by Michael Lion
“Shoes.”
I took off my boots and handed them up. After they were searched, my shirt was stuffed into one and they were handed back to me. One of them told the shotgun on the stool, “He clean.” The gun fell away.
I dressed again and was escorted by Freddie toward what would have been the kitchen had the place not been a gutted shell. My adjusted eyes picked out nothing but bare walls and cement floor. I could hear voices from the basement, talking trash, counting cash, making crack.
The only piece of furniture in the place besides the stool by the front door was a brand-new bright orange La-Z-Boy recliner in the barren kitchen. It was currently occupied by the owner of the gravelly, unforgiving voice.
“Kingfish,” I said.
“He wid it,” said Freddie, and leaned against the wall with one hand in his jacket.
Kingfish is the major supplier of crack to all the operators and private customers south of 63rd Street. He claims no gang affiliation but, being deep in Blood turf, he sports all red clothing. The dealers he delivers to eventually disperse his product in a twenty mile radius, supplying almost twenty-five thousand gang members directly and indirectly. That means heavy connections in over three-hundred fifty gangs, including major ’hoods of Crips and Bloods, Latino gangs like 21 de Ville, the Korean and Vietnamese brotherhoods that wipe out entire families for the disloyalty of a single member, and White Fence, the oldest gang in Los Angeles, now working on five consecutive generations. That’s a lot of conflicting interests and allegiances for a man who, at thirty-one, has already beaten the odds for black male life-expectancy in L.A. by six years. It hasn’t made him a warm individual.
“Birdy, Birdy, Birdy. Wudda hell? You finally gonna start dealin’?” He stuck out a closed fist. I tapped it with mine.
“You know dope scares the shit out of me, man. I just need to talk to one of your runners.” I kept glancing back at little Freddie. I knew the hand in his jacket was wrapped around a gun.
“Why.” It was a statement.
I pulled the redhead’s photo from my back pocket. “This,” I said.
Kingfish’s pink nails seemed to dance in the dimness as he took the photo from me and stared at it. He pursed his lips and said, “Never.”
“Never what?”
“Never seen her.” He handed the photo back to me.
“I didn’t think you had. But I think Double F has.”
“It Christmas for da bitch?”
Christmas means dead. “Yeah. The pigs picked her out of a dumpster about four days ago.”
“And you think a brotha capped her ass?”
I was afraid of where that might go. “The fact is, man, I don’t think anything like that. Actually, just the opposite. I got a girl lost a sister to the same fuck who did this redhead, and I kind of care about her. The redhead was wearing some money and I know that Double F does your running to the white folks on the West Side.”
“So?”
“So I’ve got a hunch she might be a customer. The cops couldn’t find her, and that means she walks a crooked line. There ain’t a white girl crackhead between Hollywood and Beverly Hills that Double F doesn’t know. He’s the man to see. Can I see him?”
He steepled his fingers under his chin and stared at me with eyes like frozen mud. “Sometimes you talk too fast, Birdy. You soun’ like you gonna trip over dose skinny lips, dey be runnin’ so far out in fronna you.” He settled slowly back into the La-Z-Boy. “But sometimes I like what dey say.” He jerked his chin in the air and the mountain with the shotgun appeared at my side. A hand like a ring of steel went around my upper arm and stayed there. Kingfish kept talking. “Double F step out de door las’ night wid a pocketfull. He should meet his man at Zulu’s tonight an’ drop da shit an’ pick up da spot. I dunno how he gets from ’ere to da Rainbow, but he does. Fast. He drop da cash in my man’s trunk in da alley, and it’s sittin’ here in my lap an hour later. After that he likes to get a bite, usually at some honky joint called Larry Parker’s. Says he sees movie stars there an’ shit.” Kingfish rolled his black eyes at that.
I said, “I just want you to understand that I’m in your debt, man. And I don’t go into debt with just anybody.”
“You watch y’self, Birdy. I be feelin’ around.” He nodded again and the steel ring on my arm tightened and lifted me out through the front door.
Out on the porch I lit a cigarette. My hands didn’t stop shaking until I was almost back downtown.
Larry Parker’s is one of those restaurants that people take their relatives to—each booth has a plastic plaque with the name of some famous person who’s sat there. The crowd can’t be described as tough, but the place sits on a border block between neighborhoods. People who don’t live in a big city don’t have a feel for how much change in scenery a block can make. A hundred yards in either direction from Larry Parker’s front entrance is the difference between doing business with the Rand Corporation and doing it with the Kingfish. It’s just enough in the dark to make the West Siders feel dangerous, and just enough in the light that they won’t mess up their hair. There was the usual three-deep crowd as I cruised past the place, and I almost went over the hood of a passing Corvette when I noticed Delores Markham. She was sitting between two crewcut gorillas in matching bomber jackets. They were all three crushed into the couch beneath Larry Parker’s red awning, a couch that is the rear end of a ’59 Cadillac with the trunk missing.
I hadn’t seen Del, as she was known, since she’d helped me with my virginity problem in a less-than-spectacular moment in a less-than-spectacular back seat in high school. I was seventeen, she was eighteen. According to my track team buddies, I looked like I wouldn’t know what to do with a naked girl if she showed up in a pair of stiletto heels and stood on my nuts. Del looked like the kind of girl who could alleviate that problem.
She didn’t look like that anymore.
She was wearing jeans that were snug and flattering, but not tattooed on. Her blond hair was pulled up away from her neck in a roll, a style you don’t see too often anymore outside of yuppie dinner parties. A man’s white Oxford shirt was buttoned to her throat, and the cuffs poked out from the sleeves of a vintage black sharkskin sportcoat. Her features had sharpened. She wore a touch of lipstick. She was a fine, intelligent, respectable looking young woman, and I was going to say hello.
I parked my motorcycle about twenty yards away between a tacky brown limo and a mouthwatering emerald green Ferrari Daytona, and Del watched me walk all the way up to the bench. I didn’t think she’d remember me.
As I came to a halt in front of her, and the two boys she was with started to bristle, she pointed at my chest and said, “Mark...Marcus—”
I smiled and interrupted. “Bird. Call me Bird. Everyone does now.”
“You’ve changed a little,” she said with no false sarcasm.
“So’ve you, and I must say in the right direction.” My eyes were still on her jeans.
She shook her head and looked at the sidewalk and said, “Holy shit, Mar...mmm, Bird, I haven’t seen you since the Buick.” Her warm smile didn’t change.
She might as well have hit me with a short, flat board. I ran a quick glance between the guys who were crunching her and laughed. “Yeah. Right. It was a Buick, wasn’t it?”
She caught my glances. “Oh! I’m sorry. This is Brandon and Dane DeNulf.” She motioned as well as she could to each of them, pinned though she was by their I-beam shoulders.
They smiled. I was feeling friendly, so I shook their hands. They weren’t twins, but had obviously crawled out of the same corn-fed gene pool. Introduced, they lost their bristle and became nice West Siders again.
“Why do they call you Bird?” This from Brandon.
I shrugged. “I don’t know, really. It’s a name I picked up from a group I used to hang with on the street. Might be because I’m never in one place very long.”
“You flit around,” came Dane, smiling proudly at his wit.
�
��You in school?” I asked Del, redirecting the conversation toward her.
“Yeah. Studying business administration. Me and thirty-four thousand other people at USC.”
“The University of Spoiled Children,” blurted Dane. Del looked at him with empty eyes and he wilted like a weed.
Del turned back and surreptitiously gave me the once over. She couldn’t figure out who I was from the clothes, so she took the overland route. “And you?”
“Ahh, I’ve been doing this and that. Never went to school. A little money here, pick up something there. This is Los Angeles, right? There are ways to make a living practically lying in the street. I guess I find those ways.” She was looking at me like she was going to get me later and go a little more in depth. But she didn’t wait.
“So you’re what, like a detective or something?”
I laughed a little and said, “No, no, no. But I know a bunch and do business with them sometimes.” The next obvious question was whether I was a drug dealer, so before she could ask I pointed in the window and said, “Listen, are you guys waiting for a spot inside?” The place was screaming.
Brandon went, “Nah. We just like the cramped bench.”
I didn’t know if I’d be able to stand their wit as a team. “How far down the list are you?”
Del put a French-manicured nail to her chin and pursed her lips. I was oddly fascinated by this action. “When we got here the girl said about an hour. That was about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Then you’ve still got about a two-hour wait, believe me,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I slipped past the crowd into the counter area before Del could say anything. Across from the counter were four booths packed full, with a party paying their check in the one farthest from the door. As they were getting ready to leave I asked them if they wouldn’t mind staying for just a moment. They said they wouldn’t.
Five minutes later I was seated across from Del, and next to Brandon, facing the door. I’d stepped back into the kitchen and had a word with Gabriel Montoya, the head chef. He owed me for a small citizenship problem he’d had involving several large INS agents and a small green card that Gabriel seemed to have misplaced. He was happy to tell the hostess we had phoned ahead.
Del was pulling at a Corona Light and I was doing the same to a cigarette, while the Flying DeNulf Brothers went at a double platter of appetizers that would have fed Nicaragua for a week.
“So you didn’t go to school and decided that life in the big city was it, huh?” she said.
“Pretty much. I love the city. And I seem to love it for the same reasons that everyone else seems to hate it. I love the smog and the garbage and the poverty and the traffic and the noise. I used to think it was sort of romantic. Now I just think I fit here, somehow. Like it was what I was meant to do, if that makes any sense.”
She kept trying to get me to tell her exactly what I did for a living, and I was tempted. But I liked her, and I kept deflecting it. I gave her a history I was comfortable with. I hoped she couldn’t see the mild frustration I felt in encountering a pleasant, good-looking, intelligent, attractive person who hadn’t painted themselves into some moral corner that I had to pull them out of, and being unable to enjoy them. I kept flicking my eyes past her into the crowd, waiting, nervous I would miss Double F. I could tell it was beginning to bother her. I asked her if she had a boyfriend.
Her eyes clouded over and she said, “Kind of. It’s at that point where it’s clear the thing needs to be over, but neither of us wants to make the effort to end it.” She glanced at my left hand, looking for a ring. I had earlier noticed that she wasn’t wearing one. “What about you?”
“Nah. The kind of women who can stand to be around me for more than five minutes tend to like other women. That, or I have to pay them.” I wasn’t sure how she would take that, but it was out of my mouth before I thought about it. She snickered a little, trying not to smile too much. I said, “I think I’m too much trouble for most women. When they leave, I rarely blame them.”
For some reason, she got a mischievous look in her eye at that. It is one of the few looks women get that I truly fear. Just as she opened her mouth to say whatever went with her facial expression, Double F came wandering in the door, nodded at the girl putting together the waiting list, and sat down at the counter like he owned the place.
He’s called Double F because of the shoes that he wears: hard-to-get Comet high-top basketball shoes that New York pickpockets call “felony flyers”; hence the nickname. Aside from that, he was wearing black Adidas warm-up sweats with a blue stripe down the side, no socks, and a plain black t-shirt underneath a black leather jacket that probably cost as much as a compact car. Slung over one shoulder was a black equipment bag with the Nike swoosh in blue on the side. His black-and-blue ensemble meant that he’d been running through Crip territory.
He was trying to look calm and doing a pretty good job of it. But when he stuck the bag between his feet and gave a nervous glance around the room, I flashed on something Kingfish had said. As he grabbed a menu from between two bottles of ketchup in the counter, Del came back out of the air. “... Bird? You OK?”
“Yeah. Sorry.” I was tucked behind a Formica partition, just feet from Double F. He couldn’t see me, but he could see her. She turned and stared at him.
“Do you know that guy?” she asked, leaning toward me.
I nodded, trying to decide some things. When Del smiled conspiratorially, I said, “Yeah. I want to see him, actually. But he doesn’t want to see me. Get it?”
She nodded. Dane took that moment to ask if anyone wanted another round. I smiled and said, “Only if I’m buying.”
“Hey, man, the only thing better than beer is free beer,” he said, waving down the waitress. While he placed another order, I took another peek around the partition. Double F was sipping a coke. As I watched him fidget with the Nike bag, a waitress set a huge plate of potato skins in front of him. I decided not to let him finish them.
I looked back at Del, who was staring at me with an odd sparkle in her eyes. Her grin got wider as I talked. “That kid is the fastest drug courier in L.A. He delivers to the west side, and I’m looking for someone who might be a user and he might know where she is. See the bag between his feet?”
She didn’t look and said, “Yes.”
“Well, it’s either full of money or full of crack.” Her eyes lost their sparkle for a moment. “Either way, he’s not supposed to have it on him. Something’s wrong.” I could tell questions were boiling up inside of her, and I could feel a case of butterflies coming on myself as I grabbed a napkin and started scribbling on it. “Would you do me a favor?”
She nodded slowly, vaguely.
“I’m going to split in a second. Give me five minutes, then go up to him and tell him that there’s a guy named Bird out front who’s looking for him. Say it just like that.”
She was still nodding. “OK. Where’ll you be?”
“Where he goes. After that, just come back and keep these two big boys company. Promise?”
She looked hesitant. Then she nodded.
“I owe you dinner,” I said, and slid the napkin across the counter at her. “It’s been great to see you, Del, and from me, that’s something. If you feel like it, give me a call. I’ll make it up to you.” I gave her an honest smile and laid forty bucks on the table. I told the DeNulf brothers, “Drink up.”
Del was still looking at the phone number on the napkin when I got up and wandered back to the other side of the restaurant. I stepped through the steamed up kitchen doors, thanked Gabriel with a pat on the back, and jumped into the alley behind the place.
I looked at my watch. Twelve-thirty. Kingfish’s pickup man would be on his way to tell his boss that he waited and waited, but Double F never showed up. Kingfish would then make several calls on his cell phone. Some time later he would get a call back, and go wherever that call came from. He would not say a word. He would not ask Double F where he
had been. He would not ask him why he missed the drop. Kingfish would simply walk up, pause long enough to pull a gun from his waist, and kill him.
The alley was cold, and I zipped up my jacket against it. The minutes clicked by.
I pulled a board off of an old forklift pallet and positioned myself next to the open kitchen door, my back sucked up tall and straight against the wall. I took a deep breath and held it as the rhythm of running feet mixed with the sudden, rhythmless confusion of Mexican slang.
Chapter 7
Lenny “Double F” Dwight’s right foot was almost touching the asphalt outside the kitchen door when I exhaled loudly and sank the end of the plank into his belly. There was a soft whump from between his lips and he died in midflight, like a well-pitched slider, right in front of me. I grabbed his jacket collar and dragged him around the other side of a dumpster about twenty feet from the glow of the kitchen. As I yanked on his lapels to haul him up straight, he puked between his knees and started coughing, taking in air as if he’d just come out of a deep vacuum.
“Hey D.F,” I said, “how do you stay so fast eating the shit that you do?”
He was standing up against the wall, but not on his own. I was helping him with a hand on his chest. In between coughs he unsquinted his eyes, recognized me and said, “Fuck you.” I stepped aside so the rest of the potato skins could follow the words out of his mouth. He finished puking and started to slump over again. I propped him back up.
