Bad Night Is Falling (4 page)

“Come on, take a load off.” Cady indicated a chair as he eased his thin frame with its slight paunch into a worn and cracked leather lounger. The thing seemed to form around him like an organic exoskeleton. The chair stood at an angle facing a late-model color TV set. A VCR sat on top of the TV, perpetually blinking 12:00.

“I was hoping you might introduce me around to some of the residents, Henry,” Monk said. “Not necessarily the ones living near the Cruzados, but the ones who knew them.”

“You know there's been two LAPD detectives prowling around here already.”

“Is one of them a sharp-dressed Chicano with a Zapata mustache?” Monk indicated either side of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger crooked in a crescent.

“Nope, I Spy team. And naturally the black one is even more of an asshole than the white one. Gotta do more shit to keep his job,” Cady joked.

Monk chuckled. “They've been to see you then.”

“Not yet, but being the old dog around here does have some advantages in hearing about a few things. But to get anything out of the Spanish residents who knew the Cruzados, you better know some lingo. A few speak English, but even they won't savvy when they don't want to. Although I guess among the black folks around here, I'm about the best ambassador you're gonna get. And trust me, that ain't saying a whole lot.”

“I figured I'd have to deal with the language situation, and I'm working on getting an interpreter.” He didn't elaborate that his possible translator was an alcoholic accountant named Andrade who frequented the donut shop he owned. The man often sat hung over at the counter for hours, working angles on a race form or, occasionally, a client's books.

“Are you figurin' it wasn't a gang thing?” Cady asked earnestly.

“I'm not figuring much right now; I just want to get a sense of things. One of my ideas is of course to try and get a line on the Scalp Hunters.”

“Won't the cops give you that?”

Monk snorted. “Not hardly, Henry. My one buddy in the department hasn't returned my calls from yesterday or this morning. I have me certain feeling the LAPD wants this to be their cotillion.”

“So what do you hope to gain?”

“I'm betting the immigrant residents will hold back from the cops,” Monk formulated.

“But open up to a black because he's got a Mexican speaker go-between?” Cady asked incredulously.

“You're forgetting my natural charisma,” Monk advised.

“Oh, yeah.” Both men laughed. “But what does it get you even if they tell you something they won't tell me cops? Especially if Absalla's right and it's me Domingos and not the Scalp Hunters.”

“A lot of the immigrants in the Rancho work long hours on bullshit jobs in the garment trade. And others in those big hotels downtown and at the airport cleaning rooms for five and a quarter an hour, Henry. They didn't come here looking for the money tree, but a chance to work steady and buy a little something of their own.” Monk stopped, considering his own words. “I think I'll find somebody who won't stand for an injustice no matter who did it.”

Cady looked off momentarily, trying to capture an image that was no longer in focus. “My folks came up here from Georgia in the thirties. My father got work at the GM plant in South Gate, even though we couldn't buy a house out there because of the housing covenants.” The import of his words fell on them. His parents' experience was a telling aspect of me city's history.

Presently he spoke again. “I'll see if I can get Mrs. Limón to talk with you. She's the shot caller on the Spanish side of things around here.”

“I'd appreciate that, Henry,” Monk said. “What are the rumors floating around among the black folks as to who did the crime?”

Cady made a face before replying. “Most everybody seems to feel it was some of them Scalps. 'Bout three weeks 'fore the fire happened, Cruzado was supposed to have had a set-to with a couple of colored boys selling that crack alongside the walkway next to his apartment.”

“These two youngsters got names?” Monk had been making a few notes on his hip-pocket steno pad.

“No, leastways I hadn't heard,” Cady replied. “The way I heard this was down at the bingo I go to at the VFW on Broadway. You know the one next to Gadberry's barbeque off of Slauson?”

Monk indicated he did. Gadberry's was a legend of brick-oven Q delight among the residents of South Central.

“It was Mrs. Hughes with her weekly gossip. She said she heard Cruzado'd run these two off. These boys weren't gangbangers really, just young wannabes. It was later, she said, that Cruzado supposedly got a threatening visit from the older Scalp Hunters.”

“Will you call Mrs. Hughes and ask her if I can talk with her?” Monk asked. “Over the phone, I mean. I don't want to get her in any trouble.”

“Sure,” Cady said hesitantly. “But you should keep in mind the old girl is known to stretch a story for the sake of making it more interesting at its retelling. But she does live in the building right across from where the Cruzados stayed, so it may not be all talk.”

Cady made the call and got Monk on the line with her.

First he had to answer her questions about what a private detective did and how much money doing it earned. Seems she had a twenty-six-year-old great-nephew who'd recently been laid off from the electronics section at Sears, and was thinking about going into telephone repair.

Monk promised to talk with him after he'd given her his office number. Eventually they got around to the reason for the call. The old lady confirmed what she'd said at the bingo game. She claimed she'd gotten it from Cruzado's sister, Karla, directly.

“You two were on a friendly basis?”

“Of course, child,” the old lady responded. “I take everybody as they come, black, brown, or whatever. Long as they ain't in no mess, I can get along with anybody,” she said proudly. “Karla and I used to talk when I'd be coming back from the store and she'd be out hanging up the hand laundry.”

“Have the cops been to see you yet?”

There was an extended pause. “You ain't gonna tell 'em what I said, are you? Lord knows I want to see them dope sellers stopped, but I'm too old to be havin' trouble comin' on my doorstep.”

The cops had to have canvased the area around the site of the murders. It may be a sad commentary on civic duty, but for an old woman living alone, a cop knocking on your door and being invited in was not a formula for quiet nerves in a fishbowl like the Rancho.

“No, ma'am. What you tell me is between you and me. I won't be telling any police officers.”

“Thank you, young man,” she said, relieved.

That second promise might bite him in the ass later, but it wouldn't be the first time. “Did the sister say who the boys were or know the Scalp Hunters who confronted her brother?”

“Seems I remember her saying one of the gang members was called Baby Blue or something like that. I believe she said her brother had words with him before, said he was a real hothead.”

“This Baby Blue,” Monk determined.

“That's right. And I'll tell you one more thing, there was more to Efraín Cruzado than people knew.”

“How's that, Mrs. Hughes?”

“He and I got to talkin' once and he went on about how the Rancho could be an example despite the politicians. But for that to happen, all of us would have to pull together to make it go. I tell you, sir, that Efraín Cruzado had more on his mind than people 'round here gave him credit for.”

“And that's the problem with black folks. We all the time think we need to think less of others just 'cause we ain't gettin' nowhere. Instead we need to be settin' our sights higher. My layabout great-nephew ought to see what I'm talking about.”

Monk gently interjected, “Thanks for your time, Mrs. Hughes. Now make sure your Gerald calls me.”

Cady eyed him knowingly.

She repeated his office number and assured him Gerald would be ringing him tomorrow if she had a say in it. Believing that she did, he hung up and got up to leave.

“'Predate your help, Henry, and see what you can do about Mrs. Limón talking with me, will you?” Monk wrote his home number on the backs of two of his business cards and handed them over. “Keep one for yourself and pass the other one along to her. She can reach me at the home number usually after six-thirty on a weekday.”

The other man also stood to shake his guest's hand. “I sure hope you or the cops can get something on this. If the killers can be caught, I think that will ease the minds of the immigrant tenants. They gotta see if their own dies, something comes of it. Somebody pays. If that can happen, we got a chance to get a number of them to go along with the HUD deal.”

“I understand. How about the Southeast Asian residents of the Rancho? Where do they stand with tenant ownership?”

“That's been a hard nut. I got a couple of prospects in line for the board, and I'm tryin' to get one of the Vietnamese on soon. Then maybe things will open up with them too. So far, we got about as many of them come to meetings as hookers workin' grade schools. We even had somebody translating for a while.”

The phone rang and Monk waved good-bye as Cady went to answer. He stepped out of the townhouse to a bright afternoon and the sound of Warren G's old cut “And Ya Don't Slip” winding around the buildings. Walking in the general direction of the eastern end of the projects, he looked north to the bold relief of downtown L.A.'s skyline.

The spires of iron and tinted glass were not far from the Rancho. The buildings seemed like the towers of an industrial magus whose secrets the commoners in the lowlands could barely comprehend, let alone attempt to master. The starkness of what those close, yet leagues distant, buildings cutting above the landscape represented to the residents wasn't lost on anyone. The populace of the Rancho didn't go to lunch over two-dollar fizzy water, wondering if they could catch that play at the Dorothy Chandler while trying to get the prospectus modemed to San Francisco.

The remodeled downtown L.A. was the virginal citadel, sleek, polished, and waiting to be deflowered. Sure the vacancy rate was high now, but that was in anticipation of the next boom, the next big infusion of capital. Twenty years of the Tom Bradley Administration, and the dotage of Cady's one-time fellow janitor, Gilbert Lindsey, had opened the city till for developers and multinational business interests.

Bradley, the liberal Democrat, had been the great black promise when he finally defeated the right-wing Democrat, incumbent Mayor Sam Yorty, in their second race in 1973. Monk had vivid memories of the elation his mother and her club members, who'd done volunteer work on Bradley's campaign, felt at finally having a black man in office. Here was a brother who would do something about the conditions of South Central, would work to make the schools better, and, they especially hoped, would do something about the notorious police department.

But Bradley, a six-foot-four-inch, athletically built man, had too long been Mr. Safe. Too long he'd had to bite his tongue at the racism he'd witnessed in his twenty years as a cop. Too long he'd been told by image handlers over and over how a man of his size and his darkness had to be careful not to intimidate white audiences. He'd chameleoned into a controlled, endearing candidate, deliberate in manner and speech.

And that manifestation did pay off for him. He got to be mayor, and he held the job for two solid decades. His was the candidacy that a coalition of blacks, westside liberals, and a significant Latino segment could rally around. Later, midway into his regime, with plant closures happening at an unprecedented rate, and immigration from Central America spiking, Bradley worked the magic again and resuscitated the flagging multiracial component of his electoral machine.

But reality caught up, and the promises of 1970 had for the most part gone unmet by 1990. And Bradley's departure from office was not met with fanfare, but a sigh of relief that he'd finally stepped aside—post the Rodney King/Daryl Gates roller derby. Nowadays, he lived in semiseclusion like an elderly chanteuse, his energy and verve drained by a minor heart attack followed by a stroke.

Lindsey, the self-appointed “Emperor of the Ninth,” managed to stay in until only the Grim Reaper himself removed him from office. And it took Death's scythe a couple of swipes to do that. Lindsey's district stretched from downtown, past and including the Rancho, and on into the heart of the ghetto. Lindsey had the best of bom worlds—the backing of business interests and the votes of churchgoing older sisters with pillbox hats tucked over rose-colored memories of life in the black belt.

The tall buildings of Lindsey's and Bradley's legacy filled the horizon to the north. But places like the Rancho stood for those parts of town too many politicians only noticed when election time rolled around. It wasn't as though Lindsey and Bradley, and others, didn't know the problems. It was just that both men, having fought the good fight to attain office, found that some of the same forces that had opposed them were now willing to bring them into the game. They had been convinced the best way to make change was to go slow, to have the money trickle down from their illusory barbicans to soothe the passions of the masses.

Monk had reached the unused Southern Pacific tracks that cut through this end of the Rancho. Beyond the tracks were a series of angular buildings designed with Objectivist-inspired charm. These structures had been a job training center and offices for Housing Authority personnel. On a metal sign, chipped and drilled in random target practices, he could still read the name the center had been christened with: T
HE
A. P
HILIP
R
ANDOLPH
A
DVANCEMENT AND
P
LACEMENT
C
ENTER
.

A Cyclone fence engulfed the abandoned buildings, but there were several gaping holes at various intervals. Absalla had told him crack heads and strawberries—women, and increasingly men, who'd perform sex for a hit on the pipe—used the interiors of the place for their transactions.