp but got his head right. His sister would kill him if he f'd this up.

Mind on my money, he admonished himself. Anyway, the honeys would be taking numbers to get with him once they pulled this off. Given this was a gathering of the cool and trendy, there was no security guard. Besides, what self-respecting stick-up artist would go for any of this stuff? It's not like a Chumash woven basket or the photos of the trolley car storage yard had street value. Chambers couldn't help but grin. Chumps.

His sister had moved to the other side of the space, faking like she was interested in a desk and chair setup said to have belonged to socialist muckraking lawyer Job Harriman. He had once come close to being the mayor of Los Angeles in the early part of the last century. That is until, some argued, his campaign was torpedoed by a conspiracy or at least a collusion of interests with the bombing of the
L. A. Times
building at its center.

A Chicano bristling with stout upper arms sidled over to her. He was definitely not rocking that in-between gender vibe. The
vato
was on the prowl for some of that artistic poon tang, Chambers reflected. The two exchanged nods and low modulated words. Maybe he should be concerned about Sally staying on point.

Chambers wheeled behind Professor Cyrus Langston who was talking to a man and woman about Talmock's head.

“It is rather amazing that the head turned up where it did.” Langston sipped some of his white wine from a clear plastic cup. “But how fortunate that Wakefield Nakano brought this amazing find to our department at USC.”

The older man was lanky with bowed legs, half glasses on a chain around his neck, and one of those Ahab kind of beards that had Chambers giggling when his sister had first shown him the archeologist's picture.

“How did you identify the head, professor?” the man asked. He was the studious type with a thin, gaunt face.

He explained there had been the vestiges of a headband on the mummified head and that corresponded with a known drawing of the shaman. Carbon 14 dating confirmed the time period, Langston went on.

Chambers reached around to the pouch draped on the backside of his chair. It wasn't time yet, but he needed the reassurance.

“Oh yes,” Langston continued, “prior to the Emerald Shoals project that's there now, there was a building dating back to the early part of the twentieth century. I mean, even then you would have assumed the digging that went on when that structure was erected would have turned up the head or some other artifact.”

“None had been found in that area before?” the woman asked in an accent Chambers couldn't place. She touched a heavy necklace around her neck as if invoking, or warding off, ancient ghosts.

Langston inclined his head. “As far as my research has yielded, there has not been any such Chumash or any other American Indian remains or items culled from that part of
downtown Los Angeles. Though mind you,” he added, brightening, “the former Produce Exchange Building that was there had quite a history, including murder.”

“That's very interesting,” the woman said, regarding her smiling companion then turning back to the academic. “What's the story, Professor Langston?”

Langston began. Seems there had been an orange grove speculator whose wife came to his office one late hot afternoon to find him involved in more than a professional way with his pretty Filipina secretary. Chambers tuned him out. His sister got into position and he casually retrieved the three oblong, hand-fashioned smoke bombs from his pouch. Using a recipe obtained online, Chambers had made the little wonders on the kitchen stove using easily obtained chemicals. He wheeled toward the restroom located along a short hallway.

The gallery owner, a handsome, running back sized woman in a flowing peasant dress with an explosion of black hair, raised her glass for attention.

“I want to thank you for coming out tonight,” she began. “And I'm so pleased that Cyrus could finally be present,” she indicated Langston who bowed slightly. Chambers finished counting to sixty and lit the short fuses on his smoke bombs. He prayed in case the good Lord could see fit to protect their criminal enterprise.

“I
T WAS SURE GOOD SEEING
you, Esther,” Magrady told his daughter.

“Same here, Pop.” She touched his hand, frowning slightly.

He nodded, understanding. Was this for real this time, or just a long set up to get money out of her? They sat at the dining table, a coffee cup before him and a wine glass before her. “Amazing how they grow,” he added, referring to his sleeping grandkids Evelyn and Cass, short for Casina. The girls were twelve and ten, respectively. The last time they'd seen him, they'd been in their Hello Kitty PJs scared and fascinated at the mumbling
drunk grandpa who fell down in their kitchen. This time they were naturally standoffish at this serious-looking old man who knew he shouldn't try too hard to gain their affection—at least on this visit.

He'd brought them an assortment of novels for young adults. That earned him a point or two right off with his wary daughter. He would have brought toys but Magrady had no idea what kind girls their age liked. Janis Bonilla had suggested the books. These gifts showed he was concerned about them broadening their minds, as Esther was a big reader, even if they didn't dig the selections. When Esther had called him back, and after they'd discussed her mother's illness, she'd asked him to come out for dinner tonight, Saturday. It wasn't lost on Magrady that it was a way for her to size up her pops without having to worry about him taking the girls to a movie or amusement park. She was willing to see him, but she didn't trust him.

Well, Magrady fondly assessed, he and Claudelia had raised their daughter right to be no one's fool, especially when a family member was involved. A comfortable silence ebbed between them. He eventually asked, “Say, you mind if I look through some of those boxes I left you before I get going?”

“You could spend the night, you know. We have the spare room.”

“For sure next time.”

She zeroed him with a look. “This big case of yours you have to solve.”

He spread his arms.

“Come on.” Unnecessarily she led the way through her townhouse in the now aging, but comfortable, subdivision. Newer, shinier ones had bloomed around her. It had been some time, but he did know the way as the attached garage was accessible through a side door off the kitchen.

At twenty-three, Esther had married one of those enterprising brothers who'd attended Howard, did the stomp pledge for Alpha Phi Alpha, and attended grad school at Stanford. Rod Delaney started and sold off various successful businesses from a limo service specializing in ferrying pro athletes to several chain sandwich shops placed strategically in two malls out here in
Diamond Bar and other parts of San Bernardino. Early on he'd made a deal with a developer of those malls before the entity was swallowed by SubbaKhan, closing some of his stores in the process. But by then his hard-charging son-in-law had invested in new enterprises.

Though he was conscious of his diet and worked out on his stationary bike, Delaney's total workaholic drive silently ate at his insides, and four years ago he'd had a fatal heart attack at thirty-nine. Esther Delaney Magrady, (the name's rhythmic cadence a song her children liked to sing,) sold off most of the investments. Thereafter she made studied and conservative stock market investments toward the girls' college fund while maintaining her career as a clothes buyer for the Tilson department store chain. She'd been well poised to ride out the economic downturn when it hit.

“Need any help?” she asked from the top step as her father sifted through the stacked, and mostly unmarked, cardboard boxes. Now they were all on one side of the two-car space, once having been pushed to the rear. But Esther only needed the sole family van these days.

“I'm okay, Chongo.”

He used to call her that goofy name when she was a kid. It used to make her wince as a teen when he did it in front of her friends and he'd been weaned off doing it by enough “Daddy, please” pleadings. Now it made her nostalgic. She left him to his digging.

He'd opened a rectangular box that contained the tool belt he wore as a cable installer, along with wires, alligator clips, voltage regulator and so on that he'd used back then as well as when he was doing security systems installations. He'd also worked as a beer truck driver and tire and tune up mechanic at Pep Boys. Fingering an old work shirt with his nametag sewn on it, Magrady revisited the jobs he'd had, most of them punching the man's clock.

But there was a period in the late '80s with a couple of buddies from the service when he'd been his own boss. Together they'd started a magazine and paperback distribution business. The partners had put their money together and bought
a two and a half-ton cargo truck used in 'Nam. They rebuilt the engine and swapped out the differential. One of the buddies knew a local writer who churned out crime potboilers for a mass-market division operated by a skin mag king. Because the publisher didn't like the percentage cut he was getting from his mainstream distributor, he gave the virgin operation a shot. And given Magrady had contacts with liquor stores in South Central, Watts, and Compton due to his beer delivery days, this opened up new territory for the girlie mags and paperbacks.

Things were going so good at one point the partnership was able to purchase two newer vans. But it turned out the nudie magnate managed cash flow situations via a three-hundred-acre pot farm outside of Arcata near the Oregon border. His bust led to the dissolution of his company and their lucrative business. Magrady didn't exactly rebound from that setback. Rather, given he'd been introduced to the wonders of powdered cocaine at a few Topanga Canyon parties the paperback writer had invited them to, he figured to seek answers in an enlightened state. How shocking the blow didn't make him wiser, only more broke and more pitiful to his wife and kids.