by Rex Bolt
Gee now. Could this, just like that, actually be the guy?
Chris said, “Are you Roland R.K? If you are, this is Mr. Wiggen from Sky Designs. You’ve won a trip.”
“Uh-huh,” Roland said.
“That bad, unh?” Chris said.
“Yeah, you gotta give it a little build up there, Pal. What do really need?”
“Sorry about that, then,” Chris said. “You’re a good sport. Any other Rolands in the neighborhood? Same last name? I got the wrong one, evidently.”
“Hang on now. You asked for me. Roland R.K. -- Why would you do that, you’re looking for someone else?”
The guy had a point, and there wasn’t much value in disputing it. “Beats me,” Chris said. “It’s been a long week.”
“No, that part I do hear you, amigo. Not sure what your game is, but least you honest about it. They do mix me up with a Roland R, by itself, no K, the mail sometimes, Hoover, that’s all I can tell you. Later bro.” The guy hung up.
And who knows what that meant, but it was like 5 to 6 and Chris hustled back upstairs to the computer and simply googled Roland R. Villanueava Los Angeles . . . and boom, there was one listing . . . and on MyLife, where they typically tried to sell you stuff there was one small section with past addresses, which you hope might include a current one as well, and the guy showed up on W. 67th Street which Chris had a feeling location-wise was in the South Central mix.
There was an announcement on the intercom that the Manhattan Beach library is now closed, and to please exit the north east door . . . and he did one more quick crosscheck, this time against the find the inmate site the Asian kid gave him. . . and sure enough, Roland R seemed to be on target . . . You’d have to confirm it, like always, but Chris had a decent feeling about this one . . . and now you had to figure out how to get over there and visit the guy, but it was Saturday evening, clear sky, balmy, very little breeze, and Earth, Wind and Fire of all people -- what was left of them -- were apparently playing a free concert tonight at the Redondo Marina, and there were worse ways to pass a few hours, Chris supposed.
Chapter 5
Chris had a dream overnight that he had an old-fashioned white cadillac and was posing as a chauffeur and he drove to Roland’s neighborhood and there was a bocce ball game going on in the park . . . except when he got closer they weren’t tossing balls, they were tossing doll heads that had 100-dollar bills taped to them.
It was a weird and unpleasant dream, and Chris could feel himself sweating, but it continued a bit longer, Roland finishing the game and flagging him down like he was a cabbie, and Chris turning on the AC caused Roland to gasp and grab his throat and keel over in the back seat . . . and Chris was fine up front, maybe he had his window open a slit . . . hard to tell why.
At any rate, the point of the dream, Chris supposed, was in it, he now had to call Mancuso at 2 in the morning to help him get rid of Roland . . . and they ended up at the same place, the ex-military plot past Torrance, and they threw Roland in the little marsh same as the other guy, Ralph, except it was more like quicksand this time, Roland hit the surface, bobbed for a moment, and then got sucked under, except the whole marsh got sucked down too, to where when they drove out of there, you had a hole as deep as the Grand Canyon.
Chris tried to dismiss the dream in the morning as idiotic, and sat around in his robe watching baseball highlights, all the announcers saying the ball was juiced this year, replays pointing to light-hitting infielders hitting the ball out the opposite way -- especially ATT Park in San Francisco where that never happened, which was now playing like Coors Field in Denver, which was a mile high.
The dream was cocymeneyed obviously, but it was idiotic specifically because Chris couldn’t see any way you drive up to Roland in South Central and work something out. A white guy in a Camry interacting with Roland -- much less persuading him into your vehicle -- is going to stand out like a sore thumb.
Chris had some LA maps, paper ones that you could spread out, that he’d picked up from Triple A when moved down here, and he put it together that the Hoover that Roland R.K. referenced on the phone -- and hopefully what he meant was that was part of the address where the wrong Roland mail that came to him should have gone -- and it appeared on the map as South Hoover, but same deal . . . the good thing being, W. 67th Street, out of the inmate database, connected to it.
Meaning . . . as he switched to StreetView and looked closer and spun it around like they let you, it was a corner apartment deal, low rise, one story, but you could see an entrance on both S. Hoover and W. 67th -- and Chris had encountered this before a few times, even his place in Teaneck that year, both addresses were valid, and could be interchanged.
Again, enough was lining up here -- not to mention Roland Villanueava period being somewhat less common than Carlos Gonzales for example -- that you had to at least give it a shot. Didn’t you?
Chris spent a couple minutes trying to talk himself out of it, especially after zeroing in and getting a better feel for the neighborhood on StreetView. It wasn’t anywhere a nerdy looking white guy would go, by choice or being dragged there . . . neither one.
What he was in the middle of trying to do -- and that’s why presently it was 5:30 in the morning, just getting light out -- was time your appearance.
Meaning get there about 7. This was a Sunday morning of course.
Chris was following the lead of a guy he knew up in Petaluma who wheeled and dealed in rental properties in East Oakland and Richmond.
Statistically these were war zones, at least certain blocks, where the cops themselves didn’t want any business with -- and Chris did wonder himself about the guy’s sanity, even though the guy was picking up foreclosures and REO’s in those neighborhoods for pennies on the dollar.
The one trick the guy told Chris, the guy joking that it kept him sane (and maybe alive) was he only went to the properties between 7 and 9 in the morning. His theory was the drug dealers (and bad guys period) had finally gone to bed by that hour, and their crime sprees typically wouldn’t resume until mid-morning.
Chris had a bowl of Special K, made a few preparations, took a deep here’s goes nothing breath, and got in the car.
He figured you should ease into the neighborhood, try to develop a feel for it, but at the same time stick to the bigger thoroughfares, and the fastest way by far would be the 405 to the 105 to the 110 -- but then when you got off that, it could be pretty dicey right off the bat.
So he took Rosekrans to Hawthorne Boulevard to West Florence, 3 or 4 miles on it -- and Gee, you passed the old Forum where the Lakers used to play -- and the neighborhood got increasingly sketchy after that, and Chris turned left on Vermont and right on W. 68th -- and a block up you had the possible Roland location.
It looked a little different than on StreetView, the place had been painted a dark blue, and it was an improvement over the original yellow but Chris was pretty sure you smelled re-development money either way. Meaning the spread-out southern California version of a housing project.
You did confirm that it was a corner property and that there were indeed entrances on both streets . . . and it didn’t look too bad at the moment, criminals-wise, the streets being pretty dang dead period coming up on 7:30 in the morning, and his real estate guy may have been onto something.
There were two guys over in the weeds across the street, the back lot of a commercial building, but they looked more like homeless guys and hopefully relatively harmless, and Chris parked and kind of gulped and was set to take his chances on Unit 18, the one that the convergent databases list Roland at.
But then he thought, you know what, this isn’t good, wasn’t that my point in the beginning, that I’m standing out like a sore thumb? Even though it’s quiet right now . . .
So he didn’t park after all, and started cruising the side streets, and it was all rough and a crapshoot, and he was a bit twisted around where he even was in relation to Roland . . . but then there was a block that had all single-fa
mily houses, some palm trees on the sidewalk, pride of ownership showing in most of the front yards, and there was a hall at the end of the block, boarded up, maybe a church at one time, but plenty of space to park in front of it without ticking off some resident in front of his own house . . . and Chris shut off the engine, grabbed his backpack and slung it over his shoulder, and locked it up and hoped for the best.
He was pretty sure he was angling in the right direction, and a couple of those front yards that looked neat and tidy were a bit more menacing, as Chris got challenged twice by pit bull situations and luckily you had fencing . . . but, not that you could take your time and actually appreciate it, this kind of block did conjure up old, classic LA.
These were the bungalows you’d see fancied up in the gentrified neighborhoods, going for big bucks, and they were impressive, typically wood shingled or stucco, L-shaped porches, plenty of architectural detail in the trim, most of them probably built before 1940.
But the business at hand . . . Chris guessed correctly with a left and then two rights, and now you were back at (hopefully) Roland’s, and the day was getting on, it was after 8 . . . and you only lived once, right? . . . and Chris found 18 and rang the bell.
Roland answered -- Chris had to be convinced of that until proven otherwise, and he matched Holly’s description pretty close, the tattoos ranging all over the exposed flesh, which was way too much, given the wife-beater t shirt and boxer shorts, and up onto the neck and head as well, as Holly pointed out.
Chris said, “Are you Roland R.K.? If you are, I got a prize for you.”
“Fuck who?” Roland said, rubbing an eye.
“The taxi guy?” Chris said. “That’s not you, right? I tried to drop it on him, he directed me to you.”
“Yeah?” Roland said, a little chuckle behind it. “Where’s my prize at then?”
“I have it,” Chris said. “But first I need some ID. Can I come in?”
“Be my guest, motherfucker,” Roland said, almost hysterical now, and Chris stepped in and Roland closed the door . . . and damn, it smelled bad in here. A combination of garbage that needed to be taken out, awkward cooking smells, like some kind of fried fish, and heavy lingering marijuana smoke.
It looked like a 1 bedroom, and Roland went in back for a second, re-closed the bedroom door and produced a hefty-looking blade and pointed it in Chris’s direction.
“Let’s you and me do a little business,” Roland said.
This was no fun, a rapid escalation of events, but you had to make sure, so Chris said, “The newspaper girl sent me. She needs more information on the case. She’s afraid to come back here, because you’re going to fuck the daylights out of her.”
Roland smiled and rubbed his lip with the non-knife hand, as though pretending to refresh his memory, and then you could see him latching onto it, amused that he had conveyed that to her.
“She fine,” Roland said. “She your lady?”
“She was. We broke up. I wasn’t ethnic enough for her, she said.”
Roland squinted, still smiling. “I told ya she got good taste.”
“You didn’t. You said she was fine. That was it.”
“Now you putting words in my mouth . . . I’m man enough to roll with it though. You best get down.”
“On the floor? What for?”
“We find out soon enough,” Roland said.
“Will the prize help?” Chris said.
“Cut the bull shit, dude. Comedy time is expired. Down.”
Chris said, “That’s fine. Do a few dollars count? This neighborhood and all -- no offense -- I got my money in my shoe.”
Roland was to back to being amused. “That,” he said, “the first intelligent thing out of your mouth.”
Chris reached down as though to untie the shoe, but at the same time slid the sickle out his backpack and straightened up and whipped it into Roland’s throat before he’d fully reacted.
The guy staggered around for a minute, eyes popping out of his skull, not that different than the way they do it in the movies, which Chris always thought was over-dramatic and lasted too long.
But Roland gave it a good 30, 40 seconds of wandering around before he pitched forward and plunked down, the kitchen counter bracing his fall for a moment and then him slinking to the floor.
The immediate problem was Roland was making a weird gurgling sound, pretty dang high pitched if you wanted to know the truth -- and Chris had no idea if there was someone else in that back bedroom, but you certainly didn’t want to initiate a wake-up if there were . . . and Chris fumbled around in the backpack and came up with a roll of grip tape, and shoved it into Roland’s mouth, and that seemed to do the job.
Then he tried to pull the sickle out of the throat region, since you’re better off taking that with you, and maybe Chris didn’t have the best angle but the sucker sure seemed wedged in there, and he tried to wobble it out but he couldn’t . . . so he left it . . . and closed the door behind him, and tried to remember the best way back to the car.
One small positive was he wore gloves, not the bulky variety but the thin ones that early-bird workout people used to keep their fingers toasty, even in southern California, and the gloves didn’t attract much attention because you saw them around. These days of course, your safest bet (foresncis-wise) in engineering something like this would be a full Hazmat suit -- but short of that, at least keep your fingerprints out of the equation.
He turned the corner and it started looking comfortably familiar, and Chris could picture it now, 1 more block, you go left, you cross over, and you’re back on the block with the bungalows and the Camry at the end.
The way he’d worked it, he wrapped the handle of the sickle with some of that grip tape that everyone uses now in tennis, and paddle tennis, and whatever else . . . and you couldn’t fit the whole sickle in the backpack so you put the blade part in first and left the handle sticking up out of the thing, which may have raised an eyebrow except the grip wrap made it look innocuous enough . . . At least Roland hadn’t questioned it, that was the main thing.
For a moment Chris sort of panicked, that Jeez, I got the wrong block here after all . . . and this was going to be no fun backtracking and straightening it out . . . but the more he looked at the boarded-up old lodge-church building, it sure looked the same . . . and then parked across the street, a low-rider vehicle of some sort, with decorative cursive on the fender spelling out the word Boo in red and green -- the car unfortunately familiar . . . and he began to conclude with a sick feeling that you didn’t find one of those on every block, even in South Central LA.
Meaning . . . the Camry was gone.
You could cry about it . . . or you could accept it as fact, and get a move on . . . and Chris was more aware than ever of the real estate guy’s timetable, that the bad guys don’t wake up and resume their crime sprees until mid-morning . . . and the day was getting there.
Chris made one of those snap decisions -- that first of all, calling a cab this close to the scene could easily come back to bite you.
So no good, you had to walk it. Secondly, you’d be better off heading toward the 110, than the way you drove here, even if that meant heading back toward Roland’s to get there.
All you could do at this point was keep your head down and stick one foot in front of the other -- it was as single-minded a pursuit as he could remember -- and he thought of turning north on Vermont to circle around Roland’s, and give it a little distance -- and fortunately that connected with West Gage, and that did put you under the freeway and the name changed to East Gage, and then some signs told you the neighborhood changed to South Park, and then Central Alameda, none of it looking tremendous frankly, but he at least found Slauson Avenue, and that was a pretty substantial through-drag, and the heavier traffic was comforting in hopefully reducing the threat of a street crime.
Eventually up ahead was a familiar sign, In-n-Out, and Chris could normally take those or leave them, but he was never so happy to see o
ne.
He took his time eating, trying to deflect the events of the morning from entering the frontal lobe of his brain, and after a while the blood sugar was stabilized a little better, and Chris was thinking reasonably clearly.
And now you’d put sufficient distance on the situation that you most probably could safely call an Uber or taxi, and he began scrolling around on his phone.
A guy at the next table started talking to him, pleasant fellow, plenty of tattoos himself, in fact Chris was thinking from a white man’s perspective he sure did look a lot like Roland, didn’t he . . . which was unfortunate . . . but the guy had a spirit and energy that you had to admire.
Chris didn’t want to get into a social thing, but you had to respond to a few comments he made, and Chris ended up asking him what he did, since the guy had work boots on in here on a Sunday morning, and a pencil behind his ear, and the look of someone going to work.
The guy said landscaping, that he’d started off doing it all himself, and now had a couple guys working for him, and they had some decent accounts, and to keep up with the competition, you had to go 7 days a week . . . and the guy seemed fine with it.
They got into the Lakers, and what was wrong since they acquired LeBron James, and the guy said he was a Clippers fan anyway . . . and Chris never liked to impose on strangers . . . but Gee, it would still be nice to keep yourself off the Uber or taxi radar today, period.
So he asked the guy where he was headed and the guy said Bel Air, and Chris could go for that, and before he spit out the question, if the guy’d mind giving him a lift, the guy answered it for him, and said it would be a pleasure . . . and they continued in the guy’s work truck talking sports, and a little politics, all the way to Bel Air, the guy never once questioning what Chris was doing at In-n-Out vehicle-less.
When they hit Sunset Boulevard Chris said that right here was fine, and he thanked the guy, and the guy said no, the other way around, it’s always good to have some company, especially when you hit traffic . . . and of course Chris would agree with that one, and meanwhile this time he did flag down a cab and it was a long way to MB, and it ran him $77.20 on the meter, but you dealt with it.
