read Installment 05

Installment 06

Magrady let the light return to the red, the closed setting. Like the conniving Snidely Whiplash in a Dudley Do-Right cartoon, he once more looked this way and that along the hallway for anyone coming or to see if he'd missed a security camera. Neither was in evidence. Nor could he detect any approaching footsteps, but how long would that last? Come on, do it he admonished himself. Man up, can't be a pussy now.

"Shit," Magrady mumbled as he swiped the mag card again, and again the electronic lock cleared. Using his shirttail, he took hold of the latch and opened the side door into the research office. He'd half expected the space to be laid out swank, given it was underwritten by SubbaKhan. Rather, the area he stepped into was plan and functionally drab. It was a narrow passageway with its length taken up by doors leading into various suites. At the near end was a wall and at the other a short hook around to some sort of reception area where the front door was. There were no pictures or prints on the walls.

He once again crooked his neck around to look for security cameras high up in the in the corners. There weren't any, but that didn't mean they couldn't be hidden. But fuck it, he told himself, he was already breaking and entering, so if he was going to go down for his crime, he might as well make it worth the effort.

There were no names or suite numbers on any door, and none of them, except one, was locked. Each office seemed to be a duplicate of the other, each containing faux wood-grain topped metal desks, system linked phones, computers with flat screen monitors and, interestingly, no file cabinets. He fooled with the keyboard of one of the computers that was in rest mode but getting onto it was password protected. So much for unlocking the secrets of the Empire.

In another office he found a small framed photo on a desk. The shot was of a pretty black woman leaning down with her arms draped around a smiling Floyd Chambers in his wheelchair. Magrady sat down. There were a couple of other photos on the desk, one of a smiling young man in a graduation shot and another of a baby. A grandchild? Magrady frowned at the photo with Chambers. It seemed to him it was fairly recent but he wasn't sure about the age of the woman in it. And certainly there were cases of teenagers becoming mothers and then finding themselves as grandmothers in their late forties, so that could be.

He looked through the drawers. It occurred to him as he sifted through yellow sticky pads, paper clips and staples containers, that playing detective made you feel entitled to invade other people's shit. Because after all you were after the big secret, you were entitled to do anything in pursuit of the truth. Must be what those jokers like that clown who had to resign, Alberto Gonzales, rationalized to do what they did, Magrady reflected.

In the bottom left-hand drawer on a stack of copier paper there was a set of keys. He was tempted to steal them but then that would only make him go off and search for the locks they fit. He could see himself then unlocking some other room somewhere else and inside that room would be a combination written on a piece of paper. That like some intricate set of Chinese puzzle boxes, one thing was inside the other, leading him on and on but no closer to Chambers and answers—if such were to be had.

He checked the time and used the phone. What the hell, it was a local number, how likely was it going to raise a flag when whoever it was paid the phone bill?

"How'd the strategy meeting go?" he asked Janis Bonilla when she answered.

"Where are you? The number's not coming up. "

"I have my secrets. "

"Be that way." She filled him in, including a push to have a meeting with Police Chief Bratton. He was about law and order, but also about his media image. While it was the feds who'd conducted the raid, the LAPD cooperated, so the coalition would make the Chief ride the beef, as an old buddy of Magrady used to say. Make him put pressure on ICE to respond.

"Oh, one of your women called," she added.

"You mean Halle's forgiven me?"

"I wouldn't know, pimpin,'" she said teasingly. "It was that Angie. Said she has news for you." There was a leer in her voice if such was possible.

"How'd she get your number?"

"I guess she's got her secrets too. And your backward self needs to get a cell phone. I am hardly your damn answering service." Nonetheless, she gave him the number Angie Baine had left. She didn't ask if he'd be camping out at her place later and he didn't bring it up. Things were getting comfortable awfully quick.

Before making that call, feeling that time was tight, Magrady tried each key on the locked door but none of them fit. Back at the desk he assumed was Barbara's, he replaced the keys and noted a lump under the paper. He pulled the sheets aside and spotted an unmarked cassette tape. He picked it up, examining it. Probably just an old-fashioned mix tape, he figured.

Magrady was slipping the tape into his shirt pocket and actually gasped. The front door was being unlocked. Good thing the lights had been on when he'd entered. No sense crawling under the desk as his sorry black ass would stick out anyway. The door to the office he was in was only open a sliver as he'd unconsciously pushed it to close when he'd re-entered. He went stone and waited, breathing shallowly. Too many movies about life in the big house, including those episodes of Oz with their numerous anal rapes, and other forms of male on male degradation, flickered rapidly inside his head. His one shining hope was that at his age, what booty bandit would want him?
The real f'ed up psycho ones of course. The Nazi custom chopper brotherhood and geranium enthusiasts would pass him around like an unscented box of Kleenex.

The footsteps from beyond the door went past his room, the person humming. He wasn't sure but thought they stopped at the last room, the locked one. This was confirmed as Magrady heard a key turning in the lock and the door opening. A beat or two more, then a radio came on, an oldies station. Magrady started breathing again and eased the drawer closed, leaving the keys.

Percy Sledge prognosticated in that down home sweat and grits growl of his that, "They gonna find us, they gonna find us," Magrady tiptoed the office chair, which fortunately was on rollers, away from the desk. He leaned back to rise and the goddamn thing creaked. Did the twang of the guitars cover the noise?  Magrady couldn't remain in this half-crouch for long so he stood erect and came around the desk. The song was concluding and he stepped out of the office. The door to the last office was wide open. The side door he'd come through was in that direction and he'd be spotted. He had to go out the front way.

Despite the natural inclination to get in the wind, he crept forward on the industrial carpet, doing his best to lift his feet straight and put them straight down to eliminate undue drag or sound. He peeked into the room, his back flat against the wall, like that made him hard to see. From the position of the desk in the room, this person sat in profile to the doorway, the desk at 90 degrees to the doorway. His head was down as he made a handwritten notation and then stood, closing a file folder.

Magrady was pretty sure that was Wakefield Nakano, SubbaKhan's regional VP, in there. He put the file away in a standing file cabinet and locked it back. He returned to his desk and Magrady knew he was pushing it to stay any longer. He scuttled away and got his hand on the front door's knob when the humming started up again along with sounds of him moving about again. He was sure Nakano was leaving too. Worse, there were voices in the hallway beyond the door. Scared, but having no choice, Magrady stepped out as quickly as he could. He stood before the door, his back to it, closing it as quietly as he could.

A young man and woman were walking past, deep into their conversation about Mitt Romney's versus Guiliani's  strengths and weaknesses. Magrady headed for the stairs. To his back he heard the front door open and Nakano exit as well.

Be cool, he reminded himself, making sure to proceed at a normal pace. Nakano's footfalls were a hurried cadence behind him. If he was busted, wouldn't the VP yell "Halt" or some bullshit like that? The exec had a couple of decades on Magarady, so could be he was just going to tackle him and make him piss and drool on himself jamming a stun gun to his nuts.

"Excuse me," Nakano said, as he moved past Magrady, bumping him slightly on the shoulder.

"No problem," the veteran replied.

"Yes, yes," the SubbaKhan's man said in a hushed voice. Magrady watched Nakano descend, one of those gadgets you stuck in your ear to talk and listen to your cell phone hands-free stuck in his ear.

He got to the bottom of the stairwell and dashed through the glass door of the business school, saying into his device, "He's not going to be a problem. I'll see to that." And Nakano was gone.

Magrady got to the ground floor berating himself for not having a car to tail the VP. What would Spenser or Mannix have to say about that? He also realized he hadn't called Angie. But as this was a college campus, finding a pay phone wasn't as hard as on the streets. He clinked his coins in and called the number Baine had given Bonilla.

"Earl," a man's voice said.

He was one of the bartenders at the King Eddy, a semi-dive, semi-hip bar in the King Edward Hotel on east 5th Street. Magrady knew all the watering holes in and orbiting Skid Row and a fair amount between there and South Central. He'd certainly done his best to turn his kidneys into pate in several of them. Years ago, before he too joined the "Am I a Murderer?" guess-o-rama, Robert Blake filmed part of his cop TV show Baretta there as the supposed east coast place where he lived. Magrady was a background extra—supernumerary bum was how it was described in the script—in a few episodes. A director told him he was a natural.

He identified himself and asked about Angie.

"She said if you called, Sergeant Fury, to meet her at the Crown Vee at 6:30 tonight."

"Why?"

"Like I give a shit. Get a goddamn cell phone like everyone else." The diplomatic Earl hung up.

The Crown Vee wasn't a bar. It was a coffee house down near the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center off of Alameda. Where the encroachers, the downtown small dog walkin', inner peace seekin,' loft crowd hung. Why the hell would she be having him there and at that time?

Having several hours to fill, Magrady sought out a cassette recorder. He walked over to the Bethune Branch Library on Vermont and they did have one such model used for older versions of books-on-tape. Only it was on the fritz, though the librarian assured him that there was a retired gentleman, a tinkerer, would be coming in to fix it this weekend. From there he decided to take in an exhibit about '30s-era jazz clubs at the California African American Museum that included a recreated section of the Club Alabam.

Standing in the tableau, a mellow croon by Billy Eckstine filled the space. When he was a kid, his dad and uncle and their friends would sit around drinking Hamms and Pabst, playing dominoes, telling stories about Central Avenue, the Stem, from back in the day. Later, eating his fries at a McDonald's inside the Science Center, he watched a group of kids on some kind of school outing. Time was tight indeed.

Because of traffic and the work around the Emerald Shoals project, he got back downtown on the bus and the coffee house late. They were showing a '60s four-waller, The Brain Invaders. Angie Baine was second-billed with John Agar as some sort of scientist to his military man. She of course also falls in love with him but has to electrocute him atop Mount Wilson after he's turned into a brain eater. All part of some Russki shenanigans. The crowd dug it.

Afterward, with Angie seated up front and looking pretty together, she answered questions and signed copies of a book about B movie actresses that included a writeup about her.

"Bet you figured I'd be wasted, huh?" she told him as he came up to congratulate her.

"Well," he began.

"I wasn't drinking at the King Eddy. But I was on my way to get my hair done, and knew Earl would at least let me make a call." She squeezed his hand. "Glad you came. "

"Yeah, it was great, Angie. "

"You can be sweet when you want to be." She kissed him on the cheek.

An older man who'd been hanging back clomped over using his walker. He had on a turtleneck, a wig worse that what Phil Spector was daring to wear in court, and a large medallion on a heavy chain around his neck. Baine smiled weakly at him and the old fella socked Magrady in the gut.

read Installment 07