The Setup Man

by T. T. Monday

  Either she ends the call or her submarine Bluetooth finally gives up. At any rate, I text her a proper thank-you (no specifics, just in case) and grab my bag from the overhead bin.

  Three names. A girl with three names is nothing but trouble. You can quote me on that.

  Marcus is waiting curbside, leaning against the front fender of a 1972 Cadillac Eldorado coupe, brown paint and a brown vinyl canopy. The hood alone is longer than any other car in sight. I have never been a car guy, but there is a special place in my heart for the Eldo. One of my buddies in high school had one—a gift from his father, who taught auto shop at our high school. It got about six miles to the gallon, but you could lie down flat in the back seat. My buddy and I couldn’t understand why the girls didn’t flock to him. It was like a bedroom on wheels. We even loaded the ashtrays with condoms.

  Before I can ask where he got the car, Marcus tells me it’s not his. “Belongs to a friend,” he says.

  “Does she know you have her car?”

  “You think I’m a car thief?”

  “Just be careful when you open the doors—they swing wide.”

  Marcus heads north on Sepulveda into silent, foggy Westchester and begins to tell his story.

  “It was like Bam Bam wanted me to find him,” he says. “I show up at his office Tuesday morning at ten-thirty, but nobody’s there. I go around to the back—but before I do, I take a little something from my girl’s glove box, you know what I’m saying, and stuff it down in my pants. Not that I ever thought I would have to use it.”

  He looks me square in the face and I can see he’s pissed. Yeah, I’d be angry, too.

  “I go around back, and there’s nobody there, neither.”

  “This his porn company’s office?”

  “Yeah, Two Lives Video in North Hollywood. Then, all of a sudden, I hear a motorcycle, and this fat dude riding a Kawasaki crotch rocket turns the corner and stops right in front of me. Sure enough, he lifts off his helmet and I see it is Bam Bam, and of course he’s surprised to see me. I sense right away that he’s coked up or something. He’s all smiles and hugs and my-nigga this and my-nigga that. I’m making up some shit about how I was in the neighborhood and heard he was making videos, and he says, ‘Oh yeah, come in and see!’ So I’m, like, ‘Great,’ and he unlocks the back door and leads me into his office. It’s a plain sort of room, blinds over the windows, lots of flat-screen TVs hanging on the walls. He flips the light switch and all the TVs turn on at once. Each one is playing a different scene. Bam Bam is smiling ear to ear, just all the gladness you can stand, and he says, ‘I almost don’t miss baseball.’ So we start laughing about old times while these folks are slanging bone on the TVs. I say, ‘Hey, Bam Bam, you ever heard of this girl name of Maria Herrera?’ And as soon as I say the name, this motherfucker reaches into his jacket and pulls out a fucking nine.”

  “Like as a joke?”

  “I wish. His face is set, man. No more smiles. He lifts up the gun and just kind of admires it for a second. He must have been high. Then he pulls back the slide—”

  The Cadillac swerves a little. Marcus has been cool to this point—much cooler than I expected him to be—but this part of the story is hard to tell.

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do?”

  “Karate?”

  “Fuck karate, man! I shot him in the head.”

  We ride in silence for a moment, then Marcus says, “You realize you owe me.”

  “I know. Big-time.”

  “Bigger than big-time. You told me to come down here and find the motherfucker. To find him, not to spray his brains against the wall.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  “You are going to make it up to me.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  Another few minutes of silence as we roll north. We are not far from the neighborhood in Culver City where Ginny and I had that first house. She doesn’t live there anymore; she sold the house years ago and moved to Santa Monica. She said the schools were better in Santa Monica, but then she put Izzy in private school. I never asked why. This is one of the battles I have chosen not to fight.

  “Did anyone see you go into Bam Bam’s office?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And did you pick up the casings?”

  “Of course. I ditched his gun, too.”

  “Was anyone in the office when you left?”

  “Don’t you think I would have told you that?”

  “Calm down, Marcus. It’s over with, and I said I was sorry. I’m just trying to figure out who might find the body.”

  “Nobody going to find shit.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”

  “Because I took him with me.”

  “You what? Where?”

  Marcus flips his head back slightly, quickly—the motion he used on those rare occasions when he accepted the catcher’s sign. “In the trunk,” he says.

  16

  My professional opinion is that Marcus is too shaky to drive. I reach over and steady the wheel. “Move over,” I say. And, just like we used to do in high school, I slip over Marcus’s knees into the driver’s seat. He slides along the warm Naugahyde to shotgun.

  “Did you wrap him up in something?” I say. “A tarp, maybe?”

  “No time for that.”

  “Sounds like I owe your girl a detailing.”

  Marcus snorts.

  We’re in West L.A., near the interchange of the 10 and 405. “You know this neighborhood?” I ask Marcus.

  “No. You?”

  “A little.”

  I get off at National and turn right. Aside from a few bums loitering in front of a twenty-four-hour Ralphs supermarket, this part of Babylon is fast asleep.

  “Look for a church,” I say.

  “A what?”

  “You look right, I’ll look left.”

  “What kind of church you want?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” I pause, reconsider: “Catholic is best.”

  Five minutes later, Marcus hollers. He reads the shingle out front: “Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church. Says they welcome all worshippers.”

  “Perfect.” I haul the Eldo into the dark parking lot and coast around to the back. Behind the church there’s a little entrance for the rectory, a mailbox, and a porch light that has been put out for the night. I maneuver the car against the fence at the rear of the lot—far enough from the rectory that the priest won’t hear the idling V-8. I put the car in park and cut the lights.

  “Give me a hand?” I ask. Marcus leaps out onto the blacktop. We move around to the rear of the Cadillac. I put the key in the trunk and turn the lock; the lid swings up.

  I know it’s a cliché, but I am surprised by how peaceful Bam Bam looks in death. His eyes are shut—lips, too—and a single dime-sized hole mars his forehead. It looks like he’s been rocking a well-kept goatee, sort of a Latin Satan look, but his cheeks now sport a healthy five-o’clock shadow. His head is cocked toward one meaty shoulder. Bam Bam was never a slim character, but I estimate he has put on nearly a hundred pounds since his playing days.

  “You got him in here by yourself?” I ask Marcus.

  “Guess I was pumped,” he says.

  “Guess so.” I reach in and touch Bam Bam’s tattooed wrist. The flesh is cold to the touch. “You want head or feet?”

  “Seriously? Feet.”

  “Okay, count of three.”

  The body is as stiff as a bundle of two-by-fours, which means my uneven grip on Bam Bam’s head and shoulders is good enough. I take care not to let the fingers of my left hand slip too far inside the cavity where the skull was blown out. The brain is cold, too, and firmer than I expected. It will be a long time before I scoop the seeds out of a cantaloupe, that’s for sure.

  I catch Marcus’s eye and nod toward the back door of the rectory. My plan is a kind of morbid ding-dong ditch—or a twist on Lazarus, if you prefer. We’ll drop the body, ring the bell, and spee
d off in the Caddy. It’s not the most graceful plan, but it’s the best I can do under the circumstances.

  We are standing in front of the door, getting ready to drop the load, when the porch light comes on. I look at Marcus. His eyes go wide, and he breaks for the car, dropping Bam Bam’s feet. I drop the other end and follow. Behind me, I hear the door open.

  “Hey!” a man’s voice says. “What’s going on here? What the hell is this?”

  I run to the rear of the Cadillac and slam the trunk shut. After I slide into the driver’s seat, I look back at the rectory. The door hangs wide open, but the priest—at least I assume he’s the priest—is no longer there. I experience a moment of terror as I consider that he might have run around behind us, maybe to get a look at our plates. But then he appears in the doorway: a short, balding man. Thin through the shoulders. From this distance, maybe twenty-five feet, he looks Asian. Then I see he’s got a shotgun. He’s peeking at the breech, checking the shells.

  I throw the transmission in gear and floor it. The parking lot is gravel—that or some seriously decomposed asphalt—and the wheels of the Cadillac spin before catching. The car lurches forward.

  “Come back here!” the priest yells. “What do you think this is, Skid Row?”

  He fires a shot, but he must have aimed wide, because nothing breaks and the car continues down the driveway. Without checking traffic, I swing a hard left back toward the freeway and narrowly avoid colliding with an oncoming semi truck. Walgreens, it says on the side. Good to know the world will have Q-tips and ChapSticks when they wake up tomorrow.

  There’s another loud noise as I escape down National Boulevard, maybe another shot from God. Maybe nothing. I don’t look back. When we’ve driven ten minutes, I pull into the deserted parking lot of a medical-office plaza. I idle the car, look at Marcus. “Do you think he saw the plates?” I ask. I feel awful for what we’ve already done to this girl’s car. An APB would be the icing on the cake.

  “Hold on,” Marcus says. He opens the glove box and removes a Phillips-head screwdriver. “Ain’t the real plates, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I took some before I picked you up at the airport.”

  “Took some from where?”

  “I don’t know—a dump truck or some shit. There’s a city yard near my girl’s place.”

  Sure enough, when Marcus returns with the plates, I see that the first digit is an “E” inside an octagon, the symbol for a tax-exempt California government vehicle.

  “A dump truck?”

  “Or a cherry picker—some big truck. It was dark.”

  Oh, it was dark, all right. I want to puke. When did my life become so dicey? To this point I’ve had a comfortable run in the investigation game—cheating spouses, paternity threats, nothing bloody or life-threatening. Now I’m disposing of bodies in the dead of night. To quote my new favorite preacher: “What the hell is this?” Meanwhile, in my real life I’ve been chugging along for a decade-plus as a setup man—a very comfortable groove, if I say so myself—and now, suddenly, I’m promoted to closer. Why me? I’m not sure I like either of these developments. I feel like a rookie, and as any big-leaguer will tell you, that’s about the worst feeling there is.

  17

  Marcus tells me to head for Hollywood, where he says we can spend the night. “Natsumi loves ballplayers,” he says. “Just act cool.”

  Half an hour later, we’re turning onto a quiet, tree-lined street off Fountain, near Hollywood High. I pull the Cadillac into the driveway, leaving it behind a pair of old Volkswagen Beetles, one on blocks. Natsumi’s place is a single-story house in the Spanish style, with a tile roof and security bars on the arched windows.

  “What about the trunk?” I say. “I read about this cleanser you can use. It contains bacteria that actually digest blood.”

  “Tomorrow,” Marcus says.

  Marcus can stay up most nights, but once he hits the wall, he’s done. He gives a ten-minute warning, and if he hasn’t found suitable bedding in that time, he will sleep where he falls. Aside from the silver hair, this may be the only way he shows his age.

  “Hey, baby,” he says when the door opens. Like the windows, the door is arched and short, as though the house were built for a family of Hollywood dwarves.

  “Y’all later than I thought,” says an African American woman in a white shift nightie. She is middle-aged but well preserved, dark-skinned, and on the thin side, with prominent cheekbones and a dazzling smile. “This your friend?”

  “Johnny Adcock, meet Natsumi.”

  I put out my hand. “It’s a pleasure,” I say. “Thanks for letting Marcus borrow your car. Sorry we’re so late—my flight was delayed. Fog, you know.”

  “Um-hm. I ain’t been in the Bay Area for years, but Marcus is always saying he gonna drag me back up there. Ain’t you, Marcus?”

  “It’s late, baby. You got a place where Johnny can crash?”

  Natsumi whisks us inside and shuts the door. It takes me a minute to adjust my eyes to low light. The living-room walls are covered with framed posters of Natsumi in boxing regalia—padded headgear, gloves clenched before a snarl. One of the posters is a reproduction of a magazine cover: Boxing News, it’s called. Natsumi is the cover girl. She’s alone in a boxing ring, holding a metallic belt the size of a car’s floor mat. If her hairdo is any indication, the photo is at least twenty years old.

  “What position you play, Johnny?” she asks me.

  “I’m a relief pitcher.”

  “Course you are. Marcus say you got a little business on the side, too.”

  “That’s right. Just a little something, that’s about the size of it.”

  I look over at my friend and see that he’s found the only chair in the room—a cheap-looking plastic folding number in the corner—and is already nodding off.

  “You used to box?” I say. “My dad was a boxer.”

  “Was he, now?”

  “Just amateur, but he was serious about it.”

  “That’s the only way to do it. Can’t use your fists no other way if you want to live.”

  “I guess not. Hey, listen, Natsumi, can I ask you something?”

  With Marcus gone for the night—thank you, Marcus, you have done your duty for today and many days to come—I decide to air out a question that has been bothering me since I spoke with Bethany.

  “Sure, what you want to know?”

  “I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that ‘Natsumi’ wasn’t the name your parents gave you.”

  It takes her a minute to see I’m not teasing, but then she loosens up. “That’s right,” she says. “My daddy never even heard of soy sauce.” She walks over to the magazine cover and points to the name at the bottom: Linda Jones. “That was me,” she says.

  “So what makes a woman want to change her name?”

  She smiles broadly. “Oh, there’s lots of things.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Well, if you getting married, that’s one. Same if you getting unmarried. Or if you trying to hide from somebody.”

  “Yeah, what about that? Since you changed your name, do people look you up less? I know you’re not hiding from anyone, but if you were, do you think it would have worked?”

  “I wondered that myself. I think the answer is no.”

  “It didn’t hide you?”

  “Right. ’Cause I still got lots of people showing up at my door. And not just people who know me from boxing. I’m talking about folks I known my whole life, folks from Oakland and Hollywood and everywhere I been in between. Lord knows how they found me. Seems a person can’t stay hidden these days. I think it’s the computers.”

  “Could be.”

  I am both satisfied and worried by Natsumi’s answer, because it is the same conclusion I have reached on my own. This girl, Frankie’s passenger, should have known that another name (or another couple of names) would not hide her. Not with fingerprints, DNA, facial recognition. Even
if she only knew this stuff from cop shows, she would understand that it was pointless to change her name if her goal was to disappear.

  “You know, Johnny Adcock, I wasn’t trying to hide from nobody. You want to know the real reason I changed my name to Natsumi?”

  “What’s that?”

  She grins. “Because it sounded pretty.”

  18

  I wake up in Natsumi’s spare bedroom. The clock says it is six-thirty in the morning. There is blood crusted along my cuticles and under my fingernails, but my first thought is not to scrub it off but to lie there and do nothing. I have not had a day off in three weeks. I lie inert for another five minutes, because that is what you do on a day off, or so I recall. Finally, I get up and take a shower, helping myself to a towel from the bathroom closet. Afterward I find I’m still the only one up, so I turn on the TV. On the morning news, a reporter with plastic hair speaks earnestly into the camera:

  “We are here at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown L.A., where a crowd of the faithful is gathering. Earlier this morning the archbishop announced via Twitter a major development in his yearlong crusade against crime. Diocese officials are reporting that a body was found at the parish of Our Lady of Sorrows in West Los Angeles this morning, an apparent murder victim. The deceased has been identified as Javier Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican native who went on to play baseball for several major-league teams before embarking on a second career in hard-core pornography. The archbishop’s Tweet went as follows, and I quote, ‘Welcome back, Javier Rodriguez, from the dominion of Satan. You will always have a home with the Lord. Praise be to God.’ A touching story of redemption, here at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Now back to you in the studio …”

  This is even better than I had hoped. I expected that the parish priest would fall in love with Bam Bam, but I had no idea he’d share the news with his boss. And no mention of the fleeing car. Just goes to show that, although you cannot rely on the kindness of strangers, you should not rely on the absence of kindness, either.

  I make some coffee and wait for Marcus to wake up. I’m hoping the news about Bam Bam’s redemption will settle his nerves. That and whatever art Natsumi practices in her bedroom. I feel bad about putting him in this situation. We have been in some tight scrapes before, but never this bad. Now we’re in the shit, as they say. Marcus has shot and killed a man, and I helped dump the body. To be honest, I’m less worried about the law than I am about whoever Bam Bam was running with. I doubt they make an exception for self-defense.